by Sayed Kashua
When I walked back into the office, Khalil called out, “Oh, just in time. I thought we were going to starve to death in here.” Leila came in behind me and the room fell silent. They knew she was coming. Walid had already been in and let them know. My colleagues were unusually polite. They stood, said hi, shook her hand, and looked her over. She smiled and repeated their names to make sure that she had gotten them right. Shadi, his confident gaze locking on her eyes, told her that Walid had gone down to city hall and that he would be back soon. “Sit here in the meantime,” he said, offering her his chair and moving over to Walid’s.
“Too bad for you,” Khalil said as he handed me the breakfast money. “If we would’ve gotten a male intern he would’ve switched you up with the food delivery.” Everyone laughed. “Allow me,” Shadi said to Leila, handing me an extra twenty shekels.
“When did you get so generous?” Khalil asked, looking over at Leila and smiling.
“No, thank you,” she said, smiling. “I’ve eaten already. But thank you very much.”
“Come on,” Shadi said, but when she didn’t change her mind he turned to me and said, “okay, so get me a pack of Marlboro Lights.”
When I got up to go, Leila jumped out of her chair and asked, “Can I come with you?”
PISTOLS
After a month with Yonatan, Osnat felt I could handle the day shift and she agreed to switch one of my nights for one of her days, either Friday or Saturday. More than two months had passed since I’d last seen my mother—the longest I’d ever been away from home—and since the Festival of the Sacrifice was coming up, during which the office was closed and my roommates would be returning to their villages, I decided that it would be the best time to go home.
Back when I was in grade school, I would spend the first two days of the holiday in Tira, with my grandmother from my father’s side. All the kids in Tira ran around during the holiday with toy guns and each year um-Bassem would hunt around Jaljulia and find me the best pistol money could buy. The guns um-Bassem got me were better than anything my uncles got for their kids and better even than the ones um-Bassem’s grandkids got from their parents. I don’t remember exactly when, maybe in kindergarten or first grade, but one year I went to um-Bassem’s house in my holiday clothes to get that year’s pistol and I heard Aunt Maryam ask her why she spent all that money on me. “It is written in the Koran,” um-Bassem answered. “The orphan must be honored.”
I liked being in Tira on the Festival of the Sacrifice because each year my uncles would roast a sheep, sometimes even a calf, in my grandmother’s yard. I liked it also because I got to play with my cousins, who had the same last name as me. In Jaljulia there was no one with my name. Usually there were around four people in every class with the same last name and I was the only one in my grade—and later, I learned, in the school and the entire village—with a strange last name. Sometimes I signed my homework and tests with a different name, usually um-Bassem’s. Her grandchildren called her Siti, Grandma, just like me, so why shouldn’t I have her name, too? But the teachers were never fooled, not even the new ones, and whenever it happened they told my mother and she sat me down and explained that um-Bassem was an honorary grandmother, not a real one. I knew that. I wasn’t an idiot. My notebooks and report cards carried my real last name, from Tira, but when the kids in school asked for my family name I gave them um-Bassem’s.
I was a stranger in school, a stranger in the village with a weird last name just like all the other strangers in Jaljulia. Everyone knew that the strangers came to the village because of a blood feud, and that the police had brought them there. That’s what they used to say then, but I didn’t really understand what it meant. I did know that something was wrong with the strangers, that their fathers were in jail, and that I shouldn’t hang out with them. Some of the strangers were called collaborators, and they were the most hated of all. There were never any of the collaborators’ children in my class, because I was in the A class and none of the children of the people that the police had brought to the village were in the A class. Our teachers would warn us about them and criticize the government for carting all of the country’s trash to Jaljulia. It’s true that I was also a stranger, but I was a different kind of stranger: a stranger in the A class, a stranger that the teachers liked, a stranger with good grades, a stranger with a mother who taught at the school. My mother told me that the police had not moved us to Jaljulia but that she had come in order to work in the school. I knew full well, though, that that was not true and that the police had brought us to Jaljulia just like the rest of the trash, just like the children of the blood feuds and the collaborators.
I remember that one time my father’s mother insisted that I remain in Tira after the holiday and not go back to my mother in Jaljulia. She yelled at my uncle that she would never speak to him again if he took me back. The holiday ended and I stayed in Tira. My cousins went to school and I stayed alone at home with Grandma. A few days later, my mother showed up at Grandma’s house in a police jeep. She got out of the backseat accompanied by two policemen. They were dressed in blue uniforms that looked like the costume um-Bassem got me in Mecca when she went for the haj. My mother was crying. She yanked my arm and then picked me up and ran back to the police jeep while my grandmother stood there and yelled, “You whore, you killed our son and now you’re taking his son. You whore, you should kill yourself. It would be better for you, you bitch.”
I packed a bag at the apartment and saw Wassim and Majdi as they were heading home to their village. When I finally got home for the Festival of the Sacrifice, I squeezed my mother’s hand and she squeezed mine. I could see in her face that she wanted to hug me, but she knew it was best to resist that urge. Instead her eyes glazed over. Me and my mother did not hug or kiss. At times I would try to imagine what that kind of touch might feel like. I was sure she had held me and cuddled me when I was a baby, at the very least in order to feed me, and I tried to imagine that feeling but couldn’t. Perhaps, I used to think, if I had a picture of her holding me as a baby it would help.
“Eight weeks,” she said, trying to break the awkwardness. “What did you do with all your clothes?”
“What I always do. I washed my underwear in the sink. No problem.”
“Are you hungry?” she asked, putting my bags back in the house.
“Soon.”
“Do you need to use the bathroom?” she asked, then started sorting the clothes and throwing them into the washing machine in the bathroom.
I shook my head.
“Mom, I’m going to go say hi to um-Bassem,” I said, and went outside into the courtyard.
Um-Bassem’s door was open. “Siti,” I called out before going in.
“Come, welcome,” I heard her say.
She was on a prayer mat in the living room. The radio played verses from the Koran. It would soon be time for the afternoon prayer and um-Bassem could no longer hear the village muezzin’s call to prayer so she used a radio station from Jordan to know when to pray—precisely one minute after the radio, because that, she had decided, was the time difference between Amman and Jaljulia.
Standing at the door with the light at my back, she couldn’t recognize me. She brought a hand up to her face to shield her eyes and started to get up off the mat. “Stay where you are, Siti, it’s me,” I said as I walked toward her.
“Ahalan, ahalan, ahalan,” she said, opening her arms. I bent over to hug her and she kissed me on the cheeks and the head. “How are you, ya habibi?” she beamed. “What kind of evil have you been up to? Fifty-four days and we hear nothing from you. How are you? Is everything okay?”
“I’m fine, Siti, how are you?”
“Alhamdulillah. I’m waiting to pray, but the radio keeps coming in and out. These Jordanians can’t sit still. I find them and then they disappear. It’s not prayer time yet, is it?”
“Not
yet. Soon.”
“When did you come? Now?”
“Just now.”
“So go eat first, and I’ll pray. I want to talk to you. This is how you treat your mother? What did she ever do to you?” As I was about to leave, she fished around under the couch and pulled out an envelope. “This is halaweh, for the good grades and the tests. Your mother told me you’re all set to be a social worker now. May God be with you always. Allah, every prayer I mention you and ask Him to keep you safe.” I took the envelope and kissed her on the cheek.
“Allah be with you, I’ll come soon.”
I knew that there was money in the envelope and that there was no way I’d be able to refuse it. She gave me a present at the end of every school year. “Halaweh for your grades,” she would say. When I was young I liked her envelopes a lot more than the good grades. I’d run over to her house with my report card, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to read it and that the envelope was waiting for me anyway, because she knew I got the best grades in the class. “Bassem was the same way,” she would say. “He was smart like you. Always top of the class. Now he’s in Italy, a big doctor.”
I remember the first time Bassem came to visit Jaljulia. He had a fair-skinned wife who couldn’t speak. Um-Bassem decorated the courtyard and we helped her hang balloons and a poster board on which I’d written, in honor of doctor bassem abu-ras. Early in the morning um-Bassem’s four daughters, Bassem’s sisters, showed up with their children and began to wait for him. He arrived and kissed his mother and his sisters, who introduced him to their children. He hugged and kissed each one of them and gave them each a little plane with blinking lights. I remember waiting for my hug and my plane and Bassem asked, “Who’s this little guy, whose son is he?” and one of the aunts said that we were just renting an apartment. “That’s my grandson,” um-Bassem said. “As dear to me as a son.” Afterward she took me inside and told me in a whisper that Bassem had gotten me the best plane of all but that she was keeping it with her because she didn’t want the other children to get jealous. It was a long time before I understood that she had gone out the next day to Petach Tikva to buy me the remote-control airplane.
Mom and I had lived with um-Bassem ever since we left Tira. The unit we lived in was a little apartment that um-Bassem had built for her son when he left for Italy to study medicine but he had never returned to live in it. I was one year old when we moved into um-Bassem’s place. My mother ran away from Tira the year after my father’s death, when I was less than one month old. After the mourning period was over, my father’s family and my mother’s father, who was actually my father’s uncle, demanded that she marry my uncle, my father’s younger brother, to preserve her honor.
Even now I don’t know exactly what happened, but I do know that my mother refused to marry my uncle and that she ran away from the village to Jaljulia. She left my father’s house, left everything behind, taking only me and a small bag of clothes. The family never forgave her. They cut her off. Her family did the same. My uncles on my father’s side and my only uncle on my mother’s side never once came to visit us, not even on holidays when it’s commanded that you visit the women of the family. I remember my mother crying inconsolably when they told her over the phone that her father had died. My uncle came to get me for the funeral but my mother stayed in Jaljulia.
There were five hundred shekels in um-Bassem’s envelope.
“Mom, that’s too much. I feel bad.”
“Just don’t disappoint her,” my mother said, lighting a cigarette. My mother was always bashful when she smoked in front of me. She never smoked outside, only at home. Her eyes would ask permission before she picked a cigarette out of the pack. She was forty-five, but she looked older. She was skinny and her face was furrowed. There was something especially old about her face, about that unchanging look, a look that seemed to be forever apologizing.
My mother had bought meat and charcoal, as she did every year. On every Festival of the Sacrifice, she tried for us to be like everyone else, with smoke and the smell of grilling meat swirling out of the courtyard. “Will you light the fire?” she asked before going inside to prepare the meat and the salads. “Yes,” I said, heading out to the yard. Small children played with cap guns and loud music bellowed out of aimlessly wandering cars. I dumped the charcoal into the grill and my mother came out with the matches and a few blocks of fire starter. “Use this, it’s better,” she said. “The lighter fluid leaves a bad taste on the meat.”
Back when I was little, it was always me and my mother, just us, eating the meat of the Festival of the Sacrifice. We never roasted a lamb because “Who’s going to slaughter it?” as she always asked when I wanted to have the same thing the other kids in the class had.
Now, fire leaped up from the starter blocks and I took the tongs and began building a cone of charcoal, taking the wind direction into account, leaving deliberate air vents in the construction. I used to like that, being in charge of the charcoal. I had to. “On the Festival of the Sacrifice,” I heard my religious studies teacher intoning, “not everyone can afford to buy a lamb, not everyone can afford to buy meat. A true Muslim is considerate of his neighbors, considerate of others, those who do not have. A good Muslim gives meat to his hungry neighbors and does not think only of his own stomach.” I remember wanting to be a good Muslim but I remember, more forcefully, wanting not to be the hungry neighbor on the Festival of the Sacrifice.
Um-Bassem left her house and shuffled, with the help of her cane, toward me.
“Let me help you.” I said, approaching her.
“No strength left,” she said, “you see what humans are?” She leaned on my left arm, the one I had extended to her, and hobbled over to a plastic chair in the courtyard near our house. She panted and wiped sweat from her brow with a white handkerchief. My mother came outside with a brass tray full of skewered lamb and kebab.
“You must eat with us, um-Bassem,” my mother said, knowing that that would never happen. It never had and it never would. The orphan’s food, it says in the Koran, is not to be devoured.
“I wish I could,” she said, “but you know what my stomach is like these days. I can’t eat a thing beside yogurt.”
“We have that, too,” I said, and um-Bassem laughed.
“Thanks, I just had two cups at home.”
Mom sat on a chair next to um-Bassem. I flattened out the mound of charcoal, set down the grill, and rubbed it with a half onion that had been dipped in olive oil.
“So,” um-Bassem said, “months go by and you don’t visit?”
“I’m really busy,” I said.
“Spare me,” um-Bassem said. My mother sat up straight in her chair. “You think that I don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“There’s only one thing that keeps a man away from his mother,” she said.
I said nothing.
“Come on, come out with it already, is she pretty? She must be pretty. You are a good-looking man and you will take yourself a pretty woman.”
I started with the kebab. I lay them down on the grill and a cloud of smoke wafted up into the air. I placed a tomato-and-onion skewer on the side.
“What are you embarrassed about?” um-Bassem asked, “There are no strangers here.”
“No,” I said, “I really have been busy.”
“So there’s no girl? I don’t believe it.”
All I did was shake my head and flip the kebab and the vegetable skewer.
Um-Bassem exchanged looks with my mother, inhaled deeply, and started again. “Now that you’ve finished school and you have a profession it’s time to find the right bride, no?” She directed the question at my mother, who nodded impatiently.
Soon it would all start again. Um-Bassem would voice the words that my mother could not say, make the requests my mother could not make. Bride, home, land�
��for how long will you continue to surrender to your father’s family? When will you demand what is rightfully yours? How will you ever marry without land? Who would ever agree to marry someone who has no home? You lack for nothing and you deserve the very best. What are you worried about? It’s your father’s land.
“I think the kebab is ready,” I said, and my mother rushed over with a plate.
“How long will this go on?” um-Bassem asked and did not wait for an answer. “It’s time you demand what’s rightfully yours.”
“Nothing’s rightfully mine.”
“It most certainly is,” she said, raising her voice. “It’s yours and it’s also your mother’s.”
“My mother can demand what’s hers on her own.”
“Me,” my mother said. “Why would they listen to me?”
“You should have thought about that twenty years ago,” I said and immediately regretted it but did not apologize, making do with an apologetic look toward my mother, who was quiet, staring into the fire. Um-Bassem mumbled a prayer. After that it was silent. A round of fireworks exploded in the skies above the village.
I set the lamb skewers on the grill, spacing them evenly, knowing that they would not be touched. The thick smell of burning fat filled the courtyard. The wind changed directions and the smoke blew straight into my eyes.
CLEAN DIAPER
I went from being the roommate who spent too much time at home to the invisible roommate. Most days I came home from work at around four thirty, took a shower, got dressed, got my bag together, and left at around six fifteen for Yonatan’s. My time with Wassim and Majdi was cut down to the rare weekends when they were off and didn’t go home, which happened around once every two months.