Before We Say Goodbye (2 page)

By now Abraham was on the road too, but still not entirely awake. This morning he wished for a gentler sun that would carry him away. Plump swarthy arms that would cradle him. A lullaby, an ancient lament. Walking quickly among the puddles towards the supermarket, he sensed those odours those flavours that accent all of which fell upon him at once, and as usual when he least expected it. Like a wave, like an echo. Like a melody. This morning. Arab eyes watching him. They were all around him. He could sense their warm pulsing. A deep pulsing, a dark breathing, a zone of shadow. Inside him. Somewhere they were waiting for him. They were calling him. They were hot on his heels.

Abraham wanted to surrender to it. Slow his pace. He wanted to return their look, which made him feel warm and uneasy. But he didn’t know how; he had forgotten.

Taking care to leap over a particularly large puddle, he shook off the feeling and laughed. It was no time, he said to himself, for daydreaming. In the days leading up to Pesach the supermarkets were particularly crowded, and that was precisely why they had called him in. To lend an extra hand, to check out every Arab who came close.

He arrived at the supermarket and went to his station. His was a backup post, just inside the entrance doors. Which were about to open.

Had she seen the arm, perhaps she would have come to terms with it sooner. They had shown it to Michael’s father for identification; it was all that remained of him but it was enough, because it was his tattooed left arm. Four of them had accompanied him to have the tattoo done. Michael had chosen a winged dragon, and one day that winged dragon had flown into the sky and then landed intact, whereas Michael had gone goodness knows where and never returned.

When they killed her mother’s cousin, the one who had made a home in the territories, and even her father had come back to stay with the family for the occasion, death had not shot her inside in this way. Everyone around her had despaired and recalled and inveighed against the tribulations of their people. Her mother had wept, as had her cousin’s wife, and the children, and Myriam too had cried at the funeral, until the last shovelful of earth had put an end to the matter for her. And that was normal. Because everyone has deaths in the family, especially when you go to live among the Arabs, where they don’t want you and you stay there precisely because you don’t want them.

But on the day they buried the Michael arm, her stomach was flattened against her belly and her head was four thousand metres up, with a void of panic in the middle; and disconnected like this she had not wept. It was as if the Michael remains were somewhere, and would arrive and put the other arm around her shoulder.

The funeral had not put an end to the matter.

Michael had been the first friend she had made when her family returned from California. He was her American friend, who like her didn’t even entertain the thought of speaking Hebrew at home. She and Michael had spent most of their free time together, and had been together that day in the shopping centre, talking nineteen to the dozen in the American slang they remembered less and less – mixed when necessary with some funny or indomitable Hebrew word – and they had gone their separate ways maybe ten minutes before the explosion. Then Michael had vanished, and with him every illusion about America.

All this had happened two months before. It was since then, since they had buried Michael’s arm, that Myriam had begun to photograph trees. The still air of the hill was the only thing that calmed her. Among the trunks and the greenery she found her place again. She felt good there.

Michael was there too. He was there somewhere. She didn’t know where, but she felt he was there.

“You are ready. From now on you mustn’t think about anything,” Ghassan had told her the previous day.

But how could she not think about anything? Dima tried, with her notebook in front of her and her pen in her hand. She stared at the page without seeing it and tried not to see anything at all. Then she saw Leila smiling at her from the al-Arabiya news desk. And a hand seized her heart and clutched it tight, until it almost broke. She closed her eyes and breathed very slowly to reopen her heart. She tried her best not to let herself be hurt.

In the days of the curfew Leila had stopped coming to see her, and little by little Dima had got out of the habit of asking her advice. Yet there had been times when Leila’s had been the most important voice to speak to her in those four rooms, in those fifty square metres in which thirteen of them grew up and aged. Four small connecting rooms in which there alternated all the voices of the world: the soft tender tones of the women, her father’s solemn tones, her brothers’ heated tones, the cheerful tones of her sisters-in-law and the sweet voices of the youngest children. And in which, at seven in the morning and three in the afternoon, every day, she heard only Leila’s voice. There was rioting in Gaza; the settlers had shot at two boys. A house had been blown up by the soldiers and the occupants hadn’t even had time to save their children’s school certificates. An old man had been arrested but it wasn’t yet known what he was accused of; his wife declared that it was impossible to find out any information about him.

Leila went into homes; the camera followed, recounted, denounced. Leila went where Dima could not go, not yet. Leila spoke loud and clear. It was all so obvious when Leila spoke. In this way she made injustice and brutality public. The future would be dead if someone didn’t shake it like this, give it no respite, make sure it didn’t stop.

That’s why today Dima had a date with the future, in her own way, somewhere. A question of hours.

She struggled to focus on the task before her.

Myriam’s mother called the office to say she wasn’t feeling well, but maybe she would go in later. And after putting down the receiver she remained seated on the chair next to the phone.

She hadn’t even managed to tell her daughter, before Myriam left the house, what a terrible night she had passed. On the other hand she had asked her, the even-ing before, if she would mind sleeping in her bed with her, but Myriam had refused – and not very kindly either. So Shoshi had spent the entire night struggling with her breathing. Enduring the mocking tricks her mind had played on her. Trying to imagine Nathan sleeping in the barracks like a baby and not on guard, an armed man in the night. My God, Nathan was a child; he was only nineteen. But this land asked for your children before you had time to explain anything to them.

Nathan was doing his military service at the Erez checkpoint. He had gone off with a clear gaze, and on his first leave had returned moody and silent. Everyone knew what had happened. A Palestinian boy had blown himself up when they had been about to search him; and with him had blown up Moshe, Ariel, Samuel and Abigail. Ariel and Abigail had been Nathan’s schoolmates; Ariel had been his friend since his first class in Israel. The madcap, cheeky one. The one who always loved to shock.

No one had asked Nathan any questions; everyone expected him to talk about it; everyone expected to weep with him. But he did not say what had happened. He didn’t even say anything to Ariel’s parents when he went to visit them. Now Nathan always had a shadow over his eyes. He no longer looked anyone in the eyes. Yet he had always been the enthusiastic one, the one who wanted to understand, the one ready to ask and to give. At nineteen, at a time when all the strengths of a boy should begin to bear fruit and new seeds, where had Nathan ended up?

Not Myriam; Myriam had always been different. Myriam never showed much interest in what others around her said or did. When had Shoshi ever managed to get her to listen to something of the spiderweb of arguments that every day she doggedly tried to spin between her children and the reality of events. Spiderwebs that in truth she desperately needed to spin for herself even more than for the children. Myriam was the one who simply switched off the television when it reported news of attacks. She was the one who simply switched off when her mother begged her not to take the bus, not to frequent closed and crowded places. She was the one who always pretended she lived in a normal country.

But after Nathan returned to Erez, Michael was blown up. From that moment, Myriam had definitively disappeared – to where, no one knew. Shoshi should have tried to talk to her, but Myriam had never let her before, and perhaps she thought she already understood everything now. Beneath a barely ruffled surface, Myriam was evidently working on discarding all that she knew and re-establishing order within herself, in her own way.

As the telephone rang, Shoshi suddenly felt an intense cold.

Dima told herself it was time to solve the equation in front of her. She’d never had any problems with maths. If she managed to clear her mind, if she managed to keep her pain in a corner, if she managed to control her panting breath: in short, if she managed to solve the equation, she would show she was ready. Without having to worry about anything any more. As Ghassan had said.

About nothing.

Nothingness.

Nothing.

Her dreams had been nothing, come to think of it now. Her successes had been nothing. Her world nothing. Her efforts nothing, her thoughts nothing. Those long hours spent with Leila: nothing.

For no one could know, but every time the news ended, Leila stayed on to talk to Dima.

Sometimes Dima would find Leila sitting opposite her on a cushion, and it didn’t matter if little Nejma was playing on it. Or she would appear beside her as she toasted chickpeas. And so they would carry on talking about current events, and about what could happen. Of Dima’s everyday life, and how it had been influenced by the beating of a butterfly’s wings in Texas. Leila was understanding things, orientation, the conquest of the world, anger and remedy. Leila was her sister, her confidante, her friend. Leila was her role model. And Dima would have followed her.

Abu Said, her father, agreed. As he would say later, “I have always tried to give my children what I never had; I was glad she wanted to study. She wanted to do something useful, something important. So I gave her my permission, and she would have succeeded. She was always top of her class.”

In the autumn, with her diploma awarded, and married to Faris, Dima would enrol for the journalism course in Bethlehem. Many times had she diverted from her usual route to pass by the college. It was a new building, still unscathed by the fury of the clashes. From the pavement opposite, Dima would observe teachers and students coming out of lessons together, always fervently absorbed in conversation.

Luckily not even Faris had opposed this plan. He had always liked her determination. Anything Dima suggested would have made him happy – he had known that since they were children. It was Dima, for example, who had chosen the games when they were small, but none of the boys in the family had ever found this strange; she knew what she was doing. She was the one who decided: we’ll be the Palestinians; you’ll be the Israeli soldiers. Because that was the game they played all the time on the streets of the camp, some of them arming themselves with branches wrapped in old rags as if they were rifles, while the others had stones. But Dima never played the Israeli soldier who browbeats the Palestinian. She fled into hiding, lay in wait, pretended to throw her stone, yelled, small furrows of anger running across her little forehead, but it always ended with her and her people being arrested and knocked about – in pretence – and forced to stand pressed up against the wall to be threatened and mocked.

The school of journalism was not even opposed by Faris’s mother, Abdelin, in whose house Dima would go to live after the wedding, and with whom she would share the task of looking after the family. Abdelin was Dima’s aunt, who had lived with their family in Dheisheh before marrying. She had never had any girls, and she had loved her niece since the day she was born.

What will Abdelin think about what will happen today? Dima almost smiled. She imagined her aunt’s expression, the cries she would let out, and she felt a little consoled.

The thought of Aunt Abdelin brought back fond memories. Of when she was small, when Abdelin would sometimes come to call and play at
beit biut
with her: make up her face and lend her her high-heeled shoes, and call her “madam” and pay her visits with great ceremony, as Dima pretended to offer her coffee with cardamom. Or of the day Abdelin had taught Faris and her to play at seven stones, and of all the subsequent evenings she had spent this way, on the floor in the corner where her mother cooked on the Primus stove, showing off in front of Suad and Guivara, who were too small to be able to toss a pebble in the air and catch it while picking up the others, and so gazed at her with great envy.

Or of when – and she was bigger then – her aunt had taught her to play draughts, which was Abdelin’s favourite game; and to this day, when she could, her aunt still challenged her to games and return games. The question of who was the better of the two would never be resolved.

Dima realized that her heart was warming, so she hastened to tear up all thoughts of Abdelin, just as you tear up pages that are no longer of any use.

“No, I’m not coming, and you won’t persuade me this time.”

“Look, I just don’t have the strength any more.”

“No, that’s not true. It’s no use.”

“It doesn’t matter to Nathan any more either.”

“OK, good for you – go if you still believe.”

“If you still believe it’s of some use, I mean.”

“I believe in it, yes; I believe in it, but only up to a certain point.”

“In any case, our demonstrating serves no purpose.”