There he stood in his uniform and his famous kaffiyeh, the tail of that scarf set carefully in the shape of greater Israel, Palestine resting on his lapel. She rarely felt silenced, but him—she’d never met Arafat before.
The General, in good spirits, made introductions. He’d said, “My favorite enemy has stopped by for a chat.”
Then Arafat had addressed her, in that high voice she’d only ever heard on the radio and TV. It sounded just the same, coming—nice to meet you—from the man’s full lips.
The men did not move out to the General’s office or the dining room, or to sit in the center patio, where so many visitors were entertained. They sat down at the kitchen table, and the General said, “Ruthi, enough time has been wasted by both sides. We’re here to make progress. And where more efficient than the kitchen to set out food?”
She’d offered to excuse herself, before the rest of the cooking was done.
The General, seeming sincerely hospitable, insisted she stay.
And so she’d remained, cooking and serving, hurrying back and forth, shuttling the finished plates from the counter, pouring drinks and refreshing. A fly on the wall.
It was not business, not politics, not the future of the peoples that they were yet discussing. While she ladled shakshuka, the two reminisced over all the times they’d tried to kill each other and failed, all their accidents and close calls, all the times they did not die.
“When my plane crashed in the desert,” Arafat said, “and I walked away.”
“When I was a young man, shot in the gut at Latrun.”
“When you had me in your sniper sights in Beirut.”
“You know about that?” the General had said, beaming.
“I have seen the photo. And if I did, you must have wanted me to see it too.”
“We should have pulled the trigger.”
“It would have saved you the price of this dinner,” Arafat said, as he took a pickle from the dish. “Why didn’t you? I’ve always wanted to know. Russian pressure? American?”
“Only because it wouldn’t have been right,” the General said. “The Devil so enjoys having us both around.”
She was good at reading her boss. She continued to dawdle in the kitchen, puttering around, helping contribute to that informal tone. She listened as they moved on to the point that seemed to have spurred this late-night meet.
The Palestinians are willing to sacrifice many things, Arafat had said, but they must at least be able to save face. On the right of return, they need a symbol. Not just a state outside those borders, but a return to someplace within.
What easier population for the Israelis to absorb, and what better place to rebuild than the tiny village of Lifta, a gem over which their broken hearts never mend?
And what else should Ruthi remember as she stands among those vacant stone houses, climbing the gorge on both sides?
Toward the end of that meeting, toward the end of that meal, Ruthi approached with feta and watermelon on a serving platter. Sweet and salty, a favorite of the General’s until the start of his endless end.
He’d openly balked at Arafat’s request. The General would swap more territory, closer in. He would talk about taking more refugees, a bolder number, in a place farther away.
And, just then, Arafat turned to her. He’d touched a hand to her arm, as if she’d been part of the conversation the whole time. “Is it not beautiful, our Lifta? You must have seen?”
“I have,” she’d said, and she’d answered not in Hebrew or English, but Arabic, and Arafat had smiled. “It is beautiful,” she’d said, and set the platter down before him.
It was this that they then argued. Repeating how willing they both were to compromise, they both, on this, stood fast.
“A right of return,” Arafat had said. “A few houses, already built, standing empty at the bottom of Jerusalem, low down. You will have the advantage of height and position should it ever again come to war.”
“It is not the bottom of the city, but the top of Israel, and you know that. Jerusalem is the Jewish head, and Lifta sits at its throat.” The General put his finger to his neck and did not need, for effect, to pull it across.
“Give us that,” Arafat said. “We should not have to ask for what’s ours.”
“If it were yours already,” the General had said, “you would not have to come asking at my door.”
2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)
The care one must take in a relationship not to say the things that won’t go away. She had insulted her love grievously the last time she’d seen him face-to-face.
They were having dinner in Amsterdam when he’d told her he was flying straight from there to Gaza. He was being sent as an emissary to bury the hatchet and reunite the Palestinian people. He would broker a different kind of deal from the one to which they’d dedicated their lives. The mapmaker was going to wrangle a lasting peace between Palestinians and Palestinians, between Fatah and Hamas.
When he’d said it, she’d used the T word, which was something, between them, that they did not do. She’d been worried for his safety on any number of fronts. And she’d maybe called Hamas—all of them, political and military bunched up together, she’d maybe called them “terrorists” outright.
What if things went bad? is all she’d been trying to say. What if he was arrested by his hosts and locked in one of their prisons? What if Israel did not let him leave. “They do not want Hamas as a third negotiating partner,” she’d told him. “It’s fire that you’re playing with, they won’t take it well.”
She could still feel the anger of it, the coiled force of him.
Then he’d said, in response, composed again, “‘They,’ as you know, are ‘you.’”
She did know that, very well. She was a former spy, at present on the National Security team, championing the treaty they never signed. And that’s why she was giving him her vulgar advice.
She’d been right, of course. They both had been, each in their way. As, when he’d finished the first round of his business and tried to leave, the Israelis had laughed at his diplomatic status and taken his papers away. They’d kept him in Gaza until this very day. But her man! Her mapmaker, he got things done. They’d kept him in and he’d kept working and Israel got just the opposite of what they’d intended—as happens with everything in the region. Hafuh al hafuh, was the rule.
It had taken a year, a year of them apart, a year of him pushing day and night. He’d finally executed his Palestinian unity government. And what good would that progress do in Gaza, when Israel—when the “they” that was “she”—would come in and smash apart whatever was built?
On the way back from dinner, she’d walked alongside him, letting him stew. She was trying to wait out one of his measured responses as it traveled the epic distance from deep inside his reserved, reticent self.
The mapmaker finally stopped and turned to face her. She knew he didn’t notice such things, but they were in the middle of a little bridge. He was going to say something grim, she was sure, and he did not at all notice that the spot was more suited for one of them to propose.
“I’m going either way,” he’d said. “With your support or without.”
It is the bridge that she pictures, missing him, solitary in her cottage. And it is what he’d said then that she holds on to, though she’d initially been unsure of what he’d meant.
“Our issues,” the mapmaker had told her, looking as tearful as she’d ever seen. “They’re insurmountable, far beyond hope.”
“Yours and mine?” she’d asked, already grieving. “Or yours and ours?”
“I don’t know if it’s worth trying any longer,” he’d said, and she followed his gaze across the mirrored black surface of the canal.
Teetering on the frantic, she’d said, “Trying with me, or trying with us? Peoples or persons, which do you mean? On what do you quit?”
“On ‘you,’ the Israelis,” he’d said, taking her hands. He’d not even entert
ained the option she’d feared. “With Bibi back, we’ll never move ahead, and he will never lose power. It is time for us to join forces—Fatah and Hamas. To forget about Israel and achieve unity for ourselves. Maybe it’s best if we fix our own house first.”
Even just thinking it now, she is ashamed at how deeply she’d been relieved. It was so selfish a thing to hang on to. How happy she’d been to hear her mapmaker still loved her, and it was only a future for the two peoples, together, that he’d thought was lost.
2014, Black Site (Negev Desert)
He paces too much and bites his nails too low. He’s stopped eating his food, and he’s taken to banging his head against the wall—not hard, not hard, is what he tells the guard. It looks worse on the camera, but when it gets this hot, when the seasons bring us here, the tapping on the cinder blocks, it is cooling.
The guard, Prisoner Z thinks, the guard must be concerned. For the guard gets the pills, stronger and better, and on the regular. Prisoner Z imagines it’s because, though the pacing has lessened, it’s more that he’s been having some problems standing up.
It’s not the guard’s business, Prisoner Z feels, and he has been denying. But the guard keeps coming and saying, “Stand up, then, if you can do it.” And when Prisoner Z tries, the room sets to spinning. There is a new thing, a vertigo, that he’s never had before.
He is fine on the mattress. And fine on the floor. But the guard won’t leave off him. Prisoner Z tells him it’s an inner ear infection or a burst eardrum, that, maybe once, he’d hit too hard against that wall.
The guard, who is not a doctor by any means, tells him, “I think it’s because you’re losing your mind.”
Prisoner Z hates when the guard is right, but after a tranquilizer or two, the room slows for Prisoner Z and then stops. Sometimes, Prisoner Z crawls to the toilet anyway and props himself up with a shaky hand, so the cameras don’t betray him and give that torturer the satisfaction.
More and more frequently it is so bad that there is, anyway, no satisfaction to be had, and that’s when the guard would rush in.
“Breathe,” he would say, “you’re having a panic attack.”
“I’m fine,” Prisoner Z would tell him, while looking very not fine.
On those occasions the guard might hold Prisoner Z, he might rock him if the motion didn’t make things worse, or rub Prisoner Z’s back in big circles.
“Try and cry,” the guard would whisper. “This is instead of that. It’s not real. Try and be sad and you’ll feel better.”
“Fuck,” Prisoner Z might also say, between breaths. And trying harder, “Go, and fuck, yourself.”
“Okay, I will,” the guard would promise, with the same serene intonation. “Right after you calm down, I’ll go fuck myself good. That’s right. That’s excellent. Be angry. That’ll help. Angry is as good as sad.”
When Prisoner Z would start to calm, when he’d get his usual color, or lack of color, back—a clamminess, still, to everything about him—after order was marginally restored, neither would admit what had passed between them.
This very last time, holding Prisoner Z’s dizzy head in his lap, the guard had gone as far as either dared at addressing it. He had posed a question to Prisoner Z, to himself, to the cameras, as if confronting a power higher than them both.
How, oh how, has it come to this?
He had asked it, appearing, to Prisoner Z, reflective—not his usual dummy’s face.
And lying there in his cell, long after the guard has gone, Prisoner Z has dedicated many hours to formulating an answer.
It would be easy to say that it was because of the waitress or Sander, the Huguenot waiter or Farid. But he does not blame the spying or counter-spying, not the betraying of country, nor his taking part in an operation that killed so many kids. It wasn’t his training to which he traced it, nor to his recruitment at Hebrew University by a friend who had handed him a number and said, “Reach out, if you want to contribute in a special way.”
How it had come to this, Prisoner Z felt, had been set so very early. His Jerusalem, his Israel, his end. He’d been given it so long ago, back in suburbia, back in America, a birthright spoon-fed to him in his Jewish day school classroom, a little boy, with a heavy prayer book and a yarmulke, like a soup bowl turned over and resting atop his head.
It is second grade, and they are running—the children—with their arms outspread. They are flying. The desks are pushed together, the teacher’s orders, their lovely eighteen-year-old teacher, who would soon get pregnant and disappear.
They know enough, the boys and girls, to love this black-haired lady, whose even more black, more beautiful hair peeks out from under her wig as she pushes the big desk, the teacher’s desk, toward theirs. She dresses modestly, but there is no modest when you are a beautiful raven-haired eighteen-year-old second-grade teacher, flushed from trying to get pregnant in all your free time.
Their love for her was different from what they felt for the others. It was marrying-love, and wanting-to-be-her-love, and it was youthful energetic teacher love, and they would do anything for her—anything at all. So when, after morning prayer, after marching into the room with their big green siddurim and taking their seats, when she’d stood, and jutted out her bottom jaw and blown the hair from her eyes, when she’d said, “Up, up,” and raised her hands, raising the class so easily with them, Prisoner Z is no longer sure if she’d actually spoken the “Up, up” at all.
“We are going somewhere and we are late,” is what she says.
“Where are we going?” asks Batya, whose English name is Beth.
A smile from the teacher, a glimmer to the eye. “We are going, my little Yidelach, to Yerushalyim. We are flying, right now, to Israel. The Moshiach is coming and we need to get there. We need to help welcome him in.” And the hands again are waving, and we are all already following. “Now push! Push the desks together so we can get up into the sky.”
And when those desks are all together, a circle around the room, the teacher takes one of our tiny chairs, raising her skirt so we can see her ankle swathed in her scratchy gray tights. She places a foot on the seat of that chair and then climbs onto those child-sized desks. A teacher! A teacher standing on a desk! It is glorious.
She bends a bit at the knees and leans her head forward. The teacher then spreads her arms wide. She says, “I am on an airplane. I am an airplane. We are all flying to Israel together, to make aliyah. We are headed to Jerusalem. We must hurry, hurry, a long flight and the Messiah is already on his way.”
And she takes off like that, flying from desk to desk around the room. Tilting her beautiful, covered arms on the turns.
“Come,” she says. “Come. You do not want to be left in galus, forgotten in this Egypt, when the Messiah comes. Our country awaits.” And it is roly-poly Bentzi who is first up, and then Meir Aryeh follows, flashing his monkey grin, there are Devorah and Yocheved, Susan and Zev. And then I am on the chair—Prisoner Z feels himself rising. But with all those arms tilting, and everyone running and howling and flying, I’m too afraid to join. And suddenly I am grabbed and suddenly I am lifted, the teacher has got me, she is holding me, and she sets me down in motion—and that is love, and that is care.
She holds on until my feet are moving and my arms spreading, until I too, I feel it, until I am looking down at the classroom below, down at New York, at America, until it all looks like desert and all looks like wasteland, nothing but the emptiness that is the whole world outside what God gave us.
2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)
She and the mapmaker were like teenagers in their attachment. They had so many games they played on their furtive weekends away. One was a game she’d lifted from her parents, her Italian-Israeli father and her Moroccan-Israeli mother, a way to understand the different worldviews from which they came.
They would, she and her mapmaker, name the singular people who’d, in their belief, changed history. Not the Stalins and the Hitlers, but the regular
actors who’d altered the course of the planet.
When they’d first played, she’d said, “Yigal Amir,” for having murdered Rabin and, in her opinion, single-handedly torpedoing the peace for which they fought.
He’d said, “Baruch Goldstein,” for his massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, which, in the mapmaker’s opinion, had set off the wave of violence that landed them in this woebegone state.
She’d liked the game better when her parents had played it. She was upset, already, at the start.
“I’d argue that point,” she’d said.
“You argue every point.”
She’d sat up to better face him, prone, as they perpetually were, in a hotel’s king-size bed. He’d stared at her over his glasses as he closed, around his finger, the book she wouldn’t let him read.
“We can’t both pick Israelis, is what I mean,” she’d said. “It’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? It’s your game.”
“Pick someone else. I have a long list of Palestinians you can borrow.”
“No, no,” he’d said. “I’ll come up with a new one myself.” And he’d thought and he’d thought and he’d said, “Katherine Harris.”
Shira had absolutely no idea who that was.
“The American woman,” her mapmaker had said. “From the election in 2000. She was the one in Florida, where they were counting the holes in the papers. Or the half-holes not punched out. She is the one who decided to award that state to George Bush, even though she was tied to his campaign. Partisan. Political. Corrupted. From her, all the dominoes fall. Through Iraq. Through Syria. Toppling over Palestine, knocking it down. Who knows where the chain ends, maybe with the end of all that we know?”
Shira had to process that for a good long while.
“Wow,” she’d said. “That is a crazy pick and exactly how you play. You are the winner of round one. I admit defeat.”
He was proud, and they’d kissed, a peck on the lips—it was that kind of night—and each had rolled the other way. The mapmaker, dropping his book to the floor, clicked off the lights.
Dinner at the Centre of the Earth Page 18
