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Pressing our noses against the car’s murky back windows we could see piles of bricks and other building materials. Plumbing pipes were scattered in a pile at no particular order, like in a large game of Pick Up Stix. One of the pipes had pierced a large paper bag and a trickle of cement powder was pouring out through the hole. A slightly chipped ceramic toilet seat stood on top of the pile fastened with a washing line.
“They are here, Mother, they are here,” cried Dafna excitingly.
“Who are they?” Tali enquired.
“The builders. They’re going to build our toilet.”
“Don’t you have a toilet?” asked Tali.
“Only the one over there,” Dafna pointed to a small tin shed at the far side of the yard. “I’m so afraid to go there at night. It’s so dark. And it’s freezing cold in winter. My mother told me that they’d build a new toilet just next to the house. And it will have light in it too.”
“Mother, they are here,” she called again.
A builder came out the house and started unloading the bags of sand and cement off the rusty car. We watched him emptying the sacks into large plastic buckets, adding water and stirring with a large branch he had broken off a nearby tree.
“Do you want to be my helpers?” he asked.
Like an army of ants, we were rushing about carrying items and removing debris from the ground. On the other side of the fence, a growing crowd was gathering, looking at the preparations. At first they were quiet, whispering among themselves. But when we started to pile up concrete bricks, the murmur turned into uproar. It was not long before a few Arab legionnaires appeared. One of them, an officer, started yelling and waving his hands in the air.
“Ignore him,” ordered the builder. “Go bring the rest of the bricks.”
From the car to the builder we carried the hollow rough bricks. The older boys carried one brick at a time. Tali and I were holding a brick between the two of us, stepping sideway like crabs, taking a rest every few steps. Avi, the oldest boy, piled three bricks on top of each other and carried them together. “Show-off!” someone called.
The officer was now shouting in Hebrew: “Enough! Stop! Here no building!”
“What does he want?” asked the builder.
“He says that the yard is over the demarcation line and building is not allowed,” translated Avi.
“Tell him that it’s only a toilet for the kids, before the winter,” answered the builder.
“No building, no building,” fumed the officer, his face turning red, obviously not used to being ignored.
The builder shrugged his shoulder and went back to mixing cement. “Kids, back to work,” he called.
“He is going to shoot us,” cried Tali.
She was right. The officer pulled out his pistol, and before anyone had a chance to respond, he pulled the trigger. Sharp snap. A single shot passed through the cement bucket, raised a cloud of dust, and ricocheted from a rock a few steps behind the bucket.
Tali held my hand and pulled me behind a large Eucalyptus tree. I poked my head out and kept looking. I could not take my eyes off the gun.
Slowly the builder stepped back, palms up, showing his empty hands. “Chalas, chalas. Stop. No shooting,” he cried. “I stop building. No more toilet. No shooting.”
Women were pouring out from the surrounding houses, flooding the street, calling for their children. Three Israeli soldiers, from the nearby post, came running and stood by the fence.
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Your headline had me going. Nice to see that you are still shooting straight. :-)