To the right, as the sun rose and the morning broke with explosions of golden light, the views across the hills and valleys, the fruiting almond and olive groves, to the mighty Jordan valley and river and beyond into Jordan itself, were, as Alex had promised, nothing short of sensational. Or, as Lizzie might have described it: ‘Amazeballs, Mum.’
Kurtiz smiled quietly at the mental image of her daughter. She was so looking forward to seeing Lizzie soon. Just a few days now. How she wished she could share this precious alchemy of light, time and geography with the teenage girl who always accompanied her in her heart. How to explain to Lizzie what all this meant to her.
They reached their destination around lunchtime. Close to five hundred metres above Mediterranean Sea level.
The Palestinian village they were to film was situated halfway up a hillside and looked out over an extended valley that might have been an ancient hippodrome or a vast modern stadium for rock concerts and sporting events, so flat and expansive was it. Alex parked in the valley in the shade of a lofty rock-face and a lone spreading tree, which he identified as a Pistacia palaestina or terebinth.
‘There are many references to this plant in the Old Testament. It’s a stunner when in flower with its shots of vibrant red. Come early winter, Upper Galilee looks as though it’s on fire with the spread of these flowering beauties. I’ll take you there one day when we’re doing nothing. Their wine is mighty fine too, although little in the region compares with the volcanically reared reds up on war-won Golan Heights, some of it planted by members of the Rothschild family.’
Kurtiz stepped out and stretched her legs, stamping her booted feet against the desiccated earth, trying not to dwell on the improbable odds of her and Alex ever enjoying carefree days together in Upper Galilee. Or any vineyard anywhere, come to think of it.
‘I’ll rig our tents over there later.’ Tim pointed to a shaded patch so concealed it looked unlikely the sun would ever penetrate it.
The valley was embraced by an amphitheatre of limestone hills. On the apex of each ran a flat scree surface, which had been stationed with caravans and shacks, rusted, half-twisted temporary accommodation. Kurtiz had witnessed similar sights elsewhere. It was the first stage of land grab before the construction of a settlement. What was new to her were the watchtowers and the floodlights. Several metres high, the towers had been rigged up at strategic points on the peaks of the horseshoe of hills. All were trained directly on the small Palestinian village.
Two Americans, a retired couple with broad Midwest accents, and one precisely spoken Englishwoman descended a hill path leading from the village, to greet the arrival of the film crew.
‘We’re very glad to see you here,’ said the male American. All three were voluntary workers for a human-rights organization, run by the Anglican Church, whose headquarters were based in Switzerland.
Darryl and Tim were unloading and preparing to set up the cameras, working in the patch with shade from the terebinth, alongside what was to be their campsite. Alex was preparing for interviews, firing questions at the Americans about the identities and backgrounds of various residents within the village, jotting down dates of infractions, trespassing. He had already instructed Kurtiz on the run-up from Jerusalem to shoot ‘daily-life material’. He reiterated it now. ‘And make sure to get some good portraits of these aid workers.’
‘Our role here,’ the British woman explained to Kurtiz, ‘is to act as witnesses. We’re not allowed to get involved. Under no circumstances. We must remain neutral. It’s not always easy. We cannot allow ourselves to be emotionally swayed.’
‘The lights from the watchtowers stay on all night?’
‘All night.’
While the men disappeared to look for locations and to meet potential film subjects, Kurtiz went for a stroll, taking nature shots as she moved to and fro, close-ups of lizards, rock formations, red and green pomegranates, skins like leather, on stunted spiny trees. In the distance she could see terraced terrains. They had been planted centuries earlier with trees, predominantly olives. The terracing protected against land erosion and aided irrigation.
The village had been carved out of the rock, centuries, millennia earlier. It was remote, nothing besides the settlement trucks within view in any direction. Even the silence had an echo to it, like a ringing in the ear. The landscape felt ancient, stratified, embedded with history and strife. Its beauty was an idyll, if you could handle the remoteness, the solitariness.
One of the two female volunteers, the Englishwoman, whose name was Beth, approached Kurtiz and took up pace alongside her with a smile. They walked in silence, relishing the moment, ingesting the expansive scenery, ancient Holy Land, while, eyes aloft, they followed the wheeling trajectory of a pair of buzzards.
‘Crested honey buzzards,’ confirmed Beth. ‘In spring,’ she continued, moving her arm in a circle to her right, ‘that swathe of flatland over there is golden with wheat. A staple food for these villagers.’
Beth was a retired magistrate in her sixties with straight, iron-grey hair that hung to beneath her ears in clumps, like a set of knives and forks. The thick strands were kept off her face with a shiny cream slide. Her complexion was smooth, slightly furred, like peach skin. To Kurtiz’s eye, she fitted the description of ‘British and a good sort’. A pressed poplin blouse, of a blue paler than an English summer sky, was tucked into the waistband of a knee-length cotton skirt sewn with capacious pockets. Here, she rested her hands. On her feet were purple Birkenstocks. She had been visiting the West Bank for at least a decade, she said, and had taught herself from tapes and practice to speak more than passable Arabic. Palestine, she claimed, was her spiritual home. ‘It has a way of drawing you in, enchanting you. Palestine never fails to work its magic and its suffering breaks my heart.’
Kurtiz wondered whether Beth had any family. Whatever, she was filled with admiration for the woman, for each of these volunteers who spent up to three months at a time within remote communities such as this one. Afterwards, they awaited relocation elsewhere within the West Bank, to villages or hamlets, no matter how tiny or how few the inhabitants, who were facing similar threats.
Once installed, there was nowhere to go, no television or internet available, no telephone. Once here, they were here. Kurtiz tapped in her code to unlock her phone. She had no signal. No one had. They, and she, were entirely cut off. If she had known she would have forewarned Oliver and Lizzie. She slipped the phone back into her bag. A redundant item until they returned to Jerusalem.
‘It’s a little nerve-racking at first but you get used to it. I read a lot. I help the women in the fields and I contemplate the heavens, when the sky is not bleached out by those hateful floodlights. But no matter what those settlers do, they will never drive these villagers off their lands.’
Beth invited Kurtiz to the house she shared with the retired American couple up in the Palestinian village. The climb was steeper, more arduous, rockier than Kurtiz had anticipated. Tossed among the briary bushes that bordered the path there were hillocks of litter: plastic water bottles, broken chairs, wind-torn rags of clothing, the remains of a gas stove and threadbare tyres. There was no such service as refuse collection.
As they entered the property, crossing a stone stoop, cool air enveloped them. The furnishings were minimal, the atmosphere austere. A stack of books lay on the floor. A camera, a Canon EOS, lower end of the range, hung by its strap from a flat-headed nail driven into the wall. Three pairs of boots, one much larger than the others, were lined up in a neat row behind the door. The room smelt musty and in places its limestone walls were puckered and crumbly where subterranean mountain water had seeped through, causing great swabs of damp. Kurtiz took a couple of shots of the interior, a close-up of the boots, then the two Englishwomen made themselves comfortable in the communal living area, while Beth boiled water, poured from a bucket. ‘There is no mains water here,’ she explained. ‘We fetch it from a spring. The Palestinian women collect and carry it fr
om the natural springs on a daily basis. Up and down the hillsides.’
The water was boiled in a solid black kettle on a free-standing two-ringed gas stove. They sat on hard wooden stools and drank mint tea. Kurtiz’s choice between that and cardamom coffee.
Beyond the bare walls and the curtain-less windows there were chalky hills, still, arid, dotted with thorny bushes and gnarled trees, whose canopies had been pushed sideways by the wind.
After their refreshments, they strolled about the tiny village where they encountered dozens of scrawny cats that flashed into the shadows at their footfall. The Palestinian residents, women only, were huddled in groups of four and five on doorsteps; most appeared to be octogenarians. They were the occupants of the stone houses hewn and chiselled from the mountainside. Each house, with its wonky, colourfully painted wooden doors, pressed tight against the next, as though containing one extended family. Beth translated Kurtiz’s questions and the responses from the whisker-faced, black-clad women. While the inhabitants talked and cackled and drooled, darting their twisted fingers for emphasis in the air, Kurtiz snapped dozens of photographs and they laughed and nudged one another, like coy schoolgirls. Two old women with amber skin, corrugated faces and barely a tooth between them claimed to be over a hundred although they were not quite certain how far over they were. They and a handful of children were the village housekeepers, the cooks, the cleaners, the laundry team, operating with the most basic equipment: straw brushes, water and open fires. The men were toiling in their groves, orchards, vegetable and wheat fields and would not be back till sunset. In total, fewer than seventy Palestinians, born and raised there, resided in this outermost station; caretakers of the surrounding lands, which had been in their families since before written records began.
The caravans, shacks and watchtowers had been on site, expanding ominously, inexorably over the past eight years.
By the time Kurtiz made her way back to base camp, it was after four. The light was softening, the heat dissipating; a few trees moved in what passed for a breeze in this arid territory. Feeling mildly apprehensive, she tried her phone again, hoping to reach Lizzie, but there was still no signal. None of her team was in evidence. They were gathering material in the outlying lands, she supposed, or perhaps discreetly recording the encircling settlements, the concrete watchtowers. She opened the hire car and was rooting through her luggage in search of her washbag, wondering whether she should have asked Beth for a canister of water or where she might locate a source, when a child’s alarmed cry broke into the afternoon calm. She ditched everything on the passenger seat save for her Leica M, which she looped over her head, and ran back in the direction she had just come from.
Four burly men, with pointed sticks, were grouped together at the foot of the winding pathway that led from the valley up towards the village. They appeared to be harassing a black-haired boy of eight or nine. Without warning one of them whipped at the child’s left thigh. He let out a yell. Another whacked the other leg. And so they continued. One slap or dig following fast upon another. The boy was jumping, dancing, shrieking, trying to block their passage or to negotiate a route round them. Beth appeared, running down the dusty path from the centre of the village. She stopped short when she saw the intruders.
Kurtiz raised her camera and began to record the scene. One of the men caught sight of her and swung towards her, shaking his arm, long arms like a chimpanzee’s, brandishing his stick, back and forth, as though poking jerkily at a fire. She ducked her head, fearing he would jab her eye. He was swearing at her in a language she could not understand. He drew closer as she stepped backwards, almost stumbling over a bush directly behind her. As the assailant, in his big flat shoes, stalked like an emu towards her, looming over her, attempting to snatch at the strap of her camera, one of his companions called to him, terse garbled instructions. The only word she thought she could make out was ‘American’. The man in front of her, bearded, six foot plus, bushy eyebrows, with those loose-hanging simian arms, held his ground. His face was a swarm of spittle and bad skin. He locked his gaze on her. It was a threat, a scowl, an arrow of hatred fired directly at her. His companions, fellow trespassers, called a third time before he drew back with a growl and sloped away.
Kurtiz was shaking. She feared he had been intent on swiping her camera, with its recorded evidence of the men’s attack. Where was the injured boy? Was he safe? Beth was escorting him back up to the village, soothing him. His thin cotton trousers were ripped ragged and his upper legs were striped with bloodied weals.
Paris, November 2015
Eventually, finally, as Kurtiz was flagging, caving in, her muscles cursing her with razor-edged shooting pains, the Chinese Theatre loomed into view. It stood to the left side of the wide avenue beyond a barrage of vehicles with illuminated strobe bars: warning lights and beacons of green, violet, blue or white, flashing, pulsing, rotating. Colours spooling outwards like ribbons about a maypole, or an al-fresco disco display.
As she veered left towards the old concert hall, she heard the echo of what sounded like fireworks. Special effects? No. Gunshots. Repeated, flat as rubber. Assault rifles. More of what she had already witnessed during the Charonne massacre a few hours earlier and what now seemed to her a lifetime ago. She picked up speed and slammed full frontal into a uniformed police officer, who grabbed her by the shoulders, swung her body in a circular motion and steadied her, hauling her to a standstill.
‘Whoa, lady, lady …’ He was trying to calm her.
‘Let me go!’ she yelled. Tears began to spurt again, acid burning her up. She was attempting to pull herself free.
‘You can’t go any further, Madame,’ he warned, without aggression.
‘My husband’s in there, my daughter too! Let me go,’ she raged, yanking herself away from his bulk of flesh.
He held fast. ‘Others also have family inside, Madame.’
‘No, please, you don’t understand. I have to explain –’
‘You must wait here. We’re doing everything we can. You don’t have the authority to go closer.’
Kurtiz squinted through sweat dripping in runnels from her soaked hair. Silhouettes crystallized, grew clear, like a focus pull, into her line of vision. A small crowd was waiting. Some strung together. Others, apart, alone. Large groups here and there. Lone individuals, whose contorted body language depicted pain or distress.
Her damp frame went limp, began to sink, implode. ‘Is it true that there are dead in there?’
As though in answer, screams broke out. Bloodcurdling screams. Figures were running, escaping, leaping. A door burst open. Salvation through a fire exit. One female hanging from an upstairs window, arms extended, rigid, fingertips clawing, clinging to a sill, swinging like a monkey. Beyond, within the belly of the building, deep-throated bangs. Bang, bang, bang. Voices screaming, ‘No! No!’ Hands pressed over bulging eyes. Arms wrapped around torsos.
And coming from the interior another ejaculation of relentless firing. Another dead or wounded. Cartridges ricocheting.
LIZZIE!
Kurtiz ripped herself free from the policeman’s thick arm that had bolted her against him and ran to where the music-lovers, mostly young, under thirty, were fleeing for their lives, scrambling beneath a red and white flapping cordon line, skipping past two other officers. ‘Lizzie! Lizzie!’ Her voice was strangled, hoarse, like fingernails scratching blackboard. She cleared her throat and foghorned her daughter’s name once more. Others were bawling a variety of others. A female, who was drugged or shocked or both, groaned, ‘I’m here, I’m Lizzie,’ with no more power than a stunned bird.
Kurtiz bulldozed her way to the young woman lying on her stomach on the ground. She hunkered down at the girl’s side, gently lifting her shoulder to get a good look at the face. Disappointment like a diving bell. It was another Lizzie. Nonetheless, some mother’s daughter. Kurtiz settled beside her. The girl was bleeding, or blood had splattered the length of her arm and the left side of her cheek. Ma
scara seeped down her beige-skinned face in arabesque swirls. ‘Hello, Lizzie, I’m going to get you some help,’ she promised the teenager. ‘Wait here, I’ll be back. Can you hear me? I’m getting help for you, Lizzie.’
At that moment a member of one of the aid teams appeared, followed by another, a woman from the emergency services. Both bent low alongside the barely more than adolescent Lizzie. Kurtiz stumbled backwards. The girl was lifted onto a stretcher.
‘Is she your daughter?’ A petite female in white with a mask over her mouth enquired. Kurtiz shook her head.
‘Any idea who she is?’
Again Kurtiz answered with a negative. ‘Lizzie. That’s all I know.’
‘Thanks.’
As the young woman bearing her daughter’s name was conveyed away to an ambulance, Kurtiz wove through the swelling numbers, repeating her call over and over. Then she called out for Oliver. To neither name was there a response.
Shapes lay huddled on the paving stones, in the alley of Saint-Pierre Amelot. There, an open door from beyond which concert attendees were scrabbling, fleeing for their lives. The crack of gunshots died down. Stopped. Silence. Only yelping, yelling could be heard.
‘What’s going on in there?’ she begged of someone, only just resisting the urge to shake the remaining life out of the benumbed creature.
‘Murder. They’re killing everyone. “Get down on the ground,” they shouted at us. “Face the floor. Death is behind you.”’
‘How many have they killed? How many? Oh, God. I’m going in.’
The Lost Girl Page 10