This novel begins with the Palestinian Nakba and ends in the present, but the actual time of its characters is the seventies and eighties in the city of Ramallah.
What preceded these two decades seems to be a deliberate introduction and what came after them is an inevitable ending. Ramallah was a fateful refuge for the two protagonists of the novel that they did not choose, and when Israel occupied it following the 1967 war, a new and different life began, even contrary to the known life of most Palestinians after the Naksa.
What began with a chance meeting between a woman and a young man ended with a special operation by a secret organization, which turned their lives into questions, possibilities and secrets. Between the promising beginning and the suspended ending is a fictional history of the characters’ lives and a large portion of the life of Ramallah, at its heart the lawyer professor who gave the woman her new life and she returned it to him without him knowing.
Looking back on those years now, they seem ambiguous, forcing the young man in the novel, the old man in his current old age, to apologetically remember his life and the reasons for the lady’s disappearance from it. His narration of his life intersects with a narrated biography of the lady’s life with the lawyer professor. This intersection does not seem to be preoccupied with a narrative multiplicity as much as it is preoccupied with singling out their biographies and proposing them as a special lens to look at Ramallah in those years.
The reader will find here a language that cannot be described as difficult, nor is it described as easy either. It is the language of a literary text and not just a tool for presenting the story. In this novel, a unique Palestinian spirit pours out completely.
From the novel:
As for me, I am the refugee who remained in Ramallah. An exciting beginning to my youth. I have never known anyone like me. A young man who had not yet reached twenty remained alone in Ramallah on the eve of the Naksa. How vast life would seem if it were not for the voice of this Israeli who prevents movement every day. I had the high school student’s excitement, and I was hungry for everything. On certain mornings I felt like I would walk out the door and start devouring the world, the houses, the streets, the trees, the clouds, and people, especially women. Nothing held me back except the need for money to live after my family left me, and that voice announcing the night curfew. Sometimes, when I think of my old age and those young days, I think that the Israeli curfew that Ramallah knew in many stages left it with a lazy nature, one that goes to bed early and wakes up late. And in a city that goes to bed early and wakes up late, the most important thing that happens in it happens in the homes.