Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  Hasni looked at McCloud, as if he’d pulled the oldest trick in the book. But then, to McCloud’s surprise, the boy began to speak.

  “Moshe Dayan,” Hasni began with a gravity McCloud thought of as essentially that of a really dangerous man-child, the gravity a Cale—for all his power of analysis—could never approach. “Moshe Dayan once boasted that my grandfather’s village had been removed from the geography books. Let me just say that. Did anyone ever do such a thing to you, McCloud?”

  “They’re threatening to publish my novel for a pittance,” McCloud said. “The world is very hard.”

  “Don’t belittle my question, McCloud. Did they take your village and plow it under and erase its name?”

  “No,” murmured McCloud without malice. “Though of course they did it to my ancestors in Scotland. But that was in the eighteenth century.”

  “Exactly. And again, your shitty little potted histories!”

  “Why does that mean I can’t write a letter to my wife?”

  “Because you are a criminal, and you try to cast yourself as a victim. That’s why! That’s reason enough!”

  For a time Hasni sat swallowing and then began to speak again. “I thought you wanted to hear my history?” he complained.

  “Yes. I’m not as closed to yours as you are to mine, Hasni.”

  “Oh no? Oh no? Then try this! Take this on board. My grandfather … my grandfather came from the village of Roshe Pinna in Galilee. Forty years ago he fled to the refugee camp in Quneitra, over in the east. He believed it would be for a month, no more. But the Israelis did not let him return, they blocked his way with armed men, and so they had a pretext for confiscating his land. Every year afterward, on the Feast of the Ascension, he would walk from Quneitra to the Golan Heights and look across to the point near Lake Tiberias where his home had been. Roshe Pinna. I was raised with the name. I still carry it. I have never visited it. I’ll visit it when it belongs to my race again. Do you have such places in your miserable memory, McCloud? I doubt it.”

  Although there was room for McCloud to ask how a homesick grandfather led necessarily to the hijacking of the New York–Frankfurt flight, he delayed and then said nothing. That was because he saw something awesome in the reverence for place and ancestry this impassioned student harbored.

  “Then of course,” said Hasni after a long breath, “the Zionists took the Golan Heights. After that, even pilgrimage was out of the question. Not only the earth itself, but a distant view of it was forbidden!”

  There were tears in the boy’s eyes now. He did not glibly flash them as symptoms of compelling and empowering sorrow.

  “What about my earth?” asked McCloud gently. “You want to forbid me a view of that.”

  Hasni waved his hand. “Oh, my grandfather would have agreed with you. He would consider this action we’ve taken extreme. Because he saw what happened to him as the will of God. He wouldn’t have accepted that God’s will should be pushed along. That politics is the means by which God’s mind is made up for him. And my parents probably think the same as my grandfather, though in their secret hearts they would be pleased that I’ve taken action at last. But defeated people, you must understand, McCloud!

  “They’ve spent their lives at the Ain Alhilweh camp near Sidon. The Lebanese call it ‘the zoo.’ My parents are in the zoo, therefore. My father walks into town every day to sell lottery tickets. Six children were raised in an UNRWA hut in Ain Alhilweh! Three meters by four meters! Oh, sure, I’ve seen worse things even in the South, in Louisiana and Arkansas. There is nothing absolutely unique to my story. And yet what you liberal readers of feature articles forget is that it’s awfully unique for me.”

  “And my story is unique to me, too,” urged McCloud. “You can call it shitty and despicable. But my situation—you can’t deny—is subjectively very serious!”

  Hasni shook his head. “Listen! Not as serious as Musa’s is for him. He’s got objective ruins, McCloud. He’s a Christian like me. His village was confiscated under one of those emergency laws. Kafr Birim. A defense area, a security zone! His people looked through barbed wire at their own homes but could not enter them. Even the Israeli Supreme Court took shame and ordered that the people be readmitted, but the Israeli army sowed the town with mines instead. They bombed it on Christmas Day, a timing which has made a strong impact on my friend Musa. Unique to him, but to you just another story from Time or Newsweek.”

  It was not lost on McCloud that by using the names of villages no one else on the plane had heard of, Hasni seemed to give injustice a title and a substance. His tale, and these hijacking transactions, were—as McCloud sensed—as much rooted in name and location as was the dance and painting of the Barramatjara. McCloud found himself nodding in spite of himself, registering the names. They were the currency of Hasni’s narration. And other names arose, Yusuf’s village, Deir Hanna, which was confiscated to make the supertown of Karni’el, in which—said Hasni—Palestinians could not live. The sealing of Yusuf’s parents’ house in Ramallah, the plugging-up of the doors and the blinding of the windows with cinder blocks, the confiscation of the family industrial plant: their sewing machine on which they made wedding suits. All because Yusuf’s uncle belonged to the Palestinian group el-Ard, the Land.

  How at Jalazoun camp near Ramallah, a twenty-two-hour-a-day curfew had been imposed—the Palestinians being allowed to go abroad and do their work and find their food and water and wood, according to Hasni, only two hours a day!

  How Razir was beaten as a child with truncheons in Jalazoun and still bore the back injury to prove it, even though it had not stopped him from being a commando for the Iraqis!

  How Hasni himself had received a UNRWA scholarship to Bir Zeit University near Ramallah and found a wreck—building permits refused by the Israelis, courses banned by them, teachers exiled! And how in a raid by security forces he was beaten so badly—he claimed—that certain Palestinian businessmen from Kuwait took pity on him and provided him with a scholarship to an American university!

  He did not say which one, since the location was not only not an item of currency, but would serve as a means of identifying him later, should he escape at the end of this demonstration, this act of making up God’s uncertain mind.

  And in this there were echoes of everything Cale had foretold. Hasni, appropriately disinherited, had been chosen, educated, and now activated for this specific cue. Hasni was pleased to return the debt of his education to those Palestinian gentlemen, whoever they were, by means of the arrest of a jet plane. He was, in his way—as Cale had also intimated—a boy worthy of a kind of admiration.

  Was it possible now, McCloud wondered, to raise with Hasni the Mossad question which had infuriated Stone?

  He was trying to frame it in a way which would bring a good result when the boy took up the story again.

  “In spite of my kind patrons,” he said confidentially, like someone too young giving away too much, “the Arab world as a whole does not want us. Like you, they wish we would go away. Over someone else’s border. So we need to go on grabbing their attention, too. Even if it’s only the attention of their secret services. They like circus acts like this, Mr. McCloud, for reasons of their own, and I can’t argue. If we didn’t do what we could, then we’d be like the Kurds and the Armenians! Stateless people! Ghosts made up of a rumor! Of a bit of grit. Of dust blowing on the wind! Unthinkable, Mr. McCloud. Seriously. How can I face that?”

  For a moment McCloud was silenced. He was bewildered by the boy’s argument: we take this plane and declare you a criminal so that the others, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Libyans, will know that I am alive and stateless!

  And the problem was that Hasni uttered from his marrow that sentiment about grit on the wind and in the process made naught of McCloud’s wish to write a letter to Pauline. Hasni was not some Palestinian poet who happened at present to be teaching creative writing at Georgetown University. The boy was talking—it couldn’t be denied—from the pit o
f his sensibilities, from that exalted and dangerous pocket of the brain where tribalism lay. And he was putting his life on the line, and that was supposed to be the apogee of male valor.

  If you forgot for a second that he was gratuitously intimidating a planeful of ordinary folk—and it was strangely easy to forget that in the intensity of Taliq’s upstairs realm—then Hasni possessed a certain nobility.

  For who am I in my stale underwear and premature flab when put up against him? McCloud asked in effect.

  There was a cry behind them. “Tomato juice? Taliq, mate. Have you got any tomato juice?”

  It was Bluey, but McCloud would have had to stand up to see him and in any case did not want either to confront or be ignored by the eyes, the ones—misted with the confusions of culture and rage—which, in the close-ups in the feature movie Gallows Crossing had won the applause of the international jury at Cannes, taken home the Gold Palm, and then been so recently fountains of grief for the unnamed uncle.

  “What’s happening?” McCloud asked Hasni.

  “The black dancer is thirsty,” said Hasni.

  Leaning forward, McCloud could see the part of the aisle level with Bluey’s seat, though the high comforts of first-class upholstery happily blocked a sight of Bluey’s face. Taliq appeared in the aisle. He carried in his right, scarred hand a can of tomato juice, which he shook expertly, as if at some stage of one of his exiles he had been a waiter. In his left he carried a can of cashews and a glass half-full of ice. Waiter to the oppressed, he was willing to serve Bluey, who was the success of his night of indoctrination. He put the glass and the can of cashews down on the tray by Bluey’s seat. He pulled the tab from the can and poured the red juice over the ice in the glass. It was like a demonstration. It was in the spirit of the pope washing the feet of old men in Easter ceremonies in the Vatican. The servant of the servants of God.

  Then he pulled the lid from the cashews. There was a hiss, a release of air, as the lid came loose in one motion. Taliq was reckless with it, so energetic and forceful that the rim rose instantly under the impetus of Taliq’s attack, of service toward his disinherited brother Bluey Kannata.

  And in that instant, the plane jolted against a column of air. The metal rim bit savagely into the webbing between Taliq’s thumb and forefinger. Without urgency, Taliq dropped the lid, grasped the wrist of his right hand with the fingers of his left, and held his bleeding limb upright, considering it with a dazed curiosity.

  With no one to prevent him, McCloud stood up. It seemed somehow a horrifying thing to McCloud that Taliq, master of the aircraft, should bleed. Bluey too climbed out of his seat.

  “Oh, mate,” said Bluey, perhaps with a little of that extreme concern we reserve for the injuries of mere acquaintances.

  Or then perhaps the concern wasn’t mimed. Perhaps Bluey saw this wound as an undermining of the position he’d taken up, the camp he’d entered.

  Whitey Wappitji rushed from the rear of the cabin, a great white bandanna in his hand. In the Barramatjara country handkerchiefs doubled up as dust excluders, but in this dustless sky Whitey’s touring bandanna was immaculate. Whitey began wrapping it around Taliq’s hand. Blinking at this activity and concern, Taliq did not yet seem returned to himself. He was for some seconds more like Mrs. Clark, who had once searched in a similar state of dazedness for her dropped wig.

  You could see memory return to Taliq. He checked on the cabin to see that everything was in place, the unperfected brethren at the rear, the prisoners, Hasni. He seemed to realize that his kinghood might have been diminished, as if in fact the injury had come from a would-be but inept assassin. So he held Whitey’s bandanna to his wound, raised his hand higher still, and displayed the whole bundle to the cabin. There was an edge of gaiety in his voice as he called out, “Look, ladies and gentlemen. All intact. And no distress!”

  To prove it, he began to wave the hand, encased in its white with a spreading rose of red on it, in the air. “No damage done! No damage at all!”

  “You be careful,” Bluey told him with a sudden, panicked urgency. “You be bloody careful with that thing there.”

  Paul Mungina the didj player had appeared now and settled Bluey back in his seat. “Your mate’s okay, Bluey,” he could be heard saying. Was there an edge of sinister meaning to what Paul said: You chose him, and now he’s bleeding, and it’s too late for second guesses.

  Turning from this task, Paul saw McCloud. Paul’s eyes were uneasy. But you could see him decide to be direct. “Frank, all this is pretty confusing. I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t know who I ought to listen to.”

  “Sorry, Paul,” said McCloud, defeated. It was the best he could do. Whitey, who was busy at the moment, would have to explain things to Paul.

  The fracas had aroused Cale and Stone but not excited them. Cale’s eyes did not seem to take account of Taliq’s small accident, since he had earlier had a small, painful accident of his own. He and Stone regathered their airline blankets about them. As if by rare mutual consent, they chose to see the event as not having much importance. They blinked and gazed and then went back to sleep.

  From the flight deck the captain now emerged. He moved with a sort of casual care, a studied saunter. This hulking middle-aged man who had been sad to show them down into the pit. In morning light the residual sandiness of his hair encouraged McCloud in an undefined sort of way. Could the man have sensed Taliq’s injury and come to work on his new weakness? The captain, McCloud noticed, had shaven, and his hair had been brushed. By these signs he showed a discrete ambition to outlast Taliq, to take command again in the end.

  But he did not look at McCloud or Stone or Cale.

  Despite himself, McCloud sat very straight and full on; rigid where Stone and Cale, unconscious of the opportunity, slumped in their blankets. He hoped the captain would speak to him, welcome him back to the level of all the other passengers, to the plane’s fraternity.

  The captain didn’t. It had to be a deliberate ignoring, McCloud decided. He must know that they had been let out not for their own good, but Taliq’s. He’d stated his theory of hijack when he’d opened the hatch: something to do with success through good order. And that he had flown in Vietnam. McCloud worried that he was therefore habituated to the idea that a few should die for the good of the multitude. He was working toward his ideal of good order by giving Taliq’s order space to exercise itself and reach its ends.

  “Taliq,” the captain said as to a familiar. “Someone’s calling you, son. On the VHF.”

  Taliq began to move.

  “I hope,” murmured the captain, loud enough, though, for McCloud to hear, “these men will be forgiven. That the loss of their clothes is as far as you’ll take it.”

  “I hope so, too,” said Taliq, and pushed the captain gently back toward the cockpit.

  McCloud felt a filial gratitude to the captain. But Cale didn’t.

  “He hopes,” Cale whispered across the aisle. “He fucking hopes! He should be telling them he’ll fry their balls in court if anything happens.”

  As Taliq moved forward, Bluey rose and followed him confusedly toward the cockpit for a few paces. Giving up then, he turned back and stared at McCloud without seeing him.

  “He ought to be bloody careful what he does with that thing,” Bluey announced.

  “What thing?” asked McCloud.

  Bluey hawked and turned his eyes away and returned to his unshuttered window.

  McCloud slept again; it couldn’t have been for long. In this brief coma Pauline, always the neat and competent girl, was tidying her schoolbooks on a table, all under the gaze of her small-boned, wronged mother. For the child Pauline he felt the pristine love that had begun things, an unspeakable affection untouched by the daily traffic of their later marriage.

  Pauline’s father, the Dentist, and afterward the prospector for precious metals, had turned up at the church for the wedding: Francis McCloud and Pauline Cross. But Pauline’s blue-lipped mother, so like Pauline
, so handsomely compact, so four-square, so brisk, had spoken to him on the pavement and frightened him away from the marriage feast. These events had of course all now been related in McCloud’s book. The grandeur of his, McCloud’s, intentions toward this material, he had felt, entitled him to the use of that raw history, the end stone of one marriage coinciding, neat as art, with the birthstone of another.

  He had even once asked Pauline if he could make free with her family history in his novel, and she’d given a guarded, grudging approval.

  “Maybe you could mention it to your mother, too,” he’d suggested. “But tell her she won’t be recognized. I promise she won’t be.”

  “Just don’t make us sound foolish,” Pauline said with her economic frown. “It’s not very interesting anyhow, but if you want …”

  But it was. Bloody fascinating, McCloud thought. And having got her edgy approval, he never put it to the test by asking her again.

  Pauline’s father, Dr. Cross, had in her early childhood run a fashionable dental clinic on Sydney’s north shore. He engineered and repaired the teeth of many knights, military, industrial, conservatively political. He fixed the mouths which spoke in boardrooms, and in those days this gave him cachet. On the north shore of Sydney there were always ambitions toward fashion. Though these were under siege from the sun and from the sad fact that in Australia nearly all the riches were nouveaux, they were persistent enough to make Dr. Cross what could be called a “society” dentist.

  Older people who remembered Dr. Cross’s father spoke of how gratified they were that the son had not inherited the father’s problem with drink.

  One day in Pauline’s childhood and McCloud’s, Dr. Cross was filling the teeth of some heavy-engineering knight’s second, younger wife when she gave what he would tell the coroner was “a small gurgle or moan” and collapsed in the chair. He did all the right things, even using compressed oxygen to try to resuscitate her. His nurse had already called for doctors and ambulances. They were some twenty minutes arriving, and it was apparent to him long before that that the woman could not be revived.