Damascus Gate (46 page)

"You sons of bitches," he shouted. "You Nazi swine! You oversaw the killing of a Jew!"

"Now...," said Lucas.

"You shut the fuck up!" said the officer, trembling with rage. "You threw that girl out of the car. You left..."

Then someone called to him and he could not go on. Some of the crowd of Palestinians had noticed the army vehicle. Soon, Lucas thought, they would notice that it was isolated and unprotected. The officer and his driver, in spite of their anger, became aware of this.

Just before he ran to attend to whatever business demanded his attention, the officer gave them a last look of such hatred and fury that Lucas's heart shriveled in his breast. Someone would die for this, it was plain. Possibly him.

"We'll have your names," the officer shouted as the jeep bore him away. "We don't forget." The rest of what he said was lost. Had he used the word
momzer?
Maybe. Maybe Lucas had imagined it. More army vehicles sped by, the soldiers in them looking with glum hostility at their UN car.

They drove disordered roads through more towns where tires were burning and the mosques echoing with
jihad.

"God, he looked fierce," the Rose said. She meant the officer who had stopped them.

"Yes, he did," Lucas said. "I mean..." He had been about to say "put yourself in his place." Then he figured, fuck it. He was tired of imagining his way into everyone's situation.

"I hate them all sometimes," the Rose declared. "Both sides."

"I know what you mean," Lucas said.

A
T JUST ABOUT
the time oily black night commenced its descent on them, they ran clean out of road. Sonia had raised Gaza City headquarters on the radio, and the Dutch officer there suggested they make for the UN distribution center in Eshaikh Ijleen, on the coast. But after they had gone a few kilometers they discovered that the track ahead was blocked with a barrier of burnt automobiles four cars wide and there was no shoulder beside it. The hulks were piled wire to wire.

They got out and edged their way along the wire until they were past the pile of charred metal. Then they began to trudge toward Eshaikh Ijleen. The last of the day's heat, fed by fires, laid twilight mirages in their path. Lucas kept thinking he could see the ocean. They came to a kind of town.

"Used to be an Orthodox church around here," Nuala said. "We had dealings with them. The priest was a Greek who sympathized with us."

Lucas could not tell whether she meant Palestinians or Communists.

"What happened to the church?"

"Hamas burned them out," she said.

The abandoned town had been a Christian camp. The church building and the priest's house beside it had been vandalized, the murals of mournful Byzantine saints defaced with graffiti, the domestic fixtures and fittings stripped. An ancient photograph of a woman carrying a parasol and wearing the fashions of the early twentieth century lay on the red-dusted floor. Nuala picked it up.

As they walked on toward the coast, they saw dozens of fires burning against the mottled sunset. Again Nuala recited the names of towns. Nuseirat. Deir el-Balah.

From inside the Netzarim wire, illumination rounds traced automatic fire. Someone had got hold of a flare gun and was amusing himself firing off parachute flares. Each explosion produced cheers. Children scampered under the canopies of pretty light.

"Looks like a bloody fun fair," Nuala said.

As darkness gathered, they stopped to rest beside the road. By now they could no longer tell what lights signified or distinguish army positions from towns in the grip of riot.

"We're on our own," Nuala said. "We'll have to get through the night. The PKF will probably close all the compounds." She had taken the map from Rose's Laredo and tried reading it with her pen flashlight. "There's another small camp down the road," she said. "Rashid has a couple of cousins there. Somebody might remember me."

Leaning over to have a look at the map, Lucas saw that they were not far away from the coastal camp where he had gone on his first journey to the Strip. It was one of the poorest and most benighted parts of the place.

At the entrance to the small camp was a pile of tires buttressed by gasoline cans, an instantly inflammable barricade. About a hundred feet beyond it, a group of youths were gathered about burning trash cans. In the light of the flames, he could see figures laid side by side under blue sheeting. The figures appeared to be corpses.

All four of them walked toward the tire barricade. Lucas took the map from Nuala. He ought to keep it as a souvenir, he thought, in case they got through the night alive. It marked a place where seven hundred thousand people passed each night in prayer by the light of trash fires, demanding their own revenge and protection from everyone else's. A major energy resource, Gaza, forty kilometers long by six wide, had more than enough fear and rage to sustain human nature for the next millennium. Beaches, too.

As he walked toward the villagers, Lucas noticed that all the men around the fire began to shout at them and point at Lucas.

"What's wrong with them?" he asked the others.

"Damned if I know," Nuala said. "Better wait here."

So Lucas waited on the far side of the tire barricade while Sonia, Nuala and Rose tried to parlay with the citizens of the camp. The citizens were screaming. They drew back the sheeting to reveal the numbers of their dead. Every few minutes, one of them pointed at Lucas. They appeared not to want to hear what Sonia and Nuala had to say to them. Eventually, the three women came back around the barricade. On the way in, a few of the Palestinian men had shifted tires and barrels to help them through. On the way out, no one helped them.

"So?" asked Lucas.

"So," Sonia said, "let's get out of here."

There were distant sirens. And now, again, the voices of muezzins.

"They have something against me?" Lucas asked.

He turned to catch a glimpse of someone from the camp stealing up behind them. In the firelight, he could see the boy had a bad eye—from viciousness or madness or plain strabismus. Apprehended, the youth skipped away, giggling. A cry went up from the men around the fire.

"They don't like you," Nuala said. "Start moving. Don't run."

"Oh, shit," the Rose said.

They kept walking jauntily along, heads held high.

"Should I sing something?" Sonia asked.

"No," said Nuala. "They'll think you're an Israeli. They always sing."

It seemed to Lucas that not even Israelis on a neo-Hegelian walkabout would sing in the present circumstances. Now a helicopter raced overhead, the roar exploding out of darkness, its fiery spotlight spinning theatrically over the ground.

"The people back there," Nuala explained to Lucas, "they think you have the evil eye. And that you're a spy. And a Jew. And that we're protecting you."

"Oh," said Lucas. "Why do they think that?"

"I don't know," Nuala said. "They seem crazy. The mullah seems crazy."

That seemed to be all she could tell him. Glancing from the road, he saw a couple of dozen people running along beside the wire. They seemed a jolly crowd, and he was the object of their attention. They were laughing and screaming, pointing, celebrating him.

"Why me?" Lucas asked, dry-mouthed.

"Oh, there are rumors," Sonia said. "They've had a few people killed, probably by snipers from the settlement across the way. There are actually provocateurs in the camps."

"The mullah says you're not a man," Nuala told him calmly. "He says you're something else."

"What?"

"I don't know. Not a man. A spirit, like a djinn."

"But still Jewish, right?"

"Right," said Sonia. "No cure for that." She sighed. "Maybe it's a camp for
majnoon.
Anyway, we won't stop there."

"Good," Lucas said.

When the helicopter went by again, Lucas said, "Do you think there's a chance the army would help us out?" He supposed he was beginning to see the point of the Israeli army.

"Us?" Nuala said. "
You,
you mean. Don't count on it. If you're press, they think you came here to make them look bad. And one of their own just got killed. They may hold you responsible."

Maybe we were responsible, Lucas thought. If we had notified the soldiers, Lenny might have been rescued. But foreign volunteers in the Strip did not run to the soldiers with information.

"Look at it this way, Chris," Sonia said. "They're not here to help you."

"You know how he's looking at it," Nuala said. "He's an American. His money buys their guns. His spies work with theirs. He thinks they owe him."

"That's not what he means," Sonia said.

"No," Lucas said. "I suppose I mean that they're people more like me, in the end. They may not be the Knights of the Round Table, but they won't kill me for being a Jew. Or a djinn."

Across a dark field more fires burned.

"You can't trust them," Sonia said. "The fact is, you can't trust anyone. Some Israelis would help you. Some wouldn't."

"I wasn't proposing pissing off to the army and leaving you three here," Lucas said testily. "I just wondered if it was worth trying to get help from them."

"The fact is," Nuala said, "we're in different situations. For each of us it's different."

They stopped again to watch the distant fires.

"Why do you think Linda got us out here?" Lucas asked. "What was on her mind?"

"We're going to find out," Sonia said. "Really soon."

"Maybe PKF will send out a patrol," Sonia suggested. "That would be nice."

"Amen," said Lucas. Someone, he thought, amid all this religion, ought to say a prayer for all the poor bastards in the world who were awaiting the ministrations of little white UN vehicles along the fucked, rutted roads of the world, and the unfortunates in control of them.

Down the road, the sound of chanting came from the direction of the village of the
majnoon.
Its tune did not particularly lift the spirit.

Turning around, Lucas saw what could only be a crowd of Palestinians advancing through the darkness. They were carrying all manner of lights—flashlights, kerosene lamps, open flames on torches. They seemed to be shouting at once. In that desert night, Lucas thought, one might actually imagine them as God's army, or Gideon's, the elect of the Lord, His host. It was undoubtedly the way they saw themselves—on the march in search of God's enemy and theirs. Him.

"They think we're getting away," Lucas said. Everyone walked faster.

They jogged through the darkness, following the faint luminescence of the road. Lucas began to think about necklacing and the uses the hostile imagination might contrive for shears and pruning hooks, all the punishments prescribed for creatures who, like himself, pretended to be human beings but were not. He found Sonia's hand and they jogged together toward the top of a small hill. For a while the smoke cleared. There were a million stars overhead, like evil angels.

At the very crest of the hill they must have been outlined against the sky, because a hearty liberationist cheer broke from the pursuing crowd. It was easier running downhill. The Rose had the penlight and was trying to read her map on the run.

"If we can get a mile and a half down the road," she said breathlessly, "there's a camp called Beit Ajani. It's supposed to be under PLO control."

"Whatever that means," Sonia said.

"Well, we don't know what it means," said Nuala. "But we'd better get down there and run for it."

So they sprinted for the gates of Beit Ajani, with the entire population of what appeared to be a camp for the insane at a quarter-mile's distance behind, waving their torches and gasoline cans in merry pursuit. They were close enough now for Lucas to hear what they were chanting.

"
Itbah al-Yahud!
"

He thought he heard a chain saw.

Inside Beit Ajani camp there was no one in sight. The place had an open gate that led off the road, so the four of them tried to push it closed behind them. Although it was made of only wood and wire they could not, all heaving together, get it to budge. Something invisible in the darkness held it immovably open.

They started running along the rows of shacks. Beit Ajani was a camp of the poorest kind; the core of each house here, too, was one of the cement structures the United Nations had built in 1948, when the place was under Egyptian rule.

"Where the hell is everyone?" Lucas asked. Not so much as a single light showed anywhere in the camp. Meanwhile, the crowd from
majnoon
ville had halted at the open gate, still waving its lighted wands and dreadful weapons, chanting its slogan.

"There are people here," Nuala said. "Lying low."

"Cooking oil," Sonia whispered. "You can smell it."

They were crouched against the line of shacks. Nuala stood upright.

"
Salaam,
" she said loudly. "
Masar il kher. Kayfa bialik?
"

"Who's she talking to?" Lucas asked.

Then he saw that she was talking to an old woman, who was peering at them from behind a quilted cotton curtain. The old woman said something in reply. She was trying to see Lucas in the darkness. The noise of the mob was growing closer. It sounded as though they had come in through the gate.

"
Itbah al-Yahud!
"

The old woman stepped aside and let the women—Nuala, Sonia and the Rose—stoop to enter her hut. When Lucas tried to follow them, she barred his way with her arm.

"It's a daya's chamber," Nuala said. "A midwife's surgery. He can't come in here."

Lucas paused and looked back toward the camp gate. He no longer saw the crowd that had been behind them, only saw the lights they carried and heard their war cries. They had turned down a different alley.

"Well, he can't stay out there," Sonia said. "Listen to them!"

Lucas looked into the dim daya's room. The plastered walls were painted with homely grape-leaf patterns and blue five-fingered palm prints such as those found in North Africa. The
daya
herself looked African. The only light in the place came from her cooking stove. She stood firmly in the doorway, her hands on his chest, pushing him away.