by Sayed Kashua
It’s so easy to differentiate between the Jewish and the Arab cars, the lawyer thought as he walked from the parking lot to the entrance of the school, holding his daughter’s hand. The Jews’ cars were modest, affordable, generally products of Japan or Korea. The Arabs’ cars were expensive and German, with massive engines under the gleaming hoods and dashboards full of accessories; many of them were luxury SUVs. Not that the parents of the Jewish kids earned less—the lawyer could swear to the contrary—but as opposed to the Arab parents, the Jewish parents were not in competition, none of them felt they had to prove their success to their peers, and certainly not by upgrading their cars annually. Judging by the parents of the kids in his daughter’s class, the lawyer surmised that the Jews worked in a variety of fields. There were high-tech employees, several senior public servants from the foreign, finance, and justice ministries, a few professors, and two artists. A wide range of professions when compared with the Arab children, who had at least one parent, usually the husband, in law, accounting, or medicine. Most of the Arab mothers were teachers, generally senior staff—they were far more likely to rise up through the ranks of Jerusalem’s educational system than the local Arabs—but still, just teachers.
The lawyer, for his part, would have been happy to forgo the Mercedes and make do with a cheaper car. He had considered a top-of-the-line Mazda, but he knew he could not afford that. Even during the tough days after the purchase of the duplex, he knew that if he did not upgrade his car to a model that surpassed what the competition was driving, it would be seen as a retreat. He had to do everything in his power to ensure that he would remain, in the eyes of the public, the number one Arab criminal defense lawyer in the city, and a fancy black Mercedes was an integral part of that campaign. If one of his competitors bought a BMW with a V6 and three hundred horsepower, then he had to get the Benz with the V8 and a few hundred more horses under the hood. If the competition had optical sensors all around the car, he had to have DVD players built into the headrests. Not that the lawyer was having trouble paying back the loan he had taken to finance the car, but he certainly would have felt a little less pressure and would have had the luxury of being a bit more selective in the cases he took on if he had made do without the Mercedes. But he could not.
KING GEORGE
Five years ago the lawyer had moved his offices from Salah al-Din Street, the major thoroughfare in east Jerusalem, to King George Street, the main drag in the western half of the city. Aside from a few Jews, his clientele was based in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, and so on the face of things it made more sense for him to stay where he was, but the lawyer suspected that the east Jerusalemites, despite everything, had more esteem for a lawyer whose offices were located in a Jewish neighborhood. Forgoing his colleagues’ advice, he went with his gut feeling, and found, in a matter of months, that the move to King George Street, which entailed a tripling of the rent, was financially sound. In a year he had doubled his clientele and his income.
Not long after his move to the western part of the city, the lawyer realized that in addition to a permanent secretary and a rotating student intern, he also needed another lawyer to help with the caseload. One year after the move to King George Street, he offered the position to a former intern, Tarik, whom he liked and who reminded him of himself back in the day. He knew he could trust him and soon enough he managed to convince Tarik to abandon his plans of returning to the Galilee, where he had intended to open an office of his own.
“Why go back? Just so your dad can see the shingle on the door?” the lawyer had said to Tarik. “You want to spend your life working for the village car thieves, or deal with the real thing down here?” In order to show to Tarik what the real thing was, he sent the twenty-three-year-old lawyer, fresh from the bar exam, which he had aced, to file an appeal at the High Court of Justice in Jerusalem. Upon return, Tarik, feeling victorious, with an interim injunction in hand, agreed to the terms the lawyer had laid out, a monthly salary plus 10 percent of all income from the cases he handled.
The office secretary, Samah Mansour, had worked for the lawyer for eight years, ever since the lawyer had opened his private practice in the eastern part of the city. At first he had hired her part-time, but after a year he was able to offer her a full-time position. Samah, who was thirty years old, had graduated from law school in Amman and was looking for a law office where she could learn the language and the system, in hopes that she could one day gain entry to the Israel Bar Association. She had come to the interview accompanied by her fiancé. The lawyer knew that the woman seated before him was the daughter of one of the senior Fatah officials in Jerusalem, and he decided to give her a job even though she didn’t speak a word of Hebrew. He never would have admitted it but her father was the main reason he had hired her, especially since in those days he could hardly afford to pay her salary. But as a young criminal lawyer, he needed the seal of approval of a man like Mr. Mansour, Samah’s father.
Samah’s father ran for office in the first Palestinian parliamentary elections, was elected, and became, before long, a confidant of those in the upper echelons of the Palestinian government. Samah married her fiancé, a Kuwait-educated city planner, who had been working as a successful contractor ever since his return to Jerusalem. The couple had three children. By now she had a firm command of Hebrew, ran the office with a high hand, and seemed to have made her peace with her position, perhaps even deriving some satisfaction from it. Nonetheless, she took the bar exam every year and though she failed it close to a dozen times, she still insisted on trying her luck each year.
The lawyer pulled his car into the lot near his office and greeted the old guard with a hearty good morning. As usual, the man was busy brewing strong mint tea. The lawyer parked in one of the five spots he had rented—one for himself, one each for Samah and Tarik, whose cars were already in place, and two for important clients.
The old guard, black kippah on his head, waddled over toward the lawyer’s car, tea in hand. “Will you do me the honor of having a glass of tea with me?” he asked. The lawyer got out of his car and smiled. “Thank you very much, Mr. Yehezkel, but today I’m in a hurry,” he said, handing the guard the keys, as he did every Thursday, so that he could clean the vehicle. “You’re always in a hurry,” the guard said, adding in thick Kurdish-accented Arabic, “haste is from the devil.” The guard laughed a hearty laugh that ended in a cough.
“Good morning, Samah,” the lawyer said into his cell phone as he walked up King George Street. “They aren’t here yet, are they?” He knew that the clients scheduled to arrive this morning were not known for their punctuality and, furthermore, he had seen that the parking spots reserved for his clients were both still open. “Okay, so I’ll be downstairs in the café. Let me know when they come. Thanks.” He hung up the phone, tucked it into his jacket pocket, straightened his tie, and turned away from his office.
The lawyer liked starting his day with a double cappuccino at Oved’s Café but all too often he had to take it to go. Usually he’d find himself sipping his coffee out of a paper cup in his office. On especially busy days, he would very cordially ask Samah to do him a favor and get him some coffee from Oved, adding, of course, that she should get one for herself and whoever else was in the office. But Thursdays were different. They were quiet, practically dead compared to the rest of the week. The lawyer always made sure not to schedule court appearances on Thursdays. If something unforeseen arose, he sent Tarik. The majority of the day was devoted to paperwork.
“Good morning, Mr. Attorney,” Oved said as he brought a brass canister of milk to a steaming spout. “Good morning,” the lawyer responded, looking around the café, making sure he recognized all the faces. He didn’t know them all by name, and he certainly didn’t know them by profession, but Oved’s customers were loyal, and he nodded in their direction. Once he’d gotten some form of recognition in return, he sat down on one of the three bar stools. “For
here?” Oved asked from behind the bar. “Yeah, you believe that?” the lawyer responded, nodding, stretching the skin on his forehead and raising his eyebrows.
Oved knew how his regulars took their coffee—how much milk, how many shots of espresso, how much foam, if any, and how much sugar. “You want something with that?” he asked as he began making the lawyer’s coffee. “Yes, thank you,” the lawyer answered, even though he didn’t want anything but coffee at this hour of the morning. Decorum, and the fact that he was occupying a seat in the café, compelled him to show some generosity and so he tacked a pastry onto the bill. “A croissant, please,” he said, nodding.
The lawyer liked Oved and felt that Oved responded in kind. He was the owner of one of the only independent cafés downtown and had also been one of the first people to welcome the lawyer to his new surroundings five years earlier. He was outwardly kind and jovial toward him and somehow the lawyer felt that it was on account of, and not despite, his being an Arab. At first the lawyer thought that Oved was another one of those Kurdish Jews, a Sephardic store owner whose tongue and heart were not in the same place, but soon enough he found that Oved’s political analyses were in line with his own. Occasionally, he even picked up on traces of bigotry that the lawyer had missed. Oved was the last of the socialists in the center of town or, as one of his regulars, an arts editor at a local paper, referred to him, “the one and only communist Kurd in Jerusalem.”
Morning was the café’s busiest time. Most of the customers, like the lawyer, worked in the area, and they took their plastic-lidded coffees with them to the clothing stores, shoe stores, hairdressers, travel agencies, insurance agencies, real estate agencies, law offices, and doctors’ offices. Oved was too busy for conversation with the lawyer, who sipped slowly and looked around often. The skinny journalist was there with a cigarette in her hand and a small computer screen flickering in front of her face. The art history professor, known to the lawyer mostly from his appearances on TV, sat before an open book. The real estate agent sat with a client, speaking loudly about soccer, and an elderly couple shared breakfast without exchanging a word. I wonder what I look like, the lawyer thought to himself as he examined his skewed reflection on the polished chrome coffee machine. Afterward, once again offhandedly, he looked down and checked his shirt and tie.
“Nice tie, Mr. Attorney,” Oved said. “What is it, Versace?”
“Thanks,” the lawyer said, slightly embarrassed. “Not really sure what it is,” even though he knew full well it was Ralph Lauren.
There was once a time when the lawyer knew he looked like an Arab. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago. His first year in university was the toughest of all as far as that was concerned. He was nineteen years old when he left his village in the Triangle and came to the university in Jerusalem. For all intents and purposes it was the first time he had left his parents’ home. He was stopped practically every time he boarded a bus—whenever he left the Mount Scopus dorms and headed toward the Old City, and again upon return. Nothing awful ever happened during those routine checks of his papers but standing there in front of the policeman or the soldier was always annoying, grating, constraining. But unlike other students in those days, who resisted the security checks, refusing to hand over their papers, butting heads with the policemen and the soldiers, charging them with discrimination and racism—assuming their stories were accurate and not mere bravado—the lawyer always forked over his papers with a smile. He was always courteous, wanting the policemen and the soldiers to know that he understood that they were just doing their jobs. The lawyer had always known that he was no hero and that he was not made for clashes, certainly not ones that could be avoided.
As his financial situation improved, he found he was stopped less. During his second year of school he got a job working at the law library and spent most of his paycheck on the kind of clothes the Jewish students wore. After he graduated, during his internship at the public defender’s office, he made a little more money and the security checks grew ever rarer. Then he passed the bar exam, opened his own office, moved to King George Street, and, for the entire five years of working there, had not been stopped once. Not by the police, not by the security guards who worked for the bus company, and not by the border policemen who patrolled the downtown day and night.
By now the lawyer understood that it had nothing to do with the way a person looked, his accent or his mustache. It had taken him some time, but he had finally figured out that the border police, the security guards, and the police officers, all of whom generally hail from the lower socioeconomic classes of Israeli society, will never stop anyone dressed in clothes that seem more expensive than their own.
SUSHI
The lawyer failed to notice how late it was until his wife called. He had been going over his notes as he constructed the defense plea for a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who was charged with taking part in the shooting of an Israeli car on one of the Territories’ many bypass roads. The lawyer was fastidious with the details, just as he had been during the trial itself, even though he knew full well, as did the accused and his family, that the man would be sentenced to multiple life sentences and that his only chance of release would be in a prisoner exchange with the Israelis. The lawyer thought these seemingly unwinnable cases were the most interesting. His task, in essence, was to do his utmost to ensure that the verdict allowed his client the chance of being included in a future prisoner exchange. The details—had he seen his victims? Had he hit his target? Had he inflicted the fatal wounds?—would have virtually no bearing on the severity of his client’s sentence but they could prove critical when the Israelis went over the names of the incarcerated and decided, based on the quality and quantity of blood on each prisoner’s hands, who was eligible for inclusion.
The lawyer’s cell phone rang. home appeared on the screen. Only then did he realize that it was seven in the evening.
“Are you still at the office?” his wife asked. He got out of his seat and began packing his bag, telling his wife that no, he had already left.
“Did you swing by Sakura?” she asked, and again the lawyer lied, saying he had placed the order, that they had called to say it was ready, and that he was on his way to pick it up. “Okay,” his wife said. He heard her open and shut the oven door. “We need some white wine, too. You know how Samir is, he’ll get all bent out of shape if we don’t have any. Oh, and did you invite Tarik?” she asked just as he walked out of his office and through Samah’s empty reception area. “Just a second,” he said as knocked on Tarik’s door and opened it without waiting for a response. Tarik was seated at his desk and the lawyer twisted his face and smiled as he spoke with his wife. “What did you say? I didn’t catch that? Did I invite Tarik to come to dinner at our place at eight thirty?” the lawyer said, nodding and looking to Tarik for an answer. Tarik nodded back and the lawyer winked at him and said to his wife, “Of course I invited Tarik. He’s coming. I’ll be home in an hour at the latest. Okay? Bye.” He hung up and put the phone in his pocket. “Sorry, Tarik, I completely forgot we’re having dinner at our house tonight.” Tarik laughed. He seemed to enjoy the lawyer’s absentmindedness.
“No problem,” Tarik said, looking at his watch. “I’ll close up here in a little while. What time did you say, eight thirty? I’ll go home first, take a shower, and then come over.”
For three years now the lawyer and his wife had been part of a group, along with three other couples, that met on the first Thursday of every month for dinner and a salon discussion. The topic was set in advance, usually a movie, a book, or a sociopolitical affair. The discussions opened on an intellectual note and deteriorated quickly. The men wound up talking about money and real estate—who bought, who loaned, who owed—while the women talked about the teachers and the parents in their children’s school.
The group was meeting at the lawyer and his wife’s house and since it w
as customary for the hosts to invite another couple or two, the kind of people whom they deemed worthy of inclusion, the lawyer and his wife—well, mostly his wife—had decided to invite Tarik. Not that they thought he was the perfect fit for the group or that he was eager to join them. They wanted him to come because they wanted to introduce him to their guests in hopes that one of them, particularly one of the women—and especially the wife of Anton the accountant, who was a faculty member at one of the teachers’ colleges in Jerusalem where the vast majority of the student body was young, female, and from one of the villages of the Galilee and the Triangle—would find a good match for the twenty-eight-year-old bachelor.
The lawyer and his wife never even considered inviting Samah and her husband. They were well-educated and well-off, more so than anyone else in the group, but were ineligible on account of their status. These meetings were for immigrant families alone. They believed that some things simply could not be shared with the locals, regardless of their material and intellectual wealth.
Sakura, the lawyer reminded himself as he skimmed down the stairs and out onto King George Street, pointing himself in the direction of the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall. It was evening, and the early-September sun had not yet set over Jerusalem. A pleasant breeze had brought people out onto the street. It was back-to-school season, before Rosh Hashanah and the Jewish holidays, and several street musicians performed along the length of the cobblestone walkway. The lawyer fished around in his pocket and came up with the list his wife had left for him in the morning. The first item brought a smile to his lips—one inside-out maki roll—and for a moment he forgot the crowds around him in the center of town. He knew the maki roll was for his daughter and he got a kick out of the fact that his six-year-old knew exactly what kind of sushi she liked, especially since he’d only heard of sushi in law school and had tasted it for the first time two years ago, on his thirtieth birthday. And here he was on the way to Sakura, the most expensive sushi bar in the city. His wife had decided to serve a first course of sushi and the lawyer knew, as did his wife, that when the wife of Samir the gynecologist asked, while holding a soy-capped cone, “Where’s the sushi from?” there was only one acceptable response.