Track Changes

by Sayed Kashua

  And that was the exact smile he flashed when he fell in battle, and when his mother read it she said that in truth—although she hadn’t been allowed to see the body—she knew that he had died with that same smile on his face.

  Peacefully, fearlessly, with the smile she remembered, just as in the book.

  7

  Now I’m alone in the student dorms with my recorder, wishing for a different story to tell, one that isn’t this one, which might be my father’s or might be mine.

  My father never hired me as his ghostwriter. He didn’t want me documenting his life and had no desire to leave a legacy for later generations. It is I who insists on re-creating a story that no one asked me to re-create, in the pages of a book that will never be written. After all, it’s been two months since I started and I haven’t written a single word. It’s been two months and I don’t even know what language I’ll write in or who the protagonist is.

  Over the past two months I’ve gone back and looked through the life stories saved on my computer. The full and unadulterated transcripts were saved separately from the one which I would start as a new file and begin editing. After my initial edit, I’d click on Track Changes and document the deletions, comments, and additions I made to the original life story. At the end of the process I’d send the clients a clean document, in which there was no indication of what had been altered in their life story.

  A good editor, I learned at the paper, is one who can rewrite, reorder, delete, and add—without the reporter noticing the changes once the article’s been published. He will believe, surely and truly, that he authored every single word on the page.

  During my first year as a ghostwriter of memoirs I managed to double my annual income. True, documenting the lives of others left little time for my own life, but the work meant that for the first time I felt we could actually shoulder the burden of a mortgage, and I tried in vain to convince Palestine to buy a house together and to have it listed in both of our names, instead of the short-term rentals we’d lived in for all of those years.

  I wrote thirty books over the next four years—or at least bound collections of pages that looked like books. My asking price was ten thousand shekels per hundred pages, with an average of around 150 words per page. Big font, double space, wide margins. The formatting never bothered those who were listed as the authors and they loved the fact that their life stories, or those of their loved ones, appeared thick and voluminous. Most of the clients chose to have the book professionally produced, which included cover design, layout, copyediting, and printing. All of them wanted to insert photos. The standard deal was ten black-and-white photos on regular paper in the middle of the book for one thousand shekels. Color doubled the price. Other than the printing and the binding, which were done at a press in the industrial zone in Givat Shaul, I did everything myself: the design and the copyediting and the proofreading. When designing the cover, I used a picture provided by the client or his or her family and spent less than half an hour seated before a software program that one of the graphic designers at the paper recommended, reading through the tutorial that more than sufficed for my purposes.

  Thirty books, the last of which I submitted to the printing press two weeks before our departure from Jerusalem. I left a mailing address with the printing press secretary, who was the daughter of the owner, for a shipment of thirty copies. My final client was a retired Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipal worker, whose memoir was paid for by the city as part of his severance package, in honor of the city’s one hundredth birthday. The idea was to help assemble the memoirs of the municipal workers born before, or with, the founding of the state, in 1948. Ten books featuring the stories of ten different Jews were set to be published. But the city is home to a sizable Arab population as well, and one of the councilmen, a representative from Jaffa, demanded that the Arab retirees not be discriminated against and that if they met the standards for the memoir bonus and their memories served, then they, too, were entitled to a book written in their name.

  Long after the centennial had passed I got a call from city hall in Tel Aviv asking if, in fact, I ghostwrite memoirs, as it says on my website, Stories of Youth, which I set up in order to help spread the word once the business got going. “Our team here at Stories of Youth is skilled in both Hebrew and Arabic,” I’d noted, among other things.

  The client, who was born in 1940, had been a sanitation worker in Jaffa. He wasn’t even from Jaffa, and he didn’t want to give any information about his life but, approached by city hall, he agreed, concerned that refusal could jeopardize his pension. The worker and his family were originally from the village of Irtakh, up on the ridge in the northern West Bank, near Tulkarm, and had left the village on account of a blood feud in which one of his family members had been involved, forcing them to move to a tiny room in one of the orchards owned by a wealthy Jaffa family. When the war broke out and Jaffa was emptied of its residents, the sanitation worker’s father decided to move into his employee’s home, the owner of the orchard, and there they stayed until, after the war, the municipality forced them to move to one of the housing projects in which they live to this day. They left out of fear that the authorities would discover that they were not the true owners. “But none of this is to be written, my son,” the worker said during our interview, and though I transcribed everything he said, including the request to not document this chapter of his life, I didn’t include it in the finished memoir.

  What is your first memory?

  What do you mean?

  What’s your first memory of childhood?

  What makes you think I’m dealing with memories?

  Everyone has memories.

  Sometimes the hardships of life leave no time for memories.

  And yet the old worker told of how he remembered the British soldiers stopping his family en route from Irtakh to Jaffa. He was the oldest of five siblings, three boys and two girls. He remembered his terror, the soldiers’ fingers curled around their triggers, and the way his father told them in Arabic they didn’t speak—seasoned with English words like “mister” and “please, sir”—that he had to get to the new job his cousin had arranged for him near Lod. The soldiers demanded to know what was in the donkey cart and the jugs. He also remembered the look in his mother’s eyes, the fear that the English, who were known to like goat’s cheese, would discover that she had stored a dry cheese in one of the jugs, the only food for the family until God delivered an answer to their plight. The soldier pointed to the jug with the cheese and asked, “What do you have in there, water? I’m thirsty. Give me a drink.”

  The mother said, “There was water, but it’s gone.” And then, before the soldier approached the jug, she placed her open hand over it and in a quick movement turned it upside down, palming the cheese inside and telling the soldier: “You see, there is no water. It’s finished,” and the Englishman gave up and let them go on their way, and the worker looked back for the last time upon the village in which he was born and saw nothing.

  The old laborer let me include the story about the British soldiers once I convinced him that the British had long since left. But I did not document the blood feud or the village of his birth. The sanitation worker insisted that I write how good it was when the Jews came, how everything got so much better, praise be to God, and how his father found work and received medical treatment from the state in his old age. And write how much easier everything became, with running water and electricity, and thank God, write how well I was treated by the municipality and how for forty years I worked alongside Jews who were like brothers to me, like brothers I tell you. And thank God, what more does a man need aside from raising children, sending them to school, watching them grow and becoming adults and starting families of their own. And write that in ’48 the Arabs conspired against the Jews and that their leaders asked that they step out for two days at most and that after that the Arab armies would come and butcher the Jews and then the residents of Jaffa would be free to return to their
homes and to live in tranquility. He never actually heard any such sentence from an Arab leader or from a resident of Jaffa, but include it, he said. Do me a favor. The book is in Hebrew anyway, and no resident of Jaffa will ever read it. Write what they want to hear and may the Lord light your path.

  I erased whatever the municipal worker wanted me to erase. And I wrote about his poverty-stricken life among the orchards, of hunger and locusts, and of how his parents would collect the manure left behind by the horses that sauntered down the orchard paths and that once the droppings were dry they would rub them between their hands, foraging for grains of wheat and kernels of corn, saving the barley for kindling. And how Israel saved them from a life of poverty and the shame of hunger.

  When I sent him the final text for authorization he didn’t even respond, and when I called him he said the book was excellent, thank you very much, may your hands be safeguarded for the service you’ve provided. Maybe his children had read the book and maybe his grandchildren, and perhaps they took pleasure in the fictitious scenes of familial warmth that I added to their grandfather’s recollections. How the little nook was cozy even in the harshest of winter days and how his mother, who had tricked the British soldiers, would tell, even though she couldn’t read or write, bedtime stories and legends to her small children, sending them off to sleep full of hope. And though in reality the worker had said little about his wife beyond may Allah have mercy on her and that she was a good woman, I added some words of love when I described his parting with her, and how, ever since her passing, he still whispers good night to her as though she were beside him in bed. When I described her funeral, I wrote that the sanitation worker’s wife lay in the casket with a delicate smile upon her face, the same life-affirming, girly smile she wore when he first met her, and I described how he kissed her goodbye on the forehead, as my father had done to my dead grandmother, speaking the very words I had heard my father whisper to his mother: “Ma’a as-salameh, mama, ma’a as-salameh, my dear.”

  8

  Other than the sanitation worker I had only one other Arab client. He was a former Member of Knesset, a representative of a left-wing Jewish party, whose voice I recognized when he called me to ask about the services I provide and who may have hired me simply on account of an honorific I used during our call that he seemed to think was either evidence of a deep appreciation for his public service or my belonging to a family clan that supported the party. The MK wanted to have his life story written in Hebrew, and, unlike the rest of my clients who generally made do with two to three dozen copies for friends and family, he aspired to have the book accepted by a commercial publishing house. The Arab MK said that the senior publishing executives he’d spoken with had assured him that when the final manuscript was ready they would be happy to have a look. He was already over the age of eighty and had not written a word about his life, and all he wanted of me was to get the story down on the page.

  Our first meeting was at his house in lower Galilee. He greeted me in a blue suit and red tie and led me to a sort of reception area, outfitted with dozens of couches and tables, a relic of his days as a politician, when he was often asked to receive ministers and prime ministers and other distinguished guests. Framed photographs of varying sizes covered the walls, featuring the MK with Israeli statesmen, foreign leaders, and diplomats—Yasser Arafat, King Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak.

  The MK sat, in what I suspected was his usual spot, on a large couch bookended by two other couches. Before him was a long, low table. He asked what I’d like to drink, and I said water would be fine. “Just water?” he asked and laughed when I grabbed one of the bottles from the table. When his wife entered, in a long and impressive dress, as though she were going to a wedding or a formal event, he asked her to make coffee for both of us and asked how I take mine. “Black, please,” I said to the woman who appeared to be at least a full decade younger than the MK.

  Two to three meetings always sufficed with other clients but with the MK I had to conduct five separate interviews, and he always greeted me in the same reception hall, in a suit I hadn’t yet seen, his wife clad in a formal dress, the colors of which changed with each meeting. The coffee was always the same, served in porcelain cups covered with decorative flowers.

  “I’ll speak in Hebrew,” he declared during our first meeting. “You’re writing in Hebrew and so it will surely be easier for you to record this way.” I knew that he thought that his Hebrew was superior to mine and that he’d like his diplomatic eloquence, which he’d acquired during the long years of addressing the Jewish public—fellow politicians, voters, and readers—to serve him one last time while recounting the stations of his life.

  The former MK spoke like a politician when discussing his personal life. His depictions strove to highlight his most dear and yet not very significant achievements, underscoring his virtues at every turn. He told of how he had joined the ranks of the Labor Party in the sixties at Hebrew University and how he had believed then, as now, that Arab-Jewish cooperation as based on the shared values of coexistence, liberty, and democracy will bring prosperity for Jews and Arabs alike. He spoke of the disappointment he felt in recent years, as his party was losing its hold on the rudders of power, and he expressed concern for the future of the region and of Arab-Jewish relations, which he viewed as being pushed to ever lower depths of segregation and polarization. He spoke in Hebrew because he knew that the only hope he had of marketing the book was among Jews of his age group and not Arabs who certainly had no interest in hearing what he had to say. And yet it seemed to me that nonetheless, even in Hebrew, the MK strove to detail his efforts for an Arab readership, telling of how teachers, principals, and Arab school supervisors would show up at his office and how he helped the local councils and the school systems and how the upper echelons of Arab society, the communists and nationalists alike, arrive at his office and fill his ample reception room. He sought to relay tales of how he would, often in the small hours of the night, assist families who had lost loved ones abroad and had come to him for guidance and assistance in how to bring the body home for burial. And the efforts he would make in trying to help concerned parents secure the release of loved ones who had been arrested at rallies or while engaged in political activity. His recollections seemed to be an indictment of the Arabs, who had forgotten his contribution and treated him instead like a sort of traitor because he had joined the ranks of a Zionist party. “And what did their heroes in Knesset do other than make noise and cause a spectacle?” he asked, his voice filled with an uncharacteristic anger. “Did they connect any villages to the electrical grid? To the national water carrier? The phone company? Did they inject money into the school system? Did they deliver sewage systems to their towns? No. They did nothing besides talk. Everyone knows this and everyone stays silent. But I would prefer, of course, that you not quote the last two sentences.”

  In the book I wrote that the MK, who had been abandoned by his constituency, switched into Arabic when I asked him about his childhood memories. At first he spoke in the sentences he had learned to recite, a historic recounting of events as they’ve been written and revised and shaped over the years, about ’48 and the “rescue” army of Arab regulars that arrived in the village of his birth. He spoke of the signing of the 1949 Armistice Agreements, the arrival of the Jewish soldiers and the collection of weapons from the residents, the transformation of the town into a part of Israel. I asked him to describe his parents’ home for me. And when he asked, “What good will that do?” I encouraged him to trust me and promised that if he wasn’t satisfied with the end product those passages could of course be excised from the book. In Hebrew he started describing how his parents had a simple home, of straw bale and mortar, like the rest of the houses in the neighborhood, with his family on one floor—six brothers and three sisters—and the farm animals: a donkey and two cows, which were brought inside on cold nights.

  He described how his father was capable of reading a newspaper, but his mother
was illiterate, as were most of the women in the village. Still in Hebrew, he apologized for his childhood and insisted on noting that with time his parents had built a proper stone house.

  I asked the MK about the war in Arabic, and he responded in kind, not noticing that we’d shifted languages and didn’t, as I wrote, say anything about the feeling of humiliation or the fear that seized him when he accompanied his father, along with the rest of the men, to the village school and didn’t talk about being certain that he would never see him again, because he had heard talk of the atrocities done by the Jews. He didn’t mention that his mother cried, regretting not having left with those who fled, and what worth is there to family honor when there is no husband, and what worth is there to courage when life is severed. But his father returned in the evening, and the MK, who was a child then, was delighted, and he recalled wanting to hug his father, even though such behavior was not permitted, for he was already six, a boy old enough to start acting like a man. Without words he told of the silence of his father, who was not joyous like the rest of the family upon his safe return, and his father said not a word and did not draw the kids in to his embrace as one might expect of someone saved from the jaws of death. It was in that moment that for the first time he knew the meaning of humiliation, though he did not have the language to describe the feeling, knowing only that the vanquished face of his father would not dim in his memory until he got older and learned to interpret glances and give words to the expressions of the senses. He did not need words, however, to vow that he would avenge in some way what the Jews had done to his father’s gaze, but he possessed neither the strength nor the courage to follow through.

  While editing his childhood years I was more concerned by his possible reaction than with my other clients. At first I made the decision to stick to his words and phrases, adhering to the stories he told, but I wasn’t able to control myself, and in the chapter that describes his life in Jerusalem and his initial acquaintance with Israeli students I described the difficulty he faced with the language and the foreign culture and the fear of falling from the path of the just and the concern that if he adopted their language and their ways he would never be able to return home. I told of his pride in the face of their racism and sense of superiority, which his democracy-loving friends tried in vain to hide, and how they were incapable of veiling, even if they did try, the tone of superiority that wormed into every comment and conversation.