Olives

by Alexander McNabb

  ‘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.

  Certain Lynch had intended me to be disconcerted at quite how easily they had broken into my house to return it, I opened another bottle and sat down to read the thing, taking great care not to spill wine on it.

  I put the bid evaluation document back on the Minister’s secretary’s desk early on Sunday morning before going down to my office and starting work on the second issue of the magazine.

  The evaluation had been a fascinating read. The committee had suggested the winning bidder might consider subcontracting the Brits for their water conservation and waste management expertise, but this wasn’t conditional to an award, meaning Daoud’s consortium could effectively ignore the advice. Otherwise, the document was unequivocal – it recommended the Jerusalem Consortium for its technical bid. The last line of the thing effectively saved having to read the forty preceding pages.

  The Jerusalem Consortium offer is technically in advance of the Anglo-Jordanian Consortium and offers significant increases in Jordan’s water resources through exploration of sources previously untapped by Jordanian stakeholders. We consider the offer and solution as outlined by the Jerusalem Consortium bid to be the only tenable course forward to meet Jordan’s water needs for the coming twenty-five years and recommend it be adopted.

  The conclusion avoided what Zahlan would have called the elephant in the room – the water the Jerusalem Consortium planned to tap would come from sources which would otherwise flow into Israel. Daoud’s bid was based on boring into a series of previously unknown deep springs which rose to feed the massive Lake Tiberias – Israel’s hard-won Sea of Galilee. Jordan’s gain would be Israel’s loss. Daoud was taking back the water.

  Aisha came by my desk and we chatted, somehow managing to keep at least a semi-professional distance but both of us aching to touch as she sat at her favourite spot on the side of my desk, grinning and playing with the silver and amber Bedouin necklace she wore over her burgundy polo-neck.

  ‘Lunch, Brit? Vinny?’

  Vinny was Vinaigrette, the perennially popular sushi and salad joint in the bustling Shmeisani area.

  ‘I can’t. I’m meeting up with one of the British Business Group people for lunch. How about later? Come around to mine and we’ll go up together.’

  Her hand brushed up my arm as she stood, a quick squeeze that thrilled me. ‘I’d like to. About five?’

  My eyes travelled up her body, from her snug-fitting jeans to the curves under the tight top, undressing her and wanting her, almost feeling the warmth of her smooth skin under my hands as my eyes moved over her. By the time our eyes locked, Aisha’s were wide and her lips parted.

  My voice came out hoarse. ‘How about four?’

  She nodded and fled.

  I left the Ministry building at lunchtime to meet Lynch, who had picked a busy street café near the Sixth Circle. He was cheery, gesturing me to a chair.

  ‘The falafel sandwich is only gorgeous,’ he beamed at me. ‘And the strawberry juice here is world-famous, so and it is.’

  I sat down opposite him at the rickety, plastic-covered table and took one of his cigarettes before ordering a chicken shawarma and an orange juice from the swarthy waiter. The traffic roared and honked alongside, the air reeked of frying and sweet shisha tobacco smoke mixed with exhaust fumes and hot engine.

  ‘I hardly need say this, Paul, but you did a great job with that document. It’s everything we wanted and more. Good man. It’s a shame there aren’t more like you about, that’s the truth.’

  The sandwich came and I stubbed out the cigarette, pulling the tissue paper away from the tightly wrapped round of hot chicken, garlic, pickle and potato chip. I ate while Lynch finished his smoke, gazing benevolently around him. I wiped my mouth, the paper wrap from the sandwich crumpled on the table.

  ‘It’s all I’m doing for you.’ My voice was flat. I’d rehearsed this scene in my mind many times by now and it was playing out pretty much as I’d reckoned it would.

  ‘Sure, Paul. Let’s walk a minute.’

  Lynch got up, dropping a couple of Dinars on the tabletop. I finished my orange and followed him up the street. I caught up with him as he turned right into a side-street.

  He heard me catching up. ‘You were away at the weekend.’

  The RFP-returning invisible hand would have reported the house had been empty, the car away. Part of me wanted to make up a lie for him, but I hadn’t foreseen this angle developing in our conversation and the only thing coming to my rescue was the truth.

  ‘Yes, I went with Aisha to her grandmother’s farm.’

  Lynch pulled to a halt and turned to face me. His blue eyes focused on me before skittering away to look around us, his voice insouciant.

  ‘Oh, right. Now where would that be, Paul?’

  I hadn’t spotted the change in him, even though I had stopped and turned to face him. ‘Near Qaffin. The West Bank. By the wall.’

  ‘Why the fuck didn’t you tell me you were planning to do that?’

  ‘It didn’t seem to matter.’

  ‘Everything matters. You fucking idiot. Have you got no sense at all? Who did you go with?’

  ‘Just Aisha.’

  ‘Who did you meet?’

  ‘Her grandmother. Her uncle Hamad.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anyone take the car away?’

  I shook my head, puzzled at the violence making him tremble, his lips compressed into a white-edged cut across his face.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anyone give you anything to carry, any bags?’

  ‘No. What’s the game, Gerry? You train in airport security or something?’

  He raised a finger to me, his head tilted to one side as he spat the words. ‘Don’t be fucking smart with me, Stokes. You want to go away for dirty weekends with your Arab bint, you tell me first. You hear me?’

  The wave rushed over me, greater anger than I’d ever felt before. It all came to a head, my resentment at Lynch’s arrogant assumption he controlled my life, his disrespect for Aisha all channelled themselves in a moment of burning fury. His finger stayed in my face as I found physical release for my impotent frustration. I lashed out at him with all my strength.

  He moved with blinding speed to catch my hand and snare my momentum, moving with me expertly with force and precision like a dancer, a whirl of action that slammed me up against the wall with my arm wrenched up my back. The bolt
of pain in my shoulder forced me to stifle a scream, grazing my cheek on the rough stone. I felt the rasp of his cheek, our breath mingling as the moment passed and the tension slowly went out of our bodies. But he didn’t release me. He spoke in a voice so low it was almost a lover’s whisper.

  ‘You move, you tell me. You shit, you tell me. I am looking after you, you ungrateful little bastard and I can’t fucking do that if you launch off on daft little tours. You understand me?’

  I said nothing and he wrenched my pinioned arm. I cried out, ‘Yes.’

  He let go of me and stepped back. I turned, rubbing my shoulder and saw the tension in him as he waited for me to make another move. I didn’t. His voice was calm, his face impassive.

  ‘I should have left them fucking shoot her when they wanted to.’

  I rubbed my aching shoulder and glowered at him. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  He stepped towards me and I flinched. I didn’t like myself very much for that. His hand rested on my chest.

  ‘You aren’t in the UK, Paul. You’re somewhere very strange and foreign and you understand very little of what’s going on here. I’ve played it straight with you, but you need to piss straight with me, too. Let me know before you take any more pleasure trips or, so help me God, I’ll put you in frigging hospital next time. If you survive any next time.’

  He wheeled away from me, stopped and turned. ‘Oh, and another thing. If you ever call me Gerry again, you won’t even see the fucking lights go out, you hear me?’

  He marched away without waiting for an answer.

  *

  Aisha and I lay together on my bed, touching and talking in murmurs, the clean cotton sheets rustling under our clothes. Somehow she understood I was still struggling with the aftermath of the journey we’d taken together and it brought us even closer, something I hadn’t thought possible. The farm bound us. Our touching became more intense, more intimate and our rhythms increased together, kissing deeply as our hands explored and cajoled, opening clothes and finding warm skin, our hands seeking pleasure. Stayed from reaching the ultimate intimacy by Aisha’s reticence, we used our hands, our mouths pressed hard together, until we cried out with a single voice.