A Little Piece of Ground (18 page)

He was about to turn and go back inside when he caught sight of Farah sitting by herself on the steps that led up to the entrance of the building. She was clutching her doll tightly against her chest. Another girl was standing in front of her, her hands on her hips, her head on one side, while several other children stood around and watched.

Karim couldn't hear what the girl was saying, but he saw his sister flinch, then lunge forward and shout something. The other children laughed. Karim could see Rasha now, standing awkwardly against the wall a little ways away, watching and chewing her thumb. The four or five other children began to skip about and chant. The words floated up clearly to the balcony, five floors above.

“Farah smells of wee-wee! Farah smells of wee-wee!”

Pity for his sister and rage at her tormentors sent Karim flying out of the apartment and down the stairs before he knew what he was doing. He burst out of the main door of the building with the energy of a charging bull, his eyes blazing.

“You,” he said, pointing to the ringleader, “are a little brat with so much dirt under your fingernails you could grow an olive grove out of your hands.” His finger swiveled to the next child. “And your hair's like a bird's nest. It's probably full of worms and bird poo.”

The children stared back at him, their mouths open.

“As for you,” he said to the next one, “you look as if you've been rolling in donkey dung. You're totally disgusting. I can smell you from here.”

He was so impressed with his own inventiveness that his anger had ebbed away.

“What about me?” the smallest child said, edging expectantly in front of the others. “What's wrong with me?”

“Snot coming out of your nose, sleepy dust in your eyes, face like Mickey Mouse, no front teeth,” Karim said, unable to stop himself from smiling at the child's pleased expression.

Rasha had sidled around from behind the others and was sitting on the step beside Farah, pressed up against her.

“You want to come in now, Farah?” Karim said casually.

Farah looked sideways at Rasha, who shook her head, then at the others, then up at Karim. She swallowed and said, “Walid
hasn't really got worms in his hair, Karim. Only caterpillars.”

The joke wasn't very funny, but the others laughed, their bullying forgotten.

“Suit yourself,” Karim said. He turned to go back up the stairs, catching a smile of dazzling gratitude from Farah as he reached the main door.

He felt satisfied and masterful as he let himself back into the apartment and checked the time, woke Sireen, gave her her medicine and set up another cartoon for her to watch.

He'd been shocked by the sight of Farah, miserably alone, the object of the others' teasing. He'd never really thought about her as a real person. A real child. He'd only ever seen her as a nuisance. Now that he came to think of it, though, she'd been different lately, more easily scared, less assertive, crying at the sound of loud voices, becoming frantic at the sound of explosions or distant gunfire.

He yawned. The last hour of the afternoon stretched endlessly ahead. There was nothing he wanted to do, nothing he could settle on. He could think only of Hopper and Joni, and wonder what they were doing at Hopper's ground.

Joni phoned half an hour after Lamia came home.

“The flag looks even better,” he said. “We found more paint and made it bigger. You can see it from miles away now.”

“Great,” said Karim enviously.

“The paint dripped all over the place though. We got green in our hair and everywhere. 'Specially Hopper. He looks like a Martian. Are you coming tomorrow?”

“Can't. Got to babysit again. The neighbor's still away. Thursday maybe.”

“See you, then.”

“Yes, see you.”

Chapter Eighteen

There's never any time for anything now, Karim kept telling himself. Life had indeed become more stressful. The teachers at school were laying on a heavy load of work, anxious, after the weeks of disruption, to make up for lost time; certain, too, that it would not be long before Israeli tanks rolled back into town to bring the curfew down and lock everyone inside their houses again.

Karim did his best at school, but he couldn't concentrate. His thoughts kept sliding back, as if on oiled wheels, to Hopper's ground. It had assumed wonderful dimensions in his imagination. The soccer area was still central, of course—it would always be the most important thing—but there were little offshoots to it as well now. He mentally constructed a stadium, small but perfect, and a press stand and changing rooms for the players. Then—why not?—at the edge there'd be a whole area, a little street almost, with all the places he liked best. An Internet café where they'd have all the best games and they'd never have to pay and they'd always be first in line. And stalls selling drinks and snacks. And a little cinema, which would only show the most exciting films.

The dream always faded more quickly than it should have. The bubble always burst. An Internet cafe? Was he crazy? A cinema? Snack stalls? There wasn't even room, at Hopper's ground, to play a decent game of soccer. It was just a piece of ground, that was all, with a mass of rubble along one side.

Very often, at this point, Karim's dream coincided with a nasty reminder of present-day reality, a smack on the head from Mr. Mohammed, or a sharp question from another teacher who was suddenly standing over him, shaming him in front of the whole class.

There was no chance to actually go back to Hopper's ground and get on with things. It wasn't only the mounds of homework he was supposed to be doing. Rasha's mother was back and was looking after the girls as usual while Lamia was at work, but his father kept asking him to help out at the shop after school.

Hassan Aboudi had lifted himself out of the depression that had started to paralyze him and was doggedly trying to make a go of his business again, setting up a new window display and poring over catalogues, trying to predict what might possibly tempt the hard-pressed citizens of Ramallah to part with their dwindling supplies of cash. Karim's job was to continue with the endless clearing up, the sweeping and cleaning, and to hold the fort in the front of the shop, in case a customer should come in, while his father saw to things in the storeroom at the back.

In spite of his preoccupations, Karim couldn't help noticing that Jamal was more tense and tight-lipped than usual. The photo of Violette, carefully hidden between books on a high shelf (out of reach of Farah's inquisitively probing fingers) was still taken out and gazed upon at frequent intervals, but Jamal appeared to have other things on his mind as well. The card on his cell phone had run out at last and he was forced to resort to the family's land line. Calls from his best friend, Basim, always frequent, had multiplied. In the past the two of them had usually met down in the town in the evenings, hanging out around the cafés or shopping malls, but Karim sensed that something else was afoot. Jamal was definitely up to something.

It was mid-afternoon on a Wednesday. Karim had been reluctantly helping his father to move boxes from the back to the front of the shop. Released at last, he was leaving to go home when he caught sight of Jamal and Basim walking fast along the other side of the street, weaving through the crowds of people, dodging between the bins that street sellers had set up on every spare corner of pavement. They looked so intent and purposeful, so taut with determination, that Karim's curiosity was aroused.

“I'm going to see Joni, Baba,” he called to his father, at the back of the shop. “I won't be home late, I promise.”

Then he slipped across the road and, keeping out of sight, began to follow the older boys.

It was difficult at first. The pavements were crowded and Karim was too short to see over people's heads, but it was easier once Jamal and Basim had passed the main shopping area.

Karim had expected them to carry on down the wide road that led out of the old center of Ramallah towards Kalandia, the main checkpoint on the road to Jerusalem, where Israeli troops manned permanent sandbagged gun nests, a high watchtower and a complex system of concrete-wall channels which tightly controlled the flow of traffic, sometimes allowing people to pass and then, without warning, shutting the checkpoint so that turmoil was created on either side. To his surprise, however, they turned suddenly to the right and began to stride down the steep hill, where the road was lined by new apartment blocks. It was harder for Karim to keep out of sight here, in this residential area, where there were few people and no street stalls among which he could hide, but Jamal and Basim were so intent and purposeful, bouncing, almost, on the balls of their feet as they walked, that Karim didn't think they'd be likely to turn round.

They had nearly reached the bottom of the slope, where the steep street ran into another lying along the side of the hill. Karim, still halfway up, heard shouted greetings and saw two other young men run towards them from the left. He screwed up his eyes, trying to recognize them. It was difficult because they had each wrapped a black and white checked keffiyeh around their head and the lower half of their face, leaving only their eyes exposed, but he was fairly sure that the shorter, stockier one was Basim's brother, and the tall, lithe one in the zip-up denim jacket was Tarik, the coolest guy among Jamal's set of friends, the one the others all looked up to.

Tarik and Basim's brother were pointing back towards the way they had come, and all four young men started off in that direction, then almost at once stopped again. Tarik pointed to Jamal's neck, then to Basim's. Karim, who had sneaked down as far as the junction and was peering round at them from the shelter of a high stone wall, saw Jamal and Basim take off their own keffiyehs
,
which they were wearing in the normal way as scarves around their necks, and wrap them around their heads in imitation of the other two. He was close enough to hear them talk in the quietness of this residential street.

“Have you got a sling?” Tarik asked Jamal.

“No,” Jamal answered.

Karim nearly snorted out loud. Jamal? Mr. Butterfingers himself? Throwing stones from a sling? In spite of the tension that was knotting up his stomach, Karim was glad he'd come. Jamal was going to make a total mess of this, he was sure of it. It would be a pleasure to watch.

Tarik reached inside his pocket and handed Jamal a long, thin strip of cloth. Jamal took it and pulled it taut, pretending to test its strength. Tarik looked at Basim, who pulled a sling from his own pocket and dangled it proudly in front of Tarik's eyes. It was made of a small strip of rubber, from the inner tube of a car tire, with pieces of string attached to either end.

“Excellent.”

Tarik patted Basim on the shoulder, nodded at Jamal, then set off at the head of the little group. Karim rounded the corner after them and, slipping quickly from one protective gateway to the next, followed as closely as he dared.

Their goal was soon apparent. The empty side road they were on soon ran into a much busier one coming up from the valley below. A flying Israeli roadblock had been set up here. An armored Jeep with a yellow light flashing on the roof blocked one half of the road, and a tank a little further on jutted right out across the other side, so that anyone passing through, on foot or in a car, would have to weave their way past both, under the barrel of the tank's big gun. No one at all was going through at the moment. Barbed wire had been rolled out right across the road and wickedly pointed “dragon's teeth,” designed to shred the tires of any cars that ran over them, were scattered across the ground. News of the barricade seemed to have spread, because no one was lining up to cross. Anyone coming this way would have taken in the situation at a glance and turned to find another, much longer, way around.

Karim felt the usual punch of fear and hatred at the sight of the enemy. He could see from the tautness in the four young men in front of him that they were feeling it too. They were collecting stones now as they went, needing only to bend down in order to scoop up any number of small rocks and bits of broken concrete, smashed pieces of pavement, which the tanks had all but pulverized.

Tarik, the leader in every way, had been holding the others back while they settled the stones into the pouches of their slings. Then, with an ear-splitting yell in which Karim could just distinguish the words “Free Palestine!” he ran forward, whirling his long-stringed catapult expertly round his head. He released one string of it with a final flick of the wrist. The stone smacked into the side of the armored Jeep with a satisfying clang and bounced off it down to the ground.

The reaction was as instant as if he'd hit a hornets' nest. Of the five Israeli soldiers, three had been on the far side of the tank, laughing at an old farmer who, with panicky haste, was trying to turn a small truck loaded with vegetables in the narrow confines of the road. Two of them came running at once, while the third climbed hastily into the tank and began to maneuver its gigantic gun barrel to face the boys.

By now, Basim and his brother had fired off their stones too. Basim's had hit the ground just short of the Jeep. His brother's, by a lucky chance, had whistled close past the steel helmet of one of the two soldiers who had been leaning against the Jeep. They instantly retreated behind their vehicle and, using it as a barricade, laid their rifles along the roof of it and took aim at the boys down their sights.