Текст книги "Dancing Arabs"

Автор книги: Sayed Kashua

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

Anemones

My parents got up early for work. My mother was first. Since I was always up before my brothers, I was in charge of getting the morning groceries: a loaf of bread and 100 grams of hard cheese. The grocery store was just across the way, but I preferred to run the errand as early as possible, because I didn’t want to be stuck with the Gazazweh, the workers from Gaza, who showed up there every morning. I almost always did get stuck with them, though, and even the few times when I arrived early enough, I’d see them getting off their buses just as I was leaving. Their buses stopped right near the store, engines still running, and the workers would swoop down by the dozen. The store would fill up completely, with a long line outside too. I hated the Gazazweh because everyone hated them; I was afraid they’d kidnap me. They looked to me like ordinary people, and they never bothered anyone, but my grandma’s stories about all the children who misbehaved, and whose parents sold them to the Gazazweh, had me really scared. I always saw myself getting on one of their red buses and standing in line with them outside the grocery store. You’d only see them early in the morning when it was still dark outside, because they weren’t supposed to be moving about in the daytime. They came to buy food, and then they’d vanish as if they’d never been there, as if there were no Gazazweh in the world.

When I returned with the groceries, Father was always in the bathroom. That’s where he’d smoke his morning cigarette, which he’d put out in the cup of coffee he had in there. I always went in after him and removed the cup with the cigarette butt. A bathroom, after someone has had coffee and a cigarette in it, has a special smell. My father had a special smell. I know that smell of morning in the bathroom, know it very well. It wasn’t unpleasant. I liked it. I hardly saw Father in the morning because, right after his cigarette and coffee, he’d take his plastic lunch box with the sandwiches Mother had made for him and leave for work.

My father worked in a place he used to refer to as the packinghouse or Kalmaniyya.I didn’t know what it meant, but I assumed my father picked fruit.

Jamal, our Hebrew teacher in grade school, never tired of telling us about the fruit pickers. We spent more time hearing him talk about fruit picking than about Hebrew. He kept yelling that we’d wind up as fruit pickers. “Like donkeys,” he’d say. “You’ll leave home at six in the morning and get back late at night.”

He happened to like me, the teacher Jamal. I was the best student in the class, and I did what I could to keep from becoming a fruit picker. But I was convinced nothing would help. My grandma had worked as a fruit picker, my father was a fruit picker, and I figured I’d become one too. I felt sorry for Father and hoped that the teacher Jamal didn’t know he worked at fruit picking too, leaving the house at 6 A.M. and returning late at night. Father had been the best student in his class too, and he had the nicest handwriting.

Unlike Father, Grandma talked a lot about her work as a fruit picker. She told us about Abu Ziad, our neighbor, who used to take the neighborhood widows in his pickup and let them off at the Mehadrin groves, where they’d alternate between picking oranges and picking pistachio nuts. She worked barefoot and liked to show us the cracked and hardened soles of her feet as proof. “Morning to night,” she always told us. “Rain or shine, day in and day out, for one shilling a day.” Grandma did all this for her children, but especially for Father, her only son, so he could study. But he destroyed it all and broke her heart. “It wasn’t the fruit picking that finished off my legs and my back, but the grief your father gave me. God bless him, I have no one in the world besides him.”

My grandmother started picking fruit after her husband was killed in the war. She was left on her own with four daughters and one son, who was two months old when he lost his father. Grandma always tells people how eagerly her husband had waited for a son, and when she tells this story she always takes the edge of her head scarf and dabs at a tear in her left eye. She was a hero in those days. When the Jews bombed Tira, she put her baby on a stack of wheat and bent over him. “I told myself it would be better if the shell hit me and not my son. As if it would have made any difference. It would probably have killed both of us anyway.”

I tried to picture my grandma younger, but I couldn’t. I always saw her as an old woman, just the way I knew her, with her faltering legs and her white dress, lying on top of that crying baby who didn’t know he had no father, and I could picture the shells falling beside her in the wheat fields of Tira, and how only by some miracle she wasn’t hurt. She gets up, grabs the baby, runs a little farther (until the plane comes back to drop some more bombs), and falls to the ground again. My grandma always says that if war breaks out we mustn’t stay inside the house because it’ll collapse on top of us. And we mustn’t turn on the light. We’d better hide among the trees.

I loved picturing the wheat fields that my grandma used to talk about. I loved picturing the baidartoo, the silo, and the people gathered there like it was an important holiday, tossing the wheat in the air with their pitchforks, so the grain would fall in one heap and the chaff would fly in the wind and form a separate one.

They used to be rich once. Three camels, carrying all sorts of valuable goods, would take the wheat and the vegetables from their fields in el-Bassah back to the house. They’d paid a shilling for each camel. Grandpa and Grandma had cows and horses too, and a trained dog that always sat on the balcony, to protect the poultry from the cats, and never tried to go indoors.

My grandpa was very smart. He could read and write, and he had a nice handwriting. But the schools back then weren’t like the ones we have today. Otherwise, he would have studied medicine and become a doctor. Grandma says she could have become an engineer if they’d sent her off to study, but girls didn’t go to school in her day. We always believed her when she said this. We thought she’d have made a good engineer. And the truth is, even though she never studied anything, she was a skillful card player, could do math – addition and subtraction – and knew where each plot of land ended and the next one began.

My grandpa, who had a little mustache, like he has in the only picture of him in Grandma’s room, was a hero, a strong man who had fought against the Jews, but he died at the entrance to his own home just as he was picking some grapes. All he said was “Allah” and fell over. He’d taken a bullet. Grandma didn’t understand why he’d fallen.

“I told him, Get up, ya zalameh,come on, get up. What’s the matter with you?” She thought he was just pretending.

Grandma says Grandpa is a shahid,and there are anemones growing in the spot where he bled. She says Abu Ziad was eaten by worms when he died, but they didn’t go near my grandfather. That’s how it is: A shahid’s body doesn’t rot. It stays just the way it was.

The Aden Hafla

My father was the first person in our neighborhood to buy a VCR. It was big and heavy, made of metal. The cassettes were different back then, short and thick. When we first got it, all our relatives dropped by. They came to congratulate us and brought bags of rice and big packets of coffee, and Father would put on The Black Samuraiand Amar Akbar Anthony,an Indian film starring Amitabh Bachchan, about three brothers who are separated at birth after a bad guy kills their father. They’re united in the end, and they get even with all the bad guys.

My father once brought home a movie called The Aden Hafla.We watched it over and over and over. The whole family would sit in front of the TV, watching it together. Grandma would sit closest, because her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. There were children with kaffiyehs and pistols, and musicians, and singers and poets. We knew the songs by heart. There was a little girl who sang her father a song before he went off to war, and Grandma would always wipe away a tear. Everyone would make the V-sign with their fingers before they got up to perform.

Father’s friends came specially to watch the film. They cracked sunflower seeds and peered at the screen. Father always laughed at them when they didn’t recognize someone. “What’s with you? That’s Abu-Jihad,” or “You don’t know who Mahmoud Darwish is?!” Once this friend of his thought that Al-Fakahani was the name of a grocer in Beirut, and Father made him leave.

At night he’d give the cassette to Grandma, and she’d hide it in her chicken coop. My mother couldn’t stand Grandma’s chickens, with the dirt they made, and the noise. There was a major battle between them because of those chickens, and they stopped talking to each other for a pretty long time. Me, I was all for Grandma’s chickens. One day my mother burned down the small coop with the Aden Haflatape inside. Father got mad and stormed off to play cards.

The next day, Father didn’t come home from work. There were no phones back then, and Mother and Uncle Bashir took the Agrexco jeep and went looking for him. All my aunts arrived and started crying. I could hear them talking about fliers, about Land Day, and about detention.

Grandma spent the whole night on a straw mat under the eucalyptus trees in front of the house, crying and waiting. Mother didn’t come home either; Grandma said she was with Father but didn’t say where that was. The next day, my brothers and I stayed home from school. I sat on the mat under the tree with Grandma. She kept swaying. Her eyes were red and swollen, and she fixed them on the farthest point down the road. Whenever a car would drive up, she’d stop swaying and stiffen. She followed each car with her eyes until it had gone by, and then she’d go back to swaying and staring.

Mother wanted to cut down the eucalyptus trees outside our house. She said they made a lot of dirt, and the entrance to the house looked ugly because of them. Grandma said that cutting them down would be a disaster, because eucalyptus trees contain a wali,a holy spirit who guards the home and the village. She told us how Grandpa’s father, Sheikh Ahmad, used to stand beside the eucalyptus trees and talk with the rebels in Jaffa and in the mountains. He would warn them against the Jews, telling them where they were hiding and which route was safest.

Two days later, my father was released from detention. They’d picked him up at a roadblock on his way to a demonstration in Taiyiba. They’d searched the car and found the fliers. With the stubble on his cheeks, he looked very different. Grandma hugged him and kept on crying. “When will you learn, yamma, ya habibi?”

Cap Guns

I’d always known there would be a war. When I was little, my brothers and I dug trenches in the grove of fruit trees behind our house. We dug with our hands, which were small. We couldn’t dig very deep, because pretty soon we hit ground that was too hard, and our attempts to soften it with water didn’t help. We wanted to dig large trenches around the entire house, so we could hide there when the shooting started. Trenches that we could stand up straight in, and only Grandma and Father and Mother would have to bend over. We filled plastic bags with sand and stacked them to form a wall, just the way Grandma said they did in the war, but the bags didn’t last. They fell apart within days.

Once Father took us up to another village, Ya‘bad, to meet some people who worked with him in the packinghouse. They had a car with a green license plate, and Father said that was how the Jews marked them. The war in Ya‘bad was very real, not like the one in Grandma’s stories. There were bullet holes in the walls of Father’s friends’ homes. It really scared me, because it had never occurred to me that a bullet could actually make a hole through the wall and get inside the house. They had green iron doors with holes you could look through and see the living room.

Father said it wouldn’t happen to us, because we were different. We believed him, because the people in Ya‘bad talked differently, and also because our doors were made of wood.

Sometimes Father and Mother would load the four of us in the backseat, and we’d make the trip almost as far as Ya‘bad, and then we’d go back home without seeing our friends. Halfway there, Father would turn around, swear, and say that we couldn’t get through to Ya‘bad that day because of a roadblock. He’d say that the people in Ya‘bad and their children were heroes. They weren’t spineless nothings like us.

My brothers and I were constantly playing war games. We’d be at it every day. At first, we used swords – I mean sticks – like in the movies about the wars of the Prophet Mohammed. I was Hamzah, the Prophet’s uncle. He was very strong in the movies, and he had a sword with two blades. He would fight against ten infidels at once and kill them all. My older brother was Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, and my two younger brothers were the khalifs Omar and Utman, the Prophet’s deputies. Nobody could be the Prophet Mohammed. Grandma said if we did that we would go right to hell. They never showed the Prophet Mohammed in the movies either, only his camel and a halo of light above.

Later we started using pistols, like in the film by Omar el-Mukhtar in Libya and the one about Jamila Bukhird in Algiers. On ‘ id el-fitrand ‘ id el-adha,my father always took us to Tulkarm to buy us pistols. No child in our village had pistols as beautiful as ours: made of iron, almost real. Before the holiday, when our grocery store still sold cap guns, we’d play the real thing. When we ran out of ammunition, we’d shout “Bang, bang!” but whoever did the shooting had to pull the trigger too. Otherwise it didn’t count and you weren’t dead.

When we were growing up, Father would bring us Ramboand commando movies, and that’s when we moved to heavy artillery. Our war games went out of the house and into the grove, spreading over the whole neighborhood. My older brother was the commander of one group, and I took the other. He never won, unless he cheated or unless one of the soldiers in my group abandoned his post and went off to pee.

When we were older we shifted to automatic weapons, big guns made of wood with a magazine and a trigger and a piece of string for slinging the weapon across your shoulder. We made everything ourselves. First we called all the guns Bren, a word we’d taken from Grandma’s stories. But after watching Azit the Paratrooper Dogwe started calling them Uzi. There was one that could shoot down seven Arabs at once, and my father got all worked up and told us it was an M-16 and could shoot sixty bullets a second. After that, no matter what weapon we had, we’d call it an M-16, even though none of us could shout bangsixty times in a second. So we switched from bangto brrrrr.I called my group Fedayeen and my older brother called his group Fedayeen too, because Father had always told us the Fedayeen were the best.

One day Father shouted to us to come home. We were in the middle of a game, and I was just about to kill my older brother, but Father shouted so loud we had no choice. We got the two younger ones from their positions and scurried home, because if Father lost it he was capable of hitting us. When we got home, he turned the volume up on the TV till it couldn’t go any higher. Mother was crying, and my grandmother, who never cried, sounded like she was about to cry too.

“Look,” my father ordered us, and kept saying, “ Yal‘an Allah, yal‘an Rabhoom, yal‘an rab Allahwho made them.” Grandma tore at her clothing and keened. My older brother and I were relieved nobody had hit us; we thought Father must have brought home a new film he wanted us to see. The next day we went back to our war games. My brother called his group Sabra and I called mine Chatilla.

Scouts

Once, I got up on a stage in a kaffiyeh.I must have been in the third grade at the time. A man with an accent showed up at school with my father. Father left, and the man with the accent took me in his car to a house I’d never seen before. A pretty house, big, with enormous sofas and lots of potted plants and plastic flowers. He took out a piece of paper with sentences in Arabic that I didn’t understand and said I’d be opening the Jafra Festival that evening. He asked me to memorize the sentences and taught me how to make the V-sign with my fingers.

That night they put the kaffiyehon me and placed me up on a stage with some musicians. I recited my lines, which had lots of references to wattan(homeland) in them. My voice was shaking, and I was very stiff. I’d never seen so many people, all looking at me and listening to me. When I finished, I walked off the stage with my fingers in a V, and everyone applauded. My father was waiting for me backstage, and he smiled as I ran toward him to hide. The man with the accent smiled too and told me something I couldn’t make out. Father said I was good.

Father sent me to the Scouts and said when I grew up I’d be a pilot, that by the time I finished high school we’d have our own state, and I could study to become a pilot then. Grandma said I’d be a minister or a judge. In the Scouts, we spent all our time playing soccer, and when one of the teachers at our school died, they would take us to stand beside his grave. Only those who had a uniform could stand by the grave, so my father took me to Tulkarm to buy me khaki pants, a green shirt, and fabric for making ties.

While we were inside the clothing store, we heard shouting outside. The owner asked us to leave and pulled down the iron bars at the front of the store. In the street across the way, older children with flags were blocking the road with tires. My father left me near the car and ran toward them with a lighter. I started crying. I was sure it was the end of the world, like they taught us in Koran lessons. My father said he couldn’t believe I was such a coward. And if I was, what was the point of all my I-want-a-gun?

My grandfather had a gun. Grandma says he was a brave fighter who had tried to defend Tira. She says the Jews couldn’t get inside the village, and it wasn’t until the Arabs handed us over that they came in. But Father says it was lucky for us King Abdullah handed the village over to the Jews in time, because otherwise they would have slaughtered us one by one.

When Grandpa’s son from his first wife was killed, Grandpa wanted to take revenge. Akab had been a real hero, one of the Rebels. He’d had a horse, a gun, and a belt full of grenades. One Friday, he took a bullet. The bullet hit the belt, and all the grenades went off at once. His body scattered in every direction. Grandma says the whole family worked till nightfall to gather up his head and his shoulders, so they would have something to bury. He had a face as round as the full moon.

Grandma says that at night, after the burial, my grandfather went up on the roof of the school building. There was an Iraqi outpost there and they’d take turns behind the Bren hidden in the bags of sand. Grandpa heard the Jews coming closer. He heard the commander say “Forward, forward”—Grandma whispered the word in Hebrew. The first bullet hit the commander, the one who’d said “Forward,” and Grandpa saw the Jews in a state of panic, trying to get away. Grandpa put the Bren to good use and sewed them together “like a Singer.” “They’re cowards, the Jews, but the British, those Ingliz dogs, preferred them,” my grandmother says.

The Ingliz got into Grandpa and Grandma’s house once. That was before my father was born. They turned everything upside down: spilled salt on the sugar, smashed bowls, and peed right in front of her. Grandma says one of them sat on the big container of olives and took a shit right into it. They poured everything out afterward, and saw the Englishman’s shit, big chunks.

The People in Tira Used to Be Braver

The people in Tira used to be braver and kept all the Jews out. Once, some Jews tried to get into the village by pretending to be Arabs. They came with kaffiyehs.But Abu el-Abed knew they were Jews. He’d been working in the wheat fields with his family, and he’d seen them. When he told the people around him that they were Jews, they thought he’d gone crazy. “What’s got into you. They’re the Iraqi soldiers,” they told him.

But Abu el-Abed was certain he was right. He could tell Jews by the way they walked. He told his friends, “One shot in the air, and we’ll know. If they’re Arabs, they’ll shout to us; if they’re Jews, they’ll lie down flat on the ground.” As soon as he fired, they all went down in the dust. It was obvious that they were Jews. Abu el-Abed and the other men stayed there, shooting and scaring them, and the women and children hurried home, shouting in the streets, “Ya ahl al-balad, al-Yahud akhduna!”(“People of the village, the Jews have come to occupy us!”)

All the men went out. Handsome, brave, unwavering, as if they were going to a wedding. The women accompanied them with za‘aruta,the traditional cries of happiness. They hardly had any guns. They held sticks and knives, stones and spades, and wouldn’t let any Jew come near. That day, they managed to seize three bodies of Israeli soldiers.

Abu el-Abed and some of the fighters in Tira tied them to horses and dragged them to the Iraqi army headquarters in Tulkarm. They wanted to prove it was possible to kill Jews. Their aim was to encourage the Arab soldiers and persuade them to fight. But the Iraqis said, “ Maku awamer, maku slakh” (“We have no orders, we have no ammunition”).

One time they were even braver than that and wouldn’t let Kahana in. We heard on the news that he was planning to come to Tira. They announced on the mosque loudspeakers: “ Ya ahl al-balad,Kahane is arriving tomorrow to take back the released prisoners. If he gets in, it will be our disgrace.”

By five the following morning, I was already out with my father at the entrance to the village from the direction of Kfar Sava and Ramat Ha Kovesh. There were some people there blocking the roads with tires. Father said the workers shouldn’t be allowed out. He said everyone had to defend the village, and that when the Jews lose out on a day of work, they get furious. “Do you know how much we’re making them lose by not going to work?”

Police vans drew up, and my father and a few other people sat down in the middle of the road. I wasn’t scared. I sat down with them. The mayor spoke with the policemen, and they moved back. Soon the entire village had rallied. Thousands blocked the entrance. An airplane circled overhead, and Father said they were taking pictures of us from the air. He pulled his shirt up over his face and taught me how to do it too, just like the kids you see on TV.

That day Father and I were late coming home. Mother and Grandma were very worried. They waited under the eucalyptus trees at the front of the house. I felt like a man. I wasn’t afraid. But all they wanted was to make sure my father was all right. They didn’t even ask me what had happened.

Nothing hadhappened actually. Kahane didn’t come. At school the next day the kids said they’d broken the windows of the police vans with bricks, and they said Kahane had come into the village that night through the orange groves of Tel Mond, dressed as a woman.