Exile: a novel (58 page)
“Ah,” Jamal interjected with an air of condescension, “at last the Jewish trump card, the Holocaust. A great exaggeration.”
David felt his self-control slipping away. “You mean six million dead Jews. How many do you think it is—a pitiful two million? A paltry one million?” He kept his voice soft. “Until recently, I was engaged to a woman whose father survived Auschwitz. I’ve seen the scars on his chest, and felt the scars on his soul. Someone put them there—”
“The Germans,” Jamal cut in. “So why not give the Jewish their own state in Bavaria?”
David managed a brief smile. “Overpopulated, I suppose. And Jews and Germans enjoy a certain history.”
“So do we with the Jewish. Until they stole our land, we lived in relative peace. They complain that the Germans wanted to make their country
judenrein
, a nation with no Jews.” Jamal jabbed David’s arm with a forefinger. “The Jewish brought Nazism to Palestine—their own state, free of Arabs. What hypocrisy. Now it’s the settlements, illegal under international law. But for the Jewish, law does not matter.” Rubbing his fingertips together, he finished, “For the Jewish, it is always about this—money. That is where your power comes from.”
David leaned forward, until his face and Jamal’s were inches apart. “I’ve seen the occupation,” he said, his voice low and hard. “I’d go insane. Obviously, you already have. Nonetheless, I wish you your own country, as ‘the Jewish’ have, in the hope that you don’t devour each other.” Deliberately, David put his index finger on Jamal’s wrist, an echo of Jamal’s own intrusive gesture. “This much I know. If you had the absolute power, you would kill every Jew in Israel or, at least, arrange a large enough ‘return’ to
ensure that they lost their Jewish state. And then one of them might decide to blow up your family, just as the Irgun killed so many British. The next Baruch Goldstein would be your own creation.” Quietly, David finished: “Where does it end, I wonder. Listening to you, I think the answer is ‘Never.’ ”
Jamal sat back so that David’s finger no longer rested on his wrist. In a brittle tone, he said, “What do you want from me?”
Briefly, David wondered if his own anger with Jamal was a cover for fear, the subconscious hope that by offending this man in the name of self-respect, he could avoid placing himself at risk. “To go to Jenin,” he said, “as we’ve discussed.”
“And there is also something else you want, yes?”
With this, David knew, the minuet of indirection was coming to an end. “Yes. The medical records for Saeb Khalid.”
“Not just that.” Jamal’s slight smile had a taunting air. “You want them without anyone knowing, and you are not scrupulous how. Just as long as they fall into your lap in some mysterious way.”
“Exactly,” David answered. “And sooner rather than later. It is, as you say, a matter of Jewish money. For that, this ‘Jewish’ will gladly pay.”
S
hortly after dawn, Jamal and David headed for Jenin in silence. The trip was marked by the trappings of occupation: an extension of the security barrier that hemmed in Bethlehem itself; a checkpoint where undocumented Palestinian workers, barred from seeking work in Israel
,
waited in dispirited huddles; an Arab village, destroyed in 1948, now occupied by settlers; a web of settlements and watchtowers on both sides of the road; a settler walking with a rifle and a Doberman. The landscape became greener, lusher—a valley terraced with olive trees, its bottomland rich with cucumbers, corn, chickpeas, wheat, and grapes. It reminded David of the Galilee, once home to Hana’s family, still home to Sausan Arif. But these sights resulted from a detour; because of the current state of siege, the IDF had blocked the main road to Nablus and, therefore, to Jenin.
The delay afforded David ample time to contemplate his dilemma: forced to rely on a man he did not like or trust, he was seeking out a meeting that held dangers he could not predict. Long ago he had lost all illusion of control.
Three hours later they reached the outskirts of Jenin.
The city itself was graffiti-scarred and denuded of trees, its dingy streets and shuttered buildings bespeaking a dire poverty. At the entrance to the refugee camp was an enormous multicolored metal horse, salvaged from the scraps of cars and trucks and ambulances blown up by Israeli rockets. The street beyond was cramped, shabby, and choked with run-down cars, through which a dark-haired child on a battered bike forged a
twisted path past two-story concrete buildings caked with dirt and covered with painted slogans. This was not a “camp,” David thought—it was a third-world slum in a war zone, haven to Al Aqsa and Hamas, a cousin to the place where Hana was born and Saeb’s parents murdered.
They met Ala Jibril outside the community center, a two-story stucco building tucked in a narrow alley. He was a large, almost shambling man with hooded eyes, a somber mien that rarely changed, and a voice that was soft but deep. He helped run the center, Jibril explained vaguely, and it was his task to show David the life his people were forced to live. He said this as though David were a tourist or a social worker, not a Jewish-American lawyer seeking out Al Aqsa.
While Jamal waited outside, David and Jibril entered a rehabilitation clinic for children. Following Jibril down a hallway, David saw posters of Donald Duck and Winnie the Pooh juxtaposed with photos of fighters brandishing weapons. At its end was an open room where three children were stretched out on tables, their atrophied legs exposed, being treated by therapists for the effects of cerebral palsy.
“We have seven such therapists,” Jibril told David. “But it is not enough.”
“Why so much cerebral palsy?”
Jibril gazed at the children. “The occupation. Children born at checkpoints, or to mothers discouraged from giving birth at hospitals, may not receive sufficient oxygen; mothers take medications without proper medical advice; childhood fevers go untreated. This is the result.”
From one of the tables, a bright-eyed child smiled up at David. But her flaccid legs showed little sign of life.
At the school, a brisk, dark-haired teacher named Reem led David to a playroom with carpets depicting hippos, rhinos, and elephants; desks where children drew; and shelves filled with games and toys. It would have seemed quite normal, save that the small boy drawing at a desk wore a prosthesis where his left leg had once been.
Reem followed David’s gaze. “The IDF,” she said simply. “The boy’s father was Hamas. But war is not so easily confined.
“For us, it is devastating to see children maimed by the land mines and grenades the Israelis left behind. And troubling to watch them using the ruins of a tank to play at combat, or repeatedly drawing rockets, bombs, and soldiers, or fighting among themselves.” She pointed to the toy shelves. “You will see we have no guns or swords. Our purpose here is play therapy, our goal to relieve the psychological pressures on children traumatized by
violence. Our hope, in the end, is to teach them that violence only breeds more violence.”
David thought of Sausan Arif, wrestling with the impulses of children who had come to her school from Jenin. It was strange to think of her now, separated from Jenin by fifteen miles and a wire fence. Nodding toward the boy at the desk, David said, “Would he mind if I looked at his drawing?”
Reem walked over to the child, speaking quietly. When the boy shrugged, she beckoned David to come. His picture was a happy one—the figures of a mother, father, and child, standing at the edge of an ocean he no doubt had never seen. But then, David remembered, the boy’s own father was dead. The boy himself did not look up.
Reem walked with the two men as they left the school. The hallway leading to the street was lined with photographs of children. But these children were dead: a girl of six or seven, lying in a pool of her own blood; another dead girl fallen next to her two dead brothers, her features unrecognizable; a dark-haired boy in a coffin. The photographs were meant to evoke both horror and sympathy. But, in David, they also provoked disquiet: what did a child emerging from a playroom stripped of violent toys learn from this tableau of violence and revenge? The last poster suggested an answer: a young Palestinian man with an assault weapon, a portrait of resistance and resolve. Turning to Reem, David said, “Do your children ask about these posters?”
She could not seem to look at him. “When the Israelis leave us in peace,” she murmured, “there will be no posters.”
On the way to what Jibril called the Martyrs Cemetery, he pointed out damage from the IDF incursion. Next to a row of houses being rebuilt from rubble was the shell of a bombed-out home. “This is where Zacharias Ibaide lived,” Jibril told David and Jamal. “Once he attended a camp with our children and Jewish children, the work of a peace activist from Israel. But when he grew older and still there was no peace, he joined Al Aqsa. In its effort to kill him, the IDF instead killed his mother and father.
“Now our children play in the ruins of his home and find the remnants of missiles fired by F-16s, sent to Israel by your country. Those who are older recall the IDF coming in a hail of missiles, tank fire, and bullets.” Staring at the rubble, he said more quietly, “The Israelis claim to have killed only ‘terrorists.’ In the cemetery lie two retarded men, murdered running through the streets because they did not know any better. For them, the ‘terrorists’ were the Jews who took their lives.”
“Welcome to hell,” Jamal told David. “A collaboration of the Jewish and the Americans. Who often are the same.”
Near the cemetery, they passed another bombed-out three-story house, hollow from its roof to its foundation. In the empty lot beside it was a bullet-riddled car, its windows shattered, its hood bedecked in flowers. “My cousin’s,” Jibril explained phlegmatically. “He was Al Aqsa, assassinated by a special unit of the IDF.”
Set in the bare red earth beside these ruins, the Martyrs Cemetery had begun with fifty-eight graves, dug after the IDF incursion; now it included many more dead. Entering, the three men stood among concrete rectangles inscribed in Arabic, most surrounded by beds of flowers. “To our left are two brothers,” Jibril told David, “assassinated by the IDF. To our right is the man who owned the house you just saw, buried without his head. Beside
his
grave lies my cousin.
“The smaller monuments are for children or infants—you can guess their age from the size of their tombstones.” Jibril pointed to a monument at the center of the cemetery. “That is for my uncle, seventy years old when we pulled him from beneath the rubble of his house. Long before that he had ceased to be a threat to anyone. As for the children, death deprived them of the opportunity.”
“There are others who should be here,” Jamal added bitterly. “Our martyrs who died in Israel. But the Jewish refuse to send them back.”
The man’s obtuseness frayed David’s self-control. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “they were hard to distinguish from their victims. Body parts tend to look alike.” Turning to Jibril, David said, “In Israel, I met three survivors of the restaurant bombing in Haifa. The IDF claims that
this
was its reprisal.”
“Not at all,” Jibril answered without irony. “This is what the world fails to understand. The bombing in Haifa was our reprisal against the IDF— which four times previously tried to enter our camp—and for the martyrs who died resisting. Don’t believe that we are by nature killers and fighters. If we have become that, the Israelis have made us so.”
David thought of Shoshanna Ravit, and Eli and Myra Landau, their unfathomable loss and grief. But for so many who had suffered in this land there was no suffering but theirs. Here people died not just from bombs and bullets but from the death of empathy.
“What do you think of this?” Jibril asked David.
David gazed at the cemetery. “I think there are no words that matter.”
Shoulders slumped, Jibril seemed to weigh this ambiguous response. Then he nodded. “Tonight you will be my guest for dinner. Later, if you are
fortunate, you will meet someone. He may have the knowledge you are seeking.”
That night, after dinner at a modest restaurant on the outskirts of Jenin, Jibril led David and Jamal to the back room of another restaurant and then, after receiving a call on his cell phone, into the darkness of the camp.
Jibril took them once again to the Martyrs Cemetery. Silent, they waited in the cool night air. A quarter moon barely illuminated the tomb-stones, creating dim outlines of varied shapes and sizes. David felt a chill on the back of his neck; warily, Jibril glanced upward, as though expecting gunships from the IDF. No one spoke.
As David glanced around him, the shadow of a tombstone seemed to change shape, growing taller in an eerie apparition. Then a second shadow arose, and David heard soft footfalls as moonlight transformed the shadows into two men in dark clothes and stocking masks, each with an assault weapon cradled in one arm.
The first gunman spoke softly to Jibril in Arabic. Following the two gunmen, Jibril waved David and Jamal forward, passing the bullet-riddled car and walking single file down an alley so dark and narrow that David could barely see. Abruptly, a door opened, expelling a pale light; with hurried gestures, a third gunman in a stocking mask waved them inside. “All of us must stay,” Jibril whispered to David. “They wish to have no mistakes.”
The third gunman led them through a hallway to a bare center room without windows, illuminated by a single lamp—someone’s dwelling, David thought, with a carpet, couch, and chairs. The third man sat in the chair, flanked by the two armed men from the cemetery. With a curt gesture, he indicated that David, Jibril, and Jamal should sit facing him on the couch. Resting the M-16 on his lap, he slowly peeled off the stocking mask, revealing himself as a man of roughly thirty with a two-day stubble, and bright black eyes beneath which David saw the bruises of sleep deprivation.
“I am Muhammad Nasir,” the man said, “commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin.” As though feeling David’s tension, Nasir gave him an ironic smile. “Forgive this drama. But the IDF means to kill me—I stay nowhere for more than an hour, perhaps less. And your record in Israel is not encouraging.”
