A Little Piece of Ground (20 page)

He got up and disappeared into the car, returning a moment later with a bottle of orange soda, one of the small stock he'd been amassing since Karim had suggested the idea. He held out the fizzing bottle to his friends and they drank from it in turn.

Hopper wiped his mouth, went up to the rock, leaned against it and pushed at it with all his strength. Wordlessly, he gave up and came back to Joni, holding his hand out for the bottle.

Karim frowned. The others' defeatism annoyed him. He looked at the rock, his eyes narrowed. People did move big things. The ancient Egyptians had done it. Brute force wasn't enough. You had to be clever—to work things out.

He went over to the rock and circled around it, studying it. It was embedded in the hard-baked soil. He kicked at the ground at its base. A little fountain of dust puffed up. The earth wasn't packed too tightly there.

The chilling wail of a siren sounded out above the still, cool city. Instinctively, all three boys flinched and looked around.

“It's one of ours. An ambulance,” Joni said uncertainly.

They waited for a moment, listening for anything else, for shouts or shots, the explosion of a tank shell or the sound of heavy engines. The siren sounded again, more distant this time. Whatever the action was, it was moving away.

Without comment, Karim resumed his study of the rock. Then he trotted over to the rubble pile, selected a sharp broken tile and returned to the rock with it. He bent down and began to hack at the earth around the base. It was breaking up more easily than he had expected. He scooped the loose earth away with his hands.

The others had wandered off.

“No, you're standing all wrong,” Joni was saying. “Karate's an art. You have to put your feet like this, and balance.... ”

Karim, intent on his task, stopped listening to them.

He'd moved quite a lot of earth away now. He stood up, choosing the right place carefully, put his hands against the rock and pushed. He felt a tiny movement.

“Hey, you two! It's moving! Come and help!” he called out.

Joni and Hopper joined him. They leaned against the rock and braced themselves, then, holding their breath, they heaved.

There was another minute shift.

“Come on! Again!” panted Karim.

They tried again. Karim felt the blood rush to his head with the effort, and the sinews of his shoulders strain and tremble. They sensed another momentary wobble, then the rock was still again.

“It's no good,” Joni said, straightening up and dusting off his hands.

“It is. We've got to do it,” insisted Karim.

Hopper was looking out towards the road. The late session had just ended at the school in the refugee camp and seven or eight boys were walking past.

“I know them,” Hopper said. He raised his voice. “Hey, Mahmoud! Ali! You guys! Over here!”

The boys sauntered over.

“Who made this flag? It's awesome,” one of them said.

“We did,” Hopper, Karim and Joni replied together.

“What are you doing now?” one of the new boys asked.

“Moving this rock.”

“What for?”

“We're making a soccer field. The rock's in the way.”

The boy grinned.

“Cool idea.”

He dropped his bag and put his shoulder to the stone. The others joined him as best they could, jostling for space to push.

Karim, elbowed aside by a tall boy with massive shoulders, stepped back, biting his lip. He wasn't sure about this. Hopper's ground was their place, his and Joni's and Hopper's. He didn't know these boys. They weren't his friends. He didn't want strangers taking over.

Then he saw that the stone was beginning to give way. It was tilting, tipping, rocking on its base.

“Yes!” he shouted. “
Wahid! Thnen! Telatte!
One! Two! Three! He-e-ave!”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw that someone passing down the road had halted at the sound of his voice and turned around, but he was too excited to take more notice.

“It's going!” he yelled. “One more push!”

The rock, moving as unwillingly as a tree wrenched bodily from its roots, rolled out of its resting place and rocked to a standstill. The man in the road was approaching now. Karim ignored him.

“Keep it going!” he called out, dancing up and down on the spot. “Keep pushing! Right over out of the way. Roll it! More! More! Yes!”

Good-naturedly, the boys obeyed.

With a satisfying rumble, and much more easily than he would have thought possible, the rock rolled right across the dry baked ground and came at last to a stop beside the wall of rubble.

“Karim?” said a familiar voice. “What on earth are you doing?”

Karim turned to see Jamal staring down at him.

“Making a soccer field,” he said, too flushed with triumph to care that his long-held secret had been discovered. “You should have seen this place when we started. We've moved loads and loads of rubbish. It's going to be great now. And we made the flag.”

“
You
did all this? You kids?”

“Yes. Me and Joni and Hopper. That's Hopper, over there.”

Jamal's eyes widened with unwilling respect.

“Well, well. I have to say that I'm impressed. So this is what you've been up to all this time.”

“Yes, and you've no idea how much work it's been. See all those stones over there? We.... ”

Jamal shook his head.

“Tell me later. Listen, you've got to get home now. Haven't you heard the news? There's been another bombing operation. The Israelis—”

“Anyone got a ball?” one of the new boys was calling out.

Karim, alert to the sharp note in Jamal's voice, was nevertheless drawn irresistibly to the lure of a possible game.

“Yes, it's somewhere over there,” he called out over his shoulder, pointing vaguely towards the place where they'd stopped playing, then he looked back at Jamal, checking his face for signs of real urgency.

Jamal shrugged.

“You've got half an hour, I suppose. The Israelis are bringing the curfew down again, everyone says. The tanks are coming back in. It'll take them a bit of time to get here though. Listen out for them and don't take risks. I'll have Mama on my back forever more if you get caught outside in the curfew.”

Karim nodded.

“Did you hear that?” he called to the others. “The tanks are coming back in.”

“Not yet, though,” one of the boys said. “They never come till after six. Where's that ball?”

“Here,” said Joni, retrieving the ball from the dip it had rolled into.

“Look, there's even a goal up there,” a boy called Latif said, pointing to the wall at the far end of the ground where, a week earlier, Karim had painstakingly outlined the shape of a goalmouth with a black marker pen against the rough stones.

Seconds later, a couple of schoolbags, roughly positioned, had created another goal at the opposite end, the boys had sorted themselves into two teams and a furious game was in progress. Karim darted in between Hopper and one of the new boys, and, taking the ball in a superb tackle, began to dribble it down the field.

“Karim!” he heard Jamal call. “Don't stay too long. Half an hour, no more. I can't wait for you. I've got to see Basim.”

Then everything else was wiped from his mind as the game took over.

One of the new boys began to mark him, trying, with neat stabs of his feet, to get the ball away from him. He was good. The challenge was real. Karim felt his inner self rise up to meet it. His focus narrowed. He was willing the ball to stay with him, aware of a new deftness in his feet as he feinted and dodged, touching the ball now with delicate coaxing strokes from the side of a foot, now punching at it with masterful short kicks from the toes.

The home stretch was suddenly in front of him, the last run down to the wall and the lines of the goalmouth. The boy guarding it was half crouching, his arms held out, but Karim could read his mind. As the boy jumped to the right, he aimed for the left. Perfectly timed, perfectly judged, his foot sliced the ball up into a magnificent arc and it bounced against the wall just inside the corner of the post and crossbar.

At once the game moved on. Karim's worthy opponent was running the ball fast down to the far end, with Hopper and Joni in pursuit, but for a second or two Karim couldn't move. The moment was too beautiful. His feelings threatened to choke him.

They'd achieved something real, the three of them, at Hopper's ground. They'd made a good place out of a rubbish heap. There would never be a stadium as there was in his dreams, no spectators, no TV cameras or scribbling reporters, but all of those things could wait. The important thing was the place, this space that was their own creation.

Today, something new had happened. These other boys—it was great, after all, that they had come. There could be real soccer games, with teams, now. And then there was Jamal. He'd approved of everything. He'd admired them. Karim felt that the two halves of his life, painfully divided, might after all come together.

But best of all, more important than anything else, was the soccer, the marvelous harmony he could feel between his brain, his eyes and his feet, the magic in his every move, the power and skill coursing through him.

He was about to launch himself joyfully back into the game when he heard, much too close, the sound of heavy vehicles—tanks, or bulldozers or both—rumbling up the road. “Watch out! They're coming! They're here!” he yelled at the top of his voice.

“
Mamnou'a al tajwwol!”
a loudspeaker suddenly blared out. “Being outside is forbidden!”

Chapter Twenty

The sound and sight of the three huge Israeli tanks sent the blood pounding through Karim. His senses sharpened and every hair stood on end.

The other boys were scattering, leaping up and over the rubble to disappear on the far side.

“Come on!” Joni was calling. “Be quick!”

Karim turned to shout goodbye to Hopper, and was about to run after Joni when he stopped, aghast. Instead of fleeing across the rubble, like the other boys, Hopper was running straight for the leading tank.

“Hopper!” Karim yelled. “Stop! Are you crazy?”

Then he saw, on the far side of the road, an old man who had been pushing a wheelbarrow heaped with vegetables. In his haste to get out of the way of the tanks, he'd upset his load, and now he was scrabbling around, trying to gather up a few of the tomatoes, eggplants and peppers which were rolling down the gutter.

He straightened up, and Karim saw that it was Hopper's grandfather.

“Leave them,
sidi
! Go inside!” he heard Hopper shout.

The old man hesitated, and then the foremost tank began to slow and the huge gun barrel swung around towards him.

The old man began to run awkwardly away, the long skirt of his robe flapping around his legs.

Karim took off himself, flying towards the rubble, then up the side and over it, his back crawling at the thought that the soldiers' rifles might be trained on him.

He looked back one last time but, taking his eyes off his feet, trod on a loose cinder block which rolled under his weight, tipping him over. He felt a sharp, agonizing pain in his ankle and fell awkwardly, wrenching it even more badly.

He tried to get up and crawl on. There were shouts now, coming from the tanks, but he couldn't make out the Hebrew words. He slipped again and rolled into a dip, badly grazing the ball of his right hand.

The tanks had halted.

They've seen me. They're coming to get me, he thought, his throat tight with panic.

He looked over his shoulder. The dip he was in was deeper than he'd realized. He was out of sight of the tanks and crews. He could see nothing but sky and the peaks of rubble all around. But the shouts were more urgent than ever.

Very cautiously, ignoring his bleeding right hand, he sat up and peered out through a crack between two rusting oil drums.

Hopper was down there alone, one wild, slim, impish figure. He was dancing about in front of the first tank, a creature possessed, moving like quicksilver, the very spirit of resistance. As Karim watched, he bent and scooped something up from the ground in a movement so subtle and fluid it was barely visible. Karim narrowed his eyes. What was that in his hand? He could make out a glint of shiny purple.

“An eggplant!” he muttered under his breath. “What on earth does he want an eggplant for?”

Hopper was holding the eggplant with ostentatious caution. Defiantly, he raised it to his mouth and bit off the green stem. It looked exactly as if he was tearing the pin out of a hand grenade. Then he aimed the eggplant and hurled it at the tank.

The man on the tank turret, a grey-yellow figure muffled in body armor topped off with a steel helmet, had been following the mercurial, dancing boy down the sights of his M16 rifle, trying in vain to get a fix on him. He shouted a warning and ducked as the eggplant flew towards him. It splattered squashily against the side of the tank.