Текст книги "Dancing Arabs"

Автор книги: Sayed Kashua

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

PART FOUR. Hitting Rock Bottom

Chest Pains

I’m walking up the hill that stretches between our house and the mosque, keeping my eyes to the ground, hoping the neighbors passing by have forgotten me by now. Maybe I’ve changed, and they won’t recognize me anymore. I don’t exchange the usual salaam aleikums. I shift my side pack from arm to arm. It’s heavy, and the trek up toward the taxi station is hard going. Normally Father would drive me there. Sometimes he’d take me as far as Kfar Sava, and the first few times, even to Jerusalem. But Father isn’t home now. He’s in the hospital.

When Mother got home, I woke up. She explained that Father hadn’t felt well the night before, and even though they didn’t find anything, they decided to keep him at the hospital for observation. She said there was nothing wrong with him and he’d be discharged soon. If she hadn’t needed to get to work by eight, she would have stayed there till they sent him home. She suggested I stop at the hospital to see him on my way to Jerusalem. I had to go through Kfar Sava anyway to catch the bus. “Sit with him for five minutes,” she said. She was always trying to mediate between Father and me, to improve our relationship.

Six months had gone by since I’d finished school, six months since my last visit home. Father had tried hard to be nonchalant at first, as if he didn’t really care what was happening with me, as if I could go to hell for all he cared. But when he recalled how I’d disgraced him, he’d go berserk and start shouting. “You, our greatest hope, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Everyone in the village keeps asking me how far you’ve gone. What am I supposed to tell them, that you haven’t even taken your finals?” All the other parents are celebrating their kids’ acceptance into medical school or law or engineering, and my father has to tell people that the Jews haven’t decided yet what to do with my brain. He’s told everyone they’re afraid another country will kidnap me and use my talents.

I don’t have a place of my own in the house anymore. My older brother has put our two beds together to make a queen-size. Whenever I used to come home, Mother would separate the beds and make mine up. But this time she didn’t, and they didn’t clear any space for me in the closet either. I left my clothes in my side pack and slept in Grandma’s room. On a mattress, not in her bed. In the morning, I took my bag and headed for Jerusalem to look for a job. At night, I plan to crash at Adel’s. He’s in law school already, and he has a room in the dorms.

* * *

Mother called four days ago and said my cousin had been killed. “You’ve got to come home for the funeral and the three days of mourning.” She said he’d been playing ball with a few classmates, and it got on the nerves of their crazy drug-addict neighbors. The ball went over the fence and landed in the druggies’ house. The three brothers stormed out with knives and stabbed the kids. Ali was the only one who died. The other kids were injured, but they’re okay. My mother said Ali’s father was stabbed in the chest when he tried to protect the kids. He was in bad shape, but he’d been operated on, and he’d be all right. They hadn’t told him yet. They pretended Ali was okay and had been sent to a different hospital. The doctors said it would be dangerous to give him the news of his son’s death at that point. My parents went to visit him in the hospital yesterday. While they were there, at my uncle’s bedside, my father complained of chest pains. The doctors decided to do some tests. The tests were okay. Mother says it’s just fatigue.

I didn’t talk with my father during the days of mourning. He was too busy. Yesterday was the third day. The women sat in my aunt’s house, and the men came to ours. The relatives from Ramallah and Bakat el-Hatab slept over and joined us in greeting the people who came to extend their condolences. It was a tragedy. They talked about it on the evening news in Arabic: the cold-blooded murder of a boy playing ball. My job was to stand at the entrance with little cups of coffee and a large coffeepot and pour bitter sadacoffee for everyone who arrived. My father just sat there the whole time. He cried at Ali’s funeral. Later I heard him say it was the first time he’d ever cried over someone who’d died.

I go up to the fifth floor, into the cardiology ward, and look for room 12. If my father asks, I’ll tell him my studies are going well and I’m about to complete my final. I really am studying. If everything continues smoothly, I’ll enroll in one of the departments at Hebrew University next year. Not anything exciting, because my grades aren’t high enough, but it hardly matters anymore. The main thing is I’ll have a degree.

My father is in the bed nearest the door, drinking coffee. He greets me with a surprised Ahalan,and I get the feeling he’s glad to see me. He asks if I’m on my way back to Jerusalem and says he’s got to have a cigarette. Then he asks me to go down to the newsstand to get him a paper, and we’ll look for a place where he can read the paper and smoke.

He looks fine, nothing out of the ordinary, hooked up to a flickering machine that’s monitoring something, and that’s all. I’ll get the paper. I’ll ask if he needs anything else, and then I’ll leave. I’m working today. Besides, I need to get away from this atmosphere. I’ve got a headache already.

Those three days were rough. It was the first time I’d seen a dead body. I hadn’t realized how much Ali had grown. The mustache over his upper lip was beginning to show. The body was naked, with an autopsy incision stretching from his stomach to his neck. Too bad I saw it. The incision had been sewn up hastily with coarse black thread. When the body washers ran out of water, they shoved a bucket in my hand and asked me to hurry. When I realized I couldn’t take it anymore, I got out of there and headed home. I said I was going to help set up the chairs and make coffee.

After the funeral, all the men in the family gathered at our house and talked about revenge. The relatives from the West Bank said they would do anything, but there was nobody to kill. The three druggie brothers had been arrested, and the police had moved the rest of their family to a different village. Most of the adults in our family stayed put, while a few of the younger ones huddled in the corner, whispering. My father was older, but he joined them. It was obvious they were planning something. Aunt Fahten walked over to the mourners’ tent where the men were seated. She was allowed in there, because she was a widow. She’s a strong woman, and wise. She stood in the middle and shouted, “There won’t be a single man among you unless you find a way of consoling Ali’s mother! Unless you do something that will comfort her!”

The stream of callers didn’t let up. From time to time, I switched places with my older brother. He poured the coffee and I washed the dishes. My father was busy the whole time. He never just sat in the tent. He kept going in and out of the house through the back door. He took a few bus trips, car trips too. Around 8 P.M. he came down to the shed, and a few seconds after he sat down we heard a loud boom. Father had a proud look in his eyes. Soon a young guy came in and whispered something to him. Father left the shed again, took the car, and came back within five minutes with two doctors who were relatives of ours. They came with their bags. Someone had been injured out there, but taking him to the hospital was not an option.

I went indoors now too. I didn’t know the person who’d been hurt, but I saw he was wearing my father’s sneakers. He had a gash in his leg from jumping out the window, but he’d be all right. The callers whispered to one another, trying to figure out what had happened. Soon they realized that the murderers’ home had been blown up using the containers of cooking gas.

I come back with the paper. My father’s in bed. When he sees me, he sits up and is about to get to his feet. Suddenly he looks at me with big bulging eyes – frightened, imploring eyes. All at once his forehead is covered in perspiration, and the monitor starts beeping nervously.

I scream to one of the nurses, “My father! My father!” and within seconds there’s a whole team around his bed. They hook him up to oxygen and pull his bed out toward Intensive Care. I follow them, trying to see his face, but I can’t. I can’t get into the elevator with them. I run down the stairs and get to Intensive Care before they do. I’m convinced he’s dead by now. That’s it. There’s no hope. He won’t make it. I start crying. I head for the phone booths next to the elevators. If he doesn’t die now, I’ll stay with him right here in the hospital till the next heart attack kills him.

Half the family arrives, my aunts and their children. My mother is wearing a head scarf. Her eyes are swollen from crying. She heads straight for Intensive Care, and there’s no stopping her. A few of the men want to talk to a doctor, and they ask for someone to come out and tell them what’s happening. They’ve left their shops, their classrooms, and their businesses to come here. That’s all we need now, another tragedy in the family.

The doctor says Father will be okay, but I don’t believe it. I saw him perspiring. I saw his eyes telling me he won’t be back, he’s somewhere else already. They’re allowing me in too now. He’s still alive, but I know it won’t last. They’ve hooked him up to lots more instruments. The doctor says it wasn’t a heart attack, just chest pains. To be on the safe side, they’re leaving him in Intensive Care till they run some more tests. I look at him, and he still looks scared, baffled by what he’s been through. He looks at me, then at Mother, and I know it’s all because of me.

Arabs Called Me a Settler

Arabs called me a settler, their label for anyone who moved into a room that already had two tenants. A third roommate. A squatter. In the Hebrew University dorms, settlers were a big and legitimate group. The rent would be divided three ways, and almost every Arab student welcomed the arrangement. There were just a few city types, mostly from Nazareth, who came to the university in their own cars and didn’t want any settlers in their rooms.

The settlers were usually students who’d been late signing up for the dorms or who’d dragged out their studies for too many years and were no longer eligible for a dorm room. There were only two beds in each room, and when both of them were occupied, the settler would bed down on a mattress. I was the only settler who wasn’t a student. To get into the dorms, which were closely guarded by security guards – some Jewish, some Druze – you had to produce a student ID. Adel gave me his. He told the administration he’d lost it, and I paid the fine for him and gave him the money for a passport photo.

I found a job within a week. It wasn’t hard. In Jerusalem, there are lots of institutions for people with special needs, and they’re always short of attendants. The Jews preferred Arabs who had a blue ID card and could get to work even when there were roadblocks, curfews, or war; not like the Arabs from the West Bank with their orange IDs. This was toward the end of the first Intifada, and the orange ones missed many days of work.

I started working at an institution for the retarded. On my shift, I was responsible for six children, some with Down syndrome and others with different conditions. The retarded kids didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them either. I took them to the bathroom, scrubbed them with a brush, and made sure they were clean. When the girls had their period, I sprayed water on them from a distance. I took them to the dining room, to the occupational workshops, and to the depressing playground. Sometimes, I simply took them on walks through the long buildings. The smell there was terrible, but somehow I got used to it.

I worked every day, and on weekends I’d do a double shift. The pay was very low, and you couldn’t really make a decent salary without the overtime and the extra pay on Saturdays. I didn’t have much to do anyway. I didn’t know anyone except Adel, and I didn’t see much of him either, because he was deep in his law studies and I was stuck at work.

Sometimes, when both of us had a free evening, we’d go down to the grocery store, buy some of the cheapest wine with the highest alcohol content, and drink it in the parking lot of the dorms. He always wanted me to tell him what it was like to fuck, and he kept talking about girls. In the end, we’d both throw up and go back to the room, and if one of the legal occupants was out, we’d share the bed.

Sometimes, when I didn’t want to go back to the dorms, I’d go to the university, look for the psych department, and wait outside for Naomi. I had tried to talk to her at first, to tell her I had a job, and money, and might invite her to a restaurant sometime. But she was always busy. Sometimes I followed her from a distance and tried to find out whether she had a new boyfriend yet. I wanted to know if she was as unhappy as I was. Maybe she still loved me and missed me; maybe it was only because of her mother that we’d split up. But she almost always looked happy, and she was surrounded by friends as she went to the cafeteria or the library.

I had a bus pass from my job, and I would travel around for hours on the buses, listening to my Walkman and staring at the people, the shop windows, the cars. I got on and off whenever I felt like it. I made a point not to keep taking the same bus, because I didn’t want the drivers or the regular passengers to notice me. Sometimes I’d be lost in thought or else I’d fall asleep, and the driver would wake me with a shout when we reached the end of the line.

I knew all the bus routes. I knew where each bus went, and which streets it went through. I studied every way of getting from the dorms to work. I knew the timetables by heart too, and all the drivers’ faces. I started avoiding eye contact when I got on the bus, because I was beginning to feel as if I knew them a bit too well. I knew where there would be traffic jams, where the old people would get on, or the children, or the religious people, and which routes were used by Arabs. Sometimes I tried to guess where the passengers were going. To work? To school? To the souk? To the hospital? Sometimes I wanted to know where one of the passengers lived, and I’d get off with him and follow him from a distance with my Walkman on. Sometimes I’d go as far as my school and head right back.

Adel helped me with the math final. It wasn’t hard. I took the test and signed up for the two courses with the easiest admission requirements. Sometimes I’d have a cutlet and rice at the university cafeteria. I never thought about the war in those days.

That Morning I Got Up, Made Some Coffee, and Decided to Get Married

It had been four years since I’d spotted Samia in the bus station near the dorms. She was a refugee but with a blue ID, which meant their village had been destroyed in the war, and some of her family had wound up in Tira. I recognized her and she recognized me. We’d gone to the same elementary school, but had not been in the same class. We’d never talked. I shook her hand and introduced myself, and she smiled. Said she knew me. She looks okay, I thought. I got on the bus before her and took my seat in the back. I was hoping she’d sit down next to me, and she did. I never would have dared to sit down next to an Arab girl. I’m well-behaved and shy.

“Do you know how I get to Hadassah?” she asked.

“Yes, you go to the central bus station and take the Twenty-seven to the end of the line. I’ll go with you,” I answered.

It was her first day in Jerusalem. I knew she needed me. I was an expert, I knew everything there was to know about public transportation, and the names of streets and places in Jerusalem. I could show her around, maybe do the Old City, even though I didn’t enjoy going there, but I’d take her wherever she wanted, even to El-Aqsa,if that’s what she felt like doing. I’d buy her a present. I’d show her what a good person I was, even if I had screwed up now and then, especially when it came to school.

She’d understand that I’ve had it rough, that I’ve been depressed. Maybe she’s been depressed too. She only knows me from Tira. She knows I’m smart. She’ll be surprised to hear I’m studying philosophy, and I’ll tell her it’s because I love the subject, and that the job market in hospitals and lawyers’ offices is very tight. But she’ll probably wind up dating a medical student. That’s how it is; doctors marry nurses. I’ll tell her I intend to do a doctorate in philosophy.

After we got off, I walked her to the Twenty-seven bus stop, and waited with her till the bus arrived. I knew what it was like to take your first bus trip on a Jerusalem line. Before we said good-bye she told me where she lived, and I gave her my room number. As soon as I got back to the dorms I went looking for her room in the long and narrow buildings. She wasn’t there.

How did I even dare? Idiot. What could I have been thinking? In the end, she won’t want to see me, and I’ll get into trouble. I’ll fall in love just the way I did the last time. I won’t be able to keep my mind on anything else, and I’ll screw up my studies again. I’m going to blow this new chance to prove that I can still make it, that I can take exams the way I used to and get the best grades. I haven’t recovered yet from the previous fiasco, and here I am repeating it. I’ll never learn.

When I got back to my room, Samia was on the stairs. “I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “It took me an hour to find the room.”

* * *

We’ve been together for four years now. It’s about time. I’ll drink my coffee; then I’ll wake Samia up and tell her we’re going to be married. Until yesterday she was living in the dorms and I was living in the Nahlaot neighborhood with Jewish roommates. Now that I’ve moved into an Arab neighborhood, we’ve got to get married if I want us to go on sleeping together. The owners, who live upstairs, would never allow us to sleep together unless we’re married. That’s it. We’ve got to do it. I know she’ll never ever leave me, so why put it off?

I didn’t know anymore back then whether she was staying with me because she loved me or in order to make it clear to me that I should forget about her ever leaving me. She kept saying I’d promised her we’d get married. I would never break that kind of a promise. It could wreck her life. Everyone in Tira knew by now that we were together, and it was all because of my lack of consideration. As far as she was concerned, she shouldn’t be walking hand in hand with me, let alone sleeping with me. She told me that a Tira bride who isn’t a virgin is sent back to her parents on her wedding night. Once, her aunt had a heart attack when a daughter of hers showed up at home on her wedding night, but all the bride wanted to do was to pick up her hairbrush.

I couldn’t believe Samia’d work up the courage to sleep at my place on that first night in the Arab neighborhood. She cleaned the house, and we told the owner we were engaged. With Jewish owners, we wouldn’t have had to explain. Samia used to visit me in Nahlaot and slept over whenever she felt like it. My roommates liked her, and for them it was natural. Not like with the Arabs in the dorms, always gossiping and spreading rumors. Well-founded rumors, but what business was it of theirs? “You, what’s it to you? You’re a man. What’s the worst that could happen to you?” she always said.

Samia has one more term paper to submit. Then she’ll go back to Tira, because what would an Arab girl be doing away from her own village? Her father has already found her a job in the municipality. She says there’s nothing for her in Jerusalem. And her parents are already suspicious of her latest excuse, the term paper. They say she could be working on it at home.

I look at her in her sleep. Pretty. Facing the wall, as always. It’s still early, and she spent all of yesterday cleaning, while I connected the appliances and opened the extra bed I’d bought long ago.

“Get up,” I say. “We’re going home to get married.”

“What, now?”

So I took two days off from work and went home to be married.

My father had no objection to the wedding, quite the contrary. He liked the idea. He didn’t mind that I was only twenty-two. He said Samia is from a good family. Communists. Friends of his.

My mother is happy: a girl with a diploma. Maybe she’ll reform me too. Maybe she’ll gradually succeed in persuading me to go back to the university. “How many courses do you have left? Isn’t it a shame for those three years to go down the drain? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, to have a wife who’s better educated than you are? I have to hand it to her for agreeing.”

My grandmother knows the refugees. Used to work with them picking fruit. “They’re the best women in the village,” she says. “Bring her here so I can see her.” Even though she can hardly see anymore.

Father says nobody in Tira gets married this way. “It can’t be done in two days. Even if we agree, her parents won’t. They have their self-respect, don’t they?” He says we won’t succeed in finding a hall overnight or inviting people. And I explain that I want it to be small. As far as I’m concerned, the only person we need at the wedding is the sheikh. But my parents wouldn’t dream of having anyone badmouth them or give anyone a pretext for saying they’re not as good as everyone else. “Isn’t it bad enough that the poor girl is marrying someone with no home of his own? Are you sure her parents agree?”

Samia’s parents agree because they have no choice. The rumors have finished them off already. Her mother had gone to pay a condolence call and overheard people discussing her promiscuous daughter who was studying in Jerusalem. In the mosque where her father prays every Friday, they mentioned her in the sermon. Not by name, but they spoke of parents who send their daughters off to university, where they turn into prostitutes.

My parents won’t give up. They settle on one hundred guests on each side, and Father closes a deal with a restaurant owner. They buy gold the way people used to in Tira, and give us money to buy clothes in Tel Aviv. Samia buys a dress on Shenkin Street, and I get a suit at Zara in Dizengoff Center. Nobody in either one of the families understands why we’re getting married like this. The sheikh arrives and I sign his papers seven times. Her father signs for her, which is the custom. We’re married now, and all I want is for everyone to finish eating so we can go home.

The next day, my mother called and said the teachers where she worked, the ones who hadn’t been invited, thought it was a shotgun wedding and we were just trying to avoid disgrace. Samia said her family hadn’t been sure if it was an engagement or a wedding, because at an engagement you only serve knaffehbut the restaurant had served a full meal. On the other hand, at a wedding you wear a bridal gown, but she’d worn a dress from Shenkin Street. Samia cried and said it was all my fault. She knew it wouldn’t work, I couldn’t think of anyone but myself, I wasn’t prepared to do anything for her, and her parents were hurt and angry because she hadn’t been married like everyone else.

My father chewed me out too. He said I was a mess. “Next week come again, and we’ll put an end to this disgrace.”

So we got married all over again. The checks covered the hall, the music, the photographer, a thousand guests, and a Netanya hotel. Apart from my aunts and their children, I hardly even knew anyone at my own wedding. I hadn’t invited anyone. Everyone had been invited by my parents or Samia’s. I put on my black suit and my black shoes, like in an Arab movie. I had to put the ring on Samia’s finger. I had to dance with her, even though I haven’t a clue about dancing the debka.I was supposed to cut the cake and kiss men whose names I didn’t know. I had to hug my aunts and uncles and smile at the camera. I had to listen to horrible music that never fails to give me a headache. And I had to put up with all that without any alcohol or cigarettes. Because I’m well-behaved and shy.