Before We Say Goodbye (3 page)

“Perhaps you will persuade someone, but what can that ‘someone’ do?”

“What’s really changed in all these years? What progress has been made?”

“Vered, you know yourself that it’s only got worse. On both sides. And I’m tired.”

“No, it’s not that… I’d tell you if it were that.”

“OK, I’m depressed. Of course I’m depressed. Aren’t you? Who isn’t?”

“No, look – the truth is, we’ve become a people of depressives. At one time I would have got angry with my daughter because she doesn’t even follow the news. Myriam never takes an interest in anything, you know that, don’t you? But now they all seem to be the same.”

“Yes, in my office too.”

“You see?”

“So you’re saying I’m right…”

“You see?”

“That’s what I’m telling you: we are a people of depressives.”

“Yes, OK, I’m speaking for myself. Let’s say I’m speaking just for myself, but it’s the truth.”

“No, this time I can’t do it. I’ve always followed you, haven’t I? I’ve always said you were right. But to tell the truth, I don’t even know… I mean … perhaps all I wanted was for someone to tell me what to do, that’s all. But now I don’t feel like making the effort any more.”

“I’m really tired. At nights I don’t sleep a wink. If I think about Nathan, who still has over two years…”

“I don’t know. He’s certainly changed.”

“Nothing seems to matter to him any more, that’s what hurts the most. No, that’s not true. That’s not true: what’s killing me is my fear for his life, every minute of every day and night. I can’t stand it any more.”

“Yes, we always said that.”

“He’s changed.”

“It’s true. A few years ago, out of all of us Nathan was the pacifist. Now it makes me laugh to think of it. Or maybe it makes me cry, what do you think?”

“He went off to serve believing in it; he felt it was his duty. He went with his friends… With his schoolmate… You knew about that, didn’t you?”

“Oh, Myriam… Myriam is another worry. Since that other awful business, she’s not been herself. She doesn’t even go to the gym any more, and you know how often she used to – how important it was to her. Now in the afternoons she just visits that hill, where she used to go with her friend.”

“Yes, I am, I’m very worried. But I don’t know what to say to her; I don’t know what to think any more. I no longer know what to hope for myself, so what do you want me to say to them? What’s left for us to say to them?”

“That’s true. I’ve begun to think the same. I’m beginning to see it like that too.”

“Maybe we should just stay apart, each defending himself from the sight of the other.”

“It depends on how you look at it. They leave us in peace, we leave them in peace.”

“Yes, it’s true, I’m very depressed. But as I said, we’re all depressed.”

“That’s just how it is. We are depressed; they are desperate.”

Having finished the equation, Dima tried to distract herself as she awaited the result, but her thoughts reacted to the spring air coming in through the window. The return of spring immediately took her back to a day last April, when she and Faris had gone out alone and walked as far as the walls of Beit Jala.

The wall in front of the school was rubble. She had to think of rubble.

Rubble.

As much of it as she wanted.

In the middle of one night a bulldozer had driven through the streets of the camp. You can hear a bulldozer from quite a distance, and it takes ages to move through the streets of Dheisheh. The slow, sinister sound was as familiar to her as the rest of the soundtrack of the occupation. As familiar as the Apache helicopters, as the tanks, as the smashed-in doors, as the gunshots.

That time the bulldozer had stopped in front of a house not far from hers. The family who lived in it had just enough time to grab the children and get dressed before the soldiers blew up their home. They had used perhaps twice as much dynamite as was necessary and the ferocious blast had carried as far as Dima’s house, sending rubble falling onto its roof.

Incredibly the bathroom of the demolished house had remained intact, but the bathroom door had ended up lodged in the wall of the house opposite. And around the dispaced door someone had written:
Even if they bombard this house they will still be unable to take what I love most.
All their photos had blown away from the ruins of the house, and kind neighbours had later picked them up. Their wedding photo, for example, with the photographer’s name printed on the back, and the place: Jerusalem, Jordan.

Now the family lived in a tent with the Palestinian flag fluttering above it; plastic chairs, carpets and the coffee pot. Sa’ana, one of the women, frequently suffered panic attacks.

At her desk Dima tried to look like she was paying attention but her mind raced with a mad whirl of images.

Until she was eleven she had lived closed up in the camp. With another eleven thousand people. In less than half a square mile. A barbed wire fence surrounded them, and there were ten gates but only one was open. Coming in and going out was long and difficult because of the checks, so she did it late and seldom; and it was only when she was older that she understood what someone had sprayed in paint on the outside:
It’s cheaper to kill them
.

After the fence had been removed, Dheisheh became open, but not even the pleasure of new discoveries could erase that warm and bitter sense of separateness. Dheisheh was her home, a world apart. A world in waiting. Far from Bethlehem, where she would go to live after the wedding and which was in fact practically next door, even closer than Jerusalem, eight kilometres further up. In purely geographical terms her grandparents’ villages were even closer, although no one had ever seen them because they were unable to return. But her father always talked of those villages on the days when the Jews celebrated what they call the War of Independence and the Palestinians call the
Nakba
– the catastrophe – when they were driven from their homes. It was on one such occasion, sitting down at their table, that her father handed his eldest son the key to his father’s house in the village, just as his father had once given it to him. But first they would have to see if the house still existed.

“Upon retirement, how many Jews will I have killed if I kill one a day every working day for forty years?” the old maths teacher was saying, repeating a familiar joke, and the class laughed and – satisfied – made their calculations. Dima lowered her head, crushed by a weight she could no longer bear.

With an enormous effort, she once more turned her thoughts to Khaldun and Ibrahim.

Six metal bottles, the kind they used in hospital. A bit dirty and a bit dented. Rizak had told him he had found them in a dump. In each bottle he had put some explosive and a mercury lamp with a twelve-volt battery. Then he had taped them to two small mortar bombs, which he had bought from a shepherd in ash-Shawawra. Finally he had connected everything to a firing button.

Boy, Rizak certainly knew how to do a good job. Ghassan had to admit that he had never learned to prepare bombs like this. Rizak was better at it – especially at picking things up here and there and adapting them to the purpose. It had been a good idea to ask him to lend a hand this time. Not that Ghassan didn’t understand explosives; he did. You could even say that he liked them – a lot. He liked to imagine the strength of the blast that lurked inside. He liked their smell and their texture; he could always feel them under his skin.

The first time they had given him explosives, Ghassan was fourteen and had only been in Dheisheh a few months. He had come there with his family after the Oslo Accords, from the refugee camp in Lebanon where he was born and raised, just like Rizak. Today, nine years later, he still hadn’t got used to the fact that he was finally in Palestine, but at the same time he wasn’t there yet. You could say that he had been happier in Lebanon: at least there it was easier to dream.

So it wasn’t long before they gave him explosives, and by sixteen he had already had an accident: a grenade had exploded too close, and a few fragments had pierced his forehead and left eye. Since then he had suffered from terrible migraines, which mostly occurred on days like this, when the weather changed. But Ghassan never felt anger towards that grenade, nor towards the person who had given it to him. On the contrary, he felt that those fragments which remained in his head had charged him with power, giving him a surplus of trapped strength, ready to explode to order.

Already this year Ghassan alone had planted a good six explosive charges in various parts of Jerusalem, and things had only gone wrong that time at Ghilo, when the guards of the Mishtara had fired at him and he’d had to flee with a bullet in the leg without managing to trigger the explosion. Otherwise he was the precise type – he knew how to time things and didn’t allow his nerves to get the better of him. Nothing compared with the moment when he set off the device: his rage exploded into the sky and for a moment he felt as if he had won a truce.

He opened a cupboard and pulled out a woman’s shoulder bag, the kind with two long handles. Carefully he placed Rizak’s explosive device inside the bag and threaded the firing button through a pocket in the strap. It seemed to him that the thing should work. It was easy to reach the pocket, and the bag didn’t seem either too full or too heavy. He put it back in the cupboard and kicked Rizak’s empty bag under the bed.

Then he went to watch the video recorded the day before.

After her conversation with Vered, Shoshi felt even more exhausted. It seemed as if fate had decreed that this morning she should remain sitting on that chair. She couldn’t move.

They had returned to Israel with ideals. Where had they ended up? Why was it that a Jewish mother no longer knew what to say to her children?

The phone rang again.

“Nathan! How are you? In Jerusalem? Why Jerusalem? Wait, I’ll come and pick you up… Right now. Wait for me in that bar on the right, just as you come out of the station… Actually, it might take me a while; I’m not dressed yet. But wait; I’m coming.”

Nathan on compassionate leave. Nathan in Jerusalem. She didn’t even pause to wonder why. All her strength came back to her. She slipped quickly under the shower, towelled her hair without drying it, dressed, picked up the car keys and headed for the bus station.

Up on the hill it was still wet but the sun gave the earth a particular scent. From there Jerusalem seemed to lie quietly, waiting to be noticed from above. Myriam looked down over the Knesset, the Gan Sacher, the Rehavia district.

Since the day they had buried Michael’s arm, she could no longer bear to feel closed in, anywhere. Their flat, for example, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, so packed with African furnishings and thousands of photos of America, and so small that if you took two steps you were already back at the door. The school entrance hall, always so full that you had to jostle your way through. The gym with no windows and the air that kept all the sweat inside. Clothes so tight that it took an effort to put them on and pull them off.

Yet she had earned those tight-fitting clothes. She had paid for them with months of workouts in front of a Jane Fonda video, and an uncompromising diet that had slimmed down her waist, hips and bottom, and won her the looks of Joseph, Moshe and even Aharon, who was gorgeous and right out of her league. An apple in the morning, salad for lunch, chicken in the evening. Checking herself out in the mirror thirty times a day. Weighing herself on an empty stomach. Measuring herself. Trying on outfit after outfit before deciding what to wear. Getting up half an hour early each morning to give herself the full make-up treatment: foundation, blusher, powder, lipstick, mascara and eyeliner. Watching her face change, take on the shadow of a woman and glow as if she were happy.

That had been her life, and only two months had passed since that life. Two months since Michael’s flight.

Like Myriam, Michael had wanted to go away. They both wanted to go away. “We are Americans,” they would say to one another. “What is there here for us? Sooner or later we’ll leave.” Michael really was American; he was born in Texas and so was his mother, whom his father had met in Paris. But one day his parents got sick and tired of McDonald’s, the long cars and the long roads, the gangs in their suburbs. They remembered the Promised Land.

For her part Myriam felt American because they had moved to California when she was only four months old, because of her father’s job, and hadn’t returned to Israel until she was twelve. And whereas her older brother, Nathan, who was almost fourteen at the time, had been able to study Hebrew for a year before starting his new school, she, being younger, had gone straight into hers. It hadn’t been fun, feeling excluded from everyone’s games for almost a year. And, since then, it had been so much effort, always, to keep up with the others in her schoolwork.

“It’s so miserable here,” she complained constantly to her mother. “When we gonna go back to California?”

Since her husband had left, moving to Tel Aviv and leaving her alone in Jerusalem with the children, since everything around her had become so difficult to understand, even Myriam’s mother had begun to ask herself, When we gonna go back to America?

It wasn’t just the language – other things in this country made life unpleasant. The armed soldiers who filled the streets, for a start. It had been one of the first things Myriam recalled seeing, newly arrived from America; still only young, it had frightened her. It was the years following the first intifada. Her mother had tried to explain it to her – as much as an adult feels like explaining to a child. And she had made that little do for always; she simply never wanted to tackle these issues.

*   *   *

“What does it mean to say we’re Jews?” Myriam and Michael would ask one another many times, in heated disagreement with others and their certainties. “Why do we have to stop being American to go back to being fundamentally a Jew? Why at a certain point in life do we have to?”