I was out after her before I knew what I was doing, shouting her name. It’s a good name — we chose a name that would grow with her, but she seemed determined not to make it to adulthood. I tried to trip her up, but she was too nimble for me. Everyone around was looking on from windows and the open gates of courtyards. The truck rolled to a stop. Someone inside it yelled, “Move, kid. We’ve got stuff to do.”
I tried to pull my daughter out of the way, but she wasn’t having any of it. My hands being empty, I wrung them. My daughter began to pelt the soldier’s vehicle with stones from her pockets. Her pockets were very deep that afternoon; her arms lashed the air like whips. Stone after stone bounced off metal and rattled glass, and I grabbed at her and she screamed, “This is my country! Get out of here!”
The people of the village began to applaud her. “Yes,” they cried out, from their seats in the audience, and they clapped. I tried again to seize her arm and failed again. The truck’s engine revved up, and I opened my arms as wide as they would go, inviting everyone to witness. Now I was screaming, too: “So you dare? You really dare?”
And there we were, mother and daughter, causing problems for the soldiers together.
Finally a scrawny soldier came out of the vehicle without his gun. He was the scrawniest fighting man I’ve ever seen — he was barely there, just a piece of wire, really. He walked towards my daughter, who had run out of stones. He stretched out a long arm, offering her chewing gum, and she swore at him, and I swore at her for swearing. He stopped about thirty centimetres away from us and said to my daughter, “You’re brave.”
My daughter put her hands on her hips and glared up at him.
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” the scrawny soldier told her.
Whispers and shouts: The soldiers are leaving tomorrow!
A soldier inside the truck yelled out, “Yeah, but more are coming to take our place,” and everyone piped low. My daughter reached for a stone that hadn’t fallen far. Who is this girl? Four feet tall and fighting something she knows nothing about. Even if I explained it to her, she wouldn’t get it. I don’t get it myself.
“Can I shake your hand?” the scrawny soldier asked her, before her hand met the stone. I thought my girl would refuse, but she said yes. “You’re okay,” she told him. “You came out to face me.”
“Her English is good,” the coward from within the truck remarked.
“I speak to her in English every day,” I called out. “So she can tell people like you what she thinks.”
We stepped aside then, my daughter and I, and let them continue their patrol.
My mother didn’t like what had happened. But didn’t you see everyone clapping for us, my daughter asked. So what, my mother said. People clap at anything. Some people even clap when they’re on an aeroplane and it lands. That was something my husband had told us from his travels — I hadn’t thought she’d remember.
My daughter became a celebrity amongst the children, and from what I saw, she used it for good, bringing the shunned ones into the inner circle and laughing at all their jokes.
The following week a foreigner dressed like one of our men knocked at my mother’s door. It was late afternoon, turning to dusk. People sat looking out onto the street, talking about everything as they took their tea. Our people really know how to discuss a matter from head to toe; it is our gift, and such conversation on a balmy evening can be sweeter than sugar. Now they were talking about the foreigner who was at our door. I answered it myself. My daughter was at my side, and we recognised the man at once; it was the scrawny soldier. He looked itchy and uncomfortable in his djellaba, and he wasn’t wearing his kaffiyeh at all correctly — his hair was showing.
“What a clown,” my daughter said, and from her seat on the cushioned floor my mother vowed that clown or no clown, he couldn’t enter her house.
“Welcome,” I said to him. It was all I could think of to say. See a guest, bid him welcome. It’s who we are. Or maybe it’s just who I am.
“I’m not here to cause trouble,” the scrawny soldier said. He was looking to the north, south, east, and west so quickly and repeatedly that for some seconds his head was just a blur. “I’m completely off-duty. In fact, I’ve been on leave since last week. I’m just — I just thought I’d stick around for a little while. I thought I might have met a worthy adversary — this young lady here, I mean.” He indicated my daughter, who chewed her lip and couldn’t stop herself from looking pleased.
“What is he saying?” my mother demanded.
“I’ll just — go away, then,” the soldier said. He seemed to be dying several thousand deaths at once.
“He’d like some tea. . ” my daughter told my mother.
“We’ll just have a cup or two,” I added, and we took the tea out onto the veranda, and drank it under the eyes of God and the entire neighbourhood. The neighbourhood was annoyed. Very annoyed, and it listened closely to everything that was said. The soldier didn’t seem to notice. He and my daughter were getting along famously. I didn’t catch what exactly they were talking about, I just poured the tea and made sure my hand was steady. I’m not doing anything wrong, I told myself. I’m not doing anything wrong.
The scrawny soldier asked if I would tell him my name. “No,” I said. “You have no right to use it.” He told me his name, but I pretended he hadn’t spoken. To cheer him up, my daughter told him her name, and he said, “That’s great. A really, really good name. I might use it myself one day.”
“You can’t — it’s a girl’s name,” my daughter replied, her nostrils flared with scorn.
“Ugh,” said the soldier. “I meant for my daughter. . ”
He shouldn’t have spoken about his unborn daughter out there in front of everyone, with his eyes and his voice full of hope and laughter. I can guarantee that some woman in the shadows was cursing the daughter he wanted to have. Even as he spoke someone was saying, May that girl be born withered for the grief people like you have caused us.
“Ugh,” said my daughter.
I began to follow the conversation better. The scrawny soldier told my daughter that he understood why the boys lined the roads with anger. “Inside my head I call them the children of Hamelin.”
“The what?” my daughter asked.
“The who?” I asked.
“I guess all I mean is that they’re paying the price for something they didn’t do.”
And then he told us the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, because we hadn’t heard it before. We had nightmares that night, all three of us — my mother, my daughter, and I. My mother hadn’t even heard the story, so I don’t know why she joined in. But somehow it was nice that she did.
On his second visit the scrawny soldier began to tell my daughter that there were foreign soldiers in his country, too, but that they were much more difficult to spot because they didn’t wear uniforms and some of them didn’t even seem foreign. They seemed like ordinary citizens, the sons and daughters of shopkeepers and dentists and restaurant owners and big businessmen. “That’s the most dangerous kind of soldier. The longer those ones live amongst us, the more they hate us, and everything we do disgusts them. . These are people we go to school with, ride the subway with — we watch the same movies, root for the same baseball teams. They’ll never be with us, though. We’ve been judged, and they’ll always be against us. Always.”