Martyrs’ Crossing (14 page)

Yizhar looked at the soldier. “Oh” was not your typical army response to such an observation.

Doron caught the look. “Well, her boy did die at an Israeli checkpoint,” he said. “She might think she has a reason to be vengeful.”

“The mother has no right to feel vengeful,” Yizhar replied, sharply. “Maybe she's to blame, ever think of that? Maybe she should have gotten him to the checkpoint earlier, maybe she should have figured out a way to have her famous daddy find her a good place in Ramallah, a good enough doctor on her side of the line. She had other possibilities.”

“I've considered that,” Doron said.

“Good.”

“I'm sure she has, too,” Doron said.

“Possibly. But possibly not. After all, Ari, the Authority has pointed out a very convenient scapegoat for her. . . . And you seem pretty eager for the job. . . .”

Reuven coughed. Yizhar looked over at him. Reuven pointed to his watch. Yizhar looked up at the clock. Maybe that was Reuven's role as an assistant, Doron thought. Telling time.

“Listen, Lieutenant,” Yizhar said. “In any situation, any incident, anyone could be to blame; it all depends on your point of view, that's what I say. I just want you to be aware of the story we're giving to the press. I'm sure it's close to yours, with a few minor emendations from the interviews we've had with the other men who were there. What we've said is this: Mrs. Hajimi waited a quarter of an hour. The child was not showing signs of distress before the ambulance was called. Procedure was followed to the letter. The boy's death is unfortunate, but there was nothing more the men at the checkpoint could have done. That's all we've said for now.”

Doron looked at him. “And my phone calls? Getting put on hold? The orders I was given?”

“Extraneous. All that comes under following procedure to the letter. We don't need to say more than that.”

“And when she and her father and her husband and this lawyer all tell the reporters that your story is not true, that we held them for much longer, what will you do?” Doron looked at Yizhar.

“I'll look the reporters in the eye,” said Yizhar, “and tell them that we stand by our men, and by their version of events. Basically, I'll say that it's a case of an Israeli lieutenant's word against the word of a terrorist's wife.”

“I wonder who they'll believe.”

“That's up to them, Ari. But we will provide transcripts of interviews with the men, a tape of the IDF's call for the ambulance you requested, and a report by the emergency medical team about the boy's condition when they arrived at the scene.”

“He was nearly dead.”

“That's one thing that their report says, but medical personnel are professionally trained to observe more about a decedent than you can, Lieutenant. How close he was to dead, what he eventually died of. How long it might have taken him to die, to be blunt. If saving him was ever a possibility. That kind of thing.”

“Ah,” said Doron.

“Ah” was also not a typical soldier's response, but Yizhar ignored it. He had no doubt that the boy was getting the message, but did not want to give in without a battle. It was all about Doron's ideas of truth and morality, and Yizhar was sure he could rein him in by showing him how much he would have to sacrifice to uphold his so-called standards, if he happened to be so inclined.

Yizhar considered Doron again. The lieutenant still looked a little too confident in his metal chair, with his long legs sprawled out and his feet resting on the heels, not with the soles planted on the floor, as they would be in someone showing proper awe.

“And the final and most important thing,” Yizhar went on, in a deeper, more gravelly tone, “something that I cannot stress enough, is that you and the other men who were at the checkpoint are absolutely forbidden to speak to any member of the media, foreign or domestic, or to anyone else about any aspect of the incident. Anyone who is found to have spoken with the media or with any third party who ends up talking to the press—and that includes your mother, and your girlfriends, and your second cousin's cousin, Lieutenant—will face a court martial. Mere suspicion of the same will mean immediate suspension. Understood?”

“Yes, sir. I'm not about to start running amok.”

Yizhar slammed his fist down on the desk and all his little toys jumped. Doron flinched, the noise was so crackingly loud. Didn't the man give a thought to his tape recorder?

“I don't really care what the fuck you think you're about to do, Lieutenant. I just want you to do what I say. I hope that's clear. You're one piece of this puzzle, one piece.”

It was, to Doron, uncanny how quickly Yizhar got himself back under control, as if—and it was only too possible—hitting the desk had been part of an elaborate act. He's West Bank security, Doron reminded himself. This is an interrogation.

“I just want to be sure you understand,” Yizhar said. “Any violation of these proscriptions could lead to something really bad, something worse than what has already happened. I want to be very clear about this. It's not only to uphold Israel's integrity. It's also for your own protection and security, do you realize?”

“Yes, sir. I believe I understand,” Doron said.

“You don't want them to know your name, believe me.” Yizhar looked him in the eye. “Or your address. Do you think she knows your name, by the way?”

“She could, sir. I've thought about that. She could. So could the lawyer.”

He was a smart boy, Yizhar thought. Good mind. Yizhar believed that Doron would not self-destruct. But you could never be a hundred percent sure. Yizhar stood, adjusted his belt and his crotch, and then walked over and unlocked the door.

“Oh, and Lieutenant? There's one thing more I want to be sure you understand,” Yizhar said. “No matter how we end up spinning this story, guilt is not a useful emotion. The only mistake you made, really, was going by the book, right? You could have let them through on your own responsibility, but you didn't. You're a soldier. You wanted an okay from your higher-ups. Fair enough; that's what we teach the average man, and that's what the average man does. The average man gets put on hold. The average man ends up in a predicament.

“Sometimes, you have to assess the value of disobedience. Disobedience can be useful in the army. All of our heroes have disobeyed at one time or another, sometimes with heroic results. But you say you had to ask headquarters for approval. You had to ask them, didn't you? You waited too long, didn't you? With the boy dying in front of you, you didn't even consider disobeying.”

“I did consider it, sir,” Doron said. “But, yes, it was too late.” He remembered himself saying Sorry, sorry. He remembered Zvili's hopping-mad face, the angry exchange, the ambulance staff rushing up, and turning to look at the boy again, and the child had just, just, collapsed, and lay there limp in his mother's arms. Marina looked up at Doron. Her eyes seemed to beg. For what? Doron remembered his rush of nausea. He felt it again, beneath his heart.

There was a long silence. Yizhar did not look at him. Doron felt fear welling up inside him, a physical thing, at the bottom of his stomach. He hadn't felt so scared since the boy started turning blue. Maybe Yizhar was not on his side at all. Maybe he had a fallback position: blame everything on Doron.

“Will that be all, sir?” Doron asked.

“For now.” Yizhar thought he detected a shaking in Doron's voice, maybe. He hoped so. Got to make him quake in his boots, that's the way to keep a man in line. Yizhar came back to his desk and looked down, sorting through some meaningless papers as a sign of dismissal.

Reuven stood up. Yizhar nodded at him.

“Lieutenant Doron can see his own way out, Sergeant,” Yizhar said.

•  •  •

R
EUVEN LEFT FOR
the day. Yizhar was alone, which was how he liked it. The boy was a smart boy, and he would come around, because this was his country and he was army. You could rely on that, almost invariably. You could count on all those feelings inculcated through years of schooling and training, you could count on the entire fucking patriotic spirit of the country. It was a comfort finally to know you could fall back on the culture, except in the case of an extreme personality—which did not describe Doron. The culture would bring Doron safe to harbor, and there would be Yizhar, waving and saluting from the dock. He sat back in his chair and put his feet up on his poor old desk. He could see a blue dusk beginning to fall over the powerful shoulders and wings of the Generali lion. Thick gray clouds were piling up down at the end of Jaffa Road. Whenever he turned his attention to it, he could hear the sporadic noise of the traffic stopping and going at the light beneath his window. If he listened hard, he could hear the sound of the pedestrians' shoes falling as they crossed the four-way crosswalk below. Where were they all going, so busily?

This was where he'd ended up. It wasn't what he would have chosen for himself, but it wasn't bad either. He was suited to investigation. He would have preferred defense, but that was not to be. That was not to be—funny phrase, “not to be,” a phrase full of destiny and fate, but always used in hindsight. Sometimes he agreed with the Torah-kissing nuts: the ways of the Lord were mysterious to man. If you looked at Doron, or at Gertler, for that matter, you'd have to agree. Of course, when the religious talked about mysteries they were not necessarily interested in an individual man's curriculum vitae, but Yizhar was.

Yizhar remembered the facts of Gertler's case with the kind of painful clarity that only youth and war inspire. Shimon said a man is only worth his courage, and Shimon was blindly brave. The end came during the Six-Day War, a heroic time for Israel, not like now. Gertler—the hero, a man who joked while missiles rained down—panicked. Too many people were dying. His boys, the enemy's boys. Gertler couldn't handle the responsibility. That was his flaw: too much compassion.

Yizhar was sure that that, and drink, had unmanned Gertler. Compassion—or its simulacrum—was a useful thing if you were trying to run the human beast. But, lesson one, Lieutenant Doron: It is not a good thing if you let it take you over. Especially in a war, when you needed to do as much damage as possible. In war, even a little bit of feeling was already too much if it was wasted on the other guy. Understand the other guy, okay, but feel only for yourself, Yizhar thought. Yizhar held to this in peacetime, too. In Israel, peacetime was wartime.

Dusk fell suddenly into night. The spotlight went on across the street, and the lion leaped into relief against the sky. With bombs going off in nearby neighborhoods, Yizhar had watched Gertler, in command, sit with trembling hands in front of a shortwave radio for ten long minutes, incapable of action—when what the nation needed was one final assault, and that, fucking quick and fucking huge. There was Shimon, who was supposed to give such orders, sitting dumbstruck and immobile—a man who normally never stopped moving, never stopped talking. He had been drinking, too. Yizhar picked up the photograph again and studied it. The smiling face. That was before everything happened.

Yizhar drank up the cold dregs of his Nescafé, and remembered the three empty glasses on Shimon's desk that afternoon, glinting in the sun. The man drank whiskey the way sand soaks up water. He absorbed it. The other officers were running around madly, trying to cover over Gertler's failure and keep things moving, but Yizhar felt as if he and Shimon were in a small empty space, alone, at two in the afternoon with the sunlight streaming in and the enemy's automatic fire bouncing off the building. Yizhar saw the empty bottle of Scotch in the garbage can, tossed there and lying at a gay angle as if this were a midnight bachelor's party instead of command central in the middle of the day in the middle of a war. Shimon looked where Yizhar was looking and then smiled ruefully up at him from behind the radio. He shrugged and raised his hands as if to say, Why not? and then he slumped. Shimon had failed the nation, and the army, at a time of crisis.

It was a great national tragedy and Yizhar was sorry for his friend, somewhat sorry. At the time, Yizhar thought that this was certainly the end for Gertler, that this unforgivable binge and breakdown would destroy him. After the war Gertler would be quietly and gently relieved of duties, Yizhar was sure. Yizhar could hope now for a brighter future for himself. He was next in line.

This was when Yizhar's spinning avocation started. The chief of staff begged him to come up with a plausible public explanation for Gertler's collapse. Yizhar didn't want to do it, he wanted to let it lie, let the public remember Gertler's failure and interpret it on their own, but the chief of staff insisted, and so Yizhar complied. Because Gertler
was
Israel.

“Exhaustion” was how he had described Gertler's condition at the end of the short war.

“He's suffering from exhaustion,” Yizhar had told the assembled microphones and cameras and tape recorders. The reporters looked at him quizzically. “Exhaustion” was a word for Judy Garland or Elvis Presley. It was the first time Israelis had ever considered the possibility that an Israeli could be tired or worn out—and it saved Gertler's name.

Back then, Yizhar was hopeful. He still didn't understand. He loved Shimon, after a fashion, but Shimon was weak and Shimon . . . well, Yizhar thought Shimon could do other things. Shimon could become head of Hebrew University, Yizhar thought. That was Yizhar's plan for Shimon, a nice, safe, comfortable seat. Leather, tweed, tobacco, and enough respect, while Yizhar would go on to lead the Israeli Defense Forces. But instead, unbelievably, the “exhausted” Gertler was decorated and promoted and history marched on, carrying Gertler on its shoulders to higher and higher rank and position, even though everyone in the army and almost everyone in the government and almost everyone in the country, when you came down to it, knew that the man had fallen apart in the face of battle, if not exactly why.