by Sayed Kashua
I would watch him and learn, and he would smile at me from the sink mirror, which was fixed on the back of the living room wall. Sometimes he would wink at me in the mirror and momentarily break the spell of the blade’s motion. He would wash his face with two cupped hands, holding an impressive amount of water, like those cowboys in the movies who would wash off outside the ranch, always knowing how to curve and seal their heavy hands in just the right way, filling them with water from a barrel. Using the towel that hung from his shoulder and never fell even when he bent over, my father would dry his face and look in the mirror, and then wipe his ears and neck, making sure that no wayward shaving cream had gotten stuck there, and none ever did.
When I stand before the mirror in my dorm on Friday morning, with a razor that can’t cut the skin and a foam that is produced with the pressing of a button and requires no lathering, my heart aches that my boys are not watching me. Maybe I’ll bring them here one day, and I’ll shave with the door open, so that they can peek, because there are no longer mirrors and sinks in open spaces, made for guests to be able to wash their hands after meals without entering the hosts’ bathrooms. Up until then I’ll have to work on my hesitant motions, practicing long strokes with the blade, raising my head, pulling my skin taut, being decisive, moving the razor in sharp straight lines, even if it hurts a bit.
I want to take the kids for a long drive in the car. Maybe Palestine will come, too. It will start getting warmer soon, and I’ll take a look at the map and go for a drive with the kids, like my family used to do when we were young. Mom and Dad in the front seat and us kids in the back—packed in and fighting over who will sit by the window and who will be squished in the middle—asking Dad to go fast and Mom begging him to slow down. And he would say this car couldn’t go fast even if I wanted it to, and the windows would be open, a strong, pleasant wind blowing in our faces.
I will have to take a drive with the kids. Maybe we’ll find za’atar growing in Illinois, and we’ll forage and fill up sacks. During our excursions with Dad, up into the hills where the herb grows, we’d always be on the lookout for the nature “insbektors,” as the adults pronounced it, though I never once saw them. “The insbektors will confiscate the za’atar if they catch us,” the adults would warn. “Which is why we need to be careful, because sometimes they fine and even arrest Arabs, depending on the amount of za’atar they are able to seize.” I loved the way the za’atar grew between the rocks, but I was very scared that the insbektors would seize my haul. I was scared and my father always said I shouldn’t be scared, that the za’atar was ours and that no insbektor could tell us what was ours and what was not, what we could eat and what we could not. The za’atar was here before them and it would be here after them, and the za’atar would stop growing if it saw it was no longer wanted. The za’atar was ours; it always was. And it had to be picked in season and prepared right away, dried and mixed with sesame and sumac, otherwise it wouldn’t taste good. My kids don’t know the taste of bread baked with za’atar leaves on winter mornings but maybe if we find some za’atar here in Illinois, I’ll find a recipe and make them that sort of bread.
On the way to the hills my father would tell stories that I loved to hear. He’d point to the trunks of the eucalyptus trees that my mother’s uncle crashed into and the village of Jisr a-Zarka that was turned into a prison by the coastal highway. “Look,” he’d say. “The only pretty village still left on the coast and look at what they did to it.” He’d point to Damon Prison, where he sat for a full year, and tell us how cold it was there, though it was not from his lips that I heard how they would seat him on glass Coca-Cola bottles during interrogation and not from him that I heard how they’d stretch his body over a chair, hands tied to his feet all night long. “Look, there’s the Damon,” he would say. “Best friends I ever had were in there, best ones I’ll ever have.”
Later on, once we were in middle school, we no longer went za’atar picking, maybe because the hills were gone, and the za’atar was now grown in hothouses and was different—bigger, with wider and sadder leaves and with the taste of decay.
Yes, I must go out on a drive with the kids. I’ll check where people take their kids around here and we’ll go there. Maybe Palestine will join, and if the weather is good I’ll open the windows so that the air whips our faces. I’ll want to tell them a story during the drive, a story that they won’t forget, to point at something and unravel a yarn, but I won’t find a single memory to unravel.
4
I always arrive ahead of time when picking the kids up from school. First, I wait for my eldest on a side street close to her junior high, even though there’s plenty of parking, owing to the fact that I am there early and our car is the smallest and cheapest of all the family cars. My daughter has never said anything, but I prefer to wait for her here, away from the other students, so that the car does not embarrass her. When I ask her if she’s getting along okay, she nods.
When she was little, the only stories my daughter heard were read from Hebrew books at bedtime. Sometimes I told her about kings and pretty princesses and knights galloping on fearsome horses, scabbards filled with golden swords. But when she went to kindergarten and started to ask questions about our lives, we taught her that not every question has an answer and that the past is sometimes best forgotten in the service of the future. And when the kids in her class would talk about their grandmas and grandpas we told her that not everyone has those. During her first Holocaust Remembrance Day, she decided that her grandma and grandpa had been killed in the Holocaust, and we said nothing. And on Memorial Day, a short while later, she asked if her grandparents had been killed in a war. She heard Arabic spoken at home but never said a word in that language. She knew at kindergarten they spoke one language and at home a different one, and she was sure that this was the way of the world, one language for the home and one for the outside world, similar and yet so different. In third grade a teacher told her that she was Druze, and my daughter thought the word was a curse. In fourth grade she heard from a classmate that she is an Arab, and at home she inquired about the significance of the word. Some people are born Arabs we told her, and some are born Jews.
Our daughter got older and became aware that she was different. She heard on the news about war, about Palestine, about a national home, and she understood that she had no choice but to choose a side, like everyone else. In the Arabic that she understood but did not speak, I told her that she is Palestinian, and that Palestine was ruined, and that she won’t find it on a map in geography class, that she’ll have to imagine Palestine, as I do, from the stories I’d heard or the stories that I tell her and myself. In Arabic I told her secrets she must not reveal. There are answers that can be given only in one language, and when they come off the tongue in a different language they take on a different significance, sometimes the opposite. And what happens if you give the right answer in the wrong language to the angels that visit the graves right after burial and ask for answers to the questions that determine whether you, the newly perished soul, will reside eternally in heaven or hell? Are you then also considered an infidel and battered down into the void or are you embraced as a believer and granted tranquility in your grave?
In Hebrew we told her that she is a citizen, with equal rights. An answer she knew to recite even if she didn’t understand it.
My daughter was a quiet baby. When she was born I didn’t hear her wail. And only when the midwife came out to the waiting room and said mazel tov and I walked into the delivery room did I hear her soft crying and her mother’s, who took her, swaddled in Hadassah Medical Center blankets, in her arms. The two cried together and were calmed as one.
My wife did not let me touch my daughter on the day she was born. I just looked at her, lying in one of those clear plastic boxes in the row of newborns, and I watched the nurse hold her naked body in her left hand while, with her right hand, she washed her under the faucet. I could have then shown the nurses my hospital bracelet,
which proved that I was the father and allowed me to pick her up in my arms, hug her, whisper to her that I love her, but I waited for the okay from Palestine, which came the day after the birth when she handed me the infant, her expression making it clear to me that she knew there was no other way.
After two days in the hospital we took a taxi to the fourth-floor apartment we were renting on Guatemala Street. We’d moved in as soon as we found out that Palestine was pregnant, one month after the wedding. We borrowed a crib from the newsroom secretary, whose kids were already grown. The stroller and the portable infant car seat came from the health reporter’s niece. A neighbor, whose name we never knew, gave us clothes, from zero to twelve months.
At first my wife thought that she was late for her period because of stress, but after a few bouts of morning sickness and finding two red lines on the pregnancy test that she had me buy for her at the pharmacy in French Hill, we went to the doctor who determined that my wife was in her thirteenth week of pregnancy.
Not a soul could know. Not yet, it was too soon, too dangerous.
There’s no shortage of busybodies among the Arab student population and I didn’t want any of them to notice and send word home, where the news would quickly and surely reach Tira. I dropped out of university and we rented an apartment in Kiryat HaYovel, one I could not afford on the basis of my freelance work. I let the editor in chief of the paper know that I had left school and that I was available for a full-time position, hoping that he’d sign me to a contract and provide a steady job with benefits, even if the salary was low. However, I soon learned from the longtime reporters at the paper that the only way to get a contract was to deliver a slew of egregiously wordy stories, because freelancers are paid by the word and only once it makes no fiscal sense for the paper to pay per word is a staff position finally made available. Aside from the arts pieces I filed, I started wandering around the West Bank and Gaza, picking up material and reporting it, and within six months I was the paper’s West Bank reporter, with a minimum wage salary. Half of it went straight to rent. My friends at the paper told me that the only way to get a bump in salary would be to present a competing offer from a rival paper, at which point the editor in chief would match that offer. The offer came with the outbreak of yet another war, at a time when I was one of the only reporters willing to walk out into the killing zones and deliver the goods that the Israeli press demanded.
We named our daughter Yasmin, a name that works in both Hebrew and Arabic, and I changed the family name on the identity card to Hadad, even though I kept the name I inherited from my father on my bylines. During the first year of her life my daughter’s crib was in her mother’s bedroom while I slept on a mattress on the floor of the other room, as I had been ever since our move. Palestine stayed home with Yasmin until she was one year old, and aside from trips to the well-baby clinic and the occasional outing to the doctor’s office, they did not leave the house, at first because we were scared of germs and viruses and later because we were scared of her being injured in the war.
Palestine was changed after the birth. As soon as she was discharged from the hospital she started studying, preparing for her university entrance exams. Six months later she enrolled in the school of social work. And when our daughter was one year old she asked that Yasmin be moved to the room in which I slept, and she moved me into her bed. Without preamble, and perhaps simply on account of the intimacy of a shared bed, Palestine and I slept together for the first time. I was filled with a great joy, and she at first would cry, and then she stopped. When Palestine began university, we’d leave Yasmin with a neighbor who looked after three babies in an unregistered day care in her home. She’s really advanced, the day care owner said, unaware of the fact that we’d added two months to her birthdate when we filled out the registration form.
Yasmin never heard a word about Tira from Palestine or me, though from time to time she would ask if there was such a thing as a blood relative. Sometimes I wonder if the kids have heard of Tira, perhaps on the news or from friends or in their studies.
I watch my daughter as she leaves school and hope to see her chatting with some of the other kids on the way to the car, only to see, yet again, that she’s walking alone, eyes downcast. She has never been at a friend’s house and every once in a while I ask my wife, who says no she has not asked to invite anyone over to hers. It’s possible Yasmin doesn’t invite anyone over because she is nervous that they’ll pick up on our strange family dynamic. After all, in Jerusalem, as soon as she was old enough to understand that she should not understand, she stopped hosting. When she asked questions and we failed to provide clear answers, she stopped accepting friends’ invitations to come over. What does she say in this part of the world when she’s asked where she’s from, what her religion is, who she is? Can “I don’t know” be considered a correct answer to the question: “Which God do you believe in?” Is “I don’t have one” an acceptable response to the question: “What is your nationality?”
I always arrive on time to pick the boys up from elementary school. On wintry days the cars pull up outside in a row and the school principal, in a heavy coat, scarf, and earmuffs, holds a walkie-talkie in his hand and calls out the names of the kids according to the signs pinned to the sun visors on the cars. I always turn down the sun visor with the note that bears my older son’s name, even though after a few weeks the principal already recognized the car. He also knew that the older brother comes out with the younger one, holding his hand and leading him from the school to the row of cars out front. When it’s freezing, the best way to protect the kids from overexposure to cold is to wait for the principal to wave them forward out of the heated school and into the car.
The kids have abandoned Hebrew and now speak only in English among themselves. The boys, no longer hearing the language in school and on TV, have forgotten it entirely. Back in Jerusalem, the little guy never even spoke to us in Arabic. He just understood what was said and responded in Hebrew, the language of his day care. Here, within a few months, he started responding in English.
“Dad,” my middle son asked me a few months after school began. “Are we Muslim?”
“Why?”
“No reason,” he said. “Just wanted to know.” Then at the parent-teacher conference halfway through the year his homeroom teacher praised his newfound command of English, a language in which he knew not a single word at the start of the year, and reminded me of how scared I was at the onset, on the first day of school, when all I could think of was how would the kids tell the teacher that they needed to go the bathroom? “His English has gotten remarkably better,” the cheery teacher said, adding that socially, too, he was doing well and that in the afternoons he went off with his Muslim friends to go pray in one of the classrooms. The kid hadn’t said anything about prayers, and when I gently inquired if he even knows how to pray he replied that he had learned by watching the other kids. He did not pray at home—no one did—and he steadfastly refused to answer any of the questions I asked about the prayer services and his Muslim friends, saying only that this was how it was in school, that he was one of the Muslims and the Muslims went to pray. And Dad, enough, I don’t want to talk about it, so I stopped pushing.
“There are some questions that have no answers,” is what his sister said.
Americans eat dinner at six in the evening, but my kids are hungry right after school, which ends at three thirty, so at four I serve them a dish that I cook up in the university dorm. Only once I got here did I start cooking in earnest, searching, for the first time, for recipes for the sort of simple down-home dishes my mother used to make. Rice is the base and you add green beans or white beans, potatoes, and black-eyed peas and cook it all up with a cut of meat and tomato sauce. Molokhiyeh leaves, which are prepared without sauce, are impossible to find here. And I really wanted to make my kids a great green bowl of molokhiyeh, and I really wanted to have some myself. But in order to get dried molokhiyeh leaves one has to drive to the outski
rts of Chicago, where, I was told, there’s an Arab neighborhood, mostly Palestinian, and one can get anything, just like in the old country, in the village, in East Jerusalem.
Once a week I stop and let the kids get fast food. Sometimes we go inside and sometimes we stay in the car, ordering at the drive-through. They love American food, especially the boys, who prefer fast food to homemade dishes.
Palestine usually finishes work at five. When the weather is nice she walks home, but during the endless winter I ask my daughter to watch her little brothers and I drive to pick her up, waiting as close to the building as possible.
At seven in the evening the boys take their bath, and at seven thirty they go to bed. I don’t read them bedtime stories like I used to. The big one already reads to himself and the little one, who loved the stories I used to read to him, now reads himself bedtime stories in English on the iPad. Still, I sit beside my son in bed until the iPad finishes telling the story, and then I give him a kiss and tuck the blanket around him. The kids’ rooms are not decorated. There are no pictures or posters on the doors or the walls, and that is true of all the rooms of the house in which my wife and kids live and the dorm room in which I spend most of my time. We are careful not to leave any marks, because you never know when it’ll be time to get up and go.
5
I’ll invite Palestine out to dinner. Just the two of us, no kids. I’ll wear the button-down checked shirt I got at the giant outlet store a half-hour’s drive from where we live. A shirt with the logo of a polo player on horseback, which was on sale, like all of the clothes at that store, and cost around ten dollars. That was the shirt I wore when I boarded the plane to Tel Aviv and in which I arrived at the hospital, so that they would see that I have a shirt with a designer logo that the residents of Tira appreciate, a shirt that would leave my family members with the impression that I’ve made it. Palestine liked the shirt. When I came out of the changing room, ostensibly without having looked at my reflection in the mirror, even though there was one in the room, she said to me: “That shirt fits you just right,” and her words made me so happy. It was one of the few sentences she said to me over the years, deliberately or not, and I cradled it inside me.