Murder Under the Fig Tree

by Kate Jessica Raphael

  As Rania had feared, the pile of vegetables in the pot dwindled quickly.

  “Shu akhbarik?” she asked, what’s your news? just for something to say. Her mother-in-law would not have minded sitting silently or listening to the radio together, but Rania was more comfortable with conversation. Especially now, with the long weeks in the solitary prison cell so fresh in her memory, she didn’t think she could bear sitting silently with another person in the room.

  “Will they let you go back to work?” Um Bassam asked.

  “Who do you mean?”

  “The Palestinian Authority,” the old woman said innocently.

  “I hope so,” she said. “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Nothing is like it was,” the old woman said. “There is so little work; many think women should not do men’s work.”

  “What do you think?” Rania asked. Her mother-in-law had always seemed to disapprove of her career but recently had softened her attitude.

  “Mmm, who cares what I think? I am just an old woman.”

  “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t care.” She wondered if she should tell her mother-in-law about the women’s force. But she was pretty sure she knew what the reaction would be, and she didn’t want more encouragement for the plan just now. It was appalling enough that she was actually considering it.

  “You are unhappy at home,” Um Bassam said. “So perhaps you should go to work.”

  “I would if I could,” Rania said irritably. Their hands continued to work in unison, picking up, stuffing, putting down, and reaching for the next. “I think Abu Walid mistrusts me.” Abu Walid was the honorific most people used for Captain Mustafa. Only the people who worked for him gave him his title, and only his friends from the PLO called him Mustafa.

  “Because you got out of jail so fast.”

  “So fast? It seemed forever to me.”

  “Yes. But you know…people talk.”

  “Have you heard people saying things about me?”

  “Someone said an Israeli policeman visited you in prison. The one who arrested the boy from Azzawiya.”

  “The army arrested him,” Rania quibbled.

  She noted that she had pounced on that particular bit of trivia, instead of the much more sobering fact that people knew Benny had been to see her in Neve Tirzah. Who had told them, and why?

  “You can’t believe I gave him information,” she protested. “I don’t, no.”

  “But others do.”

  “Who knows what they believe? People repeat anything. It doesn’t mean they really believe it.”

  “Bassam wants me to have another baby,” Rania blurted out. She was so desperate to change the subject, she forgot she didn’t want to discuss this with her mother-in-law.

  The old woman’s face lit up.

  “Yes, a baby would be nice.”

  “Perhaps. But I would like to be sure of my job first.”

  “It might be better in a year.”

  “In a year, I will have been gone so long, they might forget I was ever there. And without my salary, how can we afford two children?”

  “You could help in the store.”

  Rania shuddered at the thought of spending her days counting packs of pins and rewinding bolts of cloth.

  “There is not enough work for Marwan and Amir and their sons,” she said, referring to her two brothers-in-law.

  Bassam’s family had owned three dry goods stores, making them relatively wealthy in the eighties, but the closures and the Wall had destroyed much of their business. Just last year, they had finally decided things were not going to get better in the foreseeable future and sold off two of the stores to an engineer who had returned from the Gulf.

  The conversation was only making Rania more nervous. She turned up the radio, and they finished stuffing the vegetables without talking. Um Bassam finished sipping her tea at the same time and rose to leave.

  “Do you want to eat with us?” Rania asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Okay, Khaled will come get you,” Rania said. Maybe was a polite way of saying yes.

  “Insh’alla.”

  When her mother-in-law was gone, Rania took the stewed tomatoes from the stove, strained them and added some sugar, salt, and lemon juice. She poured the sauce over the vegetables and added a bit of water.

  Now the meal was ready to cook. It would need about an hour for the vegetables to get tender. That meant she should turn it on at four o’clock, maybe three thirty. It was barely eleven. Two long hours before Khaled would come home.

  She rinsed the cheesecloth she had used to strain the tomatoes and put it in a bleach solution to soak. There was nothing more to do in the house. For the nth time in the last ten days, she asked herself what other women who didn’t work did to fill their time.

  So often, when she was working long days, she had imagined having time off, being free to spend all day cooking and cleaning. She made a solemn vow never to wish for free time again, once she got her job back. She put on a jilbab and hijab and took her purse. She didn’t know where she was going; she just had to go out. She wandered through the village, browsing in shops. She bought a small toy for Khaled, a little airplane that lit up when it flew.

  Everywhere she went, people asked, “Will you be returning to work?”

  No one asked what they really wanted to know: Why were you arrested, and how were you released?

  Maybe that was why she ended up climbing into a shared taxi headed for Kifl Hares, across from the entrance to the massive Israeli settlement of Ariel. She waited until the taxi had disappeared before dashing across the wide street. She stared up the long road that led to the settlement gate. She couldn’t see the soldiers who guarded the entrance, but she knew they were watching her, so there was no point in taking off her hijab and trying to pass for Israeli. She didn’t want to do that ever again, anyway. This was her land. They had no right to deny her entrance. Experience had taught her that attitude went a long way in convincing Israeli soldiers that you had a right to do whatever you were doing.

  She squared her shoulders and lifted her head, walking quickly toward the gate. A noise behind her made her turn around. The bus! Even better. The police station was at the very top of the hill, and she didn’t relish walking it in this heat. She didn’t give the bus driver a chance to ask her anything, just paid her two shekels and moved to a seat in the very middle of the bus. The driver hesitated, and she held her breath.

  Drivers were not allowed to ask for ID, but she had seen plenty of them simply sit and refuse to drive on. This driver didn’t need to make that choice; all he had to do was pull up to the gate and say a word to the soldier, who did have the right to ask her for ID. If he did, she didn’t know what she would do. If they called in her ID, it could begin a perilous series of events. She could even end up back in prison. On the other hand, maybe they would just look at the ID and decide she was harmless, while, if she refused to give it to them, they would certainly not let her in.

  The bus was moving now. She would find out in a few seconds which of her fears was about to be realized.

  The driver was talking to the soldier now. She could tell they were talking about her.

  She made herself look straight ahead, not down, not watching them. She coaxed her face into a relaxed, bored expression.

  “Yesh lach teudot?” the soldier said. Do you have documents? He was still standing at the front of the bus, not near her. Was she supposed to know he was talking to her? The arrogance galled her. But, if she wanted to get in, she couldn’t insist on a confrontation. She looked in his direction and met his eyes which were fixed on her.

  “Yesh,” she said. She opened her purse, reached inside, as if looking for the ID, but didn’t pull it out.

  “I am going to see Benny Lazar, at the police station,” she said in Hebrew.

  Please don’t call, she begged silently, though she guessed that, if he did, Benny would say to let her in.

  “B’seder,” okay, the s
oldier said, not to her but to the driver. He stepped off the bus, and they sailed through the gate.

  “I need to see Benny Lazar,” she told the young woman at the front desk of the police station. Rania had an urge to take a wet handkerchief to the policewoman’s heavy makeup.

  “Do you have an appointment?” the woman asked in Hebrew.

  “No,” Rania replied in English. “But I am sure he wants to see me. Just tell him Rania is here.”

  “There’s an Arab woman here for you,” the woman said in Hebrew. She looked disappointed when she hung up.

  “You can go up,” she said.

  Benny’s mocking eyes greeted her from behind his desk. Of course, he would not do her the courtesy of getting up, but she didn’t care. She hadn’t come here for social niceties. Why had she come? She pushed that question aside.

  “How did you get out of prison?” he asked.

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  He got that look, hurt beyond belief. He was a one-man theater, part of what made him a good detective.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “Do you want tea?”

  “Yes, please.” She always liked to make him serve her. If she was going to sit in an Israeli colony, it was her duty to take every crumb she could get.

  “One and a half sugars?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Baruch!” he bellowed. A dark-skinned, young man appeared in the doorway. She recognized him from the time she had spent here last year.

  “Tea with one and a half sugars for my colleague. I’ll have a black coffee.” Benny ordered. Rania couldn’t help being pleased at being called “colleague.” It showed just how low she had sunk, to be getting self-worth from an Israeli whom she didn’t even like.

  “I visited the family of Daoud al-Khader,” she said when Baruch had vanished again.

  “And?”

  “And they are sure the army killed him. Someone claims to have seen a jeep.”

  “Claims?”

  “Someone says she saw a jeep. Why shouldn’t I believe her?”

  “I don’t know. Do you believe her?”

  Baruch returned with their drinks. Rania was silent while he cleared off some space on the desk in front of her to put her tea down. She thanked him in Hebrew, and he withdrew again. They didn’t serve tea the proper way, in a glass, to hold the steam in. This was in a cup with a handle, already losing its warmth. She picked it up and took a small sip. Typical Israeli tea, bitter and flavorless, with no mint or sage. She put the cup down on the saucer.

  “I don’t know whether to believe her,” she said finally. “She didn’t mention the jeep until I specifically asked if anyone had heard one. She said she had forgotten.” She drank a few more sips of tea, just to give herself a little time to think. “When the army kills someone in front of you, or near you, everyone talks incessantly about what they saw and heard. You’re unlikely to forget something important.”

  “So you don’t believe the army killed him.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  He had been leaning forward, subliminally encouraging her to talk. Now, he leaned way back, propping his feet on an open drawer at the corner of his desk. Even as she fought it, she felt herself relaxing with him. Damn him, she felt like a puppet on a string. But her mind was wrapping itself around a puzzle, and that felt too good to stop.

  “If the army wants to kill someone, they don’t do it secretly,” she said and caught a flash of approval in his face. “Also, it was early evening, in the spring; lots of people would have been outside, but no one else seems to have heard a jeep. Plus, there is the fact that he was involved in peace activities with Israelis, not normally the kind of boy who gets involved in confrontations with the army. But,” she adds, “people saw a soldier threatening him that afternoon.”

  “The army denies that they were in Kufr Yunus that day,” he said.

  She shook her head. “That part I’m sure of. Many people saw them.”

  “What did the women say happened?” He picked up a yellow notepad and wrote something.

  Rania repeated the story she had been told, trying to remember every detail. She hurried through the part about the children throwing stones at the jeep—she hated giving even that much ammunition to an Israeli policeman, but it gave credibility to the rest of the story. She told him about Daoud chasing the kids into the school and then confronting the soldiers, and how the women said one of the soldiers had hit him. Benny took copious notes. When she finished, he leaned forward again, gesticulating at her with his pen.

  He said, “Even if this happened…” She cringed at the emphasis on the word “if”—did he think she was lying? Or did he think she was so gullible, she couldn’t tell when people were lying to her? “…it doesn’t mean they killed him.”

  “It doesn’t mean they didn’t.”

  He made a few more notes, then put the pad down.

  “What about his peace activities?”

  “I didn’t get a lot of information about them. Just some juvenile dialogue projects, I think.” She hoped he gleaned the disparagement with which she said “dialogue.” Some might use that word for what she was doing here now. She didn’t, but she wasn’t sure she could explain why not.

  “You know what that means.”

  “You’re suggesting he could have been a collaborator?”

  “Not necessarily, but some in the village might have suspected him.”

  She had made the same insinuation to his family yesterday, but that didn’t make her more willing to hear it from him.

  “That’s not what happened,” she said.

  “Prove it.”

  There it was, the challenge. She started to say, That’s not my job, it’s yours. But that wouldn’t really be true. His job was to bury the incident as quickly as possible, and allowing Daoud’s death to be classified as the execution of a suspected collaborator would serve his purposes admirably. If she wanted to see justice done, she would need to do it herself.

  “I’m not working for you,” she said.

  “No problem. My investigation is over. The army wasn’t in the village. The kid was known to fraternize with Israelis, which made him a possible collaborator. No one saw anything. End of story.”

  She could virtually feel the strings opening her mouth, but it made no difference. What she said was what she had to say.

  “If I find out anything, I will tell the captain,” she said.

  “Good.”

  He brought the legs of his chair down with a thump and began to rifle through some files on his desk. He made himself so intent on his work that he didn’t even look up when she left the room.

  Chapter 16

  “Mama is sleeping,” said Daoud’s sister, Mayisa, opening the door to Rania’s knock. “Shall I wake her?”

  This was good luck. Mayisa might be less suspicious of Rania than her parents would be.

  “Don’t bother her. Your parents asked me to find out what happened the day Daoud was killed,” she said with the confidence of a practiced liar. “If I can prove the army killed him, they might get some compensation from the Israelis.”

  “What could compensate us for Daoud’s death?” Mayisa asked, but she opened the door wider so that Rania could enter.

  “Can I see his room?” she asked. Mayisa hesitated. Rania concentrated on making her expression friendly and professional, not pleading.

  “I guess it would be okay,” the girl said finally. She led the way through the living room to the hallway. Two of the doors Rania could see were open. Past the second one, Rania glimpsed Um Issa, sleeping uncovered on a double bed. She could hear the woman’s labored breathing. Mayisa opened the nearest door.

  “My brothers sleep here,” she said.

  There were two sleeping mats on the floor, two desks, and a bureau with four drawers.

  “You have only two brothers?” she asked Mayisa.

  “I have four, but two of them have their own houses.”
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  “This must be Daoud’s side,” Rania pointed, and Mayisa nodded. His brother’s side looked like a normal teenager’s—martyr posters and pictures of soccer players. Above Daoud’s bed was a poster of Ammar Hassan, the pop star, and over his desk one of the Palestinian tennis player, Andy Ram. Rania sat down in the desk chair and examined the clutter on top. A well-thumbed biology textbook, an agate marble, a keychain with an olivewood map of Palestine in the national colors. She picked up a narrow-woven strip, a friendship bracelet. She and her girlfriends had traded them in school, but she couldn’t remember ever seeing young men wearing them.

  “What’s this?” she asked Mayisa.

  The girl shrugged. “Friendship bracelet.”

  “Do you know where Daoud got it? Did he buy it for someone, or did someone give it to him?”

  “I wouldn’t know. He wasn’t wearing it, was he? So, what difference does it make?”

  Rania didn’t know what difference it made. It just seemed unusual. She opened one of the desk drawers. It was filled mainly with old school notebooks and a couple boxes of photos. Some of the photos were family shots, pictures from weddings, vacations in Jericho. Some were formal school pictures, Daoud, Mayisa, two young men who looked enough like Daoud that she was sure they were the brothers. One showed Daoud in the center of a group of Palestinian boys all in a row, arm-in-arm.

  “Who are the other boys?” she asked Mayisa.

  “You said you’re trying to prove the army killed Daoud,” Mayisa said. “How is going through his things going to help?”

  Damn the girl! Why did she have to be so perceptive?

  “I don’t know, but it might. First, I need to understand who he was, what he was doing.”

  “We told you, he was trying to keep the soldiers from shooting the children.”

  Rania ignored her and went back to looking at the photos. There was a small book of them, each photo encased in cellophane, that was clearly from the camp in Germany. Daoud stood with various groups of boys, all grinning in Abraham’s Garden sweatshirts. Two other boys were in nearly all of the pictures—one identifiable as a West Bank Palestinian, the other clearly Israeli.