In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees Page 2

  Much of the time in those early days they keep the American in the house, for his safety as well as theirs. Each day they take a walk up and down School Street, sometimes, for a short while, they sit against the wall across the way.

  Inside he whittles away the plodding climb and descent of the days. For the most part he stays in the back room, where the men sleep. In his notebooks he writes what he hears: of the footsteps in the alleyway, of cars and donkey carts passing up and down the street, the calls to prayer, the thrum of voices speaking words he does not understand.

  At night, while the others are asleep, he eavesdrops on the sounds, imagining what it is like out there during curfew, where, he has been told, that if one is caught they are arrested or shot. Sometimes he hears voices from the neighboring houses or a television or radio.

  Often on these nights, while finding it difficult to sleep, he hears Bassam, the eldest brother, get up and go from the sleeping room, where there are six men on mats side by side, from wall to wall. Bassam goes into the common room and paces. The American has heard from others, although not from Bassam himself, that Bassam has spent more than eleven months in prison; the American wonders if this is why he cannot sleep. The American listens to the sliding feet, then the pause when Bassam stops and lights a cigarette, again the pacing. In and out of sleep he fades, waking to the sound of shuffling feet.

  Shafiq, the only veterinarian in Gaza, introduces the American to his grandfather, Zajil, a famous storyteller well into his eighties, who only tells stories when paid by cigarettes. Each time the American visits the old man he brings with him a pack of cigarettes. He lights one and hands it to Zajil and, like that, for a short, magical time, coherent words and stories are once again a part of his life.

  Before Zajil tells the American his stories, he begins with the same words:

  “We are all exaggerators of the truth, stretchers of stories, sometimes outright liars even. But our exaggerations, our stretches, our lies, are ours and that is why we must believe them, for they are the only things we can call our own.”

  A Two Cigarette Story

  I was twelve, not eleven as I had once thought, when my grandfather first took me to the cemetery of the oranges.

  We had just finished lunch and my grandfather told me to come with him to the market. I thought nothing of it, for I had gone there with him on many occasions, but when we walked up School Street, away from the market, I wanted to say something, but I did not.

  It was at that time of year, late autumn, when the leaves of the giant willow began to turn a crinkled brown. I hated that season when the tree lost its green umbrella, the time when we most needed its protection from the cold, rainy months of January and February. As we passed the garbage bins, I ignored the goats that were nibbling through the rubbish, the same goats that my friends and I threw small stones at, imagining they were soldiers.

  We came to the end of School Street to where one could either turn left or right. Before us, the fractured remains of what once was the railroad that ran from the great cities of the Ottoman Empire, through Gaza, all the way across the north of Africa to Morocco.

  It was beyond theses tracks, however, that lay something much more important: a place I and most of the children in the camp were forbidden to go. Stories varied from family to family as to why we shouldn’t cross these tracks; two boys, my age, were playing there with an unexploded cluster bomb when it detonated and killed the both of them; a girl, the daughter of a sheik, was last seen crossing into the field, never to be seen again; it was a sacred place, where the corpses of thousands of orange trees lay.

  My grandfather stared down at me, his bent black-framed glasses made his dark eyes smaller than when he drew his sketches in his notebook without them. He took my hand and we looked both ways along the rusty tracks as if the trains had last passed by that morning and not forty years before. We climbed the slight incline, him with his limp, and over the tracks.

  We continued along in the field skirting the north end of the camp and soon, after crossing several dusty knolls, we arrived at a place tucked behind a knot of acacia shrubs. I stopped, as did my grandfather, when I saw the glorious blue swath of the sea. I had, of course, been to the sea, only two miles away, but from there in the field, from that distance, I had never seen it so blue and with those blinking eyelashes of white.

  So distracted, I didn’t notice the small group of men sitting in a circle around a snapping fire. We walked down the hill and my grandfather greeted the men, all, I could see, were older than him, which surprised me for my grandfather was perhaps the oldest person I knew. Several of the men sat on old plastic chairs, others on flattened boxes, and they all shifted clockwise to make space for the both of us. My grandfather and I shared a piece of cardboard and when we sat I could no longer see the sea.

  The wind agitated the fire and I gazed into its agitation. No one said anything until one of the men, a spindly man with a scatter of teeth, reached into his worn jacket and held out two cigarettes, splayed in his hand like the “V” for victory sign we flashed the soldiers. He held the cigarettes like that, his hand trembling. Another man and then another did the same until all the men, except my grandfather, were holding out two cigarettes. My grandfather reached into his robe and unfolded a red handkerchief and placed it on the ground where each of the men tossed their cigarettes; one edge of the handkerchief blew overtop them. My grandfather leaned over and folded the remaining ends of the handkerchief and left it sitting there.

  He began to talk:

  “As a child growing up in the Hula Valley I was always shooting small stones at the birds with my slingshot. The stones were too tiny to kill the birds, I never wanted to kill them, but if I hit them in the correct spot, the head or maybe the proper crease in the wing, I could stun them just long enough for me to run over and touch them. I loved the feel of their soft, yet taut feathers, their oily heads and tiny claws digging their fear into my palm. The only way that I could touch them was if I hurt them a little.

  “One day I hit a small bird in the head and it fell from an olive tree and lay unmoving in the dirt. I picked up the injured bird, and after a few minutes, I tried to release it into the sky, but it was injured so badly it couldn’t fly away.

  “Not knowing what to do, I took the tiny brown bird into the grain storage bin, which sat at the back of our house. Each day after working in the fields I would run home and feed it water and pieces of grain by hand. I did this for about a week and still the bird was unable to fly. One day, a Friday, I snuck a piece of string from my mother’s sewing basket and tied it around the bird’s claw. Its thin neck throbbed. The string was about a yard long and when I threw the bird into the air it would try flapping its wings, but soon the string ran out, and the bird would be yanked backward and left suspended, upside down, in mid-air, the string in my hand.

  “My best friend, Nawaf, loved to watch the helpless bird, and after seeing his reaction, I decided to try and get more of these birds and sell them. I spent all my free time with the slingshot looking for birds. I used bigger stones to shoot the birds down, killing some in the process, but finally I had five birds like the first, too injured to fly away. I took five more pieces of string and went to the other villages trying to sell the birds. One boy from the neighboring village was angry and said that three mil was too much and that he would go and shoot his own birds. The argument turned into a fight and it brought a woman out of her house, and she broke it up. The woman happened to know my mother, and the next time she saw her at the market, she told her what I had been doing. That night, my mother took me onto the roof of the house and lectured me on how I should treat all of Allah’s creations.

  “She then made me kneel in our stony courtyard and recite sura 4:19 from the Koran: ‘Allah forgives those who commit evil in ignorance and then quickly turn to Him in repentance. Allah will pardon them. Allah is all-knowing and wise. But He will not forgive those who do evil and, when death comes to them, say; Now we repent
!’

  “I repeated this sura until the moon dropped behind the date palms.”

  The dying fire was the only voice when my grandfather stopped. I sat there listening to the life of the fire, which spoke in the cadence of poetry. Reaching out, my grandfather picked up the handkerchief and placed it in his pocket. He stood, as did I, and said goodbye to the men.

  Once out of the field he spoke the only words to me since we left our house: “It is in the cemetery of the orange trees that we keep alive our story.”

  We continued through block number six and I saw a cluster of pigeons flying by, reminding me of the birds in the story; I thought of asking my grandfather about the birds in his story and what happened to them, but like earlier in the day, I said nothing. We ended up at the western end of the market. My grandfather held my hand, but then, when we came to the butcher’s he let go, leaving a chilled sheen of sweat on it.

  Staring at me with huge bulbous eyes was a sheep’s head; eyes so much like glass that I wanted to reach out and touch them. But the longer I met the eyes the more I thought that they were like ice rather than glass—cold to the touch, unlike glass which holds the warmth the longer one keeps their hand against it.

  Then, in the reflection of the sheep’s eye, I saw the red of my grandfather’s handkerchief. I spun and looked at him. He unfolded the handkerchief, revealing the cigarettes, which looked like the whitest fingers I had ever seen—sixteen of them.

  The butcher took all but one of the cigarettes and he went to the cage that held the squawking chickens. As the man opened the cage, it became difficult, if not impossible, to tell the individual chickens from the frantic flock. By the neck, the butcher grabbed one and held it up and my grandfather nodded in approval and before I knew what had happened, the knife, which I hadn’t even seen, severed the head from the body. By the claws the butcher held the chicken, the stream of blood draining onto the ground until it slowed like the water dripped into the basin that I stood in on my Friday night showers.

  My grandfather took the chicken by the claws and handed me the head, which the butcher had placed in a small waxed bag. Walking up School Street, halfway up the block, I turned and saw pellets of blood plunk, plunk, plunking into the beige dust.

  Only then did I connect that it was Thursday; the one day each week when we ate meat. And on other Thursdays my grandfather would sometimes take me with him to the cemetery of the oranges and, for the rest of my life, I would remember the stories by the number of cigarettes the men would give to my grandfather. After dinner on those nights my grandfather would go outside in front of the house and smoke a cigarette, smoke it to the tips of his callused fingers.

  That night, I stood behind him and he asked me, without turning around:

  “Have you ever seen a shooting star, Shafiq?”

  “No, Grandfather, I haven’t.”

  “Keep your eyes to the sky.”

  I did and soon freckles of red sparks raced through the night air.

  “Did you see them, Shafiq? Did you see the stars?”

  “Yes. They were beautiful,” I answered, even though I knew that it was only my grandfather flicking the cigarette high into the air, for I had seen him do so on many nights when he didn’t know I was watching.

  Then, as my grandfather did each night, he locked the green metal door behind him, keeping out the raven black shroud of curfew, until the next morning when, from atop the minaret, the muezzin would take a deep breath and cry out the call to prayers, releasing us into the streets for yet another day.

  Awake before dawn, he quietly unbolts the door and steps onto School Street. A fog has settled overnight, rendering the willow nearly invisible. The school, fifty yards away, cannot be seen. He walks up the street and turns into the first alley, making his way through the labyrinth of block number four. He knows he mustn’t stay long, but the pull of being alone, of seeing with his own eyes, is too much. The rush throttles him.

  In the fog, the voice of the muezzin sounds as though it is being pressed through a sieve. The American stops and listens to the call to prayer, watches as sleepy men leave their houses to answer it. He says good morning to a man with a cane and the man lifts the walking stick in greeting. Years since he has felt so free.

  At the end of his first week in Jabaliya, he asks for a razor and Fayez tells him that his uncle is a barber and later that night he would shave him.

  It is around seven o’clock and the American is sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, a face full of shaving cream and a straight-edge being lowered to his neck. Neighbors and curious onlookers gather. Several dozen watch the initial slide of the blade plow a path along his neck. No one is talking; the crackle of week-old stubble explodes in the hush. The only light in the large room is a single bulb above the two men. The foreigner has large, dark eyes, appearing even more so against the white of the shaving cream. With these eyes he gives the barber a side glance:

  “Do you realize how much I trust you?”

  Fayez translates and there is a smatter of laughter.

  “Yes,” says the barber, “we understand that.”

  Again, the scratch of the blade exposes more of the pale flesh. Everyone watches as the barber wipes the blade on the towel draped over his shoulder. The eyes follow the blade back down and to another sweep of the neck and back to the towel and the neck again. Entranced by the rhythm, they wait for a tiny speck of red to bubble out from beneath the puffy white cloud of shaving cream.

  It doesn’t.

  The man’s face is clean, younger than most anticipate; a face perhaps, that with a little more sunshine, could be that of a soldier, or a stone thrower.

  The crowd of onlookers begins to scatter and head back to their houses where, in a quarter of an hour, they will latch their doors and dim their lights and surrender to the hours of curfew.

  Now, most mornings, after the call to prayer and before the morning session of school begins, children gather near the house and sneak beneath the white tarp that hangs there. They huddle outside the red metal door and whisper in chorus the American’s name. Soon, the slide of the bolt clicks and the door opens and, for a short while, he talks to the children.

  The Night Guardian of the Goat

  For a single month, from new moon to new moon, I was the night guardian of the goat. It was a rather simple job, once one got used to the staying awake through the night and following the goat wherever his whims took him: garbage bin to garbage bin, under the willow, or simply to the house where his master, Ghassan Abu Majed, slept away the eight hours and thirty minutes of curfew.

  It was exactly in that house, number eighty-eight in block six, in the front room across from the bathroom and kitchen, that the last remaining goat of Ghassan Abu Majed stayed for most of his ten years. A pretty good life for a goat, I imagine. It remained as such until Ghassan’s wife of nearly half a century bolted the door at 7:55 the night before the April new moon, leaving the animal to butt his head against the door until he became tired and fell asleep outside. When Ghassan limped into the dawn air, on his way to morning prayers, he nearly tripped over the goat, lying with his legs curled under, his hooves hidden in the fur of his belly.

  Before Ghassan turned around, about to scold his wife for forgetting the goat outside, she spoke to him from the doorway.

  “Our grandson is allergic to that beast. The child has been sniffling and coughing since the moment he was born.”

  Ghassan held his tongue, respecting the calm hovering over early morning, but the word beast rankled him. He bent over and stroked the goat’s beard until the repetition kneaded away his anger.

  “He is the last link to the land.”

  “The link has long been severed,” she answered, in a voice also respectful of the hour and of her husband and the goat.

  Ghassan balanced himself with his left hand and stood, slowly unfolding his aching limbs. He said nothing more to his wife and headed toward the peace of the mosque. The dust of the camp settled on
his sandaled feet, but he ignored it, for he would wash them before prayers.

  It was on that very afternoon that Ghassan asked me if I would be the night guardian of the goat. Jobless for more than a year, I said yes.

  “Good,” he said. “Now go and get some sleep, your work will begin tonight.”

  I went to his house at 7:30 and was given only one order.

  “Don’t ever allow the goat to speak or come into contact, in any way, with the soldiers.”

  I thought it rather strange that Ghassan used the word “speak,” but I let it pass, for I assumed it to be merely a slip of the tongue. He left me with that message and closed the door, and the goat and I looked at each other and began to walk together up the darkening street. In the pink grapefruit glow of the setting sun, the military watchtower, the tallest structure in the camp, smirked down on us.

  That first night, in fact the entire first week, the goat did nothing other than what one thinks a goat would do—sniff through the multitude of possibilities in the garbage on Jabaliya’s streets. That was how we spent the majority of our time: I simply braced my back against a wall while the goat nosed around until he found a tasty morsel. I would listen to and sometimes watch the goat work his jaws, nostrils wet and splaying in rhythm, until the food was mashed enough so that it could easily slide down his throat. Sometimes he would stare at me watching him and I would remember what Ghassan had said. On several occasions, I thought the goat was about to speak, but I laughed at myself for allowing sleepiness to grapple with my imagination.