Finally, we reach the heart of the checkpoint. We reach the ‘heart of darkness.’

Fine rain has started to fall. One soldier stands close to us with his huge police dog while another asks for the driver’s papers. He orders him quietly to open the door.

The scene is repeated. The soldier can’t bring himself to look at the woman’s face, with its open eyes and bared teeth. He allows us to go on our way.

We pass through the checkpoint.

We stop behind a car at the side of the road with its parking lights on. Abu Saji is waiting for us with his private car.

We get down from the ambulance with our bags. We say goodbye to the doctor, the driver, and the nurse. We thank them. They will continue their way to Ramallah Hospital to carry out tests on the woman. Faisal and I join Abu Saji in a hug.

“Welcome back. Hey! Big adventures at your age?”

“A lovely feeling of being wilier than the Occupation. We’re just writers. We resist them with games like this and are happy when they don’t catch us. What a journey!”

Abu Saji drives me to my hotel and takes Faisal with him. We’ve agreed to meet later at his house.

At the Royal Court Hotel, which looks out over Ramallah’s park with its three cypresses in front, I take my sleeping clothes out of my bag, submerge myself in the warm water of the bathtub, lie stretched out luxuriating in the soap suds, close my eyes for a few instants, and see the woman laid out next to me on the stretcher staring at me with her wide-open eyes exactly as she was when we kept one another company in the ambulance. The nurse’s voice rings in my ear: “There’s a chance she’ll be cured, God willing.”

7. Saramago

On my way to the Khalil al-Sakakini Cultural Center, I catch a brief glimpse of him on the opposite pavement. It’s Namiq al-Tijani. At first I feel depressed, then pessimistic, and finally alarmed at what may happen on a day that starts with a sighting of this hateful, slimy character.

He isn’t one of the Authority’s most corrupt figures. He’s just a small one, a beginner, the likes of whom are to be found in their thousands everywhere. The sight of the big ones arouses only indifference now. Their corruption is firm, deeply rooted, and beyond redemption. There’s no hope of their going straight: their corruption is classic, period. He, though, is a young graduate at the beginning of his career and it wasn’t a given that he would become corrupt. The first group ended up corrupt and he began corrupt. His corruption is a blooming, fresh, rosy-cheeked corruption. A corruption strong of limb. A corruption that practices body-building. A corruption that massages itself if it can’t find anyone else to do so. A corruption that works out in the morning and lunches well, not waiving its right to dessert (kanafeh from Nablus or tiramisu, baklava or cheesecake — anything sticky will fit the bill) to top off the already rich main course. It is a corruption with supple joints, strong bones, sharp vision, and a well-developed sense of smell that can catch the whiff of an opportunity from afar. A corruption that knows the directions and the roads and is quick on its feet. It is also an infectious corruption, quick to spread among those with the disposition and the propensity. The Namiq demeans himself in order to dominate. If you spit in his face, he will ponder the matter at his own speed, at his own sweet pace. Then, if the spittle has value, he’ll collect it. He’ll smile at you and if it was an act of gratuitous contempt, he’ll count himself the winner and thank his good luck because you didn’t kill him this time but contented yourself with spitting. When, however, in your absence, he’s feeling secure, he’ll allow himself all the time he needs to set a trap for you. This young man wants to get ahead, to make money, by any and all means. He no longer attracts attention because the line between ambition and greed has become thin and barely visible, but this young man’s most vicious aspects are a tongue that extols and then betrays, a mouth that kisses and then bites, and a hand that embraces and then stabs. The likes of him are preparing themselves to be our future with the approval of the Authority. Against this, young people with clean hearts and heads are preparing themselves to be our future in spite of the Authority.

The Namiq crosses the street, approaching fast.

While a passing truck halts his forward rush, I enter the Center, climb the ancient stairs that lead to Mahmoud Darwish’s room, and escape.

We had arranged this meeting in Amman, where I’d discussed with Darwish the program for a visit of the International Parliament of Writers and getting the building’s conference hall ready for a planned press conference. The writers came, spoke, listened to the Palestinian writers, and expressed their solidarity with them and their desire to see the situation live, on the ground. We took them on a tour of the al-Am‘ari refugee camp, which is in the center of Ramallah.

One of us had to explain to them who was taking refuge with whom, and how there came to be Palestinian refugee camps in Ramallah, which was Palestinian. Some of them weren’t aware that these refugees were from the villages and cities of the Palestinian coast who had come here after their homes and possessions were destroyed following the Nakba of 1948. In other words, they had taken refuge in cities elsewhere in their homeland that were not occupied in the Nakba, and fled to the Bank and Gaza. They settled in nineteen camps in the Bank (a little later I shall explain the problem I have with the deliberately misleading term ‘West Bank,’ which poses a hidden danger): Balata, Tulkarm, Jenin, ‘Askar, al-Diheishah, Shu‘afat, al-Jalazon, Qalandya, al-‘Arroub, Nur Shams, al-Fawwar, al-Far‘a, Camp No. 1, ‘Aqbat Jabar, ‘Ayda, Deir ‘Ammar, ‘Ayn al-Sultan, Beit Jibrin, and the al-Am‘ari Camp. This, of course, omits the Gaza camps, which will later take center stage in news bulletins because of the repeated Israeli attacks on their inhabitants; these are Jabalya, Rafah, Beach Camp, Nuseirat, Khan Yunis, al-Bureij, al-Maghazi, and Deir al-Balah. Others took refuge in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Each bombardment or attack on these camps is, to their inhabitants, a second, third, or fourth Nakba. Israel’s destruction machine drove them out of western Palestine, so they took refuge in its east.

What devilish thinking, then, led to eastern Palestine being called ‘the West Bank’?

If you open the map of historic Palestine, you will find it located between the Mediterranean Sea on the west and the River Jordan on the east. The Zionist gangs occupied western Palestine, the country’s Mediterranean coast, and most of its inhabitants took refuge in eastern Palestine, which extends to the River Jordan. Since the aim was to wipe the name ‘Palestine’ from the map, from history, and from memory, this area was attached to the River Jordan and called, in Arabic and every other language, ‘the West Bank.’ With this, the name ‘Palestine’ finally disappeared from the maps of the world.

If the west of the country is now called ‘Israel’ and the east is called ‘the West Bank,’ where is Palestine?

For Palestine to be lost as a land, it had to be lost as a word too.

Every time I hear the term ‘West Bank,’ I think of the enormous and deliberate pollution of language that has led to the assassination of the word ‘Palestine.’

This is something the Chinese poet Bei Dao didn’t know when he ran into a wall of denial in front of the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco. He told the young man standing there that he wanted to go to Palestine. The young man told him, “There is no such country on the map, sir!”

Later, PEN International Magazine will publish on its front cover — an undoubted honor — a complete poem of mine entitled “Interpretations”: