I sounded urgent, distressed, panicky. Not good.
But he flicked his indicator arm, glanced at his wing mirror and channelled. He must think I’m a mad bitch. Or is this where he pulls a gun, parks up beside a smarter van. In it is sitting Burly and the Troll, maybe Hamal in the back.
I’d be glad to see him. In a strange way, it would make everything OK.
“Just stop, please. I feel sick.”
He cupped his hand up to indicate that it made no difference to him. “It’s easy. I’ll drop you at the roundabout. Better for lifts.”
Suddenly it was all true and I’d readjusted all sensory perception. This is where I am, I thought. This is reality. The road to Nazareth.
I needed time to think. I’d killed my captors. I had to come to terms with that. But here was the shock of the new: I hadn’t been held in Lebanon by Hamas. I hadn’t even been held in the occupied West Bank. I’d never left Israel. I needed to absorb that knowledge, or let it wash over me like a rising tide. I needed to know what it meant for me, for what I’d need to do next.
In the end, he drove me nearly into town, where the traffic started thickening and telephone wires criss-crossed the road. There were boys on bicycles. A petrol station.
He grinned from the driving door as he drove away, made a sweeping pass with his hand. Onward and upward. He had flicked a radio on when we’d left the freeway and I suddenly felt bad that maybe he’d been expecting to talk more, have some company.
He swung the truck around in the road. He was just a regular Palestinian – Muslim? Christian? – going about his business. The simplicity of that encounter made me want to weep by the road. I couldn’t really remember a time when I’d related to anyone who I didn’t think might kill me and I wasn’t ready for the shock of human kindness.
I was now severed from my previous life, when I’d known human warmth like that as ordinary. But I had a kind of freedom again. The road rose before me and I could walk into Nazareth from here.
*
I sat on a low white wall on the edge of a square, on the edge of the Latin Quarter. On the edge of a wall again, as I had by the leaning tree at Jerusalem University with Toby an eternity ago.
But I’d fallen back into my old familiar bubble like an old armchair. All around me crowded in, jostling for space, coming too close, but nothing and no one could touch me in my own world.
Watch but don’t touch. The cyclists ramming past, the tourist coaches schlepping up the hill into the old city, some stalls selling oranges and bananas between palm and plane trees, the sun pinking the tarmac between their creeping shadows.
The people of Nazareth went about their chores and I didn’t think of them or me. I just sat, I suppose for some hours, not thinking but only watching. No one in the world knew I was here. Just being, I think you’d say, conscious, breathing steadily, watching without really seeing.
The sounds pressed in too, the sound of motor engines, the voices, the footsteps. But I was set to a different rhythm, a more somnolent metronomic tick. I was in my own little viewing gallery.
I knew I had murdered two people since the last moon. I had stabbed one to death with a crude weapon I had fashioned and shot the other twice in the chest with two different guns. Before then, weapons of choice had been my voice, my knee and a carpentry circular saw. I’d graduated.
But these thoughts took no purchase, like gulls flying into glass, and they just fell away. So I sat in silence, with no judgement made or received, just waiting, until a time came not to do so.
Beside me on the wall was the peel of an orange that had been tossed to me by one of the market boys. He’d held it up and called in Arabic to me as I crossed the square. Maybe because he was Palestinian. Maybe because of my clothes. I had shrugged in a manner that was meant to convey something between not being bothered and having no money, and he’d lobbed it to me and I’d caught it and smiled. I hadn’t wanted to attract any attention and dropping it might have done so.
Then there had been a skip, full of building materials for recyc-ling, by one of the eternal building sites that pepper Israeli towns, patching up the flimsy buildings that hang between the international construction. There was a short length of copper piping among the cluster of plumbing detritus in one corner, and I slipped it into my sleeve as I passed between skip and plastic sheeting that hung like curtains around a wounded patient.
As ever, I can’t claim to have had any plan, but knew vaguely I shouldn’t have thrown my murder weapon away. The little piece of tap piping, about the length of a child’s geometry ruler, now lay under my orange peel, and I sat waiting for the reason I’d taken it to come to me.
I know all about wordless prayer – you don’t need words to pray; Yusef’s mother-in-law had shown me that – and so I waited for direction. It’s good enough to acknowledge there’s a plan, but you don’t need to know what the plan is.
What I did know is that I had more time for my enemies than my friends. More time for the dead Hamal and Troll, even Burly, and for the people that ran them than for those who had let them take me.
I slid my backside from the wall before I knew I was leaving it and I had a sense that I’d started an enterprise. Here we go. I slipped my copper
