The Way to the Spring by Ben Ehrenreich

Author:Ben Ehrenreich
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-26T14:26:22+00:00

The first time I crossed Qalandia by foot was in the spring of 2011. I was staying with a friend from Jayyous. The wall had wrecked the economy there. Among other things. There was no work, and the horizon had been literally cemented off. He and his brothers moved to Ramallah, where they shared an apartment not far from the al ’Amari refugee camp. I slept in their dining room on a narrow bed pressed up against the wall.

One morning, a few minutes before my alarm was set to ring, I woke to a door squeaking open. Two bare legs shuffled past me toward the bathroom. I heard water running, the toilet flushing. When the bathroom door opened, a light-haired woman in her twenties walked by and disappeared into one of the brothers’ bedrooms. I got up, pulled on a pair of pants, and lit the stove to boil water for coffee. The woman emerged from the bedroom. I mumbled a good morning. She nodded, miserably, and made a small show of pulling her key to the apartment from her pocket and placing it on the coffee table.

“The key,” she said. Then she opened the apartment door, and left.

I hadn’t seen her before and if I ever met her since that day—which I very likely did, because Ramallah is an overgrown village—I didn’t recognize her, so I never learned what happened. It was clear enough from her eyes, though, and from the tense slump of her shoulders, that I had been the unwanted witness to a breakup, and the beginning of a very bad morning. I choked down a cup of coffee, grabbed my bag, checked my pockets for my wallet and passport, and locked the door behind me.

I had an appointment in Bethlehem, which meant that I had choices. I could flag a taxi to the center of Ramallah and take another shared taxi from the bus station there straight to Bethlehem. Or not straight exactly—Jerusalem lay between the two cities, which meant that long, wide loop through the Container checkpoint and Wadi Naar. Which meant it might actually be faster to hop a taxi to Qalandia, cross the checkpoint on foot, and take a bus from the Jerusalem side to the main depot on the Nablus Road in East Jerusalem, where I could catch another bus to Bethlehem. Such conveniences, of course, were not available to everyone.

So it was that I ended up weaving my way between the cars idling as they waited and inched and inched and waited in the shadow of the wall. Maybe it’s the stonecutters’ yard a few hundred meters away, or the exhaust from all the idling cars and trucks and buses, or the black powder left by burning tires, but I do not believe there is any spot in Palestine dustier than Qalandia. Until 2000, there was no checkpoint there at all, just a road like any other leading from one city to another. That year, the monster was born. It began

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