Martyrs’ Crossing Read Online Free PDF

Katuls’ terrace next door. Katul was such a pleasant fellow, always smiling and whistling and offering to lend George his car. Katul was whistling over in the next yard, as he worked beneath his old Chevy. What was that song? Katul had something to do with Hamas fund-raising, George had heard. Oh, Hamas. George thought about it every time he heard Katul whistling. A bad and difficult organization, full of cold and rigid men, including his son-in-law. Not Katul, of course.
    George remembered feeling that he was being inattentive to Marina, so he’d turned from his study of Katul’s terrace, and watched his grandson’s face. What an amazing face it was. The boy was bent over a pot full of dirt, digging for worms that were not there, and humming. Now George recognized the song that Katul was whistling as he worked under his car—it was the theme from The Lion King. “The cirrrrrrr-cle of life . . .” Ibrahim was humming along with Katul. George and his grandson had watched the movie the other day dubbed into Arabic. That was funny. In any case, what was George to do about Marina’s problems with the Israelis? She was a big girl, now, and George was not the Israelis. He was not even the fucking Palestinians anymore, particularly. George began humming the Lion King song, too, and Ibrahim looked up, smiling. He was picking handfuls of flowers from the flowerpots on the roof. My ticket back, George thought, watching the boy.
    The defending champion went down to a sudden and ignominious defeat—and at the hands of a Swede who only liked to hit from the backcourt. Too bad. George switched off the set. What now? It was almost time to go over to the hospital, check out his mail, begin his afternoon procedures. He finished off the cold coffee.
    George did not want to think of Marina alone in depressing Ramallah in that apartment with Ibrahim while the father did his hunger strikes and made his protests and conspired with his cellmates and wasted time. She had returned to a place that was not the Palestine George had dreamed of regaining, not the place he’d told her about ever since she could understand. The new Palestine was a place totally unlike that—it was a new world, changed utterly since George and the rest of them had been forced to flee. The Catastrophe, the Palestinians called it, appropriately enough. Forever after, George had felt homeless—unlike most people, when he traveled he did not have a home to go home to. He wasn’t a refugee anymore, exactly, but he considered himself one. The worst part was that he never experienced his dislocation more acutely than when he was back in Palestine among the unhappy Palestinians who were surviving the Israeli occupation with a fixed ironic grin or eternal defiance.
    He’d made Sandra into his home, and she was gone.
    It was a strange life their daughter had chosen, and probably George’s fault. It was another reproach, he was sure. Marina had gone “home.”
    You make Palestine romantic, Sandra had told him. It’s not romantic.
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    I N MIDWINTER, Cambridge was covered in snow. The trees that lined Boylston Street looked heavy and tired, wrapped in white, like shrouds. George was beginning to feel his old, hard resentment of America: the cold, unpleasant climate, the long, long winter. Marina liked to ski, he remembered.
    â€œIt’s almost time, Doctor,” Philip said to him from the doorway. Why did Philip always have to sound so young? Six months after Sandra died, it turned out that Philip’s lease for his place on Comm Ave had run out and he was looking for a new spot. So George put him up in their basement apartment. Philip was his protégé, a doctoral candidate in the Middle Eastern Studies department at Harvard, and a Palestinian from Beit Jala near Bethlehem. He had always been around, seeking advice or information, having dinner with them or coffee