'Wearing?'
'Her clothing.'
'A dress? I don't know.'
'What color?'
'White, I think.'
'Plain white?'
'I think. What does it matter?'
'And which earrings was she wearing?'
'The only ones she had.'
'Which are those?'
'Little gold rings-they put them on her at birth.'
Anwar began to cry.
'Solid gold?' asked Daniel.
'Yes? no? I don't know. They looked gold. What does it matter!'
'I'm sorry,' said Daniel. 'These are questions I have to ask.'
Anwar slumped in his chair, limp and defeated.
'Did you talk to your father about taking her back?' asked Daniel.
A violent shake of the head, trembling lips. Even at this point, the fear of the father remained.
'No, no! I couldn't! It was too soon, I knew what he would say! A few days later I went to the monastery to talk to her, to tell her to wait. I asked her if she was still seeing the lying dog and she said she was, that they loved each other! I ordered her to stop seeing him but she refused, said I was cruel, that all men were cruel. All men except for him. We? argued and I left. It was the last time I saw her.'
Anwar buried his face.
'The very last?'
'No.' Muffled. 'One more time.'
'Did you see Abdelatif again, as well?'
The brother looked up and smiled. A wholehearted grin that made his ravaged face glow. Throwing back his shoulders | and sitting up straighter, he recited in a clear, loud voice: 'He who does not take revenge from the transgressor would better be dead than to walk without pride!'
Reciting the proverb seemed to have infused new life into him. He balled one hand into a fist and recited several other Arabic sayings, all pertaining to the honor of vengeance. Took off his glasses and stared myopically into space. Smiling.
'The obligation? the honor was mine,' he said. 'We were of the same mother.'
Such a sad case, thought Daniel, watching him posture. He'd read the arrest report, seen the reports from the doctors at Hadassah who'd examined Anwar after the assault arrest, the psychiatric recommendations. The Polaroid pictures, like something out of a medical book. A fancy diagnosis-congenital micropenis with accompanying epispaedia-that did nothing but give a name to the poor guy's misery. Born with a tiny, deformed stump of a male organ, the urethra nothing more than a flat strip of mucous membrane on the upper surface of what should have been a shaft but was only a useless nub. Bladder abnormalities that made it hard for the guy to hold his water- when they'd stripped him before booking him he'd been wearing layers of cloth fashioned into a crude homemade diaper.
One of God's cruel little jokes? Daniel had wondered, then stopped wondering, knowing it was useless.
Plastic surgery could have helped a little, according to the Hadassah doctors. There were specialists in Europe and the United States who did that kind of thing: multiple reconstructive surgeries over a period of several years in order to create something a bit more normal-looking. But the end result would still be far from manly. This was one of the severest cases any of them had ever seen.
The whore had thought so too.
After years of conflict and deliberation, propelled by cloudy motivations that he ill understood, Anwar had walked, late one night, toward the Green Line. To a place near Sheikh Jarrah where his brothers said the whores hung out. He'd found one leaning against a battered Fiat, old and shopworn and coarse, with vulgar yellow hair. But warm-voiced and welcoming and eager.
They'd come quickly to terms, Anwar unaware that he was being blatantly overcharged, and he'd climbed into the backseat of her Fiat. Recognizing the terror of inexperience, the whore had cooed at him, smiled at him, and lied about how cute he was, stroking him and wiping the sweat from his brow. But when she'd unbuttoned his fly and reached for him, the smiling and cooing had stopped. And when she'd pulled him out, her shock and revulsion had caused her to laugh.
Anwar had gone crazy with rage and humiliation. Lunging for the whore's throat, trying to strangle the laughter out of her. She'd fought back, bigger and stronger than he, pummeling and gouging and calling him freak. Screaming for help at the top of her lungs.
An undercover cop had heard it all and busted poor Anwar. The whore had given her statement, then left town. The police had been unable to locate her. Not that they'd tried too hard. Prostitution was a low-priority affair, the act itself legal, solicitation the offense. If the whores and their customers kept quiet, it was live and let live. Even in Tel Aviv, where three or four dozen girls worked the beaches at night, making plenty of noise, busts were rare unless things got nasty.
No complaint, first offense, no trial. Anwar had walked free with a recommendation that his family obtain
