The Attack
Page 12
Her fingers squeeze mine, hard and tight.
“What I’m trying to say is simple, Amin. It’s no good expecting the worst; it’ll always surprise us. And if we’re unlucky and we have to hit bottom, it’s up to us, and to us alone, whether we stay down there or climb back up. But you have to know where to put your feet. It’s very easy to slip. Move too fast, and you wind up back in the ditch. But is that the end of the world? I don’t think so. Once you resign yourself, you’re back on top.”
There’s a screeching of brakes as a car pulls up outside the apartment building. Doors slam, and the sound of footsteps drowns out the insects. Someone knocks on the door and then rings the bell. Kim opens the door to find the police, accompanied by the neighbor from apartment 38. The officer is a blond-haired man of a certain age, frail and courteous. Three agents are with him, all of them armed to the teeth. He apologizes for disturbing us and asks to see our papers. Closely followed by the policeman, we go to our respective rooms to get the documents in question.
The officer checks our identity cards and our professional IDs, lingering over mine. Then he says, “You’re an Israeli citizen, Mr. Jaafari?”
“Do you have a problem with that?”
Irritated by my question, he looks me up and down, gives us back our papers, and addresses Kim: “You’re Benjamin Yehuda’s sister, ma’am?”
“Yes.”
“Your brother’s an old acquaintance of mine. Hasn’t he come back from the United States yet?”
“He’s in Tel Aviv. Preparing for a forum.”
“That’s right, I forgot. I’ve been told he had an operation recently. I hope he’s feeling better now.”
“Officer, my brother’s never set foot in an operating room.”
He nods, salutes her, and signs to his men to follow him outside. Before closing the door, we hear the neighbor from 38 declare that Benjamin never said anything to him about any sister. The car doors slam again, and the police vehicle pulls off with tires squealing.
“Confidence reigns,” I say to Kim.
“And how!” she agrees, walking back to the table.
* * *
I don’t close my eyes all night. Sometimes staring at the ceiling hard enough to crack it, sometimes sucking on the umpteenth cigarette, I chew over Kim’s words until I’ve had enough of them, but I never find their taste. Kim doesn’t understand me, and—what’s worse—I’m not any farther along in that field of knowledge than she is. Nevertheless, I refuse to put up with any more lectures. The only thing I want to hear is what’s already in my head, dragging me willy-nilly toward the only tunnel that offers a glimmer of light now that all the other exits are closed.
In the morning, very early, I sneak out of the flat while Kim’s still sleeping, jump into a taxi, and head for Bethlehem. The Grand Mosque is nearly deserted. One of the faithful, occupied with ordering the books in a makeshift library, can’t catch me in time. I dash across the prayer hall, lift the curtain behind the minbar, and burst into a plain, unadorned room, where a young man dressed in a white kamis and wearing a cap is reading the Qur’an. He’s sitting cross-legged on a cushion in front of a low table. The assistant charges in behind me and grabs my shoulder; I push him away and confront the imam. Though he’s clearly outraged by my intrusion, he tells his disciple to return to his post. The man grumbles and withdraws. The imam closes his book and glares at me angrily.
“This isn’t a barn,” he says.
“I’m sorry, but it was the only way to see you.”
“That’s not a reason.”
“I need to speak with you.”
“On what subject?”
“I’m Dr.—”
“I know who you are. I’m the one who gave the order to keep you away from the mosque. I don’t know what you hope to find in Bethlehem, and I don’t think your presence in our community is a good idea.”
He places the Qur’an on a tiny stand and rises to his feet. He’s small and ascetic, but his being vibrates with boundless energy and resolve.
His impressively black eyes weigh on mine.
He says, “You’re not welcome among us, Dr. Jaafari. Nor do you have the right to enter this sanctuary without performing the proper ablutions and without taking off your shoes.” As he adds this last bit, he wipes the corners of his mouth with one finger. “Even though you’re losing your mind, you might at least retain some semblance of decency. This is a place of prayer. And we know that you’re a recalcitrant believer—practically a renegade—that you don’t follow the path of your ancestors nor conform to their principles, and that you have long since dissociated yourself from their Cause by opting for another nationality. Am I mistaken?”
His response to my silence is a grimace, heavy with disdain. Then he declares in a sententious voice, “In that case, I fail to see what we can talk about.”
“About my wife!”
“She’s dead,” he replies coldly.
“But I haven’t mourned for her yet.”
“That’s your problem, Doctor.”
The curtness of his tone, together with his summary manner, unsettles me. I can’t believe that a man thought to be so close to God can be so far from men, so insensitive to their distress.
“I don’t like the way you talk to me.”
“There’s a vast number of things you don’t like, Doctor, but in my opinion, that fact does not exempt you from anything at all. I don’t know who had charge of your education, but of one thing I’m certain: You went to the wrong school. Furthermore, nothing authorizes you to put on this air of outrage or to place yourself above ordinary mortals—not your social success, and not your wife’s brave deed, which, by the way, doesn’t raise you a whit in our esteem. To me, you’re nothing but a poor orphan, without faith and without salvation, wandering around like a sleepwalker in broad daylight. Even if you could walk on water, you couldn’t erase the insult that you represent. For the real bastard isn’t the man who doesn’t know his father; it’s the man who doesn’t know his tradition. Of all the black sheep, he’s the most to be pitied and the least to be lamented.”
He sizes me up as though trying to decide where to bite me. “Now go away,” he says. “You bring the evil eye upon our dwelling place.”
“I forbid you—”
“Get out!”
He stretches out his arm like a blade, pointing to the curtain.
“One more thing, Doctor. Remember, the margin between assimilation and disintegration is quite narrow. There’s not much room for maneuver.”
“You’re a crackpot!” I cry.
“I am enlightened,” he replies, correcting me.
“You think you’ve been charged with a divine mission.”
“Every brave man is charged with one. The man who isn’t is only conceited, selfish, and unjust.”
He claps his hands. His disciple, who has clearly been listening at the door, comes in and seizes me by the shoulder again. I push him away violently and turn back to the imam. “I’m not leaving Bethlehem before I talk to a leader of your movement.”
“Please get out of my house,” he says, picking up his Qur’an from its stand.
He sits back down on his cushion and acts as though I’m no longer here.
* * *
Kim calls me on my mobile phone. She’s quite exercised about the way I gave her the slip. By way of making it up to her, I agree to let her join me in Bethlehem and arrange to meet her in a service station at the entrance to the town. From there, we go to my foster sister’s house.
Leila has yet to recover from her most recent relapse. Convinced that the imam’s men are going to be watching the house, Kim and I remain at her bedside. Yasser joins us a little later. He finds Kim in the act of caring for his wife and doesn’t try to find out whether she’s a friend of mine or a physician making an emergency call. Yasser and I go into another room for a chat. By way of preventing me from spoiling his day, he enumerates at some length the dangers threatening his press and deplore
s his mounting debts and the way his creditors are blackmailing him. I listen to him until he runs out of breath and it’s my turn. I tell him about my brief interview with the imam. Yasser contents himself with shaking his chin, while a deep wrinkle forms on his forehead. He’s too prudent to risk any comment, but he’s gravely disturbed to hear about the imam’s attitude toward me.
It’s evening now, and since nothing or nobody has turned up, I decide to go back to the mosque. Two men jump me in an alleyway. The first one grabs me by the collar and kicks my feet out from under me; the second rams his knee into my hip before I hit the ground. I wedge my injured wrist into my armpit, cover my face with my arms, and curl up to protect myself from the blows raining down on me from every side. In between kicks and punches, the two promise to lynch me on the spot if they find me prowling around these parts again. I try to get up or drag myself into a doorway; they haul me by my ankles into the middle of the street and flail away at my back and my legs. The few rubbernecks who appear beat an immediate retreat, leaving me to the fury of my attackers. In the midst of contortions and outcries, something explodes in my head, and I lose consciousness. . . .
When I come to, I’m surrounded by a bunch of little kids. One of them asks whether I’m dead; another replies that I’m probably drunk. When I sit up, they all jump back and run away from me.
Night has fallen. I stagger along, leaning on walls, with wobbly knees and a loud buzz in my head. I have to perform several acrobatic feats before I can reach my brother-in-law’s house.
“My God!” Kim screams.
Aided by Yasser, she places me on a padded bench and starts unbuttoning my shirt. She’s relieved when she discovers only cuts and bruises; my body bears no wound from blade or firearm. After giving me first aid, she picks up the telephone to call the police, causing Yasser to suffer what looks like a heart attack. I tell Kim that calling the cops is out of the question; I have no intention of backing off, especially after the thrashing I’ve just received. She protests, calls me a madman, and begs me to go back to Jerusalem with her at once. I categorically refuse to leave Bethlehem. Kim sees that I’m totally blinded by hatred, and that nothing will make me give up my fixed purpose.
The next day, aching all over and dragging one foot, I go back to the mosque. No one comes to throw me out. Some of the faithful, seeing that I don’t rise for the prayer, assume that I’m a mental defective.
In the evening, a caller telephones Yasser’s house to say that someone will come to pick me up in half an hour. Kim warns me that it’s surely a trap; I say I don’t care. I’m tired of defying the devil and getting nothing but a few blows in return; I want to see him whole, even if doing so means I have to suffer for the rest of my life.
To begin with, a young boy comes to fetch me at Yasser’s. He asks me to follow him to the square, where a teenager takes charge of me. This lad leads me on a long walk through a working-class suburb plunged in darkness; I suspect he’s going in circles in order to throw me off. At last, we reach a rickety little shop. A man is waiting for us, standing beside a metal shutter pulled halfway down. He dismisses the teenager and invites me to follow him inside the building. At the end of a corridor littered with empty crates and burst cartons, I’m turned over to a second man. He and I cross a small courtyard and step into a poorly lighted patio. We enter a bare room, where he asks me to undress and change into a jogging outfit and a pair of new espadrilles. He explains that these are security measures taken in case the Shin Bet have planted a bug on me, a transmitter that could identify my exact position at any given moment. The man also uses this opportunity to make sure I’m not wearing a wire or any other sort of gadget. An hour later, a small van comes to pick me up. I’m blindfolded and made to lie down on the floor of the van. After many turnings, we come to a stop and I hear a door or gate creak and then slam shut behind the vehicle. A dog begins to bark, only to be silenced at once by a few gruff words. Arms lift me out of the van, hands remove my blindfold. I’m in a large courtyard, at one end of which motionless armed silhouettes are standing. For a moment, a prickly chill runs down my spine, and suddenly I’m afraid; I feel I’ve been caught like a rat in a trap.
The driver of the van seizes my elbow and pushes me toward a house on my right. He doesn’t accompany me very far. A tall fellow who looks like a circus strongman ushers me into a drawing room covered with a deep-pile carpet, where a young man in a black kamis with embroidered collar and sleeves opens his arms to receive me. “Brother Amin, it’s a privilege to welcome you to my humble dwelling,” he says with a slight Lebanese accent.
His face tells me nothing. I don’t think I’ve seen or met him before. He’s a handsome man, with bright eyes and fine features spoiled by a mustache too thick to be real; he can’t be more than thirty.
He comes up to me and embraces me, patting my back in the mujahideen way.
“Brother Amin, my friend, my destiny. You cannot imagine how honored I am.”
I figure it’s no use reminding him of the great thumping his gorillas gave me last night.
“Come,” he says, taking my hand. “Have a seat.”
I stare at the colossus standing guard beside the door. With an imperceptible nod, my host dismisses him.
“I’m very sorry about yesterday,” he declares, “but you have to admit you asked for it, in a way.”
“If that’s the price to pay for a meeting with you, I find the charge rather high.”
He laughs.
“Others before you have not gotten off so cheaply,” he confides to me with a hint of arrogance. “We’re going through a period when nothing can be left to chance. The slightest laxity, and everything could come crashing down.”
He hikes up the skirts of his kamis and sits down cross-legged upon a mat.
“Your loss moves me to the bottom of my soul, brother Amin. As God is my witness, I am suffering as much as you.”
“I doubt it. These are things that can’t be shared equally.”
“I, too, have lost loved ones.”
“I haven’t suffered their loss as you have.”
He presses his lips together. “I see.”
“I’m not here on a courtesy call,” I say to him.
“I know. What can I do for you?”
“My wife is dead. But before she went and blew herself up in the middle of a bunch of schoolchildren, she came to this town to meet her mentor.” As I speak, rage floods over me like a dark, uncontainable tide, and I add, “It makes me very angry to think that she preferred a set of fundamentalists to me. And my anger doubles when I consider how I was taken in. I admit I’m more furious about not having seen anything coming than I am about all the rest. My wife was an Islamist? Since when, pray tell? I can’t get this through my head. She was a woman of her time. She liked to travel, she liked to swim, she liked sipping her lemonade on the terraces outside the shops, and she was too proud of her hair to hide it under a head scarf. What tales did you tell her? How did you make a monster, a terrorist, a suicidal fundamentalist out of a woman who couldn’t bear to hear a puppy whine?”
He’s disappointed. His charm offensive, which he must have worked on for hours before receiving my visit, seems to be foundering. This isn’t the reaction he expected. He was hoping I’d be so impressed by all the fantastic rigmarole I had to go through to get here, including my consensual “kidnapping,” that I’d be put in a weak position. I myself don’t understand where this aggressive insolence of mine is coming from. It makes my hands shake, but it doesn’t crack my voice; it makes my heart beat faster, but it doesn’t bend my knees. Caught in a vise between the precariousness of my situation and the rage aroused in me by my host’s haughty zeal and tacky costume, I choose the reckless option. I need to show this operetta chieftain in no uncertain terms that I’m not afraid of him. I need to throw in his face the loathing and the venom that fanatics of his kind produce in me.
For a long time, the commander kneads his fingers, unsure of where to start.
“You can put it wherever you please.”
His face turns red. “I beg you to refrain from crudeness. I will not tolerate it. Particularly when it comes from the mouth of an eminent surgeon. I have agreed to receive you for one simple reason: so that I can explain to you, once and for all, why making a spectacle of yourself in our town is an exercise in futility. There’s nothing for you here. You wanted to meet a leader of our movement. Well, the thing is done. Now you’re going to go back to Tel Aviv and put this interview behind you. I wish to tell you, furthermore, that I did not personally know your wife. She was not acting under our banner, but we appreciate what she did.”
He lifts his burning eyes to mine. “And one last remark, Doctor. By dint of trying to resemble your adopted brothers, you’ve lost all discernment when it comes to your own. An Islamist is a political activist. He has but one ambition: to establish a theocratic state in his country and take full advantage of its sovereignty and its independence. A fundamentalist is an extremist jihadi. He believes neither in the sovereignty of Muslim states nor in their autonomy. In his view, these are vassal states that will be called upon to dissolve themselves and form the one, sole Caliphate. The fundamentalist dreams of a single, indivisible umma, the great Muslim community that will extend from Indonesia to Morocco, and which, if it cannot convert the West to Islam, will subjugate or destroy it. We’re not Islamists, Dr. Jaafari, and we’re not fundamentalists, either. We are only the children of a ravaged, despised people, fighting with whatever means we can to recover our homeland and our dignity. Nothing more, nothing less.”