by Kate Raphael
His description exactly matched Um Raad’s, so whoever this woman was, she must have been there. But it didn’t make sense; what would an Israeli woman dressed for work be doing in Azzawiya’s fields?
“Abu Anwar,” she said. “Why didn’t you want to tell me about the Israeli woman? It will be better for us if we can tell the Israeli police about her.”
He looked ashamed. “That is true, Um Khaled, but I did not want to become involved.”
She felt some sympathy for the old man. He was right to be wary. Accusing an Israeli of having something to do with a murder was not something a Palestinian could do lightly. But now that he had told them, he seemed glad to have it off his chest.
“What do we do now, Abu Walid?” the mayor asked. Rania was momentarily irritated that he had excluded her so deftly. But if he had asked her, she would have had no idea how to answer him.
“I will talk with Abu Ziyad,” the captain said. “And we will speak with you tomorrow.”
She heard the muffled ringing of her phone, deep inside her handbag. She managed to dig it out before it stopped ringing.
“Where are you?” Bassam said. “We are ready to go to Dunya’s.”
She had completely forgotten that they were to eat at his sister’s house in Deir Balut. But it was no problem.
“I’m in Azzawiya,” she said. “I’ll pick up some sweets and catch a car to Deir Balut. I’ll probably be there before you.”
“No, it won’t look right.”
“That’s ridiculous.” It would be fine for him to arrive on his own from work, but for her to do it would raise eyebrows from his brothers. As if they didn’t know that she traveled all over by herself for her work. As if Dunya herself did not travel around for her work with the Elections Commission. But not at night, he would say. She wished he would simply tell his brothers, and his mother, where to get off. If it was something important to him, he would, she thought irritably.
“Pick me up by the sweets shop,” she relented.
She hung up the phone. She needed to get going, but she didn’t want to leave before the captain did. A knock on the door solved her problem. Abu Jawad ushered in a man in a violet shirt, with an old farmer and two foreigners.
“Chiif halach, Abu Fareed?” Mustafa shook hands with the violet-shirted man.
She recognized Jaber Haddad, though she didn’t know him well. He was another one of the club of ex-fighters. One of the foreigners was Chloe, the woman she had met in the morning. The other was a young Israeli man she had seen in her village, Mas’ha, during their protests against the Wall, rakishly good looking, despite his abominable clothes.
“What happened at Beit Amin?” she asked Chloe.
“The usual,” the American woman said. She turned to her friend. “This is Rania, Um … Um aysh?”
“I prefer Rania,” she said. This Israeli man did not need to know the name of her son. Maybe Khaled was only six now, but one day, he would be old enough to be taken out of the house, beaten, tortured… she steered herself away from that train of thought.
“Rania works for the Palestinian police,” Chloe told the young man. “And this is…”
“Abe,” the boy filled in quickly. Smart boy, not wanting to broadcast his nationality, though she doubted many people would be fooled. He walked like an Israeli. That special arrogance shone in his face.
Captain Mustafa was leaving and that meant she could too. They went their separate ways, he toward the main road and she toward the shops in the village. The spring air was pungent with thyme and sage. Rania felt contented. She had acquitted herself well in front of the captain. She thought she would be able to convince him to let her continue working on the case, no matter what Abu Ziyad said.
Chapter 8
Dunya’s courtyard was a pleasant oasis. It reminded Rania of her parents’ house in Aida. The tiled terrace was surrounded by a low stucco wall and planted all the way around with fragrant herbs. A lemon tree bloomed in one corner, and brilliant purple hyacinth peeked out from behind the trellis. The coup de grâce was a real fountain that Dunya’s husband and his brothers had assembled stone by stone during the curfews of the First Intifada. Their father, an engineer, had rigged it up to use recycled water. When she perched on the wall and gazed at the fountain, Rania could feel the pride with which the young men had polished each stone until it gleamed.
This warm evening, the men were gathered there with their mother. Everyone sat on hard purple plastic chairs, except Um Bassam, who reclined in a cushioned wicker armchair. Surrounded by her sons, her apple-cheeked face held a serenity Rania rarely got to see. The other women, Rania knew, were in the kitchen. Dunya’s three sons and two of their boy cousins were playing soccer on the lawn. With them was Dunya’s youngest, Hanin, who had just turned eight and insisted on having her hair cropped short. Khaled ran to join them. Bassam shook hands with his brothers and pulled up a chair. Rania dutifully kissed her mother-in-law on both cheeks.
“Why are you late?” the older woman grunted.
“I had work.”
“Hmmph,” came the reply.
“You found the body of the ajnabiya in Azzawiya’s fields?” asked Amir. Rania had expected this. Word traveled quickly in the villages.
“That’s right,” she said.
“Do you know who she is?” Marwan inquired.
“Not yet,” she said. “The Israelis are trying to find out.”
“What is this?” her mother-in-law asked.
Rania left the men to fill their mother in on the news and went to help her sisters-in-law.
“You’ve put too much salt again,” Marwan’s wife, Jalila, was saying. Seeing Rania, she held out a spoonful of whitish broth.
“Taste this,” she said. Rania took a sip.
“Perfect,” she said.
“I can always count on Rania,” Dunya said, laughing. She kissed Rania’s left cheek, then her right and then the left again.
“What does she know about food?” said Maryam. “She’s from Bethlehem.” She was peeling cucumbers at the sink.
“True, they don’t know good food in Bethlehem,” said Jalila.
Rania found a knife and busied herself chopping the cucumbers into tiny cubes. Jalila went to work on the tomatoes.
“What about the girl they found in Azzawiya’s fields?” asked Maryam.
Rania supposed she had better get used to repeating herself. The incident would be the talk of the area for a while.
“What is there to tell?” she said. “We don’t know anything about her yet.”
“I heard she was Chinese,” said Jalila.
“We don’t know that,” Rania said. She felt annoyance welling up and tried to quell it. Naturally, her husband’s family would feel they should have inside information to show for their connection to her. If there were a scandal around the elections, she would expect Dunya to share some juicy details with her. Police work is different, she told herself. But was it, or was it arrogance that made her assume that? She tried to think of some tidbit she could release to her sisters-in-law without compromising her investigation.
“The Israelis are trying to take the investigation over,” she said. “They sent a big, bald Israeli cop to take the body away.” She launched into a description of Benny that had the other women doubled over laughing by the time the chicken came out of the oven.
“How is your work?” she asked Dunya, as she carefully upended the mound of rice into a perfect pyramid. Dunya was the one member of Bassam’s family she truly liked. She ran workshops for women in all the villages on how to participate in the electoral process, both as candidates and informed voters.
“It is good,” Dunya replied. “I think more women will register than men.”
“That is good,” Rania said. “Especially if they vote for Fatah,” she added, laughing.
“No, no, no,” said Dunya. She and her husband belonged to the People’s Party, the post-Soviet reconstitution of the Palestinian Communist Party.
“I
heard that Hamas will win,” said Jalila.
“If Hamas wins, Rania will have to leave her job,” said Dunya.
“Where did you hear that?” Rania asked.
“A colleague at work.”
Why me and not you? Rania started to ask, but then she answered her own question. Because Dunya’s work was with women, and Hamas supported that. They wanted women to participate in civil society, but not alongside men, and not in ways that gave them authority over men.
“Hamas will never win,” she said.
Rania had been active in Fatah since she was thirteen. Her best friends had joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine because they had the cutest boys, but she didn’t care about that. Fatah was the party of Abu Amaar, Yasser Arafat, who had created the Palestinian nation, and no one else was going to lead the nation into freedom. If you wanted to make a difference, you had to be with Fatah. It had paid off for her. She was a little troubled by the stories of corruption, but every political movement has its corruption. There are no pure leaders in the world; anyone alive who has nothing, if you say here, here is a nice house, here is a new car, he will take it.
Now, with Abu Ammar recently dead, everything was up in the air. There were rumors among the police about what would happen to their jobs if Hamas gained power. She wasn’t worried. Hamas might look good to the poor people when they gave away food at Eid and built kindergartens for the children, but Palestinians didn’t want a government of religionists. They wanted freedom. And Fatah was the party of freedom.
“Why don’t you run for council?” Jalila asked her.
“I don’t have time,” she said. “Why don’t you?” Jalila was the only one of her sisters-in-law who didn’t work. Of course, she didn’t need to. In addition to his share of the family stores, Marwan had a thriving business in mobile phones. No matter how poor the people got, they would not let go of their phones.
“Maybe I will,” Jalila shrugged. “I think I would be good, don’t you?”
“What is your platform?” Dunya asked.
“Dishwashers for every woman. And internet in every house.”
“I will vote for you,” Rania said. She loaded dishes onto a huge metal tray.
“Then I will get one vote,” her sister-in-law said with a grin. Balancing dishes on her forearm like an experienced waiter, she pushed the swinging door open with her backside. Rania followed her with the tray. They placed the dishes on a huge sheet of plastic on the floor and set cushions all around it for everyone to sit on.
They ate in silence, with al Jazeera in the background. Rania watched bombs explode in Baghdad, saw the half-burned bodies carted away, their family members wailing and tearing at their hair. Who would wail for the young woman she had found in the grass? How long would it be before they knew what explosion had taken her from them?
Chapter 9
Early the next morning, fortified by a good cup of American coffee and a crust of bread dipped in olive oil and the gritty herb mixture called zaatar, Chloe went downstairs to meet Jaber. They walked in companionable silence to Abu Shaadi’s.
A white minibus was disgorging its passengers in Abu Shaadi’s front yard. Avi stood next to the bus, talking to the driver, a Palestinian Israeli with a heavy handlebar mustache. Since he was occupied, Chloe studied the people getting off the bus.
Rabbi Shimon Dreyer was a forty-something American who talked so fast that he often stumbled over his words. He was clearly the leader of the group of ten or so Israelis, which included the effervescent Maya. The dancer’s long-sleeved yellow shirt was a tad sheer for propriety, camisole straps clearly visible underneath. Chloe bit the inside of her cheek to avoid starting the day off with trouble. A rabbinical student named Itai, the leader-in-training, hustled the group into the house, looking nervously over his shoulder as if terrorists might burst out from the trees. It took Chloe exactly three minutes to decide that Itai was one of those annoying men who try to take over every action and tell the Palestinians what to do.
There were five other internationals too. Chloe was relieved to see none of the men she had known during her brief stint with INSP. The average lifespan of an international activist in Palestine was a month or two. Four of the activists here today were an “affinity group”—INSP jargon for a group that had been trained together—comprising two French women chicly attired all in black, a huge Italian guy with long stringy hair, and a tiny Swedish woman who spoke British-accented English. Though affinity groups were in principle rigidly egalitarian, the Italian guy seemed to have appointed himself their leader, no doubt by virtue of his ability to speak both broken French and broken English very loudly. The four of them stood together in a tight group, while the other woman stood by herself. She was extremely tall with caramel skin and a model’s posture. Henna-tinged dark hair was caught into a knot at the nape of her endless neck.
The woman saw Chloe looking—or gawking—at her and made her way to where she stood.
“Six-one,” she said.
Chloe didn’t need a mirror to know her face had turned an unpleasant salmon color.
“Five-seven,” she stammered. “But you can call me Chloe.”
The tall woman’s wide-set, gray-green eyes danced, and Chloe felt her cheeks cool to medium rare.
“Tina,” sticking out her hand. The brief contact hit Chloe like an electric shock. She followed Tina into the house, where Abu Shaadi’s wife was busy plying the foreigners with tea and crescent-shaped date cookies.
“Maamoul?” Chloe took the plate and offered it to Tina.
“Love them,” Tina said, helping herself. Good, Chloe thought, not a dieter. So many of the foreign women who turned up talked on and on about how much weight they were gaining from all the carbs Palestinians served.
“You’re from Australia?” Chloe guessed. She took a cookie and tried to nibble it rather than swallow it whole.
“Melbourne,” Tina said. Chloe gave herself a point, wondering if Tina would think identifying the accent was such a great feat.
“So, are you working with INSP?”
“No, no, I’m volunteering at a counseling center in Ramallah. Maria,” indicating the Swedish woman with the long blonde braid, “came the other day to see about volunteering with us. I gather she finds INSP a little male dominated.”
“Gee, I can’t imagine that,” Chloe said, winning a smile from Tina.
“Anyway, I told her I would like to participate in demonstrations, and so here I am.”
“Do you counsel in Arabic?” Chloe said, accepting a tiny cup of sweet coffee from one of the children.
“Yes, of course.”
“Where did you learn?”
“From my parents. We speak it at home.”
Chloe felt heat rise in her face again. She really had wanted to make a good impression on this woman, and her foot was stuck so deep in her throat, she couldn’t even swallow her coffee. She started coughing, and Tina rapped her smartly on the back. It was so absurd, thinking about choking on her foot had actually made her choke, that Chloe started laughing and Tina good-naturedly joined in.
“I was born here in Palestine,” Tina said. “We moved to Australia when I was three. This is my first time back.”
“That must be intense for you. Do you still have family here?”
“Sure, a lot. That’s why I wanted to come.”
“Where do they live?” Chloe hoped she didn’t sound like an airport interrogator.
“All over. Jerusalem, Ramallah, some in the Galil. I’m staying with my aunt in Beit Sefafa.”
“How long are you here?”
“I’ve been here just over two weeks, and I’m staying… I don’t know. As long as I can, I guess. What about you?”
“I’ve been here nine months and I’m staying until my money runs out— which will probably be pretty soon.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m living here in Azzawiya.”
“Alone?”
“I
came with INSP when they started building the Wall here. There were demonstrations every day then, and at first the women were amazing, sitting in front of the bulldozers, but then the army started coming deeper into the village every day, shooting more gas than I ever saw, and after a few days, it was only young men and us. I don’t know what would have happened, if the high court hadn’t made them change the route of the Wall to take less land from the village.”
“So why did you stay here, once the demonstrations were over?”
“Jaber and the mayor were worried that the army would retaliate against the village for their resistance, so they didn’t want the internationals to leave right away. But the guys and the younger women didn’t want to stay, once it was calm. I stayed with one other woman who was even older than me—”
Tina acknowledged the self-deprecation with a half-smile.
“—but she was only here for a few weeks. I got involved in doing some stuff with Ahlam, Jaber’s wife, who runs the women’s club here. I’m helping her write grant proposals to some western foundations, and teaching the girls computers.”
“Do they pay you?”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t take money from the people here, that would be all wrong.”
“So how can you afford to be here so long?”
“At home I’m a software engineer. I worked for a startup that made a lot of money for a little while, and everyone who worked there got stock in the company. I managed to sell off some of my stock before the company went broke. I didn’t get rich, but I can live for a year or so, if I’m frugal. Which I am.”
The front door opened and two youngish Palestinian women entered, followed by a brood of children who looked between eight and twelve. The noise level in the house skyrocketed as the young boys tore around, greeting the men and talking excitedly in Arabic. The young women disappeared into the kitchen.
“Are you staying with a family?” Tina was asking.
Chloe turned her attention back to their conversation.
“I wanted to, so I’d have to speak Arabic all the time, but Jaber said people wouldn’t accept a single woman living in a household that included men. He has an empty apartment upstairs in his house, so I stay there by myself. Sometimes when women get sick of the sexism in INSP, they come and stay there for a while. I call it our refugee camp.”