bomb for personal use

Author's name: Mirna Al Mahdi

What enrages Elias al-Maqdisi as he sits in the restaurant now is that his new thief has not only seized control of it, as the English general had done before, but has also completely distorted its identity. He has redesigned the seat cushions, once adorned with the cheerful Galilean peasant embroidery, and replaced the sofas, once inlaid with Akkawi mother-of-peasant, with bleak, lifeless wood.
The distortion did not stop at the decor, as he also replaced a Hebrew jazz band with an oriental takht, which used to delight the hearts and give the listener space to hum the alay, the ouaf, the ataba, and the mijana while he was dancing.
Although Elias was averse to changes that marred his family's memories of having lunch every Sunday at this venerable restaurant, the settler's degraded taste served his plan perfectly. Had the sofas not been rectangular, made of dark, opaque wood like a coffin, he would not have been able to plant his bomb in them. And had the Hebrew band not been playing so loudly, its dissonance would not have provided an excellent cover for the ticking of the bomb's timer, surrounded by no fewer than forty members of the Irgun and Stern Gangs, celebrating the success of a massacre they had perpetrated in a small village a few days earlier.