Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  On the cot, both Azziz and Aown dozed, the head of the younger brother on the shoulder of the older. From the front room came the voice of Yussuf reciting passages from the Qur’an. Efrayim, lulled by the drone of voices, tried to follow the conversation but eventually gave up and day dreamed, with his eyes wide open, of how his mother and father would react to the news of his death He could picture his father, his face drawn but unmistakably proud, holding a press conference on the small lawn of their modest Long Island family home. The elder Mr. Blumenfeld would spell his name to be sure it appeared correctly in the newspapers and then, with Efrayim’s mother standing tearfully at his side, read from a prepared statement. Looking up from a scrap of paper, blinking into the television cameras, he would respond to questions with questions. So what makes you think that my son was a fanatic? he would ask. So what father, he would ask, his voice finally breaking, would not be proud of a son who sacrificed his life for a biblical dream?

  Getting a second wind, the Doctor again and again steered the conversation back to Beit Avram and the Jewish terrorism that began with Rabbi Apfulbaum’s arrival in Israel. The Rabbi shook his head wearily. Yes, he admitted, he had known several of the Jews accused of trying to blow up the Dome of the Rock; yes, he had been to meetings in which they had analyzed where Zionism had gone wrong; yes, he himself had become convinced that the Zionists had to forget about world opinion, which would condemn the Jews no matter what they did, and concentrate on finding a solution to Israel’s Arab problem; yes, pushing masses of Arabs over the frontier into Syria and Jordan had been one of the options he himself had suggested; no, he had never been tempted by Communism, although he agreed with Lenin when he said that if you wanted to make an omelet you had to crack eggs, or words to that effect.

  The Doctor pulled a large watch from a pocket and snapped it open, causing it to chime the hour and the fifteen minutes. “Three thirty,” he announced. He could feel the stiffness in his back and neck. “We have a great deal in common,” he told the Rabbi. “I also have attended endless discussion groups—as a medical student in Beirut, later in various villages and towns in the occupied West Bank—in which we analyzed where Zionism had gone wrong. I personally made a painstaking study of Zionism in order to better comprehend the movement’s mania to occupy my ancestral land. In the beginning the Zionist raison d’etre was to rescue Jews from the anti-Semitic environment of Eastern Europe and Czarist Russia. But with each victory over the backward Arabs, the Zionists moved away from this rescue mission and toward redeeming the land they thought God had bequeathed to Ibrahim. It does not require a Freud to grasp the psychological reasons for this change of focus. For two thousand years you Jews didn’t have an army. Suddenly, with the creation by the Western powers of the colonial outpost in the Middle East called the State of Isra’il, you not only had an army, but one that swept its illiterate and poorly armed Arab enemies from the battle field the way a broom sweeps sand from a Bedouin carpet. This Maccabean revival, as I call it, intoxicated you; it was almost as if you had taken a collective dose of LSD. You glorified military service, you deified the soldier-warrior defending the Holy Land. You failed to notice that Zionism succeeded because it had become the surrogate for Western colonialism, and a mouthpiece for the West’s visceral anti-Arabism. In short, if the Jews, armed with Western planes and Western tanks and subsidized by great doses of Western financial aid, succeeded in occupying land belonging for centuries to Palestinians, it was because the world was on your side—”

  Apfulbaum could contain himself no longer. “I suppose the world was on our side when the British closed off immigration to Palestine in the nineteen thirties, dooming millions of Jews to the flames of Hitler’s furnaces. Swell! I suppose the world was on our side when Roosevelt and Churchill refused to bomb the rail lines along which Jews were being transported to Hitler’s death factories. Naturally the world was on our side in nineteen forty-eight when it created a Jewish state and then failed to defend it from the British-armed and British-trained and British-led Arab Legion and four other Arab armies that vowed to throw the Jews into the sea. Ha! We can cope with our enemies, but God save us from our friends!”

  The Rabbi ran out of steam. “My legs ache,” he announced. “My heart, too. The problem with you, you see history through the prism of an ancestral hate for Jews. Your Prophet and Messenger, Muhammad, disputed with the Jews in the oasis of Medina, after which some of the Jews were exiled, others were killed. You surely remember what happened then—Muhammad ordered Muslims, who until that time had been facing Jerusalem to pray, to turn instead toward Mecca. From that day to this you are still turning away from the Jewishness of Jerusalem, and the Jews. I am practically blind but I can see you shaking your head. Why deny it? I have read what your fabulous Koran has to say about the Jews.”

  The Doctor shut his eyes and began to recite a verse from the Holy Qur’an.

  Whoso judges not,

  according to what God has sent down—

  they are the unbelievers.

  And therein We prescribed for them:

  “A life for a life, an eye for an eye,

  a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear,

  a tooth for a tooth, and for wounds

  retaliation.”

  He opened his eyes and attempted to bring the blurred face of his prisoner into focus. “‘For wounds, retaliation,’” he repeated. “In my case the punishment preceded the crime, ya’ani, which meant that the crime, when I finally got around to plotting it, had to fit the punishment.”

  “What wounds? What punishment?”

  “I will tell you what wounds, what punishment. I was studying at the American University of Beirut in the Lebanon at the time, and returning to my parents’ home in Hebron for Ramadan by way of the Allenby Bridge over the River Jordan. I was so ashamed of being a Palestinian in those days that I wore a Western suit and tie and replied in English if someone put a question to me. The Jews, who knew an Arab when they saw one, dragged me from the bus and locked me in a latrine until nightfall. Not realizing I could barely see, they blindfolded me and drove me around for hours to disorient me before taking me to a prison. Only later did I discover it was the Isra’ili Army base of Hanan outside of Jericho, minutes away from the Allenby Bridge. I was questioned for forty days and forty nights, during which time I was not permitted to sleep for days at a stretch. The hair on my head and my beard were shaved off—a grievous humiliation for an Arab. The Isra’ilis never called me by name, only by number; I was seven seven two three. My Isra’ili interrogator told me that I had been denounced as a terrorist belonging to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. When I wasn’t being questioned, I sat in a small room with a leather hood not unlike the one you wear fitted over my head. It reeked of sweat and vomit; it stank of fear. Once, when I dozed, the guard touched the electrodes used to heat water to my handcuffs. I woke up screaming as the heated handcuffs burned into my swelling wrists. I still bear the scars; I wear these dark bracelets around my wrists to remind me of my humiliation at the hands of the Jews. My interrogator was something of a pedagogue. He would tell me precisely what he was going to do, and then he would do it. ‘You will become completely dependent on me for permission to urinate, for food, for sleep, for news of your family,’ he would say. ‘At first you will resist. Then, slowly, you will come to accept this dependency. Eventually you will be grateful for every crust of bread I throw you.’ He was mistaken; I devoured the crusts but I was never grateful. I tell you, ya’ani, that I was innocent of the charge against me—the worst thing I had done was to drink Turkish coffee and talk politics at the café called Faisal’s across the road from the main gate of the university. But when, after forty days, the Jews freed me, I became guilty; I joined the group they accused me of belonging to. I tracked down the collaborator who had denounced me and attempted to strangle him. The Isra’ilis rushed him to a hospital and saved his life. I was arrested for attempted murder and sentenced to twelve years in prison
. It was in prison that I decided to use a more surgical technique if I ever needed to kill someone again.”

  “Marx says somewhere that man does not have a nature but a history,” Apfulbaum said. “Our stories illustrate this point. I myself was raised Brooklyn, but once or twice a year we used to visit an aunt who lived in Jonestown, Pennsylvania. She was a fine pianist and the only Jew in town, and played the organ at church services.” The Rabbi’s feet, lashed to the legs of the heavy chair, were beginning to swell and he twisted this way and that to alleviate the pain. “One December I was sleigh riding down the hill in front of her house, past the barn filled with riding horses, past the Bayshores’ farm, when I got into a fight with a local farm boy over who would go first. He called me a dirty Jew—so I became a dirty Jew.”

  The Doctor retrieved the hood from the floor and slipped it over the Rabbi’s head; he could hear Apfulbaum gagging on the airless stench of the leather. “The most interesting thing about someone’s history,” the Doctor remarked to the hood, “is that it reveals what he has chosen to remember.”

  From under the hood the Rabbi’s muffled response could be heard: “Amen.”

  In the front room of the safe house, the Doctor found Yussuf sitting on the floor, fast asleep with his back against the reinforced door and an AK-47 across his thighs. Petra lay curled on a blanket near the radio. A bulb burned in the overhead socket. Petra had pulled a folded dish towel over her eyes to keep out the light. Bending over her, the Doctor could make out the rope burn on the back of a wrist; another bracelet of humiliation, he thought. The green Isra’ili Army radio had been left on. Through the small speaker came the static-filled voices of the Hebrew Army reporting in from the various corners of occupied Palestine. It was four in the morning and all was well, or so it appeared to the Isra’ilis, with their distorted memories and their warped histories. “A tooth for a tooth, and for wounds retaliation,” he whispered to the voices on the radio. It was a lesson the mujaddid would have to teach the Palestinians, too, if he was going to succeed in creating an Islamic state on all of the land of Palestine. Rousing the Palestinians to jihad, to holy war, getting them to apply the formula for wounds retaliation, would be easier once Apfulbaum cracked; once he gave them details about the Jewish underground, its ruthless leader who went by the code name Ya’ir and the atrocities they had committed against the Holy Qur’an and the Palestinian people. When the Rabbi started talking, the Doctor would need an independent witness; someone who could be trusted to pass the story on to the world.

  The Doctor listened to the babble of Jewish voices on the radio as he scrubbed his hands over the laundry sink. Then, switching off the overhead light, removing his spectacles and massaging his bloodshot eyes with his thumb and third finger, he stretched out fully clothed on the cot Petra had left for him to use in the hope that he would sleep until first light.

  FIFTEEN

  THE SHIN BET MANDARINS WERE SEETHING. THE PRESS ATTACHÉ at the Israeli embassy in Washington had faxed them Sweeney’s latest article, in which he described how the Israeli equivalent of the FBI had tried to recruit him as an agent. No detail was left to the reader’s imagination. Only first names had been used when the Shin Bet representatives introduced themselves at an early morning meeting. He himself had reported on the budget crunch in Israel, Sweeney wrote, tongue in cheek, but he hadn’t realized how tight things were in the Israeli intelligence community until he discovered that no coffee or doughnuts would be served. The individual who was clearly in charge had attempted to put the meeting off the record after it was over; another agent who went by the name of Itamar, furious at Sweeney for refusing to cooperate, had closed the meeting with a calumnious slur that was unprintable even if it had been said on the record.

  The agent whom Sweeney had dubbed J. Edgar, an Irish Jew by the name of Moses Briscoe, put in a call to the chief government censor, by coincidence an armored division deputy commander who had served under Briscoe in Lebanon. “Revoke his press accreditation,” the Shin Bet department head snarled into the phone. “Send the son of a bitch back where he came from.”

  “Tried to when he wrote the article about the reservists and the broken arms,” the censor replied. “I was overruled.”

  “Try again,” Briscoe said. “Take it up to the Prime Minister’s office if you have to.”

  The censor chuckled. “That’s who overruled me the last time, Moses.”

  “Who’s protecting him? And why?”

  “You’re the guys who bug telephones and hide microphones in padded brassieres. You tell me.”

  “I may just do that,” Briscoe said.

  SIXTEEN

  SHUFFLING ALONG IN BACKLESS SLIPPERS, MAALI WAS LED INTO the unheated room padded with foam rubber so that prisoners couldn’t beat their heads against the wall and later claim they had been tortured. Dressed in a sack-like sleeveless shift that irritated her skin, she hugged herself as she settled onto the wooden stool with the front legs cut shorter than the back legs. She could hear the soothing sound of Yussuf’s voice whispering in her ear.

  I will love you even when you have grown old, he had vowed the night he proposed marriage.

  Will you take another wife? she had asked him.

  Would you object?

  Not if I selected her.

  I will never take another wife.

  Ahhhhh.

  The dazzling spotlights hanging from the ceiling burned into Maali’s eyes, causing them to tear. The voice of the interrogator came from the penumbra, drowning out Yussuf’s music in her ear. “Are you well?” he asked in fluent Arabic. “Do you have any complaints to make about the way you are being treated?”

  Maali shook her head tiredly; the first six or seven or eight times she had been questioned—she had long since lost count—she had complained bitterly about the cold cell, the lack of privacy when she performed bodily functions, the stench of the clothes she was obliged to wear, the mold on the rice she was obliged to eat, the lack of medical treatment for the rash on her stomach. Once she had been given a sheaf of paper and a felt-tipped pen—ball points were considered weapons in prison—and invited to write a letter to Amnesty International. Kneeling on the floor boards, she had bent over the paper and had written out her complaints on what looked like an Amnesty International form. The interrogator had read her letter aloud, snickering at the errors in spelling and grammar as he went along, and then torn it to shreds on the grounds that it was illiterate.

  “No complaints. Good. Let’s begin where we left off.” Maali could hear the sound of pages being turned. “You claim to have bought the ring sometime last month from a Bedouin selling jewelry in the souk. You maintain that you cannot recall the name of the Bedouin or the location of his shop. Has time refreshed your memory?”

  Maali shook her head.

  “Since our last session, we have learned more about the ring.”

  Shielding her eyes with a forearm, Maali tried to catch a glimpse of her interrogator. “It is a ring like any other,” she protested weakly.

  “It is a ring unlike any other we have seen. At first we thought the words Erasmus and Hall were a man’s name. But we discovered that Erasmus Hall is the name of a high school in Brooklyn, which is a borough in the city of New York. The 1998 refers to the year of graduation. The ring in question is a high school graduation ring.”

  Trembling on her stool from fear and cold, Maali hugged herself tightly.

  “You will be interested to hear that we have even managed to identify the owner of the ring. It belonged to an American named Ronni Goldman. He was a Talmudic student at the yeshiva run by Rabbi Apfulbaum in the Jewish settlement of Beit Avram on the hills overlooking Hebron.”

  “Have I transgressed Isra’ili law to buy a ring from a Bedouin?” Maali fumbled. “Has the Bedouin transgressed Isra’ili law to buy the ring from a Jew?”

  The interrogator’s voice droned on. “The Bedouin did not buy the ring from a Jew. You did not buy the ring from a Bedouin. Ronni Goldm
an was one of the boys killed when an Islamic fundamentalist group calling itself the Abu Bakr Brigade kidnapped Rabbi Apfulbaum while he was driving back to Beit Avram from Yad Mordechai. One of the terrorists cut off Goldman’s little finger to get the ring, and then offered it to you. Surely it was your husband, Yussuf, who gave you the ring the night of the kidnapping. Surely it was your husband, Yussuf, whom you were waving to near the Damascus Gate the next morning.”

  “I have told you a thousand times,” Maali declared. “I have not set eyes on my husband since the night of our wedding.”

  “Then who gave you the ring?”

  “No one gave me the ring. I purchased it from a Bedouin.”

  The interrogator shuffled more papers. “If, in fact, no one gave you the ring, it raises the possibility that you yourself cut the finger from the dead boy’s hand, and took the ring from the finger. I must warn you that we have enough evidence to charge you with the murder of Ronni Goldman. You are in a great deal of trouble, Maali. No judge will believe you bought the Erasmus Hall ring from a Bedouin. You could spend the rest of your life in a Negev detention camp. I will tell you that some of my superiors are convinced you took part in the ambush; we have many examples of Palestinian women playing active roles in attacks on Jews. I myself do not believe you are guilty of murder; I believe you are protecting someone. I even have a grudging admiration for your loyalty and steadfastness. But loyalty must have a limit. What kind of a man is it who cuts the finger from the hand of a dead boy to steal a ring?”