by Sayed Kashua
“Before dawn,” he said, looking at his watch. “But we waited for Bassem, may God help him. We’ve been telling him for a week to come immediately and say good-bye, but he hasn’t. What kind of job is it that keeps you from parting with your own mother? He just got here a second ago from the airport.”
“Amir,” I heard my mother’s voice behind me. She came out of um-Bassem’s courtyard toward me, her head covered with the colorful scarf she wore when visiting a mourner’s tent. Her eyes were puffy and red and she nearly hugged me but the look on my face and the way I shifted my gaze to the men in the road deterred her and she merely stroked my arm.
“Do you have laundry?” she asked, taking my little bag, probably hoping I did so that she could do something for me. “Are you hungry?”
“No,” I said, and I followed her into the house.
“How are you?” she asked, once the door closed and the two of us were alone.
“I’m fine.”
“Poor um-Bassem. But it’s better this way. More rest for her and for her daughters. She didn’t eat during these last months. Can I get you anything?”
“No, thank you, I had a falafel in Petach Tikva.”
“It’s good you came.”
“Yeah.”
“They’ve been waiting for Bassem all day. He just showed up now.”
“I heard.”
“So everything’s okay with you? Work?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine.”
“You have your own washing machine in the apartment?”
“Yes,” I said, and I knew she was looking at my shirt, which I hadn’t worn in over four years but had picked out of the closet that morning so that I could wear something that wouldn’t look strange to my mother and her neighbors.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” I said, walking toward the bathroom, trying to steady the tremble that had risen up from the balls of my feet to my knees and chest. “I have money.”
From the bathroom I could hear the teary voices of the women as they parted with um-Bassem. “Say hi to Daddy,” I heard the oldest daughter wail, and I assumed that the washing ceremony had been completed and that the coffin was being walked out of the house in the hands of the men.
“Amir,” my mother said, knocking on the bathroom door after a few minutes. “Amir, the funeral procession is leaving.”
Several dozen men trailed behind the coffin, which was carried to a nearby mosque on the shoulders of a few young men. The pace was brisk, as though everyone wanted to get this over with. Bassem looked a little tired but he smiled warmly whenever someone shook his hand and consoled him.
“Allah yirakhma,” I said, too, as I shook his hand.
“Ta’ish,” he said, and I could tell from his face that he didn’t recognize me.
A young man near me answered his phone, which rang with the opening chords of Umm Kulthum’s “Enta Omri.” “I’m at a funeral right now,” he whispered into the phone, “I’ll call you later. Um-Bassem. Yes, Bassem. Died today. Ta’ish, ’bye.”
A few dozen more men waited at the entrance to the mosque. The worshippers followed the body inside and began to say the prayer for the dead before burial. I stayed outside and tried to keep my eyes on the ground so that I wouldn’t see familiar faces.
“Hello, Amir,” said Nabil, a former classmate. “How are you?” he said, coming up to me and shaking my hand.
“Good, thanks.”
“Where’ve you been? We never see you around,” he said.
“In Jerusalem.”
“Oh, why? You still in school?”
“No. I graduated.”
“Wow, you were always one of the smart kids, weren’t you? So, do you make any money with this college job?”
“Alhamdulillah.” Thank God.
“So why don’t you take your mother with you? Poor thing, I feel bad for her, all alone in the village, isn’t it a shame?” He smiled and looked around to see if anyone else had heard him, if anyone else was laughing along with him. “You know, as it says in the Koran, ‘show compassion for your parents.’”
“What about you?” I asked in a dry tone, signaling that I really didn’t want to hear anything more from him.
“Walla, as our Jewish cousins say, blessed be God,” he said, kissing the back of his hand and thrusting it up toward the sky.
Nabil graduated elementary school without knowing how to read. Of the forty kids in our grade, there were ten or so who were completely illiterate. The majority just dropped out of school. Some went to trade school, with the best of the bunch learning car mechanics and the rest going into carpentry and metalwork. I couldn’t remember which route Nabil had taken, if any at all.
He leaned against the outside wall of the mosque and chatted quietly with his friends, occasionally stealing a glance in my direction. Nothing had changed. They were the same old kids, only larger. I could still see them at recess, sitting on the dilapidated benches and laughing at me.
“You got a hundred only ’cause your mother’s been going down on the principal,” they’d say. Or, “If your mother wasn’t a teacher in this school we would fuck you up bad.”
I’d often find notes with similar messages in my school bag, spelling mistakes and all. My mother was a teacher in the village’s only junior high. She never taught one of my classes, but that didn’t matter. My mother was different from the other teachers at the school. The kids cursed out all of the other teachers, ridiculed them behind their backs, but they would never dare tarnish their honor. My mother’s honor, all the kids knew, was free for the taking.
That’s how I learned that my mother used to show her tits to all the kids in the class; that my mother wore red bras and short skirts; that my mother was ousted from her village for whoring; that at night, after I went to sleep, my mother hosted all sorts of men in her bed; that she smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol; that she collaborated with the authorities; that she slept with policemen; that she slept with the principal; that they did it in the school library; that she’d been seen dancing at nightclubs in Petach Tikva; that she was sleeping with the math teacher, the history teacher, and the supervisor; that on the class trip she’d been seen peeing in the bushes and that she, for a fact, wore no underwear.
“Don’t believe a single word they say,” um-Bassem would tell me, even though I never told her what the other kids said. “Your mother is more honorable than all the rest of this trashy village. You must know that.”
Then, in junior high, I started to pray. I fasted during Ramadan and went to the religion lessons that our Koran teacher gave at the local mosque. During junior high I didn’t miss a single Friday prayer service. I became religious. My mother was a good mother. The proof: her son was a devout Muslim. I begged her to cover her hair, “For me,” for her to pray, at least on Friday, to stop smoking, to put in for a transfer to a different school, to transfer me to a different school in a different village. I didn’t mind taking the bus every morning or even walking to Kfar Kassem so long as it meant that I wouldn’t have to suffer kids like Nabil, leaning against the school walls and laughing at me.
I couldn’t figure out how it was that these overgrown kids could still intimidate me. You idiots, you assholes, if only you knew what I know. If only you knew what you look like to people who don’t live in these little hole-in-the-wall towns. If only you could see how lame your lives are. If you had even the slightest awareness of your social status, you’d lock yourself up in your house and never come out. The peak achievements of your lives are to be in charge of a construction site or to make your Jewish clients happy. Compassion is what you evoke in me, you and your big cars and your fancy houses. None of you will ever manage to escape from the trap in which you were born; none of you will ever venture beyond the boundaries of your village, boundaries that were drawn by another man’s hand. And
especially you, the men, who think you’re so tough and manly, not scared of a thing, your voices so deep and strong they can stop a whole neighborhood in its tracks, you are the very essence of human trash. Keep on prancing around with your guns, keep on puffing up your chests while you do the Debka dance at weddings, keep on marrying virgins and let them preserve your honor and your male delusions. I know things you will never know; I’ve seen worlds you will never see. I’ve gone to places where you and your children will never be wanted. Yeah, me, the son of your whore, I will mock you to your face. I have nothing but disdain for you. Only I know what you’re worth.
“What are you smiling about?” I heard Nabil’s voice nearby. He stood before me, head cocked to the side.
“What? Oh, me, nothing,” I said, and um-Bassem came out of the mosque just in time to save me. “Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar,” I mumbled, following the coffin with my head bowed, and I knew then that as soon as the ceremony was over I’d grab my bag and leave.
GUEST ROOM
Over the past four years Yonatan’s condition had gotten worse. On the day that Ruchaleh paid my tuition for my freshman year at Bezalel, he was taken to the hospital.
“You’ll pay me back in installments,” she said when I refused to take the money, and she suggested subtracting five hundred shekels a month from my paycheck, even though we both knew that didn’t even cover half of the monthly tuition fees.
That night I hadn’t been able to feed Yonatan, or maybe it was as Ruchaleh said later at the hospital, that he refused to eat. He spit up the water substitute and his gelatinous meal, and when I came in to relieve Osnat, she said he had done the same with his breakfast and lunch. If this persists, she said, we’ll have to take him to the hospital, even though he doesn’t have a fever.
That night something changed in Yonatan. He reacted differently to our attempts to dress him, change him, moisturize him. Strange though it may sound to say about an irresponsive body, I felt that his skin had thickened and his bones and muscles had hardened.
When he didn’t ingest a thing during dinner, I told Ruchaleh that I didn’t think we should wait any more.
“He’s trying to kill himself,” Ruchaleh said later that night, in the waiting room outside the ER. That was the first time I saw her cry.
The doctors did blood tests, urine tests, a lung X-ray, and a CT scan and found nothing out of the ordinary.
“So he’s in good shape, then?” Ruchaleh quipped, but the Arab resident who’d given her the results didn’t laugh. “Arabs aren’t too strong on the sense of humor front, are they?” she asked me afterward.
In the small hours of the night Ruchaleh and I returned home. Yonatan remained in the hospital for a few more days, for observation.
On the way back Ruchaleh tried to sing along with the radio but she ended up just shaking her head back and forth.
“Are you sleeping at home?” she asked out of the blue, “or are you going to sleep over at that girl’s house?”
Her question shocked me because I had not told her or anyone else about the girl. “What girl? I don’t have a girl,” I said, and Ruchaleh smiled and again tried to sing along with the radio but she got hooked onto a different song, one that wasn’t playing, and all the way home she kept mumbling the lyrics, “Hug me hard, kiss me till it hurts, and the sun won’t set.”
When we got home, Ruchaleh said she needed a drink and she poured herself a glass of whiskey, neat, and drained it in a single gulp. Then she asked me if I wanted anything to drink.
“Yes,” I said, “but something else, if you have.” Up until that night the only alcohol I’d ever had was a beer now and again with Majdi, whenever he brought a bottle or two home, and red wine, occasionally, when he was given a bottle from the hotel as a Rosh Hashanah gift.
“I don’t have beer,” Ruchaleh said, taking a bottle of white wine out of the fridge. “White wine is usually chilled,” she said, and she showed me how to pull out the cork. Then she drank two glasses while I struggled with one.
“Do you even know how it happened?” she asked me, pouring herself another whiskey. I was silent and I think she interpreted that as a no. We’d never spoken about it. The accident, was how Osnat and I referred to it and that was all that Osnat knew. Yonatan had been in an accident.
“One fine day I came home and found him hanging from the ceiling,” she said, nodding her head and throwing back her whiskey. “I hugged his feet,” she said, demonstrating with her arms. “Then I got up on the bed. I grabbed his legs with one arm and tried to lift him with the other, putting all his weight on me as I tried to free his neck from the noose. Did you know that? Did you know that’s what Yonatan did to me?”
She took out a cigarette for herself and offered me one, too. I poured another glass of wine and watched the cigarette shake between her fingers.
“What do you say?” she said, trying to take the edge off the melancholy. “Would you do that to your mother?”
“No,” I said, smiling a bit for her benefit. “But I’d do it to myself.”
That was the first night I didn’t sleep up in the attic. Ruchaleh told me that she hated that room so much she could barely bring herself to walk into it, that she had an involuntary response upon entry, her eyes darting toward the ceiling, where there had been a light fixture, and where she found her son’s body, swaying in the air. He had been hospitalized in Israel for six months and was then flown to the United States, Belgium, and Switzerland. They—that is, Ruchaleh and Yakov, Yonatan’s father a professor of comparative literature at Berkeley—were never married, but they had lived together while Ruchaleh studied and, later, worked in Berkeley. When Yonatan was three, they split up and she came back to Israel. Yakov was all right, she said. Boring and a bastard, a long story, but nothing terrible. The truth is he really was all right, maybe, she couldn’t remember. Back when Yonatan was healthy, he would come visit them in Jerusalem twice a year, on Christmas and Passover, and would stay with them.
“This was his room,” Ruchaleh said, opening the door to the room that Osnat and I called the guest room, even though we’d never seen a guest. “You can sleep here tonight,” she said, and then pointed at the closet. “There are sheets on the top shelf and, by the way, I’d be happy if you made this your room. When you’re not with Yonatan, that is, on your days off from school or whatever. Instead of wandering around the streets like some homeless Arab you could just stay here. And do me a favor,” she said before leaving the room, “don’t get any big ideas in your head, okay? If you want to hang yourself, do it in your mother’s house in Jaljulia.”
THE FEEDING TUBE
Yonatan came home from the hospital with a feeding tube, a kind of straw that was anchored to the wall of his stomach on one end and dangled out of his right nostril on the other. Osnat gave me a brief tutorial and from that day on we started injecting his food into the tube. I learned how to extract the tube, how to clean it, and how to make sure it was not clogged. I’d shoot a syringe full of air into the tube and put a stethoscope to his stomach, listening for air bubbles.
Yonatan was in and out of the hospital over the next four years. He had infections of the intestines and the lungs, aspirational pneumonia, urinary tract infections, lung failures. Everything became more difficult. For some reason he also started to bleed whenever I shaved him, even with an electric shaver. I had the feeling that he didn’t want me touching him. It was around then that Osnat told me she was considering leaving and looking for a different job, one where she could be of more use. “Someplace a little less frustrating,” she said, and I asked her to please stay on a little longer, promised her that I would take care of all the more difficult tasks—the showers, the haircuts, the dressing and undressing and diaper changing—and that I’d do it all before she came in or after she went home.
“That doesn’t sound fair,” she said, but I insisted, explain
ing that Yonatan had become a friend, an ally, and that I would do anything to make sure that he did not have to part with a loving caretaker like herself, that I would do anything to ease him through his last days.
“Let’s make it clear to him that we’re not abandoning him,” I remember myself saying, and Osnat had no idea that what bothered me about the arrival of a new caretaker was that he or she might start asking questions about my relationship with Ruchaleh and with Yonatan, both of which had long since strayed beyond the ordinary.
The guest room became my room and I no longer slept up in the attic with Yonatan. After classes at Bezalel, I’d rush home by bus and relieve Osnat, who had started taking sociology classes at the Open University, mostly out of boredom.
“I feel completely unnecessary,” she said, even though, despite the terms of our unwritten agreement whereby I would do all of the hard chores, she continued to do most of the work herself.
As Yonatan’s body began to decay, it became more and more difficult to rotate him on the bed. Putting him on his stomach was never a good idea, certainly not without supervision, and once he was hooked up to the feeding tube it became downright impossible. He could no longer be placed on the special wheelchair for showers and so we began laying out rubber sheets and giving him sponge baths on the bed. Osnat, who had preached the importance of speaking positively around Yonatan and of playing him his favorite music and reading to him from his favorite books, now spoke openly about his dire situation. She stopped greeting him and parting with him each time she came and left the attic and instead spoke only with me, ignoring him entirely. I found her behavior embarrassing and usually after she left I would apologize to Yonatan, sometimes telling him outright and sometimes just letting him know with nothing more than a look.
Aside from the occasional evening when Ruchaleh would have friends over for dinner, the two of us ate together. At first she would come up to the attic and knock on the door and say she didn’t want to eat alone, but later she said she was sick of calling me to dinner like a little kid, and so I would come down on my own, unbidden, at the usual time.
