Vicious Circle (14 page)

Baruch glanced at the
katsa
. Like Elihu, he knew how to read between the lines, and he didn’t like what he found there. “Moments before my father died
he asked me to pinch his skin,” he told Cohen. “Harder, he said. Pain is what makes you know you’re alive, he said.” Baruch
cocked his thumb and forefinger as if they were a pistol and sighted on the Prime Minister’s Alter Ego. “Meeting people like
you reminds me that I’m alive.”

Elihu scraped back his chair. “We appreciate your sharing the Prime Minister’s views with us,” he informed the director of
the military affairs committee. A scowl stole over the
katsa
’s face as he added in absolutely the same conversational tone, “If it is possible to get Apfulbaum out alive, we will. And
you can go to hell.”

Elihu was striding toward the door before the baby-faced director could utter a word. Baruch was hard on his heels. Neither
of them looked back.

T
HE FREE CLINIC, FINANCED BY SEVERAL
M
USLIM NEIGHBORHOOD
associations and staffed by Doctor al-Shaath and a handful of volunteers, was running late. First two taxi drivers had carried
in an epileptic man who, when he recovered consciousness, ranted on until the Doctor calmed him with an injection. “Jerusalem
is the virgin promised to the Arabs,” the patient cried, clinging to one of the male nurses, “but you permitted the thief
to enter her room during the night. You listened behind the door to the cries of her defloration.” Then two clerics had caused
a commotion when they brought in a young man with a superficial knife wound in his groin; he needed to be treated without
going to a hospital, where he would attract the attention of the Isra’ili police. Angling the surgical lamp so that it bathed
the boy’s groin in light, bending close to the raw wound, squinting through a low-power magnifying lens positioned over the
wound, Doctor al-Shaath cleaned the puncture, stitched it closed and covered it with a bandage. By the time the Doctor reached
the last patient in the waiting room, a woman suffering from an ear ache, the
muezzins
were already announcing evening prayers. A nurse fitted the otoscope into the woman’s ear. Looking through it, she described
to the nearly blind Doctor what she saw so that he could make the diagnosis. “There is a slight reddish swelling of the exostoses
obstructing the external ear canal,” she reported, “but no sign of fluid in the eustachian tube.”

“Are you diabetic?” the Doctor asked the patient.

The woman shook her head.

“Have you had a high fever in the past few days?”

Again she said no.

“When you grit your teeth, do you feel pain in the ear? Ah, I thought so. You are suffering from dermatitis of the outer ear.
It is not serious. I will give you antibiotic drops to use in the ear. You should apply a heated compress and take aspirin
to alleviate the pain.”

Hurrying from the clinic through the back door minutes later, his long bamboo cane tapping nervously ahead of his flying feet,
the Doctor made his way through a labyrinth of back alleys off Greek Orthodox Patriarchate Road. He went up a rickety staircase
and ducked through a low door with “No Entrance—Building Condemned” painted in red on it, then climbed out a window onto a
slate roof. Guiding himself with a hand on a waist-high brick wall, he crossed several rooftops and descended a flight of
steps and crossed another roof before coming to the abandoned bathhouse with the narrow staircase at the back leading to the
safe house on the third floor. “Everything in order?” the Doctor asked Petra when she unlocked the reinforced door and let
him in. “Where’s Yussuf?”

A quarter of an hour before the Doctor returned from the clinic, Yussuf had climbed onto the toilet seat in the tiny lavatory
to look out of the only window in the safe house that had not been bricked over. Using binoculars, he had spotted the green
shirt drying on the clothesline of a roof, the signal that someone had left a letter with the lame shoemaker across from the
El Khanqa Mosque. “Yussuf’s off collecting the mail,” Petra told the Doctor.

“Anything on the radio?”

She shook her head. “The Jews chased a stolen car on the Nablus Road. When they caught up with it they discovered it wasn’t
stolen after all—a reserve colonel had borrowed it to return to his unit without telling the owner.”

Washing his hands and feet, sinking to his knees before the
mihrab
, the Doctor prostrated himself four times, drumming his forehead against the tiles as he lost himself in the prayer:
Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar
. Later, Petra set out a break-fast of tea and biscuits, and then unexpectedly poured herself a cup of tea and joined the
Doctor at the low table.

With exquisite timidity, she breathed his name. “Isma’il al-Shaath.”

Startled—he didn’t remember Petra ever using his given name before—he turned toward her inquisitively.

“There is an old Islamic tradition which holds,” she whispered, her eyes carefully avoiding his, her fingers picking lint
off the front of her Bedouin robe, “that in an ideal marriage, the wife should be half the husband’s age plus seven.”

The Doctor knew that Petra was an orphan, and assumed she was about to ask his permission to marry. “I am familiar with this
formulation,” he told her.

“Do you think there is any truth to it?”

“Half the husband’s age plus seven gives to each partner in the marriage contract an important element: to the man, a young
and eager wife over whom he will exercise a natural authority based on age and experience; to the woman, a mature father-figure
who can guide her in all things, and in whom she can have confidence.”

“Yussuf showed me a magazine article about the free clinic you organized in the Old City. It stated that you were forty-six
years of age. I myself am thirty years of age.” Petra steeled herself with a deep breath. “Thirty is half forty-six plus seven.”

The Doctor, flustered, dipped a biscuit into his tea and held it there. “I do not know how to respond,” he said, for once
at a loss for words.

“Say nothing. Only consider the possibility of my becoming your wife. I must tell you that I am not a virgin; I was once betrothed
to an inspector of water mains who was swept into a wadi during a rain squall and drowned before we could marry. At the time
I was not following the straight path ordained by the Messenger and permitted the consummation of the relationship to take
place once the engagement was published. On the positive side, I am in excellent health and reasonably attractive despite
the small pox scars on my face. In addition, I have been promised a dowry by my brothers.” Petra’s hands trembled, her voice
faded in and out, then faltered. Breathing deeply through her open mouth, she pushed herself to continue. “I realize that
for someone of your station it may sound insignificant,
but they speak of twenty camels, half of them female, and a portion of date trees in an oasis on the Jordanian side of Wadi
Araba.”

“I am already married.”

“The holy Qur’an permits a man to take in marriage four wives.”

The Doctor quoted the Qur’an on the matter of wives. “‘
If you fear you will not be equitable, then only one
.’” And he said, very gently, “I fear I will not be equitable, in the sense that I have neither the time nor the energy for
more than the one wife I am already contracted to.” Bowing his head, he whispered, “I am married to the cause of Islam. I
am engaged in a war on two fronts, the first against the external enemies of Islam, the infidels; the second against the internal
enemies of Islam, who seek accommodation with the Crusaders. The second struggle is the more important of the two, for the
victor will be the one to define Islam for centuries to come.”

Petra thought about this for a moment. “Even in the service of Islam, a man is known to have”—she racked her brain for an
appropriate expression—“physical needs …”

“You are more than a wife to me, dear Petra. You are a holy warrior and an accomplice in the battle to bring this sacred land,
and the world, into the straight path, the way of God, to whom belongs all things that are in the heavens and all that are
on earth.”

After a moment she murmured, “I pray that I have not offended you.”

“You have honored me, not offended me.”

Petra noticed that the biscuit had disintegrated in the Doctor’s tea, and the tea was no longer steaming. “I will pour another
cup for you,” she said.

With the tips of his fingers, the Doctor touched the rope burns on the back of her wrist; the Isra’ilis had once suspended
her from the branch of a tree when they caught her throwing rotten tomatoes at a jeep. “Accept my thanks,” he said huskily.
And he added quickly, “For the tea.”

“You are welcome, Isma’il al-Shaath.” A melancholy smile worked its way onto Petra’s pock-marked face. “For the tea.”

Yussuf came in, handed Petra a letter to decode from the Abu Bakr cell in Ghazeh and took his place before the niche in the
wall
indicating the direction of Mecca. He thumbed through the Qur’an to find the marker he had left in its pages. As the Doctor
removed his jacket and, rolling up the sleeves of his robe, started scrubbing his hands and forearms, Yussuf began reading
where he had left off the previous evening:

O believers, take not Jews and Christians as friends; they are friends of each other. Whoso of you makes them his friends
is one of them
.

Shaking his hands dry in the air, climbing back into his suit jacket, the Doctor had Petra read him the message from Ghazeh.
The Palestine Authority police were quietly spreading word that they were ready to pay fifty thousand American dollars for
information leading to the arrest of those responsible for the abduction of Rabbi Apfulbaum and his secretary, and a second
fifty thousand American dollars for information leading to the liberation of the prisoners. The Abu Bakr cell had also detected
an increase in contacts between the Palestinian police and Isra’ili agents; dozens of homes of fundamentalist leaders had
been raided by search parties believe to include Isra’ilis disguised as Palestinians. The Doctor took this in, then, as an
afterthought, checked to be sure Petra had been salting the Rabbi’s food with doses of caffeine and giving him cups of tea
brewed from rose hips, which was rich in vitamin C and tended to keep people awake when drunk late in the day.

Entering the back room of the safe house, the Doctor discovered Azziz pulling the secretary Efrayim back to his chair. “The
Yahoud
”—Azziz spit out “
Jew
” as if the word left a bad taste in his mouth—“has diarrhea.” The young Palestinian slipped the leather hood over Efrayim’s
head. “He has been to the toilet half a dozen times today.”

“He suffers from the fear of death,” the Doctor said in Arabic, settling onto the kitchen chair in front of the Rabbi, holding
a match to the tip of one of his pungent Farids, sucking it into life with shallow, nervous puffs. “I will have some weak
tea prepared to prevent dehydration, and rice to solidify his bowels.” He pulled the leather
hood off the Rabbi’s head, then reached for his wrist and checked his pulse. Venturing onto the no-man’s land of English,
he remarked, “Your heart is beating more normally today.”

The Rabbi, delivered from the stench of the hood, opened his mouth and filled his lungs with great gulps of air. “I don’t
sleep,” he admitted. He wasn’t complaining; he was merely stating a fact. “It is not the fear of death that keeps me awake.
It is not even the foul-smelling hood you put over my head. The food I eat, the tea I drink is spiked; I can tell from the
taste. Rose hips. Vitamin C. Enough to keep a horse from falling asleep. When I do manage to doze off, one of the two goons”—with
a contemptuous toss of his head, Apfulbaum indicated Azziz and Aown, who were sitting on the cot grinning—“yells an obscenity
in my ear or kicks at the legs of the chair.” The Rabbi lifted both hands, still bound in cuffs, and ran his fingers through
his hair, which was flying off in all directions. “Exhausting me will achieve nothing,” Apfulbaum blurted out. “I can’t tell
you what I don’t know.” He took several more deep breaths and continued on a calmer note. “You have surely proposed trading
us for two or twenty or two hundred Palestinian terrorists rotting in Israeli jails. We both of us know what will happen.
The Israelis will offer to negotiate. To buy time, they will even ask the Egyptians or the Jordanians to mediate. But in the
end they will never reward hostage taking by agreeing to a swap of prisoners. I understand how these things work—you will
have given them a deadline. When it arrives, you will execute us.”

Efrayim, following the conversation from his chair, moaned, “For God’s sake, Rabbi, don’t put crazy ideas into his head.”

The Rabbi reached out and gripped the Doctor’s knee. “Make no mistake, I prefer to survive; you have to be off your rocker
to choose death over life. On the other hand, maybe my murder will scuttle this infernal charade of a peace treaty. Maybe.”
Sitting back, Apfulbaum snorted. “The choice is between no peace on, God forbid, half the land God promised Abraham, and no
peace on all the land. When the Jews understand this, they will opt for no peace on all the land.”

“Every time I come in here and listen to you rattle on about the
Messenger Ibrahim,” the Doctor said with quiet intensity, “I have the sensation of mining a seam of madness.”

“It’s you who’s insane,” the Rabbi retorted. He raised his right hand, dragging his left hand after it at the end of the chain,
and waved it above his head. “You and your Imams and Ayatollahs and fundamentalist kamikazes who blow up innocent Jews on
buses, you’re all
meshuga
,
patzo
, off your rockers; you’re all stark raving maniacs.”

Breathing noisily through his nostrils, Apfulbaum melted back into the chair. After a moment the Doctor cleared his throat.
“Let us begin tonight’s conversation,
ya’ani
, by talking about the Jewish underground movement Keshet Yonathan in the Isra’ili occupied West Bank. In the mid nineteen-eighties,
your own police arrested twenty-seven members of a Jewish terrorist cell, based on the West Bank, who were plotting to blow
up the Dome of the Rock Mosque. The same people were accused of murdering three Palestinian students at Hebron’s Islamic College,
and maiming two Palestinian West Bank mayors, Bassam Shaka and Karim Khalef, with letter bombs. Curiously, this initial burst
of Jewish underground activity roughly coincided with your arrival in Isra’il and the founding of the settlement of Beit Avram.
It is well known that the Isra’ili Shin Bet picked you up for questioning on half a dozen occasions. No charges were ever
brought against you for lack of hard evidence, so the Jewish police claimed. But you were an outspoken advocate of—”