by Sayed Kashua
Dr. Majed asked me how I was feeling. “Not very well,” I answered. He asked if I was having problems at school, and I said everything was great.
Dr. Majed said he had heard from my father that I was in my third year at the boarding school, I was about to start my matriculation exams, I was having recurrent headaches, and the pain was keeping me from concentrating on my studies. Dr. Majed said I was depressed, and prescribed some pills, doxepin 10. “Take one of these a day,” he said, “and things will work out fine.”
I did, and the pills helped me sleep a little. They made me tired, heavy. My face became bloated, but I felt they were working. I really wanted to be an official depressive like Nick Drake, like Kurt Cobain. I had a renewable prescription, and I got the pills myself. They weren’t expensive, and pretty soon I started taking two a day. Then I increased the dose to doxepin 25, and I got in the habit of popping a pill every time I felt a headache or depression coming on. I walked around in a daze, but nobody asked me why. I’d reached a point where nobody expected anything of me anymore, a condition where it’s best not to interfere.
Naomi came to see me every now and then. She said she was planning to study psychology. She was going to ask for a deferral of her army service so she could study first, and she had to get good grades on her finals. When the exams were over, we’d split up; I knew that. That’s what her mother wanted. She said boarding school was a world apart, and as long as we were there she didn’t mind that her daughter had an Arab boyfriend. She said she had nothing against me, except it was too bad my name wasn’t Reuben or David.
On the day before the final in Arabic and two days before the last exam in math, I swallowed a whole pack of doxepin 25, ten pills at once. I wanted to sleep. Naomi came to my room. She knocked on the door and I didn’t hear her. She knew I was there. I hardly got out of bed in those days. Where would I go anyway? She opened the door and tried to wake me. I could hear her, I could see her, I woke up, but for some reason she thought I was still asleep. I saw her run out and return with the guidance counselor. What was the guidance counselor doing at school at that hour?
Today we had an appointment at the mental health clinic in Jerusalem, with the psychologist in charge of the adolescents’ clinic. My parents were told they had to come.
“What are you going to tell them?” my father asks. “Did you tell the guidance counselor anything? Did you talk to them about me?” He mentions Bassem and says he knows about how I’ve screwed up my studies and ruined everything on account of some girl.
I tell my father I haven’t told them anything because there’s nothing to tell.
He calms down when he realizes he’s not going to come under attack, and nobody is about to blame him for my condition. He’ll emerge from the whole thing with his reputation intact. As always.
My mother tries to say everything’s going to be okay and I should still consider taking the matriculation exams, but that whatever I decide will be all right, because she’s sure I’ll manage. She says she doesn’t understand how I wound up like this. “We knew you had it tough,” she says, “but we didn’t realize it was this bad.”
I hear them talk. They’re interfering with my attempts to concentrate in the backseat, to think about how I have only one more day to see Naomi. To try to imagine our last kiss.
My father launches into another monologue. He says everything he did was for me, to educate me. “Do you know that in England you’re allowed to hit schoolchildren to this very day? It’s an educational approach.”
I tell him I know, I understand, and I swear I haven’t said anything to anyone. I’ve never talked about it.
He believes me again and drops the subject.
And then I remember how on my last visit home on ‘id eladha he yelled at me. “You lunatic!” he screamed. “You certified lunatic!” All this because I didn’t want to pay the usual visit to my aunts. I can still feel my left cheek burning, as if the slap happened just now. I shake my head and put my cheek against the car window to relieve the pain.
I remember the day when Naomi leaned her head against my shoulder for the first time. It was before she told me she loved me, before we started going together. It’s hard to reconstruct that feeling. You can remember it, but you can’t re-feel it.
Last week, I put my head against her chest, and she ran her fingers through my hair and said, “We shouldn’t get too attached, you know. Do you understand? We shouldn’t. Enough. We’re breaking up, and that’s that. Otherwise, Mother will throw me out of the house.” She told me her mother had said she’d rather have a lesbian for a daughter than one who hangs out with Arabs.
Suddenly I realize I haven’t a clue as to what I’m going to do about the math final, and I’d dropped out of the physics exam too at the last minute. After three years of torture in physics classes, I didn’t make it to the exam. Now it hits me: I’m going to flunk. I’m not sure I’ll even get my matriculation certificate. My parents will freak out. My father will never get over the shame. He’s right, my father. I’ve ruined my future, and it’s all because of the Jewish whore.
But I’m not mad at her, not at all. It’s entirely her mother’s fault. What could Naomi do about it anyway? If it had been up to her, she wouldn’t have broken up with me like that, because how can you stop loving someone overnight, to keep a deadline that was set eighteen months earlier? I had been expecting it the whole time, dreading it.
How I screamed yesterday! What a racket I made! I tried to run away from the emergency room, but the guidance counselor was strong enough to grab me by the arms. When I tried to break loose, I fell to the floor. She kept clutching me by my clothing and whispering, “You’re not a child. Stop screaming. Look what you’re doing.” I remember lots of people just stood around and stared at us, and the guard came but didn’t do anything, just stood to the side and watched me cry and scream. When my parents and Bassem arrived, I stopped at once.
The last thing I heard was what my father said to his friend about the Jewish whore. How I hated him then. And I hated the guidance counselor even more. She wanted me to stop loving Naomi, or at least try to love Salwa, an Arab girl at school. She was pretty and smart, that’s what the counselor kept telling me. So there I was, on my way back to Jerusalem with my parents. They’d gotten a call from my school, asking them to come with me. I wouldn’t be allowed back in school unless my parents and I met with a psychologist first. There wasn’t much time left—just one more day and one more matriculation exam—but the counselor said they couldn’t assume responsibility for me without the psychologist’s approval.
The psychologist said I was okay, I hadn’t really wanted to die, and the pills I took wouldn’t have hurt me. He believed me when I said I’d read in a book on pharmaceuticals that you need to take as much as 300 milligrams for it to work. He said the information was correct and he was inclined to believe that it wasn’t a suicide attempt. He wanted me to have the pills, but he’d give them to the guidance counselor, and she’d give me one a day, because I was still depressed, and it was a psychiatric prescription, after all.
I have to get back to school. There’s only one day left.
We didn’t talk on the way back to school. We got in the car, same as before. My father fiddled with the dial, looking for the music channel, and swore at Jerusalem for having such lousy reception. He stopped at a steak house for a hummus and a beer. Mother ordered chicken. I didn’t want anything. All I wanted was to get back there, so I could see Naomi. I didn’t have time to spare. My father looked at me and said, “This is too good for you.”
PART FOUR
Hitting Rock Bottom
Chest Pains
I’m walking up the hill that stretches between our house and the mosque, keeping my eyes to the ground, hoping the neighbors passing by have forgotten me by now. Maybe I’ve changed, and they won’t recognize me anymore. I don’t exchange the usual salaam aleikums. I shift my side pack from arm to arm. It’s heavy, and the trek up toward the tax
i station is hard going. Normally Father would drive me there. Sometimes he’d take me as far as Kfar Sava, and the first few times, even to Jerusalem. But Father isn’t home now. He’s in the hospital.
When Mother got home, I woke up. She explained that Father hadn’t felt well the night before, and even though they didn’t find anything, they decided to keep him at the hospital for observation. She said there was nothing wrong with him and he’d be discharged soon. If she hadn’t needed to get to work by eight, she would have stayed there till they sent him home. She suggested I stop at the hospital to see him on my way to Jerusalem. I had to go through Kfar Sava anyway to catch the bus. “Sit with him for five minutes,” she said. She was always trying to mediate between Father and me, to improve our relationship.
Six months had gone by since I’d finished school, six months since my last visit home. Father had tried hard to be nonchalant at first, as if he didn’t really care what was happening with me, as if I could go to hell for all he cared. But when he recalled how I’d disgraced him, he’d go berserk and start shouting. “You, our greatest hope, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Everyone in the village keeps asking me how far you’ve gone. What am I supposed to tell them, that you haven’t even taken your finals?” All the other parents are celebrating their kids’ acceptance into medical school or law or engineering, and my father has to tell people that the Jews haven’t decided yet what to do with my brain. He’s told everyone they’re afraid another country will kidnap me and use my talents.
I don’t have a place of my own in the house anymore. My older brother has put our two beds together to make a queen-size. Whenever I used to come home, Mother would separate the beds and make mine up. But this time she didn’t, and they didn’t clear any space for me in the closet either. I left my clothes in my side pack and slept in Grandma’s room. On a mattress, not in her bed. In the morning, I took my bag and headed for Jerusalem to look for a job. At night, I plan to crash at Adel’s. He’s in law school already, and he has a room in the dorms.
* * *
Mother called four days ago and said my cousin had been killed. “You’ve got to come home for the funeral and the three days of mourning.” She said he’d been playing ball with a few classmates, and it got on the nerves of their crazy drug-addict neighbors. The ball went over the fence and landed in the druggies’ house. The three brothers stormed out with knives and stabbed the kids. Ali was the only one who died. The other kids were injured, but they’re okay. My mother said Ali’s father was stabbed in the chest when he tried to protect the kids. He was in bad shape, but he’d been operated on, and he’d be all right. They hadn’t told him yet. They pretended Ali was okay and had been sent to a different hospital. The doctors said it would be dangerous to give him the news of his son’s death at that point. My parents went to visit him in the hospital yesterday. While they were there, at my uncle’s bedside, my father complained of chest pains. The doctors decided to do some tests. The tests were okay. Mother says it’s just fatigue.
I didn’t talk with my father during the days of mourning. He was too busy. Yesterday was the third day. The women sat in my aunt’s house, and the men came to ours. The relatives from Ramallah and Bakat el-Hatab slept over and joined us in greeting the people who came to extend their condolences. It was a tragedy. They talked about it on the evening news in Arabic: the cold-blooded murder of a boy playing ball. My job was to stand at the entrance with little cups of coffee and a large coffeepot and pour bitter sada coffee for everyone who arrived. My father just sat there the whole time. He cried at Ali’s funeral. Later I heard him say it was the first time he’d ever cried over someone who’d died.
I go up to the fifth floor, into the cardiology ward, and look for room 12. If my father asks, I’ll tell him my studies are going well and I’m about to complete my final. I really am studying. If everything continues smoothly, I’ll enroll in one of the departments at Hebrew University next year. Not anything exciting, because my grades aren’t high enough, but it hardly matters anymore. The main thing is I’ll have a degree.
My father is in the bed nearest the door, drinking coffee. He greets me with a surprised Ahalan, and I get the feeling he’s glad to see me. He asks if I’m on my way back to Jerusalem and says he’s got to have a cigarette. Then he asks me to go down to the newsstand to get him a paper, and we’ll look for a place where he can read the paper and smoke.
He looks fine, nothing out of the ordinary, hooked up to a flickering machine that’s monitoring something, and that’s all. I’ll get the paper. I’ll ask if he needs anything else, and then I’ll leave. I’m working today. Besides, I need to get away from this atmosphere. I’ve got a headache already.
Those three days were rough. It was the first time I’d seen a dead body. I hadn’t realized how much Ali had grown. The mustache over his upper lip was beginning to show. The body was naked, with an autopsy incision stretching from his stomach to his neck. Too bad I saw it. The incision had been sewn up hastily with coarse black thread. When the body washers ran out of water, they shoved a bucket in my hand and asked me to hurry. When I realized I couldn’t take it anymore, I got out of there and headed home. I said I was going to help set up the chairs and make coffee.
After the funeral, all the men in the family gathered at our house and talked about revenge. The relatives from the West Bank said they would do anything, but there was nobody to kill. The three druggie brothers had been arrested, and the police had moved the rest of their family to a different village. Most of the adults in our family stayed put, while a few of the younger ones huddled in the corner, whispering. My father was older, but he joined them. It was obvious they were planning something. Aunt Fahten walked over to the mourners’ tent where the men were seated. She was allowed in there, because she was a widow. She’s a strong woman, and wise. She stood in the middle and shouted, “There won’t be a single man among you unless you find a way of consoling Ali’s mother! Unless you do something that will comfort her!”
The stream of callers didn’t let up. From time to time, I switched places with my older brother. He poured the coffee and I washed the dishes. My father was busy the whole time. He never just sat in the tent. He kept going in and out of the house through the back door. He took a few bus trips, car trips too. Around 8 P.M. he came down to the shed, and a few seconds after he sat down we heard a loud boom. Father had a proud look in his eyes. Soon a young guy came in and whispered something to him. Father left the shed again, took the car, and came back within five minutes with two doctors who were relatives of ours. They came with their bags. Someone had been injured out there, but taking him to the hospital was not an option.
I went indoors now too. I didn’t know the person who’d been hurt, but I saw he was wearing my father’s sneakers. He had a gash in his leg from jumping out the window, but he’d be all right. The callers whispered to one another, trying to figure out what had happened. Soon they realized that the murderers’ home had been blown up using the containers of cooking gas.
I come back with the paper. My father’s in bed. When he sees me, he sits up and is about to get to his feet. Suddenly he looks at me with big bulging eyes—frightened, imploring eyes. All at once his forehead is covered in perspiration, and the monitor starts beeping nervously.
I scream to one of the nurses, “My father! My father!” and within seconds there’s a whole team around his bed. They hook him up to oxygen and pull his bed out toward Intensive Care. I follow them, trying to see his face, but I can’t. I can’t get into the elevator with them. I run down the stairs and get to Intensive Care before they do. I’m convinced he’s dead by now. That’s it. There’s no hope. He won’t make it. I start crying. I head for the phone booths next to the elevators. If he doesn’t die now, I’ll stay with him right here in the hospital till the next heart attack kills him.
Half the family arrives, my aunts and their children. My mother is wearing a head scarf. Her eyes are swollen from crying. She heads straight
for Intensive Care, and there’s no stopping her. A few of the men want to talk to a doctor, and they ask for someone to come out and tell them what’s happening. They’ve left their shops, their classrooms, and their businesses to come here. That’s all we need now, another tragedy in the family.
The doctor says Father will be okay, but I don’t believe it. I saw him perspiring. I saw his eyes telling me he won’t be back, he’s somewhere else already. They’re allowing me in too now. He’s still alive, but I know it won’t last. They’ve hooked him up to lots more instruments. The doctor says it wasn’t a heart attack, just chest pains. To be on the safe side, they’re leaving him in Intensive Care till they run some more tests. I look at him, and he still looks scared, baffled by what he’s been through. He looks at me, then at Mother, and I know it’s all because of me.
Arabs Called Me a Settler
Arabs called me a settler, their label for anyone who moved into a room that already had two tenants. A third roommate. A squatter. In the Hebrew University dorms, settlers were a big and legitimate group. The rent would be divided three ways, and almost every Arab student welcomed the arrangement. There were just a few city types, mostly from Nazareth, who came to the university in their own cars and didn’t want any settlers in their rooms.
The settlers were usually students who’d been late signing up for the dorms or who’d dragged out their studies for too many years and were no longer eligible for a dorm room. There were only two beds in each room, and when both of them were occupied, the settler would bed down on a mattress. I was the only settler who wasn’t a student. To get into the dorms, which were closely guarded by security guards—some Jewish, some Druze—you had to produce a student ID. Adel gave me his. He told the administration he’d lost it, and I paid the fine for him and gave him the money for a passport photo.