Shadow in a Weary Land: A Novel

State.

ONE

The visitor had come a long way to the West Bank town of Ramlus in the spring of 1989. He had come for the seventieth birthday of Akram Nasser, the patriarch of his family, grandfather of thirty-two, who still lived with his wife in the modest house in which he was born.

Akram Nasser could read only a few words, but he had encouraged learning and his children had gone out into the world and prospered. They now lived in many countries and spoke other languages with their neighbors, but on this day they were all back with their father and they all spoke the one language in which they were at home.

Unlike his children, Akram Nasser had not been successful in the traditional sense. He worked all his life at menial jobs and remained on his small plot of land in the center of town. In back of the house were two olive trees, an orange tree, a plot of vegetables, a small house for the three chickens and, in back of it all, an old date palm. The backyard itself was packed earth, the color of sand, and the Nassers’ mongrel puppy rolled in the dust, surrounded by laughing grandchildren. Crimson bougainvillaea surged up the whitewashed walls of the house and drooped over the raised and shaded porch where Akram’s wife was filling a table with dishes of falafel and hummus and baba ganouzh and tabouli salad. There were piles of hot pita bread and bowls of fresh strawberries and oranges. The women scurried back and forth from the kitchen as the men stood in the street and smoked and watched the children.

The town of Ramlus had only one main street and a few little dirt side streets partially shaded by date palms and orange trees and Jerusalem pines. Hibiscus hedges and white stucco walls buffered the houses from the street a few yards away, but there was no traffic and children played safely in the middle of the road. A small cafe with three rusty outside tables stood waiting for customers a block away. From any place in town, it was possible to see the gentle hills outside of town, still green from the winter rains, hills that rose sharply in the distance toward Jerusalem.

From almost anywhere in Ramlus it was also possible to see approaching traffic on the one road and on this April day, as the women worked upstairs on the warm porch in light flecked with shade from the overhanging grape leaves, as the men talked and laughed in the sunshine, watching the children, it was possible to see the army trucks speeding down toward them, still small dots kicking up dust, two miles away.

No one was looking that far away and no one saw the trucks. The visitor had gone back into the house to refill his glass of juice and to get one for the man of the house, for Akram Nasser. The day had the beautiful warm gentleness that made some of the children wonder if they had been right to leave, if money and worldly success were worth being torn away from so wonderful a place. The visitor regretted not being part of the Hassan family.

So quickly had the trucks approached that they had stopped at the edge of town, four blocks away, by the time the visitor came back onto the street with the glasses of juice. The Israeli Defense Force troops blocked off the road and knocked on the door of the last house before the fields, the house of Rebhi Barakat and his wife.

The children stopped playing and stared down the street. The women stopped working and leaned out from the upstairs porch, pushing back the grape leaves for a better view. One of Akram’s younger sons walked down toward the troops, several of whom now stood between them and the last house, automatic weapons at the ready. He was waved back by one of the soldiers, a nervous young reservist. Even from four blocks away, they heard the wail of Mrs. Barakat’s voice. The son stopped and spoke for a moment with a neighbor, who talked and gestured at great length. The son nodded and thanked him, and came quickly back up the street to his father. In rapid Arabic, he told him what was going on.

The Barakats’ youngest son, Jamil, was arrested yesterday in Hebron for throwing a gasoline bomb at a bus. They have given the parents ten minutes to get out of the house before they blow it up.

But this cannot be, said Akram Nasser. Young Jamil has not lived with his parents for more than three years. They have nothing to do with this.

This is the Israeli law, said the son.

Another son threw down his cigarette and stubbed it out.

It is the Israeli law for Arabs, he said, not for Jews.

They watched as Mrs. Barakat went in and out of the house three times, each time emerging with another pile of precious possessions, photographs and clothes and small ornaments she had treasured. Her husband went in and out once, carrying some small thing, but he was dazed and walking slowly. The soldiers herded them away from their house and within minutes the explosives had been set and detonated, the Barakats’ house of forty years collapsing in a pile of dust and pebbles and splinters and shards of glass.

Some older neighbor women were allowed past the front rank of soldiers to try to comfort the Barakats, who stood and stared in passive disbelief back down the street at the smoking rubble.

Jamil hasn’t even been tried, said one of the Nasser sons. They don’t even know if it’s true.

The Israeli troops did not withdraw the way they had come. Instead, they arrogantly moved forward down the main street, trucks rumbling slowly behind them, weapons aimed loosely at the onlookers who glared at them. As if to prove they were not cowed by the almost measurable feelings of hatred directed toward them, the young soldiers—office workers and mechanics and even young executives when they were not serving their annual weeks of active duty—pointedly stopped and addressed some of the men, ordering them to pick up bits of litter in front of their wives or girlfriends or mothers. One soldier collared a teenager and forced his face into a wall, then prodded the small of his back with the end of his rifle.

I hear you Arab boys like to play with each other. How would you like a warm bullet up your ass?

Another aimed his weapon at the crotch of his helpless victim.

They all breed like rabbits, he said to a companion. It’s time for a lesson in birth control.

In general, they jeered at all the men, young and old. "Why are you men here, home with the women? Are you minding the children? Maybe you would really rather be women? Pick that shit up!"

They moved closer to the little group of men standing in front of the Nasser house and their attention was drawn to the grafitti on the old wall across the street.

It had been there for months and no one remembered who had done it. There was a Star of David followed by an equal sign and a swastika. In Arabic were the words ISRAELIS OUT OF PALESTINE. The soldiers stopped and looked at the wall and then at the men.

Clean that off, said a young soldier, first in Hebrew, then in accented Arabic. The men did not move. The soldier raised his weapon. Get some brushes, some soap, some water, and clean that off. All of you. He called up to the porch. You women, bring them something to clean this off.

Two of the women went inside and came out onto the street carrying a pail of water and rags and a brush. They walked to the wall to begin cleaning it.

Not you, said the young soldier, now enjoying his role and strutting slightly in the middle of the street. Them! They don’t do anything but play with each other. He pointed to the men. The men looked around. Every soldier on the truck had a weapon aimed their way.

My father has not been well, said one of the women. Please excuse him. His heart …

Now! said the soldier, lowering the automatic rifle toward the midsections of the men as he turned back and forth.

It was quiet for a moment. No one spoke and the Israeli soldiers and the Palestinian men looked at each other, the smell of roasting meat drifting across the sunlit street. Then the men turned and walked to the wall, including the visitor, who was only there because he was a friend of the oldest Nasser grandson, but Akram Nassar moved too slowly for the soldier, who kicked him on the rump with the tip of his heavy boot. Some of the soldiers laughed. The old man looked at the soldier, his eyes filled with grief and embarrassment. The soldier kicked over the pail of water and handed it to Akram Nasser.

Go fill it up, he said. Run!

Akram Nasser, the guest of honor on this day, tried to run, but all he could manage was a half-comical trot toward the house as he was watched by his wife and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He went quickly inside and came out moments later with the pail full of water. As he reached the middle of the road, he looked at the soldier, his face marked with sadness and shame and unbearable pain, dropped the bucket as his fingers involuntarily loosened, started to touch his chest with his free hand, and fell lifeless onto the surface of the road.

A gasp went up from everyone, including the soldiers, and Akram Nasser’s wife silently ran to him and touched him and looked up at the soldier in disbelief. The soldiers, aware of what they had done, began to walk backward, their eyes on the body of the old man until they became aware of the other sounds, the low voices of the men now ominous, tense, angry. Some of the younger boys picked up rocks and everyone moved toward the soldiers who continued to walk backward toward the waiting trucks. At last, one of the teenagers could hold back no longer and a stone sailed past the ear of the young soldier.

All of the soldiers opened fire simultaneously. The bullets were plastic, smacking painfully against muscle, embedding themselves into legs and stomachs and arms and shattering into fragments when they struck bone. One bullet went into the eye and brain of five year-old Daoud Nasser, who was holding onto the hand of his older brother, not really aware of what was happening. When he, too, fell dead before them, the soldiers panicked and turned and ran, climbed into the trucks and sped out of town, leaving the bodies in the street.

The Israeli press the next day had the usual headlines. ONE DEAD IN WEST BANK CLASHES. Troops were forced to defend themselves against rock-throwers in the town of Ramlus, using plastic bullets. There was no mention of Akram Nasser.

The incident in Ramlus occurred on the same day that Ward Longman’s wife Judy left him for good in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She had left before and had said some of the same things. (You can’t expect me to spend the rest of my life here. It’s like death! You can’t expect someone to go from living in Europe to settling down like old folks. I’ve got things to try, things to do. A lot of people like me and want me.) Ward said that he liked her and wanted her and that moving to Fredericksburg had originally been her idea back when she was studying historic preservation. (Don’t throw that up to me! People can change, for Christ’s sake! Just because you can’t change, doesn’t mean the rest of the world has to stay put and like it.) He reminded her that she had wanted out of the Foreign Service; she had missed the children and was sick of the diplomatic routine, the life where she was unable to work even if she wanted to. Back at home, she had found her niche and been successful. Historic preservation was a coming thing. She was on the verge of making more money than she had ever earned. (All right, I was wrong! Is that what you want to hear? I was wrong. We should have stayed overseas. But I came back and I made it and I have a new life to live now.)

Why the anger? he had wondered. Why the bitterness? What had happened to two people who had once loved one another? This time, she didn’t come back. She left him without even a handshake. Outside on Caroline Street the white masses of Bradford pear blossoms billowed toward the sky. There was the smell of new boxwood and the glow of azaleas. There was the distant conversation of fishermen on the Rappahannock which flowed by out of sight at the bottom of the hill. He, who was now so alone, heard none of it, saw none of it. He saw instead the place where the children’s bicycles had rested against the huge old magnolia, felt the indentations on the porch railing from the rivets on the back pockets of the children’s blue jeans. He thought of the calm evenings on the porch, sounds of nearby conversation, river sounds, Judy’s calm happiness when they first returned, over and over, each time from a different country; each time with older children, older bodies, changed dreams.

For many months after she left, he stepped off the same porch, but in his shock and loneliness he changed. The man starting up the street became heavier, slower, as he filled more of his day with eating and drinking and staring and remembering. He was oblivious of his neighbors, who soon gave up on him and ceased to greet him as he lumbered past, a gray-haired figure in clothes too small. Sometimes he talked to himself. More often, he called the children to talk, to hear his grandchildren’s voices, to tell them all something about his day. Judy got half his pension under the new law and he made do on what was left.

He got by. As the sweltering humid summer came and wore on, he sat in the air-conditioned family room watching television. With the first bright, crisp days of fall, he turned off the air conditioner, opened a window, and continued to watch television and drink. In the evenings he cried and made phone calls. He wanted to sleep late, but could never stay in bed past dawn.

He began with anger and was bitter that his life had been pulled apart. In the summer, this changed to helpless wishes that she would call to say she was coming back, that she was sorry. She called a few times, but never for that. It was always for business: medical insurance coverage, whether he was still claiming her as a dependent on his income tax declarations, or when he would be able to pay her for her half of the house. There were no letters. So many of their friends had really been hers alone. And she had been his only friend.

Sometime in the fall, he began to think about her less, but it seemed he thought less about everything. His interest in religion, recaptured after many agnostic years, was lost to him again. He felt he was in a tunnel, or an abyss, where God could not find him or would not bother to look. He would get anxious over nothing, the kind of feeling he might have before giving a speech or accepting an award, except that nothing of the sort was happening. At other times, he might have no emotions at all and would feel as devoid of life as a stone or a rotting log.

One day, he overheard a small child on Princess Anne Street point to him and call his mother’s attention to the old man. He caught an unexpected glimpse of himself in a storefront window and saw that the child was right. He was looking at the sagging, bloated, weakened body of an old person. Until that moment, he had managed to carry with him the self-image of a daring international diplomat and adventurer, the attractive, tough security officer, at home in several languages, a match for terrorists. Now he saw this was not so. He was an old man trying to live on half a pension, with no savings and a huge debt on an aged house. His children were gone, busy with their own lives. He had no friends, no one to love. He was fifty-one years old and death no longer frightened him.

He walked from Princess Anne Street back past his house and down the path to the dock, past people sitting in their cars and pickups looking at the river and past the men who were pulling their boat up onto their trailer after a day’s fishing. He stopped at the end of the other boat ramp, the water almost touching his shoes. He knew the Rappahannock would still be warm, and imagined himself walking into the deep green water until it was too deep to stand, then swimming and floating in the green water and the current that would take him downstream past Ferry Farm and past the country club and on down miles and miles of ever-widening river to Tappahannock, where he would float under the high bridge connecting the Northern Neck to the rest of Virginia. He would float on, tasting more and more salt, watching the banks recede so that the river was first fifty yards wide, then a quarter mile, then a half mile. He would feel the first waves, the first strong tides. He would float down past Weems, past Windmill Point, and into the Chesapeake, and if the currents were right, they would take him south past Deltaville and Gwynn’s Island, past Cape Charles and Hampton and then out into the Atlantic, off the shores of Virginia Beach and on down to the Outer Banks, perhaps out into the waters of the Gulf Stream where he, now long dead, would sink forever into the depths. For him, time would have stopped and there would be no more worries about age or money or the end of his marriage or life itself. He would have found peace, calm, rest.

But he did not walk into the water. He turned and walked back up the hill to his house and he knew he must not think this way again, that he must change.

By the time the last leaves had fallen, he already looked different. He was watching his diet, drinking less, walking more and even running. He applied for a job as a security consultant at Mary Washington College, about a mile from his house, which he won easily because of his State Department experience. He also left his name on file with State for temporary consulting work and they kept his clearances current. He joined a karate class and was by far the oldest member. He began checking books out of the library, started smiling and saying hello to people on the street. He tried yoga and tai chi, got his teeth cleaned and bought a new tweed jacket. He even got an expensive haircut.

Mary Washington College had no real security problems. Years ago, when the University of Virginia had been all-male and Mary Washington was the Women’s Division of the University, there had been no problems. Now, with men admitted, there were still no problems. There was little crime downtown, almost none on campus. It was a dream. Ward could ramble about the green lawns, peer into the brick, white-columned buildings, chat with the campus police, write his reports and brief new faculty and students on problems which might take place but never did. It reminded him of his days as security officer in Lisbon and Rome, except that here there were no terrorists, he was no one’s target, and the signs were all in English.

It was the end of March, crocuses and big daffodils out for weeks and jonquils just opening up, the bitter edge of the wind gone for another year, when he first began to notice the woman with the light brown, streaked hair as she walked purposefully across the campus. She had a habit of tossing her head back to get her straight hair away from her face when her hands were full. She wore nice clothes, was in her middle or late thirties, and pretty in an interesting way. He assumed she was a professor and she caught his eye whenever she passed. Once, he thought she had been staring at him and he smiled to find himself pretending to look elsewhere as he slowly pulled in his stomach and straightened up even more.

On the day of the phone call from State, Ward walked down from the College to Caroline Street and into Sammy T’s for a sandwich and coffee. She was in one of the booths with a twelve-year-old girl who looked like her. It was a warm day in early April and the front door to the street had been left open so that everyone could sit in the darkness, in wooden booths or at the long bar, and look out into brilliant sunlight at the trees in flower, at the townspeople and tourists walking by.

Because it was getting warm and the tourists had begun to arrive, the restaurant was filled. This turned out to be a good thing because they caught each other’s eyes and she smiled and motioned to him.

Would you like to join us? she said.

He could see this was not a popular idea with the twelve-year-old, but he thanked her and smiled and sat down. He introduced himself quickly and learned that her name was Karen Scott, her daughter’s name was Carrie, and she was an associate professor of art history. Sitting with her made him aware of the pressure against his belt and he ordered a tabouli salad instead of a sandwich, along with the coffee.

I would have guessed something different, she said.

I’d like something different, he poked a finger unselfconsciously into his stomach, but I’m still trying to get rid of a last inch or two.

I think you should have whatever you really want, she said. It looks funny when grown men starve themselves so they can look like teenage boys. You look fine.

I’ll remember those words at dinner. He looked at the girl, who was running a forefinger over the initials carved into the table. School out early today? Carrie looked up, nodded.

She goes to Montfort, said Karen. They had a teachers’ meeting this afternoon. Carrie went back to the initials. You’re the security man, aren’t you?

Yes. I started a few months ago. The salad came and he awkwardly pulled his big hands up from the table.

Have you done this sort of work before?

He finished a couple of mouthfuls, nodding as he chewed.

I did it in embassies overseas, he said. He took the tiny whole wheat roll in his hand, tore it open and buttered it. I was a security officer in the Foreign Service for a long time. I had joined up to do that, to carry a gun and chase terrorists. That kind of thing. I was young and I wanted action. Even he was conscious of his Virginia accent and how it had returned now that he was back home. After I was promoted a few times, my wife and some other officers said there was no future in security work and I should try other things. So I did. I learned to issue visas and they sent me to Harvard for a master’s degree in management and later I got to be in charge of a consulate in Portugal. Then I quit it all and I’m back doing security work. He leaned over the table and gave her a serious look. There are those who say I’m really best at running away from chances to better myself.

But you’re doing what you like?

Well, I know how to do it. I know how to do the other, too. I can eat hors d’oeuvres and write up a conversation with the best of them. It’s at embassy parties where I learned to run off at the mouth like this.

Karen had already finished her lunch and was sipping a second mug of coffee. An empty juice glass sat in front of Carrie. A waitress came by