Текст книги "Let It Be Morning"

Автор книги: Sayed Kashua

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

7

Now I know I’m overreacting. I get into the car and immediately turn on the radio. The news will be on in a minute. I drive around, deciding not to go back home yet. The news is all about red alerts coming from the Arab villages and towns. The announcer says that security sources are trying to persuade the government to declare a nationwide state of emergency. The tone is the usual one of the news reporters, and it sounds like something that would hardly be noticed in normal times. But today it’s different, it’s obvious something’s going on. Maybe Israel is planning another large-scale attack on the West Bank. Maybe they’ve decided to get rid of Arafat and they don’t want any clashes with the Arabs within Israel, some of whom are bound to take to the streets. They don’t want to have to deal with us on top of everything else. Maybe they’re just trying to take preventive measures. And maybe that’s really why they sent the Arab students home. Maybe the security people were worried about campus demonstrations and decided to make sure it didn’t happen, to prevent clashes between Arab and Jewish students. There are all those studies now about the Arab students, dubbed the “proud generation” because they have the audacity to stand there with flags on Naqbah Day or on Land Day. I try to convince myself that everything’s going to be okay, but it doesn’t work. They sent in the tanks damn it, so maybe it’s not going to blow over as soon as people think. Maybe something big really is happening in this area. It wouldn’t do me any harm to stock up on things, would it? I’ll tell my wife I had the day off and say I didn’t know what to do with the time on my hands, so I decided to do the shopping. I’ll say I had no idea what we had in the house, so I bought a bit of everything.

I’ll do my best not to arouse the suspicion of the salespeople. A shopping spree might create the wrong impression on a day like this. People might think that as a journalist I know something that shows we ought to be getting ready for something big. They might get the idea that I have some secret information about a war that’s about to break out in the region. I decide to make the rounds of the different grocery stores and to buy a little bit in each one. I’ll start with the ones in the more distant neighborhoods, where I don’t usually shop. I cruise the streets and stop at the entrance to the first one I see. There’s an older woman standing there, someone I’ve never seen. That’s good, because it must mean she doesn’t know me either. A bag of flour is the first thing that occurs to me. That’s what you buy when you’re stocking up, isn’t it?

I take one and pay for it, say thank you and proceed to the next grocery store. “Hello,” I say with a smile, trying to seem as natural as possible. I ask the salesman for another bag of flour. If he has one of the big ones, a fifty-kilo bag, that would be great. He does. I pay for it and move on to the next store. “Could I have a bag of rice, please?” I take it, say thank you and move on. All of the stores are running low on dairy products. The trucks from Tnuva Dairies and all the other dairies haven’t been able to make the morning delivery because of the roadblocks. I take a few liters of milk, two packages of cheese, some banana yogurt for the baby and a few bottles of my wife’s favorite soft drink. In the pharmacy, I take all but one of the cans of formula for one-year-olds. By the time I get to the stores in my own neighborhood, the trunk and both seats are piled high with groceries. I stop at the one nearest my home, smile, greet the owner, who is one of our neighbors, and ask for nothing but a pack of American cigarettes. He asks if they’ve removed the roadblocks yet, and I shrug as if it’s no concern of mine.

8

I’ll pick up my wife at school today. I’ve got time. First I’ll unload all the groceries from the car. I’d rather she didn’t see the bags of flour and rice. I’ll cram them into the little room that we use for storage. I pile the dairy products into the fridge, and feel I’ve overdone it a bit. We’ll pass the expiration date before we use them all up. We hardly eat at home damn it. We usually skip breakfast, so we won’t even get to the dairy things. I put the canned goods and the formula in the kitchen cabinets and feel bad about spending money I don’t even have. Fuck, if the ATMs were working, even my brother couldn’t help me withdraw money from my account. It used to be so convenient to be able to pick up the phone and find out if your salary had been deposited in your account yet and what the balance was, but now it seems like a nightmare. He’ll realize soon enough that the paper is hardly paying me anything. I shouldn’t have lied to him about the problem with the accounting department. Damn it, I can’t go on lying this way. I’ve got to transfer my account to a different branch, one in the city, maybe. I’ll say it’s closer to work and that I spend most of my day there anyway, so it’ll be easier for me to get to my branch directly from work. It shouldn’t be too complicated to transfer an account from one branch to another. It’s not as if I’m changing banks. I hope you don’t need to close an account before you can move it to a different branch, I mean I hope it doesn’t actually have to be in the black. Not that I owe the bank very much, but I don’t have even a small amount in my account right now. I can’t believe I’ve spent almost all of the thousand shekels today to stock up for a war that won’t happen. Everything’s probably blown over by now, I tell myself and go check if the phone’s working yet. It isn’t.

The doorbell rings as I’m about to leave. A twelve-year-old boy is standing in the entrance with some tissues, some lighters and a picture of the al-Aqsa Mosque. “Special for you, sir, tissues for two shekels, a lighter for half a shekel, ten for four. Have some, and may Allah protect your children, sir.” I look at him, standing there and begging, with tears in his eyes. I try not to pity him, to remember what Ashraf told me about the hundred-shekels minimum that those bastards make each day thanks to their knack for making us feel sorry for them. I remind myself that I don’t have money to spare and that if I buy from him even once, he’ll be back at this address every time. “Sorry, I don’t need any,” I say. And he goes on begging, with his eyes all moist. “Please, sir, for my parents, and may God bless you and your family, may God bless your relatives who’ve died, please, sir, take something.” I shake my head and lock the door, trying to block out the voice of the boy who runs after me as I get into my car and drive off. I feel a pang in my chest.

It’s the first time I’ve picked up my wife from work. I mean, the first time since we got back. Before that, I’d pick her up almost every day. The paper wasn’t far from the school where she taught and I didn’t want her taking buses. Here she can manage. She could even come home on foot. It’s not far at all. It’s almost one-thirty, and they’re about to finish the sixth period.

My wife teaches in the same school where I used to go. She went there too, but a few years after me. Some kids are playing ball in the yard. Their teacher is sitting on a chair under one of the trees that kids in my class planted on Tu b’Shvat,Israeli Arbor Day. The teacher’s gaze alternates between the kids and her watch. I go upstairs and start walking down the long hallway past the classrooms. I look inside as I pass, in search of the one where my wife is teaching. I can hear the Hebrew lessons and the kids echoing the teacher as loud as they can, “abba”(father), “imma”(mother). Third grade, I tell myself, that’s when they start learning Hebrew. Every now and then I nod in the direction of one of the teachers who taught me, or someone I met at our house when a group of teachers came to welcome my wife after we moved back. Ustaz Walid, the history teacher, sees me, interrupts his lesson and invites me into his classroom. He shakes my hand and declares to the students, “He was like you once, one of my students. But he did all his homework, he was a good student, and look where he is now. He’s a distinguished journalist, who appears on TV. And you don’t want to wind up as factory workers, you want to get to the university too, right?” To which the whole class replies at the top of their voices, “Yes, Mr. Walid.”

I nod, and don’t know where to hide, I’m so embarrassed. What he says is even slightly painful. I know that journalism was a last resort for me because my score on the psychometric exam prevented me from applying to medical school or law school. Besides, my days as a distinguished journalist are slowly drawing to an end, so that even when I do find a good story that I don’t even have to struggle for, a story that’s happening to me damn it, in my own village, I can’t pick up the phone and talk to my editor.

My wife seems taken aback to see me in the hallway. I smile at her, to make sure she knows there’s nothing wrong. She leaves her class for a minute. “Anything wrong? Why aren’t you at work?”

“There’s some kind of roadblock at the entrance to the village.”

“Yes, I heard something about that, but I thought you must have made it out before they closed the road.”

“I didn’t, even though I’ve got loads of work, but it’s no big deal. You’re about to finish, right?”

“In a minute. Come on in.”

I go into her classroom. The children are giggling, whispering to one another. Grade 4-a, the same classroom I was in. My wife gives them homework for the following lesson. All of the questions, 1 to 6, in the chapter about the halutzim, the Jewish pioneers. My wife is a geography teacher, and they’re still teaching the same material they taught twenty or thirty years ago. She writes the words on the blackboard– swamps, eucalyptus trees, malaria, diseases, mosquitoes, children dying, sand, desert.

I doubt the children know who those halutzimwere. I had never understood they were Jewish immigrants. It was never stated in so many words. I was convinced they were wise heroes that all of us ought to admire because they invented important things like netting for windows and doors, to keep out the poisonous mosquitoes which used to kill babies.

Sometimes I wonder if my wife herself knows that the pioneers were Jewish immigrants. Sometimes, when I look at the tests she’s correcting, I wonder if she knows what the Jewish National Fund is, considering she’s been singing its praises for years. My guess is that she hasn’t a clue. She just accepts what the books say at face value. She’s always been a good girl, a good wife. If the JNF spends money on land, public parks and playgrounds, that’s what she’ll tell her students.

My wife doesn’t give much thought to questions like that. She’s never really had a chance to know the world outside the village. She’s all of twenty-three. Soon as she graduated from high school she entered Beit Berl Teachers College, like all the good girls do. The best thing a girl can do is become a teacher. Girls who attend Beit Berl succeed in retaining their honor despite going to school. The college is very close to the village. They go there each morning and return home in the afternoon. Unlike women who go to a university, they don’t have to stay away from home, and everyone knows what bed they slept in. The Beit Berl girls are considered the best match. They’re in high demand. You could say they’re both well educated and respectable, besides which they find convenient jobs, which allow them to get home early and to be on vacation precisely when their children are. That’s more or less what my parents explained to me about my future wife before they went to ask her parents for her hand. “There’s nothing better than marrying a teacher,” my mother said, and she still says so.

I doubt my wife knows who Berl Katznelson was, the man that Beit Berl College is named after. In fact, I’m pretty sure she thinks he was a hero and an exemplary educator, because that’s what it says on the sign at the entrance to the college.

The bell rings. They’ve replaced the large copper bell, the one the principal used to operate with an iron rod. They have an electric bell now, one that plays a catchy theme song from a famous movie. The children are delighted. They pick up their chairs and put them on their desks, then rush out of the classroom. My wife packs her bag and is the last to leave. The children emerge from school, running. Some of them stop at the kiosk near the front gate, jostling and buying grape-flavored ice pops.

“So what’ll you do?” my wife asks. “Won’t you go to work today?”

“No,” I say, and I understand she thinks the roadblock was only put there for the morning and that things are back to normal. I look at her now, among her students, and suddenly she seems so small, so young. We’ve had some nice moments, I think. We have. I’m sure of it. I march down the school hallways with her. A few other teachers wave to us. I know they’re watching us. I wonder what they think. I’m sure their thoughts about us are good ones. It crosses my mind that to an outside observer we must seem like the perfect couple, who’ve done everything by the unwritten book of the village. For some reason, this thought gives me new hope. Why not, in fact? What, just because of money? Someday soon things will all work out. I know they will. I walk out of my elementary school with a little smile on my lips.

9

As always, we’re eating supper at my parents’. It’s been almost two months since we moved here, and we still haven’t cooked so much as a single meal. My wife and my older brother’s wife are sitting in the kitchen talking about the schools where they work. My older brother’s wife is a teacher too. She teaches science in junior high. They’ve known one another since their college days. My three-year-old nephew is chasing a ball from the kitchen into the living room. Every few minutes he screams, “Goal,” and my brother cheers. My mother’s in the living room, holding my daughter in her arms and rocking her to sleep. My father’s in his customary spot on the sofa, looking preoccupied, a bit more than usual, scratching his palms and waiting for another newscast. In Hebrew this time.

There isn’t much to do in this village except sit around with one of our families, mine or my wife’s. Actually, the two houses we were born in, my wife and I, have become the two focal points of our lives. And we’re not the only ones. Everyone here is like that. The life of my older brother and his wife, for instance, revolves around the homes of his in-laws and our parents, even though they tend to cook at their own home from time to time and to have dinner on their own too. Whenever they do, it upsets my mother. “I don’t mind that she cooks,” she says. “Every woman likes to feed her husband, but why don’t they let me know? What am I supposed to do with all the food I cooked? Isn’t it a shame to let it go to waste?”

My wife prefers to eat at her parents’ house. She says she feels more comfortable eating there, and she doesn’t get the feeling that someone is watching her the way she does at my mother’s.

Even though I enjoy my brother-in-law’s company, and even though he’s really the only person outside of my immediate family that I talk to in this village, I don’t feel comfortable staying for too long at my wife’s parents’ place. Certainly not now, certainly not when my wife is mad at me, and the devil knows what she’s been saying about me to her mother, who generally looks like she resents me and makes me feel I’m the reason for her daughter’s unhappiness. I suppose it’s true, but I can always claim that the reverse is true too, except I would never complain and I would always take what I have coming to me without trying to change things or improve them. And when it comes to my relations with my wife, I’d say I’m a believer.

My wife constantly blames me for the fact that we’ve returned to this stifling, bleak village that has nothing to offer her. She mentions my brother and his wife, who take their son from time to time and head for a shopping mall in one of the nearby cities. We go sometimes too, even though I’ve never figured out why people enjoy spending time at shopping centers, and I’ve never understood the smile on my wife’s face as she strolls through the shops and along the food court, even if she’s not about to buy anything.

Every time one of her friends or relatives goes abroad, she goes into mourning, and I’m the object of her litany about how I stole her dream of traveling to a different city, a different country. I’ve stolen her dream of big hotels and even bigger shopping malls. We’ve never taken an airplane, we’ve never left the country. I’ve always said we don’t have enough money to pay for such a trip, and that’s the truth, even though it’s not what my wife would like to hear. I’ve never felt I needed those trips. Never gave it a second thought. On the contrary, I find it hard to picture what it is that makes them enjoyable. For some reason, as far as I’m concerned, leaving the country is something I could only do in one direction. I mean, when I think of a plane and of another country, I think of it only as a way of emigrating, of escaping, of deciding never to return here – not ever, not even for a visit.

True, there isn’t much to do here even if you’d like to. Unlike the city, which offers lots of stimuli even though I hardly ever feel like doing anything there either. And yet, I don’t feel more bored here, and I don’t get the urge to do more than what the village routine has to offer someone like me – hanging out in your parents’ living room.

There are several cafés in the village, all for men. But generally the men there are much older than me and they pass the time playing cards and tawlah. I don’t like those games, to tell the truth. I’ve even managed to forget the rules, which I learned from my father long ago. My father sits in cafés every day. Every afternoon he dresses up, as if he’s been invited to an official event, and heads for the café where he’s been a regular for decades. He plays with his usual partners, the same three teachers he’s been playing against for as long as I can remember. He spends his afternoons there, coming home in time for evening prayers. My brother-in-law Ashraf told me there’s a place called the Purple Butterfly too, at the outskirts of the village where you can order alcoholic beverages. Ashraf burst out laughing when I suggested that we go have a drink there. He said the only people who ever went there were the heavy drinkers that everyone in the village knows. “What’s gotten into you?” He laughed. “Are you nuts? D’you want to come home with an eye and a foot missing, and be ostracized by your family?”

According to Ashraf’s stories, some people from the Islamic Movement had tried to set fire to the Purple Butterfly a few times. In fact they actually did burn it down once, and the owner had insisted on rebuilding it. The pub is holding on, and continues to be the only place in the village where they sell alcohol – thanks to the protection of a gang that charges the owner a monthly fee, not to mention a free run of the bar for the gang members. “They deserve a place where they can have a drink too, don’t they?” Ashraf says, and laughs, the way he always does when he tells me those stories. “Something close to home that could get them through withdrawal without their having to go all the way to Tel Aviv for a swig of arrack.”

Apart from driving through the streets with radios blaring full blast, the favorite pastime of people around here is weddings. In summer, weddings are an alternative to discotheques. That’s where bachelors can fan their tails and do their mating dances, that’s where they can really let go and sweat, and stomp their feet for hours on end. The weddings provide another setting, another arena for the machismo match. Bachelors like Ashraf spend almost every summer evening at weddings. He told me that he and some of his friends used to go to Tel Aviv regularly and try their luck at the dance clubs they’d read about in the papers or heard about from the other students, except they never got past the bouncer and had to make do with spending yet another night at one of the dives that admitted just about anyone. “We’d go into places that you wouldn’t believe. You’d have the feeling a murder was just waiting to happen, someone was about to waste an enemy or something,” he chuckled. “There’s nothing like weddings. It’s the best bet. Trouble is that if you wind up at an Islamic wedding, you’re done for. Sure, everyone’s a Muslim, and everyone’s becoming religious lately, but I’m talking about the ones who decide that instead of a wedding with music and dancing they’ll invite a sheikh to read verses from the Koran and a religion teacher to lecture about the shocking behavior of today’s young people at the promiscuous weddings taking place right here in our own village. Lots of people are into that nowadays, and you can’t tell anymore what to expect. Sometimes we have to do three weddings in a single evening before we find one without a sheikh.”

True, there isn’t much to do around here, least of all for someone like me. I don’t go to the mosque, I try to stay away from weddings, I don’t play cards with men my father’s age and I have no desire to visit the only club in the village. But I’m not bored. I mean, I haven’t been particularly bored since I moved here. On the contrary, I suffered more before. I don’t even miss the nights when we’d go out to look for kicks. At least I’ve been spared those embarrassing moments, those moments of drunkenness when I could find no rest for my soul. I’ve been spared the mornings after the nights of drinking, when I felt miserable for not being able to keep my thoughts to myself the night before.