Authors: Edeet Ravel
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, I don’t know for sure, but I’ve never seen people behaving that way without drugs. Laughing hysterically, hugging each other, I’d guess it’s E. Just once or twice, I got that impression. The worst things I’ve seen, I’ve seen at checkpoints. Well, I don’t have to tell you, you see it every day.”
“There’s always some new craziness.”
“How come you were up all night?”
“Someone had a problem …” she said vaguely.
“Will you write about it?”
“Maybe.”
“What’s Daniel’s life like? Does he speak Arabic?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Yes, you said he was a teacher. He’d have to anyhow, to get by. It’s so hard to imagine, though … is he happy?”
“I don’t know, Dana. How can I know something like that?”
“What does he look like? Is he very different?”
“You’ll see for yourself.”
“But he teaches kids.”
“Everyone’s used to him in the community. He’s well liked.”
“I can’t picture him as a teacher. He’s so goofy. How often do you see him? How often do you talk to him?”
“I go over once a month,” she said and there was something
in the way she said it that gave me a jolt. I wondered if what I’d heard in her voice was the memory of sex. She must have sensed my suspicion, because she added a little too quickly, as if to cover her tracks, “I bring him his check and things he wants from the city—books, music.”
But I refused to be distracted. “Do you fuck?” I asked, and my callousness surprised me. I’d never spoken to anyone that way.
Her phone rang, and when the conversation was over, we both pretended I hadn’t asked her the question, or that she hadn’t heard me. “We’re here,” she said, slowing down.
We had reached Selah, the checkpoint at the northern end of the Coastal Strip. The only other vehicles were carrying people to and from the settlements. We were waved through; they didn’t even ask to see my permit.
Seeing the Coastal Strip brought back a flood of memories: the beach, the smell of sea salt and falafel, Palestinian families having picnics on the sand, the bossy young men, the daring women who went into the water with their skirts hitched up. Once a man slapped his wife and all the women on the beach surrounded him with shouts and accusations, while he stood there helplessly; it was only with the greatest effort that I restrained myself from photographing them. There was hope back then, even though it turned out to be an illusion.
Then I remembered that I was going to see Daniel very soon, and my heart began pounding hard and fast.
Almost immediately after Selah, we hit another checkpoint. This one was very chaotic.
We joined a very long queue of cars, taxis, transits, and pedestrians. Young, old, male, female, children, families, students. One young woman, slender and dressed in black slacks and a pale blue blouse, was carrying an infant in her arms. The child looked unwell, and the woman, who could have been a
university student, was furious. I had never seen such seething rage. The woman wasn’t carrying anything else, only the child; not even a bottle for the child. Whatever she had, money or her ID, must have been in the pockets of her slacks. The baby was asleep, and appeared to be feverish. She made her way through the crowd, pushing ahead of the queue, and no one dared to stop her. I wondered whether her fierce desperation would get her through the checkpoint.
The line crawled forward, inch by inch. There was a small white car ahead of us, with two men inside. Finally the white car reached the barrier. The driver handed the border guard his ID but the two other men in the car didn’t have theirs. They began to explain, but the soldier wasn’t interested. He motioned to his three friends to come over. The guards dragged out the two men and took them to a wall at the side of the road. They cuffed the men’s hands behind their backs, blindfolded them, turned them toward the wall and pushed them down to the ground, because you can’t stand up when you’re blindfolded and your hands are bound, someone had once explained that to me.
It was the first time I had witnessed this sort of arrest. I had seen men in detention or being taken away in a van or being led to a shed. At times they had been handcuffed, but not blindfolded and pushed down facing a wall. Seeing these things in real life was different from seeing it in newspapers or even on television. I wanted to take a photograph of the arrest but I didn’t have my camera. It was impossible to sit there and not do anything. I ran out of Ella’s car and threw myself on one of the men, wrapped my arms around him. I felt his warm, surprised body next to mine, his head turning quizzically back, and his blindfold touched my cheek.
The soldier who ordered the three men arrested pulled me away and threw me on the ground. He crouched over me and
slapped my arm. “Are you crazy?” he shouted at me. I heard Ella’s voice saying, “Leave her alone.” But the soldier was too angry. He went on hitting my arm again and again. I had never been hit before, except in play. It was hard to believe that this was a human hand was striking me and not a metal bar; I was unfamiliar with the force of a strong body. I was surprised, too, at how hurt my feelings were. The tears that came to my eyes had more to do with insult than pain.
“Are you out of your mind?” he repeated. “What’s wrong with you? What’s the matter with you?” He was letting out all his frustration on me.
Ella was shouting at him but he ignored her. Finally one of the border guards, a short kid with an earring, came over and said something. The soldier stood up and lit a cigarette.
“You’re completely insane,” the kid with the earring told me. He used the plural form, as though I represented an entire race.
I dusted myself off and headed back toward the car.
“Hey.” The soldier who had hit me pulled me back. “You’re not going anywhere. What’s she doing with you, anyhow?” he asked Ella.
“We’re together. I have a permit for both of us.”
“Yeah. Well, she’s forfeited her permit. You can go. She’s staying.”
I looked at him with disgust. His small brown eyes emitted a dull, steady glow of stupidity. Stupidity was overall his most outstanding characteristic. I remembered a female soldier I had seen once at a new checkpoint that had been set up in a Palestinian neighborhood outside the capital. She was quite young, maybe even a teenager. She had round yellow-green eyes and her face was expressionless as she checked the IDs of pedestrians and let them through. Then three women wrapped up in black and white
hijab
came up to her, and for some unknown reason her face came to life. I don’t know why; I
don’t know what it was about these women, two of them young and pretty, one much older, that roused her from her apathy. “Where are you going?” she asked, and her eyes widened and bulged out, so that the whites showed above and below her yellow-green irises. It was a look that challenged them to prove they deserved to stay alive, while asserting at the same time that they did not. I almost laughed, because I remembered the tactic from high school: there were one or two girls who always tried to make you feel small and inconsequential, and they had perfected that bulge. They had no idea how stupid their faces became when they looked at someone that way: like mechanical toys with defective wiring. And now here was this soldier with her uniform and slanted cap and weapon, trying out that look on these three women. The women didn’t seem to notice. “We’re going to school, to teach,” they said calmly. They were impervious to her contempt; she could keep them from getting through, but she couldn’t penetrate their equanimity. Their emotional lives were entirely inaccessible to her, and that was their saving grace. Defeated, the soldier had handed back their IDs and let them pass.
“I have to get through,” I said. “Someone’s expecting me.”
That only made it worse, of course. “In your dreams,” the soldier said.
“This is completely arbitrary!” Ella stormed at him.
He didn’t bother answering her.
She drove her car to the side of the road and made a few phone calls, waited, negotiated, made more phone calls, but nothing helped, and in the end I persuaded her to continue without me. She had an important meeting to get to; people were counting on her.
“Go sit next to your friends,” the soldier ordered. “Not too close, though. And no talking.”
“I’m older than you,” I said.
“Go.”
I sat next to the blindfolded men and leaned my back against the wall. I turned my head to them and said, “I’m sorry.” Then I repeated it in English.
“You are the brave,” the one next to me answered in English.
There was nothing more to say. I watched as cars and people arrived at the barrier and were either let through without a search, or searched and turned away, or searched and let through. Some of those who were not permitted to pass pleaded and argued, but they didn’t have a chance with the stupid soldier. I wanted to kick him in the balls.
I sat there for two hours. I tried calling Rafi on my mobile phone, but he didn’t answer, so I left a message telling him I was under arrest. My back began to hurt and I was dying of thirst; I’d finished my small bottle of water. I could tell the men next to me were thirsty too and I asked the kid with the earring to give them water. He came over with a plastic bottle and brought it to their mouths as if they were handicapped and he was their nurse. I got up and stretched, then sat down again. The blindfolded men were much more patient than I was; they seemed almost to be in a meditative state. I wondered whether they were in fact praying, or whether they were just very patient. I’d often noticed how patient Palestinians were in general. They didn’t get antsy the way we did.
Finally a police car arrived. I said good-bye to the two blindfolded men. “God send you good luck,” one of them said.
An officer ushered me into the backseat of the car and drove me to one of the settlements, a closed-off suburban haven in the midst of hell. It was my first time in a settlement and I was terrified of being killed.
The police station was white and new and oddly silent. “This station looks like a sugar cube some giant dropped on the
lawn,” I told the officer. I could tell he liked the image, but he pretended he hadn’t heard me.
The inside of the building was as neat and sterile as the outside. The police officer sat on one side of a desk and I sat facing him. It was a game, a ridiculous game with assigned roles, and I wondered how we hadn’t all tired of playing it. I wondered how it was that we weren’t bored to death. Well, I was bored. I had finally reached the point where I was bored to death.
“What were you doing here?” the police officer asked me. He was bald and he looked a bit like a toad. He had mild toad eyes and a squat amphibian body. If I kissed him he would turn into a handsome prince.
“I’m a terrorist, can’t you tell?”
“Let’s start over. What are you doing here?”
“I’m visiting my husband.”
“Is this another joke? Don’t push me, I’m not in a good mood.”
“It’s not a joke. I apologize, I’m just frustrated. I’m here to see my husband.”
“Your husband, where?”
“My husband lives in Qal’at al-Maraya.”
“You’re married to an Arab?”
“No. He was wounded in the army and he went into hiding. I just found out. So I’ve come to see him.”
“In the army! I can’t make heads or tails of your story.”
“Well, that’s the story.”
“What’s he doing in a Palestinian city? Did he have a …you know …breakdown or something?”
“Yes. He lost his mind, so he went to live in Qal’at al-Maraya, and now I want to see him.”
“You’re better off without him! How come I never heard about this? An insane former soldier living in a Palestinian town!”
“I don’t know. Check your computer. He’s there.”
“What were you doing trying to free a prisoner?”
“I wasn’t trying to free him. Obviously! How could I? I just wanted to …I just couldn’t bear to watch it.”
“Next time stay at home. This isn’t a place for the softhearted. Do you think we’re here to play Ping-Pong?”
“Aren’t you bored? Aren’t you sick and tired of all this?”
“Of course I’m sick and tired of it! You think you have a monopoly on that? You think only the left knows what’s going on? If you think that, you have even less brains than I gave you credit for.”
“This is Palestine. This isn’t our land.”
“You can say that about the whole country. All right, you can go. I’ll get someone to drive you.”
“Yes, yes, you
can
say it about the whole country. We don’t even deserve the part we have. You can write that in my file.”
“Believe it or not, Miss Hillman, this interview has come to an end. Someone will drive you to Selah. You can wait outside.”
“A settler?”
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t want to get into a car with a settler. I want to live a few more years.”
“The car is bulletproof.”
“Just take me to the gate, I’ll take a Palestinian transit. Or I’ll walk.”
“You don’t have a choice. A car is going to take you to Selah. Once you cross over, you can take whatever means of transportation you want. We don’t ever want to see you here again.”
“You can’t keep me out.”
“Yes we can.”
He told me to wait, and returned a few minutes later with a driver. The driver looked like an ordinary person, someone I might have seen on any city street. But we were enemies: he
hated me for supporting the Palestinians and I hated him for living in a settlement. I climbed into the back of his luxurious, air-conditioned limousine; it was the most expensive car I’d ever been in. He drove me to Selah, which was in fact only minutes away from the settlement. Neither of us said anything, not even good-bye; we were both too angry.
Standing before me at Selah was a magnificent man. He had a close white and charcoal beard and small metal-rimmed glasses, very slightly tinted. He wasn’t wearing the uniform of a border guard, and he wasn’t a soldier; he appeared to be another sort of guard, sent here perhaps to fill in for someone. His navy bulletproof vest lay against his body like a baby carrier. He had broad shoulders and he stood with his hands in his pockets, looking relaxed, casual, and modest; he could have been a crossing guard at a school. His body and his thin mouth suggested a gentle soul, kind and good. He was almost certainly an immigrant, and this was probably the only job he could find in these hard times.