“I wasn’t as special.”
“Perhaps you were more special.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t think that.”
“Don’t tell me what I think.” Rania wandered around the little house until she found a broom. She started at the far corner of the living room, nearest the hallway that led to the bedroom, and swept toward the open front door. “Samia,” she asked as she swept, “did you know that women could be in love with each other, and men with men?”
Her friend grabbed the broom from her hand. “What are you saying?” she asked. She punctuated her words with violent sweeps of the broom.
“I was just asking a question.”
“How dare you ask me that? You think I am unnatural?”
“I wasn’t saying anything about you. I just learned about this the other day, and I am still trying to understand it. You were always the unshockable one, so I thought I could talk about it with you. If you don’t want to talk about it, we won’t.”
They worked together in silence for some moments. Samia swept and Rania put things away as best she could, not knowing where anything went. It would have made sense to switch roles, but Rania didn’t dare suggest it for fear that Samia would sink back into whatever stupor Rania had roused her from.
“You know what happened to me in prison,” Samia suddenly began talking.
Rania nodded, though the other woman wasn’t looking at her. “The soldiers took special pleasure in raping me, because I was a virgin before they did it the first time. They came to my cell every day for a month. Sometimes two, sometimes three of them, taking turns.”
“Haram,” for shame, Rania said.
“Then I was moved to the camp in the Naqab. We all slept in a big room with no real roof, just some bars across the top. It was boiling hot in the summer, freezing in the winter.”
Rania knew all this too. Why was Samia reliving this history? But at least she was talking and sounded a little less dead.
“The soldiers there did not touch me,” Samia went on. “But I had nightmares about them. One night I woke up shaking. I could not stop. Another woman woke up and she got into bed with me. She was someone I did not know well, from another party.”
“Jamiya i-Shabia,” Rania guessed. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was the most left-wing of the larger factions making up the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
“Hezb i-Shab,” Samia said.
“Oh yes, those Communist girls,” Rania said. She congratulated herself for the smile that flickered across Samia’s lips.
“She held me all that night,” Samia said. “After that, she came to my bed every night. She never did anything improper. She only kissed my cheek and touched my hair. But I loved her. It was the first time—the only time—I really loved anyone. Then she was released, and I never saw her again. When I was released, I went to her village. I learned she was married, with four children, and they had gone to live in Kuwait.”
“And then? You never…?”
“No. I never. Because of those soldiers, I cannot be with a man. But I will not let them make me into a freak.”
Rania thought about Chloe saying that you don’t become gay; it’s something you realize about yourself. This could be an exception, she thought. But the truth was that Samia had always been a little different from the other girls in their circle. The boys had treated her as one of them, and Rania had been jealous of that. It had not occurred to her that they were also treating Samia as less than a girl.
“If you love women, it does not make you a freak,” Rania said.
“What makes you such an expert all of a sudden?” Samia squinted at her. Rania was happy to hear a bit of her old outrage. It made her seem more alive.
“I’m no expert, I assure you. I told you; I just heard of this a few days ago. I have some friends, a foreign woman and a Palestinian woman from Australia, and I can see that they love each other and are happy. They took me to a bar last night—that’s why I am here.”
“You left your husband and son to go to a bar?”
“It has to do with my work,” Rania said defensively. “Anyway, it was a bar all full of people who are—they call it ‘gay.’” She sensed that Samia knew the word. No doubt she had looked on the internet. “The men dress up like women and dance and sing. It seems strange to me, but they are happy. Even some Dafaween go there,” using the word for West Bank Palestinians. “If you want to go there, we could go together sometime.”
“I am not interested,” Samia said. “I am happy being alone. It’s better. Who could put up with me, anyway?”
“I don’t believe that,” Rania said.
“It doesn’t matter what you believe,” Samia said. “I didn’t ask you to come here and try to make my life something different.”
She gestured toward the open door. Rania took her meaning.
“I love you,” she said softly and kissed her friend twice on both cheeks. “Remember that.”
Samia did not answer. But she stood in the doorway and watched Rania walk down the narrow street that led out of the camp.
Chapter 23
Chloe’s phone roused her from an unsettling dream, which fled before she could catch it. In the dark closet, she had no idea what time it was. But the phone had a lighted screen, and she jumped out of bed when she saw who was calling.
“Where have you been?” she demanded.
“Germany,” Avi’s voice said.
“I need you to come to Kufr Yunus with me. Meet me at Hares junction in an hour.” Chloe remembered Daoud’s friends teasing him that his village was the size of a speck. She had barely managed to find it in her Rand McNally map book, nestled between Hares and Deir Istya, with no direct road from the highway.
“Make it an hour and a half,” he said.
That would give her a chance to get breakfast first. Now that she was up, she was hungry. She stumbled into the kitchen. It was almost ten. Tina would have been gone for hours. She must be exhausted, Chloe thought. It had been nearly two when they got home, after leaving Rania on the Bethlehem Road. They had both been wired from their encounter with the soldier, Lior, and had trouble getting to sleep.
Lior’s appearance had short-circuited the conversation with that singer, Yasmina. Tina had said they knew each other through work. But Tina had mentioned a number of her coworkers at the women’s counseling center, and none of them was named Yasmina. Chloe suddenly felt less sympathetic about Tina’s having to get up early. She made coffee and ate her favorite flaky boureka, spinach with cheese, before dashing off to meet Avi.
She should call Rania and tell her she had decided to go to Kufr Yunus. She hoped Rania wouldn’t be pissed off. Chloe really had no reason to get involved in this investigation, but then Rania’s reasons were not that clear either. Chloe felt a kinship with Daoud. Maybe she had only known him for ten minutes, but he had given her the first marriage proposal of this trip to Palestine. She needed to keep busy, and she wanted to see Avi. This was something they could do together, and his artistic skills might come in handy. He worked as an animator, but his passion was making cartoons for anarchist zines.
Rania’s phone went straight to voicemail. The policewoman must be somewhere without cell phone service. Chloe made a mental note to try again later and took off to catch a northbound bus.
Avigdor Levav was the scion of what Chloe called an Israeli Mayflower family. He growled at her every time she said it, but only because it was true. Both sides of his family had been in Palestine since the early nineteenth century. His father was known as “Israel’s Walter Cronkite” and his mother was a former member of the Knesset.
Avi had rebelled early and often. At sixteen, he had run away to Europe to live in squatter houses and participate in anticapitalist organizing that eventually landed him in a Spanish prison for two weeks and got him permanently barred from the European Union. He had returned to Israel just in time for the Second Intifada and joined the Palestine solidarity
movement. He and Chloe had liked each other instantly. Chloe thought of Avi as her Israeli twin—if you could have a twin young enough to be your son.
He was late now, but that wasn’t surprising. He was religiously on time for demonstrations but hopelessly casual about time in every other situation. She sat on the roadblock at the entrance to Hares village, trying to get into The Da Vinci Code. The people who said Dan Brown books were page-turners had clearly never tried to read him in a war zone. Of course, it didn’t help that she was precariously perched on a boulder with jagged spikes that threatened damage in embarrassing places.
She saw a speck in the distance and recognized Avi’s loping walk. She walked to meet him halfway.
His curly hair was cropped close to his head, and he had shaved the ridiculous beard that never made him look as much older as he thought. As usual when he came into the West Bank, he had covered the tattoos on one arm with a cotton sock with the foot cut out, rather than just wearing a long-sleeved shirt.
“How did you get into Germany?” she asked as they headed up the dusty road that led through Hares to the interior villages. “I thought you were barred from Europe.”
“My non grata–ness has been lifted,” he said with a shrug. “Maya has some family there.” His girlfriend, Maya, was an immigrant from Ukraine and studied dance at the university in Tel Aviv. She and Avi had been together off and on for years.
“So, it must have felt good to get back there. You lived in Germany for a while, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. It was complicated.”
It was going to be one of those days. If he had some political problem, he would be chattering away about it nonstop. But, personal problems she would have to drag out of him word by word.
“What happened between you and Maya?”
“Nothing. It was stupid. We ran into my ex.”
“Which ex?” In his off times with Maya, Avi always had flings. Girls found his bad boy attitude irresistible.
“Her name’s Inge. She was here for a while before you came. She got deported too.”
“So, you ran into her in Germany, and Maya didn’t want you to see her?” Chloe wondered how much of a coincidence that “running into” was.
“She didn’t say that. She just got bitchy and demanding.”
“Yeah, and we all know how well you respond to demands.”
“Shut up.” He was only half-kidding. They were both quiet for several minutes. The only sound Chloe heard was her own labored breathing as they trudged up the hill.
“I told her from the beginning I don’t believe in monogamy,” he said.
“But you haven’t been with anyone else since you’ve been together,” she said.
“True, but that’s just because I don’t like people very much.”
“That probably makes it worse. You don’t like people, but you like Inge. So, did you sleep with her?”
“Who are you, my mother?”
“Do you talk to your mother about your sex life?”
“Good point. Of course I slept with her.”
“And?”
“She’s in Germany. I’m here. She has a boyfriend there. Maya’s just being stupid.”
“She’s not being stupid. She’s being human.”
“Maybe.”
They wound their way through dense groves of olive and fig trees, occasionally greeting farmers pruning trees or herding goats. Stone rooftops and a minaret peeked over the next rise, letting Chloe know they were nearly to their destination. Just before the dirt path gave way to a pitted asphalt road, the groves abruptly ended. Yawning pits dotted freshly leveled dirt, clear signs of bulldozing. Stacks of olive branches littered an area the size of two football fields. Chloe stared in horror.
“I don’t understand,” she said in a hushed tone. “Why would they bulldoze here? There are no settlements or Israeli roads in this area.”
“Punishment,” Avi said. “Five settlers reported that stones hit their cars last week on the highway by Hares. The army ordered five hundred trees to be cut down in each of the four villages nearest the spot where it supposedly happened.”
“But this is nowhere near the highway. You can’t even see it from here.”
“Doesn’t matter. The kids they arrested confessed—probably after torture—and said kids from several other villages were throwing stones too. But they wouldn’t say who they were, so the army punished everyone nearby. You know they don’t care if they get the right people or not. That’s part of the terror.”
The devastation made Chloe want to cry. So many generations of work, destroyed in an afternoon’s bulldozing. Perhaps the people had been able to replant the trees somewhere else, but the old trees never did well after replanting. And many people had no other land to plant on.
They walked up the paved road, toward a thicket of spreading fig trees near the entrance to the village. Rania had said Daoud’s body was found under a fig tree. Chloe had no way to know which tree was the lethal one.
What else had Rania said? He was found by Um Mahmoud, who lived in the first house in the village. Chloe knocked on the door of the first house she saw, an imposing sandstone two-story with a wrap-around porch, sporting a row of cushioned, wicker chairs. The door was heavy blue metal, befitting a house that got a lot of attention from soldiers. The first house in a village was always popular with the army as a place to start looking for something.
She heard the hollow sound of metal on metal as the latches were pulled back.
“Yes?” The woman who answered the door looked frightened.
“We are not soldiers.” Chloe said immediately in Arabic. The woman’s face relaxed only slightly.
“My name is Chloe,” she persisted. “This is my friend Abe. We are human rights workers, and we would like to talk to you about the death of Daoud al-Khader.”
“Come in.” The woman was fifty-ish and wore a traditional, long, black coat-dress, heavily embroidered with gold and red threads. She called out to someone to bring tea and settled her guests in the ample living room. Padded arm chairs lined the walls. Chloe settled into one, and Avi left an empty chair between them. The older woman sat on the other side of Chloe. It wasn’t the ideal setup for an interview, but it would have to do.
“You are Um Mahmoud?” Chloe figured she might as well confirm the obvious.
“Um Mahmoud, naam,” yes.
“I heard that you found Daoud,” Chloe began in Arabic. “Can you tell me what you saw, Um Mahmoud?”
“I did not see anything. I heard gunfire.” She used the word slah, literally just weapons. Chloe glanced at Avi to see that he was following. He gave a tiny nod.
“So, you heard the guns and went to see?” Chloe asked.
“Yes. I waited to hear the jeep leave. But I heard no jeep. I opened my door and saw no one. When I went outside, I saw Daoud.”
“And no one else?”
“No.”
Chloe wrote it all down. A young woman in jeans and a sweater, a royal-blue silk scarf covering most of her dark hair, brought in a teapot covered with a floral, quilted cozy. She served the foreigners and then Um Mahmoud glasses of steaming tea dashed with sprigs of mint. The tea was so sweet, it reminded Chloe of after-dinner mints.
She wasn’t sure what else to ask. She looked at Avi.
“Did you have anything else?” she asked in English.
He shrugged. Chloe wasn’t sure if anything Um Mahmoud told them was worth recording in a drawing, but she had dragged Avi here so she should give him something to do. Though she doubted he cared; he should be glad for an excuse to be in the West Bank and away from Maya’s sulking.
“My friend is a…” shoot, what was the word for artist? She had looked it up this morning to refresh her memory, but now she was blocking on it. She glanced at Avi. He ought to know, because it was his profession. Just as he opened his lips, it came to her. “Fanoun,” they both said at once and all three of them laughed.
“Can you tell him exactly where
you saw Daoud, so that he can make a picture?”
“I will show you.” Um Mahmoud rose and led them outside. She walked over to the grove of fig trees and pointed to the ground beneath the largest one. The green figs were little and hard on the stout branches. “Here, you can still see his blood.”
Chloe knelt, and, indeed, there were brown stains on the rocks that poked up from the soil. She would have to tell Rania. The policewoman would want to come see the stains for herself. Maybe they would tell her something.
“Can you draw this?” Chloe looked up at Avi, to see that he was already taking out his sketchpad and a pencil. He sat on a nearby boulder. It took him a long time. Chloe wondered what to do while he drew.
“How many children?” she asked Um Mahmoud. Women loved best to talk about their children.
“Three girls, four boys.”
“Mashalla.” A blessing.
“Are you married?” Um Mahmoud asked.
“No.”
“How old?”
“Forty-one.”
Um Mahmoud looked shocked. Palestinians usually guessed she was thirty. “Why are you not married?”
“I don’t want to be.”
The older woman laughed. “Ahsan,” better, she said.
“Anjad,” definitely, Chloe responded.
Avi came to show Um Mahmoud his drawing. He had put in the trees and the house, capturing the precise angle from which she would have seen the body as she approached. “Was he lying this way, or this way?” he asked.
“Hek willa hek?” Chloe translated.
“Zai hek,” like this, she indicated, and he went back to his makeshift stool. Out of things to talk about, Chloe knelt again and poked around in the grass. She didn’t expect to find anything, but her fingers touched metal. She pushed aside the thick coating of leaves, twigs, and dirt and uncovered a gold-colored shell casing. She rooted around until she came up with another.
Murder Under the Fig Tree Page 17
