By the Rivers of Babylon (39 page)

Burg wondered if that wouldn’t be a good idea. He remained silent.

As they turned west across the flat hill, the wind pushed them so that they had to strain in order not to be forced into a run. At the first position they came to, overlooking the river, they found what appeared to be two women sleeping in the remains of a foxhole. A blue El Al blanket lay over them and sand drifted over the blanket and their partially exposed limbs.

Hausner was reminded of Dobkin’s lecture on the similarity between buried cities and people under shrouds. He stared down at the two restless forms. There was little chance of an Ashbal attack up this slope. In fact, there might not be any Ashbals left on the west slope. And if there were, could they negotiate the slope in the wind? But that was irrelevant. As soon as he had seen the two sleeping figures, Hausner’s heart had made a small flutter. On all his inspections, he, like a million officers and
sergeants-of-the-guard before him, had hoped that he would never see a guard asleep. Sleep, natural and innocent in civilian life, was a capital offense for a man or guard in probably every army in the world.

Hausner crouched down beside the two figures and cleared his throat. He hoped they would jump up so he could pass it off lightly, but neither seemed to be aware of his presence. He felt Burg’s eyes on him. The two were unmistakably sleeping. He reached out and pulled back the blanket. Esther Aronson. He pulled it back further. Miriam.

One of the two sleeping women had the duty. The other was legitimately sleeping. One would live to share the fate of them all, the other might be shot within the next hour. “Miriam.” Neither figure moved.

Burg moved around into Hausner’s view and crouched down also. He gently picked up the AK-47 lying near the two women. Hausner knew this was prescribed military procedure, and he also knew that the situation was going downhill fast.

He looked closely at Burg but could not read anything in his face. The man had assumed his inscrutable expression. Was Burg willing to let it go? Hausner wondered if he himself would let it go if he were alone, as he usually was. Of course he would. Hausner put his hand on Miriam’s shoulder and shook her. “Miriam.” He noticed that his voice was tremulous and his hand was shaking. “Miriam!” He was suddenly angry—angry at having to be put in this position—angry at having another dilemma thrown at him by fate. “Miriam, God damn you!”

She sat up quickly. “Oh!”

Burg moved in and grabbed her arm. “What are your hours for guard?” he demanded suddenly.

She was still half-asleep. “What? Oh! Guard. Midnight to two—four to dawn. Why?” She looked around bewildered and saw Hausner, then saw Esther Aronson sleeping next to her. She understood.

Burg looked at his watch quickly. It was a quarter after twelve. “Did Esther Aronson wake you for duty?” he asked loudly. “Well?”

She stared hard at Hausner, who looked away.

“Did she wake you for duty?” repeated Burg as he shook her.

“Yes.”

“Then I place you under arrest for sleeping on duty. I must warn you that this is a capital offense, Mrs. Bernstein.”

Miriam rose to her feet and stood in the wind. Her hair and clothes billowed and sand pelted her face. “I see.” She straightened up and looked at Burg. “Of course, I understand. I’ve endangered the lives of everyone else and I must pay for it.”

“That’s correct,” said Burg. He turned to Hausner. “Isn’t it?”

Hausner fought back an impulse to knock Burg over the side of the glacis. He looked down at the sleeping Esther Aronson, then at Miriam. His unpopularity, past and present, was due largely to what people called his Teutonic discipline. That had never bothered him in the least. In the civilization that he lived in, there were always people who stepped in to soften his tyranny. Now he had met a man who was either calling his bluff or, in fact, really wanted to shoot Miriam Bernstein as an example to the others. It was incredible, but anything was possible here. Hadn’t they made threatening noises about shooting
him
?

“Isn’t that correct?” Burg repeated. “Isn’t that correct—that Miriam Bernstein must pay for jeopardizing the lives of close to fifty men and women?”

Hausner stared at Miriam, clothed in darkness and dust, a scarf held up to her face like a lost child. “Yes,” he said. “We must try her—in the morning.”

“Now,” said Burg. “There may be no morning for us. Discipline in the field must be sure and swift. That’s how it’s done. Now.”

Hausner moved close to Burg. “In the morning.”

General Dobkin lay on the straw pallet in a mud hut. The wind came in through the closed shutters and deposited fine sand over his body. The oil lamp flickered but stayed lit. The man lying next to him stirred, then groaned. Dobkin could tell he was awake. He spoke to the man in passable Arabic. “Who are you?”

“Who are
you
?”
as
ked the man.

Dobkin had been told that the man had been taken out of the river also. He was shoeless and shirtless, but wore what looked like tiger fatigue pants. Dobkin had been asked by the old man, whose name was Shear-jashub, if this injured man was also a Jew. Dobkin had lied and said he did not know. He was fairly certain now that the man he was speaking to was an Ashbal, but he could not be positive. Shear-jashub, who was a rabbi in the older sense of the word—an unordained teacher, a master—had
asked Dobkin if there was any reason why the injured man should not be cared for or should not be placed in the hut of the Aluf. Dobkin had told the rabbi that there was no reason why these things should not be done.

Now, he regarded the man for a long time before he spoke. “I am a fisherman whose
dhow
overturned in the wind and I was injured. These Jews found me and helped me.”

The man lay on his side and faced Dobkin. The oil lamp flickered across his face and Dobkin almost gasped when he saw it. He kept his eyes fixed on the grotesque man’s eyes. The mutilation, he noticed, was old and scarred, not a part of his recent injuries. He saw that the Ashbal—he was sure of it now—was sizing him up: his haircut, his hands, his bare arms, which lay outside the blanket. Dobkin’s boots were off and lying in a shadow, and the man seemed not to see them, but Dobkin could tell that he’d seen enough to know he was not a Euphrates fisherman.

The man rolled casually on his back. “Well, fisherman, this is quite a thing—being obliged to these Jews for our aid and comfort.”

“Misfortune makes strange bedfellows,” agreed Dobkin. He glanced at the man. Yes. He had seen him on the glacis. He remembered the face as a blurred nightmare—but it was real. He
had
seen it. “How shall I call you?”

“Sayid Talib. And you?”

Dobkin hesitated. He had a perverse desire to say, Benjamin Dobkin, Israeli Army, General of Infantry. “Just call me fisherman.” His Arabic was not good, but he had to keep it passable so that Talib could find reason to continue the farce. Each of them was only waiting for the chance to rip the other’s throat out, and a wrong word would do it. He wondered if Talib had gotten a good look at his face on the glacis.

How badly wounded was the man, Dobkin wondered. How badly wounded was
he
himself? He flexed his muscles under the blanket and took a deep breath. He seemed to have regained some of his strength.

The clay oil lamp, a dish with a wick floating in some fat, flickered on the floor between them. Dobkin looked around him slowly. There was nothing but his blanket. He felt casually over his body. His knife was gone. He should have gotten a knife from someone. He felt something hard inside his top pocket. Pazuzu. They had given him back his obscene little statue.

Dobkin and Talib lay on their sides staring at each other, listening to the wind blow and watching the lamp flicker.

“How is the fishing, fisherman?”

“It was good until tonight. What did you say your trade was?”

“I am a buyer of dates.”

Occasionally, the mask would slip and each could see in the other’s eyes the hate and the fear and the threat.

“How did you come to be in the river?”

“The same as you.”

The conversation died and neither man moved for a very long time. Dobkin could feel his mouth becoming drier and his muscles fluttering.

Then the wind blew open a shutter and the lamp went out, and each man let out a long animal scream as he lunged for the other’s throat in the dark.

Deborah Gideon lay naked on the tiled floor in the manager’s office of the guest house. Long welts from a whip and small burn marks from a cigarette covered her back. There was blood on her thighs, legs, and buttocks as well, from wounds caused, apparently, by some animal.

Ahmed Rish washed his hands and face in a bowl of water. “Have her shot,” he said to Hamadi.

Hamadi called out to the duty man at the front desk. “Kassim.”

Rish dried his hands. What the girl had told him about Israeli numbers, defenses, and dispositions was not much more than he had already found out the hard way. But now he could fabricate his own intelligence report and his men would believe him. “We can be on that hill within an hour, Salem, if the
Sherji
stays with us. It will literally propel the men up that slope and hide their movements and sounds as well.”

Hamadi nodded. The wind must have been sent by Allah, for if it hadn’t come, he knew that he and Rish would have been murdered by their own men. Strangely, only Rish seemed unaware of this. “I will assemble our people.”

“Good.” He looked down at Deborah Gideon, then at the duty man who was staring at her. “Yes, yes, Kassim, you may use her. Then shoot her and burn the body and throw the ashes in the river. I want no evidence.” He turned to Hamadi. “A military operation is one thing. Torture and murder are another. We still have to negotiate for the hostages with Israel tomorrow.”

Hamadi nodded. Rish drew fine and meaningless lines as only an insane man could. If he weren’t a hero to the whole Palestinian people, Hamadi would himself have murdered him long ago. The image of Rish, on his hands and knees biting that girl, turned his stomach. He, Hamadi, had tortured before, but this thing that Rish had done was something quite different. The whips and cigarettes had undoubtedly hurt the girl more than the bites, but it was the sheer animal terror of the madman snapping and howling and ripping into her flesh that had made her scream out everything he wanted to know. Hamadi could hardly blame her. He only hoped that the men outside did not understand what was happening. Hamadi turned and walked out of the room and through the small lobby onto the veranda.

The last of his men and women, about fifty of them, sat crosslegged, huddled under their open pavilions, holding up the supporting poles. Hamadi blew his whistle and the Ashbals struck the tents and came scrambling toward the veranda. They stood in the wind with long trailing veils wrapped around their mouths and their
kheffiyahs
pulled low over their eyes. Hamadi held up his hand and shouted above the wind. “Allah has sent us this
Sherji,”
he began.

Hausner stood on the delta wing and watched the people swathed in all sorts of strange garments, walking like phantoms in the wind and dust, making their way under the failing moonlight.

He turned and went into the cabin. The noise of the wind through the rent skin and the sand grating against the craft made it difficult to hear or speak inside. Holes that had been punched in the roof to let the heat out during the day now let the sand sift in, and there were little hills of it in the aisles. He made his way to the rear of the cabin through the door that led to the aft galley. Across the aisle from the galley was the small baggage compartment that abutted the split pressure bulkhead. The compartment was a shambles and still smelled faintly from the kerosene, melted plastic, and burnt garments.

Miriam Bernstein had made a pallet of some half-burnt clothing and sat on the floor with her back against the hull and her legs pulled up to her chin. She was reading a book by the illumination of a small penlight that someone had given her. There was also a small emergency light on overhead. Hausner could see through the split bulkhead out to the twisted aluminum skin and braces in the tail. Swaying electrical wires
and hydraulic tubing lent a phantasmagoric touch in the cold, blue moonlight. There was a grotesque sort of beauty in any ruin, thought Hausner—even this technological ruin which stood as a monument to insult him and remind everyone of how they got there. He looked down at Miriam.

She glanced up over her book. “Is it time?”

He cleared his throat and spoke above the wind. “She said she did not wake you. She said she fell asleep on her watch and never woke you.”

Miriam closed the book gently and rested it on her knee. “She’s lying to cover for me. She woke me and I fell asleep.”

“Don’t be noble, Miriam.” He looked at the book on her knee. Camus’s
The
Stranger.

“Why not?” She shut off the penlight. “It would be a change of pace for this group.”

“Don’t criticize what we’ve done here or how we’ve done it.”

“Condemned people may criticize anything they wish. Well—is it time?”

“Not yet.”

They both let the silence drag out. Finally, she spoke. Her voice was belligerent and taunting. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t criticize. I’m one of you now. I mean, I killed that girl.”

“Yes. You probably did.”

“I had no choice, of course. You have a choice in this case.”

“No, I don’t. Self-defense is many things to many people. To some of us, it’s shooting someone who threatens us. To others it’s shooting someone only after they shoot at you first. This case is also a case of self-defense, Miriam. Society defending itself against slackers and malingerers. It’s just a matter of projecting the facts. It’s a matter of what your perception of immediacy and exigency is.”

She understood, had understood all along, really, “So, who goes on trial?”

“Both of you. Unless whoever was at fault confesses.”

“I’ve already confessed.”

“You know what I mean.”

“We’ll both lie.”