When I got back to my room, Samia was on the stairs. “I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “It took me an hour to find the room.”
* * *
We’ve been together for four years now. It’s about time. I’ll drink my coffee; then I’ll wake Samia up and tell her we’re going to be married. Until yesterday she was living in the dorms and I was living in the Nahlaot neighborhood with Jewish roommates. Now that I’ve moved into an Arab neighborhood, we’ve got to get married if I want us to go on sleeping together. The owners, who live upstairs, would never allow us to sleep together unless we’re married. That’s it. We’ve got to do it. I know she’ll never ever leave me, so why put it off?
I didn’t know anymore back then whether she was staying with me because she loved me or in order to make it clear to me that I should forget about her ever leaving me. She kept saying I’d promised her we’d get married. I would never break that kind of a promise. It could wreck her life. Everyone in Tira knew by now that we were together, and it was all because of my lack of consideration. As far as she was concerned, she shouldn’t be walking hand in hand with me, let alone sleeping with me. She told me that a Tira bride who isn’t a virgin is sent back to her parents on her wedding night. Once, her aunt had a heart attack when a daughter of hers showed up at home on her wedding night, but all the bride wanted to do was to pick up her hairbrush.
I couldn’t believe Samia’d work up the courage to sleep at my place on that first night in the Arab neighborhood. She cleaned the house, and we told the owner we were engaged. With Jewish owners, we wouldn’t have had to explain. Samia used to visit me in Nahlaot and slept over whenever she felt like it. My roommates liked her, and for them it was natural. Not like with the Arabs in the dorms, always gossiping and spreading rumors. Well-founded rumors, but what business was it of theirs? “You, what’s it to you? You’re a man. What’s the worst that could happen to you?” she always said.
Samia has one more term paper to submit. Then she’ll go back to Tira, because what would an Arab girl be doing away from her own village? Her father has already found her a job in the municipality. She says there’s nothing for her in Jerusalem. And her parents are already suspicious of her latest excuse, the term paper. They say she could be working on it at home.
I look at her in her sleep. Pretty. Facing the wall, as always. It’s still early, and she spent all of yesterday cleaning, while I connected the appliances and opened the extra bed I’d bought long ago.
“Get up,” I say. “We’re going home to get married.”
“What, now?”
So I took two days off from work and went home to be married.
My father had no objection to the wedding, quite the contrary. He liked the idea. He didn’t mind that I was only twenty-two. He said Samia is from a good family. Communists. Friends of his.
My mother is happy: a girl with a diploma. Maybe she’ll reform me too. Maybe she’ll gradually succeed in persuading me to go back to the university. “How many courses do you have left? Isn’t it a shame for those three years to go down the drain? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, to have a wife who’s better educated than you are? I have to hand it to her for agreeing.”
My grandmother knows the refugees. Used to work with them picking fruit. “They’re the best women in the village,” she says. “Bring her here so I can see her.” Even though she can hardly see anymore.
Father says nobody in Tira gets married this way. “It can’t be done in two days. Even if we agree, her parents won’t. They have their self-respect, don’t they?” He says we won’t succeed in finding a hall overnight or inviting people. And I explain that I want it to be small. As far as I’m concerned, the only person we need at the wedding is the sheikh. But my parents wouldn’t dream of having anyone badmouth them or give anyone a pretext for saying they’re not as good as everyone else. “Isn’t it bad enough that the poor girl is marrying someone with no home of his own? Are you sure her parents agree?”
Samia’s parents agree because they have no choice. The rumors have finished them off already. Her mother had gone to pay a condolence call and overheard people discussing her promiscuous daughter who was studying in Jerusalem. In the mosque where her father prays every Friday, they mentioned her in the sermon. Not by name, but they spoke of parents who send their daughters off to university, where they turn into prostitutes.
My parents won’t give up. They settle on one hundred guests on each side, and Father closes a deal with a restaurant owner. They buy gold the way people used to in Tira, and give us money to buy clothes in Tel Aviv. Samia buys a dress on Shenkin Street, and I get a suit at Zara in Dizengoff Center. Nobody in either one of the families understands why we’re getting married like this. The sheikh arrives and I sign his papers seven times. Her father signs for her, which is the custom. We’re married now, and all I want is for everyone to finish eating so we can go home.
The next day, my mother called and said the teachers where she worked, the ones who hadn’t been invited, thought it was a shotgun wedding and we were just trying to avoid disgrace. Samia said her family hadn’t been sure if it was an engagement or a wedding, because at an engagement you only serve knaffeh but the restaurant had served a full meal. On the other hand, at a wedding you wear a bridal gown, but she’d worn a dress from Shenkin Street. Samia cried and said it was all my fault. She knew it wouldn’t work, I couldn’t think of anyone but myself, I wasn’t prepared to do anything for her, and her parents were hurt and angry because she hadn’t been married like everyone else.
My father chewed me out too. He said I was a mess. “Next week come again, and we’ll put an end to this disgrace.”
So we got married all over again. The checks covered the hall, the music, the photographer, a thousand guests, and a Netanya hotel. Apart from my aunts and their children, I hardly even knew anyone at my own wedding. I hadn’t invited anyone. Everyone had been invited by my parents or Samia’s. I put on my black suit and my black shoes, like in an Arab movie. I had to put the ring on Samia’s finger. I had to dance with her, even though I haven’t a clue about dancing the debka. I was supposed to cut the cake and kiss men whose names I didn’t know. I had to hug my aunts and uncles and smile at the camera. I had to listen to horrible music that never fails to give me a headache. And I had to put up with all that without any alcohol or cigarettes. Because I’m well-behaved and shy.
Beit Safafa
A few months after we got married for the second time, we moved into Beit Safafa. It used to be a village, but by then it was a neighborhood of Jerusalem. It’s good to be a stranger. Nobody follows you around. Nobody takes an interest in you, and the only thing the landlord cares about is that you pay the rent on time. True, our landlords are Arabs, but we still don’t feel like we belong. We have no relatives or acquaintances or friends here the way we do in Tira.
Our house is in an area that was occupied in 1967. Its Hebrew name is Givat Ha-Matos (Hill of the Plane), because an Israeli plane was downed there in the war. From 1948 to 1967 there’d been a barbed wire fence running through the village, splitting it in two. For nineteen years, brothers, relatives, and families living on either side of the fence couldn’t visit each other. Our landlady says that the only time the Israelis and the Jordanians would allow families to approach the fence and shake hands with two fingers was on holidays or wedding days. She showed us pictures of a wedding being celebrated on both sides of the fence. Half the family lived in Jordan and the other half in Israel, she said, and laughed. Now both halves are occupied by Israel, except that people in the part occupied in ’67 have residents’ passes and those in the part occupied in ’48 have citizens’ passes, so they’re considered superior and more loyal. At least their homes are higher. It figures — they’ve always had more work on the Israeli side.