Before We Say Goodbye (6 page)

The ground had dried, thanks to a sun that could already kill you at this time of day. Dima took the route that had been decided for her. Ten minutes after she set off, her phone rang three times.

“Don’t do it,” Leila had urged her when she returned to the screen and understood her intentions. “This wasn’t what I meant, believe me. And anyway, I wasn’t talking to you. Don’t do it.

“It’ll take time; it’ll take generations… But the wounds
will
heal,” she had continued in a low voice.

But Dima had heard her perfectly well. “It’ll take time … but what time, what is time, not something that belongs to us. How long does it take to go from the camp to Bethlehem? Ten, fifteen minutes on foot. Unless you find a tank barring your way. So you stay there for three, four, five hours, waiting, without knowing how long you are waiting for, without knowing why, until you persuade yourself that it would be better to turn back to the camp. So what time are you talking about? Who is it that decides how time passes here?”

Leila shook her head. “I understand you. I understand perfectly. We have to stop; we have to turn back. For too long now we’ve not been able to see the way ahead. But that isn’t enough to warrant your decision. You’re just tired, wearied by the long curfew, by Faris’s absence – and I must bear much of the blame for that. I shouldn’t have left you alone.”

“You haven’t understood,” Dima dared to reply.

“I shouldn’t have left you alone during the curfew,” despaired Leila, wringing her hands.

“You’re right, you weren’t here during the curfew – and you should have been, to experience it with us, closed up in here together. Simply talking about it isn’t the same thing.

“Imagine being confined to your own home – and it’s the same for all your neighbours; the camp is just a big prison with lots of cells – limited to looking out while staying inside. There’s trouble if you go out without a permit: look what happened to Rashid during the last curfew. Killed by thirty bullets because he didn’t obey the order to stop. He was only taking vegetables home – he had ten children. You can see his photo pinned up on some of the doors in the camp. One, two, even three days go by locked up like this, and then they give you two hours to throw out the rubbish, breathe the air, do the shopping. But if these two hours of freedom, or maybe just one hour, are to be given to you, you will only find out about it just beforehand: the soldiers tell you at the last minute, going around the streets with a megaphone. You can’t make plans. Everything in your life is suspended; everything you can or can’t do depends solely on them.

“You feel like you’re hanging by something you cannot control, and of which you are afraid. You become irritable; you start to feel you are no longer at peace anywhere, not even in your own home. And after a while you notice that you are no longer at peace even when you’re alone.”

“This wasn’t your first curfew and it won’t be your last,” Leila tried to interrupt her.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Leila.”

“Daylight saving comes and you don’t bother to change the clocks – there’s no point without school or work. You start living outside time. You forget what day of the week it is. When you rush out to do the shopping, there are interminable queues, and like everyone else you don’t know if you’ll make it back in time. There’s rubbish everywhere on the streets; the dust clings to you and when you come back in you’d like to wash but you can’t, because they’ve cut off the water along with the power.

“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.

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.

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.

“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.