The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (25 page)

Raja is also a good route-finder. Over the decades of
sarha
he has gained, as he put it, ‘
an eye for the tracks
that criss-cross the hills, like catwalks’. Near the
qasr
he picked up an obviously old path which led down to the floor of the valley, the dry wadi bed. There, the path merged with the wadi, following the natural line in the landscape for both walkers and water. We passed coils of barbed wire, snaking out of the wadi-floor silt. There were more bullet-casings: reminders that this valley was fought over in 1967; that Ramallah was besieged and bombarded as recently as 2003.

As we walked the wadi path, Raja told me stories. He talked about the people he had brought walking in this valley here, and the ways in which the landscape had affected them. He talked about the different seasons of colour in the valley, which that day was yellow and purple. He pointed out a stand of dark, finger-like cypresses perhaps two miles away, rare strong verticals in this lateral landscape.

‘For years it was impossible to come into this valley because the army was stationed where those cypresses are,’ he said. ‘They surveyed the valley and would intercept anyone walking here. Now they’ve moved closer to Dolev, so we are able to walk here again.’

A westerly wind blew hard up the wadi, filling it with air. We were walking in a wind-river, against the flow. A pair of kestrels cried and roamed above the far side of the valley, following their kill paths. Then a pair of gazelles – the same browns and tans as the hillside – appeared below the kestrels, flowing uphill seemingly without using their legs, like a counter-gravitational fluid. Then – men were watching us. Palestinian men, from a roadside, perhaps half a mile away. They had turned towards us, were talking. Raja watched them watching us, but didn’t say anything to me. He just altered our route slightly, heading further up and away from them. I felt exposed, scrutinized, filled with the ridiculous worry that I might lose my footing and accidentally fall.

Travellers to the Holy Lands have always moved through a landscape of their imagination. The land itself has been easily forgotten (scurfed off as inconvenient or irrelevant) or dismissed (as lifeless and repugnant). Western pilgrims, surveyors and cartographers found the same qualities in the Palestinian hills: barrenness, the macabre. William Thackeray came to Palestine in the 1840s and rebuked the countryside as ‘
parched
’, ‘savage’, ‘unspeakably ghastly and desolate’, a place marked only by ‘fear and blood, crime and punishment’, a terrain of sustained sanguinary rites: ‘There is not a spot at which you look but some violent deed has been done there, or some massacre has been committed.’ To Herman Melville, a decade later, the limestone resembled an ossuary spread over thousands of square miles. He dashed down an appalled stream of impressions in his journal: the hills were ‘
bleached
’, reminded him of ‘leprosy’, of ‘encrustations of curses – old cheese – bones of rocks – crunched, gnawed & mumbled’.

For Raja, walking and wayfaring offered a means to refute such illiterate readings of his hills, a method of telling and discovering stories other than those of murder and sterility. Like Finlay on Lewis, Raja was a map collector, who had built up a substantial library of historical maps of the West Bank and the Holy Land. But he disliked using maps when he walked – partly because map-reading could be mistaken for a suspicious action, but also because each official map (Israeli, or British Mandate) had its own colonial biases of self-interest and misreading. Raja had preferred to develop what he called his ‘map in the head’, signposted by personal memories and references. He showed me a map he had drawn of the Ramallah hills and wadis. It was marked with doodles, Arabic place names denoting escarpments, outcrops or wadi outfalls, and little captions in English recording events: ‘Where Penny and Raja came under gunfire’; ‘Where Aziz [Raja’s nephew] picked up the unexploded missile’; ‘Where I encountered the Israeli settler with a gun’; ‘Where I found the dinosaur footprint’. It reminded me of Anne Campbell’s songlines on the Lewis moor: ‘Where the dragonfly had laid its wings out to dry’; ‘Where the eagle had preened’.

To walk between such places was, for Raja, a way to join events up into stories. He discovered on his walks and marked on his maps the locations of Palestinian villages erased by Israeli forces during the
Nakba
of 1948, whose former existences were sometimes indicated only by the presence of almond trees: shadow-sites of a kind. In recording his walks, Raja was seeking to archive in language what was vanishing, or to recreate in language what had already gone.

Miles further on, we left Wadi ’qda and entered another valley called Wadi Kalb. The Palestinian village of A’yn Qenya was to our north-west, and beyond that, on a hilltop, half a mile further on, the Israeli settlement of Dolev, with an army post and watchtower guarding its main entrance.

The sky had become heavy with unseasonal rain. The air was close, tense. So was the landscape. Suddenly there was a crackle. A boom echoed across the valley. I thought,
That was a peal of thunder
, then I thought,
That was a bomb
. No, a feedback screech followed. It was the static of the loudspeakers from the A’yn Qenya mosque being turned on. Silence, and then a voice, furiously emphatic, began to shout.
God is Great! God is Great! Muhamad is his prophet!
Allahu Akbar!

It was the Friday sermon. Eight loudspeakers mounted on the mosque tower, two in each window, pointing to each cardinal point. Raja sighed neatly.

‘There did not use to be this zealousness to the sermons. But now, of course, as there is so little pleasure in this life, the only hope is in the next. People have become disaffected, and as they have done so, the sermons have become angrier.’

We stepped over two dead dogs, flattened into the ground. I stopped to look at them, distracted by the fabulous
mycelial
landscape of mould that had sprung up on their pelts.

‘In Ramallah now, Penny and I cannot sleep through the 4 a.m. sermon. The imam becomes crazier and crazier, and then everyone complains, and he calms down for a while, and then he forgets and becomes crazy again.’

We picked our way up through terraces of prickly pears. Terrace-walking is like upwards pachinko. You move along, and then where the land offers you an option – a slope-spill of soil from one terrace down to the next; a protruding boulder – you ascend. Along, up, left and along, up, right and along, making for the next ascent point. Terraces of olive, lemon, orange and pomegranate, the pomegranates over-ripe, splitting lavishly on the branch, and around the foot of the trunks were scattered plastic bottles, food wrappers and human turds.

The imam ranted and raved.
Of the best deeds are the unity of Moslems in general and of Palestinians in particular! Do not be like those who thrive in disputes for they will be severely punished!

Rain began to fall. The droplets were the biggest I had ever seen, leaving splash-marks on the limestone the size of two-pound coins. Because of the westerly wind, the splash-marks were elliptical rather than circular. The drops also seemed to fall in interlocking squares, as if the rain were leaving corridors down which we could walk without getting struck.

The rain made the marly soil sticky as treacle. Raja and I soon both had bulbous cakes of yellow mud on the soles of our shoes, our feet heavy as a deep-sea diver’s boots. The rain woke the scent of the sage, but also the smell of decaying animal flesh and human waste, which almost overpowered the sage.

‘Let’s run for the villa,’ Raja said, beginning to march smartly up the path. I came on more slowly. The villa was perhaps a hundred yards up the slope, and it was one of the waypoints of our walk. Until 1967, Raja had told me earlier in the day, the villa had belonged to the Zalatimo family, well known in Palestine as pastry-makers. A big terrace blocked my view of the villa, but I knew roughly where it was. The rain was pummelling down, so I thought I’d take a short cut. I crossed a small field, scrambled up a limestone buttress of the big terrace – and froze.

A man was running across the open ground in front of the house, making for cover. He was not Raja. Inside the villa I saw another man. He was wearing some sort of webbing and strapping. Something metal was slung across his front, glinting. The doorway and windows of the villa were black like eyeholes.

I dropped back down behind the limestone terrace.
They must be either settlers or soldiers
, I thought. Then I thought,
I have to stop Raja
. I ran uphill after him, past a holm oak, only to see him already moving along the path to the house.

He had almost reached the front door. I thought,
He can’t have seen that there are people inside
. He opened the door. There was a shout. One of the men moved quickly towards Raja – and embraced him. I heard Raja exclaim, ‘Basel!’ Then, ‘What luck!’

The first thing I saw when I entered the villa was a white horse. The back double-doors of the house were wide open, and a white horse was standing centred in the threshold, looking over its shoulder at me. There were also five people. Three men, two women. One of the men, who was obviously Raja’s friend, had a baby slung on his front in a carrier, the metal buckles of which glinted.

It was the Zalatimo family themselves, back to see their ancestral villa. ‘I try to come here once a month or so,’ said Basel, Raja’s friend, who now lived in Jerusalem. ‘This is my mother, who hasn’t been back for many years,’ Basel said, ‘and this is my aunt, making her last visit.’ A look passed between Basel and his mother. The aunt smiled broadly and nodded a greeting to Raja and me. Outside, the thunder gave its first rumbles.

The family had been forced to abandon the villa in 1967 after the Six-Day War. It was now a ruin. There were fangs of glass in the windows, the floor was strewn with pine needles and acorns, and the walls were dense with graffiti. The villa, visited both by settlers from Dolev and villagers from A’yn Qenya, had become a site of textual dispute. There were crude black drawings of AK-47s spitting out bullets at a spray-painted Star of David, a swastika, a heart dripping black blood, as well as many Romanized names that meant nothing to me, and Arabic and Hebrew texts that I couldn’t read.

The big central hall gave onto two domed-roof rooms. I scuffed away the dust from a section of the floor with my foot, feeling a glossy surface beneath, and exposed intact floor-tiles, marked with interlocking black diagonals. Basel’s mother came over.

‘These are a very special surface,’ she said apologetically, as though the tiles had been left dirty for a day rather than for forty-two years. ‘You need only to wipe them with a mop and – they gleam as though they’ve been waxed!’ She told me that she had left Palestine in 1959 for Kuwait, and then for America, rarely returning to the West Bank. Then she steered me back inside, and gave me a tour of the house, as if I were the first visitor since a recent refurbishment.

‘This is where we piled the sacks of flour,’ gesturing to one corner of the hall, ‘and here where we piled the sacks of rice.’

She stepped close to me and opened her hand to show two knobbly brown pebbles sat in her palm, like a magician revealing a palmed coin.

‘I could not resist it, I have taken two more.’

‘Not
more
, mother,’ said Basel from the other room.

‘You would like to come and see the bread-oven my father and uncle built?’ She led me out of the back door of the house, past the horse, in the rain, along a muddy path.

‘Come, come, and here it is.’ I was expecting a vast stone oven; a blast-furnace built into the hillside. In fact, it was a small rusty carcass, barely recognizable as an oven, with an L-shaped mouth.

‘This is how it opens,’ she said, creaking open the bent door. The interior was filled with brown pebbles.

‘This is where the pebbles come from?’

‘Yes, many from here – a whole bag. I took other stones from Hebron, Haifa, Jericho, Jerusalem, one or more from every part of Palestine. I took these stones home and laid them on the belly of my oven in America, and I bake my bread on them, so that when I lift the loaf up once it is baked, Palestine has left its mark on the belly of the bread. You can get this kind of bread in Ramallah; it is called
taboun
. I recommend it!’

Her brow furrowed. ‘The Israelis have stolen this land from us, they are thieves. I once wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan, I knew it would go in the waste-paper basket, but I needed to get it off my chest. “Dear President Reagan,” it began …’

I stopped listening. Down in the valley, a covey of partridges broke from cover and whirred, churring, across the far flank of the valley. A man came out of a house on the lower side of the village and hurled a bucketful of rubbish down the hillside. I thought of John Berger’s word ‘
landswept’
, coined to describe the regions of conflict zones, meaning ‘a place or places where everything, both material and immaterial, has been brushed aside, purloined, swept away, blown down, irrigated off, everything except the touchable earth’.

‘My aunt remembers this place and that is good,’ Basel said to me as we were about to leave. ‘At the border crossing at King Hussein Bridge they gave her one week on her visa. We’ve outstayed the visa by two weeks. It doesn’t matter. Her Alzheimer’s is too bad.’

The aunt smiled at me. The thunder crashed. A donkey brayed. The imam ranted. The rain poured. A drill thumped like gunfire. Somewhere higher up the valley, the wadi started to run with water, and the old path we had walked became a new river.

The following day, Raja and I walked again, on another long Zone C trespass, starting this time from the village of Ras Karkar. Our route followed old paths and wadi beds from Ras Karkar up to a hilltop refugee camp, then down a long sine-wavey valley, Wadi Zarqa, which was fed by scores of springs. Ras Karkar was well known for having resisted the British in the early years of the mandate. It had a history of wealth and respect, but it was now extremely poor. Plastic drinks bottles had been embedded into the walls to save on concrete. A fence had been constructed out of beer crates, broken chairs and thorn branches.