by Sayed Kashua
The war was drawing to an end. There hadn’t been any alarms for several nights in a row, and Adel said there was still hope and the Iraqis might win. They were just waiting for the Americans to come closer. The Iraqis had enough oil to set the whole gulf on fire. All the aircraft carriers would be burned. The problem was that they didn’t have people who could think straight. If he’d been there, he’d have taught them how to win a war.
The uniformed guard in the glass booth across from us scared me. People in uniform always scared me. As far as I was concerned, all of them were police. I think he was a little scared of us too. Didn’t say a word, just sat there with a book in his hand as if he were trying to do his homework. Every now and then he’d peek at us, and as soon as he made eye contact he’d turn back to his book. I thought he was a student, but Adel said he must be making up some matriculation exams and looked like someone who’d never make it.
Just don’t let the alarm go off now. My parents have stopped wearing their gas masks, let alone staying in a sealed room. Mother told me that my father and brothers would go outdoors to see if there were any missiles in the air. They weren’t the only ones. Nobody in the village stayed indoors. People went out, to make sure the Patriot missiles weren’t working. Our neighbor started shouting for the missiles to come. It was as if he were trying to guide them past the Patriots. “Nooooo. … left … that’s right. Yeah!” His children applauded, and the women went lulululu the way they did at weddings.
The Arab newspapers wrote a story about a goat that could say “Sadaaaaaam.” Then people began seeing Saddam’s face in the moon. When I came home, my father couldn’t believe I didn’t see it myself. He took me outdoors and tried for hours to explain where I should look: where the nose was, where the mouth was, where the mustache was, and the beret. In the end, I did see him. It really did look like him. Not just like him—it was him. Look straight up.
Matzohs
When we were little, we used to fight over matzohs. They were like trick-or-treat candies that you can only get for a few weeks and then they disappear. The women didn’t need to bake during matzoh season. Everyone ate matzohs. With hummus, with salami, with beans, it was delicious. Grandma said the Jews kidnapped Dr. Jihad once, when he was still a little boy. His mother, a widow like my grandmother, cried all day. She looked for him all over Kfar Sava. She’d gone into a store to buy him an ice-cream bar, and he’d disappeared. Some men from the village joined her in the search. He was an only son, like my father. She almost died of grief, the poor woman. But eventually she found him. He was with some religious Jews, some rabbis, and they felt sorry for her and gave her back the child. They’d wanted to take some of his blood to put in their matzohs, my grandmother told us, but we didn’t believe that Dr. Jihad was ever little.
Sagi was the first boy to invite me to his home for the Passover seder. I had just started shaving my beard. They had a small apartment but a nice one, in a building with an elevator. There were no elevators in our village. The only ones we saw were at Meir hospital in Kfar Sava. He said I had nothing to worry about, that his parents were left-wingers. His mother was from South America and had been in the revolution. She was an ardent socialist. His father was from Poland, and I just had to see his pictures from when he was doing computer studies in the U.S. That was in the sixties, and he dressed like a flower child. There was a younger sister too, who played the piano in the living room, and in the kitchen they had a small television set on a swivel. They were nice to me. His mother kept smiling, good-natured. She cooked all day long. When she asked Sagi to bring some chairs from the neighbor, I helped him.
We weren’t close friends. Sometimes I’d borrow cassettes from him, because he liked hard rock and I wanted to learn what it sounded like. I didn’t particularly like the music, but he’d invited me, so I went. I had a hard time going home in those days. At some point in my adolescence it dawned on me that my parents hadn’t been treating me right.
Later that evening, an old man arrived, and another family with kids, including a girl our age. We sat to the side, and they sang. The girl held the Passover book and looked at the pictures and spoke a different language. She knew some of the songs, and sang them in a foreign accent, and seemed happy. She had just arrived in the country. A pretty girl.
That’s when I learned about Jewish holidays. You sit around a table, you dress up, you have wine, you don’t roast anything on a spit. And even if there are a lot of people, you don’t use disposable dishes. There’s no hummus on the table. You eat chopped liver and all sorts of strange foods. They were nice to me and didn’t put everything on my plate. They kept saying, “You don’t have to if you don’t like it.” But I ate it. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.
Sagi taught me lots of things. About the Haggadah, and the afikomen, and the ten plagues of Egypt, and who Elijah the Prophet was. He dressed up as Elijah, and I kept looking at the girl, but it’s difficult to impress a girl when you don’t speak her language. She lived in an ulpan, where she was studying Hebrew. She’d just arrived in the country, and she’d come to stay. She said, “It’s a wonderful country,” and I had no idea what she was talking about. Just you wait, I thought. Just you wait till you see the Polanski kids. Just you wait till you have to take the bus. But she really was happy. Her parents had stayed in Argentina, but it didn’t matter to her, she said. She loved Eretz Yisrael.
We were sitting in Sagi’s room. I didn’t catch her name, and she didn’t catch mine. Sagi knew a little Spanish, and he translated what she said. “Ask her if there are any Arabs where she studies,” I said, and she said there weren’t any. “She says she’s heard about Arabs and she’s not afraid of them at all,” Sagi translated. And then he told her that there were Arabs at his school and that they were cool. She said she couldn’t understand how we even agreed to study there, and that in her opinion, there was no such thing as a good Arab. Sagi thought that was funny. He told me she was a stupid thick-headed jerk, a real cow. He grabbed his head, pointed at me, and said, “He’s an Arab.” She laughed and said it wasn’t nice to say such a thing about me.
The Happiest Independence Day of My Life
The teachers at my new school don’t hit the students. There’s no lice inspection. The teachers don’t check your homework. You don’t have to say “sir,” and when you need to go to the bathroom you don’t have to get permission; you can go whenever you want. And the bathrooms are clean and spacious, with a dryer that gives off hot air to dry your hands. I can’t stand the dryer, but there are paper towels too. There are lots of cleaning people in blue uniforms. They’re not allowed to hit. They don’t even talk to the students.
You don’t have to line up to go into class. You don’t have to read the Koran every morning. You don’t have one girl playing the same silly tune on the organ, and boys are allowed to sit next to girls.
Naomi sat next to me once, and I fell in love. I sank. I crashed. I’d put my head on my pillow, open my eyes, stare at the ceiling—and feel different. An unfamiliar feeling, a new kind of pain. In the dining room, in the library, in class, in the lobby, everywhere, my ears were pricked to hear her footsteps. I recognized them, every time. I recognized the sound from a distance: when she was barefoot, when she was in those black sandals, when she was in running shoes.
We hung out a lot together. Once we studied chemistry in her room. I sat on her bed, with the pretty sheets and the quilt. Her hair was long. Not black, not yellow, something in between. White hands. Freckled face. I loved those freckles. When she had kitchen duty, I helped her. In our class play at the end of tenth grade, I danced with her. In our first month in eleventh grade I told her I loved her. A week later she had a boyfriend.
I saw them hug each other in the snow. It was the first snow I’d ever seen. Quiet, lighting up the night, not banging on the windowpane like rain. I stood at the window, looking out at the lawn, which was covered in whiteness. After that, I spent most of my time just lying on my bed
with my mouth open and my head aching, until they broke up.
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Naomi wore a white blouse and read out of a black looseleaf about a little girl who sees her father on fire in the forest. At the end of the ceremony I told her I loved her, and she smiled. On Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers, she was furious because I hadn’t stood at attention during the memorial siren. We were sitting together in biology class. Everyone else got up, and I stayed seated. I had lost a grandfather and an uncle in the war, after all. After the siren she didn’t sit down. She took her bag and left.
She didn’t show up for lunch. She wasn’t in her room or in the library. What an idiot I was. What was the matter with me? Couldn’t I have stood? Her father was killed in active duty after all. He died when she was still very little. There’s a picture of him over her bed, with her on his shoulders. She must have been about three; she hardly remembers him. He was an officer in the IDF, and he’d been in charge of the evacuation of Yamit. He didn’t die in the war. He’d had an accident on his way home from his base. The IDF took her on a trip to Canada once. They pay her tuition.
I sat at the school gate listening to sad music on my Walkman—the Cranes, maybe, or the Swans—and I waited for her.
Naomi got out of her mother’s Mitsubishi. She had tears in her eyes. It was the first time I saw her mother. She looked at me and drove off. They’d been to the ceremony at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl. But that wasn’t why she was sad.
“Why didn’t you stand for the siren?”
I’m not Jewish.
“I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time. I told my mother that I love you. I cried, and I told her I couldn’t take it anymore. Every time you told me I love you I thought, in my heart, So do I, so do I.” She smiled.
Now I understood what true joy was. I carried her bag to her room. I was ecstatic. It was the happiest Independence Day eve of my life.
A National Home
Sometimes I think about when I was young, and I thank God I’m not there anymore. What a mess I was: the way I looked, the way I felt. I’m so happy to be an adult. In the middle of twelfth grade I went to a café for the first time. It was one of those Tuesday evenings when they gave us time off. That’s when I learned that you could order a salad as a separate course, served in a big bowl, and that there were different kinds. Salad on its own, without a pitta. We were sitting in Atara Café, where Amos Oz sat in My Michael. Naomi ordered a Greek salad, and I ordered a hot chocolate. Something familiar, something I could afford.
In twelfth grade, Naomi took me to the movies for the first time. I couldn’t believe that girls could go into a movie theater. There used to be a movie theater in Tira, but not anymore. There’s a small room, with walls of unpainted bricks and a television set. When we were little, Aunt Ibtissam’s son, who was really big then, took us to see Tarzan. There were wooden chairs, like in elementary school. It was nothing more than a dark hovel. My little brother threw up right at the beginning, and all of us got out of there pretty fast. Everyone kept shouting and smoking, and when Tarzan’s guys appeared in the forest there were catcalls and whistling. I was petrified.
I was frightened in twelfth grade too. The movie theater was bound to be full of people like the Polanski students. They’d recognize me and I’d have nowhere to run. Sometimes the Polanski kids would come to the school gate and scream, “Death to the Arabs!” I never went out into the yard beyond the fence. It seemed too risky, too far from the guard.
Naomi said I had nothing to be afraid of at the movies. We were going to see Life According to Agfa, and she said it was a movie the thugs would never go to, a movie for left-wingers like her. We could sit through the whole movie holding hands. I didn’t have to be afraid of anyone.
The new life was exciting. I realized it wasn’t only bad kids who went to the movies. Grown-ups went too. Men and women sat together. Everything was clean and neat. The chairs were padded, and everyone dressed nicely. Boy, was I glad to see the two Arab kitchen workers in the film. They were cool, actually, and funny. The thugs were the bad guys. I couldn’t get over the pianist in the restaurant. Naomi said it was Danny Litani, a well-known singer. She didn’t have a tape of his in her room, but she had one of some guy who sang “Things Have Got to Change,” and “Just Get Out of the Territories.” I couldn’t believe a Jew would sing stuff like that.
Naomi was in a party called Ratz. She had a green shirt with the party logo, and she talked a lot about human beings as human beings. About how there was no difference between national groups, how individuals should be judged on their own merits, and how you shouldn’t look at a whole group as if everyone were the same. She said that in every nation there are good people and bad people. I never really understood what she was talking about, but I took the whole thing seriously.
In twelfth grade I understood for the first time what ’48 was. That it’s called the War of Independence. In twelfth grade I understood that a Zionist was what we called a Sahyuni, and it wasn’t a swearword. I knew the word. That’s how we used to curse one another. I’d been sure that a Sahyuni was a kind of fat guy, like a bear. Suddenly I understood that Zionism is an ideology. In civics lessons and Jewish history classes, I started to understand that my aunt from Tulkarm is called a refugee, that the Arabs in Israel are called a minority. In twelfth grade I understood that the problem was serious. I understood what a national homeland was, what anti-Semitism was. I heard for the first time about “two thousand years of exile” and how the Jews had fought against the Arabs and the British. I didn’t believe it. No way. The English had wanted the Jews here, after all. In Bible class, I discovered that Abraham was Isaac’s father. In twelfth grade I discovered that it was Isaac, not Ismael, who’d been replaced with a sheep.
In twelfth grade, the kids in my class started running in the parking lot, getting into shape for the army. They were taken to all sorts of installations and training camps, and I received a bus pass and a ticket to the Israel Museum. Sometimes soldiers in uniform came to our school to talk with the students, and I wasn’t allowed to take part. Our teacher always apologized. He was embarrassed to have to tell me it wasn’t for me. In twelfth grade I understood I wouldn’t be a pilot even if I wanted to be, not only because I wasn’t fit and my grades weren’t good enough. There was no way they would even call me up for the screening tests. I sure had a good laugh at my father.
An Educational Approach
That day, Mother and Father stayed home from work. They dressed up, and an hour and a half before the appointment they got in the car. They knew they mustn’t be late. They had to look like parents. The night before, they’d come to pick me up at the hospital. The school guidance counselor had taken me to the Emergency Room at Shaarei Tsedek hospital. How I screamed at her when I heard she’d asked my parents to come! I’d shamed them in the worst way. And I’d shamed myself too. Now I’d hate myself even more.
I just kept praying: Don’t let my parents find out. Don’t let my father find out. But now they knew. They came to the hospital and saw me having my stomach pumped. They talked with the guidance counselor and took me back home to the village. My father’s friend Bassem was with us. He and my father had been playing chess when the counselor called, and he offered to go along to see how I was doing.
Now I remember how this Bassem stood over my bed at the hospital and asked, “What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with him?” And Father answered, “It’s all because of that bitch of his, the Jewish whore.”
I’d been tired and dizzy all the time. I could hardly fall asleep. I didn’t sleep more than two hours a night, and I was having strong headaches. This had been going on for a few months. I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t think or sleep or even simply sit still. There was a strange buzzing in my ears, and it wouldn’t stop. Headache pills never helped me, and the CAT scan didn’t show a thing. The neurological tests were normal too.
One weekend when I had gone home, Mother took me to Amneh, ou
r neighbor, Grandma’s friend. She said her daughter was a nurse, and she wanted to take my blood pressure. Amneh’s older daughter really was just studying nursing then, but she had a blood pressure gauge. She took my pressure and said it was high.
That’s when Amneh got to work. She brought a handkerchief and tied a knot and put some salt into one corner; then she muttered some prayers and started rubbing the handkerchief around my head. She said it was all because of the Evil Eye, and with Allah’s help it would soon be over. She said she was convinced it would work, because she’d yawned as she’d applied the handkerchief, and also because the salt had melted.
The pain persisted, and the hypertension pills didn’t help. A month later, on one of my visits home, Father said he thought it had to do with my eyesight. I was having headaches because I was studying so hard, and because all those books and computers must have ruined my eyes. He said a friend of his in Taiyiba, an eye doctor, had told him this. He said the friend’s name was Dr. Majed, and he suggested that we go see him at his clinic.
I agreed. The idea of wearing coke-bottle glasses like John Lennon’s appealed to me, but I knew how much I really read and how much time I actually spent at the computer.
On our way there, I tried to doze in the backseat. I didn’t want Naomi to see me with my eyes swollen again. In fact, Dr. Majed was a psychiatrist, the director of the mental health clinic in Taiyiba. He asked us to come in the afternoon, when there were almost no patients left at the clinic. There was only one woman there, who kept rocking back and forth. Dr. Majed let her in first, renewed her prescription, and then invited us in. With him in the room was a young man, probably an intern, maybe a psychologist. Actually, he may have been a social worker.