Let It Be Morning

by Sayed Kashua

  True, there isn’t much to do around here, least of all for someone like me. I don’t go to the mosque, I try to stay away from weddings, I don’t play cards with men my father’s age and I have no desire to visit the only club in the village. But I’m not bored. I mean, I haven’t been particularly bored since I moved here. On the contrary, I suffered more before. I don’t even miss the nights when we’d go out to look for kicks. At least I’ve been spared those embarrassing moments, those moments of drunkenness when I could find no rest for my soul. I’ve been spared the mornings after the nights of drinking, when I felt miserable for not being able to keep my thoughts to myself the night before.

  10

  “Sh…sh…sh…” my father mutters. The main newscast on Israel TV is beginning. I hate watching the news on Israeli national television. Tanks appear on the screen, and planes and fire are everywhere, and in the background they’re playing a military march heralding a war that is about to break out any minute. Everyone is sitting around in silence. My younger brother interrupts his studying and comes out of his room to watch the news. He’s got an exam in two days.

  They don’t mention the words closure or roadblocks. Instead, there’s talk of red alerts or of backup forces being brought into the area of the Arab villages in the Triangle area on the West Bank border. The West Bank has actually been peaceful today, and the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are continuing with their meetings in Jerusalem. The announcer starts with the economic crisis and the heat wave sweeping over the country, then moves on to the news in full.

  Something’s wrong. They haven’t even shown any tanks or fences. All they talk about are alerts—and they’re talking so naturally, as if they’re something that’s been in the news for two years running. The chief of police for this region arrives in the studio and makes no mention of the new situation. He speaks of Israeli Arabs who have helped the Hamas. Again there’s talk of the security risk, and the growing extremism of Israeli Arabs. The finger is pointed toward the leadership, the Islamic Movement. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  “Maybe it’s a secret operation,” my father says. And my younger brother answers, laughing, “How secret could it be when the whole village knows about it? If they’d wanted to surprise someone, they could have come in and arrested him quietly. Is this what you’d call secret?”

  Father says they’re bound to enter the village tonight and arrest the ones they’re after. “’Cause there’s no way you can keep anything hidden in this village. Nobody gives a damn and everyone cooperates with the police and the security forces. It stopped being considered betrayal long ago. So if there’s anything going on, the General Security Service is bound to know all about it—where and when and how. I’m telling you, they’re about to send in one of their select units, and two jeeps, maybe, in the middle of the night. They’ll pull it off and leave as if nothing’s happened.”

  “They’re just on our case,” my older brother says. “Could you imagine anyone in this village pulling off a suicide or joining one of the Palestinian organizations? It’s never happened, has it?”

  Another senior security official appears on the screen, his face disguised to conceal his identity, to talk about the role of Israeli Arabs in terrorist attacks on Jews. He says they’re much more dangerous than the Palestinians themselves, because they’re more familiar with the Jewish cities and liable to cause greater damage. The same senior official notes that the agenda of today’s meeting with the minister of defense included a discussion of the need to announce a state of national emergency.

  Just what do they mean?

  Then they put on the water commissioner, who announces that the good rainfall of recent months has not eliminated the national water shortage. The Water Council is weighing the possibility of declaring a state of emergency in the water supply.

  Something’s wrong. I can tell. I know the Israeli media. A closure on an Arab village, and according to my younger brother he’s not the only student who was sent home, all the Arab students were sent home from the university; so it stands to reason the Israelis have surrounded some other Arab villages too, if not all of them. I know it’s the kind of story the media wouldn’t pass up. I know the government must have issued a gag order.

  My father says that every time there’s been a war, Israel has surrounded the Arab towns and villages within its borders and kept watch on them. But usually it was the Border Police and the regular police who did the job. They never used the army—or tanks damn it—the way they’re doing now. My father says maybe the Americans have thrown Israel some important information about an operation—in Syria, maybe—and Israel wants to make sure that life inside the country remains calm. As if anyone else is going to do anything. As if any one of us would ever do anything. Very soon, when they realize we haven’t done anything wrong, they’ll get out, the way they always do.

  My daughter is already asleep. My younger brother goes back to his studies. He says he might as well study because the closure is going to continue and they’ll have to give the Arab students a special makeup exam. I carefully lift my daughter out of my mother’s arms, and she says that even though it’s warm I ought to cover her head on my way home because she’s perspiring and is liable to catch cold. My older brother gets up too and calls his son. We walk out of our parents’ house. The air outside is completely still. It’s stifling. Some guys continue driving up and down aimlessly, keeping their loudspeakers at full volume. Why are they doing it damn it? A series of loud explosions takes my breath away for a moment but I soon realize it’s just a wedding. I’ve got to get a grip.

  I tuck the baby into her crib. My wife gets into bed and asks if I’m coming. “Pretty soon,” I say, and go up on the roof for a cigarette. I can hear the music from the wedding hall. I study the fields to the north and see the bluish lights of the army jeeps. Every now and then, when the wedding music fades out, you can hear the engines of the tanks. They never turn them off.

  PART THREE

  The Paper Didn’t Arrive This Morning Either

  1

  She’s waking up now, on the morning of the second day that the village has been blocked off. Very slowly, she picks herself up and sits on the right side of the bed, her side. I can feel her yawning, rubbing her eyes and stretching her arms. She doesn’t know I’m already awake, or that I didn’t sleep a wink all night. She gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom. I hear her turn on the light. She won’t shut the door behind her. She’s never closed a bathroom door in her life. I hear the familiar trickle and the paper being torn and the wiping. I’ve always hated listening to her flushing the toilet and pulling her panties back up. Sometimes I think she deliberately tugs at the rubber band around her waist and lets it make a loud sound just to annoy me.

  She brushes her teeth. It takes her exactly three minutes. She looks at her watch before starting. That’s what the dentist told her ten years ago, and ever since then she’s made a point of it, morning and evening. Three minutes on the dot, not a second more or less, with the same motions the dentists taught them in those special lectures long ago.

  She doesn’t like using water left in the kettle from yesterday. She pours it out in the kitchen sink, turns on the faucet, refills the kettle and puts it on to boil. She tries starting the flame with the long lighter a few times, and I can picture her pulling her hand away quickly with each attempt. Finally I hear the flame. Now she heads for the baby’s room. First she’ll pull up the blinds. The baby will wake with a start, try to open her eyes but finding the light too painful she’ll blink and put her hands over them. I can hear her say, “Good morning, sweetheart, good morning, good morning,” trying to sing it. And the baby groans again, as if she’s about to cry, but holds back. Gradually, she’ll wake up, in her crib. She’ll fall back on the blanket, she’ll try to sit up, then she’ll fall back again and turn her head to the right and to the left, and finally she’ll stand up in bed, holding on to the high wooden railing that keeps her from getting out on
her own.

  She’s coming back into the bedroom now. I lie on my back with my eyes closed. She’ll be raising the blinds. She always pulls hard at the cord. It’s her way of telling me it’s time for me to wake up. I remember how I used to hope she’d find a different way of waking me. With a kiss, maybe, or maybe by stroking my hair, and maybe when I opened my eyes I’d also hear her “Good morning,” but those hopes were short-lived. She pulls hard at the aluminum blinds and furiously unleashes the sunlight that blasts me each morning with all its might. She thinks I’m only now waking up. I open my eyes, and I can see her standing over the bed. It must be almost seven. The alarm clock froze a long time ago. Sometimes it springs back to life and its hands suddenly advance by a few notches, only to stop again. Sometimes the second hand tries to climb up, and you can see it struggling to reach the next second, but it can’t. It tries for awhile, then gives up and stops short. She doesn’t really need an alarm clock anymore and we haven’t had to buy a new one. Every morning she’s the first to wake up, right on time, and she wakes up the rest of the household.

  She’s wearing her dishdash, the kind all the Arab women wear. A black one with red and green embroidery near the top. I used to hate that dishdash and I thought that if she went to bed naked or with any other type of pajamas, a two-piece, maybe, everything would be so different, but she’s never parted with her dishdashes and there was no chance of her running out of them. Because almost every time her parents visited us, her mother made sure to bring along a new one. When the baby was born and her mother spent a few nights with us I discovered that she sleeps in a dishdash too. She crosses her arms, placing her right arm on her left hip and her left arm on her right hip, grabs the edges and, with one quick move, pulls it over her head.

  Now she’s standing there in nothing but her undies, and I wonder as I watch her undress if I’ve ever been attracted to her. With one hand she stretches the skin of her back. The other arm is raised to let her look behind her from under her armpit and examine her backside. It’s a movement that repeats itself every morning, and I’ve never been able to figure it out. Why doesn’t she use the mirror damn it, just six feet away from the bed? The baby’s crying interrupts her movements and she quickly puts on her bra and runs to the baby’s room while hooking it with both arms behind her back. “What’s the matter, sweetheart? What’s wrong? Shhhh,” she calls out, and picks up the baby. I can picture her clasping the baby with one arm to the left side of her body, and the baby spreads her legs and encircles her mother’s stomach, hanging on to the white bra with both hands.

  “Your bottle, you want your bottle, here’s your bottle.” She pours some warm water from the kettle into the baby’s bottle, takes some formula out of an upper cabinet in the kitchen and counts the spoonfuls out loud as if singing to the baby:

  “Wahad, tneyn…” checking with her tongue to make sure the milk isn’t too warm, handing it to the baby, putting her back in her crib and returning to the bedroom to get dressed.

  She pulls her pants up to her knees, then pulls one side up, struggling to get past her wide hips, then the other side. I’m always surprised to see how in the end her pants do close easily over her stomach. She puts on a white blouse I bought her when we were engaged. To tell the truth, I bought something else and took a receipt and she returned what I’d bought and chose a white button-down blouse with a collar shaped like two big triangles, like a butterfly’s wings. She pulls her sandals out from under the bed while trying to amuse the baby, and shouts from a distance, “Milk, you’re drinking your milk, Mommy’s coming, my pretty, you’re so pretty.” And she blurts out at me as she heads back from the bedroom to the baby’s room, “Well, what’s up, don’t you want any coffee? It’s seven-fifteen already.”

  2

  I know the paper didn’t arrive this morning either. For a few hours now I’ve been trying to concentrate, waiting to hear the paper being delivered. Maybe they’ll come on a bike, maybe by car. I’ve been waiting to hear the thud the paper makes as they hurl it at the front door, but I haven’t heard it. I go downstairs and try to turn on the TV with the remote, but nothing happens. The red lamp under the screen is turned off. This time I don’t even bother checking the fuse box. I know they’ve cut off our power too.

  I can’t see the road from my house, but I can hear the commotion. “Shu sar? What happened?” the neighbors are shouting from their windows, and the ones walking in the street shout back, “They’ve killed two people,” “They shot at people,” and “They must have caught some suicide bombers.” I tell my wife to stay home for now, and put on my pants and shirt and go to my parents’ place. They’re up too by now and are standing in the doorway that faces the street. Mother is clasping her hands together and cursing the Jews, and Father is puffing at his cigarette and saying that people say some workers were shot trying to get across the roadblock. My mother asks me not to leave the house. “What’s the point? What can you see out there anyway?” Their neighbor’s son, Khalil, who works as a nurse at the hospital in Kfar Sava, is returning in his car. My father signals him to come closer, Khalil parks outside his house and comes toward us in his white jacket. He had thought that if he approached the soldiers in his white jacket, they’d realize he was a nurse who wants to get to work. It’s just as well that he didn’t cross the roadblock, he says. There was a pickup there with a couple of workers in it. The owner, a contractor, tried to break through the barbed wire with his vehicle and took a tank shell. Just like that, no questions asked. He and the two workers died on the spot, and some of those behind the roadblock were hit by shrapnel. The Israelis didn’t send an ambulance and they wouldn’t let them be taken to hospital. The injured were picked up and taken to the infirmary. One of them was in a bad way—what could they do for him at the infirmary? He needs an operation urgently. The infirmary barely has a thermometer.

  “And what’s going on now?” Father asks.

  “The whole village is out there. The mayor and his cronies are asking people to move away and are trying to keep things quiet. The parents of the contractor and of the two workers, one of them from the village and one from the West Bank, are trying to get through with spades and knives, to get back at the soldiers. One worker’s father fainted and had to be taken to the infirmary too.”

  “Maybe now they’ll get out to avoid a confrontation with the mob,” Father says, and Khalil, in his jacket, explains there’s no chance and that, on the contrary, they’ve been bringing more and more soldiers in, and they’re standing there with their pistols and their machine guns and the barrels of the tanks as if they’re expecting a war. “Allah yustur,” he says. “They’re up to something. What are they thinking? And they’ve cut off the power, to boot. They’ve gone completely crazy.”

  3

  “It could take time,” I tell my parents and my brother. “We’ve got to get things ready before it’s too late, to buy enough food for at least a week.”

  For some reason, a week seems to me now like the longest that the thing everyone calls a roadblock—and nobody really knows if it’s a siege or a closure or the devil knows what—can continue. My father laughs and says I’m overreacting. My mother and my older brother agree with me. My brother says that, who knows, there might be confrontations with the soldiers and they’ll declare a closure, looks like they’ll stop at nothing now. I tell them they shouldn’t buy too many dairy products or too much meat or anything that needs to be refrigerated, because there’s no telling when the power will go back on.

  My father says we’re exaggerating. True, he hasn’t come across a tank shell since ’48, but it must be a regrettable mistake of some soldier who misinterpreted a command when he saw the pickup coming straight at him and thought it must be a terrorist and a car bomb. Those soldiers have been in the territories and in Lebanon, and all of them are so panicky they can’t tell a loyal Arab from an enemy. My father says the soldier will get told off by his commanders in no time. He’s convinced that right after the incident
they’ll be issuing an apology and the soldiers will leave. The power will be back soon too, because if it isn’t just an ordinary malfunction it must be that they cut the power because it was much easier for the soldiers to operate in the dark. They’ve probably finished their mission by now, and if it hadn’t been for that idiot contractor with his pickup, everything would have been behind us by now.

  My father has full faith in the state, he always has. When we were little, everybody assumed that he’d been appointed supervisor in the Ministry of Education because of his qualifications. He doesn’t really have an academic degree, and he barely finished the teachers’ seminary in Jaffa. Every now and then I’d get into a fight with students whose parents had told them that my father was in cahoots with the authorities, and I’d always scream at them that they were just jealous, and sometimes I cried when they said he was collaborating with the Jews. Because it wasn’t true. He just had a few good friends. Besides, I knew everyone liked him. When we were little, I remember how whole families used to come to see him almost every day with gift-wrapped things, and they’d talk to him very respectfully and ask him to find a job for their children or to fix situations that they couldn’t fix themselves. My father was a good person and he helped people, and it had nothing to do with the presents. He always said he didn’t want those, and that he only took them because the people insisted.

  When I grew up, I realized there was no way an Arab would get a senior appointment in the Ministry of Education if the government didn’t have a vested interest in him. It’s still that way, in fact. My father says he’s never informed on anyone and that all he ever wanted was to help the students. He says he got the job thanks to his good reputation and not because he’d collaborated with the security service. Granted, he doesn’t have an academic degree, but we’re talking about thirty years ago, and who had an academic degree in those days? Who even got as far as the teachers’ seminary in Jaffa? It was true. My father was no collaborator. All he did was vote for the Labor Party and host some parlor meetings in his home. It meant inviting some of the Jews that we used to see on TV to come here and talk, and Father got the whole family to vote like him.