by Ragen, Naomi
“What if you called your brother and said as part of your Khums and Zakat, you wanted to give your obligatory charity money to this person directly? That you didn’t want it to be traced because of the Americans and their war on terror and our frequent travel to America? That you wanted to hand it to him in cash at his house in Paris . . .?”
“Don’t be stupid. My brother knows how I feel about these low-lifes. He’d never be fooled. If anything happened, he’d know it was me. Do you want to have Hamas target us? They are all over Europe and America. If they ever found out . . .”
“But Faisal is your brother! Surely, he wouldn’t tell. Look, Whally, every day, just being married, we are risking our lives here! You know I love you. I converted to Islam for you. Brought my children up in your faith. But that faith has changed . . .”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Yes. You do.”
He turned away. “Don’t push me, Elizabeth. I can’t . . .”
“The Wahabis have been at the root of all that’s evil in Islam. They’ve made the adoption of anti-Semitism part of the religion, which it never was. They’ve made it a respectable religious obligation of Jihad to join terror cells. Wife-beating, the murder of daughters, is not the exception, it’s the rule, and you know it, all over the Muslim world. And now, they are insisting on spreading this backwardness to the west . . .”
He sat down and held his head in his hands. “I’m only one man.”
“You can make this one phone call. Get this one address. Save these two people. For your own soul. For us. For me. Because if we sit back and they die, I couldn’t go on living with myself.” She paused, taking a deep breath. “I couldn’t go on living with you.”
His face went pale as he stared up at her. “Elizabeth . . .”
She reached down and kissed his lips, pressing her body against his. And then she turned. Slowly, alone, she walked back into the house, closing the door behind her.
He sat in the garden for a long time, gazing at the flowers planted through the years that now thrived in tropical abundance. He looked beyond to the running track and the blue tiles of the pool.
Their own little world, a comfortable, delightful place with every luxury. What Elizabeth never realized—because he had protected her from this knowledge—was just how fine a line it was they walked. Like trapeze artists balancing on a thin wire over the shouting crowds, they and their children tipped this way and that, the hard, punishing ground always looming down below, ready to smash them should they lean too far to any side and stumble. And now she was asking him to jump off the line with both feet, to fill it with uncontrollable vibrations that might send them all tumbling down.
He tried to imagine life without her. His family would simply tell him to behave according to the accepted norm regarding failed east-west matches: divorce her and take the children. Have her exiled to America and deny her a visa to visit them. It was actually very simple, and could be accomplished before Elizabeth understood what was happening. There would be nothing she could do. He would find another wife, one suitable to his station. And the black line over his name would be erased, and all opportunities would suddenly open for him.
And he would never see her again, his Elizabeth. Never. And she would mourn for her children, and she would hate him.
He walked back into the house. He picked up the phone and called his brother Faisal.
That afternoon he handed Elizabeth a piece of paper. On it was the name Musa el Khalil and an address and a phone number in Paris.
“Thank you.”
“Memorize it, then destroy it. The car is outside waiting to take you to the children’s school and then on to the airport. Here is the letter of permission from me for you to travel. Tickets are waiting for you at the counter. You have a stopover in Amsterdam. Wait until you get to Europe before you pass on this information. And then go directly to California. Promise me. Make the call from a public phone.”
“Aren’t you coming with us?”
He shook his head. “That would only cause suspicion. Go.”
“Then, when are you coming?” she begged him.
He held her close, kissing her long and hard, with a touch of desperation.
“Inshallah, soon.” And then he took her to the door and watched her go.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem
Thursday, May 9, 2002
1:00 P.M.
AFTER THE LONG confinement in her room, the hospital corridors felt almost like a change of season, Elise thought as she walked slowly and painfully down the airy halls. How strange that feeling of lightness, the absence of all those burdens that her body had grown used to: the swelling abdomen, the soft pressure of the tiny head against her bladder, the rolling elbows and knees that punched out her flesh like a cat in a sack. She brushed her fingers lightly over her stomach, and a sense of loss so sharp, so palpable, brought an ache to the back of her throat. Now his fate was out of her control. She leaned against her grandmother’s shoulder.
“Maybe you should get a wheelchair, like the doctor said?” Leah suggested, worried.
“No. I need to walk. After all these months, it’s a pleasure.”
“Our NICU—Neonatal Intensive Care Unit—is the best in the Middle East,” Dr. Gabbay declared, meaning to be comforting. To Elise, he sounded very much like the guest of honor at a fund-raising luncheon. She wanted to hear something personal, something about her own baby and its personal fate as she walked into the unit where he lay fighting for his fragile life.
“From all over the country, hospitals regularly send their most urgent and complicated cases to Hadassah. A special ambulance is equipped with incubators and portable surgery units to transport them. Your baby is in the best hands, Elise,” he continued.
She hardly heard a word, focusing on the blinking green and red lights of sophisticated and no doubt expensive monitoring equipment, the heavy wump of breathing machines that forced air in and out of tiny lungs. “Hadassah ladies,” people sometimes called them, rolling their eyes, never realizing all those smart, savvy, generous women had—in their spare time—created the finest medical facility in the Middle East in this tiny country, saving the lives of their babies. Thank you . . .
And in the midst of all this Star Wars technology, she suddenly noticed the tiny bundles of human flesh. Stuck full of needles, bandaged, with eye patches and foot patches, and dressings and tubes coming in and out of every orifice, tiny human beings fighting against relinquishing that gift they had so recently been given: life. Elise felt her chest constrict. They looked like a community of miniature car-crash victims on their last legs. My God! How could any of them survive all this?
“Don’t look so worried! We have a ninety-five percent survival rate among those babies born one kilo or more!” Dr. Gabbay assured her.
“Kilo? How much is that in pounds?” Leah asked.
“About two-point-two pounds.”
“Imagine.” She shook her head in wonder. “Less than a decent Shabbes chicken.”
“And even the ones born half that weight still have a fifty-fifty chance of survival. Believe me, most of these infants are going to be perfectly fine. Don’t look at the equipment. Look at the babies.”
Elise examined them. Little faces, tiny hands and legs waving furiously. Alive, surrounded by little stuffed animals, tiny mobiles, and bright pictures placed around them by loving hands. No one had given up hope on any one of them, she suddenly realized, deeply comforted.
“Here he is, Elise, Mrs. Helfgott.”
They looked down at the tiny head, the dark hair peeking out of the fishnet bandage. A whole gamut of emotional extremes washed over Elise: fear verging on terror, thrilling love, tremendous hope, undaunted faith. She felt almost faint. “Can I touch him?”
“Of course.”
She put her hand into the sterile plastic glove that was attached to the clear plastic crib’s side, reaching into the incubator. Gent
ly, she laid her hand on top of the dark hair, trying to imagine its softness. His skin, she told herself, would feel like warm, slightly gritty soap. She brushed his tiny cheek with the tip of her forefinger. From head to toe, he would reach from the tips of her fingers to the middle of her arm. She felt a sense of slow panic, born of wonderment that the functions of human life could exist in all their complexity in the ridiculously confined space of this tiny, human package. She nudged his palm. With a shock that moved her to tears, he suddenly wrapped his tiny hand around one of her fingers.
It was almost too much to bear.
“Will he be all right?” she demanded hoarsely, almost rudely, not allowing herself to examine him too closely until she got the answer. She couldn’t stand it, to add this uncertainty, this life-or-death watch, to all the other uncertainties, all the other watches. “Please, just be honest. Just let me know what I’m up against.”
“Why don’t you come into the office and sit down, Elise?” Dr. Gabbay said kindly, “and we’ll explain everything.” Slowly, with a sense of heartbreak, she removed her finger from the baby’s grip.
“This is Dr. Levy, the head neonatologist. He’s taking care of your baby,” Dr. Gabbay said, introducing a tall, red-haired giant of a man. For no reason, Elise wondered if his wife was one of those petite little women big men sometimes married, the kind who could fit into their pockets; if that was how he had learned to use his big hands so gently. “Hello, Mrs. Margulies, Mrs. Helfgott. Let me give you a little background,” Dr. Levy began in unaccented American English.
An American-trained doctor, Leah thought. Good. Not that Israeli doctors weren’t . . . but someone who knew English . . . someone she could understand.
“A baby that’s born at thirty-two weeks still has some growing to do. It doesn’t have enough body fat to keep it warm, so we keep it in a warm place, an incubator. It doesn’t have the reflexes to suck on the breast or bottle yet, so we feed it through a tube in its nose. But if you can pump breast milk, that would really be very helpful. We’d feed your baby that.”
It had not been just talk. There was something she could do, something she had control over. “Of course!” Elise said, feeling her spirits rise.
“Believe it or not, preemies grow faster than regular babies, so it will need lots of nourishment. And all those big machines with the blinking lights . . . they are just a way of keeping abreast of how things are going. We check the glucose levels, the salt, the calcium . . .”
“But tell me . . . is there anything really wrong? Anything dangerous?”
“Well, his most serious problem is the immaturity of his lungs. A baby that young doesn’t produce surfactant . . .”
“Sur . . . what?”
“Surfactant. It’s a substance that keeps the lung tissue flexible so that it expands and contracts. Years ago, preemies often died because of this. But we’ve made enormous advances. We gave you some artificial surfactant before you gave birth, and have been giving him doses ever since. So far, so good. He has a little jaundice, and he’s slightly anemic. Both of these things are common problems in preemies. We’ll keep him under ultraviolet light for the jaundice, and if the anemia gets worse, we’ll transfuse some red blood cells until he starts manufacturing his own—”
“He’s in good shape, Elise. Really,” Dr. Gabbay reassured her.
“Well—” Dr. Levy hedged.
“What?” she asked.
“Elise, this is going to sound terrible, but believe me, it’s not,” Dr. Gabbay said, with a long glance at his colleague, who shrugged.
“WHAT?” she demanded, pushing away from the desk. “TELL ME!”
“This morning, your baby had an incident of intraventricular hemorrhage.”
She blanched. “What does that mean?”
“What it means,” Dr. Levy said calmly, “is that bleeding took place into the normal fluid spaces of the brain. A baby this size is very fragile, and there is a whole network of tiny blood vessels around the brain. All this means is that one of these tiny vessels burst. It wasn’t serious. He didn’t lose much blood. These incidents are commonplace in preemies and most of the time don’t cause any damage at all.”
No. No. No, she thought. God, don’t do this to me. I can’t take this, no. It’s not fair, God. “Are you telling me the truth, about it not being dangerous, about it being commonplace?” she demanded.
“Absolutely. I don’t believe in sugarcoating the truth. I want parents to be team players, and there is no point in stringing them along with false hopes. I’m telling you that it wasn’t serious. And we don’t expect any damage at all from it.” He was calm, assured and matter-of-fact.
Elise searched his face, the kind brown eyes, the young, healthy cheeks, the genuine smile. She decided to believe in him, in God. In mercy, and small miracles. “Thank you, Doctors. Dr. Gabbay, Dr. Levy. For everything.” She got up. “I’m going to spend a few minutes with my baby now.”
He was a person, she thought, startled. Her son. Jon’s son. liana’s brother. A person with a place in the world. He had his own face: widely set eyes, like Jon’s. His nose too had Jon’s tiny little downturn. She could almost see Jon’s face wrinkled in laughter and pleasure as he saw his big features miniaturized in his tiny son’s. He was his father’s son, and like his father he would hold on, he would fight for his life, she told herself. God willing, father and son would both win.
With that thought, something lit up inside her, a moment of bright certainty. This will be your story, baby. The story of when you were born. How your parents were in all the newspapers. And how your father didn’t get to see you for a day or two, until the army brought him and your sister home.
They would tell this story on green lawns festooned with red and blue balloons, as children laughed and ran around, and a portable radio played over the hissing of an outdoor grill. And Jon would hold out his arms, my fon, and the baby would take his first steps into them, like a little drunk, waddling on the soft grass, smiling into his father’s happy, satisfied eyes. And his big sister would hold his hand, and teach him ballet steps on the green lawn, and they would twirl until both collapsed on the soft grass, the summer grass, next year . . . “Everything is going to be all right, little fellow,” she whispered, her forefinger stroking his tiny forehead. “I just know it.”
“Elise . . .” Dr. Gabbay was touching her shoulder. “I’ve just gotten a call. General Nagar is downstairs waiting in your room.”
Her heart had the strange sensation of hiccuping: a sharp draining, an emptiness and then a sudden filling. She felt faint, grabbing the back of the chair. General Nagar was the Israeli army’s chief of staff.
“Oh, Elise!” Leah called out, alarmed, rushing forward.
“Get a wheelchair!” Dr. Gabbay ordered.
“No . . .”
“Don’t be stubborn,” Leah begged her.
She had no struggle left, she thought, sitting down gratefully when the chair arrived. They wheeled her out of the unit.
“Mrs. Doctor Jon . . .?”
She looked up at the pale young woman who stood in her path outside the NICU She was dressed in a hospital bathrobe and modest head covering. At first, because of the head covering, Elise thought she might be an Orthodox Jewish woman, one of her neighbors. But as she drew closer, she realized the woman was a Muslim. A Palestinian.
“What do you want?” Elise asked her cautiously.
“I don’t know . . . My name is Nouara. Your husband is my doctor.”
Elise felt a complicated range of emotions, everything from primitive hatred for a faceless enemy to true affection and concern for a fellow suffering human being.
“Nouara. Jon talked about you so much. How are you?”
“Your husband is not here to tell me how I am . . .”
“I have the feeling it will all be over soon,” Elise said wearily.
“Inshallah. Mrs. Doctor Jon?”
“Yes?”
“I am so ashamed, so ashamed. I
want to kill the people who did this. They did it to me too. And to my husband and my children. They are not Muslims. May Allah punish them. I don’t know what to do.”
“Just keep yourself well. Make sure when Jon comes back, he finds you well.”
The young woman shook her head in doubt and despair “Inshallah, inshallah. I will try I will pray for him. May Allah keep him and liana safe and return them to you. And to me.” She leaned forward and kissed Elise on both cheeks.
Elise took the young woman’s fragile hand in hers and held it. Understanding passed between them, and a strange kind of solidarity. They were, in a way, in this together, both their lives dependent on the outcome.
Elise watched her as she shuffled down the long corridor, her shoulder brushing the wall for support. A young Palestinian woman. A young mother. A neighbor. She too was a victim of the coarse and hateful people who seemed to be in control of all their lives, people who had created a world without intelligence, or fairness or compassion or justice. A world that made no sense at all.
“Ready, Bubbee”
Leah wheeled her down the corridor.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem
Thursday, May 9, 2002
2:00 P.M.
GENERAL MOSHE NAGAR was not at all the image one would have expected of the toughest man in the Israeli army. A short, intense, wiry man, with a sharp face and balding scalp, he was barely an inch taller than herself. But his posture reminded Elise of one of those aggressive breed of pit bulls who made up for their small stature with the ferocity of their natures. He was a man, she thought, whom no one should underestimate, particularly not the enemies of the State of Israel.
