Fuad comes out from the hostel. There’s the jeep, a block past the back door. A boy leans against it.
Jeans. Sleeveless white gym shirt stamped with the remains of a washed-out yellow smiling face. Toothpick dangling from his lips. Combat boots.
Another boy sits at the wheel.
Black aviator glasses. Green baseball hat on his head. A few bristles slime down his upper lip, a failed first attempt at a mustache.
Fuad snorts. Boys, fresh out of their Ashbal troop, the Palestinian boy scouts. Neither is a day older than fifteen.
They both think they’re the shit. They’re freedom fighters, they tell themselves.
He knows. He used to be them. At least, he had friends who used to be them. He never joined the Ashbal.
“Forbidden to you is that which dies of itself,” says Fuad.
“And that beaten to death, and that killed by a fall, and that killed by being smitten with the horn, and that which wild beasts have eaten,” says Smileyface, skipping the correct piece of the Qur’an’s passage, completing the code.
Smileyface says, “Allah made a covenant with the children of Israel.”
Fuad spits between Smileyface’s feet, completing the code.
Smileyface opens the jeep’s rear door for him.
Fuad cramps into the jeep’s back seat, the space too small for him even with both of the front seats shifted forward. He watches Sunglasses put a gun in a small hollow under the dashboard, over the glove compartment.
They drive east.
“Do you have what I asked for?”
Sunglasses points at a parcel on the back seat, next to him.
Fuad opens it. A worn pair of jeans, an old white cotton shirt, underwear, socks, a small flask with lighter fluid, a lighter.
“The boots are under the seat,” Smileyface says. “Those were hard to find.”
Fuad undresses, makes a bundle of the clothes he was wearing, puts on the new old clothes.
He takes out the money from his old pants’ pocket. There’s plenty left from what he stole from his father.
Shame colors his face as he remembers leaving his father’s house in the deep of night. Stopping by the safe box behind the cleaning closet’s door. The lock’s combination still his parents’ wedding date.
Inside, he found his mother’s wedding ring. A gold bracelet with his name on it, passed on for two centuries from grandfather to grandson as an heirloom to that generation’s firstborn Fuad Baghdadi. Amal’s earrings, the ones she’d worn since the week after she was born to the day she died. A roll of money tied together with a rubber band: Abdo’s emergency cash for a rainy day. He left everything of value behind, took the cash.
“Stop there,” he says.
They stop the jeep.
He gets down, puts the bundle of clothes on the curb. He soaks everything in lighter fluid, empties the small flask. He sets fire to it. He waits until everything is consumed.
“What was that about?” Sunglasses asks.
“I want nothing from my past. Nothing. To clean a slate, one must burn it and whatever was on it.”
“They’ll take care of your past when we get there,” says Smileyface.
“What do you mean?”
Smileyface and Sunglasses exchange a look.
“What do you mean?” repeats Fuad.
“You’ll see. People there have no past. Most don’t even have names,” says Smileyface.
They drive.
Across Hebron, past his father’s bakery. Past the Tomb of the Patriarchs, of blessed memory. Past his childhood memories, the sweet, the bitter.
Sunglasses offers him a cigarette. Fuad waves it away.
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Do what you must.”
They drive to the Judean Desert.