SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT, MAALI, SLEEPING RESTLESSLY ON a folding cot with an arm flung over her eyes to shield them from the two-hundred-watt overhead bulb, was awakened by the long, deep sobs of a woman. For a moment she thought she had been crying in her sleep. Then, through the grille, she saw Isra’ili soldiers dragging someone under the armpits along the passageway. The group came to a stop in front of Maali’s door. A key turned in the lock, the door swung open and a woman was thrown into the small cell. She collapsed onto the cement floor as the door slammed closed behind her with the brutal gnash of metal striking metal.
Crouching next to the prisoner, Maali turned her face up and cradled her head in her lap. The woman’s dark hair was matted with sticky blood. There was a cut under an eye that was swollen shut, and an ugly purple bruise on one shoulder. Her prison shift was ripped under the armpits. Both of her knees and one ankle were scraped and bleeding. The woman, who appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties, opened her good eye and peered up at Maali in fright. “They think they can throw me into a cell with a collaborator and I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t tell them,” she whispered in Arabic. “It will not happen.”
“I am no collaborator,” Maali said.
“Go to hell.” The words were spit out from between sore lips.
Maali dragged the prisoner over to the cot and wrestled her onto it. She pulled off the underwear the Jewish doctor had given her, moistened a corner with saliva and began to clean the woman’s cuts and bruises. “What is your name?” she asked after a while. “Mine is Maali. I am the wife of Yussuf Abu Saleh.”
The young woman tilted her head to get a better look at Maali. “There is a Yussuf Abu Saleh who is said to be a disciple of the mujaddid.”
Maali smiled proudly.
The woman said, “How can I be sure you are the wife of Yussuf Abu Saleh?”
“Because I say it. Because I am here. Because I have suffered as you have suffered.”
Air rattled in the woman’s throat as she spoke. “I am Delilah, the sister-in-law of Abu Bakr, the mujaddid. My husband and I were pulled from our automobile as we passed through an Isra’ili roadblock on the edge of Jerusalem three days ago. I have not seen my husband since then, though I have heard his cries of pain coming from another room when they were torturing me.”
The two woman embraced. Delilah put her mouth next to Maali’s ear and whispered, “Have you told them what they want to know?”
“Not a word has crossed my lips,” Maali shot back. “I will die before I betray my husband.”
The woman managed a twisted smile. “Whatever you do, tell me nothing. What I do not know I cannot pass on to the Jews if the torture becomes too much for me to bear.”
Exhausted, Delilah sank into a fitful sleep with her head propped on Maali’s lap. At dawn the Isra’ilis came back for her. “Hatha baladna, il yahud kilabna,” the woman cried defiantly as they pulled her from the cell. “This is our country, the Jews are our dogs.”
An hour later the door of the cell was thrown open and Delilah, bleeding from one nostril of what looked like a broken nose, stumbled in. Sobbing convulsively like a baby, she collapsed into Maali’s arms. “They are convinced I know where Abu Bakr is holding the Jewish Rabbi,” she gasped when she was finally able to talk.
“Do you?” Maali whispered.
Staring deeply into Maali’s eyes, Delilah nodded imperceptibly. Then she curled up on the cot and, her body jerking spastically from time to time, dozed. Every two hours or so the Isra’ilis hauled Delilah off, and dragged her back to the cell looking more beat up than before. Maali guessed the Jews were killing two birds with one stone—they were trying to beat information out of Delilah, and using Delilah to demonstrate to Maali that they weren’t fainthearted when it came to making a woman talk. Delilah was sleeping fitfully sometime in the early afternoon when Maali heard a door opening at the far end of the passageway. She shook Delilah awake. They could make out the sound of footsteps approaching. Delilah looked around wildly. “Can’t take any more,” she moaned. “I need metal, it does not have to be sharp, with which to cut my wrists.” Seeing nothing she could use, she pulled Maali roughly toward her until their foreheads were touching. “I ask you—knot a length of cloth around my neck and strangle me.”
Maali shrank back in horror. “It is out of the realm of possibility.”
The cell door opened. Two young Isra’ili woman soldiers, both wearing khaki miniskirts and khaki sweaters, came in. One carried a plastic basin filled with warm water. The other set a bar of soap, a towel, a pair of low-heeled shoes and a folded Arab dress on the cot. “Count your blessings,” one of the soldiers sneered in Arabic. “Palestinian lawyers have brought your case before an Israeli judge and he has ordered your release. You are free to go as soon as you clean up.”
“And my husband?”
“Your husband is in the hospital—he suffered a concussion when he beat his head against a wall to make it appear as if he had been tortured.”
“You lie!”
The young soldier shrugged. “Your lawyers are waiting outside to take you to him. Call out when you are ready to leave.”
Maali helped Delilah wash away the dried blood and fit her aching limbs into the clean dress. The two women stood in front of the cell door and embraced. “We have only known each other for a few hours, but I think of you as a sister,” Delilah said.
“I will never forget you,” Maali declared emotionally.
“Do you want to send word to your husband?”
Maali leaped at the chance. “Address a note to Tayzir the florist,” she whispered into Delilah’s ear. “Leave it with the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque in the Christian Quarter. Say I have been arrested but am holding up. Say that the Isra’ilis discovered the ring and know it belonged to the dead Jew.”
“The Isra’ilis discovered the ring and know it belonged to the dead Jew.”
“Say I have not told them who gave it to me. Yussuf will understand.”
Delilah turned away before Maali could embrace her again and called for the two women soldiers to open the cell door. She stepped through it and started striding down the passageway ahead of them almost as if her limbs were not in pain. A moment later she disappeared through the door at the end of the passageway.
Around six in the evening, Maali caught the squeak of the food cart being pushed by a Palestinian orderly down the corridor. It came to a stop in front of the door of her cell and a plastic tray was slipped through the slot. Maali carried it back to her bunk and looked at the food. There was a plastic bowl half filled with cold rice and pieces of chicken, a single slice of white bread, a bowl of jello. She knew that she had to force herself to eat to keep up her strength. Using the plastic spoon, she started in on the rice, then picked up the bread. Hidden under it was a rolled up cigarette paper. Maali glanced at the door, then turning her back to it, unrolled the paper and flattened it on the plastic tray. “Beware,” it said in minuscule Arabic writing. “The Jews are using a beat-up Arabic-looking woman to get prisoners to talk.”
Her skin crawling, her blood running cold, Maali sank to the ground. “What have I done?” she moaned, and she leaned forward and began to slowly pound her forehead against the cement floor, each stroke incrementally harder than the one before.