A Little Piece of Ground (8 page)

“She doesn't want to go. Hates the idea of leaving her family. But I keep telling her the kids would have a better future in America. We're finished. Palestine's finished.”

Karim usually ate his almonds slowly, crunching them pleasurably one by one. This time he shoveled them all up in a single spoonful, put them into his mouth, chewed hastily, and swallowed. Then he pushed his chair back and stood up. He couldn't bear the conversation any longer.

Farah and Sireen had already abandoned the table and were sitting on the sofa watching TV. Karim sat down in the far corner and stared unseeingly at the screen. A Syrian soap opera was on, a series he usually enjoyed. Tonight, though, it seemed unbearably stupid and pointless.

The program ended and the screen was filled by a whirling globe, heralding the news. The announcer looked down at his notes, then stared into the camera.

A suicide bomber detonated a massive bomb outside a café in Jerusalem this afternoon. Eleven Israelis were killed. Four of them were secondary-school students, relaxing after their exams. The bomber has not been named.

Something like triumph exploded in Karim's head.

“Yes!” he whispered. “
Yes!”

The conversation at the table had stopped. The adults, some with spoons or forks halfway to their mouths, had stopped eating and had swivelled round in their chairs to look at the TV.

“What? What's happened?” said Lamia, who had been in the kitchen and was now emerging with another bowl of lamb and okra stew.

“A bombing operation,” said Hassan quietly. “In Jerusalem. Eleven dead.”

Lamia grunted and put the bowl down on the table.

“Where did the bomber come from? Did they say?”

“No, listen. He hasn't finished yet. Yes, there you are. Ramallah or Bethlehem. They're not sure yet.”

“There'll be reprisals,” said Lamia, shaking her head. “The tanks'll come back in. They'll probably bomb the refugee camps. We might not be able to get home.”

“Not if he came from Bethlehem,” said Hassan. “They'll catch the worst of it there. They'll find his family's home and bulldoze it, then they'll put the whole city back under curfew.”

“Isn't your mother in Bethlehem?” Um Hassan turned to one of the brothers-in-law who had been discussing emigration.

“Yes.” Looking worried, he had already reached for his cell phone. “I'll call her and remind her to stock up on her blood-
pressure pills. Last time the tanks came in she ran out of them. She could easily have had a stroke.”

Karim wanted to shout at everyone, “Didn't you hear what the man said? The guy sacrificed his own life! He was a hero—a martyr! He did something for all of us—for Palestine! Don't you care?” He got up off the sofa and went outside into the darkness. He'd never felt so angry and lonely before.

He heard a chair scrape back in the room behind him and was afraid that someone would come out and ask him what the matter was. To get away, he ran around the side of the house to the old storerooms at the back. No one would be likely to come here.

Too late, he realized that the light in one of the two storerooms was on and that someone was coming out. It was his uncle. Karim turned to slink back, out of the light, but Abu Feisal had seen him.

“Karim,” he said. “It's you.” He didn't sound at all surprised. “Come in here. I want to show you something.”

Reluctantly, Karim followed his uncle into the storeroom. He'd hardly ever been in this old room, and never after dark. It was big and square. The vaulted ceiling, from which hung a single light bulb, rose to a high point. Niches in the stone walls held bottles of olives and drying onions. A bundle of kindling lay near the door and in the center of the room, lipping over a pile of hay, stood a donkey.

“Have you been in here before?” said Abu Feisal, going across to the donkey and laying a work-calloused hand on its stiff, wiry mane.

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Karim.

“I was born in this room,” said Abu Feisal. “This is where your grandparents lived, and your greats, and their greats, for hundreds of years, in this one and the other room next to it. Your grandfather, God rest him, built the modern house in front, with the money he earned in Saudi Arabia. But this is the old family home.”

Karim looked round. He couldn't imagine how the room must once have been, how people had really lived in here.

“They slept here and everything?”

Abu Feisal was gathering up the scattered hay into a pile and pushing it under the donkey's nose.

“Yes. It was cool in the summer and warm in winter. Not bad at all. Not modern, of course. We had oil lamps for lights and no running water. Just like it'll be in the future if the settlers go on shooting our water tanks and taking all our water.”

He ran a hand down the donkey's back. The grey flank twitched and the sleepy animal lifted a hoof and flicked its tail.

“He had a sore on his back, here,” said Abu Feisal. “It's healed up now. I'm still keeping an eye on it, though.”

Karim went up to the donkey and looked. He could hardly see where the sore had been. The sweet smell of its breath and the calm way it stood were soothing.

Abu Feisal sat down on a full sack of animal feed and looked up at Karim from under his heavy white eyebrows.

“You've had a bad day,” he observed.

Karim felt as if the blood was rushing to his head.

“Nobody does anything!” he burst out. “My father—they stripped him! Then they shot at him—us—in our own olive groves! But he doesn't do anything. And back in there, when they all heard about the bomber—the martyr—all they could talk about was whether they'd get home all right or not. I feel so—so ashamed!”

He slumped down onto a sack opposite his uncle.

For a moment, Abu Feisal said nothing. Then he reached down for a wisp of straw and began twirling it between his fingers.

“It's not simple,” he said at last. “Nothing's simple.”

“It is,
sidi
, it is! They take our land and kill us. We should fight back and kill them. That's justice! That's all there is!”

Abu Feisal tucked his robe around his feet.

“Listen. I'll tell you something. When they first occupied us, in 1967, long before you were born, I was here in the village, working on the farm. I was young, like you, but I had time, every day, to think things over. There's always time for thinking, on the farm. I said to myself, ‘Maybe they're right. Maybe they are better than us, and they have the right to take our land and do what they want with it. Maybe we really are the worthless, ignorant people they say we are.'”

Karim's face was red with anger and he was wriggling impatiently on the sack. His uncle took no notice.

“So I watched them closely, for a long time. I was trying to decide if they were superior beings or not. In the end, I saw that they were not. They were bad, good, moral, immoral, some greedy and vain, some kind-hearted and suffering, all just men, women, and children—like the rest of us. Human beings.”

“Human? You call those settlers human?”

“Yes. Human. Like us. And that's what I find so depressing. Watching them, I see what we humans are capable of. I know that we could be like them too. They've shown me how bad human nature can be. If we had power over them, or over anyone else, for that matter, we'd do the same things that they do. It's what happens when the conquerors rule the conquered. The powerful hate their victims or they wouldn't be able to bear the thought of what they're doing to them. In their eyes we're nothing—inferior, barely human. They can't abide the knowledge that I learned long ago—that we're all the same.”

Karim was silent for a moment, then, half under his breath, he said,
“We're
not bad. They are. Look at how many Palestinian kids they've murdered. We throw stones at them. They shoot bullets at us, to kill.”

“So, does it make it right for us to go and bomb them? Those schoolkids who died today—they were probably the same age as you or Jamal. Did they deserve to die? How do you think their families feel tonight? And what about the ones who were injured? Legs and arms blown off, scarred for life, blind maybe?”

Karim could hardly bear to listen to his uncle any longer.

“They hate us. They're trying to destroy us. I hate them, all of them. I don't care how old they are. It's simple,
sidi
, like I said. As simple as that.”

Abu Feisal laughed, but his eyes were sad.

“You think that now, but you'll remember what I said. It's not really that simple at all.”

Everyone, except for the children, was still sitting at the table when Karim and his uncle went back into the room. No one seemed to have noticed that they'd been gone.

A sort of desperate cheerfulness was in the air.

“Have another olive,” Um Hassan was saying, as she pushed the earthenware bowl of gleaming green olives across the table to her daughter-in-law. “Who knows whether we'll have any at all to pick next year?”

Lamia leaned back from the table and patted her stomach.

“I couldn't. I've eaten so much already.”

“Well, why should we worry?” said a cousin, drawing the bowl towards himself and picking out an olive. “The Israelis love us so much they'll pick our olives for us next year and sell them to us at a special price—a high one.”

The joke raised a few smiles, but nobody laughed.

“Wallah
,
”
sighed an old aunt. “When will these people go away and leave us alone?”

“When did anyone leave us alone?” said Abu Feisal, who had taken his place near the foot of the table. “Before the Israelis snatched our land it was the British who were our colonial masters. Three men they killed from this very village. And in my grandfather's day it was the Turks.”

“One day, one day,
inshallah,”
began the old aunt.

“We should be like the bombers and kill as many as we can,” interrupted Karim, looking defiantly at his uncle.

“I'm not a fool. It's emigration for me,” said a cousin.

Hassan Aboudi had sat in silence throughout the meal, but now he straightened his back and looked around the table.

“Endurance,” he said. “That's what takes courage. Decency among ourselves. That's where we must be strong. When they steal from us and try to humiliate us, the real shame is on themselves.”

Karim looked at him. His father had seemed shrunken, somehow, before the meal had started, but now he was himself again, a whole man. Karim felt a rush of love for him that took him by surprise. He wanted to run around the table and put his arms around his father's neck. The idea of making such an exhibition of himself was so embarrassing that he felt a blush spread over his face.

“The shame is on themselves,” Hassan Aboudi repeated gravely.

Suddenly, Karim felt immensely tired. An unstoppable yawn gathered in his chest, puffed out his lungs and forced his mouth wide open. Lamia noticed.

“We should go to bed early,” she said. “We ought to be on the road by seven thirty. There's no knowing how long the journey home will take.”

Chapter Nine

It was good to be back in Ramallah, in spite of the almost tangible air of dread and expectancy that haunted the town in the wake of the suicide bombing. Hassan Aboudi pulled up in the parking space outside the flats and the little girls tumbled out at once. Farah was halfway up the first flight of stairs before Karim had even disengaged the headset of his Walkman from his ears and opened the door on his side of the car. “Rasha!” Farah was calling out. “I'm home! Rasha!”

Karim was about to follow her into the building when his mother called out, “Where are you going, Karim? Come and help me unload the trunk. I can't possibly manage all this myself.”

Irritated, Karim took from her hands the basket stuffed with drooping vegetables that she was holding out to him.

It was up to him as usual to do the chores. Farah always seemed to get off with doing nothing, though he could remember clearly, when he was eight, he'd had to help his mother all the time.

At least the journey home hadn't been too bad. He'd been as tense as a coiled spring as they'd neared the checkpoint, only to find that it had gone. A mess of barbed wire and a couple of heavy boulders, which the tank had pushed across the road, half blocking it, were all that remained. The traffic, much too heavy anyway for such a small lane, was having to slow to a crawl to get past. Karim had shut his eyes as they came to the place where his father had been so humiliated. The spot was already etched indelibly on his memory. He didn't want to look at it again.

There'd been two more checkpoints to get through further on, and at the second one they'd been kept waiting for twenty minutes, for no apparent reason, but they'd been waved through at last, keeping their faces carefully immobile under the gaze of the soldiers and muttering their curses only under their breath.