Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  “Yeah,” Sweeney said into the phone.

  “Mr. journalist Sweeney?” a melodious voice asked.

  “Speaking.”

  “Do you recognize my voice?”

  “You bet I recognize your voice,” Sweeney said; he could picture the Vestal Virgin, with his round blue-tinted sunglasses and pointed beard and white galabiya, feeding Israeli coins into the slot of a Gaza public phone.

  “The last time we met you raised the possibility of an exclusive interview. Are you still interested?”

  “Interested is an understatement.”

  “The individual in question has read your article—the one describing how some of your Israeli friends who only use first names offered you part-time employment. He was impressed by your independence, not to mention your integrity. To make a short story shorter, he has agreed to meet with you.”

  Sweeney was all business. “How do I find him?”

  “Do not make any calls from your house phone or your mobile after you hang up. Depart from Jerusalem by car in precisely seven minutes, which is the time is will take you to lock your house and walk up to the parking lot. Travel alone. Take the Beit Shemesh-Kiryat Gat road down to the Ghazeh. Leave your car in the parking lot and walk across the Erez crossing. A car will be waiting for you on our side.”

  “How will I recognize the driver?”

  The Vestal Virgin laughed quietly into his end of the line. “The driver will recognize you.”

  The phone went dead in Sweeney’s ear. “Bingo,” he said aloud. A faint smile of satisfaction disfigured his lips as he slipped the phone back into his pocket.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ABSALOM HAD ONE OF HIS PATENTED “I-TOLD-YOU-SO” SMIRKS pasted on his hide-tanned face when he ran into Baruch at the water cooler. “Azazel’s boys and girls are working through the last file cabinets in the last aisle of the last basement,” he informed him. “There is so much dust down there, two of them began sneezing and had to be let off on sick leave. You realize this is no piece of cake. Roughly half of the male Arabs betrayed by collaborators wound up serving time. Half of the ones who served time were short and heavy. Half of the short heavy males who were betrayed and served time were rabid Islamists.”

  “Which leaves the suspect’s bad eyes,” Baruch noted.

  “Bad eyes narrowed it down to one hundred and eighty-three, not counting the forty-eight who are known to be out of the Middle East, not counting the thirty-six who are known to be deceased, not counting two who are known to be in a Jordanian insane asylum, not counting whatever Azazel comes up with in the last batch of file cabinets.” Absalom seemed very pleased with himself. “The list is being typed up now.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  CUTTING THROUGH THE HILLS BEHIND EIN KAREM TO AVOID THE inevitable rush hour gridlock at the entrance to Jerusalem, Sweeney rejoined the main Jerusalem–Tel Aviv highway near Motza and headed west at a fast crawl. Fiddling with the dial of the radio, he came across an English-language talk show. “I don’t agree at all,” a man speaking English with a thick German accent was saying, “From the Jewish point of view, it’s more accurate to speak of a Judeo-Islamic tradition than a Judeo-Christian tradition.”

  “Why’s that, professor?” a woman inquired.

  “One could make the case that Christianity, with its baffling doctrine of the Trinity, has betrayed Old Testament monotheism. Islam, with its uncompromising belief in one God, has preserved its monotheistic purity. There is a passage in the Koran, if I can find it—ah, here it is.” The professor cleared his throat. “‘They are unbelievers who say, ‘God is the Third of Three. No god is there but One God.’”

  “There’s also that anti-Christian Koranic inscription on the Dome of the Rock Mosque,” someone else pointed out. “‘Praise be to God, who begets no son.’”

  “For Jews, there is also the problem of the visual iconography of Christianity,” still another person observed. “Which is why Maimonides, in his ‘Epistle on Martyrdom,’ asserts that Jews can convert to Islam if it’s a question of saving their lives, but they cannot convert to Christianity under any circumstance, since by doing so they become idolaters, which for Jews is a fate worse than death.”

  “If the Jews and Arabs are kissing cousins,” Sweeney asked the radio, “why have they been at each other’s throats for a hundred years?” For answer, he got a station break and a commercial advertising an Israeli toothpaste that left your teeth whiter than white and your breath fresher than fresh. He provided his own response to the question. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out,” he mumbled. “They’ve been fighting over land.”

  At the Beit Shemesh turnoff, Sweeney passed a group of soldiers trying to thumb rides back to their bases in the Negev. He would have stopped to see if anyone was going to Gaza, but he remembered the Vestal Virgin’s admonition: Travel alone.

  Traffic was light and Sweeney made good time. Just south of Tel Azeka, his headlights illuminated an orange road-work warning up ahead. A hundred meters further along, plastic markers were strung across his side of the highway, closing it to traffic. A bearded man wearing a yarmulke and orange coveralls flagged him onto the Agur road detour. As he turned off, Sweeney could see the bearded man talking into a small walkie-talkie. Half a kilometer down the Agur road, within sight of a traffic circle, two men standing alongside a van with the logo “Fine Bedouin Robes and Carpets” printed in English on its side waved frantically as he approached. Sweeney recognized one of them; there was no mistaking his round blue sunglasses or the beard that seemed to have been sharpened to a fine point. It was the Vestal Virgin himself, dressed this time in blue jeans and a tee-shirt with “Hard Rock Café” printed across the chest. Sweeney slammed on the brakes and rolled down the window on the passenger’s side of the car. “And here I thought you were a pious Muslim,” he called teasingly.

  The Vestal Virgin stuck his head in the window. “Do not judge what is in a man’s heart by the clothing covering his breast,” he said with great seriousness. “If you still want to interview Abu Bakr, you must continue the journey in a different vehicle.”

  “I can’t abandon my car in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I will drive it to Ghazeh and leave it in the parking lot on the Israeli side. My friend here will take you to Abu Bakr.”

  Sweeney grabbed the satchel with his camera and tape recorder and got out of the car. A pock-marked Bedouin smoking a thick cigarette opened the back doors of the van and lifted the lid of a large straw hamper.

  “You expect me to get into that?” Sweeney asked.

  “Trust me,” said the Vestal Virgin with a disarming smile. “Be quick.”

  Sweeney looked from the Vestal Virgin to the Bedouin, then with a shrug climbed into the hamper. The Bedouin covered him with some carpets and closed the lid. Sweeney heard him hefting another hamper on top of the one he was in, and rearranging other hampers in front of it. The back doors slammed shut. The driver must have inserted a cassette into the van’s tape deck, because Sweeney heard the muffled sound of a popular Egyptian song. With a jerk, the van pulled onto the road. It reached the traffic circle and turned around it six or seven times to befuddle Sweeney’s sense of direction. Then the van started down the road at a brisk clip. Forty minutes later—the hands on Sweeney’s wristwatch glowed in the dark—the vehicle slowed down and Sweeney, snug in his hamper of Bedouin rugs, thought he could make out young men speaking Hebrew. Were they passing through an Israeli checkpoint into the West Bank? Half an hour later they slowed down for what could have been another checkpoint. Soon after that the van must have been caught in a traffic jam; Sweeney heard horns blaring, and someone complaining, though he couldn’t make out if the complaint was in Hebrew or Arabic. Eventually the van turned onto cobblestones and bumped its way through a labyrinth of streets before pulling to a stop. The driver’s door slammed shut. Seconds later the door of a building closed and there was absolute silence.

  Stifling in his hamper, Sweeney pushed the rugs
away from his face and waited. He must have dozed, because the next time he glanced at his watch, twenty-five minutes had gone by. Moments later footsteps approached the van and the back doors were flung open. The hampers were shoved aside, the lid of his straw trunk was lifted and Sweeney was confronted with the unsmiling smallpox-scarred face of a young Arab woman. She gestured for him to climb out of the hamper and follow her. Vaulting nimbly from the back of the van, she tugged the scarf over her short hair and set off at a brisk pace through a maze of narrow alleyways. Sweeney, who didn’t have the vaguest idea what city he was in, jogged along behind her. At one point she hiked the hem of her Bedouin robe—Sweeney noticed that she was wearing blue jeans and running shoes—and darted up a rickety staircase, then ducked through a low door with some Arabic words painted in red on it. A young Palestinian was waiting inside what appeared to be an abandoned building. As the young Bedouin woman turned her back, he gestured for Sweeney to strip off his garments. “You’re kidding,” Sweeney said. Then: “You’re not kidding.” He began to peel off his clothing, tossing them to the Palestinian, and finally stood stark naked on the cold floor while the young man searched every item meticulously, clearly looking for some sort of radio transmitting device. He confiscated Sweeney’s shoes and gave him a pair of sandals in their place. While Sweeney was climbing back into his clothing, the young Palestinian opened the journalist’s satchel and removed the camera and the cellular telephone and the four spare rolls of film. He opened the camera and the battery compartment of the telephone, removed the film and the battery, then smashed the camera and telephone, along with Sweeney’s quartz wrist watch, against a wall and carefully inspected the broken fragments. As an afterthought, he crushed the rolls of film and the battery with a brick and examined them, too.

  “Jesus,” Sweeney moaned. “What people put up with to get an exclusive interview.” The Palestinian, who obviously didn’t speak a word of English, motioned for Sweeney to turn around and fitted a blindfold over his eyes. The Bedouin woman and the Palestinian exchanged some words, after which she took Sweeney’s hand and led him out a window onto a slate roof. From somewhere below came the indistinct sound of voices speaking Arabic, and the delectable odor of lamb being grilled on a barbecue. With one hand on the woman’s shoulder and the other on a waist-high brick wall, Sweeney felt himself being led across several roofs and pushed through a door into another building that, judging from the hollow ring the door made when it closed behind them, must have also been abandoned. The woman led him to the far end of the building, up a narrow staircase and along a corridor. She knocked three times on a metal door, then twice and then once. Bolts were thrown, the door was flung open and then closed and locked behind them.

  As the blindfold was pulled away from his face, Sweeney found himself gazing into the bloodshot eyes of a short, heavy-set Arab wearing a shiny gray double-breasted suit jacket over a long white robe with a soiled hem. On his forehead was the purple bruise that Sweeney had seen once before in a Gaza mosque—on an ultra-religious Muslim who beat his head against the floor when he prostrated himself in prayer. The Arab squinted at the visitor through round, windowpane-thick, wire-rimmed spectacles. “I am Abu Bakr,” he announced, holding out a hand. “You must excuse all these precautions—my people are paranoid about my safety. Please, please, sit. My house is your house.”

  Abu Bakr settled cross-legged onto a Bedouin cushion at a low round table and invited Sweeney, with a wave of the hand, to sit across from him. Petra, modestly avoiding eye contact with the two men, set a plate of sweet biscuits, two glasses and a pitcher of fruit juice on the table, then returned to the Army radio and pulled on the earphones. The Doctor, who could make out shadowy shapes and enjoyed fooling people into thinking his vision was perfectly normal, poured juice into both glasses—he could tell from the sound when it was time to stop—and pushed one glass toward his guest. Hefting a paperweight filled with snow flakes falling on a pastoral landscape, Sweeney took in the armored door with the bars across it, the Kalashnikovs stacked in a corner, the young woman monitoring the Army radio, the large map of Palestine on the wall. He took in the second door, reinforced with steel plating, which led to … where? “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what city I am in,” he remarked.

  The Doctor grunted. “We went to a lot of trouble so you would not know.”

  “Turning around the traffic circle was very effective.”

  The Doctor sipped his juice. “I tell you frankly, ya’ani, this is the first time in my life I have granted an interview to a representative of the press. I have long been intrigued by the rapport between a journalist and his subject, with each one, in effect, trying to use the other for his own ends. You, for instance, will try to seduce me into thinking you are extremely sympathetic to my point of view in order to lure me into making revelations that may, in the end, undermine my point of view and embarrass my side. I, for my part, will try to convince you that I am being extremely open and candid in order to get you to write admiringly about my point of view and my side. From both our perspectives, it is an extremely dishonest relationship, yet even as I point this out, you will surely suspect that I am trying to beguile you into thinking I am different.”

  Sweeney smiled. “There is no danger of your beguiling me. I am an experienced journalist.”

  The Doctor squinted at Sweeney, trying to imagine what he looked like from the sound of his voice. “I am aware that you are an experienced journalist. You wear a memento of one of your experiences in your left ear.”

  Sweeney brought a finger up to the hearing aid. “I got too close to an incoming round in Beirut.”

  The Doctor seemed interested. “From a medical point of view, what happened to you?”

  “I suffered a concussion and damage to the middle ear of my left ear—there was some kind of injury to a membrane, the name of which escapes me.”

  “Was it the tympanic membrane?”

  “That rings a bell.”

  “What were your symptoms at the time?”

  “Dizziness, bleeding, a slight and temporary facial paralysis, not to mention the loss of hearing in my left ear.”

  “What type of hearing device do you wear?”

  “Analogue.”

  “Do you have more difficulty hearing high-pitched or low-pitched sounds?”

  “It’s the low intensity, high-pitched sounds—the s or sh or ch—that give me trouble.” Sweeney laughed uncomfortably. “Did you think I invented the explosion in Beirut? Do you suspect my hearing aid is a secret transmitter broadcasting this conversation to the Israelis?”

  “The thought crossed our minds. The young woman who brought you here is a genius with radios. After you were blindfolded, she used a meter to see if your hearing aid was transmitting a signal.” The Doctor spread his hands in embarrassment. “Someone in my position must be prudent. Let us move on. Why did you become a journalist?”

  “What is this, a psychoanalytic session? How much do you charge an hour?”

  “I am trying, in my clumsy way, to figure out who you are.”

  “In college I had my heart set on becoming an actor. My first big role was Vanya in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. I stumbled over the love scenes and was heckled. The review in the college newspaper didn’t mince words. Do you understand the expression, mince words? I decided it was safer to review plays than act in them, and went to work for the newspaper. One thing led to another. Which is how I became Mr. journalist Sweeney.”

  The Doctor puffed thoughtfully on his cigarette. “Let us move on to the world of politics. What do you understand to be the essence of the conflict between Arabs and Jews?”

  “Are you interviewing me or am I interviewing you?”

  “Bear with me, Mr. Sweeney. There is a method to my madness.”

  Sweeney pulled his copybook and a pencil from a pocket. “Do you mind if I copy down your questions and my answers?”

  The Doctor nodded. “Please.

  “To answer your question: the
essence of the conflict, Mr. Abu Bakr, in a word, is land.”

  “Many people would offer the same response. But not me. Let me begin our conversation by telling you a story. Once I was driven up to the occupied Golan for a consultation with an important Druze. Coming back, I ordered the driver to pull up at the side of the road and got out to urinate as the sun was setting in the west. From where I was standing I could make out the shadows of Lebanon off to my right. Behind me, the snow at the summit of Mount Hermon appeared to glisten with the last rays from the sun sinking into the sea. Below me, the electric lights in the Jewish kibbutzim in the Hula Valley began to come on. Pffffft-pffffft. Pffffft-pffffft. Can you picture the scene, Mr. Sweeney? There I was, standing in the cold, dark electricity-less Golan as the lights of the Jews flashed on. Pffffftpffffft. With each flash, I could hear the West saying ‘Fuck-you, fuckyou’ to the Arabs. Please excuse my language. I use the term for the sake of accuracy. Those are the words I heard. The kibbutz lights, billboard advertisements for a secular and material and superficial Western culture, drive home to us our seeming backwardness and humiliate Islam. Land, of course, is an important element of the problem. But the essence of the conflict between Arabs and Jews, Mr. Sweeney, is dignity.”

  “When you refer to Western culture as secular and material and superficial, I assume you are comparing it to Islamic culture. But you fall into the trap that many of your co-religionists fall into—you are comparing Western realities like poverty and crime and sexual promiscuity and drugs and racism with Islamic ideals, as opposed to Islamic reality.”

  “Western reality—your culture of drugs and sexual promiscuity—is the Western ideal; you live this way, Mr. Sweeney, because you think this is the best way to live. Islamic ideals at least show that there is a better way. Given the chance to function in an Islamic state guided by the Holy Qur’an, Islamic reality will move in the direction of Islamic ideals.”