Bloodline (21 page)

Now, once again, the imam had asked Hassan to wait for him so that he could talk to him privately. Hassan's thoughts and memories were interrupted by the sweeping brown robes of the imam as he entered the antechamber.

“Hassan, my son.
As-salamu alaykum.
”

The greeting caught Hassan off guard, but the formal reply came habitually and reflexively. “
Wa alaykum as-salamu wa rahmatu Allah wa barakatuh
,” he said, nerves prompting him to use the most formal reply he could muster.

“There is no need to be nervous, Hassan.” The imam smiled. “What have you to tell me?”

As if he were in trouble, Hassan said urgently, “Nothing, imam.”

“Hassan, you have spoken to one of your brothers. He told me you have seen the Jew doctor. Yesterday. That she dared to enter our village. Talk to me about what you saw.”

Relieved that this was all, Hassan told the imam, “Yes, I saw the doctor, the Jew woman who saved Bilal . . .” The moment the words left his mouth, he regretted using the term “saved.” He knew the imam would not approve. Bilal had not been saved. Bilal had failed. But if the imam noticed or cared, he didn't show it. “She was driving a very expensive car. She parked outside Bilal's house. She was in the protection of Bilal's father, Fuad.” Hassan hardened his voice, wanting to be clear to his imam how he felt about the woman. “She was dressed in expensive clothes. Her face and arms were uncovered, like a whore's.”

The imam nodded. He took a long moment before he spoke again and did not look at Hassan when he did, as if the chamber were full of listeners.

“Our brother Bilal has suffered greatly for our cause. He faced the enemy bravely. But make no mistake, Hassan, our fight is not easy. Allah is with us but we must prove ourselves worthy. Prove that we are deserving of victory.” The imam stopped and
stared at Hassan, his eyes boring into him like drill bits. “Are you deserving, Hassan?”

“I pray so,” Hassan said, and tried his hardest to sound like he meant it.

“Let us return to your brothers. And when we're there, show me, show them, what kind of a Muslim you are, what kind of a man you are.”

The imam put an arm on Hassan's shoulders and guided him out of the small chamber and into the open prayer space of the mosque. A half dozen of Hassan's brothers—the chosen young men who gathered fervently to listen to the imam speak after the rest had left—watched as the imam guided him into the space. The imam held Hassan in his gaze, his arm still on Hassan's shoulder in a fatherly grip.

“If a bucket is full of holes, what happens to the water?”

Hassan was confused but not surprised by the question. The imam often spoke in such ways. “The water runs out,” he answered flatly.

The imam continued. “And what use is water if it is spilled on the ground? It cannot be drunk. It cannot fill the mouths of thirsty men. Water is most precious; there is no life without water, and so, too, the bucket that holds the water, that holds life, must be free of holes . . .” The imam turned outward, away from Hassan, to spread his arms to the gathered youths. “We are the bucket that holds the water. In us there must be no holes. We must be complete.” He turned back to Hassan, this time placing both hands on the boy, one on each shoulder as if about to embrace him.

Hassan felt all the eyes of his brothers on him.

“Bilal failed, Hassan. Water has spilled. I am informed that he has told the Jew security about us . . . We must stop more water from spilling.”

Hassan's heart should have soared with pride at the attention and trust of his master in full sight of everyone. But in that
moment he felt fearful as the image of the attractive young Jewish doctor passed into his mind's eye. And he saw his friend Bilal lying on a hospital operating table with her standing over him, saving his life.

But Hassan knew what he must do. There could be no mistake.

A
HIMAAZ DESCENDED THE ROAD
from the king's palace toward the gate that led out of the wall and into the valleys beyond the city. The people of the city all looked at him in surprise and bewilderment. Nobody had ever seen the high priest in sackcloth and ashes before. Occasionally priests who had sinned were forced to wear such as penitents, but the high priest, who was supposed to be without sin, wore it on only one day, the ninth day of the month of Ab. This date commemorated the occasion when only two of the twelve spies sent by Moses as scouts to the land of Canaan, Joshua and Caleb, returned and spoke positively. All the other spies returned and said that the land was unsuitable for the Hebrews. And the people had wailed and panicked, and the Lord God Yahweh was furious and said that from that time forward, because of their lack of faith, all Israelites must fast on that day. And only on the ninth day of Ab did the high priest close himself in the Holy of Holies and spend all day and all night praying for the redemption of his people.

So to see Ahimaaz walking through the city, wearing the garb of a penitent, caused shock and disquiet among his people.

Ahimaaz could see the city gate looming as a dark orifice in the bright pale stone of the city's huge walls. Around him people parted; donkeys and carts were led aside by their owners to make way as Ahimaaz walked slowly forward to the gate.

Gamaliel the tax collector ran after him as the people looked on.

“Brother,” he called.

Surprised, Ahimaaz turned. When they were standing together, the full heat of the day made both men sweat as Gamaliel struggled to catch his breath.

“Why?” gasped Gamaliel.

Ahimaaz said nothing.

“Why? I don't understand. The king has swept away all troubles. You're free to return to the temple.” Gamaliel cast his hand up to where the temple stood at the top of the hill.

Ahimaaz shook his head.

“But I don't understand. How can you walk away? You know as well as I what's out there.” Gamaliel pointed beyond the gate to the fields and the valleys and deserts beyond.

Ahimaaz put his hand on the tax collector's shoulder and held his eyes in a fixed gaze.

“Out there is my brother.”

And with that, Ahimaaz turned and walked away through the gate into the land beyond.

Gamaliel watched him leave until the sun was almost lost to the shadow of the wall. At long last he turned and faced the hill. Slowly, wearily, he began the long climb back to the temple. Perhaps, for the first time in his life, to pray for the safety of the priest, and to give thanks . . .

D
ESPITE HER PUNISHING
operating schedule, Yael found time between ripping off her bloodied gloves and gown and scrubbing up for the next operation scheduled for midday to walk up the two flights of stairs to the men's surgical ward and visit Bilal. It was perhaps her last chance before he was hauled off to prison to uncover something of the mystery that so haunted her.

She nodded to the guard as she entered his room and found Bilal with his eyes tightly closed, his lips moving in silent prayer.

“Bilal?”

He opened his eyes and glared at her.

“You know, the men from Shin Bet were here yesterday to collect you and escort you to prison, but I wouldn't let them take you.” Yael had hoped such a statement might soften him, but if it did, he didn't show it and he didn't respond.

“I've been to see your parents, Bilal. In Bayt al Gizah. And I've promised them that they can come and visit you before you're taken away.”

“When will they be here?” asked Bilal.

Yael saw a faint crack in the armor. “Tomorrow. I've spoken to the guard. He's promised not to interfere and to allow them as much time with you as you need.”

Bilal's eyes followed her as she moved to the other side of the bed to check his chart.

“You met my father?”

“He's a lovely man. He's worried about you, you know?”

“And my mother?”

“I only met her for a moment. And your sister.”

Yael then tried to extend the topic of Bilal's mother unselfconsciously into the conversation. “Where did your mother come from?”

Bilal seemed to answer despite himself. “Peki'in. She was born there. So was I, but I left there when I was a baby. We've been back to see Peki'in when we were children, me and my sister and my brother, but I don't remember it.”

Yael said softly, “I know Peki'in. I was there when I was in the army. Did her family always come from there?”

“My grandmother came from Peki'in. And probably her grandmother before her. I don't know these things.”

“And your father? Was his family always from Peki'in, or somewhere else?”

He looked at her curiously. “My father . . . once he told me that he would take me to where my grandfather came from, Egypt. I think my grandfather worked for a Jew business. He came here with them.”

“So then your mother and father met in Peki'in?”

“I don't know. It was when you Jews made Israel and you forced my grandfather's family out.”

Forced out: a complex narrative made simplistic and disposable, she thought. The lies they were told fed on themselves in the landscape of victimhood.

“I made a promise to your father and mother that they could visit you tomorrow. I don't want their last sight of you to be behind bars. That's what I would want if you were my son, Bilal.”

Bilal was taken aback by the sudden change of topic and tone. He'd been taught to see such treatment by the Jews as lies and deception. Who was this woman? Part of him wanted to trust her, but the rest of him knew he shouldn't. The good manners his mother had always tried to teach him compelled him to thank her. But he couldn't bring himself to do that either.

The image of the Shin Bet man and the imam, and the phone and the girl and the tunnel beneath the temple wall, and the bullets tearing open his leg, seemed to scorch his mind. How did it come to this? How could he escape? What was happening to him? Who could he trust?

Bilal ran his hands over his face as if to wash it clean before he knelt in prayer. When he opened his eyes again, his jaw hardened and he clung on to the last of what he knew to be true. “I am a freedom fighter!”

The words made Yael angry. “You think freedom comes by killing innocents and blowing yourself up? What does that achieve, Bilal? Who is more free when you're dead? Your father? Your mother? Your brother and sister? Are any of them more free?”

“It's so easy for you, Doctor. Was your father a doctor? Was
his father a banker? Was your father's father a fat and wealthy merchant with servants? You know nothing except an easy life. You know nothing except having whatever you want, whatever you need, and being able to do anything you please! You live in a palace and drive an expensive car and have servants—all on Palestinian blood!”

“So your answer is spilling our blood? And this will make your family wealthy, make your people prosperous and happy? Do you know how stupid that sounds, Bilal?”

“If we do not kill, we rot! If we do not fight, we die.”

“Fighting for what, Bilal?”

“Fighting for our own nation.”

“Every time, since Israel was created, your people have been offered a nation, you've rejected it. You chose war over peace every time.”

“There will be no peace until the Jews have gone!”

With anger and frustration rising in her, Yael was ready to respond. It was the Arab states that had never allowed the Palestinians freedom and never would. The Palestinians were pawns in the Arab game they were playing with the rest of the world.

Yael wanted to tell him that the Palestinian expectation of freedom was a farce. Their land had been annexed and occupied and fought over by other Arabs a thousand years before Israel was formed. And since Israel's creation, Palestinians were forced to remain refugees because no Arab states would offer them citizenship. They were tragic hostages to Arab politics, with nowhere else to go, bullied and exploited by other nations. And as the rockets fell on Israel, launched from Palestinian rooftops, Israel was forced to build bigger walls. Walls to protect the remnants of a people who had survived Hitler's Holocaust, who'd come out of two thousand years of persecution and diaspora to return to their home, where they would no longer be outsiders.

Yael swallowed and exhaled. The endless cycle of it all was made visceral in her mind by the blood and the bullets and the
bodies of those who lay on her operating table; by childhood friends who had died in the wars.

All bodies look the same when they are bleeding. Israeli and Palestinian. Arab and Jew. Boys, girls, mothers, fathers. All victims of a cycle that seemed as old as history, and from which nobody could seem to envisage a way out.

These images and memories softened her. She looked Bilal in the eyes as if searching him for something of herself.

“You and us, Palestinians and Jews, we have something in common, Bilal . . . Neither of us has anywhere else to go . . .”

A
S THE SOLIDLY BUILT POLICEMAN
wheeled him down the corridor, nurses and doctors avoided looking at him. Normally when patients were well enough to leave the hospital, those doctors and nurses who had cared for their health acknowledged their leaving as a rite of passage. If they were important people, some of the staff lined up in congratulations, wishing the patient continued good health and fortune.

But everybody knew, without even looking at the handcuffs that tethered his wrist to the armrest of the wheelchair, that Bilal would be getting no such reception. Only Yael came to the door of the men's surgical recovery ward to wish him good-bye.

She stood at the window of the ward and watched him being wheeled into an ambulance to be driven to police headquarters, where he would be processed, arraigned by a judge, remanded in custody to await a trial hearing, and then shipped off to prison. She prayed that, for the sake of his mother and father, he'd plead
guilty so that his trial and the awful evidence that would doubtless be presented would be over quickly.