by Sayed Kashua
“What? We’re buying some drinks. We’re having a party,” my brother tells him.
“No, please do me a favor. Don’t take everything. Leave a few for me.”
“You’ve got more in the refrigerator,” my brother says, and keeps walking toward the trunk.
I pay the owner for the purchase and thank him. He looks to see how much is left in the fridge. “What? You’ve only left me three bottles?”
“If you need any Coke, just come over,” my brother says.
“Besides, you’re invited to the party. I’m getting engaged.”
“Congratulations,” the owner says. He’s feeling a little less uptight now.
We make the rounds of the stores. Most are closed, and there’s nothing useful in most of the ones that are still open. Every now and then we find a soft drink bottle on the lower shelf of a refrigerator. We manage to get hold of about twenty bottles. And every time my brother comes back with a bottle, his smile grows larger, as if we’ve managed to pull one over on the whole world. I begin enjoying the game too, for some reason. My brother’s smiles flatter me. He chuckles at the thought that things will go back to normal in half an hour and we’ll get stuck with enough drinks to last us a whole year. “In the end, I really will have to get engaged to get rid of all this Coke and juice,” he says.
We walk the village streets, which are filling up with people who have nothing to do. Bitter-looking people stare at the piles of garbage, look at each other and don’t know what to do. We can see the sewage streaming through the streets, the flow getting wider and wider. There are blockages all over the village and I wonder how it’s possible for people to know that the sewage is stopped up and the village has no water—and to continue behaving normally. Sometimes I can’t help feeling unspeakably sorry for them when I see how much they believe in their citizenship.
“Where now?” my brother asks.
“Let’s load up two gallons of cooking gas.”
“What, do you think we’re going to run out of that too?”
“I don’t like taking chances.”
5
My father walks around outside of the house with a spade in his hand, drawing circles in the blazing sand. It’s amazing how he can still find the exact location of the sewage pipes. I could never have done that, even though I was old enough when they connected us to the system and was standing next to my father when they dug the ditches and laid the pipes and covered them up. The water level in the toilets and in the sinks in my parents’ house is rising. Nobody is checking the situation yet but one can deduce that the same thing will happen soon enough in my brother’s house too, and in mine. My younger brother and I join my father, who digs down slowly until he reaches concrete. The filthy water has risen above the first covering. My father asks us to find a crowbar with which to lift the cover. He makes a circle where the next cover should be and gently pushes away the sand with his spade. “Same mess here,” he says. “I bet all of them are blocked up. The problem is in the central system, not here.” My brother gets a crowbar and tries to find an opening along the edge of the lid so he can pry it open. He doesn’t do too well, and tries a different spot. Eventually he succeeds in forcing it in, but the lid is too heavy, too stuck, and he can’t pry it loose. I take over and try to help him, using as much force as I can. The lid shifts a little but slips back into place. Father shouts at us from a distance and urges us to keep trying. “Come on, what is it with you, two men fighting with one drain cover?”
The two of us try to do it together. My brother laughs out loud. We take turns kicking it, shoving the crowbar along its edge. Finally it gives. The ditch is completely flooded, and water is spilling out. The smell isn’t that bad, and it doesn’t get any worse.
My father says there is no point draining a single ditch. “Everything is stopped up. The whole village must be stopped up by now. The problem isn’t here. There isn’t much we can do.” My father is very handy in situations like this. The truth is we’ve never had to call in a plumber or a painter or an electrician. I have no idea where he acquired these skills. You could easily assume he’d once worked in the sanitation department or with an electrician. For as long as I can remember, whenever that kind of problem came up, Father would roll up his sleeves and set about solving it and we, the three brothers, would follow him, as would-be apprentices trying to live up to their master’s high standards.
He stands there for a moment, leaning on his spade, looking this way and that, his eyes shining at the thought of the new challenge that has come his way. He looks up at the houses he’s built for us and says, “Lucky I used a provisional connection to hook you up to the sewage system. We saved money and I also knew it would save you unnecessary work. He smiles as he recalls how he managed to connect the whole system in a single night, laying out the pipes and connecting them to the parents’ house. He said at the time that there was no point paying the municipality more money and that, besides, that’s what everyone does. He did pay once, after all, and that should be enough.
So there is no blockage. The sewage is backing up, in fact, because the entire village is blocked. My father looks up from his spade, his face pensive as if trying to solve a complicated riddle, and he says, “There’s nothing we can do about it. We’ve got to block off the last drainage ditch, the one from the house to the central system. Let’s start out by doing that.” He shouts to my mother to come outside. She hurries out, wearing the kerchief usually reserved for days of mourning. Father instructs her to bring some plastic bags and the sack of gypsum from the storeroom. My mother hurries into the house and comes back with the supplies Father has asked for. Meanwhile, he brushes the sand off the last covering, the one closest to the road. One movement of Father’s hand is enough for my brother and me to understand he wants us to lift the lid. We both get into position. This time I am the one who looks for a place to insert the crowbar. Father watches disparagingly. I find the spot, shove it in with all my strength and give it a powerful kick, sending the crowbar up in the air. Father covers his head. I scurry backward.
“Are you a complete idiot?” he shouts. “Are you trying to kill us?” My younger brother laughs, picks up the crowbar and tries his luck. It works. He presses down, using his full body weight to dislodge the lid. It moves and I hurry to catch it from below before it slips back into place. “Yuck!” I say as I lift it up, my hands suddenly coated with green slime. I shake my head and rush home to wash my hands. But then I remember the water shortage and I’d better put it off till we’re through. “It’s just as well that you got yourself dirty,” my father says. “It’s about time.” The last ditch lets loose a stronger outpouring of sewage, with repulsive turds floating on top. I can’t hold back. I bend over and puke. My bones hurt, my face is flushed and I throw up again and again. I hold my hands as far away from my body as I can. My eyes are burning and filled with tears and my nose is running. There isn’t much I can do except wipe my face with the shoulder of my shirt.
“As long as you’ve gotten dirty,” my father says, and hands me a plastic bag filled with a white mixture, “shove your hand into the ditch and push this bag into the pipe that goes toward the street so we don’t wind up with the sewage of the entire village. Got that? Not the pipe going toward the house, the one going in the direction of the village.”
I retch one more time, making gagging sounds. It hurts as much as before but nothing comes out anymore. I can tell by my brother’s expression that he’s feeling very sorry for me, and he signals to let me know that he’ll do it instead. I shake my head and approach the ditch, where I see the sewage flowing in all directions. I bend over without thinking twice, my knees digging into the ground, which by now has turned into a smelly bog. With one hand I lean on the ground, and the other hand I push in, deep into the ditch. My entire arm is inside by now, as I grope for the pipe that Father was talking about. I find it easily, and keep pushing. My whole left arm is inside the pipe. My cheeks are up against the muck. I don’t think
about it at all, don’t think about anything, just keep looking at my father, who stands there smiling and tries to speed things up, looking every bit the winner.
I proceed like a robot, tilting my face to the right to keep my mouth and eyes from touching the sewage. I shove the bag into the pipe and inform my father. I pull out my arm. It’s dripping wet, but I ignore that. My father hands me a bag slightly larger than the first one and says we need to insert one more to make sure it’s completely blocked. “It mustn’t flow back up from the ditch near the road.” I take it from him without a word and stoop back down, resuming the same position, my left arm reaching all the way in, my left cheek and whole body touching the ground. And I push the bag, which is harder to do because this one is larger.
“Now we’ve got to get the sewage out,” my father says, and hands me and my younger brother some black buckets.
“Pour it out in the road, or as close as possible to the road.” The sun is centered high above us, but we can’t stop now. We have to finish the job. Empty one ditch, the one that the sewage of the three neighboring houses will flow into. My brother and I take turns plunging the bucket into the ditch, and pulling it out when it’s full, moving a few steps back and pouring it as close as possible to the road near the house. A few of the neighbors see us and try to do the same, to deal with their own sewage problems. “Let’s see how long it takes them to figure out that they have to block off the pipe to the road first,” my father says, smiling his victory smile. My brother and I work continuously, without speaking, quickly, ignoring the heat and the stench. The level of the water in the ditch remains unchanged. My father walks over to the ditches we uncovered earlier. He studies the first, then the second, and announces loudly, “Excellent, it’s beginning to go down. Soon it will be over.”
I try to think about the new situation, the roadblock, and wonder if I should be listening to the news. Maybe they’ve found out something, maybe things have changed, but I can’t really concentrate on such things. My main concern now is to dump my bucket, which is full of muck. My father gets back in position. He calls out my mother’s name, and then, “Water!” at which she emerges with a glass of water in her hand. He complains it isn’t cold, spills it out, hands the glass back to her and asks for another. She reminds him that they no longer have a refrigerator and that she can’t make it any colder—which earns her a tirade from Father, who doesn’t care about anything right now, and she should have thought of it sooner. Everyone has to obey Father. Mother is his main victim, but at least she enjoys it. She adores him, loves him more than her own life. She’ll do anything to keep him from getting upset, and it isn’t that she’s afraid of him. Unlike us—we have always obeyed him to keep from being punished. I dash back and forth with the bucket, glancing at Father every now and then, to see if he is at least pleased with my hard work. But his face shows nothing.
What am I afraid of, for heaven’s sake? I’ll be thirty soon. What am I afraid of? A punishment? It’s been ten years since he last struck me. My mother returns with another glass of water, and warns him apologetically that there is no ice, no refrigerator and it’s as cold as she can make it. Impatiently, he grabs the glass from her and drinks it, grumbling, muttering garbled words. My body is overcome with fear, not because of the situation in the village, and not because of the roadblock or the lack of food and water, but because of my father’s anger. I’ve always tried to do as he asked, but I haven’t always succeeded, and whenever I failed to do something, like pulling out the weeds under the trees which once grew where the new houses now stand, or when my grades weren’t good enough, I’d get a beating. I can still hear the sound of those lashings, of the branches he’d use to flog me.
The floggings with tree branches were not the most painful punishment I received, but they were the harshest ceremony of all. Father would decide on the punishment. He didn’t just lash out in a fit of fury or irritability. He planned the punishment, and would tell me to come out into the yard and choose the branch that would be best for flogging me. I was supposed to bring it to him with the bark removed. He would inspect it first, try it out through the air, then tell me to lift my shirt and turn my back toward him. He’d try it on me once or twice and if he wasn’t satisfied he would send me to find another one, and promise that the disrespect I showed by choosing the first branch would earn me an even bigger punishment. My father preferred branches from the lemon tree that once stood in our yard. He liked them nice and thick on one end and tapering off on the other. He liked to hold them by the thick part and to hear the noise they made in the air and the noise they made as they hit your body. You weren’t allowed to cry, because that would only increase the number of lashes. You weren’t allowed to run away, because that could really have ended in catastrophe. You weren’t allowed to make him miss. He’d tell me exactly where to stand, to turn a little, to bend over. But I knew then, as I do now, that he did it so we would be the best children in the whole village.
6
Boom, boom, boom, boom—the sound reverberates through the whole house. I wake up shrieking uncontrollably and jump out of bed. Boom, boom, boom, it continues. It is clearly the sound of shooting, but not the noise I am used to. It is very loud, much louder, the sound of shelling. My wife is on her feet too, and I shout, “The baby, the baby,” and the baby begins screaming at the top of her lungs. I hear her screaming and I lie on the floor with my hands above my head. The sound lets up for a minute. “Hurry down,” I shout to my wife, and rush into the baby’s room. I pick the baby up, hug her in both my arms and try to protect her head. I run down the stairs, and the noise begins again. It’s the loudest shelling I’ve ever heard. I bend over, trying to keep my head hidden, and continue running downstairs. “Into the bathroom,” I yell to my wife. “Get into the bathroom.” For some reason I figure that is the safest place in the house. At least it’s on the lower floor. We go in and I close the door behind me. The baby is screaming and I can’t see her face in the dark.
I put the baby into the bathtub. She screams and I bend over her. My palms touch the bathtub floor and my body hovers over her without going beyond the sides of the bathtub itself. It’s the safest place to be, I think. My wife is whimpering nearby, on the bathroom floor. She’s lying down too. “Put your hands on your head,” I tell her.
Another round of shooting, continuous. Judging by the noise, they seem to be shooting at our house, or nearby. Our house is exposed only on its northern side. If the shooting is coming from that direction and not from the roadblock, the bullets will have to go through three walls to reach the bathroom, and to hit me and the baby they’d also have to pierce the bathtub. The baby continues crying and I try to calm her down. “Shhhhh, Baba.”
In between rounds I tell my wife to switch with me. She gets into the bathtub and leans over the baby. I lie down on the floor. When the shooting resumes I give off a scream, convinced I’ve been shot in the back. I try to protect myself by pulling my head toward my legs while lying on my side, with my head toward the bathtub. Another round, then a lull, then another round, and another lull. When the shooting lets up we can hear babies and children and parents shouting in houses nearby. I think of my parents, my older brother, his wife and his little son. Their house is more exposed than ours and it’s higher up too. I hope they haven’t been hit. I try to concentrate and to make out the voices between rounds, but I can’t.
Another round of shooting, and somehow it’s less scary than the previous ones. It’s amazing what people get used to. Sounds of shooting again, and I wait for a lull, knowing somehow that it will arrive. I try to reassure my wife and daughter. “It only sounds like it’s near, but it’s very far away,” I say confidently, though it’s not what I really think. “They must be shooting at a target,” I tell my wife. Her weeping is the only sound in the room. “Shhhh, it will be over any minute, stay down, it’s okay, they have nothing to do with us, it’s just an echo, they’re shooting in a different direction. It will be over soon.”
The last lull is much longer. Between the children’s crying and the parents’ yelling, we can hear the hum of the tank engines not far away. What the hell are they doing? What are they trying to achieve? Who are they shooting at? What’s wrong with them? What do they want now? God. We stay in the bathroom even though there’s no more shooting. I dare to get up off the floor now, with my arms still covering my head. I stroke my wife’s hair. I can feel her trembling. “It’s over, you see? That’s it. But let’s stay here till daybreak. It’s not that long.”
I lie on my back on the bathroom floor. It’s almost completely dark. There’s a faint light coming in through the upper window—moonlight, maybe, or tank headlights in the distance. What do they want damn it? Maybe this is just a military drill, or they’re just trying to scare us, as if we’re not scared enough already? And maybe they’ve entered the village with their tanks, maybe this was the operation they’ve been waiting for and now it’s behind them. I lie there waiting for the power to come back on too. They must have completed their mission, they must be getting orders to withdraw and put an end to the closure imposed on the village. “Looks to me like it’s all over,” I tell my wife. “Looks to me like they’ve finally finished whatever they set out to do, huh? Tomorrow everything will be fine, things will go back to normal.”
My heart freezes when I hear the knocking on the front door. I shudder and I can’t breathe. I feel my pulse surging all at once and it takes a few seconds before I realize it’s only my father at the door. “Is everything okay with you?” he shouts from outside. “Are you okay?” He calls my name. “Yes,” I answer him, and try to calm down, taking a deep breath and attempting to overcome the tremors that grip my body. Leaning forward, head first, I feel my way toward the front door, turn the key in the lock and let my father in. “I just wanted to check if everything is okay,” he says. “Listen, I was sure they were shooting right here, behind the house.”