Flying Hero Class (24 page)

“That's not quite true,” McCloud told her. His sense of the sadness of what she was being asked to do now passed. She should understand Whitey and Tom and the reticent
didj
player Paul. “Oh yes, they do,” he said. It was vital, he knew, that if she decided to yield, she should understand what it meant: that she could alter Taliq, she could give a rebirth to all the passengers. She could be emu-mother, she could be lizard-wife. “They know exactly what they're asking. Listen … Whitey, the tall one, his world more or less started when someone called marsupial rat fucked the lizard-women. The whole human world was made by a particular seduction. That's what he believes.”

Daisy Nakamura dismissed this. “Mythology.” As if she'd heard the word muttered in the wake of Indians in her bar in Budapest.

“Not to him it isn't, Daisy.”

“Sounds like the goddamn Navajo again,” she murmured.

McCloud took her hand, the one which had been clutching the blanket tightly around her throat. The palm was so warm, and the fingers translucent, it seemed, so that you believed you saw the ivory bones within. “If you
do
speak with Taliq,” he said, knowing that he was asking too much, “could you see if we could get Pauline, my wife, up here? She's had a strange life, too, and I need to talk to her in case things happen.”

He had messages for the Girl and the Boy. He should not go into the dark without talking to them. The reason he should not was that they would always count it an injustice if he did. The image and lesson of Pauline's father the mad Dentist was in his mind.

With a minute gesture of the hand, she conceded that she would try. “I just want to visit my sister. I don't want any adventures. I've had all the adventures I want.”

The young terrorist Hasni appeared above her, wearing all the appurtenances of the hijacker, the radio, the grenade belt, the automatic rifle. And the further appurtenance of his gentle, Arab scholarship face.

“May I have this seat, Mrs. Nakamura?” he asked.

As if to some inner alarm clock, some sign peculiar to their faction, the young man called Musa had also risen now from the seats where he had been sleeping. He looked aft with enormous Bedouin eyes, eyes which made the concept that he had been dispossessed all too credible.

By now Daisy had vanished. So the dialogue would be different now.

“It is my rest period,” said Hasni, settling beside McCloud. “But your wife sends her greetings and hopes you are well. I told her your health is out of my hands now, I am afraid.”

“Is it?” asked McCloud.

“I did not deceive the native peoples as you did,” Hasni reproved him.

“How do you know that article is accurate? You don't trust the Zionist imperialist press as a whole. So why trust it in this case?”

Hasni took thought over this. “Because one of your dancers has verified it. He told us you deceived them.”

“But I didn't deceive them.”

“One of them is sure you did. And the others are tormented by doubt, Mr. McCloud. They are gentle people. They still show the subservience we've all been bullied into feeling. All those who are exiles in their own land.”

It was futile to argue, especially since there was truth there, and, in any case, messages were still to be exchanged with Pauline. But what could be said through this straight-laced boy terrorist?

“Would you give her a note from me?”

Hasni frowned and pushed his lips forward.

“A sealed note, Hasni. For Christ's sake it may be our last exchange.”

“You're not serious,” murmured Hasni.

“What could I put in a private note that could hurt you?”

“This happened in training,” said Hasni with a confessional smile. “People think I'm the weak one at first and find out slowly I'm the strong one.”

Training
. So had they rehearsed this hijack? Somewhere in a cave, maybe. Were Syrian or Iraqi recruits the subjects of the experiment? And had
they
chosen Hasni as the apparent weak link?

McCloud said, “I don't think you're weak. I think you're stronger than Taliq. Stronger and more innocent.”

“What? Is that your psychological skill at work? Anyhow, I don't know what you mean.”

“I mean that you've seen Taliq extend favors to the Japanese-American woman. Can't you extend favors to me?”

Hasni seemed distracted for a moment. He inspected the pouch in the back of the seat in front of him. He fingered the in-flight magazine, the sick bag with the advertisement for twenty-four-hour photographic development, the safety instructions card. He looked to McCloud almost like someone who rummages in a briefcase or handbag out of embarrassment. Once he had decided what he wanted to say, he gave up the rummaging and sat back in the seat, closing his eyes for a moment and adjusting his automatic.

“What's the trouble?” asked McCloud.

“Just that you are so typical,” the boy announced.

“I'm sorry,” said McCloud. “But I have children. And as well as that, all couples have their mysteries. They want to refer back to them when they're in danger.”

“Oh, Mr. McCloud, that's not what I mean by
typical
. And if you think I give a damn about your squalid
mysteries
—if that's what you insist on calling them—then you couldn't be more mistaken. You're typical in another sense, a sense which causes me to be ill. All you people, all you nice people with nice wives and what you call nice mysteries. You think that after all that's happened to me I'm still really like you!”

“I don't think you're as exclusive as you think, Hasni,” McCloud said, angered.

“Perhaps not. But I'm not like
your
type. Oh, you all have different accents, but the soul is the same. A soul sticky with silly, liberal half-truths. You've read books on most of the human catastrophes. You can give a garbled history of all the century's great uprootings and massacres. And you use this comic book history as a measuring device to exploit me. And to belittle
my
history, or Musa's, or Yusuf's. ‘Why should we give a damn about the Palestinians? Why do they posture like that? Haven't they heard of the Armenians? The Kurds? The Kampucheans? The Jews, for that matter?'”

McCloud studied the boy, the way he put his argument. To be damned in this weighty, undergraduate style of Hasni's seemed a curiously bitter destiny; damnation uttered by a serious child.

“Why should you give a damn what my mental habits are?” McCloud asked. “You're going to shoot me anyhow, aren't you?”

McCloud was, of course, in the light of Hasni's boyish polemic, hoping for a denial that this was so.

Hasni merely said, “I would like to see the light dawn in someone's eyes. That's all.”

McCloud suspected he should go on pushing the boy, should inflict a shock if he could. “In that case, watch me when the bullet goes in. You might see something dawn then.”

“See,” Hasni told him, sounding a bit flustered. “You treat the moment of death in that bourgeois manner. A moment of enlightenment! The truth is, nothing is learned at that second. Nothing.”

It was hard for McCloud to tell whether—in spite of Hasni's reply—his audacity had the right result. Certainly it caused Hasni to close his eyes and compose himself. Cale had said that hijackers possessed a sort of vanity, that they yearned for the victim's approval. This hooding of Hasni's eyes seemed a sign from the boy that it might be true.

So, was it best to let Hasni sleep now? Or should there be an effort to bring about the desired instability, the kind in which self-doubt
doesn't
cause the pulling of a trigger? For Cale had already delineated the other one, the instability which caused the hijacker to go trigger-happy, to produce a dead body as evidence of the seriousness of his history, the inhuman weight of his commitment.

What Hasni had said about garbled histories struck McCloud in any case as close to the truth and distracted him a little from the obligation of confusing the boy. Acting from his own garbled and inadequate history of the Barramatjara, he had taken the job of troupe manager.
Was
there justice in the idea that investigating the good faith of the sponsors of their tour was a courtesy he had owed Whitey and the boys?

It
could
even be argued in this febrile morning light, so high on this fragment of pirated stratosphere, that anyone who benefited from the world of diamonds, from the valves and pistons and machine coolings, all without inquiring into the price, might also be considered guilty.

And though this was a practically absurd proposition—it meant that all passengers had to be shot, if not the whole Western world, and without a Western passenger and a Western world to use as lever, the hijacker was himself powerless—McCloud felt the shadow of the argument, the draft off it, strongly enough to inquire of Hasni, “Well, then, what is your bloody history? This one I discount? This one which means I can't send a note to my wife? Tell me, for Christ's sake! Tell me what it is!”

Hasni looked at McCloud, as if he'd pulled the oldest trick in the book. But then, to McCloud's surprise, the boy began to speak.

“Moshe Dayan,” Hasni began with a gravity McCloud thought of as essentially that of a really dangerous man-child, the gravity a Cale—for all his power of analysis—could never approach. “Moshe Dayan once boasted that my grandfather's village had been removed from the geography books. Let me just say that. Did anyone ever do such a thing to you, McCloud?”

“They're threatening to publish my novel for a pittance,” McCloud said. “The world is very hard.”

“Don't belittle my question, McCloud. Did they take your village and plow it under and erase its name?”

“No,” murmured McCloud without malice. “Though of course they did it to my ancestors in Scotland. But that was in the eighteenth century.”

“Exactly. And again, your shitty little potted histories!”

“Why does that mean I can't write a letter to my wife?”

“Because you are a criminal, and you try to cast yourself as a victim. That's why! That's reason enough!”

For a time Hasni sat swallowing and then began to speak again. “I thought you wanted to hear my history?” he complained.

“Yes. I'm not as closed to yours as you are to mine, Hasni.”

“Oh no? Oh no? Then try this! Take this on board. My grandfather … my
grandfather
came from the village of Roshe Pinna in Galilee. Forty years ago he fled to the refugee camp in Quneitra, over in the east. He believed it would be for a month, no more. But the Israelis did not let him return, they blocked his way with armed men, and so they had a pretext for confiscating his land. Every year afterward, on the Feast of the Ascension, he would walk from Quneitra to the Golan Heights and look across to the point near Lake Tiberias where his home had been. Roshe Pinna. I was raised with the name. I still carry it. I have never visited it. I'll visit it when it belongs to my race again. Do you have such places in your miserable memory, McCloud? I doubt it.”

Although there was room for McCloud to ask how a homesick grandfather led necessarily to the hijacking of the New York–Frankfurt flight, he delayed and then said nothing. That was because he saw something awesome in the reverence for place and ancestry this impassioned student harbored.

“Then of course,” said Hasni after a long breath, “the Zionists took the Golan Heights. After that, even pilgrimage was out of the question. Not only the earth itself, but a distant view of it was forbidden!”

There were tears in the boy's eyes now. He did not glibly flash them as symptoms of compelling and empowering sorrow.

“What about my earth?” asked McCloud gently. “You want to forbid me a view of that.”

Hasni waved his hand. “Oh, my grandfather would have agreed with you. He would consider this action we've taken extreme. Because he saw what happened to him as the will of God. He wouldn't have accepted that God's will should be pushed along. That politics is the means by which God's mind is made up for him. And my parents probably think the same as my grandfather, though in their secret hearts they would be pleased that I've taken action at last. But defeated people, you must understand, McCloud!

“They've spent their lives at the Ain Alhilweh camp near Sidon. The Lebanese call it ‘the zoo.' My parents are in the zoo, therefore. My father walks into town every day to sell lottery tickets. Six children were raised in an UNRWA hut in Ain Alhilweh! Three meters by four meters! Oh, sure, I've seen worse things even in the South, in Louisiana and Arkansas. There is nothing absolutely unique to my story. And yet what you liberal readers of feature articles forget is that it's awfully unique for me.”

“And my story is unique to me, too,” urged McCloud. “You can call it shitty and despicable. But my situation—you can't deny—is subjectively very serious!”

Hasni shook his head. “Listen! Not as serious as Musa's is for him. He's got
objective
ruins, McCloud. He's a Christian like me. His village was confiscated under one of those emergency laws. Kafr Birim. A defense area, a security zone! His people looked through barbed wire at their own homes but could not enter them. Even the Israeli Supreme Court took shame and ordered that the people be readmitted, but the Israeli army sowed the town with mines instead. They bombed it on Christmas Day, a timing which has made a strong impact on my friend Musa. Unique to him, but to you just another story from
Time
or
Newsweek.”

It was not lost on McCloud that by using the names of villages no one else on the plane had heard of, Hasni seemed to give injustice a title and a substance. His tale, and these hijacking transactions, were—as McCloud sensed—as much rooted in name and location as was the dance and painting of the Barramatjara. McCloud found himself nodding in spite of himself, registering the names. They were the currency of Hasni's narration. And other names arose, Yusuf's village, Deir Hanna, which was confiscated to make the supertown of Karni'el, in which—said Hasni—Palestinians could not live. The sealing of Yusuf's parents' house in Ramallah, the plugging-up of the doors and the blinding of the windows with cinder blocks, the confiscation of the family industrial plant: their sewing machine on which they made wedding suits. All because Yusuf's uncle belonged to the Palestinian group el-Ard, the Land.