The Covenant (5 page)

Everyone is going to die, he reminded himself when the sadness of his defeats tore through him. But each battle he won meant that life could go on one more day, month, year. It was a battle worth fighting, worth winning, no matter the eventual outcome.

What would a man give for an hour of life, ten minutes? What price?

He could understand many things about his Palestinian neighbors: their anger and disappointment and sense of injustice. All these things were human and, seen from their point of view, perhaps justifiable. What he could not accept or even begin to fathom was their joyous connection to death. The pride of sending a child to destroy life, their own and others’. How he wished he could take them into this ward and see how people fought for the privilege of one more day of life.
Death has no glory!
he wanted to shout at them through the television screens when they interviewed the beaming mothers and uncles and friends as they fired off guns to celebrate the creation of one more
shahid. Death has no glory.

Shawan was sitting, as usual, by his wife’s bedside. He was a tall, thin man with a giant Saddam Hussein mustache. His thick hair was neatly combed and his shirt was a faded blue badly in need of ironing. His gray pants showed the flecks of paint and concrete that were the marks of his profession. His face was pale under the olive skin, his dark eyes sagging with fatigue. Jon could only imagine how awful it must be for him, caring for the children, spending so much time with his wife, trying to find some kind of work to keep gas in the car and food on the table.

“Good morning, Shawan.”

“Doctor. How is she?”

He touched the man’s shoulder. “Let me look at her chart, and I’ll get back to you.”

Nouara lay back on the white sheets, her face pale and drawn, her dark hair covered with a modest scarf, not unlike the ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman that was in the next room with advanced breast cancer. He drew the curtain around her bed, sat down and smiled. “How are you feeling this morning?”

“Ravishing,” she said with a trace of a wicked grin. She was a lover of
novels, especially the ones with the bodice-ripping titles, and they were the source of most of her English vocabulary.

He lifted his eyebrows and nodded appreciatively. “Good word! And what else can you tell me?”

He listened as she gave him a list of her symptoms and reactions to the drug regimen, all the while flipping through her charts to read the latest lab work. The truth was, the numbers were better. Not the best. Not perfect, but an improvement. He examined her head to toe.

It was good, he thought. Nothing but the usual body weariness fighting the invasive chemicals that were flooding her system, fighting the cancer. She needed very, very careful supervision at this point, someone to keep track exactly of every dosage and every side effect. He made a note to change certain medications, and told the nurse that he was to be paged immediately if there was any change for the worse. He didn’t want some outsider clomping into this delicate woman’s fragile body chemistry with combat boots. He wanted, literally, to keep his finger on her pulse. This was his war, and he was determined to win it for her, for Shawan, for their children. It was personal.

“I’m happy today, Nouara. The numbers look good. Keep it up!” His hand reached into his back pocket and he took out another Harlequin. “For you. This one is called
Burning Desire
,” he read.

She took it from him quickly, glancing with pleasure at the big-bosomed blonde in the arms of the dark horseman before hiding it quickly inside her pillow. She tucked a few wisps of hair underneath her scarf “
Shukran
, Doctor Jon.”

“Anytime.”

He was about to leave, when her hand caught his arm. “Doctor, can you tell my husband not to come? At least, not every day?”

He was surprised. “Why?”

She shook her head. “He won’t listen to me. But I know it is very hard for him. He isn’t able to find work, because he takes off so much time…”

And because since the Intifada, Israelis were just too scared to hire Palestinians… Jon finished the thought for her.

“He’s so tired. If something happens to me, he has to be strong. To take care of our children. This is more important. But he won’t listen…”

“Nouara, if my wife told me not to come and see her every day, I wouldn’t listen to her or her doctor. I’d come. But you know what, I’ll try
to find some work for Shawan. There are people building houses in Maaleh Sara who could use a hand, and their hours are flexible. He could do both.”

Her teeth were white and pretty against her dark face. She took his hand and kissed it.

“You make me feel like the pope, Nouara.”

“You are holier,” she said solemnly.

“I don’t know. My wife is pretty mad at me right now. She says I’m bullying her.”

“How is this pregnancy going? Still so hard?”

“No, she’s fine. But we don’t want to take any chances, and she hates lying in bed all day She’s so tired of doing her beadwork, of reading and watching TV…”

“I know.” Nouara picked at the bedcovers listlessly. “Maybe you should buy her watercolors and paper. Let her draw. You wouldn’t believe how the time passes when you mix colors.” She pulled open the drawer of her night table. It was full of her artwork, fresh and delicate landscapes. What was she drawing, he wondered, glancing up at the window. But only the blank white wall of the maternity wing stared back at him. He studied the paintings: the brown rolling hills, the gnarled trunks of olive trees, the pointy bright green pomegranate leaves. It was the same view he saw from his own window every morning, he realized, the same things he would miss if confined to this sterile white room. She’d drawn the landscape of her heart. And in a way, his own.

“It’s so good, Nouara. So familiar. I even think I know what tree that is.

He tried to return the picture. She pushed it back at him. “For you.”

“Well, I’m honored. But you have to at least sign it.”

She dimpled with pleasure, dipping her brush into a plastic cup of water and moistening the dried blue paint. “From Nouara to Doctor Jon,” she wrote in English, and then continued in flowing Arabic script.

“What does it mean?”

“One day, I’ll tell you,” she blushed.

As he walked down the hall to talk to Shawan, he folded the picture carefully, putting it into his pocket.

Chapter Four

Downtown Jerusalem
Monday, May 6, 2002
4:00
P.M.

T
HE RECITAL HALL
in Beit Ha Am was in the center of downtown Jerusalem. It had a real theatre, a real stage. Once a year, all the community center ballet classes took the place over, filling it with doting parents and giggling little girls with flowers in their hair. The children, dressed in colorful costumes, mingled like a field of wildflowers quivering in the wind, their sweet voices a chorus of excited expectations.

Jon ushered liana through the throng, finding her classmates and her teacher. Then he sat back in the darkened theatre, losing himself in the music and movement of little children delightedly soaking up the spotlight. First the older kids came out, trying their hand at being future stars, stretching, posing self-consciously, keeping laborious track of the music, delighting in the applause. And then came the little ones: their eyes wide, a little scared, their feet fumbling, searching the stage and the crowd for encouragement, dimpling when they found it. Like little kittens, they brushed up against each other, stepping on each others’ toes, their soft beauty almost heartbreakingly fragile under the bright lights.

And then he saw liana. Her curls had been pulled up and back into a severe chignon on the top of her head, making her face look heartbreakingly older. Tiny and graceful, full of movement and joy, he felt his heart leap up with pleasure at the reality that such a beautiful creature existed and she was his.

Then all the groups made concentric circles, their colorful pink, fuchsia
and magenta costumes interweaving, exploding into a kaleidoscope of color. Jon stared in wonderment and appreciation, seeing only liana, delighted at every practiced movement of her knees and elbows as she went through her simple routine.

When he took her into his arms afterward, he felt her body exude the dew of happiness and exertion.

“Was I good? Was I,
Aba?!”

He hugged her. “The best. I took pictures, so
Ima
can see too.”

At the mention of her mother, Jon felt her hands hold him a little tighter.
“Ima
will like what I did?”

“Of course! She’ll be so happy!”

It was already getting dark as she skipped beside him to the car for the trip back home, chattering nonstop. As the car door clicked shut, Jon turned to face his daughter in the backseat, double-checking if her seat belt was fastened. As his eyes met hers, he saw the dimples in her cheeks deepen and her face light up.

His little girl. He’d left the clinic at the last possible moment, annoyed and irritated at having to cut his workday short, begrudging the time. He’d found her sitting dejected and miserable in day care. This pregnancy was taking a real toll on her, he realized, leaning over to pat her hand and touch her cheeks, which blushed the same pretty color as her tights. It took so little to make her happy, he thought, ashamed, vowing silently to spend more time with her until things got back to normal.

He turned around, automatically reaching for his own seat belt, then stopped, thinking of Dov Kalmanovitch—the first victim of the Intifada—who had been forced to open his seat belt with a broken arm as a Molotov cocktail turned him into a flaming torch. By the time he’d freed himself, three-quarters of his body had been left with third-degree burns, and his face—it had simply been erased.

Jon remembered meeting the man in Hadassah’s burn unit. He and his pretty, young wife, who had stood by her husband with an iron will throughout his miraculous and incredibly painful recovery, had gone on to live their lives, to have more children. The power of human resilience as well as the depths of human frailty were so unpredictable. You could never tell how a person pushed to extremes would behave.

What would Elise do, he wondered, if—God forbid—something should
happen to me? And what, he thought, his arm quivering with a sudden strange cold as he fit the key into the ignition, would either of us do if something should happen to liana? He felt his eyes sting.

It was unthinkable. Slowly, he released the seat belt.

There were two ways to get home. The first was the shortest and easiest: a twenty-minute ride through the new tunnel that would leave them practically on their doorstep. Or the tortuous, ninety-minute detour that would take them almost into Tel Aviv. The tunnel had been built to avoid conflicts with Palestinian townships as well as the miserable shantytowns still called refugee camps, although most of their inhabitants had never known any other home.

He switched on the news. All the roads were open, things were quiet. He made the left turn toward the tunnel, passing the shopping center in Kiryat Yovel and those new high-rise monsters. He drove uphill past the Egged bus terminal and the Arab grocery stores of Beit Tsafafa until the white expanse of the buildings of Gilo came into view, the red-tiled roofs of the little houses lining the entrance to the
wadi.
There was the Mishav building and the telephone company building with its colorful tiles, and the strange building without windows, which conventional wisdom held was the headquarters of the Israeli Secret Service. The
trampiada
, or hitchhiking station, was coming up. He looked to see if there was anyone waiting, but a bus must have just come by, because it was surprisingly empty. He passed the army roadblock checking cars coming in from the opposite direction from Gush Etzion and Hebron that wished to enter Jerusalem. liana waved at the young soldiers, and they smiled and waved back.

After the last house in Gilo, a new fence had gone up, about a kilometer before the first tunnel. As he followed the road upward, he saw the troops encamped on the shoulders of the road, almost unseen. From that vantage point, they had a good strategic view of the entire area, he thought, exhaling, revealing to himself just how tense he really was.

There was the first tunnel. It was only seven hundred meters long, short enough not to interfere with radio signals, so that the music he was playing continued. He emerged onto a bridge—the place where the first shootings had taken place. Terrorist snipers equipped with long-range rifles had taken up positions in the peaceful homes of Bethlehem’s Christian neighborhood of Beit Jala, firing at passing cars as one would at ducks in a shooting
gallery. Now a new barrier was going up to protect motorists, thick white polyester sheets that reminded him of Venetian blinds. They seemed flimsy compared to the enormous stone barriers ahead on the second part of the bridge. Apparently, the bridge couldn’t handle such weight all the way across.

There was the second tunnel coming up. He entered, and the car radio went dead. It was very long, almost two kilometers. He looked at the familiar graffiti on the wall,
LOVE YOU KEREN
, someone had written, and again he wondered, as he did each time he passed it, did that mean “I love you, signed Keren”? or “I love you, Keren, girl of my dreams”? Was our Keren the graffiti expert, or the object of the foolhardy and industrious artist’s affections?