Martyrs’ Crossing by Amy Wilentz

the side of the ambulance. Everyone was watching her, unmoving. They looked frightened. Doron walked toward her. He hesitated. She was shaking with sobs. He put his hand on her arm. She let it stay there for a moment. She turned and looked at him. He knew right then that he would give anything to forget that look. Then she shook him off with a violent movement of her arm, and climbed into the ambulance to be with her boy.

C HAPTER T HREE
    T HE WINTER WIND BLEW THROUGH the cypress stands at the edge of the graveyard. The first line of mourners approached the family plot, followed by a small bier borne by two men over the stone-strewn yard. Behind George and Philip, hundreds more filed into the small cemetery. Marina had been left at home with her sisters-in-law. Women did not attend Muslim funerals, Philip had reminded George. The mourners wore sunglasses and shaded their eyes.
    â€œGet out of my way,” George heard someone yell. Philip wheeled around to see who was disturbing the quiet. It was the press corps. The television people were up ahead, behind a police fence. The still-rising sun cast long bony shadows over the headstones and mausoleums.
    The photographers and cameramen, shoving for position, clambered up the graveyard wall, and tumbled down. Some had hauled themselves and their equipment up into the cedar branches. Others stood on aluminum ladders they had brought along. As the wind shifted, they appeared and disappeared among the branches. Down the hill and blanketing the small street that connected the graveyard to East Jerusalem, George could see the procession coming, hats, scarves, and keffiyehs, and bareheaded young men by the hundreds, and above it all the green banners of Hamas, and then, farther back, the red, white, green, and black of the Palestinian flag. George wondered what all the young men in the crowd would do if they could get their hands on an Israeli soldier—any Israeli soldier—now, right now. Oh, Ibrahim. The cameras were pointed at the mourners like the open mouths of fish.
    George was exhausted today beyond imagining. Jet lag in one direction, jet lag back. For no one but Marina would George have roused himself once more in his condition, much less flown halfway round the world and walked for a mile in front of cameras to a place where he would have to stand for at least an hour in a cold, unpitying wind.
    The first callers had merely stunned him, and left him cold with incredulity, suspecting some kind of a hoax. But Marina, calling from Ramallah, had convinced him, and sent George into a torrent of action. He knew it was Marina because when he picked up the receiver, no one spoke. He kept saying, “Darling, darling,” and on the other end there was nothing but the oceanic emptiness of an international connection.
    This never happened to him, this inability, this fear of confronting whatever was coming to meet him. What could he say that would help her? Nothing, nothing. It was beyond his control. She was two oceans away, Christ, thousands of miles, a world away, no comfort could reach her. I’m coming, he said to her. Finally, he heard her click off. Blood seemed to drain away from him. He felt himself fading and grabbed onto the edge of his desk for support. He dumped himself into his desk chair.
    â€œPhilip,” he’d called. His voice sounded faint, even to him. But Philip came in.
    He must have been waiting just outside the door, expecting to be summoned. Obviously, he already knew everything. He came too close. George waved him back a little. George saw tears in his eyes.
    â€œNo, no, no,” George said to him, sinking farther back in his chair and covering his own eyes with his forearm. “Philip. That’s too much sympathy. I can’t stand it, really.”
    â€œI’m sorry, Doctor,” Philip said, standing there with his hands oddly clasped together.
    â€œJust don’t touch me, if you were thinking of it,” George