Before We Say Goodbye (7 page)

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.

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.

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.

“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.

All this had happened only yesterday, and, seeing her arrive today with a determined gait, dressed in Western clothes and with her face uncovered, Ghassan told himself that he would run every operation this quickly from now on.

He got out of the van and looked around: no one. He opened the door and Dima climbed in. He closed the door again. There was still no one around. Without saying a word, Ghassan started the engine and made his way down an unpaved side street. Deserted. He stopped once more at the side of the road and said, “This is the bag.”

He took it out from under the seat and showed it to her. Dima said nothing. Ghassan opened it.

“Look,” he said. “The button is inside this strap. When you find yourself among lots of people, press it.”

Dima nodded.

“I can’t take you there,” he added. “You’ll have to walk through some fields. You’ll have a good view of the whole road from there. Cut across the hill to avoid the checkpoint. We’ll meet up again in front of the marble cutter’s – a friend will be waiting for us there.”

Dima took the bag, got out of the van and set off.

As Ghassan watched her leave, he felt enormously calm.

“When we arrived in this land, Nathan, we arrived too tired. We arrived after more than two thousand years of persecution, after the Shoah, which killed one in two of us. The Shoah, which, apart from the suffering, the bitterness – an atrocious bitterness – and the terror, left us with a sense of shame. The shame of not having been able to defend ourselves, of having allowed ourselves to be led like lambs to the slaughter. Of not having protected the million children led to the slaughter with us. One million, Nathan!”

As Shoshi spoke she stared at a crumb on the table. Nathan said nothing. Around them people came in one after another to sit down at other tables; they ordered, ate, then went away again. Their day continued, while that of Shoshi and Nathan had suddenly become suspended. Shoshi’s voice was heavy. She spoke slowly, lost in the immense effort of tying up loose ends.

“Perhaps it’s in our DNA by now – fear, rejection. Destruction. Who do you think came to populate the land of Israel? Idealists … the traumatized … dreamers … fanatics… Men who thought to build themselves up by working the land, something they had never done, to rediscover strengths that had perhaps been lost. And we are their children, Nathan.”

Shoshi’s voice was both a whisper and a lament. She stared into the distance. Nathan looked at her. And as he saw her gradually immerse herself in this suffering, he felt himself re-emerging from it.

“We swore it would never happen again; you know how we say: no more Masadas. Never again, Nathan. We came here from all over the world; we practically invented a language with which to talk to one another. But we already understood one another, because a destiny like ours is a bond stronger than any nation.”

She fell silent once more, but she didn’t expect her son to reply. Then she shook herself, and said slowly, but in a high, clear voice, “We have an obligation towards our past and towards the future. We need land, space, to feel safe. You can’t feel safe in a strip of land you can drive across in three or four hours, and which is surrounded by people who hate you.”

Nathan looked at her again, then he asked, “How long have you felt like this?”

Shoshi shrugged and returned his look. “It’s not easy to say, you know. It’s not easy.”

Dima took the track through the fields. She was wearing jeans and her long hair hung free; a breath of dusty wind rose up to caress her temples and slowly slipped in among the smooth black hair. She was beautiful, with those big bright eyes that had stopped asking questions yet drunk in all that was offered them, until it hurt too badly and they became like glass.

The ground had breathed out the last of the damp and was once more dry and dusty. As she walked over the barren hill, Dima could see the houses of Jerusalem still and waiting. She lengthened her stride. As she walked, her body became charged, grew harder, like a suit of armour. The soles of her feet grew tougher too, tougher than the rocks that protruded from the red earth. Her brain was hardened and vigilant, like a wild beast ready to spring. Her lungs hardened. Her breath became short, dense, the breath of the desert. Blood mingled with shovelfuls of desert soil.

An emptiness engulfed her; as she moved forward, she felt as if she were advancing into a void. Nothing could reach her. Finally nothing could reach her any longer. Her body was so charged, it could sweep away everything around it. She was charged with an inexpressible power.

Her fist on the strap, she clutched the bag slung over her shoulder.

A red van was waiting on the other side of the Bethlehem checkpoint. From her vantage point she could already see it.

Nothing was as important as this land, despite its being so confused, with its uncertain boundaries and hard-won identity. Once more Myriam felt the trunk pressed hard against her back, while all the surrounding trees, weary of running amok in her mind, slowly began to return to their places.

When a baby was born in Israel, she recalled, the father would often plant a tree and give it the child’s name, and the child would grow up with the photograph of the tree on the wall beside the bed. She realized her hands were still plunged firmly into the earth, and she thrust her fingers in even deeper. Now she was breathing directly through her hands, from the earth. And she felt that this land was their land, just as their fathers had promised. The sky looked down on her.

Yes, this land was beneath them, in this part of the world that was their home. Somewhere in this land the roots of her tree clung deeply to the earth. And each of the trees around her was someone’s tree, a tree that had put down roots here and here rose up towards the sun.

Michael too was somewhere, around here: and he had certainly come to the same conclusions. Michael had ended in this land. By now he could no longer leave.

Neither could she.

All was still now. The patch of trees barely trembled around her. It seemed to her that it was already Saturday, when time stops and you feel closer to eternity. Today was her own personal Shabbat, and she would celebrate it all the way.

She thought about when her father had still lived with them.

Her mother had stopped being religious a long time ago; and since her father had left home, little by little they had forgotten all the customs, even eating kosher. But when her father had been there, Shabbat had been untouchable. They would light the candles, recite the prayers and share the wine and the salted bread. No one did anything on that day, and it was nice just to spend time together and talk.

Come to think of it, her father’s words had been special.

“God is you,” he would tell her. “He is you when you read a poem in your room. He is you when you learn something new. He is you when you say no to arrogance, when you refuse to condone an injustice.”

These were the things her father would say to her on those Shabbat days.

It was now that she suddenly felt sweep over her all the grief she had never allowed herself to feel since he had left home. A knife began gradually to dissect her breast, her weeping heart. She surrendered herself to it.