A Month by the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

family, also ‘natives’ and lifelong friends of the al-Helous. ‘It’s sad,’ Nabil had said, ‘that by now most Christians have left Gaza.’
    Soon after my return from a walk in the cool of the morning, through dreary littered streets, Atef rang – oddly, this being his first day at home. ‘Is OK I show you Gaza now? Only today I have. My father goes for long treatment to al-Shifa hospital – kidney cleaning. I leave him there, then find you living near it. At 9.30 is OK?’
    By 9.30 I was waiting on the pavement, chatting to Khalil and two of his friends who chanced to be passing. When Atef flung his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks all three young men hastily turned away before I could do introductions. (Khalillater commented that it’s easy to forget how to behave during a long exile in Westernised Cairo.) Unaware of his solecism, Atef led me around the corner to father’s car, a new Volvo imported though a tunnel and looking aggressively affluent in contrast to Gaza’s average vehicle. I would not have chosen to glean my first impressions from the cool comfort of a walnut-panelled limousine but I do believe in ‘letting things happen’. And our tour proved illuminating. My companion, home for the first time since 2002, reacted with mixed and sometimes disconcerting emotions to the many profound changes. Politically he seemed a babe in arms and when I provided current facts and figures, based on my recent homework, they didn’t really interest him.
    Before switching on the engine Atef switched on a gadget displaying numerous pictures of his daughter Mira, then aged seven months and one week. She had, it seemed, been photographed several times a day since birth. Skirting Beach/Shatti camp we drove along wide, dismal al-Nasser Street where Israel’s blockade has killed businesses that were still alive – if only just – before the Second Intifada began in 2000. Mingling with the motor vehicles were scores of horse- and donkey-carts, most animals well-fed, the more shapely Arab horses groomed to a glossiness not usually associated with draught animals in poor communities. Atef looked puzzled when I admired the cart-drivers’ skill, and their animals’ remarkable adaptability, and the motorists’ intelligent coping with these equine rivals for space. He glared at a horse’s ear, three inches from his window, and said, ‘Soon I hope we ban these carts. They are uncivilised and wrong in a modern city. On the West Bank you don’t see this.’ He ignored my riposte that, given polar ice-caps in meltdown, animal transport is the only sensible way forward, its waste fertilising the earth instead of polluting the air.
    This was a day of blurred vignettes – mere glimpses of camp-slums where malnourished children swarm, of unexpected stretches of empty golden beaches (why were the children not frolickingthere?) and of war-degraded fields where women labour in the midday heat wearing garments prescribed by fundamentalist bullies.
    Arriving at the far end of the Strip from Rafah, we paused near the closed Erez crossing to survey the site of Gaza’s vast Ottoman-era government building, one of Operation Cast Lead’s earliest targets. There I noted Asef’s (self-protective?) detachment from his birthplace. As a boy he had often visited those offices with his father. Now he seemed to view that shockingly empty bomb site almost as a tourist attraction.
    Before the First Intifada in 1987, Israel officially employed some 45,000 Gazan day-workers and an estimated 10,000 more who, lacking permits, could be extra-severely exploited. At least 30 per cent of those ‘illegals’ were adolescents. Permit holders received approximately one-third of the Israelis’ minimum wage. Before the Second Intifada, 30,000 or so workers crossed every day at Erez, a number reduced to 2,000 or less by July 2005, the date of the ‘withdrawal’. Since June 2007 only Israeli-approved VIPs and NGO employees and some urgent