by Sayed Kashua
Father said it wouldn’t happen to us, because we were different. We believed him, because the people in Ya‘bad talked differently, and also because our doors were made of wood.
Sometimes Father and Mother would load the four of us in the backseat, and we’d make the trip almost as far as Ya‘bad, and then we’d go back home without seeing our friends. Halfway there, Father would turn around, swear, and say that we couldn’t get through to Ya‘bad that day because of a roadblock. He’d say that the people in Ya‘bad and their children were heroes. They weren’t spineless nothings like us.
My brothers and I were constantly playing war games. We’d be at it every day. At first, we used swords—I mean sticks—like in the movies about the wars of the Prophet Mohammed. I was Hamzah, the Prophet’s uncle. He was very strong in the movies, and he had a sword with two blades. He would fight against ten infidels at once and kill them all. My older brother was Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, and my two younger brothers were the khalifs Omar and Utman, the Prophet’s deputies. Nobody could be the Prophet Mohammed. Grandma said if we did that we would go right to hell. They never showed the Prophet Mohammed in the movies either, only his camel and a halo of light above.
Later we started using pistols, like in the film by Omar el-Mukhtar in Libya and the one about Jamila Bukhird in Algiers. On ‘id el-fitr and ‘id el-adha, my father always took us to Tulkarm to buy us pistols. No child in our village had pistols as beautiful as ours: made of iron, almost real. Before the holiday, when our grocery store still sold cap guns, we’d play the real thing. When we ran out of ammunition, we’d shout “Bang, bang!” but whoever did the shooting had to pull the trigger too. Otherwise it didn’t count and you weren’t dead.
When we were growing up, Father would bring us Rambo and commando movies, and that’s when we moved to heavy artillery. Our war games went out of the house and into the grove, spreading over the whole neighborhood. My older brother was the commander of one group, and I took the other. He never won, unless he cheated or unless one of the soldiers in my group abandoned his post and went off to pee.
When we were older we shifted to automatic weapons, big guns made of wood with a magazine and a trigger and a piece of string for slinging the weapon across your shoulder. We made everything ourselves. First we called all the guns Bren, a word we’d taken from Grandma’s stories. But after watching Azit the Paratrooper Dog we started calling them Uzi. There was one that could shoot down seven Arabs at once, and my father got all worked up and told us it was an M-16 and could shoot sixty bullets a second. After that, no matter what weapon we had, we’d call it an M-16, even though none of us could shout bang sixty times in a second. So we switched from bang to brrrrr. I called my group Fedayeen and my older brother called his group Fedayeen too, because Father had always told us the Fedayeen were the best.
One day Father shouted to us to come home. We were in the middle of a game, and I was just about to kill my older brother, but Father shouted so loud we had no choice. We got the two younger ones from their positions and scurried home, because if Father lost it he was capable of hitting us. When we got home, he turned the volume up on the TV till it couldn’t go any higher. Mother was crying, and my grandmother, who never cried, sounded like she was about to cry too.
“Look,” my father ordered us, and kept saying, “Yal‘an Allah, yal‘an Rabhoom, yal‘an rab Allah who made them.” Grandma tore at her clothing and keened. My older brother and I were relieved nobody had hit us; we thought Father must have brought home a new film he wanted us to see. The next day we went back to our war games. My brother called his group Sabra and I called mine Chatilla.
Scouts
Once, I got up on a stage in a kaffiyeh. I must have been in the third grade at the time. A man with an accent showed up at school with my father. Father left, and the man with the accent took me in his car to a house I’d never seen before. A pretty house, big, with enormous sofas and lots of potted plants and plastic flowers. He took out a piece of paper with sentences in Arabic that I didn’t understand and said I’d be opening the Jafra Festival that evening. He asked me to memorize the sentences and taught me how to make the V-sign with my fingers.
That night they put the kaffiyeh on me and placed me up on a stage with some musicians. I recited my lines, which had lots of references to wattan (homeland) in them. My voice was shaking, and I was very stiff. I’d never seen so many people, all looking at me and listening to me. When I finished, I walked off the stage with my fingers in a V, and everyone applauded. My father was waiting for me backstage, and he smiled as I ran toward him to hide. The man with the accent smiled too and told me something I couldn’t make out. Father said I was good.
Father sent me to the Scouts and said when I grew up I’d be a pilot, that by the time I finished high school we’d have our own state, and I could study to become a pilot then. Grandma said I’d be a minister or a judge. In the Scouts, we spent all our time playing soccer, and when one of the teachers at our school died, they would take us to stand beside his grave. Only those who had a uniform could stand by the grave, so my father took me to Tulkarm to buy me khaki pants, a green shirt, and fabric for making ties.
While we were inside the clothing store, we heard shouting outside. The owner asked us to leave and pulled down the iron bars at the front of the store. In the street across the way, older children with flags were blocking the road with tires. My father left me near the car and ran toward them with a lighter. I started crying. I was sure it was the end of the world, like they taught us in Koran lessons. My father said he couldn’t believe I was such a coward. And if I was, what was the point of all my I-want-a-gun?
My grandfather had a gun. Grandma says he was a brave fighter who had tried to defend Tira. She says the Jews couldn’t get inside the village, and it wasn’t until the Arabs handed us over that they came in. But Father says it was lucky for us King Abdullah handed the village over to the Jews in time, because otherwise they would have slaughtered us one by one.
When Grandpa’s son from his first wife was killed, Grandpa wanted to take revenge. Akab had been a real hero, one of the Rebels. He’d had a horse, a gun, and a belt full of grenades. One Friday, he took a bullet. The bullet hit the belt, and all the grenades went off at once. His body scattered in every direction. Grandma says the whole family worked till nightfall to gather up his head and his shoulders, so they would have something to bury. He had a face as round as the full moon.
Grandma says that at night, after the burial, my grandfather went up on the roof of the school building. There was an Iraqi outpost there and they’d take turns behind the Bren hidden in the bags of sand. Grandpa heard the Jews coming closer. He heard the commander say “Forward, forward”—Grandma whispered the word in Hebrew. The first bullet hit the commander, the one who’d said “Forward,” and Grandpa saw the Jews in a state of panic, trying to get away. Grandpa put the Bren to good use and sewed them together “like a Singer.” “They’re cowards, the Jews, but the British, those Ingliz dogs, preferred them,” my grandmother says.
The Ingliz got into Grandpa and Grandma’s house once. That was before my father was born. They turned everything upside down: spilled salt on the sugar, smashed bowls, and peed right in front of her. Grandma says one of them sat on the big container of olives and took a shit right into it. They poured everything out afterward, and saw the Englishman’s shit, big chunks.
The People in Tira Used to Be Braver
The people in Tira used to be braver and kept all the Jews out. Once, some Jews tried to get into the village by pretending to be Arabs. They came with kaffiyehs. But Abu el-Abed knew they were Jews. He’d been working in the wheat fields with his family, and he’d seen them. When he told the people around him that they were Jews, they thought he’d gone crazy. “What’s got into you. They’re the Iraqi soldiers,” they told him.
But Abu el-Abed was certain he was right. He could tell Jews by the way they walked. He told his friends, “One shot in th
e air, and we’ll know. If they’re Arabs, they’ll shout to us; if they’re Jews, they’ll lie down flat on the ground.” As soon as he fired, they all went down in the dust. It was obvious that they were Jews. Abu el-Abed and the other men stayed there, shooting and scaring them, and the women and children hurried home, shouting in the streets, “Ya ahl al-balad, al-Yahud akhduna!” (“People of the village, the Jews have come to occupy us!”)
All the men went out. Handsome, brave, unwavering, as if they were going to a wedding. The women accompanied them with za‘aruta, the traditional cries of happiness. They hardly had any guns. They held sticks and knives, stones and spades, and wouldn’t let any Jew come near. That day, they managed to seize three bodies of Israeli soldiers.
Abu el-Abed and some of the fighters in Tira tied them to horses and dragged them to the Iraqi army headquarters in Tulkarm. They wanted to prove it was possible to kill Jews. Their aim was to encourage the Arab soldiers and persuade them to fight. But the Iraqis said, “Maku awamer, maku slakh” (“We have no orders, we have no ammunition”).
One time they were even braver than that and wouldn’t let Kahana in. We heard on the news that he was planning to come to Tira. They announced on the mosque loudspeakers: “Ya ahl al-balad, Kahane is arriving tomorrow to take back the released prisoners. If he gets in, it will be our disgrace.”
By five the following morning, I was already out with my father at the entrance to the village from the direction of Kfar Sava and Ramat Ha Kovesh. There were some people there blocking the roads with tires. Father said the workers shouldn’t be allowed out. He said everyone had to defend the village, and that when the Jews lose out on a day of work, they get furious. “Do you know how much we’re making them lose by not going to work?”
Police vans drew up, and my father and a few other people sat down in the middle of the road. I wasn’t scared. I sat down with them. The mayor spoke with the policemen, and they moved back. Soon the entire village had rallied. Thousands blocked the entrance. An airplane circled overhead, and Father said they were taking pictures of us from the air. He pulled his shirt up over his face and taught me how to do it too, just like the kids you see on TV.
That day Father and I were late coming home. Mother and Grandma were very worried. They waited under the eucalyptus trees at the front of the house. I felt like a man. I wasn’t afraid. But all they wanted was to make sure my father was all right. They didn’t even ask me what had happened.
Nothing had happened actually. Kahane didn’t come. At school the next day the kids said they’d broken the windows of the police vans with bricks, and they said Kahane had come into the village that night through the orange groves of Tel Mond, dressed as a woman.
A Third-Year Student
My father wrote that the holiday meant nothing to him. That it didn’t evoke the least emotion. That his real holiday hadn’t come yet, and that when it did he wouldn’t be the only one to rejoice; everyone would rejoice. He also wrote that there was a special Visitors’ Day for the holiday and that, as a one-time exception, visitors might bring in a kilo of holiday sweets.
The postcards were sent from Damon prison, P.O. Haifa, March 1970. He had been in jail for a year by then. I know because there’s also a copy of Ha’aretz from March 1969 in the suitcase, with an item about my father’s being arrested. It links him to the explosion in the Hebrew University cafeteria.
According to the letters and the papers, my father was in jail for more than two years. There’s a thick layer of dust over the papers. Inside Father’s matriculation certificate, I found a dried spider. His grades weren’t that good, but he always says that the grades in his day didn’t come close to the ones we get nowadays, and that someone who got a 70 back then was smarter than someone who gets 100 today. Grandma kept all his report cards. She can’t read, but she knows what’s important. Up to ninth grade he had only hundreds. The comments at the bottom said he should try to settle down, to be good, to be less noisy. The report card at the end of eleventh grade says: Promoted to twelfth grade on condition that he obeys the rules.
Sometimes I think nobody except Grandma and me knows about the letters, the newspaper clippings, and those report cards. Judging by the dust, I must be the only other person to look at them. I rummage through the papers, sorting them by date, by place, by institution, and put them down next to my grandmother.
She doesn’t even notice me. I have to position myself directly in front of her and shout my name in her ear before she realizes that I should get a hug and a kiss. She sits there, rocking, in front of the heater, fingering her prayer beads, listening to Voice of Amman, and waiting for the next call of the muezzin.
In all his letters from prison, Father wrote to Grandma too. “Tell my dear mother” or “This is for my beloved mother” or “Tell the dearest person of all.” He usually sent the letters to his brothers-in-law, my aunts’ husbands. In all of them, he sounded all right—or at least as if he was trying to sound all right. In October 1969, in the oldest postcard I found, he said that the problems of adjusting to life in jail were behind him. There were people you wouldn’t usually have a chance to meet, and he got along well with them. In one of the letters, he told Uncle Bashir he was slowly turning into an abu-ali, a big shot.
In a later letter, after a sixth-month remand, he wrote about the wonderful library and said he spent all his time there, studying.
Tell my dear mother I’m very glad they gave me another six months. Tell her I asked them to, because there are books here that I haven’t had a chance to read yet. There are so many books, and I spend every minute in the library, except if someone asks me to play some chess. Please ask Mother to bring me an English-Hebrew dictionary from home.
When they prolonged his detention again, he wrote that five years wouldn’t be enough for him to finish all the books he’d listed for himself. He talked about the unusual opportunity he’d been given to purify his body and soul and to test his endurance and resolve. He knew now that he’d been born to be a prisoner. He could not imagine himself without the bars and the barbed wire.
Were it not for the fact that you and my sisters miss me, I would stay here forever. I like it here. The only thing that disturbs me is that you did everything you could in order for me to reach the top. I feel sad for every drop of perspiration you shed on my behalf. I know I’ve let you down. The only thing missing in my life now is the opportunity to make it up to you. I don’t know how.
In one of the papers that has turned completely yellow, the picture of my father is no more than a blur and I can hardly make it out. They don’t write anything interesting. Just his picture and his name with the caption: A third-year student. Judging by his grades in the first two years, it looks like he wasn’t particularly brilliant or diligent. He didn’t take too many courses. One of them was Nationalist Movements in Modern Times, with Professor Y. Talmon. It seems he didn’t put too much of an effort into his university career, just like me. When I dropped out, I was so ashamed of myself that I didn’t dare go home. But it didn’t occur to me to blow up the cafeteria.
My father was twenty-two when he was arrested. He thought at the time that he was twenty-three. Grandma kept a letter she had sent to the editor of Al-Quds. They published it under the heading RELEASE MY SON. She wrote that she was a widow whose husband had died twenty-three years earlier, leaving her with four daughters and a son. She’d done everything she could for them, her son was the very essence of her life, and she was asking the Minister of Police, the Minister of Defense, and the Prime Minister to release him. The headline of the story above the letter announced that the village of Arabeh would be hooked up to electricity in the course of 1970.
After that, Grandma went on a hunger strike, and father wrote another postcard to Uncle Bashir, urging him to make her stop. If he’d been suffering, that’s one thing, but he was really doing fine in jail. Genuinely fine. He was chess champion of his whole wing.
My father doesn’t talk about those days.
All I know is what the papers reported or the things he himself wrote in his letters, which don’t explain much either. In 1971, the Council of Arab Students circulated a handbill denouncing the policy of administrative detentions and demanding that Father be put on trial or released immediately. It said the police had closed the cafeteria bombing case and all those involved had been tried.
The Dead Sea
I went to the Dead Sea once, with my grandmother. It’s good for you if you have aches in your legs. She asked her friend Amneh to sign me up for the trip too. Amneh was a tour organizer who specialized in trips for women, mainly older women her own age. Sometimes they’d go to the Hamat-Gader spa, sometimes to Jerusalem for Friday prayers. She organized trips to any place that could help people’s bones.
Grandma and Amneh had been friends all the way back, since the time of the Ingliz. Amneh’s husband had a gun that the English had given him to defend the village. One day when Amneh’s husband went indoors to sleep and left his gun beside him, Abu Ziad, that scoundrel, came inside and stole it. The English thought Amneh’s husband had sold the gun. Two soldiers held his legs up with a stick, and the officer struck the soles of his feet with a whip. They didn’t believe the gun had been stolen. They stripped him and whipped him across the back. His cries could be heard as far as the fields, and the whole village came running to see what had happened. Only when the English were about to shoot Amneh’s husband did Abu Ziad intervene and tell them he’d found the gun in the field. Liar.
Amneh looked like my grandmother: the same white dresses meant for outings, the same white scarf covering her head. They were the oldest women on that trip to the Dead Sea. The others were all younger. Every once in a while, my grandma pointed gently at one of them and asked Amneh, “Whose daughter is she? She’s sweet. Why isn’t she married?” The whole way there on the bus, the women kept playing the darabukka, singing, and dancing. One of them held the microphone and sang an Indian song from the movie Kurbani, which was a hit at the time. Everyone knew the words and sang along with her.
