Vicious Circle Read online

  The journalist glanced at the Fiddler, who was kneading a purplish bruise on the pale skin of his forehead. “I’ve been meaning to ask you all day,” Sweeney said, “how you hurt your head?”

  “Praying at the Wailing Wall.”

  “You’re making a joke.”

  “He beats his head against the Wall when he talks to God,” the secretary explained over his shoulder. “It’s the only time our Rabbi has ever come face to face with someone as stubborn as he is. In a manner of speaking, it drives him up the Wall.”

  The journalist, who was gathering material for a profile on West Bank Jewish militants in general and the Fiddler on the Roof in particular, waited for the laughter. When none came he understood the answer was serious and jotted it down. “It’s a matter of record that the Jewish fundamentalist who assassinated Prime Minister Rabin in 1995 had been an early student of yours at Beit Avram,” he said. “He was said to have been reading your book One Torah, One Land the night before he committed the crime.”

  “Hundreds of students have studied Torah at Beit Avram. Tens of thousands have read my book, which is about the unbreakable bond between ha-aretz, the land of Israel, and the Torah. What my students and readers do with this information is their business. It’s not my fault if one of them decided to excarnate the Prime Minister.”

  “Excarnate?”

  Efrayim turned in his seat belt. “Our Rabbi takes the Torah’s injunction ‘Thou shalt not kill’ to its logical conclusion—he won’t even let the word kill pass his lips.”

  “Okay. Let’s come at the question from another direction. There are rumors that your settlement, Beit Avram, is the home of the Jewish underground movement Keshet Yonatan, the Bow of Jonathan; that you are the spiritual leader of the movement and the guru to its mysterious leader who signs himself by the name of Ya’ir.”

  “‘From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan turned not back.’” The Rabbi, an amateur poker fanatic famous for playing his cards close to his vest, managed to produce a smile that transmitted no information; he could have been betting a straight flush or a pair of threes. “Two Samuel, chapter one, verse twenty-two. I would have thought a serious reporter for a serious newspaper had better things to do than check out cockamamie rumors.”

  The journalist absently brought his middle finger up to the small plastic device in his left ear; his drum had been ruptured when a mortar shell exploded next to his car in Beirut several wars back. His right ear had not been affected but his colleagues understood that he could only distinguish sound in his left ear with the help of the small plastic aid. “Are you denying there’s a Jewish underground?” he asked. “Or are you denying you are its spiritual leader?”

  The Rabbi, whose name was Isaac Apfulbaum, shrugged his gaunt shoulders. “Either. Or.”

  Up front the driver worked the windshield wipers and the sprinkler to clear sand from the window. The Ashqelon interchange with its transparent bus shelters on both sides and a swarm of hitchhiking soldiers loomed ahead. The driver pulled the station wagon onto the dirt shoulder and cut the motor. The Rabbi climbed out of the car and, with the American journalist trailing after him, walked over to a group of soldiers to shake the hand of each of them; to Sweeney’s eye, the Rabbi looked like an American politician wading into a crowd of constituents to spread the gospel of his reelection. When the Rabbi offered his hand to a young Israeli officer, the soldier thrust his fists deep into his pockets. “I know who you are,” he declared in Hebrew. He noticed someone he took for a journalist behind the Rabbi scribbling furiously in a copy book and switched to English. “You stand for everything I despise.”

  The Rabbi took the insult in stride; in the years since he had immigrated to Israel from the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn and, along with fourteen families from his Brooklyn congregation, founded Beit Avram, he had developed a thick skin. “I stand for the people of Israel on the land of Israel,” he remarked tiredly. “I stand for God.”

  He turned away to accompany the journalist to his car, which he had parked across the road when they met that morning. “I am told you have a chip on your shoulder against the Jewish state,” the Rabbi said. He angled his head, causing his thick eyeglasses to catch the light and turn opaque. He shifted his weight from one scuffed black shoe to the other. “I am told you write stories that are invariably anti-Israeli.”

  “If you think I slant my articles, why did you let me tag along with you today?”

  The Rabbi studied Sweeney in the fading twilight. “As long as you spell my name correctly—it’s I for Isaac Apful baum, with an f after the p—and quote me accurately, my arguments will resist your efforts to distort them. In a nutshell, I’m a religious Zionist. I have bad teeth because I’m too busy studying Torah to go to a dentist. I wear a hand-knitted kippah on the back of my head and would carry a gun if I could see well enough to shoot my enemies and not my friends. I am absolutely convinced that the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was a religious event. I believe our victory in 1967, which reunited what you call the West Bank and we call the biblical provinces of Judea and Samaria with the rest of Israel, was the handiwork of God. For me, Genesis 17:8—where God gives Abraham and his seed all of the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession—is the heart of the heart of the Torah. For too long Jews were a people without a land, and Palestine was a land without a people. Now the people and the land have come together and nobody—not our crazy Israeli politicians, not the conscience-stricken Diaspora Jews, not the lunatic Islamic fundamentalists, not even a goy journalist with a chip on his shoulder—is going to separate them again.”

  The word goy struck Sweeney like a slap in the face. He snapped shut the copy book and slipped it into a pocket of his worn safari jacket. “There are good-thinking people, Jews as well as goys, who would argue that Palestine was never a land without a people. When the British counted noses in 1918, they found 700,000 Arabs and 56,000 Jews—”

  “In the history of the world there has never been a Palestinian people,” the Rabbi said flatly. “Jews have lived on this land for the last three thousand years, long before Islam’s hooligans swept down from the Arabian desert to plunder Palestine.” Squinting, he studied the bloated sun, which appeared to be snared in the barbed wire atop the chain link fence ringing an electricity station. “We could continue this discussion for hours, but I have to get back to Beit Avram for a meeting.”

  Neither man offered to shake hands. “Another time, perhaps,” Sweeney said.

  “Fax your article to my office. Then we’ll see about a second interview.”

  The Rabbi turned on his heel and, splashing through an oil slick, crossed the road to the station wagon. The three young religious Jews serving as body guards flicked away their cigarettes, checked their weapons and climbed back into the Chevrolet. The driver, a reserve lieutenant in a reconnaissance unit when he wasn’t studying Torah at Beit Avram, rolled down his window and called to the Russian-Jewish Zionist behind the wheel of the Rabbi’s Nissan, “Stay close. Whatever happens, don’t stop.” Then, with the Chevrolet in the lead, the two cars sped off toward Beit Avram, a Jewish settlement of three hundred souls planted like a yarmulke atop a windswept Judean hill in the spine of mountains between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea.

  Both cars switched on their headlights as the twilight thickened into night. The Rabbi, worn out from the long day on the road, tried to cat nap in the station wagon’s back seat but the headlights of oncoming cars kept him awake. “How long?” he called to the driver.

  “Three quarters of an hour, an hour if we run into traffic.”

  Efrayim said, “It’s not sure we’ll get there in time for the meeting.”

  “My getting there,” the Rabbi observed dryly, “will be the signal for the meeting to begin.”

  After a while Efrayim looked over his shoulder and whispered into the shadows of the back seat, “Rabbi, are you sleeping?”

  “If I were sleeping I wou
ldn’t have heard you ask if I were sleeping.”

  “Excuse me, Rabbi, but what did you mean this morning when you said prayer was a waste of time?”

  “To pray is not the worst thing you can do with your time, but it’s a waste of time in the sense that there are better things you can do.”

  “For instance?” Efrayim persisted.

  A sixteen-wheel trailer truck roared past in the opposite direction. Apfulbaum waited until the noise subsided, and said, “My Rabbi in Brooklyn used to teach us that if the Torah didn’t instruct Jews to pray, he wouldn’t pray—he’d study Torah.”

  “So studying Torah is the best thing a Jew can do with his time?”

  “Studying Torah and obeying God’s commandment to settle all the land of the Torah, these are the best things a Jew can do.”

  “What if someone is already occupying the land of the Torah?”

  “Do you remember what happened to the Amalek nation when it rose up against the Israelites fleeing Egypt?”

  Efrayim, who had been studying Torah since he was a child, smiled brightly. “God instructed Moses to blot out their memory.”

  “And who has heard of an Amalek Liberation Organization today?” the Rabbi asked. He laughed under his breath at his own little joke.

  Efrayim thought about this. “Rabbi?”

  “What is it now?”

  “If our demented Prime Minister goes ahead and signs that peace treaty in Washington, we’ll have to give an awful lot of the land of the Torah back to the Palestinians. If we give back the land, how will we be able to obey God’s commandment to settle all of the land of the Torah?”

  “God will surely stay the Prime Minister’s hand at the last moment.”

  “The way he stayed Abraham’s hand when he was about to sacrifice his son Isaac?”

  “Something along those lines.”

  Rounding a curve near the Zohar Reservoir, the headlights of the lead car swept over a white Volkswagen camping car parked up ahead at the side of the road. A tall religious Jew with side curls, wearing a black ankle-length coat and a black fedora, waved his arms over his head to flag them down. A young woman, also a religious Jew judging from her shawl and pill box hat and the long skirt that plunged to her ankles, stood nearby with her eyes downcast.

  “Haredim,” muttered the driver in the point car, using the Hebrew word for the ultra Orthodox Jews.

  “Keep going,” the young man sitting next to him ordered, but the driver of the Rabbi’s station wagon was already honking his horn and slowing down, so they pulled up, too. The three young bodyguards, their side curls and the ritual fringes of the tallith katan flying in the dry gusts coming off the desert, cocked their Uzis as they stepped out of the Chevrolet.

  The Rabbi’s station wagon had come to a stop next to the camping car. The Rabbi’s Russian driver, his finger curled around the trigger of the Uzi concealed along the seam of his trousers, opened his door and stepped out onto the road. The Rabbi rolled down his window. “What’s the trouble?” he called in Yiddish to the religious Jew standing next to the parked Volkswagen.

  “We ran out of benzene,” the young woman, her face disfigured by smallpox scars, replied in Hebrew.

  The tall young man in the ankle-length coat approached the Rabbi’s car. “We are on our way back to Ashqelon,” he explained, speaking Hebrew with an accent Apfulbaum couldn’t immediately place. “Do you have a jerry can you could lend us? We will reimburse you for the benzene.”

  The driver of the Chevrolet came running back along the road. “Something’s not right,” he shouted. “They’re speaking Hebrew instead of Yiddish—”

  The warning—Haredim only spoke Hebrew when studying Torah or talking to God—came too late.

  From the folds of her shawl the young woman whipped out an automatic pistol and, gripping it in both her hands, sent a hail of bullets plunging into the driver’s chest. Gun shots erupted from the darkness at the side of the road, cutting down the two body guards standing next to the Chevrolet before they could squeeze off a round. The driver of the Rabbi’s Nissan dove onto the asphalt and fired his Uzi in short bursts at the flashes at the side of the road until the clip ran out. He was trying to jam in a second clip taped back to back to the first when a grenade rolled across the road and exploded near his feet.

  In the darkness and the confusion, one of the bodyguards from the Chevrolet, wounded in the head and stomach, managed to drag himself across the road into a tangle of underbrush at the shoulder. Wiping the blood from his eyes with a forearm, he looked through the bushes. Two Mercedes-Benzes materialized out of the dunes at the side of the highway and screeched to a stop near the Volkswagen bus. In the glare of their headlights, figures in jeans and black turtleneck sweaters, their faces masked by black-and-white kiffiyehs, could be seen wrenching open the doors of the Rabbi’s station wagon. Several Arabs dragged the Rabbi and his secretary from the Nissan and prodded them into the back seat of the first Mercedes. A heavy-set man, on the short side with short-cropped hair, came around in front of the Rabbi’s station wagon. He was wearing a double-breasted suit jacket over a flowing white robe. The Nissan’s headlights spilled his shadow down the road and onto the rear of the Chevrolet. The Arab dropped to one knee next to the body of the Russian driver, who was twitching in agony from the grenade explosion. When the twitching suddenly stopped, the Arab felt for the driver’s pulse and, bending over, put his ear against the wounded man’s mouth. He must have decided that the driver was still alive, because he seemed to probe with the tips of his fingers behind the Jew’s ear as he drew a small pistol from the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket. He pressed the barrel of the pistol to a spot on the driver’s skull. The hollow phffffft of a small-caliber weapon reached the ears of the wounded bodyguard hiding in the thicket. Close by, voices called out in Arabic. The beams of powerful flashlights danced on the road. One of the attackers opened a large pocket knife; the wounded bodyguard watching from the thicket could see light glinting off the blade as the Arab leaned over the body sprawled next to the Chevrolet. The other attackers started searching for the missing bodyguard. One of them came across a trail of blood on the asphalt and trained his flashlight on the thicket across the road. As he started toward the thicket, the headlights of a vehicle topped a rise a kilometer away.

  The heavy-set Arab in the robe and suit jacket shouted orders. Two of the men in turtleneck sweaters lifted a wounded Arab into the back seat of the second Mercedes. Doors slammed. Low beamed yellow headlights flicked on as the two Mercedes careened off in the direction of Gaza.

  TWO

  THE TWO MERCEDES SPED ALONG A DIRT ROAD, FORDED A shallow stream at a spot marked by two logs driven into the bank and pulled up in an apple orchard. The lights strung along the top of a security fence around a kibbutz flickered in the distance; from the orchard, with a little imagination, it was easy to take the kibbutz for a cruise ship and the sea of impenetrable blackness around it for the Mediterranean. In the back seat of the first Mercedes, the Rabbi and his secretary, their wrists bound in front of them, their heads covered with leather hoods, waited in the darkness. Both men stiffened when they heard footsteps approaching. The heavy-set Arab with short cropped hair came up behind the car and nodded at one of the young men in turtleneck sweaters. “Cut open their sleeves,” he ordered in Arabic.

  The young man, whose name was Yussuf Abu Saleh, pulled out his pocket knife for the second time that night and, leaning into the back of the car, slit open the jacket and shirt sleeve on the left arm of each prisoner. The Rabbi’s secretary, Efrayim, gasped. When his turn came, the Rabbi filled his lungs with air but said nothing.

  From a small metal container, the Arab with the short-cropped hair, whom the others knew as “the Doctor,” removed the two syringes he had prepared that afternoon. The Rabbi gritted his teeth and breathed heavily through his nostrils when he felt the needle prick his skin. As he slumped against his secretary, Efrayim cried out through his hood, “Oh God, you have exec
uted him.” When he felt the Doctor’s fingers searching for a vein in his forearm, he started to tremble uncontrollably. As the needle pierced his skin he began to intone the Shema from the book of Deuteronomy: “Shema yisra’el, adonai eloheynu … adonai—” Then his head slumped forward onto his chest.

  Four members of the raiding party carried the drugged prisoners over to the small delivery van parked next to a beat-up silver Suzuki with Israeli license plates. The van bore the logo “Fine Bedouin Robes and Carpets” printed in English on its sides. Each prisoner was crammed into a large straw hamper and covered with layers of robes and carpets. Then the hampers were loaded into the van and other hampers packed with robes and carpets were piled on top of them. Yussuf locked the back door of the van and handed the keys through the window to the driver, a pock-marked Bedouin smoking a foul-smelling hand-rolled cigarette and listening to a cassette of a popular Egyptian singer on the car’s tape deck. The young woman who had passed for a Haredi when the Rabbi’s car was being flagged down sat next to him. Her name was Khloud but everyone knew her by the nickname Petra, after the ruined Nabataean city in the Moab Mountains where she was born. For the ride back to Jerusalem she had changed into the long dress and the off-white head scarf of a religious Muslim. “Drive slowly,” Yussuf instructed them. “Use the dirt tracks into the West Bank to avoid Israeli checkpoints, come at Jerusalem from the Jericho side, when you arrive in the Old City pull into the alleyway next to your shop and flash your lights twice. Our people will take care of the rest.”

  Yussuf grinned at Petra and he and the Bedouin exchanged high-fives through the open window. The motor coughed into life. The van, driving without headlights, edged onto the dirt road that skirted the nearby kibbutz before cutting across the fields in the direction of the West Bank and Jerusalem.

  Yussuf joined the Doctor at the second Mercedes. The Palestinian who had been wounded by the Rabbi’s driver firing his Uzi from the asphalt lay slumped across the back seat. An older Arab who had been trying to stem the bleeding climbed out of the car. “He’s spitting up blood,” he announced.