Only they can make the “desolate” desert “bloom”, he promises. That night, over a celebratory meal, the commander congratulates his men, extolling the finer points of their Zionist mission – erasing the “sterile nationalist sentiments” of the Arabs and planting the fertile seeds of their own nationalist expansion. He is an occupier, a man at war, and Shibli reveals his sinister power slowly, with a delicate touch. A sadist capable of unflinching savagery, he lies awake at night suffering the aches and pains of a spider bite. The commander is obsessed by purity and order. Only a weeping girl “curled up inside her black clothes like a beetle” and a dog survive. The Israelis kill the unarmed Arabs and their camels, their blood absorbed into the greedy sand.
The soldiers chase the sound of barking that echoes through the sand dunes, finding nothing for days until they finally come across a band of Palestinians resting by a spring.
The first section unfolds over four days in 1949 as the commander leads his men on sweeping patrols of the Negev, or Naqab, desert in order to “cleanse it of any remaining Arabs”. The second is a woman in Ramallah who stumbles upon the story in a newspaper decades later and becomes haunted by one minor detail – the fact that the girl’s assault happened 25 years to the day before she was born. The first is a fastidious, quietly malevolent Israeli platoon commander who organises the gang rape and murder of a young Bedouin. T he two halves of Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s slim, searing novel are bound by both minor and major details: a brutal gang rape and murder, the punishing heat, the eerie presence of a dog in distress and two nameless characters.
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