The Covenant (22 page)

“Why are you so angry?” she pleaded with him, eager to recast the situation in a way more flattering to her ego and her vanity. She could now allow herself to believe she’d been had.

“I’ll tell you why,” he said, all pretense gone, savagely snuffing out his cigarette. “For years we in Eastern Europe envied you in the Free World because you had a free press. The kind that told the truth, told the facts. We gave our lives to have that! My father, my grandfather… we went to prison… Don’t you understand? It’s one of the most important freedoms in the world, and you’re letting people whore around with it…”

She felt her knees shake, and a certain strange, sharp pain in her heart. After all the things she’d marched for and protested for; all the Third World causes she’d identified with and admired. Freedom. Truth. Helping the oppressed. And he was casting her on the other side! The wrong side!
Lumping her with the enemy. The corporate, moneymaking liars… A flash of recognition tore through her defenses. Nothing he said could have hurt her more. She pulled the covers close to her chest.

“Thanks so much for the lecture,” she told him in clipped, bitter tones. “But I know what side I’m on. And it’s the right side. Even if I don’t agree with their tactics, you can’t ignore how Palestinians are suffering…”

“Oh, so it’s their terrible suffering, is it? That’s what gives them the right to walk onto a bus and decapitate babies and eviscerate pregnant women…?”

“I never said that! It’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation.”

“Well then, I’m a bit confused. The Israelis have the highest concentration of Holocaust survivors in the world. They have been through five wars. They’ve had an average of one terrorist attack every hour every day for the past two years. They’ve had hundreds of women and children murdered, thousands injured… But still, they aren’t walking into Palestinian buses and blowing them up. So I suppose that means they can’t possibly have suffered as much as the Palestinians. Or maybe the Palestinians have a lower pain threshold. After all, they never went through Auschwitz…”

“Don’t feed me that Holocaust crap… Plenty of Palestinians have suffered in prison camps too,” she said angrily.

“I don’t think my grandmother would agree that being in a concentration camp was the same as being in a prison camp. And she should know: she was in Auschwitz…”

“Your grandmother was in Auschwitz?” Her eyes widened incredulously. “But I thought… you said…” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re not Jewish, are you?”

“No. I’m not Jewish. And neither is my grandmother. But she taught me that sometimes, there is only one side a decent person can be on.”

“Then how did she wind up there?”

“She was in the Polish underground. She hid Jews in the basement of a house where she worked as housekeeper to a German commandant.”

“That’s unbelievable.”

“It took tremendous courage. When the commandant discovered them, he gave her the following option: he would turn in the Jews, and she could leave. Or, he would smuggle the Jews to safety while she stayed behind and became his mistress. She was eighteen years old, a devout Catholic, a virgin, but she agreed. Long after the Jews had been saved, the Gestapo somehow got
wind of it. The commandant got transferred to the front, and she got sent to Auschwitz. It wasn’t a prison camp. It was something indescribable. But even after all she suffered, she didn’t bring her family up to hate. She didn’t fill us with dreams of revenge, or send us out to blow up Germans. Sineh was a hate-filled fanatic, brought up by ignorant racists who taught him to value death instead of life. Blame his parents, his culture, not his victims.”

“Look, the Sineh interview wasn’t my idea!” she blurted out. “The network insisted. Try to understand! I had a world-class exclusive and the network refused to run it if it wasn’t balanced…”

He turned to look at her with a sudden realization. “But you didn’t tell Elise Margulies that, did you? You didn’t mention that you were planning to add material to her statement… to give it ‘balance’?”

“It wasn’t relevant…” she said defensively, her sense of triumph washing away in increasingly powerful waves of discomfort.

“So, how do you think she’s going to feel when you provide justification for everything they are doing to her family? When she sees the case you’ve made for the justice of kidnapping and murdering people like her?”

She straightened her back. “Whatever you think, I’m sympathetic to Elise Margulies. I’d have to be a monster not to be. But I’m also a journalist. I work for a news organization. She knew that. I’m just trying to do my job.”

He looked at her incredulously. “You were just following orders…”

“Get out of here!”

This was his cue. He could make an exit that would salvage his conscience and take him far from the moral ambiguity of his actions. But he knew that once that door closed behind him, it could not be reopened. Some strange emotion he couldn’t explain even to himself prompted him to take her in his arms. He felt her resistance. “Julia, you are better than this! Why did you do it? They’re your own people, for God’s sake!”

“And I hate that!” She struggled to free herself from his embrace.

“What?”

“That assumption of sympathy. I don’t have a people. I belong to myself. And I don’t owe anybody anything.”

“But then why all this sympathy for these murderers?”

“Don’t be ridiculous! I don’t have any sympathy for these Palestinian thugs… Get real. You’re in this business. I didn’t want to do it this way.
But the network insisted, and they were right. If BCN would have broadcast Elise Margulies without something from the Palestinian side, do you think they’d ever consider talking to us again? Let alone giving us the second videotape…”

He looked at her, stunned. “There’s a second tape!?”

“Please, don’t ask me…”

“Are liana and Jon on it? Are they all right? And they’re giving it to you? When… where are you going to pick it up…?”

“I can’t answer that. I haven’t seen it. I don’t even know if they’ve made it yet. No one does. I’m waiting for my contact person to call me…”

“Then how do you know it’s true?”

“We have our sources…”

He pulled on his pants and buttoned his shirt, his fingers trembling with anger. His
babcia
had always spoken with surprising sympathy about her Nazi commandant. He wasn’t a bad man, she often said. Just the kind that wanted to get ahead, a bland rule follower without the strength of character required to sacrifice his ambitions to his conscience.

Despite everything he knew, he still somehow wanted to believe that underneath her vanity, her ambition, was a real woman, someone worthy of love. “You can’t live just for yourself, Julia. This isn’t just a news story; it’s a terrible crime, a crime against humanity.”

“Please don’t preach. All of us in this business have done things we’re not too happy about. It’s sink or swim. If you want to get ahead in this business, then you better figure that out, Milos…” She shrugged petulantly.

He felt his body stiffen. If that was what she really thought, there was nothing left to say. He let his arms drop.

“Please…” she begged. “Please try to understand. It’s not that I’m a bad person, or that I don’t care about Elise Margulies. I do. But I also care about my Palestinian driver, the one who helped me get the first tape. He is such a decent person. He’s also suffered such injustice…”

He forced himself to put his arm around her. “He was the one who helped you get the tape?” he asked quietly.

She nodded.

“Then maybe I
should
talk to him. Maybe it would give me some insights I don’t have. A new perspective.”

She looked up hopefully. “Do you really want to? He knows so much about history, about everything that’s happened in this area…”

“Where’s he from? What’s his history?”

“I don’t know really. I suppose the usual: thrown out of his home in ‘forty-eight…”

“Then he’s an older man?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because that would make him at least fifty-five…”

She colored a little. “You’re right. He’s around forty, I think. Maybe even younger.”

“So, where was he born?”

She shrugged, surprised that she’d never even thought to ask. “I just assumed… here. Anyway, what difference would that make?”

“Well, a lot of so-called Palestinians longing for a homeland were actually born in Egypt—like Arafat—or Jordan or Iraq. But I’d like to meet him.”

“Would you?” Her lips brushed his ear.

He nodded. “I’m sorry for getting angry,” he said stiffly.

“Well, all right then, but you have to promise to behave yourself and not go off ranting like some crazed settler…” She smiled.

He laid his hand over his heart and clicked his heels. “You have my promise as a Polish gentleman.” He kissed her hand gallantly, suddenly charming again.

“Milos?”

“Hmm?”

Her long hair brushed his arms. She reached up to him, resting her wrists on his shoulders. “Can we just kiss and make up?”

He hesitated, cringing inside as he slid his arms promisingly down her back.

To his relief, her cell phone broke the momentary reverie. She mouthed the word “sorry” as she moved away, taking the call. “What? Now? Okay. What about the tape? Well, what did Ismael say?” She looked up at Milos anxiously. “No, I’ll be waiting downstairs in ten minutes. Five.”

She jumped out of bed. “Change of plan.”

“What’s up?” he asked, averting his eyes as she pulled on her under-things, and then her suit, not trusting himself to be impervious to desire.

“Emergency press conference at the prime minister’s office. I’m surprised your office hasn’t phoned you too.”

He took out his cell phone and slapped it. “I think my battery is dead.”

“You let your cell phone battery go dead!? Can’t that get you fired, even in Poland?”

“Different standards.” He grinned. “Polish battery. Come, I’ll walk you down to your car.” He hoisted his camera up to his shoulder.

The Honda Accord pulled up to the circular driveway.

“Is that Ismael?” Milos asked, pointing his camera toward the driver, unobtrusively pressing the on switch.

She knocked on the tinted glass. It rolled down. “Ismael, this is Milos. He works for Polish television. You’ve really got to sit down with him and straighten him out.”

“Hi,” Milos said, leaning in closer.

Ismael stared at him. “Why is he filming me?”

“What?” she said.

“His camera is on. Look at the red light,” Ismael said, his jaw flexing.

“Oh, is it? My finger must have slipped. Thanks. Wouldn’t want this battery to run out too, like my cell phone. You know. Polish batteries.” He smiled.

Ismael didn’t smile back.

“Well, we’ve got to go. See you later, Milos,” Julia said, leaning over to kiss him lightly on the lips.

“I’ll be right behind you.”

Chapter Twenty

Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem
Wednesday, May 8, 2002
8:00
P.M.

“B
UBBEE
,
COME QUICK
. I think they are starting.”

Leah sat down on the bed. It had been so hard for Elise, that interview. All those people barging into the room. All the strange men holding cameras, half of them Palestinians. The big lights. All the noise. Her effort to save her family had been heart-wrenching, taking her to the limits of her strength. But afterward, she seemed happy and relieved to have done it. It seemed to have given her some peace, some hope.

She held her granddaughter’s pale hand, patting it.

The two women watched the flickering images on the little screen, images that were being brought into homes, desert palaces, international airports all over the world—images and words that had the power to influence the ideas and actions of millions of unknown human beings.

They were surprised at the use of the word “activists” to describe the kidnappers, but not unduly alarmed.

“Sha. What does it matter?” Leah comforted Elise. “They all do this. The word terrorist is only when they attack Americans in New York… Or the English in their bars…”

“I’m here with an Israeli settler…”

“She called me a settler. She didn’t even use my name…”

“. . .
who has paid the highest price of all for choosing to live in the Occupied Territories…”

“Elise, maybe we should shut it off?” Leah urged her.

”NO!”

“Mrs. Margulies, what would you like to say to the kidnappers?”

Her beautiful face. My granddaughter’s beautiful face, so full of pain, facing the world, who are being coached not to care about her, the way they were coached not to care about us. We were Jews. Vermin. We deserved the camps. Deserved to die. And they are “settlers.” They too deserve to be shot in their cars. Have their children kidnapped and slaughtered. Were people so unfair, so cruel, so stupid that they would fall for this again? Leah thought, her stomach knotting.

There was Elise, begging for mercy, for her husband, her child. Why, why?! Why do Jews have to beg the whole world to let them live in peace every single generation? To stop the senseless slaughter of innocents? To ask it, like it was a favor someone had the right to grant or deny? But at least they broadcast her. At least they are willing to listen. Which is more than they did for us. They didn’t have news cameras in Auschwitz.