Martyrs’ Crossing (3 page)

Marina started to run down the road toward the watchtower, with one shoe gone and Ibrahim panting in her arms. At least now there was space to run. At the guardroom, she would plead her case. Those Israeli soldiers who looked at you as if you weren't the same species. She knew them. Their impassive faces, deathly indifference, like Roman praetorians. She'd have to beg, plead, get down on her knees. She hated having to do it; she liked looking away as she presented her documents, getting through, no arguments, no contact, no humiliation. Nothing personal. She had always sworn that if it came to total closure, she would never beg, never degrade herself that way. She'd happily stay in Ramallah, except for her visits to Hassan. What, after all, did Jerusalem have that Ramallah didn't? But that was before Ibrahim got sick again. She knew the answer to her old question, now: Jerusalem had Hadassah Hospital.

•  •  •

D
ORON BREATHED IN
the wet, fresh air. After a hot dusty day, you almost felt clean, up here in the watchtower. He leaned out the opening and looked down at the stragglers waiting outside the guardroom. The sole bench in front, which seated six or seven, was full. In spite of the rain clouds that were building toward blackness above them, a few small groups huddled in conversation near the bench. And heading down toward the checkpoint trailer across the road, coming at a run, almost, but graceful and dignified, was a slender woman in blue jeans, with long, uncovered hair, a beautiful woman, really, Doron could see, carrying a child. One of her shoes was missing.

G
EORGE WAS TERRIBLY TIRED. THE
trip back to boston had been long, and he was still edgy with jet lag a week later. He hated traveling: wasted time. And now that he was home, he realized he had been in no condition to deal with the vagaries of his trip. Sitting in the security zone at the airport in Frankfurt for three hours, waiting for a late connection, he had been lonely and bored and irritated. The newspapers bored him, his German was not what it had been, he hadn't brought enough books or magazines he could bear opening, much less reading. It was extremely unpleasant. Just hoisting himself up out of those deep seats to go to the bathroom or to get a cup of coffee, a bad cup of coffee but a necessary cup of coffee, was a physical endeavor more difficult than he could have imagined, after only a four-hour flight from Tel Aviv. He was sick and getting old at the same time, and he was not enjoying it. Before he left Boston on this pointless journey, he had sworn to himself that he was not going to let the terrible fatigue stop him. His credo had always been to do what was necessary, to keep his connection to Palestine alive, to give an important part of his energy to The Cause (he always said those two words in a deep ironic tone, the meaning of which—of course—no other Palestinian, except Sandra, could understand; Palestinians said “the cause” as if it still had real meaning . . . ). Do what was necessary for The Cause, no matter the cost, he told himself. But now that he was back, he was wondering.

That movie on the plane out of Tel Aviv! It was the most enjoyable part of this last visit. It was the kind of thing he loved: evil CIA agents, a beautiful blond, a secret installation, a ridiculous gang of swarthy foreigners of uncertain origins. One scene remained fixed in his mind. The towering CIA man gives orders to his shady, third-world ally, and the dark-skinned man bows just slightly from the waist in receiving his commands. That little diffident hint of a bow, both acquiescent and defiant, reminded him of Ahmed. George had seen Ahmed give that little bow only last week, as he dismissed someone he was pretending to respect.

Since his heart attack, it was impossible for George to take the kind of pleasure he used to in the regular events of life. When he went down to New York, to give lectures on Palestine or to attend cardiology conferences, he was tired and at his least sociable, not like in the old days—which weren't so old or so long ago. New York in the old days had been the scene of his glory: parties, congresses, fund-raising banquets, gatherings to whom he spoke about The Cause (without irony, in public), and the fate of his people. But now, with Sandra dead and his heart still unrecovered, he almost always said no. He didn't feel like making the effort. He might have taken his old comfort in the accoutrements of wealth one found at New York parties: the rich upholstery and linens and flatware, the sparkling glasses, the high ceilings, the catered food, the clink and laughter, the talk—it reminded him of evenings in his parents' dining room. But he missed Sandra. And he hated looking down at a full plate and wanting nothing.

At lunchtime on a weekday, his part of Cambridge was silent. Everyone had already gone off to work. George put his cup and saucer down, turned on the television, and leaned back into the easy chair that his father had had carried out of their house in Jerusalem so long ago. The chair that, later, he had taken from Amman to London, and then up to Oxford, that he and Sandra had stuck on a steamer to cross the Atlantic, and then lugged up to Boston in a U-Haul, all of this back when his life was just beginning. George flipped through the channels. Tennis, would it be the Open? Yes, there was Australia in the promotional shots: that odd harbor at Sydney, kangaroos looking perplexed in a parking lot. The defending Czech was playing a Swede.

George hoped the phone would not ring. Some new minuscule section of the so-called peace process was being implemented today—or was it tomorrow? yesterday?—and he was afraid the media deluge might start up again. What was there to say, after all?

Tennis relaxed him. He loved to watch the ball go back and forth. Pock, pock, pock, pock. No sound was more soothing. Now only politics could get him going, bring the blood to his face. He would never have imagined that it was possible, but Palestine was the only thing left that aroused his passion.

Love, forty. Good, the Czech was winning. All those damned get-togethers in Jerusalem. They always invited him very courteously when they had an important cabinet meeting, or if there was a big holiday celebration and they needed a rousing speaker. He was still “advising” Ahmed and the Chairman and the Authority, even though they no longer listened to him, no longer took him seriously. It was the political equivalent of Ahmed's little bow—respect combined with dismissal. You couldn't criticize them and think they would accept you in any way other than formally, nominally. But they needed him, still, they needed him.

Ahmed was his best friend, or used to be—decades and decades ago. They had shared hours and hours at school and in the afternoons, in Jerusalem and later in Amman, over tea or coffee, Ahmed stretched out on the sofa and George lying on the carpet in a corner of Ahmed's father's dark study, talking about politics and girls, daydreaming about returning home. George was still disarmed by Ahmed's brilliant smile, and yet Ahmed was a part of the whole corrupt contraption. He was dispensing jobs to cronies, selling ministries to high bidders, the whole shebang, George thought. He seemed to have lost sight of The Cause. George believed that Ahmed was just getting on with things, business as usual, petty politicking, jabbering with the Chairman as if the two of them were a couple of old hacks. Yet Ahmed was vibrant in some atavistic way. He seemed to store his own heat. On George's last trip, the chill of Palestine's winter had crept into his bones, he'd felt it even in the overheated library in Bethlehem where he'd given a talk. But Ahmed walked in from a cold driving wind blazing like a furnace.

Well, they were all virtually dead now, as Sandra used to say, many of them well past sixty. George always caught himself on the verge of walking out of meetings, leaving Ahmed and the boys behind to natter until the end of time about who should control Abdul's orchard near Dah'riyeh, and who would get those two hectares of scrub brush outside Deir el-Ghuson. The whole rickety edifice made him tap his foot with annoyance. Maybe one day he really would just split and head over to see some big brutal American movie at some big brutal shopping mall on the Israeli side. Wouldn't that shock them? He was running out of patience.

He had accomplished precisely nothing in Palestine this last time, precisely zilch. Marina kept pushing him to leave Ramallah and go for a ride through the other side of Jerusalem, the side where he spent his childhood, the places he had told her so much about when she was small. Just to see, she said, just to see. George couldn't explain to his daughter—who had grown up undisturbed in America—how very much he didn't want to. He still felt—after fifty years—like a child who had been suddenly orphaned; he was still suffering from the shock of the Israeli takeover in that unbelievable spring of 1948. His whole life had been cut off from him when he was only eight years old. When the family fled to Amman, George's world had changed as if he'd been transported to an alien planet. He felt awkward about revisiting a past that had been denied to him for so long, a past that—really—he had never been allowed to experience. Still Marina pushed him—she argued for it with the directness of someone who had only suffered secondhand.

He'd done it, finally, but he hadn't set foot outside the car. Saw a house, and felt for the key his father had given him, that he always took with him on long trips. There it was, in his jacket pocket, long and smooth. It was made of iron and it felt heavy in his hand. The end was wrought into the shape of a fleur-de-lis. He remembered how he had worked to make it one of Marina's favorite objects—
her
talisman, too—when she was little. He had dangled the shining key before her fascinated eyes so many times that she imagined it had magical powers. He held it briefly, and looked up at the house. He saw a path he remembered—it led down to the renters' apartment in the back, and the henhouse and pigeonry that had been tended by his nursemaid. He saw the old arched windows. The towering cypress that hid half the garden. A sign that said
LOVERS OF ZION STREET
—in Hebrew,
Hovevei Zion.
Well,
that
was new. Funny name for his old street. Saw unfamiliar people, new buildings, paved streets. Blue sky. And then on to another meeting.

All right, I've done it now, he said to Marina.

He would love a sweet, but in Cambridge good Arab sweets were still hard to find. Sweets with coffee, perhaps the only reason left now to visit the West Bank. Pock. Ah, the Czech was clever—a wicked backhand crosscourt, and at net. George sipped at his coffee and remembered the little nests of honey and pistachios from Nazareth that he had eaten while he was visiting Marina and Ibrahim in Ramallah. His daughter seemed happy, he supposed, under the circumstances. She was still missing her mother. She pushed more sweets on him, too much coffee, watching him with judging eyes when she thought he wasn't looking. He hadn't been taken to see the husband, and he assumed that that was no oversight.

Marina looked beautiful, and Ibrahim was very charming, for a baby. The boy smiled often, and spoke both languages, and did not seem at all sick, even though Marina said he was ill. He had had an asthma attack—was it just a month ago?—but he looked fine now to George's medical eye. George had had asthma as a child. Mothers were always nervous. Ibrahim and George played hide-and-seek—Ibrahim found George wedged in a corner between the armoire and the wall, next to the ironing board. The two of them built traps out of blocks. The color in the baby's cheeks was perhaps a little high, but otherwise he seemed well. Ibrahim was quite dark and blue-eyed, as George's mother had been. It was a lovely and surprising remembrance of her.

My Palestinian grandson, he thought.

George remembered that when Marina sent him the first photographs of her newborn baby, he had been taken by surprise by his own emotion. How could he love someone so much whom he had never even met?

•  •  •

U
P IN THE WATCHTOWER
parapet, two soldiers leaned against the sides of the opening. They were watching her. Marina's arms were beginning to ache. Ibrahim, almost two and a half years old, was heavy. The watchtower seemed far away as she half walked, half ran toward it, going as fast as she could. The sun had set over the photocopy shop. She imagined again what her father would have to say about her finding herself in this situation. He believed she never planned anything properly. He believed she was still a sloppy teenager living in a room piled high with dirty clothing. He would find the bare foot too degrading in this situation. He would be annoyed to find she had gotten herself into this fix. And he would not be interested in the fact that it was probably inescapable.

Just a few more meters, and she could begin the battle to get the attention of the checkpoint guards. A half dozen or so other people were already sitting on a bench, waiting. The setting sun left a strip of pale pink floating on the horizon behind the checkpoint, and night arrived, abruptly. A lacy drizzle was falling.