Olives (22 page)

She spat on
the ground at my feet.

I looked down
at the little congealed drops of saliva lying on the dusty ground,
then up at Aisha. At her wide, beautiful brown eyes. The horror at
what she’d done written on her face. She waited, scared, for my
reaction, for the next escalation, wiping her chin with the back of
her trembling hand. We stood under the warmth of the sun, the
clouds banished from the sky as Aisha, trembling, waited for me to
hit her. I saw the moisture gathering in her eyes, the shock in her
face, our scared eyes locked in that long moment.

Aisha’s face
crumpled as the intensity of her fury passed and gave way to fear.
I stepped forward and she was in my arms and I felt her salt tears
on my cheek as I held her and murmured her name. We clung to each
other, standing on the dusty margin of the road, whispering sorry
over and again. A car raced past, sending up a small cloud of dust
and beeping its horn at us cheekily and we finally found relief and
laughter, standing under the warm sky, peacefully and blissfully
alone together. The storm had passed.

We were
stopped again at the West Bank border crossing, an altogether
smaller and tattier affair than the Sheikh Hussein crossing. The
long stretch of rich and prosperous-looking farmland we passed
through on the road down to the crossing made the stark contrast of
concrete tank-traps and metal gates seem even more obscene. Aisha
had been sketching the farmland in one of the pads she had brought
with her, pencil-work – now her sketch was altogether
starker.

Debris was
scattered around the broken-down kerbstones and a zig-zag of
concrete blocks forced a slow slalom as the cameras mounted high
above us looked down on our painstaking progress up to the barrier.
Another set of questions, another scan of the car and we were
through, this time to the West Bank itself – Palestine, as it was
now to be. After a stretch of open country, we started to see the
security wall to our right, the countryside less developed and more
arid.

We passed
through a small town and were quiet, gazing out around us. It
reminded me of the villages in the Jordanian countryside, poor,
flyblown and ramshackle. Wrecked washing machines, prams and
rubbish littered the scrubby ground between the buildings and dirty
kids played in the streets. Somewhere in an area of low, crumbling
houses a tyre burned and a trail of thick, black smoke was rising
up into the clear blue sky.

We drove past
farmhouses by the roadside, patches of cultivated land here and
there, but nothing on the scale of the agriculture I’d seen in
Jordan – or, indeed, a few minutes ago in Israel.

As we passed
by him on the roadside, a small boy grinned a grubby-cheeked
urchin’s grin and drew himself up to salute us and I laughed at him
and waved back. And then his face changed and became fearful, his
eyes focused on the sky beyond us. I stretched around and saw the
black speck as I heard its rotors. It was travelling parallel to us
and at approximately the same speed. I turned to watch it every few
seconds until Aisha noticed my preoccupation.

‘
What is it?’
said Aisha.

‘
Chopper over
there. Can’t you hear it?’

She nodded,
‘Yes, I can now. Look, it’s coming closer.’

I brought the
car to a stop and we got out to look at the helicopter which
appeared to be heading straight for us. The side door was open and
I could make out a soldier in khaki, wearing a green beret. He was
armed.

The chopper
dropped down towards us and I started to feel an odd stir of
mounting fear. We were in an area of patchy farmland and waste
ground, the only building within sight was a tin shack hundreds of
metres away. The small boy was lost in the faintly shimmering
horizon we had left behind. There was nothing else around us to
attract their interest.

‘
What’s this
about?’ I called over to Aisha.

‘
I don’t
know, Paul. I’ve never seen this before. Our papers are in order.
It’ll be okay.’

I heard the
false note in her voice. The noise of the engine forced us to raise
our voices and then the machine hovered, standing off a few hundred
feet away from us. I kept my eyes on it as I shouted to Aisha. ‘So
what do we do? Put our hands up? Act normal?’

The stress
was clear in her voice now. ‘I don’t know Paul. I don’t
know.’

With a sense
of sick fascination, I saw the soldier move and raise his weapon. I
turned to Aisha. There was a bright red dot on her chest. She saw
my face and looked down.

The dot was
remarkably steady. Aisha raised her eyes to me and I saw her mouth
frame the words but I didn’t hear them. ‘I love you.’

I couldn’t
move, my muscles betraying me as I shouted out her name, the beat
of the helicopter engine pulsing in my ears. She glared up at the
helicopter, her face a vision of furious defiance, tears streaming
down her cheeks as, with equal care, she mouthed, ‘Fuck
you.’

She glared at
them, the dot on her chest, for what must have been ten seconds but
felt like ten years before I found myself able to break the spell
and move, but as I started to run around the car to her, the engine
note of the helicopter changed and the dot disappeared from Aisha’s
chest. As I pulled her into my arms, the helicopter veered away.
Aisha stood rigid and trembling, watching it until the speck had
disappeared over the dusty hillside, before collapsing against the
car, breathing in great, shuddering heaves and hammering against
the roof with her fists.

I put my arms
around her and she finally quietened, accepting the tissues I took
from the box on the dashboard, wiping her eyes and blowing her
nose. She spoke in a hesitant, trembling voice.

‘
In all the
time I have been coming here, in all that has happened to my
family. In all the years I have been a Palestinian and forced to
watch the repression of my people. In all of this, nobody has ever
pointed a gun at me before. Why now, Paul?’

I didn’t have
an answer for her. I just held her as I wondered the same thing.
Was this routine? I hadn’t read about it as common Israeli
behaviour. Surely if they were in the habit of pointing high
powered rifles at people from helicopters, it would have been
reported. Why would the Israelis even be interested in us? Could it
be something closer to home, something to do with Lynch and Daoud?
My money was on Lynch, but I hadn’t told him of my trip to the West
Bank. So who had?

The thoughts
tumbled through my mind as I held Aisha’s shoulders and looked into
her eyes, as she nodded with a brave little smile and we got back
into our car. We were silent, both lost in our own thoughts, but my
hand was closed tight on hers the whole way.

We motored
through Jenin, yellow taxis dodging around us in the streets of
pale stone, modern buildings. Leaving the town, I was amazed at how
dusty the countryside seemed. It had been raining on and off for a
week in Amman, and yet here we were under hot, blue skies. It might
have been summer, except for the greenery that sprouted between the
little fields by the farms we passed, olive groves shadowed by the
high, shimmering white walls of Israeli settlements. Summers here
aren’t green, they’re brown.

‘
We’re
heading for Qaffin,’ said Aisha as she watched the countryside go
by. ‘It’s on the way to Tulkaram.’

I remembered
the names from news broadcasts. Daoud had told me the farm was in
the country between two of the biggest flashpoint areas in the
whole territories. I wondered why it had never occurred to me to
pinpoint where the farm actually was, how close it was to these
places. He also told me the Dajanis’ land had been cut by the
Israeli security wall, although the whole farm was actually on the
Arab side of the 1949 and 1967 lines. The wall did that – it snaked
around the old delineations of territory to seize little bits of
farmland, grab at water or snatch at green areas.

I was in a
state of constant apprehension, trying to calm myself but the
checkpoints weren’t helping, let alone the incident with the
chopper. They were constant reminders of the simmering tension. The
land itself spoke of its unease, of the fragility of the peace the
Jericho bomb had shattered, of the decades of uncertainty and fear.
I kept seeing black specks in the air turning into helicopters
before they resolved into birds or, in one case, a black plastic
bag caught on a thermal.

We passed
through Qaffin. There were children playing in the streets. Beyond
the township, a track led off the badly surfaced road and we
followed it through the olive groves for perhaps two hundred
metres, dipping down and away from the road, virtually out of sight
from it before we reached a whitewashed farmhouse. It looked as old
as time, almost like an English country cottage, rough whitewashed
walls with a terracotta tiled roof. We pulled into the yard,
sending a handful of hens clucking away from us.

There,
standing in the kitchen doorway, was Aisha’s grandmother Mariam.
She wore a blue
kandoura
, a
housecoat. She was small, bent over a little with the weight of her
age but she moved with grace, her hair showing grey under the
white
mandeel
on her head. Getting out of the car
after the long drive through unfamiliar territory, I hobbled more
than she did. Mariam shook my hand, which I hadn’t expected. The
more traditional women in the Levant won’t shake hands with men,
holding their hand to their chest instead.

Mariam
gripped my hands and looked intently up at me. Her eyes were brown
and merry, faded with age but steady in her deeply lined face. She
reminded me immediately of Aisha’s mother, Nour. Still holding me
in her gaze she spoke to Aisha in Arabic, chuckling.

‘
She says
you’re not bad for a Brit. She says you’ve all been nothing but
trouble to her.’

Certain Aisha
was teasing me, I looked back at the old lady. ‘No, she
didn’t.’

Another burst
of Arabic, aimed squarely at Aisha. ‘She says I have to translate
properly, she doesn’t speak English but she knows when I’m being
bad, always has done.’ Aisha laughed. ‘She says you’re
handsome.’

I looked at
Mariam. ‘
Shukran
.’ One of my
precious few words of Arabic. She was delighted.

‘
Alhamdullilah, Ferriyah, houa etekellum
Arabi
,’ she said to
Aisha.

And I
understood her, too – ‘Praise be to God, little bird, he speaks
Arabic.’

Aisha smiled
sadly at me. ‘Yes, little bird. You remembered. My father’s name
for me, given me by Mariam.’

Mariam pulled
us inside to drink cool water mixed with lemon juice and
honey.

‘
The lemons
grow wild on the hillside here,’ said Aisha as we followed Mariam.
‘We have a few citrus trees in the yard but it’s not always
possible to get enough water for them.’

Mariam fired
off another burst of Arabic, chuckling.

‘
She says
they keep the water for the olives but try and spare some for the
citrus. It’s good for her teeth.’

Hamad,
Aisha’s uncle, was expected back at the farm later on. As the guest
of honour, I got to sleep in Hamad’s bedroom, while Aisha was
downstairs on the sofa. Hamad was relegated to the floor in
Mariam’s room. The old lady would hear of no other arrangement and
had obviously been preparing for our visit. She rooted delightedly
through the two bags of supplies Aisha had brought with us, damaged
though they were by the inspection and hours rattling around in the
back of the car. Almost half the tea had spilled out, mixing with
the fish oil to create a noxious paste.

Aisha and I
left Mariam chewing contentedly on a liquorice allsort and went out
for a walk around the farm as the daylight started to fade. We
wandered hand in hand through the olive groves and over the hill
behind the farmhouse. The setting sun cast long, spindly shadows
from the olive trees in their rows, each smooth-barked and heavy
with fruit.

Aisha held
out her hand to brush against the leaves as we passed them. ‘I used
to play in these olive groves as a child. They were monsters or
soldiers in my army, sometimes they were courtiers in my court,’
she said, smiling.

We crested
the hill to confront the shocking scar greyly dominating the
green-flecked earthy brown landscape. The Israeli security
wall.

I gazed down
at the continuation of the olive stands beyond the ugly monstrosity
snaking its way through the land, a dust track running alongside it
on this side, blacktop on the other. It was built up in huge
concrete slabs, topped with barbed wire, immense, incongruous and
monolithic.

I was
surprised to find myself angry at the sight of it. It symbolised an
abnegation of hope, a rejection of humanity. Whatever the rights
and wrongs, whatever the history, surely humanity had discovered
walls and barriers weren’t the answer? We’d knocked down Berlin
just to stand silently by while this thing was built: bigger, more
sophisticated and far, far more final. Aisha was quiet at my side,
holding my hand. She shook herself free of me. I blinked, focusing
on her with difficulty.