This conversation takes place in New York because I cannot picture us anywhere else. I am leading you to the north-eastern bench in Washington Square or walking by your side through the Botanical Garden in Brooklyn. I no longer need to convert my thoughts from Hebrew into English so that you will be able to understand how much I miss you. After 30 years in which you stubbornly refused to learn this language you understand every word I say. But this conversation is especially strange because you are silent. Your deep, hoarse voice does not dominate it with new trains of thought, unexpected questions, memories of your childhood in Hebron, your adolescence in Ramallah during the first intifada or the four years you studied art in Baghdad. You no longer butt in, either, with things that happened to you yesterday and this morning.

New York loves people like you, people who peel the world with their fingers, like a glowing orange dripping juice. Adventures were happening wherever we went as if they were lying patiently in ambush, waiting for you to show up. The impassive Indian owner of the cigarette stand on West 4th Street turned in your presence into a glib conjuror who juggled with his fingers and pulled the change out of his left ear. The homeless man in Union Square opened his worn sack for you and revealed a treasury of lost keys, boasting that he could open the doors of half Manhattan and spend each night in a different bed. The angelic girl with ponytails who sailed on her skates into the Lower East Side café invited us, in a heavy southern accent, to come and watch her dancing nude at a strip joint on 60th Street. The black missionary, an old lady of huge dimensions, spoke about her Sweet Jesus and rolled a cigarette filled with hash. I laughed at you, saying you lived as though your life were a film. Standing next to you, I felt that I too was being projected on an enormous screen.

Then you spoke mainly about the children's book you were writing. In the smallest room in Brooklyn, more than 30 sheets of paper covered in detailed pencil drawings were pegged on to strings you had criss-crossed above your bed. Only one character appeared in all of them - neither man nor boy, all curls and jewels; his eyes were always closed and on his lips hovered a faint, soft smile. In December his name was Sultan, in January Hassan and in May he was Reihan. The titles also kept changing until you decided on Hassan Everywhere. But the wonderful journey progressed with tremendous momentum. In one drawing your hero is embracing a drop of dew in the desert, in a second he is playing the violin to a swarm of bees and in a third he is diving into the depths of the sea to kiss a sad fish. The Arabic text that accompanied them was lyrical and abstract and went far beyond the adventure it described.

Since I suspected myself of being biased, too dazzled by the artist to be able to judge his work, I took Joy along, a senior editor in a big publishing house, who said this was an exceptional achievement. The children's book agent who met you said your talent was eerie. The representatives of the Al-Qattan Foundation, who had chosen your book to inaugurate the children's library they were setting up in Gaza, also spurred you on. You worked then without respite, by day and night. Hassan floated out of a wonder train, met a butterfly of light and spangled the sky with stars. There was no piece of wall, from the floor to the ceiling, from which this dreamy, smiling figure did not peep.

Outside your apartment, the New York winter of 2002 stretched long into the following year. There were months of continuous, disheartening, paralysing cold. Even the locals agreed it was one of the hardest seasons the city had ever known. For us this cold was a source of tears. It was so alien, so offensive, our bodies could not cope. Under the four pairs of trousers you wore, one on top of the other, and under my disintegrating red coat, we were shivering all the time. We were more Levantine than ever. We fantasised about our Middle Eastern sun, as miserable as two junkies without their fix. The weather exposed our foreignness, mocked at our opinion of ourselves as universal beings dependent on nothing. Our passports held visas from the US Department of Immigration, authorising a legal stay in New York, but the winter seemed bent on deporting us.

Neither the chicken soup we ate in the Ashkenazi restaurants in the East Village nor the Sahlab we drank at the Cairo Cafe succeeded in assuaging our longing for home. During the interminable games of backgammon that we played, I heard myself talking to you about Israel without a single drop of cynicism souring the words. Suddenly, and how ironic that it should happen with you of all people, I found in my voice a true love of homeland. I had to sit with a Palestinian guy on the freezing steps of City Hall in Brooklyn in order to admit to myself how attached I am to Israel. I had to go all the way to New York so that you, with the nostalgia of one born to a refugee family, who grew up with the ongoing longing for the landscapes that surrounded me throughout my whole life, would describe them to me. Far from them, by your side, I loved them perhaps more than ever.

It was snowing all around but we waxed poetic about the pale-silvery side of the olive leaves, the light touch that cracks open the flesh of ripe figs, the brassy smell of the carobs in bloom, the invisible thorns on the skins of the cactus fruit. In the train, on the way to Andrew's birthday party, we poured out our hearts about the smooth, dry smell of the air in the hills around Jerusalem, about the damp of the coastal plain, about the weariness of the noon hours in the July Hamsins. I compared our reflected faces in the window. Behind it, the scenes that we were visualising were projected on the sooty walls of the backward-rushing tunnel. The expression on our faces was the same expression, the vista was of the same homeland, only the passports in our coat pockets were different; the passports of enemies.

Outside the station, we mentioned the sea and we sighed a deep sigh that blew a small cloud of mist from our mouths. At every opportunity, as if it were surrounding our thoughts and appearing outside every window, from every room, the Mediterranean found a way of entering our conversations. Ever since the courses of our lives crossed in 8th Street, a new shade has been added to my picture of the sea. Since then, the water itself has seemed deeper, and suddenly frightening.

Hugo and Mahmoud, through whom I met you, trailed after us that first evening. The trees were decorated for Christmas with chains of light and the shop windows with red and green. Through the film of dry tears that the cold brought to my eyes, everything sparkled more brightly. You told me you could not drive, could not shoot and could not swim. The awareness that I was Israeli and you were Palestinian lingered between us, but slowly grew faint. We were one man and one woman in the heart of the Village in New York: young, beautiful, flirtatious.

"Me - I'm a fish in water," I boasted about my diving skills. And before you managed to react, I had already been swept away into excited chatter about the Mediterranean. I said I could not bear the thought of living far from this treasure of nature. I said life in Tel Aviv is worthwhile only because of the blue background that stretches out behind it. I said it is the wonderful, open, western wall of my home. I said that for me it is holier than all the holy places. You were silent. "And how come you can't swim, anyway?" I teased you, "what about the beach at Gaza?"

You smiled the sad version of that smile and described the difficulties that the Israeli occupation heaps on the passage of West Bank residents to the Gaza Strip. Embarrassment rooted me to the spot while you counted on the fingers of one hand the number of times you had bathed in the Mediterranean in your entire life. The inequality of our freedoms hit me powerfully because that evening, in New York, absolute equality existed between us. "Come on." You turned and held those cold, dry fingers out to me. "I won't throw you into the sea for that."

All at once, everything between us became political. In a huge wave, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict flooded the space between us. For a long moment we walked without speaking. The thing that had enabled the immediate connection between us now imposed a certain distance. It flared into an argument after we left Astor Place and you finished the sentence you had started earlier. "But I really do believe that you and we have to share this sea, we have to learn to swim in it together." The argument that began then, at two in the morning, continued throughout the entire winter. In the summer, suddenly, it was cut off.

The depressing weather broke me on June 10. It was still raining. I booked myself a plane ticket and told you that in another five days I was going back to Israel. You asked enviously: "You're going home?" I trembled, as usual, when we spoke that word. I do not know which of us started it, when it happened that we stopped saying "Israel" or "Palestine". We simply said home, but we meant the same place. Through your messianic gaze, it was always one place. In my eyes, from a distance of thousands of kilometers, it was the conflict ripping these two places apart that made them, paradoxically, one. From that distance, Abu Mazen seemed to be a brave new leader and Ariel Sharon was quoted as saying, "An end to the occupation." The renewal of talks towards negotiations joined rumours of a rare spring that was sweeping the region after a blessed winter and I, filled with hope and with a physical need for the warmth of the sun, wanted to go home.

You were more doubtful about the Road Map. The peace you dreamed of would be realised on the day when there arose, between the sea and the river, a binational state, common to both peoples. I remember how your eyes shone when you described it with broad gestures. Equal, free, without borders. For you it was exciting, the expression of a wish; for me it was a prophecy of doom that made me tremble.

Because of this disparity, the argument between us led nowhere. I prayed and I still pray for a modest, lukewarm, mediocre peace - while you dreamed of harmonious, utopian, John Lennony reconciliation, I insisted repeatedly that the crisis of hatred and suspicion between the two peoples was too deep and tragic for such a dream to come true. You mocked me and said I had little faith, that I was restricting the horizon of my thinking. I said I was reducing my expectations to the measure of two separate narrow states because the one wide one would be the end of the state of Israel. You declared that only the continuation of the occupation would be the end of Israel. I said I was filled with shame and criticism for what Israeliness looks like and for the occupation as its main feature, but I did not want it to change except for those bad and harmful features. You said I was shortsighted.

I wanted the day to come when I would need a passport to visit you in Ramallah. I wanted you to come to Tel Aviv and be able to move about freely and safely when you visited me. The reason I love the thought of a Palestinian state with the borders of the Green Line is because then, at last, the state of Israel will also have its own borders. Another reason I hope to live to see a Palestinian independence day is that I will then feel freer to celebrate my own independence day. Perhaps I told you this and perhaps I only mused anxiously that a binational state was liable to turn everything upside down, to switch our roles in this tragedy.

I see you now compressing your lower lip with disappointment and shaking your curls from side to side before starting again. Over and over, without a single drop of bitterness, your vision of the new Middle East was turning the entire room into a large, generous, ideal country: Israstine or Palestael, you would laugh suddenly; "we'll call it whatever you like".

You would explain that there are two peoples but only one land. Our sources of water depend on each other, our economies are conditional upon each other, the holy places of the two religions are interwoven in the same city, the landscapes and the roads and the communities and the air space above them are in each other's grip. Your eyes would widen then with wonder. "Deep inside you, you know very well that your grandchildren and my grandchildren will live together in this land, so why not now?" you would ask so convincingly, "why not us?"

This was the stage at which I would despair. The Palestinian insistence on the right of return, exactly like the Israeli insistence on the settlements - by now I was almost shouting - holds up the solution interminably. I want to go back to the 1967 borders, but you, you want to return to the non-borders of 1948. Stamping my feet and waving my arms, I was no longer capable of hearing your answer.

I can't really remember when exactly you too decided to leave the United States, but from that day nothing else concerned us. The time we had left together we spent wandering in the streets, drinking and smoking but mostly intoxicated with the sudden decision to leave. We got on and off the train from the Botanical Gardens to the Brooklyn Bridge and back to Union Square. It was not only the town I was taking leave of, it was you too.

Before I left for the airport we embraced again and I gave you a bitter smile. "Yaallah, baby," I then spoke the bad joke that now makes my flesh creep, "See you in the next world." We both knew that even though Ramallah and Tel Aviv are less than an hour apart by car, it would be very hard for us to meet. We knew that if we had not taken a flight of 12 hours from there to another country, to a generous city like New York, we would never have met. It was equally clear to us that even if we had met, say at some left-wing demonstration, we would, at most, have achieved a polite friendship. A bond like this could not be formed between two people facing the physical and theoretical barriers that from now on would stand before us.

Your answer, too, seems to me today like a bad omen, but then it was light and optimistic. "Not in the next world," you said, "next time we meet it will be in Jaffa; we'll sit by the sea and eat fish." I got into the taxi and did not know that, with the exception of the meal you planned for us, it was all going to come true. We arrived, three weeks apart, in Tel Aviv and Ramallah. During the 10 days that you managed to spend there, we spoke on the phone two or three times and on the 11th day you came to Jaffa, to the sea.

I am still there. I live next to the Greek Church, opposite the port. The Mediterranean surrounds the house and appears outside every room, at every window. From the balcony I can see the exact spot from which you set out on your last journey. I sigh, once because of this spectacular beauty and once for you. This sea is different from the sea I left and different from the one I recollected in New York.

Your death has conquered it since then and now dominates the entire expanse before my eyes. It has finally turned you into Hassan who is Everywhere, giving you the bluest identity card there is, entitling you to sail back and forth, with total freedom, above this country from Rosh Hanikra in the north all along the coastal plain down to the southern strip in Gaza. If I ever thought that your joy of life was a political statement, today I know that the way in which you lost your life defined it finally. Now we share the sea with complete equality - you from the water and me from the shore - and I want to tell you that your binational dream has been realised in the most terrible way.

I want you to know that the film you are starring in has been playing for the last eight months on the blue screen of the seashore in Tel Aviv. I watch it from the balcony; it opens on the morning of August 6 2003 when four young Palestinians leave Ramallah for a one-day illegal stay in Israel. Karma is driving the car, you are sitting next to her and in the back are your youngest brother Waffa and Samer, your nephew. You go through the Kalandia checkpoint with exceptional ease and the whole way west, following the humidity towards Tel Aviv, you all sing and take each other's pictures. The car is parked near the clock tower in Jaffa. When Waffa heads for the market to buy fruit, the three of you go down to the no-swimming beach at the foot of the mosque, far from the lifeguards. You choose an isolated spot so as not to arouse suspicions. The waves are rough. Karma and Samer go in to have a dip. You only roll up your trousers. As they go deeper you wave to them with ever longer gestures from the shore.

I can hear from here the sigh that perhaps you sighed. I guess at the salty smell that filled your lungs, the water lapping at your ankles and the feeling of the sand on the soles of your feet. I see your beautiful eyes moving with pleasure, drawing the perfect line of the horizon. Maybe you looked back from time to time, stimulated by the approaching taste of the fruit. But the next time you turn your gaze back to the distance, Samer is gone. I can imagine your feverish thoughts, Karma's signals of distress, your anxiety welling. I think of you deliberating. Unable to stand aloof, you remove the striped shirt you were wearing that day and then strive to swim out, fighting the waves, choking. I see your movements becoming fewer, slowing down, your strength fading, your body growing cold.

But more than anything I think of you deep in the water that surrounded you, infinite as air. The moments when you realise that not only can you not save Samer but that you yourself are drowning, haunt me ceaselessly. I cannot imagine the silence that must have enveloped your senses and the crushing loneliness, or perhaps only a sort of emptiness. Over and over I try to guess at your thoughts in those minutes, what came into your mind as life ran out of you. I want to hope that they were full of awareness, full of inspiration, full of light. I want to believe that you were carried away on underground currents as by a wind, that you let the blue colours lead you serenely and reconciled. I imagine you at this everlasting time as an illustration in a children's book being drawn in slow motion. There you are neither man nor boy, all curls, bejewelled with seaweed and shells, sinking with closed eyes among the strokes of the paintbrush that depict the water, while on your lips hovers a faint, soft smile.

My dearest Hassan, you entered and left my life so quickly that now I think I imagined you. The friendship between us seems impossible, a wild invention, considering the iron certainty of the occupation on the one hand and the terrorism on the other. I look from here at who we were in New York and see us as other people saw us - with disbelief. Israelis and Arabs were either amazed or suspicious. We seemed strange when we reminded each other to ring home after every suicide bombing in Israel and with every report of Israeli army operations in the territories. American Jews could not understand how it was that your Arabness is more familiar to me than they will ever be. We come from the same neighbourhood, I used to say, but today, when I think of it from here, I too wonder at us.

I keep remembering the blurred sight of your face through the cigarette smoke and the mists of inebriation or through the glittery curtain of those dry tears of cold. I keep remembering the utterly prophetic words you let fly one day, stoned out of your mind. You said that perhaps we should set up a sort of protest movement of friends. I would introduce you to all my Israeli friends and you would introduce me to all your Palestinian friends. We would throw a party, you said, turned on by the idea - parties!

Later, all my friends and your friends would introduce each other to all their friends; the thing would grow and grow. People would learn to love each other, learn to forgive each other. There would be comfort, reciprocity, you will see, you said, taking another drag and exhaling the words slowly from your lungs. "It will change the situation, I am telling you, a movement like this could change the whole political map in the Middle East." Then, throwing your head back, you burst out laughing.

· Hassan Hourani was born in 1974 in Hebron. In 1992 he graduated from secondary school there and went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad. An Iraqi television crew filmed his graduating project, "What Remains", as a 35-minute documentary. On his return to Ramallah in 1997, he taught art and worked in the Wassiti Art Centre in East Jerusalem.

He participated in exhibitions of young Palestinian artists in Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and South Korea. His works were awarded first and second place at art festivals in Ramallah in 1993 and in Jerusalem in 2000. In 2001 he arrived in New York where he had a one-man show "One Day, One Night" in the UN building. On August 6 last year he drowned near the port of Jaffa, by Tel Aviv. He had completed only 10 of the 40 drawings that make up his children's book, Hassan Everywhere. It will be published this year by Al-Qattan, a Palestinian cultural foundation, which has also established the Hassan Hourani Young Artist of the Year Award.

· Dorit Rabinyan was born in Israel in 1972. At 18 she was drafted for two years' service as a reporter for the Israeli army's magazine. Her debut novel, Persian Brides (Canongate, 1998) was written at the age of 21 and followed by a second novel, Our Weddings (Bloomsbury, 2000).

© Dorit Rabinyan 2004