Eye contact was out. David wasn’t involved enough to look into people’s eyes. He stared at the poster. Another cake was offered. Uncomfortable fraudulence wavered in his mind. He felt he was there by default, too conscious of his voyeurism.
And he was a natural outsider as well.
“Do you mind if I come to the funeral?” he asked.
His mind groaned as his carefree mouth moved. He clenched his fists under the desk, thinking: “What are you doing?”
“No, not all at. Please come,” Saad said.
A vision of the waiter’s shirt, puffing out in David’s mind as the waiter leaned forward to offer him a cake, epitomised relief. Fear-inducing curiosity, heaved up by a need for discovery, had caused the question.
But hollowness remained–that hollowness that mirrored the shallowness that had led to the men’s deaths, land more important than life. David’s interest was journalistic, facts greater than feelings, his interest inspired by a need to have a dramatic past, to escape old-age regret, to entertain those prepared to listen, to sit upon grateful nostalgia’s veranda recalling a vivid past, his mind scrubbed clean of niggling aspirations, his polished curiosity, shiningly fulfilled, plonked on the mantelpiece of old-age reflection.
A trophy cabinet beside the office door displayed photographs of smiling football teams. No one was smiling now. The Palestinian league was suspended after checkpoints stopped teams from traveling. The felicity, pride, and satisfaction in those photographed smiles had gone. Now there was just silence. Balata had won the league on several occasions with teams of refugees. Governments didn’t realise how hard refugees would fight; therefore, refugees remained refugees.
A fighter nodded from the doorway beside the grinning footballers, a contrast of what was and what could have been. The fighters were wearing black T-shirts and brown safari vests, like journalists from the same agency, another image of what could have been.
“Time to go,” Saad said.
His expression exposed his gentle aura: No self-indulgence in his concerns.
Balaclavas went over the fighters’ heads. Green caps topped the balaclavas. Absent noses, and the exaggerated, ovular shapes of big, dark balaclava eyes and mouths, turned the men into haunted spirits, like creatures marked for death.
They followed the fighters into the classroom, Yasser Arafat eyeing his ex-subjects with his amused ambiguity that was so ambiguous it had even confused the lying Israelis.
Doors opened; sharp, blade light slashed in, people crammed into a street behind basketball courts, women’s faces crammed into windows in the four-story wall that rose behind the courts, a face-filled façade darkening the heads below. A painted utopia of unlimited water supplies decorated the wall, the flowing yellow fluids putting smiles on painted children’s faces, water shortages acute in The Occupied Territories.
The men in black trousers and white shirts locked arms, forcing the crowd apart so the procession could enter the street. David’s natural feeling of not belonging, blizzard-fizzing in his temples, was stirred up by others’ emotions. To belong, you have to feel you belong. To get involved, you have to believe you should be involved. You have to believe involvement is your right. But I don’t feel like that: I feel I need exoticism.
High-frequency silence descended as fighters with raised guns moved toward a white building whose roof was covered in UN flags, UN blue impartial like the sky, the street lined by concrete blocks. Confetti bullet holes smeared the walls, the results of Jewish “celebrations” involving guffawing guns.
Men were gathered below a stairway that rose to a doorway, above which shone a florescent light that burnt as if powered by the street’s energy. The crowd parted so that Saad, David, and some fighters could climb the stairs.
“This is going to be difficult,” Saad said.