Almond Date

She sat alone by the window, and it felt like she was holding her breath the entire four hour bus ride, holding tight to her glass jar lest she drop it and shatter the glass to pieces.

She wanted to hear his words, 'It's like you made these almond dates out of gold.’ Sarah was ten when her father last touched her brown hair which is tied up with the same blue hair clip today, and said to her as usual, ‘You look just like your mother.’

The only thing that separates her from seeing her father is this checkpoint before going into the prison. She looked at her reflection in the glass jar and wondered if her dad would recognize her, after six years of rejected permit applications 

Wearing his military suit, with his rifle hanging over his right shoulder, right index finger hovering over the trigger, his hat in the left, the soldier called her name, and she wondered if this was the soldier who arrested her father which suddenly made her afraid that he would arrest her on the spot. 

"What’s in this jar?" he asked in an alien Arabic accent, irritated and almost bored.

"It's just dates for my father," she replied, frightened, and surprised he spoke Arabic.

"Why is the jar made of glass?" he inquired monotonously, gesturing for her to open the jar.

"I… don’t know… what should it be made of?" she said, opening the jar and thinking how stupid it was to bring a glass jar. ‘Of course, I should have put them in a cardboard box but I wanted them to be visible,’ she stumbled over her thoughts, remembering her rationale. 

"Almonds on dates? What's the reason for that?" replied the soldier, holding his head over the open jar and looking down at the dates. He reached his fingers in the jar and took a piece, examined it with his eyes as if he was seeing almonds and dates for the first time in his life.

"It's how my father likes them. it reminds him of home," she answered, “ of me,” she thought to herself, surprised she was sharing such an intimate detail of her life with a stranger.

He put it back in the jar which made her lips coil in disgust. ‘Great, now the whole jar is dirty,’ she thought to herself.

The soldier called on another one of his colleagues and said that she had dates stuffed with almonds. They talked for all of thirty seconds, one of them looking suspiciously at the jar and the other shaking his head every three seconds.

A female soldier came and grabbed her by the arm.

The female soldier led her to a room with a wooden table at the center. Two male soldiers were inside, looking suspiciously at her, as if she was smuggling drugs.

One of them asked her, in broken Arabic, to stand against the wall, the other ordered her to raise her arms. 

She raised her arms while he raised his rifle.

The female soldier started with Sarah’s T-shirt sleeves, running her hands along the arms as if she expected to find something under her skin. She paused for a moment, and asked the Arabic-speaking soldier something.

“Take off your shoes.” The soldier said while aiming his rifle at her shoes.

She slipped them off, still facing the wall. The female soldier shook them upside down as if she was shaking sand out of them. Then she started banging one of them on the wall, which Sarah was standing against making her jolt slightly every time. Sarah wished the shoe banging could open a secret portal that would swallow her out of this room. 

She slowly turned her head, looked at the jar of dates from the corner of her eye, and watched one of the soldiers inspect the dates. One by one. 

After 4 hours of immaculate body search and interrogation, she was not afraid any more. 

She walked back to the bus, almond dates dumped at the gate of the checkpoint, the jar still in her hands.

About the author

Dima Ashour is an English literature and translation student. She believes that beauty lasts longer than cruelty. She writes for "If I must die, you must live," – the will of Dr. Refaat Alareer.