The Pale of Settlement (20 page)

Leah took a sip of tea, picked up the brochures. The cyclamen was flowering, and Leah fingered its furled pink buds, pleased—it was a cutting from a plant she'd had for years. Those boys from Petra would have been close to Ezi's age, well past middle life by now. But they were long disappeared, like all the boys of that Palmach
generation, and here she was, still conjuring oases, camels, minarets, desert light, and mystic stone: all the old romantic clichés. She shifted on her chair and looked out the rain-flecked window at the familiar brown brick expanse of the ugly apartment blocks next door. How long she'd lived here! The place she was from had grown as remote as the stone city in these glossy photographs, and equally unreal. She propped the brochures back against the plant's flat leaves. She'd give them to Suzi when she saw her next. Maybe Suzi would go instead.

In the morning she pulled the news stories off the wire. There were always a few familiar bylines; the rest scrolled along her screen anonymous as soldiers, every sentence ranked and measured, every voice the same. Today, again, the news was the West Bank. Israeli tanks were rolling into Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jenin. Arafat's compound was under siege. Palestinian gunmen were holed up inside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. In the Balata and Jenin refugee camps, there was fighting in the streets. Three Palestinian gunmen, four Israeli soldiers, dead.

Susan glanced across the newsroom as she finished punching the long string of numbers into the phone. There came the sound of what might have been the muffled rumble of thunder, or workmen rolling something heavy on the floor above. In Israel, Debbie's cell phone rang and rang with a whirring tone. Then her recorded voice came on the line, first in heavily American-accented Hebrew, then in English, and Susan hung up. Debbie Nelson was a good reporter,
well connected after years of stringing for American newspapers, more valuable than ever in this environment of cutbacks and corporate squeeze. Susan had heard that Debbie had once been married to an Israeli, and even though she wasn't Jewish, she had stayed. Susan had met Debbie a few times on her periodic visits to New York. She was a short woman in her late thirties or early forties, with girlish bangs and doughy, freckled skin. Susan couldn't get over the feeling that she and Debbie should have traded places long ago.

Susan picked up the phone again and tried Debbie's home number, but got voicemail there as well. In Jerusalem it was already late on Friday afternoon, Shabbat. Susan jiggled her mouse to reactivate her screen.

DATE: April 5, 2002. Israeli helicopter gunships launched a heavy attack on a Palestinian village today, killing the man alleged to have planned the Passover Massacre, the suicide bombing that left 26 people dead at a Passover Seder in the Israeli city of Netanya on March 27
.

Susan wondered if Debbie had gotten through the checkpoints into the West Bank. She'd have to go with what was on the wires for now.

At six-thirty it was raining, really pouring, the water sheeting off the overhang in front of her building, the roadway rippling with a layer of water pockmarked by the pelting rain. All the cabs seemed to be full or off-duty, sending up sprays of dirty water as they passed. Susan gave up waiting, put up her umbrella, and began to walk toward Ninth. Water dripped off the edge of her umbrella onto her new pointy-toed shoes. She put her head down and picked up the pace.

A group of them always met at Bellevue's on Fridays after work,
and its only virtue, as near as Susan could tell, was its proximity to work. Susan pushed open the door, shaking off the dripping umbrella, scanning the crowd for somebody she knew. The place was already packed, kitschy eighties heavy metal blaring from the jukebox. Fake rats and rubber heads hung on grimy walls. Reid was sitting at the bar with his girlfriend, Kristin. Susan didn't recognize anybody else.

She pushed her way to the bar and touched Reid's arm. He was wearing an olive-drab photographer's vest and had a three-day growth of beard. She said, Did you just get back?

Hey, he said, swiveling around on his stool. Kristin gave a little wave. Susan laid her umbrella and bag on the floor, smoothing her hair with a wet hand.

Susan had always found Reid handsome, but there was something—the delicate symmetry of his almost-pretty face, his greenish eyes, his thick wheat hair—that made her feel at times as if you'd have to peel back the skin of his face, like in a bad movie, to find out what he really looked like underneath. It wasn't vanity, Susan thought, that gave him that quality of inaccessibility, but the self-consciousness that came from knowing that, even pasty forty, “good looking” was how he'd always first be read.

There were no free seats at the bar. Susan stood behind Reid and Kristin, feeling her wet nylons sticking to her toes inside her probably ruined shoes. From the back, Kristin looked as wraithlike as ever, her shoulder blades jutting out in two sharp planes beneath the thin fabric of her shirt. She had a mass of frizzy reddish hair and an angular jaw and cheekbones softened by a curvy upper lip. Kristin was getting a Ph.D., writing about something to do with female saints. In some ways, Susan envied her—it would be nice, for once, to write about a subject that wouldn't change, to write without
a deadline, to have time to sit and think. Kristin lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke out of the corner of her mouth, in the opposite direction from Susan and Reid. She gave off a tense, airless quality, a sense of disorder held in check.

Yuck, put it out, Reid said, fanning the air.

Kristin raised her eyebrows and looked to Susan, holding out her cigarette at arm's length.

Susan shrugged. It doesn't bother me, she said. Her mother used to exhale the same way, blowing the smoke away from her. Now Kristin's gesture made her feel childish, excluded, and she wished Kristin would offer her a cigarette, even though Reid would give her shit, even though she didn't smoke.

So how was it over there? Susan said to Reid. She'd seen some of the amazing photographs he'd sent back from Afghanistan: veiled women, tribesmen on horseback, American troops in dusty trucks, a landscape of bare brown mountains and cracked-earth plains. As much as she longed to escape New York, it was hard to imagine spending a month in a place as featureless as that.

The bartender set down two martinis in front of them, both an alarming shade of red.

She'll have one of these as well, Reid said.

No, I'll just have a Corona, Susan said, and then to Reid, So how many Al-Qaida and Taliban guys do you think we really got over there? Susan knew that the Americans claimed to have killed over a hundred fighters, but fewer than fifty bodies had actually been found. She looked over at Reid's vest. What could he possibly keep in all those pockets—gum wrappers, condoms, swizzle sticks, wads of Kleenex, lucky stones?

Fucking Shahikot, Reid said. Have you ever been inside a cave?

Yeah, sure, she said, feeling a tightening inside her chest. It
was a smugness they all had, those reporters and photographers who'd been there on the ground, bearing witness, bringing back the news.

Shahikot, Tora Bora, Kristin said in a breathy voice that you had to strain over the thumping jukebox to hear. She said, All of those places sound made up to me.

The Afghan names did sound rather like something out of Dr. Seuss, and Susan smiled. She glanced at Kristin's forearms, at the skin so translucent it was nearly blue across her wrists, the cigarette tipped between her fingers, and wondered suddenly if Kristin and Reid actually had sex. He was too good-looking for her, Susan thought, and Kristin was too—too self-contained. A small surge of connection rose in Susan's chest. Maybe they'd be friends.

On Monday, Debbie filed a piece saying that the Israelis were pulling out of Qalqilya and Tulkarem but that the fighting in Jenin was growing worse. She quoted the director of the Jenin hospital saying that Israeli tanks were not allowing ambulances to evacuate the dead and wounded from the camp.
The Palestinian Authority issued a statement today claiming that “the Sabra and Shatila massacres are being repeated in Jenin.”
Here in New York, it was still raining. They were predicting that it might change over to sleet later in the day. In Israel, it was probably nice and warm. Once she'd gone with her cousin Gavi to the Galilee to pick irises and anemones in the spring. She cradled the receiver against her shoulder, squinting at the screen.

Can we really say that it's a “massacre”? she said.

We're not saying it, Debbie said after a slight delay, the
PA
is.

Susan scrolled down the page.
As many as 100 Palestinians have been killed in Jenin alone
. The line crackled, fading in and out. Where
are you, in your car? Susan said. You sure about a hundred? We need attribution. Yesterday we said seventy-four, over the past ten days, and not just in Jenin. And what about the Israeli side?

A hundred is what everyone is saying, Debbie said, her voice abruptly clear. And from what I've heard, she added, it's probably much worse than that. But they're still not letting journalists into the camp.

Susan backspaced over
as many as
and typed
at least
instead. She looked at her watch. It was getting late. Okay, she said. I'll see what Bill thinks. If I need anything else, I'll call you back.

Across the newsroom, Bill, the foreign editor, was on his phone. Sipping her coffee, Susan flipped through the pile of clips on her desk, pausing on a photograph of a group of Palestinian militants gazing out from an arcade. They looked curiously relaxed, leaning on their guns, green Hamas bandannas tied around their heads. She'd never been to the West Bank, even though the border was less than twenty miles from her grandparents' Haifa home. She'd driven through the Arab villages in the dry hills east of Haifa, her parents pointing out how primitive they were: the women in their long robes and headscarves; the men sitting outside broken-down coffeehouses smoking hookahs or playing shesh-besh; the cinderblock houses with roofs of corrugated tin, the dirt yards with chickens pecking in the dust. They wouldn't even have electricity if it weren't for us, Susan's father always said. Most of the refugees in Jenin had fled those same villages. Fifty-four years ago, next week.

She tried to picture the foothills of the Carmel, the mountains of the Galilee, greened by the spring rains. She remembered the excitement of arriving in Israel for summer visits as a child, bouncing on the edge of the backseat of her uncle's car as they drove from
the airport in Lod up the coast to Haifa, sounding out the Hebrew signs. They always arrived at dusk, the humid air already weighted with dew, the evening sky a luminous pale blue above the shadowed streets, like in that painting by Magritte,
Empire of Light
. And it did seem surreal, the memory of the crunching gravel along the path to her grandparents' flat, the echoing of the doorbell, the silhouette of her grandmother appearing in the light, her powdery and perfumed smell, her frail embrace.

And what if she'd married an Israeli, like Debbie had, and had gone to live in Israel? She might have found herself one of those strong and tough Israeli men, like Paul Newman in
Exodus
, or Yoni Netanyahu, martyr of the Entebbe rescue raid. Or a Mossad agent with secret scars and a sabra's vulnerable core. She might even have joined the Mossad herself, learned to pass on information, to encrypt messages in code.

Bill was standing in front of her desk, looking down at her over his bifocals. He held out his hand.

Deadline, he said.

Kristin met Susan at her apartment and then they walked to a nearby West Side diner for lunch. The manager showed them to a booth in back, across from two young mothers with their babies and a prodigious array of sippy cups and bibs and gear spread out over the table. Susan slid awkwardly into her side of the booth, stashing her jacket and bag next to her on the vinyl seat, and unfolded the oversized menu. She'd often eaten alone at a diner much like this back when she first started work. She always sat at the counter and had salad with cottage cheese and half of a canned peach. She worried about her weight back then, even though she'd always been
quite thin. Never as thin as Kristin, though; she wasn't as much of a fanatic as that.

The waitress came and Susan asked for a Greek salad and a Diet Coke, and then regretted her restraint when Kristin ordered a cheeseburger and fries; apparently, Kristin was just naturally that thin. The mothers at the next table were sharing a piece of pie, picking at it from opposite sides of the plate, their heads bent together in conversation. The baby nearest Susan was hurling Cheerios onto the floor.

So how's the writing coming along? Susan said.

Kristin sighed the way Ph.D. candidates always seemed to do when you asked about their dissertations. She was researching the female mystics, she said, slowly, as if trying to choose words that Susan could understand. She was looking at the way patriarchal culture laid claim to the interpretation of their bodies, fetishizing them, labeling them as witches or hysterics or saints. As she spoke, Kristin's voice lost its breathy quality and she leaned forward across the table. She was rereading the women's own writings against the hagiographies and scholarly accounts. Are you familiar with any of them? she said.

Susan shook her head. Jews don't do saints, she said.

They punished their bodies in all kinds of incredible ways, Kristin said, leaning forward. Mary Magdalene de Pazzi made her fellow nuns bind her to a post and whip her; then she dripped hot wax into her wounds. Angela of Foligno drank water containing a leper's putrid flesh. Saint Rose slept on a bed of broken glass, stone, potsherds, and thorns. Catherine of Siena wound iron chains so tightly around her waist they became embedded in her skin. She flagellated herself, licked pus from a beggar's cancerous sores.
She literally ate almost nothing, and eventually starved herself to death.