Gospel (96 page)

The boys walked to the driver's side and waved, leering. They tried the door handle and, again, with the same beseeching look, they seemed to want her to come out or let them in. Right, thought Lucy, her heart beating fast, I'm not in the mood to be raped by four dirty Palestinian teenagers this afternoon, no thank you—

“Shekel!” yelled one through the window, the youngest.

He repeated this. He wanted some money. He slammed his little fist against the window: “Shekel! Shekel!”

Then there was a boy, fourteen or so, at her window: “Shekel, shekel!”

The oldest boy pulled out a knife and threatened to scrape it along the hood and side of the car. He looked at Lucy and she understood: your money, or I'll do this. Lucy reached over to the horn and gave it a toot.

This angered the older boy. Lucy quickly saw the fourteen-year-old running for the stack of cut-stone bricks by the side of the monastery wall. He came running back, smiling, with two stones, almost too heavy for him to carry. Lucy honked the horn longer this time. The oldest boy began scraping the car, in a terrible metal-on-metal noise. He was laughing at her—see? She could have prevented this. “Shekel! Shekel!” She honked the horn again—

Uh-oh. The oldest boy tried to put his knife in the small crack of the driver's side window to force the window down. Then he tried putting it between the crack of the front door, hoping to trigger the lock. Lucy leaned on the horn, terrified.

“Hey there!”

Lucy lifted her head to see O'Hanrahan and Rabbi Hersch running toward the car. The boy snarled something and held out the knife for O'Hanrahan to see. The smallest boy took a stone and hurled it at the rabbi. It hit him on the shoulder. If I had a gun, thought Lucy, these little terrorists-in-training would learn their lesson.

(Weren't you the one who felt guns weren't an appropriate response to rock-throwers?)

They're sixteen and thirteen and fourteen, she wailed to herself, already impossible to deal with. They're just boys! We're three grown people terrified of these delinquents. O'Hanrahan stepped forward to confront the guy with the knife. O'Hanrahan knew Arabic and this seemed to placate the boy. O'Hanrahan, Lucy gathered, was calmly saying that they would be in great trouble concerning their parents and their homes if the Israeli Army was informed of this, so why didn't they run along …

The rabbi quickly went to the driver's side. Another rock from the young one was aimed toward the rabbi's head. He ducked and it hit the top of the car and slid off the other side—

Kallump!
Lucy was startled by a big crash at her side: one of the boys had the stone brick and was smashing it against the passenger-side glass. He was yelling curses. The rabbi, fumbling with the keys, opened the car door and climbed in, slamming it and locking it at once.

“You all right, little girl?” he said with strange serenity.

“Yes. Were you hit?”

“Sandy Koufax the kid is not.”

The rabbi knocked on the glass and got O'Hanrahan's attention. The older boy was unsure what to do now. O'Hanrahan quickly made his way to the right-side back door, the rabbi unlocked it, the professor hopped in, almost closing a boy's fingers in the door, which seemed to add to their fury. Now two boys with the two stones were starting on the front windshield. Bringing the great jagged rocks down and down again. On Lucy's side, the nicks began to form larger cracks.

“Happy with your little persecuted Palestinian angels now?” asked the rabbi.

O'Hanrahan bellowed: “Would you start the car and get us out of here?”

Rabbi Hersch started the car. Immediately, one of the little boys climbed onto the back. The rabbi accelerated forward, sending the boy sprawling in the rocky road. Lucy looked over to see the older boy laughing at this pratfall and thought flatly: they're even cruel to each other.

Lucy then looked to her side to see the fourteen-year-old ready to heave the stone brick. She made contact with his eyes. Hate, pure animal unreasoned hate. The rock scratched the glass but did not break it. The older boy with the knife ran to the car.

“He's going to slash the tires!” O'Hanrahan perceived.

“The little momzer's not gonna do anything,” said the rabbi, turning the car sharply and heading away from him, only to have another boy standing in the road before him. “Don't dare me to run you over, I will,” the rabbi swore.

But the rabbi didn't, and slowed.

And in that time, the boy who had been sent sprawling grabbed on to Lucy's door handle. He wouldn't let go. The rabbi accelerated up the hill, and the boy in front dove out of the way.

“He's still hanging on,” said Lucy breathlessly.

“If I go fast enough, he'll have to let go.”

They were dragging him. Pure will caused him to run alongside, then drag himself over the rocks. He cried out something. Then there was a loud thud. The older boy had hurled at great speed a rock that had dented the trunk. Here came another rock right for the back windshield. The rock cracked it and O'Hanrahan ducked down in the seat.

“Damn,” he said.

The boy on Lucy's side still hadn't let go. The rabbi slammed on the brakes. The boy was flung forward, horribly, into the boulder-filled ditch. His body landed against the rocks, his head hitting a boulder. Lucy was sure he was seriously hurt.

Lucy stammered, “Rabbi, he's probably—”

“To hell with him!” said the rabbi, speeding away before more damage was done.

Lucy talked nervously. “I didn't have any shekels to give them,” she said as if that were her responsibility.

“Why should you have to give those animals anything?” said the rabbi.

“That boy was badly hurt,” O'Hanrahan stated quietly, feeling a premonition of pains in his hands and feet, brought on by the stress.

“What?”
snapped the rabbi. “You wanna go back and give him mouth-to-mouth?”

“I wasn't pleading his case,” said a tense O'Hanrahan. “It's just that they'll run up to their village and we're not gonna be very safe if the first village we pass through telephones ahead to the last, and some Palestinians are waiting for us—”

“I wasn't planning on dawdling in the next town.”

Lucy looked down at her right hand shaking. She held it with her left and that steadied her but she noticed how cold and bloodless they both were. She slumped down in the car and looked at the floorboard. How regrettable this all was. All this naked, purposeless hate. And she was right in supposing that there were tens of thousands of such young men, raised in refugee camps and impoverished streets and slums the Israeli government had no intention of improving, and there would be more and more of them, until the army killed every one of them or the Arab world rose and eliminated every single Israeli or an impossible policy of Love Thy Neighbor was attempted.

Approaching fast: the village they had encountered on the way in. It was obvious from the state of the car that they had seen some trouble. And that seemed to incite the locals to cause more. Two teenage boys took some stones from a neatly piled supply by the road and hurled two at the car. One hit the taillight with the smash of glass and plastic.

“Ah well,” murmured the rabbi, strangely serene again. “This is why I don't take my
own
car anywhere. Wait till the guys in Maintenance see what we're bringing back.”

Another village was ahead and Lucy saw three little girls run up with their stones to throw. The rabbi smiled at them and waved them no-no-no with his finger and they obeyed. Lucy stared down at the floorboard wishing to be miraculously transported out of the West Bank—hell, out of Israel. I would get on a plane tomorrow, she thought for the first time. A rock from somewhere bounced on top of the car. She didn't look up or startle or turn to see who threw it and where it came from. Please, Lord, let this be over with soon.

(Alas, Beit Shahur approaches.)

“The army's sure to be up ahead,” said the rabbi, steering this time to the village they'd bypassed on the trip in.

Lucy looked ahead to the roadblock. Israeli soldiers, lean and fierce looking, were stopping all traffic.

“Are you going to tell the soldiers about the injured boy?” asked Lucy.

“I'm going to tell the soldiers about those hoodlums, yes,” he said.

Lucy realized these soldiers, now world famous for their rough treatment of suspected Palestinian troublemakers, would not deal lightly with these boys or their families. They would get files devoted to them, stern warnings, maybe a night or so in jail, their families identified and known.

“Maybe we shouldn't say anything,” said Lucy unsurely.

Rabbi Hersch threw up his hands. “Look at the car! They're gonna ask what happened.”

“I don't know,” she stammered, “it's just if we get them in trouble, it'll be worse for the next group that comes through there to Mar Saba—”

“I hope the soldiers go and beat the shit out of those boys and that'll be a lesson to them.”

Indeed, at the checkpoint, the rabbi described the hoodlums in clear detail. What they were wearing, their ages; he had coolly studied them to make this very report. But the soldier, a young, officious woman with no courtesy about her, was acting gruff.

She asked, “What were you doing there,
Rebbe
?”

“Going to the library at Mar Saba, with my associate here, Patrick O'Hanrahan, and his assistant, Lucy Dantan.”

She said with a clipped Hebrew accent, “But there are no women allowed in Mar Saba.”

“Yes,” said the rabbi with forced politeness, “we know, but we thought she'd like to see the place from the outside.”

The Israeli soldier stared at them impassively.

“Would you please get out of the car,” she requested. “We're going to ask you a few questions.”

“Oh boy,” mumbled O'Hanrahan. “The third degree.”

“It might not be so bad,” said the rabbi, pulling the car to the appointed place. The rabbi would not criticize Israeli security because it was the world's best. A pain in the ass, yes, but planes didn't blow up and stores didn't go boom like in Northern Ireland.

“Where are we?” asked Lucy, before getting out of the car.

“Beit Shahur,” said the rabbi.

(In the summer of 1989, the citizens of Beit Shahur, largely Arab Christians, decided to stage a passive resistance campaign. Why should they pay taxes to Israel where they were second-class citizens, their rights weren't recognized, and whose moneys went to shooting Palestinians. It was peaceful, nonviolent, and their manifesto was reasonable. An international team of journalists and peace activists gathered. All were arrested. Palestinian homes were looted by Israeli soldiers, valuables smashed, beloved objects burned, TV's kicked in—the idea was to do the equivalent amount of damage as in back taxes. When the multi-faith peace groups protested, they were arrested too. This was November 1989, a week after the Israeli Army had broken in and seized U.N. documents that gave them a further list of Palestinian troublemakers to crack down upon.)

O'Hanrahan's knuckles throbbed with circulation pains. He fumbled in his sportscoat pocket for his Percodan. At the first opportunity he'd take one. With his hand in his coat pocket he felt around for his passport. “I got some good news,” muttered O'Hanrahan momentarily. “I got my wallet and my license and some ID, but my passport is in my other jacket at the hotel.”

And this lapse meant an hour.

Sixty minutes of checking, double-checking, intensive questions, all cordial enough, all rational and understandable, but draining and invasive. Lucy's passport was in order and after a small interview she was released.

She left the small official building—once someone's home, seized by the army for whatever crimes had been alleged here—and glimpsed O'Hanrahan through a window, looking ancient, answering a series of questions. His political beliefs. Who belonged to the scribbled phone number he had in his wallet? It was an antiquities dealer, an Arab man in East Jerusalem. This suspicious fact opened up possibilities of antiquity smuggling and collusion with East Jerusalem terrorism, so another thirty minutes unfolded itself.

Lucy wandered into the street, hot with the dust-filled light of the late afternoon. There was a Palestinian fruitstand across the road. Lucy imagined she shouldn't be mistreated here, a hundred yards from the police checkpoint. She walked over and was informed a bunch of grapes was a shekel. Not bad.

“American you?” said the smiling, toothless Palestinian grandfather who was shopkeeper.

“Yes.”

“Ah! Welcome to Intifada, eh?” he laughed.

“Yes,” she smiled, amused at the blunt fatalism of his comment. She handed him the shekel.

“Many, many friends in America, no?”

She wasn't sure what the question was. “Excuse me?”

“Palestinians have many, many friends now in America, yes?”

“More and more, yes.”

“You tell in America? You tell them about us, yes?”

Lucy took her grapes and the tattered paper bag, much reused, the shopkeeper had put them in. “Yes, I'll tell them,” she said. “Many people want the Palestinians to have a homeland.”

The man didn't seem to understand the word, but his wife from behind a veil translated for him and he beamed, exposing his wide, unhealthy mouth. He reached over the piles of fruit and found a lovely, juicy peach for Lucy and handed it to her.

“For me?”

“For you,” he bowed. “You the American girl.”

She made a nod of acceptance and turned back to the police station and the car. What to make of it all? This exhausting, ceaseless, relentless place. In one hour in Israel, one does more thinking about moral, religious, ethical, and political principles than one does in anywhere else in a decade. I would like to erase my mind of this vexing place, she thought, biting into her peach. Delicious. This blessed weather produced the most excellent fruit, true to its reputation.