I AIN'T SAYING HE'S A GRAVEDIGGER (but he does prepare the bodies)

Several people I've spoken with here have expressed what might mildly be called outrage over the conditions at the Ramallah General Hospital's morgue ("Ramallah General Hospital" sounds like a Palestinian soap opera, but it's not - it's the largest public hospital in the area) - "much too small a space, barely the size of a refrigerator, no place to leave the dead". Perhaps it seems a little odd that they would put so much emotional energy in to what happens to those who are already dead, but then the stories...

"During the intifada the dead would be stacked on top of each other...." "The space is so small, the family of Muslims all gather to honor their dead and they couldn't all fit...." "In all the chaos, one man was found alive after having been left there over night with the dead - can you imagine?" "There was no space, and no way we could move them, there are at least twelve people buried on the grounds...." "It's just a small outbuilding - in order to move the body they have to parade the corpse on a trolley in front of everyone watching outside...."

Noor and I visited the hospital again on Friday, which is the Muslim's Sunday, so the place was dead quiet, just a couple of people sitting in the hallways. I wanted to see this part of the hospital to discover for myself what was so wrong. Noor greets a man in the hall; his head, perched atop a slender neck, houses a mouthful of ill-kempt dentures that move whenever he speaks, a head that seems much too small for his immense belly - the proportions are all wrong, he looks like a grinning skull whose body is growing fat by eating death. Or maybe I just think that because this man is the one responsible for the morgue.

He certainly had the easy cheer of one of Hamlet's gravediggers, and when he smiled the eye turned to you seemed to leer out, his gap-toothed grin mocking - I kept checking his other hand to see if he was hiding a skull. We walk up the alley behind the hospital to the morgue, and speaking rapidly in Arabic, he apparently wants me to take a picture of the sign. "You mean the one that says 'morgue'?" No, the sign next to it - the man was incensed by this sign that specified that preparing the body would cost such-and-such an amount, and that clean sheets to wrap the body would cost extra. "It's not proper," he laments.

He unlocks the door and ushers us in - the morgue is, thankfully, empty, but there's that scent that lingers. He opens the walk-in refrigerators and I think faintly, it must be nice to work here during the hot summers. To the right is the slab upon which he prepares the bodies of the dead - "he washes them, stitches up their wounds, even though he hasn't been taught how." "I give them each a kiss," he says, "out of respect. Christians, Muslims, it doesn't matter to me." He opens a refrigerated locker and rolls out the sliding shelf for the bodies - "I don't feel anything anymore." He grins.

Walking away, I realize that I never shook his hand, but he didn't seem to mind.




Dyin' ain't much of a livin'. Unless you're this guy...