Dancing Arabs

by Sayed Kashua

  I walk in the middle, with Grandma holding my right hand and Amneh holding my left. They’re sorry they haven’t taken their walking sticks. The bus trip has tired them out, and it’s very hot. All the women have gone into the sea already, and we’re the last ones to reach the shore. A few of the girls are laughing at us, but Grandma and Amneh can’t see or hear from such a distance.

  I don’t mind their laughing at us. I stick with the two of them. I love listening to their stories, things nobody else knows. They keep repeating the same ones. About how people shot themselves in the arm to avoid being drafted into the Turkish army to fight in their war. The Turks would take them far into the mountains, where there was snow, and they would die of the cold. Nobody made it back alive.

  Grandma and Amneh remove their white dresses. They’re wearing less fancy white dresses underneath, the kind that can be worn in the water. And under those they have their sharwals. They walk haltingly toward the water, afraid of slipping. They decide to sit down on the stones and inch their way in. I sit in the middle, holding their hands and inching my way in too.

  Once we reach the water, Grandma wants me to come in, but I stay where I am so I can see her and make sure she doesn’t get lost. I watch over her from a distance. I’ll go in afterward, when she’s out. Their white dresses float on the water and look like two parachutes. Everyone laughs. Me too. It’s the first time I see my grandmother in the water. I can picture her now, young and strong. I can picture her working in the fields.

  Once people in the village would fall in love in the fields. Sometimes Grandma would tell me about how a man and a woman we knew had met in the wheat field, and how another couple would exchange glances by the well at the edge of the village. She herself never did things like that. When she was young, she rode a horse from Qalqiliya to Tira. She loved riding horses, and she dressed as a man, covering her head with a kaffiyyeh and galloping off. Two riders followed her for quite a distance, but they couldn’t catch up with her. They couldn’t believe it when they discovered the rider was a woman, but she brushed them off, yelled it was none of their business, and rode back home.

  Grandma was an orphan. Her mother died giving birth to her, and her father died shortly after that. She and her two brothers grew up with their uncle, her father’s older brother. Her aunt and uncle were good people. First they fed the orphans and only then did they feed themselves. They kept the orphans’ land safe and gave them what they had coming. They had a good life, better than the lives of children in the village who hadn’t lost their father.

  My grandma didn’t know my grandpa, her husband, at all. She hadn’t met him in the fields or “any of that nonsense.” She curses him sometimes when she recalls how he took her. Al-shahib (the white-haired one) she’d call him. He was married then, and he had grown children. His two older daughters were married already. Grandma’s brother wanted to marry Grandpa’s third daughter, so Grandpa asked for Grandma in return. It’s known as badal (exchange marriage). You give me yours, I’ll give you mine. You protect my honor, I’ll protect yours. And she was a mean woman, Grandpa’s third daughter. She had her mind set on making my grandmother’s life miserable for marrying her father, as if she wanted to keep him to herself.

  Once Grandpa hit Grandma because of her. The third daughter had come to his house and cried, “Father, Father, my husband hit me; he threw me out of the house.” It was all a lie, as it turned out afterward, but after what? After Grandpa gave Grandma a beating. Because that’s how it is with the badal. You hit that one, I’ll hit this one. You throw yours out of the house, I’ll throw mine out of the house. That’s how you keep your wives in check. It’s a kind of guarantee.

  “But he was good to you,” Amneh tells her, and jabs her with her knee. “Why don’t you mention how he used to take you on his shoulders, like my husband did, Allah yerakhamu? Why don’t you mention how he took you to Jaffa once, to the theater, to see singers perform?” Amneh turns to me and says, “Your grandfather put a tarbush on her head, gave her some men’s clothing, and took her to see singers. What woman in the village got to see singers perform back then? Forgot about that, didn’t you, you dried-out old woman? He used to take you everywhere on his horse.” And she gives Grandma another jab. Grandma smiles and mumbles something, and Amneh continues, “Without him, we wouldn’t even have known there was such a thing as the Dead Sea.”

  Five Little Blocks

  If not for that picture of a face and shoulders, a man of about forty, with a little mustache and a blue jacket over a white shirt, there would be nothing left to remember my grandfather by. Sometimes my grandmother would tell me he was a hero, and sometimes she’d say he was just an old rake who’d abducted her from her aunt and uncle’s home when she was young.

  On holidays, when we were very little, Grandma used to take us to the cemetery near the house. Almost everyone in the village would go, because that’s how it is: On the mornings of holidays you go to the cemetery. My father never came with us to visit his father. Grandfather’s grave was small and plain, less ornate than the others. The cemetery was full of people, and all of them were sitting around crying, alongside big white beautiful tombs. There were flowers on all of them. Some had little turrets, like the ones you find in a mosque. There were gravestones with three or four tiers. My older brother said that four tiers meant sheikhs or people who would definitely get into heaven directly, no questions asked, the way we’d been taught in religion classes. Each holiday the graves grew bigger. They started building them out of marble and ceramic. My older brother would roam about, looking for new ones, and he’d check to see if the dead really did come back. I was afraid to move too far away from Grandma. She said you must never step on the stones, because all of them had been graves once. I was careful and looked a million times before taking a step. I clenched Grandma’s flowing white dress, to make sure I didn’t get lost among all those people. I didn’t step on the smallest stones either, because I thought those might be the graves of children. My grandmother said little children don’t die. God simply picks them out and gathers them to him, because he wants to turn them into angels.

  Five little blocks are covered in weeds. In winter the weeds grow high and green, and in summer they are yellow and dry. My grandmother bends the branches, exposing the blocks (which are covered in a thick layer of sand), sits down beside the grave, and starts reciting verses from the Koran. She says she knows plenty of verses, even though she’s never studied. Later, when the old men in the mosque start reading the holiday verses over the loudspeakers, everyone starts shaking hands and handing out money and candy to the children. Some kids in my class managed to collect enough money to buy ten pistols. All they had to do was to say Allah yerakhamu. Only boys would come to the cemetery to collect holiday money. Girls never did.

  Grandma would change some bills in the grocery store and bring a bagful of coins with her to hand out to the kids. She gave out a lot of money, and I would get upset with her for not giving it all to me. I know those kids, I’d tell her. They don’t deserve any of it.

  Grandma never allowed us to take money from people, though some of them would hand us coins even without our saying Allah yerakhamu. Grandma wouldn’t let us take cakes either, although the older women who looked just like her used to beg her to take a small slice in honor of the Prophet Mohammed. Grandma always responded politely and warmly. She kissed their hands, wished peace on the soul of their loved one in heaven, and didn’t take a thing.

  I wouldn’t take anything either. I believed my grandmother when she said you shouldn’t take anything in a graveyard. She said we didn’t need anything, and that only the children who’d been bad would do it. She loved to take us along and kept saying that this way at least we would know where Grandpa was buried. Not like my father, who behaved as if it weren’t his father.

  On Our Way to the Sea

  My father used to tell us about Grandpa too some times, especially on our way to the sea. Father had some set stories fo
r car trips. Near Ramat Ha Kovesh he would always laugh and tell us again about Uncle Mahmoud’s accident and about how his new Dodge had been totaled. In Kfar Sava he would point to a small building and tell us that the Shabak was under there, and he had been there several times for interrogations. The interrogators had begged him to tell them what people were saying in the cafés, that’s all—but he wouldn’t. And when we’d go to the sea and pass by the cemetery of Tel Mond, he’d always remind us that all the tombstones bore the inscription 1948, THE BATTLE FOR TIRA. He said we had to believe him because he’d actually been there and had seen for himself what they said.

  Without fail, Father always repeated those same stories whenever we drove by. He’d remind us that, to this very day, Tel Mond and Ramat Ha Kovesh won’t have anything to do with us, because we killed so many of their people. That he didn’t know how many Grandpa had killed, but he figured it had to be quite a few, because Grandpa was a fighter, even though he didn’t die in battle. He would always end the story with the promise that someday he’d stop and show us around the Tel Mond cemetery. We went to the beach almost every week. We never stopped there.

  Grandma didn’t want us to go to the sea. She kept warning Father, suggesting that we go to the mountains instead; she said that for the same price he could light a fire and barbecue a few chickens for the children. She was always on edge as she waited for us to come back, and she didn’t stop worrying until she saw us herself. When we drove up the street, she would stiffen and try to count the passengers even before we’d parked. Grandma always said the sea was dangerous; even if we stayed close to the beach there was a chance that a deep well would form suddenly and suck us in. Her second stepson had drowned in the sea.

  But she also told us that as a little girl she would go to the beach all the time. She said all of Tira went; the lands of the village stretched as far as the sea. She didn’t go in deep, just enough to wet her feet. People used to come to the beach with camels loaded down with watermelons. Delicious big watermelons, better than anything you can get nowadays. Every few meters there was someone with a stack of watermelons. Strangers who spoke a language that only the big men could understand would arrive to buy the watermelons. They had lots of workers, who carried the melons for them and loaded them onto their ships.

  Grandma used to ride there on the back of a donkey, with her uncles and their children. They’d use the money from the watermelons to buy clothes in Qalqiliya. Everyone got the same thing—same quantity, same colors—to make sure nobody could say, “You got more.” Everything was different back then. Nobody tried to cheat you, and people weren’t scary. The only scary things were the jackals and the wolves.

  On holidays, they’d go to the Sidna-Ali Mosque. The men would slaughter sheep for an offering, and the women would light a fire and roast them. Grandma says that only the city women, who spoke differently and dressed like sluts, would go into the sea. They weren’t embarrassed, they were like my mother, who thinks she’s young and walks around with her hair uncovered. The city women didn’t cook, and the farm women would feed them and enjoy poking fun at them. Crazy ladies.

  Land

  When my grandfather was killed, Grandma left home. Her stepchildren, who were older than she was, wanted the house, and she gave it up in return for some land. There was plenty of land back then, and they had no problem giving her two dunams of wheat fields in exchange. My grandmother says, “They threw me out, with my small children. Four girls and a baby boy still in swaddling cloth. Now they want the land. Let them go on dreaming.”

  Nowadays everyone fights over an extra ten centimeters of land. Grandma’s stepchildren’s children claim that the distribution wasn’t fair, and they want her to give them half a dunam. But Grandma won’t budge. She gets up, bares her fingernails, and fights for her land. What the Jews took from her was bad enough. She takes the papers in their plastic wrapping out of the blue suitcase and mutters, “This is my deed for the land, and this is the one for the lands in the field. It’s all written here, with maps and lawyers’ signatures and everything. They thought I was stupid, that I’d simply take them at their word. But I got everyone to sign back then.”

  Grandma goes to city hall and asks them to make ten photocopies of her documents. She collects all the arguments that prove her right to the land and lashes out at her step-grandchildren, reminding them of everything she had to go through when she was made to live in a tent. She shouts at them that nobody gave her the land out of sheer kindness or love. She throws the papers at them, with all the maps and the signatures and the red ribbons of the Land Registry Bureau. “Get an engineer. We’ll split the costs, and if I owe you anything, then tfadallu, be my guests.”

  They always back off in the end, with Grandma emerging the victor, but bleeding. They’ve insulted her; they’ve brought up things she’s been trying to forget. The stepdaughter of the badal has left a scratch on her heart. My grandmother never cries, but her voice sometimes becomes choked with sorrow. “Did I let her brothers go hungry? May God never forgive her, in this world or the next.”

  Grandma yells at my father that he doesn’t know how to stand up to those nothings. He’s scared of a few self-important thugs. Can’t protect his land, doesn’t appreciate its value.

  Sometimes my grandmother dreams about a place she calls el-Bassah, where her parents used to spend the sunny season. They didn’t spray the watermelons there, just used fertilizer from the hens. She dreams of the camels they used to ride for three grush a person. After the war she went there once with a sack of straw on her head. The children were hungry, and she was going to see if there was anything left in the fields. They wouldn’t let her go near. “Rukh min hon,” they told her. “There’s no land. Go away.” She tried to get past the soldier, but he pointed a gun at her chest.

  When the Soviet Union was a superpower, my father used to say the lands would be returned someday. He taught us about Russian planes and tanks and antiaircraft missiles, Russian boats and submarines. “The Russians aren’t like those spoiled Americans you see undressing in the movies. They’re disciplined. The soldiers are well trained. They would never abandon their positions.” He told us about one Russian who banged his shoe on the table at the United Nations and threatened the United States and Israel.

  Father forced us to follow the Olympic Games and to root for the Russians. The Olympics are like a war, my father used to say. Anyone who wins in sports will win in airplanes too. The Russians always had the lead, and we had no doubt who would win. In those days, people had hope. In our village there were two girls called Valentina. In Kalansawa, someone named his oldest son Castro. To this day, they call him Abu-Castro.

  Meanwhile, Father’s dream had turned sour. He continued to root for the soccer teams in red but stopped following the Olympics. Hope gave way to despair, and the volumes of Marx and Lenin were relegated to the top shelf, to be replaced by the Yellow Pages in Hebrew and Arabic.

  My father says, “Al-ard zai al-ard”—“The land is like honor.” Anyone who sells his land sells his honor. But they pay $5,000 for every dunam of land that once belonged to the absentees. If Grandma has thirty dunams, that works out to $150,000. It’s a hefty sum, but land mustn’t be sold. Especially considering that $5,000 for a dunam is actually nothing. There’s a whole industry of attorneys handling the lands. Everyone in the village is selling. “I don’t understand how they can sell. Not that it will ever revert to us. Or maybe it will, who knows. But it’s a matter of principle.”

  My father understands about politics, watches the news, and reads the papers religiously. He leaves the radio on next to him even when he’s asleep. He looks a wreck. He’s come to realize it’s never going to work out, and the way things are going, they’re liable to take away even the land we still have left. He turns to us, his four sons, and says, “You’re bound to leave. None of you is going to stay to defend the land. Refugees. Is that what you want to be? Look at what happened to the ones who ran away. It would be bette
r to die than to run. But you, what do you know about the value of land?”

  PART TWO

  The Bump on My Head

  The Craziest Kid in the Village

  My parents say that before I jumped off the roof and cracked my skull, I was the craziest kid in the village. They were worried about my future and did everything they could to set me straight, but nothing helped. My parents were shattered. I made their lives miserable. Not only theirs, the whole neighborhood’s and all our relatives’ lives too.

  My father says everyone hated me; they couldn’t stand the sight of me. Little kids didn’t dare walk down the street in front of our house. He says neighbors filed complaints with the police on account of me. They thought of having me committed or putting me in reform school when I was not even in kindergarten yet.

  My parents think back on it sometimes and laugh when they recall how I used to wake up before everyone else, jump out through the window, and head for the school near our house to look for bottles and bongs left behind by the hashashin, the hashish addicts. Then I’d run through the fields looking for cars that the car thieves had burned at night, and I’d come home with the charred license plates.

  My father says by the time I was four everyone knew I’d grow up to be a car thief and a junkie. He says that on holidays, when the Tira delinquents stole the fanciest cars, I’d sneak out of the house and wait for them at the entrance to the village with all the hashashin and the worst kids, to cheer the drag racers. My father says the holidays became a nightmare because he spent the whole time chasing me up and down the streets.