the binoculars.
“That was stupid.”
Jamil rolled his eyes. They ached: he shut them. “Ya‘tik al-afieh.”
“Allah ya‘afik.”
He sipped his cooling tea. He had no appetite. He had risen earlier than necessary, and running the faucet in the dawn dark to splash his face woke his mother, who crept into the kitchen to berate him for not sleeping enough. “I sleep like the dead, Mama,” he said. But she was right. He had so feverishly compounded his duties as a bridge between the city and rebel commands, undertaking tasks that could have been delegated, that although he dropped off at night under a warrior’s fatigue he woke in the mornings with a chemical jolt, disturbed by a spectral image of victory. When he wasn’t plotting with Basil, he was on the telephone with leaders in Jerusalem, or with forces in Syria, tallying losses against victories and tracking arms deliveries over the Jordan River, where Arab patrols were bribed with hashish brought on camels from Latakia. He was not a public figure. He was not Hani Murad. He saw himself as a quiver of darkness; an actor and also a ligament; the fibre between fighter and fighter.
Ever since he first saw death at the Nebi Musa riots sixteen years earlier, Jamil had longed to be doing. That pair of dirty corpses still lay in his memory. The moment he bore the weight of that dead Arab aloft, and the still-warm blood soaked into his jacket, was a tremendous, altering moment. With a great slow force over subsequent months this experience gradually changed Jamil’s sense of responsibility. And finally, now, the time for witnessing and suffering, of debating in assemblies and composing memoranda, was over. His arms grew full of blood; his stomach sharp. He so dissolved into his mission that the strains in his body became idiomatic of the struggle: the energy in his feet was Arab energy, his mind’s determination was Nabulsi determination, the weakness of his ankles Palestinian weakness, the ache in his bones a Palestinian ache. News of British violence gusted through him and flowered out as anger. Images remained: he saw the policemen flogging student protesters on their bare buttocks in a line outside the mayor’s office. Peasant women being searched for arms on the roadside and lewdly gestured at. A house demolished, the family holding their belongings beside the soldiers on the hillock, forced to watch as their home exploded. His rage pulsed. He tended carefully to the hearth of his fury: well-kept it fuelled him, but he was no help to anyone if his whole self went up in flames. His irritation at Basil about the second shot was really irritation at himself, because he could not afford to be rash. He bowed, penitent, over his tea, and forced himself to eat a piece of bread. His grateful stomach unclenched.
The escape route was laid out in advance. After eating, they washed their hands in the Karak bathroom, slung their weapons, and left by the kitchen door into the sheltered hawsh courtyard. With a silver flash, an upper window opened along the stretched arm of a young girl. She peered down as Jamil and Basil slipped into the tunnel beneath the house, where a door on the corner stood purposefully ajar. The owner, waiting in the vestibule, bowed as they darted through his living room. Basil led them up a rear staircase. At the head of the stairs, through an open window, they heard the clamour of a police patrol. Basil hugged the wall, but Jamil slid his weapon off his shoulder and went to look. Three vehicles rolled by, reflecting blades of sunlight.
“They’re going in the wrong direction,” he said.
“You can leave those here,” came a woman’s voice.
Jamil jumped round. A veiled figure was standing in the doorway.
“Under the bed,” she added.
Basil unslung his rifle and Jamil held out both guns by their barrels. “Thank you, Khalto.”
“We’ll collect them this evening,” said Basil.
“Inshallah,” said the woman wearily, a rifle in each hand.
The external staircase took them into a back alley, darkened by high stone. At the intersection, Basil gripped Jamil’s neck. Then he turned, hunched, in the direction of his brother’s house.
Jamil took the fastest route from the old city and was soon on the mountain, unarmed but for a small old dagger in his waistcoat. His alertness began to ebb. He thought of the first man, that shadow, featureless until the moment of death, when his body had blossomed forth and his hands slipped into view. He