Zeinab hitched the sack that had the batta, the young calf up her shoulder, crossed the road ducking under the bridge so as to escape the watchtower. The bridge was crammed with military vehicles, like a smattering of ants scurrying to get a fat scrap of food. All the mighty UNRWA soldiers had trooped in like battle horses after the last bombing. Ready to pound anyone in Dheisheh — men, women, children, anyone. Slapping the burden of grief and loss on the living. Turning them into walking corpses.
Thank God. Salah and she had no kids to carry on the victimhood.
This year had proved to be such a tough year. Except for this piece of gift which she would be parting with, soon.
Zeinab ran her hand along the sack to feel the young one’s rope-like muscles, pressed her cheek to its still-warm belly.
“Hold on, you will be safe soon.” She whispered softly.
Salah had brought the calf into their quarters the day of her birth. “A poor doer.” Before he explained more, Zeinab had wrapped his shaking body — all of cellophane skin and pebble-sized bones in one of her keffiyeh, put him beside their bed. In the morning, when Salah went to the farm, she had carried him for his day’s first feed and then successive feeds, brought him back to their tent.
The farm — with all 16 cows — was bought from the kibbutz so that the Dheisheh refugees could have a life. In no time, the men and women self-appointed to oversee the duties. With fingers that had cut only stone, Salah had learnt to clutch-pull those fat, slippery udders, filling the urns with frothy yellow-white milk.
The ashy sky above formed a smoky cover above her head. Being outdoors brought her such relief. Especially the colours of nature: the oily-green of the cactus and thyme and the bushy white of the barley plants, the grey bark of the olive.
All day long Zeinab gazed at a white wall while working in the Israeli yarn factory.
Usually, the sun stalked her on her way back to Dheisheh, that bruised yellow ball reminding her of the wet wound on Salah’s spine.
Dheisheh was a dead hole — the air thickened with shocked last breaths and helpless sighs.
It had only been two weeks since Amal’s son Hamad and Khadra’s dad were taken. The army raid that day had sent all of them behind locked doors. “The names — we want the names.” They had ordered. One by one they had all shouted at the shabby door.
“Wahid-wahid.”
They slowed, went one by one.
“Amal, Zei…”
“Men.”
Issa; Jawabreh; Fayaz; Salem; Hamad.
They pulled Hamad and Jawabreh out. The rest of the day, they waited at Dheisheh, for the rush of the slippers, the tired, beaten retreats. But that was it. Really, that was it.
They didn’t hear about the thirteen year and fifty-six year olds after that.
Death rattled through each of the Dheisheh residents in a peculiar way. They were already a bunch of losers: farmers expelled of dunums of their lands; unemployed labourers stripped of their permits to travel, families separated across borders, barriers, blocks and walls that were put up by the military each day.
But they carried on. Carried on silently. Every evening Fatma, Khadra and Amal set up the open kitchen in the terrace to roll out discs of manaeesh and taboon. Washed and hung out their laundry along the cracked Dhisheh walls. Searched for their destinies in the cups of helena and kharroub they sipped to keep their woes at bay. They could do anything to breathe the air in Jerusalem: curdle their blood, turn their tears into saliva, swallow them with food.
And the leftovers clung together closer and closer, trying to make a life. The week after the take-down, when Salah took the live ammunition, they regrouped, carried him to Gilo. First on foot, then finding a taxi, paying 45 shekels for one way.
When they returned the farm site had been a tangle of flesh and rubble.
Mount of Olives was a steep climb. Zeinab hadn’t come this far in a long time and she was exhausted already. She was nearing the valley when she noticed the "fence". A jeep was parked in the middle of the field.
“Halt.”
Zeinab heard the order. Hurriedly she shoved the sack on the other side of the fence that had a crowd of olive trees, their sun-kissed tops golden, the colour of kunafa.
“Salama, young chap. Go on where life takes you.” She whispered and pushed it as far as she could, into the grove.
Then before the soldiers neared her, she kneeled on the ground.
They hovered around, abusing her, her religion, chuckling aloud as if it was a joke. She kept her eyes closed, held her body tight. No, there wasn’t an iota of fear in her.
A blast of hot smoke burned her eyelids and the smell of raw tobacco made her eyes water. The first hit landed harshly on her feet. She felt the cold iron of the rifle butt, its solid weight. The soldier asked her why she was here at the early hours of the day, if she was plotting to harm the settlers. He lifted her face to blow a fresh gust of smoke into her mouth that choked her.
“I didn’t do anything.”
Zeinab spoke in between bouts of coughing. The rifle butt continued to pound her.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
She basked in the privilege, the entitlement that bloomed afresh like a flower that created a resonance in her body. It took the pain away from her.
From across the plains, a muezzin's morning call to prayer rose. The Adhan kissed the scud of clouds floating above them, the devastated building tops, then dived down, to reach her. And him.