The Destiny Line: A Fictional
Work Dealing with Facts of
Life under Occupation
By Denis A. Conroy
“My interests (as an old man) are directed towards keeping
truth, based on facts (of course) from disappearing beneath
the dust that accumulates on ‘reports (relevant to situations
as they now stands)’ that may be consigned to the bottom
drawer, or worse, the vault.
“The International Federation for Human Rights (fidh by its
French acronym), is one such report that should not be buried
beneath the dust of history. The Report is available at
corporatewatch.org. It reveals a grim picture of depredation
and is therefore used as the basis for this story.
“The purpose in writing this story, is to remind those who
already know that these condition exist and that they are as
unacceptable now as they were when first reported.”
Saul Fire used to sing his own version of ”Dem Dry Bones” as
he did the rounds of Ofer Prison, an adjunct of the Israeli
Prison Service, checking on the condition of the juvenile
Palestinian prisoners in his custody. His hobby was Palmistry.
The
The
The
The
The
The
Head Line connected to the Life Line
Life Line connected to the Heart Line
Heart Line connected to the Destiny Line
Destiny Line connected to the Fate Line
Fate Line connected to the Intuitive Line
Intuitive Line connected to the Gospel Line
The Gospel line connected to the God Line
I hear the word of the Lord!
Dem bones,
Dem bones,
Dem bones,
I hear the
dem bones gonna walk aroun’
dem bones, gonna walk aroun’
dem bones, gonna walk aroun’
word of the Lord!
It was the practice to handcuff the juvenile prisoners before
they were taken from their cells to the interrogation center.
Saul would sometimes handcuff the hands of those prisoners he
thought had interesting or distinctive lines on their palms at
front, otherwise he automatically secured their hands from
behind. Being enemies of the State of Israel they were of
little consequence. But Palmistry was Palmistry and palms were
for reading.
Saul’s
received
his
passion
for
Palmistry
from
his
grandmother, a convert to Judaism. His grandfather had married
a fiery Turkish woman whose name Sanez meant ‘unique’, and
after deciding to bestow his family name ‘Fire’ on the bride
he ever-afterwards referred to her as his lily from Antioch.
With this union a window of opportunity was opened onto a
vista most splendid, one his introverted and homogeneous
pedigree had hitherto know little of. Life acquired a strange
miasmic mood that postulated uniqueness as the norm
henceforth, enabling Saul recourse to a proxy mobility of
thought that otherwise would not have awakened his
imagination. The ensuing union was partly religious and partly
heretical, possessing the power to discombobulate generations
of the family without limitation for ever and ever.
Sanez’ father gave her a book entitled ‘Physiognomy &
Palmistry’ dealing with Pythagoras the ancient Greek
mathematician and tracing the history of palmistry back to 497
B.C for her 21st.birthday. Shortly afterwards she had entered
a booth at an Antioch fair to have her palm read. As she sat
before an old man, hand and arm outstretched for inspection,
his piercing eyes periodically moved to make eye contact with
her. He ran his index finger back and forth across the palm of
her right hand for what felt like an eternity while muttering
‘the head line’ to nobody in particular. After a long period
of silence he told that her head line suggested that her
future was in mathematics. “Your head line is so long it
crosses the entire palm with criss-crossing wrinkles” he
blurted out while attempting to describe something unique to
Sanez by way of slicing and dicing the data contained in the
inconceivably rare phenomena now before him. “You have two
destiny lines, one hard and one soft. Mathematically speaking,
only one in five million people possess such a rare thing”, he
shouted in his excitement. “You are an un-wrinkler”, he
mysteriously said to her by way of concluding the session.
There afterwards Sanez identified herself as a mathematician
to the consternation of her family. In subsequent
confrontations with her husband, she would chastise him for
his lack of philosophical or mathematical insights, claiming
that his religious convictions were the result of gossipygospel narratives that insulated him from discovering the
truth beyond the old dry texts he so revered. She nicknamed
him ‘polystyrene’ so as to tease him. “Conviction in the mind
of the self-esteeming zealot is no different to the conviction
a fool might possess”, she would throw at him.
Sanez was the seminal influence in Saul’s life. He was in awe
of her spirit and ability to recreate her approach to everyday
affairs like her yesterday’s were merely the stepping-stones
to tomorrow’s discoveries. The magic she found life to possess
had no apparent downside. She was uniquely upwardly mobile in
an indefatigable way which led her husband Raul Fire to
attribute these qualities to her Greek and Persian ancestry.
It was his grandmother’s lightness of being that Saul wished
to emulate more than anything else, so as to offset the
troubling ‘polystyrene’ gene he imagined he had inherited from
his father’s and grandfather’s conservative patriarchal side
of the family.
Saul’s grandmother Sanez was opposed to him working in the
Ofer Detention Center. She had read an authoritative report
revealing the gross injustices that were perpetrated on
Palestinian children as young as twelve years of age at that
place of infamy. Testimonies had revealed that the majority of
children were being detained in the middle of the night in
what was typically described as terrifying raids conducted by
the army. Most children had their hands painfully tied behind
their backs and were blindfolded before being taken away to an
unknown location for interrogation. The arrest and transfer
processes were often accompanied by verbal abuse, humiliation
and threats of physical violence. All of this led to the
children finding themselves in an interrogation room, alone,
sleep deprived, bruised and scared, she discovered.
Saul had received instruction to go to the Zamir Interrogation
Section of the prison and transfer prisoner 211 to a cell in
the eastern quarter of Ofer. As he walked along the bleak
corridors intoning his version of the “Dem Dry Bones”
spiritual, the piteous cries of children’s pain and distress
seemed to seep from every nook and cranny of the prison. To
some degree he had become inured to their pain. Bureaucracy
had a strange way of absorbing individual emotions into the
sovereign power of authority. Orders existed only for the
protection of a system of governance that regarded
subordinates as useful idiots in the exploitation of human
resources, he believed. That hierarchies of the patriarchal
kind were little more than elites that fed off those below
them…as morsels within a food chain…had managed to escape
Saul’s attention because of his innate respect for authority.
Saul Fire’s mood was verging on the rebellious as he waded
ankle-deep in the river of tears the stone-throwing juveniles
had shed while imprisoned in solitary confinement. Israeli
pettiness had the power to kill and it did so, blithely
unaware of its inhumanity. It had come to a pass that his
grandmother’s words concerning hard and soft lines were now
ever present in his mind. “Your destiny is under the influence
of murky forces because your hard lines override your soft
lines, causing them to wrinkle and confuse issues relating to
your journey”, she repeatedly told him. “Someday, something
will happen to challenge your understanding of yourself…but as
your destiny line is so weak, there is no telling which way
your development will go “ was the prognosis.
Arriving at the Zamir Interrogation Section, Saul encountered
a 14 year old sleep-deprived, bruised and scared individual
handcuffed at the front…prisoner 211… tried his best to avoid
making eye contact with him. Saul approached him with more
curiosity than compassion and out of habit, lifted his
handcuffed hands so as to inspect them for insignia of the
palm-reading sort. Spotting something unusual in the child’s
right palm, Saul pulled it towards himself for the purpose of
closer inspection, causing the abused youngster to reel
backwards. With what soothing words he could muster, Saul
slowly coaxed the Palestinian boy to let him inspect his hand.
There below the boy’s destiny line he saw the unmistakable
symbol of the Star of David.
The existence of the Star of David on the prisoner Ahmed
Tawfeek’s hand triggered a metamorphosis in Saul Fire.
Overnight he found it difficult to see the Palestinian boy as
an enemy of Israel. Each night he returned home he conferred
with his still lucid grandmother Sanez on the sudden
strangeness and disbelief at finding such a symbol on Ahmed’s
hand. Sanez listened intently to Saul while peering into the
lines of his right-hand before addressing him, “something will
happen that will challenge your understanding of yourself.
Strangeness is the norm and we invent rules of identity to
deal with it”, then focusing on his destiny lines once more,
she remarked, “you are experiencing an awakening and it’s
reflected in your palm”. On releasing his hand she said
finally, “find a way for me to see the boy”.
Sanez understood the mechanisms of the abstract male womb…it
was defensive! It was the realm in which maleness found its
raison d’etre in formulating rules, be they the rules applied
to games or warfare. Fertility has a weaponised component;
clearly, it is a question of developing the means to
annihilate the seed of the other. She clearly understood that
if strangeness was cock-o’-the walk, she would use mathematics
to prove that she was the queen of Hellenistic Judaism. She
was aware of the engineering footprint in her male progeny
that had evolved the supplanting stages that took the humble
catapult to heights of lethality in making it to nuclear
fission and beyond to the mega boom-boom of full spectrum
dominance. At this point the comedic could only be tolerated
so long as it operated as a subtext to the art of projecting
male ‘strength’ through arms.
Saul passed another week in the house of horrors known as Ofer
Prison. His taste for authoritarian rule had waned, leaving
him ill at ease in the company of colleagues he had until
recently felt kinship with. He had managed, with the
connivance of a superior staff member to smuggle his
grandmother into the prison, but nothing came of it. Ahmed,
upon sensing the nobility of the old woman and hearing her
voice, placed his head upon her lap and wept uncontrollably.
Nothing could bring him out from this state of total collapse,
so Sanez spent the next hour running her fingers through his
hair while humming a lament to his lost innocence. When Ahmed
finally fell asleep, Saul, with surprising tenderness, placed
him on a bench and instructed a junior guard to watch over
him.
Saul’s place in the scheme of things was becoming more opaque
by the day. He frequently experienced worrisome forebodings
about the direction Zionism was moving in. Even Sanez, when
alluding to the health of the regime would cast serious doubts
about its validity. “The maths is all wrong”, she would
sometimes pliantly say, in order to give her opinions the
veneer of a science.
One day when Saul was visiting a Tel Aviv market place he
happened upon a strange sign advertising the service of a
palmist. ‘PALMISTRY: FAKIRS R US’ read a sign alongside a
somewhat greasy photograph of an Armenian with shoulder length
grey hair. Deciding that it might be interesting to get
another palmistry perspective on the state of his ‘lines’ he
entered the booth to find a table with a bell on it with
instructions to ring for service. The individual he had seen
in the photograph outside emerged from behind a curtain and
beckoned him into the inner sanctum.
Saul was aware of Armen Tamiroff’s exotic perfumes as he
performed his Fakir duties. His heavy breathing became more
distinct as he edged ever closer to him in order to better
examine the details of his palm. After much deliberation, he
surprised Saul with his use of military idioms when he
exclaimed “gone AWOL”, and then after a short pause added
“gone absent without leave”. Then, looking somewhat aghast at
Saul’s palm, he blurted out the words “your destiny line is
not there anymore, but in its place there appear to be two
raised eyebrows”.
Saul recalled his grandmother telling him that “something will
happen that will change your understanding of yourself”. That
‘something’ was happening to him now and it was basically the
realisation that mythology could nurture exceptionalism to the
detriment of human values. He now saw that he was part of a
culture that had become a vehicle for celebrating prejudices
via the voices of ‘celebrities’ acting as role models for the
gullible to imitate. Uncritical responses to authority bred
sheepishness and he now had little tolerance for continuing
down that path. Everywhere he looked he saw that celebrities
were the ‘adorables’ foisted onto the ‘deplorables’, who were
not meant to have a voice anyway. Israel and America were
foremost in this regard he thought…best of buddies when it
came to faux democracy.
In the course of his metamorphosis, Saul had taken to
wandering the grim corridors of the Ofer Detention Center
singing loudly his newest version of ‘Dem Dry Bones’ as he
shuffled along. The children could sometimes be heard calling
out “sing Dem Dry Bone Thoughts’ from within their cells. They
went as follows;
‘DEM DRY BONE THOUGHTS’
The thought line connected to the wish line
The wish line connected to the hope line
The hope line connected to the share line
The share line connected to the love line
The love line connected to the happy line
The happy line connected to the desire line
The desire line connected to the out-of-here line
I HEAR THE WORD OF THE FREE MAN!
Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk aroun’
Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk aroun’
Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk aroun’
I HEAR THE WORD OF THE FREE Man!
Ahmed from within his cell would hear the approaching singer
and wait next to the iron grid for Saul to come along.
Nowadays they found it easy to make eye contact. Each stood
equidistant to the grid, silently communing while transcending
the void of alienation.
– Denis A. Conroy is a writer who contributed to many online
newspapers including Counter Punch and dissident Voice. He
contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.