by Sayed Kashua
“If I saw him on the street, I wouldn’t recognize him,” she had said, and the lawyer knew you did not have to recognize someone in order to love them. The lawyer realized that she had settled—for him. What would have happened had this Amir not run off? He remembered the early weeks of their courtship and felt humiliated. She wasn’t thinking about me at all, he thought, she was waiting for someone else. She was stimulated not by my presence, but by his absence.
Amir Lahab, the lawyer typed into the search engine, at first in Hebrew, which read it as Lahav, and he found thousands of links. Designers, lawyers, carpenters—there was a long list. He typed it in along with the words social worker and got nothing relevant. Still, he clicked on several links and was surprised to find that all of the Amir Lahavs were Jews.
Then he typed the name in Arabic and found that most of the results were from different countries. The ones that were from Israel did not seem remotely related to social work.
The lawyer reverted to the tried-and-true method of locating an Arab in Israel—using the family name. He typed Lahab into the Yellow Pages search engine and found that they were a big family in Tira, not in Jaljulia as Samah had said. In Jaljulia there were no Lahabs at all. Both villages are in the Triangle, and Tira was very close to the lawyer’s own hometown. He’s from the Triangle? the lawyer wondered. My adversary is a villager? The man who had read more books than he, the one his wife had preferred, was a lousy villager, just like him? The lawyer tried to calm himself. Say she really did love someone before him? Say she had fallen for one of the boys in high school? Would he be jealous then, too? Wasn’t he just being primitive? What had happened to his progressive ideas? What happened to women’s rights? What about his daughter? Hadn’t he promised himself a million times that she would grow up differently? That he would shield her from societal expectations and norms and that he would raise her as a liberated woman?
The problem was that the lawyer knew he was not willing to be different. If it was common, if his friends and family members were married to women who had all had prior relationships, that would be one thing, then he could deal with it. But he was not willing to be the only joker in the group. And anyway, the lawyer wondered, why had she hid this relationship? If she believed she did nothing wrong, then why had she lied? Was she embarrassed of what she’d done, did she feel it was wrong, so wrong that she had hid the truth from her husband, and if that was the case, then why should he accept it now?
The lawyer found no Amir Lahab in the telephone directory. He chose one of the Lahabs in the phone book from Tira and called from the unidentified number in the office. A child, he couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, answered the phone.
“Who is this?” the little voice asked. “Who’s speaking?”
The lawyer asked to speak with the child’s father and the little voice giggled and handed the phone to the mother.
“Hello.”
“Salaam alaikum,” the lawyer said, and the mother’s voice changed when she realized it was not someone she knew.
“Alaikum a-salaam. How can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Amir Lahab,” the lawyer said.
“Who? There’s no one here by that name. I think you have the wrong number.”
“I’m a lawyer from Jerusalem, and I thought you might be able to help me find him. Maybe he’s a family member?”
“Hold on,” the woman said, and she yelled, “There’s a lawyer on the line and he says he’s looking for someone named Amir Lahab from our family. You know any Amirs?”
The lawyer could hear her husband walking toward her and taking the phone.
“Hello, who’s speaking?”
“Salaam alaikum,” the lawyer said, using the greeting he always used when he wanted to set someone at ease.
“Alaikum a-salaam. Who’s speaking, please?”
“I’m a lawyer,” the lawyer said, and gave the man a name he had made up on the spot. “I’m handling an inheritance case and I’m looking for someone by the name of Amir Lahab. I thought he might be from your extended family and that perhaps you could help me find him.”
“Amir,” the husband said. “I know an Amir, but he’s a little kid. In first grade.”
“No, that wouldn’t be right.”
“Oh,” the husband said, “maybe it’s that Amir, the son of . . . wait a second.” He called to his wife, “Do you remember what’s her name’s son, you know, Abu Hasan’s daughter, the widow, the one who left, what’s her name?”
“Meissar?” he heard the woman say. “I think she had a kid but I don’t remember his name.”
“It’s possible,” the husband said. “Might be him. If I’m not mistaken, he doesn’t live in Tira anymore. They left when he was a kid, he and his mother, there was a whole big mess and they left. Might be the guy you’re looking for.”
“I see. So they don’t live in Tira?”
“If it’s them, I really don’t know where they are. I think they may have moved to Jaljulia back in the day, the mother and the son. But I’m not sure.”
“To Jaljulia,” the lawyer said. “Thank you so much for your help, sir. Thank you.” The lawyer hung up the phone and typed Jaljulia into the space on the Web directory where it asked for place of residence. He didn’t find any Amirs but he did see a listing for a Meissar La’ab. He knew that was the person he was looking for, even though the name was slightly different. The Israeli authorities regularly bastardized Arab names.
The lawyer dialed the number. His heart thumped and he tried to organize his thoughts. What if he’d moved back in with his mother? What if he answered? He decided he’d hang up immediately if he heard a male voice. Maybe he’d ask, “Amir?” and then, if the guy said something like, Yes, who is this?, the lawyer would end the conversation.
“Hello,” the lawyer said to the voice on the other end of the line, but it was a recorded message: “The number you have reached is no longer in service.”
95 OCTANE UNLEADED
What exactly was he planning on doing? What would he do if he found out where Amir Lahab lived? The roads were relatively empty on Shabbat and he could make the drive down to Jaljulia in around half an hour. The lawyer felt the need to make the trip even though he wasn’t sure he’d get out of the car. He couldn’t stay in the office and he had the feeling that a drive on the open road would do him good. Sometimes driving alone in the new car had a therapeutic effect.
There were only a few cars waiting at the light on the way out of Jerusalem. A picnic Saturday, the lawyer thought, as he looked over at the family in the car to his right. He liked it when drivers eyed his car, liked it when he spotted women looking at him through their sunglasses, trying to guess what the rich man in the luxury car did for a living. But right now all he felt was jealousy for the family to his right. He saw the woman talking away at her husband, maybe even arguing, and he recalled the way his wife would hold her silence for long stretches of time when they were in the car together. She could keep quiet for hours, and it always pissed him off.
“Say something,” he’d plead whenever they were on their way to his or her parents or just en route to some fancy hotel with the kids for the weekend. And she’d always respond, “What do you want me to say?”
The lawyer hit the gas and headed away from Jerusalem, leaving the family car far behind. They want a show? He thought to himself, I’ll give them a show, and he remembered his first time on the highway with his daughter. She was a month old and his wife was in the back with the baby and the lawyer drove more slowly than he ever had in his life. He was sweating and his sweaty hands grew slippery on the wheel and he was afraid of losing control of the car. He stuck exclusively to the right side of the road and pumped the brakes whenever he had to slow down. He despised the car he had at the time, felt it was not to be trusted, that at any moment a tire could blow out, th
at the brakes could betray him at any turn, sending him and his family flying off the cliff. The lawyer shook his head free of those thoughts now and played with the buttons on the steering wheel, looking for talk radio, anything but music, anything that would take his mind off the matter at hand. But he found nothing.
What was the point in going to Jaljulia? The lawyer was not sure. Maybe it was his wife’s innocence that he sought. Maybe he wanted to know that the woman with whom he had not shared a bed for many years still loved him, even though he was not sure to what extent he loved her. Maybe he wanted to breathe life into the embers of his love—he’d read of such things—but he knew that at best the embers were extinguished and at worst had never been lit in the first place.
Or maybe he sought to retrieve his own honor. What was it that he wanted? To know that she’d cheated on him or to go back to living the way he had before he found the note? Maybe it was for the best that his life had been disrupted. Maybe it was a sign from above, he thought, even though he had never been one for celestial signs. Maybe it was time to pack his things and go, maybe it was time to stop sleeping alone in his daughter’s bed and start fresh, do everything differently, pick the kind of woman who would, as he imagined in his most melancholic moments, finally light the fire of love within him. The lawyer recalled an article he’d come across in which some important psychologist had said that love meant loving someone more than you loved yourself. Someone that completed you. Love is the ability to sacrifice for the object of your love, was the psychologist’s point. While reading the article, the lawyer had asked himself if those were his feelings toward his wife, and it pained him to admit that they were not. She did not complete him. On the contrary, he felt that married life limited him—financially, because he had a family to support, and professionally, because without the need to support them he might have gone back to school and pursued an advanced degree, perhaps a PhD, and become a professor, as he’d once wanted. At any rate, he didn’t want to sacrifice anything for her, that much he was sure of. But what did she lack anyway? he asked himself all of a sudden. After all, I give her whatever she wants. She has never wanted for anything. He remembered that the real matter at hand was her love for him, and not his for her. Does she sacrifice for me? the lawyer asked himself, and responded that it was not so.
Maybe at some point he really would come across what they call a soul mate. Maybe now that he was older, more organized, more aware of his wants, more in control of his thoughts, he would be able to discern between temporary lust and sustainable love. Maybe now he would be able to find a woman he could sleep next to every night, maybe he would feel the warmth of her body seeping into his bones, granting him a tranquility he had never known. The lawyer saw before his eyes a faceless woman, but he knew she had the face of an angel and she slept peacefully in his arms, her face smooth, a happy sheen across her cheeks. He imagined them sleeping harmoniously together, completing one another in their sleep, too, wrapped in a comfortable embrace, moving their bodies with complete synchronicity, always fitting together. For a moment he felt a rush of warmth in his heart. Maybe all of those romantic poets were right? Maybe he shouldn’t have been so dismissive of their words? Maybe he shouldn’t have been so skeptical of what was clearly a sublime sensation?
She, on the other hand, had never been skeptical. She was willing to lie, to live in sin, to risk her good name, the name of her family, the future of her children, all for a love she could not get from her husband. For a fleeting moment the lawyer admired his wife for her courage but the admiration quickly faded into hatred and contempt. His wife—she wasn’t smart, the lawyer thought; at best she was a functioning airhead. A miserable little Arab woman whose guides in life were love songs and filth-ridden melodramas. Only the lower classes were capable of falling blindly in love after adolescence, the lawyer thought, only the poor, the uneducated and unenlightened, could fall helplessly in love. Like animals, the lawyer said to himself, acknowledging, not for the first time, that there was no bridging the divide between their backgrounds, between where he came from and where he had found her. You must have to be primitive in order to continue believing in the delusion called love. It’s a lot like religion, the lawyer thought, it’s easy for them, the down and out, to embrace it.
He surprised himself with these thoughts. If that’s how I perceive her, he thought, then she must be aware of it, and for a moment he practically condemned himself for her decision to seek solace in someone else’s arms. But that’s not how it is, he said to himself, cutting the chain of thought, by God that’s not how it is. He might be busy, he might not love her as he used to, but he did not ignore her or forsake her or make her life unduly hard. She was just as preoccupied with life as he was. How could she ever find time to think, strive, desire? Who even had time to cheat?
His wife had a good life, he concluded, and mine isn’t too bad either. It had been a little bit boring, but by no means dreadful.
A sign missing a few of its letters in Hebrew and Arabic welcomed him to Jaljulia. The lawyer decided to stop at the gas station at the entrance to the village. He’d never been to Jaljulia but he had known, ever since he had been a kid growing up nearby, that it was even worse off than the surrounding Arab villages, which were the kinds of places he learned later in life to call disenfranchised. In college, for instance, he had never once met a student from Jaljulia.
“Hello,” a middle-aged attendant said as he wiped his hands on a towel and walked out of his office. “Ninety-five unleaded?” he asked, and the lawyer nodded and said, “Yes, fill it up please.”
“How much does a car like this cost these days?” the attendant asked as he shoved the nozzle into the tank.
“Not sure,” the lawyer said. “A lot.”
“Great ride, though,” the attendant said. “You’re not from here, are you?”
“No,” the lawyer said, and he found himself adding, without much forethought, “Actually I came down here to look for an old friend from school. I haven’t seen him in six or seven years.”
“Who?” the attendant asked. “Someone from here? From Jaljulia?”
“Yeah,” the lawyer said. “His name’s Amir Lahab.”
“Lahab?” the attendant asked, screwing up his face. “You sure he’s from here? There’s no Lahab family in this village. Not that I know of.”
“No big deal,” the lawyer said. “Could be I got confused. I was just driving past and I thought of him. I might’ve gotten it wrong. Maybe he’s from somewhere else.”
“Baher!” the attendant yelled, turning his head toward the office.
“What?” a young man asked, coming out of the office and wiping his mouth with a napkin as he chewed.
“Is there someone named Lahab in this village? Is that what you said, Lahab?”
“Amir.”
“You know an Amir Lahab?” the old attendant asked just as the tank was filled.
“Ahh,” the young guy said, approaching the car. “Lahab? There’s that teacher, you know, the one from Tira, you know who I mean . . .”
“Ah, yeah, yeah,” the older man said. “That’s her son he’s looking for?”
“Could be,” the young man said. “She had a kid in school. A few years older than me. He went to college. Could be him.”
The lawyer knew it was.
“What could someone like her ever do for someone like you?” the young man asked.
At that, the older attendant erupted. “Shut up and get out of here,” he hissed at the young man, then turned to the lawyer, afraid that somehow the young man had gotten them into trouble. “The kid is an idiot. I’m sorry. Don’t believe a word he says. I’m telling you, this village, may God forgive its inhabitants, they don’t let people live their own lives. I’m telling you that your friend was raised in a very good home. And if anyone in this village wants to tell you differently, then I’m telling you t
hat he’s a liar and a son of a liar. No one will tell you that they ever saw that boy’s mother do anything wrong.”
“I’m sure. He was always a great kid,” the lawyer said, “that Amir.”
“What did I tell you?” the attendant said, shutting the gas tank. “Anyway, she rents from um-Bassem. Go up the hill,” the attendant said, pointing straight ahead, “and take a right by the Maccabi health clinic. There’s a sign with a Magen David on it, you’ll see it; anyway, take a right there. Go about a hundred yards more and ask for um-Bassem’s house.”
All the Arab villages look exactly the same, the lawyer thought to himself as he cruised through the streets. The local councils usually invest money on the entrance to the city and let the rest of the place rot, their main concern that there be a nice place for the head of the council to take his next campaign picture. All Arab villages have some kind of traffic circle near the entrance to the village and there’s always a pale-looking palm tree rooted there. The deeper into the village you go, the narrower the streets, until they turn to dirt, thin and dusty in summer and thick and oozing with mud in winter. The lawyer followed the gas attendant’s directions, driving slowly, attracting stares from the pedestrians. He stopped alongside a neighborhood convenience store. Two older men sat outside. He took off his sunglasses and opened the window. “Salaam alaikum,” he said, playing up his country accent. The lawyer didn’t need their help but he figured he’d talk to them to quiet the neighbors’ unspoken apprehension and curiosity.
