Shadia carries a knife around with her; she stole it when she was in first grade. When there are problems, she hides the knife up her sleeve. It’s a switchblade, not like my Lederman with its nail clipper, its screwdrivers, and its spoon. Shadia laughs at me when I tell her about my knife. She says she could write a good story about these things — about an Ashkenazi nerd who entered the world of crime. There was a guy called Husni in her class. He’d robbed a bank once. She couldn’t believe he did it. He wasn’t capable of stealing an eraser. Someone shot him when he came out with the money, just some sonofabitch with a pistol. A Jew. They didn’t do anything to him, didn’t even arrest him.
It was her last shift. She couldn’t go on this way anymore. It was the night of Purim and the place was so sad. Not a single good-looking person. The regulars come in, take a look around, and leave. I can understand them. I’d never go to a place where the dancers were so ugly. Shadia and I don’t dance like them and we don’t look like them, and both of us arrived with a premonition. It was Purim night and we smelled trouble. For the first time, I was wandering around with something in my pocket that could open into a knife.
“The owner had better pay a bouncer to get them out of here,” she says, and I nod. “I for one would never come back here. And I don’t mind having to pay for my own liquor. What about you? Are you staying?”
I look at the bar, at the beer stains, the lemon, the lupine spikes in the ashtrays. We’re not emptying the ashtrays today. We don’t want anyone to stay. Facing me at the bar is a man in a suit. He must be past fifty. Sometimes he says he’s a lawyer, sometimes he tells us he studied medicine in Frankfurt. He orders another glass of white wine, and as he puts it to his thick lips, it brings out the deep wrinkles in his rugged complexion. Like cracks in the desert soil after an earthquake. Now he’s putting on his glasses to write down a phone number for the girl next to him. She’s a stranger, a volunteer in one of the human rights organizations. She’s short and heavy-set, looking for men the whole time and not particular.
There’s no way I can look like them. If I convey what these Arabs convey, I’m in serious trouble. But it’s out of the question. People aren’t scared of me, and they’re not put off by me. Or maybe they are, except they manage to hide it. I bet there are lots of girls who got the wrong idea, as if I was coming on to them, and I must have been as disgusting as the rest of them. I can’t believe it.
Every time our paths cross, Shadia and I manage to pick up our relationship. She keeps telling me about her loneliness and her sadness. But despite all the loneliness and the sadness, she always manages to make me laugh. She’s one of the few who can get me to laugh out loud, not just to smile politely. Out of loneliness, she bought a bird and stuck it in a cage in the center of the house. There are two sticks in the cage, and the bird jumps from perch to perch all day long. It helps Shadia unwind, but still she thinks she’ll probably release the bird before it dies of boredom.
When the war broke out, she managed to break the closure on Ramallah and reach Jerusalem. She dismantled her apartment, giving her furniture to her neighbors and her TV, VCR, and washing machine to friends. She says she could cram everything she owns into two bags. Which is good, because it will make it easier for her to pick up and leave next time.
Now she’s about to disappear again. If she’s quitting her job at the bar, I probably won’t see her in the near future. She runs off for long periods of time, and always comes back with stories like “I’ve made a film about the Nejaidat tribe in Jordan,” or “I’ve written a script for an Austrian film.” They always screw her. They don’t pay, they don’t broadcast what she’s done. Something bad always happens to her in the end, and then she runs away.
I’m so jealous of her now, with her bird and her two suitcases. She’s a beautiful girl, and there are lots of people who come to the bar just because of her. Black skin with curly hair and delicate features. The Arabs haggle with her over the bill. She gives in to them, anything just so they’ll leave. It’s the last shift, and she can’t stand the sight of them anymore. The lawyer-or-doctor in the suit is the only one left at the bar. He’s swaying already, rummaging through his coat pockets looking for his wallet.
I envy Shadia and she envies me: I have a wife and a child, I know where my house is, and I go back there every night. Not like her. Every time she looks for a home, she has to open an atlas. We’re stupid farmers, stupid fellaheen who won’t budge from our land. She can’t be like me.
PART FIVE. The Road to Tira
Date of Birth
My father works at city hall. He issues ID cards, passports, birth certificates, marriage licenses, and death certificates. He works out of a small office in the basement, with a small window and a shutter that can’t be pulled down. For fourteen years now, my father’s been issuing IDs to the people of Tira. In the past, they had to go to the Ministry of Interior in Netanya to renew their ID or apply for a passport, but now they can do it in the village itself.
Father works from eight to four every day. All the workers at city hall have a reputation for being corrupt. People say they just sit around doing nothing and were appointed because they’re related to the mayor. My father hated himself for accepting the job, but Grandma and Mother had pushed him. They wanted him to work in the village, not far away, so he’d always be nearby and they could always find him. Getting that job cost Father everything he believed in. Fourteen years earlier he had supported a collaborator who was running for mayor, and his reward was to be allowed to work for the State. People said my father must have been a collaborator too. Otherwise how could he work for the Ministry of Interior after sitting in an Israeli jail on security charges?
People in Tira hated my father. Maybe Grandma’s right; maybe they really were jealous of him. My father didn’t have any friends except for Bassem, who’d worked in the packinghouse with him. Bassem couldn’t get out of bed anymore. His years of fruit picking had finished off his back. Every now and then, he’d have another operation, and Father would go visit him in the hospital. Sometimes he’d take the chessboard along, and Bassem would play from the bed.
I don’t remember ever seeing Father making friends with people who were considered well-educated — doctors, lawyers, teachers, or engineers. Sometimes I got the impression that he was embarrassed, that he felt inferior, with that job of his behind the broken shutter.
Father had never been so discouraged. He hardly left the house anymore. Soon as he got back from work, he got into bed and turn on the radio on the dresser. Sometimes he’d come into the living room to watch the news, and other times he’d just stay in bed till the following morning. He didn’t have much to do at work. Sometimes, weeks would go by and nobody from Tira would need Father’s intervention with the Ministry of Interior. Sometimes he got so bored that he’d renew all our IDs and passports, saying they’d expired. Why walk around with old IDs when he could get us new ones within two days, with the signature of the new Minister of Interior?
My father renewed his own ID card every week. Sometimes he considered changing his name. The fact that this was possible appealed to him. He updated the information: Israeli citizen, Arab, married, father of four. Date of birth: 0/0/47, because Grandma couldn’t remember exactly when Father had been born. When the Jews came and she went to register him with them, she couldn’t give them an exact date. All she knew was that it had been in the prickly pear season. Grandma says there was a war on then, and nobody paid much attention to dates of birth.