In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees. Jeff Talarigo
in the pocket of the goat’s jacket. He led me in the direction of the market and when we drew close, he stopped.
“Why do we allow that tower to stand?”
I turned to the watchtower a hundred yards away.
“What do you propose we do?”
“I don’t propose anything. But imagine how simply we as a group could bring it down. With all the people we have in the camp, we could…”
A beam from the large spotlight stabbed us from above. Blinded, I shielded my eyes with my arm. Soon the headlights from a jeep and then another found us.
“Don’t move,” shouted the soldiers, about thirty yards away. I obeyed them, but the goat moved away from me and closer to the wall.
“We said to stop!”
“Listen to them,” I told the goat, but he acted as though he didn’t hear.
“Not another step!”
“He’s just a goat,” I said.
“I don’t care what he is.”
“A simple goat; he can’t understand you.”
The soldiers edged closer. “What is he wearing?”
“A jacket,” I answered. “He’s cold.”
“You just told me he’s a goat. How the hell do you know he is cold?”
I almost said that the goat had told me, but I caught myself.
“I just know. It’s my goat.”
“Do you have a permit for the goat?”
“A permit?”
“You are not allowed to have any animal without a permit from the army.”
“Goats need IDs?”
The goat took one step and then another toward the soldiers. Several shots were fired. The goat was thrown back ten feet before he hit the ground. He didn’t move. The guns were trained on me.
“You. Go and remove the jacket from the goat. Slowly.”
With guns raised, the soldiers began to back away from us. I went cautiously to the goat and knelt over him. I could see that he was dead.
“You sons of a whore. You killed the last goat from the village of al-Jiyya.”
“Remove the jacket!”
Slowly, gently, I tried to unzip the coat, but the zipper caught and my shuddering hands could not release it.
“Take the jacket off!”
The blood of the goat had begun to pond in the street. I stared at it. Again, I worked on the zipper, and finally, it came free. I lifted the goat’s left leg from a sleeve and began on the right. As I pushed the hoof up through the fabric, the leg broke cleanly in two. Sensing the soldiers about to open fire, I shoved the remainder of the leg through the sleeve and managed to remove the jacket. I held it up for the soldiers to see that there was nothing in it. No bomb. No weapon. Nothing other than a piece of flatbread, which fell to the street.
The soldiers drove away, leaving the both of us where they had found us. I didn’t want to take the goat back to Ghassan immediately. Of course there was no traffic, so I didn’t even bother to move him. Although we were near some houses, no one looked out their doors or windows.
I sat by the goat and didn’t really think that much at all about how I would get him to his master’s house, five minutes away. I didn’t think about what Ghassan would say to me, the person he’d entrusted with the goat. Nor did it occur to me that I no longer had work and would soon return to chiseling away the hours of daytime just to get to the hours of sleep.
I picked up the severed right leg and studied the goat’s hoof. Sturdy, yet delicate. I placed it atop the goat’s body. Every once in a while, the beam of light from the watchtower passed; strangely, it didn’t blind me as before, but somehow seemed now to be a part of me. The light stretched over and past us, across the blocks of six, seven, eight, and nine, and in the direction of the sea, then to the city three miles away, then to the south, and back into Jabaliya. Nothing else happened. My heart continued to knock on the closet of my chest and I listened to it. When I was a child, after playing soccer, I would stick my fingers in my ears and listen to the drumming of my heart. But I needed no fingers in my ears that night.
Like that I waited for the call to prayer, but it didn’t come. Rather, from up the street, the clopping of a donkey cart could be heard and it became louder until it was upon me.
The man, whom I didn’t recognize, spoke to me from the cart.
“What happened?”
“The soldiers killed Ghassan Abu Majed’s goat.”
He looked down at me, the night still slipping into dawn. I noticed for the first time that the man was hauling several dozen watermelons. He stepped down from the cart.
“Let me help you.”
We placed the goat onto the back end of the cart.
“Is this Ghassan, the one from al-Jiyya?”
“Yes, he lives in block six.”
I went back and picked up the jacket and thought that winter was such a long time away, and only the savage months of summer awaited.
I knew Ghassan would be up, for once he had told me he wakes at 4:30 exactly, sleeping away the entire curfew. That way he ignores it. My life, he told me, is fifteen-and-a-half-hour days.
Before the cart made it to Ghassan’s house I saw him standing in the street and he came to meet us. He said nothing, barely gave me a glance, but went to the back of the cart, where he lifted the goat into his arms and carried him away.
I don’t remember if I thanked the man with the cart or not. I cut through the alleyway and home. My wife said nothing as I walked inside; she may have sighed a sad sigh when I refused the food she offered, that I also do not remember.
I heard that Ghassan went to the field where the orange grove once stood and shoveled a grave. He dug and dug, refusing anyone’s help, and while he dug no one left the field, in fact more and more people gathered.
Night had fallen when Ghassan finished digging. So deep was the hole that several men had to link themselves into a human rope in order to help Ghassan climb out.
Well into the incarceration of curfew, the procession left the field and passed through the camp. Everyone was certain that the soldiers were all places—in the alleys, on the rooftops, somehow a part of the graffiti on the walls, even in the willow tree. We could have told them differently, the goat and I, but who would have believed us?
No one saw Ghassan Abu Majed again. The morning after he buried his goat, Ghassan’s wife checked the front room of the house, where he had been sleeping since their grandchild was born eight weeks before. When she didn’t find her husband in the room, she thought nothing of it, believing he was at morning prayers.
She went outside and cleaned the clothes and the sun had begun to scorch them and still her husband had not returned. She asked passersby if they had seen him; all offered their condolences for the goat and added that, no, they had not seen Ghassan.
The heat of summer baked the streets of Jabaliya and dried the freshly washed black jeans of the youth within twenty minutes. Each afternoon at about three o’clock, the men of block six would take their