Choose, never hesitate,Joseph had said. It is better to be inconsistent than to be uncertain.
"We never talked about them."
"Not even about horses?"
And never, never correct yourself.
"No."
From his pocket, Khalil had pulled a folded handkerchief, and from the centre of the handkerchief a cheap pocket watch with the glass and hour hand removed. Setting it beside the explosive, he took up the red circuit wire and unwound it. She had the base-board on her lap. He took it from her, then grasped her hand and placed it so that she could hold the staples while he lightly tapped them home, fixing the red wire to the board according to the pattern he had drawn. Next, returning to the basin, he soldered the wires to the battery while she cut up lengths of insulating tape for him with the scissors.
"See," he said proudly as he added the watch.
He was very near her. She felt his nearness like a heat. He was stooped like a cobbler to his last, engrossed by his work.
"Was my brother religious with you?" he asked, taking up a light-bulb and twisting a pared end of wire to it.
"He was an atheist."
"Sometimes he was an atheist, sometimes he was religious. Other times he was a silly little boy, too much with women and ideas and cars. Tayeh says you were modest at the camp. No Cuban boys, no Germans, nobody."
"I wanted Michel. That's all I wanted, Michel," she said, too emphatically to her own ear. But when she glanced at him, she could not help wondering whether their brotherly love had been quite as infallible as Michel had proclaimed, for his face had set into a scowl of doubt.
"Tayeh is a great man," he said, implying perhaps that Michel was not. The bulb lit. "The circuit is good," he announced and, reaching gently past her, picked up the three sticks of explosive. "Tayeh and myself--we died together. Did Tayeh describe to you this incident?" he asked, as with Charlie's help he began taping the explosive tightly together.
"No."
"The Syrians caught us--cut here. First they beat us. This is normal. Stand up, please." From the box he had extracted an old brown blanket, which he made her stretch across her chest for him while he deftly sliced it into strips. Their faces across the blanket were very close. She could smell the warm sweetness of his Arab body.
"In the course of beating us they make themselves very angry, so they decide to break all our bones. First fingers, then arms, then legs. Then they break our ribs with rifles."
The knife point through the blanket was inches from her body. He cut swiftly and cleanly, as if the blanket were something he had hunted and killed. "When they finish with us, they leave us in the desert. I am glad. At least we die in the desert! But we don't die. A patrol of our commandos finds us. For three months Tayeh and Khalil lie side by side in hospital. Snowmen. Covered in plaster. We have some nice conversations, we become good friends, we read some good books together."
Folding the strips into neat military piles, Khalil addressed himself to Minkel's cheap black briefcase, which she noticed for the first time was opened from the back, by way of the hinges, while the fastenings at the front were still firmly closed. One by one he laid the folded strips inside, until he had built up a soft platform for the bomb to lie on.
"You know what Tayeh said to me one night?" he enquired as he did this.
"‘Khalil,' he said, ‘for how much longer do we play the nice guys? Nobody helps us, nobody thanks us. We make great speeches, we send fine orators to the United Nations, and if we wait another fifty years, maybe our grandchildren, if they're alive, they get a little piece of justice.'"
Interrupting himself, he showed her how much with the fingers of his good hand.
"‘Meanwhile our brother Arabs kill us, the Zionists kill us, the Falangists kill us, and those of us who remain alive go into their diaspora. Like the Armenians. Like the Jews themselves.'" He became cunning. "‘But if we make a few bombs--kill a few people--make a slaughterhouse, just for two minutes of history--‘"
Without finishing the sentence, he took up the device and solemnly, with great precision, laid it inside the case.
"I need spectacles," he explained with a smile, and shook his head like an old man. "But where should I go for them--a man like me?"
"If you were tortured like Tayeh, why don't you limp like Tayeh?" she demanded, growing suddenly loud in her nervousness.
Delicately, he removed the light-bulb from the wires, leaving the pared ends free for the detonator.
"The reason I do not limp is because I prayed to God for strength, and God gave it me so that I could fight the real enemy and not my brother Arabs."
Handing her the detonator, he looked on approvingly while she attached it to the circuit. When she had finished, he took what wire remained and, with a deft, almost unconscious movement, wound it like wool round the tips of his dead fingers, until he had made a little dummy. Then wound two strands horizontally for a belt.
"You know what Michel wrote to me before he died? In his last letter?"
"No, Khalil, I do not know," she replied as she watched him toss the dummy into the briefcase.
"Please?"
"No, I said no, I don't know."
"Posted only hours before his death? ‘I love her. She is not like the others. It is true that when I first met her she had the paralysed conscience of a European'--here, wind the watch, please--‘also she was a whore. But now she is an Arab in her soul and one day I shall show her to our people and to you.' ‘:
There remained the booby trap, and for this they had to work in still closer intimacy, for he required her to loop a length of steel wire through the fabric of the lid, then he himself held the lid as low as possible while her small hands led the wire to the dowelling in the clothespeg. Gingerly now, he took the whole contraption to the basin once more, and, with his back to her, refitted the hinge-pins with a blob of solder for each side. They had passed the point of no return.
"You know what I told to Tayeh once?"
"No."
"Tayeh, my friend, we Palestinians are very lazy people in our exile. Why do we have no Palestinians in the Pentagon? In the State Department? Why are we not yet running the New York Times, Wall Street, the CIA? Why are we not making Hollywood movies about our great struggle, getting ourselves elected Mayor of New York, head of the Supreme Court? What is wrong with us, Tayeh? Why are we without enterprise? It is not enough that our people become doctors, scientists, schoolmasters. Why do we not run America as well? Is it because of this that we have to use bombs and machine guns?' ‘
He was standing strictly before her, holding the briefcase by its handle like a good commuter.
"You know what we should do?"
She didn't.