My father was very happy. In every grocery store he’d tell the owner or whoever was around, “That’s my son, the best student in the class, the best student in the whole school.” He always smiled as he said it. So my father was no traitor and no collaborator.
Ever since he retired, he’s stopped being active in the party. All he does is vote for it in the Knesset elections. After the outbreak of the second Intifada and the events of October 2000, he even stopped trying to persuade us to vote for Labor. Mother voted like him, because she always does whatever he does. I don’t know who my older brother voted for, maybe the Islamic Movement, but I boycotted the elections. It was my own decision, not because the Arab parties said that was what we should do. Sometimes I even hate them and their way of thinking.
My older brother says he’ll buy some things at the grocery store now, and he’ll finish his chores when he gets home from work. Mother tells Father we have nothing to lose. Whatever food we have we’ll eat, and she’ll send my brother to the store right away with some money and a shopping list.
4
I go back home. My wife is feeding the baby. “What happened?” she asks.
“Nothing. Some idiot tried to run the roadblock.”
“The roadblock? It’s still there? You mean you won’t be going to work today either?”
“You’d better stay home too.”
“What do you mean? I can’t. But I only have five classes today. I’ll be home early. What will you do all day? How about cleaning up a bit?”
“Yeah, we’ll see. But I’d like the baby to stay with me today.”
“Great. She’ll love it. Won’t you, sweetheart? Won’t you? You’ll stay with Daddy.”
In a way I’m happy they’ve continued the roadblock today too. It sort of saves me from the useless trip to the paper and from aimlessly roaming the streets. On the other hand, what the hell is going on here?
The baby smiles and finishes the whole bottle. My wife hands her over to me and goes to the bathroom. I’m so sorry I have a little girl. What a fool I was to decide to bring a child into the world in a situation like this. It wasn’t just the roadblock and yesterday’s events, but generally it seemed to me really inhumane to bring children into a world like ours in a region like ours. The problem is that my wife got pregnant before the present Intifada broke out. Everything seemed different then, and my own way of thinking was different too. I can even say I was optimistic. My career was going well and relations between Arabs and Jews were beginning to improve. Sometimes I think it all happened because of the baby, as a kind of retribution. Religious people would say God was testing us. I try to smile at the baby, as if to convince her that everything’s fine, that she’s living in surroundings that are just the way I’d planned for her. When I think about how quickly things deteriorated, it’s mind-blowing.
I’d rather the three of us stayed together today. That’s how I am when I have a sense that things are dangerous — I like to see all the people that I worry about sticking together, but I don’t have the strength to explain to her about how frightened I am and to persuade her to stay home.
We’re walking together and she says good-bye to the baby, I tell her to take care of herself, follow her with my eyes till she’s out of sight and go into my parents’ home with the baby in my arms.
5
My parents are getting dressed to pay a condolence call. My father pays condolence calls every time anyone in the village dies. He and two other adults in the family are regarded as the official condolence callers, and for decades the three of them have paid these calls on the second day of the mourning, after evening prayers. When the death isn’t natural, or when the deceased is someone important, or when a friend or someone young dies in his prime, the three relatives modify their standard procedure and don’t wait for the second day but try to make it to the funeral as well. My mother wears a kerchief and attends too. When they reach the road, they split up — Mother joins the women and Father walks along with the men. Many men and women are walking toward the house, trying to keep quiet, speaking in a whisper, the men walking on the right side of the road and the women on the left. I feel kind of sorry that I can’t join the funeral procession, which is bound to set out from the homes of the parents — the contractor’s and the workers’—toward the mosque, and from there to the cemetery. Too bad I offered to take the baby, because it could certainly have added some human interest to the story I’ll write for the paper. I’m still convinced I’ll be covering the whole chain of events once the roadblock is removed. If the closure is lifted tomorrow, I may still get the story written in time for this weekend’s supplement.
When my mother gets back, I’ll give her the baby and go out to see what’s happening, how people are taking it. My younger brother is back home, holding two plastic bags so heavy he can barely lift them. “Mother’s gone crazy,” he says, dumping the bags on the kitchen counter. Mostly they’re full of canned goods, corn, tuna, pickles, beans, peas, ful, chickpeas. He says the store was packed and that he practically had to hit this older woman who tried to get ahead of him. He says there were loads of people there and that some of the things that Mother had ordered were sold out already. He couldn’t find any flour, for instance.
My brother takes a seat in the living room, first beside me, stroking the baby’s head and smiling at her. She smiles back. Then he sits on the sofa farthest from us, pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights one. “So, the folks have gone to a funeral?” he asks.
“Yeah. Since when do you smoke?”
“For almost a year. You know how it is at university, don’t you?” He smiles and adds in a more serious voice, “What do you say? Should I bother studying? Do you think there’s any chance I’ll get back to Tel Aviv tomorrow?”