David went outside to catch a taxi. He didn't want to waste a lot of time getting through the checkpoint. It was moving too slowly. Too many people were trying to get to Jerusalem for Friday prayers.
"You want to go to Jerusalem?" a taxi driver asked.
"Yes. How much?"
"100 shekels."
"80."
"90."
"80."
"Okay. 80."
David put his bag in the taxi's boot. He sat in the passenger's seat. Two men got in the back. They had been waiting against the checkpoint's wall. David had assumed that he had hired the taxi—that no one else would be getting in. But….
The taxi took off.
The driver said something to the other two in Arabic.
"Where do you want to go?" the man sitting behind David asked.
"The Damascus Gate."
"Where are you from?" he asked.
"Australia."
"Nice. Welcome."
"Thanks."
They joined a queue of traffic lined up to go through a vehicle checkpoint.
"We friends, okay?" the driver asked, looking at David.
The man in the back explained that the driver was operating illegally as a taxi driver.
"If the Israelis catch him," he said, "they would jail him. And this is bad for a Palestinian."
"Okay," David said.
The driver grinned. A long moustache adorned his oily, unshaven face. He was wearing a long, white, single-piece garment that reached his ankles. It was one of those articles of clothing that could make a man look decent.
The driver looked out the windscreen at the checkpoint. Soldiers were standing on a traffic island beside a concrete barrier.
"Passport?" he asked.
His passengers gave him their ID's.
The soldiers were more interested in David than in the Palestinians. One of the soldiers was a woman. Her long, black hair fell over her blue flak jacket. An M-16 was slung over the shoulder. She asked David to get out of the car. She wanted him to open his bag. The bag was in the boot. She put her hands into his bag and felt around. From inside the slit of a concrete tower, a soldier was watching the female soldier inspecting David's possessions. When you get enough people together, with a similar love of disdain for outsiders, David thought, then the result is defensive grey walls and grey towers and guns; these artefacts of a dry existence, he contemplated, exist because inhumane ideas can never be supported universally, so you have to build concrete castles to defend yourself against the enemies you have created—and against your own repressed conscience as well.
"Where have you been?" the woman asked.
Her curiosity was impersonal. She spoke as if she was addressing a carbon pole that had freakishly mastered speech and comprehension, whose electrolysis may have attracted dubious elements.
"Ramallah," David lied.
"Doing what?"
"Eating very well and very cheaply."
This was the real reason why Israeli travellers weren't allowed to go to the West Bank. Permitting extensive travel would have improved the Palestinian economy, and reduced prices in Israel, both unthinkable, like deliberating enhancing a threat that you were trying to stamp out.
"Okay," she replied.
Back in the taxi, the man behind David said: "Some days I can't get to work because they close the checkpoints. I'm a waiter in a restaurant in East Jerusalem. I don't get paid if I can't make it to work."
"How often can't you make it?" David asked.
"About once a week. And Friday is the most difficult day."
A half-built Israeli settlement looked like a concrete scab on a pile of granite on a distant hill. All the vegetation on the hill had been cleared away to deny the enemy cover, leaving a barren mound. Approval for the settlement's construction had been given by the Israeli Supreme Court. No other court would have approved it.
"How much is he charging you?" the man behind David asked, referring to the driver.
"80," David replied.
"Unfortunately," the man said, "you get these bad men who take advantage of people. That's too much."
"If you're a foreigner," David said, "you have to expect it."
"It's a pity you have to expect it."
"Such is life."
Australians could accept "victimisation"; it could be interpreted as satisfying adventurous whims.
The driver stopped near the Damascus Gate. Israeli police vans lined the road. Men in blue were standing around white vehicles. These men were employed to throw people out of properties because unscrupulous institutions invented false title deeds. The word "mafia" comes to mind, but the men had no idea that they were a part of a criminal organisation, because they were wearing uniforms, and they were being employed by a "democratic government," even if the same handful of people kept ending up in that "democratic government" whether those people had been elected or not. The men's brutal romanticism helped them to disregard precepts of civilised behaviour; and this was their right. They could forsake decency, for they weren't really human beings, but twins of a recalcitrant God—their God—the only God. And being God you're saved from judgement. You can reject every reasonable view that doesn't suit you.
David handed over 100 shekels and got 10 back. Such is life, he thought again. He wasn't going to argue about irrelevant sums of money. High-mindedness is cultural—a manifestation of the grace of relevance. It had taken him a long time to discover that fairness was a privilege, a question of luck, not a norm. It had taken a long time because Australia was one of the few places where fairness was endemic, institutionalised, sanctified: they'd even apologised to the Aborigines! But you can't expect to come across fairness everywhere and in all situations, because different concepts of liberty still reign: there still wasn't a commonly accepted objective based on universal rights.
Had he known that the waiter had told the driver in Arabic: "He said he's going to pay my fare", he just would have smiled.
The driver didn't bother to check the veracity of this "agreement". It's got nothing to do with me, he believed.
Kim Farleigh has worked for aid agencies in three conflicts: Kosovo, Iraq and Palestine. His stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Whiskey Island, Southerly, Island, Mudjob, Write From Wrong, Feathertale, Down in the Dirt, The Camel Saloon, Haggard & Halloo, Descant, The Red Fez, Red Ochre Lit, Sleet, Negative Suck, Houston Literary Review, and Sand Journal.