Текст книги "Dancing Arabs"

Автор книги: Sayed Kashua

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

Polanski

When it was time to go home for the Rosh Hashanah break, I packed everything I’d brought with me and got on the bus. It was my first trip alone on a public bus, and if I hadn’t followed some of the kids who’d gotten on before me, I would never have known you have to pay the driver right at the beginning.

Adel and I took our seats on one bench. There was no one on the bench across from us, and Adel said maybe the girls from the our school would sit there, but it didn’t happen. All the kids from our school sat down in front, carrying on and making a hell of a racket.

I was petrified of the trip, afraid I wouldn’t make it home or that I’d get off at the wrong stop and be lost. My father had written it all down for me in a notebook:

Take the bus to the central bus station, get off with everyone else.Then he wrote: Bus 947, Haifa local, get off at the Kfar Sava stop. Walk as far as Meir hospital, then look for the Tira taxi stand. Take taxi to Tira.

Adel was supposed to go to his village, Nahf, which is a much longer journey. You go as far as Haifa, then take another bus to Karmi‘el, and there you can spend hours waiting for a bus that goes by his village. He said he’d probably walk from Karmi‘el. “It’s not that far, just half an hour’s walk.”

Adel didn’t want to go home. He was disappointed to have to leave after just one week. He asked the principal if he could spend the holiday break at school, but Pinhas said that was impossible. I invited him to Tira, and he accepted. I was glad to have someone to help me find the way, and he was glad to save time and money. He asked if we had any pretty girls in our neighborhood.

The bus leaves from the front gate of the school, and its first stop is just a few minutes away, at the Polanski Vocational School. The students there look different from the ones at our school, and Adel and I don’t look like any of them. The bus is full of students now, shouting and swearing, and girls in black high-heeled shoes and big earrings who spend the whole bus ride putting on makeup.

Three kids crowd into the seat facing Adel and me, and two others stand next to them, holding on to the metal bars. I feel stifled, dead. I tell Adel I’m getting off at the next stop. “Don’t be a retard.” he says. “I’m not going to pay for another ticket to the central bus station.”

I’m already sorry I invited him, sorry I ever met him, sorry I got on the bus with him. I can tell we’re in trouble, and within minutes my fears prove true.

One of the kids on the bench across from us asks Adel where he’s from.

“Nahf,” Adel says.

The kids laugh and turn to me. “And you?”

I put on the biggest grin I can muster, trying to be the most polite person in the world. They’re not going to hurt me. I was in Seeds of Peace. I know Jews. They’ve got to leave me alone. “From Tira,” I say. “It’s near Kfar Sava.” I try to keep up the smile, even though they’re already laughing at me. Quickly I whisper to Adel, “Let’s get off, I’ll pay for your ticket.” But he won’t do it. One thing’s for sure: I’m never getting on this bus again.

The kids across from us are whispering, laughing, repeating the names of our villages and deliberately mispronouncing them. They’re laughing at our names, and we don’t do anything about it. To take part in the general hilarity would be ridiculous, so I keep quiet. They start singing something that sounds familiar, but instead of “The Jew is dead”—the way we sing it – they sing “Mohammed is dead.” They sing loudly, and some of their classmates join in. I press the STOP button. The hell with Adel. I’m getting off. I pick up my bag, controlling myself, holding back my tears.

Once I get off, Adel decides to get off too. I see him only after I’m on the sidewalk. One of the students opens a window and spits. He misses us.

Adel starts shouting at me. “I can’t believe it! Do you even know where we are? Do you have any idea what bus we need to take now? Why do you think the same thing won’t happen on the next bus we take?”

I was willing to risk being lost. I was just so relieved it was over. My father had given me enough money. We took a cab back to the central bus station. All I wanted was for the Polanski kids not to get on our bus to Kfar Sava.

Ben Gurion

There was nothing in my father’s explanations about Ben Gurion Airport. The sonofabitch lied to me. How I hated him then. When the bus stopped for the first time, I was sure we’d reached Kfar Sava, but it was the roadblock at the entrance to Ben Gurion Airport.

A soldier got on and told Adel and me to get off. Then he asked us for our IDs.

“We’re not sixteen yet,” Adel told him, and answered all his questions: where we’re from, where we’re going, where we study.

The soldier asked us to open our bags, and the bus went into the airport without us. The soldier searched through our books, our sheets, and our clothes and said we should wait for the bus to return and pick us up on the way out of the airport.

I’m not getting back on that bus, I decided. I’m not willing to be stared at like I-don’t-know-what. I’ve had it. I can’t take this anymore. I’d survived the roommates, the dining room, and the Polanski kids, but this was the last straw. I cried like a baby. I broke down. Even the soldier felt uneasy. He said it was just routine. He brought me some water. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

I didn’t drink it. I phoned my father at home. I could barely blurt out the words.

My father screamed, “Calm down, what happened?” He was upset.

“Come here and get me right away,” I shouted, to make sure he understood I wasn’t coming home on my own. “I’m at the airport.”

Adel preferred to keep quiet. He said he could have been in Nahf already and he was sorry he’d joined me.

I sat there crying, waiting for my father.

“What happened?” my father asked, when he finally arrived to pick us up. I didn’t answer. I sat in front and Adel sat in back. My face was all swollen, and Adel told him that a soldier had taken us off the bus and I wouldn’t get back on. Father said, “Are you crazy? What’s got into you? Is that something to cry about?”

“I told him a million times, but he wouldn’t listen,” Adel said.

I didn’t say a word.

Adel and my father talked about school, about the food they gave us there, and about what they called “four o’clock snack,” which was cake and juice. Adel said they serve meat for dinner every day. They talked about the big library and the playground. My father said a million kids would like to be in my place, and there I was, crying like a baby. “Do you want to come back to Tira, to study with all the bums, is that what you want? Fine, suit yourself. But don’t come complaining to me later if everyone says they threw you out of school after a single week. Do you want people to say you flunked, that you couldn’t make it at a good school? Have you thought about how people will look at you?”

My tears hadn’t dried yet, but I could tell right away that my father wasn’t about to let me stay home. I had no choice. I’d have to go back to the school.

“Look at Adel,” my father said. “Why isn’t he crying?” Then he laughed at me. The sonofabitch knew they took Arabs off the bus at the airport. He’d taken the same bus when he went to the university. “Nobody ever told me to get off,” he said. “They didn’t notice I was an Arab. Every time the soldiers told an Arab to get off, I’d get up and shout, ‘Take me off too, I’m an Arab!’ and I’d hold up my ID card and wave it proudly. What’s the matter with you? What a jellyfish you are. Some soldier jerk can make you behave like this? Just look at yourself.”

I took that bus line hundreds of times after that. Each time, I’d feel the fear again. It didn’t let up until we’d passed the airport. The only time they ever made me get off was on that first trip. After that, they didn’t notice me anymore. I felt sorry for the Arabs who were taken off, and I thanked God they hadn’t picked on me.

In my second week at the school, I shaved off my mustache. I told Adel we had to learn to pronounce the letter pproperly. He didn’t care. The Bible teacher gave me a tip: “Hold a piece of paper up to your mouth. If the paper moves, you’ve said a p,” he said. Adel laughed at me, and when the paper moved, he said he couldn’t tell the difference. He was convinced there was really no difference between band p,that it was all in my head, and that Hebrew is a screwed-up language. He didn’t see why they had to have two different letters for the same sound.

In my second week at school I bought myself some pants in a Jewish store. I bought a Walkman and some tapes in Hebrew. After that, I’d always have my Walkman and a book in Hebrew whenever I went through the airport. I didn’t come across the Polanski kids anymore. They were liable to recognize me. I took a cab whenever I needed to get to or from the central bus station. Adel and I stayed friends, but I never invited him home again.

Shorts

At school, I got to play with real guns. I knew how to use a carbine and an Uzi: snap the magazine in, cock the weapon, hold the gun to my shoulder, position myself like a sniper, and shoot. On school trips, the teachers would have weapons, and I soon became the student in charge. The weapons were heavy, and I was the only student who was prepared to carry them. I felt proud to be walking around with a gun across my shoulder.

Our history teacher was a left-winger. He always let me have his gun and asked me to walk close to him, because someone once made a comment about it, and he explained to me that it was his responsibility. He wouldn’t let me carry the magazines, even though he could have trusted me blindly.

Pretty soon I started sitting at the back of the bus with the other kids and singing their favorite bus-trip songs. I started taking the lead, and they’d join in the refrain. I knew the words by heart. When I was in elementary school, we had one favorite song that we’d chant over and over again—“ Dos, dos ya chauffeur, al 199”—a song that urges the driver to go faster, 199 kilometers an hour. “Don’t worry about the cops. We’re the children of Palestine. Palestine is our country, and the Jew is our dog, knocking on our door like a beggar.” We sang without understanding a word. Once, our history teacher in Tira asked if anyone in the class knew what Palestine was, and nobody did, including me. Then he asked contemptuously if any of us had ever seen a Palestinian, and Mohammed the Fatso, who was afraid of having his knuckles rapped, said he’d once been driving with his father in the dark and they’d seen two Palestinians. That day, the history teacher rapped every single one of us on the knuckles, launching his attack with Mohammed the Fatso. He whacked us with his ruler, ranting, “We are Palestinians, you are Palestinians, I’m a Palestinian! You nincompoops, you animals, I’ll teach you who you are!”

On our class trips, whenever we slept outdoors we’d light a fire, and some kids would play the guitar. Nobody in Tira had ever played a guitar. We sang Beatles hits, and Israeli rock band songs too. Mashina, for instance. I knew already who they were, and I forced myself to learn their songs. I couldn’t stand that music at first, but within a few months it grew on me and I started liking it. Whenever I’d go home on vacation I’d scream at my brothers, who still listened to Fairuz and Abed el-Halim. When my father took me to the bus stop in Kfar Sava, I’d beg him to switch to a Hebrew radio station or at least to lower the volume. It wasn’t that I was ashamed. I really couldn’t stand them anymore. I told him my ear had grown used to other things.

On the trip to Wadi Qilt, I was carrying an Uzi and walked with the first group of hikers, with the teachers and the guides. Suddenly we heard something. The guide held up his hand and told all the kids to stand behind him. The history teacher yanked the gun off my shoulder, and I fell and hit my elbow. The teacher snapped in the magazine and cocked the weapon. And then we saw it was another group of schoolchildren.

It was my old class from Tira. I recognized them and they recognized me. They had a new teacher, one I’d never seen before. He asked his students to stand to the side to let us pass, because the passage was too narrow. I held my bleeding arm, lowered my gaze, and focused on my elbow.

The kids from Tira called out my name, and I pretended not to hear them. “Hey, look, it’s him. Over there, in the shorts,” they said. I passed by them quickly. A few of them said, “Hi, how’re you doing?” and I wanted to dig a hole and hide. I nodded and kept going. Later, when some of the kids asked me if I knew them, I said I didn’t. “But they knew your name,” one of them insisted, and I said it was a common name among Arabs.

Once an Arab, Always an Arab

My father says, Once an Arab, always an Arab. And he’s got a point. He says the Jews can give you the feeling that you’re one of them, and you can really like them and think they’re the nicest people you’ve ever known, but sooner or later you realize you don’t stand a chance. For them you’ll always be an Arab.

Sometimes when I’m at home, I steal a few of my father’s books. I hate reading Arabic, but I owe it to myself to look at those books. To understand why Mahmoud Darwish is considered great, and why Emil Habibi was awarded the Israel Prize. The last book I stole was Hamarat al-Baladby Salman Natour. This young Arab – a poet, maybe, or an author – writes about life in a Tel Aviv pub. He describes all the left-wing Jews, who are really very nice to him. They listen to him with great interest and introduce him to new friends. Pretty young girls sit beside him and sometimes even kiss him. He recalls how at one stage he thought he could blend in completely. I feel like an idiot for ever thinking I could blend in too.

My father used to say I’d be the first Arab to build an atom bomb. He really believed it. Adel says no way. He used to think so too, but even if he were the smartest person in the world, they’d never let him study that kind of thing. There are some things an Arab can never become. The two of us were sitting in the guard’s room. We were alarm monitors that night. Every night since the Gulf War started two students had to stay up and wake the others if the alarm went off. Adel said he wanted to be the one to wake the girls because there were bound to be a few who slept in their underwear. The thought appealed to me, but I laughed at him anyway. In the drawer under his bed he had some girlie magazines. Sometimes, when there was nobody around, I’d lock the door and look through them, and all that time I’d think to myself, The guy’s a pervert.

The war was drawing to an end. There hadn’t been any alarms for several nights in a row, and Adel said there was still hope and the Iraqis might win. They were just waiting for the Americans to come closer. The Iraqis had enough oil to set the whole gulf on fire. All the aircraft carriers would be burned. The problem was that they didn’t have people who could think straight. If he’d been there, he’d have taught them how to win a war.

The uniformed guard in the glass booth across from us scared me. People in uniform always scared me. As far as I was concerned, all of them were police. I think he was a little scared of us too. Didn’t say a word, just sat there with a book in his hand as if he were trying to do his homework. Every now and then he’d peek at us, and as soon as he made eye contact he’d turn back to his book. I thought he was a student, but Adel said he must be making up some matriculation exams and looked like someone who’d never make it.

Just don’t let the alarm go off now. My parents have stopped wearing their gas masks, let alone staying in a sealed room. Mother told me that my father and brothers would go outdoors to see if there were any missiles in the air. They weren’t the only ones. Nobody in the village stayed indoors. People went out, to make sure the Patriot missiles weren’t working. Our neighbor started shouting for the missiles to come. It was as if he were trying to guide them past the Patriots. “Nooooo. … left … that’s right. Yeah!” His children applauded, and the women went lulululuthe way they did at weddings.

The Arab newspapers wrote a story about a goat that could say “Sadaaaaaam.” Then people began seeing Saddam’s face in the moon. When I came home, my father couldn’t believe I didn’t see it myself. He took me outdoors and tried for hours to explain where I should look: where the nose was, where the mouth was, where the mustache was, and the beret. In the end, I did see him. It really did look like him. Not just like him – it washim. Look straight up.

Matzohs

When we were little, we used to fight over matzohs. They were like trick-or-treat candies that you can only get for a few weeks and then they disappear. The women didn’t need to bake during matzoh season. Everyone ate matzohs. With hummus, with salami, with beans, it was delicious. Grandma said the Jews kidnapped Dr. Jihad once, when he was still a little boy. His mother, a widow like my grandmother, cried all day. She looked for him all over Kfar Sava. She’d gone into a store to buy him an ice-cream bar, and he’d disappeared. Some men from the village joined her in the search. He was an only son, like my father. She almost died of grief, the poor woman. But eventually she found him. He was with some religious Jews, some rabbis, and they felt sorry for her and gave her back the child. They’d wanted to take some of his blood to put in their matzohs, my grandmother told us, but we didn’t believe that Dr. Jihad was ever little.

Sagi was the first boy to invite me to his home for the Passover seder. I had just started shaving my beard. They had a small apartment but a nice one, in a building with an elevator. There were no elevators in our village. The only ones we saw were at Meir hospital in Kfar Sava. He said I had nothing to worry about, that his parents were left-wingers. His mother was from South America and had been in the revolution. She was an ardent socialist. His father was from Poland, and I just had to see his pictures from when he was doing computer studies in the U.S. That was in the sixties, and he dressed like a flower child. There was a younger sister too, who played the piano in the living room, and in the kitchen they had a small television set on a swivel. They were nice to me. His mother kept smiling, good-natured. She cooked all day long. When she asked Sagi to bring some chairs from the neighbor, I helped him.

We weren’t close friends. Sometimes I’d borrow cassettes from him, because he liked hard rock and I wanted to learn what it sounded like. I didn’t particularly like the music, but he’d invited me, so I went. I had a hard time going home in those days. At some point in my adolescence it dawned on me that my parents hadn’t been treating me right.

Later that evening, an old man arrived, and another family with kids, including a girl our age. We sat to the side, and they sang. The girl held the Passover book and looked at the pictures and spoke a different language. She knew some of the songs, and sang them in a foreign accent, and seemed happy. She had just arrived in the country. A pretty girl.

That’s when I learned about Jewish holidays. You sit around a table, you dress up, you have wine, you don’t roast anything on a spit. And even if there are a lot of people, you don’t use disposable dishes. There’s no hummus on the table. You eat chopped liver and all sorts of strange foods. They were nice to me and didn’t put everything on my plate. They kept saying, “You don’t have to if you don’t like it.” But I ate it. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

Sagi taught me lots of things. About the Haggadah, and the afikomen, and the ten plagues of Egypt, and who Elijah the Prophet was. He dressed up as Elijah, and I kept looking at the girl, but it’s difficult to impress a girl when you don’t speak her language. She lived in an ulpan,where she was studying Hebrew. She’d just arrived in the country, and she’d come to stay. She said, “It’s a wonderful country,” and I had no idea what she was talking about. Just you wait, I thought. Just you wait till you see the Polanski kids. Just you wait till you have to take the bus. But she really was happy. Her parents had stayed in Argentina, but it didn’t matter to her, she said. She loved Eretz Yisrael.

We were sitting in Sagi’s room. I didn’t catch her name, and she didn’t catch mine. Sagi knew a little Spanish, and he translated what she said. “Ask her if there are any Arabs where she studies,” I said, and she said there weren’t any. “She says she’s heard about Arabs and she’s not afraid of them at all,” Sagi translated. And then he told her that there were Arabs at his school and that they were cool. She said she couldn’t understand how we even agreed to study there, and that in her opinion, there was no such thing as a good Arab. Sagi thought that was funny. He told me she was a stupid thick-headed jerk, a real cow. He grabbed his head, pointed at me, and said, “He’s an Arab.” She laughed and said it wasn’t nice to say such a thing about me.