Unit 8 Conflicts in the World课文翻译大学体验英语三

Unit 8 Conflicts in the World

Passage A Return from the Cage

It was the open space in Austin that initially overwhelmed me. I couldn't adjust to it. The ease with which I could get in a car and drive to any place left me bewildered and confused. Where were the military checkpoints? Where were the armed soldiers asking for my identification papers? Where were the barricades that would force me to turn back?

I had just returned to the United States after an absence of 11 years, during which I lived in a refugee camp in Bethlehem, the town where Christ was born. I was not used to freedom of movement, nor to going more than a few miles without encountering military checkpoints.

Getting comfortable with my sudden freedom in Austin was going to take time. I had to adjust to no longer feeling like an animal inside a cage. Most days, I felt utterly dazed. I would spend hours sitting on a stone bench at the University of Texas, staring at the squirrels and the birds. The green lawns brought tears to my eyes.

My mind would drift to the refugee camp in Bethlehem, and to 3-year-old Marianna, my delightful ex-neighbor. Marianna has never seen a green lawn in her life and has never seen a squirrel. She lives confined to Bethlehem, forced to remain a prisoner behind the checkpoints and the military barricades. The distance between Marianna's house and Jerusalem is no further than the distance from my South Austin home to downtown. Yet Marianna has never been to Jerusalem and is unlikely to go there anytime in the near future, because no Palestinian can venture into the Holy City without a special Israeli-issued permit, and those permits are almost impossible to come by.

But adjusting to my sudden freedom paled in comparison to overcoming my fears and my nightmares. When I left Bethlehem, the second Palestinian uprising against Israel's military occupation was already two months under way. The sound of bomb explosions, gunfire and Apache helicopters overhead lingered in my mind. Hard as I tried, I couldn't shake the sounds away. They were always there, ringing inside my head.

Now, in Austin, there were nightmares. I would dream either of friends being shot dead, or see pools of blood spilling from human bodies, or that I myself was the target of gunfire. I would wake up in a sweat, terrified of going back to sleep. During the day, the sound of police or ambulance sirens made me jumpy. Helicopters flying overhead made me uneasy. I had to constantly remind myself that these were most often civilian and not military helicopters. I had to remind myself that the ambulances were not rushing to the wounded demonstrators.

I looked around me, and I wondered if anyone realized, or even knew, that the