Dancing Arabs

by Sayed Kashua

  The Road to Tira

  The road to Tira stretches between two rows of cypress trees. They run close together, two tight rows. Then, all of a sudden the cypresses disappear, the fields are divided by a straight horizontal line, and beyond those are the unruly rows of houses, uneven and menacing. Bakeries, restaurants, vegetable stores, garages, spare parts outlets, watchmakers. Everything looks cheap and crowded and empty.

  The Jews driving through Tira on their way to Tsur Yigal and Kokhav Yair don’t stop to shop anymore. There’s a war on. Some of them are scared, and some are getting their own back. So much of Tira was built to cater to them, but they’ve run away. You don’t see them anymore, not even on Saturdays. You don’t see their women with the short shorts or the girls with the tube tops. For years they overran the village every Saturday, so you could hardly move. Only the store owners would come out of their homes on weekends. Everyone else stayed out of the way. The older kids would come to the souk to watch the Jewish girls. Sometimes I’d do the rounds myself. The Jews have all disappeared now, with their shouting, their plastic bags, their potbellies, their cars, their keys, their hats, and their sandals. Now, at least, there are no more traffic jams.

  We don’t need them anymore. The people in Tira have become rich enough. They’ll get through this war, they won’t starve. They build another floor, and another, and they buy expensive cars, jeeps, and trucks and computers for their kids. They send their kids to extracurricular classes too. Some people even send their kids to Jewish extracurriculars. And one neighbor even built a swimming pool outside his home and bought his younger son a Ferrari convertible. It’s all thanks to the Saturday earnings. Some people in the village had only worked Saturdays, and that was enough for them to live like kings. Now it’s only the Jewish druggies and pushers who dare come to Tira to shop.

  The Hebrew textbooks still speak of the small village. One of the questions goes like this: “What do the people in your village do for a living?” and the right answer is still: “They’re farmers.”

  People continue to get married and to have children. The wife of my older brother—the one who’s named Sam for the SAM missiles—is expecting. My younger brother, the one who’s two years younger than me, has bought tiles for his bathroom. If everything goes according to plan, he’ll finish his shell and get married within a year. There’s one shell left.

  My parents built three shells, even though there are four of us, because the fourth one is supposed to get their house. But they know that at least one of us won’t come back. Now they’re worried that the youngest, the one who’s six years younger than me, may wind up staying in Tel Aviv. He’s studying there, but he also works there all week long, taking care of chronic patients at the hospital. He’s broken off with us in Tira. He’s let his hair grow long, and he wears earrings. He dresses differently and listens to different music. Sometimes we talk on the phone. The last time we did that, we made a date to meet in Tira. He finally said he’d come to see the baby, but he didn’t. He phoned and asked us to give her a big kiss for him, and to put the receiver to her ear so she’d learn to recognize his voice.

  This brother and I get along very well. Sometimes I think he must hate me for the things I did to him when I was little. I hope I was little enough. When I get very anxious about it, I call him up and ask him to forgive me and tell him I want to know if he hates me. He always says he loves me more than anything in the world.

  I’m six years older, but if he returns to the village before me, he’ll get my shell and I’ll get my parents’ house. Since the house is old, my parents have added a larger piece of land to go with it, to be fair and prevent any problems later on. My father always says, “God help you if you fight among yourselves. That would be the worst thing that could happen.” People have been fighting over land for fifty years now: brothers against brothers, cousins against cousins. Some of them lost their lives in the process, and the survivors are still taking revenge. The wealthiest people today are the ones who managed to take over two meters of the souk on Saturdays.

  Almost everyone carries a weapon nowadays. My father went to get the muffler fixed once, and they offered to sell him a shotgun for a thousand shekels. He almost bought it, for self-protection.

  The neighbors’ young son, Ayub, was arrested. I remember him as a shy seven-year-old. My mother says he’s an arms dealer. They sent the whole country out to Tira last week. They blocked the roads, they broke into the house, and they pulled up the floor tiles, one by one. My parents knew all along that Ayub was an arms dealer. At first they thought the reason he hadn’t been arrested was that he was a civil servant. He had a Uzi, and almost every night he’d shoot a round. “Brrrrr.” My mother imitates it. “Automatic.” She didn’t think he was dumb enough to hide the weapons at home, but that’s just what he did. They found a lot. She stood by the fence and watched. Fifty pistols maybe. The police and the soldiers were there the whole day. They combed every corner. They entered our plot too with dogs and metal detectors, but they didn’t find anything. The dogs sniffed every flower, because they were after drugs. My mother says the police even climbed up on the roofs of my brothers’ homes and searched in my shell too. “Aren’t you ever going to finish it?” she asks. “When are you coming back?”

  Nelson Mandela

  My parents have enormous pink sofas in their living room. I sink into one of them and light a cigarette from the pack my father has left on the table. I move my head back and forth like a sprinkler, trying to disperse the smoke. Our house is ugly. There are electric wires sticking out of the living room wall, and a bell that never rings. Next to it is a clock made of gold-covered plastic, inspired by a lion’s mane. Hanging next to the clock is a deer’s head, also made of plastic. There used to be two sabers too, but they broke long ago. Three brown wooden plaques hang unattractively on the wall across from me, with the inscription Allah in black lettering. On the wall to the left, there’s a painting by Ismail Shammout with the inscription Uda (Return), and next to that is a picture of a mother and a baby with a flight of ravens hovering over them.

  The ugliest tapestry in the living room was woven by my mother. It shows two Japanese women in kimonos sitting near a blue lake with white swans floating in it. She made the Gobelin when she was studying at the teachers seminar in Haifa. She always says she was the first woman to study out-side the village, and the fact is she’s now the oldest woman teacher in Tira.

  When I was at the university, I invited Yossi for a meal at my parents’ house. Yossi was my first Jewish friend after boarding school. He marked a new period in my life and proved I didn’t have to be stuck with Arabs my whole life. After the meal, he joked about how our sink was in the living room, though the thought of watching the soccer match while shaving appealed to him. When we first met, Yossi said he found it hard to say the word Arab, because it sounded like a curse. Later, we became good friends.

  Now my father is lying on the big sofa, resting the upper part of his body on two pillows. With one hand he’s half scratching and half picking his nose, and with the other he’s holding a cigarette. My mother is washing something in the kitchen. My older brother and his wife come in and sit down. She’s pregnant, in her fifth month, and they don’t know yet if it’s a boy or a girl. The brother who’s two years younger than me is talking to his fiancée on his mobile. It’s a special deal called Family Circle. They bought two mobile phones and they can call each other for free.

  Time for the news. My father turns up the volume, moves his hand away from his nose, puts out his cigarette, and lights another. Mother puts a bowl of strawberries on the table and sits down on the carpet at Father’s feet. There’s no room on the sofa, because Father is taking up three places.

  “There are no men in Hebron,” my father says. He always provides a running commentary on whatever we’re watching on television, analyzing it out loud, to make sure we don’t miss anything. Every now and then my mother mutters Azza, azza—Oh, no—and sometimes she says
mujrimin, criminals. My father says if there were any real men in Hebron they’d get their act together and force the settlers out of there. “How many can they kill? Let them kill a hundred thousand. In the end, they’ll be out of there. Five lunatics are terrifying a whole city. What spineless nothings they are!”

  It’s March 30, Land Day, and people turn out to join in a general protest against the expropriations and to commemorate the people who were killed in the 1976 riots. My wife and her parents went to visit their village, Misskeh, where Kfar Warburg is today. They rented a bus and went as a group. They do it every Land Day and every Independence Day. It’s like an annual outing. Men, women, and children dress up, take their food and their barbecues, their meat and their alcohol, and head for their village. You can still see what’s left of the mosque and the school building. The women gather vine leaves and look for hyssop in the fields, the men play backgammon in the ruins of the mosque, and the younger ones drink beer and smoke joints in what’s left of the school.

  My father says he doesn’t understand why they bother going there. If they really loved their village, they wouldn’t have run away in the first place. Those cowards are to blame for everything that’s happened. Better to die defending your land. And why did they sell what they owned there? My father refers to the sale of expropriated lands to Jews as land liquidation. Anyone who sells has given up. “What kind of men are they?”

  In the evening, I join my wife and daughter at her parents’ house. They’re back from their picnic. My older brother blocks me with his car and comes over to give me the keys. I enjoy driving his car. At least the radio works. True, it’s only a short drive, but still it’s one of those rare opportunities to listen to music in Tira. I hope it’s tuned to the military station, because I’m not very good with these dials. I turn it on and listen. My brother doesn’t know how to take care of a car. He can’t drive. I’ve been in the car with him a few times, and it always ended in a fight. I don’t have it easy with my older brother.

  The radio is playing “Abu el-Halil”; I can’t believe I’m hearing that song. How could the cassette have survived so long? It’s the song we used to listen to in Father’s car when we went into the mountains to pick hyssop. I used to know the words, and I discover I still do. I sing along with the tape, as if I’ve never stopped listening to it. “Ya Amina, ya abu el-Halil … open the Nablus Gate for us and let us all enter.” Then came another song I used to love, about putting the shame behind us and restoring our honor with stones and with blood, about children who are fearless. I laugh, now, at the quality of the recording and the quality of the music.

  I lower the volume and drive through Tira. It’s Friday, and late, but people are still roaming the streets. Lots of youngsters are in their cars or walking, and I wonder where all of them are heading, and on the night of Land Day, no less. There was supposed to be a general strike, but the stores opened even before noon. People can’t afford to lose the income. Besides, strikes scare the Jews who drive through on their way to Tsur Natan and Kokhav Yair. They’re good customers.

  On the wall in my wife’s old room there’s a picture of Nelson Mandela, taken long ago, when he was behind bars. The Mandela of those days was young and strong, with a full black beard. Next to him is the drawing of a hammer and sickle, and the red Soviet flag. There are photos of models and beauty queens too, and Egyptian singers like Ihab Taufiq and Amer Diab, and women in bathing suits and dresses dating back to the eighties. The most up-to-date one in the room that my wife shared with her five sisters is of Brandon from Beverly Hills 90210. She hung it up there when she was in high school. All the sisters are married by now, and the room with the peeling walls is where we stay on our rare visits to Tira.

  My mother-in-law has put the beds together in one of the corners, under the pictures of Ofra Haza and a celebrity model. Ever since the wedding, two years ago, we’ve had the same sheets waiting for us, the same thick pillows, solid as a rock, and the same scratchy woolen blanket that forces us to sleep fully dressed even on the hottest summer nights. It’s very hot in Tira. In the past, people would sleep up on the roof in summertime, but they’re too scared now. They don’t feel safe anymore. You’re not supposed to leave your front door unlocked. The village is infested with thieves and criminals and rapists, especially now that they brought in all kinds of collaborators—and their weapons too.

  My wife’s old room does this to me every time: Suddenly I’m terribly attracted to her, as if we just met. She always puts on one of her mother’s faded robes, and I can’t resist. We always make love in her room and continue to hold on to each other in our sleep. In her room, my heart fills with love. She’s pretty as ever in my eyes, pretty as she used to be, when we first met. She says these are our best times together, the ones in Tira.

  Very soon her parents are going to be renovating the house and tearing down this room. The house has always been in bad shape. Before the first time we went there, my wife cried. I was about to ask her parents for her hand, and she was ashamed to show me where she lived. She kept hoping neither one of us would have to use the bathroom, which is the most shocking part of the house. Her father had knocked ten steel nails into the wall over the sink, for hanging sponges, and wrote the name of each member of the family over one of them. Not sponges you buy but loofahs, the kind you make yourself. Seven of the nails have nothing on them anymore. The only pieces of loofah still hanging there belong to her parents and her youngest brother. He’s two years younger than us. He’s been plodding away at one of the colleges for the past few years, studying economics, and there’s a good chance he’ll graduate soon. He has his own room under the house. It used to be a storeroom for oil and olives, and it had an oven too. Then, when he grew older, they put a bed in there, and he moved in. He covered the bare walls with red scarves of the Hapo’el soccer team, and with pictures of the Chicago Bulls, Michael Jackson, Fairuz, and Lenin, and with Land Day posters, like the one of a man sitting under an olive tree holding his blond grandson, who’s covered in a kaffiyeh, and the inscription WE’RE STAYING PUT.

  They’re remodeling the top floor for him now, and the parents will get their storeroom back. They don’t need more than that, my mother-in-law says, and it’s time for their only son to have a home of his own. That way he’ll be able to get engaged, be married, and have children.

  My Little Brother

  My little brother has tied his fate to a different world. He’s moved out of the village, like me, but he doesn’t mix with the Jews. He doesn’t have any friends, either in the village or in Tel Aviv. My little brother doesn’t talk. He’s always been like that. He can spend entire days without saying a single word. His teachers in the village used to think he didn’t understand what was going on in class, because he never took part, never raised his hand in class to give an answer. Sometimes, after parent-teacher day, my father would yell at him, “What are you, a sissy? Why are you so shy?” My brother would hear him out and wouldn’t answer. His grades were always fine, so they left him alone.

  My little brother doesn’t like people, especially strangers. When anyone knocked on the door, he’d head right for his room, even if he was the only one home. And if he happened to come home from school and heard strangers talking inside the house, he’d always wait outside under a tree till the guests left. Anything but meeting people face to face. He was capable of spending hours in the rain or in the heat just to avoid it.

  My little brother never answers the phone. That’s just how it is. My parents have finally given up on him and stopped telling him off. When the phone rings, he’s off to his room. He stays in there with his music—his not-Jewish and not-Arab music.

  For some reason, my parents think my little brother loves me. They think we’re both kind of strange and different, so sometimes when I’m at home they ask me to try to talk with him, see how he’s doing. “Ask him how his studies are going,” my mother says sometimes. “Ask him how things are going at the university, if he has any frie
nds, if he needs money, if he manages okay with the food and with his roommates.” When you ask him something, he can just keep nodding, and it’s hard to tell what he’s really thinking. But he mails my parents the transcripts with his grades, so they don’t worry, they know he’s doing all right.

  My little brother is an artist. He draws portraits and still lifes. He doesn’t show his paintings to anyone. Sometimes, when I’m at home, I go through his drawers and his notebooks and look at his silent drawings. He wanted to study art, but our parents said it wasn’t practical, and that a person needs to have a job first, a profession. Art is a hobby; there’s nothing you can do with it. My little brother didn’t argue. My parents checked out his grades, decided he was cut out for nursing, and sent him to nursing school.

  After that, he hardly ever came home. In the daytime he studies and at night he works. On ‘id el-adha, he took a day off from work and came to the village to see my daughter. It had been nine months since she was born, and he hadn’t seen her yet. He smiled at her and tried to pick her up, but he didn’t know how. He tried to play with her but gave up because he knew it wouldn’t work. He didn’t want to play with her in front of everyone. That wasn’t his style. He stared at her, and eventually he took her to his room. I have no idea what they did in there. Must have stuck earphones on her head. Anyway, when he brought her back, she was all smiles.

  My little brother and I were the only ones in the house who liked to play soccer. I knocked him down once and he broke a front tooth. After that, he stopped going out of the house. He didn’t want anyone to see his broken tooth. He stopped going to school and told our parents that he was quitting. He wouldn’t even go to the dentist. For almost a full year, he stayed home and didn’t see any strangers. It was the tooth that made him stop talking too, because he didn’t want to open his mouth.