The Distance Between Us (17 page)

Before she can get out of the car to shoo him on, half a dozen kids sweep from around the side of a house. The tallest one eyes her suspiciously, but the rest are smiling. Two who look to be about seven years old, already accustomed to the obstinate arrogance of goats, move to one side of the animal and expertly drive him out of the way. They swat at his behind as though it were a fly and call out from somewhere deep in their throats.

“Shukran,”
Caddie says out the window. “I’m looking for the home of Halima Bisharat.”

“We show you, we show you,” one boy says. He opens the back door of her car and climbs in. A friend joins him. He directs Caddie to turn right, then left. “There is house.”

Caddie parks, thanks the boys again and swings out of the car. She pauses to squeeze her left hand into a tight fist and make a wordless wish for a good interview. She wills herself to become immersed in the stink of donkey manure and exhaust fumes and sweet rotting fruit. In the competing tastes of dirt
on her dry lips and the sweet tea she knows will soon be offered. In the village’s background music—a thick hum of women and children—that comes from nowhere in particular and seems to hover near her like kicked-up earth.

She wills herself to have better luck than she did at Moshe’s.

A small group of children, boys and girls both, is playing a homegrown version of cowboys and Indians—soldiers versus martyrs. One, the “martyr,” is splayed on the ground pretending to be dead. “
I
want to be killed next,” another boy says peevishly as Caddie approaches. Several break away from their game to circle Caddie curiously. A middle-aged woman with a basket balanced on her head pauses to stare.

Half the homes are little more than concrete boxes with corrugated tin roofs held in place by piles of discarded tires and cement blocks. The others, Halima’s included, are sprawling by comparison, spread over several rooms and built of pink-tinted limestone. They were clearly constructed in times of relative calm and have managed to survive despite the frequent house demolitions carried out by Israeli troops.

Halima opens the door before Caddie, surrounded by the boys, can knock. Halima holds a baby. Caddie didn’t think this girl was a mother. Even though she’s about seventeen, which makes her old enough to have been given in marriage and borne a child or two, she doesn’t have a mother’s eyes. Her gaze is too lacking in caution.

“Welcome, welcome,” Halima says in English. She seems to sense Caddie’s unasked question. “This is my cousin.” She bounces the baby. “And this is my mother.” Behind Halima
stands a woman who smiles shyly. Her face is tan and wrinkled. Her hands, which she holds tightly in front of her, are red, as if they’d been scorched with boiling water, but Caddie can’t tell if it’s an injury or a birth deformity. The woman nods welcomingly, gestures Caddie inside and then retreats.

The boys start to enter behind Caddie, but Halima stops them. She speaks too quickly for Caddie to catch the words, though the meaning is clear. Grumbling, the boys back away and Halima closes the door.

“Sit, sit.” She gestures to a deep brown velvet couch with a look that communicates this is a possession of some pride. Above it hangs the framed painting of a young man. “My father,” says Halima, following Caddie’s eyes with her own. “He used to own a furniture-building factory.” She emphasizes the word
own
. “He died two years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He’d been ill a long time.”

The mother returns now, carrying a tray as if it were a cushion of jewels. It is crammed with eight or nine plates of salads, olives, hummus and pita. She sets it down, then disappears and returns with another tray holding cups of tea.

“Eat. Drink,” Halima says, handing her mother the baby.

Caddie smiles at the mother and sips the tea. She is surprised to be here alone with Halima, her mother and the infant cousin; she’s surprised that the women have not been relegated to a corner of the room by the assortment of males who would, in most clans, insist on being present, and then
take over. Even though the father is dead, she would expect uncles and cousins.

But she’s far from displeased. With the men, there is so much rhetoric to be gotten through; with the women, usually less so. “Tell me about that night, then, with your cousin and his friend,” she says.

Halima begins to describe settlers who come in cars to the village. Her expression is cautious. Caddie, taking notes, nods encouragingly. “Some nights they hurl stones at our house,” Halima says. “One night they tried to throw gasoline at our neighbor’s home. My uncle and two of my cousins ran after them with sticks, yelling. Finally they fled.” She shakes her head. “It is what we know to expect.”

“Eat, eat,” says the mother. She is watching Halima speak. Pride and concern dart, in turn, across her face.

Caddie takes a bite of pita. “How long has this been happening?”

Halima looks around as though to find the answer written on a wall. “Even when I was very young, it happened. But not as frequently as now. Now, every few days, they come through again. Still, you can’t live in fear. That’s what Walid used to say.”

“Walid, he’s your cousin?”

Halima nods.

“What happened that night? The night Walid was taken, and his friend was killed.”

Halima’s voice is delicate, precise—a wonderful singing voice, Caddie suspects. “Walid and Nazir were sleeping outside
on the roof; it was hot. Walid’s wife and child were inside. Walid woke up when he heard a noise. He shook Nazir and together they went down. Someone captured them from behind,” Halima makes a grabbing gesture, “and blindfolded them. Walid heard men speaking Hebrew. Three of them, he thinks.” Halima watches Caddie closely, as if to make sure every word is recorded. The mother pours more tea.

“They pulled Walid and Nazir into a car,” Halima goes on, “and drove them around for something like twenty minutes. They weren’t able to talk, but Nazir squeezed Walid’s hand. Then my cousin was thrown out of the car, still blindfolded. He had cuts, scrapes and a broken arm, but he was able to pull off his blindfold and get help.”

“And Nazir?”

Halima braids her fingers together, unknots them, then braids them again. “We don’t know exactly. Only that his body was found early the next morning, dumped outside Deheishe. A stick had been shoved into one of his ears, his chest was like pulp, his right arm broken.” Her tone is incredulous as well as bitter.

The door opens then without anyone knocking. A man strides in, tall, mustachioed, with a middle-aged spread at his waist.
“Ahalan.”
He smiles broadly, nodding his head forcefully. “Welcome, welcome. I am Ibrahim Issa. Brother of Halima’s father.”

Halima is blushing; she’s been found out. There can be no secrets for long in a village this small. Caddie wonders what
repercussions Halima will face for bypassing the family’s men. She rises to introduce herself.

“Sit, sit,” Ibrahim Issa says. The mother brings him a cup of tea.
“Shukran.”
He exchanges a few words with her, then turns to Caddie. “You are here to report on the terrorism we face?” he asks in Arabic.

From that phrase, Caddie knows she is in the land of rhetoric. Damned rhetoric: such a thin slice of the truth that, to Caddie, it has begun to seem obscene.

“You have heard of the Silwadi case?” he asks. She can’t place the name until he mentions the woman and her five-year-old daughter shot in their home. The killings Jon told her about. She nods to show she knows of it. “The Israeli settlers forced the grandmother to go outside,” Ibrahim Issa says. “Then they shot the mother, Randa, and her child, Salwa.” He goes into the back room and returns with a color poster showing the slain girl. She is dressed for her funeral, her eyes closed and, since the wounds of “martyrs” are not cleaned, a finger of dried blood coming from her mouth.

Posters, so soon. Victims Salwa Silwadi and her mother are clearly already part of Palestinian lore. “It’s very sad,” Caddie says. And it is. But she has to redirect the conversation back to the reason she’s here. “Your family has its own tragedy. Halima was explaining it.”

“Yes. Halima.” Ibrahim Issa’s voice sounds thoughtful and threatening at once. Caddie looks at him for a long moment, and then turns to Halima.

“Can I talk to your cousin?” Caddie asks.

Ibrahim Issa shakes his head twice.

“He doesn’t want.” Halima switches to English, looks apologetic and exchanges a glance with her mother, who hovers on the edge of the room. “After the killing, Walid stopped going to school,” she says, moving back into Arabic. “It has been two weeks now and he will barely talk, even to us. We used to be close, he and I. He has no trust left. Sometimes I think not even for me.” She glances at her uncle, who is watching her and taking long drags on his cigarette. “My mother is taking care of his child now. His wife has gone back to her parents.”

“For a visit,” Ibrahim Issa says. “She will return.”

Halima shrugs in a way that shows she is not sure. “I used to think he would get better,” she says. “I used to hope many things. His arm heals, but the rest of him gets worse.”

“That’s why I’d like to interview him,” Caddie says.

“I wish he were angry like the rest of us,” Halima says dully, “but he’s—” She looks again at the painting of her father. “It’s as though he’s gone.”

Caddie reaches out to touch Halima’s arm. “Sometimes an outsider can draw someone out even when family members can’t.”

Ibrahim Issa stamps out his cigarette and leaps up as though no longer able to restrain himself. He chops at the air with his hand. “No outsider can accomplish this. Certainly not—” he hesitates, looking from Caddie’s feet to her face, “not you. Impossible.” He walks once around the room, his long strides better suited to pacing a field. “Walid doesn’t even know Halima
is speaking to a journalist.” He gives Halima a quick and reprimanding look. “Walid would not be happy.”

“Walid would be proud if he had heard Halima,” Caddie says. “How well she has explained herself.”

Ibrahim Issa turns to Caddie with a hard and fabricated smile. “And you have heard her answer about talking to her cousin. I must ask you to let go of this request. The topic is at a close.”

The silence then is awkward. Halima’s mother pours more tea for Ibrahim Issa and urges Caddie to put food on her plate. The baby must be sleeping in a back room.

“Did Halima tell you what happened to her grandmother six months ago?” Ibrahim Issa asks after a few moments.

Caddie shakes her head as Halima sinks into her seat, withdrawn but watching her uncle politely. Ibrahim Issa warms up slightly as he recounts how the grandmother got angry at some trespassing settlers, charged at them with a stick, fell ill the next day and died. “They killed her, as they did Nazir,” Ibrahim Issa says intently. He waves toward Caddie’s notebook, as though ordering her to write it all down. She jots a couple words and looks up in time to catch the disappointment in his eyes. If she were with a television cameraman, he wouldn’t pay attention to whether or not she was writing every word he said. He’d be buoyed by the belief that the camera was recording it all.

“So what are you going to do about all this?” Caddie asks. “The harassment, the kidnappings?”

“What
can
we do?” Ibrahim Issa responds, his face wide open, sky-like. He spreads his arms. “It is the Israelis who are so well armed, not us.”

But she knows. Responses can be made. Bombs assembled, weapons gathered. Suicide bombers can be recruited, ambushes launched. Otherwise, the men lose face. She leans forward. “Revenge,” she says quietly. “Don’t you want to retaliate? Don’t your victims deserve it?”

Halima rises and takes a step toward Caddie, but Caddie doesn’t glance her way. She doesn’t want to be restrained. She notices she is squeezing her own knees, and forces herself to loosen her grip. “You have meetings, don’t you?” she asks. “In the mosque? In one of your homes?”

Ibrahim Issa lights another cigarette, his face rigid. “You speak, perhaps, of one of the factions. I’m with those who follow Arafat.”

“I’m talking realities, not factions.” Caddie scoots even further forward on her seat. “You can’t let them keep getting away with it. Don’t you have to do something, if only to honor the memory of those killed?”

Ibrahim Issa leans into his chair, away from her, and stares as though she were distasteful.

“There’s a moral imperative, isn’t there,” Caddie says, “to respond when attacked?”

Ibrahim Issa clears his throat. “Even if what you suppose is true,” he says deliberately, “tell me, what would you do with this information if you were to hold it in your hands? You would write it in the papers? It would find its way to the Israeli prime minister’s coffee table? Do you think that is something we would want?”

Caddie feels her blood rush to her cheeks. She stares into
her cup. All Halima sought was a simple interview. To tell her story and maybe help her cousin somehow. It had to be humiliating, turning to a foreigner, then finding the only interested one was American and
female
. No wonder she didn’t want the family’s men to know.

Now that reporter has disgraced her. Caddie is acting like some naïve neophyte who is trying to find out the date and time of the next Palestinian strike against Israel, and who seems to actually expect to be told.

Caddie places the cup carefully in its saucer. “Of course. I understand.”

Halima sits back down and gives her a quick smile, vaguely sympathetic, but says nothing. Ibrahim Issa’s lips are sewn tight. Halima’s mother has retreated and Caddie hears the baby crying somewhere out of sight. It’s the only sound in the room.

A swell of nausea rushes over Caddie. This is probably the clumsiest interview she’s ever conducted. After what she’s just done, it would take a stroke of enormous luck—no, more, a miracle—to give her the kind of access she’s looking for here.

She searches for an inappropriate question to break her inner tension, but cannot even start to think of one. Instead, the question is for herself.
What the hell were you thinking?