Bilal and I split up during the three-hour window when Israel finally lifted the curfew. It hadn’t rained in weeks. One of us had to get to the orchard. The whole southern edge had to be watered more intensively because the saplings there were struggling to survive. I thought he would do it, but instead he wanted to bake the bread at the store and go to town for food and supplies. The plan was for me to drop him off in town and take the car to the tree groves, then pick him up at the bakery. In part, he thought it would look suspicious if he went to the trees instead of the bakery, when the reprieve from the curfew was so short. They would think he was up to something. But there was another reason, which I would only learn later.

We loaded the car with four empty five-gallon water jugs, the buckets of dough, and bags of vegetables from our garden. Then we unloaded everything but the empty jugs at the bakery, and I left as lines of people formed for fresh bread. Foreign reporters scurried around the town like bugs with cameras, zooming in on faces scribbled with misery and on people shopping frantically, trying to get as much as they could in preparation for another uncertain stretch of curfew.

The tree groves were about a ten-minute drive away, and luckily I didn’t have to go through any checkpoints. But the streets had been torn up by tanks. Electric pylons were broken everywhere, and I had to watch out for sparking, jumping wires. Pipes were busted up and precious water poured into the streets. Cars parked on the streets had been smashed like toys by the tanks.

I parked our car at the top of the hill and walked to the tent. The water tank had been knocked over, which meant either soldiers or settlers had been there. But the rock formation where the tubes were hidden was undisturbed. I pulled the tank upright and activated the pump to fill it with water. I put on a show of struggling to lift the empty water jugs from the car, as if they were full, and, to the best of my acting ability, emptied their heavy make-believe water into the tank. One could never be sure when and where soldiers were watching, but we knew they had eyes on Bilal and everything he did. The last thing we needed was for them to discover a full water tank without an explanation of how it got that way.

When the tank had filled sufficiently from the pipe, I switched tubes so the water would trickle to the trees, and pushed the other tubes back into the ground, under the small rock formation.