Was it right what Youssef did that day? Could what was essentially a good deed also be haram at the same time? Did his joy over what he had done make it worse? What could drive a rational man, a man who had studied physics in Moscow in his twenties to such an act? The loss of hope? His intense loneliness? That couldn’t be it. Many had lost hope and many felt lonely. Maybe if we could ask him, he himself wouldn’t be able to explain his motivations.
Youssef had always been a little unusual. In his mid twenties, against the wishes of his family back in Nablus, he had decided to marry a Russian beauty and stay in the Soviet-Union after graduation. The woman was called Nadjezhda, whose name meant Hope. That’s why he always called his wife, Amal, which means Hope in Arabic. He had been smitten with her from the start. Nothing she did or said changed that. He lost his family connections over her. She never acknowledged what he sacrificed for her. As a child he had been the pride and joy of his parents. When his older brother died of a heart defect no doctor could have detected all their vicariouly lived ambitions were poured into him. They had always dreamt of their son becoming something like a world renowned university professor or inventor at some big international company. Not a physics teacher at a highschool in a city they struggled to pronounce the name of.
Nadjezhda hadn’t lived long, but long enough to make the differences between Youssef and his family irreconcilable. The marriage had not been a happy one. She died five years into their marriage. Nadjezhda got practically decapitated by a metal rod at the tractor factory where she worked. Some breakdown of an assembly line. Parts got moving. The wrong metal part hit her on the wrong part of her head. The man who brought Youssef the news had called it a ‘clean death’. Youssef asked what a ‘dirty death’ would have been like. He got no answer.
By the time Youssef became a widower they had left Moscow and moved to one of the ugliest cities you could find at that time east of the Urals. You could get a flat much faster there. Nadezhda had somehow thought they would leave the Soviet-Union and would resettle in Jerusalem or Cairo or Rome or New York or Tokio or Cassablanca. Youssef suspected those were the few cities outside of the Soviet Union she had often heard of. She associated the same magical living standard with each place, as if they were all located in the same country.
On the morning of the day she died they had had one of their fights. Always the same fight. He had promised her a happy life and, in her eyes, he hadn’t delivered. There were days he blamed himself for her death. He wondered what her life would have been like if he had chosen to ignore her on the metro that day. If he hadn’t got off at the same stop she got off on purpose, only to ask her to meet her at the ice skating ring the next day.
They had a daughter, Anna. She was three at the time her mother died. He did what he could to raise her on his own. There were hard moments, when his days felt like his daughter was doing whatever she could to make his life hell and getting ill on purpose and refusing to eat on purpose and refusing to sleep on purpose, but in the end taking care of his daughter had been the best part of his life. Every time he managed to make her smile he felt his heart float to the heavens.
As a teenager she got much more difficult to handle and got obsessed with western clothes brands. Youssef once paid three monthly salaries on the black market to get her a Levis yeans. To his horror she cut a hole in it the next day and claimed all Americans wear jeans like that. To Youssef’s mind his daughter seemed to think shopping was the ultimate and most sacred goal in a human being’s life. That’s not how he had tried to raise her, so in the nature versus nurture debate Youssef was a bit more prone to say that nature sometimes triumphed over nurture.
In 1993 Anna enrolled in some programme to find an American husband and she did. She emigrated to a small town in Michigan in 1995. He asked her if she had become a Wolverine, but she didn’t get what he was referring to.
Youssef visited her six times in total. He never warmed to American society. The last time he visited he was basically treated like some kind of major national security threat at the airport. The things people associated with him because of his name and his facial features were absurd to him. It didn’t surprise him though. He found out Americans don’t even know how to tell the difference between their own Native Americans. The average American knows Native Americans only from Western movies and those are usually based on cliché ideas of the Commanches or the Sioux.
If an American couldn’t tell the difference between a Cheyenne or a Cherokee or a Seminole or a Kiowa or a Navajo why should Youssef assume they could distinguish between a Palestinian and someone from Pakistan or Algeria? No American would ever look at him and think: there goes a man who understands Russia and Russian culture better than I do. Youssef also read more American classics than most Americans. At first he read them in their Russian or Arab translation, but eventually he read them in the original English. He quite liked Faulkner. The Unvanquished was his favorite.
He felt robbed by the universe, more so than when his wife died, when it became clear his daughter had decided neither to keep any of her Palestinian culture nor anything of her Russian culture. Even though as a child she had been fluent in Arabic and Russian she now only spoke English. She had grown up with Arabic and Russian children’s stories. That all went into the dust bin of her memory. She wanted to forget everything. He tried to tell her stories about her mum, but she wasn’t interested. She always changed the subject and started praising the latest product she had bought at the mall. Talking to her felt like watching a TV commercial that could talk back to you.
He tried to stay in touch with her, but he felt her slipping away. The last time they spoke was in 2003. There were no grandchildren. He had at times wanted to inquire as to why not, but he figured he would never get a real answer.
Through the nineties Youssef grew increasingly uncomfortable in Russia. He saw thugs get fabulously wealthy and he saw lots of people, especially the older generation, reduced to extreme poverty. People were selling leather bound Russian classics for a few cents just to buy milk. You would never catch Youssef idealizing the Soviet-Union, but many Soviet citizens had been avid readers. People’s vocabulary had been very rich. People had had time to read. Even people with simple jobs would read Dostojevski or Turgenev or some other Russian great at work. You could talk to people, have long discussions, even though some topics could only be whispered about. These days people only talked about their next holiday or how to get a pay raise or how to get more muscles.
People only had pressure now. Pressure to buy more, work more, party more, own more, show more, get more, get more attention, get more likes, travel more, try more food, try more drinks, go to more clubs, try more sports, try more extreme sports, flaunt more knowledge, flaunt better morals, flaunt a better diet, more, more, more. And all he could really observe them getting was just more pressure.
In his family he had always been the odd one out and his frowned upon, rushed marriage and his underwhelming career decisions had burned already fragile bridges. When he resettled back to Palestine, there was nobody to pick him up at the airport. Let’s leave it at that.
It wasn’t easy with all the red tape involved, but he managed to buy a small flat in Gaza. It cost him all his savings. He had a pension. He’d been a physics teacher all his life in a country that no longer existed, so you can imagine how tiny it was. His neighbours were very generous. He tutored some of their children. He did the grocery shopping for the lady in the apartment above him. She was over 80 years old.
For Youssef it was enough. Being in Gaza was his way of being a member of his people, of his ‘tribe’ to use a word that Americans like to overuse. He was giving some meaning to his life, by living on land he knew millions wanted to steal.
He had a front row seat to every time Israel came in to mow the lawn after 2005. Youssef was one of the very few people who looked at that with some kind of excitement. Here I am. Come and get me.
When Youssef watched the news concerning October 7th he could read the mood in Israel. He knew exactly what was coming. Israel had the perfect opportunity to destroy Gaza once and for all. The West Bank they had de facto annexed years ago, with Palestinian territory there atomized in what were basically clusters of reservations. Palestinians in the West Bank were systematically being strangled to give up more of their land. This was going on with the tacit approval of their own leaders there. Gaza was different. Gaza was defiant. And that’s why Israelis hated Gaza so much.
And so Youssef went from hospital to hospital donating his blood. Useful blood, type O. He cheated the doctors so he could give way more blood than he was allowed to give. He didn’t give himself time to rest in between. With every new doctor he claimed it was the first time had donated blood in years. The last time he gave blood the nurse suspected something, but he pretended to be ok. He managed to talk her out of her concerns.
Youssef wanted to die in his apartment, not at the hospital. It had taken him all his strength to walk out of the hospital as if nothing at all was bothering him. His legs had felt like jelly and his heart was doing stuff he had never known a heart could be doing.
He made it home. His timing had been perfect. He died three minutes and forty second after the first Israeli bomb hit a neighbourhood in Gaza City.
He died knowing his blood would be used to treat the victims of the Israeli terror campaign against Palestinian civilians. The vast majority would be women and children. Revenge for their lavishly sponsored army suffering a military fiasco at the hands of a tiny guerrila band equipped with home made weapons. That’s how Youssef saw it.
His last thoughts were of Anna’s childhood years. Playing horse. Crawling around on all fours with her on his back, her tiny body shaking with laughter. The way she had jumped up and down the first time he had come home with a bottle of Coca Cola and a gigantic poster of Michael Jackson for her bedroom.
Hassan, the ambulance driver who found him, said he had never seen such a radiant smile on an old man’s face before.
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The Confessor 