The Pale of Settlement (21 page)

The waitress set their food before them on the table. Susan looked at her salad, the gleaming olives and clumps of feta cheese. Are you serious? she said. Why?

Kristin said, Some scholars argue that self-mortification, or abjection, is a way of claiming one's own identity, of affirming the borders of the self, in essence, by defiling them. Kristin bit into her cheeseburger, licked a smear of ketchup and meat juice off her lips, and raised her eyebrows. It was also, she said, a pretty good way out of getting married and having kids.

In ninth grade, Susan had been friendly with an anorexic girl. At lunch, Terry fiddled with her lettuce, or broke up a single cookie into pieces on her plate. Her hair grew limp, her skin sallow, stretched taut as a corpse's across the bones of her face. She never walked but ran everywhere, a frightening, feeble shuffle, her heavy book bag clutched between her arms. In the locker room mirror, even though Terry turned away as she undressed, Susan could see the jutting ribs and spine, spindly femurs, and jutting pelvis of a concentration camp survivor. Terry left school halfway through the year for the hospital, where the rumor was she was force-fed through a tube. Susan never saw her again after that. She recalled the plush beige carpet in Terry's bedroom, the white lacquered princess bed, and wondered what Terry was doing now. She hadn't thought of her in years. She'd never considered the possibility that Terry might have starved herself to death.

At the next table, the mothers were picking up squeaky toys and plastic cups, buckling their babies into strollers. The mother nearest them bumped into Kristin as she pulled on her coat, and Kristin rolled her eyes.

Kristin probably wasn't even thirty yet, Susan thought. Why did guys go out with women who were so much younger than they? She wasn't sure, now, what she'd thought they would have in common, after all.

By Thursday, the ninth day of fighting, reports were coming in that the last gunmen had surrendered in Jenin. Debbie had left a message saying that rumors were flying that the Israelis might finally let journalists and aid workers into the camp and that she was heading to the West Bank. Susan pulled the wire stories and a few quotes from an interview with Prime Minister Sharon on Fox
TV
and set to work on an early edition draft. Maybe this would be the end. She flipped through her pile of clips. On Tuesday, thirteen Israeli soldiers were ambushed and killed by a ten-year-old suicide bomber in Jenin. Yesterday, eight were killed and twenty-two wounded on an Egged bus east of Haifa by another suicide bomber from Jenin. Just this morning, six were killed and seventy injured by a female suicide bomber at a crowded market in central Jerusalem. Susan knew that market well. She wrapped her arm around her stomach and pushed her hair back from her forehead. Palestinian civilians, women, and children, were dying, too. How much worse it had to be for them: she had to remember that. Five hundred dead, they were saying now, maybe many more. She turned back to her computer screen.

According to the Palestinian Authority, hundreds of civilians were killed in Jenin. The PA has formally asked the United Nations to investigate reports that soldiers massacred civilians and buried them in mass graves
. How could we have done that? she thought, then caught herself.
We
.

She clicked through the latest photographs: a Palestinian boy
walking along a deserted alleyway, a Red Crescent ambulance parked by a barbed wire barricade, a Merkava tank against a backdrop of twisted rebar and shattered concrete, a
D
-9 Caterpillar bulldozer before a smashed-in wall. Looking at these images, it was impossible not to think of those other bulldozers digging day and night in that apocalyptic rubble pit here in New York. Just last month, they'd pulled two more bodies from the debris. Susan didn't know which felt more real, the images in her memory or the ones before her on the screen, or those that were missing altogether, those of the three suicide attacks. Even though she didn't envy Debbie the ratty, scrappy, poorly paid job of a freelancer, she felt more than ever that she should be there instead of Debbie, who was probably driving north now into the Galilee, passing the dusty villages, the green scrub of tomato fields, the yellow ripple of wheat. Or maybe she was already through the checkpoints, waved on by those
IDF
boys with their laced-up boots and
M
16s and youthful Jewish faces beneath their helmets; or already in the city of Jenin, breathing that mix of diesel fumes and dung and dust and garbage rotting in the sun, in that jumble of two- and three-story cinderblock apartment houses clustered along the slope of the ravine. Was she stepping over the bodies of Palestinians in the narrow alleys of the camp? Would she find the traces of mass graves?

The words vibrated on the screen, seraphs and numerals and quotation marks rattling like bones:
occupation, apartheid, slaughter, resistance, terrorism, genocide
. Behind those words it was impossible to perceive the facts.
Militants have pledged that they will turn Jenin into a “Palestinian Masada.”
How slippery the metaphors.
What we are seeing here is a terrible human tragedy, a Holocaust against
the Palestinians
. How easily the Israelis were cast as Nazis, the Palestinians as martyred Jews.

She looked up and noticed Reid standing across the newsroom, outside the photo editor's office, leaning against the wall. He was sipping coffee from a blue-and-white paper cup and chatting up one of the girl reporters from the City Desk. Once, years ago, just after they'd first met, Reid had asked Susan out. She was still living with her ex-boyfriend then, but Reid had tried to talk her into it anyway. How could she could be seriously involved with someone who wasn't Jewish? he'd asked, and she remembered how annoyed she'd been by his presumption, and even more annoyed by her guilty sense that he was right. It hadn't occurred to her until then that Reid was Jewish; his looks certainly gave nothing away—the straight lines of his nose and jaw, his blondish hair. And now he was the one going out with an expert on Christian saints! They'd missed their chance, she and Reid, back then.

She must have been staring, because just then Reid looked up. And for a moment it seemed as if he was trying to tell her something as he held his gaze on her, but didn't smile.

A group of reporters was already clustered on the ratty couches at Bellevue's on Friday evening when Susan arrived. A few of them moved over to make room for her as she shouted her hellos over the Poison song pounding on the jukebox, whose speakers were uncomfortably close to where they sat. She craned her neck; Reid and Kristin weren't there tonight. Next to her, a young reporter named Derek was swirling the ice around in his glass, and Susan remembered that she'd once read that advertisers subtly hid images of naked female bodies in the photographs of ice cubes in liquor
ads to make the drink subliminally appeal to men. She squinted at Derek's glass, and thought maybe she did detect a sensuous curve. Or maybe you just saw what you were looking for.

Next to him, Rajiv was saying, It's always like, hey you with the brown skin, you must be a terrorist. I have to get to the airport at least three hours early now.

Well, at least they're checking, Derek said. I'd be more concerned if they didn't check.

A City Desk editor with thinning hair and round horn-rimmed glasses leaned forward from the adjacent couch. You've been getting some nice front page play this week, Susan, he said. Good stuff.

Rajiv was waving his hands. You know, they're always like, so where are you from? And I'm like, uh, New Jersey? Duh? He made a face and tipped his beer bottle to his lips.

Yeah, thanks, Susan said to the City Desk guy, whose name, she finally recalled, was Frank. But you know how it goes. Mostly I just cobble together other peoples' stuff.

Frank shook his head and frowned. I just can't see how it's going to end, he said. When one side has an army and the other side has nothing at all.

Just suicide bombers, Susan thought, but didn't say. Like the “heroic martyr” who'd blown herself up in Jerusalem today. Palestinian leaders had gone on
TV
to applaud her act, calling for more. Surely the deliberate murder of civilians was different from self-defense? Surely it was no excuse to say they had no other choice? But there was no point in arguing with Frank. There was something about him that Susan thought of as typically American, a starchy sort of moral earnestness that irritated her, even though there was nothing unreasonable in what he'd said.

Is anybody hungry? Frank said, glancing around, his eyes resting on Susan. Feel like going to get a bite to eat?

He really wasn't unattractive, Susan thought, and it wasn't as if she had any other plans. But inside she felt tight, wound around herself like a spring. For some reason, the image came to her of Terry, back in high school, breaking that single cookie into pieces on her plate. The self-denial of the saint.

Thanks, she said, shaking her head. But I really should be getting home.

Over the next few days, the list of accusations grew. On
TV
, reporters stood in front of dramatic backdrops of razed buildings and burned-out cars, describing the atrocities that allegedly had taken place inside the Jenin camp. The Arab news networks were now claiming that four hundred, or eight hundred, or twenty-eight hundred, or three thousand Palestinians had died over the past ten days; that thousands more had been arrested and detained; that the Israelis had opened fire on ambulances and paramedics and used Palestinian civilians as human shields; that they'd executed disarmed fighters and left women and children to die as armored bulldozers razed their homes. The Israelis, for their part, were saying that the entire camp was booby-trapped, that the terrorists had mined their own houses, planted detonation charges in the roads, placed snipers inside minarets and schools, commandeered Red Crescent ambulances to transport terrorists and arms. They'd found photo albums filled with pictures of children with notations indicating when each one would be ready to carry out a suicide attack.
AP
quoted a woman who claimed to have seen at least ten people killed before her eyes and said she came across dead bodies every two to three meters as she fled the camp. Reuters quoted
a man who said he'd watched dozens of corpses being carried off in military trucks before dawn. Others reported the stench of rotting bodies coming from rubble overturned by refugees searching for missing relatives and friends. None of the reports could be refuted or confirmed.

But did
you
see any bodies? Susan asked Debbie, pressing her fingers into her free ear. They were jackhammering on Thirty-third Street, a broken water main, loud even here in the windowless newsroom on the eleventh floor.

I didn't, no, Debbie said.

Susan shifted the phone to her other ear. What about the smell?

Look, Debbie said, we were in an
IDF
armored personnel carrier the whole time. I couldn't smell shit. But let me tell you something: the whole place stinks. The water and electricity have been cut off for days; the garbage is piled up a story high. The camp looks like it's been bombed. Entire fronts of buildings sheared off by bulldozers. The center of Hawashin has been bulldozed completely flat. If there were bodies under there, you'd never know.

Susan hung up and reread Debbie's piece.
Israeli officials put the Palestinian death toll at less than 100, but the director of Jenin's main hospital said the number killed could reach as high as 400 once all the bodies had been uncovered
. She stared at the vibrating words until her screensaver flashed on, a photograph of her brother Noah's kids. His two-year-old was wearing a T-shirt that said “Lock up your daughters!” in colorful bold type.

They were all implicated, Susan thought, in this tangle of images and metaphors, deliberate and inadvertent lies. She knew that Bill would cut the bit about ambulances being used to transport munitions
(unsubstantiated) and add a disclaimer about how none of the claims could be verified (true). International human rights organizations were being called in to investigate. But it didn't matter. Already it was too late.

After filing, Susan took the subway home and went out for a run. The early evening sunlight was soft and clear, a strong wind rippling the flags along Central Park West. She crossed into the park, running slowly at first, picking up the pace as her breathing settled into a steady beat, following her regular route to the reservoir track. The high-rises of the Upper East Side hovered beyond the new green leaves, glinting orange in the setting sun. Her lungs expanded behind her ribs; her abdomen pulled taut against the waistband of her shorts. It was good to feel her body: muscles, ligaments, blood, and breath. Her body seemed to grow lighter as she ran, as if her bones were aerating, losing mass.

On the way home, she sprinted the last few blocks, her legs whirring with fatigue, raising her arms as she slowed like a racer breaking through a finish line tape. At her building, she bent forward, her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. When she raised her head, he was standing right in front of her. For an instant, she didn't recognize him.

Hey, Reid said.

Susan wiped her forehead with her forearm, still panting. Are you here to see me? she said. She wouldn't have thought Reid even knew where she lived.

Reid shrugged. I was in the neighborhood, he said. Thought I'd see if you were in.

Well, come on up, I guess, she said, pulling open the door.

In the apartment, Reid looked around her living room, studying the spines of her books along the shelves, admiring the view over the Hudson, and then settled himself on the couch. Susan leaned back against the window with a glass of water, conscious of how flushed and shiny her face must be, of the outline of her nipples through her nylon running shirt, of how the crotch of her shorts was damp with sweat. She shook out her ponytail, smoothing her hair back with her hand.