Olives (24 page)

The slow beat
of
a helicopter’s rotors
sounded, its turbines’ whine steady alongside the rising and
falling notes of the wind. It soon died away.

I woke late
to sunlight and the sound of birds. Mariam was in the kitchen,
Aisha still asleep in the other room, a huddle of blankets and a
tousle of hair. I left her sleeping and sat down to a breakfast of
Arabic bread, olives and white cheese in blue-decorated dishes laid
out on a white cloth.

‘
Sabah al khair.’
A
smiled ‘good morning.’

I had enough
Arabic for this, at least.
‘Sabah al noor.’

She asked me
a question, but lost me completely and so went through it again,
speaking slowly and miming, hands together under her cheek, hands
up and a quizzical look. Had I slept well?

I nodded and
smiled.

She pointed
outside, a warning finger, hands under head, finger on mouth. A
touch of the heart, pointing to Aisha and to me before drawing a
finger across her lips.

I pointed
outside and shrugged, a questioning look on my face and Mariam
glared at me, putting her hands on her eyes, her ears and mouth.
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

I caught the
moisture in her eyes before she turned to wipe them. She shook her
head at me and again I only caught a fraction of what she said, but
it ended: ‘
Enta majnoun,
habibi
.’ You’re mad, my
love.

We ate
together in companionable silence before Mariam cleared my plate.
She touched the thin gold band on her finger and pointed to me and
then the living room with an enquiring look. I grinned at her,
then, ‘
Insh’Allah
.’ If it is
the will of God. Aisha found two happy people laughing together
when she came, yawning and fluffing her tousled hair, into the
kitchen, Mariam repeating, ‘
Insh’Allah
.’

Aisha caught
my amused expression at her state of disarray and turned to regard
herself using the base of a pan as a mirror, which you could get
away with in Mariam’s spotless little kitchen. She growled at me
and shook out her hair. Mariam loosed off a long stream of Arabic
which made Aisha laugh.

‘
She says I’m
to teach you Arabic quickly because she’s tired of fooling around
like a clown trying to get you to understand her.’

‘
Tell her
I’ll try, but it’s a difficult language.’

Aisha
translated, but Mariam just replied if I was such a very clever
Englishman, everyone knowing the English were clever and cunning,
I’d learn Arabic quickly. That she had the feeling I would learn
their ways quickly and perhaps even make allowances for her people.
Mariam looked at me as Aisha translated this, a particularly hard
stare at the last bit. I got up and looked out over the
yard.

Mariam lifted
a brass jug she had been heating on the range, pouring strong
cardamom-flavoured coffee into little cups.

‘
How long has
Mariam lived here, Aisha?’

More Arabic
before Aisha said, ‘Since 1945, when she married my grandfather.
She was seventeen, he was older. It was his family’s farm
originally since long back. Mariam came from Sha’ab, a village on
the far side of Nazareth from here, quite far away. It’s an Israeli
settlement now, her family is all dispersed. The farm is all she
has.’

I spoke to
Aisha but looked at Mariam, a strange triangular conversation. ‘How
did they meet?’

Mariam looked
misty-eyed, gazing out of the window as she talked. ‘At a market in
Nazareth. The families took a long time to come to terms with the
fact they were in love and wouldn’t marry anyone else, Mariam says.
My father was born here on the farm, in 1946. She says he cried all
the time as a baby but when he was two they were forced to leave
the farm and my father fell silent. She worried about him, he was
so quiet and still.’

1948.
Al Naqba,
‘the catastrophe.’ I had turned to look at Mariam as
Aisha translated her words, but now I looked out of the window
again, the morning light bright in my eyes and my thoughts far
away, travelling back to the young couple and their flight from the
farm, fear and danger in the night, torn away from their simple
life together. Mariam was still talking, recollection making her
voice dreamy. She paused for Aisha, who said, ‘They came back in
1952, after the border had stabilised but there was a lot of
trouble here and they had to leave again two years later and stay
in a camp near Amman. They tried coming back many times, but it was
too dangerous. Ahmed, my grandfather’s brother, ended up on the
Israeli side and so became an Arab Israeli. He was a lawyer and
managed to protect the farm against them. The Israelis used to try
and push against the border, there were raids across it constantly
and it was very… I don’t have the word, Paul.’

‘
Fluid?’

Aisha paused
to light a cigarette, sliding the pack and lighter over to me.
‘Yes, fluid. A lot of trouble. Grandma Mariam and my grandfather
finally moved back in 1966, but my father stayed in the camps with
his shops and Ibrahim left home and joined him there. For a time
they had soldiers staying here from the Arab Legion. My grandfather
was killed the next year, in the war.’

I remembered
a newspaper snippet from my background research, a biographical
article on the Dajanis. ‘Wasn’t he in the Arab Legion?’

Aisha frowned
and sipped gingerly at her coffee as Mariam started to talk again.
‘No,’ translated Aisha, ‘He fought with them but he was a…’ She
stopped, searching for the word for a second, ‘volunteer? Many of
the farmers did that, especially if they had guns. Grandma Mariam
tried to stop Grandpa but he was angry. She tried to tell him he
was too old for fighting, to leave it to the young ones, that they
needed him on the farm. He wouldn’t listen. He was shot. So she was
left here alone with Hamad.’

‘
I’m sorry,’ I said, a platitude. At least I had it in
Arabic for her: ‘
Ana
asif
.’ Mariam smiled at me, a
sad smile and a nod acknowledging my little
courtesy.

‘
The border
changed then, the Jordanians lost the West Bank and Jerusalem. The
farm became part of Israel. It was a bad time, but Ahmed managed to
fight the possession orders and the claims against the land, as he
had in the past many times. The Israelis tried being tough, but he
was a good lawyer and an Israeli citizen, even if he was Arab. They
had to respect his connections and his legal arguments.’

Mariam’s eyes
were far away and Aisha struggled to keep up with the flow of her
narrative because Mariam had stopped pausing for Aisha to
translate. Lost in her past, Mariam wasn’t talking to us so much as
herself.

‘
Arafat
brought them hope. Until he came, the family were trying to become
Israelis, to regularise their position here by gaining citizenship.
That was the one time Ahmed failed. They didn’t want us. Now she
says Arafat is dead and so is his dream of a nation living in peace
on the land it has owned and farmed for centuries.’

‘
What about
Gaza? The new peace? Surely there’s hope now.’

Mariam
changed. I had only seen merriment in her until now, or the sadness
of a gentle woman born into terrible times. Now I saw where Aisha’s
temper, demonstrated so shockingly the day before, had come from.
Mariam’s face was a picture of loathing as she spat out the words.
Aisha translated, her hand on her grandmother’s
shoulder.

‘
She says
they have no peace. Even Ahmed the lawyer couldn’t stop them
building their wall through our land. The farm was totally on the
Arab side of the 1949 armistice border, but now the wall cuts
through it, takes the land from them. She says when she dies, the
farm will die.’

I tried to
take it all in: the long years of struggle this woman represented,
the aching, enduring search for just enough peace to scratch a
living, to survive unmolested. An old peasant woman living simply
in the face of war after war.

I asked
Aisha, ‘Does she hate them? The Israelis?’

Aisha shot a
sharp glance at me, but translated and the question brought Mariam
back from the past, stemming the flow of her reminiscence. She
looked at me wide-eyed for a few moments, then at Aisha. Her eyes
had tears in them and her face trembled, her lips compressed and
her wrinkled skin pulled tight around her mouth. She looked curled
in on herself and old. She picked up the tea glass in front of her
and started to tap it on the table, an odd, repetitive movement. We
both waited for her answer, but she just sat there, staring fixedly
at the little gold-rimmed glass she was tapping on the rough wooden
surface.

SEVENTEEN

The night’s
wind had abated but there was still a thick layer of cloud in the
sky, a grey drabness that sucked the warmth and life out of the
land. Aisha and I went for a last walk through the olives. I
surveyed the concrete barrier slicing through the countryside,
trying to remember there were families on the Israeli side with
their own tales of loss, with a sense of hurt they too had carried
for generations. I struggled to maintain my objectivity, thinking
back to the border guard’s outburst. If he had endured and lost as
much as these people had, I could see how some silly Englishman’s
use of a word like ‘regrettable’ would have made his blood
boil.

We stood arm
in arm for a long time, Aisha’s hair soft against my cheek and the
misty morning light slowly lightening the rain-cleansed, gleaming
leaves of the olive grove around us, a sullen red morning glow
washing over the terracotta ground dotted with neat rows of
silvery-green leaved bushes.

Hamad and his
tractor were nowhere to be seen when we got back to the farm. As we
loaded our bags into the boot of the car, I noticed several
cigarette butts on the ground by the back wheel. I squatted and
inspected the bodywork as closely as I could without being too
obvious, but found nothing out of place. Lying in bed listening to
the wind in the night, I had let my mind wander with possibilities,
with reasons why a group of men would be meeting outside a remote
West Bank farmhouse in the cold wind and rain. And none of them
were good things.

I embraced
Mariam, kissed her cheeks and told Aisha to tell her I loved her,
which made the old lady smile and slap me on the chest.

‘
She says
you’re a very bad man,’ Aisha translated, adding, ‘and she’s right,
too.’

We left,
waving our goodbyes before bouncing along the rutted track to join
the Qaffin road. Aisha and I talked about Mariam as we drove
through the overcast, drab landscape, stopping for the Israeli
checkpoints, a routine I accepted with the same resignation I saw
on the faces of the people around me in the queues.

It started to
rain again, the morning’s red sky coming through with the goods, a
light drizzle which kept the dust down and the village children in
their houses. In the flat greyness of the day, the villages seemed
even more bleak, tired and hopeless. The washed out dreariness
ground us down so the squeak of the windscreen wipers and constant
drone of the engine soon became the only sound in the car. Aisha
opened her window and lit cigarettes for us. It wasn’t until the
cold air hit me I realised I’d been dozing.

We reached
the Sheikh Hussein crossing and this time I asked the soldier if I
could go across to the office. He was surprised at the request,
paused for a moment before nodding. He walked with me across the
floor. I hoped against hope my officer would be there. He
was.

‘
Paul
Stokes.’

‘
You remember
me.’

‘
I tell you,
we not get many English tourists here.’

‘
One of your
men told me about your daughter. I just wanted to say I am
sorry.’

I
half-expected him to hit me. He stood, his lips trembling and his
face taut, but his voice was gentle and his eyes were, too. His
smile was tight but I knew the bitterness was not directed at me.
He reached out and patted my arm and his words, though they seemed
anything but gentle, were almost soothing.

‘
Fuck off,
Englishman.’

I dipped my
head and left.

I sat on the
patio in the cold and damp, watching the rain fall on the garden,
drinking warm Chilean wine and smoking. Alone with my thoughts and
the sound of the rain, lost somewhere between the two worlds
straddling the Jordan. I needed to find a balance, because what was
in Aisha’s heart wasn’t in mine. Although I desperately wanted to
be with her in everything, I was a stranger in her conflict and for
the most part an unwelcome one. Worried this would always be
something between us that wasn’t truly shared, I felt
alien.

The rain kept
falling around me until it became dark and I took the empty bottle
and the full ashtray inside, glancing again at the original copy of
the Ministry’s bid evaluation document on my kitchen table. It had
been there when I got back from the farm, placed there by the same
invisible hands that had taken it from the chair in the café where
I had left it, following Lynch’s instructions.