Samer had known Jumana since he was a small boy playing with her brothers, Wadee and Faisal. Although the boys had drifted apart after Samer went to university, they grew close again when Samer’s brother was martyred and the twins came to pay their respects. The twins’ own father had also been killed by Israeli soldiers, and they had separately spent time in Israeli jails. Their friendship revived and spread roots in the terrain of a grief particular to martyr-dom, where the anguish of loss mixes with pride, resolve, the desire for vengeance, and camaraderie.

Trust wasn’t the only basis for Samer’s decision to confide in Wadee and Faisal: the twins worked in construction and had a large pickup truck. Their family owned a nearby hill, forested on one side and farmed on the other, and their sister’s salon provided another access for the underground secret.

Wadee and Faisal picked up the story. “We were excited and frightened at the same time. We thought Jumana would know what to do,” the brothers said, fluidly taking turns with their words, like a verbal relay.

“We couldn’t come up with any good ideas,” Wadee said.

“But we agreed that nothing could happen without Jumana,” Faisal said.

Samer had not thought beyond the digging. Wadee and Faisal could execute a plan, but not come up with one. That would be Jumana’s role. She was the big sister who looked out for them, their only parent after their father died, and she was also a dear childhood friend of both Bilal and Ghassan.

“They said they wanted to install a new bathroom in the salon,” Jumana chimed in, twisting her mouth toward her brothers. “I had been begging them to fix a few things for months. Suddenly they were ready to take on a major rehab project.” In theory, Jumana was speaking to me, but she didn’t look my way, moving her eyes between her brothers, her glass of tea, the food, and Bilal. “I knew something was up, but I never imagined this.” She swept her eyes across the walls.

I was twitching, needing to move. The body has its own logic, an impulsivity that betrays emotions running through it. But I held myself steady with a fatiguing determination to hide my discomfort.

“We decided to completely gut the bathroom and expand it,” Wadee said, describing how they had measured the precise location to dig, a corner of the underground chamber just outside the existing bathroom stall.

They managed to haul away twelve truckloads of dirt without raising suspicion.

“What about neighbors and spies?” I asked.

“People were curious, yeah. And we knew some of them had to be spies and collaborators. So the first thing we did was to dig through and then obscure the access behind a wall. Then we let people come and look around the renovation of the salon, as if we had nothing to hide.”

I turned to Jumana, forcing her to look at me. “And you weren’t the least suspicious?”