Текст книги "Dancing Arabs"

Автор книги: Sayed Kashua

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

PART FIVE. The Road to Tira

Date of Birth

My father works at city hall. He issues ID cards, passports, birth certificates, marriage licenses, and death certificates. He works out of a small office in the basement, with a small window and a shutter that can’t be pulled down. For fourteen years now, my father’s been issuing IDs to the people of Tira. In the past, they had to go to the Ministry of Interior in Netanya to renew their ID or apply for a passport, but now they can do it in the village itself.

Father works from eight to four every day. All the workers at city hall have a reputation for being corrupt. People say they just sit around doing nothing and were appointed because they’re related to the mayor. My father hated himself for accepting the job, but Grandma and Mother had pushed him. They wanted him to work in the village, not far away, so he’d always be nearby and they could always find him. Getting that job cost Father everything he believed in. Fourteen years earlier he had supported a collaborator who was running for mayor, and his reward was to be allowed to work for the State. People said my father must have been a collaborator too. Otherwise how could he work for the Ministry of Interior after sitting in an Israeli jail on security charges?

People in Tira hated my father. Maybe Grandma’s right; maybe they really were jealous of him. My father didn’t have any friends except for Bassem, who’d worked in the packinghouse with him. Bassem couldn’t get out of bed anymore. His years of fruit picking had finished off his back. Every now and then, he’d have another operation, and Father would go visit him in the hospital. Sometimes he’d take the chessboard along, and Bassem would play from the bed.

I don’t remember ever seeing Father making friends with people who were considered well-educated – doctors, lawyers, teachers, or engineers. Sometimes I got the impression that he was embarrassed, that he felt inferior, with that job of his behind the broken shutter.

Father had never been so discouraged. He hardly left the house anymore. Soon as he got back from work, he got into bed and turn on the radio on the dresser. Sometimes he’d come into the living room to watch the news, and other times he’d just stay in bed till the following morning. He didn’t have much to do at work. Sometimes, weeks would go by and nobody from Tira would need Father’s intervention with the Ministry of Interior. Sometimes he got so bored that he’d renew all our IDs and passports, saying they’d expired. Why walk around with old IDs when he could get us new ones within two days, with the signature of the new Minister of Interior?

My father renewed his own ID card every week. Sometimes he considered changing his name. The fact that this was possible appealed to him. He updated the information: Israeli citizen, Arab, married, father of four. Date of birth: 0/0/47, because Grandma couldn’t remember exactly when Father had been born. When the Jews came and she went to register him with them, she couldn’t give them an exact date. All she knew was that it had been in the prickly pear season. Grandma says there was a war on then, and nobody paid much attention to dates of birth.

Everything changed when my Aunt Camilla from the Nur-Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm was dying, and father visited her in the hospital in Nablus. Her oldest son, Ibrahim, had gotten out of jail when the Palestinians entered the West Bank, and as a token of appreciation for what he had done on behalf of the State, they gave him a position in the Ministry of Interior in Tulkarm. Granted, his salary wasn’t as high as my father’s, but at least he had some status. In the hospital, he walked around with a pistol, and the doctors treated him with respect. Thanks to him, they let my aunt die in the fanciest room in the hospital, with partitions between the beds.

I’d stayed at her place when I was little. At night, there were big fireworks that lit up all the houses, and Aunt Camilla explained that they were army fireworks. I thought then that the camp looked so beautiful, with water running through little grooves in the middle of the street, and no sand at all. The children used the English term ice creaminstead of the Hebrew glida,and when they played soccer, they said hands,not yad.Even then I knew her son Ibrahim was a hero, though I’d never actually seen him.

After my aunt died, Ibrahim took my father to visit the Palestinian Ministry of Interior in Tulkarm. They were going through some old papers, dating back to the days of the British mandate, when suddenly my father spotted his own name with a precise date of birth: May 14, 1948. My father was delighted to be one year younger. He held a big celebration with all our aunts, and even Bassem was taken out of his bed.

Then my father started tracking down the birth dates of my aunts and all our relatives who’d been born before the war, and all of them started celebrating their birthdays. Aunt Fahten, who was seventy by then, even had some performers at her party. She said it was her way of making up for all the years she couldn’t celebrate.

The rumor spread through the village, and people started saying Father wasn’t a collaborator after all, because otherwise how could the Palestinians be allowing him go through secret documents? The first one to ask my father to find out his date of birth was the mayor, and my father not only dug up his date of birth but provided him with a birth certificate. The mayor had his first birthday celebration in the soccer field, and in his speech he thanked my father for his help.

After that, Father barely found time to sleep. People who couldn’t get to him at work would come to our house asking for help. Knowing that he was doing it as a favor, and that it had nothing to do with his job with the Israeli Ministry of Interior, they started bringing gifts in return. Sheep, watches, ground meat, six-packs of Coke, packets of rice and sugar. Some of them offered money, but Father wouldn’t take it. He said the only money he’d accept was to cover the cost of the stamps he had to buy in Tulkarm, and he always gave them a receipt signed by the Palestinian Authority. Ibrahim had no problem producing the stamps and official receipts at the same printing press where he used to print protest posters. Father handed all the money over to Ibrahim and never touched it. He said Ibrahim deserved it; he needed to build a house now, and to find himself a good wife. Poor guy, twenty years he spent in jail, and now he didn’t even have a mother.

The news of Father’s magic spread from Tira to the nearby villages and later to the Galilee. People came in fancy cars, bringing money and gifts, and asked for birth certificates. My father became famous. He didn’t consider it a bother. On the contrary, this new pursuit made him very happy. People started swearing they’d seen my father having dinner with Arafat. Everyone in Tira knew it was Arafat who had asked my father to support the collaborator mayor. And the whole business with the Israeli Ministry of Interior was nothing more than a clever Palestinian ploy. The newspapers began singing his praises, thanking him and saluting him as “the well-known Palestinian hero,” “son of the brave shahid,” and “the man who has liberated land and administered justice.” My father didn’t react to their show of appreciation. He didn’t say a word. Mornings he’d work in the municipality building, afternoons he’d go to Tulkarm, and almost every evening he was guest of honor at someone’s first birthday party.

Parents’ Day

Your parents are here,” my wife says, waking me from my Friday afternoon nap. I’d forgotten they were coming. My mother had phoned the day before and told my wife they were coming to see us. She feels she’s missing out on something, and she’s got to see her granddaughter. They’re in the living room now. My mother’s holding her, making noises and expecting a response from the baby, who is dividing her attention between Mother, the bunch of keys in Father’s hand, and my brother, who’s whistling in her face. Her suspicious stares turn to grunts, and before long she’s crying. My mother says it’s our fault, that we don’t come to visit often enough and the baby doesn’t know her own grandparents.

My wife sits the baby on her shoulders and tries to calm her down in preparation for her next round with her grandmother. My wife says my mother doesn’t know the first thing about babies, she doesn’t show the baby any warmth, and it must be her fault that I’m as screwed up as I am.

I shake hands with my parents. Sometimes we kiss. I don’t like it. It feels very strange, very awkward, artificial. Especially when I kiss my father. I never let my lips touch his cheek, I just turn my head toward his lips, which barely graze my cheek.

“How come you’re still sleeping?” my father asks.

“I was working last night.”

“At the restaurant?” he asks. He knows it’s a bar, but my father is always intent on image building.

“At the chamara,the dive,” I correct him.

There are big bags of garbage in the living room and an enormous pile of dishes rising out of the sink. Generally my wife cleans up before guests arrive, but yesterday she was home alone with the baby and didn’t get to it. She tried to straighten up the living room somehow: to clear away the papers, handkerchiefs, banana peels, and peanuts that have been gathering on the table through the week. My wife hates dirt, but she doesn’t stand a chance with me. It’s all because of me. I never help out with the housework or with the baby. My wife says I’m primitive, and I agree.

My parents ask how we’re doing, how things are at work, how the baby is, whether she sleeps through the night or still wakes up every hour. My mother says the baby’s thinner, and my father says she’s still very fat. He lights up, and I take one of his cigarettes too. Again he says he can’t believe I’ve started smoking. I’ve been smoking for eight years now, and he still can’t believe it. He talks about how bad it is, how much he suffers because of the cigarettes, and how he hates himself for not being able to quit, but when it comes to me, I’ve only begun and I could still kick the habit, in his opinion. “How much do you smoke?” he asks and answers his own question, “Two or three cigarettes a day?”

My parents hardly ever visit us. Before the baby was born, they never did. Generally they stay about fifteen minutes, and leave. It’s been two months since ‘id el-fitr,our last visit to Tira, and this time Mother asked Father to make it a longer visit because she misses the baby. All week long she begged him to stay for at least an hour. My father agreed, but under one condition: he wanted Fatma, a friend from his Jerusalem days, to come along. On the way to Jerusalem, he called her and invited her to our house in Beit Safafa, a kind of official meeting place. My mother agreed, as long as she was given a chance to spend as much time as possible with her granddaughter.

Mother detests that Fatma. She won’t let anyone even mention her name. Every now and then, Grandma or Father or one of my aunts does, and it always gets on my mother’s nerves. She says Fatma’s a shameless whore. I’ve never seen Fatma. All I know is that she screwed up my father’s life. Grandma told me once that she’d found a whole bag of letters from Fatma to father – and she burned them all.

The phone rings, and before I have a chance to answer, Father says, “That must be Fatma. Tell her how to get here.”

The husky voice of an older woman says my name and notes that I sound like my father. Fatma says she’s at the “coiffeur,” the hairdresser, and her choice of words leaves no doubt that she belongs to the urban class, the one that uses a lot of European words. She’s from Ras el-Amud, but her hairdresser is in Talpiyot, on Ha-Uman Street. She doesn’t want detailed directions and makes do with the name of our landlord. One of the workers at the hairdresser’s is from Beit Safafa, and he’ll tell her how to get here.

My wife pulls me to the side and says we have nothing in the house. If it was only my parents, maybe it wouldn’t matter so much, but there’s a guest now too. She says I can’t go to the store, because I haven’t washed my face or brushed my teeth, and my eyes are swollen. She’ll go to the store with my brother. He’ll help her carry, too. My brother’s a good guy. Never lets you down.

My wife hands the baby to my mother, and the baby starts crying. My mother strokes her, rocks her, walks back and forth with her from the sink to the garbage in the living room, three steps away, trying to calm her down. It’s no use. My father lights another cigarette, and I take one too. I don’t usually smoke when the baby’s around, but since he’s smoking anyway, I don’t suppose my cigarette is going to make a difference. He smoked when I was little and I’m fine. All my brothers turned out fine.

I open the door. Fatma comes in, wearing a long black dress. She’s about my height, my father’s height. She has a red scarf over her shoulders. She’s dyed her hair and had it blow-dried. She’s fifty, maybe more. I don’t try to decide whether she’s prettier than my mother. They’re different. She looks like the society ladies who get interviewed on Jordanian or Egyptian TV. You don’t see any wrinkles, but you can still tell her age by the area around her mouth and eyes. Her eyelids are heavy. She blinks slowly as if she can hardly lift them.

She shakes my hand and smiles. She asks if I recognize her, and says that she saw me once when I was very little. My father tells her it wasn’t me, it was my older brother. My mother takes one arm off the baby and shakes Fatma’s hand, studying her. Fatma is thinner than she is. Fatma asks how she’s doing, smiles, and strokes the baby, whose crying grows more insistent. Fatma asks, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” and says I have a beautiful daughter.

Father sits down on the couch, with a cigarette. “You haven’t changed,” he tells her.

She shakes his hand, sits down, and says that actually she wouldn’t have recognized him. His hair’s gone white, and he’s gained a lot of weight.

Father says, “I haven’t gained any weight,” and pulls in his stomach as he draws on his cigarette. He goes into the bathroom to find a mirror, then comes back and says, “I haven’t gained any weight,” and looks at Mother for confirmation.

My wife and brother are back, carrying two bags. My wife looks disappointed. She wanted to get back before Fatma arrived, and now the guest will know that we shopped specially for her. A bottle of Coke is sticking out of the bag, and Fatma says, “Why all the fuss? I don’t want anything. I don’t drink Coke.” She shakes my brother’s hand and says he’s as good-looking as his father once was.

My wife brings out some glasses and pours Coke for the guests. She arranges some bananas, oranges, and apples in a dish. She pours some peanuts out of a brown paper bag and serves them. She clears away the economy pack of wipes and the breast pump and places the tray near Fatma. “You have an adorable baby. She looks like you,” Fatma says, and my wife insists it isn’t true.

The couches are all taken by now. Father and Fatma are using two seats, and my brother and wife another two. My mother remains standing with the baby and I pull up a chair and sit opposite Father and Fatma, who are trying not to exchange glances. “Since when have you known each other?” I ask, and exhale some smoke.

Everyone looks at me, as if I’ve asked a taboo question. In our family, people don’t talk. We’re experts at concealing details.

“Since when?” Fatma repeats. “I’ll tell you since when.” My father is still preoccupied with his stomach, pulling it in and running his hand over his shirt, as if trying to make it smoother. “I was a young teacher,” Fatma says. “I was teaching in a school in the Et-Tur neighborhood, and after the war in ’sixty-seven they took all the teachers to visit the university. That’s where I saw your father. That’s how we met.”

“And then what? How did you start talking?” I ask again, and my mother says she’s not going to vote in the next elections. My father says that he thinks the Arabs owe it to themselves to vote. Fatma doesn’t have the right to vote anyhow, because she’s not a citizen. But even if she was, she wouldn’t take part in elections for the Israeli Knesset. Fatma has stayed thin, she’s stayed single, living with her brother and the family. Everyone’s in the tourism business. They have a lot of money, a lot of buses. This week, they bought a huge house for one of their nephews. Fatma likes to buy her clothes abroad, preferably in London. She has money. She’s vice principal of a school in Et-Tur. She clears seven thousand, and she has no use for the money. Thirty-two years now she’s been teaching, two years more than my mother.

“How exactly did you meet?” I ask again, trying to use the opportunity to find out about Fatma and her letters.

“I was the best-looking guy at the university,” my father says, and forces a smile, but Mother frowns. Father says he and Fatma wanted to get married. Fatma cuts him short and says it’s lucky they didn’t. “Look how much weight you’ve gained,” she says, trying to be a friend of the family. “How do you let him get away with it?” she asks Mother, and Mother has nothing to say. She feels unwanted and makes do with a nod.

Father says the reason they didn’t get married was that he got stuck. First he spent a few years in jail, and then under house arrest, and he didn’t leave the village. Mother breaks into his story and reminds herself out loud that she still has some cooking to do. That’s it; she doesn’t want to stay with the baby any longer. She’s sorry she ever agreed to Father’s condition. She wants to go home. The baby’s getting sleepy anyway. Everyone realizes it’s time to leave. Fatma says it’s Friday and the stores close early, and she still has to buy a birthday present for her niece.

The baby’s fallen asleep. I’ll have another cigarette and then I’ll go back to sleep. I’m on duty at the bar tonight too. I ask my wife if she’s seen my lighter, and she says that because of me we looked like beggars. It wasn’t enough that the house was filthy because I’m so lazy and primitive, it didn’t even occur to me to wash my face and change out of my sweats. She doesn’t know where my lighter is, but she thinks Fatma is pretty and knows how to take care of herself. “What’s the real story between her and your father?” she asks, and I tell her my father’s stolen my lighter.

There’s No Beer in Saudi Arabia

The situation is really pissing me off. I’d like to be an Arab college graduate who works as a garbage collector so I can badmouth the State. But I never did make it through college, and the truth is that my job isn’t that bad. I’m not really suffering at work. I’d like to be a dishwasher at some restaurant, to pray in a mosque, to be poor. I’d like the sewage to overflow from the toilet into the kitchen, and I’d like for a donkey to be tied to the fig tree, and for little barefoot kids to be shouting all the time, and for my wife to wear a veil.

Everyone has been turning to religion except my father. Every Ramadan, my grandmother launches a rebellion against the infidels. She tries to force my father to fast, and each time he swears he will, but he doesn’t. When we were little, Grandma would count the cigarettes in Father’s pack, to see if he’d smoked during the fast. When he didn’t fast, she staged a hunger strike in protest, refusing to eat the last meal. Every Ramadan, she tries again, but father refuses to behave himself. She says that when he was little he did wash and pray and go to the mosque every Friday. It’s all on account of my mother. Men always follows their wives’ example. My mother wants to be pretty; she’s afraid if she wears a head scarf she’ll look old. She doesn’t understand that faith in God makes your face beautiful and smooth.

I think about God a lot lately. It’s easy, not like with the Jews. All you need to do to be religious is to wash and pray. You can go on living in the same house, and you don’t have to separate from your family. In Moslem families, an Imam and a prostitute can live together in the same house.

I don’t remember how to pray anymore. I used to go to the mosque, but that was a long time ago. Our religion teacher would give perfect grades to all students who went to the mosque. I went there to pray until I had my shoes stolen. I searched through the piles for hours, but they weren’t there. I started crying and waited for everyone to take their shoes. Finally the only thing left was an ugly pair of plastic thongs. I didn’t want to wear those, so I had to walk home barefoot.

Adel has returned to religion. The perestroika got to him. He stopped being a communist and slowly discovered religion. He stayed in Jerusalem when he finished studying. At first he had a Russian girlfriend, but when Gorbachev took over, he left her. He said a Jew remains a Jew. He thought about it and discovered that, if war broke out, he wouldn’t want to save his girlfriend. Eventually, he married a Christian girl, because it says that anyone who persuades a single person to join Islam has a sure place in heaven. Adel took on a particularly tough case, a Christian girl from Nazareth, who sported the biggest cross at the university. Her name is Susie, no less. Her parents refused to go along with the idea of her marrying some Moslem fellah,so Adel and Susie waited until her father died of a heart attack, and then they got married.

Adel is living a comfortable life. He’s a lawyer. He has a new car and three kids. My wife gets along with his wife, so we’ve become friends again. He doesn’t drink anymore and never skips his prayers. Whenever we meet, he tells me how wonderful Islam is. He explains that only prayer will help me cope with my problems, and he prays that God will help me to believe. Adel knows I drink, he knows I don’t fast, and yet he and his wife invite us for the last meal before the fast at least twice each Ramadan. Susie converted to Islam. She says she’s become convinced that Islam is the right religion and Mohammed is the true Prophet. She prays, she fasts on Ramadan, and the only holidays she celebrates are the Moslem ones. She can’t believe she ever sang in a church choir.

Since Adel turned religious, he talks differently and dresses differently. He’s much calmer. He keeps saying el hamdulula.I envy him. He supports the Islamic movement and its motto, “Islam is the answer.” Adel believes that ultimately the Mahdi will come, just as Islam promises, and unite all Moslems. Then the Moslem empire will be the strongest in the world, just the way it was in the days of Omar ibn el-Hatab. Adel says that the more Palestinians Israel kills, the closer the arrival of the Mahdi. The worse the situation, the greater the chances of redemption.

Adel says the Jews and the Americans have advanced technology, but according to the Koran the decisive war will be waged with swords and bare hands. Their sheikh tells them in the mosque that God will inflict a terrible frost on the infidels that will freeze all their planes and weapons. That’s why Adel has bought his children plastic swords. He tells them they have to learn to use those swords now. He’s stopped taking his children to the doctor and giving them medications, because he says that pretty soon there won’t be any antibiotics and the children will have to learn how to overcome diseases without help.

When the war broke out, Adel’s Sufi sheikh told his congregation that he’d met the Mahdi at the El Aqsa Mosque. Adel was convinced it was the end. “The Mahdi must be in Mecca by now,” he said, “and very soon he will liberate Jerusalem and defeat the Jews and the Americans.” Adel said he was going to Mecca to wait for the Mahdi. He wanted to be one of the Mahdi’s soldiers and follow him from Mecca, just the way it says in the Koran, because whoever follows the Mahdi has a place in heaven. Adel announced that I was going with him. He had money, and he’d pay my fare. He didn’t want to go on his own. He preferred to share his room in Mecca with a friend, not with some stranger, a Moslem who might not know a word of Arabic because he’s probably from Afghanistan. Adel signed us both up for the hajj.

There’s no beer in Saudi Arabia, not even malt beer. The women are covered from head to toe in black clothes with netting over their eyes. Women are allowed to leave their faces and hands and feet exposed, but they believe that if they take extra precautions and cover everything, their punishment on Judgment Day will be reduced. Adel prays the whole time. Even after the twenty-four-hour ride on the crowded bus, he doesn’t pause to rest but hurries to visit the Prophet’s grave in Medina. He says that all we have is two weeks, so he has to pray as much as possible.

There’s one spot that can only be reached by inching your way forward for hours in a terribly dense crowd, but it’s worth it, because the reward for a single prayer there is equivalent to the reward for a million prayers. It’s the spot where the Prophet Mohammed used to sit and pray and read the Koran. And anyone who succeeds in reaching it says it feels like the most sublime place of all, the true heaven.

Heaven is divided into compartments, and even the lowest compartment is magnificent: a verdant heaven with rivers of honey and cascades of nectar. Every wish comes true in an instant. Think of a pear – and right away a pear tree will appear in front of you, and the branch will bend on its own and serve the fruit right to your mouth. People in heaven sit on the lawn all day long, like in a park. If you think about women, there they are. Or you can think of both food and women at the same time.

It’s hard to tell if the women you get are like the ones in Saudi Arabia. Probably not. The women in heaven are petite and young, and they dress in white. They don’t undress, because there’s nowhere to undress. Everyone sits on the lawn and watches. In heaven there are no houses, not even tents, because it spoils the environment. In heaven there are no industrial materials. You can think about a Walkman as much as you want, but you won’t get it. There are no cars and no planes.

Adel says this is my last chance to return to Islam. He takes me to the grave of the Prophet, and when I say there’s nothing inside and that all I saw was a green rug with verses from the Koran on it, he starts crying, and screams at me. For two days he cries, but in the end he decides to let me be. He starts praying on his own, and that’s that. In his opinion, I’m a lost cause, and I’m bound to burn in hell.

Hell is divided into compartments too, but even the highest compartment there offers nothing good. You die, and get resurrected a million times a day, and to make sure you suffer, they burn you in fire so intense you can’t even imagine it. I’ll burn, I’ll melt, and then I’ll be resurrected and I’ll burn again and melt again. There are these gigantic people there who never ever smile. They just stand over you and burn your skin off with a branding iron, the way they do with animals. Anyone who goes to hell hasn’t a chance of getting out.

On Judgment Day the entire planet will explode, and a thick cloud will destroy all living things. Then we’ll all move somewhere else. Everyone there will stand in line on a thread that’s thinner than a single hair. People from every period in history, anyone who ever lived on earth. There will be prehistoric hunters alongside doctors from Hadassah hospital. The deeds of every one of them will be weighed, and any deed can wind up deciding your fate for better or for eternal fire. On Judgment Day, nobody recognizes anybody, not even parents or friends. Everyone’s caught up in his own reckoning. Your father will come along and say, “Please, I’ve been good to you. All I need is one more good deed to get into heaven.” And you’ll refuse, because who knows? Maybe that’ll be the one deed you need to save yourself. Everything you’ve ever done appears before you, from the day you were born till the day you died. The angel on your right shoulder will report all the bad deeds, and the one on your left shoulder will report the good ones. Or vice versa.

I tried to believe in God, to become part of the big circle of people in white constantly circling the black stone. I tried to become part of the ocean of humanity moving toward the mosques. I recalled how I’d prayed as a little boy. I tried to reconstruct everything they taught us at elementary school. There were moments when I was afraid of being alone in the room, and I started to cry. Adel hardly came back from the mosque at all, and I couldn’t stop thinking about my wife and baby. At night, when the streets became a little less crowded, I’d put on the white hat and set out to buy some gifts for the family. The sidewalks were filled with women and small children. Without removing their shoes or clothes, they lay there on pieces of cardboard. Adel put us up at one of the fanciest hotels in Mecca, very close to the Kaba, and from the window of our air-conditioned room, I could see the black stone and the people shoving and crowding to get up close and kiss it. Adel made it. He’s large. He dislocated his shoulder but he managed to kiss the stone. “The fragrance of perfume from heaven,” he said, before he fell asleep.

Our two weeks there were over. The bus ride back was unbearable. Everyone buys enormous woolen blankets in Saudi Arabia, because they’re good and they’re inexpensive. The Jordanian guide who held on to all the Israeli passports and counted us each evening told us not to buy more than two blankets each, but some of the women bought as many as ten. Adel and I were the youngest on the bus, and we wound up having to stand the whole way home. We hardly said a word to each other the entire trip. There was a point when Adel wanted to get out right in the middle of the desert, to get away from the Jordanian guide and return to Mecca. He was sure the Mahdi had arrived and was afraid of missing him. “Maybe he’s in Jerusalem already,” he said when we reached Jordan, but the Israeli soldiers at the border and the clerks who addressed us with overdone politeness assured Adel that the Mahdi hadn’t come yet.