by Sayed Kashua
“You want a new roll?” the Armenian asked.
“What? Oh, yes, yes, thank you,” I said, consoled by the prospect of taking more pictures.
“Black and white?”
“Yes,” I said, “black and white.”
“What ISO speed?”
“Excuse me?”
“The ISO speed relates to the film’s sensitivity to light. The higher the number the faster it responds. There’s one hundred, four hundred, and more. Do you shoot at night, too?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Take the four hundred then,” he said, grabbing a roll off one of the shelves. “Do you know how to load it?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer he popped open the back again, made sure I was paying attention to what his hands were doing, and put the film in the chamber. He fed the front end into a spool and hit the shutter-release button.
“The first two or three frames are goners as soon as the film is exposed to the light so just advance right on through them.”
The film cost fifteen shekels and the Armenian, who saw the surprise on my face, said, “I gave you the highest quality stuff.” I put the camera around my neck and headed out to the Old City.
EIGHTEEN SHEKELS
“Each picture’s a shekel,” the Armenian told me with a smile the next morning, and I cursed my new hobby under my breath. “All told, it’s eighteen shekels,” he said, handing me a bright yellow envelope. It took a moment until I understood.
“Eighteen? Why eighteen?
“Because all the other ones were overexposed,” he said. I knew right away that the eighteen that survived were the ones someone else had taken before me. The little wheel had been on the number 21 and I already knew that the first three shots couldn’t be counted. I was crestfallen and the Armenian made a gesture with his hand for the camera.
“Do you know what an aperture ring is?” he asked and all I did was shake my head. “You took a picture in the dark and didn’t compensate by slowing your shutter speed,” he said, watching to see by my response if I had any idea what he was talking about.
“Look through the viewfinder,” he instructed me, putting the camera near my face. “You see that little needle moving left and right?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the aperture. When it’s in the middle it means you won’t over- or underexpose a picture. Where is it now? Closer to the minus or the plus side?”
“The minus,” I said, and I wondered how I hadn’t noticed those signs staring at me from deep within the viewfinder.
“That means there isn’t enough light. You either didn’t open the aperture wide enough or you put the shutter speed on too fast a setting. You have to learn how to play with these things. Here, let me show you.”
The Armenian took the camera and started tinkering with a button I hadn’t seen before.
“This is the aperture,” he said. “You can open or close it depending on how much light you want to let in.”
He toyed with the ring of the lens, with something that said f-stop on it, and showed me how the small numbers let in a lot of light and the big ones blocked it out almost entirely. Then he put his finger on a button, the one that determines the shutter speed, and went on and on about how you have to balance the two of them, walking me in and out of the store to see the difference between natural light, electric light, and darkness. In the end I paid him eighteen shekels for pictures I didn’t really want and left the store. I was pretty sure that the day before I had already managed to overexpose five shots.
Not hungry, I walked east, out of the Armenian Quarter and toward the square outside the al-Aqsa Mosque. The Armenian had said that the wide open square caught the early morning light and was an ideal spot to learn how to play with the aperture and the shutter speed. “I guarantee you,” the Armenian said with a smile as I left his store, “that you won’t overexpose more than two more rolls of film.”
On the way to the mosque I did the calculations: I could afford five rolls of film a month, no more. The film would cost
75 shekels a month; the development of 33 photos per roll would add another 165 on to the bill. Back then 240 shekels a month was a fortune. My salary was only 2,500 shekels a month, but at that time my attraction to the camera was stronger than anything else. At first I thought it was just some unemployed man’s hobby, the kind of thing that would pass with one more roll of overexposed film. But I had this real desire to take pictures and, especially, to see the pictures I’d taken once they were developed. Nights, I went through Yonatan’s boxes of photos and noticed things I’d never seen before. Yonatan mostly took pictures of people. Before I’d found the camera, I would just flip through the pictures and try to guess if they were taken at a family event or on a class trip. But what had been rather dull was now fascinating. Yonatan did not take pictures at events or weddings or birthday parties. He photographed people and their expressions, freezing and preserving moments of sadness, fear, contemplation, happiness, and worry.
I arrived at the square outside the mosque and knew that I had no intention of photographing old domes and other tourist attractions. People, that’s what I wanted to capture on film. I wanted to see if I could be as precise and knowing as Yonatan, if I could also take the kind of sharp, detailed pictures that revealed the entire world of the stranger on the other end of the lens.
The guards at the entrance to the square asked to see identification and let me in only once they’d verified that I was a Muslim. It was early, and between prayer times, so the square, which was usually full of careening kids who had nowhere else to play, was nearly empty.
A few beggars asked for spare change and I ignored them, knowing that if I coughed up a single cent I’d be hounded all the way out of the Old City, followed by their outstretched hands and sorry eyes.
“Excuse me,” a bearded man said, striding toward me with a walkie-talkie. “Wait,” he commanded and I stopped. “Are you a Muslim?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Muslim,” he said, raising his radio to his mouth. “I’m sorry, your appearance was misleading. The camera made me think that maybe . . . where are you from?”
“Jaljulia.”
“Welcome,” he said, bringing his palm to his chest.
I sat down on the stairs that led from the al-Aqsa square to the Mosque of Omar. I looked around and saw there was nothing that I really wanted to photograph. I opened the yellow envelope the Armenian had given me and took out the eighteen pictures from the previous roll of film.
I saw Yonatan, an eighteen-year-old Yonatan, standing on his own two feet. In the first photo, he held the camera that I now had around my neck. He had held it down around his waist and taken a picture of himself in the mirror in the attic bathroom, a sealed, sharp expression on his face. I flipped to the next picture: Yonatan, standing by the side of the bed. He held a release cable in his hand, the kind that lets you operate the camera from afar. The cable, I thought, wasn’t in the photo by chance. He knew what he wanted in his frames. In the third photo, he was standing on a chair in the middle of the room. In the next one, he threaded a rope through an anchor for the light fixture in the ceiling. I started breathing quickly, racing through the photos. He was in all of them. He tied the noose. He took a shot of himself from below. He moved the camera away and took a picture of himself testing the rope. And always the same expression, cold, emotionless, remote. He had taken a few different shots of himself, from various angles, with his neck in the noose. I felt starved for air. I stood up and tried to inhale properly, but still I could feel myself shaking. Yonatan stood on the back of the chair and in the last photo, number 18, I saw him push the chair away with his feet. Behind him, very vividly, I could see the bed and the pictures on the wall, but the center of the frame, where the body hung, was blurry, the neck, stomach, hands, and feet were all elongated, and
I knew that he had used a slow shutter speed and a long exposure.
THE CARDBOARD BOX
I showed up half an hour early. There were two girls in the waiting room. Each had a big square art bag and they were chatting. They stopped their conversation for a second when I showed up, looked me over, and nodded in my direction. I nodded back, then lowered my eyes and went to check out the list of names on the door. I was number five.
“What time did they call you for?” one of the girls asked. She was skinny, with blonde hair that had been dyed purple.
“Eleven thirty,” I said.
“They’re running ridiculously late. The ten o’clock just went in now. How far down the list are you?”
“I’m fifth.”
“Cool, I’m fourth.”
“I’m sixth,” the other girl said softly. “After you.” She was more filled out than her friend and she wore a Ministry T-shirt. She noticed that I was staring at her shirt and lowered her eyes, and I, fearing she would think I was looking at her chest, said, “I have the same shirt.” She nodded and smiled. Her breasts were round and full and I could see the shape of her nipples through the fabric.
Each applicant had a half hour slot, and if the skinny one was right and the third on the list had only gone in now, then I had at least an hour until it was my turn. My first thought was to flee, to give up; what were the chances of me being accepted to the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design? Knowing I didn’t belong, I sat down on the floor and leaned my back against the wall, opposite the girls.
“If the whole point of photography is to capture a single moment in time, I figured why not go for it, you know?” the skinny girl said. “I figured I’ll just go for it. I’ll photograph time. Or what time means to me.”
She picked up her portfolio, laid it on her knees, and started taking out photographs in black matte frames. I couldn’t see the photos she passed along to the other girl, one after another, carefully, as though handling the pages of a holy book. Every once in a while she blew dust off the surface of a photo and carried on with her presentation.
“To me this represents the passing of time, and here I tried to understand and conceptualize the meaning of the present, and here at the end I tried to capture the future as I see it, in other words, within the infinite space of time.”
The girl with the Ministry T-shirt seemed to find the skinny girl’s presentation interesting, and I knew there was no way I could carry on like that about time, and what’s more I realized that I had not framed any of my photographs. It was a mistake to come. I had no idea how I had ever made it through the first stage of the application process, but I knew for sure that I was not an artist. The Ministry girl glanced up for a moment and caught me looking at her. She smiled at me and I smiled back.
“And this is my self-portrait,” the skinny one said. “A woman with no head and no limbs.”
I made a face and just at that moment the Ministry girl looked up at me and burst out laughing.
“I’m sorry,” she said, trying to keep her poise. “I’m really sorry. He’s just making me laugh,” she said, pointing at me.
Several long minutes later the door opened and a young dark-skinned guy with long curly hair emerged. He was well-dressed, clothed from head to toe in designer apparel. He inhaled deeply and shut the door. The skinny girl hopped up.
“Well, what did they ask?” she clamored.
“You know, just questions about my work, where I’m from, why I want to study here, that kind of thing,” he said in Nazareth-accented Hebrew. The door opened again and a woman with a file in her hand summoned the skinny girl.
“Good luck,” the cute one said, and I mumbled after her, “Good luck.”
Just before the woman shut the door, the guy from Nazareth asked when he could expect results and she said within a month and then closed the door.
He was bursting with confidence. He said he had also applied to the department of architecture and that if he got in there he would definitely go, but that if he didn’t, he’d do a year of photography and then reapply to architecture at the end of the year.
“He definitely got in,” the Ministry girl said when we were left alone in the waiting room. “To photography and to architecture. They’ll probably fight over who gets him.”
“You know him?” I asked.
“No,” she said, shrugging, “but this is Bezalel. They’d kill to have an Arab in the program.”
“Maybe he has competition in the department of architecture,” I said, smiling.
“You’re right,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that. Two Arabs is already too much.”
The skinny one walked out with a big smile on her face.
“How’d it go?” number six asked her halfheartedly.
“Hard, stressful, but I think it went well.”
“Yonatan, Yonatan Forschmidt,” the woman with the file said and I jumped up from the floor and straightened out. “That’s me,” I said.
“Good luck, Yonatan,” number six said.
Yonatan Forschmidt. That’s the name I’d put down on the application, the name I’d used for the psychometric exam, the name that had appeared on the sheet in the waiting room. For the previous six months I had been walking around with Yonatan’s ID in my pocket, or rather, to be exact, with two IDs—his, which I’d found in the attic, and mine.
I remember how scared I was the first time I’d identified myself as a Jew. It was in a café on Ben Yehuda Street, the fifth one I’d gone to in search of a job. The boss looked at Yonatan’s ID, eyed his old picture, and then filled in his personal details on the application without any hint of suspicion. In all of the other cafés, where I’d identified myself as an Arab, the bosses suddenly didn’t have waitering positions available, despite the waitstaff wanted sign on the door. Either that or they offered me a job as a dishwasher. I agreed to that once. It was called chef’s assistant, but all I was asked to do was wash dishes, clean the bathrooms, bring in the supplies, and take out the garbage. I had to come in at seven thirty in the morning and stay until six in the evening and my pay was minimum wage. I knew that the waiters worked less and made more. All of the waitstaff were Jewish and all of the kitchen workers were Arabs: the ones the customers didn’t see were always Arabs.
Once I’d gotten the job by posing as a Jew, I felt embarrassed by what I’d done and decided I wouldn’t show up for my first shift. But I needed the money and I convinced myself that I had not done anything wrong. Just a little hoax so I could get a reasonable job. The first week was training and throughout that period I focused on not answering the kitchen staff in my native tongue when they said good morning in Arabic or asked if I’d like something to eat. The training went well and the owner saw that I could be trusted. I always showed up on time, didn’t ask for days off, didn’t come in tired, and was generous with the customers, even the most difficult ones.
The kitchen staff consisted of Muhammad, whom everyone called Mukhi; Rafik, whom everyone called Rafi; and Suleiman, who preferred to be called Soli. All three of them were from east Jerusalem, and all three of them smoked, prayed, and talked about girls all the time.
As opposed to the waitstaff, who were given their shifts in advance, Mukhi, Rafi, and Soli worked all day every day, from seven in the morning until midnight, except for Fridays, which were short days, and Saturdays, when the café was closed.
My relationship with the owner, the kitchen workers, and the other waiters was polite, nothing more. I didn’t let anyone get too close to me, especially not Dana, a young waitress who, like me, preferred the morning shift—she had Bagrut matriculation courses in the afternoon. She was a pretty, smart girl who had dropped out of high school because she couldn’t stand the teachers, the other kids, and the material that was being taught. Nor could she stand the sleazeballs and bimbos who went to the Bagrut cour
ses in the afternoon instead of high school, but she had no choice. She wanted to go to college, probably to study psychology or art history; she wasn’t sure. She invited me over to her place in the Nachlaot neighborhood for Saturday brunch but I had to restrain myself and say no. Back then, I couldn’t imagine lying to other people about my identity, although, after spending a night practicing the signature he’d left in his books, I had opened a bank account in Yonatan’s name. I told myself that my lie was solely for the purposes of work, and it could not be allowed to spread to my personal life, even though I wasn’t sure I had one of those.
“Your portfolio, please,” the woman with the file said, and I already regretted coming. I opened my bag and took out a cardboard box, my portfolio. The three members of the admissions committee sat around a round table: the chair of the department, an instructor, and a fourth-year student. They looked over the paperwork in front of them and waited for me to take out my work.
The applicants who had made it through the first two stages of the application process were asked, for the final stage, to do three things: a story in ten pictures, a self-portrait, and three pictures of your choosing. I gave the secretary my box.
“What’s this,” asked the instructor. “Store-developed photos?”
“Yes,” I said. He started looking through the first photos, my story in ten pictures. In contrast to those of the skinny girl from the waiting room, my pictures were all standard size. The Armenian had developed them for me and I had not even thought of blowing them up or framing them.
“When did you start taking photographs?” he asked.
“A year ago, about a year ago.”
“Did you study anywhere?” he asked, without taking his eyes off the photos.
“No, I studied alone. I mean, someone showed me the basics and I read some books,” I said, and the instructor passed the ten photos to the head of the department.
“So you didn’t study photography in high school or anywhere else?” the instructor continued.