Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation. Colm Toibin

and become a full-time driver.”

      For twelve years, the police failed to investigate the murder. Worse, they insinuated that it was Sami who had killed his brother. I was with Sami in the car when he finally got the news that he’d been waiting a decade for: they had found the culprit. I was impressed at how restrained Sami was. He did not even flinch, just kept on driving. Most Palestinians have learned to keep their anger down, to control their emotions, to spare themselves for the long haul, a lifetime of hardship and difficulties of life at the top of a volcano ready to erupt at any moment. How I wished I were like that.

      Now, in the car, Sami began another story. He told me how once he was driving a young disabled woman through the Jordan Valley and they were stopped at a checkpoint. The guards there gave this young woman a very hard time. They wanted Sami to take her heavy wheelchair out of the trunk. But Sami, who is no wimp, told them that his job was to drive, and if they wanted to search the chair they could take it out themselves. “We Arabs are forgiving,” he commented. “We are willing so quickly to forget and forgive. But they are different.”

      Every time Sami dropped me off at home, I would think about how for me, my anxiety was over, while Sami still had to pass through the Qalandiya checkpoint again on his way back home to Jerusalem. It was worse when his sons would call asking how long would it be before their father got home. This made me feel very guilty.

      During another drive, I asked him why he didn’t find a place outside the city in one of the suburbs on the Palestinian side of the checkpoint. He told me that he already had a house in Kufr Aqab. It has a garden. He bought it when the area was within the boundaries of Greater Jerusalem. “Then one day,” he said, “I saw a man painting a big X on my fence. I asked him what he was doing and he said this is to indicate that the house has been moved outside the area of Jerusalem. Overnight I was chucked out of the city. I found a flat in At-Tur in an area that is so congested that one person complained that his neighbor’s alarm clock woke him up.”

      Sami started again with another story aimed at distracting me.

      “The other day,” he began, “I was taking my two sons to Jerusalem from our home in Kufr Aqab. When we reached Qalandiya I got a call from a client for a job. I dropped off my two sons at the checkpoint and called my brother to pick them up on the other side. As I waited to see them going through on foot I saw a soldier beating one of them. I went over. I asked the soldier why he had done this.

      “‘Your son lied to me. He told me he has no identification card.’

      “‘But it’s true. This is why he’s carrying his birth certificate. Here it is. You can see he’s not yet sixteen and not qualified to be issued an ID card.’” To me Sami commented: “They want to crush the spirit of the young. That’s what they’re after.”

      While I was trying to absorb the sinister behavior of the army, Sami, with hardly a pause, resumed his storytelling. “Imagine what I saw the other day when I went to fill up gas in Ramallah at the station near the Beit El settlement. Nearby, huge numbers of Palestinian police were standing in formation. I asked them why, and they said Abu Mazen, the Palestinian president, was planning to have lunch at Darna restaurant and they were waiting for him. Just as we were speaking, an Israeli tank rolled into the station, followed by a military jeep and an army personnel carrier. They parked at the station and several soldiers went to the upper floor above the station. They came down with a young man in handcuffs. They blindfolded him, threw him in the jeep, and drove away. The Palestinian police just looked the other way, waiting to take their president, their rais,