Martyrs’ Crossing (8 page)

And now here he was, feeling like a sack of bones, staring out at these former militants and future functionaries and bureaucrats. At least his son-in-law was not a bureaucrat. George was reminded of Hassan's importance by the presence of all the young men, the lads, the
shabab,
as they were called in Arabic, at the back and sides of the funeral procession. The green Hamas banners with their fancy glittering silver mottoes would be for Hassan, carried by his people, George supposed. There were so many, slapping against the sky. Ahmed's boys waved Palestinian flags. One other banner drooped over the heads of the crowd, all alone, dull and homely. It was written in unsophisticated Arabic script across a strip of white bedsheet, and gave the command:
FIND THE SOLDIER.

Must mean the checkpoint commander, George thought. Finding him didn't seem likely. How would you find him? What the Israelis didn't want you to know, they did not exactly give away. And then, what would you do with him if you did find him? George was sure the fellows carrying the banner had several ideas on this score.

Looking up the hill at the huge descending crowd, George lost his balance, and felt his heart flutter. He lurched and began to slip at the edge of the grave. Only the old sheikh, jumping forward with surprising strength and swiftness and grabbing him under the arms, spared him by seconds from the ignominy of falling down into the hole after Ibrahim's bier. Bag of bones, bag of bones, he kept thinking. He heard what he took to be a suppressed snicker from the other side of the chasm. He looked up, but saw nothing, nothing. No evidence. Only young moustachioed faces full of concern. Ahmed, looking curious, tilting his head. Wondering what was wrong. George dusted himself off. He smoothed his hair back, shaking himself, trying to rid himself of that feeling of fragility, of brittleness. Soon enough, he would fall. Soon enough, he would be an old person who had broken his hip. He would have a pelvic fracture. Only a matter of time, he imagined, before he would have to be wheeled melodramatically from one place to another with a blanket over his lap. Perhaps then he would buy a small dog with a good pedigree and a squashed-in face. Have it sit on his lap and snarl. Marina had barely managed to say goodbye as he departed for the funeral, he recalled. That would be his life, then: Philip pushing, and a Pekinese. Christ.

T
HIS WAS SURELY THE LONGEST
day of his life, George thought as he woke from a short nap and unexpectedly pleasant dreams of a crisp Cambridge day, the Charles River meandering, sailboats. Sandra. Apples? Something sweet. A ringing telephone and what sounded like a party down the hall had awakened him from a sleep made deep by his exhaustion after the funeral. He pulled himself slowly out of bed, sneaked through the hallway to the bathroom to splash some reviving water on his face, straightened his clothes, and walked bravely out into the gathering. I do not want to do this, he thought. Where is the coffee?

George felt heat pouring from the living room as he walked down the hall. It was a formal room—it had been Hassan's mother's house and this central, public room was done in what George thought of as West Bank Gothic, with too many high-backed, uncomfortable chairs and too many sofas; it wasn't a big room and it was crowded even when it was empty. For tonight, someone had pushed all the furniture up against the walls and stretched the two coffee tables, now laden with food, down the middle of the carpet. About forty people were stuffed into the room now, after the funeral. George plunged in and they made way for him. He located Philip in a corner near the telephone.

George walked over. A young cousin had the telephone receiver in one hand, holding it far away from his body. The Chairman was calling with condolences.

Philip shrugged and took the receiver.

He knew just what to make of condolences from the Chairman. George went and sat down near the coffee table, in the back. Books on the table, he noticed, right away. He didn't care what they were about, they were books. He opened one and listened to Philip talking.

Quite the diplomat.

“Kind of you to offer,” Philip said. There was a long pause, and Philip listened patiently.

“Oh, no, no,” Philip said. “Please. You are too kind. It's unnecessary, quite unnecessary.”

Again, that attentive silence.

“He's fine. Fine. A little indisposed after a long day, you can imagine. Of course, I'll tell him you called.”

More listening.

“Really, he doesn't want to cause you any inconvenience. You've already honored the family with your notice,” Philip said in a formal Arabic George did not realize he had mastered. “Dr. Raad thanks you.”

George winced. He looked down at the book of photographs that lay open in his lap.
All That Remains,
it was called. In its pages were many stories of fathers and sons from the past—the Palestinian Past, before Israel—people like George and Philip, and wedding photos of pretty girls like Marina. White dresses, veils framing old-fashioned faces. Correct young husbands in morning suits. A time irretrievably lost. George looked up, searching for his daughter. Nowhere. He supposed she had gone off again, lying on her bed, no doubt, staring at the ceiling, or sobbing in the bathroom, the only room in the house with a lock. He should look for her.

He tried to but each time he set off across the room to the door, someone pounced on him. Neighbors, friends, distant family, acquaintances, political allies and rivals filtered in and out. Finally, he abandoned any idea of finding Marina, and sat back down with his book. People searched him out in his little corner. Every few minutes, George had to stand again and shake someone's hand and quietly exchange traditional expressions of grief.

“Thank you for your kind expressions of sympathy.”

“I am honored by your presence here this evening.”

“The tragedy is overwhelming, but with God's help we will endure.”

George looked at their sad faces with what he hoped was an appropriate display of grief, and said the appropriate words. He would not permit himself to think about what had happened and what was happening. Someone came up and handed him a little cup of coffee. He sat down again under the lamp, and took up his book. It was dark out and each time the door opened to admit another guest, a wind rushed in and he heard cars stalling and honking and crashing down on the Ramallah road.

•  •  •

Y
ES, SHE HAD WATCHED
the funeral on the television this morning, while the sisters and cousins prepared for the evening gathering. She was the one who wrapped the little naked body in the winding sheet, who chose Hassan's prayer rug to cover the bier. Who kissed the cold cheeks she had kissed so often and habitually when they were still warm, and who kissed the dimpled hands inside and out, and smoothed the dark hair, and watched the men take him away forever. The hearse pulled down the street, and she turned away back up the narrow path forever. Later, watching them parade him down to the graveyard, she saw that these big men carrying the bier, and the television cameras, and all the flags and banners, had turned her little boy who loved lollipops into a figure from history. On the television in the bedroom, she watched the green banners wave. She heard the crowd shout and rejoice. She saw an old clip of Hassan walking down a street in Ramallah. She watched her father standing next to the bier, with his eyes closed, and she saw Uncle Ahmed watching him. She heard the sheikh and, from the other side of the bedroom door, the oven door opening and shutting, the gas igniting, soft feminine conversation. Aunts and cousins were heating up
qidreh
—rice and meat—that they had brought with them for the mourners. Water for coffee. The sheikh spoke of brave warriors.

Marina watched as the camera zoomed in on the red-and-green prayer rug waiting there beside a hole in the ground. The legs and the muddy shoes of all those men who were gathered around, watching. She couldn't begin to acknowledge that that ugly unfinished hole was for him. To put a boy underground. The camera panned up. You could see men talking on cell phones, whispering to each other, looking interestedly out at the crowd. They didn't care about the rug and the shroud. They had no idea. Her father had looked so lonely, standing there leaning on Philip. She'd turned off the television. She heard the clanking noise of plates and silverware, and smelled the
qidreh
warming. She was profoundly not hungry. She had gone into her beloved bathroom, and when the female relations had gone, she'd come out again, and lain back down on her bed, waiting for the visits to begin.

•  •  •

T
HE FRONT DOOR OPENED
and George felt a cold breeze. The sisters-in-law, who had gone home during the afternoon, were arriving back at the house, under their veils. Marina emerged briefly from the back hallway to greet them. George harrumphed to himself. Religious people, more religious than their brother had ever been, he recalled Marina saying. As she talked to the sisters-in-law, Marina waved at her father across the room without looking at him, a little wave of a hand that hung at her side. Like a secret message of recognition, that little wave. He treasured it and returned it as soon as she cast her eyes at him. A little friendly twinkle of the fingers that suggested a separate connection between the two of them. We are not among our people here among our people, George thought. Surrounded by the sisters-in-law, Marina disappeared back toward the kitchen.

He still had
All That Remains
on his lap. The book held his attention better than the visitors. There was the old mufti of Jerusalem in the fez of the haji, looking stern and austere and Muslim among the Christian elders of the city—the same noble-looking mufti who later wrote the infamous, abject letter to Hitler, offering to help with the führer's Jewish problem. The mufti: another geezbag. And there was the picture of George's grandfather with his huge moustaches and three-piece suit and medals, and the family—all the turbulent cousins—spread out for a picnic under the arching olive tree in the courtyard at Abu Ghosh, George not yet born. Pictures of burning buses and exploded houses and the smoking remnants of the King David Hotel, blown up by the Jews—photos of the Irgun, the Stern Gang, and Menachem Begin with his wild hair back when he had hair, looking Dostoevskian, dark, furtive, mad.

Another few pages of Palestinian guerrillas on horseback and beautiful girls wearing the coins of dowry, and then he came upon the picture of little Wa'il Zu'aiter, taken in 1935. Wa'il the militant, as a baby. George heard Philip on the phone thanking Salah for his condolences and inviting him to come by.

George looked down at the book again. As a baby, Wa'il Zu'aiter looked like Ibrahim, with fat arms and a thick thatch of black baby hair. There he was, sitting majestically on his father's lap in Nablus, more than ten years before Israel became a state. He was wearing a hooded white christening outfit, the tie of one of his crocheted booties undone and hanging like a tassel between his father's knees. George picked up his coffee again absently, and drank without looking—a mouthful of mud. Dah! he exclaimed mentally, recoiling. It was a syllable he and Ahmed used in the old days to express both mock and real horror.

Dah! That's what happened if you weren't careful, George! He had forgotten the simplest rule of the West Bank. Look before you drink. And before you eat, before you sleep, before everything, look. The lesson of Ahmed's warning call, the lesson of Najjar's shattered knees, and of the whole stupid battle. Mouth of mud. George tried to locate the roving coffee tray, but it seemed to have retired to the kitchen. The sharp bitter taste of the dregs stayed with him. In the picture, Wa'il's big brother Umar stood at his father's side, in velvet shorts, a satin bow tie fastened carefully around his collar, luxurious brown curls framing his sad, romantic face.

A hush had come over the room, and suddenly George noticed that everyone had turned to face the door. When he looked in that direction, George saw the backs of suits and dresses and robes, and—set off by the door frame like an official portrait of a king—Ahmed Amr, facing the gathering. He wore a black suit and a superbly woven black-and-white keffiyeh. The light from the room cut his figure out from the black background of the night. Ahmed said nothing to anyone, as he looked around, searching, George imagined, for one of his boys. The guests turned away from him, one by one, resuming interrupted conversations. Someone came up to Ahmed with a tea tray, but he waved the man away. Philip rushed across the room toward the new guest, and George half stood. No matter how they sparred, George felt it would be ill-bred not to acknowledge him. As George rose, Ahmed spotted him, strode across the room, and grabbed him by the shoulders.

“George,” Ahmed said to him, as if the name by itself signified something. Do not be false, Ahmed, George thought. He felt desperate—if Ahmed was insincere under these circumstances, then Palestine was lost to George. Don't do it, George thought.