“At home,” I muttered. “I pray at home.”
“I guess you haven’t had a chance to get to know the mosques around here. I’m telling you, come to our mosque, together with your brother. That would be the best. We don’t have a lot of politics, or a lot of fanatics. I know your family, it’s what would suit you best. Your family are like us, not like some of those crazies.”
Yesterday, two more stones fell out of the wedding ring, the one I had fixed recently, and another one. My wife wants me to go have it fixed again, even though she figures it probably won’t hold.
6
I pass by the mosque, which means I’m back in my own neighborhood already. The older people at the entrance don’t seem the least bit worried. Rolling their Arab tobacco and licking it tight, huddling there together all day waiting for the next prayer hour. What else do they have to do, actually? At least they don’t feel alone, and they can spend hours talking about people who died two thousand years ago. I blurt out a salam aleikum to which they respond with an aleikum salam, and I raise my hand. I’ve got to calm down. Truth is, I’m much calmer already. Some bulldozer must have slashed a cable and all the mobile phones went dead because the lines were jammed. Maybe an antenna has been damaged. Everything will be all right. Maybe I shouldn’t go to my parents’, maybe I ought to check the exit first, see if the roads are open already and retrieve my car. People in the street don’t seem to think it’s anything serious. There’s cheerful music inside the houses, Egyptian pop. I recognize it and it makes me happy, even though, on the whole, I hate the trend. Every now and then, a car drives by and brakes just before the makeshift speed bumps that were put there to deal with reckless young drivers and car thieves who like to show off their loot by racing through the streets at crazy speeds. Some of the neighbors simply poured cement down in the shape of a small mound opposite the house, while others preferred to slow things down by digging a ditch from one side of the road to the other. Housewives are mopping the house and pouring the dirty water into the street, the way they do every morning. Where on earth, I ask myself, did I get the idea they were closing off the village?
My parents’ home is the first one on the northern edge of the village, then my older brother’s, then mine. The two brothers’ houses look exactly the same, and on the remaining piece of land they’ll build the fourth house, identical to ours, for my younger brother when he finishes school. All his life, my father has loathed fights over land, especially among brothers, which is why he made sure, long ago, to divide it up evenly among us. “So nobody says I gave one more or less than the rest,” he tells us. I don’t think my parents have heard anything about what’s going on. I’ll tell them I overslept and that I just came to say good-bye on my way to work. “Good morning,” I say, and they both answer. My mother is preparing something in the kitchen and my father is sitting on the pink sofa staring at another newscast on Al Jazeera. They don’t seem surprised to see me, despite the unlikely hour of my visit. My father sits up to greet me. “What do you think?” he asks me “Have they arrested anyone yet? What do they want anyway?”
“I hope God takes the lot of them,” my mother says, and wipes off the counter. “Hungry?”
“Not really. Maybe I’ll have a bite a little later,” I say. So my parents do know, and I try to check whether it’s because of something they saw on TV, because they couldn’t possibly have gone out yet. Where would they be going, anyway?
But none of the events in the village has been mentioned on television. My heart starts beating hard again, and I try to keep my body from trembling when my mother curses the Jews and says they’d almost had a heart attack the night before when someone came banging on their bedroom window at about three A.M. “Who could be knocking at such an hour?” my mother says. “We were sure something terrible la samakh Allah had happened to one of you or your children.”
It was my younger brother. He’d knocked on the door first, and when they didn’t hear him he knocked on their bedroom window, right over their heads. My younger brother was dead tired. My father says they could hardly make sense of what he was saying about what had happened, except that the security guards at the student dorms had come with the Border Police, had ordered all of the Arab students out of their rooms and had escorted every one of them home.
“Where is he?” I ask at once, shouting, even. “Where is he?” And my mother asks me to pipe down, because my younger brother is asleep. “Poor boy,” she says, “they kept them up all night.” I hurry into the room where my younger brother is sleeping, the room we once shared. I move the old door slowly, trying to keep it from squeaking in its frame. I look at him, his thin, long body stretched out on the bed. The bedspread he’d covered himself with has fallen off. I’m about to cover him, but then I realize it’s too hot for that. I notice I’m perspiring. I close the door again and hurry out. “I’m going out for a while. I’ll be back soon,” I tell my parents, checking their phone on my way out to see if it’s working. It isn’t. “It’s dead,” my father says. “Want something to eat?” I hear my mother ask from inside.
I pass by the housewives again, hear the nerve-wracking Egyptian music and the drums and the mechanical clapping. I hate that music, hate those housewives, I tell myself, and walk faster. I head up toward the mosque this time, which is more tiring. I’m not going to salam aleikum the SOBs sitting across from the mosque. I can’t stand them, them or their stories. How come everything’s so calm here, as if nothing’s happened? How I hate the people here. They live for their next meal and don’t think one step ahead. I hate them all, especially the older ones, who’ve neglected us and let the situation get as bad as it is. Obsequious nobodies. Look at us now. I’m mad at the lot of them. I don’t exactly know what’s happening, but it must be something much more serious than a terrorist cell or just some intelligence report or warning about a potential suicide bomber who’s entered Israel from Qalqilya or Tul-Karm and hidden out in the village. What the hell are they bringing the students home for? How could that tie in with a warning or a terrorist attack? What’s going on here damn it?
I check my mobile again, and the result only makes me feel worse. I’ll take the car and then see. First I’ve got to get the car back, though. The entrance to the village is less crowded by now, but there are still dozens of people milling around. The mayor isn’t there anymore. He stationed a few of his thugs in strategic spots to keep people from getting close to the barbed wire. There’s no more bottleneck and I can get my car out of there. Maybe I ought to go to the town hall first, to check whether they’ve had any news. The radio is still playing happy music, talking about the economy, rapes, robberies, Palestinian homes that have been demolished and a few terrorists who’ve been killed.
I check my wallet and decide I’d better go see my older brother at the bank on my way home, to withdraw a few hundred shekels. The bank is crowded now, because everyone who works outside of the village has decided to use this day off for errands. Luckily for me, I don’t have to stand in line. I head straight for the office where my brother works. “Say,” my brother greets me, “this is serious, isn’t it? People have been coming in and saying that the village is surrounded. What do they say in your paper?” only to discover that I have no way of being in touch with my paper. He goes on, “Must be some very red alerts, targeted alerts,” jargon that’s become second nature to Arabs living in Israel, thanks to the media, who tend to classify the warnings by their level of severity: general, hot, focused, targeted…