A Little Piece of Ground (7 page)

It was chilly in the early morning air. The heat of summer was well past now. A cold November wind rattled the shutters and blew dead leaves around the terrace at the back of the house. Karim would have liked to snuggle down into his bed and sleep in, but his father came into the bedroom he was sharing with the girls and shook him awake. When he went yawning into the kitchen in search of breakfast, the baskets ready for the olives were stacked by the door and Um Hassan was busy packing up bundles of food and bottles of water for the pickers to take out with them. She would be staying at home, minding the little girls and preparing a lavish meal for the evening.

The family had already harvested the olives from the terraces near the village but they still had to tackle the more distant trees. The land, which Karim's great-grandfather had inherited from his father, was now jointly owned by a wide network of relations. They banded together when the work had to be done—weeding, pruning, repairs to old terrace walls, and the picking itself.

The hillside where they planned to work today was nearly two miles away. Hassan was loading up the car when Karim went outside the house. He had piled the baskets in the back and was attaching ladders to the roof.

“Come on. Get in,” he called to Lamia.

She squeezed into the back beside the baskets, and an aunt took the front seat.

“Karim and I are going to walk,” the old great-uncle, Abu Feisal, said, clapping Karim on the shoulder with his gnarled, work-
calloused hand. “We'll see you there.”

They set off down the village street towards the entrance to the lane that wound between old stone walls into the valley and up the hill on the other side.

Karim had always liked his uncle Abu Feisal. When he was little, Abu Feisal had taken him out sometimes into the countryside, showing him where the best prickly pear fruits grew and warning him of the places where snakes liked to bask. Today, though, he felt tongue-tied as they set out from the house together.

He was glad, at least, that his cousins had had to go to school. They seemed to have grown out of all the things they used to share. Ahmed and Latif had no computer, so he couldn't talk to them about his favorite games. They'd tried to interest him last night in their father's new horse. He'd gone to look at it in its stable, but there hadn't been much to say.

It was warmer now that the sun was up, though a chill breeze was blowing, ruffling the slim silver-green leaves of the old olive trees on each side of the lane. Abu Feisal didn't seem to mind Karim's silence. He was content to say nothing much himself, merely pointing out a brightly colored bird from time to time, or reminding Karim of the day they'd picked blackberries from the clump at the bottom of the hill.

The old man walked fast. Karim, still unfit after the long days of curfew in Ramallah, was out of breath as he tried to keep abreast with him up the steep hill.

They came to the top at last. Karim had been looking down at his feet for the last few hundred feet, his mind far away in Ramallah, divided between Joni and Hopper. He looked up as they came over the rise and gasped.

It was years since he'd been this far from the village, but he'd been expecting the landscape to be as he'd always known it: the rounded stone-strewn hill beyond, on top of which flocks of sheep and goats used to graze, and the lower slopes ringed with olive terraces. Instead, not more than a half mile away, a high wall surrounded the crown of the hill. Outside it, creating a kind of no-man's-land, were two fences of barbed wire and rows of lights suspended from high poles. Inside the walls, white houses marched in regimented lines and a huge crane towered above a half-finished block of flats. The blue and white flag of Israel fluttered from the top.

His uncle had walked on, but he turned back when he saw that Karim had stopped, and nodded as he took in the surprise on the boy's face.

“Didn't you know that this had happened? Didn't you hear us talking about the new settlement here?”

“Yes, I suppose so.” Karim hadn't listened closely to the talk about the settlement. “I didn't know it was so close.”

He could see his father's car now. It was parked at the side of the road in the valley below. His parents and aunt were setting off with their baskets into the lowest terrace on the slope opposite the hill on which the settlement lay.

Karim and his uncle had just passed the car and were walking off the road, hurrying along the terrace between the olive trees to catch up with the others, when the first shot rang out. It hit a stone a few metres away from Karim and shattered it, sending sharp fragments in all directions. Karim was so scared that for a moment he couldn't move. He stood, petrified and confused, unable even to tell where the sound had come from.

His uncle recovered first.

“Quick! Get behind a tree!” he shouted, scrambling up the wall to the terrace above, where older trees with thicker trunks offered slightly better protection.

Karim started to follow, but then he heard a voice shouting in English, “Stop! Stop! Don't move!” and a second shot pinged on the terrace wall ahead.

Cautiously, he turned around. He could see men on the opposite hillside, running down from the high-walled settlement above. He counted them. Five.

Karim's mother was shouting to him now.

“Karim! Do what they say! Don't move!”

The settlers were running fast towards the olive pickers. They all carried guns. They stopped at the bottom of the hill, 150 feet or more away.

“What are you doing here?” one of them shouted, still in English. “Drop your weapons and get out.”

Karim couldn't understand everything they said. From further along the terrace, he heard his father call back, “We don't have weapons. No arms. We come only to pick our olives.”

One of the settlers laughed.

“Your
olives? Forget it. This is part of the settlement now. You won't ever pick olives here again. You want to get shot? No? Then get out now.”

Abu Feisal appeared from behind the tree where he had taken cover.

“This place,” he called out bravely, “it is ours. We have the papers. My grandfather—”

The only answer was a bullet, which hit the tree eight inches from his hand.

“It's OK!” Lamia called out. “You don't need to shoot anymore. We're going.”

“Keep your hands up!” one of the settlers shouted back. “Drop the baskets. Leave them. Go on—get out!”

“And you can tell your terrorist friends to keep away, you hear?” yelled another.

It seemed a long way back to the car, knowing that the settlers' rifles were still trained on their backs. Karim felt his shoulders twitch in frightened expectation as he turned away from them, sure that at any moment a bullet would sear into him. His instinct told him to run, but his brain told him not to make any sharp or sudden movements. He could hear his parents and aunt behind him now, his aunt's breath coming in panting gasps.

Without the baskets there was just enough room for the five of them in the car. Gingerly, Hassan turned it and began to drive as fast as he could up the hill towards the village. Tears were running down the old aunt's broad cheeks.

“Thieves! Thieves! I've come here to pick our olives every year since I could walk!”

A sharp crack from behind made them all flinch.

“Get down!” screamed Lamia. “They're still shooting!”

Hassan hunched over the wheel and pushed the accelerator down as far as it would go. The car bounded to the top of the hill.

He pulled up when they were safely over the crest.

“Did it hit? Is everyone all right?”

“It went into the bumper, I think,” said Abu Feisal, twisting round to look out of the rear window. “Not into a tire anyway, thank God.”

Karim discovered that he was shaking, convulsed in tremors from head to foot. He did his best to control them, taking deep breaths and clasping his hands tightly together. He didn't want the others to think he was afraid.

“How can they do it?” he burst out angrily. “Stop us from picking our own olives! On our own land! They've just stolen it! Why didn't anyone stop them?”

Abu Feisal laughed bitterly.

“We tried. Don't think we didn't. It was a shock. We had no idea they were coming. They arrived out of the blue—it was a Tuesday, I think—just four or five caravans and a bulldozer. Before we had any idea what was happening, they'd gone up the hill and had started bulldozing the ground. As soon as we realized what they were doing, we came running, everyone did, the whole village more or less. We got as close to them as we could, but they had guns and they shot at us. What could we do?”

Karim wanted to shout, “Something! You could have done something! Anything!” but he didn't want to seem rude. He wriggled his shoulders impatiently.

“Karim, you don't know what it was like.” His aunt, who was squashed in beside him, patted his knee. “Some of us lay down on the road in front of the trucks and cement mixers. The settlers wouldn't stop for that. After they'd run over Abu Ali and broken both his legs, we knew they wouldn't care what they did to us. Our boys went out every day and threw stones at any settler who went past. Then the soldiers came with tanks and Jeeps. The boys threw stones and Molotov cocktails at them and the soldiers shot back. Didn't you hear about how Walid's boy was killed? He was fourteen. There's a memorial to him in the village. And his brother lost an eye. After that, when anyone tried to resist, they came to the village and arrested them, and took them off to jail in Israel. Three of your own cousins are still there.”

“Yes, but those trees, that hill, it's ours! You said, Baba. You told me about how your great-grandfather.... ”

Hassan was negotiating the sharp corner by the mosque, where an old man was trying to load a sack onto the back of a donkey. He didn't say anything until he was safely past.

“We've done everything,” he said resignedly. “I took the documents myself to show a lawyer. He's presented them in court to prove our ownership. That was two years ago. There's a case dragging on. It's costing us a fortune. And in the meantime the settlement's been built. How can anyone get them out now?”

“They must be planning to expand,” said Abu Feisal heavily. “Why else would they have shot at us? They're planning to take the other hillside too. You'll see.”

No one answered.

Chapter Eight

Sixteen people crowded around Um Hassan's table that evening to eat the huge meal that she had spent the day preparing. Lamia had joined aunts and cousins in the kitchen. They had stuffed zucchinis and eggplants with a spicy lamb filling, chopped vegetables, rolled meatballs, roasted chickens, stirred sauces, boiled mountains of rice and sprinkled fistfuls of garden herbs.

The steaming bowls and laden platters of delicious food that jostled for space on the flowery plastic tablecloth would normally have brought Karim hurrying to sit down, eager to start. Tonight, though, he hung back. He'd been miserable all afternoon, ever since they'd come back from the olive terraces.

Liberator of Palestine! he jeered at himself, remembering the list he'd written at home in Ramallah. I haven't even got the guts to stand up to a bunch of bullying Israeli settlers. I ran away at the first shot.

He'd sat outside the wall that surrounded his grandmother's vegetable patch for a long time, flicking pebbles at an old soda can abandoned under a lemon tree. Life was unpredictable and frightening in Ramallah, but the village, the crowd of relations, the sense of ownership of the old family lands, which had been there in the background of his life ever since he could remember, had always seemed fixed and unassailable.

Everything seemed shaky now. Nothing was permanent any more. And what upset him most of all was that everyone was so calm and accepting. His mind kept turning back to his father.

He's weak. Weak! he thought, remembering with a shudder how Hassan Aboudi had stood, almost naked, under the contemptuous stare of the soldiers, and how he'd run like a frightened rabbit from the settlers' guns.

Karim took his place at last at the table, flushing angrily when his mother sent him off again to wash his hands, watching sourly while Farah and Sireen climbed on and off their father's knees. He avoided the eyes of his cousins, who were boasting about the stones they'd thrown a week ago, when a gang of settlers had come to the village in the night and had rampaged about, shooting holes in people's water tanks and cutting down the power lines.

He concentrated on picking out the butter-fried almonds that garnished the rice and putting them at the side of the plate. They were his favorite tidbit and he always saved them till last. In spite of himself, he couldn't help relishing his grandmother's wonderful food.

The two men nearest him, husbands of Abu Feisal's daughters, were talking about America now.

“I've been thinking it over for a long time,” one was saying. “My brother's got a pharmacy in Boston. I could stay with him while I get started over there.”

“It wouldn't be difficult for you,” the other answered. “They always want people with math degrees. But look at me! Unemployed ex-manager of an ex-tourist hotel for ex-tourists, who aren't going to come back to this land for the foreseeable future. I've got no paper qualifications at all. You're right to think about it, though. Emigration's the only hope for us now. What does Ayesha think?”