Текст книги "Dancing Arabs"

Автор книги: Sayed Kashua

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

Wittgenstein’s Nephew

On Independence Day, my wife didn’t feel well, and I took her to the hospital. Camouflage efforts that had lasted for years were shattered in an instant. The soldiers at the entrance to the village asked me to stop by the side of the road. Me they’re stopping? The youngest Arab ever to learn to pronounce a p? I have almost no accent. You can’t tell by looking at me. I’ve got sideburns and Coke-bottle sunglasses. Even the Arabs mistake me for a Jew. I even speak Hebrew with the housekeeping staff. It must be my wife, I think to myself. She’s somewhat Arab. Sometimes, when we go to a shopping mall or places like that, I hope people will assume she’s Moroccan or Iraqi, and that I’m a western Jew who likes eastern women.

The soldier asks for our papers, and I tell him I used to have a Jewish girlfriend, I studied with Jews, and all my friends are Jews. I know all the Jewish expressions, even army slang. I shut up, and hand him my vehicle license and my driver’s license. Cars pass me, some with flags and some without. The people in the cars look like they’re sorry for me, and I feel so ridiculous with my sideburns and glasses. On the radio, the military station is blaring Hebrew songs, and I feel like such an idiot for believing I’d done everything to make sure I didn’t look suspicious.

I hurry to get past the barricade, turn off the radio, and mutter a few swearwords at the police, at the Jews, at the State, at Tira, and at my wife. I decide I shouldn’t be taking it out on her. Poor thing. She must be in pain, and the last thing she needs now is for me to be carrying on. I’ll be good.

I ask how she’s doing and she says everything’s fine.

There are only Arabs in the emergency room. Women who seem older than they are, with head scarves and plastic thongs, drag themselves through the corridors. Sometimes they bite on the edge of their scarves. They seem lost, not knowing where to go. Why the hell do they have to look like that? Why do they even go out of the house? And why are those plastic thongs still being sold anyway?

Just don’t let anyone think I’m one of them or that I’m like them. Just don’t let them call out my wife’s name when it’s her turn, or announce it on the PA system. Sometimes, when that happens, I don’t get up right away, as if it isn’t really my name, or as if it might be my name but they’ve copied it wrong in reception. So wrong in fact that it took on a new religion and nationality.

My wife doesn’t know the first thing about any of that. She doesn’t give it a second thought, which surprises and annoys me. She’s capable of talking to me in Arabic even inside a crowded elevator or at the entrance to the mall, when we’re being processed through the metal detector. She plays with the baby in Arabic in public places. I don’t understand why she insists. The baby doesn’t understand a word anyway, whether it’s in Arabic or in Hebrew.

My wife goes in to be examined and I wait as far away as possible, at the end of the farthest bench. I take out a book in Hebrew that I keep for situations like this, and start reading. It’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew,not just any book. If a doctor happens to pass by, he’s bound to be impressed. And I don’t open the book at the beginning but toward the end. The last thing I need is for them to get the impression that I just started reading it now. I stare at the book, not only to conceal my identity but also to avoid eye contact with the others. That’s all I need now – for some creep to arrive, someone who went to school with me once, in a button-down shirt and clutching his keys, his mobile phone, and his cigarettes all in the same hand. All I need is for him to decide on a sudden display of emotion and kiss me. I look down, and from time to time I cross my legs and turn the pages.

“Excuse me,” someone addresses me. She’s young, dark-skinned, and fat. Behind her are two more women. They all look the same. Must be sisters. Their religious garb hides some of their ugliness. The woman stresses the words wildly: “She is in a birth condition,” she says, and I don’t know where to hide.

What should I tell them now? Maybe I should answer in Hebrew. I do that sometimes. Arabs turn to me in Hebrew, and I answer them in Hebrew, because how should I know they’re Arabs? True, you can tell, but if they didn’t recognize me, maybe I could pretend not to recognize them either. Then again, with those three, you can’t miss it. They’re Arabs from head to toe. Maybe I ought to give my “I haven’t the faintest idea” shrug? Because I really don’t have the faintest idea what they want from me. Why me? Why not someone in a white coat? Is it the book? Did they think I was a doctor on his break?

I lower my voice and whisper to them in Arabic that they should speak with the nurse, and I point toward the nurses’ station.

“Ahhh,” the younger one says, and shouts out in Hebrew, “Because she is in a birth condition!”

I can feel my face on fire, and I try to conceal it with my book. When my wife comes out, I’ll murder her. She’s the only reason I find myself in this situation. As if I have the strength to deal it right now. When she comes out I’m going to make such a face that she’ll never dare take me to a hospital again.

The Road to Tira

The road to Tira stretches between two rows of cypress trees. They run close together, two tight rows. Then, all of a sudden the cypresses disappear, the fields are divided by a straight horizontal line, and beyond those are the unruly rows of houses, uneven and menacing. Bakeries, restaurants, vegetable stores, garages, spare parts outlets, watchmakers. Everything looks cheap and crowded and empty.

The Jews driving through Tira on their way to Tsur Yigal and Kokhav Yair don’t stop to shop anymore. There’s a war on. Some of them are scared, and some are getting their own back. So much of Tira was built to cater to them, but they’ve run away. You don’t see them anymore, not even on Saturdays. You don’t see their women with the short shorts or the girls with the tube tops. For years they overran the village every Saturday, so you could hardly move. Only the store owners would come out of their homes on weekends. Everyone else stayed out of the way. The older kids would come to the souk to watch the Jewish girls. Sometimes I’d do the rounds myself. The Jews have all disappeared now, with their shouting, their plastic bags, their potbellies, their cars, their keys, their hats, and their sandals. Now, at least, there are no more traffic jams.

We don’t need them anymore. The people in Tira have become rich enough. They’ll get through this war, they won’t starve. They build another floor, and another, and they buy expensive cars, jeeps, and trucks and computers for their kids. They send their kids to extracurricular classes too. Some people even send their kids to Jewish extracurriculars. And one neighbor even built a swimming pool outside his home and bought his younger son a Ferrari convertible. It’s all thanks to the Saturday earnings. Some people in the village had only worked Saturdays, and that was enough for them to live like kings. Now it’s only the Jewish druggies and pushers who dare come to Tira to shop.

The Hebrew textbooks still speak of the small village. One of the questions goes like this: “What do the people in your village do for a living?” and the right answer is still: “They’re farmers.”

People continue to get married and to have children. The wife of my older brother – the one who’s named Sam for the SAM missiles – is expecting. My younger brother, the one who’s two years younger than me, has bought tiles for his bathroom. If everything goes according to plan, he’ll finish his shell and get married within a year. There’s one shell left.

My parents built three shells, even though there are four of us, because the fourth one is supposed to get their house. But they know that at least one of us won’t come back. Now they’re worried that the youngest, the one who’s six years younger than me, may wind up staying in Tel Aviv. He’s studying there, but he also works there all week long, taking care of chronic patients at the hospital. He’s broken off with us in Tira. He’s let his hair grow long, and he wears earrings. He dresses differently and listens to different music. Sometimes we talk on the phone. The last time we did that, we made a date to meet in Tira. He finally said he’d come to see the baby, but he didn’t. He phoned and asked us to give her a big kiss for him, and to put the receiver to her ear so she’d learn to recognize his voice.

This brother and I get along very well. Sometimes I think he must hate me for the things I did to him when I was little. I hope I was little enough. When I get very anxious about it, I call him up and ask him to forgive me and tell him I want to know if he hates me. He always says he loves me more than anything in the world.

I’m six years older, but if he returns to the village before me, he’ll get my shell and I’ll get my parents’ house. Since the house is old, my parents have added a larger piece of land to go with it, to be fair and prevent any problems later on. My father always says, “God help you if you fight among yourselves. That would be the worst thing that could happen.” People have been fighting over land for fifty years now: brothers against brothers, cousins against cousins. Some of them lost their lives in the process, and the survivors are still taking revenge. The wealthiest people today are the ones who managed to take over two meters of the souk on Saturdays.

Almost everyone carries a weapon nowadays. My father went to get the muffler fixed once, and they offered to sell him a shotgun for a thousand shekels. He almost bought it, for self-protection.

The neighbors’ young son, Ayub, was arrested. I remember him as a shy seven-year-old. My mother says he’s an arms dealer. They sent the whole country out to Tira last week. They blocked the roads, they broke into the house, and they pulled up the floor tiles, one by one. My parents knew all along that Ayub was an arms dealer. At first they thought the reason he hadn’t been arrested was that he was a civil servant. He had a Uzi, and almost every night he’d shoot a round. “ Brrrrr.” My mother imitates it. “Automatic.” She didn’t think he was dumb enough to hide the weapons at home, but that’s just what he did. They found a lot. She stood by the fence and watched. Fifty pistols maybe. The police and the soldiers were there the whole day. They combed every corner. They entered our plot too with dogs and metal detectors, but they didn’t find anything. The dogs sniffed every flower, because they were after drugs. My mother says the police even climbed up on the roofs of my brothers’ homes and searched in my shell too. “Aren’t you ever going to finish it?” she asks. “When are you coming back?”

Nelson Mandela

My parents have enormous pink sofas in their living room. I sink into one of them and light a cigarette from the pack my father has left on the table. I move my head back and forth like a sprinkler, trying to disperse the smoke. Our house is ugly. There are electric wires sticking out of the living room wall, and a bell that never rings. Next to it is a clock made of gold-covered plastic, inspired by a lion’s mane. Hanging next to the clock is a deer’s head, also made of plastic. There used to be two sabers too, but they broke long ago. Three brown wooden plaques hang unattractively on the wall across from me, with the inscription Allahin black lettering. On the wall to the left, there’s a painting by Ismail Shammout with the inscription Uda(Return), and next to that is a picture of a mother and a baby with a flight of ravens hovering over them.

The ugliest tapestry in the living room was woven by my mother. It shows two Japanese women in kimonos sitting near a blue lake with white swans floating in it. She made the Gobelin when she was studying at the teachers seminar in Haifa. She always says she was the first woman to study out-side the village, and the fact is she’s now the oldest woman teacher in Tira.

When I was at the university, I invited Yossi for a meal at my parents’ house. Yossi was my first Jewish friend after boarding school. He marked a new period in my life and proved I didn’t have to be stuck with Arabs my whole life. After the meal, he joked about how our sink was in the living room, though the thought of watching the soccer match while shaving appealed to him. When we first met, Yossi said he found it hard to say the word Arab,because it sounded like a curse. Later, we became good friends.

Now my father is lying on the big sofa, resting the upper part of his body on two pillows. With one hand he’s half scratching and half picking his nose, and with the other he’s holding a cigarette. My mother is washing something in the kitchen. My older brother and his wife come in and sit down. She’s pregnant, in her fifth month, and they don’t know yet if it’s a boy or a girl. The brother who’s two years younger than me is talking to his fiancée on his mobile. It’s a special deal called Family Circle. They bought two mobile phones and they can call each other for free.

Time for the news. My father turns up the volume, moves his hand away from his nose, puts out his cigarette, and lights another. Mother puts a bowl of strawberries on the table and sits down on the carpet at Father’s feet. There’s no room on the sofa, because Father is taking up three places.

“There are no men in Hebron,” my father says. He always provides a running commentary on whatever we’re watching on television, analyzing it out loud, to make sure we don’t miss anything. Every now and then my mother mutters Azza, azza—Oh, no – and sometimes she says mujrimin,criminals. My father says if there were any real men in Hebron they’d get their act together and force the settlers out of there. “How many can they kill? Let them kill a hundred thousand. In the end, they’ll be out of there. Five lunatics are terrifying a whole city. What spineless nothings they are!”

It’s March 30, Land Day, and people turn out to join in a general protest against the expropriations and to commemorate the people who were killed in the 1976 riots. My wife and her parents went to visit their village, Misskeh, where Kfar Warburg is today. They rented a bus and went as a group. They do it every Land Day and every Independence Day. It’s like an annual outing. Men, women, and children dress up, take their food and their barbecues, their meat and their alcohol, and head for their village. You can still see what’s left of the mosque and the school building. The women gather vine leaves and look for hyssop in the fields, the men play backgammon in the ruins of the mosque, and the younger ones drink beer and smoke joints in what’s left of the school.

My father says he doesn’t understand why they bother going there. If they really loved their village, they wouldn’t have run away in the first place. Those cowards are to blame for everything that’s happened. Better to die defending your land. And why did they sell what they owned there? My father refers to the sale of expropriated lands to Jews as land liquidation.Anyone who sells has given up. “What kind of men are they?”

In the evening, I join my wife and daughter at her parents’ house. They’re back from their picnic. My older brother blocks me with his car and comes over to give me the keys. I enjoy driving his car. At least the radio works. True, it’s only a short drive, but still it’s one of those rare opportunities to listen to music in Tira. I hope it’s tuned to the military station, because I’m not very good with these dials. I turn it on and listen. My brother doesn’t know how to take care of a car. He can’t drive. I’ve been in the car with him a few times, and it always ended in a fight. I don’t have it easy with my older brother.

The radio is playing “ Abu el-Halil”; I can’t believe I’m hearing that song. How could the cassette have survived so long? It’s the song we used to listen to in Father’s car when we went into the mountains to pick hyssop. I used to know the words, and I discover I still do. I sing along with the tape, as if I’ve never stopped listening to it. “ Ya Amina, ya abu el-Halil… open the Nablus Gate for us and let us all enter.” Then came another song I used to love, about putting the shame behind us and restoring our honor with stones and with blood, about children who are fearless. I laugh, now, at the quality of the recording and the quality of the music.

I lower the volume and drive through Tira. It’s Friday, and late, but people are still roaming the streets. Lots of youngsters are in their cars or walking, and I wonder where all of them are heading, and on the night of Land Day, no less. There was supposed to be a general strike, but the stores opened even before noon. People can’t afford to lose the income. Besides, strikes scare the Jews who drive through on their way to Tsur Natan and Kokhav Yair. They’re good customers.

On the wall in my wife’s old room there’s a picture of Nelson Mandela, taken long ago, when he was behind bars. The Mandela of those days was young and strong, with a full black beard. Next to him is the drawing of a hammer and sickle, and the red Soviet flag. There are photos of models and beauty queens too, and Egyptian singers like Ihab Taufiq and Amer Diab, and women in bathing suits and dresses dating back to the eighties. The most up-to-date one in the room that my wife shared with her five sisters is of Brandon from Beverly Hills 90210.She hung it up there when she was in high school. All the sisters are married by now, and the room with the peeling walls is where we stay on our rare visits to Tira.

My mother-in-law has put the beds together in one of the corners, under the pictures of Ofra Haza and a celebrity model. Ever since the wedding, two years ago, we’ve had the same sheets waiting for us, the same thick pillows, solid as a rock, and the same scratchy woolen blanket that forces us to sleep fully dressed even on the hottest summer nights. It’s very hot in Tira. In the past, people would sleep up on the roof in summertime, but they’re too scared now. They don’t feel safe anymore. You’re not supposed to leave your front door unlocked. The village is infested with thieves and criminals and rapists, especially now that they brought in all kinds of collaborators – and their weapons too.

My wife’s old room does this to me every time: Suddenly I’m terribly attracted to her, as if we just met. She always puts on one of her mother’s faded robes, and I can’t resist. We always make love in her room and continue to hold on to each other in our sleep. In her room, my heart fills with love. She’s pretty as ever in my eyes, pretty as she used to be, when we first met. She says these are our best times together, the ones in Tira.

Very soon her parents are going to be renovating the house and tearing down this room. The house has always been in bad shape. Before the first time we went there, my wife cried. I was about to ask her parents for her hand, and she was ashamed to show me where she lived. She kept hoping neither one of us would have to use the bathroom, which is the most shocking part of the house. Her father had knocked ten steel nails into the wall over the sink, for hanging sponges, and wrote the name of each member of the family over one of them. Not sponges you buy but loofahs, the kind you make yourself. Seven of the nails have nothing on them anymore. The only pieces of loofah still hanging there belong to her parents and her youngest brother. He’s two years younger than us. He’s been plodding away at one of the colleges for the past few years, studying economics, and there’s a good chance he’ll graduate soon. He has his own room under the house. It used to be a storeroom for oil and olives, and it had an oven too. Then, when he grew older, they put a bed in there, and he moved in. He covered the bare walls with red scarves of the Hapo’el soccer team, and with pictures of the Chicago Bulls, Michael Jackson, Fairuz, and Lenin, and with Land Day posters, like the one of a man sitting under an olive tree holding his blond grandson, who’s covered in a kaffiyeh,and the inscription WE’RE STAYING PUT.

They’re remodeling the top floor for him now, and the parents will get their storeroom back. They don’t need more than that, my mother-in-law says, and it’s time for their only son to have a home of his own. That way he’ll be able to get engaged, be married, and have children.