Murder Under the Bridge

by Kate Raphael

  The soldier fired in the air. The shot was so loud, it made her ears throb.

  “Khalas, don’t!” she shouted, in Arabic for the kids and English for the soldiers. She hated these games, even as she knew the kids needed the outlet for their rage. Who were they, anyway, and why weren’t they in school? She couldn’t see if they were youngsters, or young adults. She pushed herself forward, recoiling as another shot rang out. She finally passed The Broom, and could glimpse one of his targets up on the hill. She turned around to plead with him. More stones thudded to the ground at her feet.

  “Please,” she shouted, targeting her words at the shorter soldier, who had made it to his friend’s side. “Go back down, and I will get them to stop throwing stones.”

  “You go down,” The Broom growled. “You are not allowed here, it’s a closed military zone. If you don’t leave, I will arrest you.”

  “Fine, if you are arresting me, then you won’t be shooting at the children.”

  He actually stopped and looked at her then. She imagined his thought process. Drop his pursuit of a group of young men armed with stones, to arrest a tiny woman for mouthing off? Still, could he shrug off her disrespect for his supreme authority? He took one step closer to her, his finger still on the trigger of his M-16. She was so close, she could count the tiny whiskers on his cheek. He reached toward her with his left hand, his right still clutching the rifle. She wanted to back up, but she would not allow herself that.

  “You know, you’re on film,” a clear voice carried on the wind.

  A foreign woman was striding toward them, video camera pointed straight at The Broom’s face. Rania’s eyes quickly took in the woman’s wild curls, black jeans faded in the knees, and baggy beige polo shirt. The other woman flashed her a smile, showing an appealing gap between her front teeth. The Broom swiveled, his rifle now pointed squarely at the other woman’s face. Relief washed over Rania, and she surreptitiously moved out of striking range.

  “You’re not supposed to leave your post, are you?” the foreigner said to The Broom.

  He did not answer, just peered through the sight on his rifle into the lens of the camera. Rania held her breath. If his finger moved on the trigger, the woman’s head would explode. How could she just stand there, calmly filming him?

  Seconds ticked by, each one feeling like an hour. The rain of stones had stopped. The boys must be transfixed by the scene below them.

  “Yalla.” Let’s go, The Broom said to Itchy. He slid the cartridge of bullets out of his rifle and they scrambled down the hillside.

  Rania exhaled sharply.

  “You’re very brave,” she said to the other woman.

  “Not really,” the other woman shrugged. “I really didn’t think he’d shoot me. I’m Chloe.”

  “Rania.”

  Chloe extended her right hand for Rania to shake, but it felt a little formal for the moment. Rania raised herself on tiptoes and kissed the taller woman first on the left cheek, then the right and the left again. The end of her head scarf caught on something on the other woman’s shirt. She extricated it. The offending item was a little silver charm, two interlocked circles with crosses attached.

  “Is it something religious?” Rania asked, fingering the little icon.

  Chloe hesitated. “Something like that.”

  “Where are you from?” Rania asked.

  “The States,” Chloe said.

  “Which state?”

  “California. San Francisco, to be exact.”

  “Like Michael Douglas,” Rania said.

  “Um… sorry?” Chloe cocked her head to one side, cat-like.

  “The Streets of San Francisco,” Rania said.

  Chloe laughed. “That stupid show from the seventies? How do you know about that?”

  “It comes on late night satellite television. San Francisco looks very beautiful.”

  “It is.” Chloe’s face softened, and she looked off into the distance, as if San Francisco, not Tel Aviv, lay just beyond the trees.

  “Let’s go down,” Rania said. “I need some coffee.”

  Chapter 2

  Abu Anwar picked his way carefully along the rocky path.

  “Watch the thorns,” he said to the donkey, who whinnied in resigned acknowledgment.

  Abu Anwar steered the beast away from the thorny cactus lining the trail. They slowly climbed rock terraces. He walked next to the donkey, one hand on its scraggly mane, the other steadying the mound of tarps, tools, and provisions tied onto the animal’s back. The terraces were not a problem for him—he knew them like he knew his own children. They were built by his family and his neighbors’ families over the decades, with the rocks they cleared from their olive groves. But he had to pay close attention to the exposed sewage pipe, pouring waste from the settlement of Elkana into Azzawiya’s precious soil. He guided the donkey over one shallow pool of sludge, partially covered with branches. Soon though, they came to a raging river of filth, too wide to step across.

  “Ya haram.” For shame, Abu Anwar exclaimed. He looped a rope loosely around the donkey’s front legs and tied it to a nearby olive tree. He clambered back over the low stone wall and wandered down the path, looking for a plank of wood big enough to make a bridge for them. He shook his head, muttering at the debris rotting in the fetid earth: plastic soda bottles that had carried water for last year’s olive picking, bits of tools long since corroded and cracked, rotting meat, a pair of baby shoes.

  More surprising was the adult shoe a hundred meters further down. A woman’s shoe, high heeled, shiny leather, in good condition. Abu Anwar mused over the shoe as he continued to scour the litter. Some young women dressed to go to the fields as if they were going to a wedding and changed into picking clothes when they reached the trees. He supposed someone might have gone to the fields in her good party shoes, but at the end of a long day’s picking, not bothered to change out of her sneakers. Laden with buckets, picnic supplies, and children, it was plausible that she would not have seen a shoe slip out of one of her bundles. Satisfied with that explanation, he let it go.

  He spied a board about a hundred meters away that looked like it would hold the donkey’s weight. A thicket of brambles blocked his path. As he bent to clear it, a bit of bright violet caught his eye. He reached cautiously into the tangle of branches and exposed the source of the bright spot—a small circle of cloth, gathered with elastic bands, caught on one of the thorns.

  Abu Anwar knew that something was not right. He couldn’t have told you how he knew it, but he would bet his house on it. He also knew it was none of his affair. He would leave the bit of cloth where it was, and the shoe, and take the board and go tend his trees and return home to eat his wife’s makluube and smoke sheesha with his brothers in the evening. If something evil was walking their lands, it would no doubt find them in its own time, like the soldiers who came in the night to take their sons and the settlers who set fire to their trees. He would not do anything to hasten it.

  He reached the board and pried it loose from the bed of mud and slime. He scraped it on an old tire. A wave of dizziness fell over him as he straightened up. He lost his balance and toppled over in the high grass. He clutched at the long weeds for support, and the sharp prickles tore at his hands. He lay for a few minutes, stunned.

  “Shu bisir?” What is happening? he asked.

  Something was definitely wrong. In his sixty-eight years on earth, he had never had a moment when he did not know where his feet were. Abu Anwar sat up slowly. His old bones ached uncharacteristically. He looked around, shaking his head over his clumsiness. Could he be losing his faculties? He got unsteadily to his feet.

  He saw the pair to the girl’s shoe a few meters from where he had landed when he fell. That was more unsettling. Two shoes would hardly have been dropped by accident, and no Palestinian girl would intentionally throw away two good shoes like this. Abu Anwar bent to look at the second shoe more closely.

  “Haram!” he said aloud again.

>   This shoe was attached to a girl. Ajnabiya—a foreign girl.

  “Allah yirhamha.” He whispered the prayer for her soul.

  Abu Anwar was careful not to touch her, but he thought she had been dead for some hours. Her skin had a bluish cast, and the faint odor which rose from her reminded him of the stench that could hang around your compound after the ritual slaughter of a cow for Eid, if you didn’t clean up well enough. She wore a violet blouse with gathered sleeves and black slacks. Her hair was shiny black, her features small and delicate. Abu Anwar thought she must be Japanese. She reminded him of pictures he saw once from the bombing of Hiroshima. At the time he had only thought, “If the Israelis get hold of this weapon, we are truly finished.” But now he heard that they had the weapon. Yet he and his family were still there, Allah be praised.

  Abu Anwar was quite undecided about what to do. This girl was not a Palestinian, and no Palestinian would have left her in this state. Still, it was Palestinian land, so it was a matter for the Palestinian police. But if Abu Anwar called them, to report this dead girl, the Palestinian police would call the Israeli police. The Israelis would ask the Palestinian police who had found the girl, and then they might decide Abu Anwar had something to do with her getting dead, and he could find himself in a belagan, a big mess.

  He left the girl where she lay. He took his board and went back to where he had tied up the donkey. It did not seem right to let her rot in the sun, but he could not think right now. He would work on his trees, and when he was done, he would go back to the village and discuss it with his brother, Thamer, the mayor of Azzawiya.

  He slowly untied the donkey and headed into the groves.

  Chapter 3

  Rania sought out one of the coffee kids and bought two small hot cups, nos hilwe, half sweet. She handed one to Chloe, and they settled under the shade of an olive tree, a little ways from where the group of women still sat. Rania sipped at the bittersweet liquid, savoring the feel of the tiny grounds in her teeth.

  “Are you a journalist?” she asked.

  “Not exactly.” Chloe had been evasive about the little object around her neck, and now she didn’t want to say what her work was. Rania started to wonder if it was wise to be hanging around this woman. Perhaps she was an Israeli spy. But a spy would probably have her story down.

  “A student?” Rania persisted, though certainly, Chloe was too old for a student in the conventional sense.

  “Sort of… I’m trying to learn about the situation.”

  “But why here?”

  Chloe was quiet for a few seconds, looking into her coffee cup, as if for an answer that would satisfy.

  “I grew up in a small town in North Carolina. Do you know where that is?”

  Rania thought about lying; she hated to sound ignorant. But if North Carolina was important to the story, she should know exactly what it was. She shook her head.

  “It’s a state in the southeast, the part that used to have slavery.”

  Rania instinctively glanced at her watch. She had learned about American slavery in school. That had ended in the 1800s, before the Jews even began to settle in Palestine. If Chloe was going to start that far back, they would be here all day.

  “Sorry.” Chloe acknowledged her impatience. “The point is, it was very racist there. Especially against Blacks, but there was a lot of prejudice against Jews too. There were only about seventy-five Jews in the whole area, one synagogue for three towns. After regular school, we—the Jewish kids—had to go to Hebrew school, so we would know what it meant to be Jewish. Most of what they taught us about was Israel. About how it was the only place in the world where men and women were completely equal, Golda Meir could be prime minister, and the people were so smart they could grow things in the desert.”

  Chloe blushed when she said this. She started talking so fast, she sounded like a tape on the wrong speed. Rania almost asked her to slow down just a little, but her pride wouldn’t let her.

  “And then during the Intifada, I saw Palestinian kids dying on television. I mean, they don’t report it nearly as much as it happens, not half as much as Palestinian suicide bombings, but they showed that little kid with his father…”

  “Mohammed al-Dura,” Rania supplied.

  “Yes, him. And it was like I could feel the terror through my television screen.”

  Rania liked that. She had felt that way too.

  “I started thinking maybe what I’d learned about Israel wasn’t the whole truth. When I was little, we used to put quarters in these blue and white cans, to plant trees in Israel. It never occurred to me to wonder what had been there before.”

  “So just like that, you decided to come here?”

  “Not just like that, no. I started reading a lot, people like Edward Said and Tom Segev. I watched movies—this one called Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land is really good. And that one that just came out, Ford Transit, about the checkpoints.”

  “I have not seen it,” Rania said.

  “Oh, sorry.” Chloe blushed again. Rania wondered why she was apologizing. She didn’t want to see any movie about checkpoints.

  “How long have you been here?” Rania asked.

  “About nine months.”

  “You came here by yourself?”

  “Not at first. Have you heard of the International Network in Solidarity with Palestine, the Jamiyat Ittadamon Iddawliya?” Chloe asked.

  “Of course.” Rania wasn’t really sure if she knew about that particular group. There were so many groups, and all of them had similar names, she couldn’t keep track.

  “I came to work with them,” Chloe answered. “But it was… not very good for women.”

  “Not good how?”

  “They didn’t respect us. Like in one village there was a tent to honor the prisoners and the Minister of Prisoners had come to speak. We all arrived together, and only men were in the tent. The leaders of the village came and shook hands with the foreign men, and took them to sit in the very front. They completely ignored us women, and the men in our group didn’t say anything. So I went to find the women from the village. They were all gathered over on one side of the tent, with the sun beating down and the kids running around, and just one little tree for shade. They were holding pictures of their sons and husbands in prison, and they couldn’t even hear the speeches.”

  Rania thought she might have met her match in the anti-tact department. She liked Chloe’s sharp sense of justice, though. Before she could open her mouth to make some sympathetic comment, Chloe started talking again.

  “So, are you on your way to work?”

  “I am at work. I am a policewoman.”

  “Really? I didn’t know there were women in the police up here.”

  Rania bristled at the words “up here.” As often as she longed for the more cosmopolitan, easygoing culture of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, where she had grown up, she didn’t need foreigners making assumptions.

  “Well, there are,” she said. She drained the remaining coffee in her cup and crumpled it in one hand. “I have to go.”

  “Go where?” Chloe asked. “The road’s still closed.”

  Rania pointed up at the settler highway.

  “To talk to the Israeli police up on the road.”

  Chloe jumped up. “I’ll come with you. Given how jumpy the army is, they might shoot at you.”

  “Stay here,” Rania ordered. “I can handle the jesh.”

  The waiting around had not improved her mood. She charged off to her right through the olive groves to the dirt path that climbed up to the settler road. The path was well marked, hammered out by the feet of hundreds of men, and a few women, who used it every Saturday night to slip into Israel where they could, if they were lucky, make enough money to feed their families.

  She carefully made her ascent. When she neared the top of the embankment, one of the policemen called out, “Diiri baalik, fii jesh honak.” Be careful, the army is there. Surprised, Rania looked up at him. He was
perhaps fifty, with short, bushy, salt-and-pepper hair and a kind, wrinkly face. Despite his blue eyes, she would have known him for a Palestinian even if he had not spoken Arabic. His name tag said “Ali” in Arabic, with Hebrew letters above it. She looked down to where he was pointing.

  Two soldiers stood about a hundred meters below, aiming their guns straight at her.

  “Atzri!” one of the soldiers called in Hebrew. “Mi at?” Stop! Who are you?

  She could hear fear in his voice. Improbable as it seemed, these heavily armed men were really afraid of a woman climbing up to the road in broad daylight, in full view of the Israeli police.

  “Shorta,” she said calmly, then “police,” in case he didn’t know any Arabic.

  “Palestinian police?” he asked in Hebrew. Obviously, she thought. She ordered herself not to be a smartass right now.

  “Yes.”

  “Mi zot?” Who is that? She followed his outstretched hand, and saw Chloe huffing up the embankment after her.

  “No idea,” Rania said. She turned back toward the Israeli policeman, Ali, who reached out a hand to help her over the guard rail. Rania declined the help, gripping the filthy metal rail for support instead, but she smiled into Ali’s twinkling blue eyes. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Chloe filming from a few feet away. Fine, as long as she kept her distance.

  “Tik alafia, Ali,” Rania said, using the Arabic greeting for someone who is working. “I am from the national police in Salfit. What’s going on?”

  “The car has been here since early morning,” Ali told her. “It belongs to an Israeli called Rotem Lehrman, from Rosh HaAyin. He reported it stolen a few hours ago. It was in the parking lot at the industrial park where he works.”

  “What does he do there?”

  “He is a security guard. He was working the night shift, and when he went to go home, the car was gone.”