The Covenant (24 page)

“No. Lucky Strikes. In Poland, we are experts in blood sausage and bacon.”

Ismael grimaced and laughed, removing a cigarette, then handing him back the pack.

Milos put it into his pocket, shaking his head affably. “Yes, I understand. We Poles aren’t exporting much to the Middle East. Muslims and Jews aren’t big blood sausage fans.”

Ismael came out of the car and leaned against it, lighting the cigarette. “There are many similarities between Islam and Judaism. Both of us believe our forefather was Abraham. Except Ishmael was his firstborn, his heir, the one Abraham tried to sacrifice to God. ‘The Dome of the Rock’ is where the sacrifice happened… that is… did not happen. God spared Ishmael.”

“So, both Islam and Judaism value human life?”

“Of course.”

“So how do you explain Jihad? Suicide bombers?”

Ismael took a long drag on his cigarette and watched the smoke curl toward the lovely bright stars over Jerusalem’s hills. “Such a beautiful place, Jerusalem. It’s been invaded so many times. Claimed by everyone: Greeks, Romans, Crusaders, Arabs, Jews. People do what they want and find religious justification after. Every religion preaches goodness. But what they wind up doing is another story altogether.”

“Weren’t the Jews here first?”

“That all depends on if you see Abraham as the father of Ishmael or Isaac. We think it was Ishmael.”

“The Bible says different.”

“We have our own bible. It’s called the Koran.”

“Why can’t Abraham be father of them both, Ishmael and Isaac?”

Ismael shrugged. “People believe what they believe.”

“Where are you from, Ismael?”

“I was born in Syria. My father was an engineer. He moved to Saudi Arabia to work on the great construction boom from the petrol dollars. He died in a work accident when I was eight years old. My mother remarried, and we moved to Tul Karem to be with her husband’s family. I enrolled at Hebrew University. I got a degree in languages. I went to work in England for a few years, translating articles from Arabic into English. And then about ten years ago, I came back.”

”Any reason?”

He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “What did Dorothy say in
The Wizard of Oz?
There’s no place like home.”

“That makes you, what? Forty?”

“Forty-one.”

“Married?”

He smiled. “Yes.”

“Kids?”

“Three boys and two girls.”

“Is your wife English?”

“No. Lebanese. My family arranged the match. They didn’t want an English daughter-in-law.”

“And are you still there, in Tul Karem?”

“Right next door to my parents.”

“You are a lucky man. And how did you get into the news business?”

“You sound like you’re interviewing me.”

“Well, maybe I am. Our news bureau—”

“Which is?”

“Zycie, Gazeta Wyborcza
—Polish dailies—anyhow, they need a ‘fixer’ in Palestinian Authority land. I’ve been shot at a few times, even with
PRESS
plastered in masking tape all over my car. It’s the Wild West out there. Would you be able to help us?”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“On what, exactly, you need me to do for you, and how much you are willing to pay.”

“Well, let’s say this. I understand from Julia that you were very helpful in getting the tape…”

Ismael stubbed out the last embers of the cigarette under his heel with more force than was absolutely necessary. “She’s new. She misunderstood. I had nothing to do with it. I’m just a driver. I go where they send me.”

“Julia said you were absolutely essential.”

“Did she?” he said softly, almost to himself.

“Julia keeps saying that I don’t know anything about the history of this area. That you are a great teacher.”

“Ah. Yes.” He opened the car door. “Some other time, perhaps? I’m
afraid I’ll have to be going. I will think about your offer, Milos. How can I contact you?”

“Oh, I’m going to be around Julia. She can always find me. And how can I contact you, Ismael?”

“The same way,” he smiled. “Say, could I ask you for another smoke?”

“Sure,” Milos said, handing him back the pack.

“You’re running out,” Ismael noted, returning it. Then he slammed the car door shut and sped off.

Milos jumped, his heart racing. The car had brushed uncomfortably close to his toes, which suddenly ached. He sat down on a low stone wall and took off his shoe. His sock was soaked with blood. God! he thought as he took it off, wiping the deep scratch on his toe with a lint-filled tissue. What have I gotten myself into?

But before he had a chance to explore that idea, his phone rang again. This time, it was his benefactor, Esther Gold herself.

Chapter Twenty-two

Ben Gurion Airport, Lod
Wednesday, May 8, 2002
11:43
P.M.

H
IS PLAN, OF
course, had always been to become the next Roman Polanski. But until then, filming the Louvre and the Cathedral of Notre Dame for Polish high school students was not the worst thing in the world, he thought, reaching down to massage his sore toe. As he stood in Israel’s international airport holding a cardboard sign with the name of a man he didn’t know and wouldn’t recognize, Milos wondered—not for the first time in the last few days—if gratitude, family loyalty and even idealism had reached their limits. His present casting in
Mission: Impossible
was not only dangerous, he told himself, but also faintly ludicrous. He just wasn’t the type. He was sincerely looking forward to the day when he could fly out of this nightmare and back to his scintillating epic:
Piotr Visits Paris.

But as the son of Witold Jankowski and the grandson of Maria and Jozef, it was, perhaps, too much to hope that he’d be allowed to live a quiet, boring life filled with ordinary pleasures.

He had been brought up with the idea that human rights were worth any sacrifice. His grandmother’s tales of her exploits during the war, his grandfather’s heroic death, his father’s imprisonment, had shaped his childhood. One didn’t live for one’s own comfort; one lived to make a better world, to right wrongs, to rescue the weak and the suffering. This is what it meant to believe in Christ. All of his people were larger than life, cast in a heroic mold that he had being trying to avoid as long as he could remember.

For years his goal had been to approximate one of those characters on
American television shows: long-haired boys who played in rock bands, danced with pretty girls and rode in fast cars. He’d studied film because it gave him the chance to dream about living in places like Hollywood, New York and the South of France. But then, somewhere in his freshman year, he’d found a box in the closet with all those yellowing leaflets his grandfather and father had written and passed around during the Communist era.

They’d been an eye-opener. He’d spent a weekend holed up in his room, just reading. The call for human rights and human dignity, for justice and freedom to write and think and act, had done something to him. As much as he’d tried to fight it, it had stirred his blood.

This was not his first trip to Israel. When he was eighteen, his grandmother had been awarded the “Righteous Gentiles Award” by Yad Vashem for risking her life to save Jews during the war. A moving ceremony had been held, and a tree planted in Jerusalem in her honor. Esther had flown them in, along with all of her friends and many of the Jews his grandmother had saved. It was then he’d met Elise.

Such a pretty, lively girl! He would have fallen in love with her immediately if she hadn’t already been married by then. Besides, as his
babcia
had admonished him, a Jewish girl needed a Jewish husband. Especially an Orthodox Jewish girl. And what Milos needed was to work hard and to find a nice Polish Catholic girl. (Since then, there had been much hard work, and many, many Catholic girls, although not of the kind his grandmother had had in mind… )

After the festivities, he’d been given the option of staying on to work at a kibbutz, and he’d taken it. It hadn’t lasted long. Like most Eastern Europeans, he was not amenable to the socialist ethic so many Israeli leftists still romanticized, despite the proven failure of Communism to solve any of the world’s problems and its unenviable success in inventing many new ones. He’d tried to convert the kibbutzniks, but had found them closed minded as well as utterly convinced of their liberalism.

So instead, he’d gone to work as a volunteer in a hospital storeroom, packing, unpacking and delivering medical supplies. And on the weekends, he’d roamed around, hitchhiking up to the luxuriantly verdant land around the Sea of Galilee, and down to the almost frighteningly bare desert of the Dead Sea. Such a tiny country, but such a jewel. Every imaginable landscape was located within its borders.

Its human landscape was equally diverse, embracing more cultures, races, languages and religious customs than almost any place else in the world. They called themselves Jews, but they had never really decided what that meant. It was certainly not a race, because the beautiful black Ethiopian immigrants with their dark skins and European facial features bore no resemblance to the Georgian Jews of the former USSR, with their squat foreheads, light skin and almost Mongolian eyes. Was it a religion? Except for the ultra-Orthodox in their black outfits, practitioners of the faith seemed to make up the rules as they went along. Some ate pig and shellfish, while others wouldn’t. Some wouldn’t eat pork in the house, but somehow didn’t mind eating it at a restaurant. On Yom Kippur, some prayed and fasted, while others went to the beach and stuffed themselves with pita and humous. True, the men were all circumcised. But what of the women? Girls in Tel Aviv looked like Britney Spears whore-chic-wannabes while Orthodox girls in Jerusalem were covered up from neck to ankle, with long dark skirts and under-the-chin blouses, not unlike Muslim women.

The native-born were pushy and brash, kind and warm, full of love for life and human beings. Everything they did became personal, whether they took you in their cab or sold you a package of gum. The driver, the grocer would often butt into your business, asking nosy questions, and giving kind and unsolicited advice that often turned out to be extremely helpful. It was an easy place to get lost, go broke, and not speak a word of the local language. Everyone knew directions, even if they were wrong; everyone would shove his hand into his pocket to give you a few shekel for the bus or a phone call; and everyone spoke a zillion languages and seemed open to strangers.

Only once did he encounter open hostility because of who he was. It was a woman he’d been sitting next to on a bus in downtown Jerusalem. She’d seen him reading a Polish newspaper.

“How are you enjoying your visit?” she’d begun in Polish, pleasantly enough.

He’d answered: “Very much.”

“Unfortunately, I was also in your country. But I didn’t enjoy my visit.”

Only then had he seen the blue numbers on her arm.

“This country was built by broken-hearted people like me. Take my tears home with you along with your other souvenirs,” she’d told him.

He’d sat there, speechless, for the rest of the trip. “I’m very sorry,” he
finally said, hanging his head. What did it matter that his grandmother had not been part of it? So many others had, their hatred making the horrors possible.

“I’m also sorry. You are a young person. It’s not your fault. Here, take a cookie.” She offered him one. “I made them for my grandchildren.”

“I heard that,” the man behind him said, tapping him on the shoulder. “Don’t feel bad. We Israelis aren’t vengeful.”

“That’s what’s wrong with us,” the woman on the other side of the aisle piped up. “We don’t know how to hate. We forgive too fast, take chances with our security for so-called peace…”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s what’s right with us!” the man answered her.

By the time he’d reached his stop, the discussion involved half the bus and was still going strong. He’d held the cookie in his hand and waved good-bye. Almost everyone had waved back.

There was no unity. Everyone thought the rest of the country were dopes, and wrong-headed, and delusional. Yet, if there was a war, or a terrorist attack, they would lay down their lives for each other unhesitatingly, whether as soldiers and policemen or simply as passengers on a bus with a suicide bomber whose hands needed to be kept away from the detonator.

Often, in the last few days, he’d asked himself what he was doing here, getting mixed up in a story that had nothing to do with him. But the more he understood the scale of the human tragedy that was unfolding in this part of the world, where ordinary, good people were on the front lines fighting big, well-funded terrorist machines, the more he realized that no decent person could stay uninvolved. Terrorism had to be stopped, before it destroyed civilization altogether, and no man, woman or child anywhere in the world was safe from its terrible reach.

He looked up at the flickering lights on the board showing incoming flights. Flight 774 from Zurich had landed a half hour ago. That was the flight number Esther had given him on the phone when she called with her urgent message to get down to the airport and give John Mellon a ride and all the information he could. That it was a matter of life or death.