The Wanting (43 page)

I
SEE HER THERE
, with her blasphemous red sneakers! Look, her leggings are pink-and-white stripes! The tiny skirt she is wearing is fringed like a cowboy’s vest. She is wearing cheap plastic bracelets of colors so bright they remind me of the fancy cocktails I used to drink. And look, her fingers are deluged with rings, just like an Arab woman’s—but her face is as white as salt, and the mop of stuff she calls hair, as black and shapeless as a moonless night, is like a spider coming to rest on the top of her head.

She is so small! Her arms are two delicate anemone, and her walk is awkward, like a giraffe’s, for her feet are too large for her body. She can barely lug her backpack and stops every few steps, but not because she is tired. She just likes to look at the people on the plaza below, to study the face of some little child, as if looking at an angel, or to listen to the bitter drone of the Jewish rabbis echoing off their famous Wailing Wall. Now she stops again, this time merely to examine the cracks in the stone pavement, then she stops again to add a little lipstick to her lips, pink and glittery, almost as if she had dusted her mouth with diamonds, and now she stops again, just to look up at the sky.

Little Anyusha, where is this cruelty coming from? Do you not understand the Muslims will never abandon al-Aqsa? Never relinquish it? You will shed the blood of every single believer in Jerusalem, and more will come to take their places. You will explode the Dome of the Rock, or burn the pillars of al-Aqsa from within, reduce them to rubble and trash, but Caliph Umar will return from the grave to clear the rubble and trash with his own hands,
for this is the Mosque of David that the Prophet visited on his Night Journey, this, the farthest mosque, where your people were condemned and ours elevated. It has been given to us by our God, and you, little Anyusha, cannot take it back.

Can’t you hear me? I am coming at you, buzzing you like a fly, stinging you like a wasp. Take no more steps! Throw down your backpack! Return to your anonymity in the suburbs of Tel Aviv where the trees grow thick as grass, and the Indian almond scents the air, and the nightingale sings you to sleep, and the pitango and shahor ripen into thick sour fruits—think of them and go back! Can you not see me? My blood drips from the sinew of my neck, and my lips are coated in melted asphalt, and my eyes have hardened into bone—do I not frighten you?

She is going down each step, slowly marking her way with song. What is she singing?
My love, watch how the day fades like a dream, and if you feel that I am far away, don’t be afraid …
It’s that Ehud Banai. The debased rock-and-roll of Israel. Why is she not singing a prayer or a psalm or reciting a verse of her Bible or her Talmud, but a silly love song for starstruck teenagers that in any case is yesterday’s garbage? Her socks go up only to her ankles, and the pink-striped leggings only down to the middle of her calf, so that a narrow ribbon of flesh is visible, burnished with threadlets of fine hair that sparkle in the sun. This little sliver of skin—what is it?

She approaches the guard post now, with its bulletproof windows and lazy Magav officers. They take one look at her and wave her through, glancing absently into her backpack as it rolls through the X-ray. She stops to chat with them, I don’t know what she’s saying, but they laugh, all three of them, and then she is on her way down to the plaza.

Now I assail her, like a bee, like a jet plane, swooping around her head, but she does not even notice me. Allah, All Merciful and Compassionate, I fall upon my face, which is all that I have left, and beg of you—how can I stop her? I lay this very head in front of her feet to trip her and cause her to fall down onto the pavement, but she steps over me as if I am not there. I fling myself like
a sharpened arrow at her heart, but she smiles. She stops and takes a drink of Mei Eden water from a plastic bottle. She walks on, almost skipping but for the burden of her pack, and she looks like any schoolgirl loaded down with textbooks, shoulders hunched forward, lumbering yet weightless.

She now approaches the Mughrabi Ascent. Perhaps I should fly up to the gate, warn the waqf guards, but I cannot seem to move. I hover above the young Anyusha Guttman, just as I did above her slumbering father. What wrong have I committed? I have testified there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His Prophet, I have said salah each day in its time, I have paid zakat as much as I could and even more. I have done jihad. I have been a shahid. My name is on a poster. Look, I can see it now: Amir Hamid, fine looking, thin-featured, boyish even at twenty-one, brand-new suit, holding a Kalashnikov in one hand and a grenade in the other. I’m standing guard atop al-Aqsa itself, holding my grenade in one hand and my AK-47 in the other. I straddle the whole of al-Aqsa, I’m even larger than the mosque I intend to protect! Well then? Why am I not allowed to protect it?

She is already in the line of tourists, making her way up the ramp. Up, up she goes. She hears nothing but the voice of her purpose. I know that voice well. If I could only make her hear something else. If only she could hear how the pigeons are squawking and the feet are shuffling and the stones are creaking and the trees are whistling. But her ears are shut tight with the wax of her one God.

Anyusha! Listen! Listen to me! You who heard the voice of the scarab and the lizard, the voice of the bicycle and the cardboard box, the voice of the doorknob and the flower pot—why can’t you hear my voice?

She approaches the gate now. The waqf guards sitting on their plastic chairs, eyeing the tourists. They’re not afraid of bombs—why should they be? They’re on the lookout for Christians, to confiscate their Bibles, to catch them moving their lips in prayer so they can evict them. That’s their job! Bombs? The efficient and terrifying Israeli border police have already checked for bombs. And
for guns, for knives, too, because in their hearts the waqf know that all police are the same, wanting nothing but a nice day and no upsetting incidents, and so they go about their business watching for someone muttering the Lord’s Prayer.

Anyusha! Can’t you hear the colored tiles of Qubbat as-Sakhrah complaining about the weather? Can’t you hear the butterflies discuss their hurt feelings? Can’t you hear the carpets in the entryway of the mosque moaning softly? Can’t you hear the doors of the Golden Gate yearning to be opened? Surely you can hear the kaffiah on that old man coo in the breeze and declare how much it is enjoying the afternoon sun?

Oh these voices! Far below the Dome of the Rock, the dead are rising already, preparing to say their salahs. The soldiers’ rifles are uncomfortable in the heat, and say so, but the peach that the old woman is eating is laughing out loud, and, Anyusha, your backpack is weeping, can you not hear it?

But I hear it. I hear it. I hear the voices on the bus that just pulled up to the stop at which I am standing, my hand on my detonator, and I hear all their conversations at once, each one distinct as a note on a piano, and I even hear the words speaking their own words to one another, and I hear the tires on the bus fretting under the weight, and I hear the mirrors on the bus bemoaning what has just passed from sight, and I hear all around me the anxiety of the traffic lights, and the cleverness of the motor scooters, and the contemplation of the cups and saucers at the café across the street, and the laughing of the sherut as it passes the bus, and the resignation of the stuffed bear in the little boy’s bag, and the pride of the milk in the baby bottle and the bewilderment of the finches in the poinciana tree, and the window of the office behind me, tall and stately, bragging about itself to its neighbors, and the rhapsody in the mind of the Arab gardeners, and the priggish vanity of the kadaif in the bakery window, and from the apartments nearby the chatter of stuffed peppers and schnitzels, and from the sky the happiness of the airplanes and the confusion of a pair of dragonflies, and from the new building going up the vaunting of the girders and the loneliness of the Thai workers, and from the
young women sashaying down the avenue the song of their earrings, and from the ground below my feet the earth itself laughing, laughing, laughing.

And now my finger cannot press the unlock button on the ignition key of the Mercedes-Benz, and my belt of C-4, which has been loudly cursing me all day, suddenly falls silent, and I step back from the curb, and I sit on the bench, and I hear my own heart ululating. It all goes backward, and none of it ever happened, and I am still just a boy in my father’s garage, and Fadi is alive and smoking Time cigarettes, and Dasha Cohen is just arriving from Odessa holding her mother’s hand, and Nadirah is teasing me in the garden of my uncle’s house.

O Allah, You have blessed me with a great blessing! O Allah, I am free of You!

But I look up, and where is Anyusha? Wait! She has stopped! She is a frozen thing, a pillar of salt holding her knapsack, looking at her feet as if they were made of jewels. Suddenly she retreats down the slope, clutching her evil bag, and runs back to the Wailing Wall where the Jews in their black throngs are keening. See her! Little golden Anyusha pushes her way into the crowd of men. This one looks at her, that one, then another, but she does not seem to care. They call out after her, “You! Little girl! Stop!” And in English, “Stop, you girl, stop now!” But she doesn’t stop, she begins to run, runs up to the wall where only the men are praying. And they run after her, screaming, “Stop! Stop!”

And now, at the very wall, she at last turns to face them. She smiles, always she smiles, and her teeth are just like milk teeth, a little space of good luck between the front two, and her gums are the color of tea roses. She lets down her backpack and sets it before her. They in their black hats and white prayer shawls ring about her, seething and cursing. Now someone grabs her, some Jew.

But from above, the Arabs are beginning to shout, too: “They are trying to take al-Aqsa! They are murdering us! They are desecrating our holy places! They are building a synagogue right under our feet!”

And you can hear the Israeli police crying, “Quiet down! Quiet down!” And the Arabs are now coming together in larger numbers, and the waqf guard is going crazy, and all of the voices I heard just a moment ago are blotted out and all there is is shouting, shouting, shouting, “The Jews are murdering us!”

And from the mount, the rocks stream down, and little Anyusha, her lips sparkling like cut diamonds, looks up to where her heaven should be—but only stones, stones flinging themselves like wolves upon ewes, meet her gaze. For the muezzin is bleating on the loudspeaker, “Muslims! Brothers! Muslims! Brothers! Defend al-Aqsa to the last drop of blood!”

Oh, little Anyusha—please, Anyusha, listen to my voice:
Now you must run! Now you must run!

But the stones of the faithful rain down upon her, till shots ring out above. And then all is silence.

W
HEN
I
OPENED MY EYES
I
REALIZED
I was in an ambulance. The shriek of the siren was unmistakable, and beside me holding my hand, a medic.

“Moishe!”

“Shhhh, shhhh,” he said. “My name is David.”

“Am I alive?”

“That fucking Arab should have taken you to the hospital right away. These people are so stupid. You’ve been missing three days. You’re on TV and the newspapers.”

“Three days?” I said.

How I wanted him to be Moishe. I wanted to tell him, I wanted to say to him, Moishe, I see you really are an angel after all, and I get it—you saved me for a reason. You saved me so that I might realize that the truth I withheld from my darling Anyusha is the thing that will set her free, free from the prison of my past.

There was salvation in the air, in the smell of antiseptic and motor oil, and in the bright lights of the ambulance, and in music coming from the driver’s radio. And I rejoiced.

When we pulled up to the emergency entrance of Hadassah Hospital, I was surprised that so many people were waiting for me. There were cameras flashing, cordons of police and Shabak, for some reason Sepha Katsir, but no Mother, no Lonya, no Daphne, no Anyusha.