Before We Say Goodbye (10 page)

Faris leaves the camp and returns to Bethlehem, taking advantage of the fact that no one is paying him attention any longer. His brother will be home – he probably knows everything by now. Things will be better with him there.

He opens the front door very quietly and hears his brother’s voice. He stops to listen.

“Of course. But when you see the people who are supposed to be governing us, the ones we believed in, our heroes, who run around Bethlehem and Ramallah in new clothes and fancy cars, what else can you think about but taking justice into your own hands?” his brother is saying into the phone. “Oh sure, it’s all just violence now, sure; we have even become violent among ourselves… We have become a violent people, that’s true. But when they’ve been pointing a gun at your chest since you were small and you’ve been subjected to abuse since you were born, what do you expect to become, if not violent?”

Faris goes over to the stairs and sinks down onto the bottom step. He hides his face in his hands, and since no one can see him he weeps.

Nathan is sitting on the steps of the Old City. His mobile lies forgotten in his pocket, turned off. He is too far from his neighbourhood to hear the wailing of the ambulance sirens; too absorbed in his own thoughts to notice the panic that is rapidly spreading through the city.

For hours he has been wandering through the Jewish and Armenian quarters. Several times he skirted the Arab district but didn’t go in. In the end he sat down on these steps, and from here he surveys the holy places of the Temple Mount. In the esplanade between the mosques, between the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa, wanders a silent crowd of men and women, veiled and wearing keffiyehs. Below them, Jews rock in prayer in front of the Wailing Wall: the men on one side, their heads covered with yarmulkes or fur or felt hats; the women on the other, with kerchiefs over their hair.

The gold of the Dome of the Rock glitters. Maybe Nathan has stared at the sun for too long. Or maybe his gaze is blurred by tiredness and anguish. What’s certain is that he witnesses the last rays of the setting sun silently melting the gold of the dome and causing it to pour down the Wailing Wall. Nathan cranes his neck, looking around to see if anyone else has noticed this phenomenon. But the Jews rocking ever more frenetically before the stones of the Wall are too absorbed in prayer to notice anything; and the passers-by are in too much of a rush.

Nathan looks away to erase the image. He gets up and spies the first set of roofs beyond the walls of the Old City. He perceives a musty air, all the fear that stagnates there.

Meanwhile his brother and father are desperately hunting for him to tell him about Myriam.

But this story takes pity on Nathan. It leaves him unaware of what has occurred, surrounded by his own thoughts, carefully sounding out his emotions, still in search of a possible truth as long as he has the time to do so.

Leila had an urgent call to the studio early in the afternoon for the transmission of a newsflash. Her shoulder still hurts from the bullet she received a month before, and on days like this, when the weather is changeable, the stitch marks around the scar begin to smart and irritate her again.

She is on air all afternoon, announcing this new suicide attack, and running the video of the young terrorist countless times. In a white veil, her eyes clear and wide, the girl repeats each time: “I will fight in place of the dormant Arab armies who stand by and watch Palestinian girls fight alone.”

Leila is tired of this weather and this office in Jerusalem. She is tired of presenting this news item. This evening she gives herself to the TV cameras with a firm gaze and no longer looks her viewers in the eye.

The mother has arrived, says one of the mortuary workers. No, make her wait, not now, is the reply. How can I do that? You can do it. She’s right here. Wait, wait. The other two have just finished washing her face and now they’re slowly applying face powder, lipstick, blusher. The men work with eyes wide with tears. When they’ve finished, they pull the sheet tight around the casket.

Shoshi doesn’t lift the sheet. She imagines there’s little beneath it. Her daughter’s eyes are half open, with an expression that strikes her as one of surprise. Perhaps tomorrow, Shoshi has time to think, tomorrow it will be better.

They take her out of the mortuary.

No, we shan’t bury her now; not the dark for my shining light. They try to persuade her but she resists with all her might.

Not the dark. Light for Myriam.

In the meantime Lia is burying her Abraham. In the space of so few hours, you cannot comprehend. When you still feel the warmth of his body upon yours, the body in whose arms you lay only that morning. When you remember the last words he said to you at the door: “I’ll bring the meat this evening.” When they hand you the dust-covered face of his watch, the strap gone but the rest miraculously intact: stopped at five past two; and you remember the puzzle he left half finished on the table yesterday evening, when he put the little boy for whom he had been trying to assemble it to bed. A puzzle depicting watches and clocks from different eras, showing all the hours of history.

Now Lia can’t seem to think about anything else, just this watch that stopped but survived, and the puzzle waiting for her on the table.

When she gets home after the funeral, Lia takes a pair of scissors and very slowly cuts her blouse over her breast – a rent on a level with her heart. Then she lies down on the floor for her seven days of mourning. Someone tries to make her eat, but without success.

At first it is a migraine, the worst he has ever had. A hideous pain that starts with a pulsating cut at the right temple and spreads across his entire skull through a hundred veins and is so strong that it paralyses his limbs and his tongue, so that even if he wants to shout or bang his head against the wall, he can’t.

Then the splinters begin to move. Ghassan is motionless, in a cold sweat, his intestines churning. The splinters have started walking inside his head.

Ghassan’s first thought is, They want to get out. But he can’t manage to raise his hands to his head to stop them. Terror blends with the pain.

I don’t want them to get out, he thinks, panic-stricken. You can’t get out, he says to the splinters. You are all my strength, all my anger; you are stuck here, and here with me you must stay.

But they carry on pushing and walking, slowly, forward; and when they can’t, a little backwards, or a bit to one side, in search of a way out.

It is a slow, endless, inhuman torture, now joined by nausea, welling up in gushes from his stomach to his throat.

Young Ghassan stays where he is, seated, inert, his arms hanging limp, his handsome yet childish face convulsed, waiting for the inevitable explosion, teeth clenched, eyes goggling.

In the end he manages to shout. It is a frightening shout, which carries across the whole of Dheisheh over the rain that is now beating down heavily, carrying beyond the houses of Bethlehem, leaping over Ghilo to be heard clearly as far as the parapet of Jerusalem, where, lined up in orderly rows on the Mount of Olives, the tombs of the Jews confidently await the day of Resurrection.

A
UTHOR’S NOTE

Many news items bombard us each day, leaving us oddly more empty, confused and frustrated – as if the sheer volume of information renders the content meaningless. But sometimes we come across a special piece of news in which we can see a flickering of meaning, and we think that maybe if we delve into it we’ll gain some kind of understanding.

I decided to delve deeper into a special piece of news about two girls: one Palestinian, one Israeli. Worlds apart, but – by an irony of fate – taken for sisters. Everyone warned me: if you write this story you’ll have to take sides, express a point of view. But a point of view is not a
good
point of view if it only shows one side of the story. Good books don’t supply answers. Good books merely help us to ask questions; more and more questions.

What emerged from my exploration of that news item was not just a story about Israel or Palestine, but a universal story. A highly symbolic story, in fact. One that applies to any love-hate relationship; to any tormentor-victim relationship. One that explores that which is more intimate and yet more universal, and which causes us to mirror our enemy. A story that tries our sensibilities and our moral intelligence.

It was a challenge to write; it will be a challenge to read.

Gabriella Ambrosio, 2010

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks to Avigail Levy, mother of Rachel; Samir al-Akhras, father of Ayat; Shoshanna Smadar, wife of Haim; Eid Bassem, Jerusalem; Eyad El Sarraj, Gaza; Gady Castel, kibbutz Sereni; Jonathan Shapiro, Tel Aviv; Michele Giorgio, Jerusalem; Lea Tsemel, Jerusalem; Rachel Lea Jones, Tel Aviv; Rami Elhenem, Jerusalem; Salim Tamiri, Ramallah; Vered Cohen-Barzilay, Tel Aviv; a young blonde woman from the Dheisheh camp; the Israeli students of a school on the border with Jordan and Syria on their sabbatical year before leaving for military service; the Palestinian girls of the youth club run by the Salesian Sisters of Beit Jala; my friends in Italy, especially Luisa Morgantini; and all the others who do not wish to or cannot be named but without whom this story could not have been told.

And, for the English edition, my thanks to Nicky Parker, Amnesty International UK; Bill Shipsey, Art for Amnesty; Donatella Rovera, researcher on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories for Amnesty International; and Sara Wilbourne, Editorial and Publishing Programme, Amnesty International.

And finally a very special thanks to Vered Cohen-Barzilay.

“
Before We Say Goodbye
can do infinitely more for the peace between the two people than hundreds of political goodwill talks I have heard.”

Ali Rashid, former head of the Palestinian delegation in Italy

“
Before We Say Goodbye
gives us a rare look and a wonderful opportunity to get to know reality from the bird’s-eye view, with all its complexity and many faces. It does not embellish it. It does not blame or judge, nor does it get tangled in political accusations of who is better off or who is hurting more. It mourns, it despairs and it hurts, but it is brutally honest. And that is where its importance lies. That is where its magic lies.”

Vered Cohen-Barzilay, Director of Communications and Publications, Amnesty International Israel

Amnesty International

Amnesty International is a movement of ordinary people from across the world standing up for humanity and human rights. Our purpose is to protect individuals wherever justice, fairness, freedom and truth are denied.

There is a long and terrible history of violence and human rights abuses in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT), where Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has lasted for over forty years. International law is disregarded and it is ordinary Israeli and Palestinian civilians who bear the brunt of the violence. Their suffering is intensified by the ongoing impunity, which means that those who have committed the violations are not brought to justice. People go through enormous stress and anguish on a daily basis. Campaigners in Israel and the OPT, as well as internationally, have tried for years to resolve the crisis. However, without credible commitment to justice and accountability, the chances of a stable and secure future are remote.

The facts tell the story: between September 2000 and the end of July 2007 at least 5,848 people were killed by the conflict. Of these, 4,228 were Palestinian, 1,024 were Israeli and 63 were foreign citizens. Of the total number killed, 971 were children, of whom 88 per cent were Palestinian and 12 per cent were Israeli.

Between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009 a conflict between Israel and Palestinian armed groups took place in Gaza and Israel. In September 2009 a United Nations Fact Finding Mission issued a report setting out evidence that both sides had committed war crimes and other serious violations of international law. For example, Israeli forces had carried out indiscriminate attacks against civilians, targeted and killed medical staff, used Palestinian civilians as human shields and fired white phosphorus over densely populated residential areas. More than 1,380 Palestinians, including over 330 children, were killed. Palestinian armed groups had indiscriminately launched rockets into Israeli population centres and 13 Israelis were killed.

Amnesty International campaigns for Israelis and Palestinians to live together in peace, prosperity and security, with their human rights and dignity respected and protected. We urge the Israeli authorities, Palestinian Authority and Palestinian armed groups to stop violating international humanitarian law and international human rights law. We campaign for justice and accountability for the long-suffering people of the region.