by Sayed Kashua
On one of the top shelves he had a fine collection of hardcover art books. Most of them were photography-related. They looked old, filled with black-and-white photos. I looked through the photos occasionally, but mostly I was interested in the Hebrew fiction. I must have averaged a book every three shifts. Some I liked more than others, but I made a point of reading each one all the way through.
There was nothing for me in Jerusalem. I was an unemployed social worker. The night shift with Yonatan wasn’t really a job and the salary I got barely covered the rent for my little room in Beit Hanina. I knew I wouldn’t be able to spend much more time in this city, and each night I would decide that it was time to go back to the village, to my mother, but when the sun came up and the shift was over, I’d delay my return by another day. Sometimes I’d lean on the windowsill of the open attic window and take in giant gulps of fresh air, telling myself that everything would work out, that a new job was waiting for me right around the corner. After all, there was always a lack of social workers. I’d go to the social services’ main branch, show them my diploma, and ask for a position, this time in the western half of the city. I’d show them that my Hebrew was as good as any native speaker’s and I’d tell them that the problem with the outpatient clinic in the Arab part of town was my colleagues’ miserable work ethic. I’d speak disparagingly of Arabs and the Jewish interviewer would nod; he knew what went on down there. This guy came to social work as a calling, he’d think to himself, not like the rest of the Arabs who studied it just because it was the only department that they could get in to. Everyone knows that Arabs study a trade in university. Everyone knows they want to be doctors or lawyers or accountants or at least registered nurses, and that their fallback options are education and social work. The university application gives you six department options and the Arab applications are all identical. My application had also had medicine on top and education on the bottom.
Once I finish charming the interviewer from social services, I’ll go straight to the Mount Scopus dorms and knock on Leila’s door and apologize for disappearing. I’ll tell her everything I told the interviewer. She’ll definitely identify with what I have to say and will understand how disgusted I was with the outpatient clinic. She’s not like them, she’s different—for some reason I had the feeling that she must have put social work first on her application. I’ll tell her that I love her, that I’m starting my master’s, that I’ll definitely get a PhD and that it won’t take me long to become a professor. I have the grades. I’ll get a faculty position and be able to support her and she’ll be proud of me and won’t be ashamed to take me to her parents and their faces will shine when they learn that their daughter has snagged herself a professor. I’ll tell her that I’m rich, not me personally, but that my family owns lots of land, and that will not be a lie but a statement of fact. Her parents could ask anyone in the Triangle about my father’s family and they’d hear that they were the biggest landowners in the region. True, I’m not in contact with them, but I am a legal heir and any court of law would give me my father’s land. I am the only heir and I could be rich. All I have to do is demand what is rightfully mine. “How long will you sit around idly,” I have heard my mother say, over and over. “It’s your future, your land.”
Tomorrow—that was the conclusion I drew from all of those nighttime thoughts, not now, tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll go to social services main branch. Tomorrow I’ll go home and start to wage my war against my family. Tomorrow I’ll launch the campaign to restore my mother’s pride. Tonight I’ll finish the chapter of this book I’m holding and then I’ll go back to the apartment to be alone.
PASSPORT PHOTO
I learned everything there was to know about Yonatan during those sleepless nights. I read every scrap of paper, every note, and every document that I found in the drawers.
Yonatan was born in 1979. Just like me. In his small, square ID photo he made a point of looking serious, not smiling, and in his eyes I saw a melancholic look that I interpreted as sixteen-year-old sincerity. Mother’s name: Ruchaleh. Father’s name: Yakov. Address: Same. Nationality: Jewish.
That was the first time I’d seen a Jew’s identity card. I had thought that the nationality article on the IDs was something only Arabs had, so they could be separated from the pack, but it turned out that Jews had to be categorized, too.
In one of the lower drawers there were drawings that looked like they might be relics from Yonatan’s kindergarten days. Blue, black, and red lines and a few attempts at circles. His report cards from first through twelfth grade, his class pictures. It was always fun looking for his face in the pictures and once I found it I’d look carefully at the other kids. They were all white and they almost all had European names, some of them Hebraized. Yonatan had gone to the local public school until sixth grade and then transferred to the elite Leyada School on the Givat Ram campus of Hebrew University. He had pretty much straight As all through school. I could see from the report cards that the Jews had a different system than we did. Instead of Arabic they had Hebrew and in third grade they started English; in junior high he took Jewish history and Bible instead of Koran. He also had art and computers, while in the village we had a few subjects that were not on Yonatan’s transcripts, like carpentry and metalwork and Islamic religious studies.
He went to the Jerusalem High School for the Arts and majored in photography. There were shoe boxes in some of the drawers with black-and-white photos and, based on his grades and the comments his teachers left on his work, it was clear that he had done exceptionally well. For his foreign language requirement, he took French.
On one of the top shelves in his closet I found a padded black case that looked like it might hold some kind of medical equipment. I got up on a chair and coaxed the box out. As I shimmied it free, I felt that Yonatan had turned his head and was watching me, as though he’d caught me in the act. But Yonatan was in the same position, face and eyes turned the other way, always away from me, especially when I went through his things and invaded his privacy. The case held Yonatan’s camera. A big camera, the kind journalists had, nothing like the little ones I’d seen at home. I put it on the table, sat with my back to Yonatan, and pulled the camera out of the main compartment. It was heavier than I expected. Alongside it, in their own compartments, were a few different lenses and a few rolls of film. I took one of the round lenses out of the case and tried to fit it onto the camera, cautiously, slowly, till I heard it click into place. I picked up the camera, looked through the viewfinder, and saw nothing but blackness. I checked the lens and saw that I hadn’t removed the cap, and then I looked back through the viewfinder and saw before me a blurry, out-of-focus world.
BLUE LIGHTER
That night, while watching Yonatan, I smoked my first cigarette. On the way from Beit Hanina to Beit Hakerem I stopped in at a little convenience store in Musrara and bought a pack of Marlboro Lights, which was what Majdi smoked. A few seconds later I went back in and asked for a lighter. The shopkeeper took out a clear blue one and sparked it to show me that it worked.
That afternoon Wassim had told me he had decided to go back to the village. He’d gotten a job as a special-ed teacher in a school near Jat and he’d decided to go home, get engaged, build a house alongside his parents, and get married.
“If I stay in the city I’ll never really be able to save up,” he said, and back home he’d have no expenditures at all. Majdi was staying in Jerusalem for the time being, but not in the same apartment. He said he’d rather rent a place in Wadi Joz or Sheikh Jarrah, as close as possible to the courthouse and the office.
“If you want,” Wassim said, “Majdi could find something that would work for both of you.”
I nodded and said nothing. I knew that if something didn’t give soon, I wouldn’t be able to afford the rent much longer. But the knowledge that in two weeks’ time I would no longer have a place didn’t bother me; on the cont
rary, it was calming, liberating. I knew I could always sleep on the sofa bed beside Yonatan.
I got to Yonatan’s an hour early. Osnat opened the door and told me that I was early and that she had finally talked to Ruchaleh about splitting the work into three shifts. She couldn’t go on not seeing her daughter from seven in the morning until seven at night.
“We’re just going to have to find one more caretaker, Yonatan,” she said, caressing his hair before leaving.
I sat on the windowsill in front of the open window and took out a cigarette. I put it between my lips and lit it with the blue lighter. The cigarette went out. I lit it again, and again it went out. I didn’t understand how Majdi and the rest of the smokers in the world managed to burn a cigarette into ash. My first one was just blackened.
I rotated Yonatan in his bed and returned to The Notebook, which I had started the night before. The book was about twin brothers whose mother hides them in their grandmother’s small village during the Second World War. I was completely drawn in by the novel. It was one of the best I’d read and I knew that the night would fly by. The problem was that the book was too thin, too short, and even though I tried to read it as slowly as possible, I finished it within two hours. I rotated Yonatan again and then tried my luck with the cigarettes. I was sure the nights would be easier if I smoked.
I put another cigarette in my mouth and brought the flame close to the tip and when it touched the paper and tobacco, I inhaled deeply. This time it worked and I started to choke. I smothered my cough and felt my eyes water and threaten to pop out of their sockets. I ran into the bathroom, shut the door, and coughed hard until I was able to breathe normally again. I came out of the bathroom with my face washed and saw Ruchaleh waiting for me by the door.
“Is everything okay?” she asked, looking up at the ceiling and then directly at me.
I froze. She did not usually come up to the attic at night.
“Yes, everything’s fine,” I said.
“I don’t want you smoking next to Yonatan,” she said. “Not in the room.”
“I, I’m, ah . . .” I stammered, “I’m not really smoking, I mean I . . .”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “If you want to smoke just go outside to the garden or come down to the living room or the kitchen.” She shut the door behind her and left.
My face was flushed with shame and my attempts to smother another cough. I stood by the window and tried to breathe regularly, gingerly at first and then heartily, taking pleasure in the clean air now being drawn into my lungs. What did she mean, you can smoke in the living room? Where would she be while I was smoking in the living room? What was I supposed to do, go down there and smoke with her? I thought of how she never even really looked at Yonatan. She treated him as though he were transparent, looking over, under, and through him. What did she care if I smoked in his room or not? How was it that she was never by his side, that she preferred to spend money on round-the-clock care so that she didn’t have to spend any time with him.
It was a little past midnight and I was not having any luck putting myself to sleep. I opened Yonatan’s closet and carefully took out the camera. Soon enough I was able to click the lens into place. I looked through the viewfinder and tried to bring the items in the room into focus. When I spotted Yonatan, lying in bed with his back to me, I hit the shutter release and heard it click. The noise scared me. What the hell did I do that for? I looked at the door, waited for Ruchaleh to storm in and throw me out of the house. I quickly took off the lens, laid it back in the case, put the whole thing in the closet, sat down on the sofa, and listened to a long and undisturbed silence.
I tried to start another book, I counted cars passing below, and I listened to one of his Ministry albums twice, but it was still only three in the morning. I have to change my sleeping patterns, I thought. I have to be active during the days and sleep at night. It must be easier to be up during the day than at night. The thoughts that come and assault you during the day seem gentler and less scary than the ones that come at night. What’s the big deal? Why am I not allowed to use the camera and yet allowed to read the books and use the bathroom?
I turned my attention back to the camera and tried convincing myself that there was nothing wrong with what I was doing. Let Ruchaleh come in, who cares? She should be thankful that I’m here doing her job, taking care of her kid for her. She should be grateful that for a few nickels and dimes I come here every night, all night, and that I always come on time, even early. I looked through the viewfinder again, this time toward the street, the Jerusalem landscape at night, and pushed the button. There was no click. I looked at the camera. A little knob showed the number 22 and I realized that that was probably the number of pictures that had been taken. But I’d only taken one, so someone had used this camera before me. I hit the button again, without pointing the camera anywhere in particular, but it did not respond. I remembered that with our old camera at home you had to turn a little plastic wheel each time you took a picture, but there was nothing like that on Yonatan’s camera. I touched all the buttons and in the end decided to pull a lever alongside the knob. I heard the film advance and saw the number 23 on the knob. I pushed the button again and this time it clicked. I pointed the camera at the bookshelf, brought it into focus, and shot. Then I did that again and again until I hit 36 and could no longer pull the lever.
BUS PASS
I didn’t have much to move. The schoolwork, the folders, and all my papers went into the big garbage can outside our apartment building in Beit Hanina. The clothes came with me. I took them little by little in my gym bag, each day another installment, straight up to the attic in Beit Hakerem. I made some room for my things on the top shelf of Yonatan’s closet, up above the camera. I had to stand on a chair to reach my stuff. Within a week all my clothes were in Yonatan’s room. It was embarrassing to see how little I had when compared to the wardrobe of the immobile man I cared for.
At the end of the month, Wassim left the city and moved back to his hometown village and Majdi moved into a place in Wadi Joz along with another lawyer. I was left with no place of my own, but with a pull-out sofa alongside Yonatan’s egg mattress. At first I tried forcing myself to get some sleep during the night shift, knowing that I had no bed to sleep on during the day. I told Osnat that as far as I was concerned she could show up at ten, but she said that would be unprofessional.
I bought a monthly bus pass and spent a lot of the time going from bus to bus, equipped with Yonatan’s Discman and the CDs I chose each morning. They were my company until the next shift.
Sometimes I’d fall asleep on the bus and the drivers would wake me up at the last stop. I always apologized, got off the bus, and waited for another one. Most mornings I was in the Old City, where I’d eat a late breakfast of hummus and fava beans. After that I’d take a bus to Sacher Park and sit down with my book under a tree, passing the hot hours of the day in the shade. Sometimes I’d fall asleep, but not usually. Then I’d walk up to the nearby Nachlaot neighborhood, take a walk through the marketplace, go up King George, down Ben Yehuda, and around to Nahalat Shiv’a. About an hour before my shift started, I’d get a falafel sandwich or two. Half an hour later, I’d take a bus from downtown to Beit Hakerem.
A week of endless wandering was enough. I realized there was no way I could go on like that. This was in early September and I knew that soon Jerusalem would start to get cold. What would I do then? What would I do when it rained? At first I thought I’d just go to the university and spend my time in the library, but I didn’t want to run into old acquaintances from school or the guys from the office or, least of all, Leila. At some point during the day I always thought about going back to my mother’s house, but that notion retreated under inspection.
It didn’t take me long to get back in the habit of sleeping at night. At first for just an hour or two, but within a week I was up to four hours a night.
The rest of the time I soothed myself with music, books, and, especially, the camera. I wished I hadn’t burned through all the film on the first night and that I could see the pictures I had taken. I played with the camera every night, putting pictures into focus and pushing the button even though I knew nothing would happen. I wasn’t sure what you did with the film that was already spent, how you took it out and got it developed. One morning, though, feeling audacious, I snuck the camera into my bag and took it out of the apartment for the first time.
“Wow,” said the shopkeeper in the Armenian Quarter as he sipped his coffee, “this is an excellent camera. Russian. They don’t make them like this anymore.” He gripped the camera, looked through the viewfinder, and started to mess with the lens and a few other dials. “There’s nothing like a 50mm lens,” he said, “it’s the best. No zoom, no nonsense, just like in real life.” I told him I had bought the camera from some Jewish guy and that I was still trying to figure it all out. “Does it still have film in it?” he asked, looking at the knob and the numbers.
“Yes,” I said, nodding.
“Do you know how to take it out?”
“No,” I said, trying to smile. “I mean, I didn’t want to ruin it.”
“Here, look,” the Armenian said, pushing a button on the left side of the the camera and swiveling a little handle. “You have to keep this pressed the whole time,” he said, showing me the button, “and you swivel this all the way till the end. Here, listen.” We both stayed quiet and waited to hear the sound of the film safely back in its roll. Then he pulled a little lever and the back of the camera popped open, the roll of film visible. “That’s it. You take it out like this. This roll’s black and white. You want it developed?”
“Yes,” I said, and the Armenian popped the roll into an envelope and wrote my name on it.
“It’ll be ready tomorrow,” he said, to my great disappointment. I had thought it would be just a matter of minutes.
