Текст книги "Let It Be Morning"

Автор книги: Sayed Kashua

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

7

Ihardly write for the paper anymore now. Cutbacks, they say. Less than a year ago, I had a position and a contract. My name was featured at the top of the masthead with the other members of the editorial board, and now it appears under the heading “regular contributors.” In a lousy month I don’t get more than ten small items into the paper. But still I keep going there each morning. It’s become a bit embarrassing lately. My spot with the computer has been given to a perky young fashion reporter. I don’t have a desk either, but I go there anyway. I want them to see me, to remember that I still exist, that I’m still ready to do my bit for that shitty rag. Mostly I sit in the smoking room going through the papers, turning pages till around noon, then make the rounds of the nearby streets. I never eat out anymore. On rare occasions I allow myself to sit in a café and order a short espresso, and then I usually spend at least an hour sipping it, browsing through the papers.

For the first time in my life, I’ve begun looking at the financial supplements before the other sections. Stories about mass layoffs, bankruptcies, the poverty line, the monthly unemployment figures reassure me to some extent. The Arab towns and villages have always held the lead on those unemployment and poverty ratings, and for me this has been a comfort of sorts. My wife and I are managing okay for now. The return home salvaged the situation, and was actually the smartest step I could have taken. We don’t have all that many expenses, don’t even spend much for food, because we eat at our parents’ houses. We can really make ends meet on my wife’s salary alone, even though teachers’ salaries are among the lowest in the country, or perhaps the very lowest.

Last month I got four hundred shekels for the only story of mine that got published all month. And even then, my editor made a point of reminding me that “for a story like that I normally pay two hundred.”

I’m dumbfounded at all the want ads in the supplements, considering the constantly rising unemployment rate. I’ve been reading the ads very closely lately. I started by looking for a position as a reporter, a proofreader, a copy editor. Anything as long as it has to do with journalism. But no go. Every now and then when I’d go back to the paper, I’d phone the people who’d placed those ads looking for energetic youngsters in search of an interesting job, and for whatever reason one phone call was enough for them to decide I wasn’t right. In the beginning I rang some of the ones looking for young academics or stipulating that the job was “suitable for a student.” I’d send in a résumé without even knowing exactly what the job was, but I never got a reply.

Nobody in my family knew what I was going through and I saw no point in telling them for the time being. Including my wife. Every day I’d leave the house early in the morning and head for the paper, only to return in the afternoon pretending to be this exhausted guy coming home from a hard day’s work. My wife did notice that I no longer had any full-length articles and that my name hardly appeared in the paper, but I told her that I’d been promoted to the news desk and that I was now responsible for several of the reporters covering the West Bank. What I’d really been given was the job of a rewriter, a kind of subeditor whose main job is to train new reporters, and all I write are items that require a lot of experience, the kind that can’t be assigned to beginners. We haven’t begun to feel the loss of my salary yet. The real deterioration only began last month and we haven’t noticed it yet because our expenses are so negligible. But I know things can’t continue this way. I can’t go on fooling everybody. I’ve got to find another job. I’ll keep doing whatever I can to make sure my name does appear in the paper occasionally, but I’ve got to find another source of income. I can’t pretend to be working, I can’t continue going there every morning. I’ve got a feeling that pretty soon one of the guys in charge is going to ask me diplomatically to stop. I know that my coming there actually upsets some of the people, but above all it upsets me.

I’ve got to look for the kind of job that someone like me has a chance of getting. If need be, I’ll work in construction. I know it will be tough at first, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Who said the solution has to be construction, though? I bet I could find a job caring for an invalid. They always want Arabs for those. An old person, maybe, or retarded. That would be the best solution as far as I’m concerned. Nobody needs to know about my new job. Nobody in my family will have to feel humiliated. I can’t afford not to work. I can’t afford to find myself without a livelihood. I want everything to go well here. I know how important that is to everyone.

People around me are forever discussing the money that others have. I don’t know whether it’s deliberate or not, but almost every time I come to visit they start talking about how this one’s son or that one’s son built a thirteen-hundred-foot home. My mother-in-law is taking an interest in houses, and sometimes I think she’s compiling a list of every person who’s building something – where it is and how much it’s costing. She spends a lot of time on cars too, and always has tales to tell about relatives who’ve bought a new Mercedes or a Volvo or a Jeep. She knows when women in the village started to take driving lessons, how many they’ve taken and how many driving tests they had to take before getting their licenses. The stories I hear at my in-laws’ home in the evenings about people with a lot of money certainly don’t jibe with all those stories and figures in the business supplement I read in the mornings. I’m mystified at how people can just go on building and buying new cars when the situation is so bad. I never hear any stories about poor people who can’t even build a single room for when they get married. All I hear in my in-laws’ home are great success stories. Sometimes my mother-in-law makes a point of mentioning, as she describes yet another young man who built a house and bought a shiny car for his fiancé or his new wife, that he had once asked for her daughter’s – my wife’s – hand in marriage, but they had turned him down. Her voice is sad as she tells me this, and it makes me feel very uncomfortable, especially in the presence of my wife, who doesn’t say a thing. Sometimes my mother-in-law says, “I suppose she was young then, and we’re not like everyone else. We wanted her to finish school first. She was good at school and we didn’t want her to just get married and stay at home.”

My father-in-law, on the other hand, specializes in real estate and livelihoods. He knows who has bought land from whom, how many acres the deal covered, how much money changed hands and which lawyer handled the transaction. He knows how much certain people make per day, per week, per month and per year. He never mentions people’s education. Educated people aren’t that interesting to him. He values people by their income. He can spend a very long time calculating, for instance, how much the barber at the shop across the street makes in a year. He counts the people coming into the shop, at least forty a day, and nearly a hundred on weekends, not to mention the Id el-Fitrand Id el-Adhaholidays, and haircuts for grooms, which cost almost three times as much as a regular cut. He calculates the wages the barber pays, the expenses, scissors, machines and various scents and lotions, and establishes firmly just how much he makes each month. Minimumis the word he uses to conclude his findings concerning people’s incomes. He admires garage owners who’ve made it big, and moving-company owners, money changers, building contractors and the proprietors of hardware stores, shoe stores and clothing stores.

PART TWO. “There’s Some Kind of Roadblock at the Entrance”

1

The paper hasn’t arrived. The paperboy must have skipped us again, or maybe he’s sick. I’m suddenly uneasy about the fact that I’ve never actually seen the paper route guy. I switch on the TV and turn up the volume, but don’t sit down to watch. My wife is still upstairs, getting herself and the baby ready to leave. “Is the milk ready yet?” she shouts from above.

“Yes,” I lie, and quickly pour the formula into the bottle and shake it.

I smile at the baby, who’s coming downstairs in her mother’s arms. “Good morning,” I say to her, and approach with the bottle in my hand, but first I kiss her on the cheek. My wife will give the baby her bottle now, and I’ll go upstairs, with my coffee in my hand, take a few sips, light a cigarette and take a few puffs, put it out under the faucet and throw it in the garbage, sit on the toilet, and when I’m through I’ll look and check the result. Then I’ll quickly brush my teeth, wash my face, change and come downstairs. I’ll talk to my daughter again and try to smile at her. I’ll say good morning all over again, and she’ll smile back – or not. I’ll take my briefcase from the study on the bottom floor and check how much cash I have in my wallet to see if it’s enough.

I’m ready now. I pick up the baby. According to the weather report at the end of last night’s evening news, it’s going to be warmer than usual today. My wife sighs. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t really matter. First we’ll stop at the nursery where we’ve begun leaving the baby. Every morning when we hand her over she cries, and we’re both kind of sad because of it, but we have no choice. My wife has to go to work, and for now at least, so do I. Then I’ll take my wife to the elementary school where she teaches. We’ll say good-bye, she’ll ask when I’m coming home and I’ll say I can’t tell because it depends on what happens today. Sometimes, when there’s a terrorist attack or a major military operation, I stay out longer and walk around because it’s only logical that a deputy news editor would be busy on days like that. I hope nothing out of the ordinary happens today. Sometimes those aimless amblings in the city streets are extremely awkward. I try not to walk the same streets twice, to keep changing locations. It isn’t only my family and the people in the village that I’m ashamed of facing because I’ve lost my job, but strangers too – kiosk owners or people in the café that I’ve never even met. So I try not to pass by them too often, because I don’t want them to think of me as a loafer.

I turn on the car radio and decide I’ve got to put an end to it, to the disgrace of it. Things can’t go on this way. If another week goes by without my finding a new job, I’ll have no choice but to go to the Unemployment Office and apply for benefits. Nobody needs to know yet. I could go on leaving the village every morning. I’ll go to an office far away where they don’t have any Arabs at all.

2

Something’s wrong. At this hour, the cars are all supposed to be heading out of the village to work, but they’re driving in, and some of the drivers coming toward me are flashing their brights. Right away, I check if my seat belt’s fastened. Flashing brights mean there’s a police roadblock at the exit.

The closer I get to the main road out of the village, in the direction of the nearby Jewish moshavim and kibbutzim and, beyond them, the cities, the heavier the traffic. Drivers are honking nervously, trying to turn around and creating a traffic jam. I manage to find a spot to park the car on the shoulder, get out and quickly march toward the exit, where hundreds of people have gathered. “Is it true?” asks a young man who’s also hurrying in the same direction.

“Is what true?”

“That they’ve sealed off the village?”

I don’t know how to react. I try not to laugh in his face, try not to seem like a know-it-all. “We’ll find out soon enough,” I say, and add, “Allah yustur,”to make sure I sound like I belong. With every second that goes by, the crowd at the exit just keeps growing. Mostly they look disgruntled, and worried about the day’s wages they’re about to lose. I recognize many of the faces and realize that some of them are people I know personally.

“What’s happening?” some of the people I know ask, turning to me. I’m the journalist in this village, after all, and they’re hoping I might have some idea of what’s going on. I shrug. Inching my way to the front of the crowd, I make out remarks like, “All the exits are blocked,” “Some people tried to make it by the dirt roads, the ones the tractors use, but they couldn’t get through,” and a story about one of the workers who tried to approach the soldiers and took a bullet. They say the bullet was shot with intent to kill, because his arm was right above his chest when he was hit. As I get closer, I notice that two tanks are blocking the road about five hundred feet away from the crowd, and aiming their enormous barrels at the people below. Everyone turns in the direction of the tanks, the jeeps and the soldiers, except for the mayor, who stands there with his back to the soldiers, facing the villagers and begging them to stay back. The mayor keeps explaining that he found out about the blockade only that morning and he has already called the people in charge, who promised to get back to him and to take care of it at once. He goes on to say that there must have been some mistake, urges the crowd to be patient, to wait a while till it all blows over. “You’ll make it to work today,” he promises. “Just give me a chance to find out what’s happening.”

“The soldiers must have confused us with Tul-Karm,” someone blurts out, and manages to elicit some laughter. Many rolls of barbed wire are blocking the road. I look in either direction and discover that they stretch as far as the eye can see. Someone in the crowd swears that the wire runs around the entire village, and wonders just when the soldiers had a chance to roll out so much. In the distance we see that besides the tanks blocking the road there are others scattered in the fields, evenly spaced on either side of the road. The tanks are still, but their engines are running, giving off billows of smoke every now and then as the roar of the engines grows louder.

3

What’s going on here damn it? We’ve had roadblocks at the entrance and exit of the village almost every morning, but this is something altogether different. This new turn of events scares me at first, then makes me happy for a few minutes. I’ll finally have a good story, I think. When’s the last time they used tanks against Arab citizens? A story like that even has a chance of being printed on the front page and, who knows, maybe it will lead to my being invited for a radio interview, like in the good days. I’m right on the spot, after all, in the heart of the story – a journalist and a resident of the besieged village. I might even get asked to appear on TV. I’ve been on a few current-events programs, to the delight of my family and friends, even my in-laws. I’ve always enjoyed it when one of the research assistants asked me to come to the studio. I enjoyed how they’d send a cab to pick me up, I enjoyed dressing nicely and getting made up. It was usually just one of the morning or late-night shows, but still, my TV moments were the best I’d known. Maybe these tanks would bring them back.

I work my way back out through the front rows of the crowd, trying to move away so I can update one of my editors about what’s going on. The way back into the village is becoming more and more jammed. All those who’d tried to get to work through the side roads are making their way back now that they’ve realized all the roads are subject to the same fate. There’s no doubt about it now: the village is blocked off on all sides.

I left my mobile in my briefcase in the car. I glance at my watch and see it’s almost eight. I step up my pace so I can catch the morning news on my car radio before phoning the news desk at the paper. There’s no more honking or bottlenecks now. Apparently the news has spread. People have parked in the middle of the road. Where can they go anyway?

The news makes no mention of what’s happening in the village. They talk about cities on the West Bank, cabinet meetings, the rising exchange rate of the dollar, but nothing to do with Israeli Arabs. Maybe it’s a mistake after all, as the mayor said, I think as I dial the paper. But luckily for me, even a mistake like that is still a story, for the back page, maybe, where they put the most amusing items.

The switchboard operator is nice as she takes my call. She says good morning, asks how the baby’s doing and only then lets me know that the editor-in-chief hasn’t arrived yet. I decide to phone him on his mobile. I was one of the paper’s senior writers until not long ago, after all, and the events in this village are an emergency situation. The editor answers from his car. He sounds surprised at what I tell him, and tries to see if I’m not pulling his leg. “Tanks? Bulldozers? Are you kidding?” he says with a laugh.

“I’m telling you they’ve shot someone already. I mean, I have to check it out first, but it’s a closure, and it’s worse than anything I saw in Ramallah or Nablus or Jenin. It’s more like Gaza. They’ve sealed off one hundred percent of the village,” I tell him.

4

The call to my editor is cut off. “Hello…Hello…” I’m not even sure he heard my last sentence. For a moment I think maybe he cut me off deliberately, but he wouldn’t pull such a thing on me. It’s not as though I call him all the time, and he knows I wouldn’t dare call him unless it was important. I try calling again, and get a recorded message: “Thank you for using Cellcom. The subscriber you have called is temporarily unavailable.”

The phone is out of order. At least it wasn’t the editor who cut off the call. Must be a technical problem. They’ll fix it right away. Sometimes when you’re under a power line or something like that, there’s no reception. I’ll wait a few minutes, and then I’ll dial again. But the phone is still dead. I get out of the car and turn to one of the people walking toward the crowd. “Excuse me,” I say with a very appreciative expression. “Excuse me, would you happen to have a phone? Mine’s dead.”

The guy nods and pulls a phone out of a leather pouch attached to his pants. He hands it to me and asks, “What’s going on in the village?” without seriously expecting an answer, just trying to make conversation. “I don’t know,” I say, and turn on his phone, but I get the same announcement. “Your line’s dead too,” I say, smiling. “Must be a technical hitch at the company.” The guy tries for himself. “ Wallah,that’s strange, first time it’s ever happened.”

It could still be a technical problem. Maybe the lines are jammed or maybe there’s been some catastrophe. On days when there’s a terrorist attack, cellular exchanges crash. It happens all over the country. I’ll go back home and call from there, I think. Except that my car is stuck in the middle of the road among dozens of others and it will take an hour for them to move now. Everyone is waiting for the roadblock to be removed so they can get to wherever they were going outside the village.

I’ll call from the bank, I think. My older brother’s the manager of one of the departments there. I’ll go into his office and phone. They’ve got to send a photographer in right away, before those damn tanks pull out. Without a good picture, I can forget about a cover story. The bank is very close by, a few minutes’ walk from the edge of the village. The commotion and the traffic jam just keep getting worse. People are pacing back and forth without the slightest idea what they’re doing or what’s happening. They talk among themselves, registering surprise and some concern and mainly agitation and impatience.

“What’s happening?” my brother asks as I enter the bank.

“I heard there’s a roadblock at the exit from the village. Anything wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him, and follow him toward his little office with the metal blinds. His office is empty, and the bank is pretty empty too. It’s still early in the morning, and except for two older women leaning on the teller’s counter there are no customers yet. My brother has hung a picture of himself with the deputy manager of his bank, not of the branch, but of the entire bank. My brother, in a white hospital gown, lying in bed, an IV in his left arm and his right hand shaking the deputy manager’s, with both of them smiling at the camera.

The deputy manager had come to visit after my brother was shot. The bank has been robbed countless times, but he was only shot at once. One of the robbers got edgy because there wasn’t enough money in the till and he took a shot at my brother, who was standing behind the counter. He was lucky, everyone said, just one broken rib. The bullet missed his heart by a few millimeters. Usually they shoot in the air or spray the windows with bullets. My brother was in the hospital for a few days, had some operations and recovered. A miracle, everyone said, a miracle from God. After that, he changed a lot. He became more religious, started fasting on Ramadan, praying at home and then going to the mosque too, and not just on Fridays. His wife also started praying. To tell the truth, she started before he did, on the day he was shot, in fact. The first time it was in the hospital, in the lobby outside the intensive care unit where my brother was. He joined her only after he left the hospital. But they’re not completely religious. I mean, he does pray, but he can also go swimming in a bathing suit, and his wife doesn’t wear the veil, or even cover her head with a colored scarf. But that’s only because she’s still young. Someday she’ll start wearing a veil too, like her mother, like my mother.

“My mobile phone’s gone dead,” I tell my brother. “Can I use yours?”

“We don’t have a connection either,” my brother says, and presses the speaker. The busy tone echoes through his office.