PEN Presents - Playing with Soldiers

About the book

Ziyad and Tamim are 14-year-old boys living in Jenin, Palestine, under Israeli occupation. The friends enjoy the usual games – football, seven stones – but their favourite game is “playing with soldiers”. Bored one day, they decide to play their favourite game by leaving a “suspicious object” on the road (a radio wrapped in a plastic bag), hoping to cause havoc among the occupation soldiers for their entertainment.

But the plan never comes to fruition. As the boys are assembling their “suspicious object” they witness something that must be kept secret. This is a book about resistance, responsibility and the loss of innocence.

What our readers say

Resisting the urge to lead with misery and trauma, this story follows a group of lively young boys playing tricks on each other and Israeli soldiers alike. Though political resistance and various related threats are referenced, the story of the boys and the mystery they – and the author – succeed in hiding is key.  

Achieving such powerful understatement in a work of literature set against the backdrop of the First Intifada is certainly a feat. Rather than drawing on a reader’s empathy, Asrawi creates a vivid landscape of life in 1980s Jenin, where the occupation is an integral part of the plot, but not its focus. We are drawn by the skilful characterisation of the young protagonists whose adventures lead them to become accidental witnesses to events that call for a level of maturity many young people growing up in a climate of conflict are forced to endure.  

Zafar’s translation is fluid and fluent, faithful to the most important elements of the original text, in this case its brevity, “dark humour” and eloquent wit, through both a mastery of language and a keen eye on context and structure.

Awards and press

“A skilful writer who knows how to combine beauty and meaning.” – Shatha Abu Hanish for Wattan

“Effectively conveys the suffering of the people of Jenin and their steadfastness… [The simple narrative style] enhances the novel’s effect, allowing readers to understand the message each in their own way, to interact with and integrate themselves into the events.” – Al-Sabaah

“Transparently presents how the cogs of society turned at the time – to do justice to some people, and oppress others.” – Hissam Marouf for Diffah

“The most beautiful thing about the novel is the image of children moving about the neighbourhoods as children do, to the backdrop of the occupation and its repercussions – perhaps this happens only in Palestine.” – Ziyad Khadash for Oman Daily

Rights available

World English

Translation extract

From Playing with Soldiers

Tariq Asrawi

translated by Anam Zafar

No boy, at the age of fourteen, would not feel baffled at the sight of a woman changing her clothes.

That is why, when Ibtihal found out her bedroom window was practically a cinema screen for Ziyad and his friends, she called for them right away. But no one dared accept her invitation.

Ziyad’s father had banned him from leaving the house that day. He thought he could smell tobacco, even though Ziyad had chewed on a sprig of mint he’d snapped off in the garden, scrubbed his hands at the well, and sworn on his life that he didn’t – that he doesn’t – smoke.

Obviously, his father was still suspicious. So, he punished him just in case – ‘You’re not going anywhere today’ – and wouldn’t hear another word.

Grumbling and fidgeting in the yard, Ziyad tried various things to entertain himself. He pitted the red ants against the black ants inside a matchbox, tried and failed to catch a grasshopper, inspected the okra pods that had been laid out to dry before being shelved away; he pointed the hose at the red Damask roses, a colourful scent wafting from the bushes as their branches shook; he moved the water towards the jujube, then the pomegranate tree, then turned off the tap at the well without watering the rest of the garden and decided to climb onto the roof instead. From there, the city and the sweeping greenery beyond spread out in front of him. He realised this was the first time he’d noticed just how big and colourful the valley was.

The houses of the city sloped down its three hills to meet the valley of Marj Ibn Amir, the biggest fertile plain in the country. From above, the plain looked like a sprawling patchwork rug, some squares brown, others pale, bright and almond green.

From where he stood on the roof, Ziyad could see his friend Tameem on his own roof next door. Brow furrowed with concentration, Tameem was trying to fix an aluminium tray to a piece of wood. He hammered the metal with a chunk of flint, attached a white wire to it, then placed the whole thing in a corner of the roof, facing north towards Marj Ibn Amir, with the persistence you’d expect from a boy back then who wanted to pick up the television signal for Israel’s Channel 2. Then, with his thumb and index finger forming a circle at his mouth, Tameem pushed the air out from his chest, with a whistle as sharp as his prickling boredom.

Parents didn’t approve of the special antenna that could pick up that Hebrew-only television channel. They were meticulous about preserving their identity, you see – and they wanted to keep the floodgates shut on all those midnight films that would stain their children’s purity. For those who needed a little bit more, they made do with just four terrestrial channels: the Jordanian channel, the Syrian channel, a channel called Israel – created by the occupation, in Arabic, especially for the Palestinians – and quite often al-Shirq al-Awsat, a channel that followed Antoine Lahad and was linked to the Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon, with its cedar tree in the corner of the screen made of three green triangles. None of these channels could show anything remotely interesting for young boys. The questions flashing across their minds had been silenced by a society that had lived under fear of their own safety for who-knows-how-many years. Questions like: ‘What is a woman?’

Once Tameem had put the finishing touches to his prized antenna, Ziyad decided he was going to ruin his friend’s evening. Maybe Ziyad was jealous, or bored out of his mind, or perhaps he just did this a lot.

At midnight – the time the film was showing – he saw Tameem sneak out of his house, creep onto the roof, and adjust the aluminium tray to receive his share of answers, films, women. In short, the kind of thing he could only watch on mute with one ear out for his dad, things that would make him howl like a puppy imagining its prey.

Meanwhile, Ziyad left his own house. He had tied together a pair of old shoes with a long, copper wire and now stood holding them in the middle of the road near the generator. He swung the shoes round in two complete circles before they flew out of his hands, spiralling towards the overhead cables and getting caught between two of them. The cables touched, there was a little spark, and the electricity went down for the entire area.

And that’s how Ziyad and Tameem’s street, in Jabal Abu Dhahir on the edge of the city, was plunged into darkness that night. Ziyad went home and lounged on the balcony, his legs stretched out on the table as he waited for the local authorities. Eventually the truck appeared, its orange lights piercing through the night, and parked under the electricity cables. The worker stood on the truck’s platform, raised it up so he was next to the shoes, and set them free, letting them fall onto the back of the truck. Then the vehicle retreated down the hill, turning left at the Deir al-Latin Cemetery to arrive at the offices where light could be restored to the lampposts and houses that the city still had.

Messing about with the cables was quite popular with the boys in Jenin. In fact, pretty much every cable in the city had, at some point, been graced with dangling wires like these, tied to stones or shoes or tear gas canisters or anything else you wouldn’t expect to see swinging overhead. But Tameem could smell Ziyad all over this particular stunt. He effed and blinded at Ziyad all the way back from school the next day because the sound of last night’s truck had woken up his dad, and he’d had to leg it to bed right in the middle of the film without managing to catch a thing.

‘Shut up about your stupid film already,’ Ziyad retorted. ‘And don’t cry all week until the next one, either. Let’s play with the army instead.’

It was rare for new neighbours to move in, the obvious reason being that there weren’t many houses to rent. Buildings more than two storeys high weren’t a common sight, and the biggest share of land went to the trees.

Every family had a house surrounded by a large garden; if you looked down from the opposite hill, the neighbourhood looked like a forest, thick with citrus and almond trees and interspersed with large olive groves, their trees at least sixty years old. There were no fences between the plots; their owners knew the boundaries thanks to humble lines of stones or barrels of rocks, fig and olive trees planted along the sides, or often by cactuses that would form barriers of their own.

The area was full of public open spaces, where nobody needed permission to go and harvest the fresh green almonds, prickly pears or wild mallow; every fig and berry that grew was eternally promised to the birds, the passersby, and all the local children, of course.

On Friday afternoon, a truck packed with cardboard boxes and bags parked in front of Abu Tameem’s house. It was a single-storey building with a basement and a white stone front, surrounded by an orchard of figs, grapes and almonds. Abu Tameem had turned the front garden into a used-goods showroom – or, to be more precise, a pile of junk. He’d buy and sell anything he could get his hands on: electrical items, furniture, bikes, machinery, you name it. And because of that, no one took any notice of the truck unloading the belongings of a new resident who’d be renting out his basement. Two whole days passed before the neighbourhood realised what was going on. It was the morning Umm Tameem took her new neighbour to visit Umm Ziyad.

Come evening, Ibtihal had become the talk of every house in the neighbourhood. And when I say every house I mean literally every house (except one: the house where The Nose lived).

Nobody knew this relative of Abu Tameem’s. No one knew whether she was divorced, widowed, married to a prisoner, or the wife of someone who’d left the country. Only Abu Tameem knew. And when Umm Ziyad asked this woman about her husband, Ibtihal just said ‘May Allah make it easy on him.’ And may Allah make it easy on her, too, this mosaic of a woman; she was, herself, something of an obscure answer. Even if Umm Ziyad had ruled out the prospect of Abu Tameem marrying another woman, Ibtihal’s silence still plunged her into a vortex of suspicious curiosity.

The weird thing was that Umm Tameem hadn’t fed Umm Ziyad any gossip this time. When Ibtihal had said ‘May Allah make it easy on him,’ the worry on Umm Tameem’s face had been as clear as day. And she wasn’t playing along with her neighbour in their usual role of ‘interrogate the new arrival’. So Umm Ziyad carried on alone, circling Ibtihal like a vulture, trying to suss out her backstory, like where had she come from, and why, and where had her grandfather been during the Nakba and where did he go then, what were the names of her uncles and brothers-in-law and so on, until Ibtihal was quite visibly uncomfortable. To diffuse the awkwardness, Umm Ziyad served up a piece of helba from the tray in front of her and handed the plate to Ibtihal.

‘May Allah curse Shaytan – all that chat and we forgot about dessert,’ said Umm Ziyad, pouring a cup of mint tea. ‘This is for you – well, what should I call you?’

‘Umm Bisan,’ Ibtihal replied. ‘The helba’s delicious, by the way. Did you make it?’ she added with a smile.

Umm Ziyad knew full well that Ibtihal was trying to dodge her questions, but before she could say anything, Umm Tameem chimed in: ‘She makes the best harissa in Jenin, too!’

Such compliments were irresistible to Umm Ziyad. Her face softened with delight. Somewhat relaxed now, she put her intrusive questions to one side and decided that next time she’d spoil her guests and really show off. ‘I’ll make harissa just for you and call you round again,’ she said.

Although Umm Tameem would usually answer anything asked within earshot, she struggled to respond to even one question on Ibtihal’s behalf. The simple reason was that, despite being a nosy woman, Umm Tameem hadn’t the slightest idea who Ibtihal was.

Abu Tameem was renting out the basement to his relative so that he could keep her under his nose. Whenever he was with his wife, he’d give emphasise ‘relative’, because while ‘under his nose’ could mean ‘under his care’, it could also mean ‘in front of his gawping eyes’. Ibtihal was a woman in her mid-thirties who usually let her hair fall loose over her shoulders, sometimes tying it in a ponytail with a small plait running through. She was fair skinned, with brilliant green eyes and a pale birthmark on the right side of her neck, and was ‘quick to smile’, as Umm Ziyad put it. In the afternoon, Ibtihal would sunbathe in the front garden, reading magazines and listening to music – usually Umm Kulthum. She worked in a clinic run by an aid agency – some sort of administrative role – and had a fixed salary. This was enough for Umm Tameem’s heart to plummet, terrified for what this meant for her husband – or what was left of him.

Truth be told, Ibtihal hadn’t really done anything to fuel Umm Tameem’s suspicions. She would come home around noon, help with her daughter’s homework, and then get on with the housework; she only started mixing with the other women upon Umm Tameem’s insistence; she changed the gas cylinder herself; and she chose times when the street wasn’t busy to go to the shop or drink her sage tea on the patio. ‘She keeps herself to herself,’ as Umm Tameem put it. But in the mornings, one glance through the kitchen window at Ibtihal’s laundry drying outside was enough to ruffle her feathers: garish nightgowns you could practically see through, a luxurious bathrobe in playful pink. Nothing was left to the imagination. When Abu Tameem said ‘Ibtihal earns nearly half what I earn,’ she could hear the coins jingling in his voice. She knew her husband, for his part, could not be trusted. She was right to worry, because he was like a cuckoo bird, never sleeping in his own nest.

Every day, just before evening, a patrol from the occupation army would pass through the neighbourhood so that the soldiers on Abu Jameel’s roof could change shifts. It was the tallest house in the area, on the highest part of land, and it was pretty much the only four-storey building in Jabal Abu Dhahir. Not to mention that Abu Jameel was the mayor – or ‘The Nose’ as the locals called him.

The soldiers used this roof as a permanent lookout post over the city to protect their colleagues. When a patrol drove past, the local boys had a habit of hiding in the trees between houses and pelting the army vehicles with rocks, pebbles and empty bottles. Usually, the soldiers paid no mind to the boys and their stones, which would simply bounce off the protective mesh on the windows like bubbles. Sometimes, though, the soldiers would venture out of their trucks and fire into the air, making the boys scamper from those nearby gardens to ones further away, and the women scramble out of their houses to gather their sons off the streets.

That day, on their way back from school, Ziyad and Tameem made a plan. Right in the middle of the patrol route, they decided they were going to leave a damaged radio in a bag with a single wire peeking out that would stretch all the way across the road. This – they knew from experience – would send the soldiers into an absolute frenzy. They’d shut down the entire neighbourhood for a while, using a remote-control device to lift the bag off from a distance and take apart the ‘suspicious object’ inside.

‘We’re really gonna mess with them this time,’ said Ziyad. In this neighbourhood, the boys played lots of games together – football, seven stones, other ball games – but playing with the occupation soldiers had always been their favourite.

Tameem was hit with pangs of dread. He hadn’t forgotten the day he’d climbed the tall cypress tree opposite his house and – with uncannily monkey-like skill – tied a Palestinian flag at the very top. Everyone watched as the flag fluttered in time to the unrest spreading through the city, the tree’s tender tip swaying like the gigantic green hand of a fellow protestor, proudly raising its flag to the sky.

The authorities couldn’t reach the flag to take it down. They tried raising up the platform on the back of their truck and reaching as far as they could with an iron rod, but the trunk of the wild cypress had no branches on it for the last two metres or so. Obviously there was no point in the soldiers shooting at it. A city worker, craving The Nose’s attention, tried to climb the tree himself, but he soon slid down and landed on his arse – which was great fun for soldiers and residents alike.

It was thrilling. The flag had defeated the soldiers! They, of all people, were the least willing and able to climb trees. As a gaggle of snickering onlookers gathered, Captain Assad, the intelligence officer, marched up to Abu Tameem, dragged him by his collar from the middle of the crowd into the group of soldiers, and ordered him – at gunpoint – to climb the tree.

Abu Tameem looked at the mayor, who was standing next to the officer. Despite the cold smile protruding from his lips, the mayor’s expression was impenetrable.

‘Bloody imbecile,’ muttered Abu Tameem, wiping the palm of his hand over his face, then turning to the mayor with a nod towards Captain Assad. ‘He wants me to go swinging up that tree? Can’t he see I can barely stand on my own two feet? Tell him I can’t.’

But the mayor didn’t utter a word as Captain Assad continued shoving Abu Tameem by the shoulder towards the cypress tree. He simply kept his eyes fixed on Abu Tameem and raised his eyebrows a little. Between the state of Abu Tameem’s legs, the mayor’s smile, and the officer’s – the imbecile’s – coercion, Jameel felt he needed to do something. To climb the tree himself. But before he could take a single step, the mayor tightly grabbed his son’s forearm. When Jameel tried to wriggle free, he was put down with a threatening stare.

Time became slow, weighing down on Captain Assad, who had realised the gravity of the situation. By this point, the onlookers had broken through his intimidation and were diligently creeping towards him and the soldiers, who were on high alert, their anxious eyes wide and shining. It was only then that he noticed the posters of a smiling boy stuck on all the nearby houses – he knew it was a local boy; the soldiers had shot him dead while he was throwing stones. The photograph only added to his rage. He pulled out the gun hanging at his back, a small black Uzi, and, pointing it above Abu Tameem’s head, fired into the air. As pigeons took off from the surrounding roofs to the clatter of shells hitting asphalt, Tameem, terrified for his father, ran headfirst through the crowd towards the cypress tree, climbed it, and took down the flag. Abu Tameem’s face had changed colour twice: yellow when the captain had ordered him – a man who could barely climb the stairs – to scale the tree, and red when he saw his own son throwing the flag down from the very top.

The mayor caressed Abu Tameem’s shoulder as the smile evaporated from his face and materialised on the latter’s. ‘Keep an eye on your son, Abu Tameem. You don’t want him coming home in a bin bag. Whoever can get the flag down could’ve got it up there, surely.’

And even though Ziyad knew the story well – he’d even nicknamed Tameem ‘the monkey’ in memory of that day – he wouldn’t acknowledge his friend’s fears. He placed a hand on Tameem’s shoulder with a mischievous grin Tameem knew well: the grin of a boy who saw troublemaking as a national duty, although neither of them realised that at the time.

‘Don’t be scared,’ said Ziyad. ‘Even if we get caught, a broken radio sitting on a road isn’t the same thing as a flag tied so high up in a tree that no one except a monkey like you can get it. Your dad could easily get this off the road without the captain even asking.’ He added that he and the other boys in his class had done the same thing once on the military road near school. That day, the whole school – students and teachers – had spent the entire fourth period glued to the classroom windows, watching things play out to their own running commentary. You could say Ziyad liked this game more than any other.

And that’s how the two boys came to meet in Tameem’s back garden, where his dad kept everything that wouldn’t sell: broken machines, screenless Sharp televisions, broken Panasonic recorders, Tadiran fridges with no doors, damaged wires. They chose a Philips radio, put it in a Forsa shoebox, and left two wires poking out, one blue and one brown. Placing the shoebox in a black nylon bag, they tied it shut with more wires, unmistakeable on the outside of the bag.

‘We’re ready,’ whispered Tameem.

‘Soon as we see the jeeps coming down the hill, we’ll put it in the middle of the road,’ Ziyad replied, eyes gleaming. ‘Then we’ll leg it back to mine and watch from the roof.’

From that day on, Ziyad and Tameem were never the same. They gradually withdrew from the streets, secluded themselves from the other boys, and barricaded themselves behind a thick layer of silence. They had never finished their plan with the radio.

But they still lived in the neighbourhood after all. Whenever someone called for them, they’d slip out of Abu Tameem’s garden and sit innocently at Ziyad’s front door, their clipped answers giving nothing away. Although nobody knew what had happened that day, their friends sensed a dangerous secret had spun its web round the pair. They decided to keep an eye on them.

Just before Maghrib, Ziyad went out to meet Tameem. The pair walked down to the last house in the neighbourhood, crossed to the other side, walked all the way back again, and then stood for a while at the top of the hill, under the generator, as if on guard. Then they jumped over the wall into Abu Tameem’s garden and sat motionless, whispering to each other until night fell and they went home exhausted.

Things went on like this for days, until Ayman lost his patience. His friends had abandoned him, he felt. They’d left him out of their secret adventures and if he didn’t find out what was going on he’d be so sad he’d die. He decided to talk to them about it. The following day, on the way back from school, he caught them unawares.

‘I know you two’s up to something. I was watching and I saw you hiding in an olive tree.’

The words ‘up to something’ mean one thing and one thing only in the language of the neighbourhood boys, and by using them Ayman had hinted that he was going to tell every single person on the planet – or this part of it anyway. Ayman was literally a travelling radio. And this was exactly why the boys had kept it from him. But now they had no choice but to let him in on the secret, to avoid those words ‘up to something’ ever leaving Ayman’s mouth again. So Tameem told him.

‘Well. When Ibtihal gets changed, she doesn’t shut the curtains.’

Ayman had no words. Eyes sparkling, he let out a long whistle. ‘No way!’ he eventually managed.

Ziyad was terrified of what Tameem might say next. They needed to be very careful – to not say another word. The story was this close to breaking loose and becoming an all-out catastrophe.

‘But she heard us yesterday and we ran away and that’s it, we’re not going back.’ Ziyad added, trying to make things better. ‘Don’t tell anyone. We told you cause you’re our mate.’

Ayman’s pupils grew. He gulped. He had made his decision.

‘I want to see too.’

Ziyad and Tameem looked at each other, their faces red as paint.

‘I told you we’re not doing it again, alright? My dad would bloody kill me!’

Ayman pursed his lips in defiance, his chin and eyebrows lifted. ‘Well, I wanna watch too. I’ll keep quiet, I won’t tell anyone. Ask Tameem – I didn’t say anything when he broke the masjid window, I said Jameel did it.’

Tameem confirmed with a nod. ‘I have one condition though. Gimme your pocket money for two days. And you’re only coming once.’

Ayman relaxed. ‘Like I’m buying a souvenir! Deal.’

Ziyad wasn’t comfortable with the agreement. He knew Ayman wouldn’t keep quiet, that after he’d ‘watched’ Ibtihal he’d blab about the entire thing – because the only thing harder for a blabbermouth like him than giving up two days’ pocket money was keeping a secret like this.

Ziyad didn’t sleep a wink that night. He tossed and turned in bed, wrestling his fears; he pulled the covers over his head and squeezed his eyelids shut. What if Ayman told Jameel? Ayman’s such a massive snitch. We’ll get skinned alive if Jameel finds out. There’s no way he won’t tell his dad. He wished he could fly into Tameem’s bedroom, grab him while he slept, and punch him in the face. Or at least moan to him about this stupid mess they’d got themselves into.

I’ll batter him inside out if he even says one word he decided. In his mind, he leafed through all the warnings he’d ever been given and those he’d overheard – from his dad, teachers, neighbours and relatives – against ever doing anything that would make people suspicious.

In neighbourhoods like these, extreme caution was the foundation stone of a young boy’s upbringing. The topic tumbled from relatives’ mouths with every visit to a neighbour who’d just got out of prison, whenever the teacher slammed the textbook shut, not sparing art and maths lessons; every day, people discussed how others had fallen into the swamp of the occupation for the most trivial reasons you could imagine. If you slipped, there was no pulling yourself out of that swamp. People didn’t need hard evidence for a person to become a suspect, a traitor, a spy: it was enough that they were the head of a school and had to speak to the education officer as part of their job, or that the soldiers had driven them from the checkpoint to the military compound next door for a few minutes and then let them go, or that somebody had seen them on the beach at Haifa with a beer bottle. And if a man was spotted in Afula with a blonde woman – not that there’s anything wrong with it – then people would swear on anything that he was a spy. No one would care if he said he worked in a factory or on a building site like thousands of others and that his boss just happened to be a woman who is blonde. And if rumours circled about someone who had commandeered a certain status for themselves – someone who ‘makes their own rules’ as people in Jenin would say, then they wouldn’t escape Captain Assad’s clutches without being chosen as the new community chief or mayor.

None of this bothered the occupation. They liked it, in fact. Even when the rumours weren’t true. What was the harm in letting spies and suspicions do the rounds? Maybe they could ask Captain Assad, a spy himself, to choose an innocent man and out him as a mole. This was, after all, the neighbourhood with a certain slogan on the walls in red paint: ‘BREACH YOUR MORALS = BREACH OUR SAFETY’.

The disaster would be Ayman finding out the real story and telling Jameel. ‘Your damn dad, Jameel,’ muttered Ziyad, still rolling about in bed, remembering the time he’d seen Jameel passing a ball back and forth with a soldier, of all people, one of those who’d stand on his roof. Then Ziyad’s thoughts wandered to his own dad.

Ziyad’s dad was always right. He knew everyone. He had told Ziyad dozens of stories about the time he got arrested, his years in jail, and how he’d escaped the clutches of Captain Assad. Ziyad would never forget the day his dad had tied his wrists to the banister and swore he’d spend the night that way, tied up like a dog, all because his brothers had cried like babies when they found out Ziyad had gone without them to Jameel’s house, with Tameem and Ayman, to play Super Mario.

His dad had made things very clear that day: ‘Don’t hang around with Jameel, son. His dad is The Nose, the mayor, the biggest dog in Assad’s pack. Don’t go to their house, don’t get into a fight with him, and don’t you dare say another word to him, good or bad. Understood?’

‘So Jameel’s a spy… Like his dad?’ asked Ziyad, chest tightening with anguish. If only he could drag Jameel to the school toilets right there and then, really teach him, break him to bits, something he’d remember all his life, as revenge for what he’d made Ziyad go through.

‘No, not a spy. But his dad’s a dirty piece of work. I wouldn’t care if he was a prophet, even, you don’t hang around with him. Just listen, would you? And stop doing my head in.’