His eyes shivered with dread, his heart pierced by a blade of anguish. Stirred-up considerations hissed in David’s head. Not belonging felt like a dearth of moral license. He feared his emotional reactions would be inadequate, that he was just a curious vulture, intruding, unjustifiably, into other people’s despair, seeking morsels of spicy action to gorge on for the benefit of fulfilling his sense of adventure, others’ suffering glamorising his shallowness.

But this fear of not belonging was overridden by the need for discovery. He was consciously pursuing what he suspected came from an unconscious necessity to experience life-enhancing amazement; and now he wasn’t sure where this was going to take him.

A woman in a black overcoat was on her knees in a white-tiled room. Her head, in a white headscarf, leaned on a sink, her mouth a hole, her closed eyes forming black, hairy slits. Huge dimples thrust up her cheeks that held up teardrops, twisted forehead lines engraved into her head by grief’s chisel, her mouth producing something that David had never heard before, like a bird being tormented by a cat, something previously unimaginable, incomprehensible that a person could have been producing that–that whine-howl shriek of shrilling shock that slashed the mesh of consciousness with its sharp, sound glass.

Her remaining son was clinging to his father’s shirt, the son’s forehead indented with lines that matched his fringe’s curls; his mouth, a jagged aperture, had been torn open by sorrow, jewel teardrops on his protruding cheeks. He sucked in as his father bent over the corpses that covered stretchers under Palestinian flags. Red triangles covered the dead men’s chests. Black, white and green fell from red chests to feet. Death’s mystery placed a veil of respect across David’s mind.

The father’s lips touched a cold forehead, carefully kissing as if his son was alive, a paternal hand on a dead son’s crown. His dead sons’ closed eyes made flourishing streaks of ebony-eyelid delicacy that, against the bleached white of their faces, emphasised their permanent peace. They made the ultimate sacrifice for a justice they would not be around to see, their mother’s gasping yelps making David feel small. Unable to categorize the facts, everything felt surreal.

David stood against a wall, a hand over his mouth. The self-consciousness that followed him into the room had been obliterated by other people’s losses. His temples felt as if they had been lifted out of his head by the genuineness of despair. His gritted teeth stopped rising emotions from breaking free, moisture glistening in his eyes, a tense sweetness thickening in his throat.

Saad hugged the father as the fighters lifted up the stretchers. Huddled women’s heads were touching in a corner, hands over their faces, the mother clutching her head as if besieged by intolerable thoughts, gasping as the stretchers reached the door.

The crowd, parting like a bewitched tribe, allowed the stretchers through; people started chanting in the packed street, a choir with a thousand heads.

“Another funeral,” Saad muttered, looking straight ahead.

Women’s and children’s faces packed the windows along the street. Amazed humility oozed from open-eyed wonder as the stretchers passed. The fighters’ upward-pointing guns formed a forest of metal defiance that glinted in the sun. Magazine cartridges, curling away from triggers, shone like stars of reassuring hope.

Humility swam in David’s head as he watched the faces in the windows. So much information had clouded his brain that he was still unconscious of how humility, shredding reluctance, was getting him involved.

The awning above some boys, who were on a landing above the street, was held up by gnarled timber posts that looked strong, but shaky, like the prevailing emotions, the boys’ mouths fixed wide open as the bodies passed, death’s awe in the boys’ eyes, faces cemented into stultification by the glory inherent in resistance.

The shop doors behind the boys were pasted with martyrs’ faces. Between the fading memories of fading posters, and the welling adoration evoked by the newly deceased, the boys were awe-struck with immobility, transfixed by illustrious death.

A tree’s reflection mirrored itself, like life producing life, life and death together, the tree’s black shadow covering a wall.

The procession turned at the tree and entered a narrow street. The outstretched fingers of five women on a first-floor balcony went down between the balcony’s iron-bar supports and glided along a body as a stretcher passed beneath them, the women’s eyebrows curved by grief. Stultifying respect filled the eyes of boys looking on, for there was no greater renown than beauty’s tribute.

Gracious understanding wiped clean from David’s thoughts all concerns about self. Had he tried speaking, his voice would have stumbled like a drunk in the dark. Impersonal curiosity had brought him into this anguished privacy, like a cold collector of facts, luring him in with the belief that he was protected from involvement by a thick, dry layer of hard-crust immunity. Now he felt a part of this testimony to sacrifice, as if he had been made by fate, against his better judgement, to see it. And it felt amazing! He had never seen himself in this light before.

He looked behind at the procession: A man on someone’s shoulders, amid fist-boughs on raised-trunk arms, was chanting out calls to resistance from a loudspeaker. Wafting, white flags, like butterflies’ wings, resembled souls of delicate distinction. Green flags surrounded the colors of the Palestinian nation that kneeling fighters, on the roof of a cream-colored Jeep, held up with posters of the dead, the fighters’ curling gun straps resembling teardrops.

Shouting and crying faces filled the windows along the tight street. A woman clenched her hands and knocked her forehead against her fists while facing the sky. A teenage girl’s eyes resembled impenetrable dots of black, sorrowful Fibreglass. Teenage boys stared in grimacing silence, fighting to stop tears from bursting free. A woman screamed up at the sky in a plea for justice. A sound tsunami of bitter truth from the loudspeaker ricocheted down the street, which entered a clearing where bushes, like green mortar explosions, erupted upon a slope where coffin-shaped tombstones rose. Low palms dotted the slope. Smoke-free fires of illumination had turned the leaves silver-white. The sky’s slash of radiant impartiality looked down, forever unmoved by pain, inexplicably without depth or surface.