Nablus

He remembers a city sitting on two hills, a city ancient and new, a winding city in the valley, on the slopes, the streetlamps under mist at night, at dusk, rising up like stars on either side, surrounded by the watchful red tower lights of army outposts. A sad beautiful place. He has come here to do four months of volunteer work, to see it with his own eyes, and to prove to himself that he is human, that he can cry and bleed at the altar of suffering like one ought to.

The morning before he arrives two people are killed, somewhere downtown, explosives in the early morning, flushing them out to be shot, or maybe they were killed in the explosion, maybe chunks of ceiling fell on them and crushed their skulls, or maybe it was all a myth conjured of blasting powder, dust and debris. No one knows.

He is immersed in the flood of disparate voices. The swaggering fighter boys who are failing high school, who lounge about on the sidewalk or in a car, slightly unhinged, full of bravado, who at night bear arms to shoot at and be shot at by army patrols, then the joking shopkeeper who is too serious to say anything serious, the proud university student who is too smart to become a fighter but swears he will fight with his life and mind, and the old man Saif whose name means sword and who briefly takes him in like a grandson, stopping him every day to tell him, in installments, how each of the old man’s living family members betrayed him, how they left the country or had a falling out with him, and why he in his old age, the oldest of five sons, is alone.

And the children. From every alleyway, on every street corner, children who curse him for being a foreigner, children who are quietly impressed that he has come to work here, children who speak to him in riddles, children whose bluster becomes abashed astonishment when they learn he can speak to them in their own tongue, children in raucous abandon pouring out from the nearby elementary school, children who cast angry stones at him, and children who meekly serve him tea and stare curiously but quietly when he comes calling at their houses by invitation of a parent or older brother.

He meets Hamza, who is five, when he accepts an invitation from Hamza’s mother and father to take tea with them. They are caretakers of a small Christian graveyard concealed behind a stone wall ten feet high at the foot of a staircase he takes daily to get to and from the volunteering office.

After tea, Hamza’s older brother takes him on a tour of the graveyard, which is a sunny lot overgrown with wild grasses and no more than thirty yards across lengthwise. Hamza tags along and is dressed in a Superman costume, apparently for no other reason than make-believe. Hamza clambers atop the highest tombstone on the highest knoll and shouts, “Should I fly? Should I fly?”

“Yes, yes,” they shout, “fly, Hamza.”

And Hamza leaps, arms outstretched before him like Superman, his cape trailing after him in a polyester arc, shimmering between the sky and the graves. As he lands in the grasses his legs give out so he rolls into the fall. His older brother cracks the type of mild smile reserved for younger children: loving, patronizing. He is about to resume the tour, when Hamza is again shouting:

“Should I fly? Should I fly?”

Hamza has already climbed back on the tombstone and is looking down at them expectantly.

He laughs. “Yes, yes! Fly, Hamza, fly,” he says.

Hamza catapults himself into the air, cracking up hysterically as he goes rolling through the flattened grasses, then leaps back up and races back to his perch atop the tombstone. His brother, tour forgotten, is laughing too.

It’s peculiar how children remember. He sees Hamza in the neighborhood every now and then, playing soccer, running with the other children—a hello, a funny comment, a relentless grin, but not much more. After his volunteer work is done, he leaves the city but returns for visits every few months. Hamza always remembers him as if he had never left, and when the months between visits became years and the visits slowly taper off, he sometimes guiltily wonders what ever happened to that five year old boy with the polyester cape who flew through the sky above the graves.