by Kate Raphael
“So, Fareed,” the man began. “How are you? Everything okay?”
“I want to go home.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do,” the man answered, nodding sagely. “Perhaps I can help you with that.”
Whatever he meant by that, Fareed was sure it was not as simple as it sounded.
“If you help me, I can help you,” the man continued. “Does that sound like a good plan?”
“I don’t think I can help you.”
“I think you can.” The interrogator’s benevolent expression never changed, his eyes never traveling from Fareed’s. He did not seem to need to blink. Fareed did. He looked away first. Another shame. The two soldiers who had brought Fareed here were no longer in the room. He had not noticed them leaving, he had been too intent on the questioner and the coffee. There was another person there, though, a woman. She was seated off to the side, while the man sat directly opposite him. She had raven black hair, and wore a very short dress. Her long legs were crossed one on top of the other. She had a notepad and pen in her hand. She didn’t make any sounds.
“I just need you to tell me what happened,” the man said. He picked up a pen and put it to the yellow pad in front of him, waiting to write down Fareed’s statement.
“What happened when?”
“When you killed Nadya Kim.”
“I didn’t kill her.”
The man sighed, tapping his pen on the notepad.
“You see, Fareed, we won’t get anywhere if you insist on doing it this way. We know you killed her.”
“But that’s impossible because I didn’t.”
“Someone saw you. You didn’t know that, did you?”
“No.”
The man gave him a “got you” look, just as he realized what he had said. It made no difference, but he hated himself once again. How could he fall for their tricks so easily? He glanced at the black-haired woman. She was furiously writing on her pad.
“So now that you know, perhaps you would like to save us all a lot of trouble and just explain what happened.”
“I didn’t mean… I didn’t kill Nadya.”
The look of gentle disappointment from the interrogator was surprisingly similar to the one he was used to getting from his father when he didn’t study hard for his tawjihi and got mediocre scores, or when he slept late and his mother had to go gather the eggs from the chicken coop by herself.
Now the man said nothing. He just sat there, looking down at the notes he had made on his pad, clicking his pen open and shut, open and shut.
Fareed didn’t say anything either. He told himself to look at the man, but he was afraid if he did, he would blink again, and that would be worse than not looking in the first place. So he looked at the woman instead, and then down at his shoes, then around the room, taking in the spiderwebs lining the bars on the windows, the plastic trash can overflowing with debris and half-eaten sandwiches.
“Okay,” the man said suddenly to the guards, who had rematerialized in the doorway. “Take him back.”
They lifted him to his feet and cuffed him again, put the bag over his head and roughly turned him around.
“Get some rest,” the man said as they led him away. “We will try again tomorrow.”
* * *
He was dreaming of Nadya when they woke him. They were sitting under their tree, near the Azzawiya bridge, and she was telling him something about a baby. He kept wondering which baby she meant. He heard a baby in the distance, but it didn’t really sound like a baby, it sounded like a group of men babbling. He stared at the men who were shaking him, saying to each other, “He’s not going to come. Get the water.”
He quickly snapped back to reality. “No, I’m coming,” he nearly shouted.
The Iraqi’s exhortation to get some rest had been, as he had known it was, a cruel joke. It had been two days since the last encounter, and he had been allowed to sleep only two hours at a time, twice each day. He could not really tell what was night and what was day here, as there were no windows, but there was a tiny crack in the wall through which light from outside trickled in, and he could tell if it was light or dark. At the times he was allowed to sleep, it was always light.
The man didn’t offer any coffee this time. Without ceremony, he shoved two pieces of paper in front of Fareed, side by side. Fareed looked at them but couldn’t tell what they said. They were in Hebrew.
“Mah zeh?” he asked the man, thinking maybe if he was willing to speak Hebrew, the man would be willing to believe him.
“There are two statements here,” the man told him in Arabic. “Both are true, but we are going to give you the chance to sign just one of them.”
“I’m not going to sign anything,” Fareed said firmly. Of that he was sure. He might look away, he might drink their coffee, he might even get tangled up in their words and say something he didn’t mean to, but signing his name was something he could only do very deliberately, and he would not do it.
“Not so fast,” the man said. “Just hear me out.”
His caramel voice told a tale of great reason. “This one,” he said, tapping his pen on the one to the left, “just says what you already admitted here the other day, that you accidentally killed Nadya Kim, your sweetheart.”
“I never admitted that,” Fareed protested. The man held up a hand to silence him.
“This one,” the man went on, “is a much more serious affair.”
What could be more serious than murder? Fareed wondered. He knew he didn’t need to ask. The man was going to tell him. He just had to be patient.
“Do you know Radwan Toufiq?” the man asked suddenly.
Fareed sat still. He willed himself to make no movement that could be construed as an answer. He knew that his face was giving him away, but they could not use his face in court.
“You see, this is bad. This is not going to help you.”
He didn’t even see the man make his gesture. In less time than it would take you to flick a cigarette lighter, he and the chair he sat on were both on the floor, the two guards on top of him. One was kneeling directly on his penis. The other was kicking him rhythmically in the ribs. The abuse was methodical and without passion. It didn’t last long. It didn’t need to. It wasn’t meant to extract the confession by itself. It was a message, about what his future might look like, if he kept insisting on his innocence. Their task finished, the two guards melted back into whatever woodwork they had materialized from.
They left Fareed to gather himself, and his chair, up from the floor. It took him longer than it should have. It wasn’t the physical effort that was difficult for him to muster so much as the will. He had to convince himself he wanted to right himself and pick up the chair and sit again opposite the Iraqi, implacable in the V-necked sweater that made him look like a college professor. The Iraqi was talking on a mobile phone. He said a few final sentences and then, “Okay, bseder, yalla. Bye,” and put the phone in his pocket. He shook his head slightly and opened the folder in front of him and began to talk again.
“You see, Fareed, we know that you know Radwan.” He drew out a picture of the two of them, Fareed and Radwan, in the detention area at Huwwara checkpoint, outside of Nablus. Their faces were turned towards one another. Radwan’s lips were parted, and Fareed was grinning.
“That means nothing,” Fareed said sullenly.
It didn’t. Hundreds of young men, especially students, were detained there every day. If two guys both lived on the other side of the checkpoint and went to school in Nablus, it was inevitable that sometimes they were going to run into each other there. Even the fact that they were talking, obviously joking about something, didn’t prove anything. You talked and joked with whomever you ended up in that pen with. It was something to do, to pass the time. You weren’t going to ignore each other.
“No, I suppose by itself it does not mean anything,” the man said. He seemed to consider it. “But that is not all we have,” he said.
He took out a heavy go
ld bracelet, and put it on the table between them.
“Where did you get this bracelet?” he asked Fareed.
Fareed’s hand reached out for the bracelet and he couldn’t stop it. His fingers closed around it. He loved the feel of the gold, because it felt to him like touching her skin. His thumb caressed the tiny indentations on the inside, where the inscription was.
“Where did you get it?” he retorted, though he knew the answer. His father had told him that the army had taken it from his room.
“You know where I got it,” the man responded. “I need to know where you got it.”
“Why do you need to know?” Fareed asked, reasonably enough. Even if he told them, it wouldn’t help them establish that he killed or didn’t kill Nadya. But the man was not impressed.
“Fareed, do not play with me,” he said, pushing the glasses up on his nose. “You know what can happen to you if you do that.”
“Nadya gave it to me,” Fareed said. This piece of information was not worth suffering for.
“When?”
“Some weeks ago.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I don’t know—three weeks, a month ago. Why does it matter?”
“Why did she give it to you?” The man did not need to say that he was asking the questions here.
“To show our love.”
“Show it to whom?”
“To each other.”
“Who else knew that you loved each other?”
“No one.”
“No one?” What was the guy getting at? It was almost true. Avi had known, but no one else. Even if they had some way of knowing that, it made no difference.
“No one.”
“Why did you move her body?”
“What?”
Fareed tried to prevent his face from registering his surprise. The disappointed look was back.
“Please, Fareed, stop wasting my time. You must know that we have ways of telling when and how someone is carried from one place to another. And we could tell, from the tracks you made in the earth, that you carried her body very carefully from where you killed her, to where we found her. From that we can tell you didn’t mean to hurt her. So we know that it was an accident.”
A muscle in Fareed’s cheek was pulsing. He couldn’t stop it. He bit his tongue, deliberately, and hoped that the pain would disguise what else he was feeling. They knew much more than he realized. Well, whatever they knew, they knew. There was nothing he could do about that. He would not tell them anything else. The man was silent and wrote on his papers for a long time. Fareed sat and twitched in his chair. His ribs ached. He needed to pee, but he could tell it was going to hurt terribly when he did.
The man finally looked up. He cleared his throat before he spoke. “How do you know Radwan Toufiq?”
“He is from my village.”
“Do you know everyone in your village?”
“No. But I know everyone there who is a student at An Najah University. There are not so many of us.”
“I understand. Did you know that Radwan was going to blow up a shopping center in Israel?”
“No.”
“But you knew that he was going to blow up something.”
“No.”
The tapered fingers drummed on the table. The man looked toward the door, as if he were weighing whether to make the secret signal that would call the soldiers to come abuse him some more.
The policeman’s mobile phone vibrated, causing the table to shake. He answered it, spoke for a second, then got up and walked across the room, to a place where Fareed could not hear him or see his lips move. He talked for more than five minutes. When he hung up, he went to the door and said something to someone in the hall, and then he came back and gathered up all his papers. The two guards materialized and fastened the shackles to Fareed’s feet and wrists, put the bag over his head, and hustled him to the door.
“Oh,” the voice said suddenly.
Fareed instinctively tried to turn toward the voice, even though he wouldn’t be able to see the speaker. He could not turn, because the two men were holding his arms. They simply stood stock still, like robots programmed to go and stop on voice command.
“What happened to the bag?”
“Sorry?” His voice came out muffled through the sack.
“The bag that you took from Nadya, when you killed her. You had it with you in Tel Aviv. Where is it now?”
Fareed was stunned. He couldn’t possibly sort out what that meant, or what he should or should not say. Not like this, standing here, with a sack over his head. He shook his head. He didn’t know if the guy could even see his head shake inside the burlap sack. His ribs hurt when he shook his head. His ribs hurt when he moved at all.
“Okay,” the voice said. “We will talk about it another time.”
Chapter 22
Captain Mustafa called Rania into his office and gave her the bad news. The boy from Azzawiya had confessed to the murder.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “You know what these confessions are worth.”
He took a sip of tea, his broad face yielding no hint of his own feelings.
“It’s out of our hands,” he said. “The boy made his choice.”
“What choice!” she exploded. “It makes no sense. We still know nothing about this girl’s life. Who was the man she was arguing with in the settlement? What about the people who brought her here? And the baby, are they at least going to do a blood test to see if Fareed was the father?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the captain. “He confessed to killing her.”
“Please give me just one more week, maybe two,” she implored.
He shook his head. “It is over. I should not have let you get so involved.”
She bit back an argument and went back to her desk. She couldn’t believe he was satisfied with the boy’s confession either. He and the rest of the old guard had gotten used to saying, “What can we do?” and letting the Israelis get their way. That was why people were so disenchanted with the Fatah leadership.
Abdelhakim, the young eager beaver, was watching her as she sat restlessly, pushing things around on her desk. She didn’t trust him. He was a clean-cut snappy dresser, and she had seen him several times out in the town, each time with a different young woman from the college, Al Quds Open University. She had heard, though, that he was affiliated with Hamas.
“Can I do something for you?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he answered and looked away.
“Tell the captain I went to speak to someone.” It wasn’t much of an excuse, but she couldn’t think of a better one. She needed to satisfy herself that Fareed was really guilty, or find the person who was. She should stay away from Benny if she didn’t want the captain to find out she had disobeyed him, but there was no other way to get the information she needed. She went straight to Ariel.
“Convince me that this boy is the killer,” she said.
“Does Mustafa know you’re here?” Benny asked with that arched eyebrow she was coming to loathe.
She wished he hadn’t asked her directly. It occurred to her to wonder if the captain had called Benny himself to enlist his help in controlling her.
“He knows I am following up on some loose ends,” she evaded. “He doesn’t need to know exactly where I go.” Hopefully he would get the message. If not, she would deal with it later.
“What about the passport?” she asked him. “Aren’t you at least going to ask Nir why he lied?”
“What’s the point?” he asked. “We have the killer.”
“Tell him you need it for the files. The woman from the agency told you she gave it to him. You thought he might have forgotten where he put it.”
He shook his head vigorously. “That’s not going to happen,” he said. “This case is finished. It’s nothing but a dead Uzbek hooker, forget about it.”
“It’s also a live Palestinian boy,” she reminded him.
“That’
s not my problem. If the boy didn’t kill her, he should have kept his mouth shut. Besides,” and now his wide eyes grew serious, “he is probably guilty on the explosives charges, and for that he would have gotten in much more trouble. He is better off being charged as a criminal.”
She should have realized this would be a waste of time. She stormed out.
Her next stop was Elkana. Funny, she thought, until a couple weeks ago, she had never been inside a settlement, and now she was breezing in and out of them as if they were her home. Before walking up to the Elkana gate, she put her headscarf in her purse. The jilbab would be more trouble, so she kept it on. The soldier couldn’t see her whole body very well from his little windowed cabin anyway. She flashed her police ID at him and walked by without waiting for his okay.
“Hey,” he yelled after her, but when she kept walking, he didn’t pursue. She thought Palestinian women could probably get away with a lot more than they ever tried.
It was early afternoon, and the streets were filled with youngsters walking home from school. In a small park, not far from the entrance, she spied what she was looking for. Malkah was standing with a group of other girls, kicking at stones and looking at magazines. She seemed to be with and not with the other girls, on the edge of the circle, looking over the shoulder of a taller girl at whatever they were giggling about.
Rania couldn’t interrupt them without attracting the kind of attention she had been warned to avoid. But she also couldn’t hang around here for hours; someone loitering on this quiet street would doubtless be observed and reported. She located a large-ish stone at the edge of the park and took aim at a big iron dumpster across the street. Calling on her younger slingshot-wielding self, she heaved the stone at the dumpster and was rewarded with a satisfying crash.
It worked.
The girls turned to see what the noise was, and she walked by slowly, catching Malkah’s eye and nodding almost imperceptibly toward the next intersection. When she turned back, Malkah was telling her friends she would see them tomorrow and trotting down the street to meet her.
Malkah was both afraid and excited to be talking to her, Rania thought. Go easy, said Benny’s voice in her head. Don’t charge in like a herd of goats.