by Sayed Kashua
“Yonatan?” the clerk asked.
“Yes.”
“I was sure that you weren’t Israeli,” she said, paralyzing me.
“Why? Is something wrong?”
“There was no reason to be so nice to that lady,” she said under her breath, taking one of my passport photos and starting to fill out the details. “People here have no shame. Just say, ‘It’s my turn.’ What, you don’t know how to deal with people around here? Only force, that’s the only language they understand.”
On the way out of the office, with a temporary ID card under the name Yonatan Forschmidt in my pocket, I dropped a renewal application for Amir’s ID in the mailbox. Attached to the paperwork were two pictures of Yonatan that I had taken myself and touched up on the computer. Everything would stay the same, only the pictures were swapped.
I left the nationality line blank on Amir’s application, as many Arabs did now that it was no longer mandatory. This had to be done to prove that all citizens of Israel are equal, Arab and Jew alike, but once it went into effect, a new number code was introduced to all official ID documents and it told whoever needed to know the ethnicity of the card-holder. After all, names were not enough: Arabs and Jews sometimes had the same names—Amir, for example—and it had become trendy of late for Arabs to give their kids Jewish names, or “universal names” as they preferred to call them.
I was not worried about updating Amir’s ID via the mail. Swapping Yonatan’s picture for my own would not arouse anyone’s suspicion: even the lowliest clerk at the Ministry of the Interior knows that no one in this country wants to be an Arab.
OXIMETER
Late that same Thursday night I called Noa.
“If you’re not working,” she said, “then I’m free. It’ll be the first time I get to see you after nightfall. I was starting to think you turned into a pumpkin at midnight.”
I hailed a cab on Herzl Boulervard and took it to her house on the corner of Agrippas and Nissim Behar in Nachlaot. I went up three flights of stairs to the apartment Noa liked calling “the studio.” She’d moved in during the summer between junior and senior year. Before that she’d lived with two roommates in a bigger apartment in the area, but that came to an end when one of the roommates began inviting over a rabbi with a white kippah and a pervert’s grin. Noa said she hated all the Rainbow and Shantipi crap.
She did not hit the India travel circuit after the army. “Even if I had gone to the army, I wouldn’t have gone to India,” she said. She had a hard time understanding how it was possible to beat the shit out of Arabs all through army service and then run straight into an ashram and feel all pure. Nor had she gone to South America. After high school she went to Europe, then she spent a month in New York City, and then she started school in Jerusalem.
She hated her hometown, Hod HaSharon. The place is disgusting, she said. Afterward she lived in Ra’anana and she detested it, too, said it was even more disgusting. Her father was a doctor but he didn’t work in medicine. He started his own company, importing medical supplies. Her younger brother, the “king of the nerds,” as she called him, seemed poised to follow their older sister, who was also a doctor and worked with her father.
“My mother is actually an amazing person,” she said, an artist at heart who had worked as a nurse for many years and now also worked in the family business. “What about you?” she would ask now and again. “I don’t know a thing about your family.”
“I don’t have one,” I’d say with a smile. “Somewhere out there I’ve got a mother.”
Noa was my girlfriend. At least that’s how I used to refer to her in front of Ruchaleh, who used to say, “Come on already, when are you going to bring her over?”
But what exactly was I supposed to say to her? Noa, this is my boss, we just happen to have the same last name. And what exactly was I supposed to say about the man in the attic—Meet my brother, we’re twins. Fraternal not identical, and, yes, he was in a terrible accident?
We’d meet up during the day, usually on Saturday mornings if she hadn’t gone back to her parents’ house for the weekend. She didn’t go there often and she would get angry with her mother whenever she forced her to visit, once every few months. The two of us would go on trips together, take photographs, drink coffee, hug when times were tough, hold hands, exchange CDs, download music, and on Thursdays, half days at Bezalel, we’d shop for records and check out photography exhibits. I liked hanging out at her place and she liked having me there. Sometimes she’d get all worked up, visibly furious, and she’d throw me out of the house.
“I need to be alone for a little while,” she’d say, starting to cry, but then she’d calm down, invite me back in, suggest we do something together, maybe a walk around the neighborhood or a stroll through the Old City.
“You look different,” I blurted out when she opened the door that evening. I’d never seen her dressed up before. In school and when I came by on Saturday mornings she always wore jeans or cords and a T-shirt. Now she stood in the doorway in a gray skirt, the kind that the lawyers wear on American TV shows. Instead of a funky T-shirt she wore a red sleeveless blouse that buttoned up the front. There was lipstick on her lips and black mascara on her eyelashes. I’d never seen her made up before.
“What do you think?” she asked, her hands trembling. “Kind of like a babushka doll?”
“Kind of,” I said, laughing. “I feel bad, I’m in my work clothes.”
“Do you want me to change?”
“No, no, not at all . . . it’s just . . .” I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.
“Just what?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, say it, you bastard.”
“Say what?”
“That I look beautiful.”
“You look beautiful.”
“Yeah, thanks a lot.”
“No problem.”
“Hold on, let me grab a shawl or something,” she said and turned back into the house.
“Are we going out?” I asked, and I checked to see how much cash Ruchaleh had stuffed into my wallet.
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “You want me to sit around the house like Little Red Riding Hood in this thing? Of course we’re going out. Don’t you want to?”
“Yeah, of course. I’d love to.”
“Good,” she said, and she shut the door behind her.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked as we walked down Nissim Behar.
“Your call.”
“Ahhhh,” I asked, unprepared. “You hungry?”
“A little bit, not really, maybe a little something.”
“Okay,” I said and I took her hand and then turned it over and looked at her watch. She smiled and I felt a surge of desire.
“I think Cavalier is still open.”
“Cavalier?” she asked.
“It’s a great restaurant.” It was one of Ruchaleh’s favorites.
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “How the hell did you get Cavalier into your head?”
“I don’t know, it’s in walking distance. If you want to take a cab we could also go to the American Colony. The food there is pretty good, too.” I knew that those were two of the most expensive restaurants in the city, the kind students walked into only through the staff entrance. One time, when we went to Arkadia, our waiter was a guy in my class. Ruchaleh didn’t hesitate. She shook the guy’s hand and said, “Nice to meet you; I’m Yonatan’s mother.”
I didn’t know much about Jerusalem’s night life but I wanted to impress Noa. I wanted her to know that I was hiding something, that I wasn’t just some loser student, working nights and forgoing any semblance of a social life in order to pay tuition.
“Those are the options you’re giving me?” she asked, laughing. “When I said I was a littl
e hungry, I was thinking that, like, maybe we’d order some fries with our beer, not Cavalier.”
“You know, I have a feeling you know the city a lot better than I do at this point. You decide.”
“Okay,” she said. “Follow me.” And she took my hand in hers, looked for my response, and when I smiled, she tightened her grip and tugged me down the road, saying again, “Where the hell do you have the cash for Cavalier from?”
I had the cash. Ruchaleh had shoved it into my wallet before throwing me out of the house.
“You can go to a hotel, you can go wherever you want, but you’re not staying here,” she had said at first when I begged her to let me stay.
That was the first change in the plan. I wasn’t sure whether she’d known it all along or if it was something she’d decided on when Yonatan’s oximeter started to beep, as it had been doing every night for the past few weeks.
That night, after getting Yonatan ready for bed, we strayed from our usual dinner routine.
“I’m not hungry,” I told Ruchaleh, who sat, inanimate, on the couch.
“I want to sell the house,” she said, looking up at the ceiling. “I don’t want to be in this place anymore.”
We must have sat there in silence for something like an hour, until the gauge started to beep. That was my cue to run upstairs to the attic and connect the plastic contraption bulging out of Yonatan’s throat to the life-support system. Ruchaleh looked at me. I bowed my head and stayed seated. According to her plan, fifteen minutes would suffice. The beeping bounced off the walls, careened inside my head, pinged against the walls of my skull. I envisioned Yonatan gasping, choking, sputtering, his body convulsing, a shocked expression on his face.
“Where are you going?” she yelled, following me as I ran up the stairs. The oximeter, a small device clipped to his finger, beeped hysterically. I stood at the foot of the bed and stared at Yonatan. He looked exactly the same, lying there with the same placid expression on his face, no apparent convulsions or torment wracking his body. Ruchaleh walked over to her son’s side, to the oximeter, and turned down the volume of the beeping.
The plan was that she would wait fifteen minutes and then call an ambulance, pleading, panic-stricken, for a mobile ICU unit. “My son has stopped breathing.” That was her line. While she was on the phone, I was supposed to hook him up to the ventilator so that when the crew arrived they’d find him on life support, even though Ruchaleh said that the doctors wouldn’t be asking any unnecessary questions.
“Doctors tend to encourage end-of-life decisions on far less severe cases,” she said, “but who knows, with our luck, we could get some religious doctor and he could cause trouble.”
She was supposed to meet the ambulance crew outside. I was supposed to wait by the side of the bed. Ruchaleh said that an ICU doctor coming to the big house in Beit Hakerem, seeing Yonatan on his eggshell mattress, surrounded by the best life-support system money could buy, would probably issue a death certificate on the spot, without ordering an autopsy or any other kind of investigation. They’d probably skip the CPR, since he was on life support already, and just confirm his death, at which point she’d burst into tears.
“I just hope I’ll be able to pull it off,” she said.
When the doctor asked whether he should issue the death certificate, she’d dissolve in tears and send me to take care of it.
“By then,” she said, when the idea first came up, around a year earlier, “I hope you’ll have decided which ID card to give to the doctors.”
Ruchaleh said that our plan was virtually risk-free. We’ve already taken care of the tricky part, she said once—the identity change. We both preferred the words change and update rather than theft when speaking of Yonatan’s ID.
“It was written from above,” Ruchaleh said once. “You think it’s coincidence that your name is Amir Lahav, a kosher lemahadrin Jewish name?”
My name, written out in Hebrew, really does sound totally Jewish, but in Arabic it’s different—Lahab—meaning flames. I remembered from a young age that whenever I went to the doctor’s office in Petach Tikva or to see my mother when she was in the hospital, Jews always got my name wrong. The way they pronounced it always made me laugh and I would tell my mother about their mistake. Later, as a teenager, it no longer bothered me and I was actually happy to have my name Hebraized, a phenomenon that saved me many a sideways glance. When I went to college the fact that my name could be read both ways turned into a real bonus: it’s how I wound up with a good dorm room at Hebrew University, near campus, unlike the Arabs, who, as freshmen, if they didn’t have connections, were housed in the notorious Eleph dorms on the Givat Ram campus. A day before school started, I discovered that my roommate was Jewish, an economics major, a freshman. He couldn’t keep the surprise off his face when I introduced myself and made a point of pronouncing my name properly, in Arabic.
“Where are you from?’ he asked, the way soldiers do.
“Jaljulia,” I said.
“Cool,” he said, and a moment later he went out for a smoke. Ten minutes later an administrator showed up. “There was a little bit of a misunderstanding here,” she said, explaining that university rules require that, barring written consent to the contrary, Jews and Arabs had to live in separate quarters.
“It’s fine with me,” I said.
“I see,” she said, consulting her clipboard. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
My Jewish roommate came back to the room a few minutes later and started packing up his things. “Bro, they got the living situation a little confused at the office,” he said before leaving.
My new roommate was an Arab from I’billin in the Galilee. I’ll never forget the expression on his face and the dance of joy he did when he came into the room. “They told me I was in Eleph. They sent me a letter—Eleph, it said—and here I am up on Mount Scopus,” he exclaimed. “My friends over at Eleph are going to die when they see this. A steam radiator, on campus. Do you know what Eleph looks like? It’s where they throw all the Arabs. Maybe they started letting Christians get rooms on Mount Scopus. Maybe that’s what happened. This is a miracle. I’m telling you, it’s the miracle of the Virgin Mary.” He kissed his cross, and frowned when he found out I was a Muslim, but he did not leave. “What does it matter—Muslim, Christian? At the end of the day it says Arab next to both of our names.”
Before leaving the house that night, Ruchaleh said, “I need one of the ID cards.” I took one out and gave it to her. The other one I put in my wallet. She opened up the little blue book, smiled, and tears started to well in her eyes. “Everything’s going to work out,” she said, and then she hugged me hard. “Go, go,” she said, “get out of here,” and she shut the door behind me.
GOLDSTAR
I want to be like them. That’s the sentence that was bouncing around my head as I followed Noa into the Ha’sira pub. She said “hey” to a few of the people there, exchanged kisses with a few others, introduced me to them. “Guys, this is Yonatan.”
She walked over to the DJ booth. The guy looked familiar. He slipped off his headphones and smiled at her, leaned over his turntables and his mixer, and kissed her on the cheek.
“Come here,” I read her lips as she motioned me over. “Meet Aviad,” she said. “He’s third-year, visual media.”
I shook his hand.
I want to be like them.
Noa asked what I wanted to drink and smiled when I said red wine, suggesting that I go with beer. I agreed. She preferred sitting at the bar, she said, but we took seats at a little wooden table in the corner because all the bar stools were taken. The DJ played some Radiohead and Noa moved her body to the music, saying that at this hour you could still enjoy the music.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” she said.
The more the place filled up, the f
aster the music got. Aviad played some soft Underworld, then switched to Plastic Man and then back to faster tracks from Underworld. Noa was a better drinker than I was, but she always waited for me to catch up. I struggled to keep the pace, which she thought was funny. I could see that off to the side of the bar the tiny dance floor was starting to fill up, people moving their bodies gently in front of the DJ, not wanting to be the first ones to really dance. I volunteered to buy the third round, and took my place in the crush around the bar. Noa smiled at me each time someone pushed past me. She wanted to get up and come help me but I signaled to her to stay put and save our seats. I was finally able to get two pints of Goldstar and make it back to the table.
I want to be like them. That’s what I thought when Noa said this was the only place she liked to go out in this ghost town of a city. “The nerd-in-disguise hangout,” she said.
Most of the people looked like they were students and I recognized many of the faces from the halls of Bezalel. I’d never been in a place like that, and I liked it. I’d been out to pubs before with Ruchaleh, but they were the kind of places that had soft light and cool jazz, nothing like what was happening here. I had to stop myself from shivering when I thought of Ruchaleh. What was she doing at this moment? How did she feel? I should have been with her. I shouldn’t have left. If everything was going according to plan, then the ambulance should have already left with Yonatan and taken him to the morgue in Shaare Zedek. They don’t check anything there, Ruchaleh had said, it’s just a refrigerated storage room where they keep the merchandise until it’s picked up. Anyone who asked about the funeral would be told that Yonatan, without her even knowing, had decided back in high school to give his body to science.
