Fariha’s Reviews > A River Dies of Thirst: Journals > Status Update

But we have a difficult mission to perform: mediation between God and the Devil to get them to call a brief truce so that we can bury our martyrs.

The news searches for their names under the rubble. Apart from that, abnormal life appears to be running its normal course. The Devil still boasts of his long quarrel with God. Individuals, if they wake up alive, can still say 'Good morning,' then go off to their normal jobs: burying the dead.

Low pressure area.Northwesterly winds, heavy showers. Grey wrinkled sea. Tall cypresses. Today the autumn clouds let thirty martyrs fall in the north of Gaza, among them two women taking part in a demonstration to demand a share of hope for their kind. Clear skies. Calm blue sea. Northerly winds. Good visibility.But the autumn clouds—the symbolic name for killing—wipe out an entire family, made up of seventeen lives.

The astrologers said: 'It is the chaos of existence at the door of the last judgement.' Luckily or unluckily for us, foreign historians, experts on our destinies and our oral history, were not here, so we don't know what happened to us!

, and when they opened their windows they saw spiders spinning their webs in the snow and went blind. When they tried to hear what was going on, storms arose, whose wild sounds were unfamiliar to them, and they went deaf.

If peace is a pause between two wars, then the dead have a right to vote: we will choose the general. If war is an accident on the motorway, then the living have a duty to vote: we will choose the donkey. But the living did not go to the ballot box, not because the snow was falling in big flakes, but because a sudden paralysis afflicted the city's inhabitants,

And at night we see it twinkling with stars, which gaze at us with affection. We also see what lies behind the snake wall: the watchmen in the ghetto, frightened of what we're doing behind the little walls we still have left. We see them oiling their weapons to kill the gryphon they think is hiding in our hen coop. And we cannot help laughing.

A snake eager to lay its eggs between our inhalations and exhalations so that we say for once, because we are nearly choking to death, 'We are the strangers.' When we look in our mirrors all we see is the snake making for the backs of our necks, but with a bit of effort we can see what is above it: a sky yawning with boredom at the architects adorning it with guns and flags.

A huge metal snake coils around us, swallowing up the little walls that separate our bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room. A snake that does not move in a straight line, to avoid resembling us as we look straight on. It twists and turns, a nightmare of cement segments reinforced with pliant metal, making it easy for it to move into the fragmented bits of land and beds of mint that are left to us.

He said: 'Hope is neither something tangible nor an idea. It is a talent.' He took a beta blocker, putting the question of hope aside, and for some obscure reason felt quite happy.