Murder Under the Fig Tree Read online

  She started making a mental list of every Hebrew verb she knew and conjugating them. Hayah. He was. He hayta. She was. Hem hayu, they were. Hu yihyeh, he will be. He tihyeh. She will be.

  She did “like,” “go,” “come,” and “bring.” Suddenly she couldn’t remember any more verbs. What were the first verbs you taught a child in Arabic? What were Khaled’s first words? She could not remember. She pushed the thought away before it could take root and drag her down. She was getting up a rhythm. She needed to keep on. Visit, that was a good one. Zar, bizur. What was the Hebrew? She had heard it a million times. She could not bring back the word. She needed a dictionary or a textbook. Maybe she could convince Tali to bring her a Hebrew textbook.

  She found the last pair of socks, the red one. She separated them and counted to twenty, just to prolong the experience. Then, she hoisted herself up and tied one red sock next to the black one. Black, red, white. It was almost right. But what to do about the green? She looked through the small bag again. No green shirt, no sock, no scarf. She didn’t like to wear green; it clashed with her skin tones. She picked through her few toiletries—the toothpaste, no green there, not that it would help. She scanned the cell, poked under the mattress even, to no avail. Her eye caught a flash of green, and, for a second, she thought she had hallucinated it. No, there it was, hanging from the back of the sink, the pair of yellow and green underpants she had been wearing when she was taken.

  “That’s no use,” she said aloud. She wasn’t going to hang her underwear on the bars of the cell, even to make a point. Though if she did—she smiled. When she was going to college in Jerusalem and living at home in Aida Camp, she and her friends came up with a trick for getting through the checkpoint easily. They would put sanitary pads on top of whatever else they were carrying. As soon as the soldiers opened the bag, they would shoo them through. In that way, she had smuggled dozens of letters home from wanted men and volumes of banned publications to keep the Intifada spirit strong. Making a Palestinian flag out of her underwear might keep it flying for a while.

  She took the panties from their makeshift hook and folded them so that only the green part was showing. But how to keep the fold from coming undone after she hung it up? She rummaged through the tote bag again. She could probably find every object in it in the dark by now. There—the little string of hair ties that Bassam had thought to send. Useful for so many possible purposes. She stretched one between her two thumbs and drew them apart next to her ear. It would make a perfect mini-slingshot, if only she had a stone to throw.

  She looped the little band tightly around the oblong of fabric. It was harder to hang than the socks had been, because the fabric was less stretchy, but she managed to nestle it between the black and the red. She pushed the four bits of fabric as close together as they could go and then sat on her bed to appreciate her work. It really did look like a little, misshapen Palestinian flag. Her body felt so light, she imagined she could fly. Fly through the bars and out through these gray catacombs, over the coils and coils of razor wire, to her husband’s family compound, where her mother-in-law would be just piling chunks of succulent lamb onto a pyramid of spiced rice. She saw the old woman’s veiny hands pouring the thin, white soup into a bone china bowl without spilling a drop. Can I have been here so long that I even miss my mother-in-law? she thought.

  For a minute, she could almost smell the delicate seasoning of the meat. Her mouth watered.

  “At re’eva?”

  She woke with a start. She couldn’t believe she was still here. The dream-reverie had seemed so real; she was sure she was free.

  “What?” she asked. She was in no mood to speak Hebrew.

  “Are you hungry?” Tali repeated in Hebrew. The tray she offered was laden with dull, brown soup, half a cucumber, and a slice of dingy bread. Tears sprang from Rania’s eyes at the contrast between what she had conjured for herself and what was available. Then she remembered her Hebrew project.

  “Lo, ani lo re’eva.” Rania carefully enunciated the foreign words. She got up and walked the seven paces to the locked door of her cell.

  “At lo rotzah ochel?” You don’t want food? Tali acted like she was going to put the tray back on the cart. Rania reached out for it, her hands through the bars.

  “Ani rotzah. Achshav, ani lo re’evah, aval ani ehyeh…” Now I’m not hungry, but I will be… she could not remember the word for later. “Ba’adeen,” she said, substituting the Arabic.

  “Lo hevanti,” I don’t understand, Tali said. She passed the tray under the bars.

  “Later,” Rania said in English. “What is it in Hebrew?”

  “Achar kach,” Tali said. It was the first time the woman ever smiled at her. But now Rania was tired of speaking Hebrew.

  “Perhaps,” she said in English, “you could bring me a Hebrew book? So I can study?”

  “I don’t know,” Tali replied in English. “You are not supposed to have anything. No books, no paper. Because you are political.”

  “Who told you I am political? That is not why I am here.” Her mouth rebelled against that statement. She had always been involved in politics; to be Palestinian was political. But that was not what Tali meant. In this context, to be “political” meant you were involved in some kind of armed resistance against the Israelis, or they thought you were.

  “Why are you here?” Tali asked.

  “I am a policewoman. Last year, I was investigating the death of a young woman, a foreigner. The man who killed her was very high up in the army. He was not punished, and he does not want me to tell what I know.”

  “They told me you are Hamas.”

  “I am not Hamas. I am Fatah.”

  “Tali, bo’ee!” a male voice called from the end of the hall.Tali, ta’ali, Rania translated in her head, and then laughed at the pun.

  “Why do you laugh?”

  “It is just… he told you to come. Bo’ee. But in Arabic, ‘come’ is ‘ta’ali.’ So he would have said ‘Tali, ta’ali.’”

  “Oh.” Tali half-smiled. Rania thought she wasn’t sure if she was being made fun of. “I have to go.”

  Tali had not responded quickly enough, and the male guard had come to see what the holdup was. He towered over Tali, radiating impatience.

  “What is that?” he demanded, pointing at the socks dangling from the top of the bars. Rania shrugged. He touched Tali’s arm.

  “Tell her to take it down,” he said in Hebrew.

  “Take it down,” Tali said in English without enthusiasm.

  “I cannot reach it.” Rania demonstrated, stretching onto her tiptoes. Her fingers fell well short of the socks.

  “How did you put them up there?”

  “I did not.”

  The police looked thoroughly confused. Did they really expect her to admit it? Obviously, she had put them there; who else would have done it? But it seemed not to occur to them that she was capable of lying to them. They both stared at the socks as if they were magic.

  The male policeman reached up and grasped the red sock easily. Rania was sure he was going to untie it. Then, his hand moved instead to the green strip, which hung stiffer than the others.

  “Tachtonim,” he said to Tali, and snickered.

  Was he going to order Tali to take it down? She didn’t know if he was Tali’s boss or her equal. But it wouldn’t matter. He could just ask her to do it, and, of course, she would.

  “They are yours?” Tali asked Rania. Again, Rania wondered if anyone really expected her to answer. Whether they did or not, she said nothing.

  The two police spoke quietly in Hebrew for a minute.

  “You won’t take it down?” Tali Ta’ali asked in English.

  “I told you; I cannot reach it.”

  Tali translated for the male cop, and they exchanged some more rapid-fire Hebrew. Tali Ta’ali sounded irritated with her colleague. She kept glancing at Rania, and Rania thought she detected a speck of respect in her eyes. But it was probably wishful thinking.<
br />
  After a long debate, the two cops walked away. The male cop shot Rania a look that said, You’ll pay for this.

  Chapter 5

  Rania ate slowly, dipping the bread into the salty soup and making each bite last one hundred chews. Hard to do with a small piece of soggy bread. She had to concentrate, and concentrating, even on something so stupid, felt good. In between bites, she watched her flag fly in the draft from the hallway. If you had told her a month ago that she could be so happy doing nothing but watching a Palestinian flag made of socks and underwear, she would have said you needed a psychiatrist.

  She heard a buzzing in the distance, like flies dancing. She seldom heard anything, except when the guards came to count or bring food. The walls were of the thickest concrete, made to absorb the sounds of torture, she supposed. She didn’t know if there were other prisoners on this hall now. Weeks ago, the police had brought two Israeli women down in the middle of the night. She had heard a lot of screaming and cursing and thuds as they were thrown into separate cells on either side of hers. She supposed they had been fighting and put in these cells for punishment. They were gone now.

  The buzzing was louder and closer. She got up and stood to one side of the door and then the other, craning to see down the dark hallway. She saw nothing.

  Suddenly, boots thundered on cement, accompanied by men shouting. A horde of men, masks covering their faces and long rifles in their hands, raced into view. One of them shouted something in Hebrew. The thundering stopped instantly. The men—at least thirty of them—pivoted as one, training their guns into her cell. She shrank involuntarily, backing into the corner by the sink and making herself smaller than she already was. She wondered what they were looking for. Could someone have placed a bomb here? She couldn’t imagine who or why, let alone how.

  “Asirah. Bo’ee heyna,” a man’s voice exploded into the corridor. She couldn’t tell who had said, “Prisoner, come here!”

  Could he be talking to her? She obviously could not “come” anywhere because her cell door was locked. She stood still.

  A shot ran out. Shooting, here? In the narrow hallway, they would kill each other if they didn’t watch out. But that familiar smell was not gunpowder; it was tear gas. It was coming into her cell, burning her eyes; they should be more careful about where they aimed it. Another volley and she was down on the ground, retching and gasping. Any other time she had been gassed, she had had somewhere to run, the fields, into the house, but, now, the gas was filling the little cell. She couldn’t breathe.

  “Stop it!” she shouted in Arabic. They probably wouldn’t understand her. Better speak English. But the words didn’t want to come. She tried to concentrate, between desperate coughs.

  “You are going to kill me with that,” she said.

  “Come out!” the commander shouted in English. So he must be talking to her. But she still couldn’t come out. It didn’t make any sense. She wanted to say that, but she couldn’t talk. Her lungs were closing up from the gas. She raced to where she had left her clothes and grabbed the first piece to hand, a cotton blouse, and tied it over her nose and mouth. It didn’t help much, but it made a little bit of a screen between her and the gas. She inched her way to the gate.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled in the direction of the voice that had spoken. A phalanx of human tanks faced her. They wore padded body armor and helmets with gas masks under them. They looked like robots from a science fiction movie. But the guns they held were not science fiction. They were exactly like all the other guns she had faced in her life, the ones that had killed her brother when she was still in high school, in the early weeks of the First Intifada.

  “Take those down.” The robot in front raised his gun toward her flag.

  Was it possible that all this was really a reaction to some colored under-clothes hanging from a bar? She burst out laughing, despite the fact that she could barely breathe and tears were running down her face from the gas. She choked on the laughter and the gas and coughed up a mess of spittle. Too bad they were too far away for her to spit it at them. But she wouldn’t, really, anyway. She just wished she could. She swallowed it. The gas burned going down her throat.

  “I can’t take them down,” she said. She repeated her performance from earlier, showing how short she was.

  “Stand up there,” he smacked his gun on the horizontal bar where the lock was.

  “I cannot.” She lifted her foot, showing him that it wouldn’t reach.

  “You put them up there. You take them down.”

  She said nothing. She was not doing it, and that was final.

  “Open it,” he said in Hebrew to someone behind him.

  The male policeman, who had been here before with Tali Ta’ali, stepped out from behind the phalanx of armed men. He wore regular clothes with a gas mask pushed up onto his head. The gas had started to settle. Her bed-clothes were probably drenched with it. She would have to check before going to bed.

  The policeman rattled his keys finding the right one. He opened the gate. The commander gestured three of the men forward. They clomped into the cell. One tore the blouse from her face and threw it into the toilet. The other two lifted her up like she was a sack of potatoes. One had a hand on her breast; the other grasped each thigh so hard she would have bruises. They held her so that she could easily reach out and untie the socks and panties. She stubbornly held her arms down at her side.

  The one holding her breast pinched it hard. She kicked him in the face.

  “Ow!” He dropped her, and she fell into the other man. The third one caught her, then threw her to the ground. He knelt on her stomach so hard she thought her organs would collapse on themselves. He slapped her face over and over.

  “Whore!” She knew that Hebrew word, because she had heard it so often at the checkpoints. He raised his rifle and swung it at her head. She attempted to raise her arms to protect herself, but one of the other men stomped on her arm. She thought she heard the bone break. She screamed, then she ordered herself to stop. Her father had told her many times about his torture, how the Israeli soldiers had broken his arm, and he had refused to go to the doctor, because he feared they would put him under anesthetic to get information.

  She felt the weight lift off of her kidney, and her bladder released a spurt of water down her leg. Her whole body was wet from something: sweat, tears, snot, now urine. She clenched her teeth hard, forbidding herself to show any fear or shame. The tall soldier who had been kneeling on top of her now crouched by her left ear. He leaned down, like a lover about to whisper endearments, and said, in English, too low for anyone else to hear, “Do you want me to kill you?”

  She remained mute, counting the pockmarks in the concrete ceiling.

  He circled her small neck with his huge, gloved hands. One thumb caressed the indentation in her throat, and her breath shortened, sending waves of panic down her chest.

  “I asked you a question,” he crooned. He yanked her head up by the hair and banged it lightly on the cement. Forgive me, papa, she said silently, and shook her head a little. It was, apparently, good enough. The crouching man took his hands from her throat and stood up. The one who had stepped on her arm gave her one more kick for good measure, then reached up and easily untied the four little pieces of clothing making the flag. He put the three socks in his pocket, but the panties he turned inside out and tossed onto her face. So much for her idea that they would not be willing to touch them.

  Chapter 6

  Rania’s husband, Bassam, worked at the Palestinian Ministry of Interior. Chloe located the number in Tina’s PASSIA directory, a book listing every important governmental and nongovernmental office in Palestine. As she dialed, she realized she did not know Bassam’s last name. Rania used her father’s name, Bakara. She had introduced Bassam only as “my husband.”

  “Mumkin ahki maa Bassam, Abu Khaled,” she asked tentatively, when the operator answered.

  “Miin?” Who? The woman sounded impatient.
r />   “Ma’lesh,” never mind, Chloe said and hung up.

  Maybe the woman just didn’t understand her. She couldn’t think of another option that wouldn’t involve one of those endless games of Palestinian telephone—calling this person who called that person who knew this other person. She would just have to venture down to the ministry and look for him in person. She jotted down the address in the wealthy suburb of al-Bireh and headed to the corner. She had no idea how to get to al-Bireh, but she knew she had to get to the center of town, the Manara. All transit to outlying areas came and went from there. She flagged down an orange collective taxi, hoping it was going downtown.

  In what seemed like seconds, she was at the Manara. The circle of lions at the center intersection presided over rows and rows of falafel and sweet shops, shoe stores, jewelry stores, hair salons, outlets for fashionable, Western clothing underneath beige brick office and apartment buildings. Orange vans and yellow taxis vied with cars of all makes and ages for control of the narrow streets. The only thing they had in common was that they all honked their horns and ignored the traffic policeman attempting to establish some order.

  Chloe made her way over to a young man pressing out little logs of falafel batter into a vat of bubbling oil.

  “Can you tell me how to get to this address?” She showed him the paper where she had written the address of the ministry. Hopefully he could read English.

  “You must take a taxi,” he said doubtfully. “Do not pay more than six shekels.”

  The driver tried to charge her twenty. She handed him eight, figuring the extra two were good for a foreigner’s tax, and climbed out before he could object. She heard him making some nasty remarks about her mother as he screeched off.