by Sayed Kashua
“Who is it?” she asked from the other side of the door. He said his name and identified himself as her roommate’s brother. She opened the door a crack and looked at him.
“She’s not here,” she said. “She doesn’t get back till six today.”
“I know,” the lawyer said, flustered, stripped of all of his rehearsed lines. “Please,” he said, pushing a bar of chocolate through the barely open door. She took the chocolate from his hand and said, “No problem, I’ll give it to her.”
“No,” the lawyer said, shaken by the sound of his own voice. “It’s for you.”
He still recalled the scorn he had seen in her eyes. She stood behind the door, did not invite him in, and said she was not interested in receiving anything from him. “If you want me to give it to your sister, I will, but if you don’t, please take this back and go away. I don’t know you.” She extended the chocolate bar in his direction, but the lawyer just nodded his head and hurried out of the building.
He berated himself all night long. He went back to his rented apartment in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and waited for the call that was sure to come from his sister. He had nothing but contempt for himself. What had he been thinking? That he would offer her chocolate and she would invite him in for coffee and then fall head over heels for his charms? What charm? He was such an idiot. What a miserable decision, one that would make him look ridiculous in front of his little sister. He, the collected, deliberate one, how had he dared do something so dumb? He chain-smoked, tried to distract himself by watching TV, then by reading, then by looking through his casework, but his mind was trained on the sound of the soon-to-ring phone. He envisioned his sister coming home after class, walking into her room, and hearing from her roommate, as she waved the incriminating bar of chocolate in her hand, that her rude nymphomaniac brother had come by unannounced earlier that afternoon. When the call failed to arrive, he figured that either his sister had not yet returned to her room or that her roommate had left before she came back. At close to ten at night he decided he couldn’t wait any longer and called his sister, expecting the worst. But she sounded natural, asked how he was doing, and said nothing about the events of earlier that day.
“Are you alone in the room?” he got up the nerve to ask, trying to verify whether the roommates had seen each other.
“No,” his sister answered, and he could hear the sound of her door opening and he understood that she had walked out so that they could continue the conversation in private. But she said nothing about chocolate or her roommate.
“I’ve been thinking about coming to visit you,” he said, feeling things out.
“Too bad you didn’t,” she said. “Maybe you could come tomorrow. My roommate’s in class till eight. You want to come at six?”
The next day, at seven in the evening, the lawyer showed up at his sister’s place. He was intentionally late, because he never spent more than an hour in his sister’s room and he didn’t want her to know that something was up. They sat on his sister’s bed and talked, and his sister ate the meal he had brought for her. He, unable to eat, pored over the photos hanging above her roommate’s bed. Some of them, he decided, were taken in the courtyard of her family home and the others in the living room. Her parents seemed rather old and she appeared to be their youngest. Judging by the furniture and the state of the house, their financial situation seemed standard small-town Arab. Her mother wore a flower-embroidered head covering, as women her age did. If all of her siblings were in the photos then there were three sisters and two brothers, and a few little ones, perhaps nephews.
The lawyer looked around for the bar of chocolate but did not see it anywhere. Maybe she’d hid it and maybe she’d eaten it. For a moment he grimaced at the thought of her throwing it out.
Just before eight, he parted with his sister and walked toward the gate outside the dorm.
The roommate was coming up the walk. She approached along with another girl and the lawyer feared saying anything to her in front of her friend. He sat stone still on the wooden bench and watched her come toward him. He looked down when he saw that she had noticed him. When he looked back up she was standing above him with her friend by her side. His face flushed a deep red. He had no idea what to expect.
“Are you here to visit your sister?” she asked. The lawyer got to his feet, looked bashfully at her friend, and nodded.
“I’ll be there in a second,” she told her friend, who said good-bye and left.
“What do you want?” she asked him when they were alone. The lawyer managed to draw a deep breath and stay focused. He decided not to get sidetracked this time and to act according to his original plan. Just as he did in court.
“I came to ask what your response would be if I were to tell you that I want to ask your father for your hand,” the lawyer said. He wanted to make clear that he was not looking for a fling. He did not have time to waste and, as always, he had decided it would be best to be straightforward.
“What?” she snapped. “My response would be a resounding no, that’s what my response would be.”
The lawyer let the insult wash over him. He nodded.
“Okay,” he said, “if that’s the case then I’m sorry if my behavior has in any way been offensive to you.” He wanted to leave as soon as possible.
“Are you out of your mind?” she asked.
“I apologize,” he said, begging to be set free, allowed to return to his room to process the humiliation.
“What do you have to apologize for?” she asked. “I don’t even know you. I met you for two seconds and then you come over and say you want to ask for my hand in marriage? What do you think this is, the Stone Age?”
“I brought you chocolate,” the lawyer said.
“Wonderful,” she said, smiling.
“Did you throw it away?”
“No, it’s good Belgian chocolate. What do you think I am, an idiot?”
“So, what did you do with it?”
“I ate some and I hid the rest from your sister.”
“You didn’t even offer her a piece?”
“No! Your sister is a nightmare.”
“You see,” the lawyer said, starting to feel slightly optimistic, “that’s already a good sign.”
“What’s good about it?” she asked.
“You already hate my sister. All women hate their sisters-in-law.”
She laughed, a wonderful and uplifting sound.
One month later the lawyer went to her village, Tamra, along with his father and mother, and asked for her hand. During their engagement, she finished her studies and her internship and later, once they’d gotten married, they moved into a rented apartment in Beit Safafa.
XEROX MACHINE
By six thirty in the morning the lawyer was already starting to regret not staying home. He chain-smoked, and drank three cups of coffee in an hour. His thoughts were fractured and visions of his wife flashed through his mind; she seemed happy, smiling, beautiful, and attractive. Why doesn’t she call? He pounded the table with his fist. Enough, he couldn’t go on like this anymore. He’d call her father, tell him about the note, and politely ask that he come and remove his filth from the lawyer’s home. But the lawyer was not sure how her father would react to that type of charge. Perhaps he would stand behind his daughter. Perhaps he would prove himself to be more of a slave to avarice than a guardian of the family’s honor. The lawyer had no way of knowing. He had never forged any serious ties with her family. The Galilean family of his dreams, educated and rich, turned out to be far more modest in wealth and education than any of the ones he knew in the Triangle. Her father was a construction worker, her mother a housewife, and she was the only member of the family to have gone to college.
And why had she not yet called, the whore? There was no way she was still asleep. Was he so insignificant
as to not be worth a phone call? But there was really no reason for her not to call. No reason at all for her to be suspicious, unless she had woken up while he rifled through her date book and her cell phone—but there was no chance of that. She had been asleep. He’d made sure of it. There was no reason that he could think of for her to be suspicious of him. Maybe the fact that he left the house on his day off and at such an early hour was enough to make her think that something dreadful had happened. Maybe she had left the house, taken the kids, and run away to the village of her birth. That notion troubled him, and he became certain that that was what she had done. He began dialing her number, sure she would ignore his call, imagining her in her new car, fleeing from him. And maybe she would answer, throwing the truth in his face as she drove. Her words would drip with derision and his children, seated in the backseat, would hear just what their beloved mother thought of their father. They were capable of believing her, the lawyer thought, shaking his head.
“Hello,” she answered, and her voice revealed that she had been up. “Where are you?”
The lawyer was glad that she had answered. Her tone soothed him.
“Are you awake?” he asked, trying to hide the tremor in his voice.
“Yes,” she said, “why, have your kids ever let me sleep in? What’s going on, why are you calling?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean, why are you calling me from downstairs,” she asked, chuckling. “Why don’t you just come up?”
“I’m in the office.”
“What? Why? Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing, I just woke up early and I have a ton of work.”
“Oh, wow, I’m such an idiot. I thought you were asleep,” she said, laughing. “I’ve been shushing the kids all morning.”
“Ha,” the lawyer grunted, trying to join her laughter.
“Will you be stuck in the office for a long time?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t really tell yet.”
“Oh, God, now we’re not going to see you on Fridays, either? Enough! You’re killing yourself! You’re coming for lunch, though, right?”
“What? Ah, I’ll see when I’m done here.”
The lawyer relaxed. It was clear she really had thought he had been sleeping downstairs. Of all the possible scenarios, he had forgotten to take the most logical one into account. After all, he always stayed in bed on his days off, until long after the house had come to life. Why should his wife have thought that this day was any different?
“Don’t be late, okay?” she asked, her tone convincing. “And also, don’t forget that I’m going over to Diana’s tonight.”
“I won’t,” the lawyer said, lying, having totally forgotten that she was supposed to go out with a few friends from work to see one of their colleagues and her one-month-old baby. Again he felt the gloom cloud his mind. The visit now seemed like a thin and feeble cover story.
“All right,” he said, feeling his voice shake, “I should get going. I’ll talk to you later. I’m not sure how long I’ll have to stay here.” He realized that this was the night to catch her in the act.
The lawyer hurried over to the Xerox machine and made copies of the note he’d found in the book and the sample of her handwriting from her bag. He went over to Samah’s desk, took a sheet of stationery with the office letterhead on it, and wrote out a request for an analysis from the graphologist. He made clear that he did not need an official report, as he sometimes did, but merely a verdict on whether the two notes were written by the same hand. The lawyer added that the matter was urgent and that he would like the results ASAP, and then he underlined ASAP twice and left his cell phone number just in case. Standing by the fax machine, waiting for it to start to ring, he looked at his watch and knew he was sending it off to an empty office. It was not yet seven in the morning.
The lawyer walked back to his office and stashed the two notes in his attaché case. He prayed that the graphologist would rule that the two samples did not match. He imagined the man telling him that one of the notes was a forgery or that the two samples were remarkably similar but in no way the same. His heart would be flooded with warmth and he’d run out of the office and buy his wife the most expensive present he’d ever bought her and then go home and kiss her and hug her and whisper the kind of sweet nothings he had not uttered in a long while.
He stood by the window and looked out at King George Street. A supply truck rumbled down the empty street. Jewish men in white shirts and black hats walked past under the window, clutching their tefillin in velvet bags that looked like black pillows, adorned with gold and silver thread. All of a sudden the lawyer was sorry he had left the house without saying good-bye to his kids, without kissing his daughter and tickling his little son’s stomach until he laughed the way only babies do. He sat down at his desk, looked at his computer, and scrolled through the morning’s headlines on one of the many news sites. Then he went to Google and asked it to search for why women cheat.
The lawyer read through the results avidly, attaching scientific importance to the most superficial of claims, even the ones that appeared in the glossiest, most shallow publications. He was furious when he found out that women cheat nearly as often as men. The rationale was different: they wanted attention, empathy, and support, and when the husband did not provide those things, they sought them elsewhere. According to one article, women seek sexual satisfaction outside the house because their husbands are often tired and uninterested, just as their own sexuality hits full stride. A sexologist said that her years of therapy had taught her that women want to feel attractive and desirable and that all too often their husbands see them differently, as caretakers of the children and the home. Other women sought wealth—gourmet restaurants, diamonds, invitations to glittering parties. Private eyes weighed in on the matter, too, and said that from their experience female adulterers were far more cautious than their male counterparts. Marriage counselors agreed: women are more discreet, and they are better liars.
The lawyer fit all of these facts to his own situation. He went from site to site, feeling more humiliated than ever before. Going back to the search page, he typed in the word hymen and soon enough realized that his assumption that his wife had been a virgin when they got married was utterly baseless. He read all about hymenoplasties and how immensely simple and popular the procedure had become. He read about blood capsules that could be surgically inserted so as to satisfy the groom’s mother, too, on the wedding night. The notion that she had fooled him from day one was more painful than the subsequent betrayal. The lawyer had never thought that the matter of his wife’s virginity was important to him, but now he learned that it was, more so than anything else in the world. He remembered how he’d always told his friends that he pitied all those Arab men who said they would never date a girl who had a boyfriend. What an idiot he had been then, during those conversations, and what an idiot he was now. Only recently he had sat with a friend, the accountant, and laughed at him for saying that he was worried about the Arab-Jewish education he was giving his daughter because he was afraid that as she approached puberty she would think, like the Jews, that it was only natural to have sex before marriage. The lawyer could not say why his opinions and beliefs, the things he had thought to be a result of his nature, had changed so rapidly. Experience had taught him that he was a conservative. Yes, a conservative, and from now on he would not be apologetic about it. What an idiot he had been when he spoke out, time and again, against the treatment of women in the Arab world, saying that it was widespread misogyny that held those societies back. What an idiot he had been, quoting Israeli writers and leaders. It was not the financial situation, he had said, parroting those public intellectuals, not the occupation, not the rotten education system, but simply the treatment of women. Only now did he realize that their goal had been to bring ruin to Arab society. Only now, for the first time in
his life, did he understand what honor meant. He, who spoke out against and even lectured now and again about honor killings, he, who opposed the phenomenon and labeled it barbaric, only now saw the error of his ways. He wished someone from her family would kill her. But who would do it? Which of her married brothers would risk arrest and a life of destitution for his children? He wished she was dead. But what about the kids, he wondered, and his heart broke at the thought of them mourning their mother.
STRUDEL
The lawyer walked along King George Street as it came slowly to life. The buses whooshed past with greater regularity, but were still half-full. The sidewalks were crowded with people, though mostly those belonging to the lower class: construction workers, sanitation workers, dishwashers, security guards, and saleswomen. “What’s up?” a security guard asked him near a bus stop, and the lawyer, who knew that the security guards checked the Hebrew of passersby, and who always answered crisply and with a generous smile, now merely nodded, but that, too, sufficed. The guard did not ask to see his papers.
The lawyer knew that the bookstore would probably be closed at this hour, but still decided to try his luck. He stood before the locked door and read the store’s hours. Looking at his watch, seeing that the store would open in fifteen minutes, he decided not to go back to the office but to get a cup of coffee and then return to the bookstore.
