Am I using this trance to escape the anxiety I feel about Tamim’s entry? There would be nothing strange about that, given how cunningly the mind can work. Am I shifting the focus of my anxiety so I can bear it? Am I changing the direction of my thoughts to drive out my worries? The trick costs the soul nothing but surrender to this stream of consciousness.
From time to time I look at Tamim.
Tamim doesn’t move his eyes from the window of the bus, through which he gazes at what he can see as though engraving the scenes on his memory.
“Baba, you were daydreaming,” Tamim says to me as the bus starts moving. It sets off to cross the river in the direction of Palestine. A few minutes pass. We’re close to the bridge now. “Now you’ll see the bridge,” I say to Tamim.
I’ve hardly finished this short sentence before we’ve crossed the bridge and put it behind us without Tamim noticing.
He turns to me in surprise—“Where’s the bridge?”—and laughs out loud when I say to him, “It’s a bridge shorter than a sentence.”
I ask him to check our papers for the third or fourth time.
I look for the permit once again to be sure we haven’t lost it and that the seals, stamps, signatures, and dates during which he is permitted to enter are correct.
This is the piece of paper that will allow Tamim the Palestinian to see Palestine.
Later, Tamim will say in an interview with London’s al-Hayat newspaper that everything he saw after crossing the bridge he was seeing for the first time, so it was difficult for him to put a name to his feelings about it: “It was as though you’d put a microwave into the hands of a pre-Islamic poet like Imru’ al-Qays.”
Indeed, from this moment in his life onward, everything that twenty-one-year-old Tamim sees he will be seeing for the first time.
It will be the closing of one circle of life and the opening of another.
The Palestine of school books, stories, newspaper headlines, and CNN images will come to an end and the tangible Palestine will be born in his senses.
And I shall see how he sees everything.
I shall see, in a few days, how he receives his Palestinian identity card.
Will it be like the moment of his birth, on the banks of the Nile, twenty-one years ago?
Will it be like the moment when we chose his name?
Will he see a difference between it and the card they hung on his chest on the Malev aircraft when he traveled alone at the age of five and which the Hungarian flight attendant told him was his ‘identity,’ which they’d hung on his chest so that he wouldn’t get lost?
A few minutes separate us from our encounter with the officers of Israel. A few minutes separate us from the faceless hyena of probabilities.
“You stand in the line. I’ll keep my distance in the hall. I’ll watch you till I’m sure you’ve got through safely and they haven’t taken you for interrogation. I’ll wait till then to present my papers.”
Will he be subjected to that experience and its unknown outcomes on his first visit? Will he handle it properly? Will he get agitated and confused?
“If they call you for interrogation, only answer what you’re asked. Remember it’s your right to refuse to talk about politics. I’ll be waiting for you in this hall no matter how late it gets. If they send you back, we’ll go back together. After going through their control desk, you’ll come out right into the baggage claim area. Take your bag. Leave the building immediately. Don’t wait for me inside the building. Wait for me in the street.”
He listens to me with the smile of a man whose family worries over him as though he were a child. I think to myself that Tamim is as anxious about me as I am about him, perhaps more so.
Such is the crossing point into Palestine.
The crossing point is the place where everyone is afraid for everyone else, a place of ambiguities that wear down the nerves. Here decisions are made that no one explains to you and procedures whose nature and extent you do not know are applied to you by human beings against whose authority there is no appeal. Here crouches a well-muscled, sharp-eyed wolf, a wolf that may leap at you with open jaws or pass you by to savage your neighbor in the line, when you barely have time to rejoice in your own escape before grieving that he has pounced on another. And you can’t be sure he won’t pounce on you until you’re safely out of the place.
The crossing point nullifies the fatherhood of fathers, the motherhood of mothers, the friendship of friends, and the love of lovers. Here it is difficult to practice tenderness. Here the possibility of solidarity and rescue are negated. Here I can neither help my son nor protect him as a father.
Dictatorship, like the Occupation, nullifies fatherhood, motherhood, friendship, and love. I ask myself how many times do I have to feel powerless to protect the ones I love.
Now, as I return Palestine to Tamim, and Tamim to Palestine, I feel I’m surrendering him to the jailer.
Tamim’s turn in the line gets one step closer. I watch him from a distance. I am now fearful, tranquil, disturbed, accepting, furious, joyful, sad, impotent, capable, apprehensive, annoyed, optimistic, pessimistic, calm, and agitated, as thoughts mix and combine in my imagination.
Every time the world throws me into the cage called ‘waiting,’ I know where to escape to.
I take my imagination, or let it take me, far from the cage.
My eyes are on Tamim as, step by step, he approaches the moment that will bring, or destroy, joy. I enter a maelstrom of fears and doubts.
I listen to my internal questions, which no one but I can hear. Stupid questions and wise questions follow one another as in a waking nightmare, or like the ghosts of questions. I follow after them; loud and low, wise and stupid, useful and trivial, contradictory, clear, and murky, they fluctuate between the serious and the absurd, as though a huge box of photos, new and old, had dropped from my hands, the photos falling in confusion on top of one another and turning into a jumble of projecting edges, colors, and sizes till they are no more than a blur of light and dark spots and ill-defined shadows. The questions run inside me, or I run behind them, between consciousness and unconsciousness, like one slowly emerging from anesthesia to find faces he doesn’t recognize, or sinking into a stupor as the anesthetic starts to work inside his body. When will the waiting end, so that I can slip from between the jaws of this trap? Why am I certain life doesn’t hold a single pure moment, and that each instant is like an alloy of moments that have fused together till they look, to the deluded and the naïve, like something pure and independent, though they are neither? Why is there always a thread of fear in the cloth of tranquility? Why does one enter a battle not because one is evil but because one is afraid? Why do I neglect a person when I am the one most concerned about him? Isn’t it true that sometimes I show great patience for no better reason than that my patience has run out? Why do questions remain questions no matter how often men answer them?
I’m sure in my mind that Tamim will get in or we wouldn’t have come here today.
I’m anxious about his getting in or I wouldn’t have gone into the trance that just came over me.
Does our getting in deserve all this anxiety?
Doesn’t my anxiety appear silly and embarrassing when compared to the chronic torments of my people? What does it matter whether we get in or are refused or arrested or even die here? Isn’t the Palestinian surrounded by death? Aren’t the torments he suffers at the borders and in the airports of the Arab dictatorships repeated and routinized to the point of banality? Can this trivial anxiety of mine be compared with the demolition of a house over the heads of those inside it in Jenin or Gaza? So what am I complaining about here? I want to make permanent history out of a passing trance. No one hears of us unless we’re being bombarded by F-16 missiles or under the rubble of houses. We suffer a resounding and collective torment and let our screams out on the world’s screens. We aren’t just corpses and we didn’t choose to be so. I want to deal with my unimportant feelings that the world will never hear. I want to put on record my right to passing anxieties, simple sorrows, small desires, and feelings that flare up briefly in the heart and then disappear. I don’t say my anxiety is justified and I won’t apologize for it. It’s my anxiety and that’s all. I describe it as it is. I don’t want anything from anyone. I don’t pray for help or seek assistance or sympathy. All I want is to probe what is inside me so that I can know it, and listen for the voice of my soul and hear it. I want to write the history of things no one else will ever write for me. I want to carve the least of my feelings with a chisel on a stone next to the highway. I realize that I’m talking nonsense now, but it’s been a brief fit, that’s lasted only as long as it as taken me to smoke this cigarette.