Текст книги "I Was Born There, I Was Born Here"

Автор книги: Mourid Barghouti

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

“I’m putting you to so much trouble. I’m sorry.”

I looked at the faces of those with me in the room. What I saw there wasn’t reassuring. The hours passed. The doctor didn’t come. When he finally came, it was around six in the morning. He came, went in, and locked the door behind him.

We kept our eyes on a small, unlit, electric bulb over the door, a bulb that was covered with dust even though the hospital was new. I had been told it would light up red for a boy and green for a girl. As far as I was concerned, its light would be a signal that Radwa’s long agony was over. When the red light came on, the nurse came out with the good news: “Congratulations, it’s a lovely boy.”

I push my way through the crowds in the passport hall toward him, my arms outstretched to meet his, which are opened as wide as they can go, holding his papers. I suddenly realize that he’s almost as tall as I am. We hug. I pat his back. He pats mine. We spin around twice, three times, maybe four. Maybe we don’t spin around at all and I just imagine it. Tamim has got through.

Now it’s my turn.

I move to join one of the short lines to present my papers to the Israeli officer. Yes, Israeli. Otherwise, what would be the meaning of the Occupation?

Tamim refuses to enter the baggage claim area despite my firm instructions (when did children ever obey firm instructions? If it weren’t for disobedience no child would ever grow up) and despite the fact that we have actually caught sight of his own suitcase on the conveyor belt in the neighboring hall. A moment later, mine appears too and he still can’t be persuaded to go.

Tamim insists on waiting next to me to see what happens. I stop urging him and move slowly with the line. I say to myself, He too wants to be reassured.

I present my papers and wait.

He stands near me outside the line.

And he waits.

Four or five years later, on a recent visit, a teenage Israeli police-woman will confiscate the documents that I always present when on the bridge (my Palestinian ID, Israeli permit, and Jordanian passport), give me a small piece of paper with a few lines in Hebrew, and tell me in broken Arabic, “Wait there till you hear your name.”

I wait about half an hour. I wait and it seems as though the time will never pass. We say ‘time is precious’ but I don’t believe it. We often waste time of our own free will. In fact, we long for holidays and weekends and go out of our way to create opportunities to be lazy whenever we can, becoming experts at wasting time playing cards, watching television, and drifting from café to café. It isn’t really the squandering of time that upsets people. What upsets them most, in my opinion, is having to wait to waste it.

One of the Occupation’s crimes is to compel people to wait. To wait at crossing points, borders, and checkpoints. To wait while permissions and permits are issued. To wait for the hours of opening and closing and of the curfew and its lifting. To wait for the hellish interrogation to end. To wait for the prison sentence to end. To wait for the electricity to come back on and for the water to come back on. To wait for all the dates and extensions to dates set for negotiation by the mysterious power that holds the Authority in its grip through the permanent concealing of its intentions. In addition and before all, to be forced to spend their lives waiting, year after year and generation after generation, for the Occupation itself to disappear.

I am still waiting for them to call my name.

They do not call it.

However, a fat soldier comes up to me and leads me quietly to the interrogation room.

A long row of seats in a narrow corridor.

Cameras sited conspicuously at the corners of the corridor and on the ceiling.

I sit down among the others who are already there – seven or eight persons of different ages, none of whom appears in the least worried and who wait in a wonderfully relaxed way, as though their presence here was completely natural and completely normal; as though they were waiting for a train that was about to arrive.

In front of us, closed doors.

We wait.

At first I feel miserable, but after a while I start laughing to myself at a funny story of Abu Sharif al-Sous’s about waiting. In the old days, before Oslo and before the Authority, Israel used to grant one-month visit permits to people of the Bank living outside. Sharif Abu al-Sous came from Kuwait to Amman intending to go to the bridge the next day. He went to the Café Centrale in Amman and ordered himself a glass of tea. After waiting for a while, he called to the waiter and said with a laugh, “I asked for a glass of tea. Do me a favor and bring it before the permit runs out!”

I ask the one closest to me, “What happens inside?”

“The usual questions. Dumb questions. Don’t worry about it.”

After an hour and a half of waiting, I’m summoned to one of the rooms, where I find two people, one of whom, it turns out, will treat me pleasantly while the other treats me like an oaf – the traditional good cop/bad cop division of roles.

“Where are you going?”

“To Ramallah.”

“Are you a member of the National Council?”

“An observer.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I take part in the discussions but don’t vote.”

“Are you Fatah?”

“I’m independent.”

“That’s exactly what it says here.”

“If you already know, why are you asking me?”

“You’re here to answer questions, not ask them. It says too that you’re a poet. Did you meet with writers from Israel outside? Did you meet with any Israelis outside?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What do you think of Abu Mazen?”

“I am on premises belonging to the security forces and do not wish to discuss politics.”

“We just want to talk to an educated person like you, no more, no less. That’s all there is to it.”

“This is a border post, not a seminar room. You have my papers. If there’s a problem with them, you can apply your procedures.”

The silent colleague intervenes.

“Tea or coffee?”

I decline with a wave of my hand but he gets up, goes to another room, returns after two minutes, places a cup of tea in front of me, and leaves again. His colleague resumes his questions.

“Why don’t you want to talk to me about politics?”

“Because of the lack of equality.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you’re the stronger party. You have the power to allow me to enter, prevent me from entering, send me back to Amman, or send me to a prison in Israel and I have nothing, so what’s the point in talking?”

“I can see you’re angry even though things are looking good now. Arafat has appointed Abu Mazen prime minister, which means there’s a chance of peace. What do you think of Abu Mazen?”

“Neither Abu Mazen nor anyone else will achieve anything because you’ll never give him anything.”

“How come?”

“Sometimes it seems to me you won’t be happy till we appoint a Zionist as leader of the Palestinian people.”

He smiles, then frowns.

“Who are you going to rely on in your obstinacy? If we expel you all to Egypt or Jordan, do you think Mubarak or Abdullah will care?”

The second interrogator re-enters.

“Where have you got to?”

“We’ve got to the threat of Transfer,” I answer.

He gives a smirk so I go on with what I was saying: “Your colleague is threatening to throw the Palestinians into the sea.”

“Transfer, my friend? The sea? The desert? Take me with you if they throw you out. It’d be better than going on the way we are now.”

He looks at the glass of tea, notices that it remains untouched, but makes no comment. Then he surprises me by saying, “Anyway, you can go.”

“That’s it?”

“Goodbye.”

Years after this interrogation session, the same thing will take place twice more. Since then, they’ve stopped calling me in, though I don’t know how long this will last.

This time we don’t have to wait long.

They don’t take long to stamp my papers and I’m not called in for interrogation.

I’ve never needed good luck so much as I do today, having Tamim with me. I say to myself this is such good luck I can hardly believe it. It’s difficult for a Palestinian to believe that he’s having luck. It’s my easiest entry to Palestine since I gained the right to do so two years earlier and has remained so for ten years. As to what may come later, who can be sure?

I leave the line, take Tamim’s hand, and we enter the baggage claim area together happily, then exit onto the street. I hug him and he hugs me in a new embrace on soil he’s standing on for the first time since Radwa gave birth to him twenty-one years ago.

Tamim’s in Palestine.

3. The Yasmin Building

We reach the hill. We enter the Yasmin Building. The elevator takes us to the fifth floor. We go in, open the windows, and take from the chairs and couches the covers put there to protect them from the dust that gathers in Rafif’s absence. I pick up the receiver of the ancient black telephone, make sure it’s working, dial Cairo, and give the receiver to Tamim so he can speak to Radwa before I do. We pass the receiver back and forth. Our conversation seems to be made up of incomplete phrases and sentences. Radwa asks about our journey, we try to convey the details, and Tamim keeps saying, “Mama, I’m in Palestine.”

Among other things I tell her, “Radwa, I want to say ‘Thank you.’”

When I went to register his birth at the Ministry of Health in Egypt and have his birth certificate issued, I’d meant to write ‘Jordanian’ in the space for Father’s Nationality, as in my passport. The only document I possess is one that proves that I’m a Jordanian; I didn’t have one to present to the relevant official that proved I was Palestinian. Here Radwa intervened decisively: “Write ‘Palestinian.’”

I wrote ‘Palestinian.’

The official questioned it and I explained to him the history of the relationship between Palestine and Jordan, and that there was no such thing as a Palestinian passport now. He didn’t ask too many questions, either because he was too good-hearted or because he didn’t want to appear ill-informed. He accepted it and issued the certificate.

(Later, the word ‘Palestinian’ on this certificate will stand in the way of Tamim’s right to obtain Egyptian nationality on the same basis as other children of Egyptian women married to non-Egyptians; for some unknown reason, Palestinians are excluded from that right.)

We call my mother in Amman and tell her of our safe arrival.

I turn on the water heater. We have to wait a while before we can bathe and change out of our traveling clothes.

I phone Husam to tell him we’ve arrived at the Yasmin apartment and he says, “I’m coming right over.”

This is the second time I’ve spent a few days in elegant Rafif’s elegant apartment, which contains her late grandfather, ‘Omar al-Salih al-Barghouti’s, furniture and a fragment of his library. She has added indoor plants and a modern kitchen, which leads straight out of the main room without a partition. Rafif lives in the apartment for a few days each year when she comes from Amman and has always insisted on giving me the keys when I come to Ramallah; she was especially insistent this time, so that Tamim and I could be comfortable.

Later, some years after this visit, Rafif will depart this life suddenly in Amman. She was starting her day at the offices of the magazine she edited when she collapsed. She never regained consciousness. I will receive the news by telephone in Cairo and travel to Amman immediately to be with my friend, her husband Dr. Muhammad Barakat. When he saw me, Muhammad’s first words were, “She completed everything she set out to do, calmly and elegantly. She restored the family home in Deir Ghassanah, she furnished the apartment in the Yasmin Building in Ramallah, she edited and published her grandfather’s memoirs, held the finished book in her hands … and died.”

Rafif al-Barghouti, who studied philosophy at the American University in Beirut, was one of the family’s most elegant women, in language, dress, and conduct. She designed the décor of her house herself with a talent that made the simplest object stand out in its carefully chosen spot. Unspoken mutual respect united us, as did a love of houseplants; she made the balcony of her house in Amman a perfect garden, which she tried to reproduce in the Yasmin Building even though she didn’t live there, leaving the key with Abu Hazim so that he could look after the plants. The first thing I do at Rafif’s house is to water these, which are neglected even though Abu Hazim waters them whenever he can gather the enthusiasm to walk here from his house in the Sharafa district.

I look for a piece of cloth, wet it, and clean the leaves of the plants one by one, even the awkward fern. Then I go out onto the south-facing balcony that is attached to the living room and water the plants there too.

I call to Tamim to join me on the balcony but he doesn’t answer. I go into the living room and find him absorbed in reading a handwritten poem hung on the wall in an old wooden frame to the right of the front door as you enter the apartment.

“Do you like it?”

“I’m still reading it.”

“Leave it now and come with me. I want to show you something.”

I take him out onto the balcony and ask him, “Do you see that arc of buildings on the horizon?”

“What is it?”

“It’s Jerusalem.”

“Amazing. You could get to it on foot.”

“You can get to it, my dear Mr. Tamim, with an Israeli permit only.”

…

“When I was in the country two years ago, I refused to go there as an infiltrator. This time you and I will infiltrate.”

“You have a plan?”

“We’ll see.”

“We have to.”

We return to the living room and he starts reading over again, out loud:

You achieved, O ‘Omar, all things in which men take pride,

So choose for your garb what exaltedness you may.

As for the land, its honor you defended

When evil men had led that honor astray.

I tell him, “I memorized it the last time I was here.”

“What’s the story behind it?”

“Ma‘rouf al-Rusafi is praising ‘Omar al-Salih al-Barghouti, Rafif’s grandfather, after the British Mandate authority pardoned him and he returned from banishment.”

“Which year?”

“1920.”

“What did he do?”

“He took part in a demonstration in Jerusalem against Jewish immigration and the British Mandate, so the British banished him to Acre.”

“Have you seen Acre?”

“I saw it for the first time last year.”

I leave him standing, finishing al-Rusafi‘s poem, and stretch out on the couch.

The longing to relax after the tension of the journey makes me fall into a nap, or something like one. I find myself back in the only time I saw Acre, the summer before.

I was fifty-three years old that summer and had never been to Acre. The checkpoints weren’t many at the time. Hikmat, my friend and host, said, “Come with me to Jenin. We’ll spend a day and a night there, and then I’ll show you Acre, Nazareth, Jaffa, and Haifa.”

I stood on the walls of Acre. Immediately, a row of question marks lined up in front of me, all pointing the same way: “How was a city like this lost?”

A wall of dark presence, almost black in color. It curves with the beach, straightens out where the beach does, and curves again. Then you think it’s disappeared but it returns to view. Towering. A battleship from below, from above it looks like an unlucky fishing boat. Wide. With the exaggeration to which the scene lends itself, I think, “If you played football on it, you’d think the ball would never fall into the sea or the city, but remain always on top” (of course it would fall, but the illusion was close to being real). What made me think of football in this historic place? Who would play with whom? Who would lose? Who would win? And was it a game I was thinking of or the war that a whole nation lost? At this point, I put my finger on an idea that struck my body full on, like a wave: Palestine didn’t fall in a war that had a beginning and an end, like the wars we’re familiar with. Wars big and small, from the Trojan War to the Vietnam War to the Second World War and more, begin and then end and you know, with a precision befitting the human mind, that you’ve lost or you’ve won. Then you think about what to do next and that’s the end of it. But Jewish warships didn’t come and bombard and breach this wall in an attack on the people of Acre. It’s still here, where it always has been and as it always has been. No power besieged a Palestinian army, thus allowing it to raise the white flag and end everything with a final winner and loser. I think to myself Palestine was lost through drowsiness, slumber, and trickery. Every time we tried to wake up, we found death and cruel displacement to places of exile, to other pillows and to other mistakes – and yes, I do mean mistakes (and we’re still making them). All this happened with a relentless slowness. How can an entire nation drowse? How could we have been so heedless – so heedless that our homeland became theirs?

Our enemy caught us at a moment of historic backwardness, as though we were incapable of realizing what would happen before it happened or at the moment it was happening, and perhaps we’re still incapable of realizing it even now that it has happened. Or could it be that we did and do realize but are too weak to right the scales now that they’ve tilted? Will our scales stay tilted forever? For part of forever? Till when, exactly? It’s unclear. As painfully unclear as a wolf’s bite.

I think to myself, we didn’t lose Palestine in war that we may now behave like the defeated and we didn’t lose Palestine in a debate that we can get it back with proofs.

Our enemy caught us at the low point of our weakness, at the low point of our drowsiness.

We have the power now to tell our grandchildren that drowsiness will not be their lot forever, or even for part of forever.

We have the power to remind them of that strange proverb coined by our ancestors, “Had Acre feared the sea’s roar, it would never have stood on the shore!”

All the same, we have to admit to them, and before them to ourselves, that we are responsible too. Our ignorance is responsible and our historical short-sightedness is responsible, along with our internal struggles, our tribal-familial logic, and the way we were let down by our Arab ‘strategic depth,’ which is made up of states enamored to the point of scandal with their colonizers. Nevertheless, we cannot take this as a reason to stay silent. We have to break the state of denial with which the world confronts us. We shall tell the tale the way it has to be told. We shall tell our personal histories one by one and shall recount our little stories as we have lived them and as our souls and eyes and imaginations remember them. We shall not let history be the history of great events, of kings and officers and books on dusty bookshelves. We shall recount what happened to us personally and the life stories of our bodies and our senses, which to the naïve will seem trivial, incoherent, and meaningless. The meaning is etched upon each individual woman, man, child, tree, house, window, and on every grave before which the national anthem will not be sung and which the historian’s blind pen will not describe. We shall retell history as a history of our fears, our anxieties, our patience, our pillow lusts, and improvised courage. As a history of the making of an evening meal, of stories of love, innocent and otherwise, of emotions hidden from the grown-ups. As a history of the goat bombed by planes in its field and of the heroism of the child who peed in his pants out of fear but suddenly felt brave and stood, wide-eyed, before the long dark line of tanks. As a history of our secret and public desires, of our jokes and our laughter, of “a wink from her eye at the wedding and the boy went crazy.” A history of all the journeys we have made and all the distances we have crossed or been forbidden to cross and of every straightforward, ordinary trip between two cities or two situations. A history of our making fun of our leadership and our mockery of their decorations, medals, and military ranks. A history of the obstinacy of our bodies and of our souls, no record of which is to be found in archives or registries. We shall make the two-hour electricity cuts to our houses important events because they are important events. We shall make the glance of the child at his friend’s empty desk in Class Four a chapter in his workbook on the living and the dead. We shall enter in the records a story of love destroyed by soldiers, or the head of the family, or the stupidity of the lovers themselves, so as to draw the world’s attention to the loss of a love story that concerns the world. I shall record our sitting on the wall of Acre and eating a meal of fish in Christo’s restaurant like any tourist who has come from far away. I shall record the history of this fish meal too, and here I am, writing it. I shall make of every feeling that ever shook my heart an historic event and I shall write it.

From Acre we headed straight for Nazareth and Haifa, but before reaching these we went by the house of Ahmad al-Shuqayri, a native of Acre who lost his city in the Nakba of 1948. A refugee, he obtained an education and became a lawyer. The first chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization died, however, without seeing Acre again, as liberator, visitor, or tourist, and was laid to rest in Amman.

At the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, we found ourselves at the heart of our history, in the midst of a group of tourists from Japan, most of them nuns. We were coming full circle. I said to Hikmat, “Let’s be Japanese tourists today. This place will be ours for an hour or so, and then we’ll leave.” I told myself that I’d write the history of these seconds during which I felt I was a Japanese tourist. I thought, I wish Tawfiq Zayyad were alive so that I could visit him in this city of his that he never left and whose mayor he was for many years. I thought, did the communist poet really have to go by car to Jericho to congratulate Arafat on his return to the homeland, only to be killed in a traffic accident on the way back? He thus deprived us all of his wit and his patriotic poems that we learned by heart as children, and also of his valiant deeds in the Knesset, where he raised his fist in the faces of Shamir, Sharon, and Netanyahu, clenched it hard, and shouted in Hebrew, “You want to throw me out of the session because I’ve got you all by the balls. By the balls, you child killers!”

The guards dragged him out of the chamber to his unceasing stream of insults. I saw the scene when it was picked up by the television stations. I thought, I’ll write this poet as he clenches his fist and bawls, knowing that it makes no difference – and here I am doing so.

We left the city of Nazareth like the Japanese tourists. We got into the car and set off for Jaffa and Haifa – Jaffa, the city that liberated the Mediterranean from its long name when the Palestinians decided that ‘the Sea of Jaffa’ was enough.

Haifa, though, is the city that imagination built as it wanted and as all cities would want to be built. To climb to the top of Mount Carmel and look out over the city and its sea is to climb to the meaning of beauty. I climbed Carmel and thought, now I am in it, I am in Haifa, this ‘beautiful city.’ Say that and nothing more. And I will say nothing more.

It seems Tamim thought I’d dropped off. He’d gone inside, taken a shower, and was waiting to hear my plan, still examining ‘Omar al-Salih al-Barghouti’s old furniture, his black telephone, his salon set which had been so splendid in its day, and a part of his library.

Later, his book Marahil (Stages), a huge work containing his memoirs from the end of the nineteenth century to the year of his death in Ramallah in 1965, will be published and I will buy a copy at the Cairo Book Fair. The second part of Marahil consists of political memoirs covering the period of the British Mandate over Palestine and the political, party-based, cultural, and educational work undertaken in an attempt to save it from the Zionist plan that aimed to establish a state for the Jews on the rubble of our cities and villages. These are memoirs from the pen of a lawyer well-versed in political analysis. The first part, however, is devoted to the family and the village of Deir Ghassanah. It is full of vaunting and boasting about everything to do with the Barghouti family, which the head of the family comes close to canonizing and whose every distinguishing characteristic he takes pains to record, as though it were God’s Chosen Family. Soon enough, however, he forgets himself and describes how the same family oppressed women and the weak that lived around them. He recounts, for example, how the Barghoutis would send the nawar (gypsies) who lived on the edges of Deir Ghassanah to do compulsory Ottoman military service in place of the sons of the family, and that the family owned slaves, which was “something natural at the time,” and that poor members of the family used to walk with a “sloping shoulder” indicating that they performed manual labor to support their families when in general the Barghoutis didn’t need to do any physically demanding work. If a man passed a woman, she was not allowed to keep on walking; she was supposed to squat on her haunches until the man had gone and then continue on her way. He also boasts of the Barghoutis’ clothes because “the Barghoutis had pockets” while the peasants in the other villages put their money either in their head coverings or their belts. I read what he has to say in praise of the pocket:

Villagers put many of their belongings in their head gear, between their skull caps and their tarbushes. If one of them is wearing a kufiya with a rope retainer he places his papers and his money in his belt. Thus they use their head covering or their belts as places to keep things. The Barghouti, however, used to view this as shameful and would put his belongings in his pockets. A member of the family once told me that a large number of village headmen were summoned by the governor of Jerusalem, who told them to put their seals to an official document. All of them pulled their seals out from their belts, except for the head-man of Deir Ghassanah, whose seal was in his pocket. “Are you a Barghouti?” the governor asked him, to which the man replied, “That I am!”

I laughed for a long time over this paragraph and mentioned it to my friends. It became a common habit of theirs to accost me whenever we met with the mocking question, “Do you have pockets, Mourid?”

I’d complete the exchange for them by answering, “Then you must be a Barghouti!”

I go inside to take a shower and change my clothes.

Anis, Husam, and Abu Ya‘qoub come and we go together to have lunch at Abu Hazim’s. Afterward I take Tamim on a tour of Ramallah and al-Bireh and he is amazed at how the two cities intermesh. The right side of a street may be in al-Bireh while the left falls in Ramallah. I take him to al-Manara, the Ramallah Secondary School, Batn al-Hawa and the Church of God, the Friends’ School for Boys and the Friends’ School for Girls, Ziryab’s Café, Rukab’s ice cream parlor, Ramallah Municipality Public Library, the Arts Center, the Qasaba Theater and cinema, the Sakakini Cultural Center, and Shari‘ al-Iza‘a.

“In the fifties we used to call it Lovers’ Lane.”

“It doesn’t look like that now. Where are the lovers? Where are the girls? Where are the trees?”

“It seems everything goes backward everywhere.”

“It seems Ramallah’s like today’s Cairo – a ‘city of Islamic law.’”

“The boys and girls from the secondary schools – Ramallah, the Friends, the Hashimiya, and so on – used to take their strolls here in the afternoons and on the weekends, promenading and making dates. They were experts in the art of flirting and attracting attention in all its forms. Stories of love, both dumb and fantastic, were born here. Scandals, embarrassments, and.… ”

“Normal life, in other words.”

In the evening, we eat at al-Bardouni’s. We agree to meet Husam the following morning to arrange our ‘infiltration’ into Jerusalem. At night, Tamim and I go back to the Yasmin Building. We go out onto the balcony. Jerusalem looks like a great crescent of lights crowning the quiet of the night.

Half asleep and half awake, I return as a boy a little younger than Tamim is now to the nearby school with the arches. I wonder, was I less in pain in those days than he is? The place was mine and my body was free in a free city that knew no dour looks and had yet to acquire the strict moralistic atmosphere in which Cairo, and all Arab cities, live today. At Cairo University, the beautiful cafeteria has been torn down and all the other cafeterias in Egyptian universities have been closed so that the students can’t socialize between lectures. As a result, there’s no place left to talk about politics and no place left for stories of love. Ninety per cent of the girl students wear the headscarf or the face veil – from religious belief, to fit in, because they’ve been preached at, out of poverty, or by contagion.

In that dreamy space where the world had the feel of velvet and the taste of peaches, and the lusts of adolescence shot sparks from my growing body, I’d go during the day with my friends to the city’s gardens, cafés, and parks. If one of us got to know a girl, we’d hide our pounding hearts from our families. We’d lie to get out of homework so we could go out and exchange visits and small gifts on our birthdays and dance and have fun and commit small stupidities.

At night, almost every night, I turned to poetry, writing and erasing, or to the short story, writing and tearing up, or to drawing with a pencil, never keeping anything I’d done.

On mornings during term time, everything about school was inviting, because it was a wider society than that of the house and there was nothing to spoil it apart from the math exam and Muhammad Basala.

Basala was top of the class each year and I’d be second and each year this got on my nerves when the final results were announced because I couldn’t think of any reason why my final mark should always be one lower than his. Things continued like that until one year I got first place and Basala got second. I took my friends to the cinema in celebration of this coup and we saw The King and I with Yul Brynner at the Cinema Dunya, though we didn’t take any of it in because we were more interested in the Ramallah girls around us in the elegant theater. Falling in love, a possibility in Ramallah, acted on my body and soul as much as a love fulfilled would have done. Our adolescence passed in a state of infatuation with the world, music, pictures, colors, of the first rain in September and the first snow on the hills, as well as of gratitude to any family that might visit ours bringing their daughter with them. We experimented with all the different ways of showing interest – gentleness and aggressiveness, calculated neglect and going too far, displays of shyness and claims of experience and multiple relationships, and always we wanted to appear older than we were. The girl would try out all her weapons at one go – bashfulness and openness, retreat and advance, closing all doors and then leaving them a little ajar – and when she walked on Shari‘ al-Iza‘a, I’d feel she could see me walking behind her through the back of her head without turning around and would adjust the rhythm of her steps as the fancy took her, hurrying up or slowing down according to her whim, sending silent messages of encouragement or rejection. This in itself was enchanting.