“And what’s going on now?” Father asks.
“The whole village is out there. The mayor and his cronies are asking people to move away and are trying to keep things quiet. The parents of the contractor and of the two workers, one of them from the village and one from the West Bank, are trying to get through with spades and knives, to get back at the soldiers. One worker’s father fainted and had to be taken to the infirmary too.”
“Maybe now they’ll get out to avoid a confrontation with the mob,” Father says, and Khalil, in his jacket, explains there’s no chance and that, on the contrary, they’ve been bringing more and more soldiers in, and they’re standing there with their pistols and their machine guns and the barrels of the tanks as if they’re expecting a war. “Allah yustur,” he says. “They’re up to something. What are they thinking? And they’ve cut off the power, to boot. They’ve gone completely crazy.”
3
“It could take time,” I tell my parents and my brother. “We’ve got to get things ready before it’s too late, to buy enough food for at least a week.”
For some reason, a week seems to me now like the longest that the thing everyone calls a roadblock — and nobody really knows if it’s a siege or a closure or the devil knows what — can continue. My father laughs and says I’m overreacting. My mother and my older brother agree with me. My brother says that, who knows, there might be confrontations with the soldiers and they’ll declare a closure, looks like they’ll stop at nothing now. I tell them they shouldn’t buy too many dairy products or too much meat or anything that needs to be refrigerated, because there’s no telling when the power will go back on.
My father says we’re exaggerating. True, he hasn’t come across a tank shell since ’48, but it must be a regrettable mistake of some soldier who misinterpreted a command when he saw the pickup coming straight at him and thought it must be a terrorist and a car bomb. Those soldiers have been in the territories and in Lebanon, and all of them are so panicky they can’t tell a loyal Arab from an enemy. My father says the soldier will get told off by his commanders in no time. He’s convinced that right after the incident they’ll be issuing an apology and the soldiers will leave. The power will be back soon too, because if it isn’t just an ordinary malfunction it must be that they cut the power because it was much easier for the soldiers to operate in the dark. They’ve probably finished their mission by now, and if it hadn’t been for that idiot contractor with his pickup, everything would have been behind us by now.
My father has full faith in the state, he always has. When we were little, everybody assumed that he’d been appointed supervisor in the Ministry of Education because of his qualifications. He doesn’t really have an academic degree, and he barely finished the teachers’ seminary in Jaffa. Every now and then I’d get into a fight with students whose parents had told them that my father was in cahoots with the authorities, and I’d always scream at them that they were just jealous, and sometimes I cried when they said he was collaborating with the Jews. Because it wasn’t true. He just had a few good friends. Besides, I knew everyone liked him. When we were little, I remember how whole families used to come to see him almost every day with gift-wrapped things, and they’d talk to him very respectfully and ask him to find a job for their children or to fix situations that they couldn’t fix themselves. My father was a good person and he helped people, and it had nothing to do with the presents. He always said he didn’t want those, and that he only took them because the people insisted.
When I grew up, I realized there was no way an Arab would get a senior appointment in the Ministry of Education if the government didn’t have a vested interest in him. It’s still that way, in fact. My father says he’s never informed on anyone and that all he ever wanted was to help the students. He says he got the job thanks to his good reputation and not because he’d collaborated with the security service. Granted, he doesn’t have an academic degree, but we’re talking about thirty years ago, and who had an academic degree in those days? Who even got as far as the teachers’ seminary in Jaffa? It was true. My father was no collaborator. All he did was vote for the Labor Party and host some parlor meetings in his home. It meant inviting some of the Jews that we used to see on TV to come here and talk, and Father got the whole family to vote like him.
Somehow, something that had once been considered a betrayal became perfectly legitimate in the eighties and nineties. Those were the years when the Arab citizens not only resigned themselves to being citizens of Israel, they even grew to like their citizenship and were worried that it might be taken away from them. They no longer dreamed of being part of the big Arab world stretching “from the ocean to the Gulf” the way they used to. On the contrary, the idea of becoming part of the Arab world even began to frighten them. They truly believed the Israeli politicians who claimed that “relative to the Arab states, the situation of the Israeli Arabs is amazing,” a sentence that always shut people up when they started talking about discrimination. People were afraid they wouldn’t get their National Insurance allowances anymore, or that a day would come when they’d find themselves in a country without medical insurance, welfare, pensions for widows or single parents or the next of kin, allowances for the elderly and the disabled, unemployment benefits or subsidies.
As soon as the Oslo Accords were signed, my father could take pride in the fact that he’d belonged to the party that had recognized the PLO and was ready to establish a state for the Palestinians. Actually, there was no real difference between the loudmouths who voted for an Arab party and those who supported the left-wing Zionists. Both adopted similar slogans, all about “peace and equality,” so what was the problem exactly?
I know some people thought my father had a lot of money, that he’d received huge sums from the state or from his party, especially when Labor was in power, but it isn’t true. My father worked hard his whole life, and that’s something I know for a fact. He did everything he could to make sure we got a university education, and to be able to build each of us a home someday. I remember how he used to come home from his Ministry of Education job in the afternoon, rest awhile, and then go to work at another job. For years he moonlighted at a frozen-meat factory. In the afternoons he’d head for one of the kibbutzim nearby. Then they’d give him a pickup with a large refrigeration compartment in back, and a freezer full of poultry and sausages and hamburger, all of it frozen. Father would distribute the meat in the Arab villages in the area. He was too embarrassed to work in our own village. I figured it out right away. He never told anybody about that job. Only we, the family, knew about it. Actually, I’m not sure my brothers knew either. I’d insist on doing the rounds with him. At first he refused. “You just see to your studies, and the rest will take care of itself,” he always said. Only when he came to accept that it wouldn’t hurt my schoolwork — that I’d finished my homework even before he got home from work at his day job — did he agree. “I know,” he said, “your teachers are always telling me how well you are doing and that you really should have skipped a grade.” That’s how I began joining my father every afternoon. I’d watch him put on his big green jacket and walk into the refrigeration room. He’d pull out boxes and pile them up in the back of the pickup, which had a big winking chicken painted over its side. I’d help my father carry the boxes. I was in ninth grade by then, and pretty strong. I loved working with him. It didn’t take too long either. Usually we finished making the rounds of all the grocery stores in two to three hours. I soon came to know all the grocery owners in the area. After a while I started carrying the boxes myself. I wouldn’t let my father touch them. All he had to do was settle accounts with the grocers while I unloaded the goods. It wasn’t hard, not at all.