CHAPTER 5

5.

 

What had brought Artie to Israel had had nothing to do with Teddy.

It had been the end of April – getting hot, humid, rainforest wet. Easter had been early; Palm Beach was emptying out. You could get a table at Café L’Europe without schmearing the maître a hundred bucks or waiting a couple of hours.

As the polo season was dribbling to its end, Artie had played in a tournament, which meant nothing to anyone, on a polo pitch in the boondocks near Lion Country Safari, bounded by fields of fresh sugar cane. Shaya …

 

“Who’s Shaya?” I interrupted.

“Shaya? Well …” Artie lifted his wineglass by the stem and took a delicate sip.

She was Israeli, a sabra, though she was blue-eyed and blonde. She wasn’t young, but she wasn’t old. Artie wouldn’t be more specific. When you looked at her face, you dreamed of being smothered by her lips. Her slim body was terrifying, a machine for immolation. She was tall, and physically fearless. Her belly, her butt were tight and flat. Her long legs were unroadmapped. There was no dairy on her thighs.

Her second husband, a billionaire, had introduced her to polo, and to flights to Paris, Brunei, Riyadh on his personal Gulfstream jet. Sunset picnics in deserts, or on the tops of cliffs; grandiose dinners in London and Rome; shopping onRodeo Drive; friends and acquaintances who were the most triumphant of the successful; raw sex in the back of his Bentley, or bent over the balustrade of a stranger’s balcony.

All of that was long over now. All she had kept of it was the polo. She stayed busy making business plans, and carrying them out. She never showed a hint of regret over what she no longer had – but there were signs of aimlessness every once in a while, and she swallowed antidepressants to fend off bouts of grief. Artie admitted that he loved to see her cry, because, for those small moments, her doors were unlocked to him. He thought she was wonderful. God knows he wanted her.

They had gone to a restaurant once - Amici, in Palm Beach. He didn’t remember how the evening happened to come about. He remembered it was Valentine’s Day, but that wasn’t the reason they went. Shaya wasn’t his Valentine; he didn’t have one, and he hated that sort of holiday, when you had to express emotions because you were expected to. He had no recollection of who had invited whom.

Even in that setting of superlative human configuration, she’d been a remarkable swirl of yellow silk sitting across from him, laughing across the frosted mouth of her margarita glass. He had never seen such twinkle in a woman’s eye. She would lean across and touch his hand to make a point – and she had a lot of points to make, so soon her fingers had rested on the back of his hand. But she took them away when the entrées came, and – though he hadn’t thought of it then – she had never put them back.

He had met her a long time before, in his New York andEasthampton days. They had actually made their acquaintance on the polo field in Southampton. By coincidence, it had turned out that she lived on Park Avenue, not far from Artie and Norma Jean, in the apartment her second husband had given her just before he’d walked out.

Artie and she had been polo buddies – a smile, a hug, a kissed cheek. They had never had much serious talk, and he knew very little about her. So, over dinner, he had asked her about herself.

One of the first things she told him was that she’d been “fixed” – that she wasn’t able to have children any more. He had sat up straight. He was speechless. And then he had smiled the smile that men think shows women just how hip they are. I had probably smiled that smile myself some night at E.J. Bradley’s when something better than usual sat down next to me. And let’s face it: what man wouldn’t have believed what Artie was believing – that she had just told him that they would finish the night in bed.

She brought out cash when the check came. He leaned across the table and stuffed it back in her bag and, since the gesture brought his face very close to hers, he put his hand on her shoulder and pulled her in for a kiss. But she turned away abruptly, so his lips only brushed her cheek.

She had said she had a headache, and would he take her home. He did, and when they got to her place she had jumped out of his car, thanked him – more or less – and said goodnight.

“So what you thought was an invitation was just unconstrained conversation.”

“Right. So now you know – who Shaya is ….. Like I said, I was in this tournament. It was a couple of months after the restaurant. Shaya happened to be on my team ….”

 

They were in the final chukker. They were losing by one goal. Artie turned the ball and sent Shaya an offside pass. She leaned off her mount, gathered it in and tapped it toward the goal posts. She galloped ahead and tapped it again. It was a certain score. And then an opponent she already hated – they had a cantankerous history – bumped her a little harder than was strictly necessary, driving her horse over the ball and out of the play. The ball went over the goal line, but not through the goal, and Artie saw a red rage blossom on Shaya’s face.

When the chukker ended, Shaya jumped off her mount, tore off her helmet and face mask and slammed them into the dirt. She hurried with huge ferocious strides to “that bastard”’s aluminum trailer. His mounts were loosely cinched to its sides, quietly curious. The bastard was bent over a horse’s leg, wrapping it for play. She hauled off and kicked him in the ass, propelling him forward into a puddle of horse manure. The shit quickly dried on his polo shirt like the shell of a chocolate strawberry. When he got up, encrusted, he emitted a bull-like bellow and proceeded to beat her senseless with full-knuckled fists to the face.

Artie couldn’t get to her until it was too late. She was bloody and unconscious, her legs splayed out unnaturally and her arms still linked in her unsuccessful attempt to ward off the blows. When she came to, five minutes later, Artie was bending over her, mopping – he had thought about licking – the blood from her face. She struggled to get to her feet. He was sure she had had a concussion and shouldn’t get up, but he let her do it because you didn’t tell Shaya what she should or shouldn’t do.

She squinted at him confusedly. She didn’t remember what had happened. But when she saw the blood on her jersey, it all came back. She turned on her heel and walked off, with Artie tagging after her. When she got to her own trailer, she untied her horses and loaded them aboard. Artie tried to help her, but Shaya pushed him away. When all the horses were in the trailer, she climbed into her duallie, fired up the engine and stomped harshly on the gas. He screamed at her to be careful. She showed him her middle finger, and jerked her foot off the clutch. Her horses tumbled into each other, finally finding their footing as she roared down the narrow dirt road toward Southern Boulevard.

After that, Artie didn’t hear from her. There were moments when it had occurred to him to check on her, but then he’d remembered the bird she’d flipped him and decided to hell with that. A woman who knew her casually – no woman knew her better – had said the word was around town that Shaya had turned her horses out on a neighbor’s farm, nailed up her windows with plywood and gone home to Israel, to her father, who lived in a town called Tsfat. Artie had driven by her house. It was true; the windows were sealed.

Time went by and he kept busy, so he’d almost forgotten her. Then, around the end of May, she had sent him an email: “Hi! Been thinking about you. How have you been? I’ve decided to blow up the Dome of the Rock.”

He didn’t know what to make of it. Who would? He emailed back: “Sure. What’s really going on?”

Then he’d gotten another email, with her picture attached. She was wearing a black covering, like a chador. Underneath the robe, she said, was a vest full of C4. She said she was going to do the Palestinian thing – she was going to blow herself up along with the Dome of the Rock. Artie had concluded she must have run out of her meds. He had sent an urgent email back: “See a physician now!”  ….

 

“Whoa, whoa, stop,” I said. “I need some clarification. And you need another glass of crappy chardonnay.”

“They don’t have chardonnay. It’s crappy Chablis.”

Artie ran a finger around the edge of his glass until it started singing a tune. I flagged down the waitress. We enjoyed her ass again. “Um,” Artie said when she scooted off, “what clarification?”

“I think I know, but so I’m sure: what is the Dome of the Rock?”

The Dome of the Rock, Artie told me, was a Muslim shrine. “People will tell you it’s a mosque, but it isn’t; it’s a shrine.” It sat on top of Mount Moriah, the hill in Jerusalemthe Jews called the Temple Mount, where the Holy of Holies, the Second Jewish Temple, had once stood. The Dome was in that location because Muslims believed that Mount Moriah, besides being the place to which Abraham had brought Isaac when God had demanded that he sacrifice his son, was also the point from which the Prophet Mohammed had concluded his mortal career by rising Christ-like to Paradise on the white winged horse Burak.

It was a mortal offense to many Jews, Artie explicated, that after Israel took Arab Jerusalem in 1967, the Israeli government, afraid of a holy war, had left the keys to theTemple Mount in Arab hands. So there were plenty of people in Israel who would have liked to have seen the Dome reduced to a pile of blackened debris….

 

But Artie didn’t believe, from the little he knew, that Shaya was one of them. She was not the religious or the political type – unless feminism was a religion, and anger was politics. So he couldn’t comprehend where the message was coming from – unless from a delusion she’d developed, or picked up.

He had remembered, at the time, that Shaya had told him once – he had no recollection of how the subject had come up – that her father had been in the Lechi, which was commonly known as the Stern Gang, and had shot and bombed the British – blew up the King David Hotel - in what turned out to be a successful campaign to force the Brits to abandon their mandate in Palestine and give way to the Jewish state.

But the Stern Gang had not blown themselves up – only other people. So Artie didn’t think her father had put her up to it. He figured if her father knew what she planned to do, he would lock her into her bedroom and swallow the key. But Artie had no way to contact him; Shaya had kept her last husband’s name, so Artie didn’t know her father’s.

The next day, Artie said, Shaya had sent another email. She had been in Jerusalem and had gone, in her Arab disguise, to take a look at the Dome of the Rock. She took off her shoes to do it, because the chador has a peculiar glide when Arab women wear it, and she wasn’t all that steady in her Blahnik fuck-me pumps. She got half-way around the shrine, unobtrusively, tugging absent-mindedly at the fuse hanging off her vest. But then her toenails gave her away; they were pink, hand-painted by herself on an evening with nothing to do. One Arab noticed her feet, and that was the end of the game, because no Arab woman in a chador would display herself that way. If they had grabbed her and lifted the chador, they would have seen the explosives. They might have killed her. She hightailed it out of there. She would have gone back the next day, she said, but she’d had to return to Tsfat to see her dad. She said maybe next week she’d blow herself up. Artie emailed: “Why?” She wrote back: “I want to.”

This was not the kind of behavior she was likely to have thought up. So, Artie reasoned, someone had talked her into it …

 

“You know, like I said, there were plenty of people who would have cheered her on ….”

 

But what kind of man, Artie wondered, could have brought himself to encourage her to tear up such beautiful flesh?

She adored her father, she had written a couple of days after that. He was almost eighty years old now. He’d lost six inches of his height. These days he puttered in a garden, growing cauliflower. He worked nights as a security guard at a settlement in the West Bank that was so new, and so secret, that it hadn’t got a name. But his night vision was no good, so it was just to keep a hand in. It was an honorific; the settlers respected what he had done.

“For us, terror worked!” he’d told Shaya. “We got rid of the British, right? And we got rid of the Arabs.” What follows is what he was talking about, in that last part there.

In Israel’s war of independence in 1948, fedayeen in an Arab village called Deir Yassin were pot-shooting Israeli convoys bringing food to the besieged Jewish quarter ofJerusalem. Or maybe the fedayeen weren’t in Deir Yassin. Depends who you believe.

The Stern Gang, the Irgun and the Haganah decided to drive them out. What they said they planned to do was to go up to the village with a loudspeaker truck, warn the villagers to run and kill whoever didn’t. The story was that the truck had gotten stuck in a ditch too far away from Deir Yassin for the Arabs to hear the speaker. But her father, who had been driving it, had said it hadn’t got stuck. It had stopped because he had stopped it – because he wanted all of them dead.

The Jews killed men, women and children – lots of them. Arabs all over Palestine heard about Deir Yassin. They packed up their teapots and worry beads and ran away. And that was how they’d invented Palestinian refugees, and how the Jews had become a majority in the new state of Israel. Menachem Begin, the head of the Irgun, had said – Artie informed me – that this Arab elopement was an “ancillary benefit” of the attack on Deir Yassin. But Shaya had said her father had said it was what he had in mind.

“And then the idiots …” – this was Shaya’s father again – “… go and bring all the Arabs back!”

He was referring to the Six Day War, when Israel had occupied half of the places the Arabs had run away to. He had not been opposed to the war; that was a case of self-defense. No. The idiots were the men who had run Israel since then – some of them old Lechi comrades of his who wanted to hold on to the land the army had overrun.

He couldn’t abide the ones who insisted on keeping the land for security. “What kind of security? They hate us over there!” Besides, lebensraum was an argument that didn’t befit the Jews….

 

I was puzzled. “Lebensraum?” 

Artie snorted: “Hitler. Go read a book. If I have to explain everything we’ll be here all night ….”

 

Shaya’s father despised the ones who said God had promised these places to themselves. He didn’t believe God had promised that land to anyone. God, as he understood Him/Her/It, didn’t do things like that. And who in his right mind would want more earth as tired and gray as the faces of old farts who never went outdoors? Even in Tsfat, in Israel, on the richest Old Testament land, it cost fifty dollars in fertilizer to grow one cauliflower.

He didn’t care if the West Bank was the ancestral home of the Jews. “What am I, a tribal? I have to build on my forefathers’ graves? I just want to live with Jews in peace, and I don’t care where.” He would have gone anywhere the world put the Jews. He only went to Palestine because his other choice – since no one was taking in Hebrews at the time – had been to stay in his shtetl, his Jewish town, and roast with the rest when the Nazis set fire to the synagogue. And once he got to Palestine, he had done what he’d had to do.

“Give the Arabs the West Bank. Let them go, and leave us alone!”

Shaya had finally let him know what she had in mind.

“No, my darling,” he told her. “In my day we did okay with that. But it wouldn’t work any more. Does it stop the Jews? No. It wouldn’t have stopped me. Why? Because we didn’t have anywhere else to go. Same for the Palestinians. They won’t run away again. And if you try to push them out, they only push back harder. You can blow up what you want; nothing is going to improve …  Besides, I made you something.” He grinned. “Let’s go see.”

He took her out beyond the hills beyond the hills of Tsfat. And there, to her immense delight, she had found a polo field.

“Papa! When did you do this?”

“Oh, a year ago.”

“I never said I was coming back.”

“So? I could hope.”

In the abstract, these were unkind words, since Shaya had only returned before when things had gone badly for her. But that wasn’t the way he’d meant it, and she knew that. She kissed him on one of the dimples where his wrinkles met, and embarrassed him.

He had built a small six-stall stable out of Jerusalemstone. In three of the stalls she found white Arab mares he had bought from a Bedouin who had bred them in the Negev – or maybe it was the Sinai. “Just as good as the horses of the Sultan of Brunei!”

“Good job, papa! Who knew you were a judge of horseflesh?”

“A horse, a cow, what’s the difference? I got eyes, from being a shochet.” From being a Kosher slaughterer. Shaya hadn’t known it, but when her father had been with the Lechi he’d killed cows as well as people.

She tacked up one of the Arabs. She knew the horses were green – they had no concept of polo – and the tack wasn’t polo tack, it was basically camel tack – ropes, pillows and wood. So she’d had a sloppy and dangerous ride across the field. But when she returned she’d yelled to him: “I love you so much, papa!”

She had emailed a tack shop in Wellington and, within an hour, everything she was going to need had been on its way to Tsfat.

That’s what was in her email. Artie had emailed back: “Are you still gonna blow up the Dome of the Rock?”

“I’m too happy now. Besides, I was on a bus …”

Oh no. Artie was horrified. “You didn’t get hurt?”

“It didn’t happen on my bus. Another bus. In front of us. Up the road. How can people do that?”

“I don’t know,” Artie wrote. “Why don’t you ask your father?”

“So I’ve decided to do something else.”

“And what is that?”

“I’m going to challenge the Palestinians to a polo match.”

 

Artie stopped talking. He studied me. His finger rimmed the glass again, raising the same mournful note. I picked up my beer bottle and blew across the hole. The interval was a perfect third. Artie grinned.

“So she was still not quite right,” I said.

“Yeah. I decided to humor her….”

 

But Israelis on horseback? Not a chance. She was going to use what – tanks?

“No, not an Israeli team. A Jewish team. You’ll have to come, and bring two other guys.”

There were twenty Jews who played polo. Artie knew all of them. None of them executed well, but they talked a terrific game.

She had sent an email to the Palestinian president. Artie was cc’d.

Dear Chairman Abbas:

In the interest of promoting peace – or, if you would prefer to view it this way, to stir up a good fight – and on behalf of the Jews of the world, whom I hereby represent, I challenge the Palestinian Authority to a polo match to be played six weeks from today on a field my father has built for me to the north of Tsfat – or Safed, as perhaps the town is better known to you.

The game will be played according to the international rules. Egregious fouls will be penalized (not with guns.) Each team will provide its own mounts, equipment and grooms and arrange for the transportation of all the above to Tsfat. The winners – naturally, that will be us – will be nothing short of magnanimous. The losers will pay no consequence, except for the ritual bottles of champagne to be shared by everyone and drunk out of a trophy which I will provide.

I will be pleased in advance of the game to educate your players, to the extent there’s a need for that.

Please communicate your acceptance within the next two weeks. I sincerely hope you will find this proposition interesting. I am eagerly looking forward to your courteous response.

Artie had stared at the email, and imagined a face. He didn’t know what Abbas looked like, so it was Arafat’s face he imagined – that big nose and those big lips working: “What … the fuck … is this?”

Abbas counsels with his advisors in the wreck of his offices. The ceiling is falling down on them, the floor is buckling, one of the walls has been shredded by the tread of an Abrams tank. “Where is the trick in it?” he asks. “What is the plan of these devious Jews?”

“What they want is to humiliate us,” one advisor says. “They know we don’t play polo. We don’t even know what it is.”

“But,” another advisor pops up, “will the dishonor not be worse if we refuse this challenge? How much shame can we accept before it buries us? All the fear we have created, all the random power we exercise when we send out a suicide bomber -  will it not dwindle down to nothing as soon as it is known that there is a confrontation that we are afraid to meet? And what will they throw at us next? Poker? American football? Not to mention: if Hamas finds out, they will call us cowards.”

What do we stand to gain from this? What do we stand to lose? Who is this woman, anyway? She says she represents the Jews. Has anyone heard of her?

Nobody can honestly say her name rings a bell.

“All right,” says the President. “This is what we do. We find out everything we can about this girl. We call Tom Friedman: is this an American ploy? Call our friends in Israel: is the Prime Minister behind this, or is it somebody else?”

“It sounds like Netanyahu,” says one. “He is a truly peculiar man.”

Is this a Saudi gambit? A Jordanian trap? Is it an al Qaeda scheme to take over our revolution? Is it Assad’s doing? (We know it isn’t Saddam.) Does the Pope play polo? Speaking of which, we must find out how one does play polo, and how one wins.

“There is one thing we must remember,” Abu Somebody says. “Jews do not ride horses. But the Bedouin do.”

Friedman has never heard of the girl or the plan, but he thinks it’s possible that somebody at NSC or Defense has cooked this up. He has no evidence of that. The President hangs up.

The Saudis deny everything. But they always do.

In Jordan, King Abdullah says it sounds like fun. Can he play?

If the Syrians were behind it, they’d call on Hezbollah.

The Pope does not play polo. He only plays theological games.

Nobody in Israel knows what it’s about. There are too many possibilities, impossible to check. Take three Israelis to dinner, there’s a new conspiracy. A dental assistant in Tel Aviv could be the mastermind.

Palestinian spies crawl around Shaya’s father’s house in Tsfat. They can’t be direct in that town – they’d be too obvious. So they overhear conversations, but nothing of consequence. The only thing they can report back is how happy they are she’s not Muslim, so they can gaze at her face.

In the end, the President winds up exactly where he began. So he moves on to Inquiry Two: what is the game about? He goes to amazon.com. There are books about water polo, and Marco Polo (the man and the game) … and then he finds what he’s looking for: Hugh Dawnay’s Polo Vision, andThe Polo Primer, by Steven D. Price. He plunks down hundreds of dollars for overnight delivery.  The books arrive two days later – in itself a miracle. The Israelis rip the brown box apart and study the books for code. They decide the books are innocent, and that the President is insane. The books are delivered to Abbas, little the worse for wear.

He stays up all night reading them, more and more intrigued. And he decides to do it: he will take up the gauntlet and throw it back in their faces, whoever they are. He’s not going to play, of course; he’s too old and unfit. But now he knows enough of the game that he is going to coach.

Orders go out: find four desert tribesmen who ride like the wind. No, better make it five, in case somebody gets hurt. Bring them to Ramallah, so I can teach them this game.

Three days later, five scruffy Bedouin boys are ushered into his office. They’ve crossed Israel illegally in the dark of night from their tents somewhere in Gaza. They think Hamas doesn’t know. They stink of goat, but he deals with it. He sits them down in the classroom where the tactics and the strategy of the Intifada have been mapped out. On the marred blackboard at the front of the room, he draws x’s and o’s.

He teaches them the rules of the game, and how to play position. They can’t read, but they can understand pictures, so he’s photographed the drawings of the eight mallet strokes. While the boys sit in the classroom, a carpenter in Ramallah crafts mallets according to the pictures in the books. He makes them all fifty inches long, since Bedouin boys are short. He hasn’t got any cane for the sticks, so he fashions them out of the dowels from which he usually makes the mouthpieces of nargilehs – the hubble-bubbles or hookahs. He delivers them to the classroom, and the President hands them out. “Go home and practice,” he tells the boys. They take their stinky leave.

And he sits down at his ormolu desk – the only thing of value he has that the Israelis haven’t destroyed – and he sends Shaya an email:

“We accept!”

Check the following links for more information:

Cafe L'Europe
Lion Country Safari
Amici
Mount Moriah
The Dome of the Rock
Lehi (Stern Gang)
Irgun
The bombing of the King David Hotel
Haganah
Deir Yassin
Menachem Begin
The Six Day War
Lebensraum
Shtetl
Polo in Brunei
Shechita
Polo tack
Mahmoud Abbas
Ramallah
Benjamin Netanyahu
Hezbollah
Hugh Dawnay


THE DOME OF THE ROCK


THE PALESTINIAN VIEW OF DEIR YASSIN

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