Martyrs’ Crossing (15 page)

This gave Yizhar early insight into how history—at least in this country—was written. Certain fates you could not change. Gertler was destined for posterity, no matter how much Scotch he poured into himself.

Another star for you, General Shimon! And Gertler, shuffling and inarticulate, is escorted from the command room once again, in the endless tape of Yizhar's memory, and while others pursue the war to its inevitable triumphant finale, Gertler sits in a chair near a window, his blond hair brushed by wind from the fields, in seclusion with his fiancée, under guard in a breezy farmhouse far from any action. The army could do things with its own back then that it couldn't do today. Today, sequestration was out of the question.

But what if it was for the good of the nation? No, it was impossible. An idle daydream.

Doron's file lay open on the edge of Yizhar's desk. There were other options.

In this job, you had to be creative.

•  •  •

D
ORON HAD TAKEN
the two tabloids from his mother's house. He sat down at Moment Cafe on Aza Street and opened
Yediot
to the photo spread. The open paper covered the whole tiny table.

And there they were. He looked at them, trying to absorb some meaning from their faces. How had they ended up with him? And more to the point, how had he ended up with them? Marina and the boy were holding hands and walking toward the camera on the main street in downtown Ramallah. You could see a stand that sold walking sticks to their left and a jeweler's to their right. The boy was toddling; must have been taken within the year. And by whom? The father, perhaps, in between incarcerations.

A small picture of the father at the bottom; clearly the work of an Israeli Defense Forces photographer, with the cell's sink visible in a corner of the shot. Hajimi looked furtive and downcast, as if he were trying vainly to avert his eyes, hoping to avoid entirely the humiliation of being photographed by some army hack, for the prison record.

Raad with the boy on his lap. Never were there two more serious faces. Doron looked and looked. He had stolen this boy from this man. He looked at the grandfather's hand resting lightly on the boy's leg and thought: They will come after me.

Why shouldn't they?

A
HMED AMR WAS DRIVING IN
over the desert from Jericho. In the passenger seat, Rana slipped off her shoes and tucked her legs under her. The days in Jericho had been slow, filled with legislative business that went nowhere, full of wrangling with the Chairman by telephone in Gaza, where the poor man was stuck as usual—hooray! The meeting in Jerusalem today would be something else entirely. No Chairman, no legislative procedure, no Robert's Rules of fucking Order. Just Ahmed Amr at the helm, in the big chair, and the rest of the cabinet, meeting in semisecret, and, as honored guest, George Raad. Friend of my childhood, Amr thought. That's what George had called him and that's what he was. Uncle Ahmed, to Marina. This time, the invitation was not just pro forma. This time, Ahmed needed George—if the Authority could get him on board, the next stage would really go smoothly. George could work a crowd. But he was so touchy and recalcitrant. Oh, we'll see, we'll see, Ahmed thought.

He loved the ride through the bald hills down into Jerusalem, especially today, with Rana next to him. Sometimes he pictured himself as Bedouin royalty, a camel-riding princeling in heavy, costly robes, surging in over the dry mountains to the holy city, with a vast army accompanying him, and wives, servants, and a whole entire city following behind to support him and supply his every need. The heroic fantasy was left over from youth, but it still struck him now and then, when he was alone in the car and driving a decent distance. Of course today he was not wearing robes—he would only put on his
abayeh
at home when no visitors were expected, or to meet his closest Palestinian friends in private quarters. Today he was wearing a suit and tie, and a keffiyeh. He and the Chairman were the only ones in the cabinet who wore the keffiyeh, but the Chairman wore it for extenuating reasons—to hide his utter, complete, and absolute baldness. Amr wore it for effect. A Frenchwoman in Beirut had once said to him, when he was wearing it:
“Ah, tu fais si arabe.”
She thought it was romantic, and his eyes had been opened. Rana, on the other hand, was not impressed. He looked over at her. She had her hand out the window and was letting the wind blow back her hair.

Nowadays, he liked to present Western observers with what they thought was the conundrum of the keffiyeh and the suit and tie. The ensemble confused and intrigued them, and Amr enjoyed that. He liked wearing the keffiyeh and sitting behind a desk in an office with a cell phone and a laptop, and reading about himself afterward in the Western press. How they fell for it! The advanced Arab, the chief negotiator in his head rag, calling Washington via satellite. They never failed to mention the phone, the fax, the keffiyeh. In reality, of course, thousands of keffiyeh-wearing Arabs, including Palestinians, worked at desks or in offices or factories or on cranes and bulldozers or in other areas of the modern, technological world. What else was left for them to do in their ancient headgear? Nothing authentic, to speak of. The keffiyeh was vestigial. The Palestinians' land had been stolen from them, and there was little of it left to work in the old traditional ways, with a keffiyeh to shield you from the sun, a flock of sheep, a long Biblical beard, and a walking stick. Who wanted sheep, anyway?

Amr liked being an Arab in a Mercedes with a beautiful girl by his side. It was part of his grand fuck-you to the world. He was one of very few council members who had bought his own car with his own money and who drove it himself. I alone have integrity, he said to himself. He loved the feel of the car. It wasn't new. It wasn't a limo, it didn't have smoked or bulletproof windows. In fact, it was old. But it was heavy, and powerful, and it handled well. It churned up the desert dust as well as any new car could. The stick itself had a thick, heavy, leather-covered richness in his grasp. The car smelled like leather and saddle soap. Why give a driver or bodyguard these pleasures, when he could have them for himself? Amr was the captain of his car. Besides, he hated the dreadful intimacy of drivers and other personal attendants. Following you around from place to place, waiting outside like a signpost for all the world to read, that you were there. Driving you from spot to spot. A driver always knew where you were, who you were avoiding, where you could be reached. He always knew who you were fucking.

It was still bizarre to be back in Palestine in broad daylight with all the proper documentation. Amr had come back after the beginnings of the peace talks to take his expected place at the Chairman's side, but still, he was always looking over his shoulder, waiting to be handcuffed, beaten, brought in. Watching for a tail. Waiting for hitmen from the Mossad, or maybe here, it would be considered internal—the Shabak. It was impossible to forget the famished months in the Israeli-run camp in Lebanon, the long terrifying, exhilarating years leading raids from Jordan into Israel, the weeks and months in solitary at Moscobiyyeh. Now Amr had a car with special Authority plates, accredited to him by the Israeli government.

He kept the two front windows down as the car thrust higher into the desert's peaks and the tropical dampness of the Jericho plain evaporated. The open windows made an attack easier, but only marginally. The breeze, the sandy smell: it was worth the risk. He checked his mirrors. No tail, no one, nothing. The hills looked like the beaten backs of Bedouin donkeys. A tuft of brush here, a dusty tumbleweed blown up against a rocky outcrop, but otherwise dry dirt, and packed solid. Nothing alive, or growing, or about to grow. Nothing his weary, cosmopolitan eyes could see, anyway.

He switched on Kol Israel, the Israeli news.

“No, put on music,” Rana said.

He laughed and shook his head.

Blah, blah, the chief of security, the Defense Minister, blah, blah, security is a priority, cannot negotiate with terrorists, without security there can be no peace, blah, blah. Then the Israeli leftists: Talks must continue, blah, without peace there can be no security, the Prime Minister is corrupt, blah, blah. When they were yowling among themselves, the Israelis were like cats. You could never tell if they were fighting or fucking. Then the Palestinian response: Whine, whine, the closure is unjust. People are without medicine, blah, blah, a baby has died, victim of inhumane Israeli policy, the talks cannot continue, how can we negotiate with these people, whine, whine, and on and on.

“So boring,” Rana said. “How can you stand it?”

“I love it,” he said.

“I know.” She shook her head. “Crazy.”

This was a low-rent desert. It was hard to imagine an Arab army descending dramatically down one of these scrubby, dirty mounds, although they had, they had. Everything that remained in the possession of the Palestinians was low-rent, low-budget, and this of course was not even theirs, not anymore, not for the moment.

A flock of sheep was wobbling over a rise. These were tended by a scrawny yipping dog and a young Bedouin wearing a rag tied around his head against the sun and a sweatshirt that had a university escutcheon on it, Amr could not make out which. Of course it was mid-morning, and the boy was not in school, much less at university. What did all his sheep eat? There seemed to be nothing for anyone in this place.

Poor George. The most brilliant man in the world. Our voice in the West—or in America anyway, which counted for something. The most amusing man, to Ahmed—but now, not amusing. George had not looked at all well at the funeral, and he seemed not himself at the Hajimis', afterward. Frail, although still capable of summoning the patriarchal glare. The man was sick. Dah! Amr thought to himself, using George's favorite exclamation. Amr had heard from one of Salah's deputies that Raad was not well, but he had not heard any prognosis. Something with the heart, he said. Amr wondered. He would miss George if George died: it was an old bond they had and one that somehow could not be broken by distance. Whenever something important happened to Ahmed, he always found himself wanting to call George. Lately, he didn't.

Ahmed still remembered that hot, hot day from so long ago that seemed, in memory, the beginning of their long association. They were neighbors and schoolmates. He remembered running down to George's—only a few blocks away—to tell him that the Amrs were packing up their things, what little they could take with them, and eight-year-old George standing there in his short formal pants and jacket, in the violent sunlight after school let out, guarding the front of the Raads' house, his legs planted as though he could never be moved from that one spot, his long fingers nervously pulling on the leaves at the end of a low branch of the mulberry tree, saying: “
I'm
not leaving. I'm supposed to be on the junior tennis team this summer. Aren't you?” The tennis team. Ahmed wondered if George remembered
that.
Or was he too caught up in The Cause? And then of course George turning up at the Amrs' in Amman for supper one evening a few weeks later, looking proud but embarrassed, with the rest of his family. He remembered how George had come to him in the hallway after sweets, and said: “Father says now we are poor.”

The threats that had been made against George—after he wrote that ridiculous book—had been troubling Ahmed's usually serene conscience, now that George was around. He kept saying to himself—as he had for months, since the threats had come to nothing (thank God!)—that it wasn't his responsibility. He had warned George, he reminded himself, he had done what was right, and then—even better—nothing had happened. Nothing! But he wondered whether George held him and the Chairman responsible for the threat. Oh well, Ahmed thought, in the end fate had been on George's side, that time, in spite of all the information—and it was good, hard information—that Ahmed had got. After all, George had only written a book—and it wasn't an entirely bad book, Ahmed recalled, although George's criticisms of the Chairman's conduct and the Authority's corruption were a little outlandish. Yes, George had only written a book.

Of course, Najjar had only written books, too, and Ahmed hadn't been able to save Najjar's legs. But then, he hadn't tried as hard for Najjar as he had for George, had he?

Ahmed downshifted. A slight hiccup in the otherwise pleasing purr of the old Mercedes, and up she went, up another rise, and up and up, and the desert spread itself before him like a vast blank terrain waiting to be conquered: it was no Sahara, but for a moment he thought he caught it shimmering. Rana was fiddling with the radio. Ahmed flicked the tail of his keffiyeh behind his shoulder, and looked at himself in the rearview mirror. Handsome, imperial. He wondered for the thousandth time how the Chairman managed to achieve such a disarrayed look in a garment that was so very noble, so very formal.