Right. No one has immunity here.

Israel is committed to nothing to which Israel does not see fit to commit itself — another bitter fruit of the stupid negotiation with Israel in Oslo to which we sent negotiators whose sole talent lay in being talentless. Their ignorance wasn’t the problem, though. The problem was that what took place between them and the Israeli delegation wasn’t so much a negotiation as a series of approvals of proposals presented by a team of Israel’s shrewdest politicians and lawyers with highly specialized skills in everything needed to make us fall into their visible and invisible traps. On my first visit to Ramallah I said, speaking of our people’s attitude to the accords, that they were waiting for the fulfilment of their leaders’ promises. Nothing has been fulfilled. There is a huge explosion coming — I don’t know where and I don’t know when, but the explosion, or explosions, are coming for sure.

At the last Jordanian police post, the officer makes us get out of the car so that he can check our papers and oversee our boarding of the first bus. This bus is unavoidable because entry by car is forbidden to everyone except senior officials of the Palestinian Authority.

I notice someone trying to get an elderly lady out of her wheelchair and onto the bus. This is extremely difficult given her great weight and the high steps to the door of the bus, which is not equipped with a ramp for people with special needs. The paleness of her face makes it clear that she’s returning from medical treatment, accompanied by a young man, who welcomes our help in getting her onto the bus and pays no attention to a rude traveler behind us who’s annoyed at having to wait.

The bus is full now and the engine is running, but it’s waiting for Israeli permission to cross the bridge. In summer, the buses line up in large numbers and wait for the signal, bus by bus. It’s just bad luck if you’re in one of the ones at the back.

We are on the threshold of Palestine.

We are at the lowest point below sea-level on the planet. Sweat oozes with sticky insistence. Clothes stick annoyingly to bodies. The air here is fried. Daytime in this black hole is a collective curse on all those like us who have to wait, as though the entrance to Palestine were through Hell. There is no way to get there without passing through this harsh spot, lashed by this air and this nature that shows mercy to none.

I tell myself, some homelands are like that: getting into them is hard, getting out of them is hard, and staying in them is hard. And this is the only homeland you have.

The traveler to Palestine does not cross its threshold in order to enter, he dwells at that threshold for a period that is not determined by him and waits for the instructions of the masters of the house, who determine everything.

I look at the passengers.

My gaze falls on Mr. Namiq al-Tijani and I feel an evil premonition.

I do not like to see this Namiq.

The sight of him reminds me of mollusks and mucosities, especially if he smiles or laughs, when his broad gums show and set my nerves on edge.

I say to Tamim in a low voice, “Do you see that person?”

“What about him?”

“He’s a very strange creature. Try to observe him. He’s the type I can’t stand. He’s the most representative ‘illustrative example’ of the generation that is being raised by the Palestinian Authority and I come across him wherever I go. He’s a person of symbolic dimensions!”

Tamim doesn’t appear interested in my talk of Namiq and is not curious to find out more. He just says, “Forget about him.”

I follow his advice and ignore “the Namiq,” looking at the other passengers. Palestinian mothers and grandmothers. Peasants with sunny faces and shaven chins, their cheeks bringing to mind the gleam of new swords. Sick people, old people, young people from university, children, merchants, contractors, civil servants from the Authority, expatriates. They prefer not to talk to people they don’t know, to avoid problems and in deference to the sense of wariness that haunts people who feel that they’re under observation by an obscure power at both ends of the bridge.

I ask myself what has happened to these exhausted, slowly moving grandmothers over the years since my youthful memories of them, when they would walk ten kilometers on foot to reach the springs outside their villages and return carrying their water jugs on their heads, their backs straight. At harvest season, they would pick the olives with their men-folk, quarreling to keep their places in front of the oil press, and receive the guests who came by for a chat in the evening in the courtyards of their houses, where the lemons, mandarins, and pots of basil reflected brilliantly off the windows. That’s how I remember my grandmother Umm ‘Ata and all the other grandmothers of Deir Ghassanah. I think about the women passengers on the bus, sketching pasts and futures for them as I fancy. Which of them, I wonder, is grandmother to a prisoner or a martyr or a fugitive in the mountains and caves? Which of them is a widow waiting in vain month after month for the National Authority to pay her the support money for her son who is imprisoned in the Ofer, Negev, Nafha, or Ashkelon prisons? Or for the pension for her husband, who sleeps beneath the earth while the radio stations dedicate patriotic songs to his memory and the bearers of the keys to the treasury forget him? What makes her face the misery and annoyances of the bridge and travel to Amman and al-Zarqa and Irbid, to struggle with her baskets and suitcases, with the mistreatment and the vexation of waiting? Is it to meet her second son, who wasn’t killed and wasn’t arrested, who is coming from his job in the Gulf or from his university in Damascus or London or Canada or the U.S. and who cannot enter Palestine, so that she has to travel in order to see him for one or two days? The Palestinian woman, like any other woman in this world, works, gets things done and brings about change, and I don’t know where all these duties of hers come from or how they have piled up on top of her or how she carries them out so well. With death, imprisonment, or exile taking off so many of their sons and male relatives, it is these women who fill the markets, the demonstrations, the workshops making embroidery, olive-wood carvings, arabesque work, mother-of-pearl, and necklaces, and who quarrel with the headmaster about their grandchildren’s schoolwork, and it is they who listen to Nawal El Saadawi explaining her implacable feminist revolution on the television without understanding a word she says. I look at them and think of my mother in Amman beseeching God that Tamim’s entry into Ramallah be easy. I think of Radwa in Cairo holding her anxiety inside her only to carry it away with her, deliberately hidden and obscured, which makes it all the clearer to me.

Am I using this trance to escape the anxiety I feel about Tamim’s entry? There would be nothing strange about that, given how cunningly the mind can work. Am I shifting the focus of my anxiety so I can bear it? Am I changing the direction of my thoughts to drive out my worries? The trick costs the soul nothing but surrender to this stream of consciousness.

From time to time I look at Tamim.

Tamim doesn’t move his eyes from the window of the bus, through which he gazes at what he can see as though engraving the scenes on his memory.

“Baba, you were daydreaming,” Tamim says to me as the bus starts moving. It sets off to cross the river in the direction of Palestine. A few minutes pass. We’re close to the bridge now. “Now you’ll see the bridge,” I say to Tamim.

I’ve hardly finished this short sentence before we’ve crossed the bridge and put it behind us without Tamim noticing.

He turns to me in surprise—“Where’s the bridge?”—and laughs out loud when I say to him, “It’s a bridge shorter than a sentence.”