by Sayed Kashua
Yes, I’ll invite her to dinner. The kids can stay home. Yasmin is old enough to watch over her brothers, or maybe, just to be on the safe side, I’ll suggest we get a babysitter, for the first time. I’ll take her to Picasso, the restaurant with the best rating in town, according to the internet. I checked the menu and the prices aren’t all that bad. We’ll drink red wine—I already know which label I’ll choose—and the bottle won’t cost more than twenty dollars. I’ll inquire as to whether she might be interested in one of the fish courses, in which case I’ll suggest a white in a similar price range. I’ll make do with a first course. I don’t like feeling stuffed and anyway I don’t like eating too much when I’m drinking.
Sometimes I think that I ought to start everything from the beginning. I’ll write short little love notes in Arabic, handwritten, preferably in pencil, as the students do. Love letters on lined paper or graph paper, like in school. Love letters that have been torn out of notebooks. I never once wrote a love letter, even though my classmates all did. I didn’t know how they got the courage to send them off to the girls. I knew that Arabic had set sentences and rhymes that you used in your first letters and that if the girl responded with letters of her own, showing an interest in furthering the relationship, then the character of the letters could change, morphing into something more personal.
I didn’t have the courage to send love letters and I didn’t have anyone to send them to. Over the years I’ve wondered what would have happened had I been a letter writer, and I was sorry that I had not taken part in that rite of youth. Did Palestine’s husband once send her love letters? I’d ask myself that every now and again, in moments of jealousy that I didn’t fully comprehend. And if he did, when did he start? How old was she when he sent her his first letter? And what did it say? Was he a gifted writer, who, for practical purposes, decided to pursue a career in accounting? Was he a better writer than me? How did his letters make her feel and in what ways did she choose to reply? Where did he first see her, and when? Sometimes I imagine a girl in junior high standing by a window in her house, looking out to the street, waiting to see her beloved, who would pass by at a chosen hour, and she, perhaps, placing her palm on the window pane, smiling, promising with her eyes that she will wait for him until it is permissible, until she is of age, until they can be together. She will wait for an eternity if that is what’s required.
Sometimes I think to myself that if their love was so strong he wouldn’t have given up on her so easily, merely on account of a short story printed in a student journal in Hebrew, followed by a rumor that buzzed through the village. Their love, if it had been true, would have endured and overcome, and they would have kept it alive even at the price of moving from their house, no matter how luxurious it may have been, to a different city, a different country, far from the evil tongues of the village. But that didn’t happen. Is jealousy stronger than love? Does suspicion, once it’s been seeded in the heart, feed off love’s roots? I don’t know who made the decision about separation; Palestine never talked about her husband and never said a word about what had happened. And I didn’t ask. What right did I have to ask?
Maybe their love never faded, and though they were forced to consent to the dissolution of their marriage, they still, nonetheless, loved one another with all their hearts? Sometimes I imagine her getting letters torn out of school notebooks, the pages filled with lines that bring her great joy and terrible sorrow. What if she stayed in touch with her beloved husband? What if they carried on meeting in secret corners of Jerusalem and even continued to meet here, in Illinois?
Maybe I just need to be straight and to the point with Palestine, start everything anew like my father said, start over with the wife I’ve been married to for the past fourteen years. I’ll invite her to dinner and tell her that I love her and that I want to go back to living with her and the children. That she must love me as I love her and then we’ll go back to being a family the way we learned families ought to be. If she does not respond, I’ll be assertive, saying that I’ve had it with the guilt. I’ll be decisive. I’ll say that just like her I am a victim, and at least I’m trying, fourteen straight years of trying, and I can’t go on like this. I’m approaching forty and how long can I possibly wait to be forgiven? If she refuses, then I’ll say I want to go back, take the kids and go back to Jerusalem, because there’s nothing for me here. And I have absolutely nothing to do besides wait for the kids to finish their school days and drive them home and be with them until they climb into bed. I’ll tell her that the hours alone are crushing me, shattering me, and that without the kids around I feel as though I’m dying, and at times I even wish for my own death. I’m sick of it all, I’ll tell her. After all I didn’t do anything on purpose, and I, too, deserve to at least once experience the taste of love. I don’t mind being disappointed or discovering that in fact it is not true love. At least that way I can say I tried; I experienced. If she asks if in Jerusalem I felt less deadened, I’ll lie and say yes, that at least there I knew the names of the barber and the grocer and two of the regular bartenders and I’d shop at the same butcher and ride on buses and in cars and would be able to look at the people and hazard a guess as to what they do and where they live. Here in Illinois I’ve been going to the barber once a month for over two years now, and each time he greets me with a smile and asks if I’ve been in before and then taps my name into the computer, which tells him the sort of haircut I like. Here I go into the same grocery store and get the same pack of Marlboro Lights every other day and the people at the register never look at me with an expression that risks conveying any sort of previous acquaintance. And if she says that the kids’ futures are brighter in the United States, I can agree and say that while she may be right, that is also the reason I want to move to a different city, a real city, where I won’t be the only lonely person, where there are gathering places for people like me. A city with pubs and bars, plays, movie theaters, and concerts, a city in which I have a chance of finding someone I can love and who might love me. Palestine won’t be jealous. She’ll know that I would never dare put any distance between myself and the kids, that I lack the courage, and that no matter what I say, in the end, I’ll do exactly as she dictates, just as I’ve done throughout the years. But she has not cast me off just yet, and maybe that’s a good sign? She has not cast me off, even though she no longer needs me. Ever since we moved I have not worked and have no way of making a living; I live in the dorm that she provides, rented under her name and paid for by her monthly salary. Maybe she’s keeping me around for the kids? And perhaps when they grow up and leave the house she’ll ask that I stop coming around? Sometimes I think the time has come to find a job. After all, the visa given to visiting academics allows for lawful employment in the United States for both married partners. After all, even dishwashing or working the register at one of the gas station convenience stores is better than the empty hours of waiting. And maybe, if I found a job, I’d also acquire the language and learn the local habits, bond with people, find friends who would invite me over to watch baseball games or to share family meals during the holidays, grilling up burgers and hotdogs and ears of corn.
Sometimes, when I’m alone in the dorm and waiting for the hour at which I go and pick up the kids, I imagine that I’ve published a book and an important TV host buys the book by mistake. She can’t even remember how it was that the book wound up on her bedside table, but once she starts reading the fascinating work written by the author whose name she doesn’t even know, she is incapable of stopping. And she invites me on to her show, because she’ll never be able to forgive herself if she doesn’t do everything in her power to convince her audience to read the wonderful book that changed all that she thought she knew about love, politics, loneliness, and family life. And I’ll come on the show, and I’ll be bashful and smart and modest, and I’ll know that my kids are watching, and they’re calling their mother. But she won’t come. And I’ll win important prizes, the names of which I don�
��t know, and maybe even the Nobel, even though it isn’t awarded for a single book but for a body of work. But maybe they’ll change the rules and I’ll be the first Palestinian writer to win it, and the Palestinians will be proud, and in Tira they will at long last believe that I’m a writer and not a gossiper looking to ruin the lives of others. Maybe then we’ll be able to go home, take the kids and go back to Tira, and Palestine will be returned to the soil from which I uprooted her, and she will forgive me wholeheartedly and will hug me hard and whisper in my ear that she loves me, that she always has, but that her tongue has been tied ever since she left Tira.
Yes, I’ll ask her out on a date, as they say around here. I’ll use that word, “date,” when I ask. I’ll say it with a smile, like a sort of joke, so that she won’t turn me down or be taken aback. And maybe I’ll tell her about the first time I saw her, on the day of our wedding, and the feeling in me that was awakened by her presence. Though maybe it wouldn’t be fair or right to remind her of that day, one of the most difficult days of her life. If that’s the case, then where will I begin?
I considered lines that I must have heard on TV or in movies: “Let’s talk about us, about the here and now.” Or: “Let’s turn over a new leaf, a new beginning.” And maybe I’ll apologize again, even though I’ve spoken a million apologies, especially during the early months, and she never once responded to my requests, asking only: “For what?” And I did not say: “For the story, for unintentionally inserting your name, that I didn’t know of your existence, and I never had any intention of hurting you.” But in the face of her suffering, “sorry” was the only word that escaped my lips—and she did, and still does, suffer, and each time my eyes meet hers I feel the need to beg for forgiveness. And with the years my guilt has intensified, and I don’t know when it was that I stopped treating myself as yet another victim in the story, which was forced not only on her but on me, too. I don’t know when I started feeling like I was a monster, believing with every bone in my body that I wrote the story about Palestine with clear and premeditated intent. When did I internalize the notion that all I had sought was to harm Palestine, to tarnish her honor and her family name, that I published a story with the clear goal of separating her from her husband because I desired to have her as my own. And because she did not respond to my courtship, I, therefore, decided to take revenge on her, ruin her house, soil her name, trample her honor, and leave her with no other choice?
Maybe I will tell her that I always loved her, even though I never dared to send her love letters. I’ll tell her the truth that has been branded into me over the years, that I could not bear the thought of her living alongside another man, the notion that she was capable of loving someone other than me and as a result of that pain I did something cruel, something I knew would leave her with no other option? I’ll tell her that I always loved her even though I never said a word about it, and I’ll tell her that every single night I dream the story that I wrote, and that I’ve imagined the two of us making love ever since I imagined her existence. And that the story that wasn’t has become an inseparable and uniquely fertile part of my memory. I’ll ask her to dinner and I’ll ask her for forgiveness, and if she asks for what, I’ll tell her all of this, and I’ll confess for the first time to a sin that I regretted not having sinned and will ask for absolution.
E
1
To the left of my father’s bed, beneath a window that has never been opened, lay an Arab man of my age, who had come to the hospital on account of chest pains. The tests showed that everything was in order, but the doctors insisted on keeping him in for monitoring. His wife cried when he asked her to go home and spend the night with the kids. Judging by their accents, they were from Taybeh.
To my father’s right was an older Jewish man who didn’t speak a word and was visited by no one. I tugged the curtain closed around us and wished the Arab man a speedy recovery and said good night to the Jewish man. Jews and Arabs are still hospitalized side by side, as though stating that diseases and death are still to be shared experiences. Births, the delivery of life, are segregated with separate rooms for Arabs and Jews.
“You haven’t been to the house,” my father stated.
No, not yet. I’ll go tomorrow.
Okay. Tell me more about your kids.
My kids, they’re cute. They’re smart. Pretty and handsome. Like I told you.
Remind me of their names.
The eldest one we called Yasmin.
Yasmin. Nice, Yasmin. I can see she is tall in the picture.
Tallest in her grade.
What grade is she in? Sorry, it’s just hard for me to talk.
She’s in junior high, eighth grade. Next year she’ll already go to high school, because high school in America starts in ninth grade rather than tenth. Dad, you don’t have to talk if it’s hard for you.
And what’s the name of the little rascal, the one with the curls?
Adam. He really is a little rascal. He’s in kindergarten, five years old, and he speaks English like an American. And Amir’s ten, in fifth grade.
Do they know they have a family? That they have a grandfather?
I don’t know.
Your wife is very pretty.
Yes.
What do you tell the kids?
I haven’t decided yet what to tell them and what not to tell them.
And what do you tell yourself?
I don’t know. I just have the beginnings of stories but not the whole tale. I haven’t yet found my ending.
Are you still the victim in these stories?
At that moment I discovered that as opposed to what many people think, new childhood memories can suddenly appear, and they are not just a dwindling collection of memories that are sealed at a certain stage, incapable of further expansion. All of a sudden, I was taken back to a holiday morning near my house. There’s a pistol in my hand, and I see a little kid, roughly my age, who used to come around the neighborhood and visit his mother’s relatives on holidays. Only on holidays did we get toy pistols that you could load with round red caps. Only on holidays did we get a stash of caps, more than was needed, because something in the mechanism of the pistol gave out after a few days anyway, usually by the end of the break, as though it knew the length of our holidays and vacations. I’d look at him, at that little kid, with his combed hair and his holiday finery—so much finer than our clothes—and be jealous of him. At times it seemed to me that I was envious of all the kids who didn’t live in our neighborhood, all those from faraway, from rich and stately surroundings, who attended better schools, wore fancier clothes, and had bigger cars and different parents.
I remember that kid’s mom, who seemed young and beautiful to me, though I can’t retrieve her face from the depths of my memory but merely the cadence of her walk and the motion of her lips when she spoke to me. He was a handsome kid, like the kids from the good families in Egyptian movies. All I wanted was to impress him as he strode toward his relatives’ house that morning, to make him look at me for once, at me and my cap gun and the cap rings I’d bought with the holiday allowance my grandmother had given me, because our parents never gave us money, only bought us new clothes and cap guns. I fired the gun in order to get the attention of the kid who never once looked in my direction; in his honor I fired off an entire eight-cap ring, and I was lucky because they all went off and weren’t old and malfunctioning as they sometimes were, making hardly any noise, the gunpowder having seeped out of the cap before it was even all loaded up. And instead of seeing the handsome kid that I was trying to impress look up and smile—and ask if he could shoot the gun, too—he stood still, pressed his palms against his ears, as though trying to crush his head, and started screaming in a way I’d never heard a kid scream. Afterward he sat down on the sand in the middle of the street. I saw his mother rush out and try to soothe him and then saw some of her relatives come outside and escort the kid into their house. I stood there, bristling, unmoving, and said nothing as
the scene unfolded around me. His mother was wearing a long, pleated skirt and had pretty sandals on her feet, and she walked toward me confidently. I was not afraid, or maybe I was just paralyzed by the shock. Her lips were painted red and I watched their delicate movements as she asked me not to fire the gun because her son is afraid of loud noises, because he is a special child.
When she turned away, I was left with the humiliation of knowing that I am not special, and deep down inside I swore that come the next holiday, I would be waiting for him again, with a gun.
You didn’t answer.
Which question?
I asked who the victim is in your stories.
I’m still undecided.
I wanted to tell my father how the power to shape a story was scary to me, nearly paralyzing. From the moment the client decided that I would write his story, I felt like his fate was in my hands; his legacy dependent on my imagination and memory.
The fears began to surface with the fifth book that I authored. The client, whose sons had hired my writing services, was a healthy seventy-year-old woman who could tell wonderful children’s stories that she had heard from her grandmother—and the kids, whose lives had been enriched by those stories, tried to publish a book of her stories about ghosts and goblins that abduct children and the village wise man or the particularly clever kid who was able to trick the goblin and slay the evil monster. But they said that no publisher was willing to take them or their mother’s tales seriously. They wanted the stories collected and bound, preserved in the unique way that their mother told them, so that they could be passed on to their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, because somehow, not one of the girls in the family inherited the narrative gift that was passed down in the family from woman to woman. They knew the plots, but their narration they felt ruined it all. “It has to be in her words,” I remember her eldest son saying to me on the day that I first interviewed the woman and recorded her. She was a pleasant woman, quick to laugh, though with nothing notably unique in the way she told stories of goblins and flying carpets and winged wolves that slaughtered the sheep in sleepy villages. She did flap her hands, pause occasionally as parents do when reading bedtime stories to their children, make the sound effects of slaps and explosions as necessary, but it was in essence the look in her eye that her daughters had not inherited, the look of a small child telling the story as she heard it for the first time. I opened the book of her stories with an intro about Jerusalem, the city in which she, like her mother and grandmother, was raised. Her stories of childhood were pleasant and warm and there was virtually no need to edit them, aside from the ones that took place during the war years. There she told of how the Arab neighbors turned on her family, going from warmhearted characters to cold-blooded killers. I corrected her in the pages of the book and wrote instead of an enduring neighborliness, of people caring for one another even during a time of war, and I added that she still thinks of her Arab neighbors and sometimes she still picks up the scent of fresh pita being baked with za’atar on the Friday mornings before the war, a scent that makes her wonder if they’re still telling the same stories she once heard or if the tales disappeared, too, along with everything else. And her son, who swore he’d read the whole book to her and praised the work I’d done, said nothing beyond thank you. Two days after the thirty copies of the book arrived at the family home, a picture of a woman with an engaging, kind gaze on the cover and the title that her children had chosen, The Folk Tales of Grandma Miriam, I got a message from the eldest son, who informed me that his mother had died, and he just wanted to let me know how happy and excited she had been by the publication of the book.