Danny and Danny and Nidal Nidal
have never met, but knew everything about each other. They were my most dear friends. They lived at a distance from each other, but at least incalculable, a distance that has not ever been able to fill in their lifetime.
-One day we will meet and live together in a normal house, "said Danny
-then you let me know and we will go all three Nidal in Haifa for a swim." Meanwhile
advancing the wall, watched with growing concern that the stunts were done every day for the children climb or pass through the narrow passages in order to go to school, and I Nidal.
-How's Danny? - Asked Nidal and his gaze at the sky searching for the gun that fired automatically placed on the wall, ie without the sniper every time he felt that the photocell something alive moving, not even a donkey or a cat. Under the empty eyes of death that hung over us technologically, we spoke of our lives and the various difficulties we all faced. I met Danny a few years ago when curious and fascinated by the reality of the kibbutz had chosen to live there for a while 'by dividing the work and daily life with its inhabitants. I had read "The children of the dream," Bruno Bettelheim's book that tells of the education of children, how they lived together in groups of same, without the constraints of adults.
-It's not like they used to-now-Danny said the kibbuzim are turning, the socialist lifestyle is less and start to become
industries .- He left a year later to live in Tel Aviv. After the exam session I returned to Israel and met in a club frequented by young Arab and Israeli left-wing pacifist.
-Forget the kibbutz, "said he come to my house, I live with four other people, I'm sure my friends will like you .- The contented. I stayed with them throughout the summer, two boys who lived with Danny was gay, the other two couples. It was nice people, they all spoke English so we had no communication problems. The Jewish have never been able to speak it. The next year he would have to come with me to Rome, but fell ill before the summer. The news about his illness were vague, had no clear idea of \u200b\u200bwhat really did, but he was in pieces. That year I went anyway, but not to go to Tel Aviv. I started to become aware of what was serious and unsustainable situation of the Palestinians and the strange thing is that crucial for this breakthrough was not the environment of the left that I attended in Rome, very aware of the topic, what was really decisive was the great and deep affection I had for Danny. He took me in because its something that you can go from theory to practice, that spark of passion, that decision with his heart as well as the mind. The Palestinians for me had become living people and not just a people fighting for their freedom. People with eyes of girls and guys like Danny who all had an uncertain future full of pain, though in different degrees and forms. I saw with my eyes and my skin felt the humiliation of check-point, I saw up close the terrible violence done to the area, bulldozers everywhere, fields destroyed, villages razed, construction sites everywhere disfigure the face of the landscape, whose hills injuries bypass roads linking settlements to Israel suffered the tear from their side of orange groves and olive trees, because trees do not cooperate with the resistance prevented by not allowing increased visibility and that everything was under control from afar. I talked to Danny that I visited before returning to Rome.
-Why so much rage against the earth? Why so much determination to make ugly, to upset to humiliate a landscape that was good? -
Danny looked at me with an expression of unspeakable sadness.
-C 'is also the pollution produced by factories that settlers built there to avoid the laws on environmental protection in Israel and there are severe water-theft.
I asked him what he thought of my commitment to interposition in the territories.
Make-a-beautiful thing I said
- And you are also brave. " I had told him that at one point ceck I was nine hours stuck in the crowd without being able to go neither forward nor back, and that on another occasion while protecting the workers of the municipality to repair the damage done by tanks of the soldiers who had entered the day before I was shootin ' shot around for a while '.
-Palestinians repair everything at once, "said Danny
smiling-I think they do to put in place before they will be depression." I noticed that I refuse to be discouraged, to give up. Nidal had just met and he more than anyone else gave me that impression.
-My friend Nidal always makes me think of that slogan of workers' struggle "to resist a minute most of the master "I said to Danny.
Nidal organization was part of our team who had welcomed the arrival in the territories. They had destroyed the house three times and three times he had reconstructed. Although he was our age, 24, was already married and had two children. Danny had wanted to speak with him. Nidal was a graduate in literature, the literature was what he liked most in the world. For so long he had wanted to travel and meet different people, but leave the territories is not easy.
-We are people without rights-said-we are not people, not we can come and go as we please, as do the other! -
-asked-How did Danny-a graduate, get married and become a father so soon? Life runs after him like the wind? -
-Perhaps it is the death that runs after him-I said, thinking the soldiers on the turrets, roads destroyed, the buildings bombed and raped the landscape. I too was amazed at the speed with which Nidal did not weave the web of his destiny, I told him:
-When I think of you I feel like an idiot with all the exams that I still have to do! - Nidal had answered me quiet:
-You have all the time, you can expect to finish school and then now you're doing something that enriches you as a human being. My time is not like yours. "
- Yes, the time in the occupied territories was not the same as elsewhere. There they took two hours to do a second course of minutes, we went out there to go to class and stayed all day at ceck point, or you came out from work and could not return home because the ceck point was not closed ... I had thought that's what wasted hours of life, then made it necessary to do everything faster. Later I realized how Palestinian students take seriously the study. Nidal had studied furiously, candlelight, shivering from the cold, as he was leaving his life in the house half destroyed and tanks on the street. Despite the forced closure of schools, the difficulty of arriving at university, and the curfew the bombing.
-When I went to university professors, students agreed with intense programs of study, which stated that the university would remain closed for months and months and we did not want to lose the years, he said.
Nidal had introduced me to the Palestinian literature, notably Gassan Kanafani, a writer for 37 years by the Mossad killed in an attack. I read it twice "Men under the sun" and his other stories translated from Arabic.
-E 'incredible' I said to Danny, the waste of talent, the beauty that happens every day .- of these writers I had hit the storytelling and profound humanity, who knows what masterpieces would have written if they had switched off his life, who knows what would have still left! - From Tel Aviv
I was playing with a strange feeling. One thing that I had had the latent time to deepen as I was taken by so many emotions. I had spent almost two months in the West Bank and Gaza, and only the last two days with Danny. I learned an incredible amount of things, my eyes were filled with colors and debris, wounds and hope, hugs handshakes courageous acts, Nidal and I knew I had hoped we'd been friends all your life, then to a suddenly became clear and thought I knew what was running through all those experiences as a black line troubled me. Danny was very strange. Sad, silent, I had listened carefully, but spoke little. When I was nominated "Men in the sun" that just was not crying and I knew that he had read. I had not said a word about his health, now that I think, and I wondered why I had my mind and my heart overflowed with emotions. I called him on the phone to find out.
-Ho-AIDS said. Those two words became a vortex, a black hole that swallowed the material time and space did not know how to get back on how to hang onto the edge of nothingness, how to fill the silence. While groping in the air the voice of Danny on the other side of the phone-
Hey are you there? E 'fall line? -
-Here I am - I said.
I went back a few months later when I could because I wanted to see it. I found him in the hospital. He was pale and thin, but strangely happy. Comforted me while I had wanted to run away, almost to scream. How could you be so calm?
-on, do not look like that-he told me, now I'm much better off - I was wondering how it was before. I could not face him because I saw his fragility, his insecurity. The skin of his face seemed clear, his eyes shining perhaps feverish nights, perhaps for the medicine. I could not accept her illness, I did not learn to accept the shocking news. Maybe he had fought against this sudden irruption of death that was made for this space and was so sad when I had met him returning from Ramallah.
-I wish could come Nidal, once-
My expression becomes even more desperate because Danny said immediately
-Never mind, you talk to me, you do it? - When I asked a curl from his eyes deviated with a gesture that looked like a caress.
-You are a valuable person, "said Danny-you greeting me like a bridge connecting two banks of a river, a prayer that connects earth to heaven .-
Before returning home I spent the ceck point and went to the home of Nidal . I was happy to see him. Was with the young wife and two beautiful children lively but disciplined. Leyla had prepared some sweets that looked like a lot to others who had eaten the year before at the home of Danny and his friends, but I did not dare ask if they were sweet Palestinians or Jewish, I certainly would have said that they were Palestinians.
-Why are you so sad? - Leyla said .- I am suddenly sad? -
-all right-confirmed Nidal-It 's all night pretending anything, but you can not .- I told them of my friend Danny, the smiles went out and a little 'I was sorry to have them pulled into my sadness.
"Now there are new treatments," said Nidal-
as to console you'll see that Danny is going to make, What the hell is already so little decent people mica if they can go! -
His protest was able to make me smile, I would have embraced.
We are not in Africa where people can not be cured, here are cutting-edge medicine and science that you believe? -
said Danny in front of my amazement at my next visit. It was the picture of health, he recovered completely, in fact, I had never seen him so well. At the initial amazement followed a cautious joy, now troubled by the thought of producing a health care over-pumped, fake. Though Danny had a beautiful appearance of the disease he was working in the service of death. He acted as if it were water past and did not speak, he seemed to always come back. Little by little my suspicions were quieted and began to believe in a gradual healing, maybe that was what Danny needed to continue living, because it would be easy to get through the days when people looked at him as a person sentenced to death, or spying on her face failure, the indication of the end.
After my visit we stayed in contact almost daily with long conversations and email communications over the phone. Danny had decided to come with me in the occupied territories as soon as we would return.
-It 's time to do something concrete instead of talk-only-until they are told
-time-which means while I'm on time? - asked alarmed
-quiet, it means that there is a time for everything and that can pass the time is right for action even if you stay alive. " I repented of my alarmed tone, I was not allowing the good to my anxiety of coming out. I also want to know
-Nidal-added. After telling
Nidal I saw her eyes become bright and I felt almost physically the wave of sadness that passed by me to him and then from him to me.
-Anch 'I said I wanted to know. By Danny
we all agreed, he would go first, then I would have been in contact with Nidal and we would leave together to Tulkarem. The day before leaving while hastily put together the little luggage phone rang. At first I did not recognize the voice on the phone, Noam. Noam was a youth who lived with Danny. When I realized I panicked because I feared bad news. "Here, I thought that here has worsened again, I knew that it was not so easy to heal."
-What are you saying? Dead? What do you mean? We heard yesterday you joking? - No, it could be. Suddenly I could not understand more English, the words of Noam waterfall in my ear like a bunch of unintelligible sounds. My ability to take froze, then a surge of sadness that I left until the time of departure and made me very tired. Why I left as I had planned and went as I had first planned in Tel Aviv where I barely have time to see him one last time to say goodbye. A
Tulkarem raid still felt there was the shooting, boys of fifteen turned kalashinkoff in the shoulder, I arrived at the home of Nidal at the height of anguish. Shortly after the bombing began again very close to us. There was the younger sister Leyla, crying with fear, I fear, too, Leyla was trying to distract the children. It had never happened to be under bombardment, it's shocking. I tried to stay calm, but looking at her hands I could shake, I did not feel my legs. My body was on her own without worrying about me. Suddenly Nidal said
-Enough! -
turned off the television news program that broadcast the news and put a disc of classical music, Leyla said led a flavored coffee and pastries. We drank coffee and ate pastries while the bombs fell around us.
"I'm crazy these Palestinians," I thought, but we all felt better.
When finally ended we saw that there was a chasm in front of the house, by a whisker had not destroyed the home of Nidal and for the fourth time with us inside.
I was wondering how those brave pilots could bomb a city full of people with the excuse of wanted to hit at that time were not doing anything. I wondered how they could sleep at night knowing what they had done. I remembered when Danny told me
-Israeli society is barbarized, has fallen into a kind of numbness, delirium .-
Danny had refused to join the army and this was often in prison, -They have no sense of limits, he said.
Perhaps to overcome the trauma talked so much that night, when he was told Nidal to Ansar 3 prison in the heart of the Negev, in the desert. I knew it was a kind of lager, but he spoke of the suffering of those were taken for granted, told when they organized a theatrical performance: they went out to play until the soldiers had raided and threw the gas. In those conditions were in the theater! I was reinforced in my belief: it was just crazy. He told of young men who came from a refugee camp in Gaza, Brazil, who had never attended school and learned in prison to read and write, learned the story, or when they were grown seedlings to light green the desert. Had brought them there to shoot them down morally and they had made the desert bloom! In prison there were doctors, professors, engineers, who knew something taught it to others, learned all the Hebrew and English, Nidal had also improved his Hebrew. The people of Gaza and the West Bank can not normally meet, but there were no prisoners in the prison of Gaza and much of the West Bank, they turned what should have been the intention of the Israelis a situation of extreme reduction in depression and an opportunity to exchange news, ideas, discussion and debate. For Ansar1 in southern Lebanon Salah Tamari had written this song:
"... Take the wire and the walls thicker and higher
brought into the tent the rest of my family and my friends
O crucified under the blazing sun, a boy
O dates the death of an old man
But Ansar will always sing to the dawn
You can stop the sun rise?
Dawn is mine, the sun is mine, the land is mine. "
again and was amazed and admired by the obstinacy of these people who live to unfold his newspaper under fire from snipers, never losing dignity . Leyla was worried and anxious children:
-have seen too many tragedies and still see, how can they grow? Once many of us would live in peace with them willingly, but it is increasingly difficult to pronounce words of reconciliation
-With the Oslo agreements we had made of illusions, "said Nidal," but the truth is that we should not expect very top, is that civil society must devise alternative routes, otherwise peace will never come even if the leaders were, miraculously, to reach an agreement tomorrow. Inside of us would not have torn the roots of hatred. We must educate for peace even as the bombs fall .-
Dear Nidal, as he did to have this power? His was not a rhetorical discourse, the bombs were just dropped.
Danny said that Israeli society was in a state of psychosis that survived and advanced imprisoning herself, he thought that it was necessary to blow up this wall of indifference that defense by telling the truth.
-course-we-said Nidal interlocutors, we do this that we can together because our children have a better future and not drowning in hate. " I appointed Danny and here he was suddenly among us. For a moment I thought I hallucinated seeing her smile, that's strange, I noticed that watching Nidal threw a glance in the same spot where he appeared for a second the smiling face of Danny. For the flash of a moment we were really together all three.
will always bring with me the sadness of Danny and the courage to Nidal as very precious gifts. Often in my dreams we meet all three travel the country by car from Rafah to Tulkarem to Tel Aviv to Eilat and go for a swim in Haifa. If hate is contagious, the confidence, love, friendship are contagious, maybe if we run very fast with all the strength we have, maybe we can make it to come a time before the catastrophe. Nidal told me, the last time I phoned him, for the project is continuing with other Palestinians and Israelis: they organize meetings between children of both parties, the children write with the help of two editors of a Palestinian and an adult Israel, a bilingual newspaper. They have a home in Haifa and one in Tulkarem, two groups of children often come together and stay together for a short period. Leyla, I said, while he was on the phone with me was helping the children to prepare packages of gifts for their friends that Israelis had to get that afternoon, if they did go to ceck point. Organizing these meetings was always a gamble, the result of endless negotiations and stressful and sometimes it was too dangerous, but they had no intention to be discouraged or intimidated. During one meeting a child told him that if Israeli troops seeking to destroy the house again, it will help him to defend
From "Peace is not just absence of war, but where life flourishes"
Marea , 2004 AAVV
