time calmly.
“I can’t, I have to wait for orders,” the soldier replied.
“Why are you here in the rst place!” a woman behind me cried out at the soldier. She sounded exasperated and plaintive, as if she were his mother and wanted him to clean up his room. “Why are you cooperating with the occupation!”
“Leave him alone,” Ezra said. “It isn’t his fault. He’s just a soldier.”
The driver couldn’t control himself any longer. He grabbed Ezra and began pul ing him unceremoniously by forearm and shirt col ar. Some people rushed to protect Ezra, but he shouted at us, “Don’t move! Don’t get up!”
The soldier came over and announced, “Okay, you can go through, everyone can go through, yal ah, get a move on.”
We reached Hroush in the late afternoon, but we were not immediately permit ed to enter the town. A large ditch had been dug on the main road in order to prevent anyone from get ing through. We parked the vans near the ditch and negotiated with the army. The negotiations began with phone cal s to various army o cials, who al said the decision wasn’t up to them, and ended with begging, nagging, and harassing the soldiers until they got bored and relented. I wandered a lit le o the road to photograph the grotesque remains of an uprooted olive orchard. The twisted trunks and amputated arms of the trees looked like mute messengers of some unspeakable doom, the details of which, perhaps fortunately, we were unable to decipher.
The soldiers watched us as we began crossing the ditch; it was hard to tel what they were thinking. We slipped going down and we slipped climbing up the other side. Those who reached the top rst helped the others; I was reminded of a hundred scenes of Palestinians pul ing their children up over wal s, over rocky mounds of earth, up steep hil sides. By the time we reached Hroush our hands and legs were covered with mud, and the feet of people who had worn sandals were no longer visible.
But our appearance was appropriate for Hroush. Hroush wasn’t anything like Ein Mazra’a, which had managed to hold itself together. Nor was it in ruins, like Dar al-Damar, which I had seen only once, after an incursion. Militants had holed up in Dar al-Damar several times, and the army had red at buildings from helicopters and shel ed them with tanks; there had also been ghting in the streets. The town had been reduced to heaps of rubble: houses had spewed out their insides as they col apsed, and bits of furniture—cribs, dishes, mat resses, lamps, embroidered pil ows—lay in random pat erns on the uneven mounds of stone and dust. Some buildings had survived, but they did not seem habitable.
Here the devastation was more subtle. The vil age was deserted: everyone was indoors because of the curfew, though there were women and children on the balconies and roofs, silent and watchful, as if decorating their houses with their bodies. No two houses were alike because they’d been built at di erent times by di erent people, with whatever material was at hand or had struck the fancy of the builder.
The result was a genial display of textures and types of stone or concrete or plaster—porous and rough, smooth and symmetrical, each one a di erent variation on o -white. Hopeful metal rods protruded from the at roofs and the beginnings of staircases clung to the sides of the houses, stopping Escher-like in midair: they were vestiges of an intention to expand. Poured concrete pil ars would cover the rods and support higher floors, which the stairs would then reach.
The stores were al shut ered down: metal shut er after metal shut er, closed and locked. The awning of one of the empty stores had come loose and lay in a tangled heap on the ground. The fabric had Arabic and English print on it, and I could make out the words Abu-Jiab Optic, and a drawing of a pair of glasses. Lit er clung to the edges of the wide path that ran through the town, and in a corner formed by two crumbling wal s I saw what looked like human shit covered with blue-green flies. Some soldier with nowhere to defecate must have used this improvised outhouse in the middle of the night; the soldiers were stil there, inside two armored carriers. Three of them sat on the roofs of their carriers and watched us with stony faces. I took a photograph of the crumbling wal s, which were covered with gra ti, and of the horrible excrement in the corner. Remarkably, ordinary cars, including a Red Crescent ambulance, were parked here and there: incongruous signs of the outside world in this closed-down paleoscape.
We considered our sorry state and wondered what we could do about it. The mud had clung to our skin and clothes and we did not feel presentable. We walked over to an outdoor water faucet next to the ambulance and turned it on. Yel ow, evil-smel ing liquid splut ered out, choked, then vanished altogether. We searched our bags for tissues, poured a few drops of bot led water on them, and did our best to wipe our hands. Ezra went up to the soldiers and asked for a thermos of water. The soldiers ignored him.
We fol owed the organizer, a short, rotund woman who looked even shorter under her wide-brimmed straw hat. She was holding a piece of paper on which she’d printed directions, but she didn’t real y need to consult her notes, because as we walked sturdy-looking men leaned out of windows, greeted us, and told us which way to go.
Near the center of the vil age the buildings were closer together and the houses were older, with pret y domes rising from the roofs. It wasn’t as eerie here, because the tanks were farther away and people felt freer. Women sat on chairs just outside their houses and children played noisily on the rooftops.
We knocked on the door of the bereaved family, and a young man with almond-shaped cat eyes and a struggling mustache opened the door. “Yes, yes, please, my parents wait. Thank you, we are happy you come,” he said in English, but his voice was unconvincing. He sounded tired and very angry.
It was a relief stepping indoors: the house was ful of people, and brought us back to reality. The visiting room was spotless and the wal s were bare apart from a few framed photographs of family members and an Arabic text in elaborate cal igraphy, also framed. The television was on, but the volume was so low that I wasn’t sure what language the man on the screen was speaking. Folding chairs had been brought in to accommodate the several generations represented here: older children held bcobys on their laps, the knees of teenagers touched those of the aged. Everyone looked unhappy, but they welcomed us enthusiastical y and urged us to sit down. The children gave us their seats and moved to the carpet; one of the bcobys began to cry and her mother, who appeared to be about sixteen, took the baby away to the kitchen to nurse her. We’d brought a few bags of food and diapers and we set them discreetly in the corner. The young man with the cat eyes served us sweetened tea in smal glasses. I wondered whether the sixteen-year-old mother was his wife.
When I brought out my camera, the atmosphere in the room became very serious and intent. The bereaved parents stared hard into the camera lens, as if they were pinning their last hopes on these photographs, as if they believed or prayed that maybe, possibly, when people saw the images and knew the story something would be done. I felt guilty and heartbroken.
saw the images and knew the story something would be done. I felt guilty and heartbroken.
