Vicious Circle (20 page)

I
N THE SAFE HOUSE PERCHED ABOVE THE MAZE OF STREETS IN THE
Christian Quarter, the Doctor was pacing behind Efrayim who, relieved to be free of his hood, was trying to make his interrogation
drag on as long as possible. “I don’t know anything about encoding or decoding,” he replied, “so how could I have encoded
or decoded the Rabbi’s messages?”

“Don’t believe a word he says,” Apfulbaum quipped, his voice muffled by his hood. “Already he writes the king’s English in
a kind of code—only people who spell as badly as he does can decipher it.”

“What were your duties as Rabbi Apfulbaum’s secretary?” the Doctor asked.

“I typed his letters on a computer that thanks to God had a spell checker. I screened his phone calls and made sure the answering
machine was on for Shabbat. I reminded him of appointments. I deposited honorariums in his bank account when he gave speeches
or sold Op-Ed pieces, and balanced his checkbook and warned him when he was overdrawn, which was almost always. I arranged
logistics when he went on trips—I called ahead to tell them what he wouldn’t eat, which was anything fried, and tasted everything
first to make sure it wasn’t too salty.”

The Rabbi piped up, “He tasted everything first, but it was to make sure some lunatic Israeli peacenik didn’t poison my food.”

“You never told me that before, Rabbi.”

“I didn’t want you to stop tasting.”

The Doctor said, “If you typed his letters, you will know whom he wrote to.”

“Our Rabbi wrote to anyone, which is to say, he wrote to everyone—he wrote to every Letters to the Editor editor in America,
he wrote to our Prime Minister practically once a week, he wrote to the White House and Ten Downing Street and the Elysée
Palace and the Bundestag and the Kremlin—”

The Doctor tried to cut him off. “I think I get the idea.”

But Efrayim couldn’t be stopped. “He wrote to the heads of state in Saudi Arabia and Syria and Iraq and Iran and Egypt and
Jordan and Monaco—”

“Why Monaco?” the Doctor demanded, intrigued.

The Rabbi snickered under his hood. “I sent Prince Charming a list of Palestinian terrorist groups that were laundering money
in his banks and advised him to clean up his act or I’d get the American Jews to boycott his Lilliputian principality. Or
words to that effect.”

“Did he ever write a letter to anyone named Ya’ir?” the Doctor asked Efrayim.

The Rabbi’s secretary thought about this. “There was someone named Ya’ir at the Ministry of—”

“I am talking about the Ya’ir who is the leader of the Jewish settlers’ terrorist organization,” the Doctor said impatiently.

“Mister, I don’t know anything about that Ya’ir and I know less about Jewish settlers’ terrorist organizations. Listen, I’m
not even sure I’m going to stay in Israel after what’s happened to me. I mean, it’s one thing to be kidnapped if you can be
positive you’re going to be released. It’s another thing to be kidnapped by people who don’t know from happy endings.”

“Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention camps are also entitled to happy endings,” snapped the Doctor.

“If it was up to me,” Efrayim said, hoping to ingratiate himself with his captor, “I’d let them all go free. I swear to God
I would.”

“It is unfortunate for us that it is not up to you.”

“Besides which,” said the Rabbi, “only God can decide who will and who won’t have a happy ending.”

“It’s not me who is going to say differently, Rabbi,” Efrayim declared.

The Doctor looked down at the Rabbi’s head bobbing under his hood. “Nor would I say differently,” he remarked softly.

In the other room, Yussuf’s failure to return from the mail drop alarmed Petra. She kept her ears glued to the Isra’ili wavelengths.
She could hear paratroop units stationed around the Old City reporting in. Suddenly an officer spoke of an abduction near
the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Soldiers were being sent to investigate. Petra went to the door between the two rooms and
summoned the Doctor with an urgent wave of her hand. “Yussuf has not returned from the shoemaker’s shop,” she told him. “The
Isra’ilis are reporting a kidnapping.” On Petra’s radio, there were bursts of static, then a cryptic report with the details
of the abduction. Four Palestinian laborers had pounced on a young Palestinian and taken him away in an Arab taxi. One of
the gunmen had scratched the words, in Arabic, “Hamas has a long memory and a long arm” in chalk on a wall.

Aown and Azziz panicked. They were all for killing the prisoners out of hand and fleeing, but the Doctor overruled them. If,
in fact, Yussuf had been picked up by Hamas gunmen, it would appear to be a settling of old scores; Yussuf was known to have
incensed the Hamas organization when he crossed over to join the Doctor’s Abu Bakr group and took members of his Nablus cell,
along with their cache of bombs and weapons, with him. Yussuf could have been betrayed by Abdullah; if he sold letters, he
might also sell people. Or Hamas could have spotted Yussuf picking up mail at the shoemaker’s shop, and decided to snatch
him the next time he came into the streets. They would have no way of knowing Yussuf was involved in the kidnapping of the
Rabbi and his secretary. And it would be out of character for Yussuf to offer this information.

Straining to make out the Isra’ili voices crackling over the wavelengths, Petra agreed with the Doctor’s analysis. “There
is no mention of us, no indication that the Isra’ilis suspect we are hiding in the Old City. We would be foolish to lose our
nerve now.”

“If Hamas picked up Yussuf,” Azziz said, “they must know about the shoemaker.”

“The shoemaker is a dead end street,” the Doctor pointed out. “As far as he is concerned, someone named Tayzir was hiding
in the Old City and arranged the drop, at twenty shekels a letter, in order to receive mail.”

The Doctor nevertheless took the precaution of distributing the AK-47s and hand grenades. Leaving Petra and the el-Tel brothers
in the front room, he retreated into the back room with the hostages, closing and locking the second armored door behind him.

“Is the Israeli Army coming to free us?” Efrayim asked excitedly.

“It does not look that way,” the Doctor said.

“
El hamdouli-lah
,” the Rabbi muttered in Arabic. “Thanks to God.” In his heart of hearts, he dreaded a rescue operation as much as he hoped
for it; even if the Israelis managed to fight their way into the safe house, the Doctor would surely shoot his hostages before
the soldiers could blow the door to the back room off its hinges.

“In times of crisis, you invoke the Arabic name of God,” the Doctor noted. “There is hope for you yet.”

A
OWN UNTIED THE LEGS OF THE
R
ABBI AND LED HIM TO THE
lidless toilet and watched him urinate into it, then brought him back to his seat and lashed his legs. Then he led Efrayim
to the toilet. When the secretary was back in his seat Aown removed their hoods and gave them each a cup of tea and several
biscuits, and settled onto the cot to watch them eat.

Efrayim whispered to the Rabbi, “I read somewhere that if kidnappers get to know you personally, they can’t bring themselves
to hurt you.” The secretary turned to Aown. “So do you have a name?” When the young Palestinian didn’t respond, he said, “My
name’s Efrayim. Efrayim Blumenfeld. Actually, I’m glad to meet you. I’m not just saying that. I really am. I never talked
to a live Palestinian before. Don’t get me wrong—I haven’t talked to dead ones either.” Efrayim indicated the Rabbi with his
chin. “His name is Rabbi Apfulbaum. Rabbi isn’t his Christian name. His Christian name is Isaac. So how old are you? Me, I’m
going to be twenty-seven next month.” Confronted with Aown’s obstinate silence, Efrayim cast about desperately for something
to say to break the ice. “I’m not actually Israeli,” he hurried on. “I’m American. I suppose from your point of view that’s
just as bad. I was thinking of emigrating to Israel but I haven’t made up my mind yet. I have a mother and a father and a
teenage sister living on Long Island. They’re not so excited about me moving to Israel. They think it’s too dangerous. You’ve
probably heard of Long Island? It’s the largest island on the continental United States. I suppose they call it Long Island
because of how it sticks out
like a sore thumb into the Atlantic Ocean. You’ve probably heard of the Atlantic Ocean?”

The Rabbi said, “Enough already, Efrayim. Chances are he’s not going to Long Island anytime soon. If he does go there it’ll
be to plant a bomb in a Walbaums.”

“I only thought—”

“You should stop thinking and give your brain a rest.”

“Rabbi, it’s impossible to stop thinking.”

“You can stop thinking if you pray.”

“What should I pray for?”

“Pray to God to let you live long enough to celebrate your twenty-seventh birthday.”

“Rabbi, you terrify me when you say things like that.”

“You terrify
me
when you say I have a Christian name.”

“W
hich brings us back full circle to Ya’ir.”

“To Ya’ir.” The Rabbi tilted his head and lifted his manacled hands in a mock toast. “Long life,” he tittered, his vocal cords
sore from the endless interrogation. “Good health. Financial success. Fifteen minutes of fame. Whatever.”

They had been at it for three and a half hours, the Doctor’s precise questions and the Rabbi’s demented replies grazing each
other as they sailed back and forth between them. The el-Tel brothers had drifted in to listen for a while, then, bored, had
returned to the front room, Azziz to strip and oil the AK-47s while his brother read aloud the nightly portion of the holy
Qur’an, after which the two settled down to a game of backgammon. The sound of the dice rattling and their muffled cries of
excitement could be heard through the partly open door. His eyes red with fatigue, the Doctor puffed intently on a Palestinian
Farid; cigarette ashes flecked the lapels of his suit jacket, butts littered the floor around the hem of his long white robe.
“The leader of Jewish underground,” he droned on, lighting a new cigarette on the dying embers of an old one, “is known by
the code name Ya’ir, after Eliezer ben Ya’ir, the hero of Masada who held out against the Roman Tenth Legion and talked his
men into committing mass suicide when it looked as if they were going to be taken prisoner. More recently, Ya’ir was the underground
name of Abraham Stern, the Jewish-Polish terrorist who led the Stern Gang against British rule until he was cornered and killed
by British soldiers in a Tel Aviv apartment.”

The Rabbi’s feet tap-danced on the floor of their own accord. “You’d be better armed for your holy war against Israel if you
understood Jewish character as well as you understand Jewish history.”

“Tell me about Jewish character,
ya’ani
.”

Apfulbaum pulled a face. He sensed that his interrogator had planted a land mine in his path; whatever answer he gave was
likely to be turned against him. A muscle in his thin neck twitched as he leaned forward, eager to outfox the fox. “Twenty-four
hours a day, seven days a week, the Jew fights an inner battle. The Torah tells us we are warriors and lions. The Holocaust
tells us we are victims and lambs. Modern day Jews carry the Torah in their heads and the Holocaust in their guts; it is the
tightening of an artery, the tensing of a muscle, an ear-splitting murmur of the heart. The two traditions, the two halves
of this split personality, war with each other within the gizzard of every Jew.”

“The predicament of the Jew is not unlike the predicament of the devout Muslim,” the Doctor said. “We also have two traditions
that war with each other in our gizzards, as you put it. When a Muslim no longer lives on Islamic territory and under Islamic
rule, he must decide which of the two traditions to follow: armed struggle, which we call
jihad
, or emigration to a territory governed by Islamic law, which we call
hejira
. In his lifetime, the Prophet Mohammed did both. In my case, I have chosen
Al jihad fi sabil Allah
—Warring in the path of God, which must be interpreted as armed struggle to spread Muslim power and the word of the Prophet.
I prefer to fight rather than emigrate.”

Despite himself, Apfulbaum was beginning to feel a grudging respect for his captor. “In your shoes I would certainly do the
same. In my case, in the case of the Jewish hero who has taken the name of Ya’ir, the warrior Jew has triumphed over the victim
Jew.”

“And your warrior Jew, by extension, has divine dispensation to steal the land from Palestinians and slaughter those who resist.”

Apfulbaum wagged a trembling finger at his inquisitor. “We are not stealing the land from Palestinians, but nurturing a Jewish
entity in the Promised Land.”

“Personally, I have nothing against a Jewish entity in, say, Uganda.”

The Rabbi snorted in satisfaction; all things considered, he was enjoying these bouts of verbal sparring, if only because
he got to spend several hours without the sickening hood over his head. If he ever managed to get out of this alive, he would
attempt to reproduce the dialogue in a lengthy article. He already had a title in mind; he would call it “The Children of
Abraham: a Dialogue of the Deaf between Two Blind Mice.” “For centuries,” Apfulbaum said, rambling on in lilting imitation
of his old Rabbi in Crown Heights instructing
yeshiva
bookworms, I. Apfulbaum among them, “we were dispersed like seeds across the planet, taking root where we could, moving on
when the local czar acquired a taste for ethnic cleansing. We lived by the Torah, but what happened to us? Pogroms, ghettos,
expulsions, inquisitions, death camps, crematoriums are what happened to us. The moral of the story would be as plain as the
nose on your face if I had eyeglasses and could see your face: To live by the Torah isn’t enough; we must follow God’s commandment
to the Jewish people and settle all of the land of the Torah. The majority of the six hundred and thirteen commandments in
the Torah can’t be carried out in Uganda—they can only be carried out in Israel. I’m talking all of the land of the Torah,
not just half. Living the life of a Torah Jew in the land of Israel is the ultimate religious experience; it’s a spiritual
orgy. Here we are in direct contact with God, on the soil God gave us. We are not weekend warriors, dipping in and out of
Jewishness in some Diaspora synagogue where singles and divorced circle each other looking for non-smoking soul mates; we
are not New York Jews who associate Jewishness with the ritual eating of bagels and lox every Sunday morning.”