Murder Under the Fig Tree

by Kate Jessica Raphael

  “Khalas,” Enough, Bassam said to his son. He was sitting against the wall, reading Al Hayat, the newspaper they bought every day.

  “Kamaan wahad,” One more, Khaled insisted. Her son’s blond curls were wild around his cherubic face. She must give him a haircut soon. His black school slacks were a little too short. Trust Bassam not to notice that he had outgrown his clothes. Khaled had a slingshot in the hand that was not holding the cookie. He picked up an olive—rummaged on the plate for a big, juicy one—and placed it carefully in the leather thong. She recognized the slingshot: hers, from her stone-throwing days in the camp. A year ago, she and Bassam had agreed Khaled was too young to play with it. Apparently, she had missed a graduation.

  Khaled took aim at his father’s head. Bassam didn’t seem to notice, or else he didn’t mind that he was about to be used for target practice.

  “Good evening,” she said from the doorway.

  Bassam looked up from his newspaper. His lips parted as if to speak, but no sound came out. He got up from the floor, his deep eyes moist, and that slow, lopsided smile she loved spread over the lower part of his face.

  “Hamdullila assalaam,” he said, giving the ritual greeting to someone who has been released from prison or returned from a journey.

  “Allah ysalmak,” she replied as custom dictated. “But is that all you can say to your wife, after so long?”

  “It is good to have you home,” he said with his trademark shrug. He was a little older than he had been in her memories but more striking than ever.

  “How did they let you go?” her mother-in-law asked. She did not get up from her chair. Rania tried to believe it was just because of her arthritis. The expression on the old woman’s face was not unkind.

  “I don’t really know,” she said. “But I am glad to be here.”

  “Welcome,” Um Bassam replied. “Welcome to you,” Rania said automatically. She waited another moment, to see if her son would say anything. He had not moved. He dumped the olive out of the sling, rolled it in his hand, and repositioned it.

  “Khaled,” she said softly. “Aren’t you going to say hello to me?”

  He stood poised, his left thumb holding the olive in the sling and the right pulling the band back by his ear. He looked straight at her face, and she could see tears forming in his slate-colored eyes. His expression softened, and he shifted into a crouch, as if to stand up. Her weight shifted forward of its own volition, planted so that she would not topple over when her son came running and threw his arms around her middle.

  He let the olive fly at her head. Fortunately, his aim was terrible. It flew off to the right and landed harmlessly next to the chair where her mother-in-law sat. She plucked it off the cushion and crossed to where her son rocked back and forth on his heels. She crouched down next to him.

  “I am sorry I was gone so long,” she said. “You know I did not want to be away from you. The Israelis took me to prison.”

  “Go away. I hate you.” He ran for the door. She caught him and strained to pick him up, bearing most of his weight on her good arm. She had lost weight in prison, and he was heavier than he had been. She couldn’t hold him if he did not help her. He struggled out of her embrace and ran from the room.

  She looked at Bassam for help. She had imagined this moment so many times in the last month, and it had never gone like this. All the tears she had not let herself cry forced their way into her eyes and down her cheeks.

  “You refused to see him,” her husband said.

  “I had to,” she sobbed. “Surely he can understand that.”

  “He is seven.” He let that stand between them for a long moment.

  “Please go to Khaled,” Bassam said to his mother. He wrapped his arms tightly around Rania and half-carried her to their bedroom. She didn’t know how long she cried. She woke in her husband’s arms and immediately began to cry again. She thought she would never be able to stop.

  Chloe stared at the screen on her mobile phone. Had they recycled Rania’s number in the short time she’d been locked up? No, that didn’t make sense. Chloe had been out of the country for almost ten months, and her number was here waiting for her when she returned. Bassam must have decided to make use of the minutes left on Rania’s SIM card.

  “Yes?” she said into the phone.

  “Marhaba, Chloe.” Greetings.

  “Rania! Where are you?”

  “In Mas’ha. At home.”

  “You’re out? Hamdullila assalam,” Chloe added quickly. She thought that was the right expression. Yes, she remembered people saying it to her after her brief stint in jail.

  “Allah ysalmik.” Rania’s ritual response sounded subdued.

  “Are you okay?” Chloe asked.

  “Yes. I am tired, but it is good to be home.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “I …well, I am not sure. Benny came to see me.”

  Chloe’s heart jumped for joy. She had done it, then.

  “What did he say?”

  “He wanted me to look into the death of a boy in one of the villages. I told him I would not, though.”

  “But you got out anyway?” Maybe it hadn’t been Chloe’s skills that turned the trick after all. She felt a little less joyful and then scolded herself harshly. The point was that Rania was safely home with her husband and child. It didn’t matter how she got there.

  “Yes,” Rania was saying.

  “Who is the boy who was killed?”

  “I do not know. But my husband knows his family. We are going to visit them today.”

  “But you’re not going to investigate?”

  “No. I do not want to work with Israelis ever again.”

  Chloe could see why. It had not gotten her anywhere but in prison. “Will you be going back to work?” she asked.

  “Of course. I hope,” Rania added belatedly.

  “I can’t wait to see you,” Chloe said. “If you can come to Ramallah, I’ll take you to this great Italian restaurant I found.”

  “I would like to try Italian food,” Rania said. “I have never eaten it. But you must come here for dinner. My husband likes you so much.”

  That made Chloe feel warm inside.

  “When are you free?” Rania wanted to know.

  Good question. She had not thought beyond this moment, Chloe realized. She had no clue what she was going to do next. They agreed to talk in a day or so, and Chloe hung up.

  “Do you think she’s telling the truth?” Tina asked when Chloe repeated what Rania had told her.

  “About what? What are you implying?” Chloe’s voice rose involuntarily.

  “Why would Benny release her if she refused to work with him? That’s not how the Israelis generally work.”

  “He likes her, and he likes to feel powerful,” Chloe said. “And probably he thinks then he will have a favor to hold over her later.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Tina said.

  Chloe got up and collected the supper dishes, carried them into the kitchen. She was not going to have a conversation about whether Rania could have agreed to become a collaborator. She was just going to give thanks to whatever deity might be out there that her friend was no longer in prison.

  Chapter 12

  Rania hated visiting the families of martyrs. You were supposed to act happy, because the martyr had gone to his Great Reward and brought honor to his family. But she never felt happy, and she knew the family never did either, and the charade always made her angry. If the young man—or woman, she reminded herself grimly—had carried out a bombing, she was supposed to be proud of them, but she could only think what a waste it was. In a case like this appeared to be, someone shot down like an animal by the army, her fury overcame her, and she wanted to scream and shout, not eat sweets and talk about how blessed his family was.

  She plucked a twig from a rose bush and snapped it sharply in two as she and Bassam approached the home of Daoud al-Khader’s family. Khaled was home with his grandmother.
Rania had managed to have five minutes of conversation with him this morning, bribing him with fries and little pizzas for breakfast, but he was nowhere near forgiving her for her absence.

  The front room was full of men, sitting silently in a ring of chairs around the edges. Empty tea cups sat on small, plastic tables placed at three-man intervals. Bassam went to shake hands with Daoud’s father, Jamal, a handsome but stern man in his early forties. Next to Jamal was someone Rania was never happy to see. Her former coworker Abdelhakim gave her a long, cool look, his upper lip curling just slightly beneath his carefully trimmed mustache. He had let his hair grow longer, no doubt keeping up with the fashions of Hamas. She would have liked to ask him what he was doing there, but she couldn’t speak in this room full of silent men. She nodded slightly in his direction and proceeded through the doorless opening into the next room, where fourteen women sat in virtual darkness.

  This room was more like a wide hallway leading to the kitchen, with doors coming off it that were presumably bedrooms. There was not enough space for the chairs to be arranged even in a semicircle, so the women sat in a row against the wall, as if waiting for a lecture to begin—or for a firing squad. Rania was taken aback at her own thought. Before Prison, she did not produce such morbid images.

  Daoud’s mother would be the one smack in the middle, fingering prayer beads compulsively while the women on either side stroked her arms and shoulders. At least she didn’t look happy, though the usual array of dates and chocolate wrappings adorned the plates scattered among the women. Rania bent to kiss the older woman’s cheeks once, twice, three times as required.

  “Allah yirhamo,” God have mercy on him, she said softly. “Um Daoud?” She did not know if Daoud had been the oldest son.

  “Um Issa,” said the woman, who now acknowledged the ritual greeting by holding out a framed portrait of her martyred son.

  “Jamil,” beautiful, Rania said. She would have said it even if it wasn’t true, but, in this case, she didn’t need to pretend.

  “He was a perfect son,” Um Issa said. “Every weekend, he would come home with sweets for me and presents for his sisters. This is his fiancée,” she added, indicating a girl two chairs away. The young woman was about seventeen, with wide, snapping, near-black eyes. No veil covered her shoulder-length brown ringlets, setting her apart from all the other women present. She wore blue jeans and a knit top with three-quarter length sleeves, rather than the traditional jilbab. Rania would not have expected the older women to tolerate such immodesty, but they all seemed very fond of the rebel girl.

  “I am Hanan,” she said.

  “Rania,” she responded. A serious-eyed girl with a long braid rose from the stool next to Hanan. She gestured for Rania to take her place and headed into the kitchen

  “How long had you been engaged?” Rania asked.

  “Two years,” Hanan said. “Since I was sixteen.”

  The marriage was probably arranged, since girls as young as sixteen did not date in these villages. But Hanan must have considered herself lucky, to be marrying such a handsome boy.

  “Had you set a date for the wedding?”

  “No,” Hanan said, just as Daoud’s mother nodded her head yes.

  “They would have been married just before Ramadan,” the woman said.

  Hanan rolled her eyes. “Daoud wanted to wait,” she said. “He thought, if we married, he might have to leave school. He was studying at the conserva-tory in Ramallah.”

  “The Edward Said Conservatory?”

  “Yes. He wanted to be an opera singer.”

  “An opera singer!” This was an unusual family indeed. She didn’t know if there was a single male opera singer anywhere in Palestine. “I didn’t know they even taught opera at the conservatory.”

  “Yes, he was going to be a great opera singer and travel all over the world,” Hanan affirmed.

  “And are you also a student?” Rania asked.

  “I was studying English, but now we have no money, so I had to quit. I am working at the hospital, in charge of ordering supplies.”

  There was a thankless task, Rania thought. Navigating the bureaucracy of the Palestinian Ministry of Health would be a full-time job in itself, even if you didn’t have to then figure out how to get the goods through the Israeli checkpoints. Hanan must have a real talent for organization, if she was any good at her job.

  “You are very young to have so much responsibility,” Rania commented.

  Hanan shrugged. “I am only doing it temporarily. The woman who usually does it has gone to have a baby. She will come back after maybe two years. My cousin Abdelhakim helped me get the job.”

  “Ah,” Rania said.

  The girl with the braid returned carrying a thermos, a glass, and a plate of cookies. She set the glass and the cookies in front of Rania and poured her tea. Then she went down the line of women, refilling their glasses.

  “What happened the day Daoud was killed?” Rania asked.

  Heads turned from one end of the row to the other and back again. They reminded Rania of a row of dominoes toppling over. Was it that the women had told the story so many times, they were trying to decide whose turn it was? Or were they checking to make sure there wasn’t someone present who really knew what happened, before passing on the combination of rumor and fabrication created over the last few days?

  She was thinking like a policewoman, she realized, and she probably sounded like one too. No doubt some of the women there knew who she was, though she didn’t recognize any of them. They might be subtly warning each other about telling her too much.

  “Some soldiers came to the village,” said the woman to the left of Daoud’s mother. “The shabab,” the boys, “threw stones at them, and they fired sound bombs and tear gas. Daoud chased the boys into the school. He argued with the soldiers, and one of them hit him.”

  “Hit him how?”

  “Like this.” The woman made a fist and jabbed it toward Daoud’s mother, stopping an inch from the other woman’s nose.

  “You saw this yourself?”

  “No, Heba did. My daughter,” indicating the girl next to Hanan. She looked about eight and was unmistakably Hanan’s sister. Her eyes had the same irrepressible spark.

  “What else happened, Heba?” Rania asked. The little girl furrowed her face.

  “I heard the soldier say, ‘You won’t get away with this.’”

  “He spoke Arabic?”

  After a few seconds, the girl nodded.

  “Was he a Druze?” Rania asked. Of all the Palestinians living inside Israel, only the Druze community and a few Bedouins sent their kids to the army.

  “No, he was a Yahudi.”

  Rania was skeptical. Few Jewish Israeli soldiers spoke Arabic well.

  “And then what?” she asked Heba.

  “The soldiers got into the jeep and drove away.”

  “At seven o’clock that night,” said Hanan’s mother, “Um Mahmoud heard two shots.”

  “Who is Um Mahmoud?” Rania interrupted.

  “She lives near the entrance to the village. She and Abu Mahmoud ran out and found Daoud dead. No one was nearby. They said the shots sounded like the guns the Israeli soldiers use.”

  “Did anyone hear a jeep driving away?”

  The women exchanged glances again. Ten heads shook in unison.

  “Everyone was startled by the shots,” suggested Um Issa. “They were not paying attention to cars.”

  Rania thought about that. Normally, if you heard shots, you tried to determine whether the jeeps were going into the village or leaving before you ran out to see what had happened.

  “I saw the jeep,” said the girl at the end farthest from Rania. Rania had to bend nearly double to see her clearly. She wore a gray jilbab and dark-blue hijab. In the dim light, she almost faded away.

  “When did you see it? During the day, when the boys threw stones at it?”

  “No, that night. When they killed Daoud. I was up on our roof, and I sa
w the jeep driving in.”

  A buzz went around the room. Clearly, none of the women had heard this before.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone before?” Rania asks.

  “I just remembered it now.”

  Yeah, right, Rania thought. Well, she was not here as a policewoman, so it was none of her business.

  “Did Daoud often have problems with the army?” she asked his mother.

  “No, he was a good boy.”

  How many times had she heard that? Whether it was true or not. The best thing about mothers, and the worst, was that they all believed their sons were faultless.

  “He worked for peace,” said Um Issa. “He went to a camp in Germany, with Israeli students. Abraham’s Garden, it’s called. Two years in a row he went, with his cousins. The Germans paid for them all.”

  “Did Daoud have Israeli friends, then?” Rania asked.

  Um Issa looked to her neighbors for guidance, which Rania thought spoke for itself. If any of the women knew she was with the police, they would be particularly reluctant to answer yes to a question which could implicate the young man as a collaborator. Even though Daoud was dead, tar on his reputation could damage his entire family.

  “Not anymore. When he first came back from the camp, they would call all the time. But since the Intifada, they stopped.”

  “What about when he went to Ramallah? Many young Israelis go to Ramallah now and then.”

  “No, he never saw them.”

  The fact that she was so sure made Rania unsure.

  “You said he came home every weekend,” she said. “So, he was staying in Ramallah during the week?”

  Daoud’s mother nodded. “He shared an apartment with some other boys.”

  “Are any of them here?” She caught herself, but not in time. Her cop side had taken over, following the chain of evidence and witnesses from one to the next, but she had no standing to do that here. Even if Daoud’s roommates were in the next room, she could not demand to talk to them, and, anyway, no one had asked her to investigate this death—well, no one she cared to please. As far as she could tell, the Palestinian community was satisfied that the army had killed Daoud, which made him a martyr, and no one was interested in turning up information that might suggest otherwise.