by Sayed Kashua
The first week at the school was the toughest week of my life. Every day gave me new reasons to cry my heart out. I cried when I had to say good-bye to Grandma. “Just don’t talk politics,” she said, and kissed me.
Then Father drove me to the meeting place at the entrance to Jerusalem. The drive up the winding roads to Jerusalem scared me. What if Father didn’t make it back in one piece? It was raining hard, and a long row of cars was inching its way up the mountain. I prayed in silence that I’d miss the school bus and would have to go back home.
There was a row of tables where people gave each of us a name tag to hang around our necks. They misspelled my name. They gave us envelopes with a piece of paper that told us the color of our building and our room number. It took me a while to find the place. My three roommates had gotten there first and had left me the bed farthest from the window, closest to the door. Everyone said Hi, and one of them shook my hand and read the name on my name tag. I didn’t correct him.
That first week, I didn’t know what to do with my tray in the dining room. I didn’t know how to eat with a knife and fork. I didn’t know the Jews put the gravy on top of their rice, instead of putting it in a separate bowl. I cried when my roommates found out I’d never heard of the Beatles and laughed at me. They laughed when I said bob music instead of pop music. They laughed when I threatened to complain to Principal Binhas—instead of Pinhas. “What did you say his name was?” they asked, and like an idiot I repeated it: “Binhas.” They laughed at the pink sheets Mother had bought me specially. They laughed at my pants. At first, I even believed them when they said they really wanted to know where they could buy such pants. “Do they make special pants for Arabs?” they asked.
After English class, one of the students said I had the same accent as Arafat. As far as I knew, Arafat was the guy from the Aden Hafla cassette. Another kid said I looked like the blind kanoon player on TV. All through the first week, they kept calling me Abu Jamil el-Anzeh, the guy in the Arabic course on Educational TV.
That first week I also met Adel, the Arab who was a year ahead of me. I saw him in the dining room and recognized him at once. He was at a table with the girls, and he was eating his chicken with his fingers. I knew I didn’t want to look like him, but just seeing him there kept me going. Within two days, we’d moved in together. I had no problem persuading one of his roommates to swap with me.
Adel thought my sheets were really nice. He came from a village in the Upper Galilee, four hours away by bus. They’d made a film about him once for Israel TV. Showed him dribbling on the basketball court, to prove that Arabs and Jews can live together. Pinhas said about him in the film, “Adel brought his whole village on his back,” and Adel said it was a compliment. He was a good student and didn’t need to study much. He answered in class and wasn’t shy.
That first week I had to read more pages in Hebrew than I’d read in Tira all the way through to the ninth grade. I gave up and didn’t do anything. They also had a placement test in physics. Adel got a hundred, and I couldn’t answer a single question. One week was enough. It was obvious that I was going home for good.
When I tell my family what I’ve been through this week, they’ll never send me back, I thought. They’ll understand me. They’ll realize it’s a different world, and I can’t live there. I’ll tell them how out of place I felt during the Rosh Hashanah meal, how I don’t know a single word of their songs. I’ll tell them how I cry myself to sleep each night. And how I can’t stop thinking about my family, because I worry that something bad will happen to them: that Grandma will die or Father will have a car accident. I’ll tell them there are some bad kids at the school, with earrings, and the girls walk around in shorts. I’ll explain it has been the hardest week of my life, and they’ll let me stay home.
Polanski
When it was time to go home for the Rosh Hashanah break, I packed everything I’d brought with me and got on the bus. It was my first trip alone on a public bus, and if I hadn’t followed some of the kids who’d gotten on before me, I would never have known you have to pay the driver right at the beginning.
Adel and I took our seats on one bench. There was no one on the bench across from us, and Adel said maybe the girls from the our school would sit there, but it didn’t happen. All the kids from our school sat down in front, carrying on and making a hell of a racket.
I was petrified of the trip, afraid I wouldn’t make it home or that I’d get off at the wrong stop and be lost. My father had written it all down for me in a notebook:
Take the bus to the central bus station, get off with everyone else. Then he wrote: Bus 947, Haifa local, get off at the Kfar Sava stop. Walk as far as Meir hospital, then look for the Tira taxi stand. Take taxi to Tira.
Adel was supposed to go to his village, Nahf, which is a much longer journey. You go as far as Haifa, then take another bus to Karmi‘el, and there you can spend hours waiting for a bus that goes by his village. He said he’d probably walk from Karmi‘el. “It’s not that far, just half an hour’s walk.”
Adel didn’t want to go home. He was disappointed to have to leave after just one week. He asked the principal if he could spend the holiday break at school, but Pinhas said that was impossible. I invited him to Tira, and he accepted. I was glad to have someone to help me find the way, and he was glad to save time and money. He asked if we had any pretty girls in our neighborhood.
The bus leaves from the front gate of the school, and its first stop is just a few minutes away, at the Polanski Vocational School. The students there look different from the ones at our school, and Adel and I don’t look like any of them. The bus is full of students now, shouting and swearing, and girls in black high-heeled shoes and big earrings who spend the whole bus ride putting on makeup.
Three kids crowd into the seat facing Adel and me, and two others stand next to them, holding on to the metal bars. I feel stifled, dead. I tell Adel I’m getting off at the next stop. “Don’t be a retard.” he says. “I’m not going to pay for another ticket to the central bus station.”
I’m already sorry I invited him, sorry I ever met him, sorry I got on the bus with him. I can tell we’re in trouble, and within minutes my fears prove true.
One of the kids on the bench across from us asks Adel where he’s from.
“Nahf,” Adel says.
The kids laugh and turn to me. “And you?”
I put on the biggest grin I can muster, trying to be the most polite person in the world. They’re not going to hurt me. I was in Seeds of Peace. I know Jews. They’ve got to leave me alone. “From Tira,” I say. “It’s near Kfar Sava.” I try to keep up the smile, even though they’re already laughing at me. Quickly I whisper to Adel, “Let’s get off, I’ll pay for your ticket.” But he won’t do it. One thing’s for sure: I’m never getting on this bus again.
The kids across from us are whispering, laughing, repeating the names of our villages and deliberately mispronouncing them. They’re laughing at our names, and we don’t do anything about it. To take part in the general hilarity would be ridiculous, so I keep quiet. They start singing something that sounds familiar, but instead of “The Jew is dead”—the way we sing it—they sing “Mohammed is dead.” They sing loudly, and some of their classmates join in. I press the STOP button. The hell with Adel. I’m getting off. I pick up my bag, controlling myself, holding back my tears.
Once I get off, Adel decides to get off too. I see him only after I’m on the sidewalk. One of the students opens a window and spits. He misses us.
Adel starts shouting at me. “I can’t believe it! Do you even know where we are? Do you have any idea what bus we need to take now? Why do you think the same thing won’t happen on the next bus we take?”
I was willing to risk being lost. I was just so relieved it was over. My father had given me enough money. We took a cab back to the central bus station. All I wanted was for the Polanski kids not to get on our bus to Kfar Sava.
Ben Gurion
&n
bsp; There was nothing in my father’s explanations about Ben Gurion Airport. The sonofabitch lied to me. How I hated him then. When the bus stopped for the first time, I was sure we’d reached Kfar Sava, but it was the roadblock at the entrance to Ben Gurion Airport.
A soldier got on and told Adel and me to get off. Then he asked us for our IDs.
“We’re not sixteen yet,” Adel told him, and answered all his questions: where we’re from, where we’re going, where we study.
The soldier asked us to open our bags, and the bus went into the airport without us. The soldier searched through our books, our sheets, and our clothes and said we should wait for the bus to return and pick us up on the way out of the airport.
I’m not getting back on that bus, I decided. I’m not willing to be stared at like I-don’t-know-what. I’ve had it. I can’t take this anymore. I’d survived the roommates, the dining room, and the Polanski kids, but this was the last straw. I cried like a baby. I broke down. Even the soldier felt uneasy. He said it was just routine. He brought me some water. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
I didn’t drink it. I phoned my father at home. I could barely blurt out the words.
My father screamed, “Calm down, what happened?” He was upset.
“Come here and get me right away,” I shouted, to make sure he understood I wasn’t coming home on my own. “I’m at the airport.”
Adel preferred to keep quiet. He said he could have been in Nahf already and he was sorry he’d joined me.
I sat there crying, waiting for my father.
“What happened?” my father asked, when he finally arrived to pick us up. I didn’t answer. I sat in front and Adel sat in back. My face was all swollen, and Adel told him that a soldier had taken us off the bus and I wouldn’t get back on. Father said, “Are you crazy? What’s got into you? Is that something to cry about?”
“I told him a million times, but he wouldn’t listen,” Adel said.
I didn’t say a word.
Adel and my father talked about school, about the food they gave us there, and about what they called “four o’clock snack,” which was cake and juice. Adel said they serve meat for dinner every day. They talked about the big library and the playground. My father said a million kids would like to be in my place, and there I was, crying like a baby. “Do you want to come back to Tira, to study with all the bums, is that what you want? Fine, suit yourself. But don’t come complaining to me later if everyone says they threw you out of school after a single week. Do you want people to say you flunked, that you couldn’t make it at a good school? Have you thought about how people will look at you?”
My tears hadn’t dried yet, but I could tell right away that my father wasn’t about to let me stay home. I had no choice. I’d have to go back to the school.
“Look at Adel,” my father said. “Why isn’t he crying?” Then he laughed at me. The sonofabitch knew they took Arabs off the bus at the airport. He’d taken the same bus when he went to the university. “Nobody ever told me to get off,” he said. “They didn’t notice I was an Arab. Every time the soldiers told an Arab to get off, I’d get up and shout, ‘Take me off too, I’m an Arab!’ and I’d hold up my ID card and wave it proudly. What’s the matter with you? What a jellyfish you are. Some soldier jerk can make you behave like this? Just look at yourself.”
I took that bus line hundreds of times after that. Each time, I’d feel the fear again. It didn’t let up until we’d passed the airport. The only time they ever made me get off was on that first trip. After that, they didn’t notice me anymore. I felt sorry for the Arabs who were taken off, and I thanked God they hadn’t picked on me.
In my second week at the school, I shaved off my mustache. I told Adel we had to learn to pronounce the letter p properly. He didn’t care. The Bible teacher gave me a tip: “Hold a piece of paper up to your mouth. If the paper moves, you’ve said a p,” he said. Adel laughed at me, and when the paper moved, he said he couldn’t tell the difference. He was convinced there was really no difference between b and p, that it was all in my head, and that Hebrew is a screwed-up language. He didn’t see why they had to have two different letters for the same sound.
In my second week at school I bought myself some pants in a Jewish store. I bought a Walkman and some tapes in Hebrew. After that, I’d always have my Walkman and a book in Hebrew whenever I went through the airport. I didn’t come across the Polanski kids anymore. They were liable to recognize me. I took a cab whenever I needed to get to or from the central bus station. Adel and I stayed friends, but I never invited him home again.
Shorts
At school, I got to play with real guns. I knew how to use a carbine and an Uzi: snap the magazine in, cock the weapon, hold the gun to my shoulder, position myself like a sniper, and shoot. On school trips, the teachers would have weapons, and I soon became the student in charge. The weapons were heavy, and I was the only student who was prepared to carry them. I felt proud to be walking around with a gun across my shoulder.
Our history teacher was a left-winger. He always let me have his gun and asked me to walk close to him, because someone once made a comment about it, and he explained to me that it was his responsibility. He wouldn’t let me carry the magazines, even though he could have trusted me blindly.
Pretty soon I started sitting at the back of the bus with the other kids and singing their favorite bus-trip songs. I started taking the lead, and they’d join in the refrain. I knew the words by heart. When I was in elementary school, we had one favorite song that we’d chant over and over again—“Dos, dos ya chauffeur, al 199”—a song that urges the driver to go faster, 199 kilometers an hour. “Don’t worry about the cops. We’re the children of Palestine. Palestine is our country, and the Jew is our dog, knocking on our door like a beggar.” We sang without understanding a word. Once, our history teacher in Tira asked if anyone in the class knew what Palestine was, and nobody did, including me. Then he asked contemptuously if any of us had ever seen a Palestinian, and Mohammed the Fatso, who was afraid of having his knuckles rapped, said he’d once been driving with his father in the dark and they’d seen two Palestinians. That day, the history teacher rapped every single one of us on the knuckles, launching his attack with Mohammed the Fatso. He whacked us with his ruler, ranting, “We are Palestinians, you are Palestinians, I’m a Palestinian! You nincompoops, you animals, I’ll teach you who you are!”
On our class trips, whenever we slept outdoors we’d light a fire, and some kids would play the guitar. Nobody in Tira had ever played a guitar. We sang Beatles hits, and Israeli rock band songs too. Mashina, for instance. I knew already who they were, and I forced myself to learn their songs. I couldn’t stand that music at first, but within a few months it grew on me and I started liking it. Whenever I’d go home on vacation I’d scream at my brothers, who still listened to Fairuz and Abed el-Halim. When my father took me to the bus stop in Kfar Sava, I’d beg him to switch to a Hebrew radio station or at least to lower the volume. It wasn’t that I was ashamed. I really couldn’t stand them anymore. I told him my ear had grown used to other things.
On the trip to Wadi Qilt, I was carrying an Uzi and walked with the first group of hikers, with the teachers and the guides. Suddenly we heard something. The guide held up his hand and told all the kids to stand behind him. The history teacher yanked the gun off my shoulder, and I fell and hit my elbow. The teacher snapped in the magazine and cocked the weapon. And then we saw it was another group of schoolchildren.
It was my old class from Tira. I recognized them and they recognized me. They had a new teacher, one I’d never seen before. He asked his students to stand to the side to let us pass, because the passage was too narrow. I held my bleeding arm, lowered my gaze, and focused on my elbow.
The kids from Tira called out my name, and I pretended not to hear them. “Hey, look, it’s him. Over there, in the shorts,” they said. I passed by them quickly. A few of them said, “Hi, how’re you doing?” and I wanted
to dig a hole and hide. I nodded and kept going. Later, when some of the kids asked me if I knew them, I said I didn’t. “But they knew your name,” one of them insisted, and I said it was a common name among Arabs.
Once an Arab, Always an Arab
My father says, Once an Arab, always an Arab. And he’s got a point. He says the Jews can give you the feeling that you’re one of them, and you can really like them and think they’re the nicest people you’ve ever known, but sooner or later you realize you don’t stand a chance. For them you’ll always be an Arab.
Sometimes when I’m at home, I steal a few of my father’s books. I hate reading Arabic, but I owe it to myself to look at those books. To understand why Mahmoud Darwish is considered great, and why Emil Habibi was awarded the Israel Prize. The last book I stole was Hamarat al-Balad by Salman Natour. This young Arab—a poet, maybe, or an author—writes about life in a Tel Aviv pub. He describes all the left-wing Jews, who are really very nice to him. They listen to him with great interest and introduce him to new friends. Pretty young girls sit beside him and sometimes even kiss him. He recalls how at one stage he thought he could blend in completely. I feel like an idiot for ever thinking I could blend in too.
My father used to say I’d be the first Arab to build an atom bomb. He really believed it. Adel says no way. He used to think so too, but even if he were the smartest person in the world, they’d never let him study that kind of thing. There are some things an Arab can never become. The two of us were sitting in the guard’s room. We were alarm monitors that night. Every night since the Gulf War started two students had to stay up and wake the others if the alarm went off. Adel said he wanted to be the one to wake the girls because there were bound to be a few who slept in their underwear. The thought appealed to me, but I laughed at him anyway. In the drawer under his bed he had some girlie magazines. Sometimes, when there was nobody around, I’d lock the door and look through them, and all that time I’d think to myself, The guy’s a pervert.