Where the Streets Had a Name Read Online Free Page B

cheekbones and the stubble mapped around their chins. My eyes glaze over and I’m weightless, unaware of my limbs, muscles, blood.
    One of the soldiers sees me and, startled, points his gun at me. ‘Get inside!’ he shouts in broken Arabic.
    The other soldiers grab their guns and frantically look around, their eyes saucering in panic. The stench of fear is in the air. My fear, their fear, in dangerous competition.
    I anxiously step back inside the house, slamming the door behind me.

Chapter THREE

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    The curfew is finally lifted. School is open again.
    Samy knocks loudly on the front door. ‘
Yallah
, Hayaat!’ he hollers. ‘Come on.’
    I bound through the house and pass Mama, who, with a large loaf of bread in one hand and a screaming Mohammed in the other, yells at me to not run through the apartment.
    â€˜Make sure you drink up that knowledge,’ Sitti Zeynab cries.
    â€˜She only has education going for her now,’ I overhear Mama say to Sitti Zeynab with a heavy sigh. ‘For who will marry her with those scars?’
    â€˜Don’t worry. Every pea has a pod,’ Sitti Zeynab says. ‘My Hayaat is royalty, I tell you.’
    â€˜She could marry somebody blind,’ Tariq says innocently.
    â€˜Don’t be
abeet
,’ Jihan scolds.
Abeet
, dumb, is her standard label for Tariq. ‘We have standards too!’
    I rush out of the apartment block and almost knock Samy off his feet. The first to accept a dare, lose his temper and bring a teacher to tears of exasperation, Samy is skinny and pale, his face framed by a heavy mane of wild black curls. His eyebrows are thick and black and hang over his small grey eyes. They say that his eyes were filled with colour before the imprisonment of his father, when he was six, and the death of his mother from a heart attack soon after. We moved to Bethlehem when I was nine and so I never knew Samy’s parents.
    They say that Samy’s father was the type of person who commanded respect. ‘When he spoke, he inspired even the most foolish empty-head,’ Um Ziyad, owner of the local bread store, informed my parents when we moved in and Mama and Baba were offered an exposition on the scandals of the surrounding homes. ‘Even the most lazy twit, my son included,’ she told them, ‘was inspired to go on strike and to engage in civil disobedience after reading one of Abo Samy’s essays or hearing him at a public address.’
    They say Samy saw his father being dragged out of the house by agents from the Israeli internal security service,
Shabak
. Somebody had informed on him. That was common enough. The
Shabak
agents came in the evening. They beat Samy’s father and then took him away. Samy never speaks about it. Maybe he was too young to remember the details. I’ve never dared ask.
    Samy lives with his uncle and aunt, Amo Joseph and Amto Christina. They’re childless. They do charity work at their church on Saturdays and Sundays, run religious workshops on week days, coordinate the replanting of uprooted olive trees in their spare time and volunteer at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency after dinner. According to Mama they’re also ‘creating the cure for cancer, sewing up the ozone hole and bringing democracy to the Middle East’.
    Amo Joseph and Amto Christina are both short and thin. They believe that television is the work of the devil and music is the devil’s hobby. Hymns and nationalistic songs are approved. Cartoons, Hollywood movies and Arabic
X Factor
are not. Consequently, Samy and I have spent a lot of time trying to formulate a convincing argument to persuade Amo Joseph and Amto Christina that television will not result in us stewing over burning coals.
    Baba likes Amo Joseph because when Amo Joseph’s not saving Palestine, he’s smoking his
argeela
. They never discuss religion. They sometimes discuss politics. They always discuss the