Second Person Singular

by Sayed Kashua

  The lawyer drove home. Radio Ramallah played an upbeat song and even though he only knew a few of the words, he sang along, practically happy.

  EGON SCHIELE

  The lawyer’s daughter fell asleep on the couch while watching TV. His son seemed also about to fall asleep, his pacifier bobbing in his mouth as he opened and closed his eyes. The lawyer looked at his son’s face and decided that they had the same nose, not long and somewhat flat. Many people told him that his son looked just like him. He tried to remember some of the people but couldn’t come up with any names. He looked at his son’s big toe on his right foot. He had once heard that the big toe was one of the clear indicators of paternity, but he couldn’t remember if that had been said in jest or not. He took off his shoes and compared big toes with his son, but was unable to say whether they were alike. By this time his son had fallen asleep, but he knew that he had to hold him for a while longer, ­until he fell deeper into sleep, otherwise he would wake up while being transferred to the crib.

  The lawyer looked at the cherrywood-and-wire-framed clock on the wall, a housewarming gift from the accountant and his wife. His wife had said she’d be home in an hour. Or maybe that she’d leave Diana’s place in an hour. He wasn’t sure. As far as he could tell, though, an hour had passed. If she was leaving now, she’d be home in fifteen minutes.

  The lawyer got up off the leather couch, moving as slowly and smoothly as possible, trying to limit his body’s movements to the bare minimum and checking that his son’s eyes remained closed. Treading lightly, he walked through the living room to the bedroom and, supporting his son’s neck, lay his head on the pillow in the crib and then let the rest of his body follow. The baby opened his eyes for an instant and then shut them again, and the lawyer covered him with a thin blanket and returned to the living room to transfer his daughter to her brother’s room.

  “In the name of Allah, the most merciful and compassionate,” he found himself mumbling, as his mother did, as all Muslim women do when they lift a child in their arms.

  The notion that his wife would come home to a house of sleeping children was satisfying to the lawyer. She’d come home and smile and when she realized she didn’t have to put the kids to sleep, she’d give him a little kiss. After that they’d have a glass of wine and climb into bed. Maybe they’d even shower together, like they used to do, long ago.

  He took his briefcase and went down to the study. He lit a cigarette and knew his wife would be home before he had the chance to finish it. Would he hear her coming in? He was tense. He didn’t want to miss the expression on her face when she realized that they’d have the night to themselves. But even if he didn’t hear her come in, she’d definitely come down to the study to find him, kissing him in his office chair.

  The lawyer did not want to open the briefcase. He did not want to see that damned note or The Kreutzer Sonata or any of Yonatan’s books. He exhaled a long plume of smoke. The whole thing was probably just an awful misunderstanding. When she got home, he’d show her the note and she’d laugh and say, “Where did you get that thing?” and tell him the whole ridiculous truth. But the lawyer couldn’t really imagine an explanation that would put him at ease. Maybe she had written it for him and somehow it had wound up in the pages of Tolstoy’s novella. “Oh, my God!” he heard her laugh like a little girl, holding the note in two hands like a scroll, reading it and then remembering the circumstances under which it had been written. An honest reaction that would leave no room for doubt. Maybe something like, “Wow, I wrote this to you back when I was still in school and as soon as I wrote it, your sister came into the library, so I shoved it into the first book I found. How did you find it? I looked for the book forever. The librarian must have come by with that little wagon and taken all the books off the table.”

  That was not a likely scenario. Maybe she’d have a different explanation. Perhaps Yonatan was a colleague who had asked her to translate the sentence into Arabic for him. Or maybe she had written it to someone else before the lawyer had met her. But the notion of her having an Arab boyfriend before they met made the lawyer wince and ruined his peace of mind. He breathed deeply and tried to remember all the conversations he’d had with his friends, in which he bragged how enlightened he was and how he would not mind marrying an Arab girl who’d been in a prior relationship. He even remembered exactly what he had said to his friends, most of whom had always said they would never marry a nonvirgin, even though some of them had spent years together with Arab girls whom they called girlfriends, but who were clearly only playthings because, as they said, she who had relinquished her honor once would relinquish it over and over again.

  At the time he had disdained those friends, particularly because they hid the fact from their girlfriends, sometimes for years, that there would come a time that they would unceremoniously dump them. What are you going to do, they would say, we weren’t the ones who popped the cherry. But if she’d had a prior relationship, why hadn’t she told him? He would have forgiven her. But would I have? he wondered. Yes, if she had been straight with me, then yes. But she had not been. And what kind of relationship had it been? Had she slept with him and then had her hymen restored before the wedding? Had she faked the blood on their wedding night? And if she hadn’t slept with the other guy, what would he think? If all they did was kiss? Or hold hands? Or write each other love letters?

  The lawyer shook himself free of those thoughts and tried to restore the calm he had felt when he learned that she had in fact gone to her friend’s house. He decided that when she came home he’d simply give her the note and see how she reacted, see if her explanation seemed plausible. After all, he knew his wife and he knew there was no way she had cheated on him. No way.

  The lawyer put his cigarette out in the ashtray. He thought he heard a noise coming from the upper floor. He rolled his chair over to the door, opened it a crack, and listened. “Leila,” he said softly, but there was no response. She hadn’t come home yet. He considered taking a shower, perhaps even getting out before she made it home, but didn’t like leaving the kids alone, especially the little one. He could wake up at any second and start howling and no one would hear him. But mostly he didn’t want to miss the moment when his wife came home. More than anything else he wanted to see that smile, the one that would explain it all away, promising that everything was okay, that nothing had changed.

  According to his calculations she should have been home already. But the lawyer figured that once she’d heard that he had picked up the kids she had decided it was all right to stick around at Diana’s, chatting a little more with her friends. He would not call her. He did not want to be one of those men that are always checking up on their wives and are stingy with their free time. She’d be home any minute. Even though he’d sworn he wasn’t going to look at the briefcase, the books, or the note, he couldn’t resist. Just the books, he told himself. The first was a book of drawings by an artist named Egon Schiele. The lawyer flipped through the book and looked at the crooked, distorted coal drawings of nudes. He went through it quickly and wondered if the artist was someone serious or just some unimportant fringe painter. How does one tell? The lawyer didn’t like the drawings much but he knew he didn’t know anything about art and as he browsed he felt a familiar ache. He Googled the artist and saw that he was an important figure. I wonder what Yonatan does for a living, he thought, and then tried to impose the artist’s name on his memory. Egon Schiele, Egon Schiele. Another scrap of information that could help him fill the glaring gaps in his education, especially in so far as art was concerned. He recalled how a colleague had once said to him in court, “Don’t tell me you don’t know who Chekhov was?” And that recollection led him to another earlier but no less painful one, from back in his college days, when a Jewish student had discovered that he had never heard of the Rolling Stones. He, of course, resorted to the technique he had learned from other Arab students, who employed it often, a
nd responded with a question that was meant to underscore the cultural divide, “Why, how many Fairuz songs do you know? Do you have any idea what Al-Mutanabbi wrote?” And yet he had felt a sharp twinge of inferiority.

  He looked at the signature on the first page of the art book again, Yonatan, and only then turned his attention to the other book. It was One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. The lawyer had heard of the author and the book. Maybe this was his chance to read it. He flipped through the pages. He stopped for a moment and made sure that the sounds he heard were not coming from the upper floor of the house and then looked at the signature again before closing the book. He went back to the Egon Schiele book and opened it to the signature page. Something didn’t add up. The same word was written in the same place, in a similar style, but the lawyer felt that the signatures were different. He left both books open to the signature page and took The Kreutzer Sonata out of his briefcase. The signature on that one was more like the one on One Hundred Years of Solitude. Those signatures were written in bigger letters and, though they were written with different pens, he was sure that they were identical. Something must have been bothering Yonatan when he penned his name in the Schiele book, the lawyer thought.

  When he called his wife he hoped to hear the ring of her phone from just outside, but no one answered. She must be driving, he thought, or maybe she was really close to home. She never answered when she was nearby. Instead, she’d park and come into the house and say, “I was right outside when you called.” He looked out through the living room window. First toward the garage and then down the block, but saw no approaching lights. He decided to call again after he smoked a cigarette, but he called after two drags and got her answering machine again. This time he didn’t even put the phone down, just immediately redialed. Why wouldn’t she answer the phone, the whore. He exhaled in bursts and kept the telephone in his hand. He punched her number in again and again and kept getting her voicemail. The lawyer slammed his hand down on the table. He inhaled sharply on his cigarette and his chest began to constrict. Again he saw his wife frolicking in bed like one of those sluts in the movies, casting a sideways glance at her phone and ignoring his calls without any remorse. Or maybe she was sitting in the car he had bought her, and her lover, who now seemed to be the most manly of men, with wide shoulders and a chiseled face, was slipping his tongue into her willing mouth, and she playfully bit his lips and then licked her own. Her lover’s lips moved down to her neck and she stretched up toward him, arching her back and moaning as his lips reached her chest. He could see this lover sliding his hands under her dress. When the hell did she start wearing dresses anyway?

  The lawyer knew he had to do something. He thought he might take the car and go out and look for her and beat the two of them to death. He was capable of that, he knew he was. No man, no matter how strong, could stop him now. But the lawyer couldn’t leave the kids alone.

  He raced up the stairs, his heart pounding, hands balled up into a fists, fingernails digging into the skin of his palms. He knew she was late, knew there was no way she had stayed at her friend’s this long. Where could she have gone? And why wasn’t she answering the phone? He knew the answer. The lawyer went into the bedroom and opened her side of the closet. She had taken the better side, the one with more shelves and bigger drawers, the one with more space, and still she always complained that she didn’t have enough room for all her things. He shoved both hands into the closet and starting clearing the shelves, flinging her clothes to the floor. Pants, shirts, nightgowns, gym clothes, underwear, all of it landing in a pile on the floor. He pulled dresses and jackets off their hangers, yanked open drawers and shook them free of their contents but making sure to do it in silence so as not to wake up the baby in the crib. He stomped down to the kitchen to find scissors, there had to be scissors! The lawyer whipped open the kitchen drawers, which opened with a smooth European efficiency, and rifled through the implements, settling on the kitchen knife.

  “What are you doing?” he heard her ask, and spun around.

  “Where were you?”

  “What’s wrong? What are you doing?”

  The lawyer wanted to pummel her and yell at the top of his lungs, but he would not raise his voice, not if it meant the neighbors would know what was happening inside his house. So he shrieked softly, tightening every muscle in his body, “Where were you? Where?”

  “What do you mean where was I? I was at Diana’s. What’s wrong? Is something wrong? You’re scaring me. Are the kids okay?”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “What? Why are you talking to me this way?” She’d never seen him act like this before. “What did I do?”

  “You’re a liar. Why didn’t you answer the phone?”

  “What? When did you call?” she said, bending down toward the bag she had already tossed on the floor. She pulled out the phone. “You called? I didn’t hear a thing. Look, my battery’s dead,” she said, showing him the phone.

  “Stop lying and tell me where you were.”

  “What do you want from me?” she said, bursting into tears. “I told you I was at Diana’s.” She covered her face with her hands and ran to the bedroom. The lawyer wasn’t buying her act. He ran after her. The pile of clothes on the floor added a decibel to her crying and the lawyer saw true fear in her face, the fear of a cornered animal.

  “What is this? What happened?” she started backing away toward the wall, looking for shelter, fearing her husband as if he were some unknown creature.

  “Why are you pretending to be scared? Just tell me where you were,” he said, and she just sobbed. She curled into herself and raised her hands to shield her face from an expected blow, even though the lawyer had never hit her. He looked over at the crib to make sure that his son was sleeping through this. Not being able to punch her in the face, to crack the cartilage of her nose, made him feel weak and lowly. Someone like her could interpret his behavior as helplessness.

  “Who were you with? I want you to tell me who you were with.”

  “What do you want from me?” And then more sobs.

  “I know that you weren’t at your friend’s house,” the lawyer said, shifting tactics. For some reason he felt at ease and in charge. “So tell me where you were.”

  She sobbed. “I swear I was at her house. Ask her.”

  “I did,” the lawyer said coolly. “I called her and she said you left over an hour ago.” The lawyer turned to her, full of confidence. He hoped to see true bewilderment in her face, for her to accuse him, or Diana, of lying and for her to insist that he call her back this instant. But his wife did not react in that manner and a listless, melancholy feeling began to spread through him, replacing the rage of earlier, when she said, “I went out with Faten for coffee at Iskandinia. She wanted to discuss something about work. So what? So what?”

  The lawyer saw her fear morph into defensiveness and he knew that he had lost. He walked slowly down to the study and lit a cigarette, but he couldn’t focus. He should have restrained himself, and now he hated himself for his impulsiveness. He had lost this battle, perhaps the war, but that wasn’t what was on his mind just then. Actually nothing was on his mind, because what did it matter if he got half their property or custody over the kids. He smoked leisurely and felt his heart rate relax. He did not respond when she knocked on the study door. She opened it and stood there with eyes swollen from crying. There was no trace of the earlier fear. He looked her way and then turned to watch the cigarette smoke curl out of the open window.

  “Can you please tell me what all of that was about?” she asked. He kept his head down so that she wouldn’t see the failure on his face. “I’m sorry,” the lawyer said softly, then reached into his briefcase and handed her the note. He did not look at her and he did not expect an adequate response.

  “What is this?” she asked after reading the note. “What is this
thing?”

  “I thought that was your handwriting.”

  “Mine? No,” she said, shoving the note away, the way children do, thinking that once you’ve hidden the evidence it ceases to exist.

  PART

  FOUR

  FRIED SAUSAGES

  For the first few weeks after quitting the outpatient clinic, I hardly ever got out of bed before noon. After the night shift with Yonatan I’d take the bus to Musrara and get hummus with fava beans at Akramawi’s hole in the wall and then take a share-taxi back to the apartment in Beit Hanina and crawl straight into bed. Majdi and Wassim were already at work so the place was empty and quiet. Sometimes I’d go straight to sleep and sometimes I’d read one of the books I’d borrowed from Yonatan’s library until my eyes closed. I’d wake up at some point, drink some water, go to the bath­room, and then crawl back into bed.

  Wassim would come back at three in the afternoon. If he hadn’t eaten anything on the way home, we’d fry up some sausage and eggs or make some tuna and cream cheese and eat together. After that he’d rest for an hour before his evening shift at the hostel. Majdi, I barely saw.

  I stopped sleeping during the night shift, remaining awake until Osnat showed up in the morning. Ever since I told her that I had left the social services job and that I didn’t mind if she came in a little late, she started showing up at eight in the morning. She was very happy with the new arrangement, even said that her husband was going to buy me a present because he wasn’t in charge of getting the kids off to school in the morning anymore. “We almost got divorced over it,” she said, laughing.

  I spent the sleepless nights listening to music and reading Yonatan’s books. There were 156 books on the shelves and 98 CDs on the racks, 70 in English and 28 in Hebrew. Yonatan had written his name on the inside jacket of his discs, too. He had nice handwriting, very delicate, like a good student or a pretty girl.