These trees have been murdered, I think, and at the same instant, in two different places, stand a peasant with empty hands and a soldier filled with pride; in the same room of night a Palestinian peasant stares at the ceiling and an Israeli soldier celebrates.

The fine rain continues.

The road becomes more rugged.

Our shoulders touch with each jolt.

The veiled lady presses herself more and more tightly against the door of the car; she has placed her bag between her and the young man as an extra layer of insulation, for greater peace of mind.

No one starts a conversation on any topic.

Everyone is worrying about arriving safely, without anyone appearing to be worrying about arriving safely.

This is how it always is: just as the drunken man proves his drunkenness by denying it, so people’s denial of their fear proves they are scared.

Suddenly, everything stops.

Now, with the car stuck in the mud, Mahmoud turns off the engine, so that the tires don’t dig in deeper and complicate matters further.

We get out to see what’s happened.

It seems the situation isn’t serious. The problem can be fixed.

“A little push, everyone.”

We gather, form a scrum at the back of the car, and push, making several attempts before we succeed in freeing it. I convince myself that I’m playing an effective role in pushing the car even though I depend on the zeal of the others, which seems so clear when compared to the amount of strength that I demonstrate. The old man’s keenness and the young woman’s determination and enthusiasm amaze me. She is the only one to do her job with the cheerfulness of a child, encouraging us at the same time with loud cries: “Come on, boys! Put your backs into it, boys!”

The old man, happy to have been included among the ‘boys,’ tells her, “God bless your youth, cousin!”

Given how difficult it is for him, the fat man stands out as the one among us who gives the most of himself, while the countryman who had been sunk in his seat provides conclusive evidence that he is very short indeed. I suppress a smile, as I remember Subhi al-Far, the peasant from Deir Ghassanah who returned from the village threshing floors to give the men in the village guesthouse the good news of a bumper wheat harvest that year and exclaimed with great joy, “The harvest this year is fantastic, God protect it! As tall as me, exactly.”

Abu ‘Odeh, the guesthouse’s best and wittiest talker, said, “God widow your wife, Subhi al-Far! If the wheat’s your height, we’ll all die of hunger this year!”

Mahmoud drives the car a few meters forward and stops to wait for us. We call to the lady in the veil to catch up; she has stood off to one side during the rescue operation.

The mud sticks to our clothes, our hands, our shoes. Mahmoud fetches a small jerry can of water from the trunk of the car.

“Everyone take turns, now. Please, sister. Please, Hajj. Please, Mister.”

One by one, each of us washes his hands as he carefully measures out the water. He offers us a piece of cloth from inside the car with which we try to wipe off the bits of mud that have stuck to our clothes and we use up a box of paper tissues drying our faces.

It’s still day but it looks like evening because of the thickness of the fog in the valley. No doubt Mahmoud has 20/20 vision and no doubt his relative quiet helps him to concentrate his eyesight to the utmost. Now he’s whispering that he’s spotted a concealed Israeli tank and that we have to wait a little to see if it’ll go away.

We stop.

After a few minutes he decides the danger is past.

We continue on our way.

I think to myself, a person could cross this valley on foot; horses or mules could find their way through these rocky twists and turns; but how can an old taxi carrying seven passengers and their luggage do so, with the fog and the rain closing in and the Israeli ‘Defense’ Force in its hideouts behind the trees? I think: this young Palestinian is trying to perform a small miracle without realizing it, is being a hero unaware that he’s being a hero. He’s only a hired driver but he wants to do the job that earns him his monthly salary perfectly. Right now, he’s the leader of this trip and doesn’t want to let us down. We are now his nation — an old man and two women (one of whom doesn’t cover her hair and face while the other wears a full veil); a man who’s short and another who’s fat; a university student; and a poet who is amazed by everything he sees and doesn’t want to spoil it by talking.

What would you do if you were in his place, I ask myself.

Would I be capable of leading this trip?

I am a writer, that is, I don’t ‘do’ anything. Isn’t that pathetic?

Or am I just being too quick to blame myself, as I always am when things go wrong around me?

How often I’ve wished I’d learned some craft, some manual trade. Isn’t it beautiful for a person to be a mechanic, a smith, a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer, a doctor, or even a construction worker with strong muscles who rises with each additional story to a higher rank and at the end looks out over the lazy city from above? He owes no one any favors, for he has raised himself by the sweat of his hands and now sees what the hawk sees, even if he leaves his glory behind and flies away forgotten after the inauguration night. One day my mother caught sight of me. I was twelve and my mother could see me trying to dig the green-onion bed in the vegetable garden with my younger brother Majid. We were breathing hard and she said with a smile as she stood at the top of the steps to the house, “It’ll have to be school for you, my boys, that’s for sure. You’ll die of hunger if you ever have to work with your hands.”

Then she came down the short flight of steps, took the hoe from me, and started whacking the vegetable bed while we watched. I don’t know how Majid felt but I was jealous and embarrassed. When I was a child I thought my muscles were weak because I was thin. I heard someone say that potatoes ‘build you up’ so I went overboard on potatoes in all forms in the hope that my muscles would harden. Whenever my mother asked the question she asked every morning as we made for the front door on our way to school—“What shall I cook for you today?”—I’d turn my head and beat my brothers to it by saying, “Potato casserole.”

She took me seriously once or twice. Then she started making fun of me and I became an easy target for my brothers’ jokes. When I published my first collection of poems, I was pleased with how thin I was. In moments of stupidity (which fortunately didn’t last very long), I’d wonder at the ‘blooming good health’ of Pablo Neruda, because he looked like a bank director — as though a poet had to look wasted, half dead, and pale, like someone who’s fallen into a chasm or just been pulled out of one!

Now we’re faced with a real chasm.

The driver stops the engine.

“Get out, everyone. We’ll have a look and see what we can do.”

We get out.

And we see.

We are on the edge of a cutting across the road that the rains have transformed into a huge, impromptu, mud-filled trench that the car will not be able to cross unless a Greek god from the heavens of myth, capable of changing fates, appears and gets us out of this earthly fix. Our driver has improvised our present route through this gray valley. He has remained in control, more or less, no matter how much it has twisted and turned and narrowed, so long as it has been uninterrupted, but now it’s cut; it isn’t a road any more. And this long, deep trench could swallow dozens of cars.

The man from al-Khalil says, “It must be my fault. I’m unlucky by nature. I’ve been that way all my life. If there are a thousand tins of milk at the supermarket, I’ll pick the one that’s gone bad.”

I tell him about Abu Wajih, who was a ploughman in our village. Once a friend of his found him exhausted from ploughing a huge olive field and told him, “Your work will soon be done, Abu Wajih, and then you can rest.”