by Kate Raphael
After a number of sharp turns, Abu Saif stopped the car and gestured to a house. “Here is where he lives,” he said.
He waited for her to get out. “Aren’t you going with me?” she asked.
“If you like,” he said. He got out of the car and rang the bell. After what seemed like an age, an old man in a tattered dressing gown opened the door a crack. Abu Saif explained what Rania wanted.
“Huwwa hon.” He is here, the old man said. He opened the door just wide enough for the two of them to slip inside, then closed it again. There were no lights on in the house. The dirty white walls were pocked with bullet marks. In the center of the dim living room, a man in his early twenties sat in a wheelchair. A blanket across his lap covered the stump where his leg used to be. Where the blanket ended, she could see the limp shin of his one good leg, atrophied from disuse. He sipped something from a plastic cup with a straw, like the ones Khaled used to drink from. He stared blankly at a huge television screen where a white-gowned cleric pontificated in high Arabic. An ancient woman sat in the room’s only chair, also staring at the television. Sensing strangers in the room, the woman suddenly started and turned toward the man Rania presumed was her husband.
“Yahud?” she asked him, a note of terror in her voice.
“Laa,” he assured her. “Palestinian police.”
How could the old woman mistake her for an Israeli? Rania wondered. Then she solved her own mystery, realizing the woman must be blind. This house seemed like a highly unpromising source of information. But she was here, so she might as well continue. The old man settled himself on a cushion on the floor, so Rania followed suit. The driver remained standing. She wondered if she had violated some little-known custom of the Jenini, or if he had some reason to know they would not be staying long. Since no one had bothered to introduce her to the young man, she did the honors herself.
“I am Rania Bakara, with the police in the Salfit District,” she told him. “You are Mohammed?”
He nodded, and took a sip from his cup.
“I am sorry for your injuries,” she told him. “How are you doing?”
“Hamdililah,” he responded. The generic and expected response—praise God. She knew not to take it literally.
“Can you tell me what happened the day you were shot?”
He looked around at the others, as if hoping someone would save him from answering. Receiving no help, he spoke.
“I was in the street with my mother,” he said. “The plane flew down very low. They started shooting. The people ran away, but my mother could not move quickly, so we did not get away in time.” He looked toward the old woman when he said that, and Rania realized that she was his mother. She would have put the woman in her late seventies, but that wasn’t possible. She identified the sudden throbbing in her skull as rage. The harshness of this life had sapped the life out of these people, made them old before their time. There but for the grace of God, she thought. In some moods she could judge people like this family for not being as motivated as she was, but today, her encounter with the soldiers at the checkpoint fresh in her mind, her emotions were equal parts pity and gratitude. She wondered if there was something she could do for them that would not hurt their pride. She couldn’t just hand them fifty shekels. Could she tuck a bill under the cushion she was sitting on without being seen?
Thinking about money, a question popped into her mind.
“How did you get the wheelchair?” she asked the young man. She knew there were organizations that helped disabled people, but there was often a waiting list for wheelchairs. This one, as far as she could tell, was state-of-the-art, not handed down.
“Yahud,” he said.
“Israelis? Which Israelis?”
“Jesh.” She looked at his father, wondering if the boy’s mind had been affected too. The father nodded.
“The army paid for the wheelchair?”
“They paid all his medical expenses,” the father explained.
“Why did they do that?” This was highly unusual. She had heard of no one else who had been injured in the siege who was compensated.
“We can’t tell you,” the father said.
“What do you mean, you can’t? You mean you won’t?” Could he mean that they had given information? That was the only reason she could imagine the army giving someone money that they couldn’t talk about. But in that case, they would not have told her the money came from the army in the first place. Collaborating with the occupation forces was a crime in the Palestinian Authority. They could go to prison in Jericho—if they were not killed first.
The father left the room abruptly. The young man went back to watching the television screen. Had her thoughts been so obvious that she had offended them? Now she became conscious of the incongruity of the big television in this empty house. Before she could decide whether to make another attempt at deciphering this mystery or call it a failed mission, the father returned. His trembling hand extended a business card with writing in Arabic, English, and Hebrew. “Shira Zohari, Attorney,” she read in Arabic. It gave a telephone number with an 02 exchange—Jerusalem. She copied the number and handed him back the card.
“You sued the army?” she guessed.
“Talk to the attorney,” the father said.
She rose from the floor and thanked them for their time. They were clearly relieved to see her go. Once in the cab, she handed the driver a fifty shekel note. “For the family,” she told him. He nodded appreciation and tucked the bill into his front pocket.
“Do you know,” she asked, “if any other families got money from the army too?”
“Five,” he responded.
“Only five? Out of all the people injured in the siege?”
“Five,” he repeated.
“Do you know any of the others?”
“Two are dead,” he said.
“They got money and then they died?”
“Their families got money after they died.” That was even more unusual than the army paying for people’s medical care.
“Do you know if they all had the same lawyer?”
“I think so. I took her to their houses.”
“All five?”
“Yes.”
This must be why the crepe seller had called this man to drive her. Or else it was a hell of a coincidence. “Did you know this lawyer? How did she contact you?” she asked him.
“My cousin works for Btselem,” he said. “He arranged for her to come here and he asked me to take her to meet the families.”
Btselem, the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, hired some Palestinians to investigate complaints.
“Does this lawyer work for Btselem?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. I think she works for herself. But you should ask her,” he said.
“I intend to,” she said.
It was already eleven. If she went to meet the other families who were paid by the army, she would not make it to Salfit today at all. And probably, they would not tell her anything either. Better to call the lawyer from the road. She asked Abu Saif to take her to the cars for Tulkarem. Once she had settled into one, she fished the lawyer’s phone number out of her pocket.
“Ken?” Shira Zohari’s greeting was all business. Rania identified herself and told the woman what she wanted.
“There is nothing to tell,” the woman replied in heavily accented English. “The army paid the medical expenses on humanitarian grounds, that’s all.”
“On humanitarian grounds?”
“That’s right. They denied responsibility for the deaths and injuries, but paid the medical expenses on humanitarian grounds.”
“Why only for these five cases? There were hundreds injured and dozens killed in the siege.”
“I cannot discuss the case with you. That is all I have to say.” The lawyer hung up.
Rania fretted. There was more to this. She had occasionally heard of the army paying medical expenses of people they shot,
but she had never once heard of them paying it to the families after people had died. She called the lawyer back. “Answer,” she ordered it on the fourth ring. The woman recognized her number, of course, and she would never answer a call from her again. Rania could try again when she got to Salfit. The 09 exchange was shared by both Palestinian and Israeli cities.
“Yes?” the voice said on the fourth ring. Startled, it took Rania a second to react. “Hello? Are you there?”
“Yes, yes, I’m here. Please, don’t hang up.”
“I’m sorry, I really can’t discuss the case with you on the phone.”
On the phone. That meant she might discuss it in person? “Can I meet you?” Rania asked.
“I guess so. Where are you?”
“Right now I am just outside of Jenin, but I am going to Tulkarem and then Salfit.”
“Oh.” Shira Zohari sounded disappointed. “You are not near Jerusalem.”
Obviously, Rania wanted to say. Since Zohari had visited Jenin, she knew very well it was not near Jerusalem. “I cannot go to Jerusalem,” she said instead. “But I can meet you in Ramallah.”
“And I cannot go to Ramallah,” Zohari replied. “It is illegal for Israelis.” That was true, but so was Jenin, where she had apparently been willing to go.
“I can meet you in Beit Hanina,” Zohari suggested. “We have an office in between the checkpoints.” That was possible, barely. Technically, Beit Hanina was Jerusalem and off limits to West Bank Palestinians, but there were still ways around the checkpoint. It would not be easy. Rania would have to go first to Abu Dis, then Ar-Ram and then walk around the checkpoint into Beit Hanina.
“I can be there in three hours,” she said, praying that was true. It would be if the roads were open. If there were roadblocks, it would take much much longer, and she could be stuck in the south overnight. In that case, she would have to go to Bethlehem to spend the night with her parents. Only after she hung up did she remember that she did not have her ID. The roads around Jerusalem were littered with checkpoints. She would need a lot of luck to avoid them.
Chapter 25
When Malkah got home from her rendezvous with Chloe, she closed her bedroom door and locked it, just for good measure. She climbed onto her bed and took out the brochures Chloe had brought. She was shocked by some of the stories they told, especially the ones about kids who had to wait at a locked gate every day, sometimes an hour or more, for soldiers to come let them through to go to school, and then they had to do the same thing to go home in the afternoon. Sometimes, the booklet said, they had a half-day at school, but the soldiers wouldn’t open the gate early, so they had to wait until evening to go home.
Malkah heard the downstairs door slam and a woman’s voice saying, “Shalom? Malkah, at po?” That meant that her grandmother was bringing her little brother and sister home. She quickly shoved the pamphlets back into her schoolbag. She could hide in the bathroom and look at them during recess.
The next day after Torah class there was an assembly where a woman from the Ministry of Absorption told them about some families from Russia, who after spending all their lives living in terrible misery under the Communists, finally had gotten their chance to come to Israel to be Jews and be happy. But, said the woman, these people now did not have enough money to take good care of all their children, and even though the government was helping them, they needed more money to buy their children’s school clothes. They brought one of the children to the stage, a girl about Malkah’s age, and she talked in Hebrew about how much she loved being in Israel and learning Hebrew and Israeli dancing.
When they went back to class, the teacher passed around a basket and asked all the children to contribute whatever money they had to help these poor families. They should think about what they planned to buy with the money in their pockets, the teacher said, and ask themselves if they really needed it, or if it would not make them happier to help the poor family. Malkah thought about what she had wanted to buy with the fifty shekels she had gotten from her mother for babysitting her sister and brother all week. The last time she went to Tel Aviv for her ice skating lesson, she had gone into a bookstore and seen a pretty cloth-bound journal and a fancy purple pen. She felt that if she could have that book and that pen to write with, she would be able to write something wonderful, like the Diary of Anne Frank. But she could keep writing in her school notebooks for a little longer. She gave forty shekels for the poor family, keeping just ten in case she wanted a chocolate bar or some chips.
Recess was cut short because of the assembly. Malkah went out into the yard with her class, and when no one was looking, she slipped back into the school building and headed for the bathroom. She tucked her feet up onto the toilet seat so no one would see that she was in there, and opened one of the pamphlets, the one about a village called Sawahre, in East Jerusalem, which was split down the middle. Half the people were now residents of Jerusalem; they had blue ID cards like hers and could go wherever they wanted. The other half were stuck on the other side of the giant concrete wall, and they had green West Bank ID cards so they couldn’t go to pray at the mosque or sell things in the Old City. Some of them even had shops in Jerusalem but they couldn’t go there.
She was deep in the story of a young boy from Sawahre when the bell rang, calling the students back into class. The boy, whose name was Ali, lived in a house with two entrances, one on the Israeli side and one on the Palestinian side. When the Wall was built, to keep the suicide bombers from going to Jerusalem to blow up Israelis in the shopping malls, the army wanted to tear down Ali’s house, but his family went to court and the court said they couldn’t, so they built the Wall right next to the house and put the family in a cage, with a gate going to the Palestinian side. Ali’s family had a key to the gate that led to the Palestinian side, and they could go in and out any time, except after eight at night, unless the soldiers decided to keep the gate locked for a few days. But the door that used to lead to Jerusalem now led only to the high Wall, which even blocked out their view of the city. Ali had to change to a different school and leave all his friends, while all his cousins lived on the other side and he almost never got to see them.
Even though Malkah had never seen anything like Ali’s house, she felt like she could see exactly what it looked like. She looked at the pictures of Ali walking by the army jeeps, and she felt afraid. When the bell rang for class, at first it sounded to her like a siren, like the jeeps sometimes made. She didn’t remember to get up and go to class until the second bell had rung and she noticed suddenly that it was quiet in the bathroom.
Malkah’s classroom had two doors, a front one which was next to where the teacher stood, and a back door, and suddenly she thought, oh, it is just like Ali’s house. She closed the door very quietly, and moved toward her seat, which was pretty near the back anyway. But the principal was standing in the front of the room, and he stared at her and demanded, “Why are you late?”
What could she say? I was reading about a Palestinian boy and when the bell rang, I thought it was the police?
“I was in the bathroom,” she stammered, and all the other girls laughed.
“Are you sick?” the principal asked. Why didn’t he just let it go? He knew she wasn’t sick, and he had already embarrassed her for being late. She shook her head.
“Next time, be on time to class,” he said, and he continued to stare at her as he explained that during the recess, someone in her class had taken the money that had been collected for the poor families. The principal said he understood that sometimes people had an impulse to do something wrong, and when they had time to think about it, they realized they were wrong and they wanted to make it right. He was sure that whoever had taken the money now regretted it and wanted to give it back. So he was going to give them a chance to do that. He was still staring at Malkah as he said that, and she realized that because she was late coming back from recess, he thought she was a likely suspect to have taken the money. She wasn’t sure how tho
se two things were supposed to fit together.
The room next door, the principal said, was empty. He was going to put a box on the desk in the empty room. Each girl would walk into the empty room, one at a time, and whoever took the money could place it in the box on the desk, and then no one would ask any questions and the incident would be forgotten. But, if they did not, then he would have no choice but to search everyone’s things until he found the money. Did everyone understand? he asked. All the heads in the room nodded soberly.
When it was Malkah’s turn to walk into the empty room, she couldn’t resist looking in the box. There was nothing in it. She didn’t put anything in it either; how could she? No one else put anything in it, so the principal announced that he was going to go through everyone’s pockets, desk, and school bags. He started at the back, and Malkah was sure, from the way he kept glancing at her, that it was because he believed she had taken the money and so he didn’t want to waste too much time until he got to her.
Because the principal kept looking at her, she had no opportunity to hide the literature in her bag, not that she could think of anywhere to put it where it wouldn’t be found anyway. When they were searching the girl two desks before her, her stomach started to ache and she started to feel wet between her legs. Oh no, she thought, could she possibly be getting her monthly troubles? It would be more than a week early, but she had read in a book that stress can cause early menstruation. She certainly felt stress. She thought that she shouldn’t be so afraid, because they were only interested in the money, and she hadn’t taken it, but as they searched the girl next to her, she started to shiver all over, as if she had the flu. She was sure she would not even be able to stand up, or that she would pee all over the floor. But somehow, when it was actually her turn, she calmed down.