Vicious Circle

  “I only thought—”

  “You should stop thinking and give your brain a rest.”

  “Rabbi, it’s impossible to stop thinking.”

  “You can stop thinking if you pray.”

  “What should I pray for?”

  “Pray to God to let you live long enough to celebrate your twenty-seventh birthday.”

  “Rabbi, you terrify me when you say things like that.”

  “You terrify me when you say I have a Christian name.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Which brings us back full circle to Ya’ir.”

  “To Ya’ir.” The Rabbi tilted his head and lifted his manacled hands in a mock toast. “Long life,” he tittered, his vocal cords sore from the endless interrogation. “Good health. Financial success. Fifteen minutes of fame. Whatever.”

  They had been at it for three and a half hours, the Doctor’s precise questions and the Rabbi’s demented replies grazing each other as they sailed back and forth between them. The el-Tel brothers had drifted in to listen for a while, then, bored, had returned to the front room, Azziz to strip and oil the AK-47s while his brother read aloud the nightly portion of the holy Qur’an, after which the two settled down to a game of backgammon. The sound of the dice rattling and their muffled cries of excitement could be heard through the partly open door. His eyes red with fatigue, the Doctor puffed intently on a Palestinian Farid; cigarette ashes flecked the lapels of his suit jacket, butts littered the floor around the hem of his long white robe. “The leader of Jewish underground,” he droned on, lighting a new cigarette on the dying embers of an old one, “is known by the code name Ya’ir, after Eliezer ben Ya’ir, the hero of Masada who held out against the Roman Tenth Legion and talked his men into committing mass suicide when it looked as if they were going to be taken prisoner. More recently, Ya’ir was the underground name of Abraham Stern, the Jewish-Polish terrorist who led the Stern Gang against British rule until he was cornered and killed by British soldiers in a Tel Aviv apartment.”

  The Rabbi’s feet tap-danced on the floor of their own accord. “You’d be better armed for your holy war against Israel if you understood Jewish character as well as you understand Jewish history.”

  “Tell me about Jewish character, ya’ani.”

  Apfulbaum pulled a face. He sensed that his interrogator had planted a land mine in his path; whatever answer he gave was likely to be turned against him. A muscle in his thin neck twitched as he leaned forward, eager to outfox the fox. “Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the Jew fights an inner battle. The Torah tells us we are warriors and lions. The Holocaust tells us we are victims and lambs. Modern day Jews carry the Torah in their heads and the Holocaust in their guts; it is the tightening of an artery, the tensing of a muscle, an ear-splitting murmur of the heart. The two traditions, the two halves of this split personality, war with each other within the gizzard of every Jew.”

  “The predicament of the Jew is not unlike the predicament of the devout Muslim,” the Doctor said. “We also have two traditions that war with each other in our gizzards, as you put it. When a Muslim no longer lives on Islamic territory and under Islamic rule, he must decide which of the two traditions to follow: armed struggle, which we call jihad, or emigration to a territory governed by Islamic law, which we call hejira. In his lifetime, the Prophet Mohammed did both. In my case, I have chosen Al jihad fi sabil Allah—Warring in the path of God, which must be interpreted as armed struggle to spread Muslim power and the word of the Prophet. I prefer to fight rather than emigrate.”

  Despite himself, Apfulbaum was beginning to feel a grudging respect for his captor. “In your shoes I would certainly do the same. In my case, in the case of the Jewish hero who has taken the name of Ya’ir, the warrior Jew has triumphed over the victim Jew.”

  “And your warrior Jew, by extension, has divine dispensation to steal the land from Palestinians and slaughter those who resist.”

  Apfulbaum wagged a trembling finger at his inquisitor. “We are not stealing the land from Palestinians, but nurturing a Jewish entity in the Promised Land.”

  “Personally, I have nothing against a Jewish entity in, say, Uganda.”

  The Rabbi snorted in satisfaction; all things considered, he was enjoying these bouts of verbal sparring, if only because he got to spend several hours without the sickening hood over his head. If he ever managed to get out of this alive, he would attempt to reproduce the dialogue in a lengthy article. He already had a title in mind; he would call it “The Children of Abraham: a Dialogue of the Deaf between Two Blind Mice.” “For centuries,” Apfulbaum said, rambling on in lilting imitation of his old Rabbi in Crown Heights instructing yeshiva bookworms, I. Apfulbaum among them, “we were dispersed like seeds across the planet, taking root where we could, moving on when the local czar acquired a taste for ethnic cleansing. We lived by the Torah, but what happened to us? Pogroms, ghettos, expulsions, inquisitions, death camps, crematoriums are what happened to us. The moral of the story would be as plain as the nose on your face if I had eyeglasses and could see your face: To live by the Torah isn’t enough; we must follow God’s commandment to the Jewish people and settle all of the land of the Torah. The majority of the six hundred and thirteen commandments in the Torah can’t be carried out in Uganda—they can only be carried out in Israel. I’m talking all of the land of the Torah, not just half. Living the life of a Torah Jew in the land of Israel is the ultimate religious experience; it’s a spiritual orgy. Here we are in direct contact with God, on the soil God gave us. We are not weekend warriors, dipping in and out of Jewishness in some Diaspora synagogue where singles and divorced circle each other looking for non-smoking soul mates; we are not New York Jews who associate Jewishness with the ritual eating of bagels and lox every Sunday morning.”

  Across the room the Rabbi’s secretary, dozing restlessly under his leather hood, shuddered so violently that he almost tipped over his chair. “I can’t swim,” he cried in the high pitched voice of a frightened child caught up in a vivid nightmare. He stretched his neck like a swan and gulped for air. “For the love of God, throw me a buoy before I drown.”

  “You’re supposed to be a consenting adult,” the Rabbi, irritated by the interruption, taunted his secretary. “Sink or swim, but for God’s sake, Efrayim, do it discreetly.” Scratching a nostril on his slit sleeve, Apfulbaum turned back to his interrogator. “Excuse the interruption. Where was I? Ah, I remember. As for slaughtering the Palestinians who resist, Moses ben Maimon, a twelfth century mensch if there ever was one, taught that an individual may be killed—must be killed!—if killing him will prevent Jews from being harmed. This principle is known as din rodef, the judgment of the pursuer; the rodef or pursuer with a knapsack stuffed with plastic explosives can be killed by a righteous Jew before the pursuer uses the explosives to kill a Jew. In the inimitable words of Maimonides, his blood is permitted. You are too shrewd not to see what I’m driving at—someone like Ya’ir is justified in attacking Palestinians to prevent the Palestinians from attacking Jews.”

  The Doctor dispelled the smoke with the back of his hand. “Do you believe din rodef justifies preemptive strikes against Palestinians wearing knapsacks, or Palestinians in general?”

  “The delicious Koran of yours authorizes Muslims to take what they think is theirs by force. Our Torah authorizes us to protect what is ours by force.” Apfulbaum tittered again. “Push has long since come to shove, but which text will triumph—your Koran or my Torah?”

  “You have not answered my question.”

  In his eagerness to reply, the Rabbi ignored the saliva dribbling from the corner of his mouth. “Given the directives of the Koran and the spin meshugana Muslim fundamentalists like you put on them, all Palestinians must be treated as potential carriers of knapsacks.” He cocked his head and added, “Read Genesis two, fifteen: God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden ‘to work and guard it.’ Israel is my Eden, and I am simply obeying God’s injunction to guard it.”


  Unfazed, the Doctor sucked at his cigarette. “You are repeating word for word deranged passages from your book, One Torah, One Land.”

  The Rabbi’s mouth gaped open in satisfaction. “You have read my book!”

  “I have had it read to me, ya’ani.”

  “Aieeeee. Efrayim told me you had a problem with your eyes.”

  The Doctor laughed harshly. “You might call it a problem. Tear ducts normally drain into the nose through the nasolacrimal ducts, but in my case the membranes were clogged at birth, which caused my eyes to tear permanently. I was born crying and never stopped, and it affected my vision. By the time my parents noticed that my sight had deteriorated and took me to a doctor, who opened the nasolacrimal ducts, it was too late—I was reduced to a kind of tunnel vision, which gradually worsened as I grew older. Each time I woke up I found I could see less than the day before—but, curiously, I understood more. I tell you: people who knew me as a child say they weren’t aware my vision had been impaired. I developed little tricks—I knew where every object in the house was. I used the tips of my fingers as if they were antennas. I would pour fruit juice into tumblers and offer them to visitors. My father had a horse, which I rode. When I was twelve I was dying to go to a riding academy run by a Syrian cavalry officer. I knew that if he discovered I couldn’t see he wouldn’t let me enter the academy. So I devised a system of taking bearings like a sailor and navigating my way around dry land. The Syrian instructor never realized I was functionally blind.” The Doctor laughed under his breath. “I am still taking bearings, and still navigating.”

  “On what do you take bearings?”

  “On the Creator, the Maker, the Shaper, the All-merciful, the All-compassionate, the All-sublime, the All-mighty. On the one true God. There is yet another name for God, the Greatest Name, concealed from all but the holiest of men. It is my dream to one day pronounce it.”

  “Me, too, I believe in one God,” the Rabbi said with quiet ardor. “‘Shema yisro’eyl, adoynoy eloheynu, adoynoy ekh-o-o-o-dddd … ’” he said, drawing out the last syllable of the word “one.” ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one.’ Me, too, I hope to enter the holy of holies in a reconstructed Temple of Solomon and pronounce the unpronounceable name of God before I kick the bucket.”

  “La ilaha illa ‘llah,” the Doctor whispered huskily. “‘No god exists but God.’” He felt himself being sucked onto a common ground beyond the no-man’s land of English, and scraped back his chair to create more space between him and his prisoner. Changing the subject abruptly, he said, “According to my notes you are married.”

  The Rabbi responded reluctantly. “I have a wife. In America she was called Janet. In Israel she has taken the Hebrew name Devora.”

  “At what age did you fall in love with her?”

  “I never fell in love with her. I married in order to procreate. She was … suitable.” He leaned forward. “God created the female of the species on the sixth day but He neglected to say, as He did when He was contemplating His handiwork on days one to five, that it was good.” The Rabbi nodded to convey that he was making an important point.

  The Doctor appeared interested. “Have you ever been in love?”

  His ankles straining against the lengths of cloth binding them to the legs of the chairs, Apfulbaum lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. The last thing in the world he wanted was for Efrayim to hear what he was going to say. “Once, when I was studying to become a Rabbi, I danced with a girl at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn. It was summer. There was no back to her dress. I remember feeling the vertebrae of her naked spine under my finger tips. I got … excited. The girl laughed and pressed herself into my … excitement.” Apfulbaum was suddenly defensive. “So what about you—have you ever been smitten? Come clean: Have you ever ached to caress the female body with all its perfections and imperfections? Are you blind or indifferent to all those young ladies with brassiere straps slipping off their bronzed shoulders or bare navels with earrings in their belly buttons? I’m not talking platonic friendship, I’m talking permanent erection, I’m talking coitus un-interruptus. You are obviously a control freak. What I’m really getting at is, have you ever lost control?”

  The Doctor cleared his throat. “My answer will surprise you. As a matter of fact, yes. I am not ashamed to admit it was love at first sight. Only remembering it now takes my breath away. The touch of her vertebrae left the tips of my fingers tingling. I wanted to drink her in, penetrate to her most secret parts, surrender myself to her, become one with her. It was my profoundest wish to die in her bare arms.”

  “What became of her?”

  “She is still alive and well and aging nicely, thank you.” The Doctor actually smiled. “The name of my beloved is Jerusalem. You must understand the difference between the secular Muslims who direct the Palestinian Authority and Islamists like me. The secular Muslims are only interested in a nation-state; the Authority’s functionaries, little men from refugee camps in Tunis, sit behind large desks and drink Turkish coffee and accept envelopes stuffed with cash in return for favors. Me, I am crazy about the land. I tell you frankly, ya’ani, when I walk in the hills above Jerusalem, I wear sandals and never wash the dust off my feet until I go to the mosque to pray.”

  The Rabbi lowered his eyes, acknowledging that he was in the presence of a pious man. “I know, I know. With me it’s exactly the same.” He buffed his lips with his knuckles as he recited words he had memorized as a young man and never forgotten. “When a man plasters his house, let him leave a small area unplastered to remind him of Jerusalem. Let a man prepare everything for a meal; then let him leave a small thing undone to remind him of Jerusalem. For it is said: ‘If I forget thee O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning.’”

  The Doctor said emotionally, “I never dreamed I would come across another human being, let alone a Jew, who loved this city as I do.”

  “The first time I set foot in Jerusalem,” the Rabbi, almost giddy with bliss, ranted on, “oy, I must have been sixteen at the time, I wound up, like every Jew visiting the Holy Land, praying at the Wailing Wall. And suddenly it hit me that I wasn’t praying, I was actually talking to God! I beat my head against what was left of the Second Temple until I had bruised my forehead. When I pressed my ear to the cold stone, I swear to you I heard voices and the clash of swords and shields. I heard Canaanites and Hyksos and Egyptians and Philistines, I heard Hebrews and Babylonians and Persians and Syrians and Greeks and Romans, I heard the Muslim warriors from Arabia and the Christian crusaders from Anjou, I heard the Turks and the British. Oh, I tell you I had taken a mountain climber’s grip on the Wailing Wall, working my fingers into its crevices as if I intended to scale it; they had to pry my hands loose from the stones, they had to drag me away. I was in a trance, I was in another world. I was home.”

  “You are a fossilized Jew,” the Doctor said, not without sympathy. “Your spiritual home is the Isra’il of Kings and Judges and burning bushes and rams’ horns bringing down the walls of cities.”

  “You are a fossilized Muslim,” Apfulbaum retorted with an agitated laugh. “You would be more comfortable if a time capsule whisked you back thirteen centuries to the golden age of Islam, if you could eavesdrop on the angel Gabriel whispering verses of the Koran into the ear of the Messenger.”

  “I would go back further,” the Doctor admitted. “I would return to the dawn of time when Ibrahim left the land of Ur; when his Egyptian bondwoman, Hagar, bore him a first-born son named Isma’il; when Isma’il helped his father build the Kaaba at Mecca, the first shrine to the one true God, with the nail in the floor the ancients believed to be the navel of the world; I would watch Ibrahim raise the sacrificial knife to the throat of his son Isma’il on the black stone at its heart only to have God stay his arm at the last instant. When Ibrahim came out of Ur, ya’ani, the religion of Islam already existed. It is written: Ibrahim was not a Jew, nor was he a Christian. He was a Muslim, a man of pure faith. This p
ure faith, this Islam of Ibrahim, this submission to God, is the straight path. It tells us all we need to know about human affairs—it tells us how to run a government, how to wash when there is no water available, how to pray and fast, how to dress, how to buy and sell, how to make love to our wives, how to eat and drink and defecate. In the Messenger’s scheme of things there is no place for bid’a, for innovation. Thus said the Prophet: ‘The most truthful communication is the Book of God, the best guidance is that of Muhammad, and the worst of all things are innovations: every innovation is heresy, every heresy is error, and every error leads to hell.’”

  “Amen again,” muttered the Rabbi. “I invite you to lecture on the subject of innovation to my Torah students in Beit Avram.”

  Petra came up behind the Doctor. “If we are going to be there and back before first light, we must leave now.”

  “Is everything prepared?” the Doctor asked her.

  “It is.”

  The Doctor rose stiffly to his feet and slipped the leather hood over the Rabbi’s head with unaccustomed gentleness. Then he pulled something from the pocket of his robe and dropped it into Apfulbaum’s palm. “During the twelve years I was imprisoned by the Isra’ilis, these helped me to keep my sanity.”

  The Rabbi’s fingers closed around a set of worn silver worry beads. A feeling of gratefulness, of affinity even, surged in his breast as he began to work them through his fingers. “You’re coming back, right?”

  “Inshallah,” the Doctor said. “God willing.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE BEAT-UP SILVER SUZUKI WITH ISRAELI LICENSE PLATES crawled along the dirt road and drew to a stop next to the back door of a fruit and vegetable warehouse on the outskirts of Ramallah, eight miles north of Jerusalem. A cat in heat, patrolling the tin roof of the warehouse, screeched with an almost human voice as Petra pulled the scarf from her head and used it to unscrew the naked electric bulb in the socket over the door. In the darkness, the Doctor got out of the car and slipped into the warehouse. He kept the tips of his fingers on Petra’s shoulder and followed her through the maze of aisles formed by shoulder-high stacks of crates. Overhead, shafts of silvery moonlight pierced the rain-streaked panes of the skylights, strewing the cement floor with slippery shadows. From every side came the fragrant scents of oranges and apples and carrots and parsley. A fat woman materialized in the aisle. She sank with difficulty to her knees, caught the hem of the Doctor’s robe in her thick fingers and brought it to her lips. “I ask you, I beg you, in the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate,” she whimpered. “Spare the life of my husband for his family’s sake.” A young man loomed behind the fat woman. “For my father’s life,” he said, his voice a muffled moan of dread, “in accordance with Islamic law, we offer diyah—”