by Sayed Kashua
I hate those situations, and I sometimes get annoyed at my wife for making me do the kinds of chores that force me to keep going down to the center and to bump into people. I’d prefer for her to do those things instead, but I know it would be considered odd. Fact is, I’ve never seen a woman at any of those stores, and if there were any, she was usually there together with her husband or a male relative. An Arab woman would never go out to buy hummus or falafel on her own. It was unthinkable. The first time I was made to go down to the center of the village, it was to fix my wife’s wedding ring. One of the stones had fallen out three weeks earlier, and I couldn’t procrastinate any longer. She just went on and on about that stone and that ring. She said it was a bad omen, that the damage to the ring was mostly a sign that there was something wrong with our marriage, which was falling apart. I reached the iron gate. I tried to push it in, but in vain. The gate was locked. The salesperson sitting on the inside looked at me, tilted his head forward, and through the loudspeaker of the intercom next to the gate I could hear him ask, “Who are you?” Only after I gave him my name, my father’s name and my last name did he smile and press the button and signal me to push the gate, which gave off a squeaky sound. Another iron gate came next, but so long as the first one was not completely shut, he didn’t press the button that would open the second one. For a few very scary seconds I was locked in a steel cage. This place must have been robbed a million times, I thought.
“Ahalan u-sahalan,” the salesperson greeted me, getting up and taking my hand. “I’ve heard about you. You just returned to the village a short while ago, right? You may not know this, but your father and I used to be close friends. Nowadays, because of business, we hardly see one another, but he’s like a brother to me.” The salesperson looked my father’s age. His large head was covered with white hair and his enormous body filled the pink director’s chair on the other side of the counter. All of the gold in front of him was yellow, shiny. On the back of the chair he had placed a green prayer mat with two mosques depicted on it. In his one hand he shifted the beads on his masbakha as he inquired about me and my wife, expressed his approval of our return and asked how he could help. I handed him the ring. He said it was nothing, he could fix the damage on the spot, in just a few minutes. My parents had bought the ring from him. He told me they had bought the jewelry for my brother’s wedding from him too. “I have the best merchandise anywhere around here, and I gave your father a great price, same as I’d give my own brother.”
The wedding jewels replaced money as the groom’s mohar payment, and represented a pretty big expense for the groom’s parents. The salesperson felt obliged to note that my parents had not skimped and had bought the most expensive ones. Both for my wife and for my older brother’s. “I want you to know,” he said, “that your parents are exceptionally fair. They bought your wife the very same things they bought for your older brother’s wife, and it’s only a wise person like your father who’d do that, because you know how it is, women look at one another and get jealous. They did the smart thing. They asked for the identical set for your wife. I had to place a special order.” He laughed. Me he’d never seen before, maybe when I was little, he said. But he saw my father and my older brother in the mosque every Friday. “Tell me,” he asked as he handed me back the ring, “which mosque do you pray at?”
“At home,” I muttered. “I pray at home.”
“I guess you haven’t had a chance to get to know the mosques around here. I’m telling you, come to our mosque, together with your brother. That would be the best. We don’t have a lot of politics, or a lot of fanatics. I know your family, it’s what would suit you best. Your family are like us, not like some of those crazies.”
Yesterday, two more stones fell out of the wedding ring, the one I had fixed recently, and another one. My wife wants me to go have it fixed again, even though she figures it probably won’t hold.
6
I pass by the mosque, which means I’m back in my own neighborhood already. The older people at the entrance don’t seem the least bit worried. Rolling their Arab tobacco and licking it tight, huddling there together all day waiting for the next prayer hour. What else do they have to do, actually? At least they don’t feel alone, and they can spend hours talking about people who died two thousand years ago. I blurt out a salam aleikum to which they respond with an aleikum salam, and I raise my hand. I’ve got to calm down. Truth is, I’m much calmer already. Some bulldozer must have slashed a cable and all the mobile phones went dead because the lines were jammed. Maybe an antenna has been damaged. Everything will be all right. Maybe I shouldn’t go to my parents’, maybe I ought to check the exit first, see if the roads are open already and retrieve my car. People in the street don’t seem to think it’s anything serious. There’s cheerful music inside the houses, Egyptian pop. I recognize it and it makes me happy, even though, on the whole, I hate the trend. Every now and then, a car drives by and brakes just before the makeshift speed bumps that were put there to deal with reckless young drivers and car thieves who like to show off their loot by racing through the streets at crazy speeds. Some of the neighbors simply poured cement down in the shape of a small mound opposite the house, while others preferred to slow things down by digging a ditch from one side of the road to the other. Housewives are mopping the house and pouring the dirty water into the street, the way they do every morning. Where on earth, I ask myself, did I get the idea they were closing off the village?
My parents’ home is the first one on the northern edge of the village, then my older brother’s, then mine. The two brothers’ houses look exactly the same, and on the remaining piece of land they’ll build the fourth house, identical to ours, for my younger brother when he finishes school. All his life, my father has loathed fights over land, especially among brothers, which is why he made sure, long ago, to divide it up evenly among us. “So nobody says I gave one more or less than the rest,” he tells us. I don’t think my parents have heard anything about what’s going on. I’ll tell them I overslept and that I just came to say good-bye on my way to work. “Good morning,” I say, and they both answer. My mother is preparing something in the kitchen and my father is sitting on the pink sofa staring at another newscast on Al Jazeera. They don’t seem surprised to see me, despite the unlikely hour of my visit. My father sits up to greet me. “What do you think?” he asks me “Have they arrested anyone yet? What do they want anyway?”
“I hope God takes the lot of them,” my mother says, and wipes off the counter. “Hungry?”
“Not really. Maybe I’ll have a bite a little later,” I say. So my parents do know, and I try to check whether it’s because of something they saw on TV, because they couldn’t possibly have gone out yet. Where would they be going, anyway?
But none of the events in the village has been mentioned on television. My heart starts beating hard again, and I try to keep my body from trembling when my mother curses the Jews and says they’d almost had a heart attack the night before when someone came banging on their bedroom window at about three A.M. “Who could be knocking at such an hour?” my mother says. “We were sure something terrible la samakh Allah had happened to one of you or your children.”
It was my younger brother. He’d knocked on the door first, and when they didn’t hear him he knocked on their bedroom window, right over their heads. My younger brother was dead tired. My father says they could hardly make sense of what he was saying about what had happened, except that the security guards at the student dorms had come with the Border Police, had ordered all of the Arab students out of their rooms and had escorted every one of them home.
“Where is he?” I ask at once, shouting, even. “Where is he?” And my mother asks me to pipe down, because my younger brother is asleep. “Poor boy,” she says, “they kept them up all night.” I hurry into the room where my younger brother is sleeping, the room we once shared. I move the old door slowly, trying to keep it from squeaking in its frame. I look at him, his thi
n, long body stretched out on the bed. The bedspread he’d covered himself with has fallen off. I’m about to cover him, but then I realize it’s too hot for that. I notice I’m perspiring. I close the door again and hurry out. “I’m going out for a while. I’ll be back soon,” I tell my parents, checking their phone on my way out to see if it’s working. It isn’t. “It’s dead,” my father says. “Want something to eat?” I hear my mother ask from inside.
I pass by the housewives again, hear the nerve-wracking Egyptian music and the drums and the mechanical clapping. I hate that music, hate those housewives, I tell myself, and walk faster. I head up toward the mosque this time, which is more tiring. I’m not going to salam aleikum the SOBs sitting across from the mosque. I can’t stand them, them or their stories. How come everything’s so calm here, as if nothing’s happened? How I hate the people here. They live for their next meal and don’t think one step ahead. I hate them all, especially the older ones, who’ve neglected us and let the situation get as bad as it is. Obsequious nobodies. Look at us now. I’m mad at the lot of them. I don’t exactly know what’s happening, but it must be something much more serious than a terrorist cell or just some intelligence report or warning about a potential suicide bomber who’s entered Israel from Qalqilya or Tul-Karm and hidden out in the village. What the hell are they bringing the students home for? How could that tie in with a warning or a terrorist attack? What’s going on here damn it?
I check my mobile again, and the result only makes me feel worse. I’ll take the car and then see. First I’ve got to get the car back, though. The entrance to the village is less crowded by now, but there are still dozens of people milling around. The mayor isn’t there anymore. He stationed a few of his thugs in strategic spots to keep people from getting close to the barbed wire. There’s no more bottleneck and I can get my car out of there. Maybe I ought to go to the town hall first, to check whether they’ve had any news. The radio is still playing happy music, talking about the economy, rapes, robberies, Palestinian homes that have been demolished and a few terrorists who’ve been killed.
I check my wallet and decide I’d better go see my older brother at the bank on my way home, to withdraw a few hundred shekels. The bank is crowded now, because everyone who works outside of the village has decided to use this day off for errands. Luckily for me, I don’t have to stand in line. I head straight for the office where my brother works. “Say,” my brother greets me, “this is serious, isn’t it? People have been coming in and saying that the village is surrounded. What do they say in your paper?” only to discover that I have no way of being in touch with my paper. He goes on, “Must be some very red alerts, targeted alerts,” jargon that’s become second nature to Arabs living in Israel, thanks to the media, who tend to classify the warnings by their level of severity: general, hot, focused, targeted…
Everyone at the bank is discussing today’s events. Nobody’s in a hurry to use terms like closure or curfew. They prefer to wonder what it all means and why soldiers would be surrounding the village. Nothing like this has happened since the beginning of military rule. We’ve had the occasional roadblock and cars are often checked, but never—not even in the days of the Gulf War or the first Intifada—was there a decision not to let the inhabitants out. The customers at the bank don’t seem too rattled. Looks like when all is said and done they accept the decision. They’re upset to be losing a day of work, but they don’t see the events as a blatant breach of normal relations between citizens and their country.
I try to look calm too as I answer the questions they and the clerks fling at me. “What do you think, must be a serious terrorist roaming around here, huh?”
“I suppose,” I say. And one customer protests, “Shame on you, calling them terrorists. Say istish’hadi, say fida’i. What’s become of us? Are we going to start calling them terrorists too?”
A clerk with rectangular glasses and an official black suit, complete with white kerchief, says, “As far as I’m concerned, they can blow up wherever they want, but what right do they have to hide out here? Don’t we have enough problems already? They should just leave us alone. We don’t need to take part in this war.” Another woman standing in the line that’s cordoned off with colored chains says, “The problem is the children. What’ll happen if he hides his explosives in the bushes, God forbid, and the children play there and touch them by accident? Those Daffawiyya West Bank residents have no shame.” The customers burst out laughing. Somehow it was enough for them to hear that word, Daffawiyya, to start laughing. Of course people around here felt sorry for them when we saw them on TV, being shot at or trying to stage a protest. That wasn’t it at all. Most of the locals identified with the Palestinians on TV, but it’s as if the ones on TV were completely different people, not the same as the ones around here who loiter, looking for work. Those weren’t Palestinians but just workers who make trouble. No chance any of them would ever be on TV. People in our village identify with pictures from far away, forgetting that those pictures were taken a two minutes’ drive away from here.
I don’t have the patience for their arguments anymore, I’m really not interested. I know the situation is bad enough even without a Palestinian Intifada or the Israeli occupation or some suicide bomber hiding out in our village. Things are bad in any case. For us, for the Palestinians, it doesn’t make any difference. We’ll always have wars in this godforsaken place. Take any six feet in this place and you’ll find too much damage, too much turmoil, too much chaos in every part of our lives, which means the wars will never end. The real wars in this village are the wars over honor, over power, over inheritances and over parking places. Actually I sometimes think it would be a good idea if war did break out, to distract the inhabitants from their cruel and never-ending little fights. To me it doesn’t matter anymore so long as they stay away from me, so long as nobody comes to me when the next disagreement breaks out.
I go into my brother’s office and close the door behind me. “So, have things calmed down?” my brother asks. I nod. “Yes, I think things are going to work out. I just overreacted, sorry I scared you.”
“No, it really is serious. But what could actually happen?”
“I don’t know.”
I was debating whether to tell him they’d brought our younger brother home from the dorms in the middle of the night, and not just him, but all of the Arab students at the university. I decide not to because he’s liable to tell the others, and we shouldn’t create panic for now. I ask my brother for a little money. “A few hundred shekels,” I say, “maybe even a thousand if I may.”
“You may,” my brother says. “There are no ATMs, everything’s being done manually, so nobody will know you’re overdrawn. Strange, your salary hasn’t come in this month.”
“I know,” I mutter. “There was a problem with the accounting because of this new job they gave me. It should have been in my account by now.”
“Lucky for you that you came now,” my older brother says. “All hell will break loose here today. The money hasn’t come in from the main branch. They wouldn’t let the armored car into the village, despite the security escort. And it’s Sunday, so the safe is almost empty. Mark my words, unless the money arrives, pretty soon we won’t have enough to give people.” He’s laughing now. “They’ll kill us. I told the manager I didn’t care. I was getting out of here. I don’t have what it takes to fight with these people.”
“Listen,” I tell him before leaving. “When you get off, come over to Mother and Father’s house. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“See you there.”
7
Now I know I’m overreacting. I get into the car and immediately turn on the radio. The news will be on in a minute. I drive around, deciding not to go back home yet. The news is all about red alerts coming from the Arab villages and towns. The announcer says that security sources are trying to persuade the government to declare a nationwide state of emergency. The tone is the usual one of
the news reporters, and it sounds like something that would hardly be noticed in normal times. But today it’s different, it’s obvious something’s going on. Maybe Israel is planning another large-scale attack on the West Bank. Maybe they’ve decided to get rid of Arafat and they don’t want any clashes with the Arabs within Israel, some of whom are bound to take to the streets. They don’t want to have to deal with us on top of everything else. Maybe they’re just trying to take preventive measures. And maybe that’s really why they sent the Arab students home. Maybe the security people were worried about campus demonstrations and decided to make sure it didn’t happen, to prevent clashes between Arab and Jewish students. There are all those studies now about the Arab students, dubbed the “proud generation” because they have the audacity to stand there with flags on Naqbah Day or on Land Day. I try to convince myself that everything’s going to be okay, but it doesn’t work. They sent in the tanks damn it, so maybe it’s not going to blow over as soon as people think. Maybe something big really is happening in this area. It wouldn’t do me any harm to stock up on things, would it? I’ll tell my wife I had the day off and say I didn’t know what to do with the time on my hands, so I decided to do the shopping. I’ll say I had no idea what we had in the house, so I bought a bit of everything.
I’ll do my best not to arouse the suspicion of the salespeople. A shopping spree might create the wrong impression on a day like this. People might think that as a journalist I know something that shows we ought to be getting ready for something big. They might get the idea that I have some secret information about a war that’s about to break out in the region. I decide to make the rounds of the different grocery stores and to buy a little bit in each one. I’ll start with the ones in the more distant neighborhoods, where I don’t usually shop. I cruise the streets and stop at the entrance to the first one I see. There’s an older woman standing there, someone I’ve never seen. That’s good, because it must mean she doesn’t know me either. A bag of flour is the first thing that occurs to me. That’s what you buy when you’re stocking up, isn’t it?