Before We Say Goodbye Read Online Free PDF

capitals. If all went well, by the afternoon little Samir would take it directly to the offices of al-Arabiya. Once more his chest swelled with pleasure. He had arranged everything, and he was almost ready. He fingered the two medallions he always wore around his neck: one held a photograph of Saddam, the other the pope, taken when he had come to Palestine and met with Arafat. At certain moments these medallions gave him encouragement and solace.
    Today he was not acting as Private Ghassan. In addition to Rizak, Adum and Mustafa were also lending a hand, together with their younger brothers, who had their own small tasks to carry out. Today Ghassan was a general. Capable of making a far more powerful explosion. Of creating panic and an unparalleled blurring in the world.
    Boom!
And skies would fall on heads, hell’s gates would open, and all would be clean again for a while.
    Boom!
    Peace. Peace for Ghassan.

11 A.M.
     
A BRAHAM THINKS AGAIN ABOUT THE LOOK OF THE ARABS
    The supermarket was packed. For Abraham the buzz of the customers and staff inside blended with that of the children and their grandparents – and the crows – in the park across the way. Also, at around nine, two Arab women had set up a stall there and were selling dates, olives and a great quantity of spices.
    Thinking about the scent of all those spices, which he could only imagine because of the distance and the confusion, took him back to his childhood, and he began to think about the land where he was born, and where his forefathers had been born and lived for generations as far back as could be remembered. He had been five when they had left Syria. Too small to understand why. Big enough to preserve its songs.
    “We couldn’t stay there any longer when the war broke out,” his father had explained to him many times. His father always remembered how they’d had to make a hasty escape, leaving all that they had built up, changing their way of life for ever. “And in any case, when did they ever want us? Even though we were born and died there, we never belonged to that land.”
    “Why?” Abraham would ask him every time; but he was a little boy, and the answer was hard both to give and to understand.
    When his family moved to the new state of Israel, Jerusalem had still been in shock after a war that had severed long-standing friendships. Few Jews and Arabs maintained relations with one another. For example, the Arab grocer in the house on the corner, two blocks away from them. As a small boy, Abraham had spent hours there, practising his version of Arabic, which was somewhere between the childish and the new. Sometimes he wondered how his parents could have closed the door for ever on that kind of warmth, which he still felt belonged to him.
    “You’re wrong,” his father, who was old by then, would say. “You’re confused, because you never really lived that life. All you can remember is the voice and the arms of your wet nurse, the good Amin, who gave you her milk for two years, may God rest her soul. But you don’t remember the looks of the other Arabs.”
    Abraham had carried it with him for a lifetime, that Arab look. A flash of recognition and rejection, a clot made of the bonds of collective suffering. A profound, shifty, veiled look. Which was a part of him and a part of them.
    Old Sara always joked about this sensitivity of his. “With you we can be sure you’ll recognize an Arab from a distance,” she would sometimes say to him when they moved him to a new assignment.
    This was not so easy for everyone. For an Arab and a Jew can have the same features, the same complexion, the same way of dressing and moving.
    But not the look; the look is different.
D IMA REMEMBERS MANY THNGS, THEN ASKS PERMISSION TO LEAVE
    On the thirtieth day of the curfew Ibrahim discovered his father’s blood by patting it with his hand several times, and then he rested that hand on his brother’s head in order to stand up.
    A moment earlier, Marwad