Before We Say Goodbye (4 page)

And everything was miserable in this city of “fundamentally” Jews, especially compared with California’s open faces and broad shoulders; the noisy laughter; the bellies and backsides wobbling under clothing; the toys in the shop windows; the big bars; the neon signs and strong colours. Here everything was white and monotonous, and black, and dry, and miserable.

Physically, though, Myriam was not exactly built like a Californian. Her paternal grandparents had come from Morocco, and like them she was petite and dark. Very dark. Grandfather had arrived in the Promised Land in 1946, when he was eighteen. Together with a group of his countrymen, he had rolled up his sleeves and begun to till, plough and harvest. Her maternal grandparents had been here even before then, since 1943, having fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe. They too had learned to work the land. And to get hold of rifles and machine pistols, and hide them under the sheaves.

*   *   *

Abu Said was born in August 1948 in the middle of the road. His aunt had used a stone to cut the umbilical cord that bound him to his mother, and his father had buried the placenta at the side of the road and then smiled at everyone, because at that moment he was happy. A few hours earlier, they had switched off the gas under the pots already fragrant with roast and fled from their village, terrified by the arrival of squads of armed Jews prepared to stop at nothing. It took days for them to realize that they wouldn’t be able to return very soon, not even to get their linen and dishes. Aatra was the Arabic name of their village, but you won’t find it on any map today.

The building site in Jerusalem opened at seven, but to get there on time Said had to leave the Dheisheh refugee camp before four. The army checkpoints were unpredictable, and at the Bethlehem one, in the dark before dawn, there was always a winding queue of vehicles and men. For a lifetime Said had been crossing military checkpoints. And for a lifetime he had been spending his days with Jews. He had been a foreman with the Israel Barzilai construction company for five years.

“This intifada won’t end soon,” Jacob was saying that morning as they put up the scaffolding. “There are people just waiting for a chance to start again. It won’t end soon.”

“Anyway, we knew they were ready,” Gabriel said bitterly, tightening the clamps with all his strength. “All these tales of provocation…” And he shook his head and stopped to make a gesture with his hand, as if to say: what provocation?

Jacob added, “Right – and where do all these weapons and explosives come from? They can hardly collect them all in a couple of days. Response to provocation, my foot!” And he too tilted his head to one side and raised his chin, and as he did so he glanced at the sky to take a look at the weather.

Said remained silent. They were used to holding this kind of conversation in front of him, and they didn’t go over the score. Above all they never uttered the words “Arab” or “Palestinian”. If anything they said “they”, to indicate someone who at that moment had nothing to do with either party.

Gabriel continued. “Fact is they don’t want peace, we’ve seen that.”

And Jacob: “We’ve granted them everything; what more can they want? They don’t accept it. Peace obviously doesn’t suit too many of them.”

“My son complains, says I won’t let him have a life,” said Gabriel after a while. “He’s right too; he’s fifteen and we keep him shut up in the house. My father drives him to school, every day, there and back. At fifteen! One time when he had to go on the bus I can’t tell you how I felt – nervous as a cat with fear I was that day. Cinemas and discos are out of the question, and now I don’t even let him wander through the shopping centre. He complains, says I won’t let him have a life.”

Jacob nodded in a token of understanding. And all the while they carried the planks to the scaffolding, according to Said’s instructions.

Old Said was dignified and patient. He was fifty-four but looked sixty-five. A lifetime of crossing military checkpoints. A lifetime of days spent with Jews.

Ghassan finished checking the video and then wrapped it up, writing on an address in capitals. If all went well, by the afternoon little Samir would take it directly to the offices of al-Arabiya. Once more his chest swelled with pleasure. He had arranged everything, and he was almost ready. He fingered the two medallions he always wore around his neck: one held a photograph of Saddam, the other the pope, taken when he had come to Palestine and met with Arafat. At certain moments these medallions gave him encouragement and solace.

Today he was not acting as Private Ghassan. In addition to Rizak, Adum and Mustafa were also lending a hand, together with their younger brothers, who had their own small tasks to carry out. Today Ghassan was a general. Capable of making a far more powerful explosion. Of creating panic and an unparalleled blurring in the world.

Boom!
And skies would fall on heads, hell’s gates would open, and all would be clean again for a while.

Boom!

Peace. Peace for Ghassan.

The supermarket was packed. For Abraham the buzz of the customers and staff inside blended with that of the children and their grandparents – and the crows – in the park across the way. Also, at around nine, two Arab women had set up a stall there and were selling dates, olives and a great quantity of spices.

Thinking about the scent of all those spices, which he could only imagine because of the distance and the confusion, took him back to his childhood, and he began to think about the land where he was born, and where his forefathers had been born and lived for generations as far back as could be remembered. He had been five when they had left Syria. Too small to understand why. Big enough to preserve its songs.

“We couldn’t stay there any longer when the war broke out,” his father had explained to him many times. His father always remembered how they’d had to make a hasty escape, leaving all that they had built up, changing their way of life for ever. “And in any case, when did they ever want us? Even though we were born and died there, we never belonged to that land.”

“Why?” Abraham would ask him every time; but he was a little boy, and the answer was hard both to give and to understand.

When his family moved to the new state of Israel, Jerusalem had still been in shock after a war that had severed long-standing friendships. Few Jews and Arabs maintained relations with one another. For example, the Arab grocer in the house on the corner, two blocks away from them. As a small boy, Abraham had spent hours there, practising his version of Arabic, which was somewhere between the childish and the new. Sometimes he wondered how his parents could have closed the door for ever on that kind of warmth, which he still felt belonged to him.

“You’re wrong,” his father, who was old by then, would say. “You’re confused, because you never really lived that life. All you can remember is the voice and the arms of your wet nurse, the good Amin, who gave you her milk for two years, may God rest her soul. But you don’t remember the looks of the other Arabs.”

Abraham had carried it with him for a lifetime, that Arab look. A flash of recognition and rejection, a clot made of the bonds of collective suffering. A profound, shifty, veiled look. Which was a part of him and a part of them.

Old Sara always joked about this sensitivity of his. “With you we can be sure you’ll recognize an Arab from a distance,” she would sometimes say to him when they moved him to a new assignment.

This was not so easy for everyone. For an Arab and a Jew can have the same features, the same complexion, the same way of dressing and moving.

But not the look; the look is different.

On the thirtieth day of the curfew Ibrahim discovered his father’s blood by patting it with his hand several times, and then he rested that hand on his brother’s head in order to stand up.

A moment earlier, Marwad had been playing with the two children and Dima had been watching them. She had looked at them without seeing them, in the torpor of that enforced quiet. For a while she had imagined Faris in Marwad’s place, and instead of Ibrahim and Khaldun she had seen other little boys.

Marwad had been lucky. Safiya had given him two boys straight away, and they were sturdy. Dima would give Faris little boys, and Faris would be a loving father to them, like Marwad. Then she would give him girls, who would help her look after the house and their father and brothers. In this way her thoughts wandered as the muezzin chanted his song on that sweetly musty evening.

Suddenly there came agitated yells followed by shots, cries and women calling; then shots from closer by, and a screech of tyres right under the window. Soldiers. The soldiers in their trucks had moved swiftly into the camp, on that thirtieth day of the curfew. Dima’s head sank violently into her shoulders, as if an unbearably heavy weight had been hurled onto it from high above, while her sisters and sisters-in-law threw themselves into a corner like rags and the men stood up in alarm behind their old father. When the sound of the truck’s engine faded, and with it the shots, Dima looked up and could no longer see Marwad.

Instead she saw Safiya, her arms spanning the doorway, pushing hard against the door jamb, her mouth gaping in horror. And after, only after, came the howl; and for a moment, there was a stunned silence, while the howl exploded through the broken window; and then the whole camp exploded in its own howl, a howl from the guts, through clenched jaws, from eyes already swollen.

And as the howl rang out Dima saw Khaldun sitting motionless on the couch looking at the floor. She saw Ibrahim slip down. She saw Safiya hurl herself forwards and huddle down on the floor. She saw herself running down the stairs, her little first aid case in her hand. She saw her cousin Ali, together with a crowd from the street, running up the stairs alongside her and glancing at her case. She saw the room that had been her companion for thirty days and she saw Safiya bent double in a corner.

Then she saw she had put her foot in the blood.

Ibrahim was rubbing his little hands very gently in the puddle of blood. The tiny room filled up as a throng of people flattened themselves against the walls. Her cousin grabbed Marwad, who was lying prostrate on the floor. Dima came up with her case, bent over and opened it. Ali turned Marwad over, and his eyes met Dima’s and slipped inside them. Then they were still.

Khaldun climbed down from the couch and he too began to put his hands in his father’s warm blood, then he looked around him. His little friend Khaled, who had come running with his mother, started to cry. Before she had time to register it, Dima found herself vomiting violently near the body of Marwad, who was still staring at her. Some of the vomit splashed onto Marwad, increasing the horror and the guilt. Finally Safiya began to wail, and then the yelling started up again, as if from a kind of shock that spread from one to another, venting and magnifying itself.

*   *   *

With trembling hands and without knowing what she was doing, Dima dug around in her case – she had just finished a first aid course in case of emergencies – as Marwad’s eyes continued to stare at her. But her cousin, who still clung to Marwad, looked at her with compassion, then lowered his head over the motionless body and concealed both their faces and his weeping.

What is a news item, Leila? Little Fatwa, who is growing up and puts on her veil for the first time, and who looks so radiant? My father, who has never had land or a village, but who talks about them as if they were the things he has known best in all the world? Lame Abdel always off his head? Marwad, who dies in the house where he has been closed up with his family, and whose children play in his blood and then find themselves in the midst of the terrifying howl of the camp and weep for fear, and whose fate is marked for ever by other people’s mistakes?

What can a news item do, Leila? Tear a rent in your guts, suddenly clear your mind, slip a commitment into your heart? Turn your life upside down: the future is what you have today, the past is what you shall live tomorrow.

What is a news item before it becomes news, Leila, when it is still a blend of anger, vengeance, action, suffering, hypocrisy, cowardice, fear, hope, signs? When you come and cook it into news and carry it around the world, it has already lost its strength; you have already stripped it of the howl and the urgency that involves understanding.

Where were you, Leila, that winter’s night when the soldiers came to our house and made us all come out – even Eyad, who was only six days old, clutched in Fatima’s arms – and we stood there in the cold rain until dawn, pretending still to be sleepy? Where were you when they took Abdel, who used to laugh, and we heard nothing more of him for six months? Where were you every time my father was humiliated by the orders of a soldier younger than his own youngest son?

A lot of things escape you, Leila.

And there comes a point when nothing remains. Not even us two. You left the scene, and when you returned there was no longer a place for you in my life.

I’ll give you some news, Leila. For them it is finished. Believing that they’re stronger is finished; believing they can do anything is finished. Rooting about in our homes and under our mattresses is finished; rooting about in our lives is finished. The news is me, Leila. All of us will be the news. They’ll find themselves in a nightmare; they’ll find themselves in a hell. They will
have
to change, because we are about to change them.

*   *   *

The muezzin’s call rose up. The moment had come to leave. Dima closed her notebooks and put them in her desk, neatly piled up one on top of the other. She left her pen next to the notebooks, lying exactly perpendicular to them. Then she asked permission from the teacher and went out.