by Sayed Kashua
Through the waiting room’s glass window, I saw an ultra-Orthodox man smoking and speaking on a cell phone. I waited for him to finish his conversation and then I went outside.
“Can I have a cigarette, please?” I asked.
“Your first?” the religious man asked, smiling at me and propping a cigarette out of his red Marlboro box.
“Yes,” I said, and I didn’t know if he meant birth or cigarette. I tried smothering the cough of that inhalation as the religious man said that everything would be okay, God willing.
5
“I’m scared,” my father said once we were left alone and the nurses had shut off the overhead lights in the room.
“Of what?” I asked, surprised. I had never heard my father pair those two words together and was curious to hear what would follow.
“Scared of what?” I asked again.
“I’m scared,” he said slowly. “Scared to death.” His pale, unsmiling face didn’t flinch.
I was more prepared for my father’s death than for his fear. Now I know what sort of expression settles on the face of a man who fears death; now I know that all those interviewees who said they were not afraid were lying. They lied when they said that they’d fulfilled all of their desires, raised children, cradled grandchildren, and what else is there to aspire to? They were just trying to soothe themselves: if they didn’t fear death, it wouldn’t come for them, as though death were a dog with the ability to sense fear and attack.
“You’ve got nothing to be afraid of,” I stammered, mostly in order to break the silence in the room. But my father did not want to be comforted. “I’m scared”: it was just him stating a fact, telling me how it was, a glimpse at the truth, telling me that you, too, will be filled with fear. You will not be concerned or worried but truly afraid.
“But look, Dad,” I tried to say, “they moved you from the ICU to General Medicine. That’s good news.”
“This is where they put those who can’t get better.”
I protested, telling him this is not a hospice. There are patients of all different ages here.
“Can you bring me some water, please?” asked my father, who was still not allowed to get out of bed.
“Dad,” I called to him just as I had silently done over the past fourteen years.
“What, my son?” he answered.
I wanted to tell my father what I figured fathers want to hear about their sons, a story that I had prepared in advance, practiced, and repeated to myself. I told him that I owned a publishing house now that made pretty good money. We publish people’s memoirs and biographies and are hired by sons and daughters who buy our services as a present for their elderly parents, especially those who have incredible life stories that the children would like to see published in book form. I told my father that I send my employees to interview the clients and that this work takes up all of my time in America, that up until the moment the kids come back from school I am transcribing and editing people’s memoirs and that my wife has a doctorate in psychology and that she accepted a position from a large American university and that the kids go to the best schools and are very happy and have made lots of friends and learned the language and are now fully fluent in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Only we missed all of you the whole time over there, but you know, we can still change that, maybe. What do you say, Dad? Can I record you and then write your story? And if you don’t like it then I’ll toss it out, and no one will ever know.
You didn’t learn a thing from the woe that your writing has wrought?
I learned a lot of things, Dad. Ever since that cursed story I only write the truth. Nothing fabricated, I promise.
And back then it wasn’t the truth that you wrote?
So what do you say, Dad? I’ll record a bit until you get tired. Just tell me, and I’ll stop.
What do you want to record?
“I always start with the same question,” I told my father, peeling the cellophane wrapper from a new cassette. I inserted it and pressed Record.
“What’s your first memory?” I asked my father, setting the tape recorder on the food tray so that the microphone would be as close as possible to his mouth.
“I didn’t bring you here from America to talk about my first memory,” my father said. “Maybe it would be better to start with the last memory I have of you.”
I said nothing, and my father suddenly blurted out: “Why’d you come?” And I didn’t know if he meant why did I come to see him now or why did I come then, to Tira, on the day of the wedding.
Why’d you come?
On that day, too, he had placidly asked me the same question, disappointed that I’d showed up after he’d firmly told me not to show myself again in Tira or in the vicinity of the village. He was so opposed to the marriage with Palestine that he was willing to be the target of degradation, threats, gossip, and defamation, in both the cafés that he frequented and the mosques that he boycotted. “You think you’re doing something noble?” he spat at me when I arrived at the home, determined to marry her as some of the family’s representatives had demanded, claiming that this was a reasonable compromise according to the accepted norms. Once I showed up, in violation of my father’s dictates, there was no longer the option of regret. I had broken something and I would fix it. That is what I thought then and that is what I still think today.
“I came to be with you, Dad,” I told him. “I came to be with you.”
“Do you have pictures of the kids?” he asked.
“Yes. I do, but don’t tell anyone that I have, okay? I didn’t even show them to Mom.”
“Your secret will go with me to my grave,” he said and smiled for the first time that evening. I showed my father a series of pictures that I had curated on my phone, with the understanding that I might have to display them. I left only those that told a warm family story. He could flip through them himself, look at my smiling wife and kids. Granted, there were no photos of me and Palestine together with the kids, but that’s because someone had to take the photographs. My father examined the photos for many long moments and then asked what the little one’s name was and why his hair was curly, and he said it’s clear that he’s the little rascal. “Well, I don’t see all that well, and I don’t even remember what your wife looks like anymore. And the girl, she’s huge. Is she always this serious or does she smile sometimes? How old is she? Thirteen? She looks older.”
I told my father that my daughter was always the tallest kid in the class, that in America they measure height in feet and inches and that she’s six foot two, tall like her mother, around one meter, eighty-five. The youngest one is also the tallest in his kindergarten, and only the middle one is average height for his age.
“They already look American,” my father said. “I bet no over there knows where they’re from.”
“Yes,” I replied. “There it’s different.”
“When was the girl born?” my father said, asking the question that I had been rehearsing the answer to for all these years.
“She was born in December,” I said. “Just last month she had her thirteenth birthday.”
The eleventh of December, ten months after the wedding. That’s what Palestine and I—my wife and I—decided would be the birth date of our daughter, our firstborn, if we were asked to provide answers.
6
Dad.
What?
Should we record, Dad?
You say “dad” a lot.
It’s weird for me to address you aloud.
You’ve addressed me in silence?
Every day.
Do I respond?
Sometimes, yes.
I always respond.
I’m recording, okay?
Your tape recorder is on. You’re already recording.
Okay. When you get tired, let me know, okay, Dad?
I slept all day, maybe two days straight, strange that I’m passing the last days I have in sleep.
Don’t say that
.
Actually, what could be better than sleep.
Right, let’s start. So, what’s your first memory, Dad?
Not being able to remember.
Do you want me to stop?
No. My first memory is of not being able to remember. I wake up, not from sleep but from daydreaming, and I know that something awful has happened, but I can’t remember what, and your grandmother tells me: ‘Asem Allah alik, ya habibi, asem Allah alik.’ And she asks, ‘What’s the matter, ya habibi. What’s bothering you?’ And I can’t tell of the terrible thing I’ve forgotten, and I tell my mother that I can’t remember and am filled with pain.
How old were you?
Don’t know. Maybe four or five. To this day I don’t really know how old I am. It’s always been one year this way or that. Bring me some more water.
Sure. Sip it slowly. Are you tired, Dad?
I don’t know. I want a cigarette. Do you have one?
No.
Are you still lying?
What do you mean a cigarette? After a heart attack? Come on, Dad.
What will they do to me if I smoke in the room? What could they possibly do to me? It’s too late for me anyway.
Don’t say that.
You’re right. I won’t say it, and it isn’t true, either. It isn’t the heart that nearly killed me.
Dad!
I’m tired.
Okay, don’t worry. I’ll stop.
Keep recording. Maybe I’ll listen and you’ll tell me.
What? A bedtime story?
Make it a story with a happy end, okay?
What do you want me to tell you, Dad?
What is permitted and what is forbidden to tell a sick father.
May I say that I am a bit jealous of you, would like to be in your place, in your sickbed? May I beg my father to stay alive, because without him I’ll be more afraid and will have a harder time going to sleep? May I tell him that I need him, because despite the distance I still console myself with the fact that I can always run back to him if the situation worsens? May I tell him that I’m almost forty and that all I want is to sit in his lap in the driver’s seat, holding the wheel as we drive along the paths of the orchards that no longer exist? What can I tell him? That ever since I left I dream only of returning, that I need his approval, that I need him to promise me that everything will be okay if I go back to Tira, that it’s safe, like it once was—or like I want to remember it having been? Is it permissible to tell a sick father that I’m still scared at nights and that I’ll always wander between the house and the elementary school, afraid of getting lost?
That I miss the red loamy soil around the back of the house, especially in the spring, when it’s still moist. That I’m saddened for my children who have never dug into the sand, that the claylike earth has never slid beneath their fingernails as they look for earthworms. That they don’t know that the gecko doesn’t care if you cut off her tail and that she grows a new one to replace the old. Geckos are evil and may be killed, because they told on the Prophet Muhammad and revealed his hiding spot to the infidels who pursued him. And that snakes shed their skins in the spring, and you can play with the skin once it dries out a bit in the sun and where there are skins there are also snakes so you have to be careful.
I miss the chameleons. I’d watch them change colors on the tree and the concrete wall that separated our house from the neighbors’ house. I want to be stung again by the honeybees, which we tried to play with, putting some juice in a plastic bag and looking for bees among the sabras flowers. When we managed to catch one in the bag we would wait for it to turn the sugary juice into honey, but that never happened, and at times we were stung. I didn’t know if the bee realized that it would die then or if it was always surprised, not having intended on suicide. If stung, we’d have to pull out the stinger and rub the infected skin with onion, though some kids contended that the proper cure was rubbing a tomato on the surface of the bite. And wasps must be watched out for, because a wasp sting in a very sensitive area could kill you. If by chance you encountered a wasp you had to stand still and not move until it flew off. And you have to be mindful of leaves when picking figs because they can cause a rash, and if you pick the fruit before it’s ripe, you need to watch out for the thick white tree sap. The fig tree is blessed because it covered the nakedness of the son of God. And the pumpkin, too, is blessed because God sent it to cover the prophet Jonah when he was spit out naked onto the shore from the belly of the whale. I always wanted to ask the adults how it was that the fig leaves did not itch our forefather Adam and how it was that pumpkin flowers suddenly grew in the sandy soil of the shore, which everyone knows is too salty to produce plants. But I did not ask because I knew that every tree and every sort of soil would obey a direct order from God.
And the loquat mustn’t be picked when it’s still green, even though it’s good when it’s unripe, so long as it’s dipped in a bit of salt, which sticks to the skin, revealing a pleasant sour taste that burns the lips and the palate. The green almonds are also good to eat with salt, when the inner nut is still white and soft. And you have to watch out for the thorns when picking lemons and be sure to tear the right size branch off the lemon tree and strip the green layer off the wood, leaving it bare and white, and I’d know it was right if I heard the precise whistling sound I was looking for when I whipped the naked branch through the air. And then I had to stand straight, trying not to move, because if I moved and the branch did not strike my body at the right angle I’d have to get another stroke, even if the inaccurate one already hurt. So it was best to stand still and not move, and there was no sense in clenching your muscles, even though they couldn’t be relaxed even if you really wanted to, and the whistling branch burnt, and it took time for the pain to spread, and you felt a sort of flame across the skin, and a desire to rub it with your hand, but you couldn’t, and you had to wait for all of the blows to land on the body, and at first the skin was covered with red stripes, which turned purple the following day and green the day after that and then dark, and within seven days you could wear shorts again, but you didn’t have to.
Two months later, seated at the dorm room desk, I look at a new file, which I’d like to save as “Dad edited”:
My first memory is of not being able to remember. I wake up, not from sleep but from gazing, and I know that something awful has happened, but I can’t remember what, and your grandmother she tells me, “Asem Allah alik, ya habibi, asem Allah alik.” And she asks, “What’s the matter, ya habibi? What’s bothering you?” And I can’t tell of the terrible thing I’ve forgotten, and I tell my mother that I can’t remember and am filled with pain.
“My first memory is of a picture of your grandmother, sitting beneath two giant eucalyptus trees that I used to love to climb when she wasn’t looking. In my memory, she’s sitting along with a few of the women from the neighborhood and family, and they’re singing happy songs and cooking sweet awameh balls in big pots over orange flames from the wood of a lemon tree.”
D
1
During the nights of fitful sleep, I realized that I’d never managed to get over the jetlag, never managed to bridge the time difference between Jerusalem and Illinois. During those rare nights that my wife requested my presence in the family home, on the ground-floor couch, which we bought together from a secondhand site, it seemed to me that my sleep was seamless and serene, even though I generally spent the whole night awake hoping that Palestine might want to talk or might hug me in silence and stroke my hair until I fell asleep.
I’m the only one who calls my wife Palestine. Her parents gave her that name—Falasteen, in Arabic—because she was born on the thirtieth of March, five years after Land Day. In those days people still had faith in the PLO, in the Fedayeed, in the national struggle. Once she told me that she doesn’t remember anyone ever calling her by that name, that at home she was called Fofo, and in class Faula. Even the teachers preferred calling her Faula, like the flower, feari
ng the open eyes of the Ministry of Education supervisors and the prohibition against speaking of Palestine in the national school system.
Once we were married she changed her name officially to Faula, and at times, when her name was called at a hospital or a government institution, they dropped the single dot that differentiated the F and P sound and pronounced it Paula, like Ben-Gurion’s wife. She changed her family name to Hadad, and when our daughter was born I switched my family name, too, on my identity card.
I had known nothing of Palestine’s existence. She was a character in a short story, a very short story I had written. I had imagined the contours of her face and drew her features in my mind’s eye: the length of her neck; the shape of her black eyes; the curve of her eyelashes, which were draped in mascara; her eyebrows darkened with kohl. I described her dimples, which winked when she spoke and kissed, and her long hair, which fell across her shoulders. I imagined her hips and the perfect line they drew toward her pelvis. I described her proud breasts and nipples, which stood erect without fear. It was a wretched story that I wrote quickly before one of our Thursday night get-togethers at the bar. I was the only Arab reporter at that paper, the only one in the group, and anything I wrote was welcomed with compliments that I didn’t fully believe, unsure to what extent they were the truth or affirmative action. Those were different days, the days between Rabin’s murder and the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Despite the election-night loss to the Right, shortly after Rabin’s assassination there had been a sense that this was a temporary farce that would soon be corrected.
I wrote “Palestine” after learning in one of my literature classes about a writer who described his homeland as a woman and colonialism as masculine. I did not put much weight in what I had written; it was nothing more than a page from the desk of an amateur scribe, brought, out of a sense of duty, to a social evening. The story, written in less than an hour in my dorm room, was narrated in first person and about a high school student from Tira who on Independence Day sleeps with a girl whose name is Palestine. It was a wretched little piece, less than a thousand words long, full of clichés and descriptions of sex that I thought, because written by a conservative Arab, would be considered audacious by my friends. I wrote about how the love-struck student uses the compulsory holiday of Independence Day, which is forced upon him annually, in order to meet the object of his desire on the roof of the local high school in Tira, which they both attend, and there, under the flag that is flown once a year, the symbol of loyal citizenship, they first sleep together, losing their virginity, and, filled with shame and humiliation, they are filled with mournful regret. The story garnered praise from the other members of the group. “You have to publish this,” the paper’s TV critic, who every now and again wrote a poem no one understood, said. “You just have to,” he added and mentioned an acquaintance who could submit the story to the editors of the student magazine at Hebrew U.