by Sayed Kashua
When I returned to Tira, rather than going to my parents’ house I went straight to the home of the sheikh who headed the sulha reconciliation committee in the village. I presented myself before the committee head and he mumbled a few words of prayer and requests for forgiveness, and when I swore to him that I had never seen Palestine, that I knew not of her existence and that I had never spoken a word to her, he said that he believed me but that it was too late and there was nothing to do but ask for forgiveness and mend my ways. But this is unjust, I said. She has done nothing wrong and does not deserve any sort of punishment. If anyone should be punished, it’s me. The sheikh intoned that he saw no way to right the wrong other than for me to take Palestine’s hand in marriage. But we didn’t do anything, I said yet again. And again he repeated that he believed me, but I knew that he did not. We didn’t sin, but if a wedding is what will right this wrong, I am willing to marry her. May God bless you, he said. Only in that way will you blot out the sin, and if you mend your ways then you will yet earn God’s forgiveness.
I didn’t know if I felt guilty or just wanted to be the good boy again, the studious one who never spoke about sex or girls with his classmates, who religiously took the right way to and from school. I didn’t know if I’d offered to marry Palestine because I had begun to fall in love with her, just as I had when I conjured her on paper. Maybe I wanted her to think that I was a noble person, willing to correct a dreadful mistake and save her from Tira, from a husband who did not believe her and a backward family that did not have the decency to stand by her side. And maybe her husband loved her dearly and did not believe a word that the neighbors said but was left no choice? Maybe doubt had eaten into his heart and he realized that he could not trust a single person in this world? Sometimes I think that what he wanted was for her to stay but that she was ashamed, humiliated by the damage done to his honor, which was, through no fault of his own, flattened by rampant stories that she realized would forever taint her, her beloved, and their children. And she went to him, kissed him, told him that she loved him, that she would never love another person but him, and then returned to her parents’ home and asked for a divorce.
That very day the sheikh showed up at my parents’ house and said that an agreement had been reached. Later, I headed out with my new wife to Jerusalem, and my father, who drove up to the bus stop in Kfar Saba, handed me a fifty-shekel note and whispered that he never wanted to see me again. And in fact there was rain slanting down that morning and the weatherman on the bus radio reported that there was a chance of snow in Jerusalem, but that the window of opportunity was small.
F
1
I don’t want to finish the story about my father. When I’m done he won’t be with me anymore as he has been during the past few months since my return from Kfar Saba. As long as I’m writing, he’s here with me. As long as I’m writing, I’m still with him, watching him wake and fall back into sleep, serving him water when he asks. As long as I continue writing, I will continue to talk to him, to tell him stories, to ask to hear his. As long as I’m writing, thinking of the next sentence, tinkering and editing, he still exists.
When I was a kid I never understood why it was that the dead were buried, why they were not left in their homes. So what if they don’t talk or breathe? The important thing is that their body remains, and I, the child, can slip into bed beside my father’s body. Later I learned that bodies rot and disintegrate, that parents can’t be left to lie in their bedrooms and that you can’t hide in their arms every time you’re scared of the dark. And I started to think about what’s inside of graves and to understand that in the end all that’s left are bones, and that worms eat the flesh faster than we think, and that after a short while all that remains are the hair and the nails, which can grow even after death and once the dead are put in their graves. I didn’t understand why in Tira the bodies are not put in caskets as they are in American movies, so that the worms won’t be able to get near the body and it will remain whole, but soon enough I learned that a casket is of no use, even if it’s made of steel.
When we were taught in third-grade history about the pharaohs and the mummies, I was happy to hear about embalming, and I wondered why it was that our parents are not mummified. And when we were in fourth grade, Kauthar, who was an average student, lost her father to a mysterious disease and I was petrified that this disease would strike other fathers and eventually reach mine. I wanted to tell Kauthar about mummification, but it was already too late. She didn’t come to school for seven days and when she returned her father was already interred in the earth, because Muslims bury on the day of death, and surely his nails were already long.
As long as I write, I mummify my father, and his body, albeit old and sick, remains whole and beside my desk. My father’s life is in my hands; I can keep him alive. When I decide that I’m done, when I Accept All Changes and save a final copy, I’ll be sending my father to the cemetery in Tira, to the worms.
At night I return to the funeral that I didn’t attend. To the ritual bathing ceremony that the men in the family likely held in the living room. That same raised wooden gurney that I once saw being brought into the home of my uncle, who died when I was in fifth grade. Muslims bury their dead on their sides, not their backs. They must certainly have mumbled prayers and repeated “Allah Akbar” as they brought the wooden coffin—the only one in Tira—into my parents’ home. And where was Mom? The body is naked when washed and the stomach is pressed on a few times to release gas or any last secretions, and then they clean the ears and the nose and seal the orifices with cotton. A single, thorough wash and then they top it off with a total of seven washes because seven is holy, and in this way are you purified for the angels, whom you meet as soon as you are laid in your grave. And then you must answer the questions of the angels, questions that determine your fate after death: whether you are hell- or heaven-bound. And when I was young, I was so scared that I would not be able to answer correctly. “Who is your God?” the angels of the grave ask. And you must answer: “God is my God.” “And who is your prophet?” And you must answer “Muhammad is my prophet.” But it isn’t all that simple they told us in religion class; don’t think it’s as simple as that. Only the true believer is able to answer correctly. The infidel is incapable of answering, and he whose heart is riddled with doubt will stutter and fall mute from fear when he senses the arrival of the angels. The angels bestow tranquility on the believers, delivering white light and a divine solace, a guarantee that you have arrived at the promised land, while the hearts of the impure and the hearts of the nonbelievers are filled with dread, a terror that we cannot even begin to comprehend. When such a person is stricken in this way, tongue-tied and incapable of answering their questions, he is pounded by angels and driven with blows to the depths.
They surely pushed the couches to the corner of the living room, covered the television screen with a white sheet, moved the colorful vases with the plastic plants, and then placed my father on the washing board. The bevy of swans floating across a pond in a foreign land looked on at the ceremony from their spot within a frame on the wall, witnessing my father’s final moments in his home. Are they still there, the swans? I wanted to ask my mother or one of my brothers. And had the couches been replaced already several times over, the living room painted a different color?
After the cleansing ceremony the deceased is wrapped in white shrouds with only his face bare, and my father smiled. They didn’t touch his lips. It was in a smile I could have sworn. It had to have been a smile and not an expression of fear. My father is not afraid of death, no matter what he might have said. He died placidly. He had to have died placidly, at one with his fate.
And people surely congregated in the courtyard—relatives, friends, and neighbors—and waited for the first-degree relatives to plant kisses on the forehead and the cheeks, caresses and final glances. My mother certainly sobbed—and my nephews? I hope they kept them away, didn’t let them see the body. The
y’re still young. I remember that I didn’t sleep for nights on end after I saw a casket being brought out of the neighbor’s house. And maybe they no longer tell tales of demons to the kids, and the dead no longer scare the young?
How many people attended my father’s funeral? Multitudes? Was it impressive? Or was it attended only by a smattering of people, relatives and friends who were compelled to be present lest they be spoken ill of. For this wasn’t the death of a young man, or the result of a terrible disaster, or the passing of a very senior official. Maybe no one showed up and only my three brothers served as pallbearers, leaving one corner of the casket unsupported, wobbling, with Dad inside, all the way to the graveyard? Perhaps no one showed up on my account and no one said a final prayer for him, and once his casket was brought into the mosque the usual worshippers left and my brothers, who do not know how to pray, were left with no imam and no sheikh to guide them. Muslims bury quickly, as though eager to get rid of the body. They do not wait for distant relatives to arrive and do not don special clothes; mourners may come straight from construction sites and from the fields, their shoes muddy, their clothes dirty, their hands stained. And at the end of the burial ceremony the crowd disperses and the sons of the deceased sit for three days in a mourning tent and receive the consolers. The men and women are separated. My three brothers would have sat there, rising to their feet whenever a new consoler entered. It was the end of January, cold and rainy, so the space would be lined with electric coil heaters, which produced only meager heat because the electricity in Tira is always weak and incapable of powering the heaters at full blast. They did not shave for three days; they shook hands; they delivered set and predictable responses to the standard condolences. They served black coffee in disposable plastic cups and sent around baskets of dates to sweeten the bitter coffee and to ensure the health of those who remained alive.
Mom likely received the female well-wishers in the living room of the house, where my father’s body had until recently lain. Mom definitely did not have patience for the ladies of the neighborhood and the relatives, who consoled her for a minute and then launched into a full hour of gossip. Who is marrying whom, who absconded with whose wife, who cheated on her husband, who fought with her mother-in-law. She only wanted to be beside my brothers and yet she would not see them until the late hours of the night when all of the strangers had left, and the men of the family were once again able to meet the women. And did my mother feel my absence then?
I was not there at the end of the evening, with my mother, in order to make the nephews laugh, the little ones who had just lost the grandfather in whose house they had grown up and from whom they had heard stories and with whom they had eaten oranges in the winter, which he knew how to peel so that the peel was one long spiral and could be played with like a Slinky. And I wasn’t there to see the way in which the refuse was released from his intestines and the gas from his stomach, and I wasn’t there to touch him, to caress his hand and kiss his forehead, for my heart to burn as his casket was taken from the living room, for my breath to catch as he was lowered to the earth, for the terror of death to tie my tongue when the sand covered him.
2
Ever since that story about Palestine, I’m incapable of making up stories. The childhood memories that I added to the life stories of my clients were taken from the bank of my own pleasant memories: when it seemed to me that one of my clients had had a sad childhood, I would add to his life the smell of holiday cakes that Mom used to make, and when I felt that one of the clients had lacked friends, then I offered up some of my sweeter memories from grade school. When a woman neglected to mention her Arab neighbors in Jerusalem before the war, I volunteered my own cheerful neighbors.
With every contribution from my memory something in me faded. I knew that the comfort that I derived from raising the memory up from the depths would never again be as it had been. These were feelings that I embedded in other people’s stories, childhood memories that I had to re-create, edit, and tailor to the lives of my clients, fitting them into the right time frame, the right period, language, village, town, neighborhood, and home in which they lived. When I added the memory of a babka cake that the client’s mother never made, I gave away my memory of the trays of rice and sweet milk my mother used to make on the eves of Ramadan, and from the moment I wrote that memory as part of the life of a Holocaust survivor, the longing no longer bubbled up within me. True, I saved the files on my computer and the hard copies in my office, and I could always return to my own memories in these books, but I had given them up, and they could never again arouse in me the same feelings they once had.
I donated each of my pleasant childhood and adolescent memories until they were all gone, and all that remained were the bad memories, which, ever since my marriage to Palestine, I’d begun to find solace in. There was no more space for the pleasant ones: I was not worthy of them. The residents of Tira were not worthy of them. The good memories no longer coincided with my life story.
The memory of foraging for za’atar in the hills I now planted in the life stories of new immigrants. And rather than keeping the scent of the silvery green herb, I retained only the fear of the nature inspectors. The memory of watching my father’s perfect shave was given to a cancer patient, my youngest client, who died at age fifty after a long struggle with the disease, which first struck when he was in high school. The spiritually uplifting feeling of riding in my father’s lap in the driver’s seat as we cruised through the fields I gave to the life stories of the old warriors, who never mentioned, when speaking into the mic, their love of their small children.
And with every pleasant memory that I relinquished, Tira was emptied of its good people. The warmth was replaced with violence, the smiles with threatening grimaces. The love stories that I used to hear in my youth were erased, and in their place stood only memories of the murder of women. The neighbors’ willingness to help was swapped for bitter feuds, the blessings and salutations for pistols and rifles, the family ties for inheritance wars, and the games of hide-and-seek for land quarrels. The pride that Dad tried to instill in us is something I can no longer feel. In its place, I sense only a sour breeze, the shameful feeling of having lost. The hope of eventual victory, come what may, has been swapped for the knowledge that defeat shall forever be my fate.
With every memory that I wove into a life story that was not mine, Tira, the home I loved, became the most terrifying place. The place that I longed to return to became a dark and threatening place in my mind, a place I didn’t dare visit.
Brothers can kill one another, the neighbors do not speak with one another, love is forbidden, and hope has been drained from the hearts of the inhabitants. There are no more fig trees, no grapes, and no strawberries, only homes ringed with tall walls isolating the residents. The rich are in big houses, the poor in small ones, the entire place is overcrowded and stifling, and there is no longer room for games of hide-and-seek in the neighborhood and no one participates anymore or commits themselves to the continuation of the struggle on Land Day. There are no longer processions on Sabra and Shatila Day, and no one remembers, and what was that anyway? A few thousand dead, a drop in the sea when compared to the number of victims these days.
The spring does not come to the Tira of my memory; nothing blooms there and there are no bees to be caught in bags of juice. The only trees remaining in the village are fruitless trees, bare of foliage, growing only thorny branches to be used for whipping little children.
There is only one pleasant memory left from Tira, one I knew I would not donate to any of my clients, and it was on account of that story that a small part of me still longed to return, knowing deep down inside that things could yet be righted, that Tira would always be the only place on earth I’d truly love, a place where I could find security and tranquility, as I can only imagine that security and tranquility might feel.
In the memory I kept for myself, I am standing on the roof of the high school, on the eve of Independe
nce Day, looking out on the fields that once were, and then, suddenly, up onto the roof comes a girl so beautiful that it is enough to look at her once and know that life has a purpose. A soft breeze teases her long black hair, and her large eyes seem to have been created with natural kohl, long eyelashes and delicate red lips. She is like Layla from “Layla and Majnun” and like the women in the poetry of Imru’ al-Qais, and yet she is from Tira. And she is standing before me, looking at me determinedly as she whispers so that only I will hear her: “Come.”
3
I have to find a way to translate the last conversation with Dad. Have to find a way to translate the saying “the lentils are fully cooked.” Have to find a way of translating the pain when I tried to slide the thongs on his swollen feet. Have to find a way of translating his final smile.
I have to transcribe it all, before I start to write. Word for word. If there’s a word I can’t make out I’ll go back and listen again. I’ll press Stop, I’ll rewind the tape, and I’ll do it again.
4
“They’re coming, they’re coming, Mom. Mom, they’re going to get us,” I type out the last sentences my father spoke.