Olives (21 page)

I smiled. ‘No
problem, I’d value your insight.’ I kept moving and was zipping up
my bag as I passed him. ‘Have a good weekend.’

‘
Hang on a
second,’ he said.

I pulled up.
My heart stopped beating.

Zahlan headed
for his office. ‘I’ll come out with you.’

He put my
article on his desk, closed his office door and slipped on his
jacket before joining me in the corridor. I was sweating under my
coat, a nasty hot and cold feeling.

The bid
evaluation document in my bag seemed to weigh me down. Aisha took a
taxi home and I took another, relieved at not having to talk to her
just then.

We crossed
over at the Sheikh Hussein Crossing, a relatively short drive north
from Amman through the green-flecked beige expanse of rocky
hillsides. Daoud’s man Selim came with us to smooth the process of
crossing the border. The queue at the Jordanian checkpoint snaked
back from the barbed wire fences and the scattering of low
buildings and concrete barriers marking the crossing point. The
Jordanian soldiers were thorough and suspicious as they searched
the car and checked our documents, Daoud’s man Selim fussing and
fixing all the way, a greasy little character who simpered and
cowered, yet who seemed to be able to smooth our way through,
procuring letters of this and documents of that. We were finally
waved through. I found the whole process unnerving, bracing myself
for the infamous Israeli checkpoint. I was already jittery passing
though the Jordanian side, fear making me gabble nervously and
point out silly things around us. I looked across at Aisha, but she
seemed lost in her own thoughts. I noticed she was gripping the
door handle.

‘
Are you
okay?’

Her smile was
taut as she shook her head. ‘I never like this very much. Sorry. I
usually go through the Allenby crossing and it’s never good. This
one I don’t know and it makes me nervous. Selim is supposed to have
fixed the paperwork. I hope he’s done it well.’

Her face
darkened as the Israeli soldiers came up to the car and asked us to
get out. They were pleasant enough, which surprised me given the
many tales I’d heard about their aggressiveness and the routine
dehumanisation that took place at the border. They took our
passports and the car permit Aisha gave them before starting their
search of the car, a methodical and unhurried process that involved
quite a lot of electronic hardware. My mouth was dry as I willed
myself to look relaxed but I knew there were dark patches of sweat
under my armpits. A dog was brought up to the car and led around
it. It stopped a couple of times, once by the rear wheel and, in my
state of heightened perception and fear, I saw it barking and
soldiers rushing over to us. But it just sniffed the wheel and
whined, then moved on.

‘
Cat piss,’
said one of the two soldiers standing by me, in English, and the
other laughed.

I wondered if
he had spoken English for my benefit. I felt confused, my
expectations of sneering brutality confounded by their dismissive
efficiency.

We were taken
into a building where we were separated, each asked a set of
routine questions by indifferent, pretty women in uniforms. Where
are you coming from? Why are you visiting Israel? I was asked why I
decided to live in Jordan, what other Arab countries I had been to
and did I have any contacts or family in the West Bank, a barrage
of questions, each answer noted down before we were sat at opposite
ends of the room and the women swapped over and ran through their
questions again. We were finally allowed out to the car, which had
been thoroughly searched while we were being questioned, our bags
on the tarmac and the supplies Aisha had brought for Mariam neatly
laid out, each parcel sliced open and reduced to its components in
a careful, considered act of searching as destructive as any wanton
act of brutal vandalism, perhaps more so for its cold efficiency.
We gathered our things up and repacked the car, trying to stem the
tide of tea from the sliced-open packets and repack the slippery,
loose soap bars. One of the two big red, yellow and blue tins of
tuna we had been carrying had been opened and the pungent oil
slopped out into the car boot, soaking into the faded grey
carpet.

Another
soldier came out of one of the checkpoint office buildings and
walked over to us.

‘
Come with
me,’ he said to me and, to Aisha, ‘You stay here.’ She didn’t look
at me, just held his gaze, her mouth turned down and her head held
up. I followed the soldier past a service desk and into a sparse,
modern office. A uniformed man with more badges than the others sat
behind a desk: a pleasant face, slightly rounded by middle age,
hair greying at his temples. He looked European.

‘
Hello. Paul
Stokes?’ I nodded. He tapped the table with his pen. ‘Why are you
come here?’

‘
I’m living
in Amman. I thought I’d come across and see the other side of the
Jordan. I’m travelling with a friend.’

‘
Yes, I see
that.’ His accent sounded Russian. He scratched his head with the
pen. There were laughter lines around his eyes that seemed somehow
out of step with the checkpoint environment and its clinical
efficiencies, railings, concrete posts and razor wire.

‘
You know we
not get many Brit come here.’ He looked up at me, a sudden
directness which made me avert my own eyes despite myself. ‘You are
perhaps a little of the light relief for us.’

‘
Well, I’m
happy to relieve the monotony, if nothing else,’ I smiled, glad of
the touch of humour in his words and starting to find my ease, just
a tourist in a strange land.

He flicked
through my passport, a gesture for show: he must have gone through
it before he had me brought in. I thought of Lynch and a similar
gesture made back in the reception area of the British Embassy in
Amman. He reached over the desk, my passport in his hand. I took
it. He picked up Aisha’s.

‘
How well you
know the girl?’

‘
I work with
her at the Ministry of Natural Resources in Amman.’

‘
You trust
her?’

‘
Yes, I
do.’

He handed
Aisha’s passport to me, but when I went to take it he kept his
grip, leaving me leaning forwards, unbalanced over his desk. We
stayed that way for a second before I managed to find my balance
again, my hand still on the passport. ‘You like Arabs?’

His eyes held
me and I looked back at him, furiously trying to think of a
response. ‘I’ve liked the people I have met since I arrived in
Jordan.’

‘
So you think
we are bad people then, Paul Stokes? That we should be drive into
sea? You agree about this?’

I let go of
the passport as I sensed the traps lying in wait all around me,
refusing to play a tug of war with him over the document. I tried
to keep my voice mild and neutral as I responded, but I found it
hard to focus, the phrase
tug
of war
in my mind stopped me
from thinking properly. I wanted to go to the toilet.

His question
had been put in a mild, almost offhand way, but at the same time it
went directly to the heart of what many of the people I had met in
the Arab World thought. That the Israelis didn’t belong here, that
they should never have been allowed to come here.

Dealing with
it from his point of view confused me. I tried to think quickly,
not so much about my own opinions, which I had taken a great deal
of trouble to keep neutral, despite the pressure to join everyone
else and demonise the Israelis, but about what I needed to say in
response to his question.
Tug
of war
running around in my
idiot mind, I started to appreciate that, casual and offhand though
he may appear, he was very good at his job.

‘
No, I don’t.
I haven’t been around here long enough to make judgements like
that. I think a lot has happened that is regrettable, but I simply
don’t know enough to take a view.’

‘
Regrettable.
Yes, is regrettable.’ He was emphasising the word as he repeated
it, thoughtful. He moved faster than I thought possible, dropping
Aisha’s passport and balling his fist before slamming it down on
the desk. He sprang up from his chair, kicking it backwards and
leaning towards me, his finger pointing into my face.

‘
Regret? What you know of regret, Paul Stokes from
Great
Britain?’

I had jumped
at the sound of his fist on the table but now I froze, looking at
the soldier wide-eyed and lost for words. He pulled his chair back
and sat again, calmly reaching out for Aisha’s passport and
flicking slowly through the pages, the rasp of his thumb on the
paper sounding in the silence. There was a bump as someone threw a
bag on the floor in the next room. I smelled cigarette smoke from
somewhere, then heard low voices through the wall, two soldiers
talking, laughing. I waited, watching the officer as he sat at his
desk looking down at the passports in front of him, his large
shoulders slightly hunched and his hands together on the desktop.
He was breathing heavily.

He threw
Aisha’s passport across the desktop without looking up. ‘Go. Get
out.’

My heart was
pumping as I emerged into the sunshine. I must have looked like
death. One of the soldiers came up to me. ‘He gave you a hard
time.’ A flat statement.

I stammered a
reply: ‘Yes, he did actually.’

‘
Forgive him.
A Palestinian labourer stabbed his daughter, before the,’ he made
finger quotes in the air, ‘peace broke out.’

‘
Don’t you
believe in the peace?’

He laughed, a
ragged sound as he turned and walked away, flapping his hand at me
behind his back, dismissing me and my peace.

Lost in
thought, I got back to the car. Aisha, standing by the door, saw
the passports in my hand, grinned wickedly at the soldiers and spat
on the hot, dusty tarmac at their feet as I got to the driver’s
side. The big gates opened to let us through.

‘
Why the hell
did you do that?’ I snapped, tension making my voice harsher than I
intended. Aisha glared at me but the soldiers were still grinning
and one waved us through by flipping us a casual, bored
digit.

We drove away
from the checkpoint in silence, leaving Selim and Jordan behind. I
felt my anger growing, impelled by my feeling of guilt at having
barked at Aisha, my thoughts increasingly hot and hard. How Arab of
her, to spit at them when she knew we were through the checkpoint,
to indulge that little spite in a moment of small victory. Cringe
in supplication and crow in triumph.

We drove on
past the queue of trucks and cars on the other side in silent, cold
recrimination. If our kissing and trembling touches had been
passionate and intense, then our conflict was to be of the same
order of intensity. Where we had cherished, now we would hurt.
Aisha’s whole form hunched in anger as she flailed herself with my
reprimand. Clear of the border post and the checkpoint just beyond
it, I stopped the car and got out to escape the toxic atmosphere
and breathe fresh air. Aisha leapt out behind me.

‘
So I spit.
On the dust my father and brother gave their blood to.’

‘
You’re so
fucking melodramatic. They did nothing to you. All that bullshit
about the brutal Israelis, the humiliation. They just did their
jobs.’

‘
Yah, like
the Nazis did theirs.’

‘
Listen to
yourself. You can’t believe that.’ I reached to the sky for the
words, the inspiration to try and get through to her. ‘They’re just
men, soldiers, the same as the Jordanians, the same as you. They’re
scared, they’re angry because people bomb them and kill their
children. The guy in the office lost his daughter because a
Palestinian murdered her. What the fuck gives you the right to
treat them like that? They’re no different to you, don’t you
understand?’

‘
Who are you to lecture me on difference, please Paul? What
is this sudden expertise in the grief of strangers? I didn’t take
their land, I didn’t kill their children. They have killed three
members of my family and tens of thousands of my people, they bomb
us from helicopters and destroy our houses, make us crawl in the
dirt and laugh as they point their guns in our faces
on our land.
What do you want to find here, precisely? You
want to find love, Paul? Is that it? You think you deserve to see
reconciliation? You, whose nation sold my people into this slavery
in the first place? What exactly do you want to impose on us, Paul?
Your superior fucking values?’

I banged the
flat of my hand on the roof of the car, a surprisingly loud, deep
sound in the quiet of the deserted road. ‘Those soldiers were
polite, Aisha. They didn’t spit at you. Why do you want to
perpetuate the pain with everything you do? Why have you got no
feeling for their loss? You lost three members of your family, but
didn’t Hamad even up that little score for you? Didn’t he kill
children? Their children?’

She had
rounded the car towards me then, her boots covered in the pale
roadside dust, her face enraged. ‘And what about our children,
English? What about our pain? How much do we have to suffer before
it stops? Here. You love them so much, you take the same as they
do.’