Olives

by Alexander McNabb

  Another soldier came out of one of the checkpoint office buildings and walked over to us.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said to me and, to Aisha, ‘You stay here.’ She didn’t look at me, just held his gaze, her mouth turned down and her head held up. I followed the soldier past a service desk and into a sparse, modern office. A uniformed man with more badges than the others sat behind a desk: a pleasant face, slightly rounded by middle age, hair greying at his temples. He looked European.

  ‘Hello. Paul Stokes?’ I nodded. He tapped the table with his pen. ‘Why are you come here?’

  ‘I’m living in Amman. I thought I’d come across and see the other side of the Jordan. I’m travelling with a friend.’

  ‘Yes, I see that.’ His accent sounded Russian. He scratched his head with the pen. There were laughter lines around his eyes that seemed somehow out of step with the checkpoint environment and its clinical efficiencies, railings, concrete posts and razor wire.

  ‘You know we not get many Brit come here.’ He looked up at me, a sudden directness which made me avert my own eyes despite myself. ‘You are perhaps a little of the light relief for us.’

  ‘Well, I’m happy to relieve the monotony, if nothing else,’ I smiled, glad of the touch of humour in his words and starting to find my ease, just a tourist in a strange land.

  He flicked through my passport, a gesture for show: he must have gone through it before he had me brought in. I thought of Lynch and a similar gesture made back in the reception area of the British Embassy in Amman. He reached over the desk, my passport in his hand. I took it. He picked up Aisha’s.

  ‘How well you know the girl?’

  ‘I work with her at the Ministry of Natural Resources in Amman.’

  ‘You trust her?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  He handed Aisha’s passport to me, but when I went to take it he kept his grip, leaving me leaning forwards, unbalanced over his desk. We stayed that way for a second before I managed to find my balance again, my hand still on the passport. ‘You like Arabs?’

  His eyes held me and I looked back at him, furiously trying to think of a response. ‘I’ve liked the people I have met since I arrived in Jordan.’

  ‘So you think we are bad people then, Paul Stokes? That we should be drive into sea? You agree about this?’

  I let go of the passport as I sensed the traps lying in wait all around me, refusing to play a tug of war with him over the document. I tried to keep my voice mild and neutral as I responded, but I found it hard to focus, the phrase tug of war in my mind stopped me from thinking properly. I wanted to go to the toilet.

  His question had been put in a mild, almost offhand way, but at the same time it went directly to the heart of what many of the people I had met in the Arab World thought. That the Israelis didn’t belong here, that they should never have been allowed to come here.

  Dealing with it from his point of view confused me. I tried to think quickly, not so much about my own opinions, which I had taken a great deal of trouble to keep neutral, despite the pressure to join everyone else and demonise the Israelis, but about what I needed to say in response to his question. Tug of war running around in my idiot mind, I started to appreciate that, casual and offhand though he may appear, he was very good at his job.

  ‘No, I don’t. I haven’t been around here long enough to make judgements like that. I think a lot has happened that is regrettable, but I simply don’t know enough to take a view.’

  ‘Regrettable. Yes, is regrettable.’ He was emphasising the word as he repeated it, thoughtful. He moved faster than I thought possible, dropping Aisha’s passport and balling his fist before slamming it down on the desk. He sprang up from his chair, kicking it backwards and leaning towards me, his finger pointing into my face.

  ‘Regret? What you know of regret, Paul Stokes from Great Britain?’

  I had jumped at the sound of his fist on the table but now I froze, looking at the soldier wide-eyed and lost for words. He pulled his chair back and sat again, calmly reaching out for Aisha’s passport and flicking slowly through the pages, the rasp of his thumb on the paper sounding in the silence. There was a bump as someone threw a bag on the floor in the next room. I smelled cigarette smoke from somewhere, then heard low voices through the wall, two soldiers talking, laughing. I waited, watching the officer as he sat at his desk looking down at the passports in front of him, his large shoulders slightly hunched and his hands together on the desktop. He was breathing heavily.

  He threw Aisha’s passport across the desktop without looking up. ‘Go. Get out.’

  My heart was pumping as I emerged into the sunshine. I must have looked like death. One of the soldiers came up to me. ‘He gave you a hard time.’ A flat statement.

  I stammered a reply: ‘Yes, he did actually.’

  ‘Forgive him. A Palestinian labourer stabbed his daughter, before the,’ he made finger quotes in the air, ‘peace broke out.’

  ‘Don’t you believe in the peace?’

  He laughed, a ragged sound as he turned and walked away, flapping his hand at me behind his back, dismissing me and my peace.

  Lost in thought, I got back to the car. Aisha, standing by the door, saw the passports in my hand, grinned wickedly at the soldiers and spat on the hot, dusty tarmac at their feet as I got to the driver’s side. The big gates opened to let us through.

  ‘Why the hell did you do that?’ I snapped, tension making my voice harsher than I intended. Aisha glared at me but the soldiers were still grinning and one waved us through by flipping us a casual, bored digit.

  We drove away from the checkpoint in silence, leaving Selim and Jordan behind. I felt my anger growing, impelled by my feeling of guilt at having barked at Aisha, my thoughts increasingly hot and hard. How Arab of her, to spit at them when she knew we were through the checkpoint, to indulge that little spite in a moment of small victory. Cringe in supplication and crow in triumph.

  We drove on past the queue of trucks and cars on the other side in silent, cold recrimination. If our kissing and trembling touches had been passionate and intense, then our conflict was to be of the same order of intensity. Where we had cherished, now we would hurt. Aisha’s whole form hunched in anger as she flailed herself with my reprimand. Clear of the border post and the checkpoint just beyond it, I stopped the car and got out to escape the toxic atmosphere and breathe fresh air. Aisha leapt out behind me.

  ‘So I spit. On the dust my father and brother gave their blood to.’

  ‘You’re so fucking melodramatic. They did nothing to you. All that bullshit about the brutal Israelis, the humiliation. They just did their jobs.’

  ‘Yah, like the Nazis did theirs.’

  ‘Listen to yourself. You can’t believe that.’ I reached to the sky for the words, the inspiration to try and get through to her. ‘They’re just men, soldiers, the same as the Jordanians, the same as you. They’re scared, they’re angry because people bomb them and kill their children. The guy in the office lost his daughter because a Palestinian murdered her. What the fuck gives you the right to treat them like that? They’re no different to you, don’t you understand?’

  ‘Who are you to lecture me on difference, please Paul? What is this sudden expertise in the grief of strangers? I didn’t take their land, I didn’t kill their children. They have killed three members of my family and tens of thousands of my people, they bomb us from helicopters and destroy our houses, make us crawl in the dirt and laugh as they point their guns in our faces on our land. What do you want to find here, precisely? You want to find love, Paul? Is that it? You think you deserve to see reconciliation? You, whose nation sold my people into this slavery in the first place? What exactly do you want to impose on us, Paul? Your superior fucking values?’

  I banged the flat of my hand on the roof of the car, a surprisingly loud, deep sound in the quiet of the deserted road. ‘Those soldiers were polite, Aisha. They didn’t spit at you. Why do you want to perpetuate the pain with e
verything you do? Why have you got no feeling for their loss? You lost three members of your family, but didn’t Hamad even up that little score for you? Didn’t he kill children? Their children?’

  She had rounded the car towards me then, her boots covered in the pale roadside dust, her face enraged. ‘And what about our children, English? What about our pain? How much do we have to suffer before it stops? Here. You love them so much, you take the same as they do.’

  She spat on the ground at my feet.

  I looked down at the little congealed drops of saliva lying on the dusty ground, then up at Aisha. At her wide, beautiful brown eyes. The horror at what she’d done written on her face. She waited, scared, for my reaction, for the next escalation, wiping her chin with the back of her trembling hand. We stood under the warmth of the sun, the clouds banished from the sky as Aisha, trembling, waited for me to hit her. I saw the moisture gathering in her eyes, the shock in her face, our scared eyes locked in that long moment.

  Aisha’s face crumpled as the intensity of her fury passed and gave way to fear. I stepped forward and she was in my arms and I felt her salt tears on my cheek as I held her and murmured her name. We clung to each other, standing on the dusty margin of the road, whispering sorry over and again. A car raced past, sending up a small cloud of dust and beeping its horn at us cheekily and we finally found relief and laughter, standing under the warm sky, peacefully and blissfully alone together. The storm had passed.

  We were stopped again at the West Bank border crossing, an altogether smaller and tattier affair than the Sheikh Hussein crossing. The long stretch of rich and prosperous-looking farmland we passed through on the road down to the crossing made the stark contrast of concrete tank-traps and metal gates seem even more obscene. Aisha had been sketching the farmland in one of the pads she had brought with her, pencil-work – now her sketch was altogether starker.

  Debris was scattered around the broken-down kerbstones and a zig-zag of concrete blocks forced a slow slalom as the cameras mounted high above us looked down on our painstaking progress up to the barrier. Another set of questions, another scan of the car and we were through, this time to the West Bank itself – Palestine, as it was now to be. After a stretch of open country, we started to see the security wall to our right, the countryside less developed and more arid.

  We passed through a small town and were quiet, gazing out around us. It reminded me of the villages in the Jordanian countryside, poor, flyblown and ramshackle. Wrecked washing machines, prams and rubbish littered the scrubby ground between the buildings and dirty kids played in the streets. Somewhere in an area of low, crumbling houses a tyre burned and a trail of thick, black smoke was rising up into the clear blue sky.

  We drove past farmhouses by the roadside, patches of cultivated land here and there, but nothing on the scale of the agriculture I’d seen in Jordan – or, indeed, a few minutes ago in Israel.

  As we passed by him on the roadside, a small boy grinned a grubby-cheeked urchin’s grin and drew himself up to salute us and I laughed at him and waved back. And then his face changed and became fearful, his eyes focused on the sky beyond us. I stretched around and saw the black speck as I heard its rotors. It was travelling parallel to us and at approximately the same speed. I turned to watch it every few seconds until Aisha noticed my preoccupation.

  ‘What is it?’ said Aisha.

  ‘Chopper over there. Can’t you hear it?’

  She nodded, ‘Yes, I can now. Look, it’s coming closer.’

  I brought the car to a stop and we got out to look at the helicopter which appeared to be heading straight for us. The side door was open and I could make out a soldier in khaki, wearing a green beret. He was armed.

  The chopper dropped down towards us and I started to feel an odd stir of mounting fear. We were in an area of patchy farmland and waste ground, the only building within sight was a tin shack hundreds of metres away. The small boy was lost in the faintly shimmering horizon we had left behind. There was nothing else around us to attract their interest.

  ‘What’s this about?’ I called over to Aisha.

  ‘I don’t know, Paul. I’ve never seen this before. Our papers are in order. It’ll be okay.’

  I heard the false note in her voice. The noise of the engine forced us to raise our voices and then the machine hovered, standing off a few hundred feet away from us. I kept my eyes on it as I shouted to Aisha. ‘So what do we do? Put our hands up? Act normal?’

  The stress was clear in her voice now. ‘I don’t know Paul. I don’t know.’

  With a sense of sick fascination, I saw the soldier move and raise his weapon. I turned to Aisha. There was a bright red dot on her chest. She saw my face and looked down.

  The dot was remarkably steady. Aisha raised her eyes to me and I saw her mouth frame the words but I didn’t hear them. ‘I love you.’

  I couldn’t move, my muscles betraying me as I shouted out her name, the beat of the helicopter engine pulsing in my ears. She glared up at the helicopter, her face a vision of furious defiance, tears streaming down her cheeks as, with equal care, she mouthed, ‘Fuck you.’

  She glared at them, the dot on her chest, for what must have been ten seconds but felt like ten years before I found myself able to break the spell and move, but as I started to run around the car to her, the engine note of the helicopter changed and the dot disappeared from Aisha’s chest. As I pulled her into my arms, the helicopter veered away. Aisha stood rigid and trembling, watching it until the speck had disappeared over the dusty hillside, before collapsing against the car, breathing in great, shuddering heaves and hammering against the roof with her fists.

  I put my arms around her and she finally quietened, accepting the tissues I took from the box on the dashboard, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose. She spoke in a hesitant, trembling voice.

  ‘In all the time I have been coming here, in all that has happened to my family. In all the years I have been a Palestinian and forced to watch the repression of my people. In all of this, nobody has ever pointed a gun at me before. Why now, Paul?’

  I didn’t have an answer for her. I just held her as I wondered the same thing. Was this routine? I hadn’t read about it as common Israeli behaviour. Surely if they were in the habit of pointing high powered rifles at people from helicopters, it would have been reported. Why would the Israelis even be interested in us? Could it be something closer to home, something to do with Lynch and Daoud? My money was on Lynch, but I hadn’t told him of my trip to the West Bank. So who had?

  The thoughts tumbled through my mind as I held Aisha’s shoulders and looked into her eyes, as she nodded with a brave little smile and we got back into our car. We were silent, both lost in our own thoughts, but my hand was closed tight on hers the whole way.

  We motored through Jenin, yellow taxis dodging around us in the streets of pale stone, modern buildings. Leaving the town, I was amazed at how dusty the countryside seemed. It had been raining on and off for a week in Amman, and yet here we were under hot, blue skies. It might have been summer, except for the greenery that sprouted between the little fields by the farms we passed, olive groves shadowed by the high, shimmering white walls of Israeli settlements. Summers here aren’t green, they’re brown.

  ‘We’re heading for Qaffin,’ said Aisha as she watched the countryside go by. ‘It’s on the way to Tulkaram.’

  I remembered the names from news broadcasts. Daoud had told me the farm was in the country between two of the biggest flashpoint areas in the whole territories. I wondered why it had never occurred to me to pinpoint where the farm actually was, how close it was to these places. He also told me the Dajanis’ land had been cut by the Israeli security wall, although the whole farm was actually on the Arab side of the 1949 and 1967 lines. The wall did that – it snaked around the old delineations of territory to seize little bits of farmland, grab at water or snatch at green areas.

  I was in a state of constant apprehension, trying to calm myself but t
he checkpoints weren’t helping, let alone the incident with the chopper. They were constant reminders of the simmering tension. The land itself spoke of its unease, of the fragility of the peace the Jericho bomb had shattered, of the decades of uncertainty and fear. I kept seeing black specks in the air turning into helicopters before they resolved into birds or, in one case, a black plastic bag caught on a thermal.

  We passed through Qaffin. There were children playing in the streets. Beyond the township, a track led off the badly surfaced road and we followed it through the olive groves for perhaps two hundred metres, dipping down and away from the road, virtually out of sight from it before we reached a whitewashed farmhouse. It looked as old as time, almost like an English country cottage, rough whitewashed walls with a terracotta tiled roof. We pulled into the yard, sending a handful of hens clucking away from us.

  There, standing in the kitchen doorway, was Aisha’s grandmother Mariam. She wore a blue kandoura, a housecoat. She was small, bent over a little with the weight of her age but she moved with grace, her hair showing grey under the white mandeel on her head. Getting out of the car after the long drive through unfamiliar territory, I hobbled more than she did. Mariam shook my hand, which I hadn’t expected. The more traditional women in the Levant won’t shake hands with men, holding their hand to their chest instead.

  Mariam gripped my hands and looked intently up at me. Her eyes were brown and merry, faded with age but steady in her deeply lined face. She reminded me immediately of Aisha’s mother, Nour. Still holding me in her gaze she spoke to Aisha in Arabic, chuckling.

  ‘She says you’re not bad for a Brit. She says you’ve all been nothing but trouble to her.’

  Certain Aisha was teasing me, I looked back at the old lady. ‘No, she didn’t.’

  Another burst of Arabic, aimed squarely at Aisha. ‘She says I have to translate properly, she doesn’t speak English but she knows when I’m being bad, always has done.’ Aisha laughed. ‘She says you’re handsome.’