The Covenant (41 page)

The decision was split-second: the Israelis opened fire. Bullets ripped
through the head and groin and stomach of Marwan Bahama, turning him from an instrument of torture into the kind of corpse he had delighted in leaving behind.

Hearing the gunfire, the soldiers inside the house opened fire, killing the guards upstairs. They ran down the stairs.

“Don’t shoot—the door!” Ismael screamed, standing in front of the red door, his hands outspread.

“Allah is great,” Bahama’s second in command answered him, getting off a single shot before the Israelis took him out.

Ismael never even felt the wound that pierced his shoulder, ricocheting off the door. The explosion threw up a fireball that made the Israelis outside drop to the ground. Sitting in the second car, Colonel Amos covered his head as the earth shook beneath them. Black ashes fell like falling snow.

Around the Sabbath table, Elise and Leah sang:

“Peace be upon you, angels of peace,
Angels of the most high Who come from the King, King of all Kings,
The Holy One, blessed be He.

Come in peace, angels of peace,
Angels of the most high
Who come from the King, King of all Kings,
The Holy One, blessed be He.

Bless me in peace, angels of peace,
Angels of the most high
Who come from the King, King of all Kings,
The Holy One, blessed be He.

Go in peace, angels of peace,
Angels of the most high
Who come from the King, King of all Kings,
The Holy One, blessed be He.”

Esther and Ariana and Maria looked on.

Chapter Thirty-seven

El Khadav, Southern Hebron Hills
Saturday, May 11, 2002
8:30
A.M.

T
HE SOUND OF
birds woke Dr. Jonathan Margulies. For a brief moment, he forgot where he was, a smile stretching his dry, swollen lips. “Elise?” he whispered, stretching out his hand. The cold, stone floor sent a chill through his fingertips that made his body shudder The nightmare… he thought. The nightmare. “liana!” he called out in panic, but then he remembered: he’d been transferred to a new hiding place. And liana?

Where was she?

A better place, he prayed, his eyes filling with tears.

When Bahama realized she was missing, he’d gone wild. But as the beating went on, and the tortures began, Jon realized that Bahama was being very careful not to cross the line that would result in his sure death. Bahama didn’t want him dead. At least, Jon thought, not yet.

And when it was over, he remembered how he’d been almost grateful for the blindfold tied over his bleeding eyes that had acted like a bandage, and for the cool, pine-scented air that had washed over his aching body like a compress as they smuggled him outside and stuffed his half-conscious body into the confines of a small space, probably the trunk of a car.

He must have, thankfully, lost consciousness, he realized, otherwise the rough ride that jostled his sore, broken body would have been unbearable. He lifted his head, examining his surroundings in the light for the first time.

It was a bedroom with a normal bed, a window—barred, but not covered in any way. He heard the shouts of young children playing, the voices of women talking to each other over the clatter of pans and the clicking of spoons and knives. His blindfold had been removed, and his mouth untaped. He touched his damp face. It had been washed, and beside him sat a plate of pita bread and a glass of water. His hands had been tied in front of him to allow him to eat and drink.

Yes, orders had been given to keep him alive, he thought. At least for now.

The blood from the wounds on his face and hands had congealed. The place where his fingernails had been torn out, festered with pus. The pain from his broken thumbs was constant, and the wounds in his stomach and back continued to throb. With professional detachment, he tried to analyze if his injuries were life-threatening. He thought about it in the way he would have considered the prospects of any patient under his care, trying not to let his personal feelings cloud his judgment.

It wasn’t easy. As a matter of fact, he finally admitted to himself, it was downright impossible. One’s own life was always a very special story, and he couldn’t help but consider himself a very special patient, one he cared very much about. It pained him that he had nothing with which to treat himself. And so he tried, as best he could, to do the things that under the circumstances were possible to do.

He tried not to move unnecessarily. If something was broken, movement could be fatal. He drained the cup and called out for more water. It was important to keep hydrated.

A boy of no more than ten or eleven came in.

“Water, please,” he begged, holding out the pitcher.

The child looked at him curiously, taking the empty pitcher from his hands and returning with a full one.

“Shukran
”, he said hoarsely, trying a faint smile.

The boy smiled back, surprised and pleased, the way a child would view a rare animal in a zoo doing tricks. His face lit up with curiosity and interest.

“Mohammad!” a woman’s voice called urgently. Still, the child lingered, testing Jon’s knowledge of Arabic, delighted when Jon answered him.

A young man burst into the room. “What are you doing in here?” He cuffed the boy. He was about sixteen, Jon estimated, with an AK-47 flung
over his shoulder. It was shocking to see the child’s features hardened and set into an implacable expression of unrelenting hatred in the older boy’s face. It was only then Jon understood where he was.

These were Bahama’s brothers.

The terrorist had taken him home.

He looked at the young man’s closed face and the words of another doctor came to him: “All the evils that men cause to each other because of certain desires, or opinions or religious principles, are rooted in ignorance,” wrote Moses Maimonides. All hatred would come to an end “when the earth was flooded with the knowledge of God.” He was glad then that liana was somewhere else. He tried to comfort himself that although he had no idea what had happened to his daughter, she was at least no longer in Bahama’s hands. What these beastly men were capable of doing to a small child, a Jewish child, a little girl… He shuddered, praying to God to send His angels to watch over her. He was totally dependent on the goodness of his fellow man, or—to be more exact—woman.

He listened to the birds, remembering those lovely mornings a thousand years ago when it seemed as if he was covered with an abundance of blessings. For the first time he thought: I might never wake up again.

I don’t want to die! I don’t! Something inside of him panicked. It’s too soon… I’m so young, the father of a young child—children! The husband of a young wife! I have my patients… Who will care for my patients…? His heart raged.

But slowly the anger left him, the panic. He breathed deeply, feeling a strange, inexplicable calm. He thought about his life, as he would a story in a book, something that had happened to someone else.

It had been such a wonderful life. So few people in the world were free to make their own choices the way he had, to follow their hearts. And he’d been one of them. He’d lived out his dreams, and instead of the hardships he’d expected—been reconciled to—in moving to a new country far from his birthplace, he’d had a life filled with so many blessings. In many ways, it had been such an easy life. His heart, body and soul had been at peace, nourished, satisfied. If he was afraid of anything, it was meeting God and being found unworthy of all the good that had been his portion, the abundance that he had enjoyed. I have no complaints, he realized with surprise. None.

He thought about Elise—that first walk they’d taken along the Promenade, the wind at their backs, the beauty of the city of Jerusalem spread out at their feet. He thought of how her hair had blown in the wind, curls dipping over her eyes, and how she had smoothed it back, tucking it behind her small, tender ears; and then how she’d reached out and smoothed his hair out of his eyes, her small hand warm on his forehead, despite the cold. How kind her eyes had been as she looked into his; how they’d sparkled and danced with humor.

“You are going to make a good girlfriend,” he’d whispered boldly, shocking himself, as he reached out to hold her hand, the touch of her fingertips still making his forehead tingle. She’d made no move to pull away, a slow, reciprocal smile spreading across her face.

That was the moment, he thought, that I stopped being alone in the world. The moment his “I” had become a “we.” Even now, he thought. Even now.

He remembered the words of Viktor Frankel, a psychiatrist who had been sent to Auschwitz, survived and written a remarkable little book. In one of the most memorable passages, Dr. Frankel recounted being asked by the senior block warden to encourage his despairing fellow inmates. The hopelessness of their situation, he told the dying men, did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. Someone is looking down on you, he’d told them. Someone living or dead, a wife, a child, a friend, or God. “We do not wish to disappoint them. They must find us suffering proudly, and knowing how to die.”

He rolled this thought over in his head.

No one knew the day of his death. Men had lived through much worse than this, he thought, looking around. They’d suffered the death of those close to them—parents, wives, children, relatives; they’d been starved and tortured mentally and physically for years—not days—and yet they had still managed to survive, marry, raise a whole new family, enjoy a whole lifetime and die peacefully in their beds. And young men had left soft beds and Cheerios in bowls on the counters of suburban kitchens on Long Island to work in Manhattan only to find themselves leaping to their deaths from the hundredth story of burning skyscrapers.

Who was to say he wouldn’t live through this? That he wouldn’t return to his family whole? That he wouldn’t get his life back and continue to do
deeds and think thoughts, and live the precious life, the one life, that God had granted him on this earth? He also knew there were no guarantees that he, or liana, would live through it either. It was all in the hands of God. And in the freely-made choices of his fellow men.

Don’t give up hope, he told himself. You have a glass of water. A pita bread. Which is more than they gave the Jews of Auschwitz. And you’ve managed to put your daughter into good, kind hands. He had to believe that. He drank and ate and tried to sleep, trying to keep as still as possible.

Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine what had turned a ten-year-old’s childish openness into a sixteen-year-old’s fossilized hardness. What had intervened to destroy a child’s natural sympathy toward his fellow man, his instincts toward generosity and goodness? What terrible machine had succeeded in deadening the expression of those eyes, draining them of inquiry, replacing them with the unseeing, blinded eyes of the fanatic?

He remembered a talk he had once had with Nouara about the education of her children. The schoolbooks rewrote the maps, wiping Israel off the earth, she told him. The incitement was constant and unrelenting.

What could one do to help good parents like Nouara and Shawan to raise their families with love and tolerance and open-mindedness? What? he thought in despair.

A child did not become a hate-filled fanatic, a terrorist, without entire, elaborate structures of educational institutions, training camps, expensive weapons and the backing of legitimate national support. It was a gargantuan beast, and it had spread its tentacles throughout the world. Like the ancient Caananite cult of Molech, which sacrificed children to a Satanic god in beastly rituals, this new beast demanded the lives of its children, forcing them to kill and convincing them it was a good thing to die.

He thought of the young boy, and then he thought of liana. Their lives were inextricably intertwined. What chance would either have to embrace life to its fullest? What chance?

He thought of his own tiny country, his own small and scattered people. A land so small no map could fit its name in its land mass. A people so small they represented one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population, a few million. A tiny creature, the Jewish people in the land of Israel. And right now, it was facing the beast alone. Just like me, he thought.

Chapter Thirty-eight