The Return: Short Story

A few days ago I learnt that the people who were displaced from Palestine during the Original Nakba could never even visit their country again. But their children and grandchildren could. 

The background of this story is a similar one. Yousef returns to Palestine to fulfill his father's dying wish...

'It should be right here,' I whisper to myself. I can feel hope and raw emotion filling up my chest as I turn the corner. 

The hope is the first to go away, the raw emotion stays, grows, claws at my heart. 

I run, down the street and back up again. Could I have made a wrong turn, could I be in the wrong block? 

But the tree is there, that tree I'd recognize anywhere, the tree I had seen many a times when my father had shown me pictures of his neighborhood. 'This is our local graveyard Yousef, this is where my parents are buried, this is where I want to buried, with them,close to them,' he had whispered, as his hand traced the edges of the picture in his lap. 

And then on his deathbed, as he held my hand, his grip wasn't one of a dying man, it was the grip of a man with dreams, with hope, ' I couldn't return Yousef, but you can, promise me you will, promise me you will find them and you will water their graves.' And I had promised him. But the promise seemed to be as much of a lie as my words then. I had told him nothing would happen to him, that he would be okay and he would go back with me and he would watch his grandchildren play where he had played as a child. 

Lies. I had told him lies. 

My knees buckle under the weight of my broken promise, the fire in my heart rises to my eyes and I kneel where I imagine my ancestors lie. 

And I can only imagine, because where there was supposed to be a graveyard stands an arrogant mansion crowned with the Star of David. 

David! If David was here he wouldn't have allowed this. But David is long gone and the descendants of his 'followers' continue to kill in his name.