Текст книги "Let It Be Morning"

Автор книги: Sayed Kashua

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

8

My mother comes in. I manage to open my eyes just slightly and see her through my wet eyelashes. She leaves the room and whispers, “He’s asleep,” then shuts the door behind her.

I lie on my bed and think of my mother, picture her as if she were a little girl before a class trip. Then I think of her rushing about in the kitchen, preparing sandwiches, wrapping them in silver foil. The sandwiches are my father’s favorite, with fried ground meat and pickles, sliced lengthwise. He won’t touch them if she slices them the usual way, four such sandwiches for him and two for her, with cheese. She’ll eat whatever there is. It’s food for the trip. She rushes about, wearing a colored scarf on her head, sweating, short and fat. When I was a child, I hated how my mother looked. It took me a long time to realize she was considered a pretty woman. She still is, for her age.

In my daydream my brothers are asleep by now, but I can’t doze off. I could never fall asleep on days when my parents went away for their regular ten-day vacation. Always ten days, always in July, sometimes to Turkey, sometimes to Eilat, or Sinai or Egypt, and lately to Jordan too. It happens every year, and I just can’t get used to it. In fact, it gets worse as the years go by. I stand there in silence, leaning against one of the kitchen walls, and watch her. She’s preparing coffee. In a moment, she’ll be pouring it into a thermos bottle, because my father can’t last half an hour without his extra bitter coffee, with no sugar.

It’s late, and my father went to bed long ago. Their suitcase is packed and soon their food will be packed too. All my mother has left to do is to fill a few bottles with water and put them in the freezer. They’ll be frozen by the time she and my father leave, and the cold water will last all the way to Cairo. She finishes, takes another look in the fridge, counts the sandwiches and mutters to herself as she tries to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anything. The bus will be arriving soon, and they’ll be leaving at five A.M. She has just two hours left. Everything’s ready.

“Come on, get into bed,” she tells me, taking off her scarf and using it to wipe the perspiration from her face and forehead. How I hate that gesture of hers. My mother doesn’t care about me. I’m convinced of it. Mother never understands what I am going through. If she did, she’d never have go and leave me home alone. When I told her earlier in the evening that I didn’t feel sleepy, because I’d slept a lot in the afternoon, she believed me, and when I say good night to her now and head for the children’s room, she’s sure I’m going to sleep. My mother isn’t the kind of mother who tucks her children into bed at night. She keeps saying she can’t understand women who are sad that they’re childless, and that only crazy women have children. My mother brought three children into the world and she keeps telling her girlfriends and us that it’s too many. My mother doesn’t love us. At least she has never told any of us that she loves us. Sometimes I think my brothers have no problem with it, because they seem pretty happy. For me, having a mother who hates us is tough, but I never mention it to anybody.

I stay awake. I know Mother is still awake too. How she loves these trips. She keeps telling people that without these annual trips she’d collapse. She works like a dog all year and then come the ten days without dishes, without cooking and especially without children. I hear her get into the bathtub to bathe and I picture her fat body with all the soap and water. My father wakes up half an hour later and he too begins to get dressed. They talk quietly, in order not to wake anyone. I can’t hear what they’re saying. I wait another few minutes, wipe away my tears and get up to go to the kitchen. Soon they’ll be leaving. I say good morning and they don’t reply. They’re checking their papers and their passports. “Go wait outside,” Father says. “Watch the bags, and call us when the bus gets here.”

I sit on the steps next to their bags. Dawn is breaking, and it’s a little chilly even though it’s summertime. The hair on the back of my hand bristles and I enjoy the feel of the goose bumps on my skin.

What could possibly happen? I ask myself, and try not to answer the question. They go away every year and in the end they come back. I struggle not to think all the bad thoughts that race through my mind, because I know that if I do, they’ll probably come true. I know for sure that if anything bad happens to my parents, it will always be because of me. I have to think positive. I’ll try to concentrate on the presents they’ll bring me. I bet they’ll bring me sneakers and maybe this time they’ll get the right size.

I see the bus coming up the road and I call out like the happiest kid in the world, “The bus is here.” My parents, who are all ready, rush outside, as though if they’re a second late, the bus will leave without them. My father carries the large suitcase, my mother takes the lunch bag and I follow with a container of water covered in Styrofoam, which I carry with both hands. They put everything into the luggage compartment of the bus, except for the water, the coffee and the little bag that Mother carries on her shoulder. Most of the passengers are adults but a few have brought along a child or two. My parents get into the bus, sit by the window nearest me, look at me and don’t say a word. They don’t even wave good-bye and I don’t wave to them either. The bus begins to pull out. I wait for it to disappear in the direction it came from and only then can I relax my muscles and let my body tremble.

I have ten days of waiting ahead of me now. I always remind myself that it’s only nine nights. The nights are the main problem. I pull out the chart I’ve prepared, of the days and the nights, and allow myself to tick off the first day even though it hasn’t begun yet. Grandmother will be arriving soon, as she does every year, bringing Grandfather with her. They’ll stay for ten days and nine nights.

She arrives before my brothers wake up, just as she does every year. They live not far from us, a five-minute walk away. If their house were larger, my mother would send us to stay with them, but they live in a single room. The rest of the house is used by my only uncle, my mother’s brother. My grandmother arrives early because she doesn’t want people to see her carrying Grandfather on her shoulder. She is old, she looks about a hundred years old, but she’s still strong and my grandfather is light as a small child. My grandmother is perspiring. She puts Grandfather down on the bed in my parents’ bedroom in his regular position, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. My grandfather never gets out of bed by himself. He doesn’t move at all. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been in this position, just lying on his back. My parents keep saying what a strong man he was before his illness. They say he was the richest man in the village, the best salesman, the first man to buy a car and to build a fancy stone house. But we never knew him like that. Sometimes my parents tell us how he lay in bed after he returned from the pilgrimage to Mecca. They say that right there, in the middle of town, in front of everyone, a thief was beheaded, because that’s how it is in Islam and it scared us out of our wits and we never stole anything ever. They say the sight of it destroyed him completely, and that he was a different person after that.

I like looking at my grandfather. I like how thin he is and how his face is so small, his cheeks so shriveled, his mouth so wide open and his eyes protruding and staring at the ceiling. People kept saying he was going to die, but that was many years ago, and he hasn’t died. My mother used to say that sometimes if God loves him and us both, He ought to take him. She was waiting for him to die, and I couldn’t understand how anyone could want a father to die. So what if he lay in bed all the time? My grandmother bends over, holds her waist with one hand, mumbles something about how heavy he is and that she’s turning into an old lady. She sits down for a minute on the living room sofa, but then gets up and goes into the kitchen, looking for the pots and pans, checking the fridge, taking out tomatoes and eggs and getting breakfast started.

My grandmother doesn’t hear a word. It’s not because of her age. She never did hear anything. She can speak and when you get used to it, you can understand what she wants. My parents say her problem can be treated and that there are all kinds of gadgets in the Jewish hospitals, but my grandmother doesn’t want that. She says she doesn’t need it and that what she hears is too much as it is.

I’m so jealous of my brothers. They don’t care that our parents are gone. On the contrary, sometimes it seems as if our parents’ absence makes them happier. They can play the whole time, they can go to bed whenever they want and they say Grandmother makes wonderful food, that her enormous breakfast gives us lots of choices, not like what Mother fixes, only one thing. They always laugh at Grandfather and when Grandmother is not around my older brother gets a stick and pokes at him. Sometimes he pokes it into Grandfather’s mouth and nose and he cracks up when Grandfather doesn’t react.

My grandmother works all the time, even though there isn’t that much to do. Either she’s preparing something in the kitchen or else she’s cleaning or she’s taking care of Grandfather. She brings him yogurt, mixes it and forces it into him, a spoonful at a time. Sometimes it drips out and she wipes his mouth and mutters things. I can’t tell if she’s muttering to herself or to him. Sometimes she carries him on her shoulder, takes him to the bathroom, puts him back in my parents’ bed or else on the sofa and goes outside to hang wet pieces of white cloth on the laundry line. In the mornings she takes him outside and puts him on a mattress in the sun. Then at noon she takes him back to bed and in the afternoon, back to the mattress outside.

I get through the days somehow, playing with my brothers and with the kids from the neighborhood. Nights are a problem, though. But my grandfather helps me a lot. My grandmother never sleeps next to him, and my two brothers won’t do it either because they say he smells awful. I’m glad Grandmother sleeps in my bed so I can sleep next to Grandfather, and take comfort from the fact that an adult is lying next to me, awake. My grandfather never shuts his eyes, and that’s very good. And despite his strong smell, I can feel the ever-so-familiar scent of my parents in that bed. Before I climb into it, I make sure to tick off another night that’s passed. It’s dark and I’ll be asleep anyway and then it will be tomorrow, even though I can hardly close my eyes and I cry almost every night.

I wonder if anything bad will happen to them. If it does, how long will it be before we know about it? How long does it take for news to travel from Cairo to our home? The thought that they could be dead and we won’t know it drives me crazy. I keep picturing an overturned bus and two bodies. I always run toward Father’s body, only Father’s. My fears are always about Father. I never dwell on the possibility of something bad happening to my mother. As far as I’m concerned, it’s okay if she dies.

On nights when I can’t fall asleep, I tell Grandfather everything. Not out loud but in a whisper, right into his ear. All the bad things I see I tell him, and then I feel better. I tell him how when anyone in the family dies someone always bangs hard on the door, and how scared I am when my parents go out. I tell him how I saw the bodies of my two uncles in coffins and that I couldn’t fall asleep afterward, how I’m convinced my father will go to hell because he doesn’t do any of the things that the religion teacher says you have to do, that I know I’ll go to heaven and my father won’t. My grandfather continues to stare up at the ceiling and sometimes I cover him and ask, “Are you warm enough?” or “Are you cold?” and he doesn’t answer.

Before going to sleep on the last night, I don’t tick off the final day. I’ll wait for the following morning to do that. If they set out from Cairo at the same time as they set out from here, five A.M., they ought to be here by five P.M. I do whatever I can to fall asleep, to get the time to pass quickly. I tell Grandfather all my stories from the beginning, shut my eyes tight and think about nice things, but nothing works. I don’t fall asleep for a minute, because bad things always happen in the end, just when you’re expecting something nice, and what could be better than to have my parents back? What could possibly be better than to see my father again, safe and sound? I tell Grandfather this too, and he doesn’t answer. I tell him that Mother never hugs us, and that in books it says that mothers look after their children when they’re sick and there are songs that I know by heart about good mothers who stay up all night when their child has a fever. I sing him the songs twice, from start to finish.

In the morning I skip breakfast, and Grandfather spits out everything that Grandmother pushes into his mouth. I pretend to be asleep and listen to her sitting beside him on the bed and saying, “I wish you’d die already. I’m fed up. Die already. What did I do to deserve this? Why does God hate me so much?”

Later, when she carries him outside to the mattress, I sit next to him all day. I know it’s still too early, but I keep looking up the street, waiting for my parents to arrive. I will recognize the bus.

My brothers talk about presents. My older brother wants them to bring him another remote-operated car that turns over, runs into walls, changes directions and keeps going. My younger brother wants the same thing but in a different color. They play video games all day, focusing on the screen. Around noon, Grandmother takes Grandfather inside because of the heat and shouts at me to come eat and then to lie down like my brothers, but I stay put.

In the afternoon she brings Grandfather back and he lies next to me. The closer we get to the time that I wrote down in my notebook, the more restless I am. Five o’clock comes and goes, and I know that something bad has happened. Now we only need to wait for the messenger. The sound of an unfamiliar car coming up our street is what scares me the most.

The bus is hardly late at all, fifteen minutes, maybe. My heart is pounding and I let loose a scream, “They’re here.” My brothers rush out toward the bus and so do I. My parents come down the steps. I calm down and give a big smile. They open the luggage compartment. Apart from the bags they took with them, I see they have some new ones. They divide the luggage among us and we carry everything home. My mother shakes her mother’s hand and shouts to Grandfather as if he can only hear when you shout, “How are you, Father?”

PART SIX. A New Era

1

Isleep well for several hours, the longest stretch of sleep I’ve had all week. I only wake up toward evening. The whole family has gathered in my parents’ living room. The front door is locked, despite the heat. Tonight we’ll sleep here so that, if need be, we can all be together to defend whatever few food supplies we have left, and we’ll also be closer to one another in case of any more shooting. The two little ones are asleep. A voice from outside takes my breath away for a second, and then I realize it’s the muezzin calling people to evening prayers. Since the power was cut, his voice has been different. It’s his own voice, not a prerecorded one. Finally the minaret is actually being used for its real purpose. For the first time in my life I hear a human voice, not a mechanized one, calling people to prayers, just like in the movies about the period of the prophet Muhammad.

My older brother decides to go to services in the mosque. “What for?” his wife asks. “You can pray here. That’s a better idea. Who knows what could happen?” But my brother is adamant. “That’s precisely why. Because of the ‘who knows?’ At least if anything does happen, I’ll know I’ve fulfilled my duties to Allah.”

My mother stands up and pleads with him, “Pray at home, for God’s sake. Why leave the house now, in the dark?” But my brother turns a deaf ear to his wife and his mother. He takes his sandals and leaves. I lock the door behind him. My mother whispers a prayer for his safety, holding out her hands heavenward.

“Nothing will happen to him,” my father says. “The mosque is practically next door. What could possibly happen?”

It’s amazing how just a few days ago these were the noisiest hours in the village, the time when everyone would be outdoors. Loud music from cars and weddings was a permanent feature of our summer nights. Who could even hear the muezzin at such times? Nobody, despite the state-of-the-art loudspeakers on the minarets of the five mosques.

“I’m afraid he’ll get arrested,” my mother says.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Who’s going to arrest him? What’s got into you?” Father tells her off.

“How can I tell?” she says. “They keep an eye on anyone who steps inside a mosque. Maybe they’ll have a raid and take him too.”

My older brother’s wife grows increasingly agitated as she listens to this. “Of course,” my father says. “Your son is Bin Laden. Stop this nonsense right now. Nobody’s going to arrest anybody. He doesn’t even have a beard. What’s got into you? He’ll be right back.”

“Actually, he does look kind of suspicious. He hasn’t had a shave in four days,” my younger brother says with a chuckle.

I can still feel the wounds caused by this afternoon’s stoning; the scenes with the neighbors and the children and the crowd outside our house linger on. I feel a strong need to avenge myself, a strange urge to restore my dignity, which I lost in a flash. But what can I do? If only I had a weapon. I wish I had a gun. I wish I were connected to one of the gangs. Then nobody would dare come near me or my family. But I’d never pull it off. I’d never even be admitted into one of those groups. I hate myself now for being unable to prove I’m strong, frightening, a man with pride.

My father turns on the radio again. There’s a Head & Shoulders commercial in Arabic, followed by Chevrolet, Ship of the Desert. The newscast begins with coverage of the Egyptian president’s state visit in the south of the republic and a cornerstone-laying ceremony for a few new food factories. Then they report on the president’s wife’s tour of a Cairo hospital for children with cancer. The Voice of Cairo reports that the president congratulated the Palestinians and the Israelis on their fervent efforts to put an end to the crisis and expressed his appreciation for the historic role of the U.S. president in this process. Next came the recorded voice of the president: “Both sides have had enough bloodshed. We are on the threshold of a new era, an era of peace and cooperation, an era that promises peace for our children. Never again will they know the suffering that our own generation has endured.”

My younger brother laughs. Father says that on the day when the Voice of Cairo broadcasts the truth, we’ll know that the East is about to become the strongest empire in the universe. My father spins the dial rapidly to the news in Hebrew. It’s eight P.M. and there’s a special broadcast, longer than usual. On Israel TV too they’re talking about serious progress in the negotiations, and the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers can be heard complimenting one another in English.

What’s going on here damn it? Is this for real, the news we’re listening to? My older brother, knowing how tense things are, knocks softly on the door and announces, “It’s me,” to keep from frightening us. His wife rushes to the door and locks it again behind him. He says there’s nothing to be afraid of, there’s nobody outside and we might as well open the door to let some air in. “Do you want to die of lack of oxygen?” he asks. But the door stays shut.

I move to the kitchen and light up a cigarette. My younger brother joins me, gesturing to me to pass the cigarette over to him. He studies Father, and once he sees him immersed in conversation, takes my cigarette and draws deeply. He coughs and hands the cigarette right back to me. Father turns in the direction of the kitchen and my younger brother chastises me: “You’re going to choke us all to death with your smoking. Enough of your cigarettes!” He chuckles.

Even though things in the village have never been this bad, at least not since the war of 1948, news of the peace that’s about to prevail helps us keep calm. At least we know that nothing on the scale of a world war is about to descend on us. Maybe everything that’s been happening is actually nothing more than a tactic because of the efforts to arrive at a complete cessation of the tensions with the Palestinians. Maybe it’s really intended to prevent the Palestinian organizations that don’t believe in negotiating with the Israelis from undermining the progress of the peace process with some terrorist attack that could lead to a complete turnabout in the political position of the average Israeli. Maybe damn it, the Israeli side didn’t actually intend for the power and the water to be disconnected and it’s still just a stupid mistake. The power cut stops the water supply too, after all. All it takes, in fact, is one bulldozer or tank to hit the power line and this is what happens.

My mother is the first to go into my room. She lines up three mattresses on the floor. The children are using the double bed. She returns to the living room and announces that she’s going to try to take a nap. My older brother’s wife gets up too, says, “Good night,” and joins my mother. “I’ll go to sleep too,” my wife says, but before heading for my parents’ bedroom, she joins me in the kitchen and asks if I’m hungry yet. “No,” I tell her. She looks at me now the way she hasn’t looked at me in a long time. “Good night,” she whispers, and I feel that if there weren’t so many people around, she might even have given me a kiss. I feel the blood rush to my cheeks and my face becomes flushed. “Good night,” I reply, and keep my eyes fixed on her until she reaches the bedroom.

My father and my older brother enter the children’s room. My older brother stretches out in his boyhood bed, and my father uses mine. My younger brother quickly takes the opportunity to ask me for a cigarette and sits down next to me at the kitchen table. I reach out and fiddle with the saltshaker, an item that has never been replaced. My parents never bought a new saltshaker because there was never any need to. My mother always put a few grains of rice into it with the salt to soak up the moisture, so the salt didn’t become lumpy.

“You know,” my younger brother says, “normally I’d be out in the streets of Tel Aviv now with my friends. Whenever we finish an exam we go out drinking. We do the most drinking after exams,” he whispers, and turns around to check if the coast is clear. He continues whispering, even though I myself can barely hear him. “Tel Aviv is an amazing city, I tell you. After exams, we don’t just have beer the way we usually do. We go completely crazy. I’d waste four hundred shekels on booze right now if I could. I’d go for the pricey whiskey or Jägermeister. Do you like Jäger? It’s great with lemon, you know. I don’t really understand why you came back here. I don’t understand you. I’d never come back. No way. I’d stay in Tel Aviv for the rest of my life, or run away to some country in Europe, or to Canada. The Canadians are easy with visas. I’d marry someone local and become a full citizen. Sure, they have their xenophobes and the anti-Muslims, but I’m telling you, from what my Christian friends tell me, the ones whose brothers emigrated there, what they call racism in London, say, is about the same as what we would call left-wing opinions here. It’s a whole different world. The problem with London is that the pubs close at about eight P.M. I don’t get it. If I want a night out on the town with some friends, we only get started at about eleven or twelve.

“Tell me,” my brother asks, looking straight at me, “why are things like this? Do you ever ask yourself why we have to be this way? And the problem is that it isn’t only us, it’s all the Arabs. Why?” He takes another drag, rubs his eyes hard because of the smoke that gets into them and continues. “Sometimes when I see all those music festivals on Cairo TV, or Beirut or even Jordan, you know, I tell myself, isn’t it great, how those people have festivals with the best Arab singers? You just buy a ticket and go to a performance. I’ve always dreamed of going to a concert in some Arab country or to celebrate Id el-Fitr in Damascus, say. Wouldn’t that be great? The whole country celebrates it, like an official holiday. I mean, it’s not like here, where they won’t even give you a day off to celebrate your holidays…. But I find myself feeling sorry for those people, know what I mean? All those kids dancing at concerts or celebrating Ramadan. Every time I remember what kind of a regime they have, I feel sorry for them when I see them dance, and I don’t understand why nothing changes in their situation. How could it be that all the Arab countries are like that?”

I look at him, and he smiles, giving off a kind of “Hmmmm.” I continue playing with the saltshaker and don’t say anything, though he’s expecting a response. “I never think about those things,” I tell him after a while.

“I’m not like that, I’m not like you,” he says, squashing his cigarette in an ashtray and exhaling the last coil of smoke through his nostrils. “I don’t feel like sleeping next to Father,” he says. “I guess I’ll take the sofa and you’ll sleep on the bed, okay?” I nod and know I won’t get any sleep tonight. “I’m not tired yet,” I tell my brother.

“Neither am I. But I guess we ought to try and get some sleep, to make the time go by faster.”

My brother lies down on the three-seater, which is barely large enough for him. He puts his head on one armrest and his feet on the other. The house is almost silent, except for an occasional cough or the sound of breathing.

I take off my shirt. It’s filthy already, even though I just put it on a few hours ago. Ever since the closure began I haven’t been able to shower but at least I’ve put on clean clothes, in the hope that they would offset the dirt. I reach for the back of my neck and scratch it gently. A thick layer of dirt gathers under my fingernails. I take a toothpick from the holder on the table in front of me and try to scrape away the dirt caked between my nails and fingers.

I don’t want to stay here either. I’ll leave as soon as I can. How can I possibly stay on here with neighbors who attacked me the way they did? How can I keep running into them? How can I go back into the grocery store after what the owner did to me today? How can I even feel safe in a place like this? I’m getting away from here, and that’s final. I feel now that I can let my wife in on what I’ve been going through. When she spoke to me before going to lie down, I felt I could tell her everything, that I don’t really have a job anymore. I felt she would have hugged me and comforted me. She would even have said something to make me feel better. I’m going to do it, to tell her everything, and we’ll turn over a new leaf. I’m sure she’ll understand what I’m going through. I’ll find another job, and I’ll go on moonlighting at the paper, in the hope that something better will turn up. There’s no telling what’s going to happen. But I’m going to find something else, anything. And who knows, maybe one of the places I sent my résumé has been trying to get in touch with me over these past few days, but can’t. We’ll live in a small apartment in a downscale neighborhood. We could even rent a one-room apartment for now, and put baby’s crib next to us. We can live in a single room till she turns one. After that, we’ll figure out something. By then I’ll find something else, I’m sure of it, and things will get better and we’ll be able to afford to move to something roomier. A two-room apartment with a small kitchen will do fine. We don’t need a living room. Nobody comes to visit us anyway. A small kitchen with a table for three is plenty.

I’ve got to get out of here first chance I get. I’m sure my wife will be pleased. She hated the whole thing to begin with. She’ll find another job. There’s always a shortage of Arabic teachers, especially if we move to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. She could work in Jaffa or in East Jerusalem. Very few of the Arab inhabitants in the mixed cities finish high school, so there are no local teachers, and there are always vacancies, and the outsiders are the ones who call the shots in the school system. Her best chance is in the Arab neighborhoods in Jewish cities. But we would not live in such a neighborhood, which seems as bad as here – worse, in fact. We’d do better living in a different neighborhood. In spite of everything, it’s much safer living in a Jewish neighborhood. The fact is that despite all the shit we had to put up with there, nobody ever attacked us, at least not physically. At least they have policemen and law enforcement. Now that I think of it, I lived there for more than ten years and I never – but never – heard a single shot.