Nora Barrows-Friedman

Subdued commemorations are happening all over the rocky hillsides of occupied Palestine; there are the throngs of children waving the colorful and banned Palestinian flag which whips in the hot springtime wind, the busloads of people trying to travel to city centers to hear stories of the Nakba, only to be stopped at checkpoints and ordered back to their dusty refugee camps and shrinking villages. 58 years after the Zionist militias lay siege to over 450 Palestinian towns and villages, Palestinian refugees are still waiting, holding the iron keys that unlock the doors to homes that no longer exist.

Today is my mother’s birthday. She called my cellphone as my dear friend Areej and I were walking in the late afternoon shadow of the brand-new Apartheid Wall and “terminal” seperating Bethlehem from the rest of the goddamn world. To prove that i was there, i held the phone up to the wall and slapped it as hard as i could. The “terminal,” as it is being called, is a cattle-catch maze of turnstyles and x-ray machines, all enclosed in an enormous building of wire and steel and sniper weapons with crosshairs tuned like a fiddle. This is on the “Jerusalem” side of the wall, which one is able to access only after papers are shuffled, cars are inspected, and people are humiliated and intimidated, or perhaps beaten and arrested and tortured.

Shadi sucks on two cigarettes at a time, the twin smoke curling up the side of his right arm like conjoined snakes. The Bethlehem air is crisp and wet; the main street hums with traffic. “Life has a beginning and an end, just like these cigarettes,” he says, pinching them between his calloused fingers. Shadi arches his eyebrow at me, squinting in the muted sunlight streaked across his face. He offers me his L&M pack. I take the last one, and we sit on the curb, silently smoking, watching the three bluish-gray plumes wind themselves up over our heads, dissipating across the concrete rooftops of Dheisheh camp, joining with the hazy fog cover, and settling, invisibly, into the atmosphere, to mingle with the ghosts.