A Little Piece of Ground (15 page)

Karim's jaw tightened with anger.

“Did he?”

“No. You don't know Salim.” Hopper spoke with a mixture of pride and regret. “He just turned his head away.”

“So what happened?”

“She said, ‘Pick it up,' and he didn't, didn't move at all. I was so scared. I knew something bad would happen. She went on saying, ‘Pick it up or you'll see what you get,' like she was really enjoying it. Really loving her power. In the end, Salim did. He had to, or his card would have gotten soaked through and been useless. I thought it was all over, and we started walking away, but this soldier, she went to another one, a man, and spoke to him, and he looked at Salim and shouted, ‘You, come here!' and he took his card and said, ‘It's impossible to read this. It's covered in mud. It's not valid any more. Go back. You can't go through.' And then it was awful. It was so awful.”

Hopper's voice trembled and he dashed his sleeve across his eyes. Karim didn't know what to do. Hopper had always seemed so tough before. Karim wanted to say something, but he couldn't find the words.

“Salim's got this temper,” Hopper went on. “When he gets going—he was beginning to lose it, I could tell. He grabbed the Israeli's arm and started shaking it and shouting. So two more of them came running, and they got him in an armlock and pushed him down to the ground, and he just looked up at me and said, ‘Look after Mama. Don't get into trouble.
'
”

“They took him away. It took Mama till last week to find out where he was. It was the first time she'd tried to visit him today. She started out at six o'clock this morning, and got through the checkpoints all right, got to Jerusalem and everything, and they kept her waiting till two—six hours—and then said she couldn't see him, she had to go home. She's been crying and crying. I just wanted to get away for a bit, so I came here, but I'll have to go back now. She's always scared I'll get arrested too.”

“She's right, with you planting fake bombs and stuff,” said Karim, to lighten the atmosphere.

Hopper grinned.

“My little bit of personal revenge.”

Joni picked up his schoolbag.

“We won't go on doing things here without you,” he said. “We'll wait till we can all do stuff together.”

Karim swallowed his disappointment. He'd been looking forward to a long session of planning and building.

“Yes, OK. Joni's right,” he said.

Hopper hesitated. Then he looked away and said, “I wish you'd come and see her. See Mama, I mean. She's scared I'm hanging out with some of the hard kids from the camp. She thinks I'm going to get involved in heavy stuff. Real bombings. It would be good if she could meet you.”

“Oh, so we're just a couple of softies,” said Joni.

Hopper's face went blank.

“It's OK. You don't have to come. Sorry I said anything.”

He turned to go.

“No, we will, of course we will,” Karim said hastily. “Hang on a minute while I change and hide my things.”

He dived into his changing place and came out a moment later in his good clothes. He crawled carefully into the car, murmured soothingly to the cat, hid the bundle of old clothes under the front seat, and wriggled out again.

“Cool idea, keeping stuff here,” said Hopper approvingly. “Come on. Let's go.”

Chapter Fourteen

The metal door at the front of the little stone house was ajar and Hopper pushed it further open, kicking off his shoes to leave them on the step outside. Karim and Joni followed shyly.

They'd entered a small living room with plain whitewashed walls. A sofa, bright with embroidered cushions, ran the length of one wall, and two big armchairs and a low coffee table, on which stood a small display of artificial flowers, used up most of the rest of the space. An old man was sitting on one of the chairs. His head was covered with a snowy-white keffiyeh, which was held in place by two circles of black rope. His eyes were bright and sharp against the weathered, wrinkled skin of his nut-brown face. He had been staring down at the floor, his hands resting on the head of his stick, but when the boys came in he looked up and his face brightened.

“
Ya
, Sami,” he said, looking at Hopper.

“Sami?” thought Karim, surprised. That must be Hopper's real name.

He looked at Hopper again. Having an ordinary name made him seem younger somehow.

Hopper bent down to kiss his grandfather.

“These are my friends,
sidi
,” he said. “Karim and Joni.”

“You are very welcome.” The old man waved a hand. “Sit down. Sit down.”

Hopper disappeared through an open doorway. Karim and Joni, sitting tongue-tied on the edge of the sofa, heard the clatter of dishes and murmur of voices beyond, then Hopper reappeared with his mother following. Karim recognized the woman carrying the sack who had called out to him before. She showed no sign of remembering him. Her eyes were red and her face was heavy with exhaustion, but she summoned up a smile.

“This is Joni. He goes to a private school,” Hopper said, trying to impress her. “And Karim. He's my friend from our school. He lives on the other side of town. He gets really good marks for everything.”

Karim wriggled with embarrassment. He could hardly believe the transformation that had come over Hopper. The daring, free-spirited boy had been replaced by a dutiful, respectful son. He seemed to have shrunk, to have become younger and smaller.

Hopper's mother pulled a few coins out of her pocket and passed them to him with a murmured instruction. He darted out of the main door and a few minutes later was back with a clutch of soda bottles in each hand. He opened them with a flick of the bottle opener lying on the table and passed them around. Karim and Joni drank gratefully, suddenly aware of their thirst.

“Is that Salim?” asked Karim, looking up at a framed picture hanging high on the wall, just below the ceiling. It showed a slim-faced young man with a serious expression.

“No. It's an old one. It's my father,” said Hopper.

The old man sighed and shook his head.

“Peace be upon him.”

Joni and Karim exchanged looks, feeling uncomfortable. Hopper's mother sighed heavily.

“It was one year ago, almost exactly,” she said.

“He went to Kuwait to find work,” Hopper explained gruffly. “There was nothing for him here. He used to send us money. That was how we managed to move out of the camp into this place. But there was an accident at the building site where he worked. We never found out exactly what happened.”

Tears, which seemed to have been held back only by the boys' arrival, began to slide gently down his mother's face, and Hopper's grandfather leaned across and patted her hand.

“Karim's really good at soccer, Mama,” Hopper said hastily. “We've been playing together.”

His mother wiped her eyes and smiled.

“Good. Very good. You boys keep out of trouble. One son in prison is enough.”

Joni's eyes had been wandering around the room, sliding over the picture of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the framed motto which read, in scarlet cross-stitch, “God Bless Our Home.” They had come to a rest on a large old key hanging from a nail.

Hopper's grandfather saw what he was looking at.

“That's the key to our house,” he said, nodding.

Joni glanced sideways at the metal door. The key looked too heavy and old-fashioned to fit it.

“Not this house,” the old man said. “Our house in Ramle.”

Joni looked surprised.

“But Ramle's in Israel,” he said. “I thought they didn't allow us to go there.”

The grandfather's eyes snapped.

“What they allow! What they don't allow! I remember, to this day, exactly how they drove us out. More than fifty years ago, but I can see it like yesterday. Panic, terror, guns firing everywhere. We were the lucky ones. So many others were shot. My mother locked the door of our house as we left and gave me the key. ‘Look after it,' she said. ‘We'll be back soon. A few weeks, maybe, when things have calmed down.
'

“How could she possibly know that they'd take our house and everything in it, and never let us go home again?”

A red flush was suffusing his face. He seemed about to explode, but he caught Hopper's eye, stopped and shook his head. “Well, boys, so you're soccer players, are you? That's good. Palestine for the World Cup, eh?”

Everyone laughed, glad that the tension had been relieved.

“Thank you,” Hopper said a few minutes later, when they'd left the house and were skirting his mother's neatly laid-out vegetable patch towards the road. “Meeting you cheered them up, I could tell. They're really upset about Salim, and they keep going on and on about how worried they are whenever I'm not there.”

“You can't exactly blame them, when you go around pretending to blow things up,” said Joni.

Hopper grinned sheepishly. Karim wasn't listening. He was thinking about Hopper's family and the awful things that had happened to them.

“I'm sorry about your father, dying like that in Kuwait,” he said awkwardly.

He was wondering how he would manage if Baba had died and Jamal was in prison. The very idea was making him shudder.

Hopper's really, really brave, he thought admiringly.

“Is it just you and Salim in your family?” said Joni, taking a tissue from his pocket to wipe a sticky drip of soda from his chin. “You haven't got any more brothers and sisters?”

“I've got a sister. Muna. She's married. She lives in the camp.” Hopper jerked his chin towards the warren of jumbled buildings and narrow, overcrowded lanes further down the hill.

“Was that really the key to your house in Ramle?” Karim asked curiously.

“Yes. And we're going to keep it forever, till they let us go back to our old house again.” Hopper sounded fierce.

“The Israelis will never let the refugees go back home, though,” said Karim, then wished he hadn't.

Hopper didn't answer, but squared his shoulders defiantly.

I'm glad I'm not a refugee, thought Karim. He'd never wondered before what it must have been like for the people in the camp.

Joni said, “I've got to go home. My father's fixed some extra math lessons for me. The teacher's coming this evening.”

They said goodbye to Hopper and began to walk quickly back into town. Neither of them was in the mood for talking.

“Thanks for the photo,” Karim said, when they came to parting ways.

“You can have the original any time you like,” said Joni. “Sisters were deliberately put on earth to torture brothers. I know this.”

“You're right,” said Karim, thinking of Farah. “You are so right.”

Farah and Rasha were playing in the girls' bedroom when he arrived home. He could hear their high excited voices as they tried to cajole Sireen into wearing something or doing something that she clearly didn't like.

“Is Jamal at home?” he said to his mother as casually as he could.

She gave him a sharp look.

“Yes. Where have you been?”

“With Joni,” Karim said virtuously. “We were doing—artwork with photographs.”

“Artwork?” Lamia looked surprised. “I didn't know you were interested in... ”

But Karim had already gone into his room and shut the door behind him.

All the way home, he had been hugging himself with pleasure at the thought of presenting the photograph to Jamal. He'd been preening himself on his cleverness, looking forward to Jamal's praise and, above all, to the return of Lineman. But now that Jamal's moody, handsome face was right there in front of him, now that Jamal was staring up at him with a sardonic lift to his eyebrows, Karim didn't feel quite so confident. The retouched photo, with the rubbed bits round the eyes and upper lip, might be worse than he remembered. Jamal might think he was being cheeky or something.