The office was silent. Mustafa felt drowsy from the heat and rain. He ached for his house, for Alia and Atef, to smoke cigarettes in the garden and joke. To not have heard this story.
Across the table, Imam Bakri looked lost in thought. He spoke. “The father salted everything after that. Even his water. He would cry out in his sleep for the sea.” The imam took a long breath. “He missed the fish,” he said simply. “When he died, he was buried beneath the hills he hated, far from the sea.”
“What happened to his family?”
The imam looked Mustafa square in the eye. “The daughter—” He swallowed. “Some say she lost her mind. She stopped talking, never married.”
“And the son?” Mustafa asked, though he knew.
The imam lifted the teacup to his lips. “The son found Allah.”
This time the silence felt endless.
“I try not to remember him like that,” the imam finally said. He narrowed his eyes. “My father. Not as that broken husk of a man, chewed up and spat out by the occupation, making a meager life of the remains. Unable to protect his daughter. Watching the soldiers . . . do the things they did.”
Something clicked within Mustafa: the imam held the key to something. The imam would be the one to change it—everything—for him. In that instant, Mustafa realized just how unhappy he was. How much like a pauper he’d always felt, peering inside a window, watching life carry on while he remained apart, separated by glass. From Alia and Atef, from Aya. He suddenly understood his boredom, the way hours seemed to stretch unbearably in front of him, that, yes, yes, it was all bullshit. The waiting, the talking, the cigarettes, the coffee. What were they doing? The thought shook him with its violence. Sitting around while the years piled up, spending his father’s money and waiting. Waiting. While their land was gobbled up.
“I like to imagine my father died before that. Before we went to Jerusalem. That he died from an enormous wave taking him while he knelt in front of a fish.” The imam’s eyes flashed. “They’ve even taken away our deaths. They’ve robbed us even of the dignity of death.” The imam gestured outside with a jut of his chin. “And our men? They dance to American music and kiss girls in the pool hall. They tell themselves that Palestine is this”—here he waved a hand dismissively—“only this, only the crumbs we’ve been given.”
A peculiar sensation skittered through Mustafa. His limbs tingled. That thing he’d read about in books: the moment when the world seems to sharpen, when colors and objects become vibrant, in focus. He could smell the torched streets, could see the young woman naked and bleeding. The glint of fish scales in the early light.
Finally, he cleared his throat and looked down at his tea. It was cold, an ugly color.
“I want to help,” he said.
Mustafa walks toward the marketplace lights. The temperature is still dropping, cool air raising the hairs on his forearms. Alia was right. Clouds are gathering in the evening sky. It is going to rain.
At the marketplace, before the strip of coffee shops and restaurants, there is a trio of ash trees. Atef is already there, leaning against the trunk of the largest tree, a cigarette between his fingers. He takes a drag and catches sight of Mustafa; his bearded face breaks into a smile.
“Abu Tafi,” he calls out, smoke trailing as he speaks. It is Mustafa’s nickname, earned from a spill during football. Despite Atef’s smile, Mustafa can see tension written upon his friend’s face; Atef is as nervous as he is.
“How are you feeling?” Atef looks concerned. Atef and Mustafa’s meetings before Mustafa speaks at the mosque have increasingly taken on the quality of coaching sessions, Atef treating his friend as though he were some mercurial prodigy. It is a dividing feeling; part of him wants to impress Atef, to make him slightly—in the manner of close friends—jealous, the other part wants to roar with impatience and stalk off.
“Fine.” The hours of nerves put an edge in his voice. Atef, always careful, lapses into silence. Past the entryway, men begin to mill into the mosque, and Mustafa squints to make out faces, blurry in the lamplight. Most are familiar: Samir the professor, Imad the engineer, Ahmad, Bashir. The shabab; the men that gather in his garden. A vendor sells fruit, his voice hawking his wares across the street.
“Bateekh, bateekh!”
Imam Bakri appears, and behind him a group of six or seven, talking among themselves as they climb the stairs into the mosque.
“Must be the Jerusalem men.” Mustafa softens his voice, an apology for his earlier curtness. Atef nods.
“They look more ajanib than the ajanib,” Atef replies. Apology accepted.
It is true. Mustafa had expected older men in dishdashas, traditional headscarfs, and keffiyehs. But these men are his age and dressed like Westerners, button-down shirts, jeans. A couple have longish hair curling over their ears. Imam Bakri stops at the domed entrance and says something; the Jerusalem men laugh as they walk inside.
Panic seizes Mustafa.
“I can’t do this.” His voice cracks.
Atef furrows his brow, concerned. “You want to do a round?” It is their habit for years, walking the small pathway encircling the marketplace.
Mustafa shakes his head. He squats, leans against the tree trunk.
“You need water? You want something to drink?”
“I don’t know what to say.” Mustafa looks up at Atef. The other man’s silhouette is outlined in the faint light. “This whole thing—” His lungs feel drained. He is panting. “I think it’s become too much. I wanted to be part of it, but I don’t think I can. Imam Bakri wants me to talk about fighting. About how things are for us, but I don’t know how things are. I don’t know what to say.”
“You say what you need to.”
“I’m afraid.” The word startles him and he repeats it. “Afraid.”
“You say what you need to.”
Atef speaks with unusual violence. He swoops down next to him. Mustafa recoils.
“They need to hear us. Those Jerusalem men, they need to know we’re with them. That we’re not all talk. They’re going to know they’ve got brothers out here. Kin.”
A thought lights in Mustafa’s mind as if ignited by flint. It reminds him of Aya speaking about the proposal. The realization that someone, one you think you know intimately, wholly, has a mystery within. Has thoughts and fears and loves that belong to him or her alone. He remembers it happening with Alia, and with his mother, when he was younger, remembers how alone he felt at the time. But now, watching Atef’s angry face—his eyes begging and accusing him at the same moment—he realizes that with Atef, it is far worse.
Atef, son of a martyr. Atef, good man. Comrade. Atef, who’d listened to the same speeches, the same sermons. Atef, who had none of the charisma or ferocity of Mustafa.