A Little Piece of Ground (4 page)

Few people were around. Come to think of it, no one he knew was likely to come here. He began to breathe more easily.

“You live down there, huh?” he said, pointing towards the haphazard warren of densely packed houses built of grey cement blocks, with narrow little lanes running crookedly between them, which made up the camp.

“Na. Over there. We moved out last year.”

He nodded towards some open ground above the camp, where a little one-story house, built of cream-colored stone, sat in a patch of open ground, under the shade of a fig tree. It looked like a village farm, a leftover from a former age. It must have been there for centuries, long before the town had grown up all around it.

Karim thought the boy was moving towards the house, but instead he veered off sideways, and climbed up and over a tumbledown wall. Karim scrambled after him.

“Is this it?” he said.

“Yes. This is it.”

The place could be good, Karim could see that at once. It was a section of flat open ground, nearly as big as a real soccer field. An old stone wall, built against the side of the hill, blocked one end. No trees, or anything else, were growing, except for some dried-up stalks of grass left over from the heat of summer. All along one side, running the whole length of the place, was a huge mass of rubble, the remains of a long row of demolished buildings. It was sixty-five feet wide and at least six and a half feet high, and it rose and dipped like a mountain range in a series of ridges and peaks. More rubbish had been dumped on top of it, and stones, chunks of concrete, old oil drums, sections of drainpipe and debris of all kinds had rolled down to litter the flat area below. The boy still had Karim's ball in his hands. He was bouncing it off his knees and catching it again.

“Here,” he said suddenly, throwing the ball.

Karim leapt for it, foot outstretched, but tripped over a stone and fell, whacking his elbow on the ground.

It hurt so much that for a moment he couldn't move or speak. He lay on the ground, stunned, nursing his left arm in his right hand, wondering if the bone was smashed.

“Try straightening it out,” the boy said, looking down at him anxiously.

Karim gritted his teeth and tried. He found he could stretch it after all, and the pain was going away already.

“It must be OK, then,” the boy said, sounding relieved.

“It's these stones.” Karim was struggling to his feet. “There's no space to play a real game. We'll fall over all the time.”

The boy shrugged his thin shoulders and looked away.

He thinks I'm soft, thought Karim, so he picked up the ball and kicked it to him.

They tried to play for a while, dodging around, passing the ball to each other, hopping over the stones as they ran for it, but the boy stubbed his toes and Karim nearly twisted his ankle, so after a while, in silent consent, they gave up.

“It's lousy here after all,” the boy said. “Sorry.”

They were now up near the wall at the far end of the ground. Karim studied it. It wasn't anywhere near as good as the old wall at his apartment building, where the stone facing was perfectly smooth and regular. This wall was made of rough jutting boulders and was pitted with big holes where the cement had weakened and stones had fallen out.

At least it's a wall, Karim said to himself. It might do for my special game. The ball would just bounce funny, that's all.

It would be more fun, too, if the boy could join in and they could play together.

“It's not too bad up at this end.” He kicked a couple of the smaller stones out of the way. “We could clear some of this lot and make a bit of space.”

The boy didn't bother to answer. He was already lifting one of the boulders and staggering across to the edge of the ground, where there was a pile of stones from a broken-down wall. Karim could see that it was too heavy for him. The muscles of his thin arms were trembling under the strain and his face was going red.

His pride aroused, Karim looked around for an even bigger stone. He found one and tried to lift it, but his bruised elbow hurt too much and he dropped it again. To save face, he started picking up smaller stones and throwing them onto the pile.

The boy copied him. They were making a game of it now. They went faster and faster, collecting stones and hurling them off to the side.

“Whee! Bang! Gotcha!” the boy started shouting. “Right on the gun turret! One soldier down! Three to go!”

The pile of stones had become an Israeli tank in both their minds and they were letting them have it, seeing the enemy before their eyes with their helmets and body armor and rifles, daring them with nothing but their courage and the stones in their bare hands.

They stopped suddenly, out of breath, and looked around. Almost without realizing it, they'd cleared a good patch of ground. There was enough room now to play against the wall.

Karim didn't bother to explain his game. He simply started kicking the ball against the wall and the boy joined in. The rhythm came at once: kick, bounce, catch-the-ball-on-end-of-foot, kick, bounce....

It was good.

He's the best ever at this, thought Karim. Better than Joni, even as good as me.

He could have gone on for hours and hours, playing ball against that wall with him.

And then, from the mosque below the refugee camp, the words of the evening prayer sounded out across the city.

“
Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!

Ashhadu an la illaha illa Allah hay ala asalah!”

“
It's late! I've got to go before the tanks come back. She'll kill me,” Karim said, grabbing the ball and getting ready to run.

He was already dashing across the open space towards the road when he realized that the boy was still standing beside the wall.

“Hey!” he called back to him. “What's your name?”

The boy hesitated.

“Everyone calls me the Grasshopper. Just Hopper, usually. What's yours?”

Karim wished he had a cool nickname too.

“Karim,” he said. “Karim Aboudi. See you again maybe.”

“How about tomorrow?” The boy said it quickly, eagerly.

“OK. If the curfew's still off, I'll come back again then.”

Chapter Five

Hassan Aboudi was in a fierce mood that evening, when the tanks had chased everyone inside once more. He walked around the apartment, picking things up and slamming them down again, kicking savagely at anything left lying on the floor. Karim sat motionless at the table, pretending to do some work. Farah had been twirling around in a frilly orange skirt she'd borrowed from Rasha, saying, “Look at me! What do you think? I'm prettier than Rasha, aren't I?” But she caught her father's eye and went tiptoeing off behind the sofa with her doll. Sireen, her ear infection a little better now, was sleeping peacefully in the girls' bedroom.

Lamia shot sideways glances at her husband as she stood at the ironing board.

“Everyone's in the same boat,” she said to him at last. “All the other shopkeepers are having just as bad a time.”

She might as well have thrown gas onto a fire, thought Karim, watching his father's face go red as he banged his fist down on the table, making the pencils rattle and roll around.

“What do you know about it?” he shouted. “I'm not like the other shopkeepers! Don't you understand anything? Nobody wants electrical goods at a time like this. ‘Oh,' you think they're all saying, ‘why don't we go along to Hassan Aboudi's shop and treat ourselves to a new TV, or one of those nice new irons, with all the money we've been earning while we've been locked down under curfew.' That's what they're saying, is it? Is it? In the same boat as George Boutros in his supermarket, with his queues of customers stretching away down the street every time their fridges empty out? Like the pharmacy, which sells out of everything as soon as they lift the curfew?”

Everyone looked at him, stunned. Hassan was normally a quiet man. His children had never heard such an outburst from him before.

He sat down on the sofa and put his head in his hands.

“I went down and opened up the shop today,” he said in a quieter voice. “I looked around at all my stock and, I tell you, it broke my heart. Everything's covered in grit and dust. It looks terrible. Neglected. Unsellable. All the years I've been building the business up—all the work I've put in.... Do you know what I sold today? Batteries. Nothing but batteries. It's the only thing people want. How are we going to live on the sale of batteries? We'll be ruined if it goes on like this.”

His voice was shaking. For one terrible moment, Karim was afraid that his father was going to cry. The idea of it made his skin crawl with embarrassment.

Lamia had been standing as if frozen, holding the iron up in the air, but now she put it back on its stand. She went over to the sofa and sat down beside her husband.

“It can't go on forever,
habibi
. It can't be as bad as this forever.”

“Can't it? Why not?” said Hassan. “This occupation started when I was ten years old. Every year you think to yourself, it can't get any worse. And then it does. It does. Much worse. I tell you, the Israelis won't be happy until they've driven us all out and grabbed every inch of Palestine for themselves.”

Karim breathed a sigh of relief. His father was off on his usual tack now. With a bit of luck he'd carry on in the same old groove, cursing the Israelis and the occupation, getting away from the personal stuff.

“Anyway,” said Lamia, “there's always my salary from the university to tide us over.”

She saw at once that she'd made a mistake. Karim could tell that by the way she bit her lip. Hassan dropped her hand, which he'd been holding, and gave a bitter little laugh.

“Oh, that's just great. I'm the sort of man who lives off his wife now, am I? And we're the sort of family that makes do on one part-time secretary's salary. Isn't that just great?”

Jamal had appeared at the door of the boys' bedroom. He caught Karim's eye and flicked his head sideways, beckoning him to come. Gratefully, Karim slipped off his chair and sidled around the sofa.

Jamal shut the door behind them.

“Better leave them alone,” he said.

“What did he mean, we'll be ruined?”

“Don't ask me. I'm not a businessman. I'm never going to be, either. Nothing but worry all the time. Unless you call sound engineers businessmen.”

Karim bit back the automatic retort that he had nearly blurted out, the usual kind of crack about people who fantasize about having amazingly cool careers as sound engineers and managers of top rock bands, but are really sad losers and pimple-heads. He was glad he hadn't said anything. For once, it was good that Jamal was there, that he had an older brother who had bothered to get him out of the room, away from embarrassing scenes.

“Did you go past school when you went out?” Jamal said.

“No. Why?”

“Because the Israelis have occupied it since the last curfew break. They've had their tanks parked all over the soccer field and they've smashed down the walls. They've wrecked the labs and the classrooms and stolen all the computers. We won't be able to go back for ages.”

Karim bunched his fists. However much he hated school, he was enraged at the idea of the enemy crawling all over it, their tank tracks churning up the soccer field. But then he thought, at least I'll be having a holiday for a while. That means I can go back to our special place and play soccer with Hopper.

Jamal was giving him a funny look.

“When are you seeing Joni again?”

“I don't know. Soon. Tomorrow. The next day. Why?”

Jamal was shuffling his feet around on the rug, studying his shoes as if he'd never seen them before.

“Look, Karim, you're my brother, right?”

“You've only just discovered that? After twelve years?”

“We're good friends, aren't we?”

Karim frowned, instantly suspicious. With this build-up, Jamal must want something big.