by Sayed Kashua
I switch just in time to the news on Channel One, Israel TV, which begins with another item about a cell of Israeli Arabs who’ve been picked up on suspicion of helping a Palestinian suicide bomber get to Tel Aviv. Maybe my editor will ask me to do a story about it tomorrow. I feel like they’ve been phasing me out lately. Ever since the cutbacks and the decision that I’ll go freelance and no longer be on the editorial board, I’ve hardly gotten any assignments. Maybe this time they’ll need me, because everyone else is afraid of going into Palestinian villages, not only on the West Bank but in Israel too. I’m glad that cell got caught. Maybe it’ll earn me something this month.
The doorbell rings. It’s my mother and my two aunts, my father’s sisters. “They’re here in honor of our new house,” my mother says.
“Welcome,” I say. “My aunts are here,” I answer my wife. The doorbell has awakened her and she wants to know who it is.
“Congratulations, mabruk, ma-sha’Allah, may this house be filled with children,” they say, and drag their big selves inside. I pull along the two bags of presents they’ve brought us.
My wife comes down, trying not to show how annoyed she is at the unexpected callers. I hate it when she makes those faces, as if it’s my fault, as if I want people to come visit us. “Where’s the little one?” the older aunt asks her. “Asleep already? I was hoping to get a look at her.”
“She’s in her crib, you can take a look.” My aunts follow my wife up the stairs. The two of them have trouble climbing, and the older one has to rest every other step, grasping the railing, panting, muttering, “ya Allah,” and taking another step or two. The younger one pauses every fourth step. Both of them complain about the stairs. Once they’ve taken a quick look at the baby, they slowly make their way back down and settle into the armchairs in the living room, wiping their brows with the white kerchiefs they’ve been wearing, and trying to catch their breath. It takes quite a while till the older one manages to say, “She’s adorable. Looks just like you,” and the younger one adds, “May God bless her with a brother. Is there anything on the way? You need another one, and it’s better for a woman to give birth while she’s still young. I stopped having children at twenty-eight after I’d had eight. It’s better for the woman, ’cause you never know when she’s going to stop getting her monthly.”
“Insha’Allah,” my wife says diplomatically, and heads for the kitchen to get our regular guest kit, the one that all the villagers serve. A bowl of fruit, some nuts, cold drinks. Then she’ll urge them to please help themselves, the way she’s supposed to, and they’ll have to eat or drink something, and toward the end of their visit she’ll offer tea or coffee, a cue that it’s time for them to leave. Tea and coffee must be offered even if they get up to go before you’ve had a chance. You’re always supposed to say, “What? Leaving already? You haven’t had your tea yet.”
Nobody wants to mess with my aunts. You’ve got to make sure everything is done by the book. Otherwise, the attack will be particularly brutal. My wife knows this, and she’s careful to do things the right way, except for that scowl that has me worrying that my aunts may catch on. “You needn’t have bothered,” they say, the way everyone does.
“The fact that you’ve bothered gives me strength,” my wife replies, and passes the test with flying colors.
They’re tough ladies, my aunts. Everyone in the village knows it, and tries not to do anything that might make them angry. They’re first-rate gossipmongers, great at bad-mouthing and criticizing anyone they don’t like. In many ways, their impression of our house and of us is crucial to us.
After a few ritual exchanges and comments about the color of the kitchen cabinets, the railing and the sofa, my aunts get on my mother’s case for letting my father, their brother, spend time in the café. “How do you allow it?” the younger aunt asks my mother. “He’s a grandfather already, and still he spends time in cafés?”
“What can I do?” Mother says. “He goes there to spend time with his friends.”
“What do you mean, what can you do?” my older aunt asks. “Stop him. What are you, a little girl? A man of his age and in his position? What does he think—that he’s still eighteen? Sitting around all day playing cards and shesh-besh. I’ll have you know that people have told me he gambles. They swore he plays for money. I wanted the earth to swallow me right then, I was so embarrassed. That’s all we need—for worthless people to come and humiliate me because my brother spends his time playing cards in cafés. Why would he be playing cards when he has a good wife at home? My husband, Allah yirhamo, never spent a day in a café from the day we were married till the day he died.”
“Instead of going to religion lessons at the mosque in the evening,” my younger aunt says, “instead of sitting with good people, reading the Koran and praying, he’d rather sit around and smoke, drink coffee and play tawlah. What’s missing in his life? Look at me. I recite verses from early evening until I fall asleep. Can there be anything better than reading verses to drive the demons and the evil eye away from your home and your children? It’s all your fault, you make him run away.”
My mother, experienced with such harangues, restrains herself as always, and makes do with nods and short replies, promising to do whatever she can. She will always pretend to agree with every word they say. She knows perfectly well that she has no choice and that no matter what she does they’ll never think well of her and will never stop making fun of her or criticizing what she does.
My older aunt tells us about another man she knows who “brought a bride from the West Bank.” The brides from the West Bank are a subject of conversation, and they mention a long list of middle-aged men who “brought brides from the West Bank.” “An eighteen-year-old,” my older aunt says of her new neighbor. “Adorable, sweet, white as an angel, not like the monster he had who just kept getting fatter and fatter.”
The younger aunt agrees. “I wish my sons would each bring a bride from the West Bank. There’s nothing better than having children, and today’s girls don’t want to have so many.” It takes me a long time to realize that taking a second wife from the West Bank is becoming the norm in our village. Because the girl is from over there, they can disregard the Israeli prohibition on polygamy. “It’s just because they don’t want the Arabs to multiply,” my older aunt says. “It goes against the teachings of Islam.” As far as the young brides from the West Bank are concerned, marrying an Israeli Arab, no matter how old, is a chance to escape from poverty, especially since the mohar gift the Israeli grooms are willing to pay is a windfall for the relatives who stay behind.
My aunts crack sunflower seeds, and the more the conversation picks up, the faster they crack them. Their talk is animated, as they review the village gossip and compare versions. They talk of a man who stabbed his brother last night. One of them heard about fifteen stab wounds; the other, who insists that her source is more reliable, heard it was eighteen. They talk about men who cheat on their wives, about how they were caught and where and when. They talk about homes that have been robbed recently, how much was taken from each house, who the suspects are, what weapons they used—an Uzi, a .36 or a .38—like regular small arms experts.
My mother must have heard my aunts’ stories already. My wife shows some interest, and every now and then, whether out of politeness or out of genuine concern, she gets in a question of clarification like, “Are you talking about the brother of so-and-so?” My wife knows the people around here much better than I do, and her reactions give the impression that she’s not surprised at the shocking stories that come up in the conversation and takes them in stride. I’m the only one who sits there and can’t believe things like that are happening around me. My aunts go on to describe how children are being kidnapped for ransom on their way home from school, how people get shot, even when they’re just sitting in a café. How a week ago a guy drove up on a motorbike and walked in with his helmet still on and a pistol in his hand, and shot someone. “And what would have happen
ed if my brother had been sitting there that minute?” my younger aunt asks my mother. They talk about little children who’ve been raped, businesses that have been burgled and youngsters who’ve been arrested.
My aunts stay for a long time, and finally say, “Y’Allah,” and get up to leave. My wife urges them to have some tea. First they say they can’t but she skillfully insists and makes them promise not to leave before tea is served. They stay seated on the sofa and I can tell by the look in their eyes that they’re satisfied with my wife’s behavior.
By the time the tea arrives, I have heard more stories—about usurious moneylenders using thugs who don’t think twice about shooting anyone who’s behind on his payments, about a whole army of criminals who exact protection payments from businesses and rape the wife of anyone who turns them down, or force them out of their vehicle in the middle of the village and confiscate it in broad daylight like the tax authorities, and about one poor guy, owner of a grocery store, who balked and dared to cross them. His store was sprayed with submachinegun fire and now he pays them like everyone else does.
When they leave, they kiss my wife and again wish her well in the new house, and say how they hope Allah will sow blessings in her home and in her womb. My wife clears away the refreshments tray. I turn the TV on again and watch an Arab news channel. Before my wife goes back up to the bedroom I ask her whether those stories are true. She sniggers and says that it’s all they talk about in the teachers’ room all day. “What would you know? Just coming back here to sleep. You don’t work here like me. I’m the one who got screwed by moving back here. What do you know about things anyway? You still think the teachers hit the pupils, don’t you? Don’t you understand it’s the other way around now, that the teachers are scared, even in elementary school? That teachers have been stabbed? You’ve brought me back to a place where you ask kids at school what they want to be when they grow up and without batting an eye, half the class say they want to be gang members.”
7
I hardly write for the paper anymore now. Cutbacks, they say. Less than a year ago, I had a position and a contract. My name was featured at the top of the masthead with the other members of the editorial board, and now it appears under the heading “regular contributors.” In a lousy month I don’t get more than ten small items into the paper. But still I keep going there each morning. It’s become a bit embarrassing lately. My spot with the computer has been given to a perky young fashion reporter. I don’t have a desk either, but I go there anyway. I want them to see me, to remember that I still exist, that I’m still ready to do my bit for that shitty rag. Mostly I sit in the smoking room going through the papers, turning pages till around noon, then make the rounds of the nearby streets. I never eat out anymore. On rare occasions I allow myself to sit in a café and order a short espresso, and then I usually spend at least an hour sipping it, browsing through the papers.
For the first time in my life, I’ve begun looking at the financial supplements before the other sections. Stories about mass layoffs, bankruptcies, the poverty line, the monthly unemployment figures reassure me to some extent. The Arab towns and villages have always held the lead on those unemployment and poverty ratings, and for me this has been a comfort of sorts. My wife and I are managing okay for now. The return home salvaged the situation, and was actually the smartest step I could have taken. We don’t have all that many expenses, don’t even spend much for food, because we eat at our parents’ houses. We can really make ends meet on my wife’s salary alone, even though teachers’ salaries are among the lowest in the country, or perhaps the very lowest.
Last month I got four hundred shekels for the only story of mine that got published all month. And even then, my editor made a point of reminding me that “for a story like that I normally pay two hundred.”
I’m dumbfounded at all the want ads in the supplements, considering the constantly rising unemployment rate. I’ve been reading the ads very closely lately. I started by looking for a position as a reporter, a proofreader, a copy editor. Anything as long as it has to do with journalism. But no go. Every now and then when I’d go back to the paper, I’d phone the people who’d placed those ads looking for energetic youngsters in search of an interesting job, and for whatever reason one phone call was enough for them to decide I wasn’t right. In the beginning I rang some of the ones looking for young academics or stipulating that the job was “suitable for a student.” I’d send in a résumé without even knowing exactly what the job was, but I never got a reply.
Nobody in my family knew what I was going through and I saw no point in telling them for the time being. Including my wife. Every day I’d leave the house early in the morning and head for the paper, only to return in the afternoon pretending to be this exhausted guy coming home from a hard day’s work. My wife did notice that I no longer had any full-length articles and that my name hardly appeared in the paper, but I told her that I’d been promoted to the news desk and that I was now responsible for several of the reporters covering the West Bank. What I’d really been given was the job of a rewriter, a kind of subeditor whose main job is to train new reporters, and all I write are items that require a lot of experience, the kind that can’t be assigned to beginners. We haven’t begun to feel the loss of my salary yet. The real deterioration only began last month and we haven’t noticed it yet because our expenses are so negligible. But I know things can’t continue this way. I can’t go on fooling everybody. I’ve got to find another job. I’ll keep doing whatever I can to make sure my name does appear in the paper occasionally, but I’ve got to find another source of income. I can’t pretend to be working, I can’t continue going there every morning. I’ve got a feeling that pretty soon one of the guys in charge is going to ask me diplomatically to stop. I know that my coming there actually upsets some of the people, but above all it upsets me.
I’ve got to look for the kind of job that someone like me has a chance of getting. If need be, I’ll work in construction. I know it will be tough at first, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Who said the solution has to be construction, though? I bet I could find a job caring for an invalid. They always want Arabs for those. An old person, maybe, or retarded. That would be the best solution as far as I’m concerned. Nobody needs to know about my new job. Nobody in my family will have to feel humiliated. I can’t afford not to work. I can’t afford to find myself without a livelihood. I want everything to go well here. I know how important that is to everyone.
People around me are forever discussing the money that others have. I don’t know whether it’s deliberate or not, but almost every time I come to visit they start talking about how this one’s son or that one’s son built a thirteen-hundred-foot home. My mother-in-law is taking an interest in houses, and sometimes I think she’s compiling a list of every person who’s building something—where it is and how much it’s costing. She spends a lot of time on cars too, and always has tales to tell about relatives who’ve bought a new Mercedes or a Volvo or a Jeep. She knows when women in the village started to take driving lessons, how many they’ve taken and how many driving tests they had to take before getting their licenses. The stories I hear at my in-laws’ home in the evenings about people with a lot of money certainly don’t jibe with all those stories and figures in the business supplement I read in the mornings. I’m mystified at how people can just go on building and buying new cars when the situation is so bad. I never hear any stories about poor people who can’t even build a single room for when they get married. All I hear in my in-laws’ home are great success stories. Sometimes my mother-in-law makes a point of mentioning, as she describes yet another young man who built a house and bought a shiny car for his fiancé or his new wife, that he had once asked for her daughter’s—my wife’s—hand in marriage, but they had turned him down. Her voice is sad as she tells me this, and it makes me feel very uncomfortable, especially in the presence of my wife, who doesn’t say a thing. Sometimes my mother-in-law says, “I suppose she w
as young then, and we’re not like everyone else. We wanted her to finish school first. She was good at school and we didn’t want her to just get married and stay at home.”
My father-in-law, on the other hand, specializes in real estate and livelihoods. He knows who has bought land from whom, how many acres the deal covered, how much money changed hands and which lawyer handled the transaction. He knows how much certain people make per day, per week, per month and per year. He never mentions people’s education. Educated people aren’t that interesting to him. He values people by their income. He can spend a very long time calculating, for instance, how much the barber at the shop across the street makes in a year. He counts the people coming into the shop, at least forty a day, and nearly a hundred on weekends, not to mention the Id el-Fitr and Id el-Adha holidays, and haircuts for grooms, which cost almost three times as much as a regular cut. He calculates the wages the barber pays, the expenses, scissors, machines and various scents and lotions, and establishes firmly just how much he makes each month. Minimum is the word he uses to conclude his findings concerning people’s incomes. He admires garage owners who’ve made it big, and moving-company owners, money changers, building contractors and the proprietors of hardware stores, shoe stores and clothing stores.
PART TWO
“There’s Some Kind of Roadblock at the Entrance”
1
The paper hasn’t arrived. The paperboy must have skipped us again, or maybe he’s sick. I’m suddenly uneasy about the fact that I’ve never actually seen the paper route guy. I switch on the TV and turn up the volume, but don’t sit down to watch. My wife is still upstairs, getting herself and the baby ready to leave. “Is the milk ready yet?” she shouts from above.
