by Sayed Kashua
Occasionally, I still considered quitting on Yonatan. I didn’t really need the money. My social worker salary was enough to live on and the caretaker money went completely untouched. I did not feel the need to save up at the time, though. I had no plans for the future. The thought of the long hours alone in the apartment, waiting for Majdi and Wassim to come back from work, was what convinced me not to quit.
Also, I started to really enjoy my time there, up in that attic on Scout Street. The physical part of the job got easier, much more like what Ayub and Osnat had described: quick dinner for Yonatan, jelly hydration, and a long deep sleep, generally till the morning.
Osnat asked me every once in a while to switch with her on the weekend, or to come in a bit early, at six or even at five, and I was always happy to oblige. Sometimes it worked out that I would spend twenty-four hours straight with Yonatan. Osnat probably thought I agreed so readily because I wanted to work longer hours, to make a little more money, but the truth is that I was willing to take her place because I had nothing else to do and I preferred spending time with Yonatan in his warm room to being alone in the cold, empty apartment in Beit Hanina.
The day shift with Yonatan was not particularly tricky either. After breakfast, which consisted of the same jar of food and shot of jelly, I would put Yonatan in the shower, which was never easy but had gotten significantly less difficult, and wash him with liquid soap and a soft sponge, hitting spots that I don’t even touch on my own body. Lifting his head and cleaning his neck, cleaning behind his ears,
in his crotch. I would even bend over and meticulously clean his bottom through the hole in the chair. I’d wash his hair with baby shampoo. Then I’d pat him down with a towel until he was completely dry because Osnat told me that anything less would guarantee bedsores and all sorts of funguses. I dried him everywhere, even tugging the towel back and forth between his toes. When he was good and dry, I would rub a special cream on his body, occasionally massaging his muscles as I had seen Osnat do.
Then I’d transfer him to the bed, diaper him, dress him in clean pajamas, put him in the wheelchair with the headrest, and move him over to the window. Sometimes I’d turn on the radio to Galgalatz, which offered a constant medley of popular music and traffic reports.
Soon enough I realized that Yonatan had more than one frozen expression—sometimes he smiled, or did something that looked like a smile with his lips, and sometimes he made noises. I could tell by the sounds he made when he was pleased or upset. When he was tired of sitting by the window, I knew it, and I moved him back to the bed, and when he was tired of his position, I rotated him.
Even though it wasn’t easy, I learned how to change his diaper and keep the bed clean. He had to be pushed over onto his side with one hand, held in place so that he wouldn’t flop back down, and then with the other hand you had to take off the diaper, wipe him, sprinkle talc on his bottom, and then lay the new diaper out so that the straps were open and ready, and only then allow him to flop back down on his back. Then you could close the diaper, inserting two fingers to make sure that it was not too tight or too loose.
All this was done with latex gloves and immediately afterward I washed my hands with soap. Still, when Yonatan went to sleep I would go back into the bathroom, scrub myself up to my elbows, dig my fingernails into the bar of soap, and disinfect my hands for a very long time under a stream of hot water.
The thing I tried to avoid most was Yonatan’s stare. I liked it better when his eyes were shut. There was something scary about them when they were open. Everything about this limp creature seemed so healthy: his straight, light brown hair, which was cut every two weeks by a barber who came to the house; his smooth, pale face, electrically shaved by Osnat once every three days; and those wet brown eyes. Everything was as it should be. Yonatan was a good-looking guy.
Sometimes, after he went to sleep, I’d sit down at his desk, turn on the lamp, and leaf through his books and CDs. There was a big white yearbook that said Jerusalem High School for the Arts. Several years had passed since his picture was taken, but Yonatan hadn’t changed. He even had the same serious expression on his face. The big somber eyes that never really focused anywhere. The only difference was that in the picture he was standing on his feet and there was a camera hanging around his neck, held in his right hand. You could see that he had used his index finger to take a picture of himself in the mirror. Under the picture, in a sloping sprawl, it said, Yonatan, we looked everywhere, but couldn’t find a better photographer to take your picture. Stay safe and good luck taking pictures for the army, you jobnik. Lots of love! P.S. Don’t be so serious all the time—it’s okay to smile for the camera every once in a while.
Sometimes I’d sit at his desk and halfway expect to find him leaning over my shoulder, looking down at me as I touched his things. It seemed to me that he was completely capable of getting up and that he was deceiving everyone, lying in bed, aware of everything, not actually felled by infirmity. His body bore no sign of illness, no scratch or scar that spoke of an accident. He looked exactly like the picture in the yearbook on the shelf.
The main problem up in the attic was figuring out how to pass the time from when Yonatan fell asleep till I got tired enough to go to bed. I’d try my mother’s technique, shutting my eyes and initiating yawns, but I was never able to go to sleep before midnight. I had five hours to burn in that attic. After getting the okay from Osnat, I started listening to Yonatan’s music. Aside from the stereo he also had a separate CD player with small Sony earphones. “I don’t know if you’ll like his music, though,” she said, “he has really weird taste.”
I didn’t know any of the albums that he had, so I decided to start from the top of the stack and work my way down. At first it had nothing to do with enjoyment; I listened to Yonatan’s music in order to pass the time. I sat on the couch, opposite Yonatan, with an album cover in my hands and listened, trying to remember the name of the band and the song. When the album cover came with the lyrics, I tried to read along. Osnat was right—he really did have weird taste. The music he liked was nothing like what I had listened to up until then, and I don’t mean Wassim’s and Majdi’s music or the Egyptian pop my dorm mate used to play. His CDs were nothing like what I used to hear over the radio on the Israeli buses, either.
The first album I listened to was by a band called Sonic Youth and their songs, the first time around, sounded like they’d been recorded in a carpenter’s workshop. But I listened to it all the way through, and then again, and then I felt tired and was able to fall asleep.
SPOON, LEMON WEDGE, LIGHTER
Walid didn’t waste any time getting Leila an active case and he asked me to accompany her on her first house call, to the Old City. At the time the Old City was one of the main drug centers in Jerusalem. All by itself it could have kept two outpatient clinics in business, but no one wanted to work there and only a few of the addicts actually wanted anything aside from their income support.
Leila showed up on time, at exactly eight thirty, half an hour after me. I tried to cover the awkwardness by rifling through the paperwork and shoving a sheaf of papers that I hadn’t really looked at into a folder. I kept my head down and said, “Okay, if you’re ready to go, we should head out.”
I knew I felt something when I was with Leila. I didn’t know if it was the same tension and shyness that I felt around all Arab girls or if it was something different. Either way, I tried to stifle it. I didn’t want to be like all those other men I knew, drooling over every woman they saw. That’s not who I am, girls don’t even really interest me, I told myself, and I knew that it was precisely the other way around.
“You’re walking too fast,” Leila said. “We’re not late, are we?”
“Sorry,” I said, turning around. I hesitated for a moment, my eyes focusing in the general vicinity of her face, and then looked her straight in the eye. I blushed and felt my face burn a
nd hated myself for it, wanting to run away.
“You’re so shy,” Leila said, smiling.
Where the hell did she get that from? I thought to myself. But I liked it. I saw it as a kind of understanding, a sense of trust, a lack of fear. Sometimes, when I heard my colleagues or even Majdi talk about girls, I was sure that if I was a girl I would be terrified of every man in the world. I walked slower, but still one step ahead of Leila so that no one would think we were together. I could’ve led us through the side streets and alleys that link Wadi Joz to the Old City but I chose to take the main road so that there’d be witnesses, so that we wouldn’t be alone. We got to Salah al-Din Street and from there to Musrara. I tried walking slowly, at her pace. As we prepared to cross the street from Musrara to Damascus Gate, we stood close to one another and she said, “You’re different from all of the rest of the guys in the office.”
I crossed the street fast and Leila ran after me.
There were faces that I recognized at the entrance to Damascus Gate but I lowered my gaze and ignored them. Some of them were selling toys and perfume and others were just leaning against the stone walls. As we entered the Old City, I drew close to Leila and said, in a professional whisper, “Damascus Gate is one of the biggest drug-dealing zones in the city.” It was a Wednesday, still early in the morning, and the foot traffic in the market was thin.
“How long will it take us to get there?” she asked, looking at her watch.
“Five minutes.”
“Then we have some time,” she said. “Do you think we could go to Lina? I haven’t been there in a long time.”
Lina’s ground-floor seating area was full. The waiter pointed us upstairs and we found a table for two. I shouldn’t have agreed to this, I thought. Leila flashed her smile, which I saw out of the corner of my eye. For some reason it seemed to me that I was making her laugh. The big city girl from the Galilee must’ve thought that I was a walking stereotype from a small village in the Triangle: the kind of guy who is embarrassed by the presence of girls. After all, she didn’t know how they talked behind her back. I still remember a joke about a guy from the Triangle who asks a Christian girl from the Galilee if she’d like to dance, and she says, “Your name’s Muhammad, you’re from the Triangle, and you want to dance with me?” For some reason I was sure that Leila was a Christian, even though, as opposed to the other Christian students I had met, she did not wear a cross. Many of the Christian students wore one over their clothes, displaying it so that everyone would know: I’m not a Muslim, not really an Arab.
We both ordered our hummus plain, no chickpeas, no fava beans. “Mmm, I love Lina,” Leila said, scooping the hummus out of her bowl with a pita. I watched her hands work: she was not one of those girls who patted some hummus on a pita with a fork. She held the pita and she shoveled the hummus into her mouth. Holding an onion wedge, she asked “Do you mind?” and took a big bite. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Why aren’t you eating?”
“I’m not hungry,” I lied. The truth is I didn’t eat because it seemed to me at that moment that it was embarrassing, beastly, the kind of thing that should be done alone, behind closed doors. Definitely not in front of a girl and definitely not in front of a girl for whom I already knew I felt something, despite my best efforts to keep that feeling at bay.
“I’m not hungry, but I’ll have a little,” I said, and I tore off a modest piece of pita and dipped it into the deep bowl. I bowed my head and put it in my mouth, chewing carefully, with my mouth shut, trying not to make any eating noises. And I immediately took a napkin and mopped up around my mouth. When I eat, it always seems to me that the food is smeared all over my cheeks and across my whole face.
Skinny, curly-haired Leila with her small delicate face finished her hummus fast and asked, “So, are you going to eat all of yours?” and when I shook my head no, she pulled my bowl over and ate it, too, this time with a fork and no pita. When we were done we paid separately.
Our destination was the Aluwad neighborhood, the home of Shareef Abu-Siam, Leila’s addict.
“Where are the Abu-Siams?” I asked an old salesman who was sitting in a wicker chair in front of the neighborhood grocery store. He pointed at a green gate, behind which we could hear an entire clan of children. Ten children met us at the entrance and an elderly woman, whose hands were busy with her hair covering, shooed them off and asked, “Are you from social services? Welcome.” The small courtyard was trapped between rooms and walls, and cement stairs descended from the upper floor in all directions and seemingly without any logic. Some of the rooms on the upper floors were unpainted and unfinished and the windows and doors were wide open. “Coffee or tea?” the old woman asked.
“No, thank you,” Leila said. “Are you Shareef’s mother?”
“Yes,” the woman said, and immediately called out three names. “These are his kids,” she said as the children clustered around her. “Two boys and one girl, and the infant’s in his mother’s arms.” The woman pointed to one of the doors. “That’s Shareef’s house. He’s not home, just his wife’s around. God only knows where he is. He was once as strong as a convoy camel. Inshallah you will be able to help, my children,” she said.
A young woman opened the door to Shareef’s house. “Please,” she said, “come in. It’s cold outside. Son,” she added, “go bring chairs.” Her son ran downstairs and came back with white plastic stools from the courtyard and set them down in the small room, under the light of a single bare bulb. A kerosene heater burned in the middle of the room. Mattresses were stacked in the corner and, on a small pallet near the stove, the baby slept.
Shareef’s wife looked to be less than thirty. She was wearing loose green sweatpants and an old sweater, and she sat opposite Leila, answering her questions with tired eyes. Shareef leaves early each morning. It’s not clear where he goes. He says he’s going to work, but he never comes home with money. He comes home at all hours. And he only comes home when he’s high and has another hit for the morning. Sometimes he pulls out a spoon, a lemon wedge, and a lighter right in front of the kids and starts preparing his hit. He’ll tie off and stick the needle in right in front of the kids. The young woman held a napkin in her hand and dabbed at her eyes and nose as she spoke. Leila sat before her with a pen and paper and nodded her head. She asked more and more questions, mostly about the kids, with surprising proficiency, unrattled by the tears, speaking softly but without pity.
The children don’t go to school anymore, Shareef’s wife explained. They weren’t even enrolled this year. Why should I sign them up? Last year I did but they never went to class, just spent all their time roaming around the Old City. According to the neighbors, her eldest had been seen begging near Jaffa Gate, where the tourists congregated, and outside the mosque. Might as well stay at home, she said, it’s better than having them out on the street. The oldest one was arrested for trying to steal a tourist’s bag and that was before he even started third grade. The younger ones try to do what he does, they copy him. According to her friends, there are boarding schools for kids like hers and she used to think it was impossible for a mother to send her children away and not see them every day, but now she knows it’s the only thing that will save them. “As long as they’re put in a good place,” she said. “At least that way they’ll have a clean bed, food, and an education. Maybe they’ll even learn a trade or something. If they stay here they’ll end up just like their father, who’s never ever going to stop using.” Her husband’s older brothers had locked him up in his room several times, keeping him there for days on end, swearing they wouldn’t let him out till he kicked the habit, and he would yell, beg, and cry like a baby but they didn’t give in—till they got tired of the whole routine. Then they’d let him go and soon enough he’d disappear again, returning home a day or two later, high as a kite.
Shareef was the youngest of five brothers, his wife said. All of the brothers had
left the neighborhood. They owned houses in Dahiyat al-Bareed or in a-Ram, and lived there with their families. Shareef was the only one who had stayed on in his mother’s house after he got married. Her mother-in-law, said Shareef’s wife, lived in one room and they had the run of the other three. But the new residency law brought all the brothers back to their mother’s house. None of them wanted to risk losing their national health insurance, their free educations, their blue identity cards. So they came back with their families and now all we have is one room, she told Leila, and then because they didn’t have enough space they built two extra rooms upstairs and now the city says it will demolish the rooms because they were built without a permit, so now we have a whole legal battle, a whole other mess. In the morning, she said, blowing her nose, I stack the mattresses, and in the evening I lay them back out. Everyone lives in this one room, just like this.
Leila walked back to the office with her head bowed. She said nothing. When we got there, she asked me to remind her of the clerk’s name at the welfare bureau and before leaving the room she asked me which boarding school was considered the best for at-risk kids.
CORDUROYS
I recall the smell of Yonatan’s clothes. Somehow they held on to the good smell of the fabric softener and not the medicinal scent of the attic.
I showed up at Scout Street an hour before the beginning of my shift and hesitantly asked Osnat if it would be okay to come a little late the following evening.
“What time will you be able to come?” she asked.
“I’m not sure, but no later than midnight. Is that okay?”
She smiled. “It’s only okay if it’s because of a girl.”
I blushed and let a stupid grin creep across my face.
“Sakhtein,” she said, turning to Yonatan and raising her voice, “at long last our shy friend has found someone. See!” then she turned back to me and asked for details.
