“I’m not like that, I’m not like you,” he says, squashing his cigarette in an ashtray and exhaling the last coil of smoke through his nostrils. “I don’t feel like sleeping next to Father,” he says. “I guess I’ll take the sofa and you’ll sleep on the bed, okay?” I nod and know I won’t get any sleep tonight. “I’m not tired yet,” I tell my brother.
“Neither am I. But I guess we ought to try and get some sleep, to make the time go by faster.”
My brother lies down on the three-seater, which is barely large enough for him. He puts his head on one armrest and his feet on the other. The house is almost silent, except for an occasional cough or the sound of breathing.
I take off my shirt. It’s filthy already, even though I just put it on a few hours ago. Ever since the closure began I haven’t been able to shower but at least I’ve put on clean clothes, in the hope that they would offset the dirt. I reach for the back of my neck and scratch it gently. A thick layer of dirt gathers under my fingernails. I take a toothpick from the holder on the table in front of me and try to scrape away the dirt caked between my nails and fingers.
I don’t want to stay here either. I’ll leave as soon as I can. How can I possibly stay on here with neighbors who attacked me the way they did? How can I keep running into them? How can I go back into the grocery store after what the owner did to me today? How can I even feel safe in a place like this? I’m getting away from here, and that’s final. I feel now that I can let my wife in on what I’ve been going through. When she spoke to me before going to lie down, I felt I could tell her everything, that I don’t really have a job anymore. I felt she would have hugged me and comforted me. She would even have said something to make me feel better. I’m going to do it, to tell her everything, and we’ll turn over a new leaf. I’m sure she’ll understand what I’m going through. I’ll find another job, and I’ll go on moonlighting at the paper, in the hope that something better will turn up. There’s no telling what’s going to happen. But I’m going to find something else, anything. And who knows, maybe one of the places I sent my résumé has been trying to get in touch with me over these past few days, but can’t. We’ll live in a small apartment in a downscale neighborhood. We could even rent a one-room apartment for now, and put baby’s crib next to us. We can live in a single room till she turns one. After that, we’ll figure out something. By then I’ll find something else, I’m sure of it, and things will get better and we’ll be able to afford to move to something roomier. A two-room apartment with a small kitchen will do fine. We don’t need a living room. Nobody comes to visit us anyway. A small kitchen with a table for three is plenty.
I’ve got to get out of here first chance I get. I’m sure my wife will be pleased. She hated the whole thing to begin with. She’ll find another job. There’s always a shortage of Arabic teachers, especially if we move to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. She could work in Jaffa or in East Jerusalem. Very few of the Arab inhabitants in the mixed cities finish high school, so there are no local teachers, and there are always vacancies, and the outsiders are the ones who call the shots in the school system. Her best chance is in the Arab neighborhoods in Jewish cities. But we would not live in such a neighborhood, which seems as bad as here — worse, in fact. We’d do better living in a different neighborhood. In spite of everything, it’s much safer living in a Jewish neighborhood. The fact is that despite all the shit we had to put up with there, nobody ever attacked us, at least not physically. At least they have policemen and law enforcement. Now that I think of it, I lived there for more than ten years and I never — but never — heard a single shot.
2
Suddenly a strong light fills the entire house. I hear myself yelling in fear — a short yell — then I bend over and cover my eyes. This light is very painful. My heart is pounding even though I realize now that it’s simply the power that’s come back on. The sudden brightness wakes my brother, who’s been sleeping on the sofa facing me. “Yeah!” he says. “Is that it?” Almost all of the light switches in the house have been switched on. The light went on in my parents’ bedroom too. The two children wake up and immediately start crying. My father emerges from the children’s room, and my mother from hers and my father’s bedroom, smiling broadly. She applauds softly, like a little girl who’s just received a new toy. “Elhamdulilah,” she says. My wife and my older brother’s wife stay in the bedroom with the children and try to calm them down, but I can hear how happy they are.
They’re chuckling and their tone of voice is different. Everyone is smiling, and I hear how enormously relieved they are. I’m actually enjoying the noise that sounded so strong and surprising at first — the familiar droning of the refrigerator and the air conditioner and the incessant hum of the TV at my parents’ house. My dad walks over to the air conditioner, puts his face up close and talks to it: “Welcome back, ahalan u-sahalan. How we missed you.”
This is it, I tell myself, it’s all over now. My mother tries to turn on the faucet in the kitchen sink. The water isn’t flowing yet, but there’s the sound of water pressure building up, the sound you always hear after it’s been off for a while. My father says it’s the sound of air and that we’ll have water too pretty soon. It’ll take time, but the sound proves that the water system is working. “It’s a matter of a few hours, or even less,” Father says, and lights a cigarette, then turns on the TV, where nothing has changed. It’s almost two A.M. and there is nothing on Israel TV. On the Arab cable networks everything looks the same — Lebanese singers go on singing love songs, wiry dancers in alluring clothes sway seductively. The Saudi channels are teaching little children how to read the Koran, and the Egyptian channels are showing reruns of familiar series. My wife comes out with the baby, smiling, rocking her gently. You can tell she’s happy. She looks at one of the series and says, “There’s Nour el-Sharif, everything’s okay.” She and my older brother’s wife are laughing.
I pick up the telephone receiver and hear a dial tone. I report this to everyone, reinforcing their collective sense of victory. I heave a sigh of relief. Tomorrow morning I’ll try to phone the paper. Maybe they’ll want me to do a write-up after all. Too bad it will only be for the following day. Tomorrow’s paper closed at midnight. My father opens the locked door and goes out. We all follow. The entire village is lit up. Instead of turning off the extra lights, we join in the improvised “electricity party” that reassures us it’s no illusion. It looks like the entire village has come alive. There are lights on in every house, and everybody’s up, like just before a holiday. The familiar sounds of summer evenings are back. Sounds of happiness, of TV sets, of children playing and of parents trying to get them to settle down. Some of our neighbors are out on their balconies, smiling broadly. The neighbor who was assailing our house earlier today, spurred on by the crowd, is smiling at us now and yelling, “The electricity’s working, the electricity’s working,” as if nothing has changed, as if she’s forgotten what she did to us and what we did to her. Even the grocery store owner is shouting to us, laughing, overjoyed. “We can have a shower at last,” my father says, and reminds us that we can remove the lump of gypsum from the sewage pipe. “I’ll get it out,” I say gleefully.
I go back inside. Everyone else is still outdoors. I look for the water bottle and gulp down almost all of it. The Egyptian singer is still singing love songs on TV. I look out the kitchen window in the direction of my house and my brother’s. They are lit up too. I’ll go over there.