In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees. Jeff Talarigo
a tasty morsel. I would listen to and sometimes watch the goat work his jaws, nostrils wet and splaying in rhythm, until the food was mashed enough so that it could easily slide down his throat. Sometimes he would stare at me watching him and I would remember what Ghassan had said. On several occasions, I thought the goat was about to speak, but I laughed at myself for allowing sleepiness to grapple with my imagination.
So it was, the nights passing in near silence, the sickle of the moon growing to half, giving the goat a cleaner white coat than in the harsh reality of the sun.
The quiet allowed much time for thought: of my only son wasting away his youth in an unknown prison for an unknown amount of time, while the moon I watch, then the nineteenth moon since I last saw him, goes about as it always has. But the goat was a distraction. A goat that has divided the people of Jabaliya into two groups—those who believe in its sacredness, the fifth generation of goats from the village of al-Jiyya, the fourth generation living here in this camp, and those for whom the goat is only a bitter, humbling reminder of what once was and never will be again.
And which side do you fall on, I asked myself. A good question, but I am afraid my answer was trapped somewhere in the abyss between trying to forget what happened to my people and trying never to forget. That began to change on my twelfth night with the goat.
About two-thirds of the way through curfew, the goat looked up at me from the wilted leaf of lettuce it was nibbling on.
“Pssst.” The goat pointed his nose down the street.
I must say that I was startled, and had to place both hands against the ground to keep myself steady. When I continued to stare at the goat and not in the direction he pointed, he again nodded his head and spoke the words: “Over there.”
I did as he said and saw, coming up the street, five figures dressed in black from hood to shoe. I didn’t move, hoping that I would become one with the garbage pile and the wall. Across the street and twenty yards down, the figures stopped. Two of them began spray-painting the wall of a house while the others jogged in place, holding small hatchets in the air. I looked at the goat and he too was watching as the wall became a beach of white paint, and then a map of green with a blood-red hawk splitting the country in half. This is how, I thought, the walls of Jabaliya were painted. When the goat looked over at me, I am certain that he was half-smiling and thinking exactly the same thing.
With each passing night, the goat talked more and more. Still, most nights he grazed in silence as we discovered the stories of the curfew-enshrouded camp. We rarely saw the soldiers that I, and I am certain many others among the hundred thousand refugees in Jabaliya, thought were everywhere. These same soldiers who stalked our dreams and dared us to peek out our doors or tiny shuttered windows. In fact, in those first two weeks, I—we—saw soldiers only once, and that in passing. On several occasions, we had seen headlights skulking the streets of blocks five and six, but, although we’d assumed they were jeeps, they could as easily have been workers returning from their cheap-labor jobs in the orange fields and kitchens and butcher shops of the occupiers.
“Where are all the soldiers?” I asked the goat late one night, unusual for me; I usually listened.
The words dangled there for a while before the goat rose on his hind legs, pressing his front hooves against the graffiti-painted wall; each click they made along the cement raced through the encroaching dawn like gunfire. He chewed on a leaf from a locust tree, then another. More time passed before he turned to me and plainly uttered his answer to my question.
“They rule us by our imaginations.”
“How do you mean?”
“Just look at you now. You are studying me standing here, thinking that I look like the soldiers have me against the wall, patting me down, checking my identification papers.”
“So what if I am thinking that?”
“Where else, other than this place, would someone think of something as ridiculous as a goat being patted down by soldiers? How often all over the world are goats doing the same thing, just stretching for something to busy their mouths? And yet, even though you see exactly what I am doing, you don’t pay attention to what you are seeing, but rather, you are imagining, crazy though it may be, what the army has seared into your mind.”
I moved my eyes to the dust. The goat went back to picking at the leaves. If I’d had a watch I would have checked it and kept checking, counting the minutes until my work finished for the night and I could go home to where my wife was making fresh bread, which I would break and share with her before going off to my mat to sleep.
The nineteenth moon had abandoned Jabaliya and the night was cool, not cold, for mid-May. The air held in it the feel of rain, but the rainy season was seven months away.
That night the goat was acting a little strange, not his talkative self, and in the first hours of darkness we had only walked a short way from Ghassan’s. In fact, we were only fifty yards from my house—so close that when I asked the goat if he was okay and he replied that he was feeling slightly chilled, I offered to get him a jacket.
“No, don’t trouble yourself,” he said.
To which I said, “Don’t be ridiculous, the house is a minute away. Come on, you can meet my wife.”
“I’ll stay here and wait.”
“Ghassan told me to never let you out of sight.”
“It’s fine. Like you said, the house is right over there.”
With that I went up the street, but I looked back two or three times, feeling uncomfortable about leaving the goat alone, even for a short while. Once, he raised his leg in a wave, as if he were telling me not to worry. Before opening the door of my house, I looked yet again and the goat hadn’t moved from where he stood. My wife gave me a surprised look when she saw me.
“I have only come for a jacket.”
“Where’s the goat?”
“Just outside.”
“You told me you weren’t supposed to leave him alone.”
“He’s cold. Do we have something he can wear?”
My wife went into the bedroom and came out with a jacket of our son’s.
“This should fit him better than one of yours, although I have never clothed a goat before.”
I wasn’t certain if my wife was joking or not, so I thanked her and went back outside. Down the street, I saw nothing, but I wasn’t too concerned. Each step I took, still unable to see the goat, increased my anxiety, so much so that halfway down School Street I began to run, cradling the jacket under my arm. I searched everywhere, saying nothing, for if the soldiers were in the area I didn’t want to alert them in any way. Then I heard a haunting snicker coming from above. I forced my head toward the sound and saw the goat atop one of the houses.
Relieved that he was okay, I did not question how he came to be up there. I held out the jacket and the goat jumped from the ten-foot-high roof, landing gently on the street.
“Let me help you,” I offered.
The goat lifted his front right hoof through the left sleeve, then the left hoof through the right, and I zipped the coat up his back, careful not to snag his fur. The sleeves were a bit loose, but the length nearly perfect and it fit snuggly.
“Like it was made for you.”
“Thank you,” said the goat.
“Are you hungry?” I held out a piece of flatbread given to