by Sayed Kashua
I was shaking all the way to school, holding my legs together more than usual so they rubbed against one another as I walked. I felt that the other kids making their way to school like me were laughing at me, figuring out the truth. I tried to get rid of those thoughts and to understand what the hell it was. I knew for sure that the answer had nothing to do with regular pee.
The following nights were especially tough. I tried not to fall asleep but it was no use. What I did do was remove the sheet before going to sleep and hide it under the blanket. If it happened again, at least I’d have a dry sheet so I could hide the stain on the mattress.
I did fine on the exams and got the highest grades in my class again. When they were giving out the report cards, the teacher made the whole class applaud me, which I didn’t like at all.
He had dreamed up a new program where the stronger students would help the weaker ones over the summer vacation. How I hated the idea and how I hated the teacher at that moment. And even more than that, how I hated being teamed up with Bassel. That was all I needed, teaching English, Hebrew and math to the one student I hated the most in the whole class. The teacher knew we were neighbors with nothing but a fence between my home and his but I’d never visited Bassel and he’d never visited me. Even on days when we happened to leave for school at the same time, I’d stay some distance away from him, on the other side of the street, stepping up my pace to avoid him and the gang that followed him to school. Bassel didn’t seem too happy at the idea either. He hated studying, and he certainly hated me too. But I’d always done whatever my teachers told me to do. I’d never dream of opposing anything they suggested.
We met twice a week at first, exactly as the teacher had ordered. He’d also made sure that Bassel’s parents knew about the plan. They treated me with great respect, and his mother kept saying things like, “These are the young men you should be spending your time with. Why aren’t all your friends like him, good students and respectful?” She always brought in a tray of cookies and something to drink, and made sure to keep Bassel’s brothers and sisters out of the room so nobody disturbed him while he was doing his homework. Bassel didn’t cooperate at all. I sat next to him and read to him from our schoolbooks and solved the math exercises, but he didn’t seem the least bit interested. He was just waiting for the hour to be over so he could be rid of me. He sat there, shaking his head in disgust at whatever I said, and never asked any questions even though I knew he hadn’t understood a word of my explanations.
We’d sit there at the desk on our wooden chairs, not talking about anything except the homework. After a few sessions, things began to change. Bassel started asking me why I didn’t shave like everyone else. Once he showed me how he shaved his mustache with his father’s razor, and said it wasn’t scary at all if you just know how to do it, and that you don’t get cut, and that he could show me how if I wanted. He was even prepared to do it for me the first time. I said I’d rather not and that maybe I’d start in the summer vacation, before we went back to school. Gradually we began talking less and less about the homework, and our sessions became much more enjoyable. At first I pretended not to listen when he talked about girls and about the breasts that some of our classmates were developing.
I refused to go along when he asked me if I had any hair growing and if anything hurt in my chest or my throat. He would chuckle and say I was still a little boy, and slowly I began playing along with him, and enjoyed it. He pinched my chest, and it hurt so badly that I had to grimace. He laughed out loud when I said it didn’t hurt. “Why are you so scared?” he asked. “It’s that way with everyone.” His parents did everything to make sure he got through school, but he always flunked at least three subjects. On one of the shelves in his room was a reference book titled The Human Body. Bassel said he’d show me all kinds of neat things, and he pointed to drawings of boys’ and girls’ bodies with their genitals showing. He began talking about erections and pointed to the drawings. He talked about the pleasure of it and the fun, and about how it completely distracts you from your schoolwork. He told me about his dreams, all about girls, and about how he’d wake up with the most wonderful feeling he’d ever felt, and his dick was hard and there was something coming out of it and that it’s the best thing that ever happened to him.
I liked Bassel a lot. It was the first time I’d ever felt like I had a friend, the first time I understood that what was happening to me at night happened to other people too. He taught me to shove toilet paper into my underwear to prevent the staining and laughed when he heard I had thought I’d been peeing in my sleep. I couldn’t believe I was telling him those things, couldn’t believe I was telling anyone. I began enjoying those wet dreams too.
Bassel and I never discussed math again, or Hebrew language or English. All we talked about was our bodies. We pored over the book and I felt I knew everything. My way of thinking changed completely, and I let him shave off my mustache, after I’d asked my mother if it was all right. Instead of twice a week, we’d meet three or four times. Instead of one hour, we’d stay alone in that room for several hours. I told his parents he was progressing nicely and that he was even enjoying the lessons. They were delighted, and he told me that his father wasn’t beating him as much since I’d arrived on the scene.
I felt really attached to him. I loved it when he laughed because of me, as if I were a little kid. He’d lock the door from the inside, take off his pants and his underpants and touch himself, with me watching. “See?” he’d say. “It’s the greatest thing in the world.” Then, at his request, I’d take off my clothes too, and he’d ask me to do the same thing. Sometimes he touched me himself. That’s what everyone does, and me, what an idiot I was not to know anything about what the other boys in the class were doing. I did everything he asked; even when he told me to undress and he would rub against me from behind, I did it. I was glad to be giving him pleasure, glad I’d met him and that I could finally say I had a friend, and what a friend: Bassel, the boy that all the kids in class were afraid of, that they all tried to be nice to. Instead of his doing the homework I gave him, I’d do the homework he gave me. He promised, in return, that he’d share a desk with me the following year. At our last session, the day before school started, he asked me to get to school as early as possible and take the front desk for both of us. “Take the one right in front of the teacher,” he said, “your favorite place.”
I was so happy. I got to school before everyone and sat at the desk in front of the teacher. I put my bag down on the other chair, though that was unnecessary, since nobody really wanted to sit next to me. He’d arrive any minute now, and they’d see who I was sharing with. Bassel was one of the last to arrive, after the teacher had already come in. He was surrounded by his old cronies. I saw him in the doorway and gave him an enormous smile. I waved at him, and he laughed back. His whole gang laughed. He walked right past me, and I whispered, “Bassel, I reserved a place for you.” He looked down at me and didn’t say a word. Then he headed for his regular place at the back. I looked at him. He was just whispering something to the kids who were with him, and they looked at me and tried to stifle a laugh, to avoid being punished. He was moving his lips, and all I could make out was, “Asshole.”
I sit there in the car. Bassel comes full circle in his BMW and drives back toward me. I see him in the mirror. I’m not going to look in his direction. He slows down as he passes me and honks. Unthinkingly, I turn to look. Four men are gazing at me and laughing. Bassel waves.
8
Dinner is ready. There’s an enormous pot of cooked meat on the white plastic tablecloth outside, along with a big bowl of vegetable salad and a few other salads and spreads taken out of the fridge to be eaten before they spoil. We’re waiting for Father to get back from town hall. A car pulls up at the front of the house and he gets out. His face is grim as he walks toward us. He greets us and takes his place at the head of the table without another word. Mother takes his plate and heaps meat onto it. “You haven’t
had anything to eat today, and the meat came out delicious.”
We start eating and wait to hear Father’s report on what transpired at the meeting. He doesn’t volunteer anything, and finally I have to ask him.
“They decided to hand over the Gazawiyya and the Daffawiyya,” the people from Gaza and the West Bank, Father says.
“They did?” my older brother asks. “Is that what the government got the mayor to do?”
“No,” Father says. “The mayor has no idea what they want, but he figures, like everyone else, that the main concern of the police is the Palestinian workers. He’s right.”
“So what are they doing? Just how are they going to hand them over?” I ask.
“If the electricity stays disconnected till tomorrow morning and the roadblock stays in place, they’ll hand over the illegal workers to the security forces. But only the adults, the ones over fourteen.”
There are hundreds of workers from Gaza and the West Bank in the village. Many of them work for contractors from the village and others work inside the village itself, in construction, sanitation or gardening. They generally sleep on straw mats at the building sites, and a few lucky ones get to spend the night in large groups in warehouses belonging to their employers. In the past they could work inside Israel, but ever since the first Intifada they can no longer work there unless their employer has Israeli citizenship. In fact, workers coming from the cities and villages have become one of the most important sources of income for people in our village. Anyone who ever did a day’s work as a construction worker has turned into a contractor, farming out work to people from Gaza or the West Bank, thanks to his Israeli citizenship. Besides the dozens of new “contractors” sprouting up in every Arab town and village inside Israel, many also transport workers to Tel Aviv, Netanya and other Israeli cities. Many of the drivers become their would-be sponsors. The workers clean, cook, work the assembly line, and the Israeli driver, the only person legally entitled to collect their salaries, distributes it after taking his fat cut. To a large extent, it is the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza are responsible for the prosperity of the village.
In other words, they are also responsible for the commercial boom. Once, before it all began, the Jews preferred to do their shopping in the cities of the West Bank, where they figured things were cheaper, and in fact things really were cheaper there. But since the Intifada began, about fifteen years ago, the Jews began to feel threatened and moved over to the Arab towns and villages within Israel itself, which were a little safer. For all intents and purposes, our village replaced two cities, Qalqilya and Tul-Karm. So as the condition of people on the West Bank got worse and worse, things were looking up for Israeli Arabs. The houses being built were unlike any we’d seen before. Businesses flourished and luxury cars could be seen outside almost every home in the village.
Besides the workers you could find hundreds of former West Bank and Gaza inhabitants in the village, people who’d managed to get Israeli citizenship once the Palestinian Authority was set up in the territories. In the past they had collaborated or had worked with the security forces, and they were now given a place to live in Arab villages within Israel, for their own protection. The local residents objected at first to the idea of harboring these traitors, but they soon discovered the economic advantages of hosting the new inhabitants. The Israeli government rented homes for them and paid well, and their purchasing power was nothing to sneeze at. Those people weren’t being handed over; they were legal, after all, just like us.
The second Intifada was quite a problem. It undermined the whole economy and led to a deep recession, which affected everyone. Besides, the Jews were much less comfortable about driving into our village because of all the stories about the Islamic Movement and all the news programs that harped on how the Arabs were helping the terrorist organizations. Border Patrol squads had begun late-night raids. They’d swoop down on the warehouses and construction sites and detain workers who were defined as illegal. Now the mayor and the inhabitants of the village were volunteering to do this job for the state.
My father told us that all the heads of families had attended the meeting at the town hall. Some, the ones who were always opposed to the mayor, were opposed again, just as they’d object to building a new school simply because they were in the opposition and because of the long-standing animosity between families. But once the mayor explained that there was no choice, that if things went on this way for one more day there would be no drinking water left, they backed down. It turned out that the water pumps had stopped functioning when the power was cut, and that there was unlikely to be any water in the pipes by tomorrow morning. The mayor told everyone that this was why the sewage system wasn’t working, and that pretty soon all of the homes would become stopped up, and people would have to start taking a shit outdoors, the way they used to long ago. He said that although people still had enough to eat, there wasn’t enough money in the banks, so that some families wouldn’t even have enough for bread. And those who did were too late, because there was no food left in the stores.
“And what did you say, Father?” I wanted to know.
“I said that we should go to prayers and that by tomorrow it would all blow over, but if there was no choice, there was no choice. Because we’re not like them, we can’t last long. This isn’t Jenin, everything here is Israeli—the banks, the electricity, the water, the sewage, even the milk we drink comes from the Israeli dairies. We can’t last more than two days here. If it goes on for a week, people will starve to death. They’ll get dehydrated, they’ll get sick.”
“But who said the workers were the real reason for it all?”
“What else could they want? What other reason could there be? It’s only the workers, they’re the reason for it all.”
My younger brother wants to know how the Communists reacted, and for a moment he’s taken aback at his own question, but Father hardly notices and says that they objected at first, of course, because we’re all one nation after all, but then they agreed too. And they weren’t the only ones. “In the end, the decision was unanimous. Even the Islamic Movement agreed. Besides, what’s the worst that could happen to them? If there were any who were wanted, they’d be detained, but they’d have been detained sooner or later anyway, in one of the raids. The ones who’d merely come to work would be taken back to their own villages. It’s not as if we’re pushing them into prison. Believe me, within two days they’ll all be back here as if nothing happened.”
We finish eating and there’s a lot of meat left. Mother says it’s a shame, and that if we want any more food today, we should come back.
9
I go home with my wife and daughter. My wife says it’s not right to hand the workers over, that they have it so tough and that every time she sees them she feels sorry for them. The villagers have no compassion, do they, as if they don’t have little children of their own and families to feed. What are they supposed to do now? Starve to death? My daughter goes back to sleep. My wife gets into bed and announces she’s going to sleep for an hour or so, if she can possibly fall asleep at all in this heat with no air-conditioning. She says that if handing over the workers means we’ll be able to turn the air conditioner back on, she’s in favor, and she laughs. She doesn’t take things seriously enough. Sometimes I envy her for the way she just accepts everything, just takes things for granted. In truth, nothing ever fazes her. She behaves as if everything is just going to be okay, and I realize there’s no way I’ll ever be able to share my anxieties with her. I’m sweating and I feel sticky. For a moment I consider getting in the bath, but I decide to wait. Mustn’t waste water now. When I urinate, I don’t even flush the toilet.
My wife falls asleep very quickly. I lie in bed beside her, my arms folded under my head and my eyes glued to the ceiling. I hear Farres, our neighbor. His voice has changed a little over the years, but I can still recognize him calling his children’s names. Farres has an unusual accent, unlike that of most of th
e people in our village, and his family name is unusual too, but everyone refers to him as Farres the Ramlawi because his family came from Ramla. I’d heard not long ago that Farres had married a girl from Qalqilya and that he’d left Ibtissam. They hadn’t actually gotten a divorce, but she didn’t want to see him anymore.
I could hear Ibtissam, his wife, screaming at him to get the hell out of there. “What are you doing here, you piece of shit? Go back to your bitch.” And Farres, with his accent, shouts that he wants to see his children. “I don’t want to come in, just let me see them. I just want to see they’re okay.”
“Get the hell out of here. Nobody wants to see your face around here. Beat it before I call the police,” Ibtissam yells.
Farres is calling his children by name now. “Muntassar, Haibbah.” But they don’t answer. Only Ibtissam keeps screaming and swearing at him.