Second Person Singular

by Sayed Kashua

  The main door to the bathroom opened and a blast of awful techno music burst in and was promptly muffled by the closing of the door.

  “Come on,” he heard someone say, banging on the door, “how long you going to be in there?” This meant he’d have to wait again, until the man gave up and went back outside, because the lawyer did not want anyone to hear him vomit.

  As soon as he left the house, the lawyer felt he had made a mistake. Leaving his crying wife in the room as she retrieved her clothes from the floor, he stood outside the door for a moment. She had asked where he was going, asked him not to leave, repeated again and again that she had no idea what was going on, begged that he explain it all to her, but he had taken his attaché case and left without saying a word. He had to show her that he meant business. She had to understand that something had been broken. But as soon as he left the house, he wanted to return, and if she had come out after him maybe he would have gone back in. All the lawyer really wanted was to have his old life back again and he tried to find a reasonable explanation for her actions, something that would set his mind at ease, something he could live with. He refused to believe the worst and began thinking of possible alibis for her.

  Starting up the car, he hoped she would not flee. The lawyer was scared that when he came back home, in an hour or two, he’d find that she was no longer there. That she’d taken the kids and some clothes and gone to her parents’ house. Maybe her lover would drive them. Now that she knew her illicit love had been exposed, what was to stop her from calling her lover? Maybe that’s exactly what she was doing at this moment, talking to him on the phone, bawling, but also reveling in the drama, feeling like her life had finally started to look like those Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese soap operas she loved. And he—being just as stupid as she—would speak the kinds of syrupy words that were supposed to calm her, promising to take care of her, to watch out for her, to lay his life down on the line for her. Let her go off with whoever she wants, the lawyer said to himself, wondering about the complex character of this lover who was learned in art and literature and Egyptian sap.

  Before even pulling out of the garage, the lawyer called his wife. Not to talk, but to make sure that her line was not busy. He let it ring twice and hung up. It wasn’t busy. Then he thought she might be talking to her lover on the landline and he called that number, too, waited for it to ring once, then hung up and pulled out. She called right back, undoubtedly having seen his missed call. But he, of course, did not answer.

  He drove slowly and tried to piece together the chain of events. The moment she came home, the look on her face when she told him about the battery on her phone. Had she planned everything? Was she that devious? He’d known her for seven years and had never noticed anything that would lead him to believe that she could plot her steps so cunningly. He recalled social events that she attended alone, parties she had said were work-related, visits to friends’ houses. Those were a weekly occurrence. But prior to the discovery of her love letter, the lawyer had never suspected they were anything beyond social calls. Maybe she really was telling the truth. Maybe the battery really had died and maybe she really had gone out with Faten for a cup of coffee and some gossip, as they often did?

  The lawyer breathed deeply before dialing Faten’s number. It wasn’t late at night and he knew he could call the accountant’s house.

  “Hello,” Faten answered. There was a trace of surprise in her voice, not on account of the hour or the identity of the caller, but because hardly anyone besides unsolicited callers used the landlines these days.

  “Good evening,” the lawyer said, trying to make sure his voice didn’t waver.

  “Good evening,” Faten said, her voice more playful.

  “So that’s how it is, ah?” he said, trying to keep his voice as light and friendly as possible. “The two of you leave us at home and go out to cafés?” His heart was pounding.

  “Half an hour is too much for you guys?” Faten said playfully and the lawyer’s body melted with relief.

  “Who is it?” he heard Anton ask.

  “Hold on a second. I’m putting Anton on,” she said, passing the phone to her husband.

  The lawyer had to come up with something. “I was thinking that if the girls can go out for coffee, maybe we could do the same. What are your thoughts on a beer at the Ambassador?” he said, praying that Anton would refuse.

  “I wish,” Anton said, “I just came home now with the kids. I took them out to eat. My dear wife is so busy she didn’t have time to make anything.”

  “I knew I couldn’t count on you,” the lawyer said. “Never mind, we’ll do it next time. Yallah, good night.”

  So she did meet up with Faten. There was no way she would ask one of her friends to lie on her behalf. The lawyer nearly turned his car around and went home, but he still couldn’t come up with a good explanation as to why she had lied about the letter. He drove out of the village and onto the wider streets of the main road, the one that had once linked Jerusalem and Bethlehem. He called Tarik and then realized that Tarik was actually the only person he wanted to see that night. The lawyer knew Tarik would not refuse. He detected a note of happiness in the young lawyer’s voice when he asked him, over the noise of Tarik’s television, “So, where do you usually go to drink?” Once they’d decided the where and the when, the lawyer hit the gas and flew through the empty streets, trying to remember just when it was that the gates to Bethlehem had been locked.

  THE FUTON

  The lawyer opened his eyes and was saddened by the fact that he’d lost the ability to cry. He wanted to go back to the village, to his parents’ house, his real home, not the rentals he’d lived in in Jerusalem and not the house he owned in Beit Safafa, which he had never called home, as though he had been doing nothing but sojourning in the city. He wanted to go back to his old room, the cold room he had shared with his three brothers, the thin mattress and the sheepskin that his mother would put under it for insulation during the winter. He missed the crispness of morning, the walk to school bursting with confidence, the knowledge that his homework was perfect and that it had been written out in elegant handwriting, the kind that made his parents proud. Too bad he hadn’t gone back to the village after school, too bad he hadn’t listened to his father, who begged him to return home.

  The lawyer’s eyes fluttered open and then closed again. Lying in Tarik’s bedroom, he drifted in and out of sleep and thought that the first thing he would do when he gained control of his consciousness would be to send Tarik home, to his village. If it comes down to it, I’ll fire him, and make sure no lawyer in the city takes him on. He was sorry he had stood in Tarik’s way, that he’d convinced him to stay in the city and not go home, and he knew he’d done it in order to prove to himself that he had not been mistaken, that he’d been right to stay in Jerusalem. The lawyer recalled that Tarik had driven him in the lawyer’s car after the long night of drinking and that he’d wanted to take the lawyer back to his house but that he had refused. He did not recall how it happened that Tarik had given him his bed, but he imagined that the young lawyer had insisted that his boss take it, saying that he would sleep on the couch in the hall.

  The lawyer’s throat felt sandy, his head striped with pain. Specific memories of the night dissolved in a murk of shame. He knew he had acted like a complete fool. He had drunk like he never had before and it was very likely he had embarrassed himself like never before, too. Certainly he’d never exposed Tarik to this kind of behavior. But what most concerned him was whether he had let anything slip about his wife’s letter, her lies, the book, and the real reason he had not wanted to go back to his house. The lawyer tried hard to remember the night, and he was able to summon many things, fragments and entire conversations from earlier in the evening, and he was pretty sure he had not said anything specific about his wife, and so he was inclined to let himself off the hook. He remembered pick
ing Tarik up at his house and driving to a pub called Ha’sira and that Tarik had said it was his favorite place on the western side of the city. He also remembered how surprised he had been and the way he had laughed when Tarik led him into the place, which looked less like a nightspot and more like a storage room that stank of beer, sweat, and cigarettes.

  Tarik had apologized and said, “I warned you. I told you it wasn’t your style.”

  Tarik had suggested going to a different place, “somewhere a little cleaner,” but the lawyer insisted on staying. They sat in the corner, around a heavy wood table near the little square of a dance floor, which was still empty because it wasn’t yet ten, and started off the evening with two pints of Taybeh. Tarik said that Ha’sira, the Boat, was one of the strongholds of the young Jerusalem left-wing crowd, and that most of the patrons were students at the city’s art schools—Bezalel, Nissan Nativ, and Sam Spiegel. They sold Palestinian beer on principle.

  “Arab students come here, too.” He said. “Not many, but they come.”

  “Arab girls, too?” the lawyer remembered asking, and Tarik had nodded.

  “Yeah, not a lot, but some,” Tarik said, turning his head toward the door and the young couple that had just entered.

  “Looking for someone?” the lawyer asked, smiling at his friend.

  “Not sure,” Tarik said, and it seemed to the lawyer like he was a little embarrassed by the question, since the two of them had never before discussed personal affairs. But personal affairs were all that mattered to the lawyer at this point and that was why he had called Tarik. He felt blind, or like a deaf man at a loud wedding, as the Arab saying goes, and he wanted to know what it was like for young Arabs these days, especially the girls, what had changed since his days in university. Even then he had felt that a new, accursed wind of sexual freedom was blowing through the campus. The lawyer never partook in any of that, had never slept with an Arab girl other than his wife, even though the university was seemingly beyond the reach of parental and societal restraints, a place where different rules applied and he could have done as he pleased. There was an unwritten rule on campus whereby what happened on campus stayed on campus, and as soon as school was over all was forgotten and returned to its earlier state.

  The pub began to fill up and the lawyer got them each another beer and offered to buy them a round of fine whiskey, but the pub did not have anything that matched that definition. There were no single malts, no malt whiskey at all, and the two of them had to make do with Johnnie Walker Red.

  After the whiskey the lawyer asked Tarik what he thought of marrying a girl who’d had previous sexual partners, and Tarik had responded with a shrug, “I don’t have any problem with it.”

  “I used to think the same way,” the lawyer said.

  “And then what happened?” Tarik asked.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know what I think these days.”

  “You know what,” Tarik said, draining his whiskey and seeming on the verge of a proclamation. “Not only do I not have a problem marrying a nonvirgin, I have a serious problem marrying a girl who is one.”

  “What do you mean?” the lawyer asked, trying to smile encouragingly at Tarik.

  “I want to marry an Arab girl who, for all I care, has fucked half the guys in the city. But only of her own free will. Someone who has used those Arab boys for her own means, slept with them and then dumped them. A wild girl, that’s what I want. That way I’ll know she picked me because she wanted me and not because it was the best of the choices she was offered or because I was the most socially acceptable option. I want to know that this girl chose me after rejecting all the other options.”

  The lawyer, lying in Tarik’s bed now, deep under his comforter, didn’t attach much significance to what Tarik had said. He’d been able to say those things because there was nothing serious in the works, but he knew his parents would hang him by the balls if he did anything that tainted their honor. He remembered also that he had continued to drink whiskey while Tarik had made do with beer. At some point the pub had filled up entirely and everyone there seemed young and attractive to the lawyer. It was around then that his inhibitions drifted off entirely and he became convinced that he was as young and beautiful as they were, and with that knowledge he sauntered onto the dance floor. With all of his heart and soul the lawyer wanted to get a girl. Acting on information he’d amassed while watching television, he knew that the key was in the eyes, and with several long glances he told the girls around him exactly what he was after. On this night he would do what he had never before done. He would cheat on his wife. He’d take whichever woman fell for him to the most expensive hotel in the city. To the King David.

  He looked at the women dancing nearby and got to thinking about how he’d find the perfect one, smart and beautiful and full of life, and already he began planning their lives together. He’d divorce his wife, and no one would say it was because she had an illicit affair. They’d say he was a creep, a skirt chaser, and they’d talk about how he had run off with a girl ten years younger than him. Yes, that’s what he would do, that would be respectable. And if she was the kind of young and bold Arab girl Tarik had talked about, all the better. A girl who’d fucked around, who’d used Arab men like socks, trying them on and tossing them aside. The important thing was that she not lie, he thought, that she be forthright.

  None of the girls around him seemed like the type he was looking for and he waited for her to come through the door and for her to realize at first sight that he was the one, and for her to choose to come dance with him, to choose to get into bed with him, to choose to sleep with him, and he would be an amazing lover, using his trick—lying on top of her, or perhaps the other way around—recalling each and every check he had deposited that month, moving in and out of her as he worked out all of the bank charges, the VAT and the payments to the income tax authorities. And the next morning, when she told him he was the one and only, his friends would be stunned and jealous, especially his wife, the whore. He continued to look around at the girls, feeling he had found what he was looking for and then changing his mind, until he realized that his stares were not being well-received. He remembered now how his confidence had crumbled and how disgust and humiliation had taken its place and how his rooster dance had turned into a tremor in his knees. It was then that he felt his way to the bathroom to vomit his guts out.

  The lawyer moved his head left and right and saw his pants and shirt on the chair in Tarik’s room, alongside the big futon. He jumped out of bed, clad only in his boxers, and his head spun. His leather attaché case was on the chair, too, and he opened it and looked for his phone while making sure not to let his eyes rest on the book or the rest of the evidence. The screen on the phone said that the time was eight in the morning and that he had missed twenty calls, all from his wife. The last one had been made just after two in the morning. The notion that she had been worried was comforting, but the comfort soon turned to fear when he wondered where the calls had been made from and whether she had gone back to her parents’ house. Maybe it wasn’t concern or remorse that had driven her to call but rather the urge to let him know that she had taken the kids and left, and that she just wanted to let him know that she did not want to see him again and that she thought he was a nothing, always had. Maybe she wanted to say that she had been an idiot, spending her best years with a creep like him, that he made her sick, or maybe she’d just hit him over the head with the truth, tell him about her true love, her unblemished lover, his support and devotion. Now that she held all the cards, she could tell him whatever she wanted. What a mistake he had made, the lawyer thought; he, the cold and calculating lawyer, had thrown half his net worth away in one moment of recklessness. By letting his guard down for one moment he had robbed himself of the chance to leave her penniless, to strip her of everything she had, to take away the children. All he had to do was wait one more day, until Sun
day, when the Sharia courts opened, and file for divorce. His only hope was to get up and wait outside the Sharia courts and file for divorce before she made it to the civil court. But she had surely already consulted with her parents and family and was certainly at this very moment seated before some lowly lawyer from the Galilee with a crude accent and together they were, at this moment, wording her plea. Who knew what she might accuse him of? For a moment he really was curious about the nature of her accusations. Perhaps verbal violence, neglect of the children, oppressiveness toward her; perhaps even a charge of physical violence. The closet incident of last night would surely loom large in her allegations, along with jealousy, feverish suspicion, and baseless accusations.

  The lawyer fished around in his pants pocket for a cigarette. His head was still spinning and he was thirsty. But he did not leave the bedroom because he knew that outside, in the hall, Tarik was asleep on the couch and he didn’t want to wake him up this early. He’d done more than enough by giving up his bed and who knew what kind of things he’d endured while hauling his boss up the stairs. The lawyer hoped that at least he had not been noisy and that none of the neighbors had woken up. He opened the bedroom window and saw that the view was of a neighbor’s balcony and that there was an old man sitting out there smoking a cigarette and having a cup of coffee. The neighbor was looking back at the lawyer. The lawyer snapped the curtain closed and pushed his legs into his pants and his arms into his shirt. As he buttoned his pants, he heard the harsh ring of a doorbell. After a moment of silence he heard the hoarse doorbell again, followed by Tarik, who, just woken, grumbled, “Just a second,” and then a confused “Who is it?”