How had Sarah known? Maybe she’d seen her arrive earlier. But she always seemed to know things before me.
The ground was wet. It was never wet unless the boys pissed in the holding pens.
“Roll up her robe.”
She was a large woman, hair matted, crying and juddering. She was past caring for her modesty, but the boy looked desperate, frozen. Sarah leaned across and slapped him across the face and barked something huskily in, I thought, Arabic but it sounded strange, more like a Hebrew patois. He lifted her robe back like a tablecloth and I gently pushed him to one side to provide some screen with my back, for some dignity. Up nearer her head, he grasped her hand and held it to his chest.
Sarah moved round, still kneeling, and lay her walking stick across her lap and the woman’s legs over it to either side of her. She cupped her hands, as if in homage. Or prayer. The woman threw her head back, arched her spine and cried again, a primal howl that filled the valley and made the men stare away.
“Oh Christ, she’s delivering,” said Sarah, to herself.
She rolled aside and tore open the Velcro strip of the med bag.
“Nat, get where I was and hold the head – don’t pull, just support.”
I knelt in the ruts her knees had left in the earth.
Then I felt a warm, firm hardness fill my palms as the woman shrieked and the boy whimpered. Sarah leaned across her with a syringe and surgical scissors between the fingers of one hand. She tore the antiseptic seal off the blades with her teeth and spat them aside. She said something to the boy again. I caught it in Arabic: “Hold her ankle towards you.” But then she seemed to repeat it in her strange dialect.
He didn’t move. She slapped him again and the message was clear in any language. “Hold it!”
Then, softly, like the sudden mood-swing of a madwoman in an asylum, she ran the ball of her thumb across the forehead of the woman to shift the hair from her eyes and spoke in English.
“It’s all right, my love. You’re going to have a baby.”
The new face appeared sideways in my palm, still in its caul, features squashed and pulled down like a tiny bank robber with a nylon stocking over its head. The blue-grey mass barely filled my hands.
Sarah dealt with the cord like she was wrapping a gift in a shop, but the baby, freed of its caul, didn’t wake. Sarah held it face down in the palm of her hand, and rubbed its back. The head rolled, the mouth opened noiselessly and a little fist twitched. Then, blinking suddenly through rubbery folds, it cried. There was a wave of acclamation in the throng behind us. God was still great, apparently.
The baby was swaddled in bandages and a gauze arm-sling from the med bag and given to the boy to hold on stiff, clumsy forearms. The woman took some minutes to deliver the placenta and get cleaned, then leaned against the hut.
Sarah handed her the bundle with the little dark face.
“Here’s your daughter,” she said. “Every happiness of her.”
The woman smiled and thanked her, the boy grinning. “He has a sister now,” she said.
He also had a fast ticket through the processing station. It would take no more than an hour or so for a UNRWA ambulance to take this fragment of a family down to the Laniado hospital in Netanya. That’s why they smiled too.
Later that evening, Sarah and I sat on a ridge and looked down across the plain towards the coast, drinking tea spiked with vodka from a Thermos and sharing a cigarette. Most of the new arrivals had been processed in threes, even if it broke up families. It was a pointless exercise, because even if they were denied access across this new border point, they’d make it through the urban streets on either side. It was all for show, though it heralded the wall that was to come. The pen beneath us had room for families to sleep now in some safety, even if others arrived in the night.
“Good gig today, Sarah,” I said, out of nothing.
“I wonder where the dad is,” she said after a moment, blowing smoke into the night. “Whether he knows.”
“She’s alive. Pretty sure that’s better than the alternative.”
Sarah didn’t reply.
“Why were you speaking Hebrew to the boy, Sar?”
“It wasn’t really Hebrew,” she said. “It was Aramaic. It’s what they sometimes speak up in the north. They may have come down from Syria originally.”
“There’s another one in the family now. Another mouth to feed. Wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t heard her.”
I could see she was drawing hard on the cigarette. Sarah never gave much away, but I knew when she was close to the edge. She screwed her eyes to see into the dark. I leaned across to take the fag and, in a girly way, started to sing.
He bought me a banana, I made it shake, he brought me home with a bellyache.
It was a hopscotch song from our childhood that we’d corrupted for the primary school girls when it was our turn to look after them. Smoke came from her nostrils like a dragon and she turned and grinned at me, then slapped me across the ear, playfully, not like she hit the boy.
So, Sarah. Sarah the Jew, whom we mocked at school and whom I came to love. Always the cleverest of us. She was always Sarah Curse at school, full name. Funny the things that come to mind when you have too long to think. We’ve always spoken with a quick frankness, as those who have grown up together do, not always really friendly but without the dishonesty of the casual acquaint-ance.
Once, after we’d left school, I told her suddenly that I’d always coveted her name, that it had been so cool, and she confessed that it had been made up, though not
