Ramallah for Real: When Dubya came to Ramallah

It's almost noon. Outside the house nothing stirs save the occasional street cat.

Dubya is in town. That's one quiet president, lemme tell you, like he's taken off his shoes and tiptoed past the Qalandia checkpoint to share sweet tea and whispered nothings with Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas].

People haven't talked about much else lately. At the bakery, the shop, cafés, hairdressers, the kids hanging out around the Clock Manara. The word "Bush" hangs in the air like the opening of a thousand cans of coke. "Pshhh. Have you heard?"

Mind you, no one but a cloistered few expects anything substantial to come of it. Some drinks offer but the mere illusion of quenching one's thirst. Too much sugar you see. Addictive, somewhat fattening, but the dryness remains. And yet there bubbles a palpable excitement, like the thrill of a school day suspended by bad weather.  

Two days ago American helicopters flew in low, reconnoitering; Black Hawks and double-rotor Chinooks, filled to the brim no doubt with anxious Marines, Navy Seals, or - God forbid - Jack Bauer himself, slapping high-fives with Chuck Norris and Rutger Hauer. Enough to strike fear into any television-educated mortal.

"I heard the PA will impose a complete curfew," said Carl, an American activist murmurs.

"What, beyond cars? They'll arrest you for walking the streets? I doubt that."

These are fertile times for conspiracy and rumor.

"They put a big black tarpaulin over Arafat's brand new mausoleum so that Bush wouldn't have to look at his nemesis," my landlord tells me, "but then some Fatah people mischievously draped a giant Arafat over the Nativity Church's entrance."

Fact and fiction easily weave into the same strange sweater. Time to do a little reconnaissance myself, see how far I can get toward meeting a friend downtown for overdue breakfast. 

Outside, Mitri and the kids look on from the terrace; the choppers are back, pummeling the horizon by means of seemingly languid blades, slowed down by the brain's inability to process the fast whir. A year's always so much more than a year around these parts, and I have to pinch myself a couple of times to realize George Bush, the undertaker of Iraq, has indeed landed at the Muqat'a with an olive branch clenched where once only bottles clung. A year is nothing indeed. And a helicopter's propeller twirls fast, yet always returning to the same position.

"Let them have theirs, and we'll have ours. Khalas [enough]!" says old Ramzi. Enough. He slaps his hands together with the weariness of one who's tired of haggling, but pays an inflated price anyway because the souq might close and at home a wife and kids await food, not high principle.  

"In sha' Allah," Mitri adds, "something will change. The only problem is Gaza. Hamas needs to give it back to the PA, but even then they will never accept the Quartet's principles." He picks up a newspaper and points out an article. "Let me tell you something; Olmert will go into Gaza to take out Hamas, and hand it back to Abu Mazen. That's the deal. That's what they're talking about. But many will die."

My own crystal ball is rather blurred, trembling as it does when one of the helicopters approaches overhead. Blackhawk up. Everywhere around me I see people on balconies, pointing at these cloppering contrivances; snipers perch on rooftops, scooping for a menace to Noah's pigeon.

I'm hungry and Dima's recently opened Café de la Paix serves a spectacular omelet, or so I heard. Fact finding being the code of the day, I start walking, skirting the main street that some policeman just tells me is off limits. Then another guy in riot gear further amends my trajectory and soon enough I’m headed South instead of North.

Luckily a passing taxi saves me from doing a complete Marco Polo. Left, right, left, right, the guy whizzes, tacks against the prevailing winds, taking his time to extrude a shimmer of hope from his foreign cargo.

"So um...how do I get to Belgium?"