Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  “I know Jews—religious Jews, that is—who would say pretty much the same thing about the Torah.” Sweeney looked at his notes to get Rabbi Apfulbaum’s words right. “We must follow God’s commandment to the Jewish people and settle every square inch of the land of the Torah. Without the lava of the land burning through the soles of our shoes, we are spiritual cripples.”

  The words slipped out before the Doctor realized what he was saying. “I also know such a Jew.”

  Sweeney looked sharply at his host. “If you’re not careful, Mr. Bakr, you’ll have me thinking that the person who kidnapped Rabbi Apfulbaum and his secretary is a pro-Semite.”

  “I am more than a pro-Semite—I am a Semite, in as much as I am a descendant of Shem, the oldest son of Noah. If you are using Semite in its narrower sense to refer to Jews, you would not be wrong. I am, in my own way, an admirer of Jewish culture and Jewish creativeness and Jewish energy. But somewhere along the way these past three thousand years the Jews went wrong. I think I know where. It was when they rejected the word of God brought to them by God’s Prophets and Messengers, and discovered in its place chutzpah; when they became convinced that this chutzpah was a virtue and not a vice. You surely will be familiar with the classical definition of chutzpah, Mr. Sweeney. It is when a boy kills his parents and then asks the judge for leniency because he is an orphan. I will offer you another definition of the word: to claim all the land God promised to the patriarch Ibrahim when someone else is living on it is chutzpah.”

  Sweeney scratched away on his pad. “Can you tell me something of your background, Mr. Bakr.”

  “My background is unremarkable. My father was a fedayeen fighter, a guerrilla in the war against the Jews. He was killed while trying to cross into Isra’il when I was still a boy. I remember little about my father’s appearance but I can summon his voice in my ear at will. I can hear him talking quietly with his sons before the evening meal. Where Muslims do not live under Islamic rule, and on Islamic territory, he would tell us, they are in what the Qur’an calls the Dar al-Harb—the Realm of War; they must follow the example of the Messenger Muhammad and wage jihad, or armed struggle against unbelief. Ever since Muhammad led raids on Meccan caravans, Islam has been waging war against unbelief. I see myself as part of this ancient tradition. In its most recent phase, this war involved the kidnapping of Rabbi Apfulbaum, himself a fundamentalist associated with the Beit Avram settlement and the Jewish underground known to have its roots there.”

  “Which brings us to the kidnapping of Rabbi Apfulbaum. What do you hope to achieve?”

  “You must understand, ya’ani, that my reasoning begins with the presumption that there exists a post-colonial plot against Islam. The world’s secularists and Zionists are all out to destroy us. Salman Rushdie is part of the plot orchestrated by World Jewry and backed by American imperialism. Over the decades, Mr. Sweeney, we Muslims have tried everything under the sun to thwart that plot—we have tried Nasserism, Baathism, Ghadhafi-ism, Khomeini-ism, Saddam Hussein-ism, and more recently, Arafat-ism. Nothing turned the clock back; the Hamas suicide bombings, like the British and American terror bombings of German cities during the Second World War, only serve to unify the people who are the targets of these attacks. In short, nothing brought us closer to Dar al-Islam, the Realm of Islam, where the pure faith of the Prophet prevails. Clearly it was time for a fresh approach.”

  Sweeney snapped his copybook shut. “You didn’t bring me here to listen to your ideas on how chutzpah ruined the Jewish people, or how Salman Rushdie is part of a Zionist plot to bring down Islam.” He leaned forward. “What do you want, Mr. Abu Bakr?”

  “A witness.”

  One of the el-Tel brothers emerged from the back room carrying a tray filled with empty plates. Sweeney watched as he stacked them in the laundry sink. “A witness to what?” he asked.

  “I am convinced that Rabbi Apfulbaum will divulge details of the ruthless anti-Arab campaign waged by the Jewish underground movement, as well as the identity of its ruthless leader, Ya’ir. If I publish this information, no one will believe it; the Jews will claim the Rabbi’s confession was coerced, and everyone will accept their word. If a respected American journalist publishes it, the world, which up to now associates all terrorism with Muslim fundamentalists, will understand, for the first time, what the Jewish fundamentalists are doing to us. That understanding will undermine international support for Isra’il and strengthen the hand of Muslim fundamentalists like me.”

  At the Army radio, Petra removed her earphones and studied the American. She didn’t speak English but she sensed that the discussion had reached a turning point; she wasn’t sure what the Doctor wanted from the American but she knew that if he didn’t get it, the American would never leave here alive.

  Sweeney felt his lips go dry. He sipped some fruit juice, then set his glass down and nodded carefully. “You’re handing me the story of my life on a silver platter. I’d be a fool to turn it down. You wanted a witness, you’ve got a witness.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  IN THE EARLY HOURS OF THE MORNING, PETRA SAT UP WITH A start. At first she thought she had been awakened by the sound of Hebrew being spoken on the landing outside the door. Slowly it dawned on her that she had been dreaming; in her dream, Isra’ili soldiers were taping sticks of dynamite to the outside of the armor-plated door. Over her field radio, an occasional voice burst through the background static to report, in Hebrew, that nothing could be seen moving on the roads in the West Bank. Splashing cold water on her face, Petra looked around for Aown, then remembered that he had tucked an ancient but serviceable British Webley into his belt and had taken Sweeney up to the attic crawl space over the safe house for the night. She glanced at her wrist watch, then got up to boil water in the electric kettle. Minutes later she was tiptoeing into the inner sanctum with a cup of steaming tea. Azziz was folded into a fetal position, sound asleep on the cot. The Doctor was deep in whispered conversation with the prisoner; Petra didn’t understand a word they were saying, but she could see that the two men were talking almost as if they were old friends. They sat with their knees touching, their foreheads bent to within centimeters of each other. She tapped the Doctor on the shoulder. When he turned around, he looked annoyed at the interruption. “What is it?” he asked sharply.

  Petra said, “I have brought you tea.”

  The Doctor gripped the cup with both hands and let the tea warm his fingers for a moment. Then he did something that struck Petra as extremely bizarre—he called the prisoner by his given name.

  “Isaac.”

  Whispering, the Doctor said something to him in English. The prisoner raised his eyes; the Doctor had said that, without his eyeglasses, the Jew could only make out shapes and shadows. The prisoner shook his head no. The Doctor spoke to him again more firmly and pressed the cup of tea into his manacled hands. The prisoner shrugged and muttered something in English. In the middle of a sentence he pronounced the Doctor’s given name.

  “… Ishmael …”

  The Rabbi brought the cup to his lips and blew loudly across the surface of the tea, and then began to sip noisily at it. The Doctor stood up and came around behind the Rabbi and started to massage his bony neck with the tips of his fingers. Looking over the head of the Rabbi, he nodded toward the door. As she backed out of the room, Petra could hear the two of them resuming their whispered conversation.

  “Ah, Ishmael …”

  “… Isaac …”

  This must be a new technique of interrogation, she told herself, one designed to gain the trust of the prisoner and lull him into thinking of his interrogator as a friend, someone in whom he could confide. Once the Jew’s guard was down, the Doctor would extract from him the information he wanted. Surely this was the meaning of the strange bond that appeared to be growing between the two men.

  How else could a reasonable person explain the Doctor’s permitting the Jew to call him by his given name?

  THIRTY

  ALARGE OVE
RHEAD FAN STIRRED THE PUTRID AIR IN THE interrogation chamber as the prisoner shrieked in agony. Sinking back, he mumbled through his swollen lips a verse from the Qur’an. “‘Whoso rebels against God … His Messenger … for him … the Fire of Gehenna.’”

  From the small Sony portable radio on the shelf came the sound of frying fat. Precisely on the hour, the Voice of Palestine, a popular call-in talk show, burst through the static. “Goooood Morning, Palestine,” a young woman brayed breathlessly into the microphone. “To everybody, everywhere, inside and outside the homeland, a morning of love and well-being. Palestine, have a happy morning. Okay, I’ll take the first call.”

  The strains of a well known Palestinian folk song filled the room, then faded as a listener from Hebron phoned in to the Jericho station to complain about the shortage of specialists in the local Palestinian hospitals. “My wife was diagnosed with cancer of the breast,” he said. “My doctor was obliged to get in touch with one of the Jewish specialists in Jerusalem to find out about the latest chemotherapy techniques.”

  “What’s your question?”

  “My question is, why aren’t our medical schools and hospitals sending more young doctors abroad for specialist training?”

  “We are sending young doctors abroad for training,” the woman running the Voice of Palestine responded. “The problem is luring them back to the homeland once they get accustomed to those Western salaries.”

  “Turn up the volume,” ordered Sa’adat Arif, the Palestine Authority’s deputy chief of intelligence, “and give him another jolt.”

  In the heart of the Palestinian Army base of Aksa, on the southern edge of Jericho, Yussuf Abu Saleh, stark naked, with electrodes clipped to his testicles, sagged limply from his wrists fastened behind his back to a hook embedded high in the wall. His left shoulder had come out of its socket, causing excruciating pain every time Sa’adat tugged playfully at one of his ankles.

  Sa’adat nodded at a young Palestinian policeman, who tripped the switch, closing the electric circuit. Gagging in pain, Yussuf’s body stiffened and twitched. A chalky saliva seeped from the corners of his mouth. When the current was cut he sank back and then howled as the weight of his body wrenched his dislocated shoulder. On the radio, a listener was putting a question about police brutality. “I’m not saying it exists,” a taxi driver from Nablus said over the phone. “But we’ve all heard rumors of what happens to some who openly criticize the Palestinian Authority.”

  “There is no place for police brutality in the new Palestinian state we are constructing,” the woman declared into her microphone. “If you know of any instances of actual police brutality, it is your sacred duty to come forward and expose it. Those responsible will be severely punished, this I promise you.”

  Sa’adat strolled across the room and looked up at Yussuf. “You are a courageous young man, I will give that to you,” he said. “Few have managed to hold out as long as you have. You are also an intelligent man. You must know that you will break eventually. Without exception, everyone does. Why don’t you save yourself more suffering. Tell us the identity of the blind mujaddid. Tell us where he is hiding the Rabbi Apfulbaum. Is he in Ghazeh? Hebron? Nablus? Only nod and your suffering will be over.”

  “Case of mistaken identity,” Yussuf moaned, half delirious. “You have the wrong man. I am Bosnian—Koskovic, Asaf.”

  Sa’adat signaled to the doctor standing by in a corner. He came over and climbed up on a chair and monitored Yussuf’s heartbeat through a stethoscope. “To be on the safe side,” he said, “I would advise an hour’s repose.”

  Sa’adat nodded to the policemen, who removed the electrodes, then climbed onto chairs and lowered Yussuf, his head rolling from side to side, to the cement floor. “I don’t want to lose him,” Sa’adat warned the doctor, who was kneeling next to Yussuf and waving a cracked vial of smelling salts under his nose. Yussuf’s eyes flicked open and he fixed them on the Authority’s deputy chief of intelligence with a gleam of dark hatred.

  Sa’adat leaned over the prisoner. “You have an hour to reflect on the hopelessness of your situation,” he whispered. “Are you able to hear me, Yussuf Ben Saleh? Be reasonable—Abu Bakr is not worth suffering for. Granted, a certain amount of terrorism is useful—the threat of fundamentalists waiting to pick up the pieces strengthens the Authority’s image as a moderate alternative. But terrorism is a matter of timing and dosage. Your mujaddid risks to ruin everything for us if he succeeds in rallying the Palestinian masses to holy war against the Jews. If we are careful not to scare the Jews off with terrorist bombs and kidnappings and threats of holy war, we will get our Palestinian state along the Sixty-seven frontiers in a week’s time. When a year or two have passed, it goes without saying we will remind the Jews that we have not gotten what was in the original United Nations partition plan of 1948; that Acre and large parts of the Hula Valley and the Negev rightly belong to our new Palestinian state. Then, alternating doses of terrorism with doses of plausible reasonableness, we will push the Jews back to the original Forty-eight partition borders. In fifty years Isra’il will be reduced to a coastal strip that is without economic viability. The Jewish state will wither away. The Jews who are still there will emigrate to America. Remember the old joke about the sign at Lod Airport: Will the last Jew to leave the country please turn out the lights. Reflect on what I say. Cast your lot with the Palestinian Authority. Only tell us where the Rabbi is being held captive. Ghazeh? Hebron? Nablus? It would cause me great distress to have to hang you back up on the wall.”

  On the radio, a Palestinian school teacher from Tulkarm was saying, “With the intifada, the younger generation set an example for us. Now, with an independent Palestinian state almost in our grasp, it is important for us to set an example for the intifada generation.”

  “I agree,” said the talk show hostess. “With God’s help, we will create the first really democratic Arab nation in the region and live side by side with the Jews.”

  Returning to his office, Sa’adat discovered Baruch slouched in an easy chair reading the matrimonial advertisements in a Palestinian newspaper. “Ah, I am cheerful you could come down from Jerusalem,” Sa’adat said, sliding in behind his desk. “Fruit juice for my friend Baruch,” he called to an aide. “Don’t tell me you are thinking of taking a second wife,” he remarked to his visitor with a wink.

  “I am very happy with the one I have, thank you,” Baruch replied.

  Sa’adat snickered. “There are some who think the four wives permitted to a Muslim by the Qur’an are not enough. There are others who think one is a wife too many.”

  “How are things going with Yussuf Abu Saleh?” Baruch asked.

  “He is what your interrogation specialists would call a tough biscuit. He will eventually tell us what we want to know, for sure. It is only a question of time.”

  “Time is what we don’t have on our hands,” Baruch mumbled. He could visualize Sa’adat’s method of questioning Yussuf and it turned his stomach. He had seen Shin Bet reports on what went on behind the closed doors of Aksa; there had even been some discussion of leaking the details to the foreign press, but the idea had been abandoned when it was decided that Sa’adat and Company could strengthen the Authority’s hand against the Islamic fundamentalists. Baruch gazed out a window so Sa’adat wouldn’t notice the look on his face and focused on the fact that this same Yussuf had participated in the kidnapping of the Rabbi and his secretary, and the murder of four Jewish boys; had cut the finger off one of them to get a souvenir for his wife. “Is there anything in Yussuf’s file that might give us a lead while we’re waiting for him to talk?”

  Sa’adat sipped some grapefruit and lime juice as he opened Yussuf’s dossier. “Abu Saleh was born and raised in the Kalandia refugee camp north of Jerusalem. When he was fourteen he worked as a plasterer building houses for Jews in the West Bank by day, by night he raided the settlements to demolish the houses he had helped build. He was first arrested at the age of fifteen for distribu
ting anti-Israeli leaflets. It is the usual story, my friend—during the first intifada he threw stones at your tanks and wound up joining a Hamas cell in Nablus.” Sa’adat looked up at Baruch, the usual smile fixed on his round face. “You Jews created the monster—”

  Baruch, who had been up most of the night, bridled. “Don’t tell me, let me guess—we should have lost the Sixty-seven war and let you push us into the sea and avoided all these problems.”

  Sa’adat shrugged. “At one point in the Nineties Abu Saleh’s two brothers were killed and he was wounded in a shootout with Isra’ili soldiers. Abu Saleh was sentenced to preventive detention in the Negev camp Ketziot, but he soon managed to escape in a garbage truck. He went to Ghazeh and then snuck into Egypt, and from there made his way to Afghanistan, where he joined a contingent of al Qaida mujahidin and wound up fighting against the Americans. When the Taliban lost the war, Abu Saleh escaped to Pakistan and later surfaced in Nablus holding a Bosnian passport identifying him as Asaf Koskovic from Mostar. He had this passport in his pocket when we picked him up in Jerusalem. We think it was during this Nablus period that he fell under the spell of the blind vigilante and came to believe that he was the long-awaited Islamic Renewer. The rest of the story I think you are familiar with. Hamas turned out not to be fundamentalist enough for Abu Saleh, so he defected, along with half his Nablus Hamas comrades, to form a cell loyal to the blind vigilante. It was about then that we raided his bomb factory in Nablus. I can tell you—where is the harm?—that we were tipped off by the local Hamas people, who were furious with Abu Saleh.”

  “You nailed two of his pals but Yussuf slipped through your fingers,” Baruch said.

  “Ah, Baruch, you do keep your ear to the soil.”

  “In this corner of the Levant people who don’t keep their ear to the soil, as you put it, wind up being buried under it.”