Before We Say Goodbye (8 page)

Along the way she had lost many things that could have been hers, but when? Without even noticing, without even understanding. She missed her father. She missed him very much. He would have helped her – now that she understood his words better.

She rubbed away the tears that had fallen under her chin. I am God, she said to herself. If there was an energy that made the grass sprout from the earth, that same energy could also run through her and take her far. Although she didn’t understand how, she felt that something was changing.

Around her were only crows, cypresses, olive trees. But the answer was gradually making its way inside her.

Dima had left Bethlehem and the checkpoint behind her; the hardest part was done. Now the path led downhill and entered a patch of bushes, concealing the red van from view. When she emerged from it, she would find the agreed place just behind her.

All of a sudden she felt tired, and she became aware that the bag was heavy and the strap was cutting into her shoulder. She was tempted to stop for a moment and carefully lay the bag on the ground so she could massage her aching shoulder and stiff arms. No one would see her if she stopped. She wanted to stop, she felt extremely tired, she could stop in the shade for a few minutes. Just like that, without thinking about anything.

But her feet carried on taking one step after another. With horror she realized she was no longer in control of her movements.

As the crows cawed at her and the view opened out again towards the marble cutter’s, she could no longer stop.

In a few days the celebrations would begin for Pesach, the Jewish Easter. Once again, at table with all her relatives on the first night, it would be her youngest cousin’s turn to say, “Why is this evening different from all the others?”

“Because on this day we were freed from slavery in Egypt,” would be the answer, repeated every year without variation. One year her father had added, “This evening we celebrate the fact that we are heading towards freedom, but to what extent are we really free?”

To what extent are we really free?

Myriam looked up at the sky. The last rain clouds had finished their journey westwards, leaving only blue.

What is freedom? Where is freedom? How can we exercise freedom?

Some minutes passed before she decided to check her watch. It was time to go. She thought about making it a long walk and returning home on foot instead of catching the bus. She had the time and the inclination. But along the way she remembered that today was her turn to do the shopping. So she only made it to the first stop, then she caught a bus straight to Kiryat Yovel.

When she arrived at the marble cutter’s, Dima saw that there was a white car parked beside the red van. Ghassan and Adum stood waiting for her. As she walked towards them with the weight around her neck, she noted that the two men were looking at her with admiration and respect, as if they envied her, as if she were about to embark on a journey that was forbidden to them.

They had nothing to say to one another, and there were loads of soldiers near by. Dima saw Ghassan take the keys to Adum’s car and realized that Adum wouldn’t want to risk compromising himself by using it to take her to Jerusalem. Instead she and Adum got into Rizak’s red van, and left.

As they rolled along in the van, which was noisy, dirty, with torn upholstery, rickety seats and ancient clutter, Dima felt as if all her strings had been cut. Disconnected. She couldn’t even sense the air around her any more. She was sure that if she were to touch any part of her body at that moment, she wouldn’t be able to feel it, so dead and frozen was everything. The only thing she could feel was the tips of her fingers and toes; they were hurting, as if the blood had stopped there and refused to do its rounds. She sensed a scent of death all around her.

At one point Adum broke into her thoughts. “Roll down your window,” he told her. “Haven’t you noticed that awful stench?”

There was indeed an acrid odour in the van, that’s what it was. The stink of explosive had spread, the smell of a bomb.

Dima opened her window. “How much longer?” she asked.

“We’ll soon be there.”

“What’s the place? Will you show me where it is?” asked Dima.

“We’ll be there in five minutes,” he replied.

They said nothing for a while. The five minutes passed, but still they weren’t there.

Then Adum asked, “Where’s the button?”

“There’s a little pocket inside the strap,” replied Dima without moving her head, but bending down towards the bag.

“Don’t touch it, otherwise we’ll be blown up,” said Adum.

“OK.”

“Keep the bag far from you, keep it far away from your hands and feet, if not we’ll be blown up,” he repeated.

“OK,” she said again.

They had arrived. Pulling up, Adum told her, “If you go straight on from here you’ll come to some steps. Go down them and you’ll find a supermarket on your left. You’ll see it; you can’t go wrong.”

He added, “Go into the supermarket and press the button.”

Dima got out of the van without a word and set off.

The bus was crowded at this time of the day, but Myriam managed to carve herself out a comfortable corner, leaning against the back. She glanced around her and saw only tense faces, so she turned back and looked out of the window. A taxi crawled along behind, driven by an Arab cabbie.

She wouldn’t take her sabbatical year, she decided, suddenly clear-headed: who could make her? Deep down her mother would be glad too; money had been scarce at home recently. Above all, she thought, she wouldn’t do her military service. It wasn’t unavoidable: she would plead conscientious objection, which was possible for girls; it would be enough to say that her religious beliefs forbade her to live and work with men.

Why not? It wasn’t unavoidable.

Funny she hadn’t thought of this before.

It would mean she could enrol at a graphic design school next year, right after her diploma. She liked the idea of graphics school, she had done for a good while. There were no subjects to be learned by memory, she believed, and the work would be fun. It was just that she had never really thought about it until now; this was the first time she had seen herself so close to it.

She would make new friends, maybe interesting ones. And she would soon find a job – why not? – maybe with a newspaper. It wouldn’t be bad. She would call her father every now and then, and occasionally go to visit him in Tel Aviv. What did she have to do with what had happened between him and her mother?

Sooner or later she would get over her grief for Michael.

She would grasp the sense of what was around her. She would learn to understand what was part of her. And what wasn’t.

That’s what Myriam was thinking on that bus journey; and suddenly America had disappeared from her future.

There was a guard in front of the supermarket, and when the sliding doors opened, Dima could see another one just inside. A double line of defence. She began to wander around the park opposite the supermarket. By now she no longer felt anything. She didn’t hear the birds calling to one another from the trees in the park, or even the heavy beating of her heart. She was simply ready. She concentrated on her task.

A double line of defence. But they didn’t necessarily open all the bags. Some people greeted the first guard with a smile as they entered. They must be regular customers, she thought. How to get past? Maybe by walking purposefully past the first guard, putting one foot forward to open the sliding doors. But how to get past the second guard and in among the crowd thronging the aisles and cash desks?

She had to blow herself up in the middle of a crowd. She had to blow up a crowd.

She wouldn’t be doing it if she weren’t sure she would kill lots of them. She would postpone it. Her life was not worth a few lives; it was worth a great many Jewish lives – at least a hundred. She would blow herself up and take a hundred people with her. A hundred Jewish families would have to suffer what they as Palestinians were suffering. And finally the camp would celebrate. The return of honour. Of a little justice. In the camp they would celebrate the hundred dead together with her martyrdom, which had made it possible.

She was claiming honour and justice, and she had more than a few injustices and humiliations to avenge. At least a thousand, suffered every day by each member of her family. She would avenge every one of them; at a single stroke she would make them remember every one. And she would do it in such a way that the injustices would burn inside them for a lifetime.

At eighteen. Now. She would do it.

*   *   *

She sat down on a bench. No. If she couldn’t do it in the middle of a crowd she wouldn’t do it at all. Things should be done properly. Adum had brought her to the wrong place. She wouldn’t get past the double line of defence.

Perhaps she lacked courage? No, it wasn’t a question of courage. She couldn’t care less about dying; she had already decided that it was fine. Today was a good day to die. Too often she had been afraid of dying at the hands of the soldiers, especially when she was a little girl and they invaded the streets of the camp where they were playing and threatened them with their guns. Today she would do it, and it would be her decision to die, not theirs. What she was lacking right now wasn’t courage; it was meaning. If she was going to do it, it had to have meaning. She didn’t want to do it otherwise; she wouldn’t do it.

That was when she saw Myriam. Approaching from the opposite side of the park with a light step and a dreamy expression. Wearing jeans. Small, dark, her hair loose, her eyes gleaming. The first thought that leaped into Dima’s head was that she knew her. That girl looked familiar. She reminded her of someone. She couldn’t say whom, but someone she knew well. She was sure she had seen her somewhere before… But she was also sure that she was Jewish.

Dima felt irresistibly drawn to her.

*   *   *

But no one had predicted that those two Arab women would have their stand right there. Why had she only just noticed it? Dima turned towards them. This wasn’t in the plan, but it was only right that she should do it.

“Get away from here, now,” she said to them, and she said it in such a low voice and with such an imperious look that the two women slipped the loose change they were counting into the folds of their clothing and hastily began to collect up their things.

Then Dima turned once more towards Myriam and purposefully but naturally fell into step with her. The first guard let them both pass, and the sliding doors opened.

What’s with those two women? Abraham wondered. From his post just inside the sliding doors he had noticed something unusual. The two Arab women selling spices were hurriedly packing up and leaving – or so it seemed. Too hurriedly.

Abraham’s heart froze.

The girl the bag was passing he could only hang on to her to stop her the children the beauty of Lia the sun Amin.

The guard was yelling and trying to stop the girl beside her – Michael’s arm; Oh God, Michael! – God, no.

The second guard tried to bar her way. He had blue eyes. Alongside them there was only the girl she had come in with, holding her shopping list.

*   *   *

So they exploded at the same time.

Dima was stretched out with her eyes wide open. She was lying on her chest flat on the floor, her arms spread. “She looked like a Greek statue,” someone remarked later.

Myriam had flown across to the opposite side, under a mountain of cardboard boxes.

Abraham was all over the place.

Reported like this it seems as if it happened quickly; and yet it didn’t. In that moment, Dima had time to picture the day of her diploma, Faris, the house with Abdelin. Myriam, in reverse, saw California again with all its colours and Jerusalem all white, and she and her father at Disneyland, and finally a curl of convolvulus that was reaching out and all the trees in the photos that carried on growing for her.

Abraham had plenty of time to understand: a Palestinian girl entering with an Israeli girl, same age, same height, same complexion, same features – like sisters. The first guard was local and had recognized the Israeli, who was a regular customer, so without thinking he let them pass together. They both had beautiful black eyes. They both had deep eyes. They both had lost eyes. But in one of them Abraham recognized the look that had been following him around since that morning, for the whole day, or perhaps it had been seeking him for a lifetime. And he even had time to return it.

After the blast and the silence come the cries of horror and the moaning of the wounded. Then the blood flowing and blending with the red paint spilled from the drums at the supermarket entrance. Then the shock of the people who come running. Then the ambulances. Then the panic and the anger and the powerlessness. Then the cursing. Then the strange light that glitters in the eyes of the Arab shoeshine boy on the corner. Then the looks that pass between one Palestinian and another all over the city.

Then the sky of Jerusalem which darkens once more.

“That’s enough now; it’s time to do your homework,” says Lia, trying to shoo the children away from the television, which they’d made a dive for after lunch. She goes to switch it off, and at that very moment the cartoon is interrupted by a newsflash.

“A few minutes ago a terrorist attack on the Kiryat Yovel supermarket in Jerusalem. We still don’t—”

Lia carries on and switches off the TV. She looks at the children, who have now got up to go and do their homework. She puts a chair next to the phone, sits down and dials Abraham’s number. His mobile is silent. She stares at the blank television. It could be turned off, she tells herself. Or the blast might have blown it away. And he can’t call me because he’s busy helping with the injured.