Yusuf tilted his head down to intercept Lou’s faraway gaze. “I know that look,” he said. “It’s how I look when I possess no real conviction that things can ever get better. It is the look of despair and surrender.”
Lou took that in and considered it. “Yeah, I suppose that is how I’m feeling,” he conceded.
“It’s a seductively powerful feeling,” Yusuf continued, “this feeling of despairing surrender. But it’s a lie.”
Lou suddenly perked up. “How so?”
“Because it’s assuming something that isn’t true.”
“What?”
“It’s assuming that you’re stuck—that you’re doomed to continue suffering as you have been.”
This was, in fact, what Lou was feeling. He slumped again in his chair.
“Just a moment ago, Lou,” Yusuf began, “you said that you were the mess. Not others, but you.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” Lou asked forlornly.
“No,” Yusuf responded, “but it should give you hope.”
“How so?”
“Because if you are the mess, you can clean it. Improvement doesn’t depend on others.”
“But what if the mess isn’t purely mine?” Lou responded sullenly. “What if the people around me are just as messed up as I am?”
Yusuf couldn’t help himself: “Then you have a huge problem,” he laughed out loud.
“Tell me about it.” Lou shook his head pathetically.
“Actually, I’m mostly joking, Lou,” Yusuf continued.
“Mostly,” Elizabeth noted with a smile.
“Yes,” Yusuf agreed, “mostly. Because even if it’s the case that everyone at Zagrum is deeply messed up, it’s still a hopeful situation.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because your despair is being invited by another lie. You’re assuming that nothing you can do will change them.”
“But that’s true,” Lou countered. “I can’t change them.”
“Quite right.”
“Then I don’t understand your point.”
“That’s because you surrendered too early,” Yusuf smiled. “While it’s true we can’t make others change, we can invite them to change. After all, didn’t Mei Li help to change Jenny?”
Lou thought about Mei Li’s story. “Yes, I suppose she did.”
Yusuf paused briefly. “Because we are each responsible for our blaming, self-justifying boxes,” he continued, “we can each be rid of them. There are no victims so far as the box is concerned, only self-made ones. And since by getting out of the box we invite the same in others, we are not even victims with respect to others the way we believe we are when we’re in the box. We can begin inviting others to make the changes they need to make. In fact, that is what the best leaders and parents do. So if you surrender, Lou, you surrender to a lie. Your box will win.”
“Then how?” Lou asked. “How can I fight this box I’m in?”
“The same way Avi fought his and I’m fighting mine.”
“How?” Lou repeated.
“I think it might help to hear more of Avi’s story,” Yusuf said.
At that, Avi stood back up. “So,” he began again, “the Arizona outback in the summer of ‘78.”
Lou listened as Avi recounted his initial meeting with Yusuf, their early battles, Avi’s anger at everything around him—the hills, the streams, the trees, the earth.
“But everything began to change for me,” Avi continued, “during a late-night conversation with Yusuf under a clear, starladen sky. We were about two weeks into the program at the time, and I’d barely said a word to anyone. ‘You know,’ Yusuf said to me, as I was lying on my back looking at the stars, ‘it’s the same night sky we see from Jerusalem.’
“I hesitated. But then I said, ‘Yeah—the Big Dipper, the Polar Star. I remember my dad teaching me all about them.’
“At that, I recall Yusuf sitting down next to me. It might have been the first time I didn’t pull away from him.
“He said, ‘Tell me about your father, Avi.’ And I remember launching into a flood of memories from my childhood: how my father took me on walks every day from as early as I can remember, how he taught me the history of our people, how he played soccer with me at the park, how he always cooked Saturday breakfast, how I loved to travel with him on his surveying jobs, how he always read to me before I went to bed. It was like a dam broke within me and my memories burst free. All my love for my father, the pain of his loss, and the sadness for no longer having him in my life burst through the box that had been confining my heart. My chest heaved at the loss I had suffered and at what I was then suddenly recovering: a longing to be with my father.
“Yusuf just sat there with me and listened. Although he couldn’t have known it, he was something of a surrogate for my father that night. If I couldn’t be with my father, it was at least helpful to be with someone after nearly five years of barricading myself from the world. That night was the beginning of my healing. And I will forever be grateful that it happened at the invitation of an Arab. For the blame I had heaped upon the Arab people for my father’s death somehow became more difficult to maintain when it was an Arab who helped reintroduce me to my father.
“When I awoke the next morning, I willingly joined in with the others and helped with breakfast. This was a first for me. We then broke camp and began our day’s journey through the bush. I remember the morning’s hike well because it was the first day on the trail that I allowed myself to enjoy.
“Over the days that followed, the memories of another flooded my mind: Hamish. What a friend he had been! How gracious, pure, and good he had been to me. And I, so wicked! He had come to me in my moment of great loss, knowing how deeply I must be hurting, and wanting in some small way to help me bear my pain. He had come as an angel of comfort and goodwill, and I cast him out.”
Avi reached up and wiped at his cheek.
“And as if that wasn’t enough, I vilified him—with every vile word I knew. I blamed him for my father’s death. Him! The bearer of mercy and love. The young boy stuck between two nations—Arab by birth and Israeli by citizenship. The boy who in the days his blood family was attacking his country, when perhaps he needed comfort most of all, came to offer his comfort to me and received pain in return for his merciful gift— mean, loathsome pain.
“Oh Hamish! I cried within as I walked. What can I ever do to repay you—to belatedly return your gift in kind, to help to bear the pain I have heaped upon you, and to erase the bitterness I have inevitably invited within?”
Avi wiped once more at his cheek.
“This question settled upon me as I trekked over the coming days. On another clear evening some ten days or so after the first, I again sat with Yusuf. This time I told him about my friend Hamish and my violent turning away. The telling was cathartic, as I had never uttered a word of it to anyone until that moment. I had of course spent the recent days replaying the events in my mind, but until I was willing to allow another to see my transgression, I was still holding on to and hiding it. My telling turned out to be part of the healing.
“Part, but not all. For the telling nourished within me the seed that had been looking to take hold and grow: I knew in the telling that it wasn’t enough in this case merely to feel sorry. Seeing Hamish as I once again did, I felt the desire and need to reach out to him.
“‘What can I do for him?’ I asked Yusuf.
“‘Do you feel the need to do something for him?’ he asked.
“‘It is what my heart is telling me, yes,’ I answered.
“‘Then what do you feel you should do?’
“‘That’s what I am asking you,’ I responded.
“ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but it is your life and your friend and your heart, is it not? I cannot tell you what you need to do. Only you would know that.’
“Then what? I wondered to myself.
“ ‘Maybe you should ponder the question as you walk over the coming days,’ Yusuf said.
“And I did. On the third morning, we came upon a spectacular plant called a century plant. Its stalk was probably thirty feet tall. The century plant lives fifteen to twenty-five years. However, it shoots up a stalk and flowers only in the last year of its life. The energy it takes to grow the stalk ends up killing the plant. When the stalk falls over, it showers seeds on the ground, giving life to a new generation. The low-lying base of the plant is commonly seen in the deserts of Arizona and elsewhere. But the once-in-a-lifetime nature of the stalk, and its determination to grow skyward from rocky, dry soil, lends it an air of authority and hope. Because of the seeds it cradles, every stalk that rises offers the desert the promise of future life.
“I had learned about the plant since joining the survival course and had seen various specimens over the first few weeks. This time, however, when I happened upon one in full flower, something hit me: I had received the gift of a once-in-a-lifetime friend; a friend and friendship that had flourished despite the difficulty of the environment in which we lived. It was of course a friendship that lived close to the ground—like the base of the century plant, mostly unnoticed. Yet before it could come of age and shoot its flower skyward as a beacon of hope to the desert, I had hacked at its roots and condemned it to death. Towering before me was a surrogate: this plant was now rising as Hamish and I could have risen had I not deserted him.
“I reached up to the lowest of its branches and snapped off a seed. I wrapped up the seed, symbolic both of what I had killed and what I hoped yet could rise to life, and placed it in my pocket. That evening, I laid my soul bare in a letter to Hamish, apologizing for my inhumanity toward him and for the pain I had inevitably caused. I offered the seed as a symbol both of what we once had and of what I hoped we could yet recover.
“I didn’t know whether Hamish or his family still lived in the same little home, but his house number was my only connection to the life I had once known with him. The weekly mail run arrived in our camp two days later. My letter and the century plant’s seed started their journey from the desert soils of Arizona to the deserts of the Middle East, hopefully to find a young Palestinian Arab still in good health and retaining a spirit that had not been irretrievably damaged by the violence of some years before.”
At that, Avi stopped.
“So what happened?” Gwyn asked. “Did you hear from Hamish?”
“No,” he said. “I never heard from him.”
There was the hint of a gasp in the room, as this revelation was neither what they had expected nor hoped.
“That’s sad,” Gwyn said. “Do you know what happened to him?”
“Yes. I have learned since that his family moved about two years after I came to the States. They moved to the north of Israel to a town called Maalot-Tarshiha. But he was killed about five years later. He was among the civilians killed by rocket attacks from Lebanon prior to the Lebanon War of 1982.”
“Oh how sad,” Gwyn whispered.
“Yes,” Avi nodded as he looked down at the ground.
“Did he ever receive your letter?” Elizabeth asked.
Avi shook his head. “I don’t know. There’s no way to know.” He looked back up at the group. “I didn’t learn of his whereabouts until after his death.”
“What a pity if he never received it,” Carol said.
“Yes,” Avi agreed, his face slack with sorrow. “I wonder about it all the time—about the pain I caused him and about whether my letter helped to relieve it in any way.”
“But writing the letter helped you,” Pettis offered.
“By helping to heal my own heart, you mean?” Avi asked.
“Yes.”
“You’re right,” he agreed. “Even if the letter didn’t reach Hamish, it reached me. That’s true. It was for me an outward expression of an inward recovery of friendship. Hamish may not have received it, but in writing it I finally received him and began to receive others like him.”
“Like Arabs, you mean?” Gwyn asked. “Like Yusuf and others?”
“Yes. And Americans and Jews and my family and myself— everyone I had gone to war against. For you see, every human face includes all others. This means that I spite my own face with every nose I desire to cut off. We separate from each other at our own peril.”