We arrive.

The metal fingers move away from the body of the car, leaving it to make gentle contact with the earth.

The mechanical swing puts us safely down.

We all get out and the two Greek gods join us.

Everyone hugs everyone else (except for the veiled lady, who stands to one side, away from our crowding emotions). We find ourselves clapping as we stand there, as though celebrating an historic victory.

“Thanks, everyone. Good work.”

Mahmoud passes out coffee cups. Coffee and its timing, again. It’s not quite as hot but it’s still good, having now acquired the taste of reward for a job well done. I savor two cigarettes, lighting the second from the first and sharing with Mahmoud, the man from al-Khalil, and our two rescuers the pleasure of sheltering our cigarettes from the rain.

The old man moves away from us without explanation, disappears behind a nearby tree for a few minutes, and then returns, fastening the buckle of his leather belt and apologizing with obvious embarrassment for holding us up.

“Goddamn diabetes. Sorry everyone, I’ve held you up.”

The two mysterious rescuers wish us a successful end to our journey. They drive the crane back to its hiding place behind the trees, perhaps to wait for another rescue mission or to get ready to make a speedy return to their village before the soldiers discover what they’re up to.

The engine is turned on again.

The car moves forward along the valley.

After a period of bucking and rocking, the silk of asphalt takes us by surprise. We look at one another in relief and joy, as though it were a dream fulfilled, as though we’d scored a victory over someone.

Peoples under occupation may be among those most given to festivity and most ready to celebrate. This, of course, is directly opposed to the picture of grossness and cruelty that the enemy and the stereotype-obsessed media draw of them. Under occupation, you experience true pleasure just because you’ve managed to get hold of a cylinder of butane gas, a pile of loaves of bread, a pass, or a seat on the bus. You feel joy at finding blood pressure pills at the chemist’s, at the arrival of the ambulance before some sick person close to you dies. You get pleasure from reaching home safely and finding that the electricity has been turned back on. You feel ecstasy at being able to walk on the beach. You dance for joy at the most trivial victory in anything, even a card game. In its most subtle form, this human fragility may take on legendary proportions, when your endless patience becomes in and of itself soft pillows protecting you from nightmares.

I look at the paved road surface and a verse leaps into my mind from a poem by Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, who lived through both dictatorship and occupation in his native Iraq:

Fortunate Tigris, how have our ambitions shrunk—

Yet even the least ambitious of our aspirations is in doubt.

Well said, poet!

Hasn’t our most exalted aspiration on this blessed morning been to reach the asphalt, to reach, what, in the end, is no more than tar?

Did it ever occur to you, Mr. Jawahiri, that tar could be an aspiration? Did it ever occur to you that a road paved with tar could become the dream of a nation?

You have to imagine it, Mr. Jawahiri!

You really ought to imagine it.

Otherwise, what would be the meaning of the Occupation?

We enjoy a few smooth kilometers on the road. We achieve our ambition and in the distance the outskirts of Jericho appear.

Later, friends and relations used to moving between Palestine and Jordan via the bridge will explain that what happened to me on my strange journey is an everyday experience, especially the business with the crane that moves stranded cars. The Israelis know that on days when there are closures we take side roads to avoid their checkpoints, so they’ve taken to cutting them using dynamite and bulldozers to create chasms, trenches, and dikes that cars can’t cross. And what has happened? The villagers and nearby shepherds have come up with this method of helping others and themselves too. They hire this giant winch with a grab from a builder’s yard and take a hundred shekels for each car they rescue. Why not? It’s their labor. What matters is that for every obstacle the Occupation sets, Palestinian desperation finds a solution.

I hear Mahmoud’s voice.

“From here to Jericho there’s no army, no checkpoints, no cranes, and no swings in the air. Praise God for a safe arrival, everyone!”

Laughing, the fat man says, “And you got me onto the swings at my age, boys! I’d never been on one before. I used to get dizzy just looking at the Ferris wheel and wonder how the little kids could ride it. We’ve become a spectacle, I swear. God bring it all down on their heads!”

I want to tell him the story of how once, in a violent storm, Tamim and his friend Zeid got stuck at the top of the Ferris wheel at the kids’ amusement park in Budapest and were rescued, but decide it wouldn’t be appropriate in our present situation. That was the second reason; the first was that I’ve got used to not talking if I’m with people I don’t know in a car or a bus or line. You never know which way a conversation with strange traveling companions may turn. A question you ask, or your answer to a question, may be embarrassing or dangerous or stir up a painful memory, or so I convinced myself some time ago. Also, under Occupation, you may find yourself learning things you’re not supposed to, and who knows what difficulties your tongue may get you into? You may indicate your admiration for the resistance fighters and fugitives in the mountains who are wanted by Israel and tell the story of one of them whom you know because he’s a relation, friend, or neighbor, and the person you’re talking to may be an Israeli agent, of whom there are thousands, unfortunately. Israel has made it a condition (accepted by our very clever negotiators) that the Palestinian leadership does not have the right to punish, pursue, or even try them. They move among us, some of them known to all. You may find yourself at a ceremony of mourning for a martyr while, because of rural family bonds, an agent — the martyr’s cousin, for example, or his in-law — receives condolences for his relative the ‘hero,’ and the agent’s mourning for the deceased may be genuine too. This has actually occurred in Deir Ghassanah, just as it has in other villages, and it will continue to. There are plenty of other risks also — such as spoiling the atmosphere with an unfunny joke, as the man from al-Khalil had done. Nevertheless, all these possibilities taken together neither explain nor justify my position, which in fact isn’t justifiable. What’s certain, though, is that my aversion to talking makes me seem aloof. Some may accuse me of being stuck-up — which is unbecoming for someone with a political cause — and I cannot defend this fault and I won’t justify it. Man’s biggest fault is to deny his faults and defend them to the death. It’s true too that my aloofness results in my losing the beautiful friendships that traveling with others might lead to under ordinary circumstances. The Occupation, however, permits no ordinary circumstances. The Occupation distorts the distances between humans as much as those between places. I wonder about this idea, which has just occurred to me and which I shall give more thought to soon.

When one is lifted off the ground, a certain loneliness and sense of isolation combine with the unexpected loftiness. This is true whatever the vehicle, be it a swing or an elevator or an airplane. This leads to me think about Mahmoud’s coming loneliness and my worries about him.

A question now comes into my head that will preoccupy me for many years: how will Mahmoud get back alone to Ramallah under these extraordinary circumstances?