Track Changes

by Sayed Kashua

  On the computer I advanced through the streets until I arrived at my house and saw a car parked out front. That was surely my father’s car. I was so happy and I hoped that he was awake, because I didn’t want to have to wait to show him my perfect score in math. I tried to enter the house, prying my fingers apart on the touch pad, but I couldn’t go beyond the porch and the front door. I almost yelled out: “Dad,” “Mom.” But no door was opened.

  5

  When I pick up my kids from school I try to read the expressions on their faces. Are they happy? Are they glad to see me? Did they wait all day long till the moment that they were allowed to go home, as I had done at their age? And do they have friends here? After all, we’ve been in the States for two years and they’ve never once invited a friend to their house or been invited to the home of one of their classmates. “Yes,” they always say in answer to my questions and never offer further details. I had hoped things would be different here.

  At night, after the boys have gone to sleep, I leave the house. Only rarely does my wife ask me to stay. She’ll say she’s afraid and maybe suggest having a glass of wine. And then we sleep together, and afterward I retreat to the downstairs couch for some shut-eye. But usually, once the two boys are bathed and in bed and have fallen asleep, I check to see that they’re breathing and then I bundle up and take the bus back to the student dorms.

  The bus goes through the center of town, and I watch the people in the few bars and restaurants clustered between the city building and the train station. Sometimes I toy with the idea of getting off the bus and having a few pints of beer before continuing on my way. I did that a few times during our first few months here, but soon enough I realized that I wouldn’t have a regular hangout here as I’d hoped. The bartenders are very polite, but other than asking if they can get you anything, they don’t speak to the customers—at least not the foreign ones. It seems to me that the locals know one another, smile at each other, and ask, “How are you this evening?” But they never really intend on having a conversation.

  Sometimes I imagine myself stepping off the bus with ease, full of self-confidence. I saw a show on TV here with an expert who explained that one needn’t be particularly good-looking or rich when trying to pick up a woman at a bar, but that instead it was all about self-confidence and the way it’s broadcast in body language, facial expressions, and gazes. “How are you doing this evening, ma’am?” I imagine myself asking the young lady on the seat beside me. She will find out the truth soon enough, but by then she’ll want me specifically for my lack of confidence and gloominess, my lonesomeness and longing. She’ll confide in me that she can’t stand all those überconfident dudes and that she, too, is a bit lost, and it’s not entirely clear to her what she wants out of life. She’ll be local and she’ll teach me the local mores, slowly revealing all of the city’s hidden treasures, the secrets that no foreigner has been exposed to. I’ll know where to get the best food, where the best music is being played, the hidden spots that people like us hang out in. She’ll help me improve my English and after a few weeks of hesitancy, she’ll no longer be bashful and will start on my accent. I’ll be her lover from a distant land, the one who will teach her about worlds she’s only heard about on the news. We’ll harbor a shared pain over our unspoken acknowledgement that nothing will come of this relationship, since we belong to different worlds, and the future is so uncertain. It will be a temporary and impossible relationship that will suit both of us at this stage of our lives. Knowing that it’s not forever, we’ll love each other passionately, until she realizes what it is she wants to do with her life—and until I am forgiven by Palestine.

  In Jerusalem I had a regular watering hole, and when I look out the window of the bus on the way to the apartment dorms, at the yellow lights of the local bars, I see it. I first went there at the age of twenty-one, just as I was starting to publish articles in the local papers as a freelancer. I joined a crew of veteran reporters, who were in the habit of parting with the workweek over a few rounds of drinks, a pause before moving on to new topics and new articles.

  We would meet up at eleven at night and we’d head home just as the delivery boys started their routes, so that we’d hit the doorstep after the newspaper had. I couldn’t get into bed until I’d looked it over, found my articles, made sure the heads and subheads were right, the pictures perfect. First, I’d look and see if the article had a reefer on the front page and then the page number and the amount of real estate that the piece had been given. I couldn’t hope for any better weekends than when my name was scrawled on the front page, proof that I’d done a good job, a sort of appreciation for labor performed in a field in which the pay was never a real draw.

  None of those veterans, besides me, stayed on for long at the paper and none continued coming to the bar, which changed ownerships and names. At times I’d see them reporting from the field or commentating in the TV news studios, occasionally finding their bylines in the national newspapers. Those who left journalism became politicians and advisers. I became the oldest staff reporter in the newsroom of the local paper, which, in the age of internet and satellite TV, had lost all of its luster. At the bar, too, I was the oldest of the regulars.

  Eventually the paper became a freebie that Jerusalemites consented to take home mostly for the ads and the coupons provided by local businesses. When I started working there our offices were in the center of town, a few feet from Zion Square. By the time I left, the offices had moved to an industrial area south of the city, the paper surrounded by garages, workshops, and small businesses. There was no longer a need for many reporters and so the office space was slashed, too. Email enabled reporters to work from home, so there was no need for a newsroom or computer desks for the few remaining reporters. The digital camera made the darkroom redundant, and the graphics programs on the computers made the editing room unnecessary.

  The paper, which was once full of life and packed with journalists who thought they’d change the world, was, over the years, drained of content, and the advertising section swelled as the newsroom shrank. It was then that I was offered the position of editor in chief. There was no pay raise offered with the job, but the publisher knew I’d take the offer because I had nowhere else to go. The young reporters, mostly journalism majors who thought it would be a good stepping-stone on the path to TV fame, were drafted personally by the publisher. Every now and again I’d discover that the education reporter was the daughter of the owner of some famous hotel in the city or that the town hall reporter was a communications major whose uncle was the owner of a wedding hall that recently bought two pairs of ongoing full-page ads in the paper. My role as editor was simply to paginate and to make order among the weak roll of articles, most of which were simply copied from PR firms’ press releases.

  On Thursday nights I’d put the paper to bed, send the files to Tel Aviv for printing, and head out to have my weekly beers alone at the usual bar, which I made sure to leave before eleven, because who even goes out before then?

  6

  That night, four years before we left the country, after putting the paper to bed, I had four pints of Goldstar and a shot of Jameson. That was the usual lineup during those days. I knew that if I was caught driving I’d lose my license, but I continued taking the car from the newsroom to a parking lot near the bar in the center of town and was never stopped or caught on the way home. Word was that the police were set up with breathalyzers and such only on Friday and Saturday nights, when the kids went out to party, and I knew that the chances of them stopping someone my age with a car seat in the back were slim. And yet, that night, right after starting up the car, still trying to navigate my way out of the parking spot, I was blinded by headlights.

  “License and registration, please,” a man in uniform and an Arabic accent said.

  I handed over the papers and added a tfadal and a smile, hoping that Arab solidarity would foster a certain leniency. Later on, I learned from the police report that he was a
volunteer from East Jerusalem. He asked me to exhale into this plastic contraption and then had me switch off the ignition and hand him the keys. Speaking to me in his broken Hebrew, he asked that I accompany him to the car around the corner and said that this was just an initial test, an indication, and that I’d have to undergo a more serious examination, which would officially determine if I was guilty of drinking and driving. He passed me on to a different police officer, also an Arab. I could tell that he was from one of the villages in the Galilee, but I couldn’t tell if he was Druze, Christian, or Muslim. It was a clear and cold Jerusalem night and after a long battery of tests I felt like I was going to freeze. The Druze/Christian/Muslim cop was dressed warmly in a police jacket. He spoke to me solely in Hebrew, which was better than the volunteer’s, and I responded in Arabic. I asked him to do me a favor, told him that I was the editor of a local Jerusalem paper, a father to young children, but he said there was nothing he could do once the breathalyzer results showed a very high blood alcohol content. After filling out the forms, he took my license, gave me back the keys, and handed me a sheath of paperwork, informing me that I had to report to the desk officer at the central police precinct the following morning.

  The officer on duty the next day was a Jew. He told me, after looking at my license: “Come back for it in thirty days.” Then he served me with a summons to traffic court in Givat Shaul. “You ought to get a lawyer,” he said, noting that he had to impound the vehicle for at least thirty days, but he asked, nonetheless, “Is there a reason you can state why I should, perhaps, not impound the car?”

  I told the officer that I have children and that my wife works at the university, and it’s the only car we have. He handed back the keys, told me I could drive the car home, that he would give me half an hour before the license suspension went into effect but that if I was caught on the road afterward it would mean immediate arrest. I thanked him.

  I hired a lawyer, who called me back two months later to tell me that he’d reached a deal with the prosecution: an eleven-month suspension, a two-thousand-shekel fine, and sixty hours of community service.

  Several days later I deposited my license with the court, paid the fine at the postal bank, and presented myself to the probation officer, who would decide on the nature of the community service. In a conversation with the officer I told him that I was the editor of a newspaper, that I’d studied literature in college, and that I don’t know how to do a thing besides write and edit. He asked if I know how to tell a story, and I said yes, even though the only story I’d ever had published was less than one page long and had been printed in a college magazine many years before.

  “In Hebrew or Arabic?” the officer inquired.

  “Hebrew,” I responded.

  He shuffled through my papers and then asked if I’d like to volunteer at an old-age home in Jerusalem, even though it was not a suggestion or a form of volunteerism.

  He gave me the number of the home’s culture and entertainment coordinator, Batya, and said I should be in touch with her. “She’ll be in charge of you,” the officer said, adding that she’ll be the one to sign off on the hours I’ve put in, ensuring that I complete the sixty hours of obligatory community service as stipulated in the plea bargain agreement.

  Batya said she was very happy that I’d decided to volunteer at the Founders Home, a top-notch establishment that offers its residents an array of cultural enrichment opportunities. She said that they have been looking for a while now for someone to teach creative writing classes to the residents. She suggested an hour a week, and I said that an hour is too short for a writing class and suggested two hours, mostly because I wanted to pay my dues and be done with the punishment as soon as possible.

  We settled on Sunday, the quietest day at the paper, at four in the afternoon, so that the residents would have enough time to get organized for dinner once class was dismissed. That is how I found my first clients: the writing class drew much interest but very little willingness to write. Mostly the residents wanted to tell me things that seemed unique or worthy and hoped that I would write these vignettes down for them. Others would write a few lines, read them aloud, and then crumple the paper and continue the story aloud. All of them felt that they had memories that were unique and rare, and they all wanted to see their stories in print.

  Some of the residents came to the writing workshop with books in which they were mentioned or quoted, books that memorialized the founding of certain kibbutzim or moshavim or books published by the history presses of the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center or the Ministry of Defense, which were considered the most prestigious. The residents whose names were mentioned in those pages were very proud indeed, even if the mention came only in the form of small print in the bibliography, in which, say, the names of an entire company were written out.

  I wrote the life stories of those who were not featured in any book, those who felt wronged by omission, those whose stories were remarkably similar to the others, covering the same well-trod ground of suffering and adversity and, in its wake, revival and success. All of them felt heroic and victimized, no less so than the heroes and victims immortalized in the official memorial books.

  During the first few weeks of community service a resident approached me and introduced himself as a former fighter in the pre-state Palmach militia and said that if I were to hear the stories he had to tell, “Well, then,” I’d realize that this was material that had yet to be put to paper, and if it were to be, it was guaranteed to be a bestseller. He had always wanted to tell the story of his life but had never had the time. For the stories that are unfurled in the memoir 1948, with all due respect to Yoram Kaniuk, whom he hadn’t read but who, he knew, had hardly taken part in the decisive battles of the war and, well, if he wrote the way he shot then he really was in a bad way, amounted to naught when compared to the tales he had to tell. The former militiaman offered to pay me for the writing of his memoir, and a week later I started recording him talking about the dangers facing the fragile Jewish settlement in the pre-state days and the spirit of heroism among the young fighters in the face of Arab hostility and banditry. He promised to keep the arrangement between us a secret, but apparently he did no such thing, because, within days, I was asked by the daughter of one of the residents, a native of Baghdad, if I would consider writing his, too, which was, in her opinion, no less fascinating and centered on his immigration to Israel. Her father, she said, was a humble and bashful man, but his children have always felt that his story is worthy of professional documentation and distribution and that now, with him in an old-age home and time being something he had in abundance, he had been persuaded to work with me on a memoir so that the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren will know from whence they’ve come and have a sense of the hardships endured by their forebears in order to bequeath them this land.

  I didn’t do much in the way of editing those first two life accounts, aside from keeping the chronology in order and underscoring the tales that seemed most important to the clients. I didn’t yet dare tinker with the childhoods of the protagonists, didn’t yet edit their memories. I wrote, as I’d been tasked, about the Palmach militiamen and about Baghdad, about riches that had been abandoned and riots that had menaced, the trials of immigration, acclimatization, and success. I did not ask these first clients about their earliest memory or about what they tell themselves before shutting their eyes at night. Those habits started with the third book, which was also commissioned by one of the participants in the workshop, after our final class, once I no longer owed the Founders Home anything. This client didn’t want her own life story transcribed but rather that of her son, who had fallen during a war. She handed me photos—some in black and white and some in color—and asked that I incorporate them into the narrative. She said that she would cover the costs of printing the book and that ten copies would suffice, and she told me about her son, as she remembered him. At one point she said, she could recall every single day spent w
ith her son. But now she had started to forget—and she was terrified that if she forgot everything, her son would truly and terminally be dead.

  She told me all she could remember, and yet the cassette was hardly filled. Mostly she recalled her son when he was little, before he was drafted. The events that led to his death were familiar to her only from the reports on the radio and the TV.

  Upon her request, I wrote about her dead son in rhyming verse, gleaning inspiration from the photos, from what appeared to be his delicate demeanor, even when he was in uniform and armed with a rifle. It was a short book, like a children’s book, with pictures of her son from one to twenty-one accompanied by poems that described his mother’s memories and, for the first time, those that I invented.

  I gave him a childhood love, whom I called Merav, a beautiful and bashful girl. And in this book, Merav insisted that her name be written with no i. And she would get angry when people were confused about that, but the son never made that sort of mistake, though he insisted on calling her Meiravi, “with a bunch of i’s.”

  He had a wonderful smile that all of his friends recalled.

  He flashed that smile in one of the poems, which described the day he fell off the swing in kindergarten, and his father came toward him with a handkerchief, and he didn’t even notice that his father had been behind him talking to the kindergarten teacher.