Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  I didn’t believe her. I don’t know why, but I didn’t believe her.

  “Well, this is the address that she gave when she was in a refugee camp in Jordan, working as a doctor. Then she fell ill and went back to Spain with her mother.”

  “And who are you?” she asked, without insisting any further that she knew no Eloisa.

  “A friend of a good friend of hers.”

  “Didn’t you tell me that you knew her?” The question was full of irony.

  “No, not exactly.” Señora Ramírez was making me nervous.

  “Right. I’m sorry not to be able to help you, but there is no Eloisa who lives here.”

  At this moment a door opened and a little girl came running in and grabbed the woman’s hand.

  “Grandmother, come on.”

  We looked at each other without saying a word. She with pride, defiant; I in the certainty that I knew she was lying to me.

  “Right, well, I don’t want to bother you, although I don’t know why Eloisa left this address . . . And I especially don’t know why we haven’t heard anything more from her.”

  “I don’t know either, I’m sorry not to be able to help you any further, and now I must ask you to please leave.”

  I still ask myself today where I found the courage to say what I then said.

  “So, that little girl is the daughter of Wädi Ziad and Eloisa. You can’t deny that he’s her father, they look identical.”

  The woman jerked herself upright and told the girl to leave the room.

  “Mari Ángeles, go and play, I’ll be along in a minute.”

  The girl obeyed. The woman and I looked at each other, I didn’t dare say another word.

  “What do you want?”

  “I just want to know what became of Eloisa and the child she was expecting.”

  She opened the door and an elderly man came in. They looked at each other and it was clear they were suffering.

  “I don’t want anything, much less do I want to cause you any problems or trouble. I give you my word.”

  “Who are you?” The man’s dignity and authority did not allow me to avoid the question.

  “My name is Ezekiel Zucker, I am a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Many years ago I was a friend of Wädi Ziad. He asked me to come to Madrid to find out what has happened to Eloisa.”

  “A Jew, friends with a Palestinian, you expect me to believe that?” The man’s voice was indignant.

  “It’s hard to believe, I know, but we were friends a long time ago, when we were children, before the 1948 war. Wädi Ziad only wants to know what happened to Eloisa and . . . well, what happened to his child.”

  “Sit down,” the man ordered me.

  “We don’t have anything to tell you . . . ,” his wife interrupted, but the man gave her such a fierce look that she fell quiet.

  “We can’t hide, and we have no reason to. Listen and tell your friend not to bother us again. My daughter died because of him, and we have suffered enough.”

  I was silent and didn’t know what to say. I was moved to know that the young woman Wädi had loved was now dead.

  “She died giving birth a few weeks after we came back here. She was in her seventh month of pregnancy, it was a miracle that the child was saved,” the woman said, fixing her eyes on me.

  “I’m sorry,” I managed to say.

  “We don’t want to hear anything about this man. He has no rights over the child,” Eloisa’s mother said.

  “She doesn’t bear his name,” the man said.

  “We want the girl to have a normal life, to be happy. Do you think we should send her to a Palestinian refugee camp, to a man who has a wife and children? We would never allow it. Tell your friend that if he really loves Eloisa then he should show it by not condemning her daughter to that fate. The child is happy.”

  “But . . . Well, she’ll want to know who her father is one day,” I said, and felt stupid as soon as I had done so.

  “There’s no reason, we’ll say that we don’t know who he was, that her mother never said.” Eloisa’s mother’s voice was the voice of a defeated woman.

  “Do you think that your friend will leave us in peace?” the man asked.

  “I’ll ask him to,” I promised them, without quite knowing how such an improvised promise could be kept.

  Paula was moved by the story. I said I didn’t know if I should tell Brother Agustín the truth, but she convinced me that it was not my business to make any decision about what future was better for this child. She was right, so when we went back to Jerusalem I looked up the friar and told him what had happened.

  “Eloisa’s parents are influential people, and Wädi cannot prove that he is the girl’s father.”

  I didn’t hear anything else about Wädi until many years later. When I found out more about him, Israel had already signed peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt, and peace negotiations between Israel and the PLO were the order of the day. An Arab boy came to the university and gave me a letter from Brother Agustín, asking me to come see him.

  The friar was now an old man, almost blind and scarcely able to walk, but he had the same energy as always.

  “Wädi wants to see you. He cannot come to Israel, as you know, the Israeli authorities don’t give permission to the refugees to travel, but you can go see him in Amman.”

  I was annoyed that Wädi would take it for granted that I would do what he wanted, just as he had done when we were children.

  Brother Agustín gave me Wädi’s telephone number in Amman.

  “Call him when you get there, the best thing would be to meet at a hotel. It would not be good for a Jew to visit him at his house in the refugee camp.”

  I got really angry this time. As far as I knew, Wädi’s house was in front of the Fortress, near the Royal Palace, and the late King Hussein had transformed it into a refugee camp by building houses there, so I was sure that Wädi would be living in a modest but worthy place; the friar seemed to discern in me a sense of guilt that I was not disposed to feel.

  Once again it was Paula who encouraged me to make the decision. She was ill, the cancer was eating away at her, and the doctors gave her only a few months to live.

  “You have to go, I want to know how your story ends before I die.”

  “What story? I don’t understand . . . I don’t know what Wädi wants from me . . .”

  “Ezekiel, the true homeland for all men is their childhood, and your childhood is inhabited by Wädi and his family, the Ziads. Life has led you to be on opposing sides, and both of you have been loyal to your causes, he knows that and so do you, but not even the fact of facing each other on opposing sides in a war has led you to think of each other as enemies. You are connected by ties that neither he nor you can break, for all that you might try to do so.”

  “I cannot go and leave you alone at this time, just because Wädi wants to see me.”

  “You are afraid that something will happen to me while you are away, but I promise you that I will be well, I’m not even going to think about dying until you tell me what happened in this meeting between the two of you.” Paula spoke with a laugh in her voice, just as she always did when she was speaking of the most important things.

  My son Aaron did not dare get angry with his mother, but he did blame me for being willing to go to Jordan.

  “You’re going to leave mother alone in the hospital . . . And what if something happens to you?”

  “Nothing will happen to me, lots of Israelis go on holiday to see Petra, why shouldn’t I?”

  Aaron said something that hurt me.

  “Do you think we can trust that nothing will happen? Have you forgotten Yuval and Gideon?”

  It was precisely because I could not forget my dead sons that I decided to go. And so I did. My granddaughter Hanna reserved m
e a room in the Intercontinental Hotel. “It’s the safest one, it’s where the diplomats go,” she said. But she did more, she decided to travel with me, even though she knew that her father, my son Aaron, would not approve.

  “Grandfather is old, and needs someone to look after him, and that is what I will do.”

  I waited impatiently in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel. Wädi had promised me that he would come at five o’clock, and it was ten past already. I don’t know how, but I suddenly felt his presence. At the metal detector, a man was emptying his pockets. An old man, like me. Rolling tobacco, a lighter, and a rosary. We looked at each other in recognition and I walked over toward him. When we were very close, both of us paused, not knowing what to do. I held out my hand and he reached out his as well, but then we hugged each other and tried not to burst into tears.

  We looked for a calm corner and spoke, spoke for hours, telling each other what had happened in our lives, bewailing the loss of our sons, remembering our shared childhood.

  “Thank you for looking for Eloisa and for finding my daughter.”

  “It was difficult for me to understand how you could have fallen in love with another woman and how Anisa . . . well, how Anisa could have accepted it.”

  “She couldn’t do anything to stop me. I fell in love with Eloisa from the very first moment I saw her, and knowing that she, too, had fallen in love with me gave me the strength to face anything, although I won’t hide from you that I suffered because I knew I was making Anisa suffer. I didn’t lie to her, I told her the truth and asked her to decide. She decided to stay with me even though I couldn’t promise her what I would do. I wanted the best for Eloisa, and even though she told me that she accepted the situation as it was, I was not happy with our situation. I would have liked it if Anisa had wanted to divorce me, but she didn’t, and I was not brave enough to leave her. We had had four sons and lost three of them. Yes, three Fedayeen, two of them died fighting against Israel and the other one in combat with the Jordanian troops, much to my regret, because my family had always been loyal to the Hashemites.”

  He spoke to me of Eloisa with such passion that it was as if he were seeing her in front of him at that very moment. He told me all he knew about his daughter.

  “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Eloisa’s daughter, but I think that her grandparents are right, I couldn’t offer her anything, and I don’t have the right to ruin her life.”

  After my visit to Madrid, using the information I had given Brother Agustín, Wädi had tried to find out more about what was happening in the life of his daughter, María de los Ángeles de Todos los Santos, as she had been baptized.

  His father, his cousins, his uncles, and three sons all dead fighting against Israel. I had lost my mother, my cousin Yasmin, Mikhail, my two sons . . . But we did not talk about our losses as a reproach against each other, but simply as a sign that peace was absolutely necessary for us.

  Two states, this was the only solution, we decided. Wädi said something else: “It is irony disguised as tragedy for us to have to negotiate for our houses with the very people who stole them. Because that is what you are, thieves who took advantage of the shadows of night to enter our homes and throw us out of them, and who now, with the complicity of the rest of the world, say that we have to negotiate, that if we accept your demands then maybe we can end up sharing a part of what once was ours. But Ezekiel, you know something? If you don’t negotiate, if you don’t accept that Palestine has to exist, then you will lose, it doesn’t matter how long it will take, but you will lose. You know why? Because your weapons will never be strong enough to overcome our determination to get back what is ours, because every stone our children throw at you makes you weaker, because you are no longer David, because you are still alone, because your sufferings in the past cannot obscure our sufferings in the present. But above all, because you have lost your soul.”

  I didn’t contradict him. How could I? You cannot argue with a man who has lost everything, who has nowhere to mourn his dead, and who has had his future taken away from him. As I listened to him I couldn’t stop feeling guilty.

  The night ended when Wädi and I said goodbye to each other in peace. We didn’t promise to see each other again, because at our age you don’t make plans for tomorrow. From that day on, he has called me every now and then. And I have called him. Short conversations, not about anything important, but we like hearing each other’s voices.

  When I told my wife about my conversation with Wädi, I told her that I felt ashamed of having fought in four wars, but not having been capable of fighting the most important battle of all: for peace.

  Marian seemed moved, and Ezekiel saw that she was struggling to hold back her tears.

  “A full stop, right?” she managed to say.

  “You know we haven’t reached the end yet. No, not yet. Wouldn’t you like to know what happened to Wädi’s daughter?”

  “No . . . It’s really not that important.”

  “She grew up without knowing who her father was. Her parents kept the secret until the end. It was her grandfather who left a letter in his will, explaining who she really was. It was a shock to her to know the truth. Suddenly her whole life seemed to have been based on a lie. She was not who she had thought she was, a girl from Madrid’s high society, with an expensive education, a university degree, and soon a master’s. So she started to investigate all that she could about her lost identity. She did not dare go look for her father in Amman, but started to go about it in a circular way. She did all she could to find Palestinians who were studying in Spain, but that was not enough, so one day she landed in Ramallah. She met a young man, and fell in love? Maybe, or maybe she decided that she had fallen in love because she thought that it was the best way to be close to that part of herself whose existence she had not known until recently. They got married and had a son. But the marriage didn’t last that long. She could not adapt to life in Ramallah, to fitting into a society where everything seemed alien to her. And she still did not dare look for her father. A father about whom all she knew was his name, and that he lived in a refugee camp in Amman. A father whom she blamed for not fighting to take her to live with him, although she knew that he had sacrificed himself for her own good. She left, left Ramallah and went back to Madrid with her son. The father made no objection at first, but when the boy was twelve years old he asked for him back. He was no longer a child, he said, it was time for him to be with his father. She had to give him up because the law was on the side of the man who had been her husband, and so she gave him up and turned his life into a ceaseless coming and going that only made him feel bitter. She was not in Ramallah the day the boy died. The second Intifada had begun, I don’t remember when and it doesn’t matter, when this boy, along with lots of other boys, started to throw rocks at a group of men who were building a new settlement. They threw their rocks as hard as they could, and then suddenly a shot rang out; a bullet had killed a child, and it was him. When she arrived, the boy was already buried, and she has not stopped mourning him since that day.

  “Wädi’s daughter has not forgiven her father for abandoning her, nor her grandparents for hiding the truth from her, nor her husband for taking her child from her, nor Israel for existing.

  “She cannot forgive or feel sorry for anything that is not herself. She has lived in pain for years, not even a second marriage could help her overcome the loss of her son. A desire has grown up in her, stronger than any other kind, a desire for revenge, stronger even than her desire for life. She met her father a few months ago. Finally she dared find him in order to try to understand herself. The meeting was sweet for Wädi, who saw in her eyes a spark of the woman who had been Eloisa. But it didn’t help her at all to meet her father. Her eyes were filled with the image of her dead son, and that stopped her from seeing anything else. This is why she has carefully planned her revenge; it was not easy, but at last she is abo
ut to fulfill the plan of revenge that she believes will bring her peace. She needs to kill the enemy who took her son’s life, she needs to bring suffering to the people who made her suffer. Am I wrong, Marian? Or would you prefer me to call you Maria de los Ángeles de Todos los Santos, as you were baptized in Madrid? Or maybe just Ms. Miller, after your second husband?”

  Marian was pale and her teeth were chattering. She had her hand hidden in her jacket pocket, and seemed to be holding onto something tightly.

  “When did you find out . . . ,” she asked in a low voice.

  “The first day you came. Wädi, your father, called me and asked me to stop you from seeing my son Aaron. ‘I don’t want anyone else to die . . . The two of us have suffered enough already . . . The best thing is for her not to see your son,’ he warned me. He was scared of your bitterness. He not only wanted to save me from another blow, but he also wanted to save you. I told him that this was a risk he had to take, because maybe if you heard our shared story, the ways in which the Zucker and the Ziad families are intertwined, then perhaps it would help bring you peace. Also I had an advantage, knowing that my son Aaron would not be here, so you could not take him away from me. You remind me so much of your grandfather Mohammed . . . You see, the history of the Zuckers and the Ziads did not end in 1948.”

  He looked straight at her before continuing.

  “I am an old man and I am very ill, what is there left to me? Your grandfather Mohammed said that there are times in life when the only way to save yourself is by dying, or killing. So . . . Don’t worry. Shoot me, I’m already dead.”

  Silence fell. For a few seconds, which both of them felt lasted forever, they didn’t move, it was so quiet that they didn’t even hear the sound of their own breath.

  Then, slowly, he started to put the cups on the tray and watched how the water was boiling for the tea.

  There were only a few feet between them and he could smell her perfume mixed with the smell of fear.

  He knew what fear smelled like. He had felt it, too, in the past, but now that death had arrived to take him he did not feel fear as he had in the past, when death had played with him for a while, only to leave him alone and carry on walking.