All the men were killed except for him, as he had found an opening in the wall of the mosque’s storeroom and hid there among the old rugs until it was all over. His great-grandfather Salem managed to escape certain death during the Nakba, when he and the other villagers found themselves trapped in the mosque. You might say it’s a quality passed down the generations. His solutions may falter, they may take aeons to achieve, but they always come off in the end. Not so Nabil – a man who, through sheer persistence, can get around any problem he can’t even remember when he last used the word problem. Say you’ve found a way to get the children to school safely in winter, and they’ll turn winter into a battlefield. Tell them you’ve worked out how to bring water to the fruit trees next year, and they’ll poke ten holes in your plan. The first thing to say about Nabil, should we wish to describe him, is that he is an optimistic man – a quality all the more striking as it has just about vanished from the village of Al-Walaja, whose residents are distinguished by their ability to find a problem for every solution. She is the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, an institution that encourages reading in Palestinian communities through creative writing projects and storytelling. She has published two poetry books and three novels, including her latest No One Knows His Blood Type (Dar Al-Adab, 2013).

Maya Abu Al-Hayat is a Beirut-born Palestinian novelist and poet living in Jerusalem, but working in Ramallah. The following is a story from the anthology All Walls Collapse:

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