Part 7
The elderly in the room, purposefully left alive by the israeli soldiers to foster guilt and sadness in their unstable hearts, urged the remainder of us to carry the bodies over to a different room on the same floor- away from the treachery and kept safe for their eventual jenazahs, if they didn’t make a morgue of this place by the time the clock strikes centre.
I got up from the floor to do exactly that but was advised against it with a silent pat down from Mouin. My limbs were restless and I was constantly fidgeting. I could see the red blinker on the camera of mine dimming to orange on a chair in the other half of the room, indicating a nearly full memory, and a nearly dead camera. I kept looking for an opening to run and stuff it in the puffy vest I hung over the back of my chair, but the soldiers kept hovering around, scoping out their audience and looking for their next target.
And their radar just so happened to land on Ahed, a young girl who pulled her ripped jean jacket over her body tighter while looking out of the window even whilst the morning sun shined searing rays over the sill.
Ben, one of the lead commanders of this “minor” operation, which would become the most major thing in news that no one could ignore if I retrieved my camera – saw the light catch on her hair and was immediately drawn to dragging her by her lioness mane onto the stage. I sighed deeply as the scenarios and outcomes looped themselves in my head, each possibility getting worse with each step she took towards the stage.
They forced her shoulders down till her knees buckled under their heavy weighted armour. She landed on the floor with a knee bruising thud and sat there for a moment, her head facing the ground and her expression not discernible with sun bronzed curls falling over her face. A second soldier with Yam coloured hair slipped his fingers under her curtain of hair and grasped her chin, stripping away her deserved solitude with a tug of the jaw. I couldn’t see anything with his ass facing me but I could tell Ahed whispered something to him, something like “don’t embarrass me” or “what’s going to happen to me”, even if I misheard either of those sentences, it was clear that she was deeply concerned about the sanctity of her dignity, but complied to keep the masses from being slaughtered at one shot. I gathered that from the way she meaningfully and steadily looked into my eyes with a stare full of warning. Our shared gaze broke when the soldier got up and answered her, looking down on her like some stray dog at their mercy.
‘lā taqlaq bishānihi, we’ll take care of you’ he repeated back, yet again, with the same devilish grin as the assaulter who in some way worked to bring Adnan’s final wish to fruition.
‘Baaaaas’ droned Ben who paced impatiently a couple metres behind Ahed, toying with the gears of his rifle- locked and loaded. ‘Is she going to take those terrible clothes off or what?’ he whined. Dover replied in a sarcastic chortle, ‘No, it seems she’s “not interested” in being embarrassed’. The commander nearly broke a rib and dropped his rifle on his toe laughing,
‘Habibi- you don’t need to undress to embarrass yourself, you Palestinian animals are already an embarrassment to this world.’ he cackled, chorusing with his spitting friend.
Ahed started rocking on her knees and praying; the soldiers wore a look of hungry excitement as she reached into her pale blue shirt.
They sucked the saliva back into their mouths after she pulled the pendant of a gold chain with engravings of the quranic verse on a shape made to resemble the Palestinian state. She started rehearsing the shahada to herself, only taking second long gaps to excuse herself for breathing in her petrification and constant cries for the Lord. The soldiers took on an awful form to their faces as they clearly recognized every word of the proclamation, like always, only being reminded of their religion and their tragic transgressions of it when inside a room with a muslim– one without a shadow of a doubt in her faith. Her continual devotion became a pulley for the frustrations locked in Dover’s throat.
‘Shut up! Shut up!’ he yelled over her, kicking her sides, only making her chant the same declarations with her cheek to the ground. He pounced over her body, clawing at her skin and trying to yank the jacket off her back when his superior, silently spectating his outburst, came over and told him to step to the side, taking his place as he towered over Ahed who remained in a foetal position. Still praying.
‘Don’t worry Dover’, he glowered down at her, ‘If she refuses to undress it’s no problem,’ he turned to me, making me realise how deeply I was staring at everything that was happening, I just couldn’t seem to rip my eyes away, something that everyone else in the room, and in the entire world–grew accustomed to doing.
Fear coursed through my veins and infiltrated my emotions as I watched him recede to the back of the stage, whistling and rubbing the barrel of his rifle with a baby’s shirt. Ahed was shackled to the ground with an anchored contraption, the short thick chain was attached to a metal ring that worked as a pin in the wood. She couldn’t hold her necklace anymore and just read into her chest, making Dover, who played an unbothered persona, rub the gun more fiercely before tossing the shirt, the shirt of someone’s child, to the side.
‘Like I said, ya3ni no problem’ he said, deliberately distorting his p’s to b’s, mimicking, no- mocking the Arab palette. ‘We can take care of her clothes once I kill her’.
The people to my sides, Shima and Besan, wept at the horrific implication with Shima’s face turning ashen grey, her eyes wide with shock and disbelief, while tears streamed down her cheeks. She raised a trembling hand to her mouth as the reality of his words penetrated her. Besan scrubbed down the wall she was leaning up against her sobs wracking her body as she slid to the ground. Abu Hannan was unable to meet anyone’s gaze. Every father in that room squeezed their eyes shut in trying to block out the horror of the situation. The room drowned with an oppressive air of sheer helplessness that made us a hopeless people today.
Dread hung in heat waves around us and I just wanted to ask why, why did they hate us so much. What pleasure does it bring them to violate our lands, our rights, our wives and now an innocent girl, someone's daughter, someone’s whole life. They not only planned to take that life but abuse its vessel after they shot it out of her. Ahed’s sobs alternated between cries for her father and cries for her creator.
The soldier waded the floor around her, finally settling into a position and raising his rifle up to his left shoulder. He flipped the safety off and pulled back the bolt. The metallic clink sent a malignant spider down my back.
He lined up the shot, aiming it for the back of Ahed’s skull as though her body was made of bottles to be knocked out in target practice. Ahed, on her knees, prayed even louder, fright lacing her voice in trying to be brave.
She recited in Arabic broken by sobs, seeking protection from the torment of the grave, and the trials of life and the question of death she was facing now. ‘O Allah! I seek refuge in you from the mischief of the false messiah-’ she looked back in a series of broken turns to see the soldier’s face twisted and cocking his gun at her with a click that caused her to tremble and turn her gaze back to the edge of the stage, beyond which lay the body of the first man executed.
‘If I were you I would stop all this damn talk about AllahAllahAllah. Ackh!’ he spoke.
‘..when you know damn well you're at our mercy,’ he sneered, kneeling down and planting the mouth of his rifle on the ground. The girl hadn’t looked back to acknowledge him but I knew she heard him when her eyebrows scrunched the skin on her fair face, an obvious marker of distress which was pushed aside as she continued praying.
‘In this room, I am your Yhweh.’ he blasphemed, using the name they supposedly believed to be ineffable for someone such as himself, someone who couldn’t even begin to make the girl falter in her prayer by declaring himself the very God she was submitting her life to.
My head was screaming for answers,
‘So you don't even believe in God! But you think he promised our land to you!’ I yelled, after getting so close to being invisible.
‘It doesn't matter if I believe or not,’ the soldier retorted, his voice dripping with contempt, along with the slightest bit of truth. Pins of discomfort threaded through my veins.
‘The fact is, he's not here to help you now, is he?’ he asked, and I gave no reply as I looked around at this doomed room.
‘We will conquer your city... and your bodies!’ he said, glancing down on their red haired sacrifice and then firing a pistol in his other hand to receive an uproar of applause from his unit.
‘Did you hear me?’ he asked again, directing his cynical stare in my direction, noticing that the bang didn’t make me flinch strongly enough for his liking unlike the others, and the children who jolted awake.
‘ NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE YOU.’ an echo boomed, pulling at the knots in my stomach and pulling me out of my transfixed state, bringing back the fear that was suppressed for a mere moment by it.
He decided to ignore me completely and straightened his relaxed stance once more, steadying the rifle against his shoulder a second time. His eyes narrowed as he latched them onto the scope, looking at the back of Ahed’s ducked head in a largened view.
Only, his finger didn’t even graze the trigger when the entire place began to rumble, the ground jumping underneath our feet.
I meant to jump over the chairs and run but the shaking beneath my bruised bare feet became violent and fully flipped me over when a blast thundered right outside the building, blowing both doors out of their bolted frame behind us and the huddled defence forces, pushing them to the ground. The previously intact portion of the ripped wall collapsed, charging the ground in an avalanche of brick and stone, crushing a few of them and throwing Ben off his feet.
The bullet escaped from the muzzle due to a misfire made by the impact, shooting up into the air past Ahed and into the ceiling where it rebounded heading straight for me as I stared blankly in shock with my hands and feet on the ground.
I was a dead man until a man swept past, sweeping me with him, saving me from the falling bullet. I looked to see who saved me from it and at first, I barely recognised him from his sunken face, features chiselled brutally by starvation. It was Farouq, a man whom I had only seen 3 months prior when he was taken hostage, when he was still starved but not to this extent. I wondered how he had the strength to push 140 pounds of me aside from imminent death. A flame started in the old storage closet and started catching everywhere. A string of fire emerged between me and Farouq who yelled in my face, but I couldn’t hear him in the barrier of heat.
And I had never seen the light of day turn to darkness so quickly.
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