The Covenant (27 page)

Suffering did different things to different people, she thought, taking out her well-worn prayer book, thumbing its familiar pages. Some souls became tempered, unshakable in their faith, while others became twisted and misshapen, throwing off all connection to God. She looked at the pages wrinkled from the moisture of fallen tears, the touch of countless turnings, the vicissitudes of different climates and different continents and different joys and sorrows.

She had no doubt Jon would endure the pain inflicted on him with courage. But the pain of witnessing his child suffer? He was young, an American, a doctor. All his life he had lived among kind people. Even in the
army, he had been a medic, saving lives. Unlike her, he had had no months in a ghetto, no time to prepare. He had been thrust into a terrible reality with no warning.

She looked down at the ancient Hebrew words. Enemies changed, horrors changed, misfortunes changed. Only the words, she thought, stayed the same, a boulder in the raging stream:
“From the depths, I cry to you, my Lord, and He answered…”

All through that bitter-cold night, they had coursed through her, keeping her alive. Wherever Jon was, she hoped their power would be great enough to sustain him too.

Chapter Twenty-five

Kala el-Bireh, Samaria (West Bank)
Thursday, May 9, 2002
2:30
A.M.

“A
BA
,
TELL ME
the story—”

He held her close, and began once again.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was walking through the forest with her daddy to dance by the lake. All the way there, she danced and danced, picking up flowers and singing…”

“What did she sing?”

“Oh, you tell it, liana—”

“I don’t know—” (This was part of the story, where she said she didn’t know, and then he said he didn’t know, and then finally she came up with a song, each time the same song.)

“Eretz Yisrael shell yaffa vegam porachat…”
she sang.

“My Israel is beautiful and blooming. Who built? Who planted? All of us together! I built a house in the land of Israel, so now we have a house, in the land of Israel…”
The song went on and on, each time adding something else that was planted or created, each addition followed by the chorus.

And as he told her the story of how the man and child reached the lake and got into the boat, which took them to the child’s mother waiting across the shore, liana’s eyes began to grow drowsy, until she fell asleep in his arms.

Jon sat, trying not to move, not to wake her. He had lost his sense of time. He didn’t know if it was morning or evening, the beginning of a new day or the ragged edge of the terrible old one.

In the last few days, he had gone through many stages. First, there had been the shock, the idea of being detached from the ordinary life men lead. The shock that all the rules of life had changed, been broken. The shock of powerlessness, the almost unbearable longing for Elise and home, the sickening disgust at the ugliness around him. The insult and the rank injustice of the beatings that rained on him for no reason, except to amuse his torturers. And the most powerful feeling of all, that which overrode all the others, the horrendous fear that they would harm his child.

He was almost grateful for the beatings, grateful that they used up their energy on him, leaving liana alone. He looked at his own life objectively, almost apathetically. Not that he didn’t want to live. He did. Every nerve ending, every breath, cried out for sustenance, for survival, for rescue. But he could somehow envision his death almost clinically, the ceasing to exist that would come when his heart stopped beating, his lungs ceased to fill with air, and his skin grew inflexible and cold.

But liana—he felt the warmth of her breath on his fingertips as he wrapped his arms around her shoulders. He could not, would not, envision this for her, his child. And each time he prayed, he offered God his life for hers.

She was tired, afraid, wet, hungry, thirsty, dirty. The last time he had begged them for help for her… He touched his nose gingerly. The blood had terrified her, and he had not asked again.

In the midst of the dark, shifting shadows whose every revelation was suspect, a cause for a new rush of blood, a greater beating of the heart, a tightening of the grip around the small, vulnerable flesh of the precious child nestled in his arms, Jon tried to pray.

Snippets of prayers would come to him, like large flakes of snow drifting down soundlessly from the branches of his memory that jutted out in all directions: his time in the army, his days in yeshiva, his childhood rituals:
He sustains the living with loving kindness, revives the dead with great compassion, supports the falling, heals the sick, unchains the bound.

He touched the filthy floor. His fingers rubbed together, feeling the gritty white film.
He keeps His faith with those who sleep in the dust.

Am I worthy, he wondered. Worthy of God’s intervention on my behalf? Or must the course of events, the freedom God gave each man to choose between good and evil, be allowed to unfold unhampered? Was it right, fair, to ask for a miracle?

I don’t know, he thought. These are decisions for God. All I can do is pray. All I can do is ask.

I trust in no man, nor do I rely on any angel but only in the God of Heaven who is the true God
, he found himself repeating again and again.
May the Father of compassion have compassion upon the heavily burdened. May He deliver our souls from evil hours. He who avenges blood has remembered them, He has not forgotten the cry of the humble. Those who were innocently slaughtered will not have died in vain.

Old words—hundreds, thousands of years old—whispered in defiance and defeat in Masada; cried out on torture racks of Inquisitorial prisons; murmured by cracked, trembling lips in Majdanek… Had it helped any of them, he wondered for the first time. Brought any comfort? Or had they all died in agony anyway, burned in Auto de Fe’s, slashed by Cossacks’ swords, pierced by Ukrainian gunshots, suffocated by Nazi gas, torn to pieces by Islamic bombs…? He did not know. Only one thing was clear to him: he had no control over what would be done to him. The only thing he could choose was how he felt and how he behaved.

When there was nothing left to gain, nothing more to lose, when one was face-to-face with the moment of greatest despair, to speak to God in love and thanks, rather than to curse Him and one’s fate, was the ultimate choice of any human creature, and perhaps the ultimate expression of one’s humanity. He drew comfort from the idea that millions of his people—facing a fate like his—had chosen to love God and believe; and that through the ages, enough prayers had been answered not only to ensure survival, but also to build an entire country on, a country that had blossomed like the most beautiful flower from the burnt and ravaged earth.

The land of Israel is beautiful and blooming. Who built, who planted all of us together.

Who would have imagined it possible?

Apartment houses, lovely red-tiled villas by a warm sea? And factories and farms, and orchards? And so many books and plays and music and art and museums and libraries and universities! And synagogues on every square block, and study halls filled with chanting Talmud students. And an army of brave, handsome young men and women, like the young Israelites who wandered out of the desert under Joshua, ready to confront the walls of Jericho.

That too was from God.

He hugged liana gently, feeling her bones, her flesh, sensing the strong young flow of life that ran through her veins. If you can’t answer all my prayers, dear God, please answer this one: Let my children live! Let them go on—as our people have always gone on, generation after generation—to create something beautiful out of the ugliness. Let their mother live, to bear more children and raise them. Even—he thought, swallowing hard—if I can’t be here. Even if they have another father. Let the living go on, the building, the beauty. Let the incredible story of my people go on and on and on…

He wiped the tears from his cheeks. He felt suddenly warm with the vital, young warmth of the child who nestled against his chest. And in that warmth, he felt he’d heard God’s answer.

He put his hand in his pocket, touching the place where Nouara’s picture had been. One of the terrorists had found it, looked it over curiously, and then begun to laugh. What do the words mean, Jon had asked him. To his surprise, the man had answered him: “It means: ‘He who has health has hope. He who has hope has everything.’”

He’d laughed, tearing it up. “You have nothing.”

Thank you, Nouara, he thought, remembering. Thank you.

He heard the rattle of the chains and locks, then saw a sudden ray of light on the floor as the door opened. He stiffened as the child buried her face in his chest. The room was suddenly flooded with light. liana looked up, surprised, then laughed, jumping out of his arms. He looked up, startled, wondering if he was dreaming.

Chapter Twenty-six

Tul Karem, Samaria (West Bank)
Thursday, May 9, 2002
10:00
A.M.

I
SMAEL ABADI SAT
in his living room in Tul Karem rewinding the second videotape from Bahama, which he had just picked up and watched for the first time. It was all right. The best that animal Bahama could manage. He thought of the way the child was dressed: the new, frilly dress they sold in children’s clothing stores in Shechem and East Jerusalem, a dress no Jewish child would wear. But at least she had been fed, bathed, her hair combed and tied back with bows. The doctor looked weary, but only a bit bruised. One would never suspect the beatings he’d been subjected to. The child, thankfully, had so far been spared.

When Ismael thought of her, of any child, in the same place with that maniac Bahama, a chill ran through his body. But at least one thing was clear: a woman had been there to care for her. Maybe one with a heart, he hoped, not some fanatic Hamas or Fatah type who had successfully erased the last spark of human intelligence, decency and compassion from their soul. These were the new leaders of Islam. The hope of the Palestinian people.

It made him nauseous.

Sometimes he thought that he had been cursed with too much intelligence. Too much curiosity. How had the passion for a homeland turned into a passion for killing? If the Israelis moved out of the Middle East tomorrow, all of these groups would have to find new reasons to go on, because they didn’t know how to do anything else. They would start killing Jordanians next. And
then Egyptians. Then they’d take over the oil fields of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. And in the end, when they’d taken over the entire world, they’d have to start blowing themselves up, because that’s all they knew how to do.

They didn’t want a country. Not really. The boring matters of tax laws, health care, importing potatoes, opening sewage treatment plants didn’t interest them at all, nor were any of them educated or equipped to deal with any of those matters. They never imagined beyond the waving of the flags, the shooting of the guns on the day that the last Zionist Jews were either blown up or raised their hands in defeat.

Not a single one of them had given a single thought to the day after.

He shrugged, filled with a familiar feeling of contempt.

He had just enough time to deliver the tape for the afternoon news and redeem himself with Julia for disappearing after the press conference, leaving her stranded.

“Are you going now?” his wife asked.

He looked at her pretty, dark face, the hair loose around her shoulders as she never wore it outside the house. She still looked like the sixteen-year-old he had fallen in love with at his brother’s wedding. After so many births, her body had not thickened, like so many Arab women’s. It was still lovely.

“Yes, I must go.”

He went into the children’s rooms. The empty beds of his three young sons who had already left for school were still disheveled with their nighttime tossing. The light was coming in from outside the window, filling the space with a sense of peace and warmth. In the second bedroom, Mustapha, two, and Wajin, four, were playing with their toys. His daughter was shrieking with laughter. She had long, dark curls like her mother and in the closet hung a dress very like the one the Jewish child was wearing in the latest tape. He reached down and lifted her into his arms, kissing her gently on the top of her head. A wave of indescribable warmth and sadness and fear washed over him. He set her back down.