The Other End of the Sea by Alison Glick

Author:Alison Glick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Interlink Publishing Group Inc
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bright morning light flooded into the room where I lay. My eyes opened to an unfamiliar ceiling. It was one of those mornings where I had to consciously remember where I was. I could hear the unmuffled sounds emitted by the creative transportation options in the camp: three-wheel motorized jitneys generically called Suzukis; circa-1950s banana yellow Chevrolets, and the occasional over-burdened donkey pulling a flat-bed cart. I dressed quickly and emerged from the room to find Khalid and Abdel Karim already drinking coffee with Fida. I joined them, and we made a plan to meet with various political connections they had who might help.

Like the camp itself, this world that I was about to enter was vaguely familiar, but also marked with a foreignness that I hadn’t anticipated. The first time I walked outside it was startling to see Palestinian flags fluttering alongside pictures of Yasser Arafat or other Palestinian leaders; in the Territories such gestures would bring a stint in prison, at the very least.

There were offices I visited during the two weeks I was there that were dedicated to working on different aspects of the Palestinian cause: the office of the Occupied Territories; the office of foreign relations; the office of youth programs; the press office. They all had people sitting behind desks, bored-looking guards, and coffee break rooms.

I had come to understand the Palestinian struggle through the lens of the intifada: protests and strikes called by the grassroots leadership and increasing calls to boycott Israeli goods. In the West Bank when schools were closed during the intifada, underground classrooms were established to continue educating the population. To avoid detection by the Israeli army when walking to “school,” students and teachers would camouflage their books and teaching materials in grocery bags under loaves of bread and cartons of eggs. Here, resistance and state-building was a nine-to-five job, with a lunch break and health benefits. Why did I register this with a sense of unease?

Once again I met several friends of Zayn’s from Palestine—prison and after—and others who had clearly heard of him but who didn’t actually know him. Those who knew him would, upon meeting me, pump my arm and exclaim giddily, “Hathee marat Zayn! This is Zayn’s wife!” The others would extend their arms and ask, “Hathee marat Zayn?”

In the end it was decided that I would return to Cairo via Amman, taking with me money and instructions for Zayn, rolled into yet another tiny capsule that I was to give no one but him. Even I did not know what it said.

Standing in a queue at the Cairo airport, every few minutes I heard the dull thump of the stamp land on someone’s passport. I shuffled closer to the immigration control counter. Behind it, I could see the droopy, raisin eyes of a young man flicker between his desk and the person in front of him. His pressed-crisp uniform, the color and shape of a desert mirage, stood out against the shabby browns and grays of the terminal.

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