Saving Edward

I need to confess something to you, something that I am ashamed of admitting:
I've stolen a book!

The 24 hours I've spent in Yaffa, the calm contrasting the subversion within me, the houses renamed, the trees re-rooted. It all became unbearable.

Woody lives with three israelis in an apartment in Yaffa. In the midst of all the arty and kindof indy things scattered around the flat I come across a book, by the late palestinian author Edward Said, my personal hero.
Edward Said was one of the reasons for my wanting to come here in the first place, at 18. He kindly and humbly answered my letters upon that first return to sweden, at a time when I was shaken and in chaos, and his example and his voice continues to speak truth, and remains one filled with human nuance.
The book that catches my eye is not just any book, either, but Said's autobiography "Out of Place".
It's in the bookshelf, amid a countless number of other books, on herbs and medicines, and novels in hebrew.
I'm in Yaffa, a palestinian city slowly transformed to something else, in a slow and painful ethnic cleansing, Edward Saids autobiography is in front of me, wherein he describes in miniscule detail, the very same powers that came to dispossess him.
I took it. Stole it.
Not because I had not read it, or because I did not own a copy, but because I wanted to save Edward. I could not leave him there, in the book shelf, as I was getting ready to leave.
I admitted to Nora and Woody what I had done. They both laughed, but seemed to understand, although it did not releave my guilty conscience.

Edward is now placed in a plastic bag, at the bottom of my suitcase, gnawing at my guilty conscience, reminding me that theft is wrong, especially when it erases a story so desperately needed to be heard.