LITMIR.BIZ

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entity.” He rested his arms on the terrace railing and put his chin on them. “That’s why Bea says I’m a bad Jew. Because I won’t join in the national romance.”

      Craik slumped lower until his spine was almost ready to fall off the seat, his long legs thrust out toward the edge of the terrace. He had his own doubts about Israel, but he had to shut up and do his job: in two days, he was supposed to meet with Shin Bet, Israel’s military intelligence, to get their input on an operation in Afghanistan.

      Fifty miles south in Gaza, three men were beating the Palestinian named Salem Qatib. Two would hold the victim while the third hit him, and then they would slam him against a stone wall and shout, “What else? What else?” They were Palestinian, too.

      “Your husband looks like hell, if I’m allowed to say that, Rose,” Bea Peretz was saying.

      “He’s stressed out, is all.”

      “What’s he doing in Israel?”

      “Oh—Navy stuff. You know.” She hesitated, added, “He got a couple of extra days on his orders to try to sort of run down.”

      “Israel’s a great place! Really. Even Abe thinks so.” She was pounding dough down on a board, making it thin. “I wish you could meet my friend Esther. She makes you understand how you can love this country. We all want to stay for good.”

      “The Bureau’ll go along with that?”

      “There’s other jobs, Rose. Some things are more important than what you do for a living.” The way she said it, Rose felt as if Bea had said it before, maybe many times—the detritus of an old argument, washed up on this woman-to-woman beach. Rose sampled a bit of something made with chopped olives and murmured, “We are what we do for a living, to some extent.”

      “And we can change!” Bea hit the dough a tremendous whack! “You were going to be an astronaut once. You didn’t make it. You didn’t die.”

      Only where nobody but me can see, Rose thought. She said, “Anyway, maybe Abe’s not so invested in it as I was.”

      “Oh—Abe!” Bea cut the dough into squares with great slashes of a knife. “Abe could sell bread from a pushcart and be happy! He lives in such a fog—”

      “How’s Rose coping with not being an astronaut?” Peretz said to Alan Craik. They were still on the terrace, new drinks in their hands, the sky almost blue-black.

      “I think it almost killed her, but—you know Rose. Get on with life.” He sipped at his weak gin and tonic. “She’s going to be deep-select for captain.”

      Peretz looked out at the sky for a long time, and when he spoke it was clear that he’d hardly listened to the answer to his own question. “If I get a transfer, I don’t think Bea’ll go with me. Or the girls.”

      “Well, if they’re in school—”

      Peretz bounced a knuckle against his upper lip. “It’s a hell of a thing, to watch a family go in the tank because of—” He sighed. “It’s never just one thing, is it. Bea and I have always had a—You know, the relationship has always been noisy. But suddenly—It’s this damned place. Jesus.” He stared at his fingers. “Religion’s soaked into the goddam soil here. Like Love Canal.”

      Salem Qatib, who had been beaten, lay in one rut of a Gaza road. By and by somebody would have driven along the road and run over him, but a Palestinian who knew about the torture and who was a Mossad informer got on a cell phone and alerted his control.

      Over dinner—candles, no kids, Israeli wine, lamb and grains in a recipe that was millennia old—the Craiks tried to talk about old friends and old days and things that didn’t have to do with Israel or being Jewish. But as more wine was poured, Bea didn’t want to talk about anything else, as if they had a scab that she wanted to scratch and watch bleed. She cited her friend Esther often—“Esther says.” Even Nine-Eleven, the topic of conversation everywhere in those days, brought her back to Israel. “Now you know what it’s like!” she cried. “Now you know what the Arabs are!” She gestured at Abe with a fork. “You’ll say next that we should be more understanding, because al-Qaida blew up the World Trade Center because they’re misunderstood!”

      Abe started to say that he never said, and so on, and she interrupted, and so on.

      “Bea enjoys being a caricature,” Peretz said, smiling to show it was a joke and failing. “Bea, beautiful Bea, light of my life, could we talk about baseball?”

      “Esther says the Palestinians are terrorists and invaders and we ought to throw them out and keep them the fuck out!”

      “‘We,’” Abe said, smiling at them.

      “Arafat is a monster. He’s paying the terrorists, killing women and children, and pretending to want peace. Esther says they live out there like animals; they live in kennels; they’re barely able to read and write and they say they have ‘universities,’ my God!”

      “When our great-grandparents lived in the shtetls, the Russians called them animals; they couldn’t read or write; they—”

      “And they came here and they made the desert bloom! They built real universities! They made a nation!”

      “On land that they took with the gun,” Abe said wearily.

      “Because it was ours!”

      Abe looked at Alan and gave an apologetic shrug. The silence grew longer, and Abe said, falsely cheerful, “What d’you hear from Mike Dukas?”

      Maybe because she had had too much wine, Bea broke in with, “I’ll never forgive Mike Dukas for saying that Jonathan Pollard was a traitor! Never. Never, never, never!”

      “But Pollard was a traitor,” Abe made the mistake of saying.

      He was probably going to explain that somebody who sells American secrets to another state, even if it’s Israel, is in fact a traitor, but Bea said in a suddenly quiet voice, “I know what you think,” and she turned away and began to talk to Rose about having daughters.

      Then things were easier for a while, and they got through dessert, and Alan looked at his watch and at Rose, and when Bea brought in coffee everything would have been all right if Rose hadn’t asked for cream, and there was embarrassment and confusion, and Abe explained the kosher rule of thumb and ended, smiling as at a great joke, “It’s a dietary law, which I’d be happy to explain the logic of if I understood it myself.”

      Bea said, “If you were half the Jew you ought to be, you’d understand it.”

      “But I must be a Jew—my mother was Jewish. Okay, Bea?”

      She dropped her voice to a purr. “Abe means he’s a modern Jew. Just like everybody else—no funny foods, no embarrassing hat, no accent—oy veh! that he should have an accent!—he should be taken for a Presbyterian, maybe. Assimilate, right, Abe? That’s the magic word, right? Assimilate European high culture and never look back—Dostoevsky, Mozart, and Wittgenstein, right?”

      In the embarrassed silence, Alan said, “Who’s Wittgenstein?”

      She stared at him, broke into loud laughter, then patted him on the cheek. “I love you, Al—you’re perfect.”

      Alan looked at his wife and got the slightly wide-eyed look: Say nothing; we’ll leave soon.

      Salem Qatib lay on a table now. A big Israeli was leaning over him shouting Shit! again and again, and then he screamed at another man, “You stupid asshole, you’ve fucking killed him!”

       Acco, Israel

      Rashid Halaby sat in the dark with his back against a wall that had been built when Augustus was Caesar. The fancy American flashlight that his mother had given him for his birthday had a new battery, but it was running down now. He had his cell phone, but the signal couldn’t

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