to pick out the funereal drums, and catch up with the coffins before they reached their graves.
Christian funerals she loved most of all, because they played music as well as the percussion. She gazed at the faces of the musicians, transfixed by the lightning movements of their fingers. She strode with confidence and no one doubted that she knew the dead. With the cemeteries she was certainly familiar; she knew the profiles of their headstones as one might know the skyline of town on the ride home. She knew the Christian graveyards around the different churches, the Orthodox and Roman monuments and cenotaphs, and the Western Muslim Cemetery where her mother’s family were buried, their tombs regularly replastered white, and the Eastern Cemetery, to the north near Ebal and the railway station. After the coffin containing the dead person had been lowered into the earth, and the sheikh or priest had emitted some holy words, Ghada trod out between the headstones and walked back to her grandparents’ house through the quiet street.
One afternoon in June, after the congregants had departed, Ghada remained peering in through the archway of the Greek Orthodox Church. A late rain conjured a rich smell out-of-doors and her shoes were muddy from the graveyard. But from inside the church the fumes of incense still emanated, dregs from the tinny censers which minutes before had been swinging up and down the aisles. The priest was the only one left. In long black robes and hat, beard sprawling from the curtains of his habit, he was lighting the tapers, stroking the wicks with the end of his thin candle to impart the flame.
The days were getting longer. And yet, owing to a lingering warmth in the wet air, Ghada did not anticipate the onset of night. Only when the call to prayer reverberated from the minarets did she notice the light changing behind her. She gasped. Her first instinct was to run, and she would have done so, had not the street before the church filled up at that very moment with other people running.
She took a breathless step back under the arch. In the half-dark the runners accumulated. Kufiyas whipping behind their heads, feet hitting the ground. She could hear the clothes rustle against their bodies, and the clicks of things they were carrying. She gripped her sandwich case and kept still. The runners thinned, now only two or three passed at a time. There was something weird about the scene, and it was a moment before she understood that it was because no one was speaking. A fusillade of gunshots started up in the distance, and a few fellahin ghost-men increased their speed. Across the way a woman appeared in a doorway. She stepped to the side, and three running men passed into her house without dropping pace.
“What are you doing here, little one?”
Ghada looked up. The priest was pressing the heel of one hand against the armpit of the arch. His eyebrows were big and put his deep eye sockets in shade.
“Where are your mother and father?”
Ghada’s face stretched open.
“Don’t cry. No, no, no.”
Tutting and pouting the way childless people pouted at children, he crouched to pick her up, and then she was in the air with his arms around her waist, being carried into the church. Tears erupted forcefully from her eyes, her only dam against fear crumbling at this first sign of kindness.
“Do you know where you live?”
“Of course I know where I live!” she broke out, full of scorn.
“We will wait,” he whispered, gesturing at the door, “until the rebels are hidden.”
Two big armoured vehicles appeared in the proscenium of the doorway, mounted with torches that beamed along the road. At last, voices. English shouts.
The hard polished wood of a pew met Ghada’s backside, and the priest, after closing and bolting the doors, crouched again before her with an agility one did not associate with priests; he was talking again but she could not hear him, she was too preoccupied with her tears, which were relentless and very tiring. The harsh fibres of a rag rubbed the underside of her nose. And then he was beside her, sitting on the pew. Gunshots screamed beyond the doors; he tried to put his big old hands over her ears but she pushed them away. By the time silence fell and she had stopped crying, nighttime was absolute. The priest dragged open the door on the black night, and gestured for her to climb into