On the Hills of God by Ibrahim Fawal Page A

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.

6
     
    “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. For him the trick was to strip the fruit naked without injuring the flesh. The pleasure was in the ritual as much as it was in the fruit itself.
    “What are we going to do with all these oranges?” his mother now asked, wiping her hands with her apron.
    “I’ll take a few with me to Salwa,” he said, offering her half of the orange he had just peeled. “I’m late already.”
    “Don’t take a few, I’ll send a box with Fatima sometime today. We need to distribute all these before they rot. Let me see, a box to Basim’s house, a box to brother Boulus’s house, a box to Salman’s house, a box to . . .”
    “Don’t forget Amin and Isaac,” Yousif reminded her.
    “Of course not.”
    “Do you think Father will take me and Isaac when he goes to visit Amin?”
    “I don’t see why not. Poor Amin,” she said and resumed counting on her fingers the names of those to whom she would send a box of oranges.
    On his way to see Salwa that morning, Yousif carried the compass in his pocket. Amin’s amputation broke his heart; Basim’s talk of war rang in his ears. The thought of war and the taste of oranges reminded him that the big, juicy, fragrant Jaffa orange was Winston Churchill’s favorite fruit. Yousif’s father once told him that during World War II Churchill always had special oranges shipped to him from Palestine. Yousif could