Martyrs’ Crossing (51 page)

Some kind of murmuring was coming from inside. Doron turned into the open doorway. Exposed bulbs hung down from a low ceiling, and all across the floor, men were on their knees, their backs to him. He felt carpet under his boots. Against the back wall, a sheikh in a white turban was saying something. Doron stood there, facing him across the room. He looked frail and ghostly to Doron in the sparse light. Oh, Sheikh, Sheikh, in your turban and robes, horror and fear spreading over your old face. Rescue me, rescue me. Following the sheikh's stare, the praying men began to turn in unison toward the door. And then, to the amazement of the scattering supplicants, the big soldier lurched forward into the mosque, tracking mud from his boots over the prayer rugs. He stumbled blindly in one direction and then another. Men with angry faces rush toward him.
“Duktor, duktor,”
Doron heard someone shout. His legs were bending beneath him like reeds in the wind, and he reached out to steady himself, but there was nothing there. The room with all the men in it was spinning and spinning. He turned, and turned again, and fell face forward onto the floor.

•  •  •

F
ATEFUL COFFEE
, good and strong but American style, what she'd grown up with. Marina stood there in the hallway with her almost empty Styrofoam cup, standing back from the small crowd that had gathered outside his door. She knew it was over. She'd come back with her coffee to find that group huddled there, mostly patients and doctors from the hospital who had gathered to witness the passing of Israel's fabled opponent. For some reason what came into Marina's mind was the dilapidated suitcase her father had packed to leave her house. The suitcase that had gone everywhere her family had gone.

She'd missed the very moment of his death. Perhaps that was just as well but she knew she would regret it always. She made her way through the cluster at the door. Doctors were all over the place, having failed to resuscitate George, and Ahmed was sitting in the big chair in the corner, with his face in his hands. A pearly glow lit the window behind him. Marina was not ready to feel anything except that it was over. Philip came up to her and put a hand on her shoulder but she shook him off gently.

There was George, the center of attention in death as in life. A Palestinian in an Israeli hospital: it was as good an ending as any, and full of meaning for a man who had never been able finally to say that any slice of humanity was wrong or evil or bad, though he had criticized and denounced with the best. She went over to the bed and touched the side of his face. No amount of advance warning prepared her for the emptiness that death created. There was no end of difference between a living body—even comatose or unconscious or asleep—and a dead one. She stroked his hair.

Ahmed came over to her side.

“I did love him, Marina,” Ahmed said. He reached for her hand. “In spite of everything.”

She nodded. “I know, Uncle,” she said.

“I think he might get up and walk out the door,” Ahmed said.

She looked up at him and shook her head.

“But I know what you mean,” she said. She picked up George's hand. She looked at it, trying to commit it to memory.

“More than an octave,” she said.

Ahmed laughed.

“Yes, I remember that,” he said.

•  •  •

S
HE WOULD BURY
him in the family plot in Nazareth.

A nurse came up to her.

“Personal effects,” she said, handing Marina a cardboard box.

Marina put the box down on the windowsill.

“I'll arrange everything, Marina,” Philip said. His eyes were red. Poor Philip.

“Thank you, Philip,” she said.

She started to sort through what was in the box.

Oh, nothing. His trousers. His wallet, with the Authority identification, his Peter Bent card, a picture of Mom. Socks, underwear, so very pathetic. Shoes. His bloody shirt that Ahmed had told her all about. The gun, for heaven's sake. She didn't touch it. Somehow she would send that back to the soldier—Ahmed had told her everything. To the soldier.

Or to his family.

And George's jacket. She looked at it, holding it up and dusting it off in front of the window through which she could see the day beginning. Cars were starting up on faraway sandy hills, children in groups walked to school, two men on donkeys headed out to their field, and down a rocky path, a shepherd and his son made their way to a distant pasture, with their tawny flock trailing alongside the main road in a desultory fashion. She felt in the pockets of the jacket and found George's passport and some change and the old iron key.

Her childhood toy, always snatched back at the end of a few minutes by her anxious father. She hadn't seen it in years, but it was not something that was ever very far from her mind. It was shiny like something new, but it had the weight and feel of keys made a century ago. She held it in her open hand. It was almost as long as her palm. He carried it everywhere.

“This is rightfully yours, Marina,” he used to say to her when she was little. “This and the house it belongs to.”

Rightfully. Marina remembered not knowing what that word meant.

“He told me he was going to give that to you,” Philip said, from behind her.

I don't want it, I don't want it, she thought. And yet she clutched the key as if she were already going down beneath black water and this were her lifeline back up to the surface, and air.

I am deeply indebted to
All That Remains
and
Before Their Diaspora,
by Walid Khalidi.

And many grateful thanks to Kate Manning, Nihaya Qawasmi, Jessica Lazar, and Jim Wilentz for their careful readings of this manuscript.

Thanks, too, to Alice Mayhew for her continued support, her thoughtful changes and emendations, and her helpful prodding on this project; to Anja Schmidt for all her work, and to Deborah Karl.

Amy Wilentz won the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for nonfiction and the Whiting Writers Award, and was a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990. She is the author of
The Rainy Season,
and has written for
The Nation, The New Republic,
and
The New York Times.
She was Jerusalem correspondent for
The New Yorker
from 1995 to 1997. She lives in New York City with her husband and three sons.

Also by Amy Wilentz

The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier

SIMON & SCHUSTER

Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 2001 by Amy Wilentz

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Simon & Schuster and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Designed by Brooke Zimmer Koven

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilentz, Amy.

Martyrs' crossing : a novel / Amy Wilentz.

p. cm.

1. Palestinian Americans—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Americans—Israel—Fiction. 4. Children—Death—Fiction. 5. Mothers and sons—Fiction 6. Jerusalem—Fiction. 7. Soldiers—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3573.I4284 M37 2001

813'.6—dc21 00-052628

ISBN 0-684-85436-8

ISBN: 978-1-5011-3487-6 (eBook)