“Then close to the camp tanks go by and you hear Safiya, who raises her voice so the children won’t hear them, singing ‘Rock-a-bye, a new world is coming; dream a little of me.’ She sings them things like that. And then you start thinking about what you’ll tell your children when they’re small so they won’t be afraid. But what’s even worse is that you start thinking about what you’ll tell them when they’re big, because they’ll grow up: and you won’t have anything to say to them. And it won’t be long before you become nothing in their eyes.
“My father. Think of my father. My father counts the working days he has lost and says nothing. He tunes in to the news. And he waits, and says nothing. My brothers let their beards grow and compete to see whose will be the longest by the end of the curfew. They wait too, but what are they waiting for?
“Meanwhile the youngest boys play at being martyrs, singing and carrying a mattress on their shoulders as if it were a coffin. ‘Honour to the martyrs of Allah! Honour to the martyrs of Allah!’ they yell as they leap up and down the stairs with this mattress a thousand times. And in the meantime they’ve started to wet their beds again. Even the little girls are agitated, they hug one another, they don’t talk much, they want you and they reject you. If they play they make a pretend house between two chairs; two of them sit inside it while a third goes tap-tap, playing the soldier who knocks and wants to come in.
“We all feel that in some way we are dying.”
“It’s just a bad patch,” Leila said again. “Take some time; think things over.”
Dima smiled bitterly. For the first time, she was the one teaching Leila something.
“My father and my brothers…” she continued quickly, gloomily. “My brothers don’t speak to him. He brings home the money he earns with the Jews, all of us have always lived on the Jews’ money, and my brothers say nothing to him, and in the end it’s the Jews who must give us something to live on, something to live on as well as to die on. And you say that this isn’t reason enough?”
“It’s not enough; it’s not enough.” Leila had begun weeping. “What will you say to Faris? How can you still look him in the eye? What gives you the strength to deceive him like this?”
Dima said nothing for a moment. She thought about it, then said, “Faris should do it too. And he certainly will, he will avenge me.”
Leila fell silent with bent head in a corner of the room. By now Dima was talking, Dima wasn’t listening any more.
MICHAEL TEARS MYRIAM’S MIND TO PIECES
The hours passed but Myriam didn’t move. The clouds scudded busily from east to west. The ground had dried, thanks to a sun that kills the Jews already at this time of day.
Michael had died a Jew, without even being able to ask, “What do you want from me?”
Michael had died a Jew, forcing her now to tackle new questions without anyone to turn to for an answer.
She sat down on the ground, leaned against a tree trunk and took out the booklet of the Tehillim. For a while now she had carried it everywhere with her. Furtively. She didn’t go around telling people she carried a book of prayers, but there were some strange ideas in the Tehillim which didn’t seem like prayers. They seemed more like insults. Or cries of pain. Or war cries.
So she read: “Lord, you have sold your people for no gain and you have not enriched yourself through their sale.” She didn’t understand this, yet it might be an explanation.
Or: “Lord, you had delivered us unto a place of jackals, and you covered us with the shadow of death.”
She also liked to read: “O God, break the lion’s teeth in his mouth; shatter his fangs, O Lord.”
At least it gave her words with which to express herself; words that she couldn’t think up on her own.
There was also a description of cataclysms: “The waters saw you; they were troubled; the depths also trembled. The clouds poured down water; voices came from the heavens; lightning bolts darted. Your thunderous voice was in the maelstrom; the lightning flashed, the world trembled and the earth shook.”
What could the waters have seen to be so troubled?
The image of God.
Michael blown up.
Something like that.
Myriam left the Tehillim open in her lap and plunged her hands into the earth as all about her began to spin: the trees, the bushes, the rocks. Everything was moving around her, faster and faster, a dizzying green blur which prevented her from distinguishing outlines and borders; a blur that danced around her, the mad dance of a mad earth, possessed by a sacred frenzy, which had no name, had no masters, as she held on tight with her hands like roots in the earth.
She held on tight with her hands like roots in the earth.
Nothing was worth as much as this earth; nothing was worth as much as this earth, she suddenly thought.
ABRAHAM REFLECTS ON DEAFNESS
The week before, Abraham and Lia had celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary. Abraham was a divorcee; it was his second time around. In fact it was the second time he had celebrated ten years of marriage. But this time it still struck him as the right one. They had invited their relatives and had a barbecue. Lia had made plenty of desserts without milk, as almost all the guests were practising faithful, and it had been a strictly kosher meal. The wine was good, and it had been a fine party. He took pleasure from the memory.
Lia was still beautiful, still carefree. She was twenty-two years younger than he, and when they met he had wooed her persistently. Every morning for almost a year he had rung and asked her to marry him, without getting discouraged. Three hundred and fifty times he had asked her; every morning for almost a year their day had begun like this: a simple question, always the same, nothing else. “Will you marry me?” Until one day, dying with laughter, she had said yes. And since then he had never given her cause to regret it.
Abraham had had no children during his first marriage. Then Lia had given him two boys, although no one had been able to explain why they were both born a little hard of hearing.
“Don’t go, Dad,” his children had said to him that morning. As they did every other morning.
And, as they did every other morning after he had kissed them, they had turned over in bed without even trying to catch his answer.
So Abraham had whispered to himself, since they were already asleep again, “See you this evening,” and he had closed the door behind him.
He wondered if over the years he had not gradually become a little deaf too. Deaf to all the words around him: he didn’t understand them any more. If he ever had. If he had ever wanted to.
What, for example, did those armed soldiers have to say to one another as they waited for the bus across the road? What did that pious one, the Chassid with the peyos, have to say as he argued with one of them? Did they use words that were any use: had they ever been any use, would they ever be? And what did that newspaper have to say this morning, the one the man was reading so avidly on the park bench? From here Abraham couldn’t even make out the headlines; but anyway, what use would it have been?
What a lot people had to say, about anything and everything.
But words flew and got soiled, and when they reached their destination they were no longer the same; you couldn’t do anything about it. Abraham was a man of few words, and above all he never argued. If he had an opinion, he attached little importance to voicing it; it wasn’t with words that he would have explained or, God willing, shared it with anyone. Words weren’t enough for something as important as understanding one another. Perhaps it was a habit he had picked up from the children; certainly he had quickly learned to pay heed to other things. To more precise things, clearer than words. To the odours he smelled in the air, for example, like these of the advancing spring. Or of the storm, which he sensed, despite the now clear sky, was still lurking somewhere. To the expressions that revealed people the more they became immersed in their thoughts. To the tiny gestures that some made when they spoke. To glances hidden even to those who gave
them.
The expression of that lady who was swiftly crossing the park, for example, staring off into the middle distance. The gesture of that soldier busy arguing with the Chassid; he seemed polite and bored but he would lift his elbow with a little jerk every time the other shook his finger. The look of those Arab women with the spice stall, a deep liquid look, pitch black to be probed, to bathe oneself in.
Maybe it would simply be easier to understand one another if everyone paid attention to looks, expressions and gestures rather than words. Because looks, expressions and gestures have more mercy for men than the words they utter.
DIMA REMEMBERS HER BIRTHDAY
“Listen,” said the man with the dark hat and the long peyos, “we need the blood of a Christian child, before Pesach, to make matzo.”
“Don’t worry about it, Joseph,” replied a young man with a disgustingly pale face, “your neighbour Helen’s son will do perfectly well.”
“But will we get away with it?”
“Don’t worry. If anyone becomes suspicious we’ll postpone the operation.”
A little later the pale-faced young man brought the boy to Joseph.
“Did anyone see you?” asked Joseph.
“No, relax.”
“Mummy, Mummy!” cried the terrified child.
“Don’t be afraid, my dear,” said Joseph. He turned to the young man. “You can go now.”
On another occasion Dima would have simply been amused. But that day she had felt a kind of comfort, a relief. She was sitting in front of the television with the youngest children, one on top of the other, watching The Diaspora, a long-running series about the history of the Jews broadcast by a Hezbollah station. She was waiting for Faris’s visit. It was her eighteenth birthday, barely a week ago.
Although it was hot, the window across the way was closed for mourning. Dima knew that the women were taking Safiya something to eat and weeping with her, but she couldn’t hear the boys any more. They seemed dead too.
It was almost as if she were dead with them. In the last two months alone, twenty-one people had been killed in the camp, and death had entered her without asking her permission. When Faris arrived with her present she felt completely dead as she smiled at him, opaque and transparent at the same time. She quietly allowed herself to be feted.
Eighteen is the right age, she thought to herself.
The others were accustomed to counting on her. They expected a lot of her, all of them. Faris most of all. She made them feel proud. That’s the way it was in the family; that’s the way it was at school. Maybe in the camp too. She had just passed an advanced English course: English was important; she knew it pretty well by now and helped out at the Dheisheh social centre, handling foreign correspondence. Then she had done the first aid course, to help the wounded in emergencies: the more emergencies there were in Dheisheh, the harder it was for ambulances to get permission to enter, or at least to manage to reach a hospital from there. And she was about to get her diploma with full marks: the first, the cleverest, as always. Capable and responsible, in everything. As everyone expected her to be.
This time it was up to her as well; she would do it. It required someone courageous, and not everyone was courageous. It was necessary to find a way to respond to them, to make them pay for death with death. It was up to her to avenge her life and the lives of her father and brothers, who didn’t have the strength to do it. And those of poor Marwad and all the inhabitants of the camp. And those of Faris and the children they would never have, because in these conditions there was no future that interested her anyway. She had already been dead for a good while; she no longer had arms, she no longer had hands, she no longer had legs to obey her will. She could no longer continue this life. Nothing interested her any more: nothing except avenging herself. She had to avenge herself; she had to do it. She had to show that any one of them had the strength to do it.
So, while on the screen Joseph offered his unleavened bread to the rabbi and, satisfied, wished him a Happy Pesach, Dima carried on calmly watching her Faris but she no longer saw him.
And at noon on this special day, completely absorbed in these thoughts, Dima had already covered a great deal of the prearranged route. A few more blocks, and she would meet Ghassan.
SAID DOESN’T REPLY TO HIS WORKMATES
Since “education is the only weapon we have in this life”, as Said would remark a few days later to the journalists about the plans he’d had for his daughter Dima, he had been a keen and brilliant student until he was eighteen. He had taken his diploma and achieved excellent marks, then he’d had to give up university to work.
He had found a job as a bricklayer, had soon learned to read plans as well as any surveyor, and over time had become site foreman. He had always worked with the Israelis. He built their houses with them, he ate with them, he chatted with them from time to time in their own language, and occasionally he laughed with them. Out of habit, he neglected to express his own opinion.
“Do you think it’ll rain again this evening, Said?” asked Gabriel, looking up at the sky as they stretched their legs for a moment before returning to work after their lunch break.
Said looked at Gabriel’s honest profile. He was one of the best workers, a hard worker, and if he talked, he talked about his son. Said recalled the first time he had worked with the Israelis, when he was eighteen; before that he had never met any of them except uniformed soldiers. At the time it had made a strange impression on him. Which had still not passed.
“Let’s hope not,” he replied. “It seems to me that it rained enough last night.”
“This morning my son complained that I won’t let him have a life,” Gabriel said again. But he didn’t expect an answer. After a while he added, “But what should a father say to his fifteen-year-old son?”
Said raised his head. He didn’t have one son, like Gabriel. He had eleven of them, seven of whom were still at school. And he was perfectly aware that for the older ones the fact that he worked with Jews was a problem, something that heaped shame upon shame.
But what should a father say to his sons? wondered Said to himself.
“This is no life; sooner or later it will have to end,” Gabriel concluded. And it was as if he were talking to a brother.
This is no life, Said repeated silently to himself; sooner or later it will have to end.
Life with nothing. His workmates had never heard him use that strange expression to define their existence. But a few days later he would use it with all the foreign journalists who came running in excitement to interview him in the hope that he might explain things to them somehow. Nor would his workmates be able to discuss it with him later, even if they wanted to.
DIMA THINKS GHASSAN IS A FOOL
If Ghassan thought he was using her, he was a fool as well as a coward. She was the one using Ghassan.
Ghassan spent his days waiting for someone to do something important. He was a layabout, an idler, someone who had fun with explosives, nothing more. Good only for putting people in touch, slinking through the camp without anyone remembering having seen him.
It had been easy to put the word about.
“I’m ready for an amalieh,” she had let it be known around the camp. An operation. A move.
And straight away Ghassan had shown up, the expert.
That’s how the camp is, she thought. Like a family, for better or for worse. Your life is there, and everyone knows you, and you know everybody – or at least you think you do, by reputation if nothing else. You use one to protect the other, you use one to spy on another. Everyone values you, but only up to a certain point; they value you as long as you behave like all the others who share this life with you. That’s the way of the world; that’s the way of the family. If you want approval, all you have to do is what they think you should do.
So by the next day Ghassan had hastily handed her a note naming a street and a time. When they met up at the designated hour and place, some people had seen them, but
no one too close to her father.
They had exchanged a few words.
“I want to do something,” she said. “I am ready for revenge.”
That had been barely three days ago. Ten days after the end of the curfew.
Since then she had begun to feel better. She had set to floating through life, suspended and alien, looking at everything with a clean eye. And at the same time, she felt capable, active and alive again. Out of the paralysis of suffering, out of the daily humiliation. Finally in charge.
And now here was Ghassan waiting for her, with his one brown eye and his one blue eye, in a red van at the end of a deserted street, just as he had confirmed with three rings half an hour before.
GHASSAN PICKS DIMA UP IN HIS VAN
“I want to do something. I am ready for revenge,” she had said on their first meeting.
He had only given her a brief glance but it had been enough. He had already spotted her the night Marwad died. He hadn’t been mistaken; the girl no longer had any blood. She had arrived.
So he trusted her, even though you could never really know with women; sometimes they seemed ready for anything, sometimes just as ready to do nothing. Barely a month before, they had all nearly got into trouble because of a woman who had set off, and then come back.
This time, therefore, he had tried to move as fast as possible. Two days after their meeting he had sent Rizak’s little brother to approach Dima outside her school and get her mobile number. Then Ghassan had made her an appointment to record the video, in the back of Mustafa’s shop. The girl had come on time, and had shown that nothing surprised her.
Before We Say Goodbye Page 5