Free Before We Say Goodbye by Gabriella Ambrosio Page A

military service. It wasn’t unavoidable: she would plead conscientious objection, which was possible for girls; it would be enough to say that her religious beliefs forbade her to live and work with men.
    Why not? It wasn’t unavoidable.
    Funny she hadn’t thought of this before.
    It would mean she could enrol at a graphic design school next year, right after her diploma. She liked the idea of graphics school, she had done for a good while. There were no subjects to be learned by memory, she believed, and the work would be fun. It was just that she had never really thought about it until now; this was the first time she had seen herself so close to it.
    She would make new friends, maybe interesting ones. And she would soon find a job – why not? – maybe with a newspaper. It wouldn’t be bad. She would call her father every now and then, and occasionally go to visit him in Tel Aviv. What did she have to do with what had happened between him and her mother?
    Sooner or later she would get over her grief for Michael.
    She would grasp the sense of what was around her. She would learn to understand what was part of her. And what wasn’t.
    That’s what Myriam was thinking on that bus journey; and suddenly America had disappeared from her future.
D IMA IS OUTSIDE THE SUPERMARKET
    There was a guard in front of the supermarket, and when the sliding doors opened, Dima could see another one just inside. A double line of defence. She began to wander around the park opposite the supermarket. By now she no longer felt anything. She didn’t hear the birds calling to one another from the trees in the park, or even the heavy beating of her heart. She was simply ready. She concentrated on her task.
    A double line of defence. But they didn’t necessarily open all the bags. Some people greeted the first guard with a smile as they entered. They must be regular customers, she thought. How to get past? Maybe by walking purposefully past the first guard, putting one foot forward to open the sliding doors. But how to get past the second guard and in among the crowd thronging the aisles and cash desks?
    She had to blow herself up in the middle of a crowd. She had to blow up a crowd.
    She wouldn’t be doing it if she weren’t sure she would kill lots of them. She would postpone it. Her life was not worth a few lives; it was worth a great many Jewish lives – at least a hundred. She would blow herself up and take a hundred people with her. A hundred Jewish families would have to suffer what they as Palestinians were suffering. And finally the camp would celebrate. The return of honour. Of a little justice. In the camp they would celebrate the hundred dead together with her martyrdom, which had made it possible.
    She was claiming honour and justice, and she had more than a few injustices and humiliations to avenge. At least a thousand, suffered every day by each member of her family. She would avenge every one of them; at a single stroke she would make them remember every one. And she would do it in such a way that the injustices would burn inside them for a lifetime.
    At eighteen. Now. She would do it.
    *   *   *
    She sat down on a bench. No. If she couldn’t do it in the middle of a crowd she wouldn’t do it at all. Things should be done properly. Adum had brought her to the wrong place. She wouldn’t get past the double line of defence.
    Perhaps she lacked courage? No, it wasn’t a question of courage. She couldn’t care less about dying; she had already decided that it was fine. Today was a good day to die. Too often she had been afraid of dying at the hands of the soldiers, especially when she was a little girl and they invaded the streets of the camp where they were playing and threatened them with their guns. Today she would do it, and it would be her decision to die, not theirs. What she was lacking right now wasn’t courage; it was meaning. If she was going to do it, it had to have meaning. She didn’t want to do it