Why did they close it? No answer. Everything had been going pretty well until now. Things were not as bad as I had imagined they would be — not on the plane, not at the airport. My luck was too good to hold for ever.
In a daze, I stand near the three boys, too paralysed to do anything. For these guys, this was a routine part of a normal day — but it is hard for me to be nonchalant about it. Should I leave? Should I go back the way I came? Where would I go if I did? Should I stay here, waiting? How long? As my questions expand, my estimated time of arrival begins to change too — everything about my trip seems to need rethinking. My trip did not begin the moment I boarded the plane at Heathrow. It did not begin when I met the Israeli actress. It did not begin with those farfetched stories she told me to break the ice. No, my journey home begins right now — in this half-abandoned plaza, standing before these gates.
I study the crossing and everything in it. A vast building situated between two worlds. They sit there, these gates of hell, on a long rise about fifty metres from where I am. In front of it stand three massive concrete pedestrian barriers. To the left, a squat single-storey structure. Male and female soldiers come in and out, their weapons clanking loudly enough to tell the world how ready they are to be used. To the right, there is a thicket of cypress and willow. Their leafy branches completely screen the western side of the building.
On the other side of this gate live one-and-a-half million Palestinians. The people who live there — and the settlements around them — form another world, whose doors shut tight on this spot. Here is the syphon where, early each morning, long lines of Gazan workers drain into Israel, and where, when night falls, they are flushed back out, exhausted by their twelve- or fifteen-hour shifts. Youths born between the two Intifadas burn up their lives travelling this short span. Filling the construction industry, factories, building the walls of Jewish settlements. They probably even built this huge processing plant itself that churns and crushes the people twice a day, first as they exit Gaza and then again as they re-enter.
I put my suitcase down to the side, then sit on a shaded piece of concrete near to where the three boys still sit — chatting, laughing, and smoking up a storm.
A little after 9 am groups of people start to get dropped off in front of the main gate. There are men and women of all ages, and children too. They begin to take their places here and there around the plaza as if they were permanent refugees. They fill the place with the same question I had been asking — and over and over again, they receive the same old answer: ‘God only knows.’
A large bus enters the plaza and parks not too far away. The driver points the front of the bus toward the crossing so he can watch for things happening there. He backs up the bus until it is almost pissing against the cement wall.
The driver does not get out. He does not start asking people the same old question, and he does not wait to hear that the only one who knows anything here is God. Most likely, he has already heard it all before.
Within an hour, the shaded areas fill up with crowds of people and the plaza has turned into a vast open-air waiting room. Under the beating sun, the soldiers shout louder and louder at the crowds to remind them that they alone hold the keys to the gate.
A sky-blue Opel enters the plaza and parks near the bus. When the rock under my butt gets tired of complaining, I give it a rest. I start walking back and forth, dragging my suitcase behind me from one spot to another. I listen in to the conversations between the newcomers and the others around the plaza. Some of them find a place to sit under the sunshade. Others make a spot for themselves on the ground in the shade of the long wall just behind it. Others sit in the shadow of the Opel. Three women get out of the bus and sit in its shade while their children play under the sun.
A young man in overalls comes up. Another man runs over to him and they exchange some words before the first man disappears again. The second one comes back and begins to make an announcement to everyone: ‘That man works here — and he told me that the soldiers found a bomb in a paper bag.’
A chunky man in his thirties walks up and asks, ‘What are you saying? Really?’
‘God only knows — but that’s what that guy I was talking to just told me.’
My whole trip, exploded by a briefcase. If it’s true, they’re not going to open up the gate for me or anyone else today.
From behind the Opel, a voice calls out: ‘Don’t believe it, folks. There was nothing but tomatoes in the briefcase. Four big tomatoes. One of the workers accidentally left it at the main gate.’ No one can see who says this.
A woman in a hijab yells out, ‘Fuck them! They shut down the entire border crossing on account of four goddamn tomatoes?’
‘They made one of the Palestinians who works there pick up the case and empty it out. And then they made the poor guy take apart each tomato, picking out the seeds one by one! I can’t help thinking that those tomato bombs would have been perfect with okra.’
I laugh at the kitchen explosive, and at the rumours that fly around faster than facts could ever do. I laugh at everyone standing around. One of them blurts out: ‘Since the bomb was just some tomatoes, they’ll have to open up and let us through now.’
‘If only every bomb were a tomato — and not the precious blood of our children,’ comments an old woman. She sounds like she has lost someone. A small waking dream begins to stir in my mind — small, no bigger than a tomato seed.
But the crossing remains as closed as it was before, even as the crowds of arrivals grow and grow, and the flow of conversation returns to its usual channels.
Behind the guard gates and the kiosk, a small truck enters the plaza and comes to a stop in front of the concrete barriers by the main building. Soldiers run into the plaza behind the guard booth, in a way that makes everyone nervous. A military jeep surges from behind the thicket of trees and parks close to the barriers. Two soldiers jump out and disappear behind the truck. Two men and a woman in uniform walk into the plaza. One of them is carrying a video camera on his shoulder. A young man who had been sitting by the wall stands up and walks over to me. A transistor radio dangles from his hand. In a trembling voice he says: ‘Israeli radio just reported that they caught a girl from Jabalia Camp wearing an explosives belt.’
All my hopes of them opening the crossing go up in smoke. The news tears my dreams to shreds, and I start to envy Adel El-Bashity for how easy he had it. No matter the lengths to which a narrator goes in order to imagine something, he will never reach the shore of truth. If your understanding of an Israeli border crossing is limited to what you hear or try to imagine in your mind, you will only ever glimpse the outlines of a shadow — which could be shorter or longer depending on how much light you cast on it. But the truth itself: that is a bitch on the imagination and on anyone who wants to tell a story.
It is now 11:30. The June sun has begun to shed its morning gentleness to announce the pending arrival of a scorching afternoon. The shady spots have disappeared. There is not even enough shade now for a quarter of the people standing there.
I begin to look for a shady spot, one for myself and one for my shadow, which has shrunk so small that were I to lend it out, it would not cover a soul. I head toward the bus and shyly lean up against it, by the front door. Just as the years of my youth now lean upon my old age, I rest my head on the side of the door.