Maiden Voyages (63 page)

Someone grabbed my
kefiyeh
, and rocks came battering down on the car. The windshield was hit but it didn’t break. The
mulethamin
were attacking from the olive trees, and I went again into a maniacal highspeed reverse until I was once more out of range. The masked Palestinians stood on the road and glared at me. I sat in the car, more frightened than I had been since I first set foot on the West Bank. I wasn’t going to drive forward into the same trap again, but I also wasn’t going to retreat. I was in a quandary.

Then, as if in answer to my dilemma, three villagers came walking up behind me from the direction of Abu al-Koroun. I didn’t recognize the trio of men, but they knew me by sight, as many villagers did. They tried to calm me, telling me not to be afraid. I was still trembling; my
left leg was shaking on the clutch pedal. Two of the villagers stayed with me in the car, and the other went and talked to the
mulethamin
. He returned with the
kefiyeh
, and all three got into the car. We drove to the ambush point, got out and moved the rocks, drove past the ambush point, got out and carefully replaced the stones. The
mulethamin
had blended into the landscape. I asked my newfound benefactors who my attackers were, but they didn’t tell me.

“I told the
mulethamin
,” one benefactor said, “that they made a mistake just now, that you are good. It is up to them whether they believe this. It won’t help you to know their names.”

We made it into the village, and my benefactors went their own way. I headed for the house of Naim Najajra, the schoolteacher who was Ratiba’s youngest brother and who had helped so merrily and briefly with the olive picking. The driveway to Naim’s place was narrow and led to a courtyard protected by the houses of relatives. I pulled hastily into the driveway and brought the car to a screeching halt, startling Halima, who had been basking in the sun on a blanket in the courtyard. I told them what had happened, and Halima told me that the army had riled the village the day before. Soldiers had come upon the flag on the minaret and had ordered a young man to climb up and tear it down. They had fired tear gas through the whole village to keep the
shabab
indoors and then had sped away. The ambush I chanced upon could have been laid by rankled
shabab
. But whatever the reason, I was still upset.

Halima was upset, too. She brought out coffee. I had to drink two cups of the strong stuff before my hands ceased shaking. At first, I spilled from the cup. Halima then hefted herself inside and brought out a platter of leftover lunch, chicken and rice, and tried to get me to eat it. The village hospitality never ceased, but I could not eat anything. Naim came out from his house. Halima and he tried to coax me to go sit in his cloud-painted guest room, where I could feel safe. I refused.

Slowly I was becoming angry. The fear that had shaken me was transmuting into an anger that came from deep inside. The bunch of villagers who ambushed me could have killed me. The windshield could have shattered into glass-sharp shrapnel. A rock could have struck me
in the face. Had they wanted to kill me? Were they just trying to scare me off? I didn’t know.

I had a taste of what Israelis felt when they traveled the West Bank. Transmitted along the arc of a rock being thrown, the Palestinians’ anger was personal and deadly. There was nothing accidental about it. You were the target. But what made me even angrier and what hurt me was that I was not an Israeli settler. Although all the Palestinians in Nahalin might not be convinced, I had done nothing to harm them.

Hussein Najajra, an Arabic teacher and relative of Naim, came out into the courtyard, and I made a speech to him about the need of the American people to understand the Palestinians and that this stoning of my car was not helpful.

He agreed. “Whichever people did this, they were stupid,” he said.

Halima again offered me food. “It is a shame that they threw stones on you,” she said.

Sena arrived in the courtyard, having already heard what happened. She hugged me. “Helen,” she said, “this was unnecessary. This was not good. You should not stop coming to Nahalin.”

I gave Sena the books and Halima the medicine. By then, I had calmed down enough to think ahead. I was again flooded with fear. Naim’s courtyard made a temporary sanctuary. I guessed there must be
mulethamin
in ambush on any route I would try to take out of the village, but I couldn’t stay cowering in this courtyard in a village that was on edge.

A single stone was tossed at me as I backed out of the driveway and headed for the other side of the village, the neighborhood where Hanan’s and Hilmi’s houses were and where I was well-known.

On the way, I saw another bunch of
mulethamin
milling around on the main road. Some were rolling tires toward the Valley of the Cow. My impulse was to yank the car around and head in the other direction, but that would only have taken me back to the place of the first ambush. I proceeded, and the anonymously wrapped figures let me pass. I could recognize none of them. As I was weaving down the road, avoiding the
mulethamin
, one stepped out in front of the car. As I stopped, he pulled his
kefiyeh
aside. It was one of Hanan’s brothers, and he said it would be OK for me to drive out the other way if he came with me.

“It’s Jebha on this side of the village. We like you,” he said.

I hoped he was telling the truth. One of their tires was already burning. The
mulethamin
had laid down a strip of nails across the road, which they directed me around. Just outside the village, in the high olive grove where the
shabab
had fought the army,
mulethamin
had gathered in colored garb. Others stood in the open with rocks in their hands. One of the leaders ordered the
shabab
to come quickly, and they came, some carrying clubs. They surrounded the car, and for a moment I wondered whether this was another, more terrible trap. But nothing happened and I drove forward, out of the village. The
shabab
ran along both sides of my car to ensure that nobody on high made a mistake. I was not to be stoned by this faction of the Palestinians. Jebha approved of me and Fatah had not.

Rocks were the starkest of weapons. There was nothing to them; there was no elaboration; there was no apparatus between the thrower and the target. Rocks were direct, much more so than guns, which could be fired accurately and cleanly from a distance. Rocks were primitive, employed for millennia before mankind developed tools and weapons.

The
mulethamin
could have killed me with their rocks, and I wanted to know why they wanted to. I wanted to talk to them. I wanted them to explain to me the depths of their paranoia and anger, an ugly mix, I was sure. I wanted to understand.

The warm afternoon had passed, and the evening chill had been settling on Jerusalem, where I was holed up, shaken and writing notes about what had happened. I was wondering why, or how, the
mulethamin
had failed to kill me. They were close enough. Maybe they were momentarily unsure. Maybe I was lucky. Or maybe they just wanted to terrify me or warn me. I planned to see Fawzi and get an explanation.

The next day Fawzi came to see me.

“I am sorry,” he said. He said that I had been caught in a rending fissure between the village’s Fatah and Jebha factions.

“I talked all last night to people with importance about what happened. I said that you were writing about the village and that this was a good thing. The world needs to understand that Palestinians live like
human beings. They listened. We agreed to send representatives from each one, from Fatah and Jebha, to Jerusalem to ask questions about you. To find out if you are straight.”

Readily I agreed that the investigation should proceed, but I had plenty of doubts. I had no idea who would be judging my integrity. I assumed members of the underground leadership of the Intifada would be my arbiters, but I did not know them. Or if I did, I did not know their clandestine roles. I was jittery.

“The problem you had was not because of you,” Fawzi continued reassuringly. “These people who attacked you thought you were against them because you were spending too much time with the Jebha.”

A lesson had been learned the hard way. From then on, I vowed to make friends with more Shakarnas, with anybody who might think I had been taking sides.

I had been blind to the obvious. I lost another layer of naïveté. Bucolic was no longer a word that occurred to me when I thought of Nahalin. Complex, yes. Difficult, yes. Hospitable, yes. But what was behind the smiles? Had one of the masked stone throwers previously invited me onto his guest porch and plied me with tea? How was I to know whom to trust?

I asked Fawzi if any of my attackers would speak to me.

“No,” he said flatly. Clearly this was not something that could be talked about within the village.

I asked whether I had ever been in any of their houses.

“Perhaps you have by chance,” he said, offering no clues to their identity.

Fawzi was perturbed not just by my account. He hated seeing the village fighting itself. “We should put these things away. Now is not the time to be fighting inside the village. The fight is much larger than just our village. It is not a game that we should be playing now. We have to be more serious. The enemy is not you, and it is not the other Palestinians.”

Talk had been bouncing around Jerusalem that the different Palestinian factions were rubbing against each other on the West Bank as a whole, trying to gain ascendancy in the national and international arenas.

I was going to have to prove my neutrality on yet another level. I gathered once more proof of my writing and my identity. A few days later I was summoned by telephone to an office in East Jerusalem. Fawzi was not there. Two men whom I had never seen before were seated at a table. One was tall and thin with a sharp face. He did the talking. He started by asking me the details of the stoning. He paused and looked at me hard.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Tell me everything, because I will be hearing the other side. Others saw what happened in Nahalin. I will be hearing the truth. Any lies will finish you.”

I was telling the truth, but that did not stop me from squirming in my chair. I had no idea what my attackers might say, and it seemed that my questioner was from the Intifada’s leadership. What would happen to me if lies about me went up through the Palestinian ranks?

After a few more questions about my motives for traveling on the West Bank, he ended the questioning abruptly. “That is enough. Go now and do not remember what I look like. Do not tell anyone about me.”

I said that I wanted only one thing, which was to talk to some of those who had stoned me, disguised or not. I wanted to make them realize I was not the enemy.

“If you have told the truth, they will understand,” he said. “Don’t make the mistake of asking me too many questions.”

He rose as I did and walked stiffly toward the door, as if something in his legs caused him pain. He opened the door and closed it quickly behind me. I heard a lock click.

Back in my apartment I waited to find out whether I was doomed or saved. Four days after the meeting he telephoned.

“You have done excellently. Now don’t worry. You will be safe everywhere you want to go around Bethlehem and the area. You have my word. I am the man from Fatah.”

He hung up. I took this cryptic message to mean that he represented Fatah and could guarantee that members of his group would not bother me. I suspected the ambushers had been among them.

(1941-1987)

THE HOLYLAND BUFFET

“The most amazing thing I saw in all my travels,” Kali was saying, “was that streetcar in Cairo.”

“I thought you never travelled,” said Ibrahim the Syrian, who was sitting across the table from her in a new vegetarian restaurant called Mythological Foods. “When you get mad, you always swear that you’re going to pack up and go to India. But you never go, so I assumed you never travel.”