Stones

Sometime two weeks ago, between Wednesday and Friday, the streets were swept clean. Where all the rubble, stones, and sand went, or who cleared them and how, I can’t imagine. Just two weeks and a half ago when the Israeli army had camped itself in and around Nablus the streets were littered with everything from middling nuggets to football sized rocks—the broken wartime toys of children thrown against the implacable side of an armored jeep. And where there were stones a fine coat of sand lay atop the asphalt as well—the leavings of impact, the dusty the crumblings of everyday aspirations. But then, like the Israeli soldiers, jeeps, and humvees, the stones disappeared much as they had appeared—suddenly, and out of nowhere. Really they had been there all along, hiding and waiting under the semblance of normality. But none of that was self-apparent at first.

I suspect that in reality the army withdrew en masse one Thursday afternoon, but in most of our minds it lingered on: disbelief obscured reality. Closed shops, hesitant residents, and rumors that secret squadrons had been left to hold key places were manifestations of this residual invasion, though it too receded in its turn. Ordinary life tumbled back into place. I went to my classes, stopped in at friends’ shops, spent the evening at a good friend’s house, and went to the sweets shop where the owner and some regulars have become accustomed to my visits. Whenever someone asked what I did during the incursion days, I told them I spent one day in the old city helping the Red Crescent Society deliver milk and bread. It was as if I had earned a badge of honor that said, "I did something useful", and I wore it with pride. It was only then that delayed news of my friends' detentions began to reach me.

Two of their stories reached me by email. Neither of them are on the Israeli army's list of 'wanted people'. One of them who was detained with his brother for several hours and then made to walk from the military outpost back into the city along with a score of other detainees described it as one of the worst experiences in his life. The other's account, Iman, a manager at one of the children's centers I work for, was posted in a previous week's entry.

The third, Samir, was only held for an hour or so. He showed up at our apartment two days after the withdrawal, bleary eyed and exhausted.

"I'm sick," he says. Samir is a paramedic and during the military operation he was already working too many hours a day in the old city without enough rest or food. One night he went back to the old city after nightfall to try to deliver supplies to an older man he had not been able to reach during the day. The army caught up with him, made him strip his rain soaked clothes, and held him in the cold for an hour. The following day the army chose to occupy his house, a common practice in Israeli incursions wherein the family is usually confined to a single room. If the soldiers are decent, they do not destroy anything in the house. Luckily for Samir the soldiers let him sleep most of the day away in an invalid's coma.

"I tried to go to the hospital today, but they are on strike.” Samir slumps in a chair and shrugs.

"Why? Because they have not been paid in weeks. There's not enough money. So they just gave me a shot.

"Yes, they keep enough people for emergencies only.

"No, I don't really know what the shot was. It's just a shot."

There had been a shortage of money even before the military operation forced half the city to close down for most of the week. My friend Hakkam works at a windows and glass cutting shop six blocks from downtown. Half the time when I drop by he and his coworkers are idling around the shop. At first I thought they simply enjoyed the slow life, but really there’s just not enough work. Everyone here asks how the work is in America, how the pay is, what their chances of getting a visa and a job are. I try to explain that seven dollars an hour sounds great, but you can hardly make a living out of it in the states. I'm not sure that they care.

"The work here is bad, Brian." We are sitting in the shop on the Sunday after the army's withdrawal. Hakkam and two others have been waiting for a single work order to come through. It's been at least an hour coming.

"This is shit, you know. Nablus is broken. Broken. No future."

Despite that life goes on inexorably. I went to my class in the children's center where Iman works near the old city. He is not there when I arrive, so I ask Kareem, one of the younger managers for news of Iman.

"Iman. He was arrested. Arrested, you know?" Kareem pantomimes being handcuffed.

"Yes, I know. But how is he? Is he ok?"

"Yes, ok. But not happy. Arrested. How do you say arrested in English?"

I tell Kareem, spell it out in red on the whiteboard.

A-R-R-E-S-T-E-D

"Brian, if I am ever arrested. I will call you and tell you where I am, so you can come get me. Ok?"

An hour later, after my class, Iman walks in, pale and sallow. I ask him how he is. Fine, fine, he says. Did I get the e-mail about his arrest? Yes, of course. Again I ask if he is ok. Yes, yes, fine. A nervous look, his face is bathed in a thin sheet of cold sweat.

“I heard you were in the old city distributing food on Sunday,” he tells me.

“Yeah, I was.”

“Why didn’t you call me? I was at al-Jalala school. We needed food for the neighborhood.”

The magnitude of even this minor oversight rushes to my head.

“I’m sorry…”

Later for lack of more appropriate things to say, I apologized again.

“It’s ok. Not a problem. Just next time, ok?”

“Yes, of course. Next time.”

“Ok. Now if you don’t mind, I have to study. I have exams in two days.”

Other than back-room grumblings, and some invective curses, the thousands of lives and jobs that had come to a halt resumed as if nothing had happened. Even the children at the local secondary school greeted me with no more than the ordinary interest or innocuous harassments. The only real problems I ever encounter on the streets are from the children in the form of taunts, mockery, or, at the worst, schoolyard style bullying. I was thus moderately surprised that they too seemed to take a week’s worth of cancelled classes, soldier infested streets, and limited freedom of movement in stride.

A few days later my friend Hakkam decided to upgrade his sputtering automobile with a second-hand CD player. I went with him to buy it from a friend of a friend of his in al-Ein refugee camp. It was a beautiful day, and as we drove through the narrow gray streets a bright blue sky pierced through the jagged edges of rooftops. Hakkam met his contact and, after some polite haggling, the man went back up to his house to fetch the CD player while we waited in the car.

“I’ve never been here before,” I say to him. Contrary to nomenclature, a refugee camp is a permanent place of residence. In fact it would be indistinguishable from the rest of the city if not for the compactness of its streets, the density of tiny buildings often built one on top of the other after space runs out, and the heavy presence of poverty. The camp was only a ten-minute walk from my apartment. I had never known.

Hakkam looks out the windows of his car.

“The army used to come here always. There are many martyrs from al-Ein. Two of them from just a few months ago. Dawoud and Yousef. Maybe you remember them?”

I do not. They had been killed two months before I ever arrived in Nablus.

“Afterwards the army would come into the camp and say on the device that makes your voice loud, ‘Where is Dawoud? Where is Yousef? Where are they now?’”

And the residents of the camp, acquaintances, friends, and family of the two killed fighters would have been able to do naught but sit inside their homes while the army patrolled the streets calling out the names of their dead.

As it turns out, one of Hakkam’s co-workers was a cousin of the al-Ein martyr, Dawoud. He smiled proudly and, standing beside his fallen cousin’s martyr poster, asked if I thought they looked alike at all. I cautiously admitted there was a family resemblance.

In Palestine there is a habit of glorifying what has passed to escape or lament the conditions of the present. People talk of the days before the Second Intifada, before the checkpoints stifled Nablus’ economy, before regular army incursions, and their eyes mist over with the golden light of remembrances; as to how true collective memory is to actual history, I can only guess it’s a mixed basket. The truth is perhaps less important than the ways in which memory chooses to remember.

Martyrs are immediately and unquestionably heroes. It doesn’t matter how they died, what they were doing, who they were, all that matters is that the Occupation killed them. Just like the much-mourned pre-Intifada epoch, they are painted in the most positive light as a way of coping with the emptiness left in place of what once was.

But not everyone copes so well.

There is a boy named ‘Alaa who lives close to one of my best friends, who goes to school near my organization’s office, and who seems to hate me with a vengeance. I met him, without realizing it would be a protracted relationship, three or four weeks ago. I remember something in the air that day unsettled the children. Even in the early afternoon children in the streets were restless. On my way to a class, I saw three of them throwing floor tiles at each other. Two eventually ganged up on the other and forced him to run past me. The children quieted as I approached, but one of them ran up from behind and throw a tile at my feet; it exploded into a hundred ceramic shards, skittering on the asphalt. I did the same thing I always try to do in so many similar situations where I am the outsider being tested or toyed with: maintain the appearance of calm.

“What’s with this boy?” I ask the other children. They watch me silently. One or two talk to me out of curiosity and follow me down the street. As I leave the neighborhood someone pushes me from behind. I turned around to see who it was: the same boy who threw the tile, now laughing and running away fast. I yell at him to come back. It only bothers me that he pushes me and then runs away. If he just wanted to fight I would understand. Instead I am being baited, being provoked to anger, and I know it.

That same night I visited my good friend, Ashraf. Somehow all the children of the neighborhood knew that a foreigner was around and a crowd of fifteen or so trailed after me as I went up the stairs to the main road. Some of the older youths, sixteen or eighteen years old, working construction in the nearby buildings, tried to shoo the children away from me as I walked past. Their efforts earned me a reprieve of thirty seconds or so.

Later I would wonder what I did particularly wrong this one time of all the times I heave dealt with edgy children on the streets. Maybe it was when one of them, a gangling boy with pale skin and light brown hair, grabbed me insistently.

“You! You are a donkey!” he cries in Arabic.

I reply “No, you are a donkey!”. His face turns dark and I immediately try to say it had only been a joke, but it is too late.

Maybe that was the mistake that snowballed into a mob of angry children. Or maybe it was later when that pale-faced boy first shoved me from behind and ran away laughing, eerily imitating the other boy who had pushed me that afternoon.

“Hey, come back here!

“Come!” I say in Arabic. I take a few slow steps towards his manically grinning face.

The crowd of children, over a dozen of them ranging from six to twelve, echo my Arabic. “Come! Come! Come!” They laugh hysterically. Someone else pushes me from behind. I turn around and walk towards him. Then another and another. They’re not interested in hurting me physically, perhaps they’re not cruel enough to want to, they just want someone to push around.

When the cab comes I gratefully step in, though some of the children continue running up from behind and pushing me. Two of them, including the first boy with pale skin and brown hair, spit in my face before I close the door. The taxicab driver yells at them, gets out and chases after them.

“Whose are these animals?!” he shouts to the nearby shopkeeper, a young man who silently stood by during my entire ordeal. I’m not sure which bothered me more, the children’s behavior or the reticence of adults when I am in trouble in a city from which I have come to expect so much hospitality.

I spent a good hour back home thinking about the event. The most unsettling thing was that I genuinely felt angry towards the children, and I honestly worried that if I let that sort of anger sit, the next child to smart mouth me would get a kick in the face. … I have a temper sometimes. After that I would be at the mercy of the neighborhood, both children and adults, and in street terms, after hitting a child, as a foreigner and a guest, I would deserve whatever justice the neighborhood metes out.

I saw that same lanky brown haired boy twice in the following two weeks. Once he spit at me in front of his school as I went by, then threw a few stones towards me as I walked away; they knocked about at my feet. Another time he followed me half a block, screaming the entire way. I did my best to ignore him, hoping not to incite the anger of his fellow schoolchildren who were, for the most part, more curious than angry about my presence.

I wonder if there’s anything I could have done to avoid this single child’s enmity, if there’s anything I did in particular to deserve it, or if fate had written it for me the instant I stepped into that neighborhood three or four weeks ago. The street where I had been awaiting my taxicab was famous during the First Intifada. The Israeli army was always there, and a large number of Nablus’ martyrs in the first Intifada were from that neighborhood. Children invariably saw soldiers breaking into their homes, arresting their brothers or fathers, and terrorizing their friends. And if there were indeed a large number of martyrs, then some of the children must be absent a brother, uncle, or father.

As an American, I feel responsible for the part that my government plays in funding the Israeli state and army while they commit such abuses. It is hard to hate a child who hates you only because of the things done unto him, especially when those things are perpetrated by your own government. Really, in my eyes, I have much in the way of debt to pay to the Palestinian people, as well as to so many other people of the world who are in as dire or much worse circumstances because of injustice, apathy, or ignorance in the way nations treat with others. From there everything unfolds in a deadly bloom of consequences.

The next time I went to visit my friend, the children saw me the minute I stepped out of the cab. I had gone over to talk to a young shopkeeper who invited me in. As I stood there explaining who I was, where I am from, what I do in Nablus, a familiar voice screamed up at me from the street level.

“Enough, ‘alaa! Get out of here,” the shopkeeper shoos away the brown haired boy who has plagued me for weeks and whose name, I have just learned, is ‘alaa. He is not deterred; instead he waits for me across the street by the stairs to my friend’s house.

After saying goodbye to the shopkeeper, I cross the street. ‘alaa says nothing, grins widely at me. I greet him reservedly, “Salaamu ‘alaikum”.

As I descend the stairs I feel the light touch of stones at my back. Thrown fro above by a child’s hands, they fall harmlessly against my coat, then precede me clattering down the stairs. I briefly wonder how it is that the children always have stones in plenty. The answer that comes to me is both simple and complex: the stones have been given to them, placed in their dirty little hands by an impenetrable storm of events and circumstances, economic, political, cultural, religious, historical and otherwise.

A few days later I am back at the children’s center, teaching a room of twenty attentive, obedient, though somewhat noisy kids. Kareem occasionally interrupts me to tell the children that talking without raising their hand is unacceptable. Afterwards I play chess and ping-pong with some of the children and Kareem. Iman comes in. I go over to greet him, clap in on the shoulder, ask how he is today.

“Fine, fine, thank you,” he says, smiling weakly.

He walks over to his desk, and I follow behind him awkwardly making conversation, sitting down beside him hoping to make amends for not having called him during the Israeli invasion to see if he needed my help.

“Hey, Iman!” Kareem shouts across the room.

“Hey, Iman, when I am arrested, Brian will come to save me. Isn’t that right, Brian? I will call you and tell you the place. Isn’t that right?”

Kareem and Iman both turn to me.

In my mind, before I answer them, I swallow a big ball of saliva that’s trapped in the back of my throat.

“Yes. Of course. I will try. Just call me and I will try.”

Kareem grins and gestures to Iman as if to say, ‘See? I told you so.’

Iman looks back at his work. He second later he turns to me. “Brian?”

“Yes?”

“Is it ok if I call you also?”

I say, “Of course.”

There is much to be answered for in Palestine, but so little that can actually be done. I think Iman and Kareem both know there is almost nothing I could do for them if the Israeli army decides to detain or arrest them. Maybe it was just that a part of them welcomed the little white lies that we bring upon ourselves in order to continue believing what we do: that somewhere, somehow, something can be done.