Doesn’t he give any thought to the dangers of the ruined, muddy roads that await him as he returns to his family after a day’s work that was supposed to be routine but was anything but routine?

Will he go back today?

Will he spend the night in Jericho and wait till the morning?

And what if the closure lasts for days?

I admire his poise and ability. Indeed, his conduct, liveliness, youth, and confidence now seduce me into a burst of optimism that sees the Palestinians as the stronger side in this long conflict with the Occupation. All I need is an inspired idea on how to thank this boy without insulting what he did with empty, worn-out words.

The moment he hugs me I decide that the best I have to offer is silence.

I throw out the fleeting idea of offering the young man extra money in less than a second.

I consider a strange paradox. One may easily get into a quarrel with an opponent and slip without thinking into uttering the most vulgar words, which you will later regret — but find it difficult to choose a pleasant word with which to praise a friend. Some forms of gratitude demean the gift, sometimes, and that’s what I’m afraid of in this case.

I’m jealous of his determination and his abilities and I admire him to the point of feeling proud of him, but I can’t tell him that because the very word has something of the patronizing or the paternalistic or the classist about it that cancels our equality as humans. How am I supposed to convey this ‘pride’ to him? With a tip?

I’m worried about him.

I think of telling him, “Take care of yourself,” but don’t.

That tender and loving phrase is the most beautiful thing one can hear from a person who’s important to you when you part. My mother used to say it every time I left the house, or traveled for a job or other purpose. “Take care of yourself.”

“How am I to take care of myself, Mother?”

If an Arab ruler wishes to arrest me, he will without doubt arrest me.

If a policeman wants to kick me in the stomach and liver, he will without doubt kick me.

If an esteemed ‘sovereign’ Arab sister-state wishes to exercise its ‘sovereignty’ against my thin body or my innocuous words in order to kick me out with its imported shoes, it will kick me out.

I want to tell him “God be with you” and immediately smile at an unforgettable anecdote about God’s lack of support for the Palestinians. This was explained on the one hand by the repeated assertion of Sheikh Qaysar, muezzin of the mosque of Deir Ghassanah, that God wasn’t standing by us because we’d “abandoned His religion.” On the other was the comment of Hajja Umm Nabil, nearly maddened by the Arab defeat of 1967 and Israel’s six-day (really six-hour) victory over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Hajja Umm Nabil raised her arms in the face of a reporter who didn’t know her language and yelled at the top of her voice, “Performing our prayers didn’t help us and keeping the fasts didn’t get us in with Him either, sonny. It turns out the Almighty wears a kipa and shorts. If He curled his side-locks, He’d be perfect.” Sensing that anger had drawn her into saying something rather odd that didn’t go with her instinctive piety, she then muttered to herself, “I seek God’s forgiveness! It’s enough to make heathens of us.”

I say nothing to Mahmoud. To myself I say, “I’ll write him. I’ll write the driver Mahmoud. And I’ll put down exactly what he did and how he did it. I’ll write him. It’s my duty. I’m a writer and that’s my job. He did his job and one day I’ll do mine too.” And here I am doing it.

We reach the Jericho resthouse.

We get our bags down and each of us pays Mahmoud the fare plus his share of the cost of hiring the divinely blessed crane.

The bus for the bridge is standing waiting for passengers. We put our bags into the compartments allocated for them under the bus.

We say goodbye to Mahmoud.

He shakes our hands and wishes us a good journey to Amman.

I stand in a disorganized line where everyone is pushing, waiting to get my papers stamped.

In the long line next to mine, I see the veiled lady raise her veil hesitantly from her face. The Israeli policewoman tells her to remove it completely, which she does. Clearly the policewoman wants the security cameras or the officer seated behind tinted glass in the raised booth to identify the traveler’s face properly.

The people in the line surge about trying to get ahead of each other, those at the front of the line protesting at the others who are bothering them. The voice of a short, bald man in the line is heard: “Keep to the line, please. Have some manners. Let’s get on our way.”

He might as well have been talking to the deaf.

The Israeli officer notices the disturbance. He stands up and yells at everyone to form a single line.

They do so immediately.

Between the Israeli police post on the bridge and the Jordanian police post, we have to change buses. The first bus delivers us to a dusty lot around which our suitcases are dropped in scattered piles so roughly that bits of them generally get damaged or their contents are strewn everywhere. In all cases, it ensures that they get dirty, especially on rainy days. Then we have to get out, pushing and shoving like a repulsive human herd whose individual members are so selfish that the elderly, the slow-moving, and the polite are ignored among the struggles of each passenger to find his bag in the middle of the chaotic pile into which it has been thrown and then put it with his own hands onto the new bus that will travel the short distance to the Jordanian police station.

Someone whom I take from his accent to be from Nablus shouts, “Have you made your ablutions, Muhammad?”

“Sure, Dad. I performed the ablutions, praise be to God.”

“Okay, let’s get the afternoon prayer in quickly then.”

“Did you hear the call to prayer, Dad?”

“Damn it, you’re a fool. Who’s going to give the call to prayer here? You’re wearing a watch the size of a wall clock and it’s prayer time.”

Amid the scattered suitcases, the man from Nablus and his son stand up to perform the prayer and a number of male passengers join them, so the rest of us have to wait until they’re done. It’s a new phenomenon in society, this public display of Islam.

We sit in the new bus waiting for them and then leave for the Jordanian police post. We arrive. A Jordanian policeman gets in, collects the IDs and passports from all the passengers, and leaves, after ordering the driver to keep the doors closed until he is given permission to open them by the officials on the other side.

In this spot in summer, temperature and humidity reach their highest levels in the world, sometimes rising to 50 degrees Celsius, even though the meteorological authorities, for reasons I don’t understand, record them as being only in the upper forties. It’s winter now and waiting does no harm, but having to wait again each time is annoying. During this wait too I retreat into my shell.

I’m alone with sounds and sights, with my private question marks and exclamation marks.

It’s as though a huge deserted warehouse had opened its doors to me or I’d become my own museum and its only visitor after the guards have gone home to sleep and locked me in.

I find fault with my acts, or the fewness of them, or the total lack of them, or their total ineffectiveness. I confront my faults like a courageous hero of the stage or make up hypocritical excuses for myself like any coward.

I become a severe judge who refuses to accept the arguments of the self, lovers, or relatives, and, in the same instant, I become the conniving, bribable judge who flees difficulties in favor of peace of mind.

I open my small eyes to the ‘intellectual’s diseases’ that have taken root in my body.

I say to myself, I’m just a poet. Why should I have to wait at all the different types of border?