Vicious Circle (8 page)

Fair question. Where I’m at now is I’m shrugging off a persuasive despair. I have the sinking feeling this is going to be
the last moment of grace before a terrible
khamsin
rouses the Levantine demons to fire and fury because a quirky Jewish rabbi managed to get himself kidnapped
.

L
OCKING HIS CAR IN THE SPRAWLING PARKING LOT
, S
WEENEY MADE
his way on foot to the festering wound known as Erez, the main crossing point between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Since the
kidnapping of the Fiddler on the Roof, security had become tighter than ever. The edgy Israeli frontier guards kept loaded
clips in their assault rifles and their fingers on the triggers as long lines of sullen Palestinian men wound past on their
way to work in the fields and factories up the Israeli coast. From a low tower, an Israeli officer bellowed through a battery-powered
bullhorn, in Arabic, for a Palestinian truck to stop before it came to the first cement-and-sandbag strong point in the wide
Erez alley. Behind one of the sandbags, a pudgy sergeant wearing a net-covered helmet and high-collared flak jacket swiveled
his machine gun and sighted on the truck’s tires, ready to shoot them out if the driver didn’t instantly obey.

The spectacle at Erez never failed to dazzle Sweeney: one hour and ten minutes down the road from the creature comforts of
Jerusalem—the roof-top terrace of his apartment in Yemin Moshe with its spectacular view of the Old City walls, the ice cubes
rattling in the driest martinis this side of the river Jordan, his hand resting lightly on the sexiest female thigh in the
holy land—and he was knocking on the gate of D. Alighieri’s inferno.

Not that there was any problem getting in. Getting out of Gaza, for a Palestinian, was an ordeal; you had to have a spanking
clean charge sheet and no known relatives in any fundamentalist organization and a special magnetic identity card that the
Israelis swapped for
new ones whenever they wanted to give the Palestinians a hard time. Entering Gaza, on the other hand, was a piece of cake.
Barely glancing at Sweeney’s American passport and his government-issued press card, a baby-faced border guard who looked
as if he had never shaved in his life waved him through the indoor border post. Sweeney appeared to be a consenting adult,
the cranky gesture seemed to say. If he was dumb enough to walk into this hell on earth, the Israelis weren’t going to stop
him.

A hundred yards up the Erez alley, past endless coils of tangled concertina wire and more strong points protected by steel
spikes set in the road, Sweeney reached the local Palestinians, come to pick up their clients in ancient automobiles that
billowed clouds of dense brown smoke when the drivers kicked over the motors. For a hundred dollars a day, cash on the barrel
head, you got ferried to your rendezvous in Gaza or one of the swarming refugee camps; for another hundred the driver would
organize a demonstration for or against anyone or anything you named; for an additional sawbuck, he would translate the slogans
scrawled on every naked wall in the Strip. Two Christian Arabs Sweeney recognized as reporters from a Gaza news agency were
loading television cameras into the back of a battered Buick station wagon. A prime-time newscaster Sweeney remembered from
his Beirut days—the newscaster used to pick his brain for the price of a three-course meal in the St. George Hotel—was passing
out American cigarettes to the scrawny Palestinian kids hawking tiny cups of thick sweetened coffee. “My man Sweeney, how
you doing?” Prime Time called.

“I’m hanging in there,” Sweeney answered. “What do you have lined up?”

“I’ve got a noon interview with the head honcho. I promised him six minutes, no commercial breaks, as long as he wears a checkered
kerchief—shit, what do you call those damn things?”

Sweeney, who had not managed to arrange an interview with anyone higher than dog catcher in his eight months as Jerusalem
bureau chief, said, “
Kiffiyehs
.”

“Yeah. That’s it.
Kiffiyehs
. I knew that. I just couldn’t remember how to pronounce it. Hey, Sweeney, there are three problems with growing old. The
first is you start to lose your memory. Awh, shit! I
can’t remember the second and third.” Prime Time cackled at his own joke until he was short of breath.

Sweeney’s driver, universally known as Roger because the Palestinian had picked up the habit from American war movies of acknowledging
orders with the word “Roger,” had parked his beat-up Lada at the end of the line. It occurred to Sweeney that only God knew
how a car constructed in Russia wound up in the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, all cars finished in a junk yard, so there
was probably a logic to it after all. Roger, wearing his habitual Indian shirt buttoned up to the neck, a brown suit and sandals,
squeezed his over-weight body in behind the wheel. “Where we off to today, Mr. Max?” he asked as Sweeney settled onto the
seat next to him.

“I want to see the wake,” Sweeney said.

“Roger, Mr. Max,” Roger said, an eager smile spreading across his round face, the gold crowns glittering in his lower jaw.
“The wake it is.”

There was a grinding of gears and a violent shudder under the hood as the Lada, with a backfire that sent several men ducking
for cover, started up the road. A hundred yards further along they came to the Palestinian Authority check point. Another
baby-faced policeman, this one wearing a crisp blue uniform and a blue beret and carrying what looked like a brand new Chinese-manufactured
Kalashnikov tucked under his arm, took Sweeney’s passport and passed it to a short mustached man wearing goggle-like sunglasses
and a green belted raincoat.

The Green Hornet, as Sweeney dubbed him, looked up from the passport. “Max could be a Jewish name,” he announced in perfect
English, scrutinizing Sweeney through the open window.

“Jesus could be a Jewish name, too,” Sweeney shot back.

“Jesus was not a Zionist,” Green Hornet said.

“There’s a lot of things Jesus wasn’t,” Sweeney retorted. “A Christian is one of them.”

“Westerners cannot resist giving lessons to Palestinians,” observed the Green Hornet. “One day you will understand that there
are also things to be learned from us.”

Sweeney smiled uncomfortably. He didn’t see himself getting into a theological discussion with the boss of a Palestinian policeman
who had one finger on the trigger of a Kalashnikov. “Look, I’m not Jewish,” he said. “Sweeney is an Irish Catholic name.”

Roger leaned across the seat. “Sweeney is a friend of the Palestinian people,” he said in English. (Sweeney always came across
with a generous tip at the end of the day, a charitable action Roger liked to encourage.)

The Green Hornet handed the passport back through the open window and turned toward the next car. Struggling with the gear
box, Roger jammed the stick shift into first and, with a series of jerks, managed to get the Lada rolling in the direction
of Gaza City.

A Mercedes taxi filled with Arab women and valises piled high on the roof rack overtook the Lada, kicking up a cloud of chalk
dust that obliged Sweeney to cover his nose and mouth with a handkerchief. Laughing at the discomfort of his passenger, Roger
swung around a Bedouin boy, a goat slung around his neck, leading a string of camels, and a donkey pulling a cart sagging
on its axles under a load of oranges, then splashed through a swamp of sewage onto a side road that took them, within minutes,
into the heart of Gaza City.

With the abduction of the Fiddler, who was believed to be somewhere in Gaza, security was high on this side of the border,
too; Palestinian police armed with submachine guns stood in front of their jeeps surveying traffic at every crossroad. The
streets, dust-clogged and reeking from garbage, teemed with barefoot children and women in long robes lugging baskets of vegetables.
Clustered around small tables in bleak cafes, bearded men smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and played backgammon. At every corner
claxons shrieked; there were very few stop lights in Gaza and each intersection had become a test of manhood as drivers tried
to bluff their way through. The Lada swung past the sprawling office complex in central Gaza known as Al Saraya, where the
Palestinian Authority held court; workmen on bamboo scaffolds were rebuilding the wing that had been bombed into rubble by
Israeli helicopters before the cease fire went into effect. Leaning on the horn, Roger inched the car through a horde of people
waiting for the bride and groom to emerge from a wedding hall, and turned into the Gaza neighborhood of Shajaiyah. “The martyr
lived in his family’s house down the narrow street there,” Roger said, pulling onto the side-walk
and cutting the engine. Carefully locking the car, he led the way to a portal in a whitewashed stucco wall. He pointed to
the Arabic writing over the door. “This is the word
Shahid
, which Westerners translate as
martyr
but really means
witness
, meaning that the dead boy, whose name was Anwar, bore witness to God and the Prophet.”

The driver rapped his knuckles on the door. A teenage boy wearing a sweatshirt with a Palestinian flag on the chest opened
it. Roger spoke to him in Arabic. The boy, gesturing with the grace of a ballet dancer, motioned with his palm for the two
visitors to enter.

Sweeney stepped onto the concrete of the bare open courtyard filled with rows of white plastic chairs. Thirty or so men in
polyester trousers and sandals sat silently around an open grate on which coffee was being brewed. A giant framed photograph
of the late Anwar hung from one wall; it had been taken in a Gaza studio but made to look as if the boy was posing in front
of the great Dome of the Rock Mosque in Jerusalem. There was Arabic writing on the wall under the photograph, which Roger,
leaning toward Sweeney, translated. “It is what we call the
shahada
, the single most important verse from the sacred Qur’an, which an infidel recites when converting to Islam and a Muslim recites
at the time of his death. ‘
Ash’hadu an la illahu ila Allah wa’ash’hadu anna Muhammadan rasulu Allah
.’ ‘
I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah
.’”

The boy in the sweatshirt, who turned out to be Anwar’s kid brother, made his way down the rows of mourners holding a tarnished
brass tray filled with almond biscuits and small porcelain cups of brackish coffee. Roger handed a cup to Sweeney and took
one himself. “It is polite to drink,” he whispered. “The coffee is bitter even though at the home of a martyr it is usually
sweet. This is because the boy’s father is bitter at the death of his son at such a young age.”

“I heard he threw garbage at the feet of a local Imam who came to pay his respects,” Sweeney said.

“This may be true,” Roger said with artful vagueness.

“Which one is the father?”

“The older gentleman with patent leather shoes and his head bowed onto his chest.”

“I’d like to ask him some questions.”

Roger turned to the gaunt Palestinian sitting next to him and said something. The Palestinian got up and walked over to Anwar’s
father. Bending, he mumbled something in his ear. The father lifted his eyes and studied Sweeney, then nodded his head once.

“The father of Anwar accepts to reply to your questions,” Roger said.

Sweeney looked across at the father. “Please accept my condolences on the death of your son.”

Roger translated. The father, his features drawn, the lids of his eyes heavy with grief, nodded again.

“Is the coffee you serve bitter because the bullet that killed your son was fired by a Palestinian?”

When Roger hesitated, Sweeney said, in a tone that left him no room to maneuver, “Translate.”

“Roger.” Sweeney’s driver turned back to the father and repeated the question in Arabic. Sweeney knew he had translated correctly
when several of the men sitting around the room gasped.

The dead boy’s father thought a moment before responding. Then, measuring his words and speaking with great dignity, he launched
into a lengthy reply. Sweeney turned to Roger. “He tells,” the driver said, whispering a running translation as Sweeney scribbled
notes on the back of the page containing the interview with Rabbi Apfulbaum, “that he would find no comfort if an Isra’ili
bullet had killed his son. He tells that he himself is for the treaty of peace even if it leaves the Jews in possession of
Arab lands. He tells that he bitterly regrets the death of his son, but understands the frustration that drove Anwar to join
the armed struggle against the Jews.” The Palestinians around the courtyard rocked back and forth on their chairs in solemn
agreement. “He tells that his son’s wrist was broken by the Jews during the
intifada
when he was caught throwing stones at an Isra’ili patrol. He tells that the broken bones mended, but not the broken pride
in Anwar’s head. He tells that he himself works for the Palestinian Authority tax assessment office, so he knows that more
than a million Arabs, half of them under the age of sixteen, are crowded into this forty-kilometer-long open-air concentration
camp. He tells that the lucky ones get permits to work in Isra’il; that the
wage one man earns supports the twenty others who sit around cafes playing
sheshbesh
and thinking up schemes to hurt the Jews.”

From somewhere in the city came the shrill sob of a police siren. Roger’s translation trailed off as Anwar’s father cleared
his throat and shook his head and said something else. “He asks you to reply to
his
question,” Roger said. “‘What hope can we offer to our children under these circumstances?’”

Sweeney looked up from the notebook into the eyes of the father of the boy who had been shot dead, so the Israeli press was
reporting, to prevent him from falling alive into the hands of the Shin Bet. “Say to him I am only equipped with questions,
not answers. Say to him again I feel only sympathy for his family’s loss.”

Roger translated, listened to the father’s reply and said, very quietly, “He tells that everyone he talks to is equipped with
questions, not answers. He thanks you from his heart for coming to this house of mourning.”