Qalandiya

Sticking to him like a shadow.

“That son-of-a-bitch Levinger is dead” he said, “I knew the son-of-a-bitch.  He’d tell them to throw rocks at us.”

“Who threw?”

“The stakers.” 

That’s what he calls the settlers.

Actually, stakers sounds more appropriate.

He, the one telling us, paced restlessly, in circles, the memory of the lad used to be flooding him, gripping him.  Recounting that memory was as if he’d been forced to recount himself.  And when a friend who stood nearby told him to stop, there’s no point, maybe someone’s listening, he gestured indifferently as though waving off a pesky fly.

And told us how he and his friends would walk to school in the morning and return in the afternoon, the school next to the Ibrahimi mosque, the Cave of the Patriarchs, and how dangerous it was because the stakers Levinger had instructed “stood on the other side of the road and threw rocks at us, that’s what Hebron was like, we’re here and they’re there,” and how one day, on his way to school, soldiers detained him, Why? – because he was there, “I got six months.”  And it was right before the baccalaureate exams, the tawjih, and because he was in jail he missed the exams and when he was released had to go back to school, with younger students, and be tested at the end of the school year.  But something good came out of it nevertheless, he was lucky to finish his studies because later the school closed.

One story follows another, one memory after another, like meshed gears and forgotten images rising from the abyss, and he told us about two good friends of his, with whom he’d grown up and gone to school, youths who’d been among those murdered by Baruch Goldstein on the day of the massacre, “And him, Goldstein, they built a large monument to him in Hebron.”

And he, when he grew older, understood it would be better for him to leave Hebron, not to be the stakers’ neighbor.  He married a woman from Ramallah and left.  His parents also left their home, which was situated right in the heart of the harassment.  They moved to a refugee camp.

But even when someone leaves a town and neighbors and everything around him, and moves elsewhere and begins what he hopes will be a new life, his childhood and youth and memories and fears accompany him and stick to him like a shadow.