Once I get off, Adel decides to get off too. I see him only after I’m on the sidewalk. One of the students opens a window and spits. He misses us.
Adel starts shouting at me. “I can’t believe it! Do you even know where we are? Do you have any idea what bus we need to take now? Why do you think the same thing won’t happen on the next bus we take?”
I was willing to risk being lost. I was just so relieved it was over. My father had given me enough money. We took a cab back to the central bus station. All I wanted was for the Polanski kids not to get on our bus to Kfar Sava.
Ben Gurion
There was nothing in my father’s explanations about Ben Gurion Airport. The sonofabitch lied to me. How I hated him then. When the bus stopped for the first time, I was sure we’d reached Kfar Sava, but it was the roadblock at the entrance to Ben Gurion Airport.
A soldier got on and told Adel and me to get off. Then he asked us for our IDs.
“We’re not sixteen yet,” Adel told him, and answered all his questions: where we’re from, where we’re going, where we study.
The soldier asked us to open our bags, and the bus went into the airport without us. The soldier searched through our books, our sheets, and our clothes and said we should wait for the bus to return and pick us up on the way out of the airport.
I’m not getting back on that bus, I decided. I’m not willing to be stared at like I-don’t-know-what. I’ve had it. I can’t take this anymore. I’d survived the roommates, the dining room, and the Polanski kids, but this was the last straw. I cried like a baby. I broke down. Even the soldier felt uneasy. He said it was just routine. He brought me some water. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
I didn’t drink it. I phoned my father at home. I could barely blurt out the words.
My father screamed, “Calm down, what happened?” He was upset.
“Come here and get me right away,” I shouted, to make sure he understood I wasn’t coming home on my own. “I’m at the airport.”
Adel preferred to keep quiet. He said he could have been in Nahf already and he was sorry he’d joined me.
I sat there crying, waiting for my father.
“What happened?” my father asked, when he finally arrived to pick us up. I didn’t answer. I sat in front and Adel sat in back. My face was all swollen, and Adel told him that a soldier had taken us off the bus and I wouldn’t get back on. Father said, “Are you crazy? What’s got into you? Is that something to cry about?”
“I told him a million times, but he wouldn’t listen,” Adel said.
I didn’t say a word.
Adel and my father talked about school, about the food they gave us there, and about what they called “four o’clock snack,” which was cake and juice. Adel said they serve meat for dinner every day. They talked about the big library and the playground. My father said a million kids would like to be in my place, and there I was, crying like a baby. “Do you want to come back to Tira, to study with all the bums, is that what you want? Fine, suit yourself. But don’t come complaining to me later if everyone says they threw you out of school after a single week. Do you want people to say you flunked, that you couldn’t make it at a good school? Have you thought about how people will look at you?”
My tears hadn’t dried yet, but I could tell right away that my father wasn’t about to let me stay home. I had no choice. I’d have to go back to the school.
“Look at Adel,” my father said. “Why isn’t he crying?” Then he laughed at me. The sonofabitch knew they took Arabs off the bus at the airport. He’d taken the same bus when he went to the university. “Nobody ever told me to get off,” he said. “They didn’t notice I was an Arab. Every time the soldiers told an Arab to get off, I’d get up and shout, ‘Take me off too, I’m an Arab!’ and I’d hold up my ID card and wave it proudly. What’s the matter with you? What a jellyfish you are. Some soldier jerk can make you behave like this? Just look at yourself.”
I took that bus line hundreds of times after that. Each time, I’d feel the fear again. It didn’t let up until we’d passed the airport. The only time they ever made me get off was on that first trip. After that, they didn’t notice me anymore. I felt sorry for the Arabs who were taken off, and I thanked God they hadn’t picked on me.
In my second week at the school, I shaved off my mustache. I told Adel we had to learn to pronounce the letter p properly. He didn’t care. The Bible teacher gave me a tip: “Hold a piece of paper up to your mouth. If the paper moves, you’ve said a p,” he said. Adel laughed at me, and when the paper moved, he said he couldn’t tell the difference. He was convinced there was really no difference between b and p, that it was all in my head, and that Hebrew is a screwed-up language. He didn’t see why they had to have two different letters for the same sound.
In my second week at school I bought myself some pants in a Jewish store. I bought a Walkman and some tapes in Hebrew. After that, I’d always have my Walkman and a book in Hebrew whenever I went through the airport. I didn’t come across the Polanski kids anymore. They were liable to recognize me. I took a cab whenever I needed to get to or from the central bus station. Adel and I stayed friends, but I never invited him home again.
Shorts
At school, I got to play with real guns. I knew how to use a carbine and an Uzi: snap the magazine in, cock the weapon, hold the gun to my shoulder, position myself like a sniper, and shoot. On school trips, the teachers would have weapons, and I soon became the student in charge. The weapons were heavy, and I was the only student who was prepared to carry them. I felt proud to be walking around with a gun across my shoulder.
Our history teacher was a left-winger. He always let me have his gun and asked me to walk close to him, because someone once made a comment about it, and he explained to me that it was his responsibility. He wouldn’t let me carry the magazines, even though he could have trusted me blindly.
Pretty soon I started sitting at the back of the bus with the other kids and singing their favorite bus-trip songs. I started taking the lead, and they’d join in the refrain. I knew the words by heart. When I was in elementary school, we had one favorite song that we’d chant over and over again—“Dos, dos ya chauffeur, al 199”—a song that urges the driver to go faster, 199 kilometers an hour. “Don’t worry about the cops. We’re the children of Palestine. Palestine is our country, and the Jew is our dog, knocking on our door like a beggar.” We sang without understanding a word. Once, our history teacher in Tira asked if anyone in the class knew what Palestine was, and nobody did, including me. Then he asked contemptuously if any of us had ever seen a Palestinian, and Mohammed the Fatso, who was afraid of having his knuckles rapped, said he’d once been driving with his father in the dark and they’d seen two Palestinians. That day, the history teacher rapped every single one of us on the knuckles, launching his attack with Mohammed the Fatso. He whacked us with his ruler, ranting, “We are Palestinians, you are Palestinians, I’m a Palestinian! You nincompoops, you animals, I’ll teach you who you are!”
On our class trips, whenever we slept outdoors we’d light a fire, and some kids would play the guitar. Nobody in Tira had ever played a guitar. We sang Beatles hits, and Israeli rock band songs too. Mashina, for instance. I knew already who they were, and I forced myself to learn their songs. I couldn’t stand that music at first, but within a few months it grew on me and I started liking it. Whenever I’d go home on vacation I’d scream at my brothers, who still listened to Fairuz and Abed el-Halim. When my father took me to the bus stop in Kfar Sava, I’d beg him to switch to a Hebrew radio station or at least to lower the volume. It wasn’t that I was ashamed. I really couldn’t stand them anymore. I told him my ear had grown used to other things.