‘Don’t be fucking stupid.’ A hand grabbed her and threw her backwards, sending her slamming against a wall. Her head cracked, rang, swam.
Loved ones were calling to loved ones in vain – and then the executions started again. One. Two. Orderly. Three. Systematic. Picking the victims off. Four. Five. A trained, professional firing squad.
She hurled herself through the pandemonium of living and wounded, cross-legged or collapsed on the ground: terrorized people.
Doré’s The Massacre of the Innocents.
Heads in laps, heads thrown backwards, eyes closed or open, staring, dead-eyed, fish-eyed. Locked in a nightmare. The music echoing, no longer heavy metal rock. Bullets flying past their ears. Lead streaking through the air. Spent cartridges bouncing off their bodies. Was Oliver lying face down on the ground, screams, gunfire erupting all about him? Was he shielding Lizzie? Was she also a hostage in the old theatre, held at gunpoint, or had she managed to escape?
‘LIZZIE! LIZZIE! LIZZIE, forgive me …’
Kurtiz, West Bank, July 2011
Before the night shoot, which Alex had decreed would be filmed hand-held and Kurtiz was not to be involved, they ate with the residents and volunteers in one of the village houses. Built into the rock, it was surprisingly large, rambling, but devoid of furniture, save for a few cane and wood chairs. The cooking was achieved outside on an open fire by a small team of women squatting on the ground. Grilled lamb and a great steaming aluminium pan of couscous. They sipped fizzy soft drinks of bright orange and mud-brown hues, which were loosely related, the labels promised, to orange and cola. Kurtiz would have killed for a whisky. She was still shaken by the afternoon’s ugly confrontation. The talk was of the recent slaughter of a small flock of Palestinian sheep. A punishment, Alex explained to her, for a Palestinian, not from this village but from somewhere closer to Nablus, who had entered the settlers’ camp by night and fired rounds from a gun aimlessly. No one had been hurt, but it was logged as an act of terrorism.
‘Sometimes, they don’t do their cause any favours by shooting off rockets, using arms recklessly, but they are a people in resistance. They are frustrated, deprived and in pain, and sometimes they make unwise decisions and it costs them. Such ill-advised responses give the crazy extremists out there grounds for killing. We’ll be out of here tomorrow,’ was Alex’s comfort to her later.
Kurtiz went to her tent soon after they had eaten. Alex told her to get some sleep and not dwell on the cruelty she’d witnessed. She would have dearly liked to touch base with home, with Lizzie, whose voice she was aching to hear. Under normal circumstances – if any of this work was normal – she would have forewarned her husband and daughter that she would be out of range for a time. That way, no one grew concerned. Too late for the regret.
Eventually, she must have fallen asleep, dozed off while reading by torchlight. Through the thin white skin of the tent, the floodlights poured their unremitting light down upon the village. An ever-watchful malevolent eye.
How do these people suffer this night after night? she asked herself. This torture.
Half of her had an ear alert, listening for her colleagues’ return. She wasn’t afraid, but she wasn’t entirely at ease either. She feared snakes as much as the threat of violence. Beth had offered her a bed in her room but Kurtiz felt it was her duty to remain with her team, to be waiting and available where they could find her, if necessary.
It was the shot that shocked her into full wakefulness. Its metal bounce echoed round the curvature of hills, seeming almost to sing. Sharp, high-pitched. She threw off her sleeping bag and pulled on her boots, fingers jiggling clumsily with laces. She was already dressed in a T-shirt and trousers. She snatched up a denim jacket, punched her arms into it, and the smaller of her cameras, the Fuji pro2, she stuffed agitatedly into the right pocket of her chinos. Ready to go, she smacked at the tent flap and faced the night.
In the hot white light, the figures drew instantly into her line of vision: a lens image coming into focus. Men on the hillside, silhouettes beneath a wide sky. A flank of them abreast. Purposeful in their approach, like a sequence from a classic western. Two were hatted, two carrying rifles. All were descending not by the paths and the winding donkey tracks but directly down the face of the hill – the scrubland, the uncultivated dust, rock and earth. Digging their booted feet into the ground beneath them, sinking as they came closer, growing larger, more threatening. Earth and stones were dislodged and dispersed, rolling downwards, thudding like a landslide against the flat valley surface in front of her. There was something chilling about the earth moving in this way. Bestrewn. Getting out of harm’s way. Kurtiz counted four, no, five men. Big men. One shorter. Three were bearded. She hung back by the entrance to the tent, gripping its cotton fabric, inhaling its mothball scent. She would be in full view due to the lights that flooded this natural arena. She glanced towards the other three tents. Were the men occupying them or were they still out somewhere, working? Close by, she prayed.
She stood at a distance, full on to the men. Their descent brought them within range. The hillside sloped in her direction. Faces grew more defined, identifiable, but she was uncertain what she should do. Should she raise the Fuji, focus, grab the image? If so, they might know about it and it would enrage them. Where were they going? Not to the village, it seemed. To whom should she give a warning? Should she scream, raise an alarm? Had no one else heard the shot? Had it been a shot? Or had she dreamed it? She glanced upwards to the heart of the village. The American couple were outside their accommodation in their nightclothes, arms wrapped tight about their torsos. Some of the local men were out on the ridge too. No one was bearing arms besides the approaching quintet, one of whom had a pitchfork resting on his shoulder, like a soldier standing to attention. Two had chainsaws. They had dropped to ground level now and were no more than thirty metres from where Kurtiz was standing. She shivered, recognizing among them her pockmarked challenger from earlier in the afternoon.
The entire scene, illuminated with such intensity, was taking on a surreal aspect. It was trance-like, and it was menacing. This, in itself, might have been a film. The moment before something abominable happens. An act that is irreversible.
No, her mind was running along apocryphal scenarios. She must find Alex, alert him, warn him. The armed men, one with a turkey-wattled neck, glanced in her direction but did not appear to register her presence. Was she invisible? He, from her point of view, was larger than life. His eyes were smouldering, on fire. Volcanic spit. They were not climbing to the village. They were advancing towards the nearby fields. They would be passing almost directly by where she was standing. Instinctively she pressed herself back a step or two inside the tent until they had marched by. She tilted her head upwards to the village square, if one could describe a scruffy patch of beaten earth as a square. A small crowd had gathered. Men, women and children. And all three of the overseas volunteers now.
What was happening? Did they know?
The intruders had moved on, and were approaching the outskirts of a recently planted olive grove. Their intent was clear to her. They were bent on destroying the trees, chopping or, rather, chainsawing them down. Just as they had slaughtered the sheep, deftly by night. Kurtiz knew that, in the West Bank, to destroy the olive groves, wipe out the livelihoods of the resident farmers, was a political act. Over the past two weeks she had witnessed the results of such vandalism but she had not been present for its execution.
She had to find Alex. Surely to God the crew were not sleeping. She hurried across the scrubland to his tent. ‘Alex. Alex!’ Her call was low but urgent. No reply. She pushed at the flap. The tent was empty, which would mean the two others would also be vacant. Both cars were in place. They couldn’t have gone far, not with all the equipment. They needed to be here.
She heard the stut-stuttering of a chainsaw firing up, as it diced into the silence of the night, followed instantly by a second machine. A crude symphony of destruction. The whip
and whack, air whooshing, as wooden sticks beat against living branches. Disregarding their own safety, unarmed men, farmers, were running to protect their groves. The Palestinians were shouting, calling. Kurtiz had hared back to the tent for her Leica. She was working with both cameras at the same time. Shooting everything. Feet crunching, ankles twisting on unseen stones, regaining her balance, stooping and dipping in and out of cover towards the groves, which were beyond the range of the floodlights and illuminated only by a last-quarter moon and stars. Trees were falling, thudding, dark shapes bouncing and rolling. Men were weeping; women halfway up the hill in the village were wailing like ambulance sirens.
From another direction, Alex came running. He was slower than usual, bearing the weight of the larger of the two movie cameras. His crew were no distance behind him. The destructors, vigilantes, were incensed by the arrival of cameras. Like wild bulls they came at the foreigners wielding sticks and pitchforks. A scene from a medieval revolt. Trees were whirring in a dance of death to the pale earth. A small boy; at first Kurtiz thought it was the child whose legs had been thwacked earlier in the day, but it was another, older, thirteen perhaps, resembling him, a brother, cousin, relative or perhaps not. This one was ramming a path, using his elbows, through a forest of knees, thighs, limbs, beating his way to the front of the madding crowd. Working at an eye level lower than everyone else’s, he was not immediately spotted as he lunged forward, grappling the legs of one of the bearded bear men. He hammered with closed fists at the man, knocking him off balance. The fellow reeled backwards, feet kicking upwards, as though in a jig, and then the boy, still clinging to his prey, bit into the man’s thigh. A curse rose above the other cries. One of his comrades pulled his gun, an M16 assault rifle, and fired two shots into the air while another beat the boy on the back with a stick, a third with a gun butt, whipping and beating, beating and whipping. The boy crumpled, curling like a flayed hedgehog.
Kurtiz let go her cameras. One swung from her neck; the Fuji she stuffed back into her pocket. She was on her knees at the boy’s buttocks. His back was bleeding. He seemed to be unconscious. A thud caught her on the shoulder. The pain momentarily disjointed her. She ignored it. A brawl had broken out around her. Gunshots. Everybody spilled, dispersed. The boy lay still. The vigilantes fled. She was lifting the young Palestinian, dragging him. ‘Someone help me, please.’ She should probably leave him be.
Alex was at her side, leaning down over her. ‘Let me,’ he said, bending. He scooped the boy into his arms, attempting not to press against the flesh on the child’s back, and conveyed him towards the village. His crew stepped in to take charge of the equipment. Kurtiz followed Alex, stumbling, unbalanced. Her head was whizzing, her ears ringing from the shots, the shock; her shoulder was wounded. Her teeth were chattering, her nose running.
The boy died within hours. Before daylight he had drawn his last breath, his mother at his side. He was the older brother of the boy whose legs had been lacerated. Kurtiz, who had been boiling water, soaking rags and bits of shredded, bloodied cloth in a plastic bowl to bathe him, slumped to the floor in the living room of the family’s stone house. Another stone house sparsely furnished. She pressed her head, which had the weight of a cannonball, against the cool wall. The floodlights from the watchtowers were still emblazoned. The boy had died in full glaring light. No privacy for his final exhalation.
Ironically, moments later, the lights snapped out. Darkness fell in an instant, or a quasi-darkness because the first glow of the rising sun was making its way skywards. An aubergine-violet light crept up beyond the window as the mother of the two boys sank to her knees and sobbed. It was an ugly rasping, a guttural, visceral moan. There was no grace or dignity about her. A spewing of rage and pain. Kurtiz dragged herself to her feet, walked to the woman and pressed a hand hard upon her shoulder, stroked her untidy hair. The woman shook her head and brushed her away, then clung to her violently before turning her face to rest it against her dead son. Kurtiz, as she left the house, vaguely wondered where the father was. Outside, she paused on the step to ingest the first moments of dawn, breathe the daybreak coolness. Then, slowly, she trod the dust path, returning in the gloaming to her tent.
She had no idea what had happened to the small crew she had arrived there with.
She and Alex returned to Jerusalem later that day. The flesh along her collarbone was bruised, patches of purple appearing, but no bones had been fractured. They exchanged barely a word on the journey back. They were no longer in convoy. The other jeep had set off a couple of hours earlier. Alex had insisted the women up in the village dress Kurtiz’s shoulder wound before they hit the road. Their next location was Hebron, down in the south. It was two days till her plane would take her out of here. Hebron, then home. She wondered how anyone had the stamina, the guts, for this calling.
Back in her hotel room she stood under the shower until the water ran cold. Warm water flowing over her, into her mouth, her nostrils, choking her, soothing her, mingling with her tears. When she was done she lay in a towel on the bed, wet. Too enervated to dry herself. Her cameras, her memory cards, her telephone lay in her bags, forgotten. Of little importance. She needed to rid her soul of the violence, of the beating to death of an innocent child.
When she woke, she heard a tapping on the door. She was freezing, damp, sticky. Hair bedraggled, skew-whiff from lying on it wet. The tapping increased in force. She had no idea what time or even what day it was.
‘Who is it?’
‘Alex. Let me in.’
She rolled off the bed and grabbed something, a bedcover, a shirt, and hauled it over the wet towel. The key was in the lock ready to be turned. His dark face was creased, full of concern.
‘Shit! Have I missed the call? Crew waiting for me?’
‘Let me in,’ he said, and gently nudged at the door. She did not resist him. Instead, she shuffled awkwardly into the cramped room with barely space to move around the bed and sank backwards on to the quilt. He closed the door with his foot. ‘I’ve been up here four times,’ he said. ‘I was getting worried.’
She shrugged. ‘I was sleeping. What happened back there …’
‘Was unconscionable. Yes. And you look awful.’ He sat down beside her and she instinctively shifted herself towards the foot of the bed, out of range.
‘Alex. I’m not coming to Hebron. I’ve thought it through carefully and I am not coming.’ Her voice was low, strangled. ‘I’ll wait here or take the bus to Tel Aviv for my plane on Saturday. I want to go home.’
‘You will come.’
She dropped her gaze and shook her head.
‘You’ve been witness to your first death. The first murder. I’m very sorry for you that it was a child. Always tougher. This is a war, Kurtiz. An internationally undeclared war, but that is what is happening here and it’s what we are making films about. Man’s inhumanity to man. To redress the balance, find the stories that will open up another perspective to the lies and the cover-ups that are perpetrated out there in the wider world. To see this through is your job, Kurtiz. You took it on. You hungered for it. And now you’re committed to it and I’m counting on you. Get dressed. I’ll buy you a large drink, and when you’re ready, we’ll have dinner. I’ll see you downstairs in fifteen minutes.’
She shook her bent head but there was no force in her disagreement.
‘And before dinner I’m moving you to the American Colony where I can keep an eye on you. You are a member of my team and I have a responsibility. Get dressed. Come and have a drink.’
They dined with Tim and Darryl. Alex judged that companionship was the best panacea for all four of them.
‘No one takes pleasure in witnessing such brutality, no matter whose side the victim is from.’ She took comfort from Darryl’s words. Even these guys who were habituated, having worked in war zones all across Africa, the Middle and Far East, were subdued, smoking cigarette after cigarette and drinking shot after shot.
She sat alongside Alex at the
round table, aware for the first time that the men were bonded to one another by hellish experiences. They drank heavily, all of them, but they were accustomed to it. Whisky for them, wine for her. Her innards were wrung out. None of them had slept the night before and they would be making another early start for Hebron in the morning. She would accompany them, not only because Alex had insisted but because it was her job and she had promised herself to be a trouper.
And once this West Bank trip was over she would go home and spend special summer days with her daughter, her precious child. They’d go shopping, take the bus to the Heath, swim in the open-air pool, eat long lunches together, buy chocolate and vanilla ice cream, toss aside all-calorie counting, talk about Lizzie’s teenage issues. Yes, she was going to relish every moment, make the most of being a normal mother in the company of her lovely blossoming girl. It briefly crossed her mind during dinner that she didn’t have her phone, hadn’t switched it on since the signal had been disrupted, lost up in the West Bank hills yesterday. She’d ring home, she told herself, when she returned to her room. Dinner arrived; they ate, discussed. The evening moved on. Slowly, the events of the previous night were assigned to a rarely visited place inside her, which she had mentally labelled ‘work experience’. Still the ache remained, the rawness. Raw on the inside as well as the shoulder, as though someone had stuck a brush down her throat and scrubbed.
She begged off the second round of nightcaps and bade them ‘Sleep well.’ Alex offered to accompany her, which she refused but he insisted. He had her key, had taken it from Reception when they had checked her in. He walked her to her room. Above them, taking up an entire floor, were the offices and suites of peace envoy Tony Blair. Little peace here, she remarked silently. Kurtiz’s new room was set at the far end of a gently curving corridor.
Alex unlocked the door – room 206 – and hung back while she entered. Then he followed her in. She’d known he would. She wanted him to. She had always wanted him to. He closed the door and took her powerfully by the shoulders, careful to avoid the bruise, folding her body into his, wrapping himself around her. His dark, muscular body enveloped her. His lips nudging beneath her light hair to find the pale flesh of her curved neck. He danced her in spins to the bed, which, with her fatigue and the alcohol she had consumed, left her giddy. With its white cover, it was a capacious double, unlike the iron skeleton in her box room at the East Jerusalem.
The Lost Girl Page 11
