The Dust Will Never Settle (4 page)

Had it not been for the air-conditioning, the seven-hour drive to Vavuniya would have been intolerable. The dust and the pot-holed road added to her misery. But Mark seemed to be handling the heat and dust well. Ten minutes into the drive, he was sprawled against the car door, snoring gently. Ever so often, Ruby saw him smile. He was obviously having pleasant dreams.

Oh well… at least someone is.
A mirthless smile creased her face. He looked good, if a trifle uncomfortable, his head knocking against the window every time they hit a bump.
Pity he is gay! All the good ones are… either gay or married.
Ruby sighed; she could do with some comforting. It had been a while since she had been held… not since Chance had gone. Wondering where he was right now, Ruby felt a tug at her heart. She missed him.

For a moment she thought about the differences between Chance and Mark. Physically they had a lot in common – both were tall, well-built and fair, with similar close-cropped hair. But that was where the similarities ended. Chance was sensitive, caring and had a great sense of humour. Mark, on the other hand, was not cerebral and liked to plunge into action without a second thought. Well, that was what she needed right now. Someone who would simply follow orders.

Ruby couldn’t sleep; she felt restless, pumped with oxygen. She sat on the edge of her seat, watching the countryside fly past. Barring small green patches of cultivation, she saw only bleak, brown land. As they moved further north from Colombo, the stretches of green grew scarce and the presence of soldiers and army camps increased, grim reminders to the recently-ended insurgency.

The driver stepped on the gas, going as fast as the road allowed. Ruby was finally about to try and catch some shut-eye when they hit another checkpoint. A long line of vehicles waited ahead. The soldiers were searching each vehicle thoroughly.

Ruby sat back, exasperated, watching the vehicles inch forward. Her mind wandered back to Palestine, to a similar checkpoint.

‘That day the line at the Huwwara checkpoint was long.’ Rehana’s oft-told story echoed in Ruby’s memory. Her voice was clear, as though it was Rehana, and not Mark, sitting beside her in the car.

The Israel Defence Forces checkpoint at Huwwara, one of the main inner checkpoints of the West Bank, lay deep within Palestinian territory, just south of Nablus, at the junction of Routes 57 and 557. It was located between the settlements of Bracha and Itamar, dividing Nablus from the satellite communities that depended on it.

‘About six thousand people pass through Huwwara every day,’ Rehana’s narration echoed in Ruby’s mind, ‘to work, to the hospital, to visit relatives or to do their shopping.’

Like all such checkpoints, passing through Huwwara involved a meticulous process. It was not uncommon for it to take up to two hours to get through. And the rules were never predictable, adding to the confusion and delay.

Men lined up in a closed waiting area, while women and children went through a separate pathway. The area for men was an open shed with a corrugated roof. Waist-high walls demarcated the aisles. The roof trapped the sweltering heat.

‘
Wuakef
(stop)!
Jubil aweah
(show me your identification papers)!’ the soldiers shouted as each person was processed.

‘One by one, the men trudged up to the barred window and handed over their papers. They lifted their shirts and rolled up their trouser legs to confirm that no weapons or bombs were concealed there. The women and children were also frisked thoroughly. Rows of scanners would be at work constantly.

‘The procedure for cars was more tedious, with all passengers having to get out while a search was carried out using undercarriage mirrors, detectors and sniffer dogs.’

Bilal, Rehana’s brother, thumped the steering wheel, looking worriedly at his mother Salima lying in the back seat. Half an hour had passed and only two cars had been cleared, with three more still ahead of them. Bilal, the eldest and usually the calmest of the three siblings, was getting jumpy; perhaps his diabetes was acting up. It did not help that in their rush to take their mother to hospital, he had not eaten. Eventually, driven by his anxiety, he got out and went to speak to the IDF soldiers.

‘You!
Wuakef!
Stop right there!’ a soldier yelled at him, the Galil AR multi-purpose rifle in his hand coming up.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘Soldier, my mother is ill,’ Bilal replied.

‘I don’t fucking care,’ the beardless soldier yelled. ‘Get back into your car and wait your turn.
NOW!
’ His rifle pointed straight at Bilal, rock-steady, confirming his willingness to use it. ‘Don’t come any closer.’ He pointed at the security line painted on the road meant to keep the soldiers safe from suicide bombers. The neatly painted
Born to Kill
, shining whitely across the front of his helmet, and his badly accented Arabic added to the menace of the moment.

Bilal walked back to the car, cursing under his breath. Another fifteen minutes slithered by and only one more car had been cleared. A bout of coughing shook Salima and more blood sprayed out. By now the sheet covering her was splattered with red dots.

‘Mother had been terribly ill when she woke up that morning. She had started coughing blood. Her condition was so bad that your uncles Bilal and Yusuf decided to rush her to hospital at once. I too went with them.’ Rehana began to cry as she told the story to Ruby. ‘By now our mother was barely conscious. The fever had skyrocketed. I could feel her body burning.’

Sitting in the front passenger seat, Yusuf looked explosive, but also on the verge of tears.

Bilal could not take it any more. His breath was short and his hands had begun to shake as the level of glucose in his body plummeted and hypoglycaemia began to take hold. That, coupled with his mother’s increasing distress, shattered his control. He jumped out of the car again.

‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’
Born to Kill
screamed again. ‘Get back inside your car!’

‘Come on, soldier,’ Bilal yelled back. ‘Look! She is losing so much blood. Let us through.’

‘Yeah, right!’ The anger in
Born to Kill’
s voice matched his raised weapon. ‘Get back to your car and wait for your turn!’

‘Please, soldier!’ Bilal was begging.

It had no effect on the soldier. ‘Back in line.’

‘She seems to be really sick,’ a younger soldier standing beside
Born to Kill
whispered in Hebrew. He had peered inside the car during the heated exchange. ‘Why don’t we let them through first?’

‘You shut your fucking mouth, wimp,’
Born to Kill
hissed. ‘You don’t know these bastards. That is exactly what a pregnant woman said to my father. They were about to let her through when she blew herself up, taking my father and four others with her.’

The recruit, Ean Gellner, subsided. This was only his fifth week in uniform and his first day on checkpoint duty.

The other soldiers sniggered.

Their words meant nothing to Bilal since he did not understand Hebrew, but those sniggers were more than he could take. He leapt forward shaking an angry fist.

‘Stay back!’
Born to Kill’
s strident yell fell on deaf ears.

‘Stand back, you moron!’

The second warning also went unheeded.

‘Do
not
cross the line!’

Tension suddenly escalated.

To Yusuf and Rehana, watching from the car, everything happened fast and slow at the same time – too fast for them to do anything, yet slow enough to feel every nuance.

As Bilal crossed the line, the rifle in
Born to Kill’
s hands emitted a sharp flat report. A second later, another shot exploded out.

The gunshots echoed bleakly in the silence, shattered seconds later by Bilal’s howl of pain. The first bullet gutted him. He was falling when the second bullet hit him. He swayed, and then slumped to the ground. A shocked Yusuf jumped out of the car and rushed to his brother’s side.

Yusuf ’s move broke the frozen tableau. People scattered about frantically, racing to get out of the line of fire.

Born to Kill
stood still, his rifle still pointed at Bilal, a confused expression on his face.

Ean Gellner looked as though he was about to burst into tears.

‘What the hell have you done?’ a soldier yelled, dismay plastered on his face.

‘What could I do? Didn’t you see he was rushing me?’
Born to Kill
said, a sick smile on his face and fear in his eyes.

Yusuf, who was kneeling beside his dying brother, looked up and saw the smile. He let out a howl of rage and ran towards the soldier.

Rehana screamed, but Yusuf had already broken past the line.

Born to Kill
saw him rush forward. His finger was still on the trigger. The finger tightened and seconds later, half the 35-round magazine had emptied itself.

Two of the bullets slammed into Yusuf ’s right shoulder, spinning him around and dropping him to the ground. One bullet shattered the windscreen of the car and found his mother’s jaw. It decimated Salima’s face, replacing the already quivering, blood-stained lips with a gaping red hole. Three bullets found two more victims in the fleeing crowd. The others slammed harmlessly in the cars and the milling dust.

‘There was so much blood all around me… I can feel it even now.’ Rehana shuddered as she narrated the incident to Ruby. Involuntarily her hands started rubbing against her skin, as though trying to wipe the blood clean. ‘No outsider can ever understand why our youngsters are so ready to seek martyrdom. Ruby, they don’t understand that we have no choice. We either die in a blaze of glory or slowly, inch by inch, one day at a time, but we die and continue to die…’ her voice trailed away. ‘And still nothing changes.’ Rehana’s cheeks were wet with tears, her voice barely audible. ‘Nothing changes… nothing. Ruby,
we
have to change this, we
have
to do something…’

Harsh popping sounds shattered Ruby’s bloody march down memory lane. The heavy tyres of the Nissan van ground over loose gravel, and pebbles flew from under the tyres with sharp, flat reports as the driver brought the vehicle to a halt. Except for the puffs of dust swirling around, everything was still and silent.

Ruby looked around, befuddled, her mind still trapped in her mother’s violent memories. It took a moment for the red and yellow faded signboard outside to register.

‘Diya Dahara Restaurant’, it read. ‘You must try the food here,’ the driver said, turning around. ‘This place is famous.’

‘Why don’t you help us with the menu?’ Mark took the reluctant driver by his arm and led him to a table below a fan.

‘And tell them to go easy on the spices,’ Ruby added.

The driver seemed uncomfortable sharing the table with them, but that did not stop him from ordering a big meal.

The service was efficient, not surprising since there was just a handful of customers. They had just cooled off with a glass of chilled King Coconut when the waiter carted in a series of steaming dishes.

‘Did you order food for the whole restaurant?’ Ruby said and smiled as dish after dish arrived, soon covering the entire table.

‘I did not want you to go hungry,’ the driver replied, eyeing the food hungrily.

The aroma of yellow rice flavoured with spices filled the air as the waiter removed the lid from the first platter. Next, he displayed fried chicken, crab curry in coconut gravy, devilled cuttle fish, white cashew curry and coconut sambol.

Mark cast several covetous glances at the bottles of Three Coin Beer chilling in the cooler near the cash counter but made no move to order one. He knew Ruby enforced the no-drinking-on-the-job rule.

Ruby couldn’t believe it all cost just a little more than what they would have paid for a sandwich back home in London.

‘So why are we here again?’ Mark asked Ruby when the driver went back to the car. ‘I thought you said this assignment was in India.’

‘It is, but we first need to meet a man and pick up some equipment.’

‘Okay…’

‘We also need to recon our extraction route. In case we need to leave India by less… umm… conventional means.’