Bilal turned on the television news as I unpacked the bags. The reporter was interviewing a young woman when the military came through with loudspeakers on their jeeps. The girl immediately ran away. The reporter argued with the soldier that they still had fifteen minutes, but the footage ended abruptly with the camera being thrown. The announcer came on just as I pulled some strange white plastic containers from one of the bags.

The latest statistics were being read off on the television. The body count, the number of injured; people who’d died under curfew and had to be kept in their houses until the curfew was lifted; the number of people transferred to the hospital during the last three hours; how many doctors and nurses were living at hospitals during curfew to take care of their patients. A teenager in Nablus had been shot only moments before for remaining in the streets after curfew was over. It turned out he was mentally disabled, and his family didn’t realize he was out. Soldiers shot people even when we were allowed out. Yousef Iyad and his wife, Jameleh, left their children in the Dheishe refugee camp to buy food when Israel lifted the curfew there the previous day. On their way, soldiers shot up their car and the couple ran to the nearest house for refuge. The curfew was reimposed, and the couple were now separated from their children, the youngest of whom was a breast-fed two-month-old who hadn’t been fed in eighteen hours. The reporter was interviewing the eldest sibling over the phone and we could hear the baby crying.

“What are these?” I held up the plastic containers of white powder. The English label said: PHTHALIC ANHYDRIDE.

“An Israeli professor brought them.” He put the containers back in the bag.

“It’s a little annoying how you say things that make no sense and expect me to understand,” I said as he walked upstairs with the bag. I followed him. “Bilal, where did the professor deliver them to?”

“The bakery.”

“Does that mean Ghassan knows?”

“I had to tell him for practical reasons, but also because if he knows how you’re helping he’ll stop doubting your commitment,” Bilal said. I figured that’s why Ghassan had been extra friendly to me. I had thought it was the ice cream.

Moments later Bilal went to the kitchen and emerged with a large bowl and two spoons in one hand and the other behind his back.

“If that’s ice cream in there, you’re not getting your fair share, darling. You might as well go get yourself a separate bowl because I’m an ice cream eating machine. I have to work hard to get thighs and an ass this big,” I said.

“I knew you were going to say that.” He revealed another bowl in the other hand.