A Little Piece of Ground (13 page)

Karim looked abashed.

“Sorry. I sort of needed something to hang on to.”

“Yeah, the way Joni was crushing my arm,” Hopper said, fingering his elbow. “Come on. Let's get the hell out of here.”

They crawled back to the gap in the wall and peered out. The roadblock had been lifted and the settler traffic was on the move again. The ambulance had gone but the armored vehicles were still there. Several soldiers were clustered near them and one was talking into a mobile phone. They were all on the far side of the building now, and the scaffolding was out of their sight.

“We've got to be quick,” Karim said. “They'll search the whole area.”

It was horrible climbing down the scaffolding, scarier, even, than climbing up it had been, but when at last they stood on the solid ground again, relief sent waves of euphoria through them. Minutes later, they had scrambled back over the piles of rubble, run up to the top of the hill, and were standing in the relative safety of the street above, three boys indistinguishable from any others, dancing around with crows of delight as they looked down at the scene of their triumph.

Chapter Twelve

It seemed the most natural thing in the world, after all that had happened, to go to Hopper's ground. The three boys didn't even need to talk about it. Something unexpected had happened on the bare rooftop. They had become a trio.

“Too bad I haven't got my ball,” Karim said when they arrived. “We could have had a real game.”

He was watching Joni as he spoke, trying to work out his reaction to the place.

“What do you want to do here?” Joni asked. Karim couldn't tell if he was enthusiastic or not.

“Play soccer, what else?” he said defensively.

“Why? You got another idea?” said Hopper, propping his shoulders against the wall. He had pulled a dry grass stem out from between the stones and was rolling it between his teeth.

“Yes, well, it's got
possibilities
.” Joni was walking around, picking up scraps of metal and old plastic buckets, looking over the walls, measuring distances with his eyes. “We could do things here. Make something of it.”

“Yeah. We could play soccer.” Karim was beginning to feel irritated.

Hopper was studying Joni. He took the straw out of his mouth.

“Do what? Make what?”

“I dunno. I'm only thinking. Like—I mean, over there. Isn't that a wrecked car under all that rubble? We could clean it out. Make a sort of base. Those oil drums. Maybe we could do something with them.”

“I know what you want,” Karim said impatiently. “A place to do karate in.”

“You know karate?” Hopper peeled himself off the wall and leaned forward, looking interested.

Instead of answering, Joni took up a martial position, raised his hands and kicked. He lost his balance and almost fell over.

“He
thinks
he knows karate,” Karim said. “Meet the number-one ace champion gold-medalist martial arts expert of the entire world. Of Palestine, anyway. Well, of Ramallah. OK, of this bit of it, maybe.”

“All right, all right, funny man,” said Joni, steadying himself.

Hopper had moved away from them and was examining the mountain of rubble.

“You're right, though, about the car. We could clear all this stuff away and get into it. That would be good. We'd have a place to go. A place of our own.”

He bent down and pulled at a length of plastic pipe that was sticking out of the heap. A hearty tug brought a cascade of old cans, plastic bottles, broken tiles and ripped curtains tumbling down. The driver's side of the car, from which the doors had been ripped off, was now fully revealed.

“It's still got seats in it,” said Karim. He was interested now. He could see this might be fun.

Hopper was working at the rubble with both hands, tearing it away to reveal more and more of the car. He drew back suddenly with an exclamation of pain and stuck his thumb into his mouth.

“What's the matter?” said Joni.

“Nothing. I cut myself. Broken glass.”

Joni reached into his bag and pulled out a new tissue from a packet. He handed it to Hopper, who wrapped it around his thumb and raised his eyebrows towards Karim.

“I know,” said Karim. “He carries packets of tissues.”

He thumped Joni affectionately on the back and grinned at Hopper. Joni ignored them and began to worm his way through the opening in the rubble into the side of the car.

“There'd be loads of room in here if we took the seats out,” he began, his voice sounding muffled, but then the others heard a yelp of alarm as he backed hastily out.

“What happened? What's in there?” asked Karim.

“I don't know. Something's alive. Something moved. I thought it might be—you know—a snake or something.”

“A snake? In the middle of Ramallah? It couldn't be,” scoffed Hopper, but he made no move to look into the car himself.

And then something wholly unexpected happened. With a strident meow, a tabby cat, lean and rangy with its tail erect, streaked up from behind them and disappeared into the car.

“The snake doesn't stand much of a chance against the cat,” said Karim.

They stood silently and watched. There was a clattering sound as if something metallic had been dislodged and then, unmistakably, the high-pitched mewing of a kitten.

“She's got her babies in there,” said Joni, sounding relieved. “That's what must have been moving.”

Karim crawled cautiously through to the side of the car and looked in. The cat lay curled on the back seat with one—no, two kittens snuggled up against her. She raised her head and bared her teeth at him, but made no attempt to attack. “Good for you,” he said soothingly. “Yeah. You stay there. Good for you.”

He liked the idea of the cats. Their presence gave the old car a new status. It was a good place for them, safe and secret, a place to hide.

Joni was enthusiastically heaving pieces of broken cinder block off the pile that was obscuring the front of the car.

“Wait, stop,” said Karim, putting out a restraining hand.

“What's the matter?” said Joni.

“Don't you see? If we left this stuff here, and built it up a bit more even, the car would be hidden. Anyone coming here would think there was just a pile of rubbish, but we could make it so that there'd be a secret way in.”

“Good,” Hopper said succinctly. “I like that.”

“A place to hide from
them
,” said Joni approvingly.

Hopper walked up and down in front of the pile of rubble, surveying its possibilities. Joni scrambled up till he was standing on the roof of the car and looked out across the whole area.

“Karim's right,” he called out to Hopper. “Come up here.”

The other two climbed up after him, snagging their clothes on old coiled bedsprings and watching out for broken glass. They stepped gingerly on to the roof of the car, afraid that the metal might buckle under their combined weight.

Karim was used to the outlook from the steep hillsides of Ramallah, but the sweep of the view in front of him seemed almost new. The rocky, dry hillsides of Palestine glowed golden and ivory under the afternoon sun. New buildings rose up everywhere, and gashes in the brown earth showed where more were planned. A few old olive trees stood in the remnants of forgotten groves, their silky grey-green leaves shimmering in the breeze. Here and there a fig tree still clung to the wall of an ancient terrace, soon to be swept away in the creation of the new city. The sun, shining in from the west, slanted across from the lower, more fertile hills and plains of Israel that lay between Ramallah and the sea.

“What do you think, then?” Joni said, bringing Karim's attention back to the immediate surroundings.

Karim looked down. The rubble must have been tipped all around the car from the back of a dump truck. Peaks of it rose in waves, some higher than the roof of the car and some level with it. The car doors on the far side were still intact, and the rubble was banked right up against them so that they couldn't be opened. There was a gap toward the front of the car, though, and it would still be possible to see through the windshield, which remained miraculously unbroken.

“We ought to cover the roof with something,” Hopper said, “so that even if someone climbed up here they wouldn't see there was a car underneath.”

“Yes, but what about letting the light in?” objected Karim. “If we dump stuff all over it, we'll cover up the windshield and it'll be dark inside.”

Hopper didn't bother to answer. He'd jumped off the roof and was heaving at something on one of the mounds nearby. The other two clambered over to him, and saw that he was struggling to free an old broken shutter from a mass of heavy stones and concrete blocks which was pinning it down. They worked with him, enthusiastically heaving and tugging, ignoring their straining muscles and scratched hands. A few minutes later they stood triumphantly staring down at their find, then, slipping and stumbling on the loose stones, they managed to carry it back to the roof of the car.

They laid it down carefully.

“Hey,” said Karim, “look at this. We can slide it backwards and forwards. If we're here and we need light inside, we can pull it back from the windshield end. When we go, or we want to hide it, we can just pull it forward again.”

They tried it out. The shutter moved quite smoothly across the roof of the car and it covered the gap over the hood perfectly. As it grated over the metal roof, an angry meow of protest came from inside.

“We've scared her,” said Karim. “She's going to have to get used to us, that's all.”

“We'll bring them things to eat,” said Joni. “Milk and bits of meat and stuff.”

“Meat?” said Hopper incredulously. “You've got enough meat to spare for a cat?”

“My father's got a shop,” Joni told him. “There's usually bits of meat that get too old to sell, that people can't eat. Cats wouldn't mind it, though.”

From the refugee camp below came a crackling sound as the loudspeaker in the mosque was turned on and the first words of the evening call to prayer spilled out across the city.

“Is that the time?” Karim said. “It can't be.”

He looked at Joni, then, shocked at what he'd seen, looked down at himself. Joni was doing the same. They were taking in the wreckage of their appearance, the smears of dirt and dust on their faces and hands and the filth sticking to their clothes. Joni saw that his uniform shirt was ripped from cuff to elbow, while Karim stared aghast at the jagged hole in the knee of his jeans.

“She'll kill me,” they both said at the same time.

They laughed, and Karim was filled with a delicious sense of reckless happiness. He didn't care what was going to happen when he got home. It had been a good day. An amazing day, in fact.

“We've got to go,” he said to Hopper, jumping down off the rubble. “See you tomorrow.”

They were halfway up the hill above Hopper's ground when he remembered something.

“Hey, Joni,” he said. “You'll never guess what. My stupid brother likes your sister. He wants a photo of her.”

Joni stopped in his tracks and stared at Karim in disbelief.

“What?”

“I know. Sad, isn't it?”

“I mean, Violette, of all girls! Violette! And I always thought Jamal was kind of cool.”

“Have you got one, then? A photo?”

“You'd better believe it. Loads of them. Violette's so dumb she gets herself photographed all the time. Leave it to me. No problem.”

A load had rolled off Karim's shoulders. He held up his hand and Joni slapped it. They'd come to the V in the road where their ways diverged.

“Tomorrow?” asked Karim with a lift of his eyebrows.

“Of course,” said Joni, moving his bag from one shoulder to the other and setting off at a brisk trot for home.

Chapter Thirteen

The thunderous storm that broke over Karim's head when he crept into the apartment, hoping in vain to slip through the living room and into his own room unseen, was the worst he'd ever experienced. It began the moment he opened the front door.

“Karim!” his mother screeched. “Where exactly have you been? Don't you know what time it is? Don't you realize that I've been worried half out of my... ”

She stopped, having taken in the full horror of his appearance.

“Oh, my darling! You've been caught in an explosion! Your clothes! Everything's torn to shreds! Are you hurt? Where were you hit?”

“I wasn't. I'm not. I've just been out, that's all,” Karim said warily, trying to shrug her off.

She stared narrowly at him and her relief turned to fury.

“Out? And where's ‘out'? What do you mean, ‘out'? You're up to something. You've been getting into trouble. Karim, tell me. Where have you been? What have you been doing?”