LITMIR.BIZ

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crammed dwelling. Two or three families, according to Ustaz Sa’adeh, were squeezed in each apartment, and children were constantly running up and down the stairway. Their noise, coupled with the sound of traffic on the street below, made it rather safe for the conspirators to debate the issues with relative ease.

      Yousif was immensely surprised to discover that his first cousin and his principal were so close. He had not been aware that the two were in cahoots for months. When he confronted them with his disbelief, they laughed and told him that they had kept him in the dark on purpose. They wanted to impress upon him that the essential quality in revolutionary work was secrecy.

      “Never trust anyone,” Basim told him.

      “Not even your shadow,” Ustaz Sa’adeh concurred.

      Soon the attendees began to arrive. The first was Hanna Azar, who had worked at Haifa’s seaport. Basim embraced him, led him inside and made the proper introductions. Yousif judged him to be around forty, although his hair was almost completely gray. He was nervous, sitting first on a chair with his back to the door, then getting up to look out the window, then sitting back down, this time facing the door. His handshake with Ustaz Sa’adeh, however, was long and friendly. The link between the two, obviously, was Basim, who was also the link between these two and the tall balding young man who arrived ten minutes later. This was Ali Bakri, the youngest of the guests—and only six or seven years older than Yousif. Ali still had that college exuberance even though he had graduated from law school several years earlier. He sat on the edge of the seat with his hands clasped between his legs, ready to immerse himself in whatever activity they were about to undertake. Yousif liked him instantly.

      Within minutes, the room grew conspicuously quiet.

      “Let’s get started,” Hanna said to Basim. “We’re all here, are we not?”

      Basim shook his head and took out a pack of cigarettes and passed it around. “One more is coming,” he said, placing an ashtray between him and Hanna.

      “Who might that be?” Hanna asked, leaning on his elbow.

      “You’ll see,” Basim said, smiling. “While waiting, let me tell you the latest political joke I’ve heard. A Bedouin soldier in Jerusalem was ordered by his lieutenant to take down the numbers off the cars involved in traffic violations. Guess what he did? He went out and literally pulled down the tags off those cars until he had a sack full.”

      Some laughed, some rolled their eyes, the rest shook their heads.

      “Hard to believe,” Ali said, still laughing.

      “It’s absolutely true,” Basim told him, chuckling.

      “May God help us,” Hanna said, his fingers tapping the armrest.

      “These are our liberators no less,” Basim added, walking toward the window to look out.

      “What do you expect from a camel rider who had never been out of the desert?” Ustaz Sa’adeh asked,

      Still standing by the window, his hands locked together behind his back, Basim turned and spoke to Ali. “Haven’t you heard one lately? You always have a political joke tucked away.”

      “As a matter of fact I have,” Ali said. Then facing the others he began: “Have you heard about the Lebanese who asked a Palestinian refugee to describe what happens in war?”

      They all shook their heads and waited.

      “Well,” Ali continued, “the Palestinian refugee could see that this particular Lebanese was naive, so he told him: ‘It’s like this. You take a gun and I take a gun. You stand there and I stand here. You aim at me and I aim at you. Then we both shoot.’ The Lebanese was shocked. ‘You mean we shoot for real?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ the Palestinian told him. ‘Mon Dieu,’ the Lebanese shrieked in his affected French, ‘to hell with that game.’”

      Amidst the laughter they heard another knock on the door. This time Yousif was seated closer to the door than anyone else, so he was the one to open it. To his surprise, Raja Ballout was standing outside. Basim rushed to greet the mournful-looking, emaciated and famous journalist from Jaffa whose popular editorials often stung readers and authorities alike. His buttoned-up gray jacket with his left hand thrust in his pocket made him look sickly and in pain. The tightness of his lips and the sour expression on his face more than hinted at his derision of the world.

      Yousif knew a lot about Raja for reasons other than his journalistic skills. It was said that Raja had suffered brutally at the hands of the invading army.

      Before the forced exodus, the stories went, Raja was visiting his sick sister in their hometown, when suddenly the house was surrounded by military jeeps. Five or six soldiers jumped out and demanded that Raja and the rest of the family evacuate the house. Raja told them that his sister was bedridden and desperately needed medical attention. Her two young teenagers could testify to that. The soldiers could come in and see for themselves. She had a gallbladder attack and ought to be hospitalized, he repeated. He even led them to her bedroom to prove his point. Her face was pale and contorted, and her hands were clutching her right side.

      “It will be most kind of you if you would help us move her to the hospital in one of your jeeps,” Raja appealed to the soldier, with his nephew and niece moving closer to their mother’s bed. Other soldiers, also with guns at the ready, were standing behind him and to the side of the room.

      “You must be crazy,” replied the first soldier, his gun pointed at him and his finger on the trigger. “Hurry up and take her with you.”

      “How am I going to take her?” Raja pleaded. “I don’t have a car. I can’t call a taxi. And look for yourself, she simply can’t walk,”

      “Then I’ll help you out,” the soldier said

      With mystifying nonchalance, the soldier pulled out his bayonet and walked toward the bed. With one master stroke, he slit her throat. It was like a flash, so electrifying, and so particularly wild, that the poor woman didn’t have a moment to blink her eye or make a peep.

      A blast of horror filled the house. The children howled. Raja froze in place, his eyes glazed.

      “Now you don’t have to worry about taking her to the hospital. Get out.”

      Between looking at his dead sister with the blood oozing on the bed sheet, and with her hysterical children throwing themselves on her feet and chest, Raja felt utterly helpless. What could he do with the killer giving him a murderous look? Raja blamed himself for not having defended her. But he couldn’t have, he told himself. Defend her with what? With his bare hands? His impotence, anger, despair, and indescribable shame consumed him. The world was closing in on him. Suffocating him. Suddenly he pictured the room as Hades, with a huge monster at the gate licking its chops, ready to swallow them.

      “Church . . . simple funeral,” Raja blurted, his well-known eloquence escaping him. “. . . cemetery . . . burial.”

      “No problem,” the soldier assured him. “We’ll bury her for you here and now.”

      “You’ll do what?” Raja screamed, his eyes bulging.

      “Just take the kids with you and get out before I kill all of you. Out, I said. Out, out.”

      Raja couldn’t fathom how a human being could be so cruel, so cold-blooded. Traumatized, he led his niece and nephew out of the house onto the main street, and the boy and girl never stopped sobbing and clinging to him. After walking less than fifty yards, they heard an explosion. Their hearts sank. With sheer terror gripping their heart and soul, they slowly turned around to look. What they saw engulfed them in a higher level of panic. Their house was tumbling down. The body of their slain mother/sister was literally buried beneath the rubble.

      “The bastard kept his word,” Raja muttered, over and over again, enfolding the orphaned niece and nephew in his arms and leaning against a lemon tree. As the youngsters sobbed uncontrollably and kicked whatever was before them, Raja found himself too outraged to even cry. Dry-eyed and with all the solemnity he could

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