East Jerusalem Noir by Rawya Jarjoura Burbara

Author:Rawya Jarjoura Burbara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books

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Years later, after numerous conflicts, more roads were closed and more barriers were erected by the city entrance. They turned into permanent checkpoints. The boy’s planets, stars, and galaxies gradually disappeared. The six-pointed star consumed even more of the cosmos.

The small room was now the boy’s alone. He brought colored chalk home from school—blue, red, and green—and drew galaxies and constellations on the wall and a spaceship taking off without fuel. The wall was collapsing because it had been poorly built and no new permits for construction were available in the city. A new settlement sprang up nearby, and the man in charge offered his father an opportunity to purchase a house. He refused, despite their pressure. The household consisted of a father, mother, and boy who wished to be an astronaut.

After high school, the boy studied at al-Quds University in the town of Abu Dis, near the eight-meter wall that separated it from Jerusalem. The university also had a modest branch inside the city. His father died, and the dilapidated house was passed down to him and his mother.

Representatives of the Israeli settlement projects called him in. They bargained with him, threatened him. On the table they placed a large check, along with a file that outlined the details of his life. They would make him an astronaut, a doctor in physics, a traverser of galaxies, anything, provided that he gave up the house. Well, boy, what do you want to be when you grow up? he remembered his old teacher asking.

With shaky hands, he ripped up the file and tore the check in two.

“I want my own house!” he declared to the enemy. “I don’t want galaxies. I just want to be myself. A pox on space and physics!”

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