Vicious Circle

  The katsa kicked at a rusting tear gas canister. “These funerals are what’s eating me. They’re burying two killers on this hill as if they were national heroes.”

  Sweeney said, “Does that mean Apfulbaum really was the head of the Jewish underground?”

  Baruch flashed a dark look in Elihu’s direction. “Apfulbaum was a deranged Rabbi even before Abu Bakr terrorized him,” he declared. “Speaking as a cop, I can tell you we have no reason to take anything he may have said in that room literally.”

  Sweeney said softly, “When he admited he was Ya’ir, I knew it was true.”

  “Whether he was or wasn’t Ya’ir is beside the point,” Elihu said. “Look at those characters—there are a dozen Ya’irs, a dozen Abu Bakrs waiting to step into their shoes.”

  The Jews from Beit Avram began filing by the Rabbi’s open grave. As they passed, each one dropped a handful of dirt onto the shroud. At the foot of the grave, a tall rangy Jew with a long scraggly beard and a singularly intense gaze rocked back and forth on the soles of his scuffed black shoes. His side curls dancing in the wind, the hem of his ankle-length black overcoat caressing the freshly turned earth, he began intoning the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. “Yisgaddal v’yiskaddash shmay rabboh b’olmoh dee v’roh chirusay …”

  Below, in the Muslim cemetery, the body of Doctor al-Shaath was being lowered on ropes into a crude crypt as an austere young Imam with a neatly trimmed beard recited verses from the Koran. Sunlight glinted off his thick spectacles as his words drifted up the hill.

  God has bought from the believers their selves and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the way of God; they kill, and are killed; that is a promise binding upon God in the Torah, and the Gospel, and the Qur’an; and who fulfills his covenant truer than God? So rejoice in the bargain you have made with Him.

  Elihu raised a hand to shade his eyes and peered toward the east. The swollen sun was slicing upward into the underbelly of a cloud. In the fault behind the ridge of mountains, the Jordan River gushed down from the Galilee to empty into the Dead Sea. Beyond the sea, the hills of Edom, which burned a fiery red when the sun set into the Mediterranean, perched like a smudge of smoke on the horizon. From where Elihu was standing, he could make out narrow wadis cutting eastward toward the Dead Sea. He had patrolled them scores of times during the long years of military service; in the rainy season the soldiers would strip and bathe in the icy needle-like falls spilling down the sides of the wadis. Secret ravines filled with wild peach and plum trees branched off from the wadis. It was in a cave in one of these ravines that the young giant-killer David had hidden from the mad king Saul a thousand years before Jesus. From the spine of the central Judean hills, on which Elihu was standing, to the Dead Sea surely had to be one of the wildest and most glorious places on the surface of the planet.

  What was it about this land, these wadis, these blood-tinted stone walls, that stirred, in the people who trod the Judean hills, the brutality lurking immediately beneath the beauty?

  On the fringes of the funerals, mourners drifted away from the graves toward the chain-link fence. No one could say who shouted the first insult, who hurled the first stone, but within seconds the battle was raging. A group of young religious Jews leaped onto the fence and tried to scale it to get at the Palestinians, who filled the air with flying stones and beat at the fence with sticks. Two Jews fell back, bleeding from head wounds. An Arab boy was knocked unconscious, a second clutched a broken wrist. Cameramen on both sides knelt on the hill and filmed the brawl for the evening news, which only spurred the rioters on. In an age-old gesture, the young Arabs drew their kiffiyehs across their faces, obscuring everything but their eyes, which burned with fierce loathing. Palestinian police and Israeli soldiers came running up on both sides of the fence to separate the combatants. The wail of sirens filled the air as ambulances pulled over the slopes to pick up the wounded. Tear gas canisters rolled downhill and exploded. Voices blasted over bullhorns in Hebrew and Arabic, warning the rioters to disperse.

  With the katsa and Baruch trailing after him, Sweeney ducked behind one of the television relay trucks. As the tear gas spread like morning mist over the hill, the Rabbi’s demented cackle echoed in Sweeney’s good ear. “Let us seek religious asylum together in Paradise,” he had said. “You and me, Ishmael, the Renewer and the Messiah, side by side. A real simcha, a real joy.”

  “Do you know Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya?” Sweeney called to Elihu as he reached the relay truck. “I acted in it once in a previous incarnation. There’s a scene where someone asks Vanya what’s new. Nothing’s new, he says. Everything’s old.” Sweeney smothered a raw laugh. “Everything—these hills, these wadis, this blood feud between tribes that worship the same God—is old.” He shook his head in an agony of despair. “If they really are up there,” he said, “two mad hatters hanging out at the right hand of God, they’ve got to be laughing their deranged heads off watching their funerals.”

  A whiff of tear gas stung Sweeney’s nostrils. Backpedaling to get away from it, he spotted something that caused him to catch his breath. On the flank of the hill, the austere young Imam in the white robe, the tall lean Jew in the black overcoat could be seen standing on small knolls behind the melee. Oblivious to the whorls of tear gas scouring the rock-pitted ground around their feet, they appeared to be taking the measure of each other over the heads of their disciples. Around them the air filled with the whetted lisp of cicadae and the sky began to grow dark, almost as if a plague of locusts had blotted out the sun.

  And then the dry crack of a rifle shot reverberated through the Judean hills.