A Little Piece of Ground (2 page)

There was no chance, none at all, that he'd be able to go outside and play his game while the tank was there. Since a Palestinian gunman had shot two people in an Israeli café two weeks ago, the Israelis had set up another curfew, which meant that the whole city had been locked down. Everyone in Ramallah had been trapped indoors for those two weeks, unable to go out (except for a two-hour break once or twice a week) by night or day. If anyone tried—if they so much as stuck a foot out of their front door—the soldiers would open fire and blow it away. Jamal was right. Even standing by the window was dangerous.

He turned away. He wished now that he hadn't looked down at his soccer field. It had made him long to be outside, to be able to run and jump, to swing his arms and kick.

“Anyway,” he said to Jamal, “I haven't noticed you being so fantastic at scoring yourself.”

Jamal turned his head to stare at him.

“What are you talking about?”

“You're a lousy shot. You know you are,” Karim said daringly. “I saw you and your friends throwing stones at the tanks last week. You missed, every time. And don't pretend you weren't aiming at them, because you were.”

Jamal sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, pleased to have an excuse for a wrestling bout at last.

“You little spy. You've been following me again.”

He advanced on Karim, his arms outstretched. Karim shifted away, shuffling up to the head of his bed, wrinkling the scarlet blanket with his white-socked feet, his back against the wall, his hands held up in surrender.

“Lay off me, will you? I won't tell Mama. Not if you leave me alone.” He registered with satisfaction the look of caution that had crossed Jamal's face. “And,” he went on, “I won't tell Baba either, if you give me one hour of totally unrestricted time on the computer without a single interruption. No, two.”

Disgusted, Jamal retreated. Karim could see that he was searching for something cutting to say, and failing. With one hunch of his shoulder, he turned away to the table, grabbed his headphones, hurled himself down onto his bed and clamped them to his ears.

Thrilled with his triumph, Karim jumped up and settled himself at the computer, which took up almost the whole of the table between the two beds. He would do it this time. He would get up to Level 5 in Lineman. He'd nearly managed it last week, but then there'd been a power cut and the computer had crashed just as victory was in sight.

He pushed the tottering pile of textbooks to the edge of the table. He had lists of English words to learn, as well as the dates of the Arab Conquests.

“They can stop you coming to school,” his teacher had said, before the curfew had been imposed, “but don't let them stop you learning. Work at home. Your future is Palestine's. Your country needs you. Don't forget it.”

He'd tried to work once or twice, but it had been impossible to concentrate for long, with Jamal coming in and out of the room all the time, and Farah and Sireen, his two little sisters, noisily playing in the living room next door. After a few minutes, he'd usually ended up leafing through old comics and weaving delightful daydreams, imagining, for example, that Jamal was a million miles away, preferably in a space capsule endlessly orbiting around the planet Jupiter—or Saturn, he didn't mind which—and that the computer was his and his alone.

And now, for the next two hours, it was.

When my two hours are up I'll do some real work on biology, he told himself, as he stared at the screen, waiting for the game to boot up.

Peace settled on the room. Jamal had got up and gone back into the sitting room, to settle himself on the old red velvet sofa and watch the news with his father. Sireen, who was four and had been crying all morning, had stopped at last, and Farah, who was eight, seemed to have gone across the landing to play with her best friend, Rasha, who lived in the apartment opposite.

The game began. At once, he was totally absorbed.

The opening moves were familiar. He'd played Lineman often enough to go through them almost automatically. Soon, though, he was doing the harder stuff. He tensed over the keyboard, his eyes boring into the screen, his fingers responding with lightning speed to his brain's commands. Slowly he was climbing through the levels. This time, he might really make it.

The door of the bedroom opened. He didn't look around, but he sensed his mother's presence. He needn't need to turn and look at her to know that a deep frown was scoring her forehead between her sharp black brows.

“You want an education, Karim, or you want to grow up like your uncle Bashir?” She paused, waiting for an answer. Karim said nothing. “You want to mend roads for the next fifty years? Break your back in the hot sun, shoveling dirt?” Another silence. “Suit yourself. Don't expect me to wash your dirty clothes for the rest of your life, that's all.”

He grunted, having barely heard what she had said. She sighed with exasperation and closed the door again. The game went on. One by one, the targets fell, and level succeeded level. Breathless, almost dizzy, Karim willed the screen to obey him, and when at last it exploded into stars as he reached the highest level, his head seemed to explode too.

“Ye-e-ess!” he yelled, and he slammed out of the bedroom into the sitting room and danced around the rest of his family, punching the air in triumph. “I did it! I did it! Level Five! First time ever! Champion of the world! Victory is mine! Yield and obey, all lesser mortals!”

Jamal got up off the sofa.

“Level Five? In Lineman? Let me see.”

He pushed past Karim into the bedroom.

Hassan Aboudi, Karim's father, was sitting bent over on the sofa, staring at the TV screen, watching people wailing at a funeral. The announcer's solemn voice seemed to fill the room.

Five Palestinians, including two children, died during clashes between Israeli soldiers and stone-throwing youths in the West Bank town of Nablus this morning.

Hassan Aboudi turned to look angrily at Karim.

“Stop that noise right now,” he snapped. “Get back to your homework or I'll take the damned computer away.”

Lamia, Karim's mother, was half reclining on an easy chair nearby. Her legs were crossed and a pink slipper dangled from her raised foot. Sireen had been sleeping against her chest, but she woke at the noise and struggled in her mother's arms, beginning to cry fretfully again. The mark of a button from Lamia's red blouse showed clearly on the little girl's cheek.

“Now look what you've done,” Lamia said reproachfully, lifting the damp black curls off Sireen's hot little forehead. “You know how sick she is. Don't you remember what an earache feels like? I had just gotten her settled, poor little thing. You might think what it's like for other people sometimes, Karim. Or is that really too much to ask?”

Jamal lounged back into the room, his hands in his pockets.

“It was only Level Four, you sad person. Thought you were one of the big boys, huh? Well, I've got news for you. You aren't.”

Karim felt his pleasure and triumph drain away and the miserable sense of imprisonment that the game had kept at bay for the last two happy hours closed in on him again.

“I hate you! You're lying! You know you are!” he shouted, aiming a blow at Jamal's chest.

Jamal laughed and ducked out of the way. Karim rushed back to look at the computer screen, but Jamal had turned the machine off. Now he couldn't prove a thing.

Desperate to be alone, to get away from his whole unbearable family, he went to the front door, opened it, stepped outside, and closed it after him. The landing and stairs weren't much, but at least he'd be on his own for a bit.

Almost at once the door behind him opened again.

“Karim,” his father said, his voice tense with anxiety, “what do you think you're doing? Get back in here right now.”

“I'm not going outside, Baba,” Karim said. “I'll stay on the landing. I just—I need to be on my own for a minute.”

His father's face softened.

“All right, but only for a little while. Don't go near the window. Don't let them see you. Keep yourself out of sight. Come back in after ten minutes or your mother will start going crazy on me.”

The sound of the TV news followed Karim out through the open door of the apartment.

Israeli troops shelled a refugee camp in Gaza this morning, killing nine Palestinians, including a three-year-old child. Five Israeli women died and three children were badly injured when a Palestinian gunman opened fire in a crowded shopping street in Jerusalem this morning. A spokesman....

He pulled the door closed behind him, shutting the voice out, then balled his fist and punched at the wall, painfully grazing his knuckles.

Chapter Two

Three more eternal days passed before the curfew was lifted and then the break was only for two hours. A soldier on the tank down below shouted the news through a megaphone.

“From six o'clock in the evening for two hours,” his voice boomed, “going out of your houses is permitted.”

Lamia let out a sob of relief.

“If they'd kept us penned up in here one more day,” she said, wringing out a cool cloth to lay on Sireen's head, “this child's ear infection would have gone into her brain. Her temperature's been way up for three days now. And anyway, we've almost run out of food.”

Her husband was already on the telephone. He replaced the receiver and turned to her.

“Dr. Selim's given me the name of the right antibiotic. I'll take her down to the pharmacy as soon as we can get out. He says to start her with a double dose tonight.”

He went off to his bedroom, shaking his head.

“Punishing children,” Karim heard him mutter. “Let God punish them.”

It wasn't only Sireen's ear that was likely to be saved by the break in the curfew, thought Karim. Just one more day of imprisonment and there would have been a massacre of the entire Aboudi family. He himself would have personally murdered both Farah and Jamal, his parents would have murdered each other, and the whole family would have ganged up to murder him.

He fished his cell phone out from the mess of stuff on the shelf above his bed and punched in the number of Joni, his best friend.

“I've got to take my homework into school and get a whole lot more,” he told him. “Have you?”

“No. My teacher called. He's coming by my father's shop. He says he'll pick it up there.”

“You are lucky,” Karim said enviously. “I wish I went to your school. They're much stricter at mine. There's only two hours. We won't have time to meet.”

“Yes, we will. I'll come down to your school. I'll meet you at the gate.”

The last few minutes before six o'clock came seemed to Karim like the longest since the curfew had begun. He felt like a can of Pepsi that had been shaken up and was full of fizz, just bursting to shoot out in a wild, frothing spray.

By 5:55 the whole family was poised to rush out. Lamia waited, impatiently smoothing down the blue material of her skirt, her purse in her hand. Hassan was holding Sireen, ready to run with her down to the pharmacy. Farah was frantically searching her bedroom for the pink top she was determined to put on before she skipped out to play in the apartment courtyard with the other children of the building. Karim, in clean jeans and a fresh sweatshirt, was reluctantly putting together his homework. It was only now that he came to look at the scrappy bits of paper and the half-finished exercises in his books that he realized how little he'd managed to do.

The hands on the fancy pendulum clock that hung on the living room wall moved around to six at last, and with it came the longed-for revving of the tanks' engines. With the front door ajar, everyone listened eagerly as the huge machines clanked away from the street corner and retreated to the bottom of the hill.

Jamal, his thick hair freshly gelled, was the first out. He jumped down the stairs six at a time, with Karim right after him.

“Karim! Meet me at the supermarket at seven thirty!” his mother screeched after him. “I can't carry all the shopping back on my own. And Jamal, if you're not back before eight, I'll... ”

But neither boy heard what she planned to do. They were out on the street already.

The fresh air on his face, the wind in his hair and the wonderful liberty to run and jump intoxicated Karim. He had taken the bottom flight of steps in one wild leap and now he was jumping up and down and running around the parking lot in a wide joyful circle.

Jamal had taken off at the speed of a bullet, but instead of going up the hill, towards the school, he was racing down it. Karim stopped running and watched him, eyes narrowed. He guessed what Jamal had in mind. He would be meeting up with Basim and his other friends and making for the wrecked bus park which the soldiers had taken over and where they had their base. He could imagine the great armored machines lying down there, like a row of green scaly monsters, crouched, waiting to crawl back up the hill and pin the people of Ramallah down in their houses again when the two precious hours of freedom were up.