The Second Catastrophe
“Marian looked at Ezekiel, whose eyes were half closed. She was wondering if he might have gone to sleep when she felt him looking straight at her.
“End of the story. I don’t need to tell you what happened next. You live where Hope Orchard used to be and the Ziads are in exile in Amman. May 14 was the Catastrophe, a catastrophe that still hasn’t finished.”
“Wädi Ziad didn’t tell you anything else?” Ezekiel said, looking straight at Marian.
“Yes, of course he told me more, but I don’t think it makes sense to go over the last sixty years. Thousands of Palestinians all piled up together, living a wretched life in refugee camps inside what used to be their homeland, others in exile, some who decided to start a new life and who are now scattered all over Europe, the United States, the Gulf . . . None of them has lost their hope of returning.” Marian’s answer held a challenge.
“I understand that they have not lost their hope. For two thousand years we Jews have said, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’”
“So the Palestinians will have their justice in two thousand years . . .” Marian’s voice was ironic and bitter.
“We are now where we were in 1948, where we were when the powers-that-be decided that the only solution was partition and the creation of two states. They have to accept it.” Ezekiel seemed to be talking to himself.
“I think that the situation is worse now. There are too many dead on both sides.”
“No, it is not the dead, it is the interests of the living on one side, and the actions of others who do all they can to stop there from being a fair peace.”
“There cannot be justice while Israel still violates international resolutions and carries on building settlements in places the United Nations has designated as belonging to the Palestinians.”
“That’s what your report is about, then?”
“Yes.”
“I hope that, as well as including Wädi Ziad’s point of view, you will take into account all that I have said to you over the course of our conversations. I imagine that it must have been interesting for you to hear the two parallel stories.”
Marian shrugged. She felt suddenly tired and asked herself if it had made any sense to dedicate so many days and hours to hearing what this old man had to say. Wädi Ziad had told her to do so and she asked herself why.
“You will not lose anything by listening to him,” Wädi had said, when she had told him about her long conversations with the Israeli. Yes, Ezekiel Zucker knew what suffering was, but his suffering was no more than Wädi’s was, nor was it more than that of other Palestinians who had had everything snatched from them, down to hope itself.
“I would like you to tell me about what happened to the Ziads later on,” Ezekiel asked her.
“Well, it’s not hard to imagine, their life was not different from that of so many other refugees. Nineteen forty-eight is the year of the Nakba, the Catastrophe, and there is not much to tell from that point onwards.”
“No, Marian, we cannot put an end to the story here, you know we cannot.”
“There’s no sense carrying on these conversations . . .”
“Please, carry on, there’s not much left . . .”
Marian wanted to say no, that she wouldn’t carry on with the story, but she didn’t, and instead she unwillingly continued.
Wädi and Anisa got to Jericho, where they stayed at Naima’s house for a while. His sister was glad that he was alive.
Târeq, Naima’s husband, invited Wädi to work with him.
“You have to earn your living somehow, and I need someone I can trust. Your sister would be glad if we worked together.”
But Wädi rejected the generous offer his brother-in-law had made. He wanted nothing other than to be a teacher and was prepared to return to Jerusalem. The pause in Jericho was simply a halt on the journey, to help cure the wounds to his soul. He would return with Anisa and his son to Jerusalem. He did not know what had happened to Brother Agustín, but he had decided that he would give classes in the improvised school and work once again for Mr. Moore in his print shop if his employer had not fled the Old City.
He would leave Anisa with his sister Naima and when he had a place to live he would go and find her. He did not want Anisa or little Abder to lack for anything. They didn’t have much, but it was enough to begin a new life.
“Palestine no longer exists,” Anisa said sadly.
She was right. Palestine no longer existed, some of it was a part of Transjordan, the rest of it was in Israel. The borders would move again, but they would not give birth to Palestine once more.
Wädi found a modest house close to Brother Agustín’s school, about a hundred yards from the Damascus Gate leading into the Old City. The friar was alive and had not abandoned Jerusalem.
His four sons were born and brought up in Jerusalem and they lived there until 1967 when the Israelis took control of the whole city and impelled them into a new period of exile, which this time led them to Amman.
The relationship between the Ziads and the family of Abdullah went back to the time when Mohammed had fought cheek by jowl with Faisal and Abdullah had himself been chasing the dream of a greater Arab nation, so Wädi felt almost as close to Transjordan, soon to be renamed the Kingdom of Jordan, as he had to Palestine. Anisa did not share this feeling.
“The victors in this war were the Jews and Abdullah,” she complained to Wädi.
“King Abdullah is the most sensible of all the Arab leaders and the only one who will not betray us,” Wädi replied.
Brother Agustín shared Anisa’s opinion.
“Abdullah has increased his kingdom at the price of taking land from Palestine.”
“Don’t be wicked, the troops of King Abdullah fought with greater bravery than those of the rest of the army who said they were going to help us. Also, they kept the Old City for the Arabs. Jerusalem is ours,” was Wädi’s normal response.
“Jerusalem is his; also, the Jews are in charge of the western part, exactly where your house was, where your farm was, where your grandparents are buried,” the friar replied. He did not feel any warmth toward the Israelis.
Omar Salem, who had also survived the war, was still one of the most prominent men in Jerusalem. Wädi did not share his ideas, but he couldn’t forget that Omar Salem had been a friend of his family, so every now and then he accepted his invitation to visit his house and discuss the future along with other men.
The main point of contention between Omar Salem and Wädi was the man who had been the mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husseini. Wädi disapproved of al-Husseini because of his support for Hitler during the war, but in Omar Salem’s eyes the mufti had done nothing more than defend Palestine from its Jewish aggressors. This is why Omar Salem thought that it was an insult for Abdullah to name Sheikh Hussam ad-Din Jarallah the mufti of Jerusalem.
Wädi never hid his sympathy for the Jordanian king, and did not see this as contradicting his desire that Arab Palestine should be a nation. And so, on the day that Abdullah was assassinated, Wädi felt it as deeply as if he had lost a member of his family.
It was a Friday, that day in June 1951, and the king had decided to pray on Temple Mount. His grandson Hussein, who would later become king himself, would remember that on that very day his grandfather had said some premonitory words: “When I die, I should like to be shot in the head by a nobody.”
Wädi was on his way to the al-Aqsa Mosque when he heard a dull noise followed by shouting. He started to walk more quickly, but some Jordanian soldiers blocked his path. A few meters beyond them lay the corpse of the king. A tailor, a simple tailor had taken Abdullah’s life. No one would remember his name, but he was called Mustafa Shukri Usho.
Such was the surprise and shock at that moment that only one person tackled the assassin, and that was a child, Hussein, the king’s grandson.
The murder shocked Wädi and all those who supported the Hashemite family.
After this, life returned to its routine until the Six-Day War in 1967 provoked a second catastrophe. The Arab states that had tried to create an Arab Palestine once again failed in their attempt. They were summarily defeated by the Israel Defense Forces, in a war that took only six days and led to the capture by the Israelis of the whole of Jerusalem.
House by house, Jews and Arabs fought over every inch of ground. Wädi and his children were among those who defended East Jerusalem. But when the war ended, Israel had increased the size of its territory and had taken control of the Old City.
Wädi Ziad, along with Anisa and his sons, went into exile again, this time to Amman.
Naima, Wädi’s sister, asked them to stay in Jericho, but Anisa refused bluntly.
“I don’t want to be an exile in my own country, and if we stay in Jerusalem then we will have to accept that the Israelis will tell us what we can and cannot do. I would prefer to live somewhere where everyone knows I’m a foreigner, and then at least I won’t feel humiliated.”
These were not easy years. They lived in wretched circumstances for some years in a refugee camp, where Wädi devoted himself to his true vocation, teaching. He helped set up a school, and there, day after day, he tried to bring at least a taste of routine and normality into the children’s lives.
They would never go back to Jerusalem. Israel did not allow them to travel. Also, what sense would there be in their returning as foreigners to their own country? For them, as for most Palestinians, it all came to an end in 1948. Like I said, the end of the story.
Marian paused. She didn’t want to continue. The conversation had tired her out. She looked off into the distance.
“Are you going to go back to Amman?” Ezekiel asked, bringing her back to reality.
“Yes, I want to say goodbye to the Ziads.”
“And you will go back home, go back to work, write your report. Someone will send it to the newspapers and everyone will talk about it for a few days and then things will go back to normal.”
“Yes, things will go back to normal. Your son will still push for more settlements that take more land from the Palestinians, and thousands of men and women will sink into frustration and bitterness and call for justice to be done.”
“Has Wädi Ziad told you how he has lived all these years?”
She was confused by the question. What did this man mean?
“Yes, of course he has.”
“Please could you tell me what he told you?”
“I don’t know why you insist so much . . . You know as well as I do that for the Palestinians their hell started in 1948. There’s no point talking about the same things again and again.”
“Well, if we’ve spoken about what happened up until 1948, we should talk about what happened afterwards, which is why you are here. No one cares about everything we’ve been talking about, but what happened since the night of May 14, 1948, is the reason we are here.”
“I cannot stay in Israel a single day longer. My boss wants to take me off the report already.”
“And you don’t care if he does.”
Marian shuffled uncomfortably in her chair. Ezekiel was making her nervous.
“I’ll tell you what happened.” Ezekiel carried on speaking.
“It would be hard for you to tell me what happened to the Ziads,” she protested.
“You’re wrong, of course I can, just as Wädi Ziad can tell you everything about me.”
“I don’t understand . . .”
“Ah, you don’t understand . . . Maybe you don’t know everything and maybe you know even less about the Ziads than you do about me.”
“You are wrong, Wädi Ziad and his grandchildren haven’t hidden anything from me . . . There was no need, they trust me . . .” Marian was confused.
“You are tired and you want to finish, I understand, so do I. But you will have to allow me to tell you the epilogue to this story. Wädi won’t mind. We have both suffered since 1948, suffered the worst kinds of loss, the most unbearable kind, the loss of children. His children and mine fell fighting for what they believed to be just.”
“My report is nearly finished, I don’t want to add another comma. Also, I’m tired . . .”
“Don’t worry, after hearing me out you’ll have a lot of time for yourself, time to think. After tonight, the rest of your life begins.”
“I don’t understand . . .”
“Yes, you do understand me, but you are scared to. Listen to me carefully . . .”
I heard nothing about Wädi until 1972. He would not have wanted to hear my news and I did not look for an excuse to see him. The war had separated us, we were in two irreconcilable groups, where what was at stake was more important than the lives of a few thousand people, what was truly important was the possession of a piece of land.
The Israelis had no doubt that we were fighting to maintain possession of that piece of land, or else to find ourselves once more transformed into a wandering people, leaving our fate in the hands of others. And we did not want to do this. We had lived in a wretched state for centuries, in the ghettoes, we had paid excessive tribute to those who had accepted us within their borders, we had suffered appalling campaigns against us, and always, always we had been persecuted by the unjustifiable hatred of those who claimed that we killed Jesus. How many generations had been taught the same, that the Jews killed Jesus? This made us guilty and worthy of contempt, so that for years we tried not to provoke those who hated us for the simple fact of our existence. We suffered pogroms in Russia, Poland, Germany . . . so many places . . . We were expelled from Spain, Portugal . . . We had no homeland, no place that belonged to us; all we had was a feeling older than time itself—we knew where we came from, where our ancestors were, and that was no other place than these empty colonies in Judea, in Samaria . . . “Next year in Jerusalem,” repeated Jews for generations and generations. Until one day, men and women started to come home. My father, Samuel, was one of those men. Then Germany unleashed the largest massacre of Jews ever imagined, the Holocaust. Six million children, women, men, died in the concentration camps. We allowed it to happen. We let ourselves be led into the camps, just as we had put up with persecution for centuries, put up with pogroms, allowed them to burn our houses, kill our children.
When the Jews in Palestine found out about the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War, they realized more clearly than ever that we needed a home, and that our home could be none other than the land of our forefathers. We asked to share it, and some Arabs, like the Hashemites, seemed at least willing to consider the question. Did you know that Arab leaders have blamed the Jordanian royal family for decades? Why? Because they were the only ones, out of the whole lot of them, who were realists, ready both in the past and in the present to converse with us. They have never been forgiven for this, even though when the time came for fighting they were the only ones to do so for real. The Jordanians are formidable warriors.
I have said that since that day in 1949 when Wädi and Anisa left their home we knew no more about them. I did not know that Aya had died in Amman, and she did not know about the deaths of Marinna and Igor.
Marinna did not survive Mohammed’s death very long. She started to die the night that Wädi went to Hope Orchard to tell her about it.
Marinna suffered a heart attack a few days later. She recovered, but her period of renewed good health was brief, then her heart stopped and never again resumed beating. She had not been able to deal with so many losses; and Igor, for his part, was unable to deal with losing Marinna. He had a stroke and was forced to use a wheelchair.
Suddenly I found myself living in a communal house with a sick man who could barely move and who had no desire to live. Don’t think that I didn’t believe that the best thing would be to take him to an institution where he would be looked after. But I didn’t, I thought that neither my father Samuel nor my mother Miriam would have approved. Igor and I were all that remained of the life that my father had built around that house, so I looked after him for a long year until one morning I went to wake him and found him sunk into eternal sleep.
The day I buried Igor I realized that I was now definitively alone. Back then I was in the army. Perhaps because I spoke Arabic as fluently as I did Hebrew, my superiors decided to send me on a number of missions in enemy countries. The first of these was to help Israel bring home the Jews who lived in Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Egypt and who, as you know or should know, were suffering indescribably. Ever since 1948 they had been expelled from their homes, had their houses taken from them, lost their lands, their possessions; lots of them lost their lives, and others, with our help, took the journey into exile. The tragedy is that most of them were not Zionists, but all the world they had was in Baghdad, or Cairo, or Damascus, or Tehran.
But I won’t tell you any more of my own story except insofar as it has to do with Wädi Ziad, to whom fate had connected me in some irreversible way that night he saved my life when I was a child.
I sold Hope Orchard and fought for the Ziads’ house and their little farm not to be confiscated, but without success.
I thought of Wädi when some of the Jews we had brought to Israel from remote corners of Iraq told me with tears in their eyes what it meant for them to know that they would never again be able to return to the place that had been their home. They spoke to me of their houses, their farms, their belongings, their memories, and I thought that their loss must feel the same as Wädi’s did.
I married again. After Sara died I thought I would never re-marry, but I met Paula again. The girl whom I had taught Hebrew to in the kibbutz had become a lawyer and was working as an analyst in the Ministry of Defense. I won’t say I wasn’t surprised, probably because when we first met I didn’t know how to assess her intelligence and worth.
We met by accident in Jerusalem. I was wandering round the Old City, something I had always liked to do, and suddenly I saw her. She was alone, so I went up to her. I had not spoken to her since the day I called the kibbutz to tell her that I was going to marry Sara, and I was scared that she would rebuff me, but she didn’t. We went to a café and caught up on how our lives had developed. From that moment on we were inseparable. We married three months later and lived together until she died of cancer ten years ago. We had three children. Yuval, the oldest, died in the war of ’73. The second, Aaron, is the one you really wanted to talk to. He is the only son of mine who is still alive, because the youngest, Gideon, died in a terrorist attack. He was doing his military service when a bomb exploded and destroyed the jeep he was traveling in. He died with three other soldiers. He was only nineteen.
I’m telling you this because Paula was the reason I met Wädi again.
You will know, or you should know, that not all the Palestinians who had sought refuge in Jordan were loyal to King Hussein. Jordan became the base from which the Palestinian guerrillas attacked Israel, but they were not content with this, and at the beginning of the seventies they tried to overthrow the king. The confrontations between King Hussein and Yasser Arafat were bloody. They even tried to kill the king. In the seventies, the PLO and other organizations had a membership of more than one hundred thousand people, they were like a state within the state. Confrontation was inevitable, but the paradox was that some Palestinians fought alongside the Jordanians. Hussein won the battle and by the summer of 1971 he was back in charge of his country. Twenty thousand Palestinians died in the conflict, including Wädi’s oldest son. So, his oldest son died in 1971, and mine died two years later . . . But let’s go back to Jordan, and the confrontation between the troops of King Hussein and the Palestinians, out of which rose Black September.
I was in the army, and in the summer of 1972 a soldier told me that a friar was insisting on seeing me. “He says that he’s named Brother Agustín and that he knows you.”
I was stunned at the friar’s visit. It was a call from the past, from a past that I had corralled away in some corner of my brain.
It was difficult for me to recognize him. He was older and thinner. We did not shake hands. We were not friends and I knew that he disliked the Jews.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“I’ve got a message from Wädi Ziad.”
I felt a shiver run down my spine, but I tried to make sure that the friar did not notice my discomfort. I didn’t reply, and waited for him to tell me his reason for coming.
“Latîf, Wädi’s youngest son, is a prisoner here in Israel. He is very young but very brave, he wanted to go to Jericho and then to Jerusalem. He was arrested.”
I said nothing, not so much to make the friar nervous as to give myself time to think.
“Wädi wants you to get him freed. His son is only sixteen years old. He is a boy, a brave and daring boy, who has not hurt anyone.”
“That’s what you say.”
“You can check. He is not a member of the Fedayeen.”
“So if you cross the border and want to get to Jerusalem, clearly with a message that could very easily be instructions for a terrorist attack, then you are not a member of the Fedayeen.” I tried to sound indifferent.
“The Palestinians fight as they can. What you call terrorism is nothing more than war by other means.”
“Right. Do you think that hijacking planes and planting bombs against civilian targets is merely war by other means? It’s terrorism, and the people who do such things are the worst of the worst,” I replied with irritation.
“I didn’t come here to argue about the war, just to bring you a message. You owe your life to Wädi Ziad. He has never asked anything of you for having saved you, but now the moment has come for you to repay him for what he did for you. Save his son. He has already lost two sons: one in the struggles between the troops of King Hussein and Arafat’s guerrillas, and another on the border, in a skirmish with Israeli soldiers. He doesn’t want to lose another.”
Brother Agustín turned away and in spite of his age walked away before I had time to answer.
I told Paula what had happened and asked her to help me.
“You have to know where the Palestinians who cross the border are held.”
“The only thing I can do is find out exactly what this Latîf has done, but I will have to tell my superiors why I am interested in this kid.”
“The truth is always the shortest path, all I want to know is what he is accused of. I have to pay my debt.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Ezekiel! Wädi saved your life when you were a child, it was something praiseworthy, you will always be grateful to him, but this doesn’t make you his hostage.”
I didn’t know how to explain to Paula that her Cartesian ways of thinking had little to do with how things truly are in the Orient. I had been born in Jerusalem, I had grown up alongside Arab children, I knew and shared many of their values, and this was one of them, a life for a life, just as vengeance had to be paid with an eye for an eye. But Paula was German, she had been born and brought up in Berlin until she fled the Nazi menace with her parents, and she applied other codes to her life.
“I have a debt to pay, Paula, and I’m asking you to help me pay it. If the boy is not a criminal, then he should be returned to his father.”
“You’re crazy! In any case, you don’t get to decide that.”
Paula confirmed what Brother Agustín had told me. He had been arrested a few meters beyond the Jordan River, having only just crossed the border. They found nothing compromising on him. He stuck to his version of the story, that he wanted to go to Jericho to visit his Aunt Naima, just that. Of course, they didn’t believe him. I knew the truth; Brother Agustín had told it to me without realizing it. Latîf wanted, more than to visit Jericho, to head to Jerusalem where he doubtless had to pass a message to some member of the PLO in Israel. Although he had not confessed, the people who interrogated him knew this for a fact, it was not the first time they had come across a case like this.
I spoke to my superiors in the army and explained to them the case of Latîf, insisting that if the child had not committed any major crime then he should be set free. My superiors said that entering Israel illegally was a crime in itself and that if he had not committed anything worse, then it was because he had been arrested in time.
I was not a lawyer. I had finished my studies in agricultural engineering, although I had never dedicated myself to farming as my career was now in the army. I didn’t know what to do, but I was ready to do whatever it took to get Latîf back to Wädi. It was Paula who recommended that I get in touch with a young human rights lawyer.
“He’s a lawyer who has become a living nightmare for the Ministry of Defense; he defends the Palestinians, no matter what they have done, and has been successful in cases when they have not committed any crime that involved bloodshed.”
Isahi Bach’s office in Tel Aviv was a room with three desks in it, where two other young men worked as well. I explained the case to him and he agreed to take it on.
“It will not be easy, but we should try. The important thing is that he is only accused of a single crime: illegal entry into the country.”
“Yes, but he shouldn’t spend too much time in prison,” I said, almost begging these young men, none of whom was older than thirty.
“Look, we’re not going to lie to you, you should know how these things work, the first thing is to obtain permission to see him. It would be helpful if the friar were to come with me, so that Latîf will know that he can trust me. Once we have found out how he is and he has told me his version of what happened, I will start to prepare his defense. It won’t be easy, but it shouldn’t be impossible.”
“The boy hasn’t done anything,” I said.
“I’ll make things clear for you. We believe in Israel’s right to exist, but we also believe that the Palestinians have a right to their own state, and above all we believe that no one should be able to trample the rights that are theirs as human beings, no matter what they may or may not have done. I am sure that Latîf came with a message for Palestinian activists within Israel, but if the prosecutor can’t prove anything, then he is innocent. No one is guilty until so proved.”
“Why do you defend the Palestinians?” I asked these young men with great curiosity.
“Because we do not want Israel to lose her moral compass, which is the first thing that gets lost in a war.”
It was hard for me to understand their ideas, but I decided to trust them. I looked for Brother Agustín and told him to call Isahi Bach.
“It’s all I can do,” I explained.
“It’s not much. Wädi wanted you to get his son freed immediately.”
“Wädi is not a fool, and he must know that there are things that are beyond my capacity when it comes to paying the debt I owe him. I will pay it, or I hope to pay it, but there are certain steps to take.”
The process lasted six months, but eventually Isahi Bach managed to achieve more than I had expected. They sentenced Latîf to a year in prison and then he was to be expelled to Jordan. As he had been in prison for eight months already, he only needed four more to obtain his liberty.
I didn’t know Wädi’s son, because Isahi Bach had asked me not even to come to the trial. I went to meet him as he was released from prison. He came through the door accompanied by Isahi. He looked a lot like Anisa: the same pointed face, the same almond eyes, and the same thin frame. I went up to him and held out my hand, but he pretended not to have seen my gesture and I didn’t insist.
“We’ll take you to the border, your father is waiting for you on the other side,” Brother Agustín said.
When we got to the Allenby Bridge, the boy got out of the car in a single bound. He wanted to get back to see his family. He didn’t thank me and he barely looked at me. It’s not that I was expecting a great deal of emotional display, but I would at least have liked to have seen him happy.
After doing all the necessary paperwork at the border and arguing for a while with one of the soldiers, who seemed not to trust us and who read the documents and the safe-conduct pass at least three or four times, Latîf started to cross the bridge toward the other side of the Jordan.
“He’s not very expressive,” I complained as we saw him trotting away.
“What do you expect? He’s a little kid who’s having a horrible life in a refugee camp. He has been arrested and interrogated, probably with a certain amount of brutality, and he has been in prison. He has nothing to thank you for. Put yourself in his skin,” Isahi Bach said.
“If I were in his skin I would be happy to have been set free.”
“Neither you nor I has set him free, all we have done is make sure that justice was carried out.”
“You know as well as I do that he came with a message for the operatives in Jerusalem,” I protested.
“Maybe, but that could not be proven. He put up with his interrogations bravely, no one managed to get out of him more than he wanted to say, and he suffered for it,” Isahi Bach scolded.
“He is a future terrorist,” I said.
“Of course, but neither you nor I know that for a fact. Ask yourself what you would be like, what you would do, how you would feel if you were in his skin.”
“They have to accept that Israel is a reality,” I said angrily.
“Yes, one day they will, and we will have to accept that they are people, too, with their own rights.”
Isahi Bach irritated me, but over time he became one of my closest friends.
Two months later Brother Agustín came to my office once again.
“I have brought a message from Wädi.”
I behaved as I had before, I said nothing and waited for the friar to give me the message.
“He thanks you for what you did for his son.”
“I owed it to him. Now we are even.”
“Yes, now you are even, but he wants to ask you a favor.”
I was set on edge. Wädi was forcing himself into my life and making me feel uneasy. I had paid my debt and was not prepared to do any favors for the enemy, and, like it or not, enemies were what we were.
“Wädi has another son and doesn’t know where he is. He has no way of finding out, and maybe you do.”
“If they have arrested another of his sons it is no business of mine. Tell him from me that he should keep them on a tighter leash and not let them dedicate themselves to terrorist activity.”
“The Fedayeen are not terrorists, but I am not referring to any of Anisa’s children.”
Brother Agustín’s reply surprised me. I did not know what he could be referring to. I wondered if I should send him away and cut short that strange relationship that was building between Wädi and me after more than twenty years with no news from each other. But I didn’t, and today I rejoice that I made that decision.
“A few years ago Wädi met a woman. She was Spanish, a Spanish doctor who had come to the country as part of a group of doctors and nurses, all of them volunteers, to help in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Wädi is one of the men who looks after the camp’s organization and so he has to have direct relationships with all the foreign organizations who come to bring food, or medicine, or help of whatever kind. The children need vaccines and food in good condition, and the adults need doctors to look after their health problems, to prescribe them the drugs they need. Wädi suggested that Eloisa examine the children in the school, so that they would be less frightened than if they had to go to the camp dispensary. She accepted. And that was how their relationship began. He fell in love with her the first moment that he saw her. ‘She is like a medieval princess,’ was how Wädi described her. He was right. Eloisa was blonde with blue eyes and a false air of fragility. If I were of an age when I could still pay attention to women, and if I were not a friar, then I would not have been indifferent to her either. The surprising thing is that Eloisa fell in love with Wädi. The scars that were left on his face the day he rescued you from the fire have grown darker with time and have made his face even more altered. Also, he is no longer a boy. Maybe it was his serenity and dignity that won this woman’s heart. When the summer ended and the Spanish volunteers went back to their country, she stayed behind. She had decided to work in the refugee camp; she did not expect anything, all she wanted to do was help, but she especially wanted to be by Wädi’s side.”
“And what about Anisa?” I asked.
I knew Anisa and was sure that she would never agree to share her husband. She was a strong-willed woman who had suffered and fought and would never accept not being treated as an equal. But maybe time changes us all, so I waited with interest for the friar’s answer.
“Anisa decided not to see or hear more than she wanted to see or hear. She realized that Wädi could not avoid feeling attracted to Eloisa and that if she interfered then she would most likely lose her husband forever. No man should fall in love after the age of forty, and Wädi was more than fifty. Anisa did what she could to see that her sons were not disgusted by their father’s love affair. She maintained her dignity, kept her distance, and didn’t abandon the little house at which Wädi appeared ever more rarely. No one was surprised when Eloisa fell pregnant. No one asked whose child it was that she was expecting, but it didn’t matter, Wädi’s care and attention was too obvious for there to be any doubts. What neither of the two could imagine was that she would fall ill. Pneumonia was the diagnosis of an Amman doctor. Eloisa was very ill and Wädi decided he should get in touch with her family and explain the situation to them. Eloisa’s mother came from Spain to take charge of her daughter. When she met Wädi she didn’t hide her surprise that her daughter should have fallen in love with a man with a deformed face. I think that surprised her more than finding out he had another family. Eloisa refused to return to Spain; she wanted her child to be born in Jordan, as close as possible to Palestine. But her mother, María de los Ángeles, pretended not to notice her daughter’s protests. She spoke to Wädi: ‘I suppose you must know that I disapprove of my daughter’s relationship with you. It is clear that you have taken advantage of her feelings. She is a young woman who came here having just finished her degree and with her head full of flighty ideas, only wanting to help. It is her father’s fault and mine for allowing her to come, but what is done is done. You have a wife and children, turn your life over to them, and if you really feel something for Eloisa, help me to take her back to Spain, as she will not recover here.’ Wädi replied that the doctor had said that it would be dangerous to move her. Eloisa’s mother had a fit of rage and her shouting could be heard all over the camp: ‘You are a selfish pig! You want to sacrifice my daughter’s life for your own benefit! Hasn’t she done enough for you people? I will take her whether you want her to go or not, and I swear that I will do whatever it takes to make sure you never see her again.’ This outburst shamed Wädi and he told Eloisa’s mother that he and her daughter were going to have a child together. But this just set the formidable old woman off again: ‘Yes, my daughter is going to have a child and I promise you that the poor little tyke won’t grow up in conditions like these; tell me, why on earth should she?’ Eloisa was in no condition to refuse her mother, and they left on a flight to Madrid two days later. Ever since then, Wädi has heard nothing more from her, and doesn’t even know if the child she was carrying was born.”
“And what does all this have to do with me?” I asked, astonished not just at the story I had just heard, but at Wädi’s cheek in coming to me for help.
“Wädi doesn’t have the money or any way of finding out what happened to the girl, and you do.”
“You’re crazy! Tell him I’m sorry for what has happened, but I can’t do anything for him.”
“You have money, contacts, the ability to fly to Madrid and find out what has happened to Eloisa.”
I looked straight at the friar to see if he was serious. Wädi’s request seemed to me to be extremely presumptuous and made me feel very uncomfortable.
“So you and Wädi think that I will be able to ask for leave to go to Madrid to find out what has happened to a doctor whom I don’t know, but who has had an affair with someone I have not seen since we both were children. Of course, the army, and my wife, will create no problems. Really, you must have a screw loose somewhere if you’re asking me to do something like that!”
“That’s exactly what we are doing, asking you. I don’t know anyone else who can help us with this matter.”
Brother Agustín was not to be moved by any argument I could offer him, as if it were normal that a Palestinian in a Jordanian refugee camp should ask an Israeli soldier to drop everything and help him with an affair of the heart.
Hope Orchard by then was only a memory, as were all the people who had been part of my childhood and youth. I had fought in the Second World War, in the War of Independence, in Suez in 1956, in the conquest of East Jerusalem in 1967, and my life and my interests were all focused on the survival of Israel and on attempting to be happy with Paula and our children. I had paid my debt to Wädi when I had taken an interest in his son Latîf’s case, even though I was more and more sure that he was one of the Fedayeen. I had done more than I ought to have done, so I said to the friar that I would not move a finger to help Wädi now.
That night I told Paula what had happened and she burst out laughing.
“Wädi used to be your best friend, when we first met you did nothing but talk about him,” she reminded me.
“Yes, but now we are on different sides, he wants to destroy Israel and I will do whatever I can to make sure he doesn’t, so there isn’t a great deal we can say to each other.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be so strict. There was a time, from what you’ve told me, when you, too, were convinced that the Palestinians should have their own state.”
“And I still think they should, but don’t you remember that their leaders have sworn not to stop until we are pushed into the sea? No, I am not going to do more for him than I have already done, I even feel regret for having helped his son Latîf. He is a Fedayeen.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, that’s what Isahi Bach his defense lawyer used as the basis for his case, the idea that what you cannot prove does not exist; but he and you and I all know that no Palestinian crosses the border illegally simply to visit his aunt and his cousins.”
“Who knows . . .”
“Please, Paula, how can you say that, when you work in the Ministry of Defense!”
“It’s precisely because of where I work that I need to bear in mind all the variables, even the most absurd and unlikely ones. In any case, Wädi didn’t lie to you.”
I heard nothing more from Wädi or Brother Agustín until much later. By that time I had lost my son Yuval in the 1973 war. Paula and I were distraught, no one is prepared for the death of a child. Wädi, for his part, had not just lost his oldest son, but his second son had been killed during an attack carried out by a group of Fedayeen on a battalion of Israeli soldiers patrolling the banks of the Jordan.
I was no longer in the army. I was giving classes at the university, and I remember that when I was speaking to another teacher about the war he said something that made me shudder: “I have three children, and I know I will lose one of them. It happens to everyone else, why not to me?” This is exactly what happened to Paula and me, we had lost the child we were destined to lose.
Yuval was a young soldier of barely twenty, at the age when you should be studying instead of walking around with a submachine gun in your hands.
It was Paula’s idea that we should go on a trip.
“It would be good for us to get out of Israel.”
I protested, and said that even if we traveled a thousand kilometers I would still not be able to forget my son. Paula got angry with me.
“Do you think that I’m going to forget my son? All I want to do is leave so I don’t suffocate here. I need to walk on ground where the war is not present in every step I take. Just that, I don’t want anything else.”
Our children Aaron and Gideon suggested that we go to Madrid. I had told them about the journey that my parents and I had taken to Spain when I was a child, and it seemed like a good idea to them that we visit the country.
Paula was packing her suitcase when she remembered Wädi’s request to look for this woman named Eloisa.
“Now that we are going to Madrid anyway, maybe we could try to find something out,” Paula suggested.
“Definitely not! How could you think of something like that? Do you think I care that Wädi fell in love with a Spanish doctor and had a child with her? Let him take care of his life, we’ve got enough with ours.”
I think I never really learned to understand Paula. If I had been surprised that she worked as an analyst in the Ministry of Defense, I was now equally surprised at her lack of prejudice when it came to dealing with any topic. She had an ability far beyond normal to, as she put it, get herself into another person’s skin, whoever they were. Perhaps this was what made her such a good analyst.
“It would be fun to look for this girl, what’s wrong with that?”
I resisted as much as I could, but in the end I went to find Brother Agustín without telling her that this was what I was doing. I found him in the old school where he used to give classes alongside Wädi. He didn’t seem to be surprised to see me.
“So, have you finally decided to help your old friend?” he asked me without even saying hello.
I was irritated by the way he received me, he assumed that I was there about Wädi, but in fact, what other cause could there have been?
I told him that I had to go to Madrid, and that if I could I would try to find out some more information about this Eloisa, but I insisted that I couldn’t promise anything.
Brother Agustín could barely give me any information; just an address, where Wädi sent letters that were returned with a stamp saying that the addressee was unknown.
Paula was right, it was good to get out of Israel. We didn’t forget about our son—how could we?—but at least we started to be able to sleep for a few hours every night. It wasn’t until a week had gone by that Paula reminded me that we should go to find out about Eloisa. By then we had been to Toledo, Aranjuez, and El Escorial, as well as the Prado Museum.
To my surprise, Paula refused to come with me to the address Brother Agustín had given me.
“I’ll go and walk for a while, and try to find something to get for the boys as a present.”
My wife was surprising like that, she had convinced me to look for Eloisa, but now she made it clear that this was a personal matter for me, from my past.
The house was in a wealthy area, not far from the Palace Hotel, which was where we were staying.
“The Barrio de Salamanca is the best part of Madrid,” the taxi driver assured me when I gave him the address, happy not to have forgotten Ladino, my mother’s native tongue, in which she had spoke to Dalida and to me when we were children.
A friendly porter told me there was no Eloisa Ramírez living there, although she had only been on the job a couple of years. There was a Ramírez family on the fifth floor. She let me go up in the elevator without causing any problems. I was nervous, thinking that I might meet a family that had nothing to do with Wädi or Eloisa.
A maid opened the door to me and told me that there was no Eloisa living here. I don’t know why, but I asked her to ask the lady of the house. She paused for an instant, then led me into a little office and asked me to wait. Suddenly an elderly woman stood in front of me, well dressed and with her grey hair pulled up in a chignon.
“So, you say that . . .”
“I’m sorry to bother you, I’m looking for Eloisa Ramírez.”
She looked at me for a few seconds and I could see how uncertainty clouded her vision.
“I’m sorry, but I am Señora Ramírez and there is no Eloisa here.”
I didn’t believe her. I don’t know why, but I didn’t believe her.
“Well, this is the address that she gave when she was in a refugee camp in Jordan, working as a doctor. Then she fell ill and went back to Spain with her mother.”
“And who are you?” she asked, without insisting any further that she knew no Eloisa.
“A friend of a good friend of hers.”
“Didn’t you tell me that you knew her?” The question was full of irony.
“No, not exactly.” Señora Ramírez was making me nervous.
“Right. I’m sorry not to be able to help you, but there is no Eloisa who lives here.”
At this moment a door opened and a little girl came running in and grabbed the woman’s hand.
“Grandmother, come on.”
We looked at each other without saying a word. She with pride, defiant; I in the certainty that I knew she was lying to me.
“Right, well, I don’t want to bother you, although I don’t know why Eloisa left this address . . . And I especially don’t know why we haven’t heard anything more from her.”
“I don’t know either, I’m sorry not to be able to help you any further, and now I must ask you to please leave.”
I still ask myself today where I found the courage to say what I then said.
“So, that little girl is the daughter of Wädi Ziad and Eloisa. You can’t deny that he’s her father, they look identical.”
The woman jerked herself upright and told the girl to leave the room.
“Mari Ángeles, go and play, I’ll be along in a minute.”
The girl obeyed. The woman and I looked at each other, I didn’t dare say another word.
“What do you want?”
“I just want to know what became of Eloisa and the child she was expecting.”
She opened the door and an elderly man came in. They looked at each other and it was clear they were suffering.
“I don’t want anything, much less do I want to cause you any problems or trouble. I give you my word.”
“Who are you?” The man’s dignity and authority did not allow me to avoid the question.
“My name is Ezekiel Zucker, I am a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Many years ago I was a friend of Wädi Ziad. He asked me to come to Madrid to find out what has happened to Eloisa.”
“A Jew, friends with a Palestinian, you expect me to believe that?” The man’s voice was indignant.
“It’s hard to believe, I know, but we were friends a long time ago, when we were children, before the 1948 war. Wädi Ziad only wants to know what happened to Eloisa and . . . well, what happened to his child.”
“Sit down,” the man ordered me.
“We don’t have anything to tell you . . . ,” his wife interrupted, but the man gave her such a fierce look that she fell quiet.
“We can’t hide, and we have no reason to. Listen and tell your friend not to bother us again. My daughter died because of him, and we have suffered enough.”
I was silent and didn’t know what to say. I was moved to know that the young woman Wädi had loved was now dead.
“She died giving birth a few weeks after we came back here. She was in her seventh month of pregnancy, it was a miracle that the child was saved,” the woman said, fixing her eyes on me.
“I’m sorry,” I managed to say.
“We don’t want to hear anything about this man. He has no rights over the child,” Eloisa’s mother said.
“She doesn’t bear his name,” the man said.
“We want the girl to have a normal life, to be happy. Do you think we should send her to a Palestinian refugee camp, to a man who has a wife and children? We would never allow it. Tell your friend that if he really loves Eloisa then he should show it by not condemning her daughter to that fate. The child is happy.”
“But . . . Well, she’ll want to know who her father is one day,” I said, and felt stupid as soon as I had done so.
“There’s no reason, we’ll say that we don’t know who he was, that her mother never said.” Eloisa’s mother’s voice was the voice of a defeated woman.
“Do you think that your friend will leave us in peace?” the man asked.
“I’ll ask him to,” I promised them, without quite knowing how such an improvised promise could be kept.
Paula was moved by the story. I said I didn’t know if I should tell Brother Agustín the truth, but she convinced me that it was not my business to make any decision about what future was better for this child. She was right, so when we went back to Jerusalem I looked up the friar and told him what had happened.
“Eloisa’s parents are influential people, and Wädi cannot prove that he is the girl’s father.”
I didn’t hear anything else about Wädi until many years later. When I found out more about him, Israel had already signed peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt, and peace negotiations between Israel and the PLO were the order of the day. An Arab boy came to the university and gave me a letter from Brother Agustín, asking me to come see him.
The friar was now an old man, almost blind and scarcely able to walk, but he had the same energy as always.
“Wädi wants to see you. He cannot come to Israel, as you know, the Israeli authorities don’t give permission to the refugees to travel, but you can go see him in Amman.”
I was annoyed that Wädi would take it for granted that I would do what he wanted, just as he had done when we were children.
Brother Agustín gave me Wädi’s telephone number in Amman.
“Call him when you get there, the best thing would be to meet at a hotel. It would not be good for a Jew to visit him at his house in the refugee camp.”
I got really angry this time. As far as I knew, Wädi’s house was in front of the Fortress, near the Royal Palace, and the late King Hussein had transformed it into a refugee camp by building houses there, so I was sure that Wädi would be living in a modest but worthy place; the friar seemed to discern in me a sense of guilt that I was not disposed to feel.
Once again it was Paula who encouraged me to make the decision. She was ill, the cancer was eating away at her, and the doctors gave her only a few months to live.
“You have to go, I want to know how your story ends before I die.”
“What story? I don’t understand . . . I don’t know what Wädi wants from me . . .”
“Ezekiel, the true homeland for all men is their childhood, and your childhood is inhabited by Wädi and his family, the Ziads. Life has led you to be on opposing sides, and both of you have been loyal to your causes, he knows that and so do you, but not even the fact of facing each other on opposing sides in a war has led you to think of each other as enemies. You are connected by ties that neither he nor you can break, for all that you might try to do so.”
“I cannot go and leave you alone at this time, just because Wädi wants to see me.”
“You are afraid that something will happen to me while you are away, but I promise you that I will be well, I’m not even going to think about dying until you tell me what happened in this meeting between the two of you.” Paula spoke with a laugh in her voice, just as she always did when she was speaking of the most important things.
My son Aaron did not dare get angry with his mother, but he did blame me for being willing to go to Jordan.
“You’re going to leave mother alone in the hospital . . . And what if something happens to you?”
“Nothing will happen to me, lots of Israelis go on holiday to see Petra, why shouldn’t I?”
Aaron said something that hurt me.
“Do you think we can trust that nothing will happen? Have you forgotten Yuval and Gideon?”
It was precisely because I could not forget my dead sons that I decided to go. And so I did. My granddaughter Hanna reserved me a room in the Intercontinental Hotel. “It’s the safest one, it’s where the diplomats go,” she said. But she did more, she decided to travel with me, even though she knew that her father, my son Aaron, would not approve.
“Grandfather is old, and needs someone to look after him, and that is what I will do.”
I waited impatiently in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel. Wädi had promised me that he would come at five o’clock, and it was ten past already. I don’t know how, but I suddenly felt his presence. At the metal detector, a man was emptying his pockets. An old man, like me. Rolling tobacco, a lighter, and a rosary. We looked at each other in recognition and I walked over toward him. When we were very close, both of us paused, not knowing what to do. I held out my hand and he reached out his as well, but then we hugged each other and tried not to burst into tears.
We looked for a calm corner and spoke, spoke for hours, telling each other what had happened in our lives, bewailing the loss of our sons, remembering our shared childhood.
“Thank you for looking for Eloisa and for finding my daughter.”
“It was difficult for me to understand how you could have fallen in love with another woman and how Anisa . . . well, how Anisa could have accepted it.”
“She couldn’t do anything to stop me. I fell in love with Eloisa from the very first moment I saw her, and knowing that she, too, had fallen in love with me gave me the strength to face anything, although I won’t hide from you that I suffered because I knew I was making Anisa suffer. I didn’t lie to her, I told her the truth and asked her to decide. She decided to stay with me even though I couldn’t promise her what I would do. I wanted the best for Eloisa, and even though she told me that she accepted the situation as it was, I was not happy with our situation. I would have liked it if Anisa had wanted to divorce me, but she didn’t, and I was not brave enough to leave her. We had had four sons and lost three of them. Yes, three Fedayeen, two of them died fighting against Israel and the other one in combat with the Jordanian troops, much to my regret, because my family had always been loyal to the Hashemites.”
He spoke to me of Eloisa with such passion that it was as if he were seeing her in front of him at that very moment. He told me all he knew about his daughter.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Eloisa’s daughter, but I think that her grandparents are right, I couldn’t offer her anything, and I don’t have the right to ruin her life.”
After my visit to Madrid, using the information I had given Brother Agustín, Wädi had tried to find out more about what was happening in the life of his daughter, María de los Ángeles de Todos los Santos, as she had been baptized.
His father, his cousins, his uncles, and three sons all dead fighting against Israel. I had lost my mother, my cousin Yasmin, Mikhail, my two sons . . . But we did not talk about our losses as a reproach against each other, but simply as a sign that peace was absolutely necessary for us.
Two states, this was the only solution, we decided. Wädi said something else: “It is irony disguised as tragedy for us to have to negotiate for our houses with the very people who stole them. Because that is what you are, thieves who took advantage of the shadows of night to enter our homes and throw us out of them, and who now, with the complicity of the rest of the world, say that we have to negotiate, that if we accept your demands then maybe we can end up sharing a part of what once was ours. But Ezekiel, you know something? If you don’t negotiate, if you don’t accept that Palestine has to exist, then you will lose, it doesn’t matter how long it will take, but you will lose. You know why? Because your weapons will never be strong enough to overcome our determination to get back what is ours, because every stone our children throw at you makes you weaker, because you are no longer David, because you are still alone, because your sufferings in the past cannot obscure our sufferings in the present. But above all, because you have lost your soul.”
I didn’t contradict him. How could I? You cannot argue with a man who has lost everything, who has nowhere to mourn his dead, and who has had his future taken away from him. As I listened to him I couldn’t stop feeling guilty.
The night ended when Wädi and I said goodbye to each other in peace. We didn’t promise to see each other again, because at our age you don’t make plans for tomorrow. From that day on, he has called me every now and then. And I have called him. Short conversations, not about anything important, but we like hearing each other’s voices.
When I told my wife about my conversation with Wädi, I told her that I felt ashamed of having fought in four wars, but not having been capable of fighting the most important battle of all: for peace.
Marian seemed moved, and Ezekiel saw that she was struggling to hold back her tears.
“A full stop, right?” she managed to say.
“You know we haven’t reached the end yet. No, not yet. Wouldn’t you like to know what happened to Wädi’s daughter?”
“No . . . It’s really not that important.”
“She grew up without knowing who her father was. Her parents kept the secret until the end. It was her grandfather who left a letter in his will, explaining who she really was. It was a shock to her to know the truth. Suddenly her whole life seemed to have been based on a lie. She was not who she had thought she was, a girl from Madrid’s high society, with an expensive education, a university degree, and soon a master’s. So she started to investigate all that she could about her lost identity. She did not dare go look for her father in Amman, but started to go about it in a circular way. She did all she could to find Palestinians who were studying in Spain, but that was not enough, so one day she landed in Ramallah. She met a young man, and fell in love? Maybe, or maybe she decided that she had fallen in love because she thought that it was the best way to be close to that part of herself whose existence she had not known until recently. They got married and had a son. But the marriage didn’t last that long. She could not adapt to life in Ramallah, to fitting into a society where everything seemed alien to her. And she still did not dare look for her father. A father about whom all she knew was his name, and that he lived in a refugee camp in Amman. A father whom she blamed for not fighting to take her to live with him, although she knew that he had sacrificed himself for her own good. She left, left Ramallah and went back to Madrid with her son. The father made no objection at first, but when the boy was twelve years old he asked for him back. He was no longer a child, he said, it was time for him to be with his father. She had to give him up because the law was on the side of the man who had been her husband, and so she gave him up and turned his life into a ceaseless coming and going that only made him feel bitter. She was not in Ramallah the day the boy died. The second Intifada had begun, I don’t remember when and it doesn’t matter, when this boy, along with lots of other boys, started to throw rocks at a group of men who were building a new settlement. They threw their rocks as hard as they could, and then suddenly a shot rang out; a bullet had killed a child, and it was him. When she arrived, the boy was already buried, and she has not stopped mourning him since that day.
“Wädi’s daughter has not forgiven her father for abandoning her, nor her grandparents for hiding the truth from her, nor her husband for taking her child from her, nor Israel for existing.
“She cannot forgive or feel sorry for anything that is not herself. She has lived in pain for years, not even a second marriage could help her overcome the loss of her son. A desire has grown up in her, stronger than any other kind, a desire for revenge, stronger even than her desire for life. She met her father a few months ago. Finally she dared find him in order to try to understand herself. The meeting was sweet for Wädi, who saw in her eyes a spark of the woman who had been Eloisa. But it didn’t help her at all to meet her father. Her eyes were filled with the image of her dead son, and that stopped her from seeing anything else. This is why she has carefully planned her revenge; it was not easy, but at last she is about to fulfill the plan of revenge that she believes will bring her peace. She needs to kill the enemy who took her son’s life, she needs to bring suffering to the people who made her suffer. Am I wrong, Marian? Or would you prefer me to call you Maria de los Ángeles de Todos los Santos, as you were baptized in Madrid? Or maybe just Ms. Miller, after your second husband?”
Marian was pale and her teeth were chattering. She had her hand hidden in her jacket pocket, and seemed to be holding onto something tightly.
“When did you find out . . . ,” she asked in a low voice.
“The first day you came. Wädi, your father, called me and asked me to stop you from seeing my son Aaron. ‘I don’t want anyone else to die . . . The two of us have suffered enough already . . . The best thing is for her not to see your son,’ he warned me. He was scared of your bitterness. He not only wanted to save me from another blow, but he also wanted to save you. I told him that this was a risk he had to take, because maybe if you heard our shared story, the ways in which the Zucker and the Ziad families are intertwined, then perhaps it would help bring you peace. Also I had an advantage, knowing that my son Aaron would not be here, so you could not take him away from me. You remind me so much of your grandfather Mohammed . . . You see, the history of the Zuckers and the Ziads did not end in 1948.”
He looked straight at her before continuing.
“I am an old man and I am very ill, what is there left to me? Your grandfather Mohammed said that there are times in life when the only way to save yourself is by dying, or killing. So . . . Don’t worry. Shoot me, I’m already dead.”
Silence fell. For a few seconds, which both of them felt lasted forever, they didn’t move, it was so quiet that they didn’t even hear the sound of their own breath.
Then, slowly, he started to put the cups on the tray and watched how the water was boiling for the tea.
There were only a few feet between them and he could smell her perfume mixed with the smell of fear.
He knew what fear smelled like. He had felt it, too, in the past, but now that death had arrived to take him he did not feel fear as he had in the past, when death had played with him for a while, only to leave him alone and carry on walking.
He saw how she was moving. He knew that she had her finger on the trigger and was ready to fire. He decided to turn to face her so that he could die with dignity, if there is any dignity in the moment when one ceases to be.
He could see the fury in her infinitely dark eyes, but also the struggle that she was having with herself. He felt sorry for her; if she shot him, then she would lose herself, and if she did not then she would never forgive herself.
And those moments, when their gazes met, crossed, and held each other, seemed to both of them to last forever.
“Shoot me, I’m already dead,” he repeated in a faint voice.