closed it indifferently. Yousif got the impression that not everyone agreed with Basim; some seemed to regard him an alarmist.
“Why don’t we organize?” Yousif asked, impatient. Again the eyes focused on him. “That’s what we should all do,” he added, almost in defiance of their stares.
“‘And a child shall lead them . . .’” Uncle Boulus quoted, smiling.
Yousif bristled. “How old do I have to be to be called an adult?”
“I apologize, Yousif, you are not a child,” his uncle told him, his tone respectful. “In fact, you impress me as being more grown up than most.”
Yousif nodded in his uncle’s direction and then turned to Basim. “And what do you do with the spies you catch?” he asked, surprising his parents by his persistence.
“We take their maps,” Basim replied, “and we interrogate each and every one separately.”
Yousif waited for more. When Basim did not volunteer any further information, Yousif asked, “Who’s ‘we’?”
“A few associates of mine here and there, that’s all,” Basim said, smoke billowing all around him.
“I see,” Yousif muttered, thinking. “And what do you do with them afterwards?”
“We beat them,” Basim said. “Some we shoot.”
By gesture and word they all seemed horrified. The barber’s plump old wife sneezed, causing the baby in Maha’s arms to cry. Even the Spanish woman looked confused until her husband explained to her what was going on in her own language. Visibly rattled, she reached for a pinch of snuff from the barber’s wife.
“Without trial?” said Yousif’s mother.
“Just like that?” asked the barber.
“What if the Zionists begin shooting our boys at random,” asked the retiree, resting on a cane with an ivory handle.
“I didn’t say we shoot them at random,” Basim defended himself. “We shoot the ones we catch spying on us.”
“Is that wise?”
“Why not?” Basim wanted to know.
“It could start the violence all over again,” Uncle Boulus predicted.
“Sooner or later we’re going to have open war,” Basim argued, taking his crying baby from his wife. “No sense pretending otherwise.”
Shooting was a grave mistake, Yousif thought. But who among them, their silence seemed to say, could argue with a hero who had actually fought in battle against the British and the Zionists? Basim’s patriotism was beyond reproach—and so were all his political and military actions, it seemed.
“What do you think, Father?” Yousif asked. “Do you think they should kill the ones they suspect of spying?”
“No, I don’t,” the doctor answered, drawing on his pipe.
“And why not?” Basim snapped. “What do you want us to do? Accuse them of trespassing?”
“You can do more than that,” Yousif argued. “You can interrogate them, learn all about their secret cells, lock them up—but you don’t have to kill them. For one thing, you might use them in the future for an exchange.”
“A trade for what?” Basim insisted. “For whom?”
“One day they’ll probably hold some of our people,” Yousif protested. “There could be an exchange of prisoners.”
“Who has the time or the money to feed and look after them?” Basim asked. “They are our enemies, and they are working overtime to throw us out.”
The clicking of Uncle Boulus’s worry beads was the only thing that could be heard.
“I can tell you we’re facing hardened people,” Basim continued. They’re coming at us with full force. Or have we forgotten the bombing of the King David Hotel?”
“And that was a year ago,” Uncle Boulus agreed.
“Their terrorists,” Basim added, “blew up that hotel at the height of the rush hour. Over a hundred people were killed—all of them innocent. They didn’t blink an eye. And you tell us to restrain ourselves? War is hell and we might as well face it—we are at war.”
“Then take these spies as prisoners of war,” Yousif suggested. “Wouldn’t that be the decent thing to do?”
Disappointment flashed on Basim’s face. “So far I’ve been impressed with you, Yousif. I hope I don’t change my mind.”
Suddenly Yousif remembered the compass he had stumbled on that fateful day. He had hidden it in a drawer full of socks. He rushed into his bedroom and returned within a minute.
“I found this in the fields, just before Amin broke his arm,” Yousif explained.
“Let me see it.”
Yousif handed him the compass. He felt alone with Basim, remote from the rest. The muttering and the whispering around him did not seem to matter. Basim turned the compass over and over in his hand and was now directing his eyes at those around him.
“Salman, what do you think of this?” Basim said to the frail shopkeeper beside him. “Made in Brooklyn. Hardly an object for lovers, don’t you think?”
Basim’s mild sarcasm made Salman’s lips twitch. Again there was silence.
So they were spies, Yousif thought. There were plans for war. On the one hand, he felt vindicated; on the other, he felt initiated to a world he did not like, a world of insecurity, mistrust, and suffering. Everything around him began to look and sound different. The crickets began to chatter. The moon grimaced like a one-eyed god. The lights of Jaffa, twenty miles to the west, looked aflame. Some of his caged birds inside the house twittered in disharmony. He sat next to the railing, toying with the compass, the omen of mysterious and threatening things to come.
Yousif could read fear on the faces around him.
“Can you believe this!” Yousif’s mother exclaimed next morning on the balcony, as she watched two men unload a pickup truck packed with boxes of oranges.
Yousif shook his head. The truckload was a gift from the family friend who bought the orange grove his parents had visited a few days earlier. The stack of boxes was now getting taller than the men. Yousif was overcome with disbelief. He loved oranges, but what could one do with two thousand of them?
“That’s the Arabs for you,” his mother said, bemused. “No sense of moderation.”
“We’re generous people, that’s all,” Yousif said. Taking his knife, he made a precise incision around the top of one orange. He took pride in the art of peeling. Whereas most people peeled and ate a whole orange in a couple of minutes, he spent far longer.
