Ever since my mother said that the house I saw was ours, everything that used to be has come back to me. Not shwaya shwaya, not slowly, but all at once, as if a wall fell down in my mind and let everything in. All of a sudden, I remember the house where our neighbour, Salman el-Sa’adi, lived. His door was always half open, at night too, and he kept chickens in his yard. On very windy days, chicken feathers would fly over to our place and a brown feather would come in through the window and drift slowly on to the floor. I also remember his son, Wasim, who was the first friend I ever had. We used to climb trees and chase each other and have fist-fights, and after every fight my mother would lock me in the house, ya’ani to punish me, but only for a day, and then we’d go back to running around together and playing marbles and looking for ants’ nests so we could block them up with stones and see what the ants would do.
I also remember the day everyone ran away. I’d forgotten that day for almost fifty years. Maybe it was too painful to remember. How Mama put all our belongings into two big sacks — clothes and small pots, and some rice and olive oil — and sent me to Salman el-Sa’adi to ask if they had something that we could carry water in and I ran through the field and tripped on a stone and my knee bled, but I still kept running. Everyone around me was running, loading things on donkeys, swearing at each other, pointing to the hills. That’s where el-yehud, the Jew, would come from, they said. From there. I looked at the hills but didn’t see anything but the sun setting, and I kept on running till I got to their house, and Wasim’s mother gave me a big leather pouch covered in fox hair and said, give this to your mother, may Allah protect her, and on the way back — my knee was still bleeding — Kamel, who drew the water for the village, grabbed my hand, stuck his fingernails into my flesh and yelled at me, lawen, where to, where are you running to? Anyone who leaves his land has no life, no life. Halas, ya Kamel, leave the boy alone, someone who was tying a mattress on a donkey yelled at him, and Kamel swore and let me go. I ran all the way home, sure that my mother would be happy that I’d brought her a container for water, and she’d be proud that I kept running even though I was bleeding, but when I came in, she didn’t look at me. She was busy with Marwan, my brother, who was crying, why aren’t you taking my football? It’s all right, she told him, we’ll come back in two weeks and your ball will be waiting for you here. No it won’t, inti cazab, you’re lying! he said and kept on crying. Then my father went over and slapped him hard and said uskut, shut up, ya walad, you baby. That was when I started to understand that something serious was going on, that this wasn’t a game. My father never hit us. He was a quiet, shy man, and if he slapped Marwan, then something important was happening. Keep an eye on your little brother, my mother said, and pointed to Marwan, whose cheek was still burning from the slap, and go and pick some figs we can eat on the way. I took Marwan by the hand and we got small a bag. I climbed on to a branch and handed him a fig, then another fig, and he ate one and put one into the bag, ate one and put one into the bag, and we didn’t go home until the whole bag was full.
I’m looking at the fig tree now, from the ramp. They completely knocked down Salman el-Sa’adi’s house and built a big villa where it used to be, three storeys. Only stones are left from the mosque, at the bottom of the wadi. They built a synagogue where the village square used to be. But the tree is still there, in the same place.
When we went into the house with the figs, our fingers sticky sweet, we found my mother and father and Nabil sitting on a crate, trying to lock it but they couldn’t, so we sat on it too to help, then we walked through the house to check that we hadn’t left anything important, and then we closed the door and loaded the sacks and crates on to two donkeys and started to walk in the procession with everyone else. First, we walked very quickly, then slowly. I remember — yallah, it’s amazing how fifty years suddenly shrink in my memory, as if someone put them between two rollers and pressed — I remember that I asked Mama: where’s Wasim? Because I didn’t see him there. And she said, Wasim’s father has a brother in Gaza, and they’re going to stay with him. It’ll be better for them there, but don’t worry, ya ibni, we’ll all come back to the village in two weeks and you and Wasim will be able to fight again.
Fifty years passed and I still haven’t seen him. To tell the truth, I’ve never had a friend like Wasim since then. That’s the way things go. The friendships you have when you’re a child, they’re the strongest. In prison, when I was there, I asked the Gazans if they knew Wasim, but no one did. No one had ever heard of him. I wonder what he looks like now. Whether he got married. How many children he has. What kind of job he has. Maybe he went to Egypt. Or Qatar.
And I wonder what Mama left in the house when we ran away. What didn’t she put into the two big sacks we loaded on to the donkeys? What is it that’s so important to her that she wants me to bring it back to her?
Halas, as soon as the old man and woman come back to the house, I’ll go in and find out. I don’t care what they say. And I don’t care what Rami says. Let him fire me if he wants. Let him kill me if he wants.
*
When Sima thinks about ‘the end’, she thinks about her mother, even though she doesn’t believe in such things, it’s nonsense and she knows that very well. She likes to imagine how it would be to meet her in heaven (that tzaddikah would never be sent to hell). How she’d kiss her on both cheeks (if her mother only kisses one, she knows she’s about to get told off. How she’d disappear into her arms, like a gift into its wrapping. How she’d rest on her large breasts for a moment and listen to her heart beating. Then she’d tell her about all the things she hadn’t lived to see. How much her grandson loves to climb trees. How her granddaughter is already crawling around on her hands and knees. And how her daughter Sima listens to songs in French and is never scared. Later, when darkness falls on the trees in the park, she’ll tell her secrets she’s never shared. Like she used to when she was little and they sat in the kitchen. Oh, if only she were sitting in the kitchen with her now with the clock ticking quietly on the shelf, she’d tell her things she never even tells herself. For instance, that sometimes she’s sick and tired of Lilach’s crying. That sometimes she asks, why did I need another child, why was I in such a hurry to have more? And if her mother wasn’t shocked by that confession, she’d tell her about the students who were living in the apartment next door. About Amir who, she was embarrassed to admit, she was slightly attracted to. When she’d stood next to him a few days ago, his elbow had touched hers. Unintentionally, that’s true. And she felt a kind of flash in her chest she hadn’t felt in a long time. Naturally, she didn’t do anything. Didn’t make a peep. His girlfriend is lovely and she babysits for Lilach. Almost every week. And that day, there’d been a terrorist attack. But still, Mum, a flash in my chest. What do you think of that?
Moshe almost killed his buddy in basic training. During an exercise with the whole platoon. The buddy was supposed to jump, but he did it a second too soon. Moshe was shooting at a cardboard figure and didn’t see that someone had walked into his line of fire. Stop! Stop! someone yelled. He froze on the spot. Put the safety catch back on. The commander came running over like a madman. He slapped Moshe’s helmet: what did you do, you idiot?! Then he leaped right into the ditch where Moshe’s buddy was lying in a pool of blood. The wind whistled. Dust clouds whirled. All the soldiers stopped breathing, couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Moshe closed his eyes and for a long, long, long minute, he was sure he’d killed a human being.