Martyrs’ Crossing Read Online Free PDF Page B

with George. And now George needed companionship to keep him from depression. Now Philip was his assistant. Spirited, faithful, kind. Hardworking, intelligent, learned. Just the sort of thing the doctor ordered, George thought glumly.
    â€œI’m going, I’m going,” George said. Wisp of a boy, the phrase kept going through his mind. He pulled himself up and adjusted his robe. Yes, okay, sure, it was just a flannel bathrobe, a dressing gown—as he used to say before he came to America where the names of things were less euphemistic—but somehow the adjustment, the rewrap, the pulling at the sash, made him feel more kingly, more distant.
    He started slowly up the stairs. He felt his face. Gray whiskers growing. He stood barefoot on the planks of the dark upstairs landing, feeling around on the wall for the thermostat—ha! there it was. He turned up the heat.
    George made his way down the hall, flicking on the lights as he went. He wondered what made him so angry with Ahmed and the Authority. Was it the stupidity of it all, and how this group of thieves thought they represented a “people”? No, it was also the self-congratulatory tone Ahmed always adopted, and the way things were decided these days, how the Chairman—and his sycophants and flunkies—scraped away all the profits and made deals with the Israelis to enjoy the eventual spoils.
    Ah, well, and why should the people get anything? They never had and never would. Never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. You couldn’t put your fate into the Chairman’s hands, or Ahmed’s hands, and expect to come out of it unscathed. It infuriated him, and yet he could never quite abandon Ahmed, friend of his childhood. Sadiq at-tufoulah: it was a classic Arabic formulation. George rinsed the razor and slapped at his face with a cold washcloth. Those connections were impossible to overlook, especially when one had so little else from the past to hold on to. Look how he had clung to his easy chair.
    He came downstairs into the front hallway and put on his coat, his fur hat, his scarf, and his gloves. He stepped out onto the stoop. The light this afternoon looked like a winter dawn, gray and dismal. The snow on the ground was not new, and it was caked black along the curbs. He could see the spots where the neighborhood’s dogs had been pissing on his tires. His car had not been moved since before the snow.
    Ah, he thought, feeling himself hesitate before unlocking the car door. George’s wrist would not turn: he was having a terror episode. Calm yourself, he thought, using Grandfather’s strict, military voice. George had started having this problem after Najjar got shot in the knees three months earlier, in London. There were rogue elements, Najjar had told him on the phone. Najjar was something like him, a Palestinian writer who objected to the way the peace was being concluded—but Najjar was a poet and had worse enemies, apparently. And an ominous, paranoid turn of mind that had turned out to be prescient. A few days after Najjar was shot, Ahmed had rung George from Jericho to warn him that, as Ahmed had said portentously, “threats were being made.”
    By whom, George had asked. Against whom?
    Don’t ask, Ahmed had said. Just be careful.
    George didn’t believe Ahmed. It didn’t make sense. He was pretty sure that you didn’t blow up people these days because of what they wrote. Probably, the warnings were just one method the Authority was using now to quiet annoying dissent. But then, look at Najjar. It was bound to make you think.
    George tried to control these episodes. Especially since he had had his little coronary problem, he rejected them as redundant worrying. But Najjar’s knees and Ahmed’s call had forced him to contemplate the renewed volatility of the situation. As a writer who frequently expressed opinions that were at odds with someone or other’s—you