Free A Little Piece of Ground by Elizabeth Laird

he could remember clearly, when he was eight, he’d had to help his mother all the time.
    At least the journey home hadn’t been too bad. He’d been as tense as a coiled spring as they’d neared the checkpoint, only to find that it had gone. A mess of barbed wire and a couple of heavy boulders, which the tank had pushed across the road, half blocking it, were all that remained. The traffic, much too heavy anyway for such a small lane, was having to slow to a crawl to get past. Karim had shut his eyes as they came to the place where his father had been so humiliated. The spot was already etched indelibly on his memory. He didn’t want to look at it again.
    There’d been two more checkpoints to get through further on, and at the second one they’d been kept waiting for twenty minutes, for no apparent reason, but they’d been waved through at last, keeping their faces carefully immobile under the gaze of the soldiers and muttering their curses only under their breath.
    The bags that Lamia had given him to carry seemed to weigh a ton. It was always like this when they came home from the village. Grandma and the aunts loaded them down with produce from their vegetable plots, fruit trees and storerooms—bags of onions and lemons, bundles of spinach, swags of fresh mint and parsley, and bottles of pickles, olives and oil.
    â€œTake them while you can,” Grandma had said to Lamia, pressing yet another bunch of homegrown grapes on her daughter-in-law. “Who knows how long we’ll be able to grow anything here at all? They’ve taken our olive terraces this year. Next year they might help themselves to our whole farm.”
    It was clear, when at last they got inside, that Jamal hadn’t expected his family to return so soon. He was out, and there was no sign that serious study had been taking place. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink in the kitchen, and empty mugs and a drift of crumbs graced the coffee table between the sofa and the TV.
    â€œYou shouldn’t have let him stay,” Lamia grumbled to her husband, after she’d clicked her tongue disapprovingly at the mess. “If he’s done half an hour’s work in total I’d be amazed.”
    Hassan Aboudi rounded on her.
    â€œYou’re sorry he wasn’t with me at the checkpoint that day? You wish he’d come out with us to pick the olives? What a prime target for them he would have been! A seventeen-year-old boy!”
    Lamia bit her bottom lip and edged past him into the kitchen.
    Hassan Aboudi had switched on the TV.
    Tanks entered Bethlehem this morning and a strict curfew has been imposed. In Ramallah, clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli troops....
    Karim blocked the voice out.
    Home again, he thought sourly, feeling the familiar crackle of tension in the air.
    He’d only been back for five minutes, but he felt the need to get out again at once. He fetched his ball from behind its usual chair, then sidled around the edge of the sofa, making for the door.
    â€œI’m going to see Joni,” he informed his father’s hunched back.
    Hassan Aboudi, who was fiddling with the remote control for the TV, grunted but didn’t turn around to answer.
    It was great to be outside and on his own. Karim stuck the ball firmly under his arm, walked across the parking lot and down the short road that led to the main street running up the hill. He had set off fast, anxious to get away from the apartments before anyone could call him back, but without realizing it his steps were getting shorter and slower.
    Would he turn right when he reached the road and go to Joni’s? Or would he skip off the other way, towards the refugee camp and Hopper?
    Preoccupied with his thoughts, he almost bumped into Jamal, who was turning onto the street with a gift-wrapped package in his hand.
    â€œKarim! What are you doing here?”
    â€œWe came home early. We just got back.”
    Jamal’s