Crescent Star

by Nicholas Maes

  Already he was running forward. To approach the roof, they had to pass a window at the top of the stairwell. If Avi hung from the edge of the roof, from a rail that was there to keep them from falling, could he lower himself and pick them off…?

  Pick them off, his fear was saying. There you go with that language again. And what if you fall? It’s a three story drop and if you land on your head….

  Shut up shut up shut up, he shouted back at his fear, as he ducked around a concrete doorway, grabbed the rail, and lowered himself deftly. As if his limbs had rehearsed this maneuver before, his right foot found a purchase on the frame, his left foot steadied his swinging body, and his right arm brought his gun into position. The “terrorists” could only watch in horror as he riddled them with fifty rounds.

  Nerves of cheese!

  “You missed him by a meter!”

  “Did he notice?”

  “Let me look.… No, he’s still smoking. You try, Mahmoud.”

  Moussa frowned as he crouched behind a parked Peugeot. He and some friends were in the old bus station parking lot, just outside the city’s walls. Cars were parked all over the place, many at irregular angles, and the boys were using these as hiding spots. They were armed with slingshots that Amir had constructed, from wire, leather, and heavy elastics. They could hurl a paintball a good fifty meters.

  “Go on. You can do it,” Amir said.

  “Just don’t let him see you,” Abdul added.

  “There!” Mahmoud cried, releasing the pouch with a twang.

  “Did you hit him?” Amir asked.

  “It seems unlikely. He’s still smoking and looking up at the clouds.”

  “Maybe he’s in love,” Abdul suggested.

  “Then we’ll bring him to his senses,” Amir sneered. “Here, let me try.”

  Anxious to enjoy their first day of vacation, the friends had met by Moussa’s stall and wandered the quarter with their weapons in hand. At first they’d contented themselves with walls and doors: it had been fun to watch the paintballs hit a surface and leave a bright red mark behind. Amir had suggested they use paintballs and not stones because the capsules would be more accurate — and annoying. As an afterthought he’d added that they wouldn’t hurt people

  “Okay, I have him in my sights. I’m just verifying the wind resistance.”

  “The wind resistance,” Mahmoud joked. “He thinks he’s a sniper.”

  From walls and doors they’d graduated to more difficult targets. Moving into the Jewish quarter, they shot at flowerpots and panes of glass. They marked up cars and hanging sheets, and shot into any open window they saw, laughing at the thought of the mess they were making. “It serves them right,” they kept repeating, as they fired into kitchens, bedrooms, and studies.

  Moussa hadn’t fired that much. It didn’t bother him much to mark a door or wall, or stuff that could be cleaned without too much bother. Breaking things was a different matter, as was marking furniture with the crimson dye. As his friends laughed raucously about how the Jews would be scrubbing for the next three months, there was acid in their voices; it was absent from his. He also deliberately missed his targets, claiming he wasn’t much good with a slingshot. His friends weren’t exactly angry with him — anger was something they reserved for Israelis — but they did seem disappointed.

  At one point they came across a dog and his owner. Amir hit the dog on its flank, causing it to yelp a little. While his friends laughed at the scarlet stain, Moussa complained that the dog was harmless and it didn’t seem fair to attack it like that. Amir turned on him, snarling that the Jews had shot plenty of Arabs with bullets and not plastic capsules, and he didn’t give a damn about some Jewish dog. The others agreed with him, mentioning friends who’d suffered because of the Jews. In their anger they might have started swearing at Moussa but, thankfully, the owner had spied them just then. Ordering them to stay where they were, he had taken out a cellphone and called the police. The four of them had rushed off and wound up in the old bus station, opposite a rampart where a guard was smoking. A Jewish guard.

  “Ready. Steady. Fire!” Amir murmured, releasing the elastics with a look of satisfaction.

  “Status report?” Mahmoud asked, like a soldier in some action thriller.

  “The target is not neutralized,” Amir joked bitterly. “Gunner Moussa, would you care to try your luck?”

  “What’s the point?” Mahmoud sneered. “His heart isn’t in it.”

  “He has disgraced our sniper team,” Abdul added, in a tone that said he was only half-joking.

  For some reason their words touched a raw nerve. Why didn’t he feel the same rage as them? Had his family been treated any better than theirs? Wasn’t his father rotting in jail? Hadn’t relatives been kept from the wedding? Hadn’t his jadda been treated like dirt? What gave him the right to remain free of anger? Why was he behaving like an overgrown child when the man he would become was pleading to take over…?

  Did he feel angry? Yes, no … it was hard to say. But what difference did it make? Whether he felt it or not, he could still take action.

  Shoving Mahmoud to one side, Moussa placed a paintball in the pouch of his slingshot. He’d noted that the weapon pulled a bit to the right, so he compensated by aiming a bit to the left. There was a breeze from the south, which he also had to consider. While his mind was calm and analytic, a fire flowed from his gut into his hands, allowing him extend the elastic further. The slingshot whistled like a bird of prey as the paintball hurried forth to work its business.

  “Bull’s eye! What a shot!” Amir murmured in triumph.

  “You hit his neck,” Mahmoud crowed. “He’s rubbing it and … look, he’s studying the dye.”

  “He thinks he’s bleeding,” Abdul said with a laugh.

  Moussa was grinning. The target had been neutralized and his honour had been saved.

  Avi was home. He was passing Dan’s room. His brother was busy taking a shower, so he crossed the threshold and surveyed the room quickly. He spied what he was looking for: the M-16 stood over in the closet.

  Avi hefted it. After carrying a paintball gun for six long hours, the M-16 didn’t seem so heavy. He approached a window and held the rifle to his shoulder. He scanned the street and saw someone in the distance, a guy of maybe twenty, talking on a cellphone. He set him in his sights.

  Could he do it? If an officer said this man was dangerous and ordered him to take him out, could he do it? Could he pull the trigger?

  He forced himself to complete the picture. A deafening crack. The gun’s recoil. The man glancing upwards with a look of shock, unable to believe he’d been shot through the heart. His fall to earth gurgling and with a red-soaked shirt. His last frantic gasps, a final shudder, his mother’s anguish when she heard the news, his empty chair at the family table, and his tomb a reproach to the bastard who’d killed him….

  Avi lowered the gun. He put it in the closet. It was only with a very great effort that he kept himself from puking all over.

  His nerves were still of cheese, not steel.

  Moussa was standing on the family’s roof. He held his slingshot and a paintball capsule. A pigeon was roosting on a roof five meters off. It was sitting still and made an easy target.

  He raised his slingshot and placed the paintball in its pouch. He drew back the elastic and steadied his aim, compensating again for the weapon’s pull. He then forced himself to complete the picture. The elastic would snap forward and send the paintball hurtling. The bird would pitch a meter in the air and instinctively attempt to fly away, unaware its wing had been severed and blood was pouring from a gaping wound. With a stunned, near comical look it would slip from the roof to the street below. There it would shake for a couple more minutes until death, out of kindness, released its soul….

  He lowered the slingshot and tossed it aside. It
was only with a very great effort that he kept himself from puking.

  If men carry tanks where they store their anger, much like tanks on the typical car, the needle measuring the rage in his tank was still pointing straight to zero.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Moussa could think of nothing but soccer. All day he and his friends had discussed the World Cup playoffs, debating who they thought was most likely to win. Germany had beaten Sweden two days earlier, Argentina had dashed Mexico’s hopes, England had eased Ecuador out, and Portugal had crushed the Dutch. There were three more games scheduled that day; Italy and Australia would be playing soon. As he wandered back to their market stall, having delivered all of his orders, he hoped Ahmed would agree to close early and hurry home to watch the match on TV. His excitement was so out of control that he almost hit a cat with his cart. Looking up from a discarded sandwich, the cat eyed him angrily and vanished down an alley.

  Drawing near the stall, Moussa saw that Ahmed had taken out a radio and was listening intently. Three more people were listening in: Mustafa from the stall next door, two strangers, and, much to Moussa’s amazement, Wasiim, the guardian of the mysterious doorway several buildings down the road. Moussa grinned: the Italy-Australia match had started. Looking at the men who were hanging on the broadcast, he imagined the fans across the globe who’d stopped their routines to tune into the broadcast: this was the magic of soccer. No matter who you were, whether rich or poor, Muslim or Jewish, the game offered something for everyone. It was the great equalizer.

  He called to his brother from a short ways off. Ahmed motioned brusquely. The gesture wasn’t like his brother and suggested that something else was up.

  “Is something wrong?” Moussa asked, joining the group.

  “We’ve killed two soldiers in Gaza,” one man spoke. He was dressed in a yellow, short-sleeved shirt, had a chain around his neck, and stank of cologne. He looked very pleased but, at the same time, uncertain.

  “We’ve kidnapped another,” the second stranger said, a wrinkled gentleman in a jacket and keffiyeh. “The Israelis are fuming but it serves them right, considering they murdered the Ghaliya family.”

  “Hamas will teach them,” Mustafa spoke up. He seemed nervous, the way he kept looking sideways, as if expecting to be pounced on at any moment. “Those guys are fearless and will burn the Jews’ fingers.”

  “I thought you hated them,” Ahmed asked, eyeing him sideways. “Last year, when they captured Gaza, you were raining curses on them for firing on Fatah. And you said you’d never bow to their sharia law.”

  “Look, I have problems with Hamas. But they’re hammering the Jews, so how bad can they be?”

  “My enemy’s enemy …” Wasiim said quietly. Moussa discreetly glanced at him, taking in his rolling fat, sallow skin, and thinning hair — patches of dandruff covered most of his skull. The worst part was his eyes: they were very dark and very moist and had black, puffy pouches hanging beneath them. It would be hard to face such eyes directly: they projected a near unbearable sadness. His station by the doorway day and night, through summer and winter, would drive any man crazy. Still, for all his ugliness, his voice was deep and reassuring.

  “This won’t be good for business,” the guy in yellow observed.“The Jews will open fire, people will riot, and again the tourists will keep their distance.”

  As if to prove this point, there was a rush of motion at the top of the road. Rounding a bend some fifty metres distant, a knot of heavily armed soldiers appeared. There were lots of them and they were marching swiftly; they had a no-nonsense air that forced pedestrians to step aside. A number of merchants were packing up their wares, just in case the scene turned violent.

  Once they had passed the stall, the man in yellow spat. The four men started their discussion again: how quickly would the Jews open fire in Gaza and how aggressively would Hamas respond? Their voices were rough, impatient, and inflamed as they expressed how each would like to deal with the Israelis. Hearing their anger but unable to reflect it, Moussa felt himself contracting — and a moment ago he’d been so cheerful! He had to escape their collective rage before they discovered that his own anger was sleeping.

  Then it hit him: if Wasiim was standing in front of the stall, who was watching over his doorway…?

  He snuck away from the group, keeping an eye on Wasiim. He was so engrossed with the talk around him that didn’t notice as Moussa crept off. Moussa rounded a narrow bend; safely out of sight he started running full tilt to increase his lead time over Wasiim, and praying that the “guardian” had forgotten to lock up. There, the doorway was visible and….

  It was yawning wide open!

  He slid up to it, panting slightly. Determining the coast was clear, he inhaled deeply and crossed the threshold. He grinned as he imagined himself solving the mystery and describing to his friends the stuff cluttering the space beyond: mouldering produce, pots and pans, old TV sets, and half-broken souvenirs.

  The space inside was lit by a single bulb — it couldn’t have been stronger than thirty watts — and it took him a minute to adjust to the shadows. He was expecting a dank, dusty room but the air was dry and nicely chilled. There was a faint smell; it was sweetish, yes, and only slightly unpleasant.

  The space itself was bare. There was no furniture, no stock, no register, nothing. The walls displayed no shelving but…. How odd: they were covered in shirts. Was he mistaken? No, they were certainly shirts, hundreds of them. So that was the great mystery? Wasiim was in the clothing business?

  He was about to turn away when he started thinking. If Wasiim was in the clothing business, why didn’t he exhibit his wares outside instead of storing them in the dark like this? And where did he keep his extra stock? And, was it his imagination, were these shirts secondhand? He leaned in closer. Yes. How weird. The shirts were ripped, torn, and tattered, some of them beyond all hope of repair. And some of them were horribly stained — no, all of them were, without a single exception: each exhibited gross red blotches that….

  He sprung back in horror and practically retched. It was blood! Each shirt was steeped in blood. Their former owners must have met with violence, gunshots by the look of it, and maybe worse. Who … what…?

  He shivered as the truth struck home: this wasn’t a store; it was a shrine. The space was dedicated to the sad, sad souls who’d been shot by the Israelis or blown up by their missiles. Wasiim had somehow acquired their shirts and tacked them to his walls to do these poor ghosts justice.

  Moussa viewed the shirts with respect, sorrow, and mounting horror. He couldn’t catch his breath. The space paraded too much tragedy and sadness and it was squeezing the air from his lungs. His feet were carrying him backwards. He couldn’t take it in all at once: the bloodshed, the suffering, the courage, the folly. And the anger. The shredded fabric with its rosy stains conveyed, even in death, a rage so grim and deadly that it was practically setting the walls on fire, causing the earth to tremble.

  He started. The shirts, they were moving! Despite the tacks fixing them in place, the T-shirts were shuddering as if still reeling from the volley of shots; the dress shirts, too, were reaching out with their sleeves as if to touch him and prove the extent of their wounds. “Look! Look!” they seemed to be saying. “Do you see what we have suffered? Do you see what we have given and what was taken from us?” They were closing in on him, one and all. The holes and tears and lurid stains were, above all else, an accusation. The shirts were accusing him. What did they want?

  As if he didn’t know.

  “I understand,” he gasped, fighting back his tears. When still they shook and shuddered and flinched, he practically shouted: “I’ll do it! I’ll fight. I won’t let you down.”

  He turned and fled. Running as fast as he could back home, he expelled the room’s foul fumes from his lungs and kept blinking to clear his eyes of its horrors.


  But wherever he looked, he was confronted with blood.

  He was on the roof. He had the slingshot in hand. A short distance off a pigeon was roosting. He slipped a paintball in the pouch. Drawing the elastics, he took aim. Moments later the bird fluttered slightly as the paintball struck it full in the chest, passing through its fragile body.

  The bird heaved a couple of times then stopped. It had been graced with life and now this blessing was gone. But Moussa too had been transformed. He had been innocent once; he was no longer. Who was he to be innocent? Why should he be free of rage?

  If that bird had been a Jewish soldier? If the slingshot were a gun? If he’d been told a Jew had fired on his brothers, even if only to protect his own? Could he squeeze the trigger? Could he take human life?

  A feather blew towards him and he smiled grimly.

  Chapter Twenty

  Avi rushed off from Ilan’s place, where they’d been watching the England-Portugal game. The match was only halfway done and so far neither side had scored, but his mother had called and told him to go home. Dan had contracted some sort of bug and was lying in bed, sick as a dog. She had some ministry papers to drop off and didn’t like the idea of leaving Dan home alone. She wasn’t normally the coddling type, so Avi knew he should get home quickly.

  In some ways it was lucky Dan had taken ill. The Gaza campaign had entered its fourth day and the situation was looking bleak. During commercial breaks for the England match, Ilan had switched to the Israeli news, opening a window on a very different world. Instead of a stadium with emerald grass and cheering fans, they’d been faced with scenes of ruination. Hamas was launching missiles from all over and that meant there were tons of possible targets: apartment blocks, offices, stores, schools, markets, mosques. The air force was trying to keep casualties to a minimum, but even so it had hammered the region and the effects were really starting to show. There was smoke everywhere and burnt out cars on the roads. Gaping craters appeared at random: the aftermath of missile strikes and constant bombing. The earth looked like it had been set on fire. An electrical station had been pounded flat: its metal frame was broken and its complex guts had been blown to hell. And the people. The women were either crazed with grief or screaming words of hatred and rage. The men were either rescuing victims or opening fire on the Israelis.