“Do you know either of these boys?” she asked Mayisa.
For a minute, the girl looked like she might not answer. “That’s our cousin, Ahmed. He was Daoud’s best friend. I don’t know the Yahudi.”
“How do you know he is Israeli?” Rania asked, just for fun. Mayisa rolled her eyes.
“May I borrow this?” Rania asked, making to put the little photo album into her purse.
Mayisa chewed her lip. “Maybe I better ask Mama.”
“I would hate for you to wake her.”
“You’ll give it back?”
“Of course, as soon as my investigation is done.” She tucked the little book away before the girl could change her mind. There was only one closet. She walked over to it and threw the door open.
“Can you show me which clothes were Daoud’s?”
Mayisa pointed to a few white shirts and a single pair of dress slacks. A threadbare school sweater hung next to a windbreaker that was clearly long outgrown.
“This can’t be all he had. Where are the rest?”
“Ramallah. In his apartment.”
“Do you know where the apartment is in Ramallah?”
“No. I was never there. He said I could visit him there, but my parents wouldn’t let me go.”
“He couldn’t have lived there by himself.” Only very wealthy students could afford their own apartments in the cities. Most crammed four or five into a room. “Who did he share with? Ahmed?”
“Yes, Ahmed and their friend, Elias.”
“Do you know Ahmed’s telephone number?”
“It might be in my mother’s phone.” Mayisa disappeared for a moment and returned with a standard Jawwal phone, like the ones Rania’s brother-in-law, Marwan, sold by the dozen. Rania opened the contacts, and there was Ahmed, first up. She copied down the number.
“What’s it like, working for the police?” asked Mayisa, as Rania prepared to leave.
“It depends. Sometimes it’s interesting, sometimes it’s just a lot of work, like any job. But I like being able to help our people.”
“I would like to do something to help our people, too. But I don’t think I would like to be in the police.”
“What are you interested in, Mayisa?”
“I think I would like to be a nurse.”
“My mother is a nurse,” Rania said. “It’s a good career. Are you good in math and science?”
“Pretty good.”
“If you want to be a nurse, you will need to do very well in those subjects. You must work extra hard.”
“That’s what Daoud said.”
“Your brother sounds like a smart boy.”
“He was.” Mayisa’s eyes filled with tears. Rania gently brushed the girl’s hair behind her shoulder.
“Honor Daoud’s memory by following his advice,” she said. Was it her imagination, or did Mayisa close the door behind her extra quickly, as if she didn’t want anyone to see that Rania had been in the house?
Chapter 17
Rania was tired and would have liked to go back home and rest before it was time for Khaled to get home. She was unused to working a full day. But she was anxious to speak to Ahmed. Fortunately, he answered his mobile on the third ring and explained how to get to the apartment.
The roads were clear, and, in forty-five minutes, she was walking up the narrow staircase to a gloomy hallway with dirty beige carpets. She knocked on the door of number ten.
She recognized Ahmed immediately. His wide face had not changed much since the photos in Daoud’s room were taken, but he had a lazy eye that hadn’t shown up in the pictures. His short, dark curls were damp, and he smelled vaguely of soap. He invited her into the living room with a gesture that said he didn’t care whether she entered or not but was too polite to keep an older woman standing in the hall.
She sat on the edge of a straight-backed wooden chair. There were more comfortable seats, but she suspected they might have bugs.
“Why do you want to know about Daoud?” he asked. This time, she fluently recited her tale about helping his family get compensation, sounding to herself as if she believed it.
“Why was he in the village that day?” she asked. “Didn’t he have class?”
“It was a school holiday,” he said. “We all went home for my engagement party.”
“You are engaged? Mabrouk,” congratulations.
“Thank you.”
“When will you marry?”
He shrugged. “When I have saved enough money for a nice house.”
With the toll the American and European embargo was taking on the Palestinian economy, she thought that would be quite a while.
“Are you studying at the conservatory also?” she asked.
“Me? No, I am studying English at Birzeit.”
“Birzeit! You must be a very good student. I wanted to go there, but I was not accepted.”
That was a little lie, to give him a one-up on her. She had been offered a scholarship to Birzeit University, which took only the top students, but it had been the First Intifada, and her parents had not wanted her traveling so far each day.
“I suppose so.”
“Why did you choose English?” It certainly wouldn’t help him acquire the nice house.
He shrugged, shoulders rippling like a flag in the breeze. “I would like to live in England or America.”
“Why do you want to live abroad?” she asked. Coming out of her mouth, the question sounded ridiculous. Every young Palestinian dreamed of a normal life, without checkpoints or soldiers coming in the night.
“It was Daoud’s idea,” he said. “He wanted all of us to move to America— him, me, Elias, and our wives—and live together in a big compound like the rich Americans have on television.”
She smiled. She pictured the young man in the photos, his wide, soulful eyes lit up with plans for transplanting his family and friends to an American television set. Daoud seemed to have lived in brighter colors than anyone around him.
“Do you know when Daoud planned to marry Hanan?”
“No. I don’t think they had discussed it yet.”
“His mother said they would marry before Ramadan.”
He shook his head. “I do not think he would have married before he graduated. He had two more years in school.”
“Did he bring other friends here much?”
“Usually, we would all be here together, and sometimes friends would visit.” His lazy eye made it seem like he was avoiding her eyes, so she couldn’t tell if he actually was.
Rania took out the photo album she had taken from Daoud’s room at home. She flipped it open to a picture of Daoud, Ahmed, and the Israeli boy.
“What about this young man? Who is he?”
For the first time, he looked uneasy. “Just some Yahudi at the camp.”
“What is his name?”
“I don’t remember. I barely knew him.”
“You look pretty friendly here.”
“It was years ago. The camp was a week, and I never saw him again.”
He was lying. But she had no way, and no reason, to make him tell her the truth.
“Why don’t you want to talk about this boy?”
“It doesn’t matter. I just don’t know him. I don’t do those things anymore.”
“Which things?”
“Normalization.” He spat out the English word as if it were a curse.
“Why are you angry?”
“Why shouldn’t I be? Look at our lives. We can’t go anywhere. We can’t go to Jerusalem to pray. My friends are killed for looking at a soldier the wrong way.”
She was surprised by his reference to praying in Jerusalem. He didn’t strike her as someone who did that much praying.
“Do you each have a room here, or do you all share?” she asked.
“We have two bedrooms,” he said. “Daoud and I sleep—slept—in one, and Elias has the other.”
“May I see your room?”
He hesitated. She
stood up and took a few steps toward the hallway, just to indicate that she wasn’t really asking. He shrugged and led the way. When she stepped inside the little room, she thought she knew why he hadn’t wanted to show her. The floor was so covered with clothes, she had to pick her way through them to stand in the center. In fact, that seemed to be the only storage system that existed; there was neither bureau nor closet. A few things were folded and stacked in one corner. She imagined this was the clean stash, and the ones strewn around were the dirty ones. Two sleeping mats were semivisible amid the clutter, one partially covered with a light blanket.
“Can you tell which things are Daoud’s and which are yours?”
He pointed to the neat stack in the corner. “Those are Daoud’s.”
“Is that all of them?”
He nodded. She crossed the room and crouched down by the little pile of clothes. She fingered two pairs of jeans, both fairly new, and, she imagined, tight-fitting for someone Daoud’s size. A few T-shirts, one well-worn with the logo of Abraham’s Garden, another newish with the words Coca-Cola in Arabic, lay atop a cross-colored polo shirt with no logo, a Western style popular in Ramallah.
Next to the pile of clothes stood a silver metal music stand, the kind that folded up. That made sense, given that Daoud had been a musician, but he must not have used it regularly, because it was draped in filmy, bright-colored scarves. He must have been accumulating them as gifts for his sisters. On one corner of the stand hung a leather jacket, similar to the one Bassam had been given when he got out of prison in the nineties. Had Daoud’s father or another relative been a fighter?
“Did Daoud buy this for himself?” she asked Ahmed, who was gathering up some of the clothes on the floor.
“I guess,” he said.
Expensive item for a student. Daoud must have had some source of income. She plunged her fingers into the pockets. Her fingers touched metal and paper. She pulled out a few coins, an empty cigarette carton, and a small square of pressed cardboard. The little square had English and Hebrew writing on it and a drawing of two people holding hands. She couldn’t tell if they were supposed to be men or women. Adloyada, the English said.
She was about to ask Ahmed what it was, but something stopped her. He was still folding up clothes and hadn’t seen her take the things from the pocket. She quickly stuffed the little square into her purse. She returned the shekels to the pocket and hung the jacket back on the stand.
“Thank you,” she said to Ahmed. “You’ve been very helpful.”
Rania had just bundled Khaled off to school the next morning when Chloe arrived to borrow the car. Her friend Tina was with her. Rania greeted both of them with kisses on both cheeks.
“Do you want tea or coffee?” she asked.
“Do we have time?” Chloe looked at her friend.
“We are supposed to pick up Reem at ten,” Tina said.
Rania checked the clock, although she knew it was just past eight. With the roads open, it should take them only half an hour to reach Salfit.
“You have time.”
“Coffee then,” Chloe said. Rania half-filled the long-handled brass pot with water and added two heaping tablespoons of sugar. She set the well-used pot on a low flame. While waiting for it to boil, she produced the little cardboard square she had found in Daoud’s room yesterday.
“Do you know what this means?” she asked. Chloe took it and held it close to her face, then passed it to her friend.
“Where did you get this?” Tina asked.
“A boy from one of the nearby villages was killed last week, we think by the army. This was in his clothes.”
Tina and Chloe exchanged glances.
“What is it?” Rania demanded. “I need to know if it has something to do with why this boy was killed.”
More conspiratorial looks passed between the two foreigners.
“Why do you think this is important?” Tina asked.
“I do not know if it is important. It has Hebrew writing on it. This boy was involved in some normalization things. Perhaps…he could have been a traitor.”
“It’s from a bar, in West Jerusalem but very near East Jerusalem,” Chloe said.
“An Israelien bar?”
“It’s owned by an Israeli. Israelis go there, and Palestinians too.”
“It’s a gay bar,” Tina said.
“What is gay?”
“It’s a word for men who love men, or women who love women.”
“But we don’t have people like that in Palestine.”
Chloe squirmed in her seat. “There are gay people everywhere,” she said.
Rania’s head was spinning. Something like that among her own people, and she had no idea? They couldn’t be right.
“Maybe just one or two,” Rania said.
“They say it’s 10 percent, ashara bil miyya,” said Chloe.
“Who says?”
“People who study such things.”
Rania considered it. “I can’t believe that. So, you think Daoud was… ‘gay’?” She hesitated over the word. “He was engaged.”
Chloe shrugged. “I don’t know. Most people who go to Adloyada are gay.” She picked up the little cardboard square again and fiddled with the layers of paper.
“Rania,” she said, “Did you say this guy’s name was Daoud?”
“Daoud al-Khader,” Rania said. “Do you know him?”
“I met him once,” she said.
“At that bar?”
“No, at a restaurant. But I think he performed at Adloyada.”
“They have performances? Perhaps he only went there to sing. He was studying to be an opera singer.”
Chloe chuckled. “I don’t think they exactly sing,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Rania said. Why was Chloe being so cryptic? Maybe Chloe was wrong. She was smart, and she tried to be sensitive, but she wasn’t Palestinian.
“It’s hard to explain,” Tina said.
Rania suddenly felt like someone had thrown a bucket of icy water in her face. If men could be in love with other men, presumably women could be in love with other women as well. There was a word for it, suhaqqiyya; it wasn’t a nice word. She had never called anyone that, but she had heard it whispered about women in the villages who seemed too bold or independent. Could Chloe and Tina…
She turned to the stove, where the sugary water was bubbling away. She stirred in the coffee, held it over the flame, took it off before it boiled over, held it to the flame again, removed it, replaced it, then poured off the liquid into three tiny cups.
“Forgive me,” she murmured in Arabic, as the others sipped. “I didn’t mean…” But what didn’t she mean? She couldn’t think of a way to complete the sentence.
“It’s okay,” Tina said. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But if you have questions, you can ask us.”
“I never thought about this.… If there are…gay…people here, it must be very hard for them.”
Chloe smiled, the wide, gap-toothed smile that Rania had first found appealing about her.
“I think it’s getting a little easier,” she said. “The hardest thing is not being able to talk about it.”
Tina touched her friend’s arm. “We should go,” she said.
Rania was suddenly aware of the tenderness between them.
“Let me get the keys,” she said, grateful for an excuse to turn away. She found the extra car keys in the bedroom.
“Why are you investigating Daoud’s death?” Chloe asked when Rania returned with the keys. “Have you gone back to work?”
“Not officially, no. But I’m trying to help the family find out what happened. If the army killed him, they might be able to get some compensation, like those people in Jenin.”
She was not completely lying, she comforted herself. If the army had killed Daoud, she would give his family the telephone number of the lawyer who had represented the families in Jenin. Chloe did not need to know that the investigat
ion had been Benny’s idea. She might inadvertently mention it to someone who would think… She couldn’t articulate the difference between what people would think and what she was doing, but there was one.
“When will you go back to work, then?”
“I’m not sure.… They want me to head a women’s police unit.”
“Wow, that’s great,” Chloe said. “Isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. It’s kind of a…morals police, I guess you would say.”
“Oh, we call it a vice squad,” Chloe said. “What exactly would you be doing?”
“I’m not sure. I think they expect us to monitor women’s behavior, go talk to girls who are doing improper things with men, that kind of thing.”
“That doesn’t sound like your type of work.”
“No. But I wouldn’t necessarily go out as part of the squad. I would be doing the training.” Her rationalizing sounded pathetic. The trainer would certainly be as responsible—even more responsible—for the actions of the squad as the women who put the training into practice.
Chloe’s face livened up when Rania mentioned training. “That’s good, though. If you are the trainer, you can subvert—” She saw that Rania didn’t know the word. “You can use their tools to different purposes.”
“That’s what my husband says.”
“Think about this,” Tina said. “If you refuse, who knows who they will get? If you do it, you can have a big impact on how the work is done. Things have changed a lot in the last few weeks.”
“What do you mean?” Rania leaned forward.
“I work at a counseling center for women whose husbands beat them. In the past, the PA was pretty uninterested in what we did. They gave us our license, we got a little money from the Women’s Ministry, and they left us alone. But, in the last month, since the government has been reorganized, men from the Ministry of Interior have been in several times. They wanted to know things about who our clients are, how they find out about us. They looked at our outreach materials and took some back to show their superiors. We are afraid they will want to interfere with our work.”
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