by Robert Stone
Nuala took a cautious look at Linda and nodded. The Rose was crying, big tears coursing down her milk-fed, tanned cheeks. There was blood on her shirt.
"Was he alive?"
Nuala only gave her a grim look.
As they drove, Linda slumped over into the space between the seats and cried and retched.
"Do it out the window, love," Nuala said. "Better not stop, you know."
Finally Linda said, "We could have saved him. If we'd had a gun."
For a moment, Lucas was afraid Nuala would say something unkind about Americans.
"Who was he?" he asked her.
"Christ," Nuala said, nursing her injured forehead. "They half broke my bloody leg as well, the fucking wogs. Lenny? I don't know who he was. Who was he, darling?" she asked Linda. "You have friends over here? Work for Shabak? For the CIA?"
Linda just kept sobbing.
"You're bleeding," Sonia told Nuala.
"Well," Nuala said, "I'm a bleeder. Thin skin."
"Like a white fighter," Sonia said.
The rough humor of the revolution, Lucas supposed. Meanwhile, he could still half hear it.
"Itbah al-Yahud!"
After a few miles they saw an army checkpoint ahead, heavily reinforced. Half-tracks and regular deuce-and-a-half trucks were pulling up and soldiers were fanning out from the road.
"We've got to tell them about Lenny," Linda said.
"Stop!" said Nuala. "Pull over."
Lucas did as he was told. Nuala and the Rose, who seemed to have recovered, stepped out of the car.
"Sonia," Nuala said. "Tell her."
"Make her understand," the Rose said.
Sonia turned in her seat and spoke to Linda.
"Linda, Lenny has been killed by now. People who work in the Strip can't afford to be seen as informers for the IDF. They can't provide intelligence for the soldiers. Even to be thought of that way."
"You can't!" Linda screamed. "You can't just let those animals kill a Jew!"
"This is tough," Sonia said, looking up at Lucas.
"I see," he said.
"We tried to save Lenny," Sonia said. "We failed. He's dead now. If the soldiers were guys we maybe knew or trusted we might ... I don't know. But these guys"—she nodded toward the checkpoint, where the Border Police and Golani Regiment paras were assembling—"these guys the Golanis are very tough soldiers. Special soldiers. If we told them what happened, they might blame us. They might even, accidentally on purpose, what with the riot, kill one of us." She glanced up at Lucas, in case he failed to understand who that would probably be. "It happens."
"But that's not the point," Lucas said.
"It's not the point," Nuala said, kneeling outside the car. "If we tell them, they will go to that village and they will kill ten for the death of one Jew. They will torture kids to get names out of them, and the names won't always be the right ones. They will kill, and some of the people they kill will be innocent. That's what they do. They think it's justice."
"But we don't think it's justice," Sonia said quietly. "Because we believe in..." She looked at the dun sand and shook her head.
"Human rights?" Lucas suggested helpfully.
"That's it," said Sonia. "Human rights."
"Righto," said Nuala. "That's why we're here, see. So we're going through that checkpoint, God willing, and we're not saying a bloody word."
"You are shits," Linda told them. "I'm reporting you."
"No," the Rose said earnestly. "You don't understand."
"Linda," Nuala said. She beckoned Linda toward a point in the distance that would cause her to put her head outside the car window. "Have a look at that."
When Linda stuck her head out to look, at what she presumably hoped was aid, solace, resolution, Nuala hit her with a solid, considered uppercut. Linda's eyes teared, then glazed over.
"Settle back," Nuala said to her gently. "Settle back, darlin'."
She climbed in beside Linda, and Lucas started the car.
"Make it quick," Nuala said. "She's not unconscious."
"Could of fooled me," Lucas said.
At the checkpoint, a paratrooper captain elbowed the young reserves who were inspecting their identification out of the way.
"What were you doing back there? Where are you coming from?"
"We had a hardship case at Argentina camp," Sonia said. "Bureij is going up. We have two injured people here and our radio's out."
"So where do you think you're going?"
"Back to base," Sonia said, "if we can make it to Gaza."
The officer shook his head in disgust. There was another Golani officer present. Lucas watched him observe that Sonia was American and black, and this moved him to sympathy.
"If they won't let you through Gaza," the other officer said, "you might want to take the coast road to the line. Especially if your people are hurt." He looked into the back seat. "Is it bad?"
The captain barked an order at him and he moved off. Ignored, they drove away. They were almost a mile along when Linda, her jaw swollen, began to scream. She screamed and screamed.
"Hold her," the Rose said.
"Jesus!" cried Nuala, because Linda had succeeded in working her way from Nuala's rough embrace and jumped out of the car. They had been doing about 20 miles per hour on a bad stretch. By the time they were out of the car, Linda had scrambled to her feet.
"Linda, please, baby," Sonia said.
But she flashed them the fierce eyes of a child and brushed her bruised knees and ran, making for the Israeli post as though the devil himself were after her—which, Lucas thought, was just about the way she saw it—while the four infidels milled about ineffectually.
"She's not safe on the road," Sonia said.
"Well, hell," said Nuala, "we can't hold her prisoner. But we're in deep shit now."
"Know any Sufi prayers?" Lucas asked Sonia.
"This is one," she said. But that was all she said, so he concluded that their situation represented some variety of Sufi prayer. Obviously, it was a demanding religion.
They were driving among fires. Young men veiled in green-checked kaffiyehs appeared beside the road again. Suddenly an IDF jeep loomed behind them, right out among the racing demonstrators. It nearly forced them off the road. In it, next to the driver, was the kindly Golani officer who showed concern for their injured. The officer leaped out.
"You sons of bitches," he shouted. "You Nazi swine! You oversaw the killing of a Jew!"
"Now...," said Lucas.
"You shut the fuck up!" said the officer, trembling with rage. "You threw that girl out of the car. You left..."
Then someone called to him and he could not go on. Some of the crowd of Palestinians had noticed the army vehicle. Soon, Lucas thought, they would notice that it was isolated and unprotected. The officer and his driver, in spite of their anger, became aware of this.
Just before he ran to attend to whatever business demanded his attention, the officer gave them a last look of such hatred and fury that Lucas's heart shriveled in his breast. Someone would die for this, it was plain. Possibly him.
"We'll have your names," the officer shouted as the jeep bore him away. "We don't forget." The rest of what he said was lost. Had he used the word momzer? Maybe. Maybe Lucas had imagined it. More army vehicles sped by, the soldiers in them looking with glum hostility at their UN car.
They drove disordered roads through more towns where tires were burning and the mosques echoing with jihad.
"God, he looked fierce," the Rose said. She meant the officer who had stopped them.
"Yes, he did," Lucas said. "I mean..." He had been about to say "put yourself in his place." Then he figured, fuck it. He was tired of imagining his way into everyone's situation.
"I hate them all sometimes," the Rose declared. "Both sides."
"I know what you mean," Lucas said.
41
AT JUST ABOUT the time oily black night commenced its descent on them, they ran clean out of road. S
onia had raised Gaza City headquarters on the radio, and the Dutch officer there suggested they make for the UN distribution center in Eshaikh Ijleen, on the coast. But after they had gone a few kilometers they discovered that the track ahead was blocked with a barrier of burnt automobiles four cars wide and there was no shoulder beside it. The hulks were piled wire to wire.
They got out and edged their way along the wire until they were past the pile of charred metal. Then they began to trudge toward Eshaikh Ijleen. The last of the day's heat, fed by fires, laid twilight mirages in their path. Lucas kept thinking he could see the ocean. They came to a kind of town.
"Used to be an Orthodox church around here," Nuala said. "We had dealings with them. The priest was a Greek who sympathized with us."
Lucas could not tell whether she meant Palestinians or Communists.
"What happened to the church?"
"Hamas burned them out," she said.
The abandoned town had been a Christian camp. The church building and the priest's house beside it had been vandalized, the murals of mournful Byzantine saints defaced with graffiti, the domestic fixtures and fittings stripped. An ancient photograph of a woman carrying a parasol and wearing the fashions of the early twentieth century lay on the red-dusted floor. Nuala picked it up.
As they walked on toward the coast, they saw dozens of fires burning against the mottled sunset. Again Nuala recited the names of towns. Nuseirat. Deir el-Balah.
From inside the Netzarim wire, illumination rounds traced automatic fire. Someone had got hold of a flare gun and was amusing himself firing off parachute flares. Each explosion produced cheers. Children scampered under the canopies of pretty light.
"Looks like a bloody fun fair," Nuala said.
As darkness gathered, they stopped to rest beside the road. By now they could no longer tell what lights signified or distinguish army positions from towns in the grip of riot.
"We're on our own," Nuala said. "We'll have to get through the night. The PKF will probably close all the compounds." She had taken the map from Rose's Laredo and tried reading it with her pen flashlight. "There's another small camp down the road," she said. "Rashid has a couple of cousins there. Somebody might remember me."
Leaning over to have a look at the map, Lucas saw that they were not far away from the coastal camp where he had gone on his first journey to the Strip. It was one of the poorest and most benighted parts of the place.
At the entrance to the small camp was a pile of tires buttressed by gasoline cans, an instantly inflammable barricade. About a hundred feet beyond it, a group of youths were gathered about burning trash cans. In the light of the flames, he could see figures laid side by side under blue sheeting. The figures appeared to be corpses.
All four of them walked toward the tire barricade. Lucas took the map from Nuala. He ought to keep it as a souvenir, he thought, in case they got through the night alive. It marked a place where seven hundred thousand people passed each night in prayer by the light of trash fires, demanding their own revenge and protection from everyone else's. A major energy resource, Gaza, forty kilometers long by six wide, had more than enough fear and rage to sustain human nature for the next millennium. Beaches, too.
As he walked toward the villagers, Lucas noticed that all the men around the fire began to shout at them and point at Lucas.
"What's wrong with them?" he asked the others.
"Damned if I know," Nuala said. "Better wait here."
So Lucas waited on the far side of the tire barricade while Sonia, Nuala and Rose tried to parlay with the citizens of the camp. The citizens were screaming. They drew back the sheeting to reveal the numbers of their dead. Every few minutes, one of them pointed at Lucas. They appeared not to want to hear what Sonia and Nuala had to say to them. Eventually, the three women came back around the barricade. On the way in, a few of the Palestinian men had shifted tires and barrels to help them through. On the way out, no one helped them.
"So?" asked Lucas.
"So," Sonia said, "let's get out of here."
There were distant sirens. And now, again, the voices of muezzins.
"They have something against me?" Lucas asked.
He turned to catch a glimpse of someone from the camp stealing up behind them. In the firelight, he could see the boy had a bad eye—from viciousness or madness or plain strabismus. Apprehended, the youth skipped away, giggling. A cry went up from the men around the fire.
"They don't like you," Nuala said. "Start moving. Don't run."
"Oh, shit," the Rose said.
They kept walking jauntily along, heads held high.
"Should I sing something?" Sonia asked.
"No," said Nuala. "They'll think you're an Israeli. They always sing."
It seemed to Lucas that not even Israelis on a neo-Hegelian walkabout would sing in the present circumstances. Now a helicopter raced overhead, the roar exploding out of darkness, its fiery spotlight spinning theatrically over the ground.
"The people back there," Nuala explained to Lucas, "they think you have the evil eye. And that you're a spy. And a Jew. And that we're protecting you."
"Oh," said Lucas. "Why do they think that?"
"I don't know," Nuala said. "They seem crazy. The mullah seems crazy."
That seemed to be all she could tell him. Glancing from the road, he saw a couple of dozen people running along beside the wire. They seemed a jolly crowd, and he was the object of their attention. They were laughing and screaming, pointing, celebrating him.
"Why me?" Lucas asked, dry-mouthed.
"Oh, there are rumors," Sonia said. "They've had a few people killed, probably by snipers from the settlement across the way. There are actually provocateurs in the camps."
"The mullah says you're not a man," Nuala told him calmly. "He says you're something else."
"What?"
"I don't know. Not a man. A spirit, like a djinn."
"But still Jewish, right?"
"Right," said Sonia. "No cure for that." She sighed. "Maybe it's a camp for majnoon. Anyway, we won't stop there."
"Good," Lucas said.
When the helicopter went by again, Lucas said, "Do you think there's a chance the army would help us out?" He supposed he was beginning to see the point of the Israeli army.
"Us?" Nuala said. " You, you mean. Don't count on it. If you're press, they think you came here to make them look bad. And one of their own just got killed. They may hold you responsible."
Maybe we were responsible, Lucas thought. If we had notified the soldiers, Lenny might have been rescued. But foreign volunteers in the Strip did not run to the soldiers with information.
"Look at it this way, Chris," Sonia said. "They're not here to help you."
"You know how he's looking at it," Nuala said. "He's an American. His money buys their guns. His spies work with theirs. He thinks they owe him."
"That's not what he means," Sonia said.
"No," Lucas said. "I suppose I mean that they're people more like me, in the end. They may not be the Knights of the Round Table, but they won't kill me for being a Jew. Or a djinn."
Across a dark field more fires burned.
"You can't trust them," Sonia said. "The fact is, you can't trust anyone. Some Israelis would help you. Some wouldn't."
"I wasn't proposing pissing off to the army and leaving you three here," Lucas said testily. "I just wondered if it was worth trying to get help from them."
"The fact is," Nuala said, "we're in different situations. For each of us it's different."
They stopped again to watch the distant fires.
"Why do you think Linda got us out here?" Lucas asked. "What was on her mind?"
"We're going to find out," Sonia said. "Really soon."
"Maybe PKF will send out a patrol," Sonia suggested. "That would be nice."
"Amen," said Lucas. Someone, he thought, amid all this religion, ought to say a prayer for all the poor bastards in the world who were awaiting the ministrations
of little white UN vehicles along the fucked, rutted roads of the world, and the unfortunates in control of them.
Down the road, the sound of chanting came from the direction of the village of the majnoon. Its tune did not particularly lift the spirit.
Turning around, Lucas saw what could only be a crowd of Palestinians advancing through the darkness. They were carrying all manner of lights—flashlights, kerosene lamps, open flames on torches. They seemed to be shouting at once. In that desert night, Lucas thought, one might actually imagine them as God's army, or Gideon's, the elect of the Lord, His host. It was undoubtedly the way they saw themselves—on the march in search of God's enemy and theirs. Him.
"They think we're getting away," Lucas said. Everyone walked faster.
They jogged through the darkness, following the faint luminescence of the road. Lucas began to think about necklacing and the uses the hostile imagination might contrive for shears and pruning hooks, all the punishments prescribed for creatures who, like himself, pretended to be human beings but were not. He found Sonia's hand and they jogged together toward the top of a small hill. For a while the smoke cleared. There were a million stars overhead, like evil angels.
At the very crest of the hill they must have been outlined against the sky, because a hearty liberationist cheer broke from the pursuing crowd. It was easier running downhill. The Rose had the penlight and was trying to read her map on the run.
"If we can get a mile and a half down the road," she said breathlessly, "there's a camp called Beit Ajani. It's supposed to be under PLO control."
"Whatever that means," Sonia said.
"Well, we don't know what it means," said Nuala. "But we'd better get down there and run for it."
So they sprinted for the gates of Beit Ajani, with the entire population of what appeared to be a camp for the insane at a quarter-mile's distance behind, waving their torches and gasoline cans in merry pursuit. They were close enough now for Lucas to hear what they were chanting.
"Itbah al-Yahud!"
He thought he heard a chain saw.
Inside Beit Ajani camp there was no one in sight. The place had an open gate that led off the road, so the four of them tried to push it closed behind them. Although it was made of only wood and wire they could not, all heaving together, get it to budge. Something invisible in the darkness held it immovably open.
