“The General has been living in a coma.”
“Sort of.”
“In a coma?”
“Sort of living. Since 2006.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t want to upset you.”
“The only one outside this prison who knows I’m here has a stroke. The one person in charge of my fate—my freedom—has a stroke and you don’t say anything for nine years?”
“Eight.”
“What?”
“Eight years.”
“Fuck! How could you keep that from me?”
“My mother and I. Well, more my mother. She prays. And she was hopeful. For his sake. For yours.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying we were hoping, the two of us, and really, when you get down to it also the nation! We were all hoping, together, that one day the General—maybe he would just wake up.”
2002, Berlin
Joshua sits in the sunroom, overlooking the lake. He bounces a leg and wipes the sleep from his eyes.
The kitchen door opens, and in comes the boy with two coffees on a tray. He hurries to serve and hurries away. Before the kitchen door closes behind him, Sander is already pushing through the formal entrance, his silk vest undone and, yet more shocking, his crisp shirt unbuttoned beneath that vest.
Joshua can see Sander’s tanned and hairy stomach right out there in the open. He turns to the wall of windows, through which anyone with a pair of binoculars might see this break with decorum.
Sander follows Joshua’s gaze and seems to understand his concern, and also not to care.
He drops down in the chair next to Joshua’s and picks up one of the coffees. Taking a boiling sip, he says, “Shit,” and then, “Shit, that’s hot.”
He blows atop the tiny cup with what Joshua can only acknowledge is a mighty exhalation and takes another sip. “Have you ever heard of anyone getting burned on an espresso after it’s already made its way to the table? Jesus,” Sander says, “that kid.” And then, squinting his eyes as if uncovering the conspiratorial, “Is there some way to turn up the boiler on those machines? Can you make it extra hot on purpose?”
“I don’t think so,” Joshua says, listening nervously. For he cannot quite grasp how Sander, his reserved and stoic and generally silent German house manager, seems to have switched from speaking English to Hebrew.
“Then that little shit must have run it in here just to spite me. He’s the most dangerous character under this roof, and the only one who’s not supposed to mean any harm. Even that evil little chef does his job without incident.”
“I don’t understand,” Joshua says, stressing the English.
He’s doing his best to catch his breath, though it hasn’t, since the phone call, fully returned. He looks out the windows again, this time at a racing shell passing nearby. He focuses hard on it, trying to mine the calm from all those oars breaking the water with an even grace.
“You don’t understand what?” Sander says, fully committed to the Hebrew. “Is it the point I’m making that’s confusing, or the words themselves?”
“Please, Sander,” Joshua says, practically begging. He knows the boy who brought the coffee can hear this in the kitchen. “I really don’t understand.”
“Is that all you have in your fucking arsenal?” Sander says. Then, twisting his face up, mocking Joshua, he employs a tone that Joshua finds to be unfairly whiny. “‘What? What? Who is this? I don’t understand!’”
Edging into a full-on panic, Joshua slides into Hebrew himself, pleading for Sander to quiet himself down. “What if the boy hears?”
Sander shakes his head, as if there were someone else there besides Joshua, to register his disappointment. “That was the boy’s last coffee. He’s already gone. What you need to worry about is how we fix the mess that you made. What if the Germans were listening? What if the Americans, who listen to the Germans, were listening to them listening to us? The sirens may already be headed this way. And that’s without considering what happens if Hamas wants to fight it out right here. You, with your big mouth, have fucked us good.”
Joshua presses at his chin with his palm, rotating it until his neck gives an audible crack. “What even happened over there? They’re talking about a massacre on every channel. There are pictures of people carrying dead children over their heads.”
“Yes,” Sander says. “Evidently, our target was hiding in a taller building that tipped over onto a smaller building, where there was an unrelated family. A large family, judging by the reports.”
Joshua turns pale. He can feel the tips of his fingers tingling, as if he might pass out. “So then, it’s really us who did that? We just killed a houseful of children?”
“It’s not us. It’s that the larger building fell funny. It’s gravity behind that. Gravity unforeseen.”
Sander then scratches at his hairy chest, and Joshua takes note of how powerful a man he is. It does not show, all that muscle under his clothes.
“A baby girl,” Joshua says. “Two months old.”
“What do you want me to tell you? It’s twenty of our kids on purpose, or ten of theirs by accident. No one forced our target to dispatch a stream of killers. No one made him make bombs.”
“We just dropped a one-ton bomb onto a slum. We used a fucking fighter jet to strike inside our own borders. It’s not even an enemy state.”
“No, no, no. That’s where you get it wrong. Palestine isn’t a state when it concerns statehood. When it comes to warring, it’s a state, yes? The Palestinians, they live in a country for the purpose of war.”
“Do you know how insane that sounds?”
“And do you know how many Israelis have been killed in the last week? The last month? Because I do. I know by heart. When you’re worried about the unlucky people killed today, think of the five Israelis killed last week in Tel Aviv, and the nine killed the day before them in Emmanuel, and the seven killed the month before that on French Hill, and the nineteen blown up less than a day prior in Gilo, and the seventeen blown up on a bus in Megiddo the week before. And that’s only June. All of those attacks facilitated by that one man. And those same attacks were all financed by, and likely plotted with, his brother, your friend.”
“He is my friend. He was. We should still use him. If Farid can plan these things, he can also unplan them.”
“You’re finished with Farid. And probably with the Mossad. We’ll see what the fallout is from blowing your own cover on that call.”
“But he knew. He figured it out. He said it was me and those phones.”