Free Miral by Rula Jebreal

blonde hair. On the woman’s left, a nymph offers a cloak. Behind her, the ocean’s horizon is lost in the blue of the sky. The girl wakes up. Fatima hands her the book and smiles. For an instant, the world seems to be in harmony with the image in the book, even inside that crowded bus, on the bumpy streets of Jerusalem, with its white houses piled one on top of another and the Mount of Olives in the background.
    Then the cell door opens with the grating metallic sound that awakens her each morning.
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    Fatima eased into consciousness, her head still full of the painting she had dreamed about. After a moment, she raised her upper body a little to see which guard was on duty. But the door had closed again, and Fatima found herself looking at a tall, slender young woman with full lips, light brown eyes that almost seemed yellow, and long, straight black hair. “But there’s no room for Venus in this tormented land,” Fatima thought. “This is where beauty dies.”
    Without much enthusiasm, she said hello to her new cell mate, turning on her side and resting her head on her pillow.
    Nadia gave a slight nod, her only response, and then quickly clambered up to the top bunk. After a few seconds, however, she came down again, walked over to the water basin, observed its contents with a certain disgust, and asked how often they changed the water.
    â€œIt depends,” Fatima replied.
    â€œDepends on what?”
    â€œOn the guards. Look, everything in here’s like that, more or less. Your best course is to get used to it,” Fatima concluded, sitting on the edge of her bed.
    Nadia shrugged, but a brief smile crossed her lips. She felt an immediate sympathy for this short, compact woman with frizzy hair, green military trousers, and a flat nose that added an element of character to her face.
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    Their differences provided the glue that held them together, a friendship born in a prison where they were the only Arab women and where, moreover, one of them had been arrested for political reasons. By a sort of alchemy whose deeper workings remained a secret to both of them, unaccustomed as they were to sharing confidences with strangers, it took them only a few days to understand that they could trust each other. They quickly began to unburden themselves, and when they could find no words to explain their meaning, a look or gesture would suffice. And so they discovered that during the very period when Nadia had begun to work as a waitress at the restaurant in Jaffa, Fatima was gradually drawing closer to political activism. Their worlds were far apart, but they had both ended up inside the confined space of a prison cell, and in their months of forced cohabitation the wariness that had enveloped their two existences subsided. Both of the women, but particularly Nadia, found that it was possible to look at the past in a new light.
    â€œWeren’t you afraid?” Nadia asked one day, when Fatima was telling her about the attempted attack.
    â€œNo, not for a minute. It was like this, Nadia: Fear wasn’t an emotion I could feel, because I basically didn’t care about anything, including my own life. The only thing that counted was the success of our plan—I couldn’t see past that.”
    Nadia stared at her new friend, amazed. It was the first time she had ever met anyone so involved in the Palestinian cause. Nadia had never considered herself either an Arab or an Israeli, and the vagaries of politics had made little or no impression on her. And here she was now, in the company of a woman who had given everything she had for something whose necessity Nadia couldn’t even see. What most fascinated her about Fatima was her fearlessness, especially her indifference to her own fate. Nadia wasn’t all that attached to her own life either, but the difference was that if she were to risk it, it certainly wouldn’t be while fighting for a cause. Except, perhaps, for her