by Sayed Kashua
The thought of the gynecologist’s wife biting into a cone of sushi instead of a stuffed eggplant amused the lawyer for an instant, but the feeling passed with a dark thought, one that surfaced every now and again, that his life was a mirage, that all of it could suddenly melt away. What business did he have eating sushi? Why was he spending his evenings with these people, friends whose company he wasn’t even sure he enjoyed? Dinner would cost half a teacher’s monthly wage. He thought of his older brother, a high school teacher in the village, and imagined him sitting down to dinner with his parents, and he knew that no matter what his mother made, even if it was only scrambled eggs with green onions, it would be better than what he was about to order.
He looked at his watch as he walked through Zion Square, hoping he wouldn’t be late. He wished he had ordered in advance, as he’d told his wife. He turned right on Jaffa Road and walked to Feingold Court. The owner of the restaurant smiled at him as he walked in. The lawyer handed him the note with the order and very politely mentioned that he was in somewhat of a rush. He looked at his watch again and saw that he would be on time. “Oh, and add two bottles of white wine, please,” he told the owner, even though he knew he’d be paying double.
BOOKSTORE
“Don’t worry,” the lawyer told his wife, when she called again, a touch more anxiety in her voice. “I’ll be home on time.”
She gets so uptight before these meetings, he thought to himself. There was so much tension and unspoken competition between her and the other women in the group. Maybe she, like him, saw the monthly meetings as a kind of burden, the type of thing that was required of immigrants like themselves. He imagined his wife getting dressed in the bedroom. She had probably parked their daughter in front of a movie, and their son, if he wasn’t asleep, in the playpen, and then spent the better part of an hour deciding what to wear. Ordinarily she didn’t spend much time on her clothes, throwing on a simple shirt and a pair of slacks before going to work. As far as he could tell she also didn’t wear makeup, and she definitely wasn’t one of those women who spent hours putting on their faces in the morning. But when it came to the monthly meetings, she couldn’t afford to look rumpled or even ordinary. Perhaps she had gone out and bought something for the occasion. “Look at Faten,” he remembered her saying about Anton’s wife. “I’ve never seen her wear the same thing twice.”
His wife frequently took offense at things said by the other women in the group, especially on the matter of their children. Faten, for instance, had once noted that her daughter knew both the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets, and that she, along with other kids from the class, had been going to something called First Grade Prep, an initiative that the lawyer’s wife had not been told about.
The lawyer smiled to himself as he remembered how his wife had, for months afterward, begun spelling and penmanship lessons the second their daughter came home. “Anton’s kids are no smarter than yours,” he remembered her telling him when he tried to calm her down.
The lawyer looked at his watch and saw that it was only seven thirty. He slung his briefcase over his shoulder, picked up the brown paper bags with the sushi, and turned back up Jaffa Road, toward King George Street and his favorite bookstore. The place, located behind the Mashbir department store and a few feet from his parking lot, closed at eight in the evening. He went there once a week, whenever he was able to leave the office in time.
He pushed open the glass door, stirring the metallic wind chime.
“Hello,” the saleswoman said, looking up from her book and smiling at the lawyer.
“Hi, Meirav, how are you?”
She nodded, returning to her book, knowing that the lawyer would follow his usual browsing route and that he would find the still unshelved new arrivals.
He breathed in deeply, basking in the singular smell of used books. Oved, the café owner, a fervent supporter of independently owned businesses, had first recommended the new-and-used bookstore. The art critic, one of the regulars at the café, cited the owner’s personal touch and his ability to get all sorts of rare books.
The lawyer first came to the store three years ago, in preparation for the monthly meeting. Anton, his accountant and college friend, had invited them all over to his house for dinner and a discussion of the best seller Who Moved My Cheese?
Placing his bag and his sushi next to the counter, the lawyer remembered how mortified he had been when he brought his selection to the old saleswoman. Standing at the register, he hated Anton for making him buy the book, hated the saleswoman for her sneer and for making him feel the way he did, and, predominantly, hated himself for the many things he wanted to know but did not.
That saleswoman was replaced by the helpful and polite Meirav, at least in the Thursday evening slot, his preferred time of arrival. Ever since the Cheese incident he had decided to bolster his literary education and, in order to ensure that he would not be embarrassed again, he made a point of reading the Wednesday book review in Haaretz, the highbrow Hebrew paper he subscribed to. Accordingly, he usually knew what book he would buy before he even walked into the store. This had started three years ago, and since then he had been buying, and reading, a book a week—a task complicated by the fact that he allowed himself only non-work-related texts before bed.
The lawyer knew he had no reason to browse upstairs, where the English and Jewish Studies books were housed. Mostly he bought fiction, modern fiction to be exact, for the simple reason that that was what was reviewed in the paper. The lawyer actually very much wanted to read the classics and he would have been happy to familiarize himself with the great works, those that were known in name even to nonreaders. He wanted to know what Dostoevsky had said, what Anna Karenina and War and Peace were about, and he wanted to read Kafka and Chekhov and even Chaim Nachman Bialik, but it was hard to do, almost impossible. How could he pull it off? If he brought those books to the register then Meirav, who had once told him “I wish all our customers were like you” when he purchased all three books in Italo Calvino’s historical fantasy trilogy, would realize how mistaken she had been. He would never forget how good her remark had made him feel, even though he had bought the books only because a young author had said, in an interview that appeared in the book review, that they had had a great influence on him. The feeling of elation in the store that day had surpassed anything he had felt at work, even after the acquittal of a client. He did not tell Meirav that he had not managed to get past the first thirty pages of the first much-praised book—and that those pages had nearly driven him to give up reading entirely.
Sometimes, when he could not overcome his curiosity, he would take one of the classics off the shelf and ask Meirav to gift wrap it. Lolita, Crime and Punishment, and Anna Karenina were all taken home in festive wrapping because, more than anything else, the lawyer wanted to read the great works, the ones that all his Jewish peers had read.
He looked at his watch and saw that the store would be closing in ten minutes. He already knew which book he was going to buy: he had seen it reviewed in that week’s paper, had spotted it on the shelf, and knew that after a quick walk through the classics he would return to it. As he browsed, The Kreutzer Sonata caught his eye and he remembered that his wife had asked him once, as the resident expert on books, whether he’d ever read the novella by Tolstoy. The lawyer had been surprised by her sudden interest in books and she explained that The Kreutzer Sonata came up in class whenever her professor discussed Freud. He pulled the book off the shelf and walked over to the new-books section, where he picked up Haruki Murakami’s most recent novel.
“I’d like this one gift wrapped, please,” he said, handing Meirav the used copy of The Kreutzer Sonata, adding, “my wife’s studying psychology and she’s been nagging me forever to get her this book.”
Meirav nodded. “All the Freudians are crazy about it. But it’s a great book no matter how you read it. We just got it today,”
she said, pointing at a stack of book cartons in the corner. “I only had time to unpack one of the boxes but there are some gems in there.”
“Great,” the lawyer said, putting Murakami in a plastic bag, “in that case, I’ll be back soon.”
DINNER
Anton-the-accountant and his wife, Faten, the instructor at the teachers’ college in Jerusalem, were the first to arrive.
The lawyer had met Anton in university, back when he was a nineteen-year-old freshman and Anton was in his final year of accounting and economics, but the two only became friends after the lawyer had branched out on his own and needed someone to handle the office finances. Anton had already made a name for himself in east Jerusalem, where he still had his office, on Salah al-Din Street, not far from the lawyer’s old place.
Anton and his wife had first come over to the lawyer’s house after his daughter was born but the two couples became closer when the lawyer’s daughter and the accountant’s son, their third child, started going to the same day care center, at age three. It was then that the accountant invited the lawyer and his wife to join the group’s monthly meetings.
The lawyer found it difficult to describe his relationship with Anton as a friendship, even though he liked the accountant and was quite sure that the accountant liked him. Anton and his wife were the only Christians in the group and the only ones who lived in the northeast neighborhood of Beit Hanina, unlike the lawyer and everyone else, who lived in Beit Safafa, the southernmost enclave of east Jerusalem, just within walking distance of the locked gates of Bethlehem.
Tarik was next to arrive, at a few minutes to nine. Samir, the gynecologist, and his wife, Nili, the principal of a girls’ school in the eastern half of the city, arrived along with Nabil, the civil lawyer, and his wife, Sonya, who had once been a nurse at Shaare Zedek Medical Center but had opted, quite a few years earlier, to devote herself to the rearing of their four children. Aside from Tarik, the lawyer was the youngest of the group. The oldest was the civil lawyer, whose daughter would be graduating from the Anglican International High School in Jerusalem later that year.
The lawyer’s wife exchanged kisses with the other women, introduced Tarik to the guests, and then said, “Welcome, tefadlu,” her hands stretched toward the table. She was wearing gray pinstriped pants and a black tunic that came down to her hips. She looks great, the lawyer thought, imagining the struggle it must have taken to wiggle her bottom and hips into the girdle she wore.
“Where’s the sushi from?” asked Nili, the gynecologist’s wife.
“From Sakura,” the lawyer’s wife said, ready.
“Really?” the gynecologist’s wife asked, dropping a slab of raw salmon from the clasp of her chopsticks, “that’s weird, usually their sashimi is a lot fresher.”
“Would you like a fork?” the lawyer’s wife shot back.
The gynecologist, a senior faculty member at Hadassah Medical Center, intervened. “Did you hear the gunshots yesterday?” he asked.
“Oh, my God, yes, they were terrifying,” his wife said. “Right opposite our house. And did you see how many policemen showed up? Must have been half the district.”
Tarik exchanged a look with the lawyer and understood that although the lawyer was quite familiar with the details of the case, he would not be saying anything.
“Beit Safafa,” Nabil said mournfully. “Two shootings in the last six months. That’s never happened here before.”
Beit Safafa is the neighborhood of choice for the immigrants from the north. It stands apart from the rest of east Jerusalem and is a short drive from the center of town. The Israelis consider the neighborhood to be friendly. A few isolated incidents notwithstanding, the residents barely participated in the first intifada and didn’t stage a single protest march during the second one.
Most of the village only came under Israeli control in 1967, meaning that those born in the village, unlike the lawyer and his ilk, were given resident status rather than full citizenship. For them, political passivity has paid off; Beit Safafa is the best neighborhood in east Jerusalem. It’s relatively uncrowded and up until recently it was thought to be virtually crime-free. Over the past several years, rent and real estate prices skyrocketed. Nabil, the civil lawyer, the point man for the local real estate trade, was the one who approached the criminal lawyer with a legal and newly available plot of land. The lawyer bought it and built his house. “In two years’ time,” Nabil had told the lawyer, “these properties are going to double in value.” And he was right.
The immigrants from the north were largely responsible for the rise in prices. To the locals, the immigrants were rich, exploitable foreigners who could be made to pay the kind of prices they had previously been able to extract only from Jews. And the influx of people with money brought inflation to more than just the real estate market: meat, milk, and vegetables became more expensive and the neighborhood bakery had adopted two sets of prices—one for the locals and one for the foreigners. Price hikes aside, the locals liked the immigrants. They knew that the immigrants were far better than the rest of the riffraff that were apartment hunting around there—Palestinian collaborators who had been relocated to east Jerusalem by the Israeli security services. The collaborators had money but, as far as the locals were concerned, they were traitors. The Arab-Israeli immigrants, on the other hand, were well-educated and politically savvy and the locals respected the achievements of their brethren from the Galilee, hoping that their academic and economic success would trickle down to the rest of the village. The trouble was that the sudden rise in real estate values sparked feuds within clans and families, with cousins and brothers quarreling over every square inch of land.
“What was it all about?” the gynecologist asked, looking at the lawyer. “Or are you going to tell me they didn’t come to you with their problems?” he added, chuckling.
The lawyer smiled and nodded his head in affirmation, but it was clear he had no interest in discussing what had happened. The lawyer’s wife, sensing this, got up from her chair and announced that it was time for the next course. The lawyer rose and began collecting the guests’ sushi plates. He poured what remained of the white and red wines into the appropriate glasses and brought new bottles to the table. His wife served an arugula salad with a balsamic dressing, pumpkin ravioli, and entrecôte steaks in a cream and mushroom sauce, along with a potato pastry.
“So you’re not telling?” the gynecologist tried again. “Come on, these are my neighbors, don’t I deserve to know why my neighbors are shooting each other?”
The lawyer offered him another smile and tried to treat his demands as a joke. “No, not a word, Samir, especially because I see how badly you want to know.”
The lawyer’s response drew a few laughs. Nabil, the civil lawyer, felt an allegiance toward his colleague and said, “You’re right, let him stew in his own curiosity. Don’t say another word.”
Samir, of course, was correct. Both sides had turned to the lawyer for representation. He, though, had to pick one party, and he picked the stronger one, not out of greed but because, on the contrary, he knew he would have a better chance of pushing the stronger side toward reconciliation. At the end of the day, it was his neighborhood, too, and if the two biggest clans became locked into a blood feud his life would be affected.
The situation had begun with a fight at the local high school. One student, a member of the stronger clan, the one the lawyer had decided to represent, supposedly used his cell phone to snap a picture of one of the girls in the class. When word of this treachery reached her male cousins, who went to the same school, they assaulted the alleged cameraman, and sent him home bleeding and bruised. The parents and brothers of the kid, who swore he had never taken any such picture, set out for revenge. They mobbed the house of the boys who had attacked their kin, pelted it with rocks, and demanded that the perpetrators come out and show their faces. The
head of the household had drawn an unlicensed weapon and begun shooting in the air, summoning, with great alacrity, the police and border police, who do not tolerate armed feuds in the eastern part of the city. The security forces dispersed the mob and arrested five family members from each clan. The gun, however, was not found.
The lawyer chose to represent the stronger clan, hoping to reach a compromise out of court. If he could get them to agree, there was no doubt that the weaker one would consent, too. In the meantime, he spoke to the head of the household of the stronger clan and convinced him that the feud was not worth the arrest of the youths and the damage that could be done by dragging this matter through the Israeli courts. The patriarch agreed to try and settle the problem with the help of the village mukhtars and peacemakers. “But only on one condition,” he said to the lawyer, “that the head of the other family comes and personally asks for my forgiveness.” The lawyer nodded and immediately sent Samah’s father, the Fatah official, to go and make peace between the two hawks.
“The steaks are delicious,” Faten said, and her husband, Anton, agreed.
“Everything is excellent,” Nabil said to the lawyer’s wife. “You were blessed with hands of gold.”
Only Samir and his wife were silent. “What’s wrong, Samir,” a chuckling Nabil asked the gynecologist. “The food isn’t good enough for you?”
“I won’t pay her any compliments until her husband tells me why there were people shooting guns right outside my house,” he said, laughing, and everyone understood that the matter of the gunfire in the neighborhood had been brought to a close.
