Martyrs' Crossing

by WILENTZ, AMY

• ISBN13: 9780345449832
• ISBN10: 0345449835
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2002-01-02
• Publisher: Ballantine Books

Summary

"SOPHISTICATED AND SUSPENSEFUL . . . TAUTLY WRITTEN . . . Wilentz knows the world she writes about very well, and her descriptions have a solid specificity that lends authority to her fiction." The New York Times Book Review "At a closed Israeli checkpoint, Marina, a Palestinian mother, clutches her ailing boy, desperate for access to Jerusalem and its doctors. When a young Israeli soldier waits too long before deciding to disobey orders, a martyr is born. Thus begins a graceful, painful, illuminating novel of the Middle East. . . . [Wilentz's] prose tugs at the reader. . . . The characters are magnetic. . . . [This] is a very human tale of regrets, revenge, and the elusive nature of absolution." Entertainment Weekly "SO PRECISE, SO STARTLING, SO UNFORGETTABLE. . . . These characters are all pawns of history and politics, but Wilentz makes them live." Los Angeles Times "MAGNIFICENT . . . Wilentz writes with a prose style reminiscent ofThe New Yorker's highest ambitions: crystalline, pure, faultlessly communicative. . . . Like the best documentaries,Martyrs' Crossingallows us unprecedented access to a little-understood and often misrepresented part of the world." Chicago Tribune "A BRILLIANTLY RESEARCHED MEDIDATION ON THE CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST . . .Martyr's CrossingmatchesDamascus Gatein the quality of research and the mass of intriguing charactersand yet it remains a lean thriller." The New York Observer

Author Biography

<b>Amy Wilentz</b> won the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for nonfiction and the Whiting Writers Award, and was a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990. She is the author of <i>The Rainy Season</i> and has written for <i>The Nation</i>, <i>The New Republic</i>, and <i>The New York Times</i>. She was the Jerusalem correspondent for <i>The New Yorker</i> from 1995 to 1997. She lives in New York City with her husband and three sons.

Excerpts

She wanted to be lifted away from here by angels,
plucked up into the empty sky. Failing angels, she would
accept any transportation--no matter how mean, no matter
how low. The crowd was squeezing the breath out of her,and Ibrahim 's
hand kept almost slipping away. Marina picked him up so that she
wouldn't lose hold of him. He turned and twisted irritably in her arms.
There was too much old sweat here, there were too many bodies close to
hers, and the whole thing made her feel like retching, like running. Too
many people were breathing down her neck, and whose breath was it? No
one who knew her, no one she wanted to know. Strangers,foreigners, was
how she thought of them, really, even though they were her own people,
standing packed around her. Finally, she was sharing their predicament.
She had always thought she wanted to.

They were all treading dust out here on the Ramallah road under the
blue winter sky, and Ibrahim was inhaling it, too, like fire. It was scratchy
air. He coughed and coughed again, and squirmed in her arms, trying to
see what was happening. He was pale and feverish,but there was strength
in those little legs. Marina looked down at his flushed cheeks. She looked
through the dust up at the sky and saw a string of faded plastic flags
fluttering over the road, crisscrossing it. There was a picture of the
Chairman on one side of each flag, and on the reverse, a picture of a jowly
commando who had been assassinated more than ten years earlier.

She felt an elbow grind into her side. No one liked to be this close to
his fellow man--she could say that with certainty. A car alarm yowled.
The crowd was approaching the yellow sign: PREPARE YOUR DOCUMENTS
FOR INSPECTION. The sky overhead was clear, but there was a threat in
the clouds piling up far out to the west over the distant sea. The wind
whipped through the cypresses that scrabbled up a hill behind the low
stores and houses. Straining toward the rickety watchtower that
overlooked Shuhada checkpoint, the faces of the crowd, upturned and
expectant,were like faces in religious paintings,the faces of believers waiting
for a miracle. Just let me through, Marina thought. A man next to her
coughed in Ibrahim 's face.

Next time, get him out of there and over to us as fast as you can, Dr.
Miller had said. He needs to be on the machines. He needs drips you can 't
always get at your hospitals. He needs our nebulizers.

She held Ibrahim tightly with one arm, and pushed his hair back from
his eyes. He felt hot and he looked frightened, and this was a boy who did
not scare easily. Not even when they went to visit Hassan in the prison on
the other side. In order to see Daddy, they had to get through the
checkpoint, find a taxi, drive into Jerusalem--and then, at the prison, pass
through a reinforced steel door while men with big guns watched them
and asked questions.

Marina was used to the rituals of crossing over. But today was different.
The press of bodies made her feel faint. In the months since Hassan was
arrested, she and Ibrahim had become accustomed to lining up. It was more
or less civilized. With the right papers you almost always got through--if
you had the patience. Sometimes the soldiers didn't check at all; they were
naturally unsuspicious and lenient with mothers and children. But if they
did run her through the computer, she was ready with her passport and with
Ibrahim 's medical file from Hadassah Hospital. There would be a few
questions about Hassan, because prisoners always turned up on the computer.
But then, right through. Marina looked like what she was, a Palestinian, but
she was an American citizen, born in Boston, with what had always been a
foolproof passport.

But nothing works forever, especially here. Early this morning, there
had been two bus bombs in downtown Jerusalem. Bodies had been blown
all over a square. These were the first attacks in a long time,and now the
checkpoint was like a place she'd never visited before. Marina had never
seen a complete closure before, a <i>towq</i>,it was called in Arabic. They
hadn't done one in years, and she'd never believed they could do it, not
really.

Could they? No one knew, not even her doctor in Ramallah. She had
run to him this afternoon, when Ibrahim seemed to be getting sicker. The
medications he had been expecting for more than a week had been
delayed again. Get yourself into Jerusalem, the doctor told her. With
your passport, it should be all right.

Turning away from his of fice door, Marina flagged a cab and headed
for the checkpoint. Traf fic to the crossing had slowed to a stop a half mile
from the Jerusalem line. She got out to finish the trip on foot.


Facing the crowd in the shadow of the watchtower, Lieutenant Ari
Doron flicked away his cigarette and tried to decide on a few next steps.
In the old days, he might have panicked. But he was a harder man now, he
didn 't wilt when confronted. That 's why his superiors used him for
checkpoint duty when the situation got bad. And today it certainly was
dangerous. The crowd had grown larger as more and more were refused
permission to cross. It was hot out for this time of year, and Doron felt
damp beneath his heavy bulletproof vest. He pushed his hair up under his
cap and drank some tepid water out of a plastic bottle that was standing
on one of the sand-filled, plastic roadblocks the army had set up at the
intersection three years ago, as a temporary measure. By now,the
checkpoint had become a permanent part of Jerusalem's geography. Since the
peace was declared, Doron thought. He tried to brush some of the dust
off his shoulders.

Today's disturbance was going down like clockwork, each notch up in
the violence coming according to schedule. It was like a drill for the
checkpoint soldiers, the angry crowds of rock-throwing young men. Doron was
used to it. It started with children, the little boys who slipped through legs
and whipped around the crowd and were having the best time, you could
see it. It was only a matter of minutes before the young men joined in. They
used slingshots, which Doron considered fair practice in the land of David.
He wondered whether these were the kind David had used to kill the giant.
The contraption looked like a holiday noisemaker, and the Palestinians
spun it from the hip so that if you were up close, which you tried not to be,
you could hear it whipping the air. The slingshot could send a rock flying at
what seemed like the speed of a bullet.

Usually,the soldiers waited until a rock hit its mark, until there were
enough men throwing stones, so that they weren 't firing into a gaggle of
schoolboys. First they shot into the air. Rubber bullets. Then they tried
tear gas. When the tear gas didn't work, the soldiers would shoot in the air
again, which also never worked, and then they 'd begin shooting in earnest,
over the heads of the crowd if their aim was good, into the crowd if it
wasn't. By then,the men would be angry and nervous and ready to shoot
for real, but Doron always tried to avoid this stage. He had never used live
ammo at a checkpoint, and could not imagine the situation in which he
would give that order. Rubber bullets were bad enough. Or there were
sound bombs, a kind of grenade that did not explode but could generally
be counted on to send a mob hurtling away. Doron also tended to go extra
heavy on the tear gas. He didn't want casualties on his record. Things
could escalate quickly into something really bad, something he didn't want
to see, didn't want to deal with, didn't want to be responsible for.

Doron had seen the crisis building today as the politicians pulled the
closure tighter and tighter. The Palestinians here at the checkpoint were
trying to get into Israel for all the usual reasons: work, work, and work.
There had been closures before, as punishment for acts of terror, and yet
they would still come, desperate to get through, and every day, some of
them made it, because usually the closure was not airtight, and there was
room for lackadaisical enforcement,there was room for leniency--even
sympathy, on occasion.

Like most of the officers in charge of the checkpoints today, Doron
had asked headquarters to loosen up --he could feel the place turning into
a flashpoint as the pressure built. But Tel Aviv kept tugging on the
drawstrings. Responding to terror, the government said, the two bus
bombings all over the television,the two suicide boys, dressed up like Israeli
soldiers, who packed their kit bags with explosives and got on the buses
and blew themselves up. Whose brothers or cousins might explode
tomorrow at the mall, the movies, the grocery store. Fifty killed and
scores wounded, in two minutes. So no passage between the West Bank
and Israel. No movement among the towns and villages of the West
Bank. Even the most urgent cases would be judged harshly today.

The stone throwers were close. Doron called in to headquarters.
There was trouble at several of the other crossings. It sounded chaotic
over the phone line. He heard other phones ringing and the sound of
someone cursing loudly. He hung up and had his men advance a few more
meters in front of the watchtower, hoping they would look tough and
determined, even though right now he had only seven men on shift, if you
didn't count the other two he had diverted to watch the dry, deserted wadi
a hundred meters away. Sometimes enterprising Palestinians would walk
or drive around the checkpoint through the dry riverbed behind it. The
Israelis knew about these violators, but usually ignored them. Today, the
wadi was off-limits. Nine men total, a reasonable number. The
checkpoints were not supposed to be war zones.

Zvili came up to him. It amazed him that checkpoint duty always
meant working with guys like Zvili.

"They 're closing in," Zvili said. He sounded excited.

"They are far away," Doron said.

"We might have to begin firing," Zvili said. He knew that Doron
shied away from this.

"I don 't think so, not yet." Doron looked at Zvili. The little man had
a hard look on his face, like a gargoyle. These little guys shocked Doron
with their toughness. They were ready for anything. Unlike Doron.

"Well, what do you suggest?" Zvili asked him.

"Nothing," Doron said. "Nothing yet."

"So we're just going to sit here like target practice?" Zvili spat on the
ground. He was a gremlin, but he was scared. Doron could see it in his
posturing.

"No, we're just going to sit here like grown-ups until we see what 's
developing," Doron said to him. His tone was condescending, the vocal
equivalent of patting Zvili on the head." For all we know, this is business
as usual, but a little more intense. Anyway, they 're still too far away to
hurt us."

Doron prided himself on his new maturity. He was an old hand,
temperate and calm, having found himself --sometime after his twenty-
eighth birthday--suddenly quite able to distinguish between a problem
and a crisis. Was it a run-of-the-mill melee, or "a situation "? Making that
judgment was the essence of Israeli military professionalism. Doron
checked the time and calculated how long it would be until nightfall.
Even the most violent crowds tended to disperse at sunset. It was a matter
of keeping the boys at bay until the earth's rotation came into line with
your military strategy. It would be almost an hour, not soon enough. He
noticed the dust rising. It made his eyes itch. He sniffed at the air. He
listened. A car alarm was going off. From this distance, about a hundred
meters, he could only make out beetled brows, and kerchiefs around
noses and mouths. It always looked in photographs as if they were seeking
anonymity, but in fact it was protection against the gas. The gas slowed
them down--it prolonged the time between the hurling of the rock that
smashed a soldier's cheek, and the shooting that would repel the stone
throwers. That was the only use for the gas, as far as Doron could see. It
never really put an end to things.

He nodded to Zvili, and Zvili prepared a tear-gas cartridge. The
young men were moving in closer, their pitching arms back. Doron
nodded again.

Zvili fired off the cartridge. It soared up into the air and then
plummeted down like the tail end of a firework, exploding on descent. The
crowd opened up around it. Breaking through the ring of those who were
fleeing, a young man with a kerchief around his face ran up to the
spewing cartridge, picked it up, and galloped toward the checkpoint like a
strange tribal smoke-dancer,stopping finally a few meters from Doron 's
line of defense to hurl the cartridge back at the Israelis. Doron coughed
and bent over, and tears bit at his eyes. He felt for a second as if he were
going to black out, the stuff was so fucking strong. Should have shot him,
he thought. When Doron stood finally after the cramp in his lungs had
abated, he saw the boy scampering back into a rejoicing crowd.

Doron wished these battles did not have to be so intimate. He
coughed into the back of his hand. There was something too much like
children's games about being at such close quarters with the enemy. It was
like hide-and-seek, or a color war. They ran up to you, you chased them
back. They conked your guy, you conked theirs. You got to know each
other by the end of a day. You could take the measure of certain
individuals. He hated seeing their joy at a wounded soldier, and wished he could
take the same raw pleasure in their injuries. He wanted to want them dead.
But God, he just wished that these people had stayed home today. He
wished that they would stay home every day.

---

Excerpted from Martyrs' Crossing by Amy Wilentz
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.