Martyrs’ Crossing (21 page)

Doron was feeling guilty. Here came his military side: he didn't like feeling guilty. Shake it off! Guilt was like a side of meat hanging around your shoulders, some repulsive thing about you that everyone could see. It was not permitted. Not here in his hometown. This was the place of no regrets, no apologies. No one does wrong here. You do what you have to do for your country—that was Doron's ethic, what he'd been raised on, in school, in the army. His father, a stalwart old soldier, preached this credo. His mother was different, but she too believed.

Do what you have to do. Doron thought about it. It was so seductive. And with all his penance, with all his guilt, he did recognize in himself an unmistakable panting desire for self-preservation, not learned but organic. Live with it. Shake it off. Like Yizhar, Doron was a simple soldier. Find the soldier; he thought: That's me! Ready or not.

He wondered what would happen. Maybe by now, while Doron sat shivering behind the wheel of the jalopy, maybe by now Marina had already given his name to Hajimi. Maybe by now, the whole terrorist network was gathering its forces to find him, get him, deal with him. He doubted it: it was hard to imagine himself as that important. For a simple soldier, it was not easy to be frightened of something until it was actually holding a gun to your head. Doron believed—no, he knew, now—that Ibrahim's death had been an accident, an inevitability that Ibrahim and Doron and everyone else involved had somehow stumbled into. It was difficult for him to imagine that anyone could see it—seriously—any other way. That was the line he was feeding himself today.

But what if he were the boy's father, cut off, in prison, his wife alone and undefended on the outside, the Israelis his eternal enemy and the boy his only child?

And then there was always the Palestinians' paranoia to take into consideration. For them, no accident was accidental.

As Doron drove up HaNevi'im Street, the skies cleared momentarily, and in patches of moonlight and cloud, the low houses of Musrara with their red roofs appeared and then disappeared. He turned left onto Highway 1. The Dome of the Rock was on his right, its shining cap bursting out of the Old City into the sporadic moonlight. Doron drove up toward Ramallah. Before the Jericho turnoff, the rains began again. He turned right onto the Jericho road, and then left again, off Jericho, toward Pisgat Ze'ev, the Jerusalem suburb where Zvili lived. Zvili had invited him many times and finally he'd had to say yes. Doron remembered that afternoon barbecue. He'd tripped over his own feet in the little backyard, and spilled his beer on the new Mrs. Zvili. Pink dress. She was a good sport.

The road curved up and around a precipice, and Doron passed the darkened fronts of the dry cleaners, the Co-op supermarket, the pizza shop, the SuperPharm, the hardware store, the health insurance office, all along the main drag, until he looped off into the residential area, where the houses were built like little castles, with crenellated turrets and bits of balustrade made of concrete and stucco and brick, and terra-cotta tiles. From the edge of the short cliffs on which the suburb had been erected, you could see down into the West Bank, into the winking Arab villages, with their minarets and domes and flat roofs that shone tonight like patches of a silver quilt whenever the rain let up. During the day, if it was clear, you could see the Dead Sea's salty oblong through Zvili's picture window, evaporating along the Jordanian border.

Zvili and his wife lived in one of Pisgat Ze'ev's tight little castles. Next to his place, a new house was going up, and Zvili complained a lot about the Palestinian workers who were building it. Most of the lights were out in Zvili's neighborhood now. It was almost ten, but Doron was in no mood to be polite. He honked his horn. He honked again, and some lights went on, but not at Zvili's. Finally, Zvili came to the door. He turned on an outside light—the short brick path up to the house sprang out of the dark. He stood in the lit doorway, a small wizardly figure in white underwear and a streaming white bathrobe.

“Who is it?” Zvili yelled through the storm, shading his eyes from the rain as if he were looking at the sun.

“Me,” shouted Doron. It was hard to hear above the hammering of the rain.

“Ah, you,” Zvili shouted. “Come in. What's wrong?”

“No, you get in the car,” Doron yelled.

“Into that car?” Zvili shouted back. “With a madman at the wheel? No way.” He lifted the shoulders of his bathrobe up over his head and ran over to Doron's car. “What's up, Ar?” he asked, peering into the window.

“Just get in,” said Doron. “We have to talk.”

“Actually, we do,” said Zvili. He ran back to the house and shouted some words into the doorway, picked something up, and dashed back to Doron's car, letting himself in to the passenger seat after a brief tussle with the car's door handle. He was wet.

“You should kiss me,” Zvili said, as he sat down.

“What?” said Doron, looking at Zvili as if perhaps he hadn't heard right. “That's not what I had in mind, really.” He started up the car again. It coughed before turning over.

“Kiss me. I'm gonna be a father,” Zvili said, turning to Doron with a wide, lecherous grin. He lit a cigarette, and shifted his gun around on the elastic holster belt he had snapped around his waist.

“Alana's pregnant?”

“You think it would be someone else? Yeah, she's pregnant. We found out today.” Zvili let his bathrobe fall open wide, and he played with the hair on his thighs.

Doron drove.

“Aren't you going to say congratulations?” Zvili asked. There was a note of hurt in his voice.

“Oh, congratulations, of course.” Doron turned to him briefly and smiled. “That's great.” These days, everyone wanted him to give the appropriate answer.

“You planning to have kids?” Zvili asked.

“Yeah. I guess. Maybe someday.” More appropriate answers. Doron hunched over the steering wheel.

“Where are we going?” Zvili asked.

“Nowhere,” said Doron.

“Nice night to go nowhere.”

“You want to go somewhere? Where?”

“Actually, home to my wife,” said Zvili. “We were just, you know, getting into it, if you must know, when you started blowing that fucking horn. Shit, man, what's wrong with you? Arriving unannounced at ten at night. What's up?”

“I'm a little stressed out.”

“So who isn't in Jerusalem?”

Doron gave a short laugh.

“You're freaked about the Hajimi kid.” Zvili tapped a cigarette on the dashboard.

“Right.”

“You see they're going to have a rally for him? Those people are crazy. It's going to be wild.”

“Yeah. Sounds like fun.”

“Hey, Ari, lighten up. Yizhar has it all worked out.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” Zvili said. “When's the last time you talked to him?”

“Yesterday.”

“He's got it covered.”

“Oh, good,” said Doron.

“Come on. Yizhar's our savior, Ari. Remember that.”

“He's not telling the truth.”

“Big deal.”

“It's going to blow up in our faces.”

“Not in my face, buddy. And not in yours, I hope. He won't let it.”

“Don't kid yourself,” said Doron. “If people find out the story is not true, we're the ones who'll catch the flak for it, not Yizhar. The only one he'll stand by is whoever it was who told us not to let them through.”

“You mean, whoever told
you,
” Zvili corrected him.

“Right.”

“Was there
really
someone who did that?”

“Come on, man,” said Doron, looking at Zvili out of the side of his eye. A truck came out from behind them and passed them going fast. Its tires sucked up rain from the road and swept Doron's windshield with water.

“Yizhar doesn't mention it, if you know what I mean,” Zvili said.

“No, I don't know what you mean.”

“I mean it's not in the story.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” Doron said. “He also doesn't mention you jumping up and down like a madman and trying to stop me from letting them through. Or that I called the ambulance for a guy with a scratch on his face, not for the kid.” Doron slowed the car down for the light at Hebron Road. The walls of the Old City were shining through the rain. They drove past the Ariel Hotel near the corner, with its imposing facade—a huge concrete reproduction of the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. In the distance, the lights of the Talpiot commercial zone twinkled. “Yizhar did the story for me. Boom. Boom. Boom. He's got it down cold. Did he give you a chance to tell him what happened?”

“Yes.”

“Not me. Did you tell him about the guy on the phone?”

“Of course,” said Zvili. “He didn't seem interested. He said: ‘That's what Lieutenant Doron says.' ”

“I'm fucked.” Doron shook his head. “I assume you didn't tell him about your, um, behavior.”

“Of course not. Did you tell him?”

“No,” said Doron. “Of course not.” He could hear Zvili's relief.

“You know what I've got somewhere?” Doron said. “I've got that number somewhere, the one I called that night? I wrote it down on a matchbook or a cigarette pack, and now I can't find it. But I will.”

“And what good will that do?”

“I'll give it to Yizhar, to prove I called someone. Not that it will mean much, I guess. I'm still fucked.”

“You are not fucked in any way, Ari,” Zvili said, holding on to Doron's shoulder and shaking him. “Buck up, man. Yizhar's on your side.”

“You don't even know which side I'm on.”

“Oh, yes, I do, Ari. I know better than you do,” Zvili said. He shook his head in annoyance as if Doron just didn't get it. “You're on my side. We're on the same side,
habibi,
even if you don't like it. I swear, Ari. You're an army boy, and that's it.”

Doron listened. He felt that Zvili's words could comfort him, he just had to let them seep in. Fall back on what you know. Relax into the shelter of the army. It sounded good.

“I feel really bad about the kid, too, Ari,” Zvili said. “I'm not a heartless creep, no matter what you think. After all, I'm about to have a kid of my own. But what can we do? He's gone. So now you're going to tell the world that some IDF bigwig ordered you to keep him out? What would happen if you did that? Which you would never do, I know. First, no one in Israel would believe you—Yizhar will deny it, you can be sure. You'd sound like a coward to most people, blaming everything on a nameless somebody. Second, there would be, like, a
major
international uproar, because even if the Israelis wouldn't believe you, everyone else in the world would.

“Let's just keep a lid on the thing, for God's sake. Let's get all our stories straight and then over time the thing will die down. The less information out there, the better. Because if the Authority
finds
the soldier, then they damn well have to do something with your ass.”

Doron drove for a while in silence. He hated it when Zvili acted like his superior. It had been the same at the checkpoint. Zvili always thought he had everything under control, and the worst part was, he did. Unlike Doron, who did not have things under control. Not now. He hated little Zvili, who was always more sensible than he was. Who was always more practical and
realistic.
Zvili
was
his superior. Who wants to be realistic, Doron's mother had always asked, when he complained that she wasn't. The answer was: Doron. Doron wanted to be. He never wanted to dither around in a sentimental dream world, like his mother and her sister, with their fantasies of peace. He wanted to be hard and firm and masculine and see the big picture, get what was really happening. Was that realistic? He remembered Marina standing under the askadinia, distant and glamorous in her sunglasses and scarf.

“I know you're right,” Doron said to Zvili, and he meant it. “You make a lot of sense.” He made a U-turn on Bethlehem Road and steered the car back across the old railroad tracks toward town. He wondered if Zvili would repeat this conversation verbatim to Yizhar.

“I feel like shit,” Doron said. “I want to do something to make me feel better. I don't like lying to a mother whose baby is dead.”

“You're not lying to her. But telling the truth isn't always useful, either.” Zvili pushed his foot down on an imaginary brake, and Doron sped up just a little more in response. “Like, you don't want to tell the truth just because it's, I don't know,
the truth.
So fucking what? That's not going to make you
feel
better. You tell what you have to tell. You do the right thing. That's what I'm going to do. Don't look to me to support you if you do something crazy, Ari. Or even something that's just not what Yizhar wants us to do. I won't help you out. Only if you're on board. Go talk to Yizhar. He has some ideas.”

Talk to Yizhar. The streets were still wet but the moon was out in a cold and brilliant sky. Talk to Yizhar. Driving down from Zvili's house, Doron let those words play inside his brain. They had a peaceful ring to them, maybe it would be like seeing a therapist. He'd piss out all his bad thoughts to Yizhar, and then Yizhar would tell him what to do. Not to worry. Everything will be all right. Doron shook his head at the thought. He smiled to himself. The idea that Yizhar would somehow comfort him—it was ridiculous. A mouse doesn't go to a hawk and nestle under its wing. Yizhar was not on his side. He was not on anyone's side.