Martyrs’ Crossing by Amy Wilentz Page A

said.
    â€œNo,” Philip said. “No, I won’t.”
    And now here Philip was, in a graveyard in East Jerusalem, bothering to be furious at some noisy cameraman. Dear boy. What a good idea to bring him. Philip was having all George’s emotions for him. Philip was in charge of emotions and political thought: outrage at the Israelis, lucid understanding of the Palestinian politicians who were making hay out of the tragedy, canny but diplomatic. Very useful. George might as well be dead already. As he watched them pray over the small, shrouded body, he wished he were.
    Reading Al-Quds over the breakfast he could not bring himself to taste that morning, George had felt tears sting his eyes for the first time. That was typical of him, to feel something only when it was in writing, only at that safe, mediated distance, when it was more like art or spectacle than like something that was really happening, and to him. He had emotions the way a pornography enthusiast had sex. There was something about the use of the word gasp that did it. The editors of Al-Quds wrote that Ibrahim had been detained at the checkpoint because he was Hassan Hajimi’s child. Hajimi, they reminded their readers, was a disaffected young follower of the Chairman who had turned to Hamas in the past two years.
    They wrote that the boy had been visibly gasping—that word—for two hours while his mother, incidentally the daughter of George Raad, the physician and writer (“incidentally”—George noticed that), waited for the officers at the checkpoint to examine and approve the boy’s medical documents. That a new, superstrong U.S.-issued tear gas had been used, for the first time, on the crowd at the checkpoint, and had gravely exacerbated the child’s respiratory distress. The editors noted that Ibrahim Hajimi was Hassan Hajimi’s only child and George Raad’s only grandchild. Hajimi, they went on, had been in and out of Israeli prisons since he was first arrested in a general sweep in Jenin in 1992. They added that Raad had recently been ill. Somehow, they managed to imply that all of this—the desperation of the Palestinian people, the prisons, the lack of offspring in Marina’s family, the gasping, George’s own condition—was the fault of the officers at the checkpoint. Philip was drinking coffee and reading over George’s shoulder. George looked up at him, and Philip shook his head, pointing down to several errors in the Arabic typography, and an incorrect identification of George’s great-grandfather, the family patriarch, in an old photograph. Ignoring painful content. Attaboy, Philip—trained at the foot of the master.
    He was glad Philip was with him, because it was so hard right now to be with Marina. George could barely bring himself to talk to her or to touch her, she seemed so alien and past helping. Her sorrow was transforming her. She had welcomed him the morning he arrived by walking into his arms and sobbing there for a long minute, as he could recall her having done when she was little. He held her and remembered all the stooping and hugging he’d done then, the enclosing arms and bent head and pathetic useless doglike murmurs that were meant to console his child for the broken dolls and spilled glitter and fights with friends and ruined dresses. He cherished those few moments after he arrived back in Ramallah, moments during which he felt himself give way the smallest bit, felt himself feel something along with her, felt the loss of her little boy who had been so delightful and full of interest and amusement. His grandson. He knew it would catch up with him later, when he wasn’t trying, wasn’t ready for it.
    After that initial outburst, Marina retreated. She seemed distant, even when she was not sitting curled up in a corner with her head buried in her hands and her hands buried in her hair. George busied himself with plans for her trip down to