Let It Be Morning

by Sayed Kashua

  Somehow, something that had once been considered a betrayal became perfectly legitimate in the eighties and nineties. Those were the years when the Arab citizens not only resigned themselves to being citizens of Israel, they even grew to like their citizenship and were worried that it might be taken away from them. They no longer dreamed of being part of the big Arab world stretching “from the ocean to the Gulf” the way they used to. On the contrary, the idea of becoming part of the Arab world even began to frighten them. They truly believed the Israeli politicians who claimed that “relative to the Arab states, the situation of the Israeli Arabs is amazing,” a sentence that always shut people up when they started talking about discrimination. People were afraid they wouldn’t get their National Insurance allowances anymore, or that a day would come when they’d find themselves in a country without medical insurance, welfare, pensions for widows or single parents or the next of kin, allowances for the elderly and the disabled, unemployment benefits or subsidies.

  As soon as the Oslo Accords were signed, my father could take pride in the fact that he’d belonged to the party that had recognized the PLO and was ready to establish a state for the Palestinians. Actually, there was no real difference between the loudmouths who voted for an Arab party and those who supported the left-wing Zionists. Both adopted similar slogans, all about “peace and equality,” so what was the problem exactly?

  I know some people thought my father had a lot of money, that he’d received huge sums from the state or from his party, especially when Labor was in power, but it isn’t true. My father worked hard his whole life, and that’s something I know for a fact. He did everything he could to make sure we got a university education, and to be able to build each of us a home someday. I remember how he used to come home from his Ministry of Education job in the afternoon, rest awhile, and then go to work at another job. For years he moonlighted at a frozen-meat factory. In the afternoons he’d head for one of the kibbutzim nearby. Then they’d give him a pickup with a large refrigeration compartment in back, and a freezer full of poultry and sausages and hamburger, all of it frozen. Father would distribute the meat in the Arab villages in the area. He was too embarrassed to work in our own village. I figured it out right away. He never told anybody about that job. Only we, the family, knew about it. Actually, I’m not sure my brothers knew either. I’d insist on doing the rounds with him. At first he refused. “You just see to your studies, and the rest will take care of itself,” he always said. Only when he came to accept that it wouldn’t hurt my schoolwork—that I’d finished my homework even before he got home from work at his day job—did he agree. “I know,” he said, “your teachers are always telling me how well you are doing and that you really should have skipped a grade.” That’s how I began joining my father every afternoon. I’d watch him put on his big green jacket and walk into the refrigeration room. He’d pull out boxes and pile them up in the back of the pickup, which had a big winking chicken painted over its side. I’d help my father carry the boxes. I was in ninth grade by then, and pretty strong. I loved working with him. It didn’t take too long either. Usually we finished making the rounds of all the grocery stores in two to three hours. I soon came to know all the grocery owners in the area. After a while I started carrying the boxes myself. I wouldn’t let my father touch them. All he had to do was settle accounts with the grocers while I unloaded the goods. It wasn’t hard, not at all.

  My father was very happy. In every grocery store he’d tell the owner or whoever was around, “That’s my son, the best student in the class, the best student in the whole school.” He always smiled as he said it. So my father was no traitor and no collaborator.

  Ever since he retired, he’s stopped being active in the party. All he does is vote for it in the Knesset elections. After the outbreak of the second Intifada and the events of October 2000, he even stopped trying to persuade us to vote for Labor. Mother voted like him, because she always does whatever he does. I don’t know who my older brother voted for, maybe the Islamic Movement, but I boycotted the elections. It was my own decision, not because the Arab parties said that was what we should do. Sometimes I even hate them and their way of thinking.

  My older brother says he’ll buy some things at the grocery store now, and he’ll finish his chores when he gets home from work. Mother tells Father we have nothing to lose. Whatever food we have we’ll eat, and she’ll send my brother to the store right away with some money and a shopping list.

  4

  I go back home. My wife is feeding the baby. “What happened?” she asks.

  “Nothing. Some idiot tried to run the roadblock.”

  “The roadblock? It’s still there? You mean you won’t be going to work today either?”

  “You’d better stay home too.”

  “What do you mean? I can’t. But I only have five classes today. I’ll be home early. What will you do all day? How about cleaning up a bit?”

  “Yeah, we’ll see. But I’d like the baby to stay with me today.”

  “Great. She’ll love it. Won’t you, sweetheart? Won’t you? You’ll stay with Daddy.”

  In a way I’m happy they’ve continued the roadblock today too. It sort of saves me from the useless trip to the paper and from aimlessly roaming the streets. On the other hand, what the hell is going on here?

  The baby smiles and finishes the whole bottle. My wife hands her over to me and goes to the bathroom. I’m so sorry I have a little girl. What a fool I was to decide to bring a child into the world in a situation like this. It wasn’t just the roadblock and yesterday’s events, but generally it seemed to me really inhumane to bring children into a world like ours in a region like ours. The problem is that my wife got pregnant before the present Intifada broke out. Everything seemed different then, and my own way of thinking was different too. I can even say I was optimistic. My career was going well and relations between Arabs and Jews were beginning to improve. Sometimes I think it all happened because of the baby, as a kind of retribution. Religious people would say God was testing us. I try to smile at the baby, as if to convince her that everything’s fine, that she’s living in surroundings that are just the way I’d planned for her. When I think about how quickly things deteriorated, it’s mind-blowing.

  I’d rather the three of us stayed together today. That’s how I am when I have a sense that things are dangerous—I like to see all the people that I worry about sticking together, but I don’t have the strength to explain to her about how frightened I am and to persuade her to stay home.

  We’re walking together and she says good-bye to the baby, I tell her to take care of herself, follow her with my eyes till she’s out of sight and go into my parents’ home with the baby in my arms.

  5

  My parents are getting dressed to pay a condolence call. My father pays condolence calls every time anyone in the village dies. He and two other adults in the family are regarded as the official condolence callers, and for decades the three of them have paid these calls on the second day of the mourning, after evening prayers. When the death isn’t natural, or when the deceased is someone important, or when a friend or someone young dies in his prime, the three relatives modify their standard procedure and don’t wait for the second day but try to make it to the funeral as well. My mother wears a kerchief and attends too. When they reach the road, they split up—Mother joins the women and Father walks along with the men. Many men and women are walking toward the house, trying to keep quiet, speaking in a whisper, the men walking on the right side of the road and the women on the left. I feel kind of sorry that I can’t join the funeral procession, which is bound to set out from the homes of the parents—the contractor’s and the workers’—toward the mosque, and from there to the cemetery. Too bad I offered to take the baby, because it could certainly have added some human interest to the story I’ll write for the paper. I’m still convinced I’ll be covering the whole chain of events once the roadblock is removed. If the closure is lifted tomorr
ow, I may still get the story written in time for this weekend’s supplement.

  When my mother gets back, I’ll give her the baby and go out to see what’s happening, how people are taking it. My younger brother is back home, holding two plastic bags so heavy he can barely lift them. “Mother’s gone crazy,” he says, dumping the bags on the kitchen counter. Mostly they’re full of canned goods, corn, tuna, pickles, beans, peas, ful, chickpeas. He says the store was packed and that he practically had to hit this older woman who tried to get ahead of him. He says there were loads of people there and that some of the things that Mother had ordered were sold out already. He couldn’t find any flour, for instance.

  My brother takes a seat in the living room, first beside me, stroking the baby’s head and smiling at her. She smiles back. Then he sits on the sofa farthest from us, pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights one. “So, the folks have gone to a funeral?” he asks.

  “Yeah. Since when do you smoke?”

  “For almost a year. You know how it is at university, don’t you?” He smiles and adds in a more serious voice, “What do you say? Should I bother studying? Do you think there’s any chance I’ll get back to Tel Aviv tomorrow?”

  “Sure, you’ve got to study for the exam.”

  He takes a puff at his cigarette and tells me that in the beginning, when the security service knocked at his door, he thought they were rounding up the students they considered problematic, the political activists, the ones who showed up at campus rallies. But with him in the police car were students who were so good that they always made a point of keeping out of politics and just focused on their studies. My brother’s description takes me by surprise. I have the feeling I hardly know him anymore. I’d never imagined him as a smoker, and now he tells me he’s a campus activist. “And in what party are you active?” I ask him.

  “I’m with the Communists.”

  “The Communists? And just how did you wind up with the Communists?”

  “Well, you know how it is. You’ve been, haven’t you? You meet people. Your friends are active in the party, so you decide you want to be active too, but it’s mainly because of how they treated me. Suddenly I see our problems. Suddenly I understand what it means to be hated, what racism and discrimination are. In the dorms, they make sure you’re put into the Arabs’ rooms, which are the worst rooms there are. One room for Arabs on each floor, to make sure there aren’t too many of us in any one place, to keep us in a minority status even on the floor. You know how there’s a single refrigerator for each two rooms? Well, the day I got there, I went into the kitchen to get a compartment for myself and my roommate from Djat, and this Jewish guy asked if I’d share a compartment with him. He said it was lucky I’d come because he was so worried he’d wind up having to share with an Arab.”

  With my younger brother it’s hard to tell what he is, especially with his ponytail and his hard-rock clothes. Like most of the young people who join the Communist Party, my brother doesn’t know the first thing about Communism. They know it’s a party that aims at equality between Jews and Arabs, between the poor and the rich, but they haven’t a clue about its principles. We continue talking and I try to find out more about his Communism. I discover he knows who Lenin was but he’s never heard of Trotsky. He can curse the capitalists but knows nothing about the concept of a proletariat or the distribution of capital. The Communist slogans suited him, there were a few guys there from the law faculty where he studies, and that’s why he chose the Communists. He adds that there are some really cool Christian girls from the Galilee there too, not afraid to smoke in front of everyone, dressing right and joining the guys for a beer. It’s not that my younger brother is dumb. Not at all. He’s smart, and someday he’ll learn to tell the difference between them all. I don’t think I understood much about the different parties at his age either, or just what the conflict is all about. My brother asks me not to say a word to Father, ’cause he’ll kill him. Father’s motto has always been that if you want to amount to anything and if you want to do well at school, you’ve got to stay away from politics. Girls and politics. He makes me swear not to mention the cigarettes either, because Father is liable to make him stop school and come back home. I tell him he’s exaggerating, but promise not to say anything. My younger brother goes back to his studies, the baby begins to cry.

  6

  My little girl has fallen asleep and I put her down on my parents’ bed, the one they bought on their wedding day more than thirty years ago, the one they still sleep in. I go home, get the car keys and get in the car to listen to the news. The heat is overpowering, and it isn’t even noon. The radio dials are boiling. I try to turn them without getting burned, and pull away quickly. They’re playing the commercials now, the ones that come right before the news. Advertising air conditioners, savings plans at the bank and special deals on trips abroad or at local resorts. The news begins with an announcement that the government, in cooperation with the army, has decided to declare a general state of emergency. Officials in the security system are talking of the imminent danger of an Arab uprising and about red alerts related to certain people in the Arab sector who are planning to attack Jewish citizens and state institutions. Later, toward the middle of the newscast, they mention our village. The announcer reports an attempt to attack some soldiers who were conducting a routine patrol near the entrance to the village. “An attempted terrorist attack,” he says, “which ended without casualties thanks to our soldiers’ alertness.” He’s referring to the incident with the contractor and the worker in the pickup. Needless to say, there’s no mention of the Arab casualties, and it stands to reason they don’t have the facts anyway. There’s no way of communicating with people in the village, after all.

  The situation has become unbearable. They’re up to something, it’s obvious by now, and they’re laying the foundations in Jewish public opinion. For two years now, politicians, ministers, members of Knesset and security experts have been talking about a “cancer in the heart of the nation,” an “imminent danger,” a “fifth column,” and a “demographic problem that threatens to undermine the Jewish fiber of the state.” What do they expect? What the hell do they expect? The Jewish public is already filled with hatred and a sense of danger. Just how far do they expect it to go? I look for the Arabic news on Voice of Israel. I know it’s the government propaganda channel—still, maybe they’ll give some more information—but their frequency has been cut too.

  There’s a loud noise coming from the street, and I run back to see what’s happening. My younger brother is standing outside watching. It’s the funeral, judging by the noise, the largest funeral there’s ever been in this village. We can’t see it, but the cries of “Allahu akbar” reverberate through the village. A few women come out of their houses all excited and watch the funeral procession. They must have taken the bodies out of the mosque by now. My wife returns home and tells me that the high school kids came to the elementary school, entered each of the classrooms and announced a general strike and a demonstration. “I hope the younger ones go home and don’t get into trouble now, that’s all they need,” she says.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” I tell her. “The baby’s fallen asleep and I’m going out to see what’s happening.”

  “What for? What can you do to help?”

  “It’s not for me, it’s part of my job,” I say, and feel the rush of the adrenaline that used to course through my veins when I set out to do a story.

  “If things heat up, come back right away, do me a favor. Don’t be late, okay?” my wife says, and it reminds me of the days when I used to cover stories on the West Bank and it worried her. How I’ve missed her worrying.

  The cemetery is teeming with people. Everyone is silent, allowing the prayer for the dead to be conducted peacefully. As soon as it’s over, the crowd cries out, “Allahu akbar,” and continues walking. Almost nobody goes home after the burial. The funeral has turned into a demonstration, possibly the largest the village ha
s ever seen. A village that kept out of trouble even on Land Day and in the October events because it knew where its interests lay. The demonstration is being led by high school students repeating slogans they’ve heard from the Palestinians on TV. “With blood and might we shall redeem you, ya shahid.” They’d decided that the contractor and his two workers were shahids. The students march toward the council building. Some climb up on the roof, pull down the Israeli flag and burn it. The demonstrators whistle and boo and call out slogans against the State of Israel and against the prime minister—Swine, the Murderous Dog.

  Very soon activists from the Islamic Movement join in, equipped with a pickup with loudspeakers and green party flags. Mostly they’re thinking of the political capital they can get out of it, and so are the Communists, who are waving red flags and singing their slogans and calling out the names of their leaders. The pan-Arabists are not far behind, with their yellow banners and the pictures of their leader stuck onto construction-paper placards. They all join a single procession at first, and call out the same slogans against the army and in support of the shahids. Very slowly the groups drift apart. The Islamic Movement activists lead the way, followed by the pan-Arabists, then the Communists, each group shouting different slogans, and then come the masses of demonstrators, ordinary people who’ve come for the funeral and decided to join in, to unleash their anger, show their solidarity and maybe do something to alleviate the grief of the bereaved families.