People got into squabbles on the air or shoved each other, and every now and then someone would let out a salvo of curses that could be heard in every home in the village. The cable people realized it was time to do something, and they moved the quiz to the soccer field. The only ones who watched from home were the deep thinkers and speed-dialers in each household. All the others took their places in the field as soon as the fast was over for the day. People swarmed through the streets toward the soccer field, almost running, before they’d had a chance to digest their hurried post-fast meal.
Father hadn’t taken any part in the game up until then. He and the principal had been in the same class, and he always used to tell us how the principal had been a nobody when it came to schoolwork and had gone to some second-rate teachers college. His grades — Father’s, that is — were the best in his class, and if he’d had enough money to finish university he would have become a doctor long ago.
The day the competition moved to the stadium was when they announced the Big Question. When my father heard that the principal, his classmate, had composed the hardest question, he stood up and plodded heavily toward the TV. “Get me a pen,” he commanded. “Now, be quiet.” And when the quizmaster repeated the question, Father wrote it on his palm:
From the land of Uncle Sam. Blue as the sky. Brings nothing but trouble. Can begin with two letters. And Abd el-Wahab lives there.
It was his battle now. Our family may have been small, but we saw ourselves as being very smart. My father copied the question from his palm to his notebooks and studied each and every word. “Has anyone solved it yet?” he asked.
“No, not yet, Father.”
Time passed, and nobody seemed any closer to an answer. Father got angry and said the question was actually very dumb and he couldn’t think like those idiots anyway. The program continued until the meal that marks the beginning of the fast, at about 5 A.M. Father stayed up and continued to ponder the question. Nobody found the answer that day, and on the following day people started to say that the principal had deliberately composed a question that had no answer. He represented his own family in the municipal elections, after all, and he’d do anything to undermine the others.
In the morning, Father phoned in and asked for time off from work until ‘id el-fitr—in other words, until the competition was over. Then he sat down with all the encyclopedias we had in the house and started digging. He checked even the unlikeliest meanings of the words. There were rumors about people who’d found the solution. There were dozens of phone calls and dozens of answers, but nobody had come up with the right one. Then my father began looking for religious connotations in the question. From time to time he thought he might be on to something, and he’d yell the answer to us, to make sure we gave him the credit if anyone phoned in meanwhile with the same answer.
A few days went by, and my father had to strike out all the answers he’d thought of that had been suggested by other people and proved wrong. Then he decided to check out the ones that remained. He never would have phoned in. He wasn’t sure enough of himself, so he decided to go ask the station manager if any of his answers was right. If it turned out one was, he would forfeit the prize and promise not to phone in until the competition was over. When father returned from his visit with the station manager, we could tell he’d failed.
There were only two days left until the holiday, and the answer had yet to be found. Heads of families began proposing ideas for the big prize to be awarded to the winner at a grand ceremony in the soccer field on the eve of ‘id el-fitr.
That night, Father didn’t set foot outside his room. A moment before the show began, he opened the door, walked over to me, and said, with trembling lips and teary eyes, “I’m out of cigarettes. Go buy me some.”
On my way home, I looked down at the pack of cigarettes in my hand. Parliaments, Father’s favorites. AMERICAN BLUE, it said on the wrapper, and there was a picture of a blue sky. Suddenly it all fell into place. “Father, it’s Parliament,” I told him. “I think the answer is Parliament.”
Father looked at me, sat me down, and took his place beside me. He knew it was the right answer. He and the school principal smoked Parliament Longs. “Parliament is an American cigarette,” I told him. “The pack is blue as the sky. Cigarettes cause nothing but trouble. You can write Parliament in Arabic either with a P or with a B. And Abd el-Wahab Darawsheh is a member of the Knesset, the Parliament.”
Without saying a word, Father leaped to the phone and dialed the number. The principal could be seen on the screen, sitting on a blue sofa in the center of the stage. The quizmaster was sitting beside him, and behind them were some thugs whose job was to manage the incoming calls. The line was busy. Father was all worked up. He kept dialing, again and again. Then he rushed out of the house and ran to the soccer field. He had to get the chance to answer before the principal gave it away.
Fifteen minutes later I saw Father on TV, trying to get through the barrier of thugs who were blocking the entrance to the makeshift studio. Then a cameraman walked up to him, and I could hear him say, “I have the answer.”
The principal heard him too. I could see him get up out of his stately seat, walk over to his son, and ask him to put Father on the air. “I want the whole village to see he didn’t solve it,” he said. The manager must have told him about Father’s incorrect answers. The quizmaster signaled something to one of the thugs, and my father moved up onto the stage, barely able to catch his breath. He grabbed the microphone, walked up to the principal’s seat, looked him in the eye, and said, “Parliament.”
“Correct!” the principal’s son shouted at once, but the principal got up and took the microphone from Father.
“There can be no solution without an explanation,” he said.
Father took back the microphone. He knew now that victory was his. He turned toward the camera. “Parliament is a cigarette from the land of Uncle Sam. Cigarettes bring nothing but trouble. The pack is blue as the sky. You can spell it with a P or a B, and Abd el-Wahab Darawsheh is a member of Parliament.” The crowd listened to the answer and realized it was correct. They didn’t need any confirmation. Everyone cheered like crazy. Even the quizmaster, the principal’s son, seemed happy to hear the answer that only he and his father had known. He encouraged the crowd.
“Congratulations,” he said to Father. “You’ve won five kilos of ground meat from the Triangle Butcher Stop.” But my father and the principal just went on staring at each other, panting.
The entire crowd was applauding by then, delighted that a member of a small family had figured it out. Father was still standing there with the microphone in his hand, staring at the defeated principal. The camera focused on him as he lifted the microphone again and said, with a winner’s smile, “It’s my son. My son solved it.”
The Last Days
Those were the last days of ninth grade. Every morning I’d march to school feeling very proud. I knew people were looking at me now, but I didn’t look back at them, didn’t turn my head. I tried to stay focused on myself and to look like someone who is absorbed in deep thoughts, maybe pondering some question in physics.
They started treating me differently at school too. Until then, I’d been in the weakest of the ninth-grade classes, because my father had no connections. I was the best student in the class, but it was a class where half the kids couldn’t read.
A few days after ‘id el-fitr, the principal himself came to see us. He shook my hand and asked to speak with Father. He said the Jews were opening a new school for gifted students, and they wanted to test Arab students too. The principal said the list of candidates from Tira had already been submitted, but that after I solved the riddle he managed to persuade the Jews to let me take the test too. He said they take one out of a thousand and I stood a chance, but we mustn’t be too disappointed if I didn’t get in. “The tests are tough,” he said.