Breakable You (18 page)

He was sure that the possibility of peace between Israel and Palestine, never very strong to begin with, had been extinguished now. And he anticipated a pogrom against the Muslim American community, a response that would match the insanity of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. His organization, dedicated to fighting against discrimination against Arabs in American society and culture, was going to be faced with the biggest challenge of its existence. If his job had been important in the first place, it was doubly important now.

The only problem was that he didn't care. He didn't care about Israel and Palestine, and he didn't care about the Muslim American community. He wasn't even sure he still believed there
was
such a thing as the Muslim American community, but if there was, he didn't care about it. He didn't care about anyone he didn't know. The only thing he cared about was Zahra.

It wasn't just that politics had ceased to matter to him; it was that politics—his own politics, at least—had come to revolt him. He had come to believe that he was a hypocrite. He had never been a hypocrite in his words or actions, but he had been a hypocrite in his thoughts.

For many years, in many contexts, he'd had occasion to write about terrorism. In college and graduate school he'd written papers on the subject, and since he'd been working with the AAHRC, whenever there was a suicide bombing in Israel he'd written an article or press release with the organization's response. He'd written more of these than he cared to remember.

He had always approached the subject in the same way. In response to suicide bombings, for example, he would write the same three paragraphs. He would begin by denouncing the bombing. Then he would denounce all forms of violence against civilians. And finally he would assert that Palestinian violence against Israel was dwarfed by Israel's violence against Palestinians. He would argue that when a Palestinian teenager sets off a bomb on a bus in Jerusalem, the U.S. government and media rightly condemn it as a terrorist act, but when the Israel Defense Force bombs a house in Jenin, in an attack ostensibly aimed at a Palestinian militant but one that results in the deaths of innocent people, the U.S. government and media look the other way.

He still believed that this argument, in its basic outlines, was accurate, but what he admitted to himself for the first time after Zahra's death was that at the same time as he had always condemned the suicide bombers, he had always, in his secret heart, admired them. He admitted to himself that whenever he'd written his three paragraphs of boilerplate condemnation of violence in the Middle East, the only paragraph that he truly believed was the third one, the one in which he argued that Israel's crimes were far worse than those of the Palestinians, and that, although he never put it on paper, he had always believed that the history of Israel's violence against the Palestinians was the true cause of the suicide bombings, and that therefore they too were Israel's fault.

When Zahra was alive, he had sometimes, in order to stoke his rage against Israel and the United States, imagined her as the victim of an Israeli raid in Palestine. To his shame, he now realized that he had never imagined her as the victim of a suicide bombing in Israel.

His organization expected him to write a press release responding to the World Trade Center attacks in the same old terms: condemn the attacks, and then condemn the larger injustices that give rise to terrorism. He couldn't do it. He could no longer write anything that would subtly excuse the killing of innocents by putting it into some anodyne "context." When he walked through Lower Manhattan and saw the posters taped up on the walls and bus shelters and street signs, posters with the faces of the missing, every face he saw was Zahra's face.

The response of friends to September 11 sent him reeling. People he had always considered comrades were—in private, in secret—celebrating. His own grandmother had celebrated. His parents, born in New Jersey, thoroughly assimilated, had been as horrified as anyone else, but his grandmother had actually been gleeful. When they talked on the phone on the night of September 11, he was disgusted by her reaction, but not surprised. While he was hoping that the authors of the act would turn out to be Americans, his grandmother was hoping that it had been planned by Yasser Arafat. "The old man has finally come through," she kept saying. (Later she changed her tune: she came to be certain that "the Jews" had planned the attacks. Every time they talked about the subject, she would tell Samir solemnly that she knew for a fact that no Jews had shown up to work at the World Trade Center that day.)

His grandmother was a simple woman. Far worse than the responses of the simple were the responses of the clever. Noam Chomsky, whom he had always admired, wrote on September 12 that Bill Clinton's bombing of a factory in Sudan in 1998, in which one person had been killed, had been an atrocity worse than the attacks on the World Trade towers. Edward Said, the most articulate and intelligent defender of the Palestinian cause, a man who had always been one of Samir's heroes, condemned the attacks in language so exquisitely evasive that it was hardly clear whether he was condemning them at all. In an essay written shortly after September 11 he wrote, "No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents, most particularly when only a small group of people are in charge of such actions and feel themselves to represent the cause without having a real mandate to do so." So it must follow that if a large number of people are in charge of such actions, and do have a real mandate to represent the cause, the mass slaughter of innocents might be okay. The thinkers Samir had always admired now filled him with loathing.

The thinkers on the other side were just as bad. He still hated the writers who apologized for the violence of Israel and the United States. Although the cause was different, the contempt for others was the same. When the United States invaded Afghanistan, Christopher Hitchens, the former leftist who was now a newly minted friend of the Republican party, dismissed critics of the war with the remark that the Pentagon had adhered to "an almost pedantic policy of avoiding 'collateral damage.'" As if the U.S. had taken a bit too far some quirky reluctance to murder noncombatants. A sentence this morally shallow, Samir believed, could have been written only by someone who had never endured the loss of a loved one. If Hitchens ever
had
endured the loss of a loved one, so much the worse for him.

The partisans on both sides made the same lazy gestures to conceal their root belief that the murder of innocents is justified in the name of tomorrow's greater good.

Samir tried to find a political thinker who seemed truly to grieve over the death of innocents on the "other side," who seemed truly to feel compassion for his enemies. He found the note he was searching for in the writings and speeches of Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, and Gandhi. He found it in the memoirs of Primo Levi, the survivor of Auschwitz, and in the articles of Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian theorist of nonviolent activism whom Samir always used to consider a bit of a clown. But for the most part the world of political thinking now filled him with disgust.

He couldn't do his job anymore. He could no longer be the partisan of a cause. When he heard of an opening for a position as a writer and researcher at Amnesty International, he applied for it, and when he got it, he quit his job. Amnesty didn't take positions about ideological or theoretical questions, about forms of government or economic systems. It stood for a few simple things: it was against torture, it was against the killing of civilians, it was against cruel treatment of prisoners, it was against capital punishment. It fought against certain measurable forms of cruelty. This was the kind of thing that he had once scorned about the organization. It wasn't militant enough; it had no historical perspective; it had no critique of the deep structures of political and economic oppression. But it was precisely what he valued about it now. It was against cruelty, and that was enough.

He didn't last long. It was a job that required that you be obsessed—obsessed with the fate of the individuals whom it was Amnesty's goal to defend—and Samir could no longer be obsessed with anyone's fate. He knew that each of these people, the jailed poets, the disappeared student leaders, the tortured dissidents, was a world; he knew that each life was as valuable as Zahra's; but this knowledge could not fill him with the zeal you had to have if you were going to lead campaigns to help them. He didn't care that much about anyone anymore.

He left the job respectfully, making clear his admiration for the organization and the work it did, and then he set out to make his living as a carpenter. He had worked his way through college by way of carpentry and student loans, and he was skilled enough that it didn't take him long to begin to make a living at it again.

It was the only possible work for him, in his new state of mind. The demands of simple honest craftsmanship kept him sane.

For two years he kept his life scrupulously empty. At first he spent his evenings reading, but he rarely finished any of the books he began. History and politics seemed like part of a life he had left behind, and fiction bored him. Fiction was just writers showing off. He would read five pages of a novel and then come across something that was obviously fake, and then he would put it down.

He never watched television. If he did make the mistake of turning it on, he would inevitably come upon one of those made-for-TV movies about dying children, families bravely struggling to cope. Each of these movies concluded in a glow of heartwarming acceptance, as if the death of a child were the best thing that could happen to a parent.

Once a week he would stop at the library and pick out one. or two books of photographs, and he would sit at a long table, looking at faces. The faces in the Mathew Brady photographs from the Civil War; the faces of Palestinians; the faces of the Israeli pioneers, from the generation of 1948; the faces of people who had been distinguished by nothing, touched by no large fate. He preferred old books of photographs. He preferred to gaze upon the faces of the dead.

And that had been his life, for two years. Until now. Until Maud had come along and dragged him back into the world.

He still had moments of resentment, of resistance. Still had moments when he was horrified by the thought of abandoning Zahra. But in the wisest part of himself, he knew that he wouldn't be doing justice to Zahra by holding himself back from life.

So he was allowing it to happen. He watched the lights inside him go on, one by one, and he didn't do anything to stop them.

In January, during Maud's winter break, she and Samir took a trip to New England. They stayed for two nights in Rockport, Massachusetts, where her family used to go every summer when she was a kid. She had always loved it and hated it. She hated it because her parents would always rent the same tiny cottage and she and her brothers would get crammed together in one room, and as the smallest child and the only girl she always suffered the gravest indignities. But she had loved it because of the ocean, and because of the starkness of the weather, boiling in the day and freezing at night, and because of the romance of Bearskin Neck, which was one long street that ran the length of a skinny peninsula, extending into the ocean like the finger of a giant, a street filled with candy stores and bookstores and knickknack shops, down which, after supper, she and her family would stroll, and where her parents would buy her a different kind of penny candy every night. Now, as she walked there with Samir—the place was unchanged, its glamour, to her eyes, undiminished—she was touched with the flutter of mortality. She missed her childhood: the time when she knew her father simply as her father, not as a public man, a man renowned for his literary achievements and his indefatigable interest in chasing youthful tail. The time when she knew her mother simply as her mother, a being complete, rather than a woman who, like the rest of us, was struggling and baffled and half born.

But of course she wouldn't trade her old naivete for her present knowledge. Knowledge is always a good thing, even when it makes us unhappy. This was one of the beliefs closest to her heart.

It was good to be an adult here, to be a grown woman with her lover. When she used to come here with her family she was a cog, a squished little fish, voteless.

They went to the end of Bearskin Neck and sat on the huge rocks near a lighthouse, and though it was too dark to see the ocean below them, they heard it, battering forever against the rocks.

"Thank you for taking me here," he said.

"Why?"

"It's good to see a little more of your life."

She knew that his happiness was still a guarded happiness, a happiness with a wound, but she marveled at how far he had come, and she thought that with enough time and enough love they would knit their lives together, and although he would never "move on," if moving on meant ceasing to mourn his daughter, he would finally be free to take her, Maud, all the way in.

There would be no fairy-tale ending here, because life wasn't like that; there would always be the fact that his child had died. But there could be something rich and strong between them. Sometimes when they were making love they would keep their eyes open. This was new for her. Sex always used to be something to be done with eyes closed. What was different now, she thought, was that there was no break, no separation, from the flow of feeling between them when they were in bed and the flow of feeling between them when they were out in the world.

We have the world and we have the bed, she thought. We have everything.

They sat on the rocks near the lighthouse, bundled up in the frigid night. The light at its tip revolved slowly, sending its thin long beam into the black.

After Rockport they drove north and stayed in little towns they'd never heard of. There were moments, sitting beside him in the rental car, when she felt lonely and estranged. Because he was still mysterious to her. He seemed to have made himself a creature who existed in the moment only. He rarely talked about his daughter, he rarely talked about his parents, he rarely talked about his past: he didn't "share," in the conventional sense. Yet he was entirely present, entirely engaged. She thought he was the most alert person she had ever met. He listened to her in a full, undistracted way, as only her mother had ever listened to her before.