It’s late, and my father went to bed long ago. Their suitcase is packed and soon their food will be packed too. All my mother has left to do is to fill a few bottles with water and put them in the freezer. They’ll be frozen by the time she and my father leave, and the cold water will last all the way to Cairo. She finishes, takes another look in the fridge, counts the sandwiches and mutters to herself as she tries to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anything. The bus will be arriving soon, and they’ll be leaving at five A.M. She has just two hours left. Everything’s ready.
“Come on, get into bed,” she tells me, taking off her scarf and using it to wipe the perspiration from her face and forehead. How I hate that gesture of hers. My mother doesn’t care about me. I’m convinced of it. Mother never understands what I am going through. If she did, she’d never have go and leave me home alone. When I told her earlier in the evening that I didn’t feel sleepy, because I’d slept a lot in the afternoon, she believed me, and when I say good night to her now and head for the children’s room, she’s sure I’m going to sleep. My mother isn’t the kind of mother who tucks her children into bed at night. She keeps saying she can’t understand women who are sad that they’re childless, and that only crazy women have children. My mother brought three children into the world and she keeps telling her girlfriends and us that it’s too many. My mother doesn’t love us. At least she has never told any of us that she loves us. Sometimes I think my brothers have no problem with it, because they seem pretty happy. For me, having a mother who hates us is tough, but I never mention it to anybody.
I stay awake. I know Mother is still awake too. How she loves these trips. She keeps telling people that without these annual trips she’d collapse. She works like a dog all year and then come the ten days without dishes, without cooking and especially without children. I hear her get into the bathtub to bathe and I picture her fat body with all the soap and water. My father wakes up half an hour later and he too begins to get dressed. They talk quietly, in order not to wake anyone. I can’t hear what they’re saying. I wait another few minutes, wipe away my tears and get up to go to the kitchen. Soon they’ll be leaving. I say good morning and they don’t reply. They’re checking their papers and their passports. “Go wait outside,” Father says. “Watch the bags, and call us when the bus gets here.”
I sit on the steps next to their bags. Dawn is breaking, and it’s a little chilly even though it’s summertime. The hair on the back of my hand bristles and I enjoy the feel of the goose bumps on my skin.
What could possibly happen? I ask myself, and try not to answer the question. They go away every year and in the end they come back. I struggle not to think all the bad thoughts that race through my mind, because I know that if I do, they’ll probably come true. I know for sure that if anything bad happens to my parents, it will always be because of me. I have to think positive. I’ll try to concentrate on the presents they’ll bring me. I bet they’ll bring me sneakers and maybe this time they’ll get the right size.
I see the bus coming up the road and I call out like the happiest kid in the world, “The bus is here.” My parents, who are all ready, rush outside, as though if they’re a second late, the bus will leave without them. My father carries the large suitcase, my mother takes the lunch bag and I follow with a container of water covered in Styrofoam, which I carry with both hands. They put everything into the luggage compartment of the bus, except for the water, the coffee and the little bag that Mother carries on her shoulder. Most of the passengers are adults but a few have brought along a child or two. My parents get into the bus, sit by the window nearest me, look at me and don’t say a word. They don’t even wave good-bye and I don’t wave to them either. The bus begins to pull out. I wait for it to disappear in the direction it came from and only then can I relax my muscles and let my body tremble.
I have ten days of waiting ahead of me now. I always remind myself that it’s only nine nights. The nights are the main problem. I pull out the chart I’ve prepared, of the days and the nights, and allow myself to tick off the first day even though it hasn’t begun yet. Grandmother will be arriving soon, as she does every year, bringing Grandfather with her. They’ll stay for ten days and nine nights.
She arrives before my brothers wake up, just as she does every year. They live not far from us, a five-minute walk away. If their house were larger, my mother would send us to stay with them, but they live in a single room. The rest of the house is used by my only uncle, my mother’s brother. My grandmother arrives early because she doesn’t want people to see her carrying Grandfather on her shoulder. She is old, she looks about a hundred years old, but she’s still strong and my grandfather is light as a small child. My grandmother is perspiring. She puts Grandfather down on the bed in my parents’ bedroom in his regular position, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. My grandfather never gets out of bed by himself. He doesn’t move at all. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been in this position, just lying on his back. My parents keep saying what a strong man he was before his illness. They say he was the richest man in the village, the best salesman, the first man to buy a car and to build a fancy stone house. But we never knew him like that. Sometimes my parents tell us how he lay in bed after he returned from the pilgrimage to Mecca. They say that right there, in the middle of town, in front of everyone, a thief was beheaded, because that’s how it is in Islam and it scared us out of our wits and we never stole anything ever. They say the sight of it destroyed him completely, and that he was a different person after that.
I like looking at my grandfather. I like how thin he is and how his face is so small, his cheeks so shriveled, his mouth so wide open and his eyes protruding and staring at the ceiling. People kept saying he was going to die, but that was many years ago, and he hasn’t died. My mother used to say that sometimes if God loves him and us both, He ought to take him. She was waiting for him to die, and I couldn’t understand how anyone could want a father to die. So what if he lay in bed all the time? My grandmother bends over, holds her waist with one hand, mumbles something about how heavy he is and that she’s turning into an old lady. She sits down for a minute on the living room sofa, but then gets up and goes into the kitchen, looking for the pots and pans, checking the fridge, taking out tomatoes and eggs and getting breakfast started.
My grandmother doesn’t hear a word. It’s not because of her age. She never did hear anything. She can speak and when you get used to it, you can understand what she wants. My parents say her problem can be treated and that there are all kinds of gadgets in the Jewish hospitals, but my grandmother doesn’t want that. She says she doesn’t need it and that what she hears is too much as it is.
I’m so jealous of my brothers. They don’t care that our parents are gone. On the contrary, sometimes it seems as if our parents’ absence makes them happier. They can play the whole time, they can go to bed whenever they want and they say Grandmother makes wonderful food, that her enormous breakfast gives us lots of choices, not like what Mother fixes, only one thing. They always laugh at Grandfather and when Grandmother is not around my older brother gets a stick and pokes at him. Sometimes he pokes it into Grandfather’s mouth and nose and he cracks up when Grandfather doesn’t react.
My grandmother works all the time, even though there isn’t that much to do. Either she’s preparing something in the kitchen or else she’s cleaning or she’s taking care of Grandfather. She brings him yogurt, mixes it and forces it into him, a spoonful at a time. Sometimes it drips out and she wipes his mouth and mutters things. I can’t tell if she’s muttering to herself or to him. Sometimes she carries him on her shoulder, takes him to the bathroom, puts him back in my parents’ bed or else on the sofa and goes outside to hang wet pieces of white cloth on the laundry line. In the mornings she takes him outside and puts him on a mattress in the sun. Then at noon she takes him back to bed and in the afternoon, back to the mattress outside.