The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier

http://palestinechronicle.com/article.php?story=20020614150332461

"What source can you believe in order to create peace there?" a friend
writes when I come back from Palestine. I have no answer, only this
story:

June 1, 2002: I am in Balata refugee camp in occupied Palestine, where
the Israeli Defense Forces have rounded up four thousand men, leaving
the camp to women and children. The men have offered no resistance,
no battle.

The camp is deathly quiet. All the shops are shuttered, all the windows
closed. Women, children and a few old men hide in their homes.

The quiet is shattered by sporadic bursts of gunfire, bangs and
explosions. All day we have been encountering soldiers who all look like
my brother or cousins or the sons I never had, so young they are barely
more than boys armed with big guns. We've been standing with the
terrified inhabitants as the soldiers search their houses, walking patients
who are afraid to be alone on the streets to the U.N. Clinic. Earlier in the
evening, eight of our friends were arrested, and we know that we could
be caught at any moment.

It is nearly dark, and Jessica and Melissa and I are looking for a place to
spend the night. Jessica, with her pale, narrow face, dark eyes and curly
hair, could be my sister or my daughter. Melissa is a bit more punk,
androgynous in her dyed-blond ducktail.

We are hurrying through the streets, worried. We need to be indoors
before true dark, and curfew. "Go into any house," we've been told.
"Anyone will be glad to take you in." But we feel a bit shy.

From a narrow, metal staircase, Samar, a young woman with a wide,
beautiful smile beckons us up. "Welcome, welcome!" We are given refuge
in the three small rooms that house her family: her mother, big bodied
and sad, her small nieces and nephews, her brother's wife Hanin,
round-faced and pale and six months pregnant.

We sit down on big, overstuffed couches. The women serve us tea. I
look around at the pine wood paneling that adds soft curves and warmth
to the concrete, at the porcelain birds and artificial flowers that
decorate a ledge. The ceilings are carefully painted in simple geometric
designs.

They have poured love and care into their home, and it feels like a
sanctuary. Outside we can hear sporadic shooting, the deep 'boom' of
houses being blown up by the soldiers. But here in these rooms, we are
safe, in the tentative sense that word can be used in this place.
"Inshallah', "God willing', follows every statement of good here or every
commitment to a plan.

"Yahoud!" the women say when we hear explosions. It is the Arabic word
for Jew, the word used for the soldiers of the invading army. It is a word
of warning and alarm: don't go down that alley, out into that street.
"Yahoud!"

But no one invades our refuge this night. We talk and laugh with the
women. I have a pocket-sized packet of Tarot cards, and we read for
what the next day will bring. Samar wants a reading, and then Hanin. I
don't much like what I see in their cards: death, betrayal, sleepless
nights of sorrow and regret. But I can't explain that in Arabic anyway,
so I focus on what I see that is good.

"Baby?" Hanin asks.

"Babies, yes,"

"Boy? Son?"

The card of the Sun comes up, with a small boy-child riding on a white
house. "Yes, I think it is a boy," I say.

She shows me the picture of her first baby, who died at a year and a
half. Around us young men are prowling with guns, houses are exploding,
lives are being shattered. And we are in an intimate world of women.
Hanin brushes my hair, ties it back in a band to control its wildness. We
try to talk about our lives. We can write down our ages on paper. I am
fifty, Hanin is twenty-three. Jessica and Melissa are twenty-two: all of
them older than most of the soldiers. Samar is seventeen, the children
are eight and ten and the baby is four. I show them pictures of my
family, my garden, my step-grandaughter. I think they understand that
my husband has four daughters but I have none of my own, and that I
am his third wife. I'm not sure they understand that those wives are
sequential, not concurrent-but maybe they do. The women of this camp
are educated, sophisticated-many we have met throughout the day are
professionals, teachers, nurses, students when the Occupation allows
them to go to school.

"Are you Christian?" Hanin finally asks us at the end of the night.
Melissa, Jessica and I look at each other. All of us are Jewish, and we're
not sure what the reaction will be if we admit it. Jessica speaks for us.
"Jewish," she says. The women don't understand the word. We try
several variations, but finally are forced to the blunt and dreaded
"Yahoud."

"Yahoud!" Hanin says. She gives a little surprised laugh, looks at the
other women. "Beautiful!"

And that is all. Her welcome to us is undiminished. She shows me the
shower, dresses me in her own flowered nightgown and robe, and puts
me to bed in the empty side of the double bed she shares with her
husband, who has been arrested by the Yahoud. Mats are brought out
for the others. Two of the children sleep with us. Ahmed, the little four
year old boy, snuggles next to me. He sleeps fiercely, kicking and
thrashing in his dreams, and each time an explosion comes, hurls himself
into my arms.

I can't sleep at all. How have I come here, at an age when I should be
home making plum jam and doll clothes for grandchildren, to be cradling
a little Palestinian boy whose sleep is already shattered by gunshots and
shells? I am thinking about the summer I spent in Israel when I was
fifteen, learning Hebrew, working on a kibbutz, touring every memorial to
the Holocaust and every site of a battle in what we called the War of
Independence. I am thinking of one day when we were brought to the
Israel/Lebanon border. The Israeli side was green, the other side barren
and brown.

"You see what we have made of this land," we were told. "And that-
that's what they've done in two thousand years. Nothing." I am old
enough now to question the world of assumptions behind that
statement, to recognize one of the prime justifications the colonizers
have always used against the colonized. "They weren't doing anything
with the land: they weren't using it." They are not, somehow, as
deserving as we are, as fully human. They are animals, they hate us.

All of that is shattered by the sound of by Hanin's laugh, called into
question by a small boy squirming and twisting in his sleep. I lie there in
awe at the trust that has been given me, one of the people of the
enemy, put to bed to sleep with the children. It seems to me, at that
moment, that there are indeed powers greater than the guns I can hear
all around me: the power of Hanin's trust, the power that creates
sanctuary, the great surging compassionate power that overcomes
prejudice and hate.

One night later, we again go back to our family just as dark is falling,
together with Linda and Neta, two other volunteers. We have narrowly
escaped a party of soldiers, but no sooner do we arrive than a troop
comes to the door. At least they have come to the door: we are
grateful for that for all day they have been breaking through people's
walls, knocking out the concrete with sledgehammers, bursting through
into rooms of terrified people to search, or worse, use the house as a
thoroughfare, a safe route that allows them to move through the camp
without venturing into the streets. We have been in houses turned into
surreal passageways, with directions spray painted on their walls, where
there is no sanctuary because all night long soldiers are passing back
and forth.

We come forward to meet these soldiers, to talk with them and witness
what they will do. One of the men, with owlish glasses, knows Jessica
and Melissa: they have had a long conversation with him standing beside
his tank. He is uncomfortable with his role.

Ahmed, the little boy, is terrified of the soldiers. He cries and screams
and points at them, and we try to comfort him, to carry him away into
another room. But he won't go. He is terrified, but he can't bear to be
out of their sight. He runs toward them crying.

"Take off your helmet," Jessica tells the soldiers. "Shake hands with him,
show him you're a human being. Help him to be not so afraid." The owlish
soldier takes off his helmet, holds out his hand. Ahmed's sobs subside.
The soldiers file out to search the upstairs. Samar and Ahmed follow
them. Samar holds the little boy up to the owlish soldier's face, tells him
to give the soldier a kiss. She doesn't want Ahmed to be afraid, to hate.
The little boy kisses the soldier, and the soldier kisses him back, and
hands him a small Palestinian flag.

This is the moment to end this story, on a high note of hope, to let it be
a story of how simple human warmth, a child's kiss, can for a moment
overcome oppression and hate. But it is a characteristic of the relentless
quality of this occupation that the story doesn't end here.

The soldiers order us all into one room. They close the door, and begin
to search the house. We can hear banging and crashing and loud thuds
against the walls. I am trying to think of something to sing, to do to
distract us, to keep the spirits of the children up. I cannot think of
anything that makes sense. My voice won't work. But Neta teaches us a
silly children's song in Arabic. To me, it sounds like:

"Babouli raizh, raizh, babouli jai, Babouli ham melo sucar o shai,"

"The train comes, the train goes, the train is full of sugar and tea."

The children are delighted, and begin to sing. Hanin and I drum on the
tables. The soldiers are throwing things around in the other room and
the children are singing and Ahmed begins to dance. We put him up on
the table and he smiles and swings his hips and makes us all laugh.

When the soldiers finally leave, we emerge to examine the damage.
Every single object has been pulled off the walls, out of the closets,
thrown in huge piles on the floor. The couches have been overturned
and their bottoms ripped off. The wood paneling is full of holes knocked
into every curve and corner. Bags of grain have been emptied into the
sink. Broken glass and china covers the floor.

We begin to clean up. Melissa sweeps: Jessica tries to corral the
barefoot children until we can get the glass off the floor. I help Hanin
clear a path in the bedroom, folding the clothes of her absent husband,
hanging up her own things, finding the secret sexy underwear the
soldiers have obviously examined. By the time it is done, I know every
intimate object of her life.

We are a houseful of women: we know how to clean and restore order.
When the house is back together, Hanin and Samar and the sister cook.
The grandmother is having a high blood pressure attack: we lay her
down on the couch, I bring her a pillow. She rests. I sit down, utterly
exhausted, as Hanin and the women serve us up a meal. A few china
birds are back on the ledge. The artificial flowers have reappeared.
Some of the loose boards of the paneling have been pushed back.
Somehow once again the house feels like a sanctuary.

"You are amazing," I tell Hanin. "I am completely exhausted: you're six
months pregnant, it's your house that has just been trashed, and you're
able to stand there cooking for all of us."

Hanin shrugs. "For us, this is normal," she says.

And this is where I would like to end this story, celebrating the resilience
of these women, full of faith in their power to renew their lives again and
again.

But the story doesn't end here.

The third night. Melissa and Jessica go back to stay with our family. I
am staying with another family who has asked for support. The soldiers
have searched their house three times, and have promised that they will
continue to come back every night. We are sleeping in our clothes,
boots ready. We get a call.

The soldiers have come back to Hanin's house. Again, they lock
everyone in one room. Again, they search. This time, the soldier who
kissed the baby is not with them. They have some secret intelligence
report that tells them there is something to find, although they have not
found it. They rip the paneling off the walls. They knock holes in the
tiles and the concrete beneath. They smash and destroy, and when
they are done, they piss on the mess they have left.

Nothing has been found, but something is lost. The sanctuary is
destroyed, the house turned into a wrecking yard. No one kisses these
soldiers: no one sings.

When Hanin emerges and sees what they have done, she goes into
shock. She is resilient and strong, but this assault has gone beyond
'normal', and she breaks. She is hyperventilating, her pulse is racing and
thready. She could lose the baby, or even die.

Jessica, who is trained as a Street Medic for actions, informs the
soldiers that Hanin needs immediate medical care. The soldiers are
reluctant, "We'll be done soon," they say. But one is a paramedic, and
Melissa and Jessica are able to make him see the seriousness of the
situation. They allow the two of them to violate curfew, to run through
the dark streets to the clinic, come back with two nurses who somehow
get Hanin and the family into an ambulance and taken to the hospital.

This story could be worse. Because Jessica and Melissa were there,
Hanin and the baby survive. That is, after all, why we've come: to make
things not quite as bad as they would be otherwise.

But there is no happy ending to this story, no cheerful resolution. When
the soldiers pull out, I go back to say goodbye to Hanin, who has come
back from the hospital. She is looking dull, depressed: something is
broken. I don't know if it can be repaired, if she will ever be the same.
Her resilience is gone; her eyes have lost their light. She writes her
name and phone number for me, writes "Hnin love you." I don't know
how the story will ultimately end for her. I still see in the cards
destruction, sleepless nights of anguish, death.

This is not a story of some grand atrocity. It is a story about 'normal',
about what it's like to under an everyday, relentless assault on any
sense of safety or sanctuary.

"What was that song about the train?" I ask Neta after the soldiers are
gone.

"Didn't you hear?" she asks me. "The soldiers came and got the old
woman, at one o'clock in the morning, and made her sing the song. I
don't think I'll ever be able to sing it again."

"What source can you believe in order to create peace there?" a friend
writes. I have no answer. Every song is tainted; every story goes on too
long and turns nasty. A boy whose baby dreams are disturbed by gunfire
kisses a soldier. A soldier kisses a boy, and then destroys his home. Or
maybe he simply stands by as others do the destruction, in silence, that
same silence too many of us have kept for too long.

And if there are forces that can nurture peace they must first create an
uproar, a vast breaking of silence, a refusal to stand by as the boot
stomps down.