Damascus Gate (48 page)

According to the mukhtar, the al-Firuli and their cousins, the Zhillo, had come from Albania with the khedives in the nineteenth century. They had fared well in Egypt and Gaza until the overthrow of King Farouk, who, as a descendant of the khedives, had been their patron and protector. The al-Firuli had been in Gaza since before the refugee camps, the mukhtar said. The Palestinian refugees sometimes oppressed them, as they themselves were oppressed by the Israelis. In the past the al-Firuli had made their way as musicians and dancers. Their men and women danced together and told fortunes. Since the Islamic revival, fortunetelling and mixed singing and dancing had gone into decline. And since the intifada had begun, a state of war had existed. Neither weddings nor Bihram was celebrated with music, out of respect for the martyrs. There were only funerals, and the al-Firuli did not do funerals.

The mukhtar made the Nawar view of things sound attractive and open-minded. They celebrated life, using wine and arak when they could be had. They honored Muhammad, Moses and Issa, all prophets of God.

In Tel Aviv, Khalif explained, people could be found who spoke a language the al-Firuli understood. These people in Tel Aviv spoke Romany. The Nawar language was called Dumir. Many of the younger Nawar no longer spoke it.

Lucas asked Khalif if he had been to Tel Aviv. Khalif answered ambiguously about his own travels. But many of the al-Firuli had been across the line, he admitted. They went to Tel Aviv and to Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, they went to churches and mosques and other public places to tell people about themselves. Lucas assumed he meant that they went there to beg.

It developed that Khalif had heard of Yad Vashem. The al-Firuli went there as well. Lucas ventured to ask him if he knew the significance of the place.

"The Jews were killed," Khalif said. "Many died until they came here."

He said he had heard that it was a magnificent place, built of precious metals, as great as any mosque.

"But it's not a place of worship, exactly," Lucas said. "It's a monument. To Jewish martyrs. In remembrance." The shrine there was of unhewed stone, he told the mukhtar. Not of precious metals.

Khalif said he thought he had grasped the message there. "The greater the grief," he said, "the greater the revenge will be. When one man grieves, he wants to see the grief of his enemies. He thinks, Why should I weep and not another man?"

Khalif noticed Lucas's distress at receiving this information.

"You are sad? You are a Jew?"

"I am sad," Lucas said. It had been a sad day and night for him, he explained. Of Yad Vashem, Jews, Romany, al-Firuli, he said nothing. It was a hopelessly long story. What am I, he thought, a missionary? Things had quieted down on the road.

Paying again, Lucas observed that the frenetic West had much to learn from the ancient wisdom of humble peoples. The mukhtar complimented Lucas on his humility and readiness to learn. The mukhtar had wide experience of Western peoples. Lucas, he believed, was an exception, different from the others.

Just before dawn, Lucas heard the morning call to prayer sounding throughout the great valley of ashes. This time there was no raging muezzin's song, no calling down of wrath upon abominations, no
Itbah al-Yahud.
Only the beauty of the summons to devotion, the admonition and promise to the faithful that prayer was better than sleep. Of course, it was only a recording. But as it sounded, the first rays of the sun appeared over the desert, and the road was quiet and at peace.

Khalif came by the place he had been dozing. "The day will be better," he said.

"Good," said Lucas.

A young Nawar drove him up the road in the dawn light, the same road the crazed villagers had scoured for him the night before. A military helicopter passed overhead and hovered for a minute. Presently they would be ordered off the road.

After a while, Lucas recognized the outskirts of Eshaikh Ijleen, where the UN distribution center was said to be. The Nawar let him out there and he began to walk down the road. The sky was still full of smoke. Somewhere not too far away, Lucas thought he detected an iodine smell that might have been the ocean, seaweed, the shore.

An hour after sunrise it was extremely hot. Lucas, who had not brought a hat, felt the sun bear down on his bald spot. Mirages shimmered along the road. A cloud by day would be handy, Lucas thought. A pillar of fire by night.

He did not think it made sense to try to get back to Beit Ajani, where the women had taken refuge in the old daya's house. Better to try and duck into the shadow of the UN or some NGO presence and make contact from there. They ought not, by his reckoning, to be in any immediate danger.

As he walked down the road, four stick figures emerged from a mirage in the road before him. When they drew closer, he saw that they were four young Palestinians. Their clothes were dirty and blackened, as though they had been too close to a fire. One had a kaffiyeh with a black band and was carrying a gasoline can. The sight of the gasoline can annoyed Lucas.

The young men approached him, staring impolitely. He could tell little about them. They might have been Palestinians from town, or Bedouin, or even Nawar of the al-Firuli.

"You are Jew," one said to him as they passed.

"You are spy," said another.

"You are shit," said the young man with the kaffiyeh who carried the gas can.

"Shit," said the fourth, who presumably spoke the least English.

Why argue? Lucas thought. Everyone went his way and Lucas, at least, did not look back. It was no worse than similar encounters he had had in the Caribbean.

The next vision to take shape in the glare was a self-propelled gun, stopped by the side of the road, with a blue and white Star of David flag on it. It was dusty and forlorn-looking but turned out to be a patrolling IDF vehicle. A hatch opened and a young man in a tanker's helmet stuck his head out. He then took the helmet off, reached into his sweatshirt pocket for sunglasses and squinted down at Lucas.

After a puzzled moment, he said, "Identification."

Lucas showed him his passport and press pass.

"You got a little trouble?" the soldier asked drily.

"Well, I ran into a barricade last night. Had to leave my vehicle."

"It's probably burned now," the soldier said. "Lucky you weren't in it."

Lucas smiled in appreciation of the joke. "You're right there."

"You think I'm joking?" the soldier asked irritably. "A civilian was murdered last night. Attacks all over the Strip. In the West Bank also. Even in our own cities. In Lod. In Nazareth. In Holon. A young girl was killed, the
skezzin.
"

"In the Strip?" Lucas asked.

"In Tel Aviv itself," the soldier replied.

"Well," Lucas said, "as you can see, I'm lost and I'm a foreigner. I'd like to call my office back in Jerusalem. Do you think you could give me a lift to a UN post?"

The soldier looked troubled. A second young soldier appeared in the hatch, fanning himself with his beret. The open hatch was killing the gun's air conditioning.

"I'd like to help you out," the first soldier said. "But something happens and you're with us, we're in Lebanon." He scanned the horizon. "Look," he said, pointing across the spinach field to the nearest settlement. "That's Kfar Gottlieb. They have a phone. They'll help you out."

The second soldier said something offhand in Hebrew, which amused his comrade but which Lucas could not understand.

"We
think
they have a phone," the first soldier translated. "We don't always know what's allowed with them."

They spread an army blanket, cool with the tank's interior currents, on the blazing metal of their vehicle and Lucas rode on top of it to Kfar Gottlieb. At the settlement's gate, the soldier commanding the self-propelled explained Lucas's situation. The armed sentries there opened the gate so Lucas could enter. Except for their kippot, the sentries wore khaki uniforms that were identical to the soldiers'. They were grim and silent.

Lucas shook hands with the two soldiers who had given him the lift and passed through the gate.

"I didn't think I'd make it," he told the sentries. There were three of them. Two were in their mid-twenties, the third was in his mid-fifties. They made no reply whatever to Lucas's attempt at conversation. Soon a jeep arrived from the settlement's headquarters, summoned by walkie-talkie. The jeep was driven by a handsome dark-haired woman with a khaki bandanna. The older sentry motioned for Lucas to get into the jeep and sat down beside him. They drove in silence through the fields of spinach. Beyond the spinach were fields of tomatoes, and beyond them rows of grapefruit trees and then bananas.

"So this is Kfar Gottlieb," Lucas said, again trying conversation with the couple in the jeep.

The older sentry looked at him blankly. "That's right," he said. His voice seemed without accent or expression.

They drove for nearly half an hour before they reached the neat rows of stucco houses among which the settlement's headquarters stood. Getting out, the sentry ordered Lucas from the jeep with the same peremptory gesture he had used before. Although the man kept his machine gun strapped to his shoulder, Lucas felt himself somehow a prisoner. The woman in the khaki bandanna drove off without looking behind her.

"I'd like to get in touch with the people I was traveling with," Lucas said pleasantly as they walked into the air-conditioned trailer that seemed to be the settlement's main office. "Some folks from the International Children's Foundation."

The man with the machine gun stopped in his tracks and stared at him with the same blank look, informed now with a lurking rage.

"Children?"

"Yes, I—"

"You a reporter? We have children here. You want to do a story about our children?"

"I've been working in the camps."

"Oh, the camps," the man said. "I understand. Sure. Those children."

"It was a hell of a day," Lucas said, still hoping to be pals. "Dangerous for everybody."

"That's right," the man said. "In fact, one of our brothers was killed. One of our children."

"I'm sorry," Lucas said.

"He wasn't a child," the man explained. "He was a beautiful young man. I hope you don't think I'm a faggot."

Lucas thought it best not to answer. He was obviously in trouble again.

"Of course if you're gay," the man said, "I don't want to insult you. I want you to think well of us. That's very important to us, what the world thinks."

"You've certainly..." Lucas looked around at the verdant fields, in search of an observation. Sprinklers on movable sections of irrigation pipe made ranks of misty rainbows stretching into the haze on the horizon. "You've certainly grown a lot of spinach." He was frightened and very tired.

The man laughed appreciatively, a hearty, false laughter. "A lot of spinach. That's good. Yeah," he said, "we've made the desert bloom." He waited a beat. "The young man who died, who was murdered by that scum—he was new here. At the same time, he was one of our children. Maybe that's hard for you to understand?"

"Of course I understand," Lucas said. He might, he thought, have rashly allowed some irritation to creep into his voice. "Why shouldn't I?"

"You should," the man said. "And you will."

"How," he asked the man with the gun, ignoring the prediction, "did it happen?"

"Mister," said the man, "we're gonna start asking you about that."

L
YING ON
the tiles of the cool bright room, Lucas had occasion to reflect that until a few moments before, no one connected with the business had really troubled to hurt him. The several straight-armed shots he had just taken from the jolly-faced red-headed man in front of him were the most solid he had ever stopped—this was far worse than the time he had been mugged drunk in Morningside Park. He had no intention of striking back, but the man had a little homily for him anyway.

"You do not ever strike a Jew," the red-headed man said. "For you to raise your fist, to attempt to injure a Jewish person, is to direct an injury against the Almighty Himself."

"I never heard that," Lucas said, starting to his feet.

The red-haired man had a colleague in the room with him.

"Now you heard it," said the colleague. He was a much shorter man and lacked his associate's good-humored appearance. He was short and squat and hard-eyed, with dark hair and a slight potbelly. He seemed aware of his own effect.

Lucas hauled himself onto the stool that had been provided for him. It was a three-legged stool, one on which a fighter might rest between rounds or a class dunce might be exhibited. At Kfar Gottlieb, Lucas could imagine it being used for both purposes. Looking into the hard light, he saw that the red-headed man who had been hitting him was wearing bright red boxing gloves. The man's colleague noticed Lucas's surprise.

"He's an athlete," explained the colleague, who seemed to be in charge. "So he needs to protect his hands."

"I thought maybe he played the violin," Lucas said. This proved entirely the wrong answer. Whappo, and he was on the floor again, numb-nosed, tasting cartilage, looking down at his own blood.

"I do," the red-haired man said. "I'm shopping for a fiddle. Want to be one?"

Helping himself back onto the stool, Lucas thought about respiration, wondering when his own might be restored. It reminded him of the time he had run out of air during a night dive at Sharm al-Sheikh. He'd hit the surface not a moment too soon and seen the black sky and the huge desert stars. Then he had pulled the regulator from his face and settled back in the BC's rubbery embrace, savoring the sweet air. Yet for some mysterious metabolic reason, the air was unavailable. He had floated on the black surface rasping, breathing what might have been the air of Uranus, for all the nourishment it had given his poor lungs.

The room they were in had been pitch black and moldy on their arrival. Its single fluorescent overhead light showed it to be lined with ceramic tiles. It was a hideaway of some kind, a bunker. Strive as he would, it seemed twenty seconds before Lucas had his breath back.