by Sayed Kashua
When the war broke out, she managed to break the closure on Ramallah and reach Jerusalem. She dismantled her apartment, giving her furniture to her neighbors and her TV, VCR, and washing machine to friends. She says she could cram everything she owns into two bags. Which is good, because it will make it easier for her to pick up and leave next time.
Now she’s about to disappear again. If she’s quitting her job at the bar, I probably won’t see her in the near future. She runs off for long periods of time, and always comes back with stories like “I’ve made a film about the Nejaidat tribe in Jordan,” or “I’ve written a script for an Austrian film.” They always screw her. They don’t pay, they don’t broadcast what she’s done. Something bad always happens to her in the end, and then she runs away.
I’m so jealous of her now, with her bird and her two suitcases. She’s a beautiful girl, and there are lots of people who come to the bar just because of her. Black skin with curly hair and delicate features. The Arabs haggle with her over the bill. She gives in to them, anything just so they’ll leave. It’s the last shift, and she can’t stand the sight of them anymore. The lawyer-or-doctor in the suit is the only one left at the bar. He’s swaying already, rummaging through his coat pockets looking for his wallet.
I envy Shadia and she envies me: I have a wife and a child, I know where my house is, and I go back there every night. Not like her. Every time she looks for a home, she has to open an atlas. We’re stupid farmers, stupid fellaheen who won’t budge from our land. She can’t be like me.
PART FIVE
The Road to Tira
Date of Birth
My father works at city hall. He issues ID cards, passports, birth certificates, marriage licenses, and death certificates. He works out of a small office in the basement, with a small window and a shutter that can’t be pulled down. For fourteen years now, my father’s been issuing IDs to the people of Tira. In the past, they had to go to the Ministry of Interior in Netanya to renew their ID or apply for a passport, but now they can do it in the village itself.
Father works from eight to four every day. All the workers at city hall have a reputation for being corrupt. People say they just sit around doing nothing and were appointed because they’re related to the mayor. My father hated himself for accepting the job, but Grandma and Mother had pushed him. They wanted him to work in the village, not far away, so he’d always be nearby and they could always find him. Getting that job cost Father everything he believed in. Fourteen years earlier he had supported a collaborator who was running for mayor, and his reward was to be allowed to work for the State. People said my father must have been a collaborator too. Otherwise how could he work for the Ministry of Interior after sitting in an Israeli jail on security charges?
People in Tira hated my father. Maybe Grandma’s right; maybe they really were jealous of him. My father didn’t have any friends except for Bassem, who’d worked in the packinghouse with him. Bassem couldn’t get out of bed anymore. His years of fruit picking had finished off his back. Every now and then, he’d have another operation, and Father would go visit him in the hospital. Sometimes he’d take the chessboard along, and Bassem would play from the bed.
I don’t remember ever seeing Father making friends with people who were considered well-educated—doctors, lawyers, teachers, or engineers. Sometimes I got the impression that he was embarrassed, that he felt inferior, with that job of his behind the broken shutter.
Father had never been so discouraged. He hardly left the house anymore. Soon as he got back from work, he got into bed and turn on the radio on the dresser. Sometimes he’d come into the living room to watch the news, and other times he’d just stay in bed till the following morning. He didn’t have much to do at work. Sometimes, weeks would go by and nobody from Tira would need Father’s intervention with the Ministry of Interior. Sometimes he got so bored that he’d renew all our IDs and passports, saying they’d expired. Why walk around with old IDs when he could get us new ones within two days, with the signature of the new Minister of Interior?
My father renewed his own ID card every week. Sometimes he considered changing his name. The fact that this was possible appealed to him. He updated the information: Israeli citizen, Arab, married, father of four. Date of birth: 0/0/47, because Grandma couldn’t remember exactly when Father had been born. When the Jews came and she went to register him with them, she couldn’t give them an exact date. All she knew was that it had been in the prickly pear season. Grandma says there was a war on then, and nobody paid much attention to dates of birth.
Everything changed when my Aunt Camilla from the Nur-Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm was dying, and father visited her in the hospital in Nablus. Her oldest son, Ibrahim, had gotten out of jail when the Palestinians entered the West Bank, and as a token of appreciation for what he had done on behalf of the State, they gave him a position in the Ministry of Interior in Tulkarm. Granted, his salary wasn’t as high as my father’s, but at least he had some status. In the hospital, he walked around with a pistol, and the doctors treated him with respect. Thanks to him, they let my aunt die in the fanciest room in the hospital, with partitions between the beds.
I’d stayed at her place when I was little. At night, there were big fireworks that lit up all the houses, and Aunt Camilla explained that they were army fireworks. I thought then that the camp looked so beautiful, with water running through little grooves in the middle of the street, and no sand at all. The children used the English term ice cream instead of the Hebrew glida, and when they played soccer, they said hands, not yad. Even then I knew her son Ibrahim was a hero, though I’d never actually seen him.
After my aunt died, Ibrahim took my father to visit the Palestinian Ministry of Interior in Tulkarm. They were going through some old papers, dating back to the days of the British mandate, when suddenly my father spotted his own name with a precise date of birth: May 14, 1948. My father was delighted to be one year younger. He held a big celebration with all our aunts, and even Bassem was taken out of his bed.
Then my father started tracking down the birth dates of my aunts and all our relatives who’d been born before the war, and all of them started celebrating their birthdays. Aunt Fahten, who was seventy by then, even had some performers at her party. She said it was her way of making up for all the years she couldn’t celebrate.
The rumor spread through the village, and people started saying Father wasn’t a collaborator after all, because otherwise how could the Palestinians be allowing him go through secret documents? The first one to ask my father to find out his date of birth was the mayor, and my father not only dug up his date of birth but provided him with a birth certificate. The mayor had his first birthday celebration in the soccer field, and in his speech he thanked my father for his help.
After that, Father barely found time to sleep. People who couldn’t get to him at work would come to our house asking for help. Knowing that he was doing it as a favor, and that it had nothing to do with his job with the Israeli Ministry of Interior, they started bringing gifts in return. Sheep, watches, ground meat, six-packs of Coke, packets of rice and sugar. Some of them offered money, but Father wouldn’t take it. He said the only money he’d accept was to cover the cost of the stamps he had to buy in Tulkarm, and he always gave them a receipt signed by the Palestinian Authority. Ibrahim had no problem producing the stamps and official receipts at the same printing press where he used to print protest posters. Father handed all the money over to Ibrahim and never touched it. He said Ibrahim deserved it; he needed to build a house now, and to find himself a good wife. Poor guy, twenty years he spent in jail, and now he didn’t even have a mother.
The news of Father’s magic spread from Tira to the nearby villages and later to the Galilee. People came in fancy cars, bringing money and gifts, and asked for birth certificates. My father became famous. He didn’t consider it a bother. On the contrary, this new pursuit made him very happy. People started swearing they’d seen my father
having dinner with Arafat. Everyone in Tira knew it was Arafat who had asked my father to support the collaborator mayor. And the whole business with the Israeli Ministry of Interior was nothing more than a clever Palestinian ploy. The newspapers began singing his praises, thanking him and saluting him as “the well-known Palestinian hero,” “son of the brave shahid,” and “the man who has liberated land and administered justice.” My father didn’t react to their show of appreciation. He didn’t say a word. Mornings he’d work in the municipality building, afternoons he’d go to Tulkarm, and almost every evening he was guest of honor at someone’s first birthday party.
Parents’ Day
Your parents are here,” my wife says, waking me from my Friday afternoon nap. I’d forgotten they were coming. My mother had phoned the day before and told my wife they were coming to see us. She feels she’s missing out on something, and she’s got to see her granddaughter. They’re in the living room now. My mother’s holding her, making noises and expecting a response from the baby, who is dividing her attention between Mother, the bunch of keys in Father’s hand, and my brother, who’s whistling in her face. Her suspicious stares turn to grunts, and before long she’s crying. My mother says it’s our fault, that we don’t come to visit often enough and the baby doesn’t know her own grandparents.
My wife sits the baby on her shoulders and tries to calm her down in preparation for her next round with her grandmother. My wife says my mother doesn’t know the first thing about babies, she doesn’t show the baby any warmth, and it must be her fault that I’m as screwed up as I am.
I shake hands with my parents. Sometimes we kiss. I don’t like it. It feels very strange, very awkward, artificial. Especially when I kiss my father. I never let my lips touch his cheek, I just turn my head toward his lips, which barely graze my cheek.
“How come you’re still sleeping?” my father asks.
“I was working last night.”
“At the restaurant?” he asks. He knows it’s a bar, but my father is always intent on image building.
“At the chamara, the dive,” I correct him.
There are big bags of garbage in the living room and an enormous pile of dishes rising out of the sink. Generally my wife cleans up before guests arrive, but yesterday she was home alone with the baby and didn’t get to it. She tried to straighten up the living room somehow: to clear away the papers, handkerchiefs, banana peels, and peanuts that have been gathering on the table through the week. My wife hates dirt, but she doesn’t stand a chance with me. It’s all because of me. I never help out with the housework or with the baby. My wife says I’m primitive, and I agree.
My parents ask how we’re doing, how things are at work, how the baby is, whether she sleeps through the night or still wakes up every hour. My mother says the baby’s thinner, and my father says she’s still very fat. He lights up, and I take one of his cigarettes too. Again he says he can’t believe I’ve started smoking. I’ve been smoking for eight years now, and he still can’t believe it. He talks about how bad it is, how much he suffers because of the cigarettes, and how he hates himself for not being able to quit, but when it comes to me, I’ve only begun and I could still kick the habit, in his opinion. “How much do you smoke?” he asks and answers his own question, “Two or three cigarettes a day?”
My parents hardly ever visit us. Before the baby was born, they never did. Generally they stay about fifteen minutes, and leave. It’s been two months since ‘id el-fitr, our last visit to Tira, and this time Mother asked Father to make it a longer visit because she misses the baby. All week long she begged him to stay for at least an hour. My father agreed, but under one condition: he wanted Fatma, a friend from his Jerusalem days, to come along. On the way to Jerusalem, he called her and invited her to our house in Beit Safafa, a kind of official meeting place. My mother agreed, as long as she was given a chance to spend as much time as possible with her granddaughter.
Mother detests that Fatma. She won’t let anyone even mention her name. Every now and then, Grandma or Father or one of my aunts does, and it always gets on my mother’s nerves. She says Fatma’s a shameless whore. I’ve never seen Fatma. All I know is that she screwed up my father’s life. Grandma told me once that she’d found a whole bag of letters from Fatma to father—and she burned them all.
The phone rings, and before I have a chance to answer, Father says, “That must be Fatma. Tell her how to get here.”
The husky voice of an older woman says my name and notes that I sound like my father. Fatma says she’s at the “coiffeur,” the hairdresser, and her choice of words leaves no doubt that she belongs to the urban class, the one that uses a lot of European words. She’s from Ras el-Amud, but her hairdresser is in Talpiyot, on Ha-Uman Street. She doesn’t want detailed directions and makes do with the name of our landlord. One of the workers at the hairdresser’s is from Beit Safafa, and he’ll tell her how to get here.
My wife pulls me to the side and says we have nothing in the house. If it was only my parents, maybe it wouldn’t matter so much, but there’s a guest now too. She says I can’t go to the store, because I haven’t washed my face or brushed my teeth, and my eyes are swollen. She’ll go to the store with my brother. He’ll help her carry, too. My brother’s a good guy. Never lets you down.
My wife hands the baby to my mother, and the baby starts crying. My mother strokes her, rocks her, walks back and forth with her from the sink to the garbage in the living room, three steps away, trying to calm her down. It’s no use. My father lights another cigarette, and I take one too. I don’t usually smoke when the baby’s around, but since he’s smoking anyway, I don’t suppose my cigarette is going to make a difference. He smoked when I was little and I’m fine. All my brothers turned out fine.
I open the door. Fatma comes in, wearing a long black dress. She’s about my height, my father’s height. She has a red scarf over her shoulders. She’s dyed her hair and had it blow-dried. She’s fifty, maybe more. I don’t try to decide whether she’s prettier than my mother. They’re different. She looks like the society ladies who get interviewed on Jordanian or Egyptian TV. You don’t see any wrinkles, but you can still tell her age by the area around her mouth and eyes. Her eyelids are heavy. She blinks slowly as if she can hardly lift them.
She shakes my hand and smiles. She asks if I recognize her, and says that she saw me once when I was very little. My father tells her it wasn’t me, it was my older brother. My mother takes one arm off the baby and shakes Fatma’s hand, studying her. Fatma is thinner than she is. Fatma asks how she’s doing, smiles, and strokes the baby, whose crying grows more insistent. Fatma asks, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” and says I have a beautiful daughter.
Father sits down on the couch, with a cigarette. “You haven’t changed,” he tells her.
She shakes his hand, sits down, and says that actually she wouldn’t have recognized him. His hair’s gone white, and he’s gained a lot of weight.
Father says, “I haven’t gained any weight,” and pulls in his stomach as he draws on his cigarette. He goes into the bathroom to find a mirror, then comes back and says, “I haven’t gained any weight,” and looks at Mother for confirmation.
My wife and brother are back, carrying two bags. My wife looks disappointed. She wanted to get back before Fatma arrived, and now the guest will know that we shopped specially for her. A bottle of Coke is sticking out of the bag, and Fatma says, “Why all the fuss? I don’t want anything. I don’t drink Coke.” She shakes my brother’s hand and says he’s as good-looking as his father once was.
My wife brings out some glasses and pours Coke for the guests. She arranges some bananas, oranges, and apples in a dish. She pours some peanuts out of a brown paper bag and serves them. She clears away the economy pack of wipes and the breast pump and places the tray near Fatma. “You have an adorable baby. She looks like you,” Fatma says, and my wife insists it isn’t true.
The couches are all taken by now. Father a
nd Fatma are using two seats, and my brother and wife another two. My mother remains standing with the baby and I pull up a chair and sit opposite Father and Fatma, who are trying not to exchange glances. “Since when have you known each other?” I ask, and exhale some smoke.
Everyone looks at me, as if I’ve asked a taboo question. In our family, people don’t talk. We’re experts at concealing details.
“Since when?” Fatma repeats. “I’ll tell you since when.” My father is still preoccupied with his stomach, pulling it in and running his hand over his shirt, as if trying to make it smoother. “I was a young teacher,” Fatma says. “I was teaching in a school in the Et-Tur neighborhood, and after the war in ’sixty-seven they took all the teachers to visit the university. That’s where I saw your father. That’s how we met.”
“And then what? How did you start talking?” I ask again, and my mother says she’s not going to vote in the next elections. My father says that he thinks the Arabs owe it to themselves to vote. Fatma doesn’t have the right to vote anyhow, because she’s not a citizen. But even if she was, she wouldn’t take part in elections for the Israeli Knesset. Fatma has stayed thin, she’s stayed single, living with her brother and the family. Everyone’s in the tourism business. They have a lot of money, a lot of buses. This week, they bought a huge house for one of their nephews. Fatma likes to buy her clothes abroad, preferably in London. She has money. She’s vice principal of a school in Et-Tur. She clears seven thousand, and she has no use for the money. Thirty-two years now she’s been teaching, two years more than my mother.