Vicious Circle (16 page)

“Marx says somewhere that man does not have a nature but a history,” Apfulbaum said. “Our stories illustrate this point. I
myself was raised Brooklyn, but once or twice a year we used to visit an aunt who lived in Jonestown, Pennsylvania. She was
a fine pianist and the only Jew in town, and played the organ at church services.” The Rabbi’s feet, lashed to the legs of
the heavy chair, were beginning to swell and he twisted this way and that to alleviate the pain. “One December I was sleigh
riding down the hill in front of her house, past the barn filled with riding horses, past the Bayshores’ farm, when I got
into a fight with a local farm boy over who would go first. He called me a dirty Jew—so I became a dirty Jew.”

The Doctor retrieved the hood from the floor and slipped it over the Rabbi’s head; he could hear Apfulbaum gagging on the
airless stench of the leather. “The most interesting thing about someone’s
history,” the Doctor remarked to the hood, “is that it reveals what he has chosen to remember.”

From under the hood the Rabbi’s muffled response could be heard: “Amen.”

In the front room of the safe house, the Doctor found Yussuf sitting on the floor, fast asleep with his back against the reinforced
door and an AK-47 across his thighs. Petra lay curled on a blanket near the radio. A bulb burned in the overhead socket. Petra
had pulled a folded dish towel over her eyes to keep out the light. Bending over her, the Doctor could make out the rope burn
on the back of a wrist; another bracelet of humiliation, he thought. The green Isra’ili Army radio had been left on. Through
the small speaker came the static-filled voices of the Hebrew Army reporting in from the various corners of occupied Palestine.
It was four in the morning and all was well, or so it appeared to the Isra’ilis, with their distorted memories and their warped
histories.
“A tooth for a tooth, and for wounds retaliation
,” he whispered to the voices on the radio. It was a lesson the
mujaddid
would have to teach the Palestinians, too, if he was going to succeed in creating an Islamic state on all of the land of
Palestine. Rousing the Palestinians to
jihad
, to holy war, getting them to apply the formula
for wounds retaliation
, would be easier once Apfulbaum cracked; once he gave them details about the Jewish underground, its ruthless leader who
went by the code name Ya’ir and the atrocities they had committed against the Holy Qur’an and the Palestinian people. When
the Rabbi started talking, the Doctor would need an independent witness; someone who could be trusted to pass the story on
to the world.

The Doctor listened to the babble of Jewish voices on the radio as he scrubbed his hands over the laundry sink. Then, switching
off the overhead light, removing his spectacles and massaging his bloodshot eyes with his thumb and third finger, he stretched
out fully clothed on the cot Petra had left for him to use in the hope that he would sleep until first light.

T
HE
S
HIN
B
ET MANDARINS WERE SEETHING
. T
HE PRESS ATTACHÉ
at the Israeli embassy in Washington had faxed them Sweeney’s latest article, in which he described how the Israeli equivalent
of the FBI had tried to recruit him as an agent. No detail was left to the reader’s imagination. Only first names had been
used when the Shin Bet representatives introduced themselves at an early morning meeting. He himself had reported on the budget
crunch in Israel, Sweeney wrote, tongue in cheek, but he hadn’t realized how tight things were in the Israeli intelligence
community until he discovered that no coffee or doughnuts would be served. The individual who was clearly in charge had attempted
to put the meeting off the record
after
it was over; another agent who went by the name of Itamar, furious at Sweeney for refusing to cooperate, had closed the meeting
with a calumnious slur that was unprintable even if it had been said on the record.

The agent whom Sweeney had dubbed J. Edgar, an Irish Jew by the name of Moses Briscoe, put in a call to the chief government
censor, by coincidence an armored division deputy commander who had served under Briscoe in Lebanon. “Revoke his press accreditation,”
the Shin Bet department head snarled into the phone. “Send the son of a bitch back where he came from.”

“Tried to when he wrote the article about the reservists and the broken arms,” the censor replied. “I was overruled.”

“Try again,” Briscoe said. “Take it up to the Prime Minister’s office if you have to.”

The censor chuckled. “That’s who overruled me the last time, Moses.”

“Who’s protecting him? And why?”

“You’re the guys who bug telephones and hide microphones in padded brassieres. You tell me.”

“I may just do that,” Briscoe said.

S
HUFFLING ALONG IN BACKLESS SLIPPERS
, M
AALI WAS LED INTO
the unheated room padded with foam rubber so that prisoners couldn’t beat their heads against the wall and later claim they
had been tortured. Dressed in a sack-like sleeveless shift that irritated her skin, she hugged herself as she settled onto
the wooden stool with the front legs cut shorter than the back legs. She could hear the soothing sound of Yussuf’s voice whispering
in her ear.

I will love you even when you have grown old
, he had vowed the night he proposed marriage.

Will you take another wife?
she had asked him.

Would you object?

Not if I selected her
.

I will never take another wife
.

Ahhhhh
.

The dazzling spotlights hanging from the ceiling burned into Maali’s eyes, causing them to tear. The voice of the interrogator
came from the penumbra, drowning out Yussuf’s music in her ear. “Are you well?” he asked in fluent Arabic. “Do you have any
complaints to make about the way you are being treated?”

Maali shook her head tiredly; the first six or seven or eight times she had been questioned—she had long since lost count—she
had complained bitterly about the cold cell, the lack of privacy when she performed bodily functions, the stench of the clothes
she was obliged to wear, the mold on the rice she was obliged to eat, the lack of medical treatment for the rash on her stomach.
Once she had been
given a sheaf of paper and a felt-tipped pen—ball points were considered weapons in prison—and invited to write a letter to
Amnesty International. Kneeling on the floor boards, she had bent over the paper and had written out her complaints on what
looked like an Amnesty International form. The interrogator had read her letter aloud, snickering at the errors in spelling
and grammar as he went along, and then torn it to shreds on the grounds that it was illiterate.

“No complaints. Good. Let’s begin where we left off.” Maali could hear the sound of pages being turned. “You claim to have
bought the ring sometime last month from a Bedouin selling jewelry in the souk. You maintain that you cannot recall the name
of the Bedouin or the location of his shop. Has time refreshed your memory?”

Maali shook her head.

“Since our last session, we have learned more about the ring.”

Shielding her eyes with a forearm, Maali tried to catch a glimpse of her interrogator. “It is a ring like any other,” she
protested weakly.

“It is a ring unlike any other we have seen. At first we thought the words
Erasmus
and
Hall
were a man’s name. But we discovered that Erasmus Hall is the name of a high school in Brooklyn, which is a borough in the
city of New York. The 1998 refers to the year of graduation. The ring in question is a high school graduation ring.”

Trembling on her stool from fear and cold, Maali hugged herself tightly.

“You will be interested to hear that we have even managed to identify the owner of the ring. It belonged to an American named
Ronni Goldman. He was a Talmudic student at the yeshiva run by Rabbi Apfulbaum in the Jewish settlement of Beit Avram on the
hills overlooking Hebron.”

“Have I transgressed Isra’ili law to buy a ring from a Bedouin?” Maali fumbled. “Has the Bedouin transgressed Isra’ili law
to buy the ring from a Jew?”

The interrogator’s voice droned on. “The Bedouin did not buy the ring from a Jew. You did not buy the ring from a Bedouin.
Ronni Goldman was one of the boys killed when an Islamic fundamentalist group calling itself the Abu Bakr Brigade kidnapped
Rabbi
Apfulbaum while he was driving back to Beit Avram from Yad Mordechai. One of the terrorists cut off Goldman’s little finger
to get the ring, and then offered it to you. Surely it was your husband, Yussuf, who gave you the ring the night of the kidnapping.
Surely it was your husband, Yussuf, whom you were waving to near the Damascus Gate the next morning.”

“I have told you a thousand times,” Maali declared. “I have not set eyes on my husband since the night of our wedding.”

“Then who gave you the ring?”

“No one gave me the ring. I purchased it from a Bedouin.”

The interrogator shuffled more papers. “If, in fact, no one gave you the ring, it raises the possibility that you yourself
cut the finger from the dead boy’s hand, and took the ring from the finger. I must warn you that we have enough evidence to
charge you with the murder of Ronni Goldman. You are in a great deal of trouble, Maali. No judge will believe you bought the
Erasmus Hall ring from a Bedouin. You could spend the rest of your life in a Negev detention camp. I will tell you that some
of my superiors are convinced you took part in the ambush; we have many examples of Palestinian women playing active roles
in attacks on Jews. I myself do not believe you are guilty of murder; I believe you are protecting someone. I even have a
grudging admiration for your loyalty and steadfastness. But loyalty must have a limit. What kind of a man is it who cuts the
finger from the hand of a dead boy to steal a ring?”

Maali’s knees turned weak and she had difficulty keeping herself from sliding off the stool. “The man who is pushed to cut
a ring from the hand of a dead Jew is someone who has suffered at the hands of a living Jew,” she blurted out.

The interrogator said with unnerving patience, “So you admit that someone cut the finger from the hand of Ronni Goldman to
get the ring, which he then gave to you?”

“I admit nothing,” Maali cried. “I curse your eyes. I spit at your feet.”

Shivering on the cot in her icy cell after the evening meal had been pushed through the slot in the door later that night,
Maali scratched at the rash on her stomach until it bled. The warder who
checked the occupants of the cells every hour on the hour noticed blood on the front of her shift and summoned two Israeli
woman guards, who walked her through the labyrinthine corridors to the infirmary. The Jewish woman doctor who was on duty,
appalled at Maali’s condition, had her strip to the skin and shower with a special soap. The doctor, a young draftee on her
first tour of duty in a prison, cleaned the rash with antiseptic and treated it with an antibiotic cream, and issued Maali
new underwear and a new shift with long sleeves. Waiting for the two woman guards to return, the doctor gave Maali a small
plastic comb and a plastic container filled with vitamins.

“
Shoukran
,” Maali murmured in Arabic.

“
Bavakasha
,” the doctor answered, avoiding the prisoner’s eye. “If the rash still bothers you tomorrow, ask to be brought back to the
infirmary.” She became impatient when the woman guards didn’t show up and summoned the Palestinian orderly who sat at a small
table outside the infirmary door logging everyone in and out. “Take her back to Cell Block four,” the doctor instructed the
orderly.

Maali fell into step alongside the Palestinian, a young woman whose thick tresses had been hacked short in what looked like
a botched prison haircut. Moving her lips like a ventriloquist, keeping her eyes trained straight ahead, the orderly murmured,
“What are you arrested for?”

“They think I killed a Jew,” Maali said, suddenly proud of the charge against her.

They turned a corner and passed a control point. The Israeli guard behind the window recognized the orderly and waved her
on.

“How did they catch you?” the orderly asked.

“I was denounced.”

“By whom?”

“By Mr. Hajji, the one who changes money at the Damascus Gate.”

“How can you be sure?”

“It was Mr. Hajji who confirmed the identification when I was brought in by the Isra’ilis. I saw him with my own eyes.”

“The Holy Qur’an prescribes execution, crucifixion, amputation
or exile for those who wage war against Allah and his Messenger, and sow corruption on earth. Surely Mr. Hajji will not escape
the judgment of God or man.”

They approached a steel door guarded by a young Israeli woman soldier wearing black Reebok sneakers and holding an Uzi submachine
gun. She gestured for the prisoner to raise her arms and slowly ran the palms of her hands over Maali’s breasts and thighs
and buttocks. She discovered the plastic comb and vitamin pills in a pocket and confiscated them before waving the prisoner
through the door.

“Are you familiar with the passage in the Holy Qur’an entitled
The Woman Tested
?” the orderly breathed as they approached Maali’s cell. “‘
Pray to Allah, who answers all prayers. Resist the infidel with your soul and your body and your brain. Remember that God
sees the things you do
.’”

Maali entered her foul-smelling cell; she had grown accustomed to the odors coming from the open toilet in the far corner.
The orderly started to shut the door behind her. “Take heart—Mr. Hajji will rot in hell,” she whispered before the door slammed
closed. “Take heart—water like molten copper will scald the collaborator’s face.”

An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:

T
urns out that my one-time Harvard colleague Henry Kissinger got it dead wrong when he observed that the absence of alternatives
clears the mind marvelously. This may be true in the real world; in the Looking-Glass miasma of the Middle East, the absence
of alternatives only seems to befuddle minds even more. My telephone call to the Chairman of the Palestinian authority this
morning is a case in point. Before I could get a word in, he was lecturing me on how he wasn’t going to make the mistake of
letting himself be seen cooperating with the Israeli Shin Bet to capture Palestinians—even though they had broken the cease
fire he endorsed, even though they were jeopardizing the peace treaty he was ready to sign
.