Chapter 25 Honor’s Child #5
“No one knows how she lost her arm—no one asks,” Siegfried said, not whispering now. There was something of the soldier’s rigidity of training in his voice. “The story I tell myself, Yimmy, is that the angels asked Esther if they could have her arm, and Esther gave it to them.”
“Seriously, dear Siegfried—is this what you believe?” Jimmy asked the good soldier.
“I don’t believe in God, just in angels—your Esther is our angel, dear Yimmy,” Siegfried said.
One of the soldiers standing closest to Siegfried was a young, pretty woman—as tall as Siegfried. “Your Esther is Israel’s angel, Mr. Winslow,” she said.
James Winslow knew that it must have been Annelies, the good tutor, who’d made Siegfried a reader.
Jimmy tried to say that, from his perspective, there was something more mythical than actual about Esther.
Like a literary character, didn’t the one-armed one seem more symbolic than real? Jimmy asked Siegfried.
“If you see her, Yimmy, her missing arm will be real—not symbolic,” Siegfried said.
“I’m also hoping I see Annelies—if she’s in Jerusalem,” Jimmy said. He knew Siegfried had tried to steer him away from the Annelies subject.
Fr?ulein Eissler had maintained her IDF connections.
In 1967, she’d served as an interpreter in the Six-Day War, and Siegfried said she was in the Sinai in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War—when Siegfried would have been eight and fourteen respectively.
“She was good at languages, as I know you know,” Siegfried said, with sudden awkwardness.
That was when Jimmy knew she was gone. “She was so glad you got to be what you wanted to be,” the tall soldier told Jimmy, with no hint of his birth mother’s cynicism.
There was not much of a signing line left, but the bossy bookseller was agitated with Jimmy and Siegfried—their conversation was holding things up. Siegfried’s comrades-in-arms were among those in the line.
“What happened to Annelies?” Jimmy asked her adopted son. The same tall woman soldier—the prettiest one—squeezed Siegfried’s hand.
It had happened in Hebron, in the West Bank, where Annelies was working as a mediator—what people who are good at languages do.
“It was a roadside bomb, a car bomb,” Siegfried said.
Some Palestinian children had been curious about the abandoned car.
Fr?ulein Eissler must have believed the kids were too close to the car; she’d made them move away.
Yet there’d been something about the car that drew Annelies to take a closer look.
James Winslow told Siegfried where he was staying and gave him a number he could reach him at.
They talked about having dinner—or just breakfast, if dinner didn’t work out.
Jimmy didn’t doubt that Siegfried Eissler was a young man with lots of options.
Don’t be afraid of the telescope—only the passage of time sees into the future!
Jimmy almost said to him. But the soldier resembled Annelies, the singular woman who’d saved him; like Annelies, the tall and handsome soldier knew how to move on.
As suddenly as Siegfried had shown up, the blue-eyed one and his comrades-in-arms disappeared.
James Winslow had calculated that the young soldier must have been twenty-two or twenty-three.
He won’t call me—we won’t have dinner, or even breakfast, Jimmy knew, as certainly as he knew Fr?ulein Eissler was gone.
Naturally, Jimmy told his Hebrew translator, Yaakov Himmelman, all about encountering Siegfried—the Austrian boy who’d been the inspiration for Roommates in Vienna. “Die Vergangenheit ist nicht Siegfrieds Freundin,” Yaakov told Jimmy. (“The past is not Siegfried’s friend,” Yaakov had said.)
Jimmy knew that Yaakov had been a prisoner at Mauthausen concentration camp and had been forced to transport stones on the “stairs of death.” Jimmy understood that the past wasn’t Yaakov’s friend, either.
One time, when Jimmy and Yaakov were working on the translation of Not an Egyptian, Yaakov took a bathroom break—as he often did when Jimmy sought his opinion of the current situation in Israel. Yaakov was still in the bathroom when Omar brought Jimmy the rock.
The five-year-old needed both hands to carry such a heavy stone.
“Stone,” Jimmy said, and Omar studiously repeated the word stone.
Not a souvenir from Mauthausen, James Winslow had hoped.
“Maybe Omar should put this back where he found it,” Jimmy said to Nour, handing her the stone.
She seemed to understand him, or perhaps Nour just knew—as cleaning women do—where everything belonged.
After his encounter with Siegfried, now a full-grown man, it was hard for Jimmy to get used to being a “James” again, but he was always that to everyone who knew him as a writer, including Nour and Omar.
Just to be sure, Omar liked to point at Jimmy—as if Jimmy were an unnamed object Omar had found.
“James,” Jimmy told Omar, who laughed when he repeated the funny-sounding name.
“Yames,” Omar usually said first, before he said the name correctly.
Then there was the day Jimmy repeated to Yaakov something that Anat had told him.
He’d been frustrated by the them and us designations his European Jewish publishers gave to the Palestinians and the Israelis.
Anat was frustrated with the Europeans for another reason.
The Israeli policy was not to call them Palestinians, Anat told him—thereby not acknowledging that Palestinians had national identity.
Jimmy admitted to Anat that he was uncomfortable with the way the Israelis restrained the Palestinians. He’d asked Anat if this restraint didn’t amount to suppression or repression of the Palestinians.
“You can call it ‘suppression’ or ‘repression’ if you want to, James,” Anat had told him. “But if we don’t restrain them, they will drive us into the sea—they will annihilate us,” Anat said.
This was what Jimmy repeated to Yaakov Himmelman.
Yaakov took another bathroom break, his response to Anat’s “If we don’t…
they will…” Jimmy just sat at the long table in the kitchen, where Nour and Omar were watching him.
Nour looked like she wanted to say something, or so Jimmy thought, but there were no words between them.
There was nothing in Omar’s hands—no object for Jimmy to name, no name for Omar to repeat.
It was one of those days when a couple of soldiers were supposed to fill in for Anat, who was busy, but no soldiers showed up.
Yaakov explained it to Nour in Arabic. “It’s not difficult for Nour and Omar to take you through the Old City to the Damascus Gate—to where you know your way back to the American Colony,” Yaakov told Jimmy.
Walking with Nour and Omar delighted Jimmy.
They were the only Palestinians he knew, and they were wonderful.
Omar held Jimmy’s hand, not his mother’s.
It was Omar, not Jimmy, who noticed there were no Christians in line outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—waiting their turn to kneel (or pray, or wail) at Christ’s tomb.
Omar had dropped Jimmy’s hand; the boy was tugging on his mother’s hand now, beseeching her to do something.
“Omar wants to see where Jesus died. Jesus is dead in there,” Nour said to Jimmy.
“I know—I want to see Christ’s tomb, too,” Jimmy told her.
They went into the cool darkness of the church together.
The darkness made Omar hold Jimmy’s hand again.
The towering height of the dome of the church made them look up at the skylight above them.
The sobbing Christian surprised them; he was already crying when he came inside the church, and he didn’t hesitate to enter Christ’s cavelike tomb.
Omar had questions for his mother about the sobbing Christian.
The candlelight in the darkened tomb did not make the weeping Christian visible.
They all heard him cry out, more loudly, just before he emerged from the tomb—his face streaked with tears, his smile radiant.
“Jesus touched me—I felt him touch me!” the lunatic Christian cried. Nour needed to reassure Omar more; the five-year-old didn’t want to enter the tomb. The sobbing Christian had left the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, still claiming he’d been touched by Jesus.
When Jimmy cautiously entered the tomb, Nour and Omar didn’t follow.
It may only have been in Jimmy’s imagination that the candlelight flickered at the same moment the cat brushed against his leg.
The cat’s plaintive yowl made Omar and his mother laugh.
The cat and Jimmy came out of Christ’s tomb together.
It was a warm afternoon in the Old City; one of a hundred cats was seeking and had found somewhere cool and dark.
“Not Jesus,” Jimmy said to Omar, who perfectly repeated it. Omar didn’t say Yesus the first time; the boy had gone straight to the Jesus.
“Not Jesus,” Nour had also repeated—the three of them laughing.
When they got to the Damascus Gate, where Jimmy knew the rest of the way, he had to restrain himself from hugging Nour.
Anat had warned him not to be too familiar.
“Her hijab means you should respect her, you shouldn’t even look at her closely—her hijab means she is modest in the presence of a man who isn’t her husband or a blood relation,” Anat said.
The way her hijab haloed Nour’s head gave her a saintly or a holy presence, or so Jimmy thought.
They had an awkward goodbye at the Damascus Gate.
“And we will,” Nour said quietly.
“And you will what?” Jimmy asked her.
“We will drive them into the sea—we will,” Nour told him.
“We will,” Omar repeated, beaming at Jimmy.
“We will annihilate them,” Nour said, hitting all four syllables.