The Wanting Read Online Free

TV. But what could he do? Mr. Hamas was waiting at the safe house with a vest full of C-4 and a video camera, so he muttered a prayer of regret, stuffed his father’s CopperTops into his pocket, and placed the now-lifeless remote on his father’s pillow with a little note—“Sorry, but your batteries are needed to liberate Palestine. Love, Amir.” Maybe he thought he should have left a few shekels for new ones but decided he needed what little he had in his pockets for carfare. Perhaps then he took one last look around his father’s house, the house of his childhood, his youth, his young adulthood now come to an end, took in with a sigh the photos on the walls—the family portrait taken when little Salah was only two, or the one of himself on his twelfth birthday, or his parents’ wedding photo, or his three sisters in their school uniforms—perhaps he hesitated one moment more to inhale the scent of tobacco, the musty carpet, last night’s eggplantfatteh, and the peculiar residue of motor oil that permeated any room his father long inhabited; I can only hope his mother was then taking her midmorning nap, so he could, at last, having refocused his mind on the Koran and the blessings of Allah, quietly slip through the door and run back to the moldy basement where Mr. Hamas was waiting impatiently, perhaps worrying that Amir had changed his mind.
    Hamas must have been using some crappy batteries from India, I thought.
    But crappy batteries or not, Najya Hamid was a proud mom. Even some weeks later, after the IDF bulldozed her house, and she, Abdul-Latif, and the girls had to move in with Abdul-Latif’s brother a few blocks away on Armenia Street, she said she wished Amir would come back to life so that he could blow himself up all over again. This was in a little film called
Mothers of Martyrs
that was broadcast repeatedly on PBC.
    I was struck by this incident of the batteries. I wondered what Mr. Abdul-Latif Hamid felt when he learned that it was his own batteries that set off the explosion that blew his son to pieces and massacred eight other people, including Suliman bin-Sula and Mukhtar Raif, two Arab construction workers on the first leg of their long commute back to Ramalah. I remember thinking this weeks later, and in great agitation rising from my chair and walking across the living room to Anyusha who was doing homework at the kitchen table, and running my fingers through her thick, dark hair, which she had recently cut short and spiky to look like her Japanese comic book heroes, and thinking: What of mine will you steal to kill yourself with?
    The bomb went off at exactly 4:23 p.m. on that Wednesday afternoon in 1996, in a bus shelter on the corner of the street my office is on. Even though the explosion was timed with the onset of rush hour, the authorities speculated that it ignited prematurely, perhaps even accidentally, as the C-4 would have caused significantly more damage had Amir actually stepped onto the bus before pressingthe unlock button on the Mercedes key. As it was, the pressure wave shattered windows in a fifty-meter radius and sent debris flying in a more or less perfect circle at a velocity approaching the speed of sound. This short (less than one second) but quite lethal (nine dead, forty-two wounded) shock wave exceeded one thousand tons per square millimeter at the epicenter of the blast; by the time it reached my office, approximately twenty-four meters away, the pressure had decreased to a mere three hundred and twenty kilograms per square millimeter, enough to break glass and pop eardrums and throw a seventy-five-kilo man off his chair but not enough to rip apart my innards or soften the masonry in my three-hundred-year-old building significantly enough to bring the walls down around my head. However, the Egged bus that had, some seconds earlier, come to a halt in front of Amir was thrown three meters into the air and landed across the street, on its side, like a dead horse. The bus