by Sayed Kashua
She learned the ropes in no time. She developed ties with Arab members of the Knesset, the ones people referred to as Druze dignitaries and Arab dignitaries. She wrote to all the newspapers. Every week she’d send out letters to all of them, written for her by people in the village who had a nice handwriting. She dictated: Give me my son back. I have nothing in the world except him. You’re killing me. Sometimes one of her letters appeared in print. She kept all of them in the blue suitcase. She’d go to different villages in the Galilee and meet with anyone she thought could help: mayors, mukhtars, Druze clergymen. Time and time again, she’d visit them. She’d make them write letters to judges, to the police, to the government. “All he did was go to study,” she’d explain to them. “They’re just jealous. Those goddamn bastards informed on him, because he’s the best-looking, the smartest.”
My father wasn’t scared. He knew Gamal Abdel Nasser would get him out. And he didn’t get worked up about the way they treated him in the interrogations—the beatings and all. Sometimes later, when he watched television, he’d recognize one of the guys who questioned him. There were lots of well-known people about whom he could say, “That guy hit me once.” To this day, he still rubs his hand up and down his cheek as he says it.
Father did everything he could to get out of jail. Once he cried for hours to convince the wardens that he had a toothache, just so they’d take him to the hospital. Father says the sonofabitch dentist knew there was nothing wrong with him but pulled one of his teeth anyway, without an anesthetic. “It was worth it just to get out for a while,” he always says.
In the album there’s one picture of my father sitting with someone on a high balcony. They’re wearing heavy jackets and their hands are buried inside. They’re freezing, struggling hard to warm up. Father says they sat on that balcony on the day of the Battle of Karama and counted the helicopters transferring wounded soldiers from Jordan to Hadassah hospital, he and his friend Halil from Tur‘an. They were both detained for the same incident, but he didn’t tell us what it was. It said in the papers that they’d bombed the university cafeteria, but Father says the papers always lie. Fact is, the day he was released, he bought a copy of Ha’aretz and it said that, according to Moshe Dayan, the student they’d detained posed a tangible threat to state security and was not going to be released in the foreseeable future. My father was released pretty quickly. It took Halil seventeen years. He was given a life sentence, but the Ahmad Jibril prisoner exchange saved him.
A few days after Halil was released, Father loaded the four of us in the backseat, and we set out on the long trip north to Tur‘an, Halil’s village. Father asked people where Halil lived. Some of them said they didn’t know, because there was this crazy “rabbi” of theirs, Kahana, who promised to make sure the released prisoners were sent back to jail, so people were afraid to talk. People in Tur‘an had a strange accent, and all of us laughed at them behind their backs because they stressed their ks. Father and Halil exchanged long hugs and kisses. I’d never seen such kissing. Halil didn’t know we’d be coming, and his mother was pretty frightened to see us there all of a sudden. But then they said we were all one family, that Halil and my father were like brothers, and they invited us to stay the night. Halil and his whole family had that strange Tur‘an accent too. We could hardly make out what they were saying.
While we were there, Father said that he and Halil and one other student from Jaljulya had once rented a house in Jerusalem from Rehavam Ze’evi’s mother. Ze’evi was commanding officer of Central Command at the time. He was well-known for his right-wing philosophy, and everyone called him by his nickname, Gandhi. When his mother opened the door she said, “I’m Gandhi’s mother. You must have heard of him?” and the guy from Jaljulya answered, “Sure, Gandhi the Indian,” and the two of them—Father and Halil—couldn’t stop laughing. Gandhi was married by then, and my father got his room. He says the library in that room was really something; he took a few books of revisionist philosophy by Jabotinsky. There were lots of war books too. His mother was nice and only asked them to make sure the neighbors didn’t find out they were Arabs. My father says she must be dead by now. She was very old even then, and used to volunteer at Shaarei Tsedek hospital every day, cutting gauze.
After the Six-Day War they left Gandhi’s mother’s house, and when the army opened the way into the Old City, Father and Halil were among the first to go visit the Dome of the Rock. Father says they were very disappointed, because they’d been expecting to see a holy rock suspended over the mosque. Later, my father became a Communist and started distributing the party paper in the village when he went back there on weekends.
My father believed in Trotsky, in Lenin, in the Russians, in Yuri Gagarin, and in Valentina. He still remembers whole speeches by Nasser and can recite them by heart, even though there was only one radio in the village back then and everyone had to crowd around it to listen. To this day, the phrases In the name of the nation and in the name of the people are my father’s favorites. My mother loved Nasser too. She was in high school when he died, and she always tells us how they carried a mock coffin through the village and held a mock funeral. My grandmother says the Jews put poison in his cigarettes. That he didn’t just die, the way they say, it had all been planned.
My father says there’s no comparing Nasser and Sadat. The day Sadat was killed, we were on our way home from Tulkarm. They announced it on the radio, and Father laughed. He said it was about time. He couldn’t understand why Egypt had stopped fighting in ’73. He even named my older brother Sam, after the Russian SAM missiles the Egyptians used in the October war. My father says Golda Meir had been on the verge of agreeing to surrender. It was all because of that sonofabitch King Hussein. Too bad Nasser didn’t have him killed, my father says, and then he puts on an Egyptian accent and tells us how Nasser once said that Hussein was a dog: You step on his tail in London to make sure he’ll bark in Amman.
My father doesn’t understand how my brothers and I came out the way we did. We can’t even draw a flag. He says kids much smaller than us walk through the streets singing “P-L-O—Israel, no!” and he shouts at us for not even knowing what PLO stands for.
Anemones
My parents got up early for work. My mother was first. Since I was always up before my brothers, I was in charge of getting the morning groceries: a loaf of bread and 100 grams of hard cheese. The grocery store was just across the way, but I preferred to run the errand as early as possible, because I didn’t want to be stuck with the Gazazweh, the workers from Gaza, who showed up there every morning. I almost always did get stuck with them, though, and even the few times when I arrived early enough, I’d see them getting off their buses just as I was leaving. Their buses stopped right near the store, engines still running, and the workers would swoop down by the dozen. The store would fill up completely, with a long line outside too. I hated the Gazazweh because everyone hated them; I was afraid they’d kidnap me. They looked to me like ordinary people, and they never bothered anyone, but my grandma’s stories about all the children who misbehaved, and whose parents sold them to the Gazazweh, had me really scared. I always saw myself getting on one of their red buses and standing in line with them outside the grocery store. You’d only see them early in the morning when it was still dark outside, because they weren’t supposed to be moving about in the daytime. They came to buy food, and then they’d vanish as if they’d never been there, as if there were no Gazazweh in the world.
When I returned with the groceries, Father was always in the bathroom. That’s where he’d smoke his morning cigarette, which he’d put out in the cup of coffee he had in there. I always went in after him and removed the cup with the cigarette butt. A bathroom, after someone has had coffee and a cigarette in it, has a special smell. My father had a special smell. I know that smell of morning in the bathroom, know it very well. It wasn’t unpleasant. I liked it. I hardly saw Father in the morning because, right after his cigarette and coffee, he’d take his p
lastic lunch box with the sandwiches Mother had made for him and leave for work.
My father worked in a place he used to refer to as the packinghouse or Kalmaniyya. I didn’t know what it meant, but I assumed my father picked fruit.
Jamal, our Hebrew teacher in grade school, never tired of telling us about the fruit pickers. We spent more time hearing him talk about fruit picking than about Hebrew. He kept yelling that we’d wind up as fruit pickers. “Like donkeys,” he’d say. “You’ll leave home at six in the morning and get back late at night.”
He happened to like me, the teacher Jamal. I was the best student in the class, and I did what I could to keep from becoming a fruit picker. But I was convinced nothing would help. My grandma had worked as a fruit picker, my father was a fruit picker, and I figured I’d become one too. I felt sorry for Father and hoped that the teacher Jamal didn’t know he worked at fruit picking too, leaving the house at 6 A.M. and returning late at night. Father had been the best student in his class too, and he had the nicest handwriting.
Unlike Father, Grandma talked a lot about her work as a fruit picker. She told us about Abu Ziad, our neighbor, who used to take the neighborhood widows in his pickup and let them off at the Mehadrin groves, where they’d alternate between picking oranges and picking pistachio nuts. She worked barefoot and liked to show us the cracked and hardened soles of her feet as proof. “Morning to night,” she always told us. “Rain or shine, day in and day out, for one shilling a day.” Grandma did all this for her children, but especially for Father, her only son, so he could study. But he destroyed it all and broke her heart. “It wasn’t the fruit picking that finished off my legs and my back, but the grief your father gave me. God bless him, I have no one in the world besides him.”
My grandmother started picking fruit after her husband was killed in the war. She was left on her own with four daughters and one son, who was two months old when he lost his father. Grandma always tells people how eagerly her husband had waited for a son, and when she tells this story she always takes the edge of her head scarf and dabs at a tear in her left eye. She was a hero in those days. When the Jews bombed Tira, she put her baby on a stack of wheat and bent over him. “I told myself it would be better if the shell hit me and not my son. As if it would have made any difference. It would probably have killed both of us anyway.”
I tried to picture my grandma younger, but I couldn’t. I always saw her as an old woman, just the way I knew her, with her faltering legs and her white dress, lying on top of that crying baby who didn’t know he had no father, and I could picture the shells falling beside her in the wheat fields of Tira, and how only by some miracle she wasn’t hurt. She gets up, grabs the baby, runs a little farther (until the plane comes back to drop some more bombs), and falls to the ground again. My grandma always says that if war breaks out we mustn’t stay inside the house because it’ll collapse on top of us. And we mustn’t turn on the light. We’d better hide among the trees.
I loved picturing the wheat fields that my grandma used to talk about. I loved picturing the baidar too, the silo, and the people gathered there like it was an important holiday, tossing the wheat in the air with their pitchforks, so the grain would fall in one heap and the chaff would fly in the wind and form a separate one.
They used to be rich once. Three camels, carrying all sorts of valuable goods, would take the wheat and the vegetables from their fields in el-Bassah back to the house. They’d paid a shilling for each camel. Grandpa and Grandma had cows and horses too, and a trained dog that always sat on the balcony, to protect the poultry from the cats, and never tried to go indoors.
My grandpa was very smart. He could read and write, and he had a nice handwriting. But the schools back then weren’t like the ones we have today. Otherwise, he would have studied medicine and become a doctor. Grandma says she could have become an engineer if they’d sent her off to study, but girls didn’t go to school in her day. We always believed her when she said this. We thought she’d have made a good engineer. And the truth is, even though she never studied anything, she was a skillful card player, could do math—addition and subtraction—and knew where each plot of land ended and the next one began.
My grandpa, who had a little mustache, like he has in the only picture of him in Grandma’s room, was a hero, a strong man who had fought against the Jews, but he died at the entrance to his own home just as he was picking some grapes. All he said was “Allah” and fell over. He’d taken a bullet. Grandma didn’t understand why he’d fallen.
“I told him, Get up, ya zalameh, come on, get up. What’s the matter with you?” She thought he was just pretending.
Grandma says Grandpa is a shahid, and there are anemones growing in the spot where he bled. She says Abu Ziad was eaten by worms when he died, but they didn’t go near my grandfather. That’s how it is: A shahid’s body doesn’t rot. It stays just the way it was.
The Aden Hafla
My father was the first person in our neighborhood to buy a VCR. It was big and heavy, made of metal. The cassettes were different back then, short and thick. When we first got it, all our relatives dropped by. They came to congratulate us and brought bags of rice and big packets of coffee, and Father would put on The Black Samurai and Amar Akbar Anthony, an Indian film starring Amitabh Bachchan, about three brothers who are separated at birth after a bad guy kills their father. They’re united in the end, and they get even with all the bad guys.
My father once brought home a movie called The Aden Hafla. We watched it over and over and over. The whole family would sit in front of the TV, watching it together. Grandma would sit closest, because her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. There were children with kaffiyehs and pistols, and musicians, and singers and poets. We knew the songs by heart. There was a little girl who sang her father a song before he went off to war, and Grandma would always wipe away a tear. Everyone would make the V-sign with their fingers before they got up to perform.
Father’s friends came specially to watch the film. They cracked sunflower seeds and peered at the screen. Father always laughed at them when they didn’t recognize someone. “What’s with you? That’s Abu-Jihad,” or “You don’t know who Mahmoud Darwish is?!” Once this friend of his thought that Al-Fakahani was the name of a grocer in Beirut, and Father made him leave.
At night he’d give the cassette to Grandma, and she’d hide it in her chicken coop. My mother couldn’t stand Grandma’s chickens, with the dirt they made, and the noise. There was a major battle between them because of those chickens, and they stopped talking to each other for a pretty long time. Me, I was all for Grandma’s chickens. One day my mother burned down the small coop with the Aden Hafla tape inside. Father got mad and stormed off to play cards.
The next day, Father didn’t come home from work. There were no phones back then, and Mother and Uncle Bashir took the Agrexco jeep and went looking for him. All my aunts arrived and started crying. I could hear them talking about fliers, about Land Day, and about detention.
Grandma spent the whole night on a straw mat under the eucalyptus trees in front of the house, crying and waiting. Mother didn’t come home either; Grandma said she was with Father but didn’t say where that was. The next day, my brothers and I stayed home from school. I sat on the mat under the tree with Grandma. She kept swaying. Her eyes were red and swollen, and she fixed them on the farthest point down the road. Whenever a car would drive up, she’d stop swaying and stiffen. She followed each car with her eyes until it had gone by, and then she’d go back to swaying and staring.
Mother wanted to cut down the eucalyptus trees outside our house. She said they made a lot of dirt, and the entrance to the house looked ugly because of them. Grandma said that cutting them down would be a disaster, because eucalyptus trees contain a wali, a holy spirit who guards the home and the village. She told us how Grandpa’s father, Sheikh Ahmad, used to stand beside the eucalyptus trees and talk with the rebels in Jaffa and in the mountains. He would warn them again
st the Jews, telling them where they were hiding and which route was safest.
Two days later, my father was released from detention. They’d picked him up at a roadblock on his way to a demonstration in Taiyiba. They’d searched the car and found the fliers. With the stubble on his cheeks, he looked very different. Grandma hugged him and kept on crying. “When will you learn, yamma, ya habibi?”
Cap Guns
I’d always known there would be a war. When I was little, my brothers and I dug trenches in the grove of fruit trees behind our house. We dug with our hands, which were small. We couldn’t dig very deep, because pretty soon we hit ground that was too hard, and our attempts to soften it with water didn’t help. We wanted to dig large trenches around the entire house, so we could hide there when the shooting started. Trenches that we could stand up straight in, and only Grandma and Father and Mother would have to bend over. We filled plastic bags with sand and stacked them to form a wall, just the way Grandma said they did in the war, but the bags didn’t last. They fell apart within days.
Once Father took us up to another village, Ya‘bad, to meet some people who worked with him in the packinghouse. They had a car with a green license plate, and Father said that was how the Jews marked them. The war in Ya‘bad was very real, not like the one in Grandma’s stories. There were bullet holes in the walls of Father’s friends’ homes. It really scared me, because it had never occurred to me that a bullet could actually make a hole through the wall and get inside the house. They had green iron doors with holes you could look through and see the living room.