Before We Say Goodbye Read online

  Inspired by the true story of

  Ayat al-Akhras and Rachel Levy

  MAIN CHARACTERS:

  Abdelin, 38, Dima’s aunt and her fiancé’s mother; Palestinian

  Abraham, 59, a security guard; an Israeli Jew who was breast-fed by an Arab woman

  Adum a haulage contractor; Palestinian

  Dima, 18, top of her class at school; Palestinian

  Faris, 20, Dima’s cousin and fiancé, a tiler; Palestinian

  Ghassan, 23, an unemployed Palestinian; an explosives expert

  Leila Oder a star journalist with Arab television station al-Arabiya

  Lia, 37, Abraham’s wife

  Marwad and Safiya and their sons, Khaldun and Ibrahim, live across the way from Dima; Palestinian

  Michael, 18, Myriam’s “American” friend; Israeli

  Myriam, 18, spends some time at school and some time on the hill; an Israeli Jewess

  Nathan, 19, Myriam’s brother, doing his military service at the Erez checkpoint; an Israeli Jew

  Rizak, 25, Ghassan’s acquaintance and owner of an old red van; Palestinian

  Said, 54, Dima’s father, a foreman with an Israeli construction company; Palestinian

  Sara, 61, a clerk with the company that employs Abraham; an Israeli Jewess

  Shoshi, 45, Myriam and Nathan’s mother; an Israeli Jewess

  Vered, 50, a pacifist and Shoshi’s friend; an Israeli Jewess

  EXTRAS:

  Israeli workers at the site where Said works

  Inhabitants of Dheisheh, a Palestinian refugee camp

  Soldiers from the Israeli army

  Workers in the mortuary

  JERUSALEM, 29 MARCH 2002

  7 A.M.

  DIMA DOESN’T LISTEN TO LEILA AND GOES OUT

  It was technically springtime on the day that Dima got up from her mattress after a long yet strangely brief and confused night. She switched on the television as she did on any other day, and the journalist Leila Oder appeared before her as she did on any other day. Leila was giving a news item which Dima didn’t understand. So she lit the gas ring, and since it wasn’t just any other day, the smell of the gas slipped straight into her veins and began to flow slowly through her blood.

  Leila Oder didn’t take her eyes off Dima that morning as she spoke to her from the al-Arabiya news desk. Now she was the spectator, watching Dima drinking her coffee, which slid down slowly, ever so slowly, and blended with the blood and the gas inside her.

  Everything would be slow that morning, slow and dull to avoid getting hurt. Even Dima’s smile was slow and dull as she turned back from the door to embrace everything and everyone in one glance, as if to photograph them, and to remain photographed there herself, all in one piece – head, arms and feet. Feet that did not move from there, yet they eventually did and finally carried her out.

  It had rained throughout the night and the street was a sea of mud all the way to school. Dima’s shoes became heavier and heavier, sinking into the mud, and she didn’t think about Leila. She trudged through the mud with her mouth wide open. And that’s how she was when she came across Jihan, who would later say, “Her expression wasn’t that of someone who wants to talk. So we said hello and I went on my way.”

  MYRIAM IS IN THE COMPANY OF MICHAEL

  At that same moment, Myriam found herself with Michael. They were on the hill of Tiberias, breathing deeply; the air slipped under their skin as the sun traced squares on the fruit trees. They were shouting into the distance, no one could hear them, when the alarm clock rang. She would have switched it off and carried on dreaming, had it not been the day of her school photography exhibition.

  All the trees of Jerusalem were waiting for her, lined up in rows behind glass panes, hanging from the walls of the school corridors. Olive trees, fig trees, grapevines, pines, acacias, convolvuluses; full suns on the horizon, gnarled boughs and strong boughs. Perhaps this was why she had dreamed that Michael was shouting with her up on a hill. This morning her trees at the school were forming an avenue along the corridor all the way down to Michael’s corner. She closed her eyes again and imagined that the last few trees bowed towards Michael’s photo.

  She smiled at the thought, and found the strength to get out of bed. She went into the bathroom, where she looked in the mirror and reminded herself that Michael was dead.

  “Sooner or later you’ll have to come to terms with it,” said her mother when she saw Myriam come into the kitchen with a lost look.

  “I’m gonna,” said Myriam in her funny English, taking her jacket and going out.

  Her mother was left alone.

  ABRAHAM GETS UP

  In another house the phone rang at seven, while Abraham and Lia were still in bed, his arm round her shoulder, one of her long legs over his back.

  “Did I wake you, Abraham?” laughed old Sara on the other end of the line.

  “You know it’s always a pleasure to hear from you, Sara,” replied Abraham as he stifled a yawn.

  “They’re asking for two replacements today,” said Sara, “one for the Artists’ Restaurant and one for the supermarket in Kiryat Yovel.”

  “If I can choose, I’ll go for the supermarket,” he said. “I don’t feel like working late tonight.”

  “Of course, Abraham, that’s precisely why I called you. Only you’ll have to hurry – the supermarket opens at eight.”

  “I’m already up,” he replied, sitting on the edge of the bed and feeling for his slippers with swollen feet.

  Lia heaved herself up from the other side with a yawn, grabbed her dressing gown and headed for the bathroom. “I can see you’re in a rush; I’ll make you some coffee,” she promised, tidying her hair with her hands before closing the door behind her.

  GHASSAN IS ALREADY ON THE ROAD

  Ghassan had got up before everyone that morning, and it was still raining when he went out. His one brown eye and one blue eye glittered beneath the tiny droplets on his lashes. In the rain he walked unseen to Rizak’s house, where Rizak gave him a small heavy bag and the keys to the van. Ghassan stowed the bag under the seat, switched on the engine, put the van in gear. As he adjusted the mirror he first turned it towards him and took a good look at himself. The water was running down his black curls onto his face, which broke into a smile. His heart leaped with a deep satisfaction.

  He looked towards the distant city, which still seemed asleep. “Wait a few hours and you’ll get your wake-up call,” he murmured. He looked at the sky and thought that the fine weather was returning.

  Ghassan was twenty-three, and today he felt strong. His only fear was that he might suddenly get one of his terrible migraines. He pressed on the accelerator, and with head held high he drove the van home. A faint smile danced at the corners of his handsome mouth. When he got back, he hid the van as best he could behind the house and took the bag with him. It had stopped raining, and in the distance, in the direction of Jerusalem, the sky was brightening.

  Everything seemed under Ghassan’s control that morning, even the sun as it broke through the clouds and urged everyone out of their homes to meet their fate.

  ON THE STREET DIMA THINKS ABOUT A WINDOW ACROSS THE WAY

  Meanwhile, Dima continued to make her way through the mud, staring fixedly ahead.

  A window into a room across the street had been the only proof, in the long days of the recent curfew, that the world was still going on. Marwad and Safiya and their children, who were growing up in that room. There was nothing else to do but grow, in those circumstances. And there was nothing else Dima could do but watch them. The street that separated their houses was only a few arm spans wide, and the old broken windows of the Dheisheh refugee camp were not windows with curtains.

>   On the first day of the curfew little Ibrahim had begun to crawl on all fours. On the fifteenth he took three steps at a run, throwing himself from his mother’s arms into his father’s. By the twentieth he was moving about with the aid of the sofa. That day he got hold of a piece of soap and with it he rubbed Khaldun, who was ten months older than he was and had the patience of an old man. Together they would fall down and get up, lean against each other and tug each other, pointing to new horizons every time. The world was theirs, the three by two metres of that room. What lay beyond, they would see sooner or later. But there was no hurry. Their voices filled Dima’s long days without an outside or an event, without light, without time.

  Faris could not reach her from Bethlehem because of the curfew. Their wedding plans, as the exhausted hours gradually dripped from the days, seemed further and further away: perhaps illegitimate. Faris’s evening visit was another right that had been eliminated. Another punishment on the way. And there was nothing to do.

  There was

  nothing

  to do.

  Leila Oder hadn’t come to see Dima any more either. While broadcasting the unrest live from the streets, she had been wounded by a rubber bullet and had vanished from the screen, to be replaced by other reporters. But no one was as good as she was at giving the world the news from Palestine. And no one was as capable as she was of looking Dima straight in the eye as she spoke.

  Without Faris, without Leila, without school; in a paralysis of action and a deterioration of thought. The window across the street had taken Dima far away. Where there was no difference between yesterday today and tomorrow, where the past was a hole, the present didn’t exist and the future was the same; where there were two children who were strong, who were learning, who were growing and who were laughing.

  But one day the window had suddenly shut. And everything had begun urgently and unstoppably demanding to settle accounts.

  So that morning, Dima stared fixedly ahead, and in front of her now she saw nothing more than a wall. For a moment, she hoped the earth would open up to swallow her and all the walls. Instead she went into school with eyes lowered and headed straight for her desk.

  MYRIAM SKIPS SCHOOL

  To get back to Myriam. It’s important to know this about her: her trees didn’t stop breathing once they were in a photo. On looking carefully, you could see that they didn’t even stop growing. Now some had gone beyond the frame, branches suddenly intoxicated by spring.

  That was what did not disappoint her about this land: the trees. A miracle among the many – too many – stones and the thick dust and the gusty breath of the desert. A miracle, the trees planted there, growing sturdier by the day. And so Myriam had begun to photograph trees. Framed in a viewfinder, things immediately seemed clearer. A tree was a tree, claiming the right to exist, to remain planted there, peacefully reaching up towards the sky.

  It had been a stroke of luck for her the day someone at school had thought of organizing a photography competition. That way, she’d had a pretext to leave school every day and go off alone up onto the hill, which was the only thing she felt like doing at that time. And she had found so much material, unexpectedly even fuller, stronger and more solid in the finished images than when she actually took the shots.

  When she had handed in her photos the week before, she had peeked at the other students’ entries, and none of them had struck her as up to much – except Ella’s. She had photographed all kinds of water: fountains, puddles, rain, gutters, jets. Myriam had liked those almost as much as her trees.

  In any event, Myriam was sure she would do well today. But as she was about to pass through the main school gate, she realized that she was no longer interested in the exhibition at all. So, instead of going into school, she turned once more in the direction of the hill.

  She caught a bus. Her mother had said I beg you, please don’t ever do that; but it didn’t matter, she was fine; she was part of a living, breathing nature.

  ABRAHAM DAYDREAMS AS HE DODGES THE PUDDLES

  By now Abraham was on the road too, but still not entirely awake. This morning he wished for a gentler sun that would carry him away. Plump swarthy arms that would cradle him. A lullaby, an ancient lament. Walking quickly among the puddles towards the supermarket, he sensed those odours those flavours that accent all of which fell upon him at once, and as usual when he least expected it. Like a wave, like an echo. Like a melody. This morning. Arab eyes watching him. They were all around him. He could sense their warm pulsing. A deep pulsing, a dark breathing, a zone of shadow. Inside him. Somewhere they were waiting for him. They were calling him. They were hot on his heels.

  Abraham wanted to surrender to it. Slow his pace. He wanted to return their look, which made him feel warm and uneasy. But he didn’t know how; he had forgotten.

  Taking care to leap over a particularly large puddle, he shook off the feeling and laughed. It was no time, he said to himself, for daydreaming. In the days leading up to Pesach the supermarkets were particularly crowded, and that was precisely why they had called him in. To lend an extra hand, to check out every Arab who came close.

  He arrived at the supermarket and went to his station. His was a backup post, just inside the entrance doors. Which were about to open.

  8 A.M.

  MYRIAM THINKS ABOUT A TATTOOED ARM

  Had she seen the arm, perhaps she would have come to terms with it sooner. They had shown it to Michael’s father for identification; it was all that remained of him but it was enough, because it was his tattooed left arm. Four of them had accompanied him to have the tattoo done. Michael had chosen a winged dragon, and one day that winged dragon had flown into the sky and then landed intact, whereas Michael had gone goodness knows where and never returned.

  When they killed her mother’s cousin, the one who had made a home in the territories, and even her father had come back to stay with the family for the occasion, death had not shot her inside in this way. Everyone around her had despaired and recalled and inveighed against the tribulations of their people. Her mother had wept, as had her cousin’s wife, and the children, and Myriam too had cried at the funeral, until the last shovelful of earth had put an end to the matter for her. And that was normal. Because everyone has deaths in the family, especially when you go to live among the Arabs, where they don’t want you and you stay there precisely because you don’t want them.

  But on the day they buried the Michael arm, her stomach was flattened against her belly and her head was four thousand metres up, with a void of panic in the middle; and disconnected like this she had not wept. It was as if the Michael remains were somewhere, and would arrive and put the other arm around her shoulder.

  The funeral had not put an end to the matter.

  Michael had been the first friend she had made when her family returned from California. He was her American friend, who like her didn’t even entertain the thought of speaking Hebrew at home. She and Michael had spent most of their free time together, and had been together that day in the shopping centre, talking nineteen to the dozen in the American slang they remembered less and less – mixed when necessary with some funny or indomitable Hebrew word – and they had gone their separate ways maybe ten minutes before the explosion. Then Michael had vanished, and with him every illusion about America.

  All this had happened two months before. It was since then, since they had buried Michael’s arm, that Myriam had begun to photograph trees. The still air of the hill was the only thing that calmed her. Among the trunks and the greenery she found her place again. She felt good there.

  Michael was there too. He was there somewhere. She didn’t know where, but she felt he was there.

  DIMA HAS A SPECIAL APPOINTMENT

  “You are ready. From now on you mustn’t think about anything,” Ghassan had told her the previous day.

  But how could she not think about anything? Dima tried, with her notebook in front of her and her pen in her hand. She stared at the page without
seeing it and tried not to see anything at all. Then she saw Leila smiling at her from the al-Arabiya news desk. And a hand seized her heart and clutched it tight, until it almost broke. She closed her eyes and breathed very slowly to reopen her heart. She tried her best not to let herself be hurt.

  In the days of the curfew Leila had stopped coming to see her, and little by little Dima had got out of the habit of asking her advice. Yet there had been times when Leila’s had been the most important voice to speak to her in those four rooms, in those fifty square metres in which thirteen of them grew up and aged. Four small connecting rooms in which there alternated all the voices of the world: the soft tender tones of the women, her father’s solemn tones, her brothers’ heated tones, the cheerful tones of her sisters-in-law and the sweet voices of the youngest children. And in which, at seven in the morning and three in the afternoon, every day, she heard only Leila’s voice. There was rioting in Gaza; the settlers had shot at two boys. A house had been blown up by the soldiers and the occupants hadn’t even had time to save their children’s school certificates. An old man had been arrested but it wasn’t yet known what he was accused of; his wife declared that it was impossible to find out any information about him.

  Leila went into homes; the camera followed, recounted, denounced. Leila went where Dima could not go, not yet. Leila spoke loud and clear. It was all so obvious when Leila spoke. In this way she made injustice and brutality public. The future would be dead if someone didn’t shake it like this, give it no respite, make sure it didn’t stop.

  That’s why today Dima had a date with the future, in her own way, somewhere. A question of hours.