Before We Say Goodbye

by Gabriella Ambrosio

  She struggled to focus on the task before her.

  SHOSHI SITS AND THINKS ABOUT HER CHILDREN

  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.

  9 A.M.

  DIMA SMILES WITHOUT MEANING TO

  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.

  SHOSHI SPEAKS ON THE PHONE

  “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 demon
strating serves no purpose.”

  “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.”

  DIMA FORCES HERSELF TO REMAIN GLOOMY

  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.

  GHASSAN CHECKS THE CONTENTS OF THE BAG

  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.

  SHOSHI RECEIVES ANOTHER PHONE CALL

  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.