In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees. Jeff Talarigo
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I was twelve, not eleven as I had once thought, when my grandfather first took me to the cemetery of the oranges.
We had just finished lunch and my grandfather told me to come with him to the market. I thought nothing of it, for I had gone there with him on many occasions, but when we walked up School Street, away from the market, I wanted to say something, but I did not.
It was at that time of year, late autumn, when the leaves of the giant willow began to turn a crinkled brown. I hated that season when the tree lost its green umbrella, the time when we most needed its protection from the cold, rainy months of January and February. As we passed the garbage bins, I ignored the goats that were nibbling through the rubbish, the same goats that my friends and I threw small stones at, imagining they were soldiers.
We came to the end of School Street to where one could either turn left or right. Before us, the fractured remains of what once was the railroad that ran from the great cities of the Ottoman Empire, through Gaza, all the way across the north of Africa to Morocco.
It was beyond theses tracks, however, that lay something much more important: a place I and most of the children in the camp were forbidden to go. Stories varied from family to family as to why we shouldn’t cross these tracks; two boys, my age, were playing there with an unexploded cluster bomb when it detonated and killed the both of them; a girl, the daughter of a sheik, was last seen crossing into the field, never to be seen again; it was a sacred place, where the corpses of thousands of orange trees lay.
My grandfather stared down at me, his bent black-framed glasses made his dark eyes smaller than when he drew his sketches in his notebook without them. He took my hand and we looked both ways along the rusty tracks as if the trains had last passed by that morning and not forty years before. We climbed the slight incline, him with his limp, and over the tracks.
We continued along in the field skirting the north end of the camp and soon, after crossing several dusty knolls, we arrived at a place tucked behind a knot of acacia shrubs. I stopped, as did my grandfather, when I saw the glorious blue swath of the sea. I had, of course, been to the sea, only two miles away, but from there in the field, from that distance, I had never seen it so blue and with those blinking eyelashes of white.
So distracted, I didn’t notice the small group of men sitting in a circle around a snapping fire. We walked down the hill and my grandfather greeted the men, all, I could see, were older than him, which surprised me for my grandfather was perhaps the oldest person I knew. Several of the men sat on old plastic chairs, others on flattened boxes, and they all shifted clockwise to make space for the both of us. My grandfather and I shared a piece of cardboard and when we sat I could no longer see the sea.
The wind agitated the fire and I gazed into its agitation. No one said anything until one of the men, a spindly man with a scatter of teeth, reached into his worn jacket and held out two cigarettes, splayed in his hand like the “V” for victory sign we flashed the soldiers. He held the cigarettes like that, his hand trembling. Another man and then another did the same until all the men, except my grandfather, were holding out two cigarettes. My grandfather reached into his robe and unfolded a red handkerchief and placed it on the ground where each of the men tossed their cigarettes; one edge of the handkerchief blew overtop them. My grandfather leaned over and folded the remaining ends of the handkerchief and left it sitting there.
He began to talk:
“As a child growing up in the Hula Valley I was always shooting small stones at the birds with my slingshot. The stones were too tiny to kill the birds, I never wanted to kill them, but if I hit them in the correct spot, the head or maybe the proper crease in the wing, I could stun them just long enough for me to run over and touch them. I loved the feel of their soft, yet taut feathers, their oily heads and tiny claws digging their fear into my palm. The only way that I could touch them was if I hurt them a little.
“One day I hit a small bird in the head and it fell from an olive tree and lay unmoving in the dirt. I picked up the injured bird, and after a few minutes, I tried to release it into the sky, but it was injured so badly it couldn’t fly away.
“Not knowing what to do, I took the tiny brown bird into the grain storage bin, which sat at the back of our house. Each day after working in the fields I would run home and feed it water and pieces of grain by hand. I did this for about a week and still the bird was unable to fly. One day, a Friday, I snuck a piece of string from my mother’s sewing basket and tied it around the bird’s claw. Its thin neck throbbed. The string was about a yard long and when I threw the bird into the air it would try flapping its wings, but soon the string ran out, and the bird would be yanked backward and left suspended, upside down, in mid-air, the string in my hand.
“My best friend, Nawaf, loved to watch the helpless bird, and after seeing his reaction, I decided to try and get more of these birds and sell them. I spent all my free time with the slingshot looking for birds. I used bigger stones to shoot the birds down, killing some in the process, but finally I had five birds like the first, too injured to fly away. I took five more pieces of string and went to the other villages trying to sell the birds. One boy from the neighboring village was angry and said that three mil was too much and that he would go and shoot his own birds. The argument turned into a fight and it brought a woman out of her house, and she broke it up. The woman happened to know my mother, and the next time she saw her at the market, she told her what I had been doing. That night, my mother took me onto the roof of the house and lectured me on how I should treat all of Allah’s creations.
“She then made me kneel in our stony courtyard and recite sura 4:19 from the Koran: ‘Allah forgives those who commit evil in ignorance and then quickly turn to Him in repentance. Allah will pardon them. Allah is all-knowing and wise. But He will not forgive those who do evil and, when death comes to them, say; Now we repent!’
“I repeated this sura until the moon dropped behind the date palms.”
The dying fire was the only voice when my grandfather stopped. I sat there listening to the life of the fire, which spoke in the cadence of poetry. Reaching out, my grandfather picked up the handkerchief and placed it in his pocket. He stood, as did I, and said goodbye to the men.
Once out of the field he spoke the only words to me since we left our house: “It is in the cemetery of the orange trees that we keep alive our story.”
We continued through block number six and I saw a cluster of pigeons flying by, reminding me of the birds in the story; I thought of asking my grandfather about the birds in his story and what happened to them, but like earlier in the day, I said nothing. We ended up at the western end of the market. My grandfather held my hand, but then, when we came to the butcher’s he let go, leaving a chilled sheen of sweat on it.
Staring at me with huge bulbous eyes was a sheep’s head; eyes so much like glass that I wanted to reach out and touch them. But the longer I met the eyes the more I thought that they were like ice rather than glass—cold to the touch, unlike glass which holds the warmth the longer one keeps their hand against it.
Then, in the reflection of the sheep’s eye, I saw the red of my grandfather’s handkerchief. I spun and looked at him. He unfolded the handkerchief, revealing the cigarettes, which looked like the whitest fingers I had ever seen—sixteen of them.
The butcher took all but one of the cigarettes and he went to the cage that held the squawking chickens. As the man opened the cage, it became difficult, if not impossible, to tell the individual chickens from the frantic flock. By the neck, the butcher grabbed one and held it up and my grandfather nodded in approval and before I knew what had happened, the knife, which I hadn’t even seen, severed the head from the body. By the claws the butcher held the chicken, the stream of blood draining onto the ground until it slowed like the water dripped into the basin that I stood in on my Friday night showers.
My grandfather took the chicken by the claws and handed me the head, which the butcher had placed in a small waxed bag. Walking