by Sayed Kashua
“How exactly did you meet?” I ask again, trying to use the opportunity to find out about Fatma and her letters.
“I was the best-looking guy at the university,” my father says, and forces a smile, but Mother frowns. Father says he and Fatma wanted to get married. Fatma cuts him short and says it’s lucky they didn’t. “Look how much weight you’ve gained,” she says, trying to be a friend of the family. “How do you let him get away with it?” she asks Mother, and Mother has nothing to say. She feels unwanted and makes do with a nod.
Father says the reason they didn’t get married was that he got stuck. First he spent a few years in jail, and then under house arrest, and he didn’t leave the village. Mother breaks into his story and reminds herself out loud that she still has some cooking to do. That’s it; she doesn’t want to stay with the baby any longer. She’s sorry she ever agreed to Father’s condition. She wants to go home. The baby’s getting sleepy anyway. Everyone realizes it’s time to leave. Fatma says it’s Friday and the stores close early, and she still has to buy a birthday present for her niece.
The baby’s fallen asleep. I’ll have another cigarette and then I’ll go back to sleep. I’m on duty at the bar tonight too. I ask my wife if she’s seen my lighter, and she says that because of me we looked like beggars. It wasn’t enough that the house was filthy because I’m so lazy and primitive, it didn’t even occur to me to wash my face and change out of my sweats. She doesn’t know where my lighter is, but she thinks Fatma is pretty and knows how to take care of herself. “What’s the real story between her and your father?” she asks, and I tell her my father’s stolen my lighter.
There’s No Beer in Saudi Arabia
The situation is really pissing me off. I’d like to be an Arab college graduate who works as a garbage collector so I can badmouth the State. But I never did make it through college, and the truth is that my job isn’t that bad. I’m not really suffering at work. I’d like to be a dishwasher at some restaurant, to pray in a mosque, to be poor. I’d like the sewage to overflow from the toilet into the kitchen, and I’d like for a donkey to be tied to the fig tree, and for little barefoot kids to be shouting all the time, and for my wife to wear a veil.
Everyone has been turning to religion except my father. Every Ramadan, my grandmother launches a rebellion against the infidels. She tries to force my father to fast, and each time he swears he will, but he doesn’t. When we were little, Grandma would count the cigarettes in Father’s pack, to see if he’d smoked during the fast. When he didn’t fast, she staged a hunger strike in protest, refusing to eat the last meal. Every Ramadan, she tries again, but father refuses to behave himself. She says that when he was little he did wash and pray and go to the mosque every Friday. It’s all on account of my mother. Men always follows their wives’ example. My mother wants to be pretty; she’s afraid if she wears a head scarf she’ll look old. She doesn’t understand that faith in God makes your face beautiful and smooth.
I think about God a lot lately. It’s easy, not like with the Jews. All you need to do to be religious is to wash and pray. You can go on living in the same house, and you don’t have to separate from your family. In Moslem families, an Imam and a prostitute can live together in the same house.
I don’t remember how to pray anymore. I used to go to the mosque, but that was a long time ago. Our religion teacher would give perfect grades to all students who went to the mosque. I went there to pray until I had my shoes stolen. I searched through the piles for hours, but they weren’t there. I started crying and waited for everyone to take their shoes. Finally the only thing left was an ugly pair of plastic thongs. I didn’t want to wear those, so I had to walk home barefoot.
Adel has returned to religion. The perestroika got to him. He stopped being a communist and slowly discovered religion. He stayed in Jerusalem when he finished studying. At first he had a Russian girlfriend, but when Gorbachev took over, he left her. He said a Jew remains a Jew. He thought about it and discovered that, if war broke out, he wouldn’t want to save his girlfriend. Eventually, he married a Christian girl, because it says that anyone who persuades a single person to join Islam has a sure place in heaven. Adel took on a particularly tough case, a Christian girl from Nazareth, who sported the biggest cross at the university. Her name is Susie, no less. Her parents refused to go along with the idea of her marrying some Moslem fellah, so Adel and Susie waited until her father died of a heart attack, and then they got married.
Adel is living a comfortable life. He’s a lawyer. He has a new car and three kids. My wife gets along with his wife, so we’ve become friends again. He doesn’t drink anymore and never skips his prayers. Whenever we meet, he tells me how wonderful Islam is. He explains that only prayer will help me cope with my problems, and he prays that God will help me to believe. Adel knows I drink, he knows I don’t fast, and yet he and his wife invite us for the last meal before the fast at least twice each Ramadan. Susie converted to Islam. She says she’s become convinced that Islam is the right religion and Mohammed is the true Prophet. She prays, she fasts on Ramadan, and the only holidays she celebrates are the Moslem ones. She can’t believe she ever sang in a church choir.
Since Adel turned religious, he talks differently and dresses differently. He’s much calmer. He keeps saying el hamdulula. I envy him. He supports the Islamic movement and its motto, “Islam is the answer.” Adel believes that ultimately the Mahdi will come, just as Islam promises, and unite all Moslems. Then the Moslem empire will be the strongest in the world, just the way it was in the days of Omar ibn el-Hatab. Adel says that the more Palestinians Israel kills, the closer the arrival of the Mahdi. The worse the situation, the greater the chances of redemption.
Adel says the Jews and the Americans have advanced technology, but according to the Koran the decisive war will be waged with swords and bare hands. Their sheikh tells them in the mosque that God will inflict a terrible frost on the infidels that will freeze all their planes and weapons. That’s why Adel has bought his children plastic swords. He tells them they have to learn to use those swords now. He’s stopped taking his children to the doctor and giving them medications, because he says that pretty soon there won’t be any antibiotics and the children will have to learn how to overcome diseases without help.
When the war broke out, Adel’s Sufi sheikh told his congregation that he’d met the Mahdi at the El Aqsa Mosque. Adel was convinced it was the end. “The Mahdi must be in Mecca by now,” he said, “and very soon he will liberate Jerusalem and defeat the Jews and the Americans.” Adel said he was going to Mecca to wait for the Mahdi. He wanted to be one of the Mahdi’s soldiers and follow him from Mecca, just the way it says in the Koran, because whoever follows the Mahdi has a place in heaven. Adel announced that I was going with him. He had money, and he’d pay my fare. He didn’t want to go on his own. He preferred to share his room in Mecca with a friend, not with some stranger, a Moslem who might not know a word of Arabic because he’s probably from Afghanistan. Adel signed us both up for the hajj.
There’s no beer in Saudi Arabia, not even malt beer. The women are covered from head to toe in black clothes with netting over their eyes. Women are allowed to leave their faces and hands and feet exposed, but they believe that if they take extra precautions and cover everything, their punishment on Judgment Day will be reduced. Adel prays the whole time. Even after the twenty-four-hour ride on the crowded bus, he doesn’t pause to rest but hurries to visit the Prophet’s grave in Medina. He says that all we have is two weeks, so he has to pray as much as possible.
There’s one spot that can only be reached by inching your way forward for hours in a terribly dense crowd, but it’s worth it, because the reward for a single prayer there is equivalent to the reward for a million prayers. It’s the spot where the Prophet Mohammed used to sit and pray and read the Koran. And anyone who succeeds in reaching it says it feels like the most sublime place of all, the true heaven.
Heaven is divided into compartments,
and even the lowest compartment is magnificent: a verdant heaven with rivers of honey and cascades of nectar. Every wish comes true in an instant. Think of a pear—and right away a pear tree will appear in front of you, and the branch will bend on its own and serve the fruit right to your mouth. People in heaven sit on the lawn all day long, like in a park. If you think about women, there they are. Or you can think of both food and women at the same time.
It’s hard to tell if the women you get are like the ones in Saudi Arabia. Probably not. The women in heaven are petite and young, and they dress in white. They don’t undress, because there’s nowhere to undress. Everyone sits on the lawn and watches. In heaven there are no houses, not even tents, because it spoils the environment. In heaven there are no industrial materials. You can think about a Walkman as much as you want, but you won’t get it. There are no cars and no planes.
Adel says this is my last chance to return to Islam. He takes me to the grave of the Prophet, and when I say there’s nothing inside and that all I saw was a green rug with verses from the Koran on it, he starts crying, and screams at me. For two days he cries, but in the end he decides to let me be. He starts praying on his own, and that’s that. In his opinion, I’m a lost cause, and I’m bound to burn in hell.
Hell is divided into compartments too, but even the highest compartment there offers nothing good. You die, and get resurrected a million times a day, and to make sure you suffer, they burn you in fire so intense you can’t even imagine it. I’ll burn, I’ll melt, and then I’ll be resurrected and I’ll burn again and melt again. There are these gigantic people there who never ever smile. They just stand over you and burn your skin off with a branding iron, the way they do with animals. Anyone who goes to hell hasn’t a chance of getting out.
On Judgment Day the entire planet will explode, and a thick cloud will destroy all living things. Then we’ll all move somewhere else. Everyone there will stand in line on a thread that’s thinner than a single hair. People from every period in history, anyone who ever lived on earth. There will be prehistoric hunters alongside doctors from Hadassah hospital. The deeds of every one of them will be weighed, and any deed can wind up deciding your fate for better or for eternal fire. On Judgment Day, nobody recognizes anybody, not even parents or friends. Everyone’s caught up in his own reckoning. Your father will come along and say, “Please, I’ve been good to you. All I need is one more good deed to get into heaven.” And you’ll refuse, because who knows? Maybe that’ll be the one deed you need to save yourself. Everything you’ve ever done appears before you, from the day you were born till the day you died. The angel on your right shoulder will report all the bad deeds, and the one on your left shoulder will report the good ones. Or vice versa.
I tried to believe in God, to become part of the big circle of people in white constantly circling the black stone. I tried to become part of the ocean of humanity moving toward the mosques. I recalled how I’d prayed as a little boy. I tried to reconstruct everything they taught us at elementary school. There were moments when I was afraid of being alone in the room, and I started to cry. Adel hardly came back from the mosque at all, and I couldn’t stop thinking about my wife and baby. At night, when the streets became a little less crowded, I’d put on the white hat and set out to buy some gifts for the family. The sidewalks were filled with women and small children. Without removing their shoes or clothes, they lay there on pieces of cardboard. Adel put us up at one of the fanciest hotels in Mecca, very close to the Kaba, and from the window of our air-conditioned room, I could see the black stone and the people shoving and crowding to get up close and kiss it. Adel made it. He’s large. He dislocated his shoulder but he managed to kiss the stone. “The fragrance of perfume from heaven,” he said, before he fell asleep.
Our two weeks there were over. The bus ride back was unbearable. Everyone buys enormous woolen blankets in Saudi Arabia, because they’re good and they’re inexpensive. The Jordanian guide who held on to all the Israeli passports and counted us each evening told us not to buy more than two blankets each, but some of the women bought as many as ten. Adel and I were the youngest on the bus, and we wound up having to stand the whole way home. We hardly said a word to each other the entire trip. There was a point when Adel wanted to get out right in the middle of the desert, to get away from the Jordanian guide and return to Mecca. He was sure the Mahdi had arrived and was afraid of missing him. “Maybe he’s in Jerusalem already,” he said when we reached Jordan, but the Israeli soldiers at the border and the clerks who addressed us with overdone politeness assured Adel that the Mahdi hadn’t come yet.
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
On Independence Day, my wife didn’t feel well, and I took her to the hospital. Camouflage efforts that had lasted for years were shattered in an instant. The soldiers at the entrance to the village asked me to stop by the side of the road. Me they’re stopping? The youngest Arab ever to learn to pronounce a p? I have almost no accent. You can’t tell by looking at me. I’ve got sideburns and Coke-bottle sunglasses. Even the Arabs mistake me for a Jew. I even speak Hebrew with the housekeeping staff. It must be my wife, I think to myself. She’s somewhat Arab. Sometimes, when we go to a shopping mall or places like that, I hope people will assume she’s Moroccan or Iraqi, and that I’m a western Jew who likes eastern women.
The soldier asks for our papers, and I tell him I used to have a Jewish girlfriend, I studied with Jews, and all my friends are Jews. I know all the Jewish expressions, even army slang. I shut up, and hand him my vehicle license and my driver’s license. Cars pass me, some with flags and some without. The people in the cars look like they’re sorry for me, and I feel so ridiculous with my sideburns and glasses. On the radio, the military station is blaring Hebrew songs, and I feel like such an idiot for believing I’d done everything to make sure I didn’t look suspicious.
I hurry to get past the barricade, turn off the radio, and mutter a few swearwords at the police, at the Jews, at the State, at Tira, and at my wife. I decide I shouldn’t be taking it out on her. Poor thing. She must be in pain, and the last thing she needs now is for me to be carrying on. I’ll be good.
I ask how she’s doing and she says everything’s fine.
There are only Arabs in the emergency room. Women who seem older than they are, with head scarves and plastic thongs, drag themselves through the corridors. Sometimes they bite on the edge of their scarves. They seem lost, not knowing where to go. Why the hell do they have to look like that? Why do they even go out of the house? And why are those plastic thongs still being sold anyway?
Just don’t let anyone think I’m one of them or that I’m like them. Just don’t let them call out my wife’s name when it’s her turn, or announce it on the PA system. Sometimes, when that happens, I don’t get up right away, as if it isn’t really my name, or as if it might be my name but they’ve copied it wrong in reception. So wrong in fact that it took on a new religion and nationality.
My wife doesn’t know the first thing about any of that. She doesn’t give it a second thought, which surprises and annoys me. She’s capable of talking to me in Arabic even inside a crowded elevator or at the entrance to the mall, when we’re being processed through the metal detector. She plays with the baby in Arabic in public places. I don’t understand why she insists. The baby doesn’t understand a word anyway, whether it’s in Arabic or in Hebrew.
My wife goes in to be examined and I wait as far away as possible, at the end of the farthest bench. I take out a book in Hebrew that I keep for situations like this, and start reading. It’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew, not just any book. If a doctor happens to pass by, he’s bound to be impressed. And I don’t open the book at the beginning but toward the end. The last thing I need is for them to get the impression that I just started reading it now. I stare at the book, not only to conceal my identity but also to avoid eye contact with the others. That’s all I need now—for some creep to arrive, someone who went to school with me once, in a button-down sh
irt and clutching his keys, his mobile phone, and his cigarettes all in the same hand. All I need is for him to decide on a sudden display of emotion and kiss me. I look down, and from time to time I cross my legs and turn the pages.
“Excuse me,” someone addresses me. She’s young, dark-skinned, and fat. Behind her are two more women. They all look the same. Must be sisters. Their religious garb hides some of their ugliness. The woman stresses the words wildly: “She is in a birth condition,” she says, and I don’t know where to hide.
What should I tell them now? Maybe I should answer in Hebrew. I do that sometimes. Arabs turn to me in Hebrew, and I answer them in Hebrew, because how should I know they’re Arabs? True, you can tell, but if they didn’t recognize me, maybe I could pretend not to recognize them either. Then again, with those three, you can’t miss it. They’re Arabs from head to toe. Maybe I ought to give my “I haven’t the faintest idea” shrug? Because I really don’t have the faintest idea what they want from me. Why me? Why not someone in a white coat? Is it the book? Did they think I was a doctor on his break?
I lower my voice and whisper to them in Arabic that they should speak with the nurse, and I point toward the nurses’ station.
“Ahhh,” the younger one says, and shouts out in Hebrew, “Because she is in a birth condition!”
I can feel my face on fire, and I try to conceal it with my book. When my wife comes out, I’ll murder her. She’s the only reason I find myself in this situation. As if I have the strength to deal it right now. When she comes out I’m going to make such a face that she’ll never dare take me to a hospital again.