I do indeed run into Namiq al-Tijani everywhere and he does spoil everywhere for me. He seems to be more than just himself, more than just one person.

I become busy, don’t return to the Ziryab Café for three or four days, and don’t see Hussein. One day, I go out to look for a gift or a bunch of flowers to give to a lady who has invited me to eat fish for lunch having heard me singing the praises of fish on some occasion. At the crossroads in front of Rukab’s shop I find myself face to face with Hussein, who is carrying his only child Athar in his arms and holding his wife Petra’s hand. We greet one another and I ask him how he is. I don’t tell him that I had been worried about him that evening at the Ziryab. I say only, “Put my mind at rest. Are you okay?”

“I wish I could say that.”

I turn quickly to look at Petra’s face in the hope of finding something in it that would show that perhaps he’s joking but find her stony-faced and unaware that I’m looking at her.

“What do you mean?”

“You won’t be reassured, my friend.”

“You have bad news?”

“I have one of two possible things — AIDS or cancer.”

…

“No, I swear it’s the truth. Just as I told you.”

“Come and let’s sit down somewhere.”

“No. The doctor told me that the symptoms that I was complaining of are.… ”

Interrupting him, I say, “When did you go to the doctor?”

“A while ago. He said, ‘We’ll run some test for AIDS first and if they’re negative, you have cancer.’”

…

…

“Are they running the tests?”

“Of course. What else could I do?”

“When are the results due?”

“In a week.”

I look at Petra and Athar, and once more at Hussein. I say goodbye to them, do not continue on my way to lunch, and make my excuses to the lady.

The mountains of Kobar, its valleys and almond groves, as well as the streets of Ramallah and the corridors of universities, knew Hussein al-Barghouti by his long hair in falling curls around his exceptionally beautiful face, as also by his smile, his simple sandals, and his unkempt clothes, consisting usually of t-shirt and shorts. The cafes knew him from the gatherings at which he sat surrounded by students of his who loved literature and poetry and admired his writings and personality. No one knew him at Ramallah Hospital. He had to wait and receive the terrifying results from the hands of a female nurse with an expression bound to discourage optimism in anything that might originate from her.

Having found out that he’d been cleared of AIDS, he danced with joy … at having cancer.

Cancer was his own battle. It would never include his son Athar or his wife Petra.

When Athar was happy, he would ‘tweedle’—“o-oh, o-oh, o-oh”—so Hussein took to jumping around the streets of Ramallah repeating “o-oh, o-oh, o-oh” and postponing that point in time — a point he had no desire to either name or fix — when he would take in properly the meaning of a confirmed diagnosis of cancer and at which he would begin his mythic preparation for death. We followed him as he “walked to his destiny alone,” as he would write later in the book that reached me after his death and to which he gave the significant title I Shall Be among the Almonds:

I no longer have a place in this intifada beyond the boring routine of visits to the hospital, now my Kaaba or final Wailing Wall. The only space that can be made for me there is among the newborns on the top floor or in the refrigerator for the dead in the basement.… The wounded and the dead are everywhere, and I’m lost, asking for the hematologist. A harried nurse responds to my question with “Can’t you see we’re dealing with an emergency?” and I realize that I’m surplus to requirement, a parasitic patient walking to his destiny alone.

As I rewrote his death in my introduction to an Egyptian edition of his book, I did not mention the painful part of Hussein al-Barghouti’s story, which is that some members of the family didn’t recognize his value when alive. Some of them made fun of his ‘womanish’ hair, of his khaki Bermuda shorts, and of his habit of giving lectures in bare feet, and the poet was able to claim his place of honor among his family only through death. Even those writers who were consumed by jealousy at his skill competed over who loved him most in death.

The nurse is resting his head against the side of the ambulance, his eyes open, having graciously left me to my moment of withdrawal. The ambulance is taking the usual route from Jericho to Ramallah. There are no checkpoints on the road and everything appears to be going fine.

I can’t take my eyes off the woman. I want her to come to, to utter a word, to complain how bad she feels, so that I can reassure her; to ask about her children, so I can tell her their news. Imagination takes me to one in the Gulf, another in prison, a third held up at the bridge. Impossible: it’s clear she has no children and no husband. If my grandmother, Umm ‘Ata, God rest her soul, had found herself in this situation while I was in Budapest, her daughter was in Amman, and her son was in Kuwait, would she be stretched out here like this woman? Is this woman, a stranger, lying here unconscious, aware that I now travel under her protection, that she is keeping me safe, colluding in my plans and collaborating with me, a child of her country whom she has never seen before and certainly will never see again from now till the end of time?

The ambulance stops suddenly and two Israeli soldiers approach.

To start with, one of them asks for the driver’s papers. The two of them talk in Hebrew for a few minutes. Then the driver comes back and takes other papers from the ambulance and hands them over to the soldier, who examines them thoroughly. The soldier asks for the rear door of the vehicle to be opened. The two soldiers stand side by side but, before the driver can open the door all the way, they look, first into my face, and then into that of the sick woman. One of them, turning away, shouts, “Close door. Finish. Go from here.”

The soldier hasn’t been able to look at the face of the woman lying stretched out in the ambulance. We leave them and pass through. The nurse tells me, “You have the right glasses. They thought you were her doctor.”

I think to myself, did this woman take part in the smuggling of two Palestinian writers without even knowing? When Faisal turns round to talk to me after we resume our journey, he sees her face and looks upset. I hear the doctor telling him what’s wrong with her but can’t make out his exact words. Faisal suffers from a slipped disc and I have chronic neck pain.

“To be honest, an ambulance is the right place for us. We’re not infiltrators. You have an identity card and I have an identity card. We’re citizens. But we’re too old to put up with ‘Qalandahar.’”

I laugh at the term, thinking it must be something Faisal has made up, but he explains that it’s the people who have given the Qalandya checkpoint this name, derived from Qandahar in Afghanistan.

On our left, the settlement of Maale Adomim sprawls and spills over till it almost reaches the road. We’re close to the Qalandya checkpoint now, though it hasn’t appeared yet.

Suddenly I feel a dryness in my throat.

As though I’d swallowed dust.

No hand has throttled me but I feel as though a hand had throttled me.

It’s the Wall.

The Wall, which separates Jerusalem from Ramallah and from all the lands of the Bank.

The Wall wasn’t here last time. No news bulletin, statement of condemnation, official data as to its length, breadth, and height, or even photograph or television image, can convey its ugliness when seen by the eye. It’s enough to see a person, any person, of flesh and blood walking next to the Wall to feel upset. That person doesn’t have to be Palestinian, tired, wounded, an old man, a child, or in any way distressed to feel upset. Just seeing a person and this wall in the same frame is enough to send a shudder down one’s spine. It’s enough to see a cat prancing in its shadow or a nearby tree moved by the breeze or an empty can discarded at its foot to feel that nature — the air, winds, plants, weather — has been subjected to a cruel and disfiguring intervention. A thing of cement that winds its way among the houses, topped by army towers at irregular intervals. Reports, articles, speeches by politicians and campaigners for solidarity with the Palestinian people all speak of its disfigurement of the land. What I see, over and above that, is its disfigurement of the sky. Yes! This wall disfigures the sky itself. It disfigures the clouds that pass above it. It disfigures the rain that falls upon it. It disfigures the moonlight that touches it and the rays of the sun that fall next to it. The issue, however, certainly isn’t only one of aesthetics. The Wall is surrounded by lies, some of which have been passed off on our worthless media, which repeats them idiotically. Lies such as that the Wall is a ‘security’ wall. The Wall has nothing to do with security. On the contrary, it is the wall of the great historic theft, the theft of more land and trees and water, the wall of the displacement of Palestinians following the exhaustion of their resources through their separation from their lands, crops, and water basins. It is built on land belonging to the Bank and if it were for security, as Israel claims, it would have been built along the 1967 borders. It is the wall for the emptying of the Bank of the greater part of its inhabitants through its inhibition of industry, agriculture, education, and geographical and social contact among people. It is the wall of the Silent Transfer. This wall puts houses in prison. Prisons the world over are designed for individual criminals who, justly or unjustly, have been found guilty. This wall has been designed to imprison an entire human community. To imprison a morning greeting between neighbors. To imprison a grandfather’s dancing at his grandson’s wedding. To imprison the handshakes exchanged at a ceremony of mourning for the death of a relative. To imprison the hand of a mother and prevent it from holding her daughter’s when she gives birth. To separate the olive tree from the one who planted it, the student from his school, the patient from his doctor, the believer from his prayers at the mosque. It imprisons dates between teenagers. The Wall makes you long for colors. It makes you feel that you are living in a stage set, not in real life. It imprisons time inside place. The Wall is a word that has no definition except in the dictionary of death. It is the fear felt by our children and the fear felt by the others’ state, for the Wall is the fear of both its sides. This is what makes it so satanic. International resolutions, court cases, the voices of Israeli peace advocates and of Israelis who believe in the right of the Palestinian people to freedom and self-determination will never bring this wall down, I tell myself. At the same time, I am confident that it will disappear one day by some other means. This wall will be demolished by our refusal to become used to it. It will be demolished by our astonishment at its existence. This wall will fall one day but now, in this moment of sorrow of mine, I see it as strong and immortal. The only things stronger than this wall are the birds, the flies, and the dust of the road. Then I tell myself, this is the Lesser Wall. The Greater Wall is the Occupation. Isn’t the Occupation a wall too? I tell myself that I have lost all feeling. I tell myself, if nothing makes me cry any more, perhaps I would do better to laugh. And laughter would be easy: the victims of the ghettoes of the West reintroducing them in the East! In the third millennium, the Jews putting themselves in a ghetto again! And of their own free will, this time. Some of Israel’s more intelligent politicians have said the same but no one has paid any attention. In the internal struggle over Israeli decision-making, the less intelligent side always wins — the side that sees the solution to all problems in ‘absolute force.’ And in the debate between the civilian and the military minds of the Jewish State, the military always wins. This is the khaki state that throughout history has disliked colors. It is not enough that the Wall has no color; it also spoils all the colors around it. It spoils the embroidered dress of a peasant woman who waits four hours in front of one of its gates or beneath one of its towers. It spoils the school uniform of a small girl waiting impatiently for permission to get to her first class.