by Sayed Kashua
2
Suddenly a strong light fills the entire house. I hear myself yelling in fear—a short yell—then I bend over and cover my eyes. This light is very painful. My heart is pounding even though I realize now that it’s simply the power that’s come back on. The sudden brightness wakes my brother, who’s been sleeping on the sofa facing me. “Yeah!” he says. “Is that it?” Almost all of the light switches in the house have been switched on. The light went on in my parents’ bedroom too. The two children wake up and immediately start crying. My father emerges from the children’s room, and my mother from hers and my father’s bedroom, smiling broadly. She applauds softly, like a little girl who’s just received a new toy. “Elhamdulilah,” she says. My wife and my older brother’s wife stay in the bedroom with the children and try to calm them down, but I can hear how happy they are.
They’re chuckling and their tone of voice is different. Everyone is smiling, and I hear how enormously relieved they are. I’m actually enjoying the noise that sounded so strong and surprising at first—the familiar droning of the refrigerator and the air conditioner and the incessant hum of the TV at my parents’ house. My dad walks over to the air conditioner, puts his face up close and talks to it: “Welcome back, ahalan u-sahalan. How we missed you.”
This is it, I tell myself, it’s all over now. My mother tries to turn on the faucet in the kitchen sink. The water isn’t flowing yet, but there’s the sound of water pressure building up, the sound you always hear after it’s been off for a while. My father says it’s the sound of air and that we’ll have water too pretty soon. It’ll take time, but the sound proves that the water system is working. “It’s a matter of a few hours, or even less,” Father says, and lights a cigarette, then turns on the TV, where nothing has changed. It’s almost two A.M. and there is nothing on Israel TV. On the Arab cable networks everything looks the same—Lebanese singers go on singing love songs, wiry dancers in alluring clothes sway seductively. The Saudi channels are teaching little children how to read the Koran, and the Egyptian channels are showing reruns of familiar series. My wife comes out with the baby, smiling, rocking her gently. You can tell she’s happy. She looks at one of the series and says, “There’s Nour el-Sharif, everything’s okay.” She and my older brother’s wife are laughing.
I pick up the telephone receiver and hear a dial tone. I report this to everyone, reinforcing their collective sense of victory. I heave a sigh of relief. Tomorrow morning I’ll try to phone the paper. Maybe they’ll want me to do a write-up after all. Too bad it will only be for the following day. Tomorrow’s paper closed at midnight. My father opens the locked door and goes out. We all follow. The entire village is lit up. Instead of turning off the extra lights, we join in the improvised “electricity party” that reassures us it’s no illusion. It looks like the entire village has come alive. There are lights on in every house, and everybody’s up, like just before a holiday. The familiar sounds of summer evenings are back. Sounds of happiness, of TV sets, of children playing and of parents trying to get them to settle down. Some of our neighbors are out on their balconies, smiling broadly. The neighbor who was assailing our house earlier today, spurred on by the crowd, is smiling at us now and yelling, “The electricity’s working, the electricity’s working,” as if nothing has changed, as if she’s forgotten what she did to us and what we did to her. Even the grocery store owner is shouting to us, laughing, overjoyed. “We can have a shower at last,” my father says, and reminds us that we can remove the lump of gypsum from the sewage pipe. “I’ll get it out,” I say gleefully.
I go back inside. Everyone else is still outdoors. I look for the water bottle and gulp down almost all of it. The Egyptian singer is still singing love songs on TV. I look out the kitchen window in the direction of my house and my brother’s. They are lit up too. I’ll go over there.
My older brother joins me, and my younger brother decides to come along too. The rest of the family stays with my parents. It’s best that way. The front door of my house is broken, but not too badly, and I can still lock it. I just need to replace one of the handles. There are lights on everywhere. The house itself is filthy. The doors to the kitchen cabinets are open wide and all of the shelves are bare. They didn’t leave a thing in the refrigerator either. It’s wide open, and there’s a light on inside. My brothers and I close all the doors. There’s nothing missing except food. In the storeroom I discover they took the olive oil too and all of the containers of olives. Never mind. The faucets give off the same sound of air pressure, and the occasional spurt.
“It’s okay. Just a little dirt, that’s all,” my younger brother says, and asks for a pack of cigarettes and the lighter. I go upstairs. The bedroom is just the way it was before, as if my wife and I are getting up to another ordinary morning, another day of work. I turn off the bedroom light, then check the baby’s room and take a look at all her toys. We’ll go back to playing with her in here. I turn out that light too and walk up the stairs leading to the roof. First I bend a little to catch sight of the tanks to the north. I can hear them, but not as loudly as before. The sound of the return to normal in the village overrides the sound of the tanks which I kept hearing so loudly these past few nights. I look up slowly and see their headlights. They’re moving, they’re in motion, they’re on their way out of here, leaving a trail of dust behind. Now I really know it’s all over.
My younger brother follows me up. “They’re leaving,” I tell him. He smiles and looks in the direction of the tanks and the jeeps as they move away from the boundaries of the village. “What was it all about?” he asks.
“We’ll know that tomorrow,” I reply, and walk toward the water tank on the roof. “I suppose things will be much better now.” I bend over and look inside. It’s beginning to fill up with water. “I’m telling you, things will be much better than they were. You’ll see.” My younger brother waves at the family downstairs. “Everything okay?” he asks, and I can hear my older brother answer from below. “Sure, no big deal. They hardly took anything. How about you?”
“Same here,” my younger brother answers. “I’m watching the military tanks. They’re leaving. Salamat.” He says to me, “Give me another cigarette. Let’s celebrate a little before I go back home.”
3
It’s almost four A.M. I go into the bathroom and stand completely still under the stream of water. I lower my head and let the water land on my scalp and drip down over my whole body. A brown puddle forms at my feet. Slowly the brownness fades, but the layer of dirt clings fast to my body. I rub my head with a generous dollop of shampoo. My hair has never felt this way before—tangled and bristly. One rinse isn’t enough to soften it, and I squeeze out some more shampoo, working it into my hair and across my scalp. But even though it’s no longer dirty, my hair refuses to go back to its former state. I wash my face with soap. My wounds burn at the touch of the lather. I ignore the burning sensation and try to be more gentle. I can’t shave my beard off yet. I have to wait for the sores to heal first. It won’t take long, maybe two or three days. I use a brush to clean my hands, my stomach, my back and my legs. After every part of my body that I clean, I rest a little, lift up my head and let the water run down my face and over my closed eyes. I open my mouth and let the water in.
I won’t go to work tomorrow, but I can’t wait till morning to pick up the phone to one of the editors and find out if they’re interested in a story. If they are, I’ll write it from home and send it in by e-mail. Enough is enough, I’m not going to make a fool of myself anymore. I’m not going to go into the office just to sit around doing nothing, not after what I’ve been through this week, not with these sores. If I go in tomorrow, I’ll look like a beggar.
From now on, I won’t go in unless they ask me to, the bastards, and if they don’t want this story from me, I guess it means they don’t want to see me anymore at all. Normally the papers have a field day if a reporter of theirs experiences anything even remotely as incredible as what I’ve be
en through. Reporters who were involved in a car accident and emerged with a scratch have been given front-page coverage damn it, and headlines about what it’s like: “Look Death in the Eye—Our Reporter Was Involved in a Traffic Accident and Miraculously Survived.” If they don’t want my story, I’ll try to sell it to a different paper. I’ll tell them so. Maybe it will scare them a little, but then again, maybe they won’t give a damn. We’ll see tomorrow. Only over the phone—I’m not going down there.
My wife comes into the bathroom and looks at me, smiling. “She’s asleep,” she whispers, and starts to undress. “How I’ve missed water,” she says. “I’ll go straight from the shower to school. I’m going to spend at least two hours in the shower.”
I look at my wife and study her body. How pregnancy and childbirth have made it expand. I study her face and she looks bashful, delicate, still embarrassed as she stands before me naked. It’s like that day, the first day I saw her. “You’ll never find a wife like her,” my mother said. “She comes from a very good family,” my father pointed out, and after my parents spoke with hers and received their approval in principle, the three of us went to propose to her. We sat in the living room, the best-tended room in their house—a big, colorful room with black leather sofas surrounded by vases with plastic flowers. A painting of a waterfall and lots of green trees on either side of a lake adorned one of the walls. In the center of the table was a large bowl of fruit and next to it a big copper vessel for making coffee, standing there like a sculpture. She wasn’t there waiting for us, and only arrived after her parents had welcomed us and we’d taken our places on the sofas. She was wearing a green dress that rustled like the plastic bags at the supermarket.
I look at her and recall the girl I saw on that visit, her body disappearing into her dress, her head lowered as she took my hand with her fingertips, so delicately that I could barely feel them. I felt uncomfortable at having planned the usual kind of handshake, using my full hand. I liked her handshake, actually, I’d never had anyone shake my hand that way before, gently, shyly. She really was good-looking. I’d never sat next to such a pretty girl, and I’d never dreamed I’d marry anyone like that. She looked like a high school student, though she had graduated two years earlier. Thin body, white face. Everything about her was a tad too small. She reminded me of the good girls in the Egyptian serials, which thrilled me.
I couldn’t believe such girls really existed. Women who were actually little girls. I tried not to stare, and made do with quick, stolen glances. I knew I mustn’t behave like an animal, but I also knew I wanted to marry her. After a few days of waiting, the time came for the official consent. Our next meeting added up to a handshake and an exchange of greetings after reading verses of the Koran as part of the engagement ceremony. When I took her hand in order to put on the ring that my mother had bought in her size, I felt my erection, and was terribly embarrassed. Never in my life had I held such delicate hands in mine and such thin white fingers. Two months later, we were married. Ten months later, our daughter was born.
“Make room for me,” she says with a laugh, and her body touches mine under the water. She hugs me and I push her away.
“I’ve got to rinse myself off again,” I say, which she finds funny, even though I meant it seriously. I get out of the bath and wrap myself in a towel. “Where to?” she asks with an apologetic look in her eyes. “Stay here, I’ve missed you. How about you?”
“Me too,” I say. “But I prefer the bed. I’ll wait for you outside.”
“Just don’t fall asleep.”
“I won’t.”
4
I get dressed, pull back the curtain of the second-floor bedroom window and look out over the village. Everyone is awake, and it looks like nobody intends to get any sleep tonight. It’s as if the light and the water are about to disappear all at once and everyone wants to make the most of them for as long as possible. I hear a helicopter nearby, probably covering the soldiers on their way back to base. They’ll be calling from the bank tomorrow. No, not tomorrow, it could take time, because the local branch burned down. I hope my overdraft disappears, I hope the last withdrawal, which was done manually, doesn’t show up. There was no electricity, after all, and the one form that I signed probably went up in flames. This thought cheers me. I only hope my brother will go easy on me this time. I know him—if he remembers, he’ll debit me again. I won’t mention it to him. He can do whatever he wants, but I think it isn’t fair to write off everyone else’s debts and to keep track of mine. The last withdrawal won’t change anything anyway. I’ve just dipped in a little bit deeper than I should, that’s all. It’ll be okay.
My wife is still in the shower. I’ll go downstairs, meanwhile, to my study. On the bottom floor, I work my way between the smudges on the floor, trying not to get my feet dirty again. I turn on the computer. I’ll check my e-mail. Ever since I stopped working, I’ve made a point of checking messages. I’m forever expecting the one that will let me know everything is about to change. When I’m not home, I check my voice mail every five minutes or so, and whenever I see an Internet connection, I log on to see if there’s anything new. The truth is that when I’m home, I lift the receiver and check for the tone that signals an incoming message. Who knows—maybe I missed a call, maybe the phone was out of order. No new messages. I figure maybe it has something to do with the power cut and the fact that the phone lines were dead so that incoming messages couldn’t be received. I know it isn’t true, but still maybe, just maybe, there really was some special kind of glitch.
I won’t manage to get any sleep anyway, till I can call the editor. Maybe at eight o’clock. Anything earlier would be overdoing it. Even eight is pretty early for an editor who doesn’t put the paper to bed before midnight. I’ve got about four more hours to kill until then. I log in to one of the Hebrew news sites. There are dozens of them. People need to know what’s happening every minute. Something can happen every five minutes and people don’t have the patience to wait for the half-hourly newscast. Half an hour is too long in this fucking place. It takes the computer a long time to link up to Ynet. Too bad I don’t have broadband. It takes forever for the home page to come up. While the computer calls up the visuals, all I can read is the headline. “Historic Peace Treaty Between Israel and the Palestinians,” the banner headline announces. Very slowly, I can make out the picture, as it becomes less and less blurry. The Israeli prime minister and the Palestinian prime minister are shaking hands, with the U.S. president in the background.
Wow! A historic peace treaty! I discover myself smiling from ear to ear. I can’t help it. That’s it. It’s all over. If our discomfort of the past few days spells peace between Palestinians and Israelis, I forgive everyone for everything. I know that peace with the Palestinians changes the whole picture and directly affects the attitude of the Jews and of Israeli Arabs. The Jews will start doing their shopping here in the village again, they’ll be all over the place, people will smile more, we’ll feel safer in the streets, on the buses, on the beach. It’s all over. We’re not going to have to feel suspicious, we’ll go back to being almost-citizens. Everything will be different. I haven’t forgotten how, right after the Oslo Accords, people used to say that it was time to improve the status of the Israeli Arabs. That’s it, it’s happening now. I remember how the media kept looking for Arab reporters who could serve as an example of the change that was under way. After the first peace treaty, we began seeing a few Arab moderators. The second Intifada wiped them out, but now things are getting back to normal. Things will be okay. Actually I too got my job at the paper after the first peace treaties and, to tell the truth, my fall from grace only happened after they collapsed because of this fucking Intifada. No more. Especially since peace also means a better economy. I’m sure those business and finance reporters will be celebrating tomorrow with the stock market investors, shares will go sky-high and the U.S. dollar will drop as the value of the shekel rises.
Finally there’s a compl
ete picture on the screen. Finally I can see the lawn under the feet of the smiling leaders, and the caption: “The three leaders after signing the permanent agreement.” Who would have believed that the Israelis and the Palestinians would sign such an agreement? That’s it, no more negotiations, crises, breaches and arguments about the status of Jerusalem, the return of the refugees and the dismantling of settlements. A permanent agreement is a permanent agreement.
The text reads: “Following intense deliberations, the final version of the peace agreement with the Palestinians was signed yesterday. Jerusalem will be divided, the Old City will come under UN supervision, Jews will have access to the Western Wall. Most of the settlements will be dismantled and will be repopulated with Palestinian refugees returning from the camps in Lebanon and Syria. The large blocks of settlements will be permanently annexed to the State of Israel. In return, the Palestinian Authority has received Israeli lands in direct proportion to the size of the settlements.”
Wow! Unbelievable. On the face of it, this is a pretty major victory for the Palestinians. Israel could never have agreed to divide Jerusalem, to allow refugees to return and to dismantle most of the settlements. That’s impossible. But it’s a fact. There, another picture is coming up on the screen. This one’s a map with a caption: “The State of Israel has clearly established borders at last.” The Palestinians have received everything they asked for, almost the entire West Bank. According to the colored legend underneath the map, the Palestinians are in red and the Israelis are in green. The orange indicates blocks of settlements that will remain Israeli—very few of them, in fact—and they’re pretty close to the Green Line—places like Ariel, Gilo, Pisgat Zeev. And the territories being handed over to the Palestinians are colored blue. Our village is colored blue. All of Wadi Ara and Triangle are blue. It must be a mistake. Some idiot graphic artist who always thought that Wadi Ara and the Triangle are both located on the West Bank.
