8
I’ll pick up my wife at school today. I’ve got time. First I’ll unload all the groceries from the car. I’d rather she didn’t see the bags of flour and rice. I’ll cram them into the little room that we use for storage. I pile the dairy products into the fridge, and feel I’ve overdone it a bit. We’ll pass the expiration date before we use them all up. We hardly eat at home damn it. We usually skip breakfast, so we won’t even get to the dairy things. I put the canned goods and the formula in the kitchen cabinets and feel bad about spending money I don’t even have. Fuck, if the ATMs were working, even my brother couldn’t help me withdraw money from my account. It used to be so convenient to be able to pick up the phone and find out if your salary had been deposited in your account yet and what the balance was, but now it seems like a nightmare. He’ll realize soon enough that the paper is hardly paying me anything. I shouldn’t have lied to him about the problem with the accounting department. Damn it, I can’t go on lying this way. I’ve got to transfer my account to a different branch, one in the city, maybe. I’ll say it’s closer to work and that I spend most of my day there anyway, so it’ll be easier for me to get to my branch directly from work. It shouldn’t be too complicated to transfer an account from one branch to another. It’s not as if I’m changing banks. I hope you don’t need to close an account before you can move it to a different branch, I mean I hope it doesn’t actually have to be in the black. Not that I owe the bank very much, but I don’t have even a small amount in my account right now. I can’t believe I’ve spent almost all of the thousand shekels today to stock up for a war that won’t happen. Everything’s probably blown over by now, I tell myself and go check if the phone’s working yet. It isn’t.
The doorbell rings as I’m about to leave. A twelve-year-old boy is standing in the entrance with some tissues, some lighters and a picture of the al-Aqsa Mosque. “Special for you, sir, tissues for two shekels, a lighter for half a shekel, ten for four. Have some, and may Allah protect your children, sir.” I look at him, standing there and begging, with tears in his eyes. I try not to pity him, to remember what Ashraf told me about the hundred-shekels minimum that those bastards make each day thanks to their knack for making us feel sorry for them. I remind myself that I don’t have money to spare and that if I buy from him even once, he’ll be back at this address every time. “Sorry, I don’t need any,” I say. And he goes on begging, with his eyes all moist. “Please, sir, for my parents, and may God bless you and your family, may God bless your relatives who’ve died, please, sir, take something.” I shake my head and lock the door, trying to block out the voice of the boy who runs after me as I get into my car and drive off. I feel a pang in my chest.
It’s the first time I’ve picked up my wife from work. I mean, the first time since we got back. Before that, I’d pick her up almost every day. The paper wasn’t far from the school where she taught and I didn’t want her taking buses. Here she can manage. She could even come home on foot. It’s not far at all. It’s almost one-thirty, and they’re about to finish the sixth period.
My wife teaches in the same school where I used to go. She went there too, but a few years after me. Some kids are playing ball in the yard. Their teacher is sitting on a chair under one of the trees that kids in my class planted on Tu b’Shvat, Israeli Arbor Day. The teacher’s gaze alternates between the kids and her watch. I go upstairs and start walking down the long hallway past the classrooms. I look inside as I pass, in search of the one where my wife is teaching. I can hear the Hebrew lessons and the kids echoing the teacher as loud as they can, “abba” (father), “imma” (mother). Third grade, I tell myself, that’s when they start learning Hebrew. Every now and then I nod in the direction of one of the teachers who taught me, or someone I met at our house when a group of teachers came to welcome my wife after we moved back. Ustaz Walid, the history teacher, sees me, interrupts his lesson and invites me into his classroom. He shakes my hand and declares to the students, “He was like you once, one of my students. But he did all his homework, he was a good student, and look where he is now. He’s a distinguished journalist, who appears on TV. And you don’t want to wind up as factory workers, you want to get to the university too, right?” To which the whole class replies at the top of their voices, “Yes, Mr. Walid.”
I nod, and don’t know where to hide, I’m so embarrassed. What he says is even slightly painful. I know that journalism was a last resort for me because my score on the psychometric exam prevented me from applying to medical school or law school. Besides, my days as a distinguished journalist are slowly drawing to an end, so that even when I do find a good story that I don’t even have to struggle for, a story that’s happening to me damn it, in my own village, I can’t pick up the phone and talk to my editor.
My wife seems taken aback to see me in the hallway. I smile at her, to make sure she knows there’s nothing wrong. She leaves her class for a minute. “Anything wrong? Why aren’t you at work?”
“There’s some kind of roadblock at the entrance to the village.”
“Yes, I heard something about that, but I thought you must have made it out before they closed the road.”
“I didn’t, even though I’ve got loads of work, but it’s no big deal. You’re about to finish, right?”
“In a minute. Come on in.”
I go into her classroom. The children are giggling, whispering to one another. Grade 4-a, the same classroom I was in. My wife gives them homework for the following lesson. All of the questions, 1 to 6, in the chapter about the halutzim, the Jewish pioneers. My wife is a geography teacher, and they’re still teaching the same material they taught twenty or thirty years ago. She writes the words on the blackboard—swamps, eucalyptus trees, malaria, diseases, mosquitoes, children dying, sand, desert.
I doubt the children know who those halutzim were. I had never understood they were Jewish immigrants. It was never stated in so many words. I was convinced they were wise heroes that all of us ought to admire because they invented important things like netting for windows and doors, to keep out the poisonous mosquitoes which used to kill babies.
Sometimes I wonder if my wife herself knows that the pioneers were Jewish immigrants. Sometimes, when I look at the tests she’s correcting, I wonder if she knows what the Jewish National Fund is, considering she’s been singing its praises for years. My guess is that she hasn’t a clue. She just accepts what the books say at face value. She’s always been a good girl, a good wife. If the JNF spends money on land, public parks and playgrounds, that’s what she’ll tell her students.