Eight years ago, he talked to her for the first time during break. On the way to the water fountain, he felt he was walking crookedly and thought he looked a mess. At Hanukkah, they started exchanging looks. At first, quick flashes, as if accidentally. Then she smiled. And he was hooked. He already knew every feature of her face. He already knew that her light-coloured jeans were a little too short and a beautiful part of her leg was exposed in the space between the edge of her trousers and the top of her socks. Based on her smile, he thought she might be interested, but how could he really tell? In any case, he felt that if he didn’t ask her out by Passover, his life would be hell. As for her, she finished drinking, wiped the last drop of water from the corner of her mouth and leaned against the concrete wall behind the fountain, in the shade. He walked the last few steps that separated them and practised one more time the words he’d spent the night before planning to say. But when he was standing in front of her, a gust of wind carried the thick, intoxicating scent of her hair to his nostrils, and instead of ‘I wanted to tell you that I think you’re very pretty’ or ‘You look beautiful in this light’, what came out of his mouth was, ‘Do you want to go to the cinema tomorrow night?’
He drove across the Mevesseret bridge and turned right.
The red bus is racing through the streets with a dull roar. It doesn’t pull into bus stops. It doesn’t open its door. It’s four-thirty in the morning. Soon, Moshe thinks, he’ll get into bed. He’ll hug Sima from behind, whisper sweet nothings in her ear, and she’ll forget the terrible things he said. If she wakes up, maybe they’ll go to look at the children together. There they’ll stand, hand in hand, in the kids’ room. He’ll remind her of how they once stood together at the water fountain in the playground. He won’t mention the kindergarten. He’ll be on his guard. Where’s the fire, tomorrow’s another day. She’ll admit she’s wrong after she hears what he has to say.
*
When the programme on Rabin is over, the men kiss at the door and my father takes all the sections of A-Nahar that were lying around the living room and goes to read them in bed, leaving only me and my mother there watching an Egyptian movie, and I want to say to her, Ya umi, I saw the house. I saw it with my own eyes. But I know that whenever anyone mentions the subject, it makes her ill. Forty years have passed, but the hurt she feels in her heart is as wet as the ground after rain.
A few weeks after the Six Day War ended, people started visiting their old homes. Quietly, not making a big fuss about it, they’d pile the whole family into a pickup, sometimes ten people in one small truck, and go. Back then, they didn’t have to pass five checkpoints every hundred metres like today.
Some people only found a pile of stones where their houses used to be. Some people, like the ones who lived in el-Castel, found their houses still there and in good condition, but Jews were living inside. They would stand and look at the houses from a distance, and if someone asked what they were looking for, they’d just turn around and leave.
The ones who came back from al-Kuds brought plums from the plum tree, the crooked one near the square, and figs from the muzawi tree, the one that had fruit as big as pears, and they told us that the Jews had built ugly buildings that didn’t fit in with the mountain, and that they gave all the streets the names of wars, Independence Street, Victory Street, Six Day War Street, and they told us about Aziz, the only man who stayed in the village to wait for the soldiers, and after he was killed, he turned into a black demon that entered into the body of the Jews and made them crazy.
We were the only ones who didn’t go back. My mother wouldn’t let us. She said she didn’t want to see. Didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to hear. With eyes glittering with anger, she would say, I will only go back to my home to live there. I won’t be like those fellahin who stand around like beggars, waiting; maybe some Jew will invite them in to sit in the living room and drink coffee, in their own house. She’d say to my father, and you too, don’t you dare take the children there, or else find yourself another wife.
Even now, sitting in front of the TV, my mother’s eyes are glittering, but not with anger. In the Egyptian movie, Mahmoud Yassin comes home to his village after six years in Cairo and only the dog recognises him. Yekhreb baitak, she curses Mahmoud Yassin’s father, who’s looking at him through the window, how can you not know your own son?!
My mother, she has something to say to everyone, even to people in films. Usually, Arab women are silent, hiding behind their husbands, but with us, ever since they took away my father’s land and he had to go out and work like a common labourer, he became weak, ya’ani depressed, and my mother talks for him.
I look at the dog that’s licking Mahmoud Yassin’s face, and remember my mother’s story about Assuad the dog. It’s a story she always tells when my aunts and uncles from Ramallah come for Ramadan or Id al-Fitr, and someone mentions the sweet katayif my grandmother used to make, and before long, they’re talking about that house. Then she says: Do you remember Assuad, al-kalb, the dog? Everyone says, taba’an, of course, and they turn their chairs towards her to hear again about the night they ran away, about how Assuad, who was a big, black dog, refused to leave the house and how his howls filled up the whole wadi and even after they tied a strong iron chain around his neck he kept on pulling my father, who was holding him, back to the village and how he looked at the long line of people with the eyes of someone whose best friend had just tricked him, and how at one of their stops, when my father wasn’t watching, he managed to break loose and ran to the village with the iron chain trailing after him and never came back. They never saw him again. ‘Even a dog was more faithful to his home than we were. Even a dog!’ My mother always ended the story with those words, and all my aunts and uncles lowered their heads in shame. Then they sang mawal to the village. My father usually started quietly and all of us gradually joined in:
Ya dirati ma lakh aleinu lom, lomackh ala menkhan. Do not be angry with us, our village, be angry at those who betrayed us.
I think he’ll apologise to his son, my mother said and pointed to Mahmoud Yassin’s father, who was sitting in the dark smoking a nargileh. Mazbut, ya umi, I say, even though I’m thinking about something else: should I tell her or not? Where is your dignity, she’ll yell, how could you build houses for Jews in our village? Aren’t you ashamed? Don’t you know that the land is registered in your name? Don’t you know that it’s your land? That’s what she’ll say. So why should I tell her? Besides, how can I tell her if I’m still not sure? And how can I be sure if I still haven’t gone into the house? We’ll be finishing Madmoni’s frame soon, and I still haven’t been inside, God forgive me.
*
If you think I’ve forgiven you, you’re making a big mistake, I told Moshe and turned my back on him. Two minutes before that, I had been crazy with worry about him. It’s not like him to go out like that, in the middle of the night, when he has to drive in the morning. I looked at the alarm clock every five minutes, then every minute, then I got up and went to the kitchen and finished off a whole bag of cornflakes, even though I knew that Liron would be disappointed in the morning when he saw there were none left. I read two magazine articles about Sigal Shahmon, one in For Women and the other in Modern Times — she said she didn’t want to have children yet, but family was the most important thing in life for her — and from so much Sigal Shahmon, I was ready to forgive Moshe just as long as he came home quickly and didn’t fall asleep on the road, God forbid, and have an accident, like Turji, his friend from work who fell asleep on the road to Eilat and now he parks his car in the handicapped spaces.