A Little Piece of Ground (6 page)

He began to reverse up the road.

A sudden violent hammering on the roof of the car made everyone inside jump with fright. Karim felt his hair stand on end and he gripped the headrest of his mother's seat in front. Then he heard shouts. Through the square of the car window he could see only the chest of the soldier who was standing beside it, the body armor, which covered his upper half, and the rifle he was gripping in his arms.

Another soldier had appeared beside his father's window.

“Move up,” he said in thickly accented Arabic, pointing to the line of cars in front.

Hassan drove forward to park behind the last car in the line. The soldiers had walked alongside. Now one of them wrenched open the driver's door.

“Get out,” he said to Hassan.

The other soldier rapped on the front passenger window to make Lamia open it. He bent down to scrutinize everyone in the car, peering out from under the rim of his heavy steel helmet, his eyes darting nervously towards Karim and away again.

“How old is he?” he said to Lamia, jerking his head to indicate Karim.

“Eleven,” Lamia said, looking straight ahead.

Karim opened his mouth to say, “Excuse me. I'm twelve,” but he shut it again.

He could now see the line of men and boys, some only a little older than himself, who had been ordered out of their cars and were standing at the side of the road, guarded by a soldier, who stood in front of them, his finger on the trigger of his gun.

The soldier pulled his head back out of the car.

“Shut the window,” he said. “Shut all the windows. Stay in the car.”

Wordlessly, Lamia obeyed. From the stiff way she held her head, Karim could imagine her face. It would be quite expressionless. She would be refusing, with all her self-control, to give the soldier the satisfaction of seeing her fear and anger.

The soldier had disappeared now, running back up the road to deal with the next car that had appeared. Karim leaned forward between the front seats.

“What are they going to do with Baba, Mama?”

“How should I know? You think I understand these animals?”

Farah had grabbed her doll when the soldier's face had appeared at the window of the car. She was holding it against her chest, crooning to it. Sireen seemed unconscious of the tension around her. She had scrambled into the empty driver's seat and was standing at the steering wheel, pretending to drive the car.

Karim was watching the line of Palestinian men and boys. Their guard was shouting something he couldn't hear and waving his gun at them. The men were shuffling uneasily and looking at the ground. Some were fumbling with the buttons of their shirts. The soldier jabbed the long barrel of his rifle at the nearest man and shouted again. The men began to move more quickly.

Karim craned forward to look.

“What are they doing?”

Farah's thumb had been stuck in her mouth. She took it out.

“Why is Baba taking off his clothes?” she said.

Lamia didn't answer. She had pulled Sireen into her arms and was holding her close. Sireen was struggling to get away.

The men had stripped to the waist now. Their shirts and jackets lay in heaps on the ground. The soldiers kicked at them and shouted again.

“I don't believe it,” moaned Lamia. “To humiliate them. Old men, too. In front of their families, and strangers.”

Slowly, the men were undoing belts, buttons, and zippers, letting their trousers slip to the ground, taking off shoes and socks.

Karim watched in horrified fascination. Giggles of embarrassment were bubbling up inside him. The men, standing out in the road in their underpants, looked funny and pathetic, helpless and stupid. They were staring at the ground, at the sky, into the distance, anywhere except at each other, or at the waiting line of cars in which their women and children sat, witnesses to their shame.

I didn't know Baba's legs were so thin, Karim thought, or that his shoulders were so round.

He couldn't bear to look at his father. He couldn't look away.

An old man, who until a few minutes before had been a dignified figure in the long robe and white headdress that elderly men in the village usually wore, was standing beside Hassan. Almost naked, stripped of everything, he was trying to stand upright, to hold up his head and show, in his face at least, the dignity which had been taken from him. As Karim watched, the old man staggered. Hassan put out his hand to steady him. The old man leaned on him gratefully, and as they stood together, Hassan began to gently pat the old man's hand.

Even from this distance, Karim could see that it was violently trembling.

His desire to laugh had gone. He couldn't believe that he'd felt it at all.

It's what they want, he thought. To make us look silly.

There was a burning pain inside him. He'd never thought much about his father before. Sometimes he'd been scared when Hassan had been angry. Sometimes he'd glowed when he'd praised him. He'd always assumed that his father knew best, that his decisions were right, that he could protect his family and would always be there to give advice, that he would know what was right and what was wrong.

All those sure things shifted in his mind as he saw his father's humiliation. Hot, red anger pulsed behind his eyes.

He came to with a start at the sound of a click. Sireen had wriggled off Lamia's lap and was back in the driver's seat. She had opened the door and was jumping out onto the road.

“No!” shouted Karim. “Sireen! Come back!”

Without stopping to think, he opened his own door and ran to pick her up. He heard a shout and before he could reach her was pulled up short by a soldier grabbing his arm.

“What are you doing, Palestinian?” the soldier snarled at him.

“My sister,” babbled Karim. “She's only four. She opened the door herself. I... ”

Sireen had run back and grabbed hold of his leg. With the other hand she pulled at the soldier's grey-green uniform trousers.

“Please, uncle,” she said. “I want my Baba.”

The young soldier looked down at her, as if he didn't understand. He hesitated, seemingly disconcerted at the touch of the little girl's hand. Karim could feel that the soldier's fingers, still gripping his arm, were shaking.

He's terrified, he thought, with surprise. He thinks we're going to attack him.

He could almost smell the soldier's fear.

“She didn't mean any harm,” he said, hating the placating note he could hear in his own voice. “I'll take her back to the car.”

The soldier shoved at him roughly.

“Take her. If there's any more trouble from you, you go over there and join the other terrorists.”

Karim scooped Sireen up in his arms and ran back to the car with her.

Lamia had half opened the door, but another soldier was alongside the car now, ordering her to shut it. Karim handed Sireen to her and jumped into the back seat.

“Oh, my darling,” sobbed Lamia, her face in Sireen's hair.

Karim was trembling violently. He felt sick with the backwash of fear.

Farah moved across and leaned against him, her thumb firmly in her mouth. Her other hand clutched at his arm. This time, he didn't push her away.

I hate them. I hate them. I hate them, he thought, unable now to look at his father, who still stood, reduced to an object of ridicule, beside the bewildered old man.

Chapter Seven

They came into the village at last, driving past the half-built houses on the outskirts, and the old school, and the souvenir factory, closed since the present troubles had begun.

Hassan Aboudi had been allowed to dress himself and return to his car at the end of an agonizing hour. He had bent his head over the steering wheel for a long moment, gripping it so hard that his knuckles had whitened. Karim hadn't been able to see his father's face, and he was glad. His own face was burning with embarrassment and shame.

I'd have fought back, he told himself savagely. I wouldn't ever let them do that to me.

But he knew that his father had had no choice. He knew he'd have been forced to bear it too.

No one had said a word for the last half-hour of the journey. Lamia had tried once to put her hand on her husband's arm, but he had shaken it off roughly. Even Sireen, who usually babbled nonsense to herself, sat in passive silence.

It was a relief to arrive at last at the old family home. Karim's grandmother came to the door, wiping her hands on a towel. She was wearing, as she always did, traditional clothes: a richly embroidered black dress that fell to the floor and was belted round her wide waist, and a dazzlingly white scarf that covered her hair.

Karim expected Farah to run towards her, as she normally did, stretching out her doll to show her grandmother, anxious to get the first hug ahead of Sireen, but to his surprise she held back and let Sireen go on ahead.

He looked away, down the hill. His great-uncle, Abu Feisal, was coming up the path from the olive terraces below, his pruning knife still in his hand. The old man's face was split in a smile of welcome, but Karim could hardly bear to look at him. He kept remembering that other old man at the side of the road, with his long grey robe and undergarments lying around his feet.

“I thought you'd never get here,” his grandmother, Um Hassan, was saying, as she disentangled herself from Sireen and led the way inside. “Held you up all that time, did they? It's getting worse and worse. Trouble, trouble, all the time.”

It was the smell of the old house more than anything that struck Karim every time he came. The slight mustiness, the whiff of wood smoke, the lingering wealth of his grandmother's cooking, the warmth of new bread, the tang of lemons, the spiciness of drying herbs—without even being aware of them, the rich mixture usually reduced him to childhood again, and somehow relaxed him.

Today, though, he didn't like it. Everything disgusted him today.

News of their arrival had spread and relatives from nearby houses were arriving. Large great-aunts with loud country voices shrieked out greetings. Small grandchildren clung to their floor-length skirts and stared with round-eyed shyness at Farah and Sireen.

“Well, Karim, so you're here,” his grandmother said with a comfortable nod. “Ahmed and Latif are at school. They're looking forward to seeing you. Remember how all you cousins used to play down at the stream?”

Karim smiled awkwardly. He hadn't been to the stream for years. The thought of those childish games was mortifying.

The afternoon slipped past. Lamia whispered an account of Hassan's ordeal to his relatives. They tutted over it and talked quickly of other things. News was passed on. Several people in the village had died since they had last been here. A number of babies had been born. A new, radical sheikh had come to the mosque. The old church had been hit by a tank shell.

A whole hillside just outside the village had been confiscated two years earlier to make a big new settlement for Israelis, a move which had enraged everyone for miles around. There were always goings-on to report from there. This time, it was an attack on the settlement by three young Palestinian men, who had hurled stones and petrol bombs at a car on the settlers' road and had been taken off to prison in Israel.

“We'll think about picking the olives tomorrow,” Um Hassan said as she served up the meal she had hastily prepared. “Let's forget all our troubles this evening. The family's together for once. That's the main thing.”

“Are you expecting problems from the settlers, Mother, when we go out to pick?” Karim heard his father say.

“We thought there would be last week, when we went over to the far side,” his grandmother replied. “But there wasn't, thank God. Things have been quiet up there recently. We should be all right,
inshallah
. Best keep a careful lookout, all the same.”

That night, for the first time since her babyhood, Farah wet her bed. She tried to hide the sodden sheets, but her grandmother, finding them, washed them and hung them outside, and put the mattress out to air. No one scolded her. No one needed to. Farah was deeply ashamed.