Track Changes

by Sayed Kashua

  I handed him the page, torn out of my notebook.

  Two months later the journal printed my story. I remember how filled with joy I was at the sight of my name on the page, at the tender age of twenty-two, an Arab who writes in Hebrew. It was the real thing: not some article in the weekly fish wrap, but literature, the sort that only a chosen few are able to produce. This was a green light for dreams I had that up until then had not been put into motion. I was no longer bothered by the suspicions that I was being published or praised by my friends simply because they expected less of me, and that, perhaps, the simple fact of my being able to string together a few sentences in their language was perceived as a feat worthy of wonder. I was not bothered by the fact that I’d written a short story on the basis of a sentence I’d heard about the homeland as a woman. And I had completely forgotten that when I’d put my pen down I’d thought that it was shallow and predictable. I was simply happy, and I already dared to believe that I was to be counted among literary writers. Aside from my colleagues at the paper, my friends from the Thursday night writing crew, I didn’t know if there was anyone else who had read “Palestine.”

  Nonetheless, after my initial excitement, I was assaulted by angst and self-loathing. I imagined my teachers in the literature department making fun of me behind my back. I imagined the head of the department sitting in his office chuckling with the rest of the faculty about the Arab student who wants to be Anton Shammas, and in the end just winds up fucking the homeland in broken Hebrew beneath the blue-and-white flag.

  Then, after several weeks of not hearing a word from anyone about the story, I forgot about it entirely and my angst and sorrow died down, too. It was more than a year later that my father called me.

  “Did you write a story about Palestine?” he asked.

  It took me some time to comprehend the question and to remember and I answered with a prideful yes but was soon overcome with concern. After all, it was not for nothing that I didn’t tell my parents about the story or show them copies of the issue during my monthly visits to Tira. I had written about the alcohol consumed by both characters as they looked out at the landscape of their youth from the school rooftop, a landscape that was once a quilt of strawberry fields and fig trees now crowded with a rash of metal shops and garages, their signs advertising devoted service and reduced prices for Jewish customers in mistake-ridden Hebrew. The story I wrote was not for the residents of Tira, not in their language, not on their behalf, not in their names. I never once considered that it would reach Arab hands. And now, somehow, it had made its way into my father’s hands.

  “It’s just a story.” I tried to soothe my father, to convey that I was still the same good kid that he had sent to Jerusalem, capable of imagining and writing but certainly not of the acts described in the story.

  “A story it is,” my father said, and I could sense the concern in his voice, though he kept his cool. “You never wrote this story, though,” he went on. “Do you understand? You have nothing to do with this story, if anyone asks. And you watch out for yourself over there. For now, it’s best that you sleep over at the house of a friend that you trust, until I say otherwise. You understand?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “And no matter what, don’t go anywhere near Tira.”

  2

  Palestine had a suitcase, old but well crafted, a top-of-the-line brand, and she brought it with her when she left Tira. Sometimes I wondered if she had ever been out of the country before we were married, maybe on a honeymoon somewhere in Europe or maybe in America before we flew over there together for the first time.

  She was the only one in the family who had a passport, but it was expired. She brought that, too, with her from Tira when we left, but she forgot her identity card and later we had to have a new one issued. She told the clerk at the Ministry of Interior in Jerusalem that she’d lost her old identity card and that she wanted to have a new one made and for her name to be changed, both first and last. When we started planning our trip to Illinois, she insisted that her old suitcase was perfectly fine, and there was no reason to get a new one. The kids and I had never been out of the country, and the few trips we’d taken down to Eilat or the Dead Sea or Tiberias, we’d done with gym bags of different sizes.

  When you leave the country, though, you need a suitcase. So we bought four new pieces of luggage, two large cases—for me and my daughter—and two small ones for the boys. The suitcase sizes were determined by volume of memories, which was determined by age: the little ones grow fast and gain at least a size each year, so other than some summer clothes, which we knew they would need for the first few weeks, we decided to buy everything else there, when we got to America. We were told clothes are cheap there and anyway we knew they’d need a whole new wardrobe, suitable clothing for the long, hard winters they had yet to experience.

  “You can only take two toys,” I told my son, who was then three. And in order to verify that he understood I repeated myself, this time in Hebrew: “Only two, cutie,” I said and promised him I would buy him whatever he needed when we got to America. “There are giant toy stores there,” I said, and I accompanied the statement with hand gestures, working to convince him or perhaps myself—so we’d know we were going somewhere deserving and better. My little son cried, not understanding why he had to abandon his old toys and why we were leaving. His older brother, who shared a room with him, didn’t say a word as he packed his little suitcase. “Take only the things that you really, really love,” I told him, and he nodded and said that he didn’t need any toys and that there was room in his suitcase for his brother to bring two more.

  My daughter asked that she be left alone, and she locked her bedroom door. She didn’t need help from anyone she said and would be fine on her own. Everything happened so fast that summer. It had been a year since my wife had received the offer and, left with no other choice, I had consented to go. Then during the final weeks before departure, still very much unready, we decided to move the departure date up by two months. I could not wait until mid-August to leave Jerusalem.

  That summer fires ringed the city. Smoke spiraled up from the Jerusalem Forest every day and curtained off the sky. Three teenage settlers were kidnapped. The percussion of helicopter propellers and the wails of ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars reverberated throughout the city. Somehow, it was the fires that bothered me the most. I was scared that the flames would grab hold of the buildings in the neighborhood and burn them down and there would be nowhere to run to and no way to defend ourselves from the advancing heat. I’ve never had such a fear of fire as during those final days in Jerusalem. The news reports said it was Arabs who had started them. Everyone knew it was Arabs, even though in most cases it turned out that the fires were sparked by hikers or kids in summer camps of one sort or another. But that never changed a thing and that summer especially it was clear that the Arabs were guilty.

  Every day, whenever the secretary in the newsroom saw me, she started swishing spit around her mouth and then hurled it into the garbage. The reporters sent in their copy and I kept their barbed anti-Arab prose intact, didn’t ask questions, didn’t ask for facts to be checked. The education reporter filed stories from the abducted teens’ schools; the police beat reporter wrote of the danger of the Arab residents of the city; and the city hall reporter told of the sanctions planned against the vendors and residents of those neighborhoods. The pictures of the three boys were the only ones we ran on the pages of the two editions that I edited, from their abduction to their discovery. And once they were found, lifeless, the fires only intensified, the smoke thickening over the Kiryat HaYovel neighborhood. That summer is when I first realized that I wanted to leave even more than Palestine. Even though I knew that there, once we arrived, she would surely set new rules to our joined lives. Sometimes I hoped that there, aided by distance and isolation, we’d start over again, as though we’d just met for the first time. Maybe I’d send her flowers or love letters and with
time would invite her out to a movie or to dinner.

  On the day of the funerals for the three boys, Palestine stayed home from work with the kids, who, out of a fear of Jewish vengeance, were not permitted to leave the house. I had no choice but to go to the newsroom and edit the articles about the funerals, the interviews with the bereaved families, the neighbors, the friends from school and the rabbis, and the comforting feeling of unity that settled over the nation in its mourning. A deep, honest, and pure mourning, to which strangers are not admitted and the essence of which they will never know.

  On Wednesday morning, the day after the funerals and the subsequent stalking of Arab workers on the streets of Jerusalem, there was a news report of a suspected kidnapping of an Arab child in one of the city’s southern neighborhoods. My wife said that maybe we should move up our flights. After all, the academic year was finished, all the tests had been given, and the final grades could always be uploaded into the computer system from the United States. Before heading off to work that day I bought bread and eggs at the local grocery store, and Palestine stayed home and promised to lock the door and bolt the shutters. I had that week’s issue of the paper and then two more issues to put to bed and my tenure as editor was over. I’d already given advance notice. The radio news in the car reported that a charred body had been found in the Jerusalem Forest, and even though on that day there was no smoke and the sky was clearer than it had been all summer, the charred scent rising up in my nostrils was redolent of hair and skin, muscles and bones, intestines and a heart.

  I felt repulsed by that hideous glimmer of hope. The hope that this human sacrifice would redeem the souls of my children. The secretary greeted me as always with an audible spit into the trash can, and the janitor from East Jerusalem who cleans up after her did not show up to work on that day. Here, now they’ve burnt a live child, and maybe that will slake their thirst for revenge and put things back on the track of routine brutality, the rules of which we already know. I need to hold on for just two more issues after this week and then we’ll have two weeks to pack, get organized, and get out of here.

  The police reporter filed a news piece stating that the Arab boy had been killed by members of his own family.

  According to the information he submitted, the Arab boy was a homosexual who had been abused in the past by his family members, who had tried in the past to abduct him on several occasions. The police started an investigation, looking for the family members who had burnt the child while still alive.

  During those torrid days it was not possible to ask questions or poke holes in the veracity of the reports. This version of events was being written up by all of the police reporters, and it was the version the unified public believed in. The publisher, in a rather unusual move, showed up in the newsroom to make sure that I ran the piece about the murder actually being the result of an honor killing. In truth, he knew I would run it; he just wanted to make sure that I felt the scorn he had for me. I read through the piece, which was given top real estate on the front page, and I chose a picture that had been distributed by the police spokespeople, in which a Palestinian youth, maybe twelve years old, was depicted in a selfie that had served as a profile picture for Facebook or some other site, his hair shaved on the sides, his face delicate and pretty. That was the story that was sent to print on the front page of the Jerusalem weekly paper on Thursday night and distributed to stores on Friday morning.

  With only three issues of the paper left to produce, I worked with the office door shut. No one came in, not even the janitor, who used to empty the trash and share a cigarette with me. Maybe he was afraid and maybe he was tired of the routine. I was afraid and I was tired of it. I edited the issue: the teens’ funerals, the pictures of their smiling faces in school yards and on field trips, and a gay Arab boy who must have known how to dance the debka, or not and maybe would have joined the circles of dancers and maybe would have stood off to the side, watching and learning. I don’t know how to dance. How is it possible that I never learned to do the debka? How is it that all of the boys, already in middle school, danced at the weddings and knew how to link arms and stamp feet and I never managed to learn the rhythm of the circle, which leg to raise when, how to memorize the moves, when to dip with the knees. How is it that I never managed to dance with my chest puffed out, my movements sure? My cousins would ask me how I intended to dance the traditional dance with the bride, and they laughed that I wouldn’t know what to do and they didn’t imagine that I wouldn’t have a wedding or a party or a song or a circle for the debka. My kids don’t know how to dance, and they don’t even know that they don’t know. They don’t know any wedding songs or how threatening they can sometimes sound. Wedding singers are always men and they are capable of saying some bold things about women. The women are always sashaying to the well to draw water. They are beautiful and noble, and the pitchers sit steady atop their heads. And the men are always strong hunters. The women are gazelles; the men are lions. Palestine was surely a gazelle and her husband surely knew how to dance and had no fear of the wedding songs and their bold verses of praise for women.

  I left the office only when I knew there was no secretary waiting outside the door, no publisher, no advertising salespeople. And rather than go home I drove to the Malha Mall, my head down, avoiding eye contact with passersby, knowing that their gazes were clouded with hatred and fear. I had no desire to be antagonized by their identity-probing stares, as they tried to figure out whether or not I was one of them or the enemy. All I wanted was to buy four pieces of luggage, two big, two small.

  On the morning that a yellow flame flared from the child in the Jerusalem Forest, Palestine informed me of the flight change. “We’ll leave tomorrow,” she said. “There are seats available because people are canceling flights, and we’ll have to pay a two-hundred-dollar fine.”

  Tomorrow? And what will we do with the apartment? The car? I need the money, even though it isn’t worth all that much. But I’ll just have to leave it at a used car lot. I have no choice. We won’t have time to store the furniture in the storage unit that I intended to rent for three years, for chances are we won’t be back. Palestine will surely find a way to stay in America, and she’ll allow me to stay with her and not push me away from the children. She wouldn’t do that to me.

  The kids will be fine.

  Kids grow accustomed to any situation.

  And the furniture?

  Don’t know.

  And the car?

  And the apartment?

  We’ll leave it all and run. We’ll tell the owner of the apartment that we moved up our trip. We’ll leave him everything, and he’ll do what he pleases. If he’s nice, he’ll reimburse us in some way and maybe the new tenants will want some of the stuff.

  We’ll shut off our electricity.

  We’ll empty the fridge.

  One suitcase per person, it’ll suffice.

  We’ll disconnect the gas.

  The phone.

  The main waterline.

  We’ll call the apartment owner in the morning and discuss the furniture with him, maybe he’ll keep it for us?

  And the toys.

  Two toys for each of them will do.

  The next morning, I did not go into the newsroom, and no one called to see how I was doing.

  3

  Ever since arriving here I shave only once a week, on Friday mornings, as opposed to every other day the way I used to do in Jerusalem. My father used to shave every morning using a green shaving gel that he rubbed into his left and right cheek. Every morning he’d heat water for coffee in a tin pot and before the water came to a boil he’d splash a bit into a plastic cup into which he’d dip his wood-handled shaving brush. When the brush bristles were wet and softened he would rub them across his short scruff in a precise circular motion, and the green cream would turn into a white foam. He would stiffen his lips and draw the brush up under his nose and then relax his lips so that the foam wouldn’t go into his mouth.

/>   Dad’s razors were thin, rectangular, double-edged, and he would peel off the white wrapper every morning and place the blade in a stick with a jagged wheel at the bottom; a clockwise turning of the wheel would open the doors of the razor head and once the blade had been stably inserted, the wheel was turned in the opposite direction and the doors held the razor in place, so that the double-edged razor stuck out just the right amount on either side.

  He’d place his left forefinger above his cheekbone, stretching the skin upward, knowing exactly where he’d place the blade so that his sideburns would be at just the right height, and then he’d drag the blade, in long and steady strokes, toward his chin. Then he’d turn the razor head around and pull in the other direction. After going both ways, on either side of his face, he’d shake the razor in the cup of warm water and do it again. Straight, precise lines, which do not require more than one pass on the already revealed skin, free of soap and stubble, which with the years went from black to white.