Czytaj książkę: «The Spoils of War»

1

Tel Aviv, Israel, January, 2002

Abe Peretz told the old joke about the Polish immigrant woman and the boy on the bus. It was practically archaic, he said, from the early days of Israel, but still funny: A mother and her little boy are riding on a bus in Jerusalem. The boy speaks Hebrew but the mother keeps speaking Yiddish. A man sitting across the aisle leans over and says, “Lady, the little boy speaks wonderful Hebrew; why do you keep talking to him in this wretched Yiddish?” “Because,” she says, “I don’t want him to forget he’s a Jew.”

Outside, the night was coming down like a lavender curtain, darker to the east behind them but brightening into orange on the undersides of the clouds out over the Mediterranean. The apartment was high above Ben Yehuda but the sounds of the street came up; and the smell of evening, a swirl of salt sea and car exhaust and cooking food, rose with them.

“They say that if you breathe really deep, you can smell the desert,” Abe Peretz said.

“Only if you’re a Jew,” his wife said with a smile. “You, you’d have trouble.”

The Peretzes lived in Tel Aviv but had been there only a few months; the Craiks were old friends passing through. The two men had served on a ship together fifteen years before, when one had been new to the Navy and the other had been in too long; now Peretz was the FBI’s deputy legal attaché at the US embassy, and Alan Craik, long ago that young newbie, was the Fifth Fleet intel officer in Bahrain.

Peretz grinned at the two guests. “Bea thinks I’m not Jewish enough. Funny, because I don’t look Jewish.” He winked at his wife; she overdid rolling her eyes and laughed and said to Rose Craik, who was visibly pregnant, “This one had better be a girl. Two boys are enough.”

“Well, I’m concentrating really hard.”

“Two girls are enough, too,” Peretz said. His own two had just come in, still out of sight but noisy at the apartment’s front door. “The quietest voice they know is the scream. If you think Italians are noisy, wait until you’ve lived in a—”

The two girls erupted through the glass doors to the terrace, both in T-shirts with slogans across their breasts that were meaningless to the adults, one in Hebrew, one in English. There was a lot of kissing and flouncing and shouting; the greetings to Rose were enthusiastic but forced, because Rose Craik had been a great favorite when they had been children but now they were grown up—in their own eyes, at least; and after a lot of shouting, in which Bea took a major part, they whirled out again and the terrace seemed astonishingly quiet.

“As I was saying before I was interrupted,” Abe Peretz said. He grinned again. He grinned a lot, his way of saying that nothing he said was quite serious, or at least not quite as it sounded.

“As you were saying,” Bea Peretz erupted, “it’s time I started cooking if we’re ever going to eat.” She got up and gestured toward Rose. “Come help me.” She was a big woman, getting a little heavy, but she had beautiful eyes and still-black hair that lay tight against her skull and then cascaded down her back. “You guys tell each other war stories so we don’t have to listen over dinner.”

Alan Craik smiled at his wife, who had as many war stories as either of the men—chopper pilot, ex-squadron CO, currently deputy naval attaché, Bahrain—and who now gave a little shrug and let herself be led away.

That was the day that the latest fragile truce between the Israelis and the Palestinians had self-destructed when a Palestinian militant was killed by a car bomb in the West Bank. The al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade declared that the cease-fire was finished. Before the day was over, two soldiers had been killed at a settlement, and the Martyrs Brigade took credit.

That was also the last day of a man named Salem Qatib, who, like the cease-fire, was a victim of both sides: first the Palestinians tortured him, and then the Israelis tortured him, and then he died.

“Bea’s kind of bossy,” Abe said. He looked at the fingertips of one hand, sniffed them—an old habit. “We talk too much about being Jewish, don’t we.”

Embarrassed, Craik mumbled something vague.

“No, we do. Since we moved here, Bea and the girls have got like the Republican Party—a steady move to the right.” He gave a snort, certainly meant to show disgust. “Bea has a new bosom buddy named Esther Himmelfarb. I mean, it’s good that she’s found a friend; Bea doesn’t usually get close to people. And the woman helps her a lot—she knows where everything is, knows who to see, what to say, but—” He waved a hand. “We keep kosher—that’s new. The girls want to go live on a kibbutz, even though the kibbutzes are all turning into corporations and the days of boys-and-girls-togethertaming-the-desert are long gone. It’s a romance. All three of them have fallen in love.” He sniffed his fingers.

“You don’t like it here?”

“I’m not enchanted by living on land that the former owners gave up because they had a gun at their head. And now they’re sitting out there in refugee camps, watching me eat their dinner.”

“The Palestinians don’t exactly have the cleanest hands in the world.”

“They’re absolute shits. Just like a lot of Israelis. But overall, Israel gives me a royal pain in the butt because they’re the occupying power and that puts a special responsibility on you to behave better than the other guy—and they won’t face up to reality.” He shot Craik a look to see if he knew which reality he meant. “You can’t say ‘No right of return, no reparations’ and be a moral entity.” He rested his arms on the terrace railing and put his chin on them. “That’s why Bea says I’m a bad Jew. Because I won’t join in the national romance.”

Craik slumped lower until his spine was almost ready to fall off the seat, his long legs thrust out toward the edge of the terrace. He had his own doubts about Israel, but he had to shut up and do his job: in two days, he was supposed to meet with Shin Bet, Israel’s military intelligence, to get their input on an operation in Afghanistan.

Fifty miles south in Gaza, three men were beating the Palestinian named Salem Qatib. Two would hold the victim while the third hit him, and then they would slam him against a stone wall and shout, “What else? What else?” They were Palestinian, too.

“Your husband looks like hell, if I’m allowed to say that, Rose,” Bea Peretz was saying.

“He’s stressed out, is all.”

“What’s he doing in Israel?”

“Oh—Navy stuff. You know.” She hesitated, added, “He got a couple of extra days on his orders to try to sort of run down.”

“Israel’s a great place! Really. Even Abe thinks so.” She was pounding dough down on a board, making it thin. “I wish you could meet my friend Esther. She makes you understand how you can love this country. We all want to stay for good.”

“The Bureau’ll go along with that?”

“There’s other jobs, Rose. Some things are more important than what you do for a living.” The way she said it, Rose felt as if Bea had said it before, maybe many times—the detritus of an old argument, washed up on this woman-to-woman beach. Rose sampled a bit of something made with chopped olives and murmured, “We are what we do for a living, to some extent.”

“And we can change!” Bea hit the dough a tremendous whack! “You were going to be an astronaut once. You didn’t make it. You didn’t die.”

Only where nobody but me can see, Rose thought. She said, “Anyway, maybe Abe’s not so invested in it as I was.”

“Oh—Abe!” Bea cut the dough into squares with great slashes of a knife. “Abe could sell bread from a pushcart and be happy! He lives in such a fog—”

“How’s Rose coping with not being an astronaut?” Peretz said to Alan Craik. They were still on the terrace, new drinks in their hands, the sky almost blue-black.

“I think it almost killed her, but—you know Rose. Get on with life.” He sipped at his weak gin and tonic. “She’s going to be deep-select for captain.”

Peretz looked out at the sky for a long time, and when he spoke it was clear that he’d hardly listened to the answer to his own question. “If I get a transfer, I don’t think Bea’ll go with me. Or the girls.”

“Well, if they’re in school—”

Peretz bounced a knuckle against his upper lip. “It’s a hell of a thing, to watch a family go in the tank because of—” He sighed. “It’s never just one thing, is it. Bea and I have always had a—You know, the relationship has always been noisy. But suddenly—It’s this damned place. Jesus.” He stared at his fingers. “Religion’s soaked into the goddam soil here. Like Love Canal.”

Salem Qatib, who had been beaten, lay in one rut of a Gaza road. By and by somebody would have driven along the road and run over him, but a Palestinian who knew about the torture and who was a Mossad informer got on a cell phone and alerted his control.

Over dinner—candles, no kids, Israeli wine, lamb and grains in a recipe that was millennia old—the Craiks tried to talk about old friends and old days and things that didn’t have to do with Israel or being Jewish. But as more wine was poured, Bea didn’t want to talk about anything else, as if they had a scab that she wanted to scratch and watch bleed. She cited her friend Esther often—“Esther says.” Even Nine-Eleven, the topic of conversation everywhere in those days, brought her back to Israel. “Now you know what it’s like!” she cried. “Now you know what the Arabs are!” She gestured at Abe with a fork. “You’ll say next that we should be more understanding, because al-Qaida blew up the World Trade Center because they’re misunderstood!”

Abe started to say that he never said, and so on, and she interrupted, and so on.

“Bea enjoys being a caricature,” Peretz said, smiling to show it was a joke and failing. “Bea, beautiful Bea, light of my life, could we talk about baseball?”

“Esther says the Palestinians are terrorists and invaders and we ought to throw them out and keep them the fuck out!”

“‘We,’” Abe said, smiling at them.

“Arafat is a monster. He’s paying the terrorists, killing women and children, and pretending to want peace. Esther says they live out there like animals; they live in kennels; they’re barely able to read and write and they say they have ‘universities,’ my God!”

“When our great-grandparents lived in the shtetls, the Russians called them animals; they couldn’t read or write; they—”

“And they came here and they made the desert bloom! They built real universities! They made a nation!”

“On land that they took with the gun,” Abe said wearily.

“Because it was ours!”

Abe looked at Alan and gave an apologetic shrug. The silence grew longer, and Abe said, falsely cheerful, “What d’you hear from Mike Dukas?”

Maybe because she had had too much wine, Bea broke in with, “I’ll never forgive Mike Dukas for saying that Jonathan Pollard was a traitor! Never. Never, never, never!”

“But Pollard was a traitor,” Abe made the mistake of saying.

He was probably going to explain that somebody who sells American secrets to another state, even if it’s Israel, is in fact a traitor, but Bea said in a suddenly quiet voice, “I know what you think,” and she turned away and began to talk to Rose about having daughters.

Then things were easier for a while, and they got through dessert, and Alan looked at his watch and at Rose, and when Bea brought in coffee everything would have been all right if Rose hadn’t asked for cream, and there was embarrassment and confusion, and Abe explained the kosher rule of thumb and ended, smiling as at a great joke, “It’s a dietary law, which I’d be happy to explain the logic of if I understood it myself.”

Bea said, “If you were half the Jew you ought to be, you’d understand it.”

“But I must be a Jew—my mother was Jewish. Okay, Bea?”

She dropped her voice to a purr. “Abe means he’s a modern Jew. Just like everybody else—no funny foods, no embarrassing hat, no accent—oy veh! that he should have an accent!—he should be taken for a Presbyterian, maybe. Assimilate, right, Abe? That’s the magic word, right? Assimilate European high culture and never look back—Dostoevsky, Mozart, and Wittgenstein, right?”

In the embarrassed silence, Alan said, “Who’s Wittgenstein?”

She stared at him, broke into loud laughter, then patted him on the cheek. “I love you, Al—you’re perfect.”

Alan looked at his wife and got the slightly wide-eyed look: Say nothing; we’ll leave soon.

Salem Qatib lay on a table now. A big Israeli was leaning over him shouting Shit! again and again, and then he screamed at another man, “You stupid asshole, you’ve fucking killed him!”

Acco, Israel

Rashid Halaby sat in the dark with his back against a wall that had been built when Augustus was Caesar. The fancy American flashlight that his mother had given him for his birthday had a new battery, but it was running down now. He had his cell phone, but the signal couldn’t penetrate the layers of rock and mud brick above him. He was hungry. He was filthy. He was thirsty and had no water. His ribs hurt every time he took a deep breath or moved in a certain way, from a fall.

Salem, his best friend—taken. Beaten.

Rashid had run from the dig in Gaza, fought the men who had tried to stop him. He had run and left Salem to their attackers. Then he had hidden, then hitched a ride with workers from a kiln going back to their homes in Israel. He thought he might have killed a man—a Hamas man. With a rock hammer.

He couldn’t go home.

His hand dug almost of its own volition, scrabbling in the ancient dirt. He built a little pile of worthless artifacts; the bones of a small animal, some shells, a coil of brass or bronze wire, something that might have been a bead or a carbonized grain of wheat. And a bronze arrowhead with a distinctive cast barb, the type that the Scythians had used. Salem Qatib had taught him all that.

Sitting in the dark, he cried. Once he started, he couldn’t stop, and it went on and on, because too many bad things had happened. He wanted out. He needed to find Salem.