SHUFFLING ALONG IN BACKLESS SLIPPERS, MAALI WAS LED INTO the unheated room padded with foam rubber so that prisoners couldn’t beat their heads against the wall and later claim they had been tortured. Dressed in a sack-like sleeveless shift that irritated her skin, she hugged herself as she settled onto the wooden stool with the front legs cut shorter than the back legs. She could hear the soothing sound of Yussuf’s voice whispering in her ear.
I will love you even when you have grown old, he had vowed the night he proposed marriage.
Will you take another wife? she had asked him.
Would you object?
Not if I selected her.
I will never take another wife.
Ahhhhh.
The dazzling spotlights hanging from the ceiling burned into Maali’s eyes, causing them to tear. The voice of the interrogator came from the penumbra, drowning out Yussuf’s music in her ear. “Are you well?” he asked in fluent Arabic. “Do you have any complaints to make about the way you are being treated?”
Maali shook her head tiredly; the first six or seven or eight times she had been questioned—she had long since lost count—she had complained bitterly about the cold cell, the lack of privacy when she performed bodily functions, the stench of the clothes she was obliged to wear, the mold on the rice she was obliged to eat, the lack of medical treatment for the rash on her stomach. Once she had been given a sheaf of paper and a felt-tipped pen—ball points were considered weapons in prison—and invited to write a letter to Amnesty International. Kneeling on the floor boards, she had bent over the paper and had written out her complaints on what looked like an Amnesty International form. The interrogator had read her letter aloud, snickering at the errors in spelling and grammar as he went along, and then torn it to shreds on the grounds that it was illiterate.
“No complaints. Good. Let’s begin where we left off.” Maali could hear the sound of pages being turned. “You claim to have bought the ring sometime last month from a Bedouin selling jewelry in the souk. You maintain that you cannot recall the name of the Bedouin or the location of his shop. Has time refreshed your memory?”
Maali shook her head.
“Since our last session, we have learned more about the ring.”
Shielding her eyes with a forearm, Maali tried to catch a glimpse of her interrogator. “It is a ring like any other,” she protested weakly.
“It is a ring unlike any other we have seen. At first we thought the words Erasmus and Hall were a man’s name. But we discovered that Erasmus Hall is the name of a high school in Brooklyn, which is a borough in the city of New York. The 1998 refers to the year of graduation. The ring in question is a high school graduation ring.”
Trembling on her stool from fear and cold, Maali hugged herself tightly.
“You will be interested to hear that we have even managed to identify the owner of the ring. It belonged to an American named Ronni Goldman. He was a Talmudic student at the yeshiva run by Rabbi Apfulbaum in the Jewish settlement of Beit Avram on the hills overlooking Hebron.”
“Have I transgressed Isra’ili law to buy a ring from a Bedouin?” Maali fumbled. “Has the Bedouin transgressed Isra’ili law to buy the ring from a Jew?”
The interrogator’s voice droned on. “The Bedouin did not buy the ring from a Jew. You did not buy the ring from a Bedouin. Ronni Goldman was one of the boys killed when an Islamic fundamentalist group calling itself the Abu Bakr Brigade kidnapped Rabbi Apfulbaum while he was driving back to Beit Avram from Yad Mordechai. One of the terrorists cut off Goldman’s little finger to get the ring, and then offered it to you. Surely it was your husband, Yussuf, who gave you the ring the night of the kidnapping. Surely it was your husband, Yussuf, whom you were waving to near the Damascus Gate the next morning.”
“I have told you a thousand times,” Maali declared. “I have not set eyes on my husband since the night of our wedding.”
“Then who gave you the ring?”
“No one gave me the ring. I purchased it from a Bedouin.”
The interrogator shuffled more papers. “If, in fact, no one gave you the ring, it raises the possibility that you yourself cut the finger from the dead boy’s hand, and took the ring from the finger. I must warn you that we have enough evidence to charge you with the murder of Ronni Goldman. You are in a great deal of trouble, Maali. No judge will believe you bought the Erasmus Hall ring from a Bedouin. You could spend the rest of your life in a Negev detention camp. I will tell you that some of my superiors are convinced you took part in the ambush; we have many examples of Palestinian women playing active roles in attacks on Jews. I myself do not believe you are guilty of murder; I believe you are protecting someone. I even have a grudging admiration for your loyalty and steadfastness. But loyalty must have a limit. What kind of a man is it who cuts the finger from the hand of a dead boy to steal a ring?”
Maali’s knees turned weak and she had difficulty keeping herself from sliding off the stool. “The man who is pushed to cut a ring from the hand of a dead Jew is someone who has suffered at the hands of a living Jew,” she blurted out.
The interrogator said with unnerving patience, “So you admit that someone cut the finger from the hand of Ronni Goldman to get the ring, which he then gave to you?”
“I admit nothing,” Maali cried. “I curse your eyes. I spit at your feet.”
Shivering on the cot in her icy cell after the evening meal had been pushed through the slot in the door later that night, Maali scratched at the rash on her stomach until it bled. The warder who checked the occupants of the cells every hour on the hour noticed blood on the front of her shift and summoned two Israeli woman guards, who walked her through the labyrinthine corridors to the infirmary. The Jewish woman doctor who was on duty, appalled at Maali’s condition, had her strip to the skin and shower with a special soap. The doctor, a young draftee on her first tour of duty in a prison, cleaned the rash with antiseptic and treated it with an antibiotic cream, and issued Maali new underwear and a new shift with long sleeves. Waiting for the two woman guards to return, the doctor gave Maali a small plastic comb and a plastic container filled with vitamins.
“Shoukran,” Maali murmured in Arabic.
“Bavakasha,” the doctor answered, avoiding the prisoner’s eye. “If the rash still bothers you tomorrow, ask to be brought back to the infirmary.” She became impatient when the woman guards didn’t show up and summoned the Palestinian orderly who sat at a small table outside the infirmary door logging everyone in and out. “Take her back to Cell Block four,” the doctor instructed the orderly.
Maali fell into step alongside the Palestinian, a young woman whose thick tresses had been hacked short in what looked like a botched prison haircut. Moving her lips like a ventriloquist, keeping her eyes trained straight ahead, the orderly murmured, “What are you arrested for?”
“They think I killed a Jew,” Maali said, suddenly proud of the charge against her.
They turned a corner and passed a control point. The Israeli guard behind the window recognized the orderly and waved her on.
“How did they catch you?” the orderly asked.
“I was denounced.”
“By whom?”
“By Mr. Hajji, the one who changes money at the Damascus Gate.”
“How can you be sure?”
“It was Mr. Hajji who confirmed the identification when I was brought in by the Isra’ilis. I saw him with my own eyes.”
“The Holy Qur’an prescribes execution, crucifixion, amputation or exile for those who wage war against Allah and his Messenger, and sow corruption on earth. Surely Mr. Hajji will not escape the judgment of God or man.”
They approached a steel door guarded by a young Israeli woman soldier wearing black Reebok sneakers and holding an Uzi submachine gun. She gestured for the prisoner to raise her arms and slowly ran the palms of her hands over Maali’s breasts and thighs and buttocks. She discovered the plastic comb and vitamin pills in a pocket and confiscated them before waving the prisoner through the door.
“Are you familiar with the passage in the Holy Qur’an entitled The Woman Tested?” the orderly breathed as they approached Maali’s cell. “‘Pray to Allah, who answers all prayers. Resist the infidel with your soul and your body and your brain. Remember that God sees the things you do.’”
Maali entered her foul-smelling cell; she had grown accustomed to the odors coming from the open toilet in the far corner. The orderly started to shut the door behind her. “Take heart—Mr. Hajji will rot in hell,” she whispered before the door slammed closed. “Take heart—water like molten copper will scald the collaborator’s face.”
An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:
Turns out that my one-time Harvard colleague Henry Kissinger got it dead wrong when he observed that the absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously. This may be true in the real world; in the Looking-Glass miasma of the Middle East, the absence of alternatives only seems to befuddle minds even more. My telephone call to the Chairman of the Palestinian authority this morning is a case in point. Before I could get a word in, he was lecturing me on how he wasn’t going to make the mistake of letting himself be seen cooperating with the Israeli Shin Bet to capture Palestinians—even though they had broken the cease fire he endorsed, even though they were jeopardizing the peace treaty he was ready to sign.
I let him ramble on for a while. When he came up for air I said, very casually, “What are your alternatives?”
When he started to tick them off, one by one, I interrupted. “Mr. Chairman, let me tell you how we see your alternatives from Washington,” I told him. “You have none.”
I let that sink in. “Everyone always has alternatives,” he finally said. “To start with, I can sit back and let the Isra’ilis solve their own problems.”
“Frankly, I thought you were too shrewd to consider that an alternative. Put yourself in Israeli shoes. What happens when Abu Bakr murders the secretary and the Rabbi? What then?”
“I telephoned the Isra’ili Prime Minister when this began. I suggested that he should follow your President’s advice and treat the kidnapping as an isolated incident—”
“It’s an isolated incident if the perpetrators don’t get away with murder. If they do, it’s not an isolated incident because they will draw the inevitable conclusions and perpetrate again—and again, and again until your nerves, and those of the Israelis, crack. Don’t forget that the Prime Minister has 240,000 right-wing settlers looking over his shoulder—they would welcome an excuse to scuttle the Mt. Washington peace treaty before it can be signed.”
“What does it mean, scuttle?”
“Sink. Wreck. Ruin. Destroy. Kill.”
There must have been others in the room with the Chairman listening in on our conversation, because I heard someone whispering to him in Arabic. I asked, with what I hoped was a reasonable amount of sarcasm in my voice, “What did he say?”
He cleared his throat, which I took to mean that he wasn’t as calm as he sounded. “He asks how is it we always seem to end up with you Americans pushing us to help the Isra’ilis crack down on Palestinians.”
“I’ll answer his question with a question: How is it you people don’t see that this Abu Bakr is as much an enemy of the Palestinian Authority as he is of Israel? Come to think of it, maybe even more of an enemy.”
“How more? Why more?”
“With the Israelis, he will consider the operation a success if he kills two of them; he will consider it a triumph if the Israelis don’t turn up in Washington to sign the peace treaty. With you, he’ll consider it a success if the murder of the two Israelis causes you embarrassment; he’ll consider it a triumph if he and the other fundamentalists can kill you and govern in your place.”
I could hear him arguing with someone in Arabic. I made a mental note to have an Arab-speaker with me next time I put a call in to the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority. After a moment he came back on the line. “I tell you frankly, Mr. Sawyer, I do not disagree with your analysis. But in this part of the world there is a big difference between analyzing a situation correctly and taking a public position on it.”
“Let me put another question, Mr. Chairman: What would you do if Israeli right-wingers kidnapped a crazy fundamentalist Imam and his secretary, killing four of their bodyguards in the process? Would you agree to treat the kidnapping as an isolated incident?”
He laughed under his breath; one of the things I appreciated about the Chairman was his occasional ability to stand back and see himself and the Palestinians as others might see them. Empathy is the mother of self-knowledge. “I would dial your number in Washington,” the Chairman conceded, “and ask you to put pressure on the Isra’ilis to bring the culprits to justice. I would do this knowing full well the Isra’ilis would be in no great hurry—”
“Mr. Chairman, when the Mt. Washington treaty is signed, your two peoples will have to find ways to live with each other on your postage stamp of a territory.”
“We have signed treaties with the Isra’ilis before and look what happened. Remember Oslo? They built additional settlements and expanded the existing ones. They constructed a network of security roads that crisscrossed Palestine, effectively cutting it into isolated enclaves. They built so-called security walls, cutting Palestinians off from access to hospitals and universities and jobs and the fields they farmed. They dragged their feet about giving back territory. We are afraid history will repeat itself.” I could hear the Chairman being interrupted again by one of his aides. When he came back on the line he said, “Perhaps it would be wiser to put off any decisions in this matter until tomorrow.”
I have a Pablo Picasso quotation I used from time to time to impress my students at Harvard. I came up with it now. “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” I never did get to gauge the effect of my erudition on the Chairman because the line suddenly filled with static, and then went stone dead.
I didn’t ask the White House operators to reestablish the connection. I had made the points I wanted to make and decided to stand on ceremony—having initiated the first conversation, I felt it was his place to call me back.
He never did.