“The lost peace you put on him too? On the General who pulled every last one of his beloved settlers out of Gaza, as he once did in Yamit? The very father of those settlements and the only one to take concrete steps toward withdrawal? That is your enemy of progress?”
“When telling the Palestinians different mattered most, he took a thousand men up to Haram al-Sharif to let them know who’s boss. The Second Intifada was just them telling him back something different.”
“Again with the thousand men and that stupid walk up the hill?”
“It’s symbolic. Symbols matter. They give shape to a time,” the guard says. “Shape to the abstractions.”
“Shapes to abstractions? From your mouth?” His mother is not having it. “You should only be so smart. This,” she says, waving at his words as if they still hang above him along with the smoke. “It’s because you sit all day babysitting that brain in a cage. What you just said, it comes from him. I can tell.”
The guard gets up, frustrated, and grabs hold of the rail.
“Better to babysit a brain than to babysit a body.”
His mother takes hold of the balustrade beside him.
“No, son,” she says. “Not a body. I babysit a dead man so powerful, he continues to live. You, you sit over the living, already dead. A coward who earned his spot in the dark.”
“I’ll agree that he’s an idiot, but he’s actually sort of brave. He risked everything, and lost everything, for what he believes.”
“What does he believe?”
The guard looks to his mother, embarrassed. “He never says.”
Ruthi pats her son sweetly, lovingly, on his pale, pale arm.
“It bothers me that you truly don’t understand the world and yet somehow think you do. What worries your mother is another generation of Israeli men like yourself, who think they know it all and don’t have a clue.”
Ruthi moves away from him, shifting over to the plastic window boxes hanging from the railings.
One of the planters is completely overgrown with giant flowering basil. Ruthi snaps off the tops and starts to pull the dead leaves. She talks without turning.
“You’re beyond ignorant, my left-wing son, if you think the Palestinians needed the General to start that Intifada.”
The guard laughs out loud at this. “Left-wing? Mother, I’m a secret prison guard, and a Golani soldier, and a Beitar fan. I listen to the Shadow on my iPhone and vote Likud every time.”
“Your point?”
“I’m only saying, the right has moved so far over that, from where you stand, I look left.”
Ruthi snorts at that. “Well, don’t call the Temple Mount ‘Haram al-Sharif’ in my house. It already has a name, a Jewish name.” Ruthi lets the handful of yellowed leaves she is holding drop from the balcony into the empty, garbage-strewn lot below. “And know that the last Intifada was inevitable. If you don’t believe me, ask any Arab. They were looking for an opening and the General gave it to them. They could have stayed quiet. They could have kept their casino and their airport. They could have had a capital right here in Abu Dis. They could have had near everything they wanted. And they threw it all away.”
“Sometimes, almost what you want just isn’t enough.”
“Fair enough. Only remember, it was your mother who had to welcome the parents of our murdered schoolchildren. Your mother who had to sit with the parents of the soldiers whose bodies were dragged through the streets. Their protests left a lot of bodies, and a lot of survivors that your mother had to lead into the General’s office, so he could tell them their children hadn’t died in vain.”
“Now your boyfriend is also a social worker?” And now the guard can’t control himself, now he goes where he shouldn’t. “Let’s not make the man behind Qibya, and Sabra and Shatila—”
“In Beirut, he only turned a blind eye,” his mother says, stopping him. “It was the Phalangists who did the killing.”
“A murderer, Mother. A butcher.”
“I know what he did in the past,” she says, “same as you. But that same General saved this country from certain destruction many times.”
“No one disputes that.”
“But your mother is trying to tell you something else. I’m trying to tell you what the General had planned for the future. He’d have given you and your Palestinian friends just what you wanted. He’d have saved this country for good too. I know what would’ve come next. If only—” she says.
“If only he’d lived?”
“If he’d gone on as he was. The General was going to make two states. He was going to make peace. A tactical choice as strategic and painful as war. Peace was the bomb the General was going to drop.”
“You really believe that?”
“If he ever finds his way back, he’ll end up looking more lefty than you.”
The guard shrugs and takes a pull off the joint, extinguished. He lights it and pulls again, holding smoke, and then offers it to his mother, an invitation she’s refused a thousand times. “Try it,” he says. “I promise, it’ll help you calm down.”
She demurs, but it makes Ruthi think. “You know what?” she says. “Go fetch your mother a glass of wine.”
“For breakfast?”
“Look who’s talking. I’ve been up for more than a day. I think, in this instance, it’s all right.”
The guard nods. He goes off toward the door, and Ruthi watches his beautiful, skinny self, her son in his worn briefs, with his amateurish tattoos horribly prominent wherever she looks—dolphins and tigers, a child’s choices etched onto a grown man.
The guard returns with an open bottle of white wine from the fridge and, along with it, a box of chocolate wafers and an empty jelly jar for a glass.
He finds his mother already sitting in his chair and goes back and drags out another to join her. She drinks in silence, and he smokes in silence, and they eat the cookies together.
It feels quite lovely between them, and at some point they both tip their chairs back and both hang their feet over the edge of the balcony’s rail. They stare out over the city, a span of red-tiled roofs and then that beautiful carpet of cypress and evergreen trees stretching out toward the Jerusalem Hills.
2014, Limbo
A dozen. Ten dozen. A hundred dozen Egyptian tanks rolling in. Four times that number in armored vehicles, and another four times that in men. A Yom Kippur bloodbath, as thousands of Egyptian troops bound across the Suez. Their engineers drop bridges and the infantry swarm. They clog the canal with rubber dinghies, bear-crawling up the berms on the Israeli side. If God had split the sea for them, they’d still not have gotten across that fast.
And what do they find waiting at the Bar Lev Line?
A few score Israelis dug into holes.
The General stares into the sandstorm churned up by all that movement. Like a curtain draped across the world, tawnying the October sky. Last time he was down here—right here—it was as peaceful as an empty beach. Nothing but silence, so that he picked up on the drumming of its little feet as a yellow scorpion scuttled across his boot. Now the ground shakes from the noise as if from an earthquake that never ends. And with all that billowing sand as backdrop, making the light so strange.