Before We Say Goodbye Read Online Free PDF Page B

had been playing with the two children and Dima had been watching them. She had looked at them without seeing them, in the torpor of that enforced quiet. For a while she had imagined Faris in Marwad’s place, and instead of Ibrahim and Khaldun she had seen other little boys.
    Marwad had been lucky. Safiya had given him two boys straight away, and they were sturdy. Dima would give Faris little boys, and Faris would be a loving father to them, like Marwad. Then she would give him girls, who would help her look after the house and their father and brothers. In this way her thoughts wandered as the muezzin chanted his song on that sweetly musty evening.
    Suddenly there came agitated yells followed by shots, cries and women calling; then shots from closer by, and a screech of tyres right under the window. Soldiers. The soldiers in their trucks had moved swiftly into the camp, on that thirtieth day of the curfew. Dima’s head sank violently into her shoulders, as if an unbearably heavy weight had been hurled onto it from high above, while her sisters and sisters-in-law threw themselves into a corner like rags and the men stood up in alarm behind their old father. When the sound of the truck’s engine faded, and with it the shots, Dima looked up and could no longer see Marwad.
    Instead she saw Safiya, her arms spanning the doorway, pushing hard against the door jamb, her mouth gaping in horror. And after, only after, came the howl; and for a moment, there was a stunned silence, while the howl exploded through the broken window; and then the whole camp exploded in its own howl, a howl from the guts, through clenched jaws, from eyes already swollen.
    And as the howl rang out Dima saw Khaldun sitting motionless on the couch looking at the floor. She saw Ibrahim slip down. She saw Safiya hurl herself forwards and huddle down on the floor. She saw herself running down the stairs, her little first aid case in her hand. She saw her cousin Ali, together with a crowd from the street, running up the stairs alongside her and glancing at her case. She saw the room that had been her companion for thirty days and she saw Safiya bent double in a corner.
    Then she saw she had put her foot in the blood.
    Ibrahim was rubbing his little hands very gently in the puddle of blood. The tiny room filled up as a throng of people flattened themselves against the walls. Her cousin grabbed Marwad, who was lying prostrate on the floor. Dima came up with her case, bent over and opened it. Ali turned Marwad over, and his eyes met Dima’s and slipped inside them. Then they were still.
    Khaldun climbed down from the couch and he too began to put his hands in his father’s warm blood, then he looked around him. His little friend Khaled, who had come running with his mother, started to cry. Before she had time to register it, Dima found herself vomiting violently near the body of Marwad, who was still staring at her. Some of the vomit splashed onto Marwad, increasing the horror and the guilt. Finally Safiya began to wail, and then the yelling started up again, as if from a kind of shock that spread from one to another, venting and magnifying itself.
    *   *   *
    With trembling hands and without knowing what she was doing, Dima dug around in her case – she had just finished a first aid course in case of emergencies – as Marwad’s eyes continued to stare at her. But her cousin, who still clung to Marwad, looked at her with compassion, then lowered his head over the motionless body and concealed both their faces and his weeping.
    What is a news item, Leila? Little Fatwa, who is growing up and puts on her veil for the first time, and who looks so radiant? My father, who has never had land or a village, but who talks about them as if they were the things he has known best in all the world? Lame Abdel always off his head? Marwad, who dies in the house where he has been closed up with his family, and whose children play in his blood and then find themselves in