Drunken Angel (9781936740062)

by Kaufman, Alan

  Instead, I found deserted streets and empty shops with aproned storekeepers standing in the doorways looking forlorn, and in front of the cafés stood plastic bubble tents with posted armed guards who frisked you and inspected your ID before granting entrance. Up and down the street cruised border guard jeeps and a new type of antiterrorism motorcycle cop like something from a futuristic graphic novel: pistols holstered at their chests, wearing black bubble helmets that obscured their faces as they cruised slowly, scanning every nook, each set of eyes, prepared at a moment’s reflex to dart off after suspects and bombs.

  I got frisked and admitted to a favorite café spot, only to find it completely deserted, with only a single pair of elderly women gabbing over transparent glasses of steaming hot tea.

  When I sat at a table nearby they turned heavily rouged faces to me and said: “You are a tourist?”

  “No. I’m an Israeli American from San Francisco, visiting.”

  “But still, you are visiting?”

  “Yes, I’m here to do some journalism work and to see my daughter.”

  “Where lives the daughter?”

  “In Ashdod.”

  “But still, you’ve come from outside Israel. Do you see what’s going on here?”

  “I’m beginning to.”

  The waiter came. I ordered a Turkish coffee, or “mud coffee,” as we used to call it in the army. It has caffeine enough to keep one going for days with little sleep, which soldiers often must do.

  “Young man, you should be very proud of yourself to come now when you do. There’s no tourism. People are afraid. We beg the world’s Jews to come but they stay away. It’s never been so bad.”

  “I didn’t feel I have a choice. For one thing, I have a daughter here. For another, Israel is my center of gravity. I don’t want to live in a world without Israel.”

  In Beit Agron, the Government Press Office had the pitched grimness of a command bunker at the height of a siege. I didn’t like the new government spokesman even a little. He exuded a feeling of shrillness and incompetence. Nonetheless, I presented my Israeli and American passports, the letter from the Chronicle, and while these were examined and my application for a press credential processed, I recalled the trysts with Anna and Edna, the crazy days of shuttling around with a sidearm and officer tags. They made for good stories, no more. But alcohol had linked them to a fatal and progressive descent into hell.

  A harried young woman sat me in front of one of those camera ID-making machines, shot my face, and issued me a press card. It showed me as a correspondent for the Chronicle and listed me as an Israeli citizen. I was now free to go out and get myself killed any way I pleased.

  I then sat with a spokeswoman. “I want to write something about the war that no one talks about, no one sees,” I said.

  She thought. Then reached for a desk drawer and pulled a file. “I have something. As a matter of principle, I offer it to each reporter. They all say no. They want to see soldiers, guns. They don’t want to see what’s inside. Deeper. The uncomfortable place.”

  “What have you got?”

  She put the file before me. “Two mothers. Their teenage daughters, fifteen, best friends, blown up together by a Hamas suicide bomber in a downtown Jerusalem pizzeria. There have been a few minor stories but no one has told the whole story, as it should be told. No one has let these women really speak. Too painful. What do you think?”

  There was no question that to go and, if nothing else, just sit and listen to these ignored women, their grief, was what my Higher Power intended for me.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Astonished and pleased, the spokeswoman said: “You’re the first not to push it away with a face.” Then added: “The odds against your paper running this are high.”

  “Worth a try,” I said, taking the file. I rose. We shook hands.

  “Will they talk to me?”

  “I’ll call to let them know you’ll be in touch.”

  The two mothers agreed to see me. They lived in an ugly white housing complex in an area regarded by some as disputed territory: a bus ride of several minutes from the center of town, where the girls had been blown up.

  The two mothers lived just doors apart. The first, Frimet Roth, an American Jew from Queens, had immigrated to Israel, changed denomination to Orthodox, and married. The house was filled with children, scruffy little boys with earlocks and yarmulkes and jam-stained mouths. Little girls in long-sleeved dresses shuffled around, fingers hooked in their cherubic mouths, dragging dolls along the ground. Frimet sent them outdoors to play, sat me down. The place was as gloomy as a cave, disheveled, filled with unsorted laundry, toys—a typical motherhood battleground. It was not a cold gloom, though, more like a warm ovarian cave in which we sat at a big wooden table covered with alphabet blocks, notepads, dreidels, coloring books, crayons. She pushed these to the side, made space for our tea and elbows. Set down a plate of hard-looking homemade cookies dusted with confectioners’ sugar.

  “I’d like to show you something,” she said.

  “Of course. Do you mind the tape recorder?”

  “No. Go ahead.”

  She returned with a stack of photo albums. Placed a photo before me. “This is them.”

  “Your daughter’s on the left?”

  She nodded. “Malki. And the other, of course, is Michal. Both fifteen.”

  They appeared like so many girlfriends of that age, complementary—Malki, the fair-haired dreamer, Michal more down to earth. Each smiling brightly, as if dazzled by all the promise they embodied.

  “They’re beautiful,” I said.

  “Were beautiful.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Michal was Malki’s best friend. I never saw two girls so close. More than sisters. They did everything together. Michal was like my other oldest daughter. I still can’t believe they’re gone. On some mornings I wake up thinking she’ll be here. You never saw such a child.”

  “I have a daughter,” I said.

  She looked at me vacantly. “Oh? Where?”

  “Ashdod.”

  “An Israeli?”

  “Yes. Like me. I also emigrated years ago. I served in the army too.”

  “But she doesn’t live with you. You’re from San Francisco. The Chronicle, you said. You’re in California.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I see. How old is she?”

  “Isadora is fifteen.”

  She nodded. “The girls’ age.”

  “I’m just telling you so you’ll know I’m not here only as a reporter but as a father.”

  She nodded. “Thank you for saying that. I’ve spoken to reporters. But the way they twist the story, it never gets told.”

  “On the day, what happened?”

  She spoke as those do who live in the presence of their worst tragedy every waking minute, entranced by it, benumbed, even in dreams; who as they speak lean close to the sound of their own voice, listening with their heart to their recounting, hoping to pluck from it some shred of déjà vu so evocative that for an instant the world will again seem as it was before the loss occurred.

  The girls, she said, were inseparable. In their circle Malki was the leading light. During the year preceding her death she had suffered frequent nightmares due to the incessant blowing up of buses. The bombers hit hardest the bus lines that she and Michal rode to and from school and other destinations important to their sense of normalcy, of life’s routines. So, for these two girls, the effort to live normally was fraught with peril.

  “Malki had so many plans. She was going to volunteer that summer to a camp for mentally disabled children. Michal planned to join her. Both girls loved to play the guitar. Malki had a special gift. She was extremely talented. They had guitars with them when they were killed. And do you know what the irony is?”

  “No, what?”

  “That the terrorist who killed them carried his bomb in a guitar case! He was standing right next to Malki at the pizza sh
op when the bomb detonated. Hamas had made him to look like a normal teenager.”

  “Was the terrorist a teenager too?”

  “Yes.”

  She said more. Then we sat quietly for a time. I thought that perhaps she’d said everything there was to tell.

  But there was more. There is always more.

  “I want to show you something.”

  She went into another room. I could see her through a doorway looking at a small picture in her hand. She wiped her eyes. I snapped my head around, pretended to gaze dumbly ahead, the way New York subway riders do, sealed in waiting. She sat down, the photo cupped in her right hand. Gingerly, laid it down before me. It could have been Isadora’s photo, or any Israeli girl’s, but I thanked God that it was not my daughter and grieved that it was Frimet’s.

  “This was the last photo taken of Malki in the hospital morgue. You can see, her features are unmarked. But the whole of her face had been completely flattened. At the moment of detonation, she stood right next to the bomber. The explosive concussion completely flattened her face, her body. The victims who stood or sat further away were shredded by nails and ball bearings and burned by fire. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Except for the flattening, she seems unscathed.”

  It was as though a giant boot had crushed her. She seemed scathed enough for me.

  “And Michal?” I asked.

  “Not like this. Much worse to look at.”

  I nodded.

  She leaned forward. Lifted the snapshot. It was passport sized. “They give you this to help with identification. On the clipboard on the table where she lay. I took it off, kept it. And you know what?”

  I waited.

  “I love her in this picture as much as any picture ever taken of her. She’s still my daughter in this photo. The blast that killed her did not turn her into something that is not my little girl. She is still my little girl. She’ll always be my little girl.”

  And then she spoke politics. Her rage at Hamas. The world’s indifference. As she spoke, the shadows grew. She needed to talk. I sat quietly listening, opening my heart to her with a wordless, focused gaze.

  I then went to visit Rivka, the other mother.

  She was slender, pretty, brunette, nonreligious, a modern nonsecular Israeli woman formerly from South Africa, with dark gentle eyes and a soft-spoken manner. I could tell: the interview would be brief.

  “What is there to say?” She smiled sadly. “The girls went out to the center of town for pizza. A young man came in with bombs and blew them up. I should make sense from this? Only those whose own children have not died in this way can make sense of such things. The rest of us, like me…” She shrugged.

  “What?”

  “What? Nothing. That’s what. Every day that I wake up, she is gone. I wake up to nothing.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “On the radio they said there was a bombing in the center of town, where they had gone. I tried to call on her cell. It went to message because her phone was destroyed. That’s when I knew. When it went to message, I knew.”

  80

  THE NEXT DAY, A RECOVERY CONTACT PUT ME IN touch with a woman named Helene, who invited me to meet her at Café Cafit, an upscale German Colony hangout in Jerusalem. Just months earlier, an explosive-packed suicide bomber with wires poking out everywhere had visited the café, took his seat, broke out in a cold sweat, behaved weirdly in general, and my guess is, lost his nerve to hit the trigger. Overwhelmed by suspicious waiters and patrons, he was dragged into the street, his wires ripped out, and he was turned over, defused, to the police. Shortly after, another bomber entered the Moment Café, in nearby Rahavia, and detonated himself, along with eleven young Israeli patrons.

  Helene, who was born in Northern Ireland and was a registered nurse and paramedic with a local hospital, was in 12-step recovery. She invited me along on her secret route through the deadly corridor between Gilo and Beit Jalla, smuggling illegal medical supplies to Arab infants. A woman not much given to fuss, Helene waved me into her dusty vehicle, a generic car so unassuming that I failed to note its make. Within minutes, the boutique-lined relative sanctuary of the German Colony gave way to rocky, terraced hilltops covered with Jewish settlements and Arab villages.

  For the past eighteen months, the area had been the site of an ongoing firefight between the IDF and Palestinian snipers that had escalated—in response to the Palestinians’ use of armor-piercing bullets to fire on Jewish homes—into full-scale warfare. The battles involved tanks, Cobra helicopters armed with Vulcan machine guns, and, it was rumored, shoulder-held Stinger-like antiaircraft missiles deployed by the terrorists. The snipers were not targeting military installations but the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom windows of a defenseless block of apartment buildings that strikingly resembled any average one-bedroom community in America. As we drove past I imagined the armor-piercing rounds smashing into shower stalls and piggy banks, and it made me shrink a little in my seat.

  The buses that traveled this route, said Helene, were bulletproof, yet for the most part the road stayed empty—even the orneriest residents preferred alternative routes to this road. The sniping here had been continuous and accurate.

  “There on your left,” she said quickly. “The Church of Saint Elijah, Palestinian militia meeting place.”

  We now entered a tunnel. “There was sniping in here just yesterday.”

  “Here where?”

  “Right here in the tunnel. They drove past and fired shots. No one was hit, I think.”

  We charged at high speed. The only other vehicles in the tunnel were a Land Rover black-taped with the word TV, a U.N. Forces military jeep, and an IDF armor-plated truck. Helene’s fragile no-name car rattled among these like a tenacious beetle as the speedometer climbed. Then we burst into light, and on the left rose a haunting row of sniper barriers. “These are new, put up in the last two months. Not perfect, no, but better than nothing.”

  We entered a second tunnel, the only ones traveling in it, and emerged on a curving stretch of sun-hammered blacktop that branched to the left and right. “There, to the left, the army checkpoint to Beit Jalla,” she said, bearing away to the right. She slowed to let me absorb the immense tank cannon pointed straight at the road, then sped up. “We don’t want to enter there with what I’ve got in the trunk.”

  “What is it?” I asked nervously.

  “Baby food. Medicines.”

  “What will the IDF do if they find it?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “They actually turn a blind eye to what I do, though they always search, which is a pain. The Palestinian militias are the ones I worry about.” She navigated the car through narrow dusty streets and up inclines, approaching her secret drop-off point. “Until 1995, my Palestinian patients and their kids all had Israeli medical insurance, and were under my care. But since then they have been under the jurisdiction of the Palestinians, who get their health care money from the EU, who have given over, in good faith, a fortune in funds. I tracked my baby patients through the new situations. Their conditions were now declining. And year after year, I wondered, why are they not receiving their medications? What supplies there were got stockpiled in warehouses but remained undistributed; or if they were ever given out, it was grab what you can. And my patients just did not receive the specific medical help they required, like powdered breast milk formula, special baby foods, eardrops, such things.”

  “Why not?”

  She didn’t admit it easily. Up ahead was a gate. She stopped the car. Before getting out, she said: “Because the militias used the EU health care funding and the medical supplies that got brought in, used all of it, it all went—they bought guns with it. It all went to buy weapons.”

  We were in what Helene called Area C, a West Bank Arab zone, at the gated entrance of a local institution. She exited the car, spoke through an intercom. A buzzer sounded and the locked gates parted just enough for Helene to swing them wide, then shut them behind us. She drove quick
ly through the grounds to a rear area of dense woods and up a road to a house. There, behind a low stone wall with a rusty metal door, lay Beit Jalla under curfew.

  We entered the woods and, following the barrier wall, mounted a small hill that afforded us a panoramic view of the entire city. It spread before me, white and hot, miragelike.

  “Listen,” she said. It was the muezzin in his tower, sending the faithful a mournful, lilting summons to prayer. Then out came a cell phone. “I’m calling Sami,” she said. “He’s the contact. I’ll leave out supplies. He’ll come get them when it’s safe.”

  We descended to the car. Helene popped open the trunk and began lifting out transparent pink grocery bags filled with jars of baby food, cans of powdered breast milk, and medicines of all sorts. These she left in a small pile by a wall at the side of the house. “I’ve treated some of these children since the day they were born. Some of them need special medications, foods. I know their cases. The authorities can’t be trusted to get them what they need, so I bring it myself. It’s my money.”

  In the US you could find this pathetic little pile of goods on the shelves of any pharmacy. Looking at it, I wondered how many jars of baby food went to buy a clip’s worth of armor-piercing incendiary rounds. How many cans of powdered breast milk formula, how many children’s-strength antibiotics, how many bottles of ear and nose drops and packs of cotton swabs went to underwrite a suicide bomber’s belt?

  81

  ESTHER AGREED TO LET ME SEE ISADORA. MY daughter’s appearance shocked me. She didn’t look herself—had grown taller but her gaze seemed listless, face puffy, flat, withdrawn. While Esther talked nonstop in her usual manic high-pitched mock-theatrical English stage voice, Isadora’s eyes rarely met mine. After a time together, she withdrew into her room, where I glimpsed her lying on her stomach on the bed, reading Prozac Nation.

  “Is she on meds?” I asked Esther.

  “No, no, no, no, no!” she said dismissively, but by her eyes, her manner, I sensed deceit.