Damascus Gate (31 page)

For a moment no one advanced from the checkpoint. Then a blond young soldier, hatless but in a flak jacket, moved out, his weapon held chest high. His comrades were covering him, watchful. The young soldier took a quick angry look at the UN logo and the van's passengers.

"You got a fucking problem? Going so fast?" He had a slight Slavic accent.

Another soldier advanced from the barrier—an officer, Lucas thought, but it was hard to tell with the Israelis. While the first soldier backed away, rifle cocked, the officer put out a stiff hand for their papers.

"Where to?" he asked when he had inspected the documents.

"Al-Amal," Nuala said.

The officer looked at her curiously and checked a list secured to his guard belt. It was as though he had been told to expect her. Then he took note of the others.

"Lukash?" He looked at Lucas's press credentials. "Sonia Barness?"

"Barnes," she said. They had a brief exchange in Hebrew and he waved them forward to the barrier. The APC rumbled forward to let them pass.

"Drive slower," Sonia said to Lucas. "Just a suggestion."

"Good thought," he said. "What did he say to you?"

"He said have a nice day. More or less."

"What do you think he meant by that?" Nuala asked.

"Hard to say," Sonia said. When Lucas turned around she winked at him. How cool she was, he thought. "I think he was wishing us luck."

Jabalia town was a collection of shapeless stone buildings with a marketplace by the side of the road. At its principal intersection a knot of Muslim women turned toward their van and began to cheer. Lucas was astonished.

"We appear to be the good guys," he said.

"Good guys," Nuala said scornfully.

"It's the car," Sonia told him.

And indeed, as they drove deeper into Gaza City they passed more people—cloth-swathed women carrying babies, market workers, schoolchildren—who briefly turned from the column of black smoke that increasingly blotted out the desert sky to wave and applaud.

"The car?" he asked.

"It's a UN van, remember."

"Of course," he said.

Driving through crowds that cheered them, Lucas became exhilarated. Their innocent, earnest van displayed twin pictures of the great world itself, portrayed from its nonconfrontational polar perspective, wreathed in boughs of peace. And people were actually waving. Take up the good guy's burden, he thought. Something new.

"Slow down," Nuala said, "because we're getting into it." She spoke quite deliberately. "If the army asks you where you're going, tell them Al-Azhar Road."

There were a great many people in the street as they inched the van forward. No one was cheering any longer. Now Lucas could catch the stench of the burning rubber, and with it another smell, a sweet skunky musk not immediately unpleasant but charged with something dangerous and unreasonable. Tear gas. It reminded him of Easter in the rain.

"Keep going," Nuala said. "Maybe we can make Al-Azhar."

"Everyone all right?" Lucas asked.

"We're fine," the women said together.

Around the next corner, a shabby concrete mosque thrust its angular minaret from among the rickety shapeless buildings around it. An amplified voice, transcendent with anger, sounded from the tower, echoing in the empty spaces below. Now they could hear shouts and shattering glass and the rattle of stones against pitted walls. From nearby came the explosive thud of launched grenades. Smoke, blended with the bitter gas, drifted before the windshield and Lucas rolled the windows up.

At an intersection, a crowd of women in blue robes were carrying on, wailing, raising fists to heaven. Some wrapped their headdresses over their mouths, less from piety, it seemed, than because of the fumes. When they saw the UN van, they all ran toward it.

Lucas slowed to a roll. Outside, the women pounded on the roof of the van, on the hood, the windows.

"Stop," Sonia said. When he stopped, she and Nuala got out and were engulfed by shrieking women. A few of them went around to the driver's side to shout at Lucas. Out of politeness, although the gas and the smoke were getting bad, he lowered the window. A woman reached in and scratched his face with her nails. Their sheer frenzy set his head spinning and dimmed his vision. He was stunned, vertiginous, stained with their tears.

"Go," Sonia said as she and Nuala climbed back in the van. "They've shot a kid, I think."

The heart of the thing itself was a block away. Out of the smoke came a chanting, howling gang of teenagers, boys in ragged hand-me-downs—Purdue sweatshirts, ripped sweaters and khakis. There were three or four dozen. The youngest among them might have been twelve, the oldest around seventeen, and they were straining to support the slender, supine body of a youth like themselves. The young man they carried was fuzzy-lipped and deathly pale, his eyes were milky and unfocused, his teeth bared and set. He was bleeding from the ear.

"Shouldn't we get him to a doctor?" Sonia asked in a low voice.

"He's dead, Sonia," Nuala said.

Up the street, an enraged voice over the minaret loudspeaker carried on, beside itself, summoning all hell. Competing with its grim measures now was a second amplified voice, a cold, bored police voice in Arabic, reading what Lucas assumed was the riot act.

Driving on, they lost sight of the fallen boy. The crowd of youths had retreated ahead of them and disappeared in the turns of the road. Smoke and gas were growing thicker, the stones fell closer about Lucas. CS fumes were truly like skunk: if you'd never been dosed there was a brief psychological immunity, but once the stuff took hold you were immobilized. Rifle fire sounded behind them.

"We're in between the army and the crowd," Sonia said calmly. "How shitty!"

Suddenly IDF soldiers were all around; an officer stepped out in the road ahead and put out the flat of his hand to halt them. When Lucas slowed, the soldiers flowed around the van from behind, advancing along the reeking, peeling walls, moving cautiously, covering each other's moves, checking the rooftops and their backs. Two soldiers moved directly in front of the van and raised their weapons to fire gas canisters at the withdrawing mass of young men. Taking aim, they posed like archers in an ancient frieze, squinting up at the declining sun. The propelled gas grenades exploded from their launchers with a disastrous thud, like sprung rivets. A few came back, spinning against the blue sky, sputtering and smoking, in the hail of rocks from the shadows at the far end of the street. More soldiers moved in, firing from one knee, discharging what Lucas assumed were rubber bullets—there was no sure way to tell—in the direction of the crowd.

"We should get out in the square," Nuala said.

"Right," Sonia said. She took some wads of Kleenex from her bag, wet them with bottled water from the seat beside her and passed them around.

At the next intersection, an officer crouching against the closed shutters of a café waved at them to halt.

"Keep going," Nuala said. Lucas speeded up and crossed the intersecting street with angry shouts behind. He also heard more firing close by.

A rain of fair-sized stones met them halfway down the next block. When he pulled over to the side, the stones stopped coming but the smoke was thicker than ever.

"Maybe we should turn around," Lucas said.

Neither Sonia nor Nuala said anything.

"I'm from out of town," he said, turning in the driver's seat. "That's why I'm asking."

"We have to go on," Nuala told him.

"Right," he said, and put the car in gear.

At the far end of the street, visible through the smoke, was a sight Lucas had some difficulty making sense of. A skirmish line of troops had secured the entrance of an alley, firing gas grenades and whatever ammunition their rifles contained. Behind them, a larger body of soldiers in riot gear were milling about in the time-honored military tradition of hurry up and wait. In front of the Israeli firing line, a small white jeep was parked. Hanging limply from its radio antenna was the blue and white flag of the United Nations. Beside the jeep stood a tall sweating man in a plain, uncamouflaged khaki uniform and blue beret. His shoulder displayed a flag patch with a white cross on a red field. A Dane. He stood, arms folded, legs wide apart, frowning at the ground, lips pursed in an attitude of intransigence.

The soldiers, in their helmets and flak jackets, contrived to fire around him. Two Israeli officers were shouting at him at once. One seemed reasonable, the other less so.

"Want to walk home in the desert?" the more reasonable officer asked him. "Fine. Because we'll bulldoze your goddam jeep."

"A violation!" the other officer shouted, appealing as to heaven.

"Interference with the security forces!" He swore in Arabic, Hebrew being lacking in obscenities for the occasion.

The Dane shifted his stance and shrugged.

"How can you do this?" the unreasonable officer demanded. "How? How?"

"We're resisting a criminal attack," the reasonable officer explained. "We're resisting criminals, you're creating an international incident. It's not your business, Captain."

From time to time one of the soldiers in the mass of troops at the rear would also shout at the Dane, but most watched without expression. A few appeared amused. After he had been shouted at for a while the Danish captain condescended to reply quietly. Lucas and the women in the van could not hear what he said. Stones still flew from time to time, coming from somewhere up the alley under siege. The Dane and the officers who were shouting at him ignored them in soldierly fashion. The air reeked of burning rubber.

"Let me go out and talk to them," Sonia said. "I think I know the UN guy."

When she got out, Lucas got out with her.

"Look," Sonia said, "someone's got to stay with the van. Otherwise the soldiers will just shove it off the road."

"I'll stay," Nuala said.

Lucas and Sonia made their way through the smoky street to the alley where the officers stood. The two Israeli officers were not happy to see them. The less reasonable one raised his arms in exasperation.

"What now?" the reasonable one asked.

"Hullo," said the Dane to Sonia and Lucas. "Are you my reinforcements?" He appeared to be joking.

"We were on our way to Al-Amal camp," Sonia said, "but we're stopping at headquarters in town. What's up?"

"I have explained that I must stay," the Dane said. "But these gentlemen are opposed."

"None of you have business here," the reasonable officer said. The unreasonable one nodded fierce agreement.

"What happened?" Lucas asked.

"This," the Dane said, "is under dispute."

"Do you want us to stay?" Sonia asked.

The captain looked at the van in which Nuala sat and then at Lucas and Sonia.

"No," he said. "I want you off the street. Headquarters knows I'm here."

"Will you let us pass?" Sonia asked the two Israelis.

"No!" shouted the unreasonable officer.

"Certainly," said the reasonable one. With a courtly gesture he offered them the street ahead, smoky and laced with stones. "Pass."

They got back in the van and drove by the alley unharmed. Some of the Israeli troopers muttered after them.

"What's going on?" Lucas asked as they drove out of the smoke.

"They're murdering Palestinians," Nuala declared.

"What's going on," said Sonia, "is that they've got a bunch of the
shebab
cornered up that alley and they want to go in and whale on them. So they'd like Captain Angstrom out of there. But Angstrom, God bless him, is being an asshole."

A kilometer away, the smoke had dissipated and the streets of Gaza City were deserted. Other columns of smoke, more than half a dozen, rose from various points of the landscape.

The army had concentrated its forces around the university, near UN headquarters, so they had a few more checkpoints to negotiate. They found headquarters on an emergency footing. In the dusty courtyard stood an old Laredo with yellow Israeli plates and a bumper sticker that said
STUDY ARSE ME.

"The Rose is here," Sonia said.

Inside, Helen Henderson, the Rose of Saskatoon, was in conversation with a Canadian called Owens, who was chief of the Social Services Department of the field office of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine.

Sonia introduced Lucas and asked them what had happened in Daraj, in the southeast of Gaza City, where the riot was. A radio transmitter carried muffled voices over static, speaking in English.

"Someone raised a Palestinian flag," the Rose told them. "The army came. The
shebab
threw rocks. That's as much as we know. Captain Angstrom's up there."

"We saw him," Sonia said. "I think there was a fatality. We saw a boy who appeared to be dead."

"More than one," Owens said. "We have reports of three."

"We have to go to Al-Amal," Nuala told Owens. "Can we get through?"

"I wouldn't use the inland road. The whole Strip's hot and it'll be dark soon. There'll be a curfew and a lot of paranoia. The army might let you through over on the coast. Or they might not."

"They're supposed to let us through," Nuala said. "They're obliged to."

"Yes," Owens said, "well, good luck. Do you have a radio?"

They had no radio. Owens told them to keep their heads down.

The army did in fact let them pass by the Beach camp checkpoint, and their drive from Gaza to Khan Yunis featured sunset on the sea. A half mile off Deir el-Balah, the searchlight of a helicopter played on shrimp boats, gliding theatrically across the dark swells from vessel to vessel. The sea was smooth and they could hear it gently breaking on the nearby beach. There was another camp close to the shore; darkness somewhat dissolved its squalor and menace, encouraging illusions of tranquility. The evening call to prayer echoing from its loudspeakers sounded tragic and fateful, resigned, remote.

 

The name of the Compassionate and Merciful One still hung over the mud-brick hovels when they encountered the first of the settlers' resort hotels. Beyond the sandbags and razor wire, its poolside glow was green and lush, and there were strings of colored lights along the beach.