the late afternoons as Ghassan had for decades. Here, the men talk and dream of the distant days of winter, and when winter comes they think of the days of summer while the rains keep them huddled inside their houses.
Half a year rushes past and it is the first day of winter’s mist, and soon the mist will become droplets of rain and they will plink off the zinc-roofed houses.
My dream of the brittle days of summer is interrupted by a knocking, a tapping more like it, on the front door. I don’t bother to move as I hear my wife walk by my room to the front of the house. She opens the metal door and its creaking reminds me of a job, long since promised and unfulfilled.
There are no voices and the door echoes its moan, shuts. And now there is a tapping on my room door.
“Yes.”
The silhouette of my wife is there and it looks, in the low light, and through my squinted eyes, like another person as well. I say nothing, for my wife will certainly nag me about getting new glasses. When I sit up on the sleeping mat and look closer I see that she is holding a jacket.
“This was hanging on the door outside.”
“Who was knocking?” I ask.
“There was no one there.”
“Coats don’t knock, my wife.”
“There was no one there,” she repeats.
I sigh as I get out from under the blanket.
“Hand me my sweater.”
“Just put this on.” She gives me the jacket.
I do as she says and the jacket is new and warm and it reminds me of my son. I shake off the ruthless thoughts of whether he too is warm on this December morning. Slipping into my sandals, I walk to the front of the house, and before opening the door I turn to my wife, who is right behind me.
“I will fix the door this afternoon.”
She says nothing, and the sound as I open it mocks my procrastination. I look up and down the deserted, damp street and I am about to shut the door when I see the footprints facing me on the stoop.
“There was someone here,” I say.
“Obviously, for the coat didn’t arrive on its own.”
I keep my attention on the ground. The top right corner of the right foot, where the last two toes should be, is missing. Ending at my door, the footprints then go in the opposite direction, back up the street.
Quickly I leave without telling my wife where I am going. Besides, I can hear her words, real or imagined, chasing me up the street. Crazy man. I wear the new jacket, the jacket for my son, following a long-missing man who believes he had a goat that could talk.
I remember what I once heard about Ghassan, many years before I met him. It is something of a legend, I guess, or used to be. As a young man, when he fled to Gaza in 1948, Ghassan carried his goat the entire nine miles, and when they arrived, he whispered a promise into its floppy ear.
Two years later, in 1950, the year the camp opened, Ghassan went out under the giant willow tree and, with a small hatchet, chopped the little toe from his right foot. The following year, on the same day, November 4th, he went to the willow once again and severed the next toe on his right foot. In 1952, the day before the anniversary, his wife-to-be approached him.
“And what are you going to do after eight years?” she asked.
“Take my fingers.”
“And when they are gone?”
Ghassan said nothing and his wife-to-be jumped on the silence and answered her own question.
“If you want to marry me, you will raise the goats, as a memory of our village, and keep your toes.”
And that is what happened—and why I am following, in light rain, the eight-toed footprints up the street. The farther I go, the more I am certain where they will lead me. I continue on, drawn by the inevitability of it all. Once I cross the rusted railroad tracks and enter the cemetery of the oranges, I am guided to a simple grave, a grave I have never visited but know for certain is the goat’s.
The footprints end at the edge of the grave. I stare at them, hugging the warmth of the coat against my body. The drizzle patters off my head and my hair is wet before I realize that the jacket has a hood. I put it on and the rain patters against it, louder but more hollow. How hard must it fall, I wonder, before the footprints will be erased, or is it even possible that it will ever rain that hard again?
He marvels at, while at the same time is saddened by, how adept the children are at recognizing the sounds. How they tell him that the shot just heard was from a tear gas gun rather than a Kalashnikov or that was the sound of a bomb rather than an exploding Molotov cocktail. It is the children in the house who are the first to hear an army patrol wending its way up the night street. Or, at least, they are first to admit to hearing it.
The gurgle of falafel grease wakes him and he goes a couple of houses down the street. The morning already speaks of heat and he studies Aysa scooping ball after ball of the bright green chickpea batter into the pond of grease, watches them dance and brown and crisp.
In a short while, Aysa’s little sister steps outside and sees the American and then disappears into an alleyway; before the falafel are cool enough to bite into, a half dozen children are there. Several of them exchange a coin for some breakfast falafel, others just come to watch the stranger, who has now become a familiar sight in the morning and early evening streets. Aysa hands him a falafel and, as always, refuses the coin.
Some take lemons each day, others a small bottle of cheap cologne and a rag, the grandmother, Fatima, hands the American half an onion to help combat the scorch of the tear gas.
He loves the nights, rare that they are, when he, and a few others, slip on black jackets and vanish into the lightless camp. They avoid the main streets and keep tight to either side of the alleyway walls, straddling the trough of open sewage. Once in a while they pass someone and whispered greetings are exchanged, as well as whether or not any soldiers have been seen.
One night, as they near their house in block number four, a jeep can be heard, and it is not far away. Then the beam of a spotlight startles the main street; the men separate and find different places along the alley walls, getting as close as possible. With his face against the cement blocks, he feels the geography of their pockmarks, and how, as if in defiance of curfew, they have held the sun’s warmth in them. As the searchlight stalks the streets and the patrol passes, he draws even closer to the wall, realizing that it is here, and only here, where one can find a moment of solitude in this place.
Once there was a beautiful and powerful hawk. It spent its days soaring high above the land and from so far up it could see everything that moved on the landscape below. The swiftest of rabbits, snakes, field mice. The hawk, when it saw something that it liked, would follow it from above and when the creature broke out into an open space the hawk