Martyrs’ Crossing (9 page)

“Friend of my childhood,” George said.

“You are my family,” Ahmed said to George, looking him full in the face. Something about the claim seemed brazen to George. Or, worse, staged. Others were watching them, they both knew. “We are brothers.”

“We are what we have left, I suppose,” George said quietly.

“Your loss is my loss,” Ahmed went on. “Oh, George, I am so sorry, so sorry.” Tears fogged Ahmed's eyes. George blinked at him. Possibly he cares, George thought. Possibly, on the other hand, he is overwhelmed by his own performance. George put a hand out and touched his friend's forearm, then grasped it and held on. He remembered with precise visual clarity the swing and the sandbox in the park overlooking Bethlehem Road. Ahmed's sand castle; the domes and walls and battlements they both worked hard to create, every Sunday afternoon of their childhood. “I shall be Salah al-Din!” he recalled Ahmed crying out, when they'd staged their wars to conquer or defend the city of sand. That was Amr, always working in the name of the conqueror.

“Look at this,” George said to Ahmed. He pulled his friend down on the sofa with him, and picked up the opened book.

In the photograph, Wa'il's father looked proudly down, through dark-rimmed spectacles, at the boy on his lap.

“Do you know who that child is?” George asked Ahmed.

“Not sure, really,” Ahmed replied. Curiosity and caution combined in his voice. He shifted uncomfortably.

“It's Wa'il,” George said.

“Wa'il Zu'aiter?” asked Ahmed. He fiddled with the tassels of his keffiyeh.

George nodded.

“Amazing,” said Ahmed, picking the book up out of George's hands to examine the photograph more closely.

“He died in Rome, I remember,” Ahmed said. “That must be his father, the lawyer, wasn't it?”

In the picture, Wa'il's father had a happy but tense expression on his long face, and George imagined that this sitting might well have marked the first time that Baby Wa'il had been placed on the august paternal lap. From that precarious perch, Wa'il squinted into the sun. He already had a very grown-up expression.

“Sad, isn't it,” said Ahmed, laying the book down.

“Yes,” said George.

“Sandra liked him, I recall.”

“She certainly did.”

Wa'il had been assassinated by the Israelis in Rome; he must have been thirty-five, or thirty-six. The picture in
The New York Times,
which George remembered vividly, had shown a long, thin body facedown in the street, and a trickle of blood running down to the photo's edge. That was the black-haired baby's destiny. This pretty baby with his untied bootie. Would Ibrahim's fate have been different? Could all this idiocy continue?

“Sad,” Ahmed said again. “We grow old, my friend.”

“We're
too
old,” George said. Sad, sad—that was all Ahmed could think to say.

“He was a real fighter,” Ahmed said.

“Yes, he was,” George said. Was Ahmed reproaching him?

“It will end, it will end,” Ahmed said. “The struggle will end. Soon.”

“Do you think?” George asked. “Oh, I doubt it, Ahmed, I highly doubt it.”

“We will end it. But we have to get there, George. You know that. I thought you were the one who believed that we were still at war, no? We can't just throw up our hands. The peace talks are the last best way to continue the struggle, that's what you don't see. Every moment has its own strategy. And we have to pull the Israelis by the balls to bring them to peace.”

Ahmed looked at George, who was shaking his head.

“You're just a visitor, George,” Ahmed said. “Visits don't count,
habibi.
You've been away a long time. You don't understand what's going on here. This is the final conflict.”

This??
George wanted to say. But he chose to maintain a friendly tone.

“I've been watching you, though,” he said to Ahmed. “I've had my eye on you, Salah al-Din. You all make a lot of declarations. You talk a lot. And talk is fine, I know, I agree. But you don't need to use everything that comes to hand.”

Ahmed shook his head.

“We've
always
used whatever tools were available to us, George.”

“What does that mean? It sounds sinister.” George flipped through the index of the book, looking for his own family name, for Ahmed's, for Wa'il's. But he wasn't concentrating.

“Oh, you know what I mean,” Ahmed said. “When we had only knives, we used knives. We got guns, we used them. TNT, then plastics, Semtex. We used raids, actions, operations, hijacking, explosives, and when that stopped working, we used the intifada. Every mistake they made, we exploited for every ounce of usefulness, and we must keep doing that. Until the end, we must keep doing that.”

“I think I know what you're trying to say,” George said, after a minute. “But you have enough weapons at your disposal. You have enough bargaining chips. You don't need to use my grandson to spur on the masses. He's not a blunt instrument, Ahmed.” George looked down. He riffled through the pages of his book.

“We use the tools that are given to us, George.”

George raised his eyes.

“Oh, don't look at me like
that,
Raad. Don't be so angry with me. I'm only doing what you would be doing if our roles were reversed.” Ahmed fixed him with those bright, penetrating eyes. “I want you to join forces with me.

“Listen,” Ahmed said. “I mean it, really listen, George. Right now is unfortunately when the rest of us—and that means me, too, no matter our connection—right now is when the rest of us have to keep pushing. We have to. Hamas bombed those buses to stop the Israelis from negotiating with us. And it worked, too, of course. Hamas is our enemy. Now, the Chairman wants to put a little gentle political pressure on the Israelis to bring them back to the talks.”

“Go on,” George said. He wanted to hear the whole bloody rationale.

“You know it all already, George.” Ahmed shut his eyes for a second.

Was he showing exasperation? George wondered. How irritating.

“We need the boys to come out to the checkpoints and stir things up again. As usual, riots at the crossings will be the one thing that convinces the Israelis we mean business. You know how they hate seeing Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian kids on CNN.”

George nodded.

“To get the boys to come out,” Ahmed said, “the Chairman needs something to fire their imagination. He has to push with whatever he has—whatever incident—and I think you and I both know just what it is he has right now.”

Ahmed looked at George's face. What did he expect to see there?

“Don't hate me, George,” he said. “Just listen to me. A violinist who's a soldier can't say as he marches onto the battlefield, ‘Well, my bow arm is too valuable, too sensitive—I'll just fight with my left arm.' He'd be cut to bits in a matter of moments. Or he'd lose his left arm: No more music in any case. If you're serious, you have to use what you have, no matter the cost. I'd like to have you on board. It matters to me, and it would help. It would help very much.”

George looked back down at the open book that was balanced on his lap.

“I hate it, Ahmed,” he said in a low voice. Wa'il looked up at him with large innocent eyes.

“George, what can I do?” Ahmed asked. “I can't promise you anything. The Chairman is not going to see it from your point of view, that much I can say. The Chairman rarely wastes a political opportunity.”

The Chairman, George wanted to say. I don't think this is about the Chairman.

•  •  •

A
NOTHER SECOND OF
it and Marina thought she would collapse absolutely. Female relatives kept coming into the kitchen and looking at her expectantly, as if
she
were supposed to say something kind and sympathetic to
them.
She pushed her chair away from the table and walked out. They were all looking at her, she knew, and when she was gone they would start to discuss her.

She went into the bathroom. She loved the bathroom, her refuge. The closed seat of the toilet was hard, but at least private. The fluorescent light zipped and hummed and flickered. It was her noisy but undemanding companion. And there was something about tile: smooth, white; it had an appealing blankness. She let her eyes drift over it, and then occupied herself in the study of the arabesque border design, whose repeating pattern could be fiddled with mentally for minutes at a time, to distraction. The pattern had endless possibilities, and no meaning. She locked the door with the key and removed the key from the keyhole.

Everything you could possibly need was here, Marina thought. Water. A small window, through which you could see a single tree. Reams of tissue paper. A place to sit. A place to lie down—the bathtub. Pills and razors.

She was still living only because going on living was what you did. But she had no interest in it. Her heart felt dark and empty. She couldn't suppress the feeling that she was responsible. She was his
mother.
This bathroom was the little prison cell where she came to hide her guilt. She ran a finger around the rim of the sink. She put her feet up on the toilet seat and wrapped her arms around her knees. She leaned her head against the cool white tiles behind the toilet. The evening breeze blew over her. In the mirror, she could see her tree swaying in the light of a streetlamp.

Y
IZHAR'S RUBBER SOLES MADE A
spongy noise as he walked past the yellowing, grime-stained, malfunctioning Xerox machine toward his office. At this hour, the hallway on the fifth floor of The Building was always nearly empty. That was one reason why Yizhar liked to keep late hours, free himself from the watchful if unobservant eyes of the human beast. You needed privacy for his kind of work. Yizhar's beat was scandals and fuck-ups and security lapses. He had a reputation for
handling
things. The Prime Minister was always praising Yizhar for fixing the things—the very
simple
things—that the Prime Minister had somehow fucked up. Like last year. Last year, Yizhar took Israel's failed assassination of a Hamas official and spun it into an attempt by Israel to
save
the guy from assassination. Not bad, not bad.

When he arrived finally at the wall-to-wall carpet that marked off his office from the hallway, Yizhar smiled at last year's coup. Even the Hamas guy, formerly certain that he understood and could explain every little thing that happened in this chaotic, random, inscrutable universe, was no longer—and Yizhar knew this for a fact—no longer
really
sure whether the Israelis had been his saviors or his assassins. Yizhar imagined the guy fiddling with his beard.

“Packaging problems”—that was how the Prime Minister liked to put it.

So of course, the minute Yizhar heard that the boy at the Shuhada checkpoint had died, he had asked to be put on it. Naturally. Yizhar did not like to push for things that would come to him anyway, simply because of the army's colossal bureaucratic inertia, but for this one, he pushed. He was afraid to miss it. He had to admit to himself that he had his own personal interest in what had happened, but then, as number two in charge of West Bank security, he was also someone to whom they would naturally come. Packaging this “problem” was a perfect job for Yizhar. It was high profile, and delicate. It needed a proper army investigation, and thorough army spin.

If a situation demanded a straightforward treatment, entirely aboveboard, Colonel Daniel Yizhar was happy with that: he could be direct and open. But also, he had no problem with the little distortion, the white lie, the stretching of truth to fit necessity. He could look quite honest and innocent with that kind of situation, too. He had a law degree. He had military standing. He cared about the army, thought it was an institution that was probably worth respecting. He was a lifer, as far as the army was concerned. He had gone to them and asked for this one, and he knew why they had chosen him. He was glad.

The main thing was to get the story out there, Our Way.

Irit brought him the file. Why did she always have to have that piece of white stomach sticking out between her tight little sweater and her tight pants? It was all he saw when he considered her from behind his desk. She must be under the impression that it was appealing in some way. He should send her home soon.

“Look at these,” she said. Of course Colonel Daniel Yizhar would have to have a secretary with a stripe of white stomach who felt it was her right as a citizen to look at—and probably memorize, and probably recite for her friends over morning coffee while also making time to discuss her boss's waistline and hairline and extreme lack of social life—who thought it was her right to peruse every little secret scrap of paper that blew across her desk. She had to have seen the stamp that said
CONFIDENTIAL
on the soldier's file, on the checkpoint file, on Hajimi's file. She had probably stamped them herself, when you came down to it. And there she stood, not going away. Yizhar considered pinching that piece of flesh.