who tore down the Berlin Wall here?
” They could at least have the Abu Dis wall down in a couple of days. He laughed, but I was kinda serious. Our driver was pretty swervy, and I asked at one point if we were in Bir Zeit. A Palestinian guy said, “I think Bir Zeit was the place where we almost ran off the road.” Someone else said, “No, Bir Zeit was where we almost hit the ambulance.” The first one laughed and said, “Name the place we almost had an accident and I’ll tell you the geographical location.” I called Ammar, my friend in Jenin, this weekend, and it was pretty hard to communicate. I haven’t spoken Russian in a year, and since then I’ve been stuffing Arabic words and phrases into my head like a bewildered chipmunk on an infinite pile of hazelnuts. I just watched several films in French, Spanish, and Italian, and sometimes my roommate tries to speak French to me, which does not help. I was tired, too, so talking to him, there was no telling which language would pop up in which atrocious or misplaced accent. But I th
