The Cat at the Wall (8 page)

Eighteen

—

I knew
because I saw the whole thing happen.

It happened at the hole in the wall they call the checkpoint. There’s more than one of these spots. Some are big and are often choked up with cars, trucks, vans and buses. Others are small and get choked up with people. They remind me of the border between the United States and Canada, which I crossed with my parents on one of our boring family vacations.

I was there because there are often young soldiers at the checkpoints. Some of them are homesick and they like cats, especially one as friendly as me. I go to the checkpoints and purr and let the soldiers pet me and I chase a rolled-up bit of paper around the floor of the room where they search people, and that makes them laugh. And sometimes they feed me.

This thing with Omar’s parents happened at that small crossing place just before I got chased by the cats and came to stay in the little house on the hill. I was quite happy, perched on a post, looking down at the world, hoping for a nice dinner if the soldiers took a break. The two soldiers were both young. And they both liked me.

The crossing was open, but not many people were coming through. It was pretty late at night.

I was nice and relaxed and hoping for supper when a taxi pulled up to one side of the checkpoint, close to the soldiers. A man got out. I could see there was a woman in the back seat, but I couldn’t see her well. The man was the same man in the photograph with Omar.

I sniffed and could not smell food on him, so I wasn’t too interested. Still, I couldn’t help overhearing.

“My wife, she is going to have a baby. We need to get through to the hospital.”

“Move your cab back,” the soldier said to the cab driver. He gestured with his arms. The taxi started to reverse.

“My wife is in the back!”

The taxi moved back to the place the taxis usually stopped. The man kept looking around wildly, as if he already knew he was trapped.

“Papers, please.”

“Papers, yes, yes, papers. They are here.” The man started to fumble through his jacket but the young soldier stopped him.

“Why are you wearing that big jacket? Do you have any bags with you? Where are you going?”

“Please let us through,” the man said. “My wife is having a baby.”

They were talking in two different languages. I understood everything but the soldier and the guy at the checkpoint did not understand. They also were not listening to each other.

A female soldier motioned to the woman to get out of the car. The woman tried, but then she just moaned, a zombie-type moan that I heard on one of those Having My Baby shows on television when I was alive.

“Please get out of the car!” the soldier said again.

Slowly, painfully, the woman swung her legs out of the front seat and, clinging to the door, stood up. She wore the black cloak and head cover some of the women wear on this side of the wall.

“Be careful,” the man soldier told the woman soldier. “They send their women over with bombs strapped to them. I lost my cousin to one of them.”

The female soldier asked the pregnant woman for her papers. “Where is your identification? Where is your permit to cross this border? Who is your doctor?”

The soldier kept asking her questions in Hebrew. The pregnant woman kept moaning and not answering.

And this is when the circus leapt to a whole new level of craziness. The man — Omar’s father — kept saying, in Arabic, “My wife can’t hear. She is deaf. Please let us cross!” He motioned to his ears and shook his head. His wife doubled over in pain.

“Tell us who you are!” the man soldier started to yell. “We cannot let you through if you can’t prove who you are!”

“Use your radio!” Omar’s father said. “Call for one of your ambulances! Do you have a doctor with you here? A medic? A first-aid kit? Please — my wife!”

“She’s on the ground,” the woman soldier said. She had to talk loudly because of the screams coming from the woman. “I don’t know what to do. How do I help her? I can’t lift her up!”

“It could be a trick,” the man soldier said. “My brother was stabbed by someone pretending to be sick. Back away!”

“My wife!” yelled Omar’s father. “Help my wife!”

“Show me your papers! Hey, get back here!”

Omar’s father left his own soldier and headed back to the taxi.

“What are you doing?” the man soldier asked. “Get back here!” He shone a very bright flashlight at the taxi. Omar’s father, blinded by the light, held his arm up to his eyes.

“My papers are in the cab,” he pleaded in Arabic. “I forgot. Let me get them.” He opened the back door and reached for something.

“Show me your hands!” the soldier yelled in Hebrew.

The cab driver opened his door, got out and yelled curses at the soldiers.

“Get back in the taxi,” the man soldier ordered him. The cab driver kept standing there and cursing.

Omar’s mother screamed one final time, then stopped.

“She’s not getting up,” the woman soldier yelled. “I can’t tell what’s going on. She’s not moving!”

“Radio for an ambulance,” the man soldier told her. “Tell them to hurry!”

There was so much yelling, so many flashlight beams shining in so many different directions. I was scared and I backed up into a shadow.

“Yes, yes, they are here. My papers, they are in this case. I know it’s a funny case to keep papers in but it is the only one I have. I’ve got them right here. I’ve got my papers.”

Omar’s father backed out of the taxi. In his hands was something long and black.

“He’s got a rifle!”

I heard one shot. And then another.

And then there was silence. A terrible, terrible black silence.

The young soldiers slowly approached the cab. They had their rifles pointed and their flashlights shone over everything. The cab driver was lying in the dirt, not moving.

The man soldier went to Omar’s father and knelt down, looking for a pulse. He didn’t find one. He picked up the long, black thing they thought was a rifle. It was a violin case. The soldier opened it. He took out a sheaf of papers.

The woman soldier gently shook the pregnant woman, Omar’s mother. It was no use.

The two young soldiers looked at each other across the bodies. I could see the tears on both of their faces.

“What happened?” they cried to each other. “What happened?”

The area soon became very busy with ambulances and officials. The bodies were taken away through the checkpoint, the cab was hooked up to a tow truck and hauled to the other side of the wall. There were officers barking orders, investigators taking statements and replacement soldiers beefing up the security.

I waited for quite a while, but nobody brought out any food. So I left. I headed off to sniff out garbage along the high wall, ran into the king tom with the big head, and that’s when all of this began.

Nineteen

—

“Context, context
, context!”

Ms. Zero wrote the word on the board three times while she said it.

“Context is everything. Understanding the context of something will allow us to understand the meaning of an event, a word, a look, an act. If we don’t understand the context, we are liable to misunderstand the details.”

I didn’t mean to be doodling, but I couldn’t take out my new cellphone in class and I had to do something to pass the endless hours of English lit. I started by making one small, innocent circle on the paper. It was followed by another innocent circle.

Then some lines and curves, and before I knew it, I had drawn a very ugly cartoon of my teacher.

“Look at this photograph,” she said, putting a large magazine photo on the board. It was a picture of a little girl with curly blonde hair with a big pink bow in it. Most of the photo was covered over. All you could see was a kid’s face. “What is your impression of this child? Where do you think she is and what do you think she is doing?”

I only half-listened to the answers.

“She’s at a party.”

“She’s in an ad for pudding.”

“She’s at Disney World.”

Then Ms. Zero uncovered the rest of the photo. “This little girl was in a refugee camp for children orphaned by the violence in Bosnia,” she said. “What about this one?”

The second photo was of a little boy with dark skin. He wore a green shirt and camouflage trousers and had a rifle slung over his shoulder.

“Child soldier.”

Ms. Zero uncovered the rest of the photo. The little boy was with a bunch of other kids in Hallowe’en costumes.

“Context is everything,” she said again. “I want you to write down a scenario where misunderstanding the context could lead to a conflict.”

I took the whole context theme and put it into my cartoon. In a frame I put Ms. Zero at a chalkboard. Outside the frame I drew a coven of witches. The context was that Zero looked like an innocent teacher, but really she was a witch, luring children into the black arts.

It was a pretty good bad cartoon, if you know what I mean.

I had a full half second to admire it before Ms. Zero picked it up and looked at it.

“I asked for something in writing,” she said, “but I’m glad to see you understand the concept. Well done.”

She handed the cartoon back to me. She didn’t get mad and she didn’t give me another detention.

It was pretty substantial, my detention total. I had not made one single copy of the poem since the parent-teacher interview. We were now into May. On the board beside my name was the number seventy-five. Some of those were for new crimes. Most were because of the daily accumulation of new ones when the old ones were not turned in.

I had the most detentions of anybody. One kid had five. Another had three. A couple had two. Most kids, when they got detention, copied out the poem and then were done with it.

No one could expect me to copy out that long, stupid poem seventy-five times. No one. And what else could she do to me?

Toward the end of the lesson, Ms. Zero had an announcement.

“The eighth-grade class trip will happen in the second week of June,” she said. “We will be going to Washington for five days.”

I didn’t care about Washington, but it would be fun to be away from home and in a hotel room with my friends. The teachers and chaperones couldn’t watch us all the time!

“Permission forms will be available from me tomorrow. Anyone with incomplete assignments will not be able to go. Detentions are considered assignments.”

I heard the other kids gasp. It felt like the whole class turned to look at me.

I couldn’t quite believe it. My feelings must have shown on my face. A couple of the kids giggled. That just made me madder.

I knew the teacher was daring me to complain, but I was not going to give her that satisfaction.

I would copy the damn poems. And I would enjoy seeing the look on her face when I handed them in.

I used the lunch period to make five copies. I made two more during math class and three more during science. My hand was sore by the end of the day. I half-hoped I was injured, because then my parents could sue her. But then I would have to admit to all the detentions and I wasn’t ready to do that yet.

At the end of the day I walked into my homeroom classroom with my ten copies and put them in the center of Ms. Zero’s desk. I watched her look them over, then go over to the board and change the number beside my name. She reduced it by ten.

“I’d like a permission form for the trip, please,” I said.

Ms. Zero looked at me. “You have made a good start,” she said. “When you complete the detentions, then you can have a permission form.”

I put on one of my smiles. Not the flashy one, which didn’t work with her, but a smaller one. One that I hoped would say, “I’m a really nice girl and I’ve learned my lesson so please just give me a break.”

“It’s getting near the end of the year,” I started. “There is so much going on right now. Exams, and that big science project. I’m wondering if I could have the rest of the detentions excused.”

“If you manage your time well, I think you will find that you can do everything you need to do. The detentions stand.”

“I’ve done ten copies.”

“Yes, I’ve got them. Thank you.”

I stood there like a dummy for a full minute.

“That’s it?” I asked. “You won’t even consider dropping them?”

“I have considered it,” she replied. “You just don’t like my conclusion. If you do ten copies a day, by the middle of next week, you will be done, and you can place the task behind you.”

I stood by her desk in cold silence. We glared at each other for a full minute. Well, I glared. She just looked at me calmly, as if she were watching TV. It made me madder and madder. I wanted to swipe the papers off her desk and kick her chair over. My hands curled themselves into tight fists.

“I hate you,” I said.

“You are certainly free to do so. Clare, there are so many long-term benefits you could take away from this detention exercise if you chose to. For example, imagine the sense of accomplishment you will feel when all the copies are completed and you no longer have them hanging over you. And if you actually read the poem while you are copying it out, you will see it is a work of great value. But it is up to you. You will take away from this what you choose.”

I turned and walked out of that classroom without saying another word. I stalked down the hallway and, without planning it, found myself at the exit closest to the teachers’ parking lot. I walked through that door and stood in front of Ms. Zero’s old blue Toyota.

On the ground by my feet was a large rock. I picked it up. It would take nothing to smash in the witch’s windshield.

“That would be a criminal act.” Ms. Zero had followed me out of the school and was standing behind me. “You know I would report it to the police. Is the momentary satisfaction of breaking my window worth the pain your action would bring upon yourself and your family?”

It almost was. But the anger went out of my shoulders and my arm dropped to my side. The rock hit the dust.

“Excellent choice, Clare. I’m proud of you.”

She got in her car and drove away.

I just stood there, in that spot, not knowing what to feel.

I felt strangely proud that Ms. Sealand was proud of me.

And I hated myself for caring what she thought.