by Kate Raphael
Tina was behaving like it was a foregone conclusion that she was coming. Having paid their bill, she matched Chloe stride for stride on the way back to the Hospice. If Chloe wanted her to go home, she would need to say so forcefully, and she didn’t have it in her. Silently, she acquiesced.
* * *
Ahlam spotted them coming up the walk and waved from the kitchen window, so they went straight to the downstairs flat. Ahlam was humming to herself and scrubbing an enormous pile of grape leaves in the sink, then carefully laying them out on a cloth to dry. She dried her hands on the sides of her slacks so she could hold Chloe’s shoulders and kiss her cheeks. When Chloe introduced Tina, Ahlam kissed her too, and immediately started grilling her about her family, both here in Palestine and in Australia. She settled Chloe and Tina at the kitchen table with tea, before turning back to her grape leaves.
“Can we help?” Tina asked.
Ahlam gathered the leaves onto a plate and brought them to the table along with a bowl of chopped meat and an empty dish. Tina immediately took a leaf and placed a small row of meat on it. Faster than Chloe’s eyes could follow, she was placing a neat roll onto the empty dish. Chloe hesitantly reached for a leaf. Her first one looked like a misshapen cigar.
“It’s too fat,” Ahlam said, laughing. She opened the leaf up and took out half the stuffing. “Watch.”
They made it look so simple; Chloe felt like a lumbering ignoramus. But on her fourth try, both women pronounced her effort perfect.
“Fareed says hello,” Ahlam told Chloe as they rolled. “He is in Jalame, and he is able to call us almost every day.” No wonder she seemed so relaxed and had the energy for a massive cooking project like stuffed grape leaves. “He says he is safer in prison than in Nablus,” she said, chuckling. A friend he had made in prison told him about a lawyer who was good at getting people light sentences. Tomorrow, Jaber was going to see this lawyer and ask him what kind of sentence he could get Fareed.
“But he’s innocent,” Chloe protested. She knew that that wasn’t really an issue. It didn’t matter if you were innocent. Chloe just wanted to hear Ahlam say yes, he was innocent.
“Yes,” Ahlam said emphatically.
“Don’t make any deals with the lawyer yet,” Chloe said. “I’ll go see Fareed tomorrow.” Ahlam’s eyes lit up.
“He gave me a list of what he wants,” she said, her hands already moving among the cupboards, picking up jars of jam and packets of spices. “You are going too?” she asked Tina.
Tina glanced at Chloe, who shook her head. “Avi,” Chloe said. “I don’t think I could get in without an Israeli.”
“I will give you the things to take,” Ahlam said.
“Why don’t you want me to go to the prison with you?” Tina asked when they got upstairs.
“It’s not that I don’t want you to. It’s just… Avi’s kind of obnoxious. We’ll need to hitch, and it’ll be hard for three people to get rides. Plus we might go all that way and not even get to see him.”
Tina didn’t pursue it any further. She went through her bag and pulled out a journal, and went up on the roof to write. Chloe lay face down on her mattress. She could almost feel the weight of everyone’s expectations in the small of her back. She was so far out of her depth here. She needed to just admit to everyone that she had no idea how to help them.
“Penny for them,” Tina said in her ear. Chloe glanced at the clock. She must have dozed off. The sun was going down. Tina slid onto the bed next to her, gently massaging the sore place at the base of her spine. How did she know? Chloe started to dissolve under her touch.
She wriggled around to face her lover, reached up and tucked the dangling curls behind her ear. Tina brought her lips down, brushing Chloe’s cheek on the way to her lips. Chloe felt her body answering the call, a deep quivering in her cervix. Her eyes strayed to the open windows. The apartment had no curtains, and she had never felt the absence of them before. She jerked away from Tina’s feathery touch.
“What do you want for dinner?” she asked, already on her feet.
Tina came up behind her as she fished in the refrigerator, sorting through half-rotten vegetables for something cookable.
“Close the refrigerator,” Tina commanded.
Chloe obeyed, her head pounding. She turned to see Tina standing with hands on her slim hips, jade eyes blazing. She had fallen in love with her in that pose, when she saw it facing the border police. But now here it was aimed at her.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled.
“That’s not good enough,” Tina said. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing… I’m just tired.”
“Tired of me.”
“No!” At least she left no doubt about that one.
“Well, what then?”
“I can’t have sex here. I can’t make out with a woman—well, not with anyone, really, but especially not with a woman. They wouldn’t understand.”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly planning to do it out in the mosque square.”
“I know, but people talk—you wouldn’t believe what they find out.”
“I wouldn’t? I’m one of them, remember. I’ve been dealing with it my whole life.”
“That’s the thing—you’re one of them, but I’m not. They’ve got no reason to trust me. I’m on display all the time. I have to be extra careful, or I’m out of here.”
The green eyes softened with compassionate understanding. “Honey, I didn’t come here to take your place. I came to kick your butt at Scrabble,” as her eyes lit on the board.
“You like Scrabble?”
“Is the imam Muslim?”
They were soon deep in five-letter words. They both played for keeps, puzzling for long minutes over how to get a triple-word score. Tina maintained a slight edge, but Chloe got to make “dyke” interlock with “witchy,” for which she insisted she should get a fifty-point bonus.
Chapter 32
Fareed was being held in Jalame, outside Jenin. Ahlam had assembled a small store’s worth of things for him—zaatar, pickles, fresh-baked bread, cookies, and pretzels and hummus. Chloe’s bag weighed several tons. Avi met her at the bus station. They took buses as far as they could, and then began to hitchhike. There were few cars on the road, and those that passed by, passed by. A car with a man and woman in it slowed as if to pull over, but at the last second, it sped up instead.
It was already late afternoon when an army jeep pulled up. “Oh, great,” said Chloe, “just what we need.” She started to fish in her pockets for the plastic folder where she kept her ID. But the young man in the driver’s seat wasn’t on patrol. He asked where they were going and waved them to come on. An hour later, he deposited them outside a barbed-wire fortress. The perimeter of the prison was a double fence surrounded by what Chloe thought of as a moat, a huge trench, deeper than a man is tall. There were watchtowers in each direction, equipped with bright searchlights and sharpshooters. As they approached the gate, two soldiers converged, each pointing his rifle directly at one of their middle sections.
Avi told them in Hebrew why they were there. The guards said they would check. A few minutes later, one of them returned and said that Fareed wasn’t there.
“He told his mother he was here,” Avi objected. “Please check again.” He gave them Fareed’s ID number.
The soldier went off again and when he came back he said yes, he is here, but he is in the adjustment center and can’t have visitors. They should come back next week and they could visit. Avi protested, but we came a long way, we can’t come back, we were told on the phone we could visit. The soldier finally took Avi’s ID and went away for quite a while, and then came back saying they were trying to get authorization for the visit.
“You can wait there,” he said, pointing to a patch of grass the size of a bath mat, surrounded by cigarette butts. Chloe wondered how many visitors had spent how many hours there, and how many of them ever got inside. They waited almost two hours. Chloe shot a few pictures wi
th her zoom lens. She doubted they would look like anything, but she didn’t dare get up and focus. Finally one of the soldiers called to her “boi,” come. She and Avi got up.
“Not you,” the guard said to Avi in Hebrew. “Just her.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Avi protested.
“He doesn’t want to see you. He wants to see her. You can have ten minutes,” he told her.
Avi stood, stunned. Chloe held her breath. She hoped he would not make so much trouble about it that they would cancel the whole visit. She started to move toward the prison. After a second’s contemplation, Avi stepped back in acquiescence.
“Find out what’s going on,” he called as she took off with the soldier.
“I would never have thought of that,” she replied over her shoulder. Did he think she was going to spend ten minutes telling Fareed what flowers were blooming in Azzawiya? Men could be so irritating.
After all that, they did not ask for her ID or to look in her backpack. They went through the bag she had brought for Fareed, removing a few things. The fresh cooked food was disallowed, and the pickles because they were in a glass jar. The fruit and vegetables were allowed, along with the dried wild zaatar and cookies. At least Fareed would be comforted for a while, with things that smelled and tasted like home.
The guards ushered her into a small wire cage, about eight by ten, with a metal table and two straight chairs. They gestured her into one of the chairs. Fareed was ushered in, flanked by soldiers but not cuffed or shackled. He looked rested and not hurt. He shook her hand and asked about his parents and little brothers and sisters.
“You look thin,” Chloe said. “Is the food here so bad?”
“It is okay,” he said, “but sometimes there is not enough. They are counting us all day long, every two hours we have to stand up silently on the floor for them to count, and they do it twice, and then they can’t even figure out how much food to bring.”
As soon as he paused for breath, she plunged in, not wanting to waste her time with small talk. “Why didn’t you want to see Avi?”
“I don’t trust him.”
“But he’s your friend.”
“I thought he was my friend, but I don’t know… people say he is a spy.”
“Who says that?”
“Many people.”
“Well, you can’t believe what people say. They say that about lots of people. Plenty of people say it about me.”
“I know. But this time I know it is true.”
“What do you mean? How can you know that?”
“When I found Nadya dead,” he said, “the little bag she had packed for running away was next to her. I didn’t want the police to find it, so I took it with me.”
Chloe didn’t understand why he was talking about this bag, but she didn’t want to interrupt. He would get around to what was causing his suspicion eventually. She just hoped she wasn’t booted out by the soldiers before he did. She squirmed in her chair a little, hoping to subtly influence him to speed up the storytelling.
He and Avi had agreed, he said, that he would stay in the warehouse while Avi went back to Azzawiya to see what was happening. But he couldn’t sit still. He was going crazy in the house, he needed to get out. He walked around for a while, and then he saw a bunch of shabab, young men from the West Bank, hanging out in front of the Hassan Bek Mosque. He went and sat down with them, just passing the time. There was a guy there he knew from school, whose name was Wajdi. Fareed was surprised to see him there, but he said he was working nights in a restaurant. He stayed in a house with some other guys from the West Bank and he invited Fareed to stay with them. Fareed told him he was staying with an Israeli friend on Ben Zakai and Wajdi said, “Oh, that guy.”
“He knew Avi?”
“All the guys there knew who I meant. And they shook their heads and said, no, you shouldn’t stay with him, he is a spy.”
Wajdi had gone with him to Avi’s to get his things and then they had gone to Wajdi’s house and smoked argila—the flavored tobacco popular all over the Middle East.
“So that’s why you trust Wajdi more than Avi, because he let you smoke his argila?”
She knew that wasn’t why. But she couldn’t bring herself to say, You trust Wajdi more than Avi because he is Palestinian? Why shouldn’t that be true? But it made her uncomfortable.
“Did you ever think that maybe Wajdi is the spy, and he wanted you staying with him so he could keep an eye on you?”
“When I was being interrogated, the man asked me questions about the bag. He kept asking me what had happened to it. Only Wajdi and Avi knew I had the bag.”
“Someone might have seen you with it.”
He shook his head vigorously. “If anyone had told them they saw me, he would have said so. He would have given me their names, so I couldn’t deny it. It had to be either Wajdi or the Yahudi who told them.”
So Avi was now “the Jew.” How quickly relationships can fall apart. “What makes you think it was Avi and not Wajdi?”
“I left the bag at Wajdi’s, so if Wajdi had told them about it, they would know where it was. So it had to be Avi.”
“Avi was arrested by the SHABAK,” Chloe said. “They took him to the interrogation center, just like you, and played loud music so he couldn’t sleep. Why would they do that, if he was working for them?”
“How do you know that happened? Were you with him there?”
He had a point. No one had seen Avi in prison, not even his lawyer. Why was she being so protective of Avi? Collaborators didn’t smell bad or wear a special patented sneer. Anybody could be one. People had been turned in by members of their own families.
“Tell me about Nadya,” she said.
Fareed brushed tears from his eyes. “She was the sweetest person I ever knew,” he said. “She loved chocolate and Arab music. I was teaching her to dance debka.”
“Where would you meet?” Chloe asked.
“In the fields, where she died. In the afternoons when I came home from Nablus. The older girl would come home from school and watch the children for a few hours and Nadya could go out for a little while. Sometimes I could not get through the checkpoint, and then I did not see her. She always waited for me, until the very last minute. Sometimes we would only have five minutes together.”
“Why didn’t you bring her to the village?” Chloe asked.
“I did once,” Fareed said, “but everyone stared at her—you know how it is.” He grinned at her, looking like his old self for a moment.
Chloe smiled too. He had once witnessed a spectacular meltdown of hers, when she had been so tired of people staring at her that she blurted out, “I’m not a kangaroo!” That story had been all over town by supper time.
“Nadya was Muslim, even though she wasn’t very religious. When she saw Muslim men looking at her, suddenly, she felt bad about how she was dressed and… and everything. And then she saw a man who worked sometimes in the settlement, and she got really scared. She was afraid he would tell the people she worked for and they would report her to the immigration, or something worse.”
“What worse?”
“She was afraid about her daughter in Uzbekistan. The man she worked for threatened that if she disobeyed him, he would tell the people who brought her here, and they would hurt her daughter.”
“That bastard!” Chloe spat out. “Did you tell the SHABAK that, when they interrogated you?”
“No, I don’t want to tell them anything about Nadya.”
“But why not?” she argued. “If you told them the truth, they might let you go.”
“They don’t let me go,” he said. His lips seemed to clamp shut. She supposed to him she must sound terribly naïve, thinking that the SHABAK had any interest in what really happened to Nadya. It seemed wise to back off of the subject. “What else did they ask you about, besides Nadya?” she asked.
“They ask me about Radwan. They think I am involved in the same things as him, because we are from the same v
illage and go to the same school. They show me a picture of us together.”
“What were you doing?” Chloe blurted out.
“We were just talking, at Huwwara checkpoint. You spend so much time there, you meet many other students, you talk. If you take pictures there long enough, you will find any two students together.” She regretted making him defensive, and made a sign of apology, that he should continue.
The SHABAK believed he had befriended Nadya on purpose, he said, to get information from Gelenter and carry out an action against the Ministry of Defense. It was quite an elegant theory, Chloe had to admit. But no, it just couldn’t be true. She looked at her watch. Her ten minutes was nearly up. She cut to the chase.
“Fareed,” she said, “did you know what you were doing, when you signed the confession?”
“Yes.”
“Did you sign it just so they would stop asking you questions?” His eyes narrowed. She supposed she sounded just like everyone else he had seen lately, with her nonstop questions. She hurried on. “Because if you did, your lawyer might be able to get the confession thrown out. The Israeli Supreme Court decided a few years ago that the police can’t use physical or psychological torture to get confessions.”
“I signed it because I am guilty,” he said.
“You mean you feel guilty, because you were not there in time to save her?”
“I mean I am guilty,” he said. “I killed her.”
“Fareed, you don’t mean that.” She was almost shouting. She looked around and lowered her voice. “You just told me how much you loved her. Why would you have killed her?”
“I did not mean to,” he said. The tears were rolling down his cheeks now. She started to reach out and touch him, but she remembered that he would consider it haram and snatched her hand back. Then the soldiers were there, telling her it was time to go.
Chapter 33
Rania was dying to call Bassam. She wanted to hear Khaled’s voice, and she wanted to say they might as well come home because everyone already knew where they were. Just because Abu Ziyad knew, of course, didn’t mean the Israelis did, but it also didn’t mean they didn’t.