Hamdu and Samya began to meet in the park behind the Knesset. They preferred mornings, when Israeli children are at school and the area is deserted, save for the odd German pensioner from the Rehavia quarter taking the air. To arrive there together would have been unwise. Each took a different route. If Samya ran into an acquaintance she would pretend to be on her way to a haberdasher or some other innocuous destination.
It worked well, and during summer they linked up several times in Israeli parks. A few evenings when Samya’s family was away at a wedding or a celebration, she told her parents she had to study with Mary in Jerusalem and went and saw Hamdu in the park instead.
But one evening their scheme came to grief. Samya’s mother called Mary’s house and asked to speak to her daughter. Luckily Mary, not her mother, answered. Samya’s mother said that the feast had finished early and now she wondered if they should come and pick up Samya at Mary’s. Mary kept her calm, knowing she was Samya’s alibi.
‘Samya just left; we also finished early,’ she said.
‘Ah, so she took the bus.’
‘Yes.’
This was a flagrant lie, but what else could she have done? Now she was in a fine stew. In less than an hour Samya’s parents would be back home, and if their daughter arrived much later it would be the undoing of the status quo in that home. Mary went into emergency-decision mode. She went to her mother and said she could feel a migraine attack coming on and asked her for the car so that she could go and buy her medicine at the pharmacy on duty. It workedher parents were much easier to handle than Samya’s. Mary knew where Samya and Hamdu used to spend their illicit evenings; that is, she knew about the park below the Knesset. But she had never been there. She had to ask people along the way, in English, for directions. Mary imagined Sacker Park as a small green plot with a couple of benches. How was she to find them in a kilometer-long jumble of groves and winding paths? Mary clenched her teeth and pushed into the darkness.
‘Samya,’ she called out in Arabic. ‘Where are you? Something has happened.’
Startled shadows looked up from cumbersome park-bench embraces. After some time there was a shout answering back and then Samya came running toward her. Mary explained it all; they had no time to lose.
‘Get in the car,’ said Mary, ‘I’ll drive you to the village. Hamdu will have to manage by himself; with him in the car we’ll get stuck at a roadblock.’
They took off, back to East Jerusalem and the main road to Ramallah. By the Israeli checkpoint at al-Ram, two Ethiopian border policemen put floodlights in their faces and waved them on.
‘What luck,’ said Mary. ‘Now we’ll make it. But tidy up, for heaven’s sake. Brush your clothes and comb the straw out of your hair.’ In Biddu, Katanna’s neighboring village, Mary caught up with the bus.
‘Honk at him, please,’ said Samya, I’d like to get on the bus. If my mother is waiting for me at the bus stop and sees me arriving in your car she’ll put two and two together.’
Such was their lovemaking most of the time, with mythological obstacles blocking the way to diversions we regard as innocent and self-evident. But in spite of all the bother Hamdu and Samya had managed something most West Bank youths only dream ofthey had established a premarital amorous relationship. For us the right to socialize with the opposite sex is a social axiom; for them it was a grace bestowed on the lucky few.
Translated by Nathan Shachar.