by Sayed Kashua
I called her cell and she answered. “Are you okay?” I asked in Arabic, a language she comprehends only in the Palestinian field-workers’ dialect that we spoke at home.
“Yes,” she answered in Hebrew and then in English: “I’m fine.”
“Are your brothers okay? Your mother?”
“Did something happen?”
“No, nothing. Just checking,” I told her, even though I wanted to say that she has a grandfather, that I have a father and mother and a village and family. “Sorry, I’m just writing a bit and suddenly, you know, just do me a favor, please, and go into your brothers’ room and check that they’re okay. Sometimes when I’m writing I imagine all sorts of nightmare scenarios.”
“They’re fine. I’m not going into anyone’s room.”
“Please, otherwise I’ll have to come over,” I begged. I asked that she stay on the line as she goes into their room.
“They’re asleep,” she whispered.
“Can you do me a favor and just put the phone next to your little brother’s mouth, as if he’s speaking to me?”
I held my breath, perking my ears to pick up the child’s respirations but heard nothing.
“Okay,” my daughter said. “He’s starting to wake up, so I think we’re done here.”
“He’s moving?”
“Yes!” she yelled in a whisper. “I have to get back to my room. Bye.” She hung up.
They’re okay. The little one is the one who worries me. It’s always the littlest that generates the most amount of anxiety, and my daughter said that he had moved, that he practically woke up, so he’s okay.
I stepped out onto the kitchen balcony to smoke, this time without gloves, in the hopes that the cold would shock me back to my surroundings and still the rhythm of my breathing.
I ground the cigarette out in the bucket of frozen water and returned to the desk, where I opened a new file: “Dad Transcript.”
2
Back when we lived in Jerusalem, I always woke up before my wife and kids. I liked that hour of early morning quiet. In Illinois the situation is different. I want to sleep late, to avoid waking up, as has long been my habit.
The winter mornings here are icy and dark. I try to stay still in bed, hoping for the sun to come up. I try to think about the book I have to write, about the first-person protagonist that is the me character. But swiftly I’m seized by harsh thoughts that force me out of bed to start my morning routine, rituals meant to banish the demons.
Coffee is my first task. It took me several long months to get used to the idea and the taste of American coffee, coffee that until we came here I had seen only on TV and in movies. A white filter, four heaped tablespoons, four cups of water in the designated slot, a transparent glass pot, set in its ring—and then the flipping of a switch to start the process. Only then do I go urinate. Even if my bladder is pressing I will always start the coffee machine before going to the bathroom. Ten minutes will pass before it’s ready, and I have to make the most of my time.
I’ve now developed a fondness for American coffee. I take the first two cups with milk, with the firm belief that the lactose gets the intestinal track moving. After going to the bathroom, I put on my two-ply winter coat—the inner layer providing insulation and the outer layer serving as a sort of wind and rain guard. We bought these coats together, for the whole family, over two years ago, once we understood that without proper winter coats a person could freeze to death here in ten minutes. In Israel there’s no need for special coats, not even in Jerusalem, which is considered especially cold.
Before zipping up the coat I pull on some thick thermal socks and then step into waterproof boots, another local purchase, and wrap a wool scarf around my neck and pull a hat down over my ears. I put a glove on my left hand but leave my right one bare, so that I can pour coffee into a travel mug, and then add only a touch of milk so that the coffee doesn’t cool down too much. Smoking is prohibited inside—actually it’s prohibited everywhere on campus—including the graduate student dorms and the faculty housing for visiting academics.
During our first few weeks in town, I’d walk down one of the side streets with my coffee and cigarette in hand, but as the weather got colder I started smoking on the path that leads from the kitchen to the stairs. I smoke fast in the winter, three minutes per cigarette at most. Otherwise my hand goes numb. Afterward I grind the cigarettes into a bucket of frozen water, enjoying the hissing sound that the burning cigarettes make upon impact with the ice.
3
Whenever people ask me: “What are you doing in Illinois?” I always say that I’m writing a book, even though ever since we’ve arrived I’ve not written a single word.
To be honest, I’ve only been asked this a few times, mostly at social events held by the department where my wife is teaching, events that family and spouses are specifically invited to and that she, having told her colleagues that she’s married, was compelled to request I accompany her to, knowing full well that I would not pass on an opportunity to feel like we were in a relationship.
“So, you’re a writer?”
I lie because I have nothing better to say.
Albeit I’ve written thirty books but only as a hired hand. Aside from one short story, less than a page long and featured in the Hebrew University students’ journal some fifteen years ago, I’ve not published a single piece of writing under my own name, and even then the editor misspelled my first name, adding a guttural vowel where there was none.
Sometimes I think about my book, the one I promised I would never write, and I imagine the protagonist in a furnished one-room apartment in the University of Illinois dorms.
Around here they only count bedrooms when specifying the number of rooms in an apartment. He lives alone, this protagonist, in the married-student dorms. He has a small bedroom, in the middle of which sits a queen-size bed on an appropriately sized box mattress, with no headboard. He has a closet, which is nothing more than an accordion-like door that opens to a narrow, carpeted, shelf-less space that houses a single hanging bar, fixed at the protagonist’s eye level, five foot seven.
In his apartment there’s also a living room and a three-seater couch, an old TV with cable access, and a desk made out of sturdy wood. In that same open space there is also a small kitchen and a refrigerator, a stove and an electric stovetop, a microwave and a coffee machine. It was all there when I moved in; I bought no new furniture aside from some plastic shelves that I got at one of the giant hardware stores, a translucent set of storage drawers that are bought individually and can be assembled any which way, like Lego. I placed them one on top of another and shoved them into my bedroom closet. The bottom one is for socks, the top for underwear.
That’s where I wake up almost every morning. That’s where I have my first coffee and my first cigarette.
I brush my teeth, wash my face, dress, and wait to leave the house. Usually I click through the Hebrew and Arabic Israeli news sites, and sometimes I flip on the TV and passively watch the local news or the Weather Channel. It is during those mornings, from the moment I open my eyes until the moment I leave the house, that I am assailed by the sharpest pangs of longing for Palestine.
At six thirty I head out to the bus stop near the dorms. Usually I am the first passenger on the bus. I nod at the driver, whom I see almost every day, and sometimes she nods back. Off campus more passengers board—mostly gas station attendants and salespeople coming off night shifts at one of the twenty-four-hour stores. There are no college kids on the buses at that time of day and no students on their way to school.
At a quarter to seven I reach the house. I have a key and don’t have to ring the bell or ask my wife’s permission to enter. She’s already awake, seated at the kitchen table with her coffee. Palestine drinks cappuccinos. She told me she once used to cook coffee in a pot over an open flame. When she left Tira, she turned to instant coffee, and once we could afford it she bought herself a coffee machine.
My arriva
l is a sign that it’s time to wake the boys. Palestine no longer asks if I’d like coffee. I take my shoes off by the door, shed my winter layers, and take the wooden steps, padded with a gray American carpet, to the bedroom level. The two boys share a single room with matching beds and a desk for the eldest, who is ten. He’s the one I wake first. I stroke his hair, say good morning, give him a kiss. He gets up quickly, says good morning, and gets to his feet, ready to wash his face, brush his teeth, and get dressed. Then I sit on the edge of my younger son’s bed, stroke his hair, kiss his cheeks, whisper gentle words in a soft voice. He refuses to rise. He doesn’t like going to kindergarten. Two years have passed and the first words out of his mouth every single day are: “I don’t want to go to school.” At first he said that sentence in Hebrew, but after three months in the United States he started to protest in English. The door to my daughter’s room, when she’s at home, is perpetually locked. She wakes up alone, wishes no one a good morning, and responds to no one when she is greeted but is always ready on time.
I head over to the garage through a side door connected to the kitchen, open the door by pressing a button, raising it a couple of feet off the ground so that the exhaust fumes don’t gather inside, and start the car so that it warms up, at least slightly, while the boys slurp down the last of their cereal. Then they struggle with their shoes.
4
“It’s much better for the kids,” I find myself saying out loud sometimes, sitting in my student dorm after having dropped them off, now waiting for them to finish yet another day of school.
It has to be better for them, even if they don’t know it yet. And they don’t need to know. They’re learning English, and the language will never scare them as it scares me. Even if we have to head back once the three years are up on Palestine’s contract, the kids will already be using the language as if it’s their own.
It would be better for them here, without a doubt. They won’t have to feel humiliated, won’t have to bow their heads beneath the glare of that monstrous glass ceiling. Here, so I hoped, they won’t be constantly reminded that they don’t belong, aren’t wanted, be forced to internalize their own inferiority, compelled to weigh each word spoken in school and on the street and at work out of a fear that they might somehow upset the status of the rulers.
Even if my wife and I have to return, the kids will always have the option of fleeing to a different country, into the arms of a familiar language. The notion that they may stray far from me rises painfully to the surface every now and again. I’d like to have them nearby, always, in the same village, the same town, same neighborhood, or at least a short drive away, along safe, orderly streets, with a safety barrier between the lanes of oncoming traffic. Tira was an hour from Jerusalem, and yet at times it felt so far.
The kids have never been to Tira, and my wife and I have not been back since the wedding.
Ever since we met, my wife has wanted to leave the country. When she finished her doctorate at Hebrew University she had several options for postdocs and visiting teaching residencies at a few universities abroad, but she was forced to turn those offers down on my account. I couched my opposition to any move in work-related concerns—the financial burdens of that sort of trip—but the real reason I didn’t want to go was that I knew that elsewhere it would be easier for her to leave me. I had no doubt that moving countries would lead to a separation between us. I hoped I could string things along until she managed one day to love me, just as I loved her from the moment I saw her. But her love did not materialize. And the kids arrived and multiplied. By the time we’d left, our daughter was eleven and already could ask questions we couldn’t answer. We had to protect her and keep her away from Tira to the greatest possible extent.
Sometimes, when I’m left alone in the university’s apartment dorms, I click over to a local Tira site and look through the pictures in the news articles and advertisements. I sift through the nursery school birthday party pictures and the sporting events and the murders, the burnt cars, the roadworks, the grand openings of the newest convenience stores. I zoom in on the photos and examine them closely, looking for familiar faces, hoping to find some of the kids who were in my class in elementary school.
I think I remember each of the forty-two kids who were with me from first to ninth grade. Many dropped out along the way and others were sent to the asfuriyya, the bird house, which is what we called the special-ed school that was founded in the village when we were in fourth grade, and to which the idiots, the blind, the impaired—those who couldn’t get by—were sent. We knew nothing of special education, but we knew that whoever was sent to the asfuriyya was messed up, to be avoided, not to be played with, and if he should be found walking alone on the street then it was fine to yell at him and pelt him with tangerines. Sometimes I wonder what became of each of my forty-two classmates.
I know for a fact that one student in the class died, because I read about her on that same local news site. There was not much in the way of details in that article, no name, no cause of death, no comment from the police. The news on Tira’s local site is written for the people of Tira, and they are the only ones who know to read between the lines and understand what really happened—the chain of events, the names of the suspects and their motives. The only way of knowing what’s happening in Tira is to live in Tira.
Besides news sites I also look at Google Earth, at both satellite images and roads. I sit in front of the computer and move east across the globe, toward its middle, and with precise motions of my finger I approach home. Once properly positioned, I zoom in on Tira, infiltrating, from above, the streets, and, from the spot where I touch down, I navigate my way home.
I walk down the main street in our neighborhood, the way back from elementary school to home. Some of the houses have been renovated, some are newly built, old stores have been closed, and new ones have been opened in their place. The road is filled with kids dressed in the same blue uniform, backpacks on their shoulders, frozen in time as they walk with me back to their houses. The faces of the children are not clear enough to recognize and still I try to imagine their parents and I wonder if one of them was in my class. People don’t leave Tira, don’t abandon it. They don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s always the same families, same eyes, same skin color, same gaze, passed down in Tira from the war to the face-blurring cameras of Google.
I continue to stride along the main street, avoiding the dirt path that cuts away toward the cemetery. Most of the kids in the neighborhood used to take the shortcut and follow the dirt track through the graveyard, but I was scared. Even when I circled along the length of the outer wall, I’d mumble the Fatiha that my grandmother taught me to recite and that she promised would protect me from danger. I walked fast because I wanted to prove, perhaps to the neighborhood kids and perhaps to myself, that the graveyard shortcut wasn’t any shorter. And actually they weren’t rushing to get home, those kids from my class. They lingered in the graveyard, and I would beat them even if I took the long way at a stroll. I could hear the sounds of their laughter rolling through the cemetery wall, and I couldn’t understand how they dared to laugh. Were they not taught that laughter in a graveyard rouses the wrath of God? It took me a while to realize that they weren’t looking to shorten the distance home; they were just looking to get rid of me.
Did they want to get rid of me because I was the kid who reminded them of the homework we’d been given? The one who scolded them when they talked about girls? The one who refused to copy and refused to let others copy off him? The one who followed the teachers’ orders, never broke the rules, and freely reminded others of what the religion teacher had to say about the words they use, the wicked thoughts they think, the talk of the sex they’d seen in movies and the papers?
I only realized this on the first day of junior high. I had plotted out that day with the next-door neighbor’s kid, my best friend, who had sat next to me every day from kindergarten to the end of elementary school. In order to get o
ver the hump of the new experience, we ought to get to school first, I had said, to stand in line for morning calisthenics before anyone else. And with the first indication that we may head into class, we ought to run ahead and grab desks that are in front of the board so that we miss nothing of what is being taught, and we guarantee ourselves a joint desk—together, the two of us—with no strange kids from different neighborhoods and different schools coming between us. When the day came, I did everything alone: I stood in line alone, I went into class alone, I grabbed the good seats alone. My best friend had no need to rush I told him. I’ll do it all and secure the good seats for us. If one of the kids asks to sit next to me, at one of the two-person desks, I’ll tell him that the seat is taken and he should find himself someplace else. I remember the triumphant smile spread across my face, the giddy feeling that the plan I’d been rehearsing in my mind for weeks had succeeded. I remember the rest of the kids filing into class, most of them knowing who they wanted to sit with, snapping up the seats in pairs. And I remember the neighbor’s son walking into the class, looking at me with a smile, which only subsequently felt derisive, and sitting at a different desk, alongside a different student, who had not been in our elementary school and whom I had never seen before.
I was more upset with myself than with my best friend, fuming at my blindness, my inability to see and to properly interpret the other kids’ behavior. I spent three years in that junior high and was a good student. I got the best grades, didn’t cheat, didn’t let others cheat off me. I had no friends, nor did I not want any back then.
I kept taking the long way home, skirting the cemetery, circling around the dead. I walked around the graves of my maternal grandfather, my paternal grandmother, my two uncles, and my young cousin. My paternal grandfather was buried elsewhere, in the village in which he was born and killed, where there was a graveyard that is no longer. Twice a year, when we visited the cemetery all together, on Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, the graveyard was thronged with visitors and I was still afraid. My grandmother, who read the fear in my eyes, would say in a tone of wonder: “You’re scared of the dead? They aren’t scary at all. It’s the living you should be afraid of.”