Michael laughed again, briefly, showing even white teeth.
‘I saw the only way for me was through the Bible, through study. I started going to class properly and after a year I told my parents I felt ready. You know, I thought they’d be proud and I thought they’d be relieved because they’d never really learned to speak English properly themselves. But they were sad I was leaving. I told them it was the way of God. America was not for us with its modern ways, its lack of faith. But God is great, and he brought me here to this beautiful land. We have been weak for too long. I don’t blame people like my parents. But the Jews in Eastern Europe were passive for too long, they always wanted more time to think. Now we have a duty to take this land and to keep it, because God gave it to us. To go some place there was danger, to me that was part of the pioneering spirit, too. We hear so much these days from people in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem who talk about “peace” and how we should not be here in Samaria. I think we should talk to them. They’re wrong, but they’re not past a point where we can discuss things. I think it’s a phase and I think it’s coming to an end. They will see the simple truth sooner or later. Someone even mentioned the words “civil war” to me the other day. Ridiculous! They would never be that foolish. I pray for them. Did you hear that? I pray for my enemies! Maybe I’m becoming a Christian!’
He beamed at them all with the healthy certainty of faith. There was a brief pause, interrupted by Daoud clearing his throat, before the older man went to get drinks.
Back in the car, negotiating the rocky driveway back to the road, Daoud said, ‘I think you guys should see Nablus.’
‘What happens there?’ said Pietro.
‘It’s the Palestinian stronghold in the West Bank,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s an awful place.’
Daoud laughed. ‘It’s beautiful. I have friends there.’
‘Would we be welcome?’ said Pietro.
‘Of course,’ said Daoud. ‘They are decent people. You mustn’t believe everything these others tell you.’ He jerked his head back in the direction of the settlement.
They drove on through the empty roads of Samaria. Pietro found that his first impression of the bone-white hills of Judaea had been corrected or altered. There was after all something desirable in this barren land, particularly when you thought of the yearning with which it had been regarded by poor people in the shtetl of Eastern Europe, or by pressed and persecuted immigrants in the big cities of America. When a man lay down to sleep with his wife in the ghetto in Warsaw, had he dreamed of a promised land that would look like this? Perhaps when his body ached with the work of the city he had thought of a whitewashed house with a vineyard, a little grove with fruit trees, animals; a tiled roof, a shady tree, bougainvillaea, and grandchildren running in to be caressed and petted at his knee. How his soul must have longed for it, under the hammer of city labour, broken, beaten, among hard buildings in a foreign land.
The detested author of the magazine article had pointed out another irony: that the olive trees, the fig trees, the cultivation of the land, the trailing trellises of grapes, the sheep on the hills, the gentle flow of water through tiled cisterns, the essence of the landscape that had so inflamed the early Zionists could best be summed up in one word: Arab. In the occupation of Samaria, the Jews had built with pre-stressed concrete, steel and plastic tiles; in taking possession, they had built over their loved biblical landscape so that the promised land was, by some further irony, withheld from them in the moment of fulfilment, as it had been withheld from Moses.
To a foreigner, a Gentile, the land looked neither especially Arab nor Jewish nor promised. More than anything else, it looked frightening: the object of too much desire.
It was a cloudy day in Nablus. The people went about their business overlooked by a large hill whose massive physical indifference made their swarming lives look aimless. Pietro took photographs. Here it was impossible for the camera not to be full of people; yet the men and women added a particular force to the images of place, because part of the reason for their existence was simply to be there. What they did was less important than the fact that they did it there, in that spot, and by their occupation laid claim to it.
It was a close, grey afternoon. They went into a café and a waiter brought them tea with mint and sugar. A table of four elderly men played backgammon. The town seemed mortally depressed, slouched in torpor. Yet in the streets there was the anxious and frenetic activity that accompanies poverty. Young men ran and shouted in the alleys; women elbowed their way through the crowds. The result of these contrasting moods – the languor with the activity, the passionate sense of possession in a place that no one could be proud of – was a sense of threat. The missing factor in the equation could have been violence.
Two men came in and greeted Daoud. They sat down at the same table and after cursory introductions fell into conversation.
‘That doesn’t sound like Hebrew,’ said Sarah.
Daoud broke off. ‘You’re right. It’s Arabic. Excuse me. I’d forgotten for a moment.’
He said something to the two men and they talked in a mixture of Hebrew, Arabic and English. Daoud was the only one who understood everything. It seemed to amuse him. His eyes narrowed as if in amusement at some grand joke that none of the others was quite equipped to understand.
‘My friend here,’ he said, touching one of the men on the arm, ‘says he would like you to know that he and most of his friends concede that the Jews have a rightful claim to live in Israel. He says his dream is that there should be one state in which people live together peacefully, like brothers, but given what is happening here in Nablus, with terrorist bombs, and what has happened elsewhere he thinks this is not likely. So he says there must be two states, one for each of the two peoples. He says he regrets very much that many Jews think his people are not worth considering, that they think of them as . . . dirt. But he says the Palestinians and the Jews are similar peoples and they must work out their destiny together. It is like a difficult marriage. You would not have chosen this partner, but you are stuck with her. You can fight for ever, or you can decide to live in peace. He does not like it, but he has accepted it.’
Sarah smiled. ‘That is a very reasonable view.’
Daoud said, ‘If you doubt my translation, you can ask him to repeat it in Hebrew.’
‘Not at all.’ Sarah looked embarrassed under Daoud’s mocking gaze.
The older of the two Arab men lit a cigarette and asked Daoud a question in Arabic.
‘He wants to know if you have noticed about the street-cleaners,’ said Daoud. ‘The garbage men, the labourers, the shit-gatherers.’
Pietro and Harry nodded. Daoud turned back to his friend.
‘And do you know why they are all Arabs?’ he asked Harry.
Harry shrugged.
‘My friend says it is because his people are not permitted proper citizenship of this country, this model society.’
Sarah said, ‘Ask him why his people don’t unite with their friends in Jordan or Syria.’
Daoud didn’t ask him. He said, ‘It’s because they must first have their own independence like any other state. They must first have their own land and their own city.’
‘You mean Jerusalem?’ said Sarah.
‘Why not?’
‘Oh God.’ Sarah rolled her eyes heavenward.
They were due to spend the evening in Tel Aviv, with a family who were friends of Harry’s mother. As they walked back to the car, Pietro said to Sarah, ‘How come Daoud speaks Arabic so well?’
‘Because he’s an Arab,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t you tell?’
‘It hadn’t occurred to me,’ said Pietro, glancing back to where Daoud was walking with Harry. ‘He told me he was a Christian yesterday.’
‘There are quite a number of Arab Christians in fact.’
‘And yet by nationality he’s Israeli. Perhaps that helps him see all sides of the question.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Sarah.
It was growing dark as they emerged from Nablus. Pietro thought of the good Samaritan as they drove through the rocky hills. A man had fallen among thieves in just such a place. Then he remembered that this was wrong: the Samaritan had come from here, but the robbery had been elsewhere. And the Samaritans, had they been Jews, a lost tribe? Or were they Arabs? Or Gentile? He had heard it said that the Palestinians themselves were initially Jewish, more authentically the children of Abraham than those who had remained in the faith.
They were on a narrow motorway with headlights bending towards them and the tarmac road lit by the chemical splash of sodium overhead. With the snaking red tail-lights of the cars ahead, the scene might have been from any busy highway at dusk: the rush hour from Seattle out to what its residents called the ‘burbs’; the packed périphérique at Lyon; the drab slip roads from Runcorn and Liverpool. The world was bounded by the red velour of the car seats, the smell of the ashtray, the lit instrument panel on the dashboard and the swish of cars passing in the opposite direction. In their moving capsules no one at this moment cared about the ownership of the terrain they crossed; their aim, like that of any traveller, was only to be somewhere else.
Back in the lobby of their hotel in Jerusalem the next day, Pietro saw a photograph which excited him more than the arguments he had heard. It showed four Israeli soldiers arriving for the first time at the Wailing Wall after the capture of East Jerusalem from the Jordanians in 1967. It looked quite familiar – perhaps he had seen it in a newspaper – but its eloquence had survived. Three men stood in the foreground, close up to the camera. The photographer had knelt with his back to the Wall, facing the soldiers. One had his eyes raised beneath the rim of his helmet, looking up and to the right, his eyes scanning what he saw, but watchfully, as though still expecting resistance. On the right was a slightly older man, also helmeted, his face in shadow, unshaven, looking up and straight ahead in the passionless expression of a trained soldier. And in the middle was a younger man, fairer, perhaps not more than twenty years old, who had his helmet in his hands, as though, contrary to Jewishcustom, he had doffed it in reverence. Of the three, only he had quite given way to personal emotion, and in his face, half frowning, half turned, there was a look of concerned wonder, of excitement barely contained by the discipline of arms. The arrangement of the three figures close to the camera gave a sense of movement. It was as though they still quivered with the momentum of arrival; this was clearly the actual instant of awe and of possession. Then they would be gone, succeeded by other soldiers, whose helmets and faces were already edging into the background of the picture. Then they too would be replaced; on and on.
Pietro had doubted all the words he had heard in Israel because he did not know enough to check them, but he could not doubt the evidence of this picture.
He parted company with Harry and the guide, and went to visit the Garden Tomb, in the spot selected by General Gordon because the Holy Sepulchre was ‘too Arab’. Aware of everything that argued against it, Pietro still privately hoped that this might be the place; that if he sat quietly enough and watched, something might reveal itself to him. He encountered a problem. It was something he could not quite express, but it meant that he came away like most tourists and pilgrims, feeling uneasy. What was said to have happened, resurrection, seemed too important to have happened here, in this particular place. He tried to work out why. Was it again some kind of snobbery? Was it the inscription – ‘He is not here. He is risen’ – which instead of sounding numinous, seemed bathetic? Was it the ripe scepticism of the local people? Certainly the proximity of the East Jerusalem bus station at the foot of the slope was unfortunate. But then Christ had been born in a manger. Did these difficult surroundings in fact not constitute exactly the kind of paradoxical test of faith He would have wanted? The Son of God, born in a barn with animals; buried among trinkets and diesel fumes . . . It was not really that either. It was a problem of believing that an event of such universal magnitude could have had such a specific location – this stone, this blade of grass, these atoms. He wondered whether that made him an atheist; if not here, then where? It was more complicated than that too, he told himself, though he could no longer find the words to frame the thought.
He did, however, have his camera. With this he took several photographs of Arab children playing in the bus station with the skull-shaped hill behind them.
Harry had been to the Wailing Wall with Daoud, and they reunited at lunchtime. Daoud sat eating falafel and drinking Fanta. He had brought a friend with him he thought Harry and Pietro ought to meet, a dark-skinned, smiling man who told them his parents had come from Morocco. They were observant Jews and forceful in their Zionist beliefs, but he was not so happy.
They ordered beer and talked about the climate in Tel Aviv compared to Jerusalem, then about whether military conscription made young people more sexually active. The small talk lasted about two minutes before, as Pietro had expected, Daoud’s friend began to define himself and his beliefs. Though not religious like his parents, he was a keen Zionist and believer in Mr Begin. His hatred was not for the Palestinians or even the Jordanians, but for the effete Ashkenazi Jews who toyed with the idea of giving back parts of the West Bank to the Arabs, who despised and abused Sephardic people like himself, employing them only in menial jobs the Arabs could not be made to take on.
Pietro had begun to feel light-headed on his way back from the Garden Tomb and now felt a thin sweat breaking out on his back. He imagined he had caught some chill or flu. He watched the dark-skinned, earnest face arguing, but because he felt slightly removed from the world around him found it difficult to take in more than occasional phrases. This was a new development as far as he was concerned – intra-Zionist bitterness – and he wanted to understand it. But the phrases that stuck in his mind seemed too colourful or exaggerated to be worth trusting. ‘Our parents imported to be slaves . . . like blacks in Mississippi or South Africa . . . I would be arrested as a suspicious character if I showed up where they live . . . What chance for my children if they let the Arabs have their own land? We will become the slaves again, even people like me who’ve pulled ourselves up.’
He was more difficult to follow than some of the people they had met. He did not use the smooth English of political debate that was polished by practice and repetition; but he was quite as angry, just as certain of his right to survival on his own terms and no one else’s. In childhood Pietro had liked to choose a side to support in any debate, even if it turned out to be the ‘wrong’ one – the Roundheads, the Southern States, Sonny Liston, even, when he was older, George McGovern. When a combination of experience and laziness showed him there were seldom easy solutions, he relied on balance as a substitute for commitment.
He began to be depressed in Israel because there seemed to be no ground available for compromise, no logical way in which all the parties could be even partially right. So whose experience counted for most?
In the schedule of visits Harry had arranged before leaving London there was a stop for tea at the home of a woman he had met when he was on his kibbutz. She welcomed them to her small apartment in a modern block on the edge of Jerusalem and gave them tea and cake. When Pietro thanked her for her hospitality as they were leaving she turned his thanks abruptly away. Life was too urgent for such matters as thanks, she implied; there was no time for anything but the truth and the question of survival.
As they walked back to the hotel, Pietro said to Harry, ‘Don’t tell me; I don’t understand. You’re the only person who hasn’t said that to me yet.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Harry.
‘Of course I don’t. And sometimes I feel my attempts to understand just make people more annoyed. My ignorance is like a sore to them. My questions are distrusted as though they’re not only ignorant but in some odd way prejudiced as well.’
Harry laughed.
‘And do you understand?’ said Pietro.
‘Good God, no.’
It i
s the evening. It is their last night and they are back again with David and Sarah, Harry’s friends. This time they are in their flat, and a couple of other guests are expected.
Pietro is sweating under his shirt. He can feel a film crawling over his back, like traces of fixer clinging to a photographic print. His head feels hot and stuffed up. The sensation is not altogether unpleasant; he also feels insulated and secure. The problem is that his brain feels as clogged as his sinuses; his thoughts are as impaired as his breathing. He drinks beer and takes some nuts from a little dish on the coffee table.
David and Sarah’s son, a small boy called Ben, totters round the room. He has black curly hair and a slightly hectoring manner when he calls out to his parents. Pietro thinks briefly about the boy’s upbringing. No doubts for him about where to live. His parents have made the decision. This land is natural to him. Soon he will be in the army, preparing to fight for it.
The doorbell rings and Pietro feels a start of disappointment, for which he guiltily corrects himself, to see that the guest is Shimon, the man whose political certainties he had found close to remorseless on their second night in Jerusalem.
Shimon sits next to him on the 1950s sofa, drinking canned orangeade. Pietro talks to him about pictures, and Shimon lends half his attention, with a patient, quizzical air, as though to a child’s presentation before the main event.
The doorbell rings again and Sarah bustles out to answer it on stocky denimed legs, her hips brushing the armchair in which Harry is sitting with a vacant expression while Ben loudly explains to him some aspect of his school.