by Alan Gold
Naamah stretched her long neck in a manner so sensual that Ahimaaz felt his groin stir.
“But it’s not true,” Ahimaaz said in a whisper.
Again Naamah smiled condescendingly. “But it will be true. Once whispered and said, words can easily become truth. I know my husband. It’s me, always me, that he returns to when his shoulders need rubbing with oils and when his mind needs distraction from the weight of being king. And that’s when he’ll begin to question just why Abia is away from the palace and why Azariah is sending messengers to strange places, and why nothing is being done to build his temple . . .”
Ahimaaz looked at the queen as if confused, but he understood clearly and plainly.
“Join me and you will understand. And in your learning, you will come to appreciate much about leadership. Stay with me and I will teach you how to destroy your enemies without raising a finger. Support me and you will be the most powerful priest in the whole world.”
* * *
October 18, 2007
SECURELY TETHERED by tempered steel handcuffs, Bilal was a prisoner of the bed, the room, the hospital, and the nation. On the second day after his operation, he’d slept much of the night and woken up groggy and in pain, but as the morning dawned, the pain lessened under the effect of the morphine drip and the painkillers he was given, and his mind was clearer because he no longer needed to press the drip as often.
He remembered everything from the time when he left the imam’s home to the time when he made the shahid video in the bomb-maker’s basement, his explanation to the world of why he was becoming a martyr. He remembered being driven very early in the morning through darkness, with no car headlights, to a point in the floor of the valley where he could access David’s tunnel once he’d dealt with the guard. He thought he could remember climbing the tunnel after he’d slit the guard’s throat, but after that, nothing was clear until the Jew doctor was checking his wounds on the day of his operation. It was a blank, an absent memory, a hole in his mind; try as he might, he couldn’t remember leaving the tunnel—or anything else—until waking up in the hospital. All he had were the dreams, some vivid, some indistinct, which had floated through his mind when he was drifting in and out of consciousness.
Bilal knew that he would soon leave this room, this hospital, and be transferred to a prison. At least there he’d be among his own tribe, among Palestinians; in prison he’d be a hero—a hero like his brother; a man of position because he’d brought freedom and prosperity to his land. People would come to his cell and pay their respects, ask him to tell them how he’d carried out the daring and amazing plot to kill so many Jews. But try as he might, he couldn’t remember.
The door to his room suddenly opened, and in walked a tall, lean man in an expensive suit, wearing a white shirt without a tie and open at the neck. On the back of his head he wore the skullcap of the religious Jew. Bilal looked at him in surprise and suspicion. But it was his hair that was unusual. There was a thin streak of white hair. Bilal had seen him before.
As though he owned the place, the man walked over to the bed, pulled up a chair, and sat down. “Hello, Bilal. My name is Eliahu,” the man said in flawless Arabic, though with a Jewish accent. “I’m with the Israeli government. I’ve come to talk to you about what you did. But before we get down to details, are you comfortable? Is there anything you want? Food, water? Would you like your parents to visit you? I can arrange all those things.”
The man’s smile belied the coldness in his eyes. Bilal had seen that coldness before.
“I won’t talk with you. Leave here. You’ll get nothing out of me, Jew!” he said, repeating words he’d practiced a thousand times.
Eliahu smiled. “Bilal, you were shot and wounded committing a terrorist act. I don’t need anything from you to have you sent to prison for life. But if you cooperate, life could be made a lot easier for you and your family. Help us, and I can help you. All you have to do is tell me what you know.”
“Fuck off. You’re a thief. You’re a criminal. I’m a mujahideen. I fight for the freedom of my people. I’m a warrior for Allah, and you and your—”
“Cut the crap, Bilal.”
Startled by the blunt response, Bilal stopped talking.
“I’ve heard it a thousand times, and it doesn’t impress,” Eliahu said. “Now, if you want to wallow in slime for the rest of your life, getting raped by lifers and being the girlfriend of really nasty prisoners, then stay quiet. If you want to make life easier, with visits from your parents, maybe even an early release date from a halfway decent prison, just answer a few simple questions. Okay?”
And then a curtain was raised in his mind. The man’s movement, his gestures, were vaguely familiar. Bilal looked at his face, his hair, and suddenly was shocked by the memory, no longer distant. Through a window, a gap in the curtains.
The man removed his skullcap to scratch his head, just as he’d done when he was sitting in the front room of the house in the village. The recollection, once vague, indistinct, suddenly became vivid and present. And terrifying. This was the man sitting with his imam. But how? He was with the Israeli government. Why?
Bilal remembered the phone. A gift from his friend Hassan, a phone he’d pickpocketed that day from a Jew. A new phone, a smartphone. He remembered returning to the car after speaking to the pretty girl. He had taken her number and keyed it into the phone’s address book. The device had a video camera and he recorded her smiling at him. She was shy but she didn’t stop him. He recorded her a second time, giving him her name and telephone number. She giggled in shyness, but he could see in her eyes that she wanted more.
Walking back to the car, he had played the video of the girl back to himself. It was the first time he’d owned such a camera phone. He pressed RECORD again and enjoyed the way the colors of the streetlights blurred and flared in the darkness. He lifted the camera up and saw the glow in the crack of curtains covering the window in the small house where the imam materialized on the screen. Like the photographer on Candid Camera, he’d hidden outside the house, taking a video of what was happening inside.
Later he had shown the video of the girl to his friend Hassan to prove he wasn’t making it up. Then they watched the video of the house, laughing at the man inside the window with the white streak of hair. Hassan said it looked like a skunk, ridiculing the old Jew in the hat with the ringlets of hair.
Now the man was beside his bed. Bilal was chained and it was impossible for him to move.
Was this man here to kill him? His mind was in turmoil. Looking at him, Bilal was terrified. Was this Malak al-Maut, the Angel of Death? Was this man here to put an end to his life? Was he suddenly going to take out a blade and slash his throat, just as Bilal himself had killed the Jew guard? Would he die a coward and not a shahid, die chained like an animal to the bed?
Confused, terrified, Bilal closed his eyes and began to pray. He held his breath, waiting for the agony before the ecstasy. But not being a martyr, how could he be taken up into heaven? O, Allah the Compassionate, he thought, where is my imam when I need guidance?
“Bilal? What’s wrong with you, boy?” asked Eliahu, a mix of suspicion and annoyance creeping into his voice.
Eliahu Spitzer put his hand on Bilal’s arm, but Bilal reacted with a shudder and tried to pull his arm away, only to be restrained by the handcuffs.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Bilal.”
But Bilal wouldn’t open his eyes. Instead they remained tightly squeezed shut. Only his lips were moving in silent but heartfelt prayer.
“Either you can talk to me here in safety or we can talk in the prison. And let me assure you that if your brothers in jail learn that you’re talking to Shin Bet, your life won’t be worth a cracker,” said Eliahu.
Still Bilal refused to open his eyes. Still his face remained a mask of pain, as though a knife had already been stuck into his guts and was being twisted by the man sitting beside his bed. He wouldn’t say a word to this man until he’d s
poken with his imam.
Fed up, the Shin Bet agent said softly, “Okay, kid, have it your way.”
Bilal remained stubbornly mute. Eliahu stood and walked toward the door. For the first time since remembering who the man was, Bilal opened his eyes and watched him leave. He looked up at the ceiling, his mind a whirl of confusion and doubt. What was going on? What in the name of Allah and Mohammed and all the angels was happening?
* * *
YAEL TRIED TO MAKE IT a normal postoperative visit, but even as she walked down the corridor of the men’s surgical ward, it was obvious that this patient was very different from all the other patients in the hospital. For starters, how many men who had just been through an operation were given an armed police guard stationed outside, checking the identity of everybody who walked into the room? And how many patients were handcuffed to their bed?
Yael smiled at the policeman, who nodded back. She hesitated before entering the patient’s room, even though she’d already been in there twice during the day to check on him, just in case the policeman wanted to see her ID card. But he immediately returned to his inspection of the corridor and Yael pushed open the door.
Bilal was looking nervously to see who was coming in. When Yael emerged from the doorway her eyes met his and he lay back down and stared at the ceiling, as if to pretend she wasn’t there. Yael walked to his bed, picked up his chart, and read it. His vital signs were good for postoperative recovery, but his blood pressure had risen considerably since the morning. She wondered why. But he seemed to be recovering well from the two operations, one to stitch up his wounds, the second from the surgery on his kidney.
She put down the chart and walked around to his bedside, sitting on a nearby chair.
“So, how are you feeling?” she asked in Arabic.
Bilal looked at her closely, again confused at hearing his language from the mouth of a Jew. It was unnerving and so different from what he’d experienced when he was in the shops and shuks of Jerusalem, where the Israelis were always so gruff and aggressive and suspicious of him, always refusing to speak with him in his own language.
He shrugged, but his right arm, handcuffed to the bed, made the gesture difficult.
“Do you need anything?” she asked.
Again he tried to shrug.
“Are you in pain?”
He said nothing and stared at the ceiling.
The revelation about their shared DNA rang in Yael’s mind like a bell as she looked at the boy, but she couldn’t find the words to frame questions that would give her the answers she sought. Instead she fell back to the instinctual questions of a doctor. “Can I examine your wounds? I want to make sure they’re healing properly.”
Again he made an attempt to shrug. Yael didn’t notice and unwrapped the bandages, first on his leg and then his arm. They didn’t talk, but she could tell that he was scrutinizing her and she felt his hostility. It wasn’t unusual but it was unnerving.
Satisfied that his wounds were healing nicely, she smiled at him. A silent moment passed, an opportunity for Yael to fill it with questions she was anxious to ask. But instead she just remarked, “Your wounds weren’t all that bad. But the angiomyolipoma could have been very serious. I spoke to the renal surgeon and he told me that it was so large, he feared they might have to remove your kidney. But fortunately he was successful in the operation. We just have to monitor your urinary output for a few days to ensure that the left kidney is working properly.”
Bilal frowned. It was obvious that he had no idea what he’d suffered two days previously.
“Has anybody explained why you needed two operations?” she asked.
“Two?” said Bilal in obvious confusion.
Yael realized that nobody had told him, and he probably hadn’t realized he’d been wheeled into surgery a second time while still unconscious from the first. It could have been an oversight on the part of busy nurses, or, more likely, Bilal was simply being ignored because everyone in the hospital knew who he was and what he’d done. Yael told him precisely what had happened in the recovery room and why such an extensive second operation had been necessary.
He looked at her in a mixture of amazement and incredulity but said nothing.
Yael continued on to fill the silence. “You were fantastically lucky you were here when it happened, or you’d have been very seriously ill.”
“You operated on me?”
Hearing something that wasn’t an insult took Yael by surprise. “Not me. Another surgeon, head of renal. He’s very good. He was—”
Bilal cut her off sharply, the details lost on him. “Why? Why did you save me? Why did you stop me from going to paradise?”
“You’re going to prison, Bilal. That’s a very long way from paradise.”
Bilal’s jaw stiffened. “I am not afraid,” he declared with all the bravado he could muster. “The man who came to me this morning, I showed him that I wasn’t afraid.”
“You didn’t succeed, Bilal.” Yael’s tone was remarkably soft and calm. “Your bombs didn’t go off, people were spared, and you didn’t die a martyr.”
Bilal’s eyes narrowed.
“You failed, Bilal.” Yael’s words came not as an accusation but with a tinge of sadness that surprised her as she heard her own voice. She turned to leave. But Bilal’s anger rose behind her and she heard the rattle of metal as he pulled at his handcuffed wrist.
“When I see my brothers in your prison, they will greet me as a hero. They will cheer my name!”
And it was in that moment that Yael realized how naïve she had been and, worse still, how blind Bilal was. He had failed. He had been sent with a task to kill, and in his failure had achieved too little. Yael knew Bilal’s brothers in prison would not offer him the hero’s welcome he expected.
The revelation brought the reason for her visit to her mind and she turned back to the room with images of DNA strands floating in her brain. But before she could formulate questions about where his family was from and who they were, Bilal launched into a spiel.
“You say I failed. Maybe. But behind me come thousands. And they will drive you into the sea. This is not your land. It is my land. You occupy my home, you made my family into refugees, you build giant walls through the middle of our towns, and you kill my people. We live in tents, in dirt, while you live in palaces. But your time is ending!”
Yael looked at him, torn between wanting to tell him the truth and wanting answers. Before her she saw little more than a kid fed a diet of distortions that gave him an identity, a reason to be. There was no point in trying to convince a fanatic he was wrong. For Bilal, just as for many in the West, Israel was a colonizer, an aggressor, an imperialist. But the narrative he’d been taught was simplistic and naïve. Yael, too, had her own recitations. How Palestinians tore up the UN partition plan and seven hundred thousand Jews were expelled from Arab nations and made refugees, all of whom had been absorbed into Israel and become valued citizens. She wanted him to see the hypocrisy of Syria and Egypt championing the Palestinian cause while refusing to give them citizenship, using them as tragic pawns in a twisted game for their own political ends.
But she didn’t.
In that moment, with the young man in front of her, the image of their matching DNA overshadowed politics and culture and she said nothing. Moreover, she thought of the prison that awaited him and the yawning chasm between his expectations and the hard reality he faced.
Her scowl softened and instead she asked a question. “Bilal, do you know where you come from? I mean, where were you born?”
Bilal was caught off guard by the sudden change of topic and answered before he could stop himself. “I am Palestinian,” he declared.
“No, I mean specifically. In what town?”
“I was born outside Nahariya in the north of Israel. We came to Bayt al Gizah when I was two.” Again Bilal answered the question as a prisoner of war might declare his name, rank, and serial number: a kind of badge of honor, proof of his id
entity and purpose.
“Do you know where your father or your father’s father came from?” she asked.
“We are Palestinian!” he declared once again in an elevated voice. “My father’s family lived for thousands of years in Palestine. Why do you want to know, Doctor? Why is this important? You’ve stopped me from going to paradise. Now I’m going to prison. Why do you need to know this?”
She’d already said too much. The last thing she wanted to do was to alert him to the information that was troubling her. So she shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.” She turned and started to walk toward the door.
“I will give you no information. I gave none to the man from the government. You will get nothing out of me, Jew!”
She left his room, but instead of walking away she dallied outside his door for a moment, thinking. The security guard looked at her questioningly. She smiled at him and sneaked a final look inside Bilal’s room. She’d left a boy full of bluff and bluster, mouthing hatred taught to him by older and more malicious people. But now he was lying on his hospital bed, his free arm over his eyes. She was sure he wasn’t, but from the look of him he could have been sobbing.
* * *
THE MUSEUM’S THEATER was big enough to be impressive but small enough to deny anonymity to anyone in the audience. Half a dozen print reporters were sitting in the front rows reading the press release. There were four television cameras in the stages of adjustment for height and focus, positioned at the back of the room. Radio reporters entered en masse and put their microphones on the table; the cords and the mics themselves reminded Yael of the head of a Gorgon.
Yael sat several rows back from the front and behind the reporters, unconsciously putting herself out of their gaze in case it turned her into stone. She never liked the spotlight and even resented speaking at the conferences and seminars that were part and parcel of her job as a surgeon. She wasn’t shy and retiring, and had even received prizes in school for public speaking, but she much preferred working with a small, intimate group in an operating theater. Yet, even sitting behind them, she felt the focus of the reporters on her, probably wondering who this person was.
