The rest of this site argues. This page only tells a story. It is fiction — a morning in Jenin, three years after independence — and it is the closest thing this document has to a photograph of what it is for.
The test train came through at 5:40, before the muezzin, and Abu Yusuf heard it the way he heard everything now: lying on his back in the dark, itemizing.
It was not a loud sound. That had surprised everyone. Forty years of Israeli jets had taught the town what speed sounds like, and speed sounded like the sky tearing. This was a low hum with a note inside it, rising and falling once as it passed the cut east of the camp, and then gone, south, toward Nablus and Ramallah and the tunnel under the hills and, eventually — next month, they said — the sea.
His nephew had a ticket for the first week. He had shown it to Abu Yusuf on his phone, the way the young showed everything now, holding the screen up like a merchant holding fruit. Jenin to Ramallah, twenty-two minutes. Jenin to the Gaza Corniche, two hours and ten. We're going for the day, uncle. Six of us. Marwan's brother works the solar park at Bureij and he says you can see the fishing boats come in at four. Karim was seventeen and had never seen the sea. Neither had his father at that age, nor Abu Yusuf at that age, and for them it had been a fact of life the way stones are a fact of a field. His nephew's generation had discovered it was an outrage. They were outraged for approximately one winter, and then the timetable was published, and the outrage became a plan for a Thursday.
Abu Yusuf rose, washed, prayed, and went down through the camp to the dye works before the heat.
The shaft was in the old dye works because the dye works had a cellar and the cellar had a floor nobody had poured concrete over since the Turks. Abu Nidal had chosen it in twenty minutes, walking the room twice with his hands behind his back like a doctor. He was from Khan Yunis, gray as ash, and he had dug under Egyptians and under Israelis and once, he said, under his own mother's kitchen without her knowing, and Abu Yusuf believed him. In Gaza in the old days, Abu Nidal said, a shaft like this would have forty boys on rotation and a waiting list. Boys fought to dig. It was wages and it was glory and the two were the same thing.
They had six men. The youngest was thirty-eight.
They went down in pairs, two hours on the face, the spoil going up in buckets to the room where Samir logged it in a notebook so the volume would match what they scattered in the wadi. The earth at nine meters was red and close and smelled like a grave and like childhood, both at once. Abu Yusuf worked the face with the short pick and thought, as he thought every shift now, about arithmetic.
The pay had been doubled in the spring. Then a bonus was added, cash, for every completed meter. The money came down from men Abu Yusuf had stopped asking about, through a channel he had spent thirty years respecting, and it sat in envelopes, and it could not buy a young back to save its life. He had gone himself to the coffee house on the hill where the seventeen-year-olds sat — he, Abu Yusuf, who at their age had carried a rifle through these same alleys while the whole camp fed him and hid him and named its sons for men like him — and he had spoken quietly to two boys whose fathers he knew, about duty, about dignity, about wages besides.
The boys had not argued. That was the thing he could not describe to Abu Nidal, who still believed it was fear. The boys were not afraid. One of them had turned his phone around — that gesture again, the merchant's gesture — and on the screen was the map that everyone's phone had now, the official one, the one in Arabic with the sectors drawn and named and numbered, and the boy had put his finger on the strip east of town, the Fadl orchards, the land taken in the bad year, '27, after the rocket that killed the two Israelis in Afula. Thirteen square kilometers. Two villages emptied into Jenin in a winter.
"Eleven months," the boy said. Not angry. Explaining. "Eleven more months clean and the orchards start coming back. My grandfather has the deed in a tin. He checks the counter every morning like it's the weather." The boy had looked at him — respectfully, that was the worst of it, with the respect owed to an old man from a great era — and said: "Whatever you are building, uncle, don't build it under my grandfather's eleven months."
Abu Yusuf had walked home the long way, past the mural.
The mural had been the three from '27, once — the boys who fired the Afula rocket — painted ten meters tall in the first week, keffiyehs and green bands, before anyone understood the new arithmetic. Then the bulldozers had come to the orchards exactly as the website said they would, exactly to the meter, six months' warning, not one soldier crossing, and the whole town had watched the Fadl family load a truck. Someone painted over the mural within the year. Nobody organized it; it was simply gray one morning. Now it carried an advertisement, or perhaps it was a promise: the Tariq Corridor, towers along a rail line in the southern desert, cranes and palms and a stadium like a white shell. NEW GAZA, it said. 250,000 HOMES. And underneath, smaller, in the confident sans-serif of the new ministries: Applications open — Technical University, Al-Bidaya. Engineering. Rail systems. Water.
His nephew's letter had come from that address in March. The whole building had heard his mother from the stairwell.
Of the three from '27: one was in Chile with a cousin, and did not call. One had married, finally, a widow, and worked the asphalt crew on the airport road, and kept his eyes down in the market, and Abu Yusuf had once seen a man refuse to sell him cigarettes — not dramatically, just turning to serve someone else until he left. The third did not leave his mother's house. His sister swept the step every morning and looked at no one.
They had cost the town thirteen square kilometers and, everyone knew the number, one hundred and ten million dollars — the agricultural station and the packing houses that had been Phase Five on the schedule, the ones with the sign already standing out past Qabatiya. The sign had come down quietly, like the mural. The land east of town would come back, insha'Allah, in eleven months; the boy's grandfather's counter said so, and the counter had been right about everything so far, right to the day, which was itself the strangest new fact in a country where nothing official had ever once been right to the day. But the packing houses were gone the way the dead are gone. There was a word for the three of them now in the camp's daily speech, and it was not shahid. It was a plainer word. It was the word you use for a man who steals from his family.
Abu Yusuf had said that word himself, once, before catching it in his teeth.
Midday, they came up from the shaft and ate in the shade of the cellar door: bread, oil, the tomatoes Abu Yusuf grew on his roof — everyone praised the tomatoes, every day, the same jokes — and Abu Nidal talked about Gaza. Not the war. Before, and after. His street in Khan Yunis was gone in the war and existed now only in his telling; his granddaughters lived in Al-Bidaya, the new city, in an apartment with a lift, and the youngest was on a football scholarship, a girl, and when the National Stadium opened in the autumn — the shell-white one from the mural — her school would march in the ceremony. He showed the photograph around: a gap-toothed child in a green kit, one foot on a ball, the cranes of the Corridor behind her like a forest of ships' masts.
"She asks me what I did in the old days," Abu Nidal said. "I tell her I was a farmer."
The men laughed, not much.
"You should tell her the truth," Samir said. "The truth is history."
"The truth is a shovel," Abu Nidal said, and stood, and went down again.
Abu Yusuf sat a moment longer with the last tomato in his hand. Through the cellar door, over the roofs, he could see the gantries of the rail line catching the light, and beyond them, hazed, the ridge where the fence ran — the light fence, theirs, the one that moved; the heavy one behind it, unseen from here, that never would. Eleven months. The tunnel wanted four more, Abu Nidal said, maybe five, to pass the buffer. And then it would lie there in the dark under the counter and the orchards and the grandfather's tin deed, loaded, a held breath under everything — waiting for an order from men in another country who had never once, in Abu Yusuf's long life in their service, been right to the day about anything.
He did the arithmetic. He had been doing it for weeks, at the face, in the dark, to the rhythm of the pick. Not the town's arithmetic — his own. Yusuf, for whom he was named the father, nineteen years in the ground of the bad decade. A brother in the ground of the decade before. What the service of the channel had bought his family in forty years, itemized; and against it, a girl in a green kit with one foot on a ball, and a boy with a train ticket, holding up the sea on a screen like fruit.
He did not go down after the meal. He told Abu Nidal his back, and Abu Nidal looked at him for a long moment with his ash-gray eyes and said nothing at all, which meant everything, and turned to the shaft.
Abu Yusuf walked up through the camp in the four-o'clock light, past the coffee house, past the gray mural with its white towers, to the hilltop where the old antenna used to be. In the box under his bed at home there was a camera, his mother's gift, from the years when he had wanted — he could barely conjure it — to photograph birds. He had not brought it. Next time, perhaps. From the hill the whole valley was laid out plain: the town, the camp, the cut where the rail ran silver toward Ramallah, the dark line of the orchards east that were not yet anyone's again, and would be. The counter in every phone in the valley stood at three hundred and thirty-some days and, below it, in small gray type, the sum of everything: no incidents recorded.
The evening train came through on its test run, south, low, that one rising and falling note, carrying nobody yet. In a month it would carry his nephew to the sea.
Abu Yusuf sat on the hill until the light went copper, and the muezzin called, and he prayed there on the stone, and afterward he stayed sitting for a long time, no longer itemizing, just listening to the valley's new quiet — which was not peace, he would have told anyone who asked, not yet, not for men like him. It was only quiet. But he had lived sixty-one years in the noise, and he knew the difference now, and he thought about the packet of seeds on the shelf at home, and decided that tomorrow, early, before the heat, he would put in the tomatoes.
Fiction, of course. But every mechanism in it — the counter, the queue, the sectors on the phone, the fence that moves and the one that never does, the orchards' eleven months, the cancelled Phase Five, the train, the university, the stadium — is specified, priced, and scheduled in the chapters of this plan. The story is what the arithmetic is for.