by Sayed Kashua
In the opening chapter of his childhood I added sentences in Arabic that he never said. I told his future readers: “There are memories that are feelings, which cannot be expressed in any way but through body language or in the mother tongue, in the dialect and the accent and the cadence that cannot be re-created in a foreign language and perhaps not in the original, either. And therefore I shall write the following chapter in Arabic.” And I wrote a childhood story that the Member of Knesset never told. I told of the humiliation that he saw in his father’s eyes, even though all he said was that all of the men had been convened for a “meeting” in the school, a meeting in which the new rulers detailed the new rules. The MK did not protest, not over the Arabic that I put on his tongue and not the vow of revenge that I had him swear and not fulfill.
I never saw the MK’s book in stores, and I saw nothing about it in the papers. When I submitted the final manuscript, he paid me the remainder of my fee as we’d agreed upon and had me sign a document prepared by one of his children, whom I’d never met but was clearly a lawyer, stipulating that I had no rights or claims to the manuscript, along with a few more lines of legalese ensuring that I could not steal the MK’s life story. Two days after I submitted the book he called me to thank me for the wonderful work and told me that he had sent copies to several publishing houses and is convinced he will be hearing from them shortly and then he will decide which house will be the right one for his autobiography. He said nothing about the memories I had added.
Six months after leaving Jerusalem and moving to Illinois, I returned to the edited copy of his book, to the version marked up with Track Changes, and I went over the deletions and additions. I did that every now and again: even after the books had been sent to the presses and printed up, I continued to rework the lives, as saved in the memory of my computer.
Sometimes, as I reread, I regretted having donated pleasant childhood memories of mine to the stories of different clients, and at times I would read the versions of the edited files, take the cursor and put it over a memory I had added and choose the Reject Change icon, reclaiming the memory as my own. But it was too late. The final draft had already been sent to the clients and printed. The memory had become theirs and would never again be mine.
One day after looking through the MK’s altered childhood memories, I found a short article on a Hebrew news site announcing that the former Member of Knesset had passed away. There was no picture and no mention of a memoir; no one eulogized him and no one left any comments.
C
1
When I was a kid, the houses in the old immigrant neighborhood of Kfar Saba, a ten-minute walk from Meir Hospital, used to remind me of the houses in Tira. They didn’t look like the houses of the Jews, and those few that did have red-tile roofs seemed out of place, like the first red-tile homes in Tira had done in the eighties. “Bayt Karamid,” we’d say when we wanted to note the lavishness of a new house in the village—“a house with tiles”—even though those tiles generally just slanted over a balcony or were tented over a set of stairs leading to the front door.
“The Jews are confused,” my father used to say in the face of our excitement about the tiles. “Tiles are for snow. It never snows here, so why would we need tiles. All you get from having them are pigeons and their droppings.” And yet, when it came time to draw houses, nearly every single one of the kids in my elementary school class drew them with red-tile roofs. We never drew houses that resembled the houses in which we lived.
I pushed open the creaking metal gate on HaRav Kook Street and walked down the tiled path to a two-story house with peeling paint and exposed sections of gray cement. It was the sort of house that was built in a rush during the fifties, in the face of mass immigration, the sort of house about which my father would say when we drove through Kfar Saba: “This is where they put the Yemenites.” He would call the Aliya neighborhood, named for the act of Jewish immigration to Israel, the Alia Neighborhood and until a rather late age I thought it was named after an Arab woman, like Queen Alia of Jordan, since the Yemenites must have been Arabs.
It was close to eight in the morning when I called the landlady from the public phone in the hospital. “Hallo,” came the alert voice of an elderly woman, and I apologized for the early hour and told her that I had rented out the room over the internet and that I knew check-in was only in the afternoon, but I’d landed not long ago after a twenty-four-hour journey, and I wanted to see if, perhaps, I could arrive earlier.
“Of course, honey, we’re waiting for you,” the woman said. “Come whenever you like. I’m at home. You have the address, right?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I have it, thank you so much, really.”
My mother had arrived at the hospital at seven that morning accompanied by my little brother Mahmoud, who shook my hand hesitantly. Hamouda, we called him, and he was fifteen when I saw him last; now he’s twenty-nine, a father to a two-year-old girl and a nurse at a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. I wanted to hug him, my little brother, even though he no longer looked like the clumsy adolescent who I missed so dearly and only the bashful smile and the lowered eyes resembled the picture I had stored in my head.
My father remained asleep. I told them that he had woken up and asked for water and that he had said a few words, that his urine bag had filled toward morning and that the nurse had said that there’s a marked improvement in his condition and that there was no longer a need for oxygen. He’s still fatigued from the anesthesia and the pills and he should be allowed to recuperate and to awake in his own good time. “No visitors,” the Russian nurse, who finished her shift at 7:00 a.m., said. “Just immediate family and no more than two in the room at the same time. Preferably just one.”
“Alhamdulillah,” my mother said, praising God. Her hair was covered with a kerchief, and I couldn’t tell if she had become religious and when this may have happened. Was my father now also a believer?
“Have you had anything to eat?” she asked, as though I were a schoolboy just now back from studies.
“Yes,” I lied. “I ate in the café downstairs. A sandwich with feta cheese.”
“You have to come home,” she whispered, crying and nearly hugging me. “You must be dead tired. Go home, my son, go, take a shower, rest, sleep, have something to eat. There isn’t much in the house, but there’s fresh bread and labaneh and some salami in the fridge. Go home. I fixed up your bed, put new sheets on. Don’t be afraid, nothing will happen to you. I swear to you, nothing. Everything’s good. Everything’s okay. The village has changed. Everyone has their own troubles. No one’s interested in other people’s affairs. In the name of Allah, my sweet, go rest, go home, my son.”
“I can give you a ride,” my younger brother said and checked the time on his cell phone. “I’ve got time before my shift starts.”
“Thanks,” I replied. “It’s okay, though. I’m going to stay here a bit longer and then I’ll get a share taxi to Tira.”
“You sure?”
“A hundred percent,” I told him, and he clasped Dad’s hand for a second, checked the data on his graph, said he’d be back after his shift at the hospital, and made Mom swear that she’d update him about even the slightest change in his condition.
“Your father was afraid of dying without seeing you again,” my mother said once my brother left. “He would say that all the time.” I wanted to ask why, in that case, he never asked to see me during all those years and why she, my mother, never called to ask how I was doing.
“You have no shame,” she said. “You have no heart. We don’t even know your children. You prevented us from seeing our own grandchildren.” She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and only then did I notice how old she’d gotten. Wrinkles crowned her forehead and creased her neck, covering the backs of her hands and skin at her wrists.
And maybe she really did want me to come back. Maybe she did ask to see me, inquire whether I had kids, the kids that I told my father about for the
first time in a message shortly before boarding the flight to America. Maybe for fourteen years she begged and cried about not being able to endure the distance between her and her son, the longing lashing at her heart, and maybe it was my father who stood like a wall between us. She wasn’t afraid of him—that I always knew—but she loved him truly and fully and surely didn’t want her actions to cause him sorrow. At times I thought that my mother was the one who convinced my father to do the right thing, banishing me, chasing away the shame before it stuck to them for eternity, to all their children, tarnishing their names and ruining the future that she sought for them all. And maybe, I tried convincing myself, she preferred the pain of separation and distance simply because she knew it was in my best interest. Maybe she knew, like me, that any link to them and to Tira would only cause suffering to me and my wife, more severe even than that which accompanied the beginning of our relationship. My mother and father, like my wife and I, knew that there was nowhere for us to return to and that nothing would ever be restored to the way it was.
“Enough, Mom,” I said to her and for the first time since we met up yesterday I touched her shoulder and led her to the couch beneath the ICU window. “Please, don’t cry.”
“But now you are going home,” she stated determinedly, and I looked at my father, as though waiting for him to authorize the request. But he just lay there with his eyes shut, his face covered in two-day-old stubble, like the stubble he hadn’t shaved when my grandmother, his mother, died.
“Okay,” I told my mother, feeling smothered and wanting only to leave the ICU room. “How long will you be here?”
“All day, till night, I suppose.” She fished around inside her handbag and produced a key, the same key I remembered, only the key ring had changed, and it now was in the shape of a plastic square framing the Surat al-Fatihah. I tucked it into my pocket.
“Do not fear, my son,” she said. “No one remembers you anymore.”
2
I knocked weakly on the front door of the house on HaRav Kook Street in the Aliya neighborhood. The family name, Hadad, was etched at eye level into a slab of eucalyptus wood. I strained my ears, hoping to catch the sound of footsteps, confirming that my soft knocking had been heard by the old lady who had answered the phone fifteen minutes earlier. There was a bell hanging on the right side of the doorframe, but on account of the early hour and the chance that some members of the household may still be sleeping, I preferred not to ring it.
“Shalom,” Miriam said, introducing herself and smiling. She was younger than I’d expected, perhaps sixty, though I have never been able to guess people’s ages. “Are you Saeed?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied, and I was ready to answer all of the questions I suspected she might ask. Yes, I’m an Arab, and I am currently living in the United States with my wife and kids. My wife has a job there, a faculty position at one of the state universities, and I just got an emergency call from the family saying that my father’s in a life-threatening situation, so I got on the first flight I could and came to visit him here at Meir Hospital. Lung cancer, and yes, he’s okay, thank you. Where am I from? I won’t say Tira, because it makes no sense that a son of the village, situated a two-minute drive from the tenements, would choose to pay 150 shekels a night for a room that serves only one purpose, housing those who live far away and have loved ones in the hospital nearby. I’ll say I’m from up north and won’t have an answer when she asks, “So, why is your dad being treated here?” For there are perfectly respectable hospitals up north and Meir is not the sort of place that people go out of their way to get to, preferring it over more proximate hospitals.
But Miriam only said, “Welcome, Saeed. Come on in. I’ll show you the room, okay?” She stepped out and led me down a paved path that wound around the left side of the house. “See that?” she said, pointing, her Bank Hapoalim key chain in her hand. “That’s spearmint. Totally natural. You give it a bit of water and it grows on its own. You can pick as much as you want, okay?”
“Thank you.”
“There’s a fig tree over there that gives fruit the likes of which you’d never find in America. “If it was in season,” she added. “Too bad.”
“Here it is,” she said, standing in front of a brown door set in the middle of a west-facing room. She turned the lock twice and pushed open the door, which led to a chamber that was once an empty space between the pillars that held the second floor aloft. They used to build that way in Tira, too. Bayt ala a’mdan, they’d say of the raised houses that stood perched in the sky on giant concrete legs, and if nothing was built beneath them then they’d leave the space open for parking or kids’ games or family events.
“I set everything up for you. Sheets are fresh, towels aplenty, soap and shampoo in the bathroom. I put the Wi-Fi code on the fridge, and inside there’s some fresh milk. You must be tired. It’s a long flight from America, right? How long is it, twelve hours?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, honey, you probably want to get some sleep, so I won’t keep blabbering on, but if you want me to make you a cup of tea just say so, okay? And don’t be bashful, child, whatever you need just knock on the door. Me and my husband are pretty much home all day. Where do we have to go already? Okay, honey?”
“Very okay,” I thanked her, and she left.
It was more than I’d expected for 150 shekels a night.
A double bed with white sheets and blue embroidered trim, just like they have in Tira, and four pillows that the landlord tried to prop up against the headboard as they do in hotels. An old, twenty-one-inch television faced the bed. In the corner of the room there was a kitchenette and a small refrigerator, on the counter a microwave and an electric cooktop with two different-size elements. There were plates and a number of cups on the top shelf of the cabinet and a few basic cooking utensils on the bottom, two small pots, a frying pan, and silverware. There was a small table in the corner of the room with two simple wooden chairs. In the bathroom there was a shower stall with glass doors set nearly flush against the toilet and on the other end of the room a sink with a mirror in a white plastic frame.
I took off my shoes, freeing my feet from two days of bondage. I hadn’t wanted to take my shoes off in the hospital, releasing a stench into the room in which my father lay. I lay the trolley suitcase flat next to the bed and as I was trying to work the zipper around the bag I heard a knock at the door.
“Coming,” I said and went to open the door.
“I’m sorry for the disturbance,” Miriam said, standing with a glass of tea in one hand and a plate of ma’amul cookies in the other. “Don’t worry, I won’t bother you anymore. I promise. I just figured, why not bring him some tea. It helps after a long trip.”
“Thank you so much,” I said with a smile and took the tea and cookies, trying to still the tremor that had taken hold of me. “Enjoy,” she said and left, leaving me to shut the door and cry into the glass of tea, the color I remembered with the exact right amount of mint leaves floating at just the right level.
What the hell am I doing tearing up over some tea? What does this glass have that makes it seem like it might be the perfect glass of tea, and why is it that when I sip from it I can’t help but let the tears flow freely down my face?
3
I woke with a start. The time on my phone said four in the afternoon. I had no missed calls or new messages. My mother doesn’t have my number, and no one knows how to get a hold of me. She thinks I’m in Tira. She probably sent one of my brothers to go find me at home, and he could not locate me.
I’d saved my father’s cell number and had always made sure it was up-to-date, but I didn’t know if his phone was working while he was in the hospital. Nonetheless, I tried calling him with the app, with no success.
I knocked on the door to Miriam’s house. “I apologize for the disturbance,” I said when she answered, and I asked to use her phone. I was about to explain that I needed to call the hospital and that my phone was
American and that I had no way of using it in Israel and that I thought I’d buy a local SIM card but hadn’t had the chance, but Miriam just handed me the phone and said, “No disturbance whatsoever, honey. Of course, go ahead.”
I called the ICU number that appeared on the hospital website and after a few moments I heard an impatient voice snap: “Intensive care.”
“Hello,” I said and explained that I was the son of the man in Room 204. “I just wanted to ask—”
“He’s not in the ICU anymore,” the receptionist said and inquired of the colleague apparently beside her: ‘Where did we move the patient that was in two oh four? To the C wing of internal?’ He’s been moved to internal medicine, Wing C. I’m transferring you now.”
“Thank you,” I said to the receptionist even though I had not asked to be transferred, wanting only to confirm that he was still alive.
I hung up and thanked Miriam, who said “my pleasure” and added that it was a good sign if someone’s moved from the ICU to General Medicine, and may God keep him in good health.
I hadn’t eaten a thing since the strips of chicken breast and mashed potatoes that were served on the second leg of the flight from Paris to Tel Aviv, and even Miriam’s plate of ma’amul sat untouched on the table in my room. The time was just after eight in the morning on Monday in Illinois, and my phone showed no word from Palestine. She’s surely in the car now, I thought, and I won’t send her a distracting message while she’s driving. She’s probably already taken the kids to school and is now on the way to her office on campus. The weather app showed a 20 percent chance of snow, and I hoped that the kids had made it safely to school.