Amin Jaafari is a naturalized Arab citizen of Israel and a respected surgeon. He is talking with a colleague when the walls of the hospital are shaken by an explosion. They know what has happened, but details don't emerge until later: a suicide bomber at a fast-food restaurant, at least 19 dead, including 11 schoolchildren celebrating a classmate's birthday.
BOOK REVIEW
The Attack
Yasmina Khadra; Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 272 pages, $24.95)
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Jaafari works until 10 that night treating the injured and gets home – after being stopped and searched by police on the way – by 11. His wife has not returned from visiting her grandmother. Exhausted, he showers, takes a sleeping pill, and climbs into bed. Then, just as he's about to fall asleep, the phone rings.
It's Navid Ronnen, a senior police official and a friend. He asks Jaafari to return to the hospital immediately. When Jaafari arrives, “my friend doesn't know ... whether he should take me by the shoulders or keep his hands to himself.
“ 'We've got a body on our hands and we've got to put a name on it,' says a thick-set, brutish-looking man who suddenly appears behind me.” Jaafari is led into the hospital morgue “like a condemned man mounting the scaffold.” A doctor pulls back a bloodstained sheet. “I cry out, 'My God!' ”
Only his wife's head, “strangely spared by the devastation that ravaged the rest of her body, emerges from the mass, the eyes closed, the mouth open a little, the features calm, as though liberated from their suffering. ... I could think that she's peacefully sleeping, that she's going to open her eyes any minute and smile at me.”
After a harrowing three-day interrogation, Jaafari is allowed to return home. In his mailbox is a little envelope with no return address. The four-line note inside is undated and without salutation. It is from Sihem, his wife. Its final words: “Don't hate me.”
All of this is but the premise of Yasmina Khadra's “The Attack.” What the novel is about is Amin Jaafari's quest to discover why his wife did what she did and how he could not have had the least suspicion of her involvement with terrorists. He tells himself he wants to find those responsible for his wife's committing such a horrendous act so he can look them in the eye and demand an explanation.
His quest might be called quixotic were it not devoid of any comic element. It is deadly serious and dangerous every step of the way.
Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of Mohamed Moulessehoul. More precisely, it is his wife's name. A retired Algerian army officer who now lives in Paris, Moulessehoul originally published his books under his wife's name in order to get around military censorship. He may well be the most powerful and serious writer in French since his Algerian compatriot Albert Camus.
“The Attack” derives its force in large measure from never going off track as a novel, never slipping for a moment – as it easily could – into a fictional political tract. Every idea expressed, every action that takes place, is solidly grounded in character, in the complex, inconsistent and contradictory elements of human nature. Khadra neither demonizes nor offers any apology for the terrorists. He simply presents them as human beings who happen to be willing, even eager, to kill innocent people. By so doing, he places them squarely beyond the pale.
As Jaafari tells a terrorist commander: “You dare to feed me these tales of courage and dignity when you remain at your ease in your little corner and send women and kids to do your dirty work? Get it straight: We do indeed live on the same planet, my brother, but we're not staying at the same address.”
Passages of great lyrical beauty ease the tension of what could otherwise become a suffocatingly claustrophobic tale:
“ ... Jerusalem remains proud and unbowed. It stands there still, nestled between the clement plain and the harsh Judean Desert, drawing the strength it needs from spiritual sources untapped by either the kings of yesteryear or the charlatans of today. Although cruelly outraged by injustice and suffering, the city continues to keep the faith. ... Hopefully, it enters silence like a peaceful harbor. ... If only you listen closely, you can detect the pulse of the gods; if only you reach out your hand, you can gather in their mercy; if only you pay attention, you can be one with them.”
“The Attack” leaves its discord unresolved, but in a conversation with an old hermit named Zeev, Jaafari does hit upon a solution. “Every Jew in Palestine,” he tells Zeev, “is a bit of an Arab, and no Arab in Israel can deny that he's a little Jewish.”
“So why so much hate between relatives?” Zeev wonders.
Jaafari tells him “it's because we haven't learned much from the prophets and hardly anything about the elementary rules of life.”
“Then what's to be done?” Zeev asks.
“First of all, give God back his freedom. He's been hostage to our bigotries too long.”
That sentence alone is worth the price of this wonderfully humane book.
© The Philadelphia Inquirer
