October 22
We walked toward Jaffa Gate. It was called Jaffa Gate because, long ago, at the end of their journey from the port of Jaffa, pilgrims walked through it. Now, brooding nuns walked through it. Priests with brown cloaks and long hoods walked through it. Bearded imams with long robes and bearded imams without long robes walked through it. Haredi Jews in wool suits walked through it. Settlers with guns and foreign money and searching eyes walked through it, and past us. They had occupied two houses in the Muslim Quarter last year, not in my neighbourhood but close enough to see their guns and flags waving on the roofs.
We went up the twisting alleyways, and they went down, and surveillance cameras, standing like owls in the armpits of balconies, watched everyone. To fail facial recognition, we lowered our eyes like the devout. Since September, Captain Moussa had arrested half the boys of the Old City. If you sneezed without showing your nose to the camera, he would arrest you. He was the Shabak officer responsible for our neighbourhood. He’d been around for a long time, but nobody knew his real name. People whispered stories about him as though talking about cancer.
I pointed to one of the cameras. “Hassan, since you’re good with computers, why don’t you hack that?”
He opened his backpack and pulled out a screwdriver. “This only hacks wood,” he said, and we laughed.
Hassan had been chosen by our physics teacher, Ustaz Salim, to participate in science experiments supervised by professors at Hebrew University. Genetic engineering took his fancy, but Hassan’s father didn’t like the idea of messing with God’s creation.
Dragging his feet on the cobbled stone, Hassan shoved the screwdriver back into his backpack and said, “I can’t be late getting back home.”
He lived in Wadi al-Joz, just outside the Old City wall.
Mustafa chuckled. “We have all night.”
“I don’t have all night,” Hassan said.
“I’ll get you the biggest shawarma ever made in the history of Jaffa Road,” Mustafa said. “And ice cream. We’ll get ice cream.”
I told Hassan it was Mustafa’s wish to celebrate his first paycheque from the car wash he had started working at this summer. “We must go,” I said, and he told me something about his parents giving him a hard time about being out after a certain hour.
“Don’t worry, we’ll walk you home,” I said, jokingly.
He wore a large white shirt, and I asked him if it was his father’s. He scoffed, his glasses bouncing on his nose. I liked to tease him because he always had a serious face. My theory was that he sat at his computer for too long. Mustafa’s theory was that it was because Hassan had five sisters—he not only had to protect them but also win every argument with them.
The light of the day was fading. Shopkeepers swept the dust off their doorsteps and pulled back inside carousels of postcards, embroidered dresses and cushions, and T-shirts with maps and logos on them. They yelled at some boys who were setting off firecrackers and chasing cats, threatening to tell their fathers and older brothers if they didn’t go away.
My shoelaces were loose, and I bent over to tie them. A Haredi Jewish man, walking in the middle of the road, flinched and changed his path. As his arm brushed against the concrete wall, the wool of his suit crackled.
“You scared him!” Mustafa said as the man trotted down the stairs, mumbling something—a prayer, a curse.
Haredi Jews never scared me. They walked fast, but they minded their own business all the way to the Jewish Quarter. I envied them. They read books and prayed, and got paid for reading and praying. In the old days, when Muslims had a great civilization, their smart and pious people also got paid for being smart and pious.
Mustafa and Hassan stood under a dim streetlight. “You scared him!” Mustafa ribbed me again.
We crossed the road that separated the Old City from West Jerusalem. The road was nameless, or none of us recalled its name. After the Nakba of 1948, a line of rubble and barbed wire had split the city in two portions: East and West. Following the 1967 war, a rope of asphalt had replaced the rubble and barbed wire, meandering through the city like an unwanted river.
It was a short walk to Ben Yehuda Square, but when the streetcar stopped in front of us, we jumped on. We patted our pockets. Hassan paid with his card, and I pretended to look for mine. Then I turned and looked for Mustafa but couldn’t find him. The seats were full, and I started to wonder if he’d made it. Then he signalled to me from up front. He had found a seat beside a woman soldier.
“Aziz, come!” he said, and I made the mouth-zipping move. We had an agreement not to speak Arabic on the streetcar. “Do you remember when Abu-Yousef’s donkey ran to the municipal park and ate all the grass?” He snickered and pointed to the sidewalk. “They arrested the donkey right there. Abu-Yousef had to pay a big fine!”
The soldier remained still as though the archangel Gabriel was talking to her. Passengers in front and behind us whispered, a few stood up, and some clung to the bars and handles. I was stuck between a pregnant woman who was chewing gum and a man who kept looking at my waist. The sweatshirt I was wearing was loose. It looked like I was hiding something. I was not hiding anything. I clung to a handle and my eyes shot straight toward the road.
The streetcar stopped near Ben Yehuda Street, and we jumped out. We were hungry. Mustafa cut the line at a shawarma place and shook hands with the cashier boy. “Everything?” he called out to me and Hassan, and we nodded from the end of the line. “Everything” meant a hundred toppings on the sizzling meat: tomatoes, cucumber, eggplant, cabbage, tahini sauce, hot sauce, amba sauce, hummus—you name it. Standing by a thin tree with quivering leaves, we wolfed down the sandwiches and volleyed the wrappers onto a crammed garbage bin.
We strolled to the café where Mustafa’s brother, Marwan, worked. We called it Marwan’s café because he practically ran the place. He spoke Hebrew better than his boss and gave us ice cream for free. The café was packed. We stood in the doorway as waitresses wearing shorts or skirts slit up the thigh leaped across the dining area like ballerinas. Minutes later, Marwan came out of the kitchen, his apron splashed with tomato seeds and parsley. He was in his twenties but had a boyish face.
Marwan let us in, smiling his naughty smile as if he were letting in thieves. Then he disappeared inside the kitchen. Between us and the kitchen pass-through window, which was the size of a small TV screen, stood a bright-red coffee machine and an ice cream refrigerator.
I browsed the buckets of ice cream.
“Shalom,” a tall girl with curly hair said from behind the containers of many colours. She smiled as if we knew one another.
I turned and looked at the other boys. They said nothing, and Marwan shouted from behind the kitchen’s square window, “Two scoops each, vanilla and chocolate.”
“Maybe we want something different this time,” Mustafa said, raising his arm.
“Hurry up!” Marwan said. “Trouble outside.”
The tall girl arranged her curls behind her ears and handed me three cones with vanilla and chocolate.
“Thank you, todah,” I said.
“You’re welcome, ahlan,” she responded, resting her tongue longer on the l and the n.
Mustafa grabbed the cones from my hands, and we went outside. Around a corner that faced all the action on Jaffa Road, we arranged ourselves on top of an oak tree stump, ate ice cream, and smoked. Only Mustafa and I smoked. I only smoked in this part of the city and only with Mustafa.
Hassan was annoyed by the smell of cigarettes. He stood up and said we blew too much smoke because we didn’t inhale properly.
“Why don’t you teach us how to inhale properly?” Mustafa said, laughing, extending a cigarette to him.
At times, Mustafa talked to us as though we were little boys. He was a year older—sixteen. He carried an ID card; we carried our birth certificates. In the eyes of the government, he was a man. In our eyes, he was also a man, and we were catching up with the hair growing on his face, his muscles, and his manly, prickly words.
Hassan was looking at his phone, his face serious.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him.
“It’s too late to go home,” he said. “I’ll take a taxi to Beit Hanina and spend the night at my grandparents’ place.”
Hassan turned away and stood in front of a closed shop. He started talking on his phone, his arms swinging.
Mustafa shook his head. “What a whiner.”
Across the street, four Border Police soldiers carrying long rifles threw glances at everything and everybody.
“Maybe he’s right,” I said. “Maybe we should have gone to Beit Hanina.”
“No girls in Beit Hanina,” Mustafa said, and pointed at the middle of the square, where music was playing and people clapped and danced. “Staying home for too long has spoiled you.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said.
I turned and watched the lineup at Marwan’s café behind us.
“She’s gorgeous,” I whispered to him.
“Who?”
“The waitress.”
“Dafna?”
Dafna. Nice name.
“How old is she?” I asked him.
“My age, I think,” he said.
“I like her name,” I said, without thinking. “I wouldn’t mind if a girl named Dafna seduced then assassinated me.”
“She’s taken,” he said with a snicker.
“Someone like her has to be taken,” I said, looking over my shoulder, imagining a Jewish bodybuilder with swollen arms leaning over her slim body, hugging her from behind, breathing into her neck, telling her smooth things that would make her melt like the ice cream we had swallowed minutes ago.
Mustafa whistled a tune, and I followed him, and we laughed when we didn’t sync. A passerby turned around and gave us a strange look.
“I hate it when they give that look,” I said.
“What look?”
“Like we’re monsters with horns.”
“You’re too sensitive,” he said in a singsong tone. “Just look them in the eye. I learned this from Marwan. They’ll only respect you if you look them in the eye. Try it.”
He challenged me to bum a cigarette, but I didn’t speak Hebrew. Only a few words: shalom, todah, boker tov, and cigaria. The plan was for me to use one word, one perfectly pronounced word. I practised the word cigaria, rolling the r to sound like it came from the back of my throat. I swished the letter around my mouth: Cigarrrrrrrrrrrria. First I asked a woman. She clutched her handbag and crossed the street. Then I asked a man my father’s age, and he stopped and raised his eyebrows. He pulled back and asked why I wanted the cigarette. I panicked and said something in Arabic. He cursed at me, and I gave him the finger.
I retreated and told Mustafa I was done for the night. I bent down to tie my shoelaces. They were constantly coming loose. I needed new shoes. Mine were dirty and worn out. I liked Hassan’s. I looked up toward his location in front of the closed shop, but I couldn’t see him. The sidewalk was more crowded than before, or maybe it had been crowded the entire time. I couldn’t tell.
I stood up, and at the corner, I saw the man I had asked for a cigarette was talking to the Border Police soldiers. He pointed in our direction, and they pointed their guns and came howling toward us.
“Run!” Mustafa roared.
I froze, unable to talk, unable to run, unable to move, unable to think, like in a bad dream, except that it wasn’t a bad dream. I could see Hassan now. He was standing on the sidewalk, in front of a lotto kiosk. I could not locate Mustafa anymore, but Hassan was in my line of sight.
Behind Hassan, a bald, muscular man yelled something in Hebrew, and his two arms stretched forward, pointing at Hassan.
Hassan turned around. Then I heard bang, bang, bang.
Hassan collapsed before my eyes.
I turned back to face the soldiers. A trembling grew in my arms and legs, and I shouted, “Don’t shoot! For the love of Allah and the prophets, don’t shoot!”
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Excerpted from Seven Heavens Away by Ashraf Zaghal. © 2026 Ashraf Zaghal. Published by House of Anansi Press www.houseofanansi.com.
