Текст книги "Dancing Arabs"

Автор книги: Sayed Kashua

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

The Happiest Independence Day of My Life

The teachers at my new school don’t hit the students. There’s no lice inspection. The teachers don’t check your homework. You don’t have to say “sir,” and when you need to go to the bathroom you don’t have to get permission; you can go whenever you want. And the bathrooms are clean and spacious, with a dryer that gives off hot air to dry your hands. I can’t stand the dryer, but there are paper towels too. There are lots of cleaning people in blue uniforms. They’re not allowed to hit. They don’t even talk to the students.

You don’t have to line up to go into class. You don’t have to read the Koran every morning. You don’t have one girl playing the same silly tune on the organ, and boys are allowed to sit next to girls.

Naomi sat next to me once, and I fell in love. I sank. I crashed. I’d put my head on my pillow, open my eyes, stare at the ceiling – and feel different. An unfamiliar feeling, a new kind of pain. In the dining room, in the library, in class, in the lobby, everywhere, my ears were pricked to hear her footsteps. I recognized them, every time. I recognized the sound from a distance: when she was barefoot, when she was in those black sandals, when she was in running shoes.

We hung out a lot together. Once we studied chemistry in her room. I sat on her bed, with the pretty sheets and the quilt. Her hair was long. Not black, not yellow, something in between. White hands. Freckled face. I loved those freckles. When she had kitchen duty, I helped her. In our class play at the end of tenth grade, I danced with her. In our first month in eleventh grade I told her I loved her. A week later she had a boyfriend.

I saw them hug each other in the snow. It was the first snow I’d ever seen. Quiet, lighting up the night, not banging on the windowpane like rain. I stood at the window, looking out at the lawn, which was covered in whiteness. After that, I spent most of my time just lying on my bed with my mouth open and my head aching, until they broke up.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Naomi wore a white blouse and read out of a black looseleaf about a little girl who sees her father on fire in the forest. At the end of the ceremony I told her I loved her, and she smiled. On Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers, she was furious because I hadn’t stood at attention during the memorial siren. We were sitting together in biology class. Everyone else got up, and I stayed seated. I had lost a grandfather and an uncle in the war, after all. After the siren she didn’t sit down. She took her bag and left.

She didn’t show up for lunch. She wasn’t in her room or in the library. What an idiot I was. What was the matter with me? Couldn’t I have stood? Her father was killed in active duty after all. He died when she was still very little. There’s a picture of him over her bed, with her on his shoulders. She must have been about three; she hardly remembers him. He was an officer in the IDF, and he’d been in charge of the evacuation of Yamit. He didn’t die in the war. He’d had an accident on his way home from his base. The IDF took her on a trip to Canada once. They pay her tuition.

I sat at the school gate listening to sad music on my Walkman – the Cranes, maybe, or the Swans – and I waited for her.

Naomi got out of her mother’s Mitsubishi. She had tears in her eyes. It was the first time I saw her mother. She looked at me and drove off. They’d been to the ceremony at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl. But that wasn’t why she was sad.

“Why didn’t you stand for the siren?”

I’m not Jewish.

“I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time. I told my mother that I love you. I cried, and I told her I couldn’t take it anymore. Every time you told me I love youI thought, in my heart, So do I, so do I.” She smiled.

Now I understood what true joy was. I carried her bag to her room. I was ecstatic. It was the happiest Independence Day eve of my life.

A National Home

Sometimes I think about when I was young, and I thank God I’m not there anymore. What a mess I was: the way I looked, the way I felt. I’m so happy to be an adult. In the middle of twelfth grade I went to a café for the first time. It was one of those Tuesday evenings when they gave us time off. That’s when I learned that you could order a salad as a separate course, served in a big bowl, and that there were different kinds. Salad on its own, without a pitta.We were sitting in Atara Café, where Amos Oz sat in My Michael.Naomi ordered a Greek salad, and I ordered a hot chocolate. Something familiar, something I could afford.

In twelfth grade, Naomi took me to the movies for the first time. I couldn’t believe that girls could go into a movie theater. There used to be a movie theater in Tira, but not anymore. There’s a small room, with walls of unpainted bricks and a television set. When we were little, Aunt Ibtissam’s son, who was really big then, took us to see Tarzan.There were wooden chairs, like in elementary school. It was nothing more than a dark hovel. My little brother threw up right at the beginning, and all of us got out of there pretty fast. Everyone kept shouting and smoking, and when Tarzan’s guys appeared in the forest there were catcalls and whistling. I was petrified.

I was frightened in twelfth grade too. The movie theater was bound to be full of people like the Polanski students. They’d recognize me and I’d have nowhere to run. Sometimes the Polanski kids would come to the school gate and scream, “Death to the Arabs!” I never went out into the yard beyond the fence. It seemed too risky, too far from the guard.

Naomi said I had nothing to be afraid of at the movies. We were going to see Life According to Agfa,and she said it was a movie the thugs would never go to, a movie for left-wingers like her. We could sit through the whole movie holding hands. I didn’t have to be afraid of anyone.

The new life was exciting. I realized it wasn’t only bad kids who went to the movies. Grown-ups went too. Men and women sat together. Everything was clean and neat. The chairs were padded, and everyone dressed nicely. Boy, was I glad to see the two Arab kitchen workers in the film. They were cool, actually, and funny. The thugs were the bad guys. I couldn’t get over the pianist in the restaurant. Naomi said it was Danny Litani, a well-known singer. She didn’t have a tape of his in her room, but she had one of some guy who sang “Things Have Got to Change,” and “Just Get Out of the Territories.” I couldn’t believe a Jew would sing stuff like that.

Naomi was in a party called Ratz. She had a green shirt with the party logo, and she talked a lot about human beings as human beings. About how there was no difference between national groups, how individuals should be judged on their own merits, and how you shouldn’t look at a whole group as if everyone were the same. She said that in every nation there are good people and bad people. I never really understood what she was talking about, but I took the whole thing seriously.

In twelfth grade I understood for the first time what ’48 was. That it’s called the War of Independence. In twelfth grade I understood that a Zionist was what we called a Sahyuni, and it wasn’t a swearword. I knew the word. That’s how we used to curse one another. I’d been sure that a Sahyuni was a kind of fat guy, like a bear. Suddenly I understood that Zionism is an ideology. In civics lessons and Jewish history classes, I started to understand that my aunt from Tulkarm is called a refugee, that the Arabs in Israel are called a minority. In twelfth grade I understood that the problem was serious. I understood what a national homeland was, what anti-Semitism was. I heard for the first time about “two thousand years of exile” and how the Jews had fought against the Arabs and the British. I didn’t believe it. No way. The English had wanted the Jews here, after all. In Bible class, I discovered that Abraham was Isaac’s father. In twelfth grade I discovered that it was Isaac, not Ismael, who’d been replaced with a sheep.

In twelfth grade, the kids in my class started running in the parking lot, getting into shape for the army. They were taken to all sorts of installations and training camps, and I received a bus pass and a ticket to the Israel Museum. Sometimes soldiers in uniform came to our school to talk with the students, and I wasn’t allowed to take part. Our teacher always apologized. He was embarrassed to have to tell me it wasn’t for me. In twelfth grade I understood I wouldn’t be a pilot even if I wanted to be, not only because I wasn’t fit and my grades weren’t good enough. There was no way they would even call me up for the screening tests. I sure had a good laugh at my father.

An Educational Approach

That day, Mother and Father stayed home from work. They dressed up, and an hour and a half before the appointment they got in the car. They knew they mustn’t be late. They had to look like parents. The night before, they’d come to pick me up at the hospital. The school guidance counselor had taken me to the Emergency Room at Shaarei Tsedek hospital. How I screamed at her when I heard she’d asked my parents to come! I’d shamed them in the worst way. And I’d shamed myself too. Now I’d hate myself even more.

I just kept praying: Don’t let my parents find out. Don’t let my father find out. But now they knew. They came to the hospital and saw me having my stomach pumped. They talked with the guidance counselor and took me back home to the village. My father’s friend Bassem was with us. He and my father had been playing chess when the counselor called, and he offered to go along to see how I was doing.

Now I remember how this Bassem stood over my bed at the hospital and asked, “What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with him?” And Father answered, “It’s all because of that bitch of his, the Jewish whore.”

I’d been tired and dizzy all the time. I could hardly fall asleep. I didn’t sleep more than two hours a night, and I was having strong headaches. This had been going on for a few months. I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t think or sleep or even simply sit still. There was a strange buzzing in my ears, and it wouldn’t stop. Headache pills never helped me, and the CAT scan didn’t show a thing. The neurological tests were normal too.

One weekend when I had gone home, Mother took me to Amneh, our neighbor, Grandma’s friend. She said her daughter was a nurse, and she wanted to take my blood pressure. Amneh’s older daughter really was just studying nursing then, but she had a blood pressure gauge. She took my pressure and said it was high.

That’s when Amneh got to work. She brought a handkerchief and tied a knot and put some salt into one corner; then she muttered some prayers and started rubbing the handkerchief around my head. She said it was all because of the Evil Eye, and with Allah’s help it would soon be over. She said she was convinced it would work, because she’d yawned as she’d applied the handkerchief, and also because the salt had melted.

The pain persisted, and the hypertension pills didn’t help. A month later, on one of my visits home, Father said he thought it had to do with my eyesight. I was having headaches because I was studying so hard, and because all those books and computers must have ruined my eyes. He said a friend of his in Taiyiba, an eye doctor, had told him this. He said the friend’s name was Dr. Majed, and he suggested that we go see him at his clinic.

I agreed. The idea of wearing coke-bottle glasses like John Lennon’s appealed to me, but I knew how much I really read and how much time I actually spent at the computer.

On our way there, I tried to doze in the backseat. I didn’t want Naomi to see me with my eyes swollen again. In fact, Dr. Majed was a psychiatrist, the director of the mental health clinic in Taiyiba. He asked us to come in the afternoon, when there were almost no patients left at the clinic. There was only one woman there, who kept rocking back and forth. Dr. Majed let her in first, renewed her prescription, and then invited us in. With him in the room was a young man, probably an intern, maybe a psychologist. Actually, he may have been a social worker.

Dr. Majed asked me how I was feeling. “Not very well,” I answered. He asked if I was having problems at school, and I said everything was great.

Dr. Majed said he had heard from my father that I was in my third year at the boarding school, I was about to start my matriculation exams, I was having recurrent headaches, and the pain was keeping me from concentrating on my studies. Dr. Majed said I was depressed, and prescribed some pills, doxepin 10. “Take one of these a day,” he said, “and things will work out fine.”

I did, and the pills helped me sleep a little. They made me tired, heavy. My face became bloated, but I felt they were working. I really wanted to be an official depressive like Nick Drake, like Kurt Cobain. I had a renewable prescription, and I got the pills myself. They weren’t expensive, and pretty soon I started taking two a day. Then I increased the dose to doxepin 25, and I got in the habit of popping a pill every time I felt a headache or depression coming on. I walked around in a daze, but nobody asked me why. I’d reached a point where nobody expected anything of me anymore, a condition where it’s best not to interfere.

Naomi came to see me every now and then. She said she was planning to study psychology. She was going to ask for a deferral of her army service so she could study first, and she had to get good grades on her finals. When the exams were over, we’d split up; I knew that. That’s what her mother wanted. She said boarding school was a world apart, and as long as we were there she didn’t mind that her daughter had an Arab boyfriend. She said she had nothing against me, except it was too bad my name wasn’t Reuben or David.

On the day before the final in Arabic and two days before the last exam in math, I swallowed a whole pack of doxepin 25, ten pills at once. I wanted to sleep. Naomi came to my room. She knocked on the door and I didn’t hear her. She knew I was there. I hardly got out of bed in those days. Where would I go anyway? She opened the door and tried to wake me. I could hear her, I could see her, I woke up, but for some reason she thought I was still asleep. I saw her run out and return with the guidance counselor. What was the guidance counselor doing at school at that hour?

Today we had an appointment at the mental health clinic in Jerusalem, with the psychologist in charge of the adolescents’ clinic. My parents were told they had to come.

“What are you going to tell them?” my father asks. “Did you tell the guidance counselor anything? Did you talk to them about me?” He mentions Bassem and says he knows about how I’ve screwed up my studies and ruined everything on account of some girl.

I tell my father I haven’t told them anything because there’s nothing to tell.

He calms down when he realizes he’s not going to come under attack, and nobody is about to blame him for my condition. He’ll emerge from the whole thing with his reputation intact. As always.

My mother tries to say everything’s going to be okay and I should still consider taking the matriculation exams, but that whatever I decide will be all right, because she’s sure I’ll manage. She says she doesn’t understand how I wound up like this. “We knew you had it tough,” she says, “but we didn’t realize it was this bad.”

I hear them talk. They’re interfering with my attempts to concentrate in the backseat, to think about how I have only one more day to see Naomi. To try to imagine our last kiss.

My father launches into another monologue. He says everything he did was for me, to educate me. “Do you know that in England you’re allowed to hit schoolchildren to this very day? It’s an educational approach.”

I tell him I know, I understand, and I swear I haven’t said anything to anyone. I’ve never talked about it.

He believes me again and drops the subject.

And then I remember how on my last visit home on ‘id eladhahe yelled at me. “You lunatic!” he screamed. “You certified lunatic!” All this because I didn’t want to pay the usual visit to my aunts. I can still feel my left cheek burning, as if the slap happened just now. I shake my head and put my cheek against the car window to relieve the pain.

I remember the day when Naomi leaned her head against my shoulder for the first time. It was before she told me she loved me, before we started going together. It’s hard to reconstruct that feeling. You can remember it, but you can’t re-feel it.

Last week, I put my head against her chest, and she ran her fingers through my hair and said, “We shouldn’t get too attached, you know. Do you understand? We shouldn’t. Enough. We’re breaking up, and that’s that. Otherwise, Mother will throw me out of the house.” She told me her mother had said she’d rather have a lesbian for a daughter than one who hangs out with Arabs.

Suddenly I realize I haven’t a clue as to what I’m going to do about the math final, and I’d dropped out of the physics exam too at the last minute. After three years of torture in physics classes, I didn’t make it to the exam. Now it hits me: I’m going to flunk. I’m not sure I’ll even get my matriculation certificate. My parents will freak out. My father will never get over the shame. He’s right, my father. I’ve ruined my future, and it’s all because of the Jewish whore.

But I’m not mad at her, not at all. It’s entirely her mother’s fault. What could Naomi do about it anyway? If it had been up to her, she wouldn’t have broken up with me like that, because how can you stop loving someone overnight, to keep a deadline that was set eighteen months earlier? I had been expecting it the whole time, dreading it.

How I screamed yesterday! What a racket I made! I tried to run away from the emergency room, but the guidance counselor was strong enough to grab me by the arms. When I tried to break loose, I fell to the floor. She kept clutching me by my clothing and whispering, “You’re not a child. Stop screaming. Look what you’re doing.” I remember lots of people just stood around and stared at us, and the guard came but didn’t do anything, just stood to the side and watched me cry and scream. When my parents and Bassem arrived, I stopped at once.

The last thing I heard was what my father said to his friend about the Jewish whore. How I hated him then. And I hated the guidance counselor even more. She wanted me to stop loving Naomi, or at least try to love Salwa, an Arab girl at school. She was pretty and smart, that’s what the counselor kept telling me. So there I was, on my way back to Jerusalem with my parents. They’d gotten a call from my school, asking them to come with me. I wouldn’t be allowed back in school unless my parents and I met with a psychologist first. There wasn’t much time left – just one more day and one more matriculation exam – but the counselor said they couldn’t assume responsibility for me without the psychologist’s approval.

The psychologist said I was okay, I hadn’t really wanted to die, and the pills I took wouldn’t have hurt me. He believed me when I said I’d read in a book on pharmaceuticals that you need to take as much as 300 milligrams for it to work. He said the information was correct and he was inclined to believe that it wasn’t a suicide attempt. He wanted me to have the pills, but he’d give them to the guidance counselor, and she’d give me one a day, because I was still depressed, and it was a psychiatric prescription, after all.

I have to get back to school. There’s only one day left.

We didn’t talk on the way back to school. We got in the car, same as before. My father fiddled with the dial, looking for the music channel, and swore at Jerusalem for having such lousy reception. He stopped at a steak house for a hummus and a beer. Mother ordered chicken. I didn’t want anything. All I wanted was to get back there, so I could see Naomi. I didn’t have time to spare. My father looked at me and said, “This is too good for you.”