Made of Stone

[Warning: Contains foul language]

Break time, and they all had the dust coat on their clothes to prove it. Mahmoud shut off the backhoe and left the keys in the ignition. He undid his kafiya to let the front part fall off his face, took off his safety glasses and one of his earplugs, and used the inside of the kafiya to get the dust off of them before putting them back on and dismounting.

Dust mixed with sweat to form caking layers of mud on their heads as their machines cut through bedrock and construction loader trucks hauled it away. Cutting stone for construction materials was neither the most glamorous nor most technical profession, but it paid better than anything else a man could get in al-Khalil (without a government wasta that is).

Mahmoud joined the gaggle of men meandering up the dirt path out of the deep quarry towards the prefabricated building that served as an office and break room. This was actually a Yehudi owned company, but the Yehudi and Shami were indistinguishable in their common work clothes and kafiya when working here.

They all filed into the breakroom without a word. The small room had a folding table and chairs but was not big enough for all 18 men and some sat on the floor in the crowded space. But there was air conditioning and coffee in there, and these men all poured themselves some and got their lunches. Mahmoud had a reb plastic lunchbox from he fetched the falafel he made before coming to work that morning.

Jasar who ran the cutting machine was complaining about the coffee, but no one seemed to care. Until he asked why no one around here seemed to know how to make coffee.

"Someone's pissy today," said Yoni the geologist.

Mahmoud noticed that Badra the office clerk did not look up from her desk during this, and she normally made the coffee. Mahmoud was not sure, but he thought Jasar did not like her for some reason.

Jasar sat on the floor and sipped his coffee and the room was silent for a while. Mahmoud had been thinking something had been missing in this room for some time and the thought just occurred to him.

"Where's Ali?" He said. "I haven't seen him around in a while."

No one seemed to want to answer although a few seemed to realize they had not seen Ali either.

"I'm not sure he's still with us," Yoni replied glancing up at the general manager from his lunch.

The boss was slow to answer, "No, at this point he's gone." The boss was an old man named Benny who wore a face of a man whose seen it all in his time.

Yoni's reaction was muted, "I figured, I saw him trying to get a few days off last week and haven't seen him since."

Silence followed. "No one has to work here if they don't want to," said Benny.

Mahmoud said, "Not really, a lot of places I've worked don't always pay on time. I got kids to feed."

Benny exhaled in a small suppressed laugh. "Is that why you put up with us all these years?"

Mahmoud was too tired to answer and kept eating, not minding the bit of dust that fell off his shirt into the falafel. Sometimes it seemed to Mahmoud that all his life would ever be was cutting stones, and pondered how it was that some people had gotten cushy office jobs so easily. Mahmoud finished his food and then relaxed a bit.

Silence prevailed as most of the men were on their phones. Jasar seemed to be drifting off to sleep and Mahmoud figured he might just have been tired and cranky. Benny got up and leaned against the wall as he always did since lunch was a convenient time for staff meetings.

"Overall we've been meeting our production quotas, but we've just got a large order in for white marble."

This invariably meant mandatory overtime.

Jasar seemed mildly disgusted and said, "Oh, come the fuck on." He got up and stormed out.

Yoni laughed quietly and said, "I hope he's coming back."

"He left his lunchbox," said Ahmed who had been sitting next to him.

Benny continued "Yes, so we will be working all day Saturday, and probably the same next week too."

There were a number of objections and excuses made that Benny either ignored or just said "We need you here." Arguments seemed more like negotiations that made life more complicated than it needed but some people thought they could get Benny to give an inch. As that was wrapping up, they all tied their kafiya to cover their faces and donned their safety glasses, knowing that some people would take them off as soon as Benny wasn't around to tell them to put them on. As soon as one man got up on his own initiative, they all did as they could linger no longer.

They found Jaser sitting by his workstation on his phone and he got ready for work again as they approached. Ahmed was still learning his post and had to work with Jaser cutting stones from the cliff face. Mahmoud went back to the backhoe and started it again. Mahmoud went to his usual routine of taking large stones from the quarry and moving them to an area by the road where they would be cut into small stones.

Later approaching sundown Mahmoud noticed Jaser and Ahmed seemed to have a problem holding them up as he drove by. When Mahmoud came back for another load, both men were gone and Benny and several others were there. Benny waved Mahmoud down and he shut off the engine so he could hear Benny over the noise. Benny said they were sending everyone home immediately.

Mahmoud did not find out until later that Ahmed and Jaser had gotten into an argument because, like all seasoned workers, Jaser had his own way of doing things which was not how Ahmed was taught. Jaser had said a lot of rude things to Ahmed with every slight misstep and eventually a shoving match ensued where it seemed to Jaser that Ahmed was trying to push him into a spinning saw.

No one knew whether to believe that, but Mahmoud never saw either of them again... All because one guy was having a bad day. No one even bothered telling the police as they only did stuff if you were a friend of theirs, and the government was far away.

Sometimes Mahmoud picked up the finished stones and pondered how much trouble there was over something so simple. In its natural environment, the rocks seemed completely useless, littering the landscape and rendering it unfit for crops, but it was a cheap building material.

Mahmoud also thought of all the farmers he used to work for when he was a transient day laborer. All the verbal abuse and sometimes they would expect him to keep coming back even as they neglected to pay the small wage they had offered.

People liked to blame the war for all problems, but nothing Mahmoud had experienced had anything to do with that. Mahmoud valued peace since it was so rare in this place.