For Jennifer

An overdue journey guided me briskly through relentless rain, my brown leather trainers soaked and weighted as I leapt across and into murky puddles. Sweet, charcoal smoke climbed upward and away from the burning embers of a determined grill, stolen from an awaiting chimney by heaving drafts, drenched and denied promises of broiled tomato, onion and za’tar.

I drew and held a tentative breath, passed the butcher with averted gaze, straining as a child when witness to his first paraplegic; a slaughtered, skinned body swayed heavily in segments from steel hooks. The butcher scraped a rubber broom across chipped, spotted tiles, pacing methodically in crimson splashed galoshes. Blood spilled onto the black asphalt in tides, swirled through a meandering spectrum of oily rainbows, and found the piled beaches of a construction site. It pulled at the powdery dunes of unmixed cement and wandered lazily on, a brown, silted concoction, between crowded steel bars, briefly floating the rotting skins of discarded vegetables and an empty cigarette pack before disappearing beneath the road.

I pulled the collar of my wool coat around my neck and peered upward through a thin, stinging veil to a dimly lighted window. Cinderblock walls, pocked by Israeli guns, shown dark grey as they slowly absorbed a days old storm. I wrenched my hands from dewy pockets and pushed through the metal door, punctured and ironic, its sharp, rusting bullet holes inviting the chill fury behind me.

I ascended a narrow corridor towards the blaring explosions of an Egyptian action movie and collapsed unto a crushed velvet cushion. In the corner, an elderly man stroked his wiry, metallic beard and kneeled eastward upon a faded rug. Next to me, a boy with Coke bottle glasses squinted intently at a television mounted high on the wall, secretly anticipating the change of channel and hippie-era Speed Racer cartoons during commercial breaks, impossibly tiny feet hanging motionless from his perch on the couch’s edge.

Three cracked mirrors reflected a disguised man, a foreigner’s face hidden beneath squalid black shrubbery, neglected tan curls protruding from beneath a stretched winter cap. I waited, a stranger unto myself, until beckoned to the stiff rose leather of a motorized chair, my dingy jeans wiping oily hair from its surface.

It is here that the ritual and clanship of men transcend nations. This fraternity of artisans lifts itself from the currents of three worlds, pauses solely on its universal day of rest, and invites only those who know the way as Tuesdays dawn.

He scanned the crowded counter. Scissors, an oversized comb, a brush, thick with shorn black hair, a towel to drape over his shoulder, its worn cloth drenched with heavy shaving cream and subtle after shave.

Trust is releasing Western vanities to the mercy of Eastern considerations, without the luxury of language, bound beneath nylon and vicars’ stretched white paper.

It is letting a declared enemy of state brush through your dusty hair; pull through tangles and examine moles cautiously; advise you as a doctor with the concurrence of waiting patrons; cut through American brown amidst Palestinian black; grasp your jaw and tilt your head with rough, steady hands; examine, evaluate, strategize; touch you prone; set a razor blade to your throat and deftly scrape away self neglect; return you to a vaguely familiar self. It is trust that opens wide the heart, without the longing of expectation.

“The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a ‘circle of certainty’ within which reality is also imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.” --Paolo Freire