Miral (12 page)

“Soldiers! Soldiers are coming!” one boy shouted.

“They're only passing through, stay calm,” Miral replied. However, she soon discovered that they were there to demolish the house of a leader of the intifada.

“We won't let them do it,” Khaldun remarked. “It won't be easy for them to knock down that house.” He snatched up a stone and started running toward the tanks. A call to alarm shivered through the whole camp, transmitted from shack to shack. Women came running, looking for their children; men gathered in groups. Shouts came from everywhere: “Go away, you bastards! Leave us in peace!” Some panic-stricken children started running to their homes; others hid behind the schoolgirls, covering their faces with their clothes and crying out in fear.

Miral and Muna tried to calm the youngest children, who started trembling and clinging to the girls more tightly. Every incursion of the Israeli soldiers traumatized the young ones, and it would take weeks to make them smile again.

The first sharp explosions could be heard. Tear gas canisters began to fall everywhere. Some were fired high and came down in slow parabolas; others flew horizontally, a couple of meters above the ground. The inhabitants of the camp started throwing stones at the tanks, and the soldiers responded with plastic bullets and tear gas. But after a little while, the plastic bullets gave way to real ones. All that was needed to produce a massacre was one frightened soldier. Soon the air became unbreathable. Miral and Muna picked up the smallest children and began to run, looking for a hiding place. Khaldun turned back to help the girls reach safety.

Although the battle did not last long, it was exceedingly violent. Before they withdrew, the tanks fired a few rounds from the top of the hill that dominated the camp. After the resistance leader's house was leveled, a cloud of dust mixed with tear gas settled over everything. Miral and Muna, together with a group of the youngest children, were running to take refuge inside a big Dumpster. Before they reached it, however, a tear gas grenade grazed Miral and exploded a few centimeters away. The gas stung her eyes, and the frightened children continued to scream. Miral was unable to calm them down. She wondered what kind of adults these children would become after taking in so much terror and violence.

When the barrage was over, the inhabitants of the camp began to dig through the rubble, using their bare hands and makeshift tools. Two bodies emerged from beneath the ruins.

After an interminable wait, an ambulance finally arrived. The two people recovered from the wreckage were seriously injured, both of them with several broken bones, but at least they were alive. Miral cried out when she saw Khaldun nearby, clutching one of the smallest children. He had saved the child by shielding it with his body. An old man had been less lucky; his corpse lay motionless in the dust. The women wept and despaired, and their cries were lost in the unreal silence that had fallen upon the camp. Miral saw one of her little pupils, a seven-year-old boy, sitting on a pile of rubble that used to be his house. He stared into space.

Later, still shaken, Miral and Muna set out for Jerusalem. That evening Hind decided to suspend the teaching initiative in the refugee camp for a few days.

Little by little, Miral felt the anger inside her mounting. She couldn't get the memory of one family she had seen out of her head. After their dwelling had been destroyed before their eyes, they had tried to recover from the ruins their few intact possessions—some children's notebooks, toys, photographs.

“What kind of war is this? A regular army against children with rocks?” Miral thought, as the red sun sank behind the Mount of Olives. “What sense does it make to teach English to children who may not ever become adults?”

 

A few weeks later, the bus that was once again bringing the girls from Dar El-Tifel to the refugee camp was stopped at an army checkpoint. The Israeli soldiers weren't letting anyone through because there had been clashes in the camp that morning. Miral still wanted to go; she was afraid for Khaldun, Said, and the other children and wanted to make sure they were all right. She got out of the car and approached a soldier who was leaning against a jeep. He was around twenty, with black hair, dark brown eyes, slightly olive skin, and fleshy lips. He could have been an Arab. He smelled strongly of cologne, and he looked her over, head to toe, hesitating here and there along the way, attracted by the charms that were beginning to bloom in her young body. Finally, he lit a cigarette and said, “If you give me a kiss, I'll let you pass.”

Miral watched him inhale a mouthful of smoke from his American cigarette. His hands were smooth and perfectly manicured. She looked him in the eyes and said no before walking away.

Then she remembered a path the camp kids had shown her one evening when she stayed past curfew. It would take her at least two hours to go that way, but she'd get there without having to kiss a soldier. Making her way down an embankment covered with weeds, she found herself with a view of Ramallah, and it seemed to her as though she were seeing it for the first time. Everything appeared compressed, the living space reduced to a bare minimum. “How can anyone live in such a place?” she wondered, tripping over a crumpled Coke can.

That morning Khaldun had taken part in the clashes with the Israeli soldiers, and he had gotten closer to the tanks than anyone. Contrary to his practice during English lessons, he was always in the front rank during battles. The hail of stones had been intense and had continued for several hours. Said climbed up on the roof of Yassir's shack—it offered the best view—so that he could follow the soldiers' movements and communicate them to the other boys by a series of coded whistles. He noticed Khaldun creep toward a tank until he was a few meters from it, take cover behind a mound of garbage, and raise his slingshot, which was made from an olive branch and the inner tube of a bicycle tire.

Khaldun was so close that he could have looked into the eyes of the soldier standing in the turret of the tank. On his third try, Khaldun struck the soldier's helmet, slightly denting it on the left side. The boy's movements were casual, almost insolent, and even though he was creeping through dust and garbage, he looked almost elegant, as if he were another combatant in one of the many wars that had left a mark in history books during the course of the twentieth century.

In response to the thick volley of rocks, the soldiers launched tear gas missiles and then sent several shots into the air; but when these measures persuaded few of the camp boys to stop fighting, the Israelis lowered their sights and fired on their adversaries. A few meters from Khaldun's position, Hassan was cut down, having been foolish enough to get up and try to run to a heap of stones while exposed to Israeli fire. Two other boys were wounded, one in the arm and the other in the leg. Said had to crawl across the rusty metal of Yassir's roof and drop to the ground because a sniper posted on the hill in front of the camp had got him in his sights. One bullet missed his right leg by a few centimeters, the same leg that was still aching from the fall he'd taken the previous week. In the meantime, Khaldun threw all the rocks he had and waited for the tanks to complete the operation of withdrawing from the camp; then he got to his feet and began slowly walking home.

A grim silence had settled on the camp. Khaldun carefully approached the clearing that divided Kalandia from the city of Ramallah, and he was surprised to see the column of armored vehicles once again ascending the dirt road. In that instant, he realized that the Israelis had set a trap for him and his comrades. Signaling to the other boys, who were still huddled on the ground, he started running toward the shacks.

First he heard the roar of a jeep engine, and then he saw the jeep itself come out from behind the peeling wall that marked the boundary of the camp. He cursed his own foolishness, which had brought him to his present position: exposed, with his line of retreat uncovered and a hundred meters between him and the first shack—an easy target for the Israelis' bullets. He zigzagged as he ran, trying to avoid the piles of garbage, and did not turn around at the sound of gunshots. The Israeli soldiers managed to capture at least five of the younger boys but didn't seem satisfied.

Khaldun knew what would happen to him should he fall into the soldiers' hands. Since he was a minor, they wouldn't be able to put him on trial, but in the best possible scenario they would break his hands and his wrists—if not his arms—to make it impossible for him to pick up a rock again for a long time.

A soldier in a jeep spotted him when he was no more than twenty meters from the shack and pointed his rifle in Khaldun's direction, but his vehicle hit a hole in the ground and he fired into the air. Nearing exhaustion, Khaldun dashed into the little street formed by two rows of shacks, but the jeep driver apparently had no intention of letting him go. Khaldun was out of breath. It had been hours since his last drink of water, and the heat had become unbearable. He slowed from a run to a lunging walk. All of a sudden, an arm seized him and hauled him in. Too weary to offer resistance, Khaldun found himself inside a shack. It took his eyes several seconds to adjust to the darkness of the small room, which was only a few square meters and had no window. There was a mattress in one corner and a washtub stood in the middle of the floor; some laundry hung to dry on a cord that crossed the room diagonally. The only chair was propped against the wall. A woman stood before him, not much taller than he and dressed in traditional robes that must once have been blue but were now faded and threadbare. She could have been forty or sixty.

“Take off your clothes and get in the tub,” she said decisively. Her eyes, accustomed to the darkness in the shed, were two slits. Khaldun did not understand what was happening but obeyed, guided by instinct. He felt he could trust the woman, and anyway he had nothing to lose.

When the Israeli soldiers entered the hovel, they found only a mother giving her little boy a bath.

Meanwhile, hands in his pockets, Said walked along, whistling in the direction of the battlefield where everything was over by now. He wanted to ask Khaldun to teach him how to use a slingshot. Suddenly, he became aware of the approaching jeep and heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire. He turned and ran, limping toward home. After a while, he stopped and, flattening himself against a mud-brick wall, cautiously stuck out his head. Everything seemed calm, but as soon as he drew back, he heard the jeep again, followed by a rumble he recognized as the sound of an advancing tank. He peered out to see an enormous tank headed straight for the place where he'd been hiding.

 

By the time Miral reached the top of the hill overlooking Kalandia, dense clouds of smoke and dust were rising from the refugee camp and drifting on the wind.

The previous days' rains had made a host of yellow flowers bloom, forming a strip that ran along the crest of the hill and then down one side, among the rubble and wrecked automobiles scattered on the slope. Miral hurried along that flowery trail, a sad path that seemed to be created just for her, especially since she was named after a flower—yellow on the outside and red at its heart—that blooms in the desert after the rain. Its fragrance is sweet and delicate but intensifies with the heat of the sun.

When she finally reached the open space where classes were held, she saw no one at all. Directing her steps to the center of the refugee camp, she soon made out a large gathering of people standing in front of a pile of rubble and twisted metal. As she got closer, she recognized Said and Khaldun, who were busy rummaging around in the debris, which, Miral now realized, was what remained of Yassir's house. Khaldun saw her coming and went to meet her. His eyes were more alert than usual, as if lit from within by strong emotion.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Big fight this morning: one dead, ten wounded, and six arrested. They almost got me, too,” he replied, pointing to the cartridge cases strewn about.

“What about Yassir?” Miral asked, as she watched the crowd digging among the remains of his shack.

“Unfortunately, this time he was buried under his roof for real. Just think, it was only yesterday that we finished rebuilding his wall. Said feels guilty about it—he often used Yassir's roof as an observation post, and he thinks that's why they knocked the house down. Maybe he's right, maybe not. But what difference does it make now?”

Staring at Khaldun as he lit a cigarette, Miral wondered how he could be such a fatalist, but then she considered the probability that embracing fatalism was the only way to survive when death and suffering formed such a constant part of everyday life.

“Why don't you accept the scholarship to study in Damascus? I know I've been asking you that question for some time now, but you should give some thought to accepting. It could be an alternative for you.” Miral spoke to him firmly, sure that she was right; she had no doubt that they would all have happier lives if they lived anywhere other than the refugee camp. “Yesterday I talked to a girl from Dar El-Tifel who studied in Damascus for a year,” Miral went on. “She said it's a very beautiful city. And after you complete your studies, there will be a lot you can do. You could come back here and teach.” She felt certain that this was Khaldun's weak spot: his desire to feel useful.

“No, Miral,” he said. “The alternatives are for you. My place is here, in the midst of my people. I'd wind up putting on a tie every morning, and slowly but surely, day after day, I'd forget about the refugee camps. I'd even forget they existed. I don't want that to happen, and, besides, I'd rather stay here and throw rocks.”

“Stupid jackass,” Miral said, under her breath. Khaldun was very hardheaded and had his own implacable logic. She played the only card she had left. “I fight my battles, too. I go to demonstrations in Jerusalem or Ramallah. But that's no reason for me to give even a moment's thought to dropping out of school. Khaldun, we were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we mustn't give up on trying to make a life here. A people that can't see a future for themselves or their children have already lost.”