Before We Say Goodbye Read Online Free

but her thoughts reacted to the spring air coming in through the window. The return of spring immediately took her back to a day last April, when she and Faris had gone out alone and walked as far as the walls of Beit Jala.
    The wall in front of the school was rubble. She had to think of rubble.
    Rubble.
    As much of it as she wanted.
    In the middle of one night a bulldozer had driven through the streets of the camp. You can hear a bulldozer from quite a distance, and it takes ages to move through the streets of Dheisheh. The slow, sinister sound was as familiar to her as the rest of the soundtrack of the occupation. As familiar as the Apache helicopters, as the tanks, as the smashed-in doors, as the gunshots.
    That time the bulldozer had stopped in front of a house not far from hers. The family who lived in it had just enough time to grab the children and get dressed before the soldiers blew up their home. They had used perhaps twice as much dynamite as was necessary and the ferocious blast had carried as far as Dima’s house, sending rubble falling onto its roof.
    Incredibly the bathroom of the demolished house had remained intact, but the bathroom door had ended up lodged in the wall of the house opposite. And around the dispaced door someone had written:
Even if they bombard this house they will still be unable to take what I love most.
All their photos had blown away from the ruins of the house, and kind neighbours had later picked them up. Their wedding photo, for example, with the photographer’s name printed on the back, and the place: Jerusalem, Jordan.
    Now the family lived in a tent with the Palestinian flag fluttering above it; plastic chairs, carpets and the coffee pot. Sa’ana, one of the women, frequently suffered panic attacks.
    At her desk Dima tried to look like she was paying attention but her mind raced with a mad whirl of images.
    Until she was eleven she had lived closed up in the camp. With another eleven thousand people. In less than half a square mile. A barbed wire fence surrounded them, and there were ten gates but only one was open. Coming in and going out was long and difficult because of the checks, so she did it late and seldom; and it was only when she was older that she understood what someone had sprayed in paint on the outside:
It’s cheaper to kill them
.
    After the fence had been removed, Dheisheh became open, but not even the pleasure of new discoveries could erase that warm and bitter sense of separateness. Dheisheh was her home, a world apart. A world in waiting. Far from Bethlehem, where she would go to live after the wedding and which was in fact practically next door, even closer than Jerusalem, eight kilometres further up. In purely geographical terms her grandparents’ villages were even closer, although no one had ever seen them because they were unable to return. But her father always talked of those villages on the days when the Jews celebrated what they call the War of Independence and the Palestinians call the Nakba – the catastrophe – when they were driven from their homes. It was on one such occasion, sitting down at their table, that her father handed his eldest son the key to his father’s house in the village, just as his father had once given it to him. But first they would have to see if the house still existed.
    “Upon retirement, how many Jews will I have killed if I kill one a day every working day for forty years?” the old maths teacher was saying, repeating a familiar joke, and the class laughed and – satisfied – made their calculations. Dima lowered her head, crushed by a weight she could no longer bear.
    With an enormous effort, she once more turned her thoughts to Khaldun and Ibrahim.
G HASSAN CHECKS THE CONTENTS OF THE BAG
    Six metal bottles, the kind they used in hospital. A bit dirty and a bit dented. Rizak had told him he had found them in a dump. In each bottle he had put some explosive and a mercury lamp with a twelve-volt battery. Then he