It is past midnight and Ghassan has completed twenty-two signs. He can barely lift his arm and he joins his wife on the mat. She sleeps and he thinks of reaching out and touching her stomach, but is afraid to, so he slides down the mat to where his head is level with her stomach and listens closely for the hiccups of their baby.
The days that follow are the same; Ghassan goes off to work along the beach, rushes home, eats, then paints two dozen signs before wearily crawling onto the mat. He has seventy signs remaining; three more nights at his present pace. When he awakens, although tired, the knowledge that he is only a few days from completing the work gives Ghassan some energy. He steps out of the cave and rubs his eyes, trying to shake away the mirage before him. Overnight, another stack of signs has appeared with a new list of an additional six or seven dozen names nailed to them.
Ghassan doesn’t go to work on this day and he paints nonstop; his only break is at dusk when the mosquitoes are at their most ravenous. By the time he makes it to his mat he has nearly completed the entire initial list given to him by the jackals. He sleeps little on this night and his wife tries to find a position that will allow her to rest. Ghassan dreams that his wife, while trying to leave the cave in the morning, is unable to do so, not because of the stacks of unpainted signs, although they do hinder her, but because her stomach has grown so large that it is like a massive boulder plugging the mouth of the cave. Ghassan is left with no choice but to deliver the baby himself; the screams of his wife can be heard for miles along the shoreline, mistaken by some as a foghorn, and then, after the baby is born, he must wait until his wife’s stomach distends enough for him to squeeze out of the cave. In this dream, he wakes feeling not the hiccups of the baby but the kicks, not one little leg kicking, or two, but four, and Ghassan bolts from the mat fearing that the time is near and, if he doesn’t hurry, he will be the father of a goat.
As with all the signs he has painted, the five dozen he finished the day before are gone, taken away in the middle of the night. But today, as with yesterday, there is a new stack with a new list of names attached to it. He begins working on them at once and it is more of the same for the next couple of days; Ghassan is unable to go down to his work hut.
On the twelfth day of sign-painting, Ghassan’s wife lets out a scream and she screams again and again. Her water has broken and Ghassan, before spinning and running down the hill in search of the midwife, looks at the unfinished stack of signs, perhaps eighty are left, and he doesn’t know what to do and he just stands there, locked in indecision and fatigue.
“Hurry, Ghassan,” his wife shouts. “It feels like a horse is coming out!”
These words kick Ghassan down the hill and to the village of al-Jiyya where the midwife lives. He races past his work hut and along the breakwall and to the village. He is yelling for the midwife, but no one comes out of their houses. The village is without sound, not a single man gurgling from a waterpipe or sipping morning coffee, not a single person in their house. The village’s six dairy cows are nowhere to be seen.
Ghassan retraces his steps. At the village entrance he notices, above his head, one of the signs he has painted—MOSHAV GE’A. Briefly he admires his work before wondering where the sign for his village—al-JIYYA—has gone. But he knows. He knows what he has done, his betrayal.
He thinks of his wife and passes the breakwall and his work hut and several fishing boats in disrepair. As he is about to turn onto the path leading to his cave, Ghassan hears the bleating of a goat. He imagines the goat is still sticky in its birth fluids, wobbling on newborn legs. Ghassan turns from the path and hurries southward knowing that by following the shoreline, in a few hours, he will come to the city of Gaza.
But it is the conscience of man that makes him different from animals, is it not? Would a wolf or a bird or a horse be pestered the further it moved away from its pregnant mate? Perhaps, the animal would return out of instinct, but guilt would not prey on its mind rendering it unable to go a step further.
It is this guilt that forms a sheen on our skin and takes an enormous, debilitating effort on our part to shed. And it is this that turns Ghassan around, halfway to Gaza. He retraces his footsteps past the fallen villages, past the signs that he has painted, and up that hill he has climbed thousands of times, but never as difficult as on this day, and he comes to the mouth of his cave and in there lies a baby goat, lapping at its birth fluids. Ghassan looks around, inside the cave and out, for his wife. He calls her name. Only the cave answers. The goat glances at him and Ghassan wonders, if like infants, newborn animals also cannot see clearly.
Ghassan bends down, lifts and cradles the baby goat, walks out of the cave for the last time in his life, down the hill and along the beach, south with the sun on the left side of his face, atop his head, and onto the right. Before the sun drowns itself in the Sea, as he arrives at the Gaza border, with a city of tent camps swelling the beach, Ghassan lifts the tiny, floppy ear of the goat and whispers into it a promise, a promise of remembrance, that same promise that each and every generation of goat will whisper into their kids’ tiny ears. On and on, so that they never forget.
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.”