Only then did I connect that it was Thursday; the one day each week when we ate meat. And on other Thursdays my grandfather would sometimes take me with him to the cemetery of the oranges and, for the rest of my life, I would remember the stories by the number of cigarettes the men would give to my grandfather. After dinner on those nights my grandfather would go outside in front of the house and smoke a cigarette, smoke it to the tips of his callused fingers.
That night, I stood behind him and he asked me, without turning around:
“Have you ever seen a shooting star, Shafiq?”
“No, Grandfather, I haven’t.”
“Keep your eyes to the sky.”
I did and soon freckles of red sparks raced through the night air.
“Did you see them, Shafiq? Did you see the stars?”
“Yes. They were beautiful,” I answered, even though I knew that it was only my grandfather flicking the cigarette high into the air, for I had seen him do so on many nights when he didn’t know I was watching.
Then, as my grandfather did each night, he locked the green metal door behind him, keeping out the raven black shroud of curfew, until the next morning when, from atop the minaret, the muezzin would take a deep breath and cry out the call to prayers, releasing us into the streets for yet another day.
Awake before dawn, he quietly unbolts the door and steps onto School Street. A fog has settled overnight, rendering the willow nearly invisible. The school, fifty yards away, cannot be seen. He walks up the street and turns into the first alley, making his way through the labyrinth of block number four. He knows he mustn’t stay long, but the pull of being alone, of seeing with his own eyes, is too much. The rush throttles him.
In the fog, the voice of the muezzin sounds as though it is being pressed through a sieve. The American stops and listens to the call to prayer, watches as sleepy men leave their houses to answer it. He says good morning to a man with a cane and the man lifts the walking stick in greeting. Years since he has felt so free.
At the end of his first week in Jabaliya, he asks for a razor and Fayez tells him that his uncle is a barber and later that night he would shave him.
It is around seven o’clock and the American is sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, a face full of shaving cream and a straight-edge being lowered to his neck. Neighbors and curious onlookers gather. Several dozen watch the initial slide of the blade plow a path along his neck. No one is talking; the crackle of week-old stubble explodes in the hush. The only light in the large room is a single bulb above the two men. The foreigner has large, dark eyes, appearing even more so against the white of the shaving cream. With these eyes he gives the barber a side glance:
“Do you realize how much I trust you?”
Fayez translates and there is a smatter of laughter.
“Yes,” says the barber, “we understand that.”
Again, the scratch of the blade exposes more of the pale flesh. Everyone watches as the barber wipes the blade on the towel draped over his shoulder. The eyes follow the blade back down and to another sweep of the neck and back to the towel and the neck again. Entranced by the rhythm, they wait for a tiny speck of red to bubble out from beneath the puffy white cloud of shaving cream.
It doesn’t.
The man’s face is clean, younger than most anticipate; a face perhaps, that with a little more sunshine, could be that of a soldier, or a stone thrower.
The crowd of onlookers begins to scatter and head back to their houses where, in a quarter of an hour, they will latch their doors and dim their lights and surrender to the hours of curfew.
Now, most mornings, after the call to prayer and before the morning session of school begins, children gather near the house and sneak beneath the white tarp that hangs there. They huddle outside the red metal door and whisper in chorus the American’s name. Soon, the slide of the bolt clicks and the door opens and, for a short while, he talks to the children.
The Night Guardian of the Goat
For a single month, from new moon to new moon, I was the night guardian of the goat. It was a rather simple job, once one got used to the staying awake through the night and following the goat wherever his whims took him: garbage bin to garbage bin, under the willow, or simply to the house where his master, Ghassan Abu Majed, slept away the eight hours and thirty minutes of curfew.
It was exactly in that house, number eighty-eight in block six, in the front room across from the bathroom and kitchen, that the last remaining goat of Ghassan Abu Majed stayed for most of his ten years. A pretty good life for a goat, I imagine. It remained as such until Ghassan’s wife of nearly half a century bolted the door at 7:55 the night before the April new moon, leaving the animal to butt his head against the door until he became tired and fell asleep outside. When Ghassan limped into the dawn air, on his way to morning prayers, he nearly tripped over the goat, lying with his legs curled under, his hooves hidden in the fur of his belly.
Before Ghassan turned around, about to scold his wife for forgetting the goat outside, she spoke to him from the doorway.
“Our grandson is allergic to that beast. The child has been sniffling and coughing since the moment he was born.”
Ghassan held his tongue, respecting the calm hovering over early morning, but the word beast rankled him. He bent over and stroked the goat’s beard until the repetition kneaded away his anger.
“He is the last link to the land.”
“The link has long been severed,” she answered, in a voice also respectful of the hour and of her husband and the goat.
Ghassan balanced himself with his left hand and stood, slowly unfolding his aching limbs. He said nothing more to his wife and headed toward the peace of the mosque. The dust of the camp settled on his sandaled feet, but he ignored it, for he would wash them before prayers.
It was on that very afternoon that Ghassan asked me if I would be the night guardian of the goat. Jobless for more than a year, I said yes.
“Good,” he said. “Now go and get some sleep, your work will begin tonight.”
I went to his house at 7:30 and was given only one order.
“Don’t ever allow the goat to speak or come into contact, in any way, with the soldiers.”
I thought it rather strange that Ghassan used the word “speak,” but I let it pass, for I assumed it to be merely a slip of the tongue. He left me with that message and closed the door, and the goat and I looked at each other and began to walk together up the darkening street. In the pink grapefruit glow of the setting sun, the military watchtower, the tallest structure in the camp, smirked down on us.
That first night, in fact the entire first week, the goat did nothing other than what one thinks a goat would do—sniff through the multitude of possibilities in the garbage on Jabaliya’s streets.