Ashraf goes on laughing the whole way, telling me about my village, his village, the new village I no longer know, and his disdain is unmistakable from the word go. As we continue driving, he explains the best way to behave to avoid getting into trouble. “You’re driving along a narrow road and a car comes in the opposite direction. There isn’t enough room for both of you. You drive right back, insha’Allah, even if he only has to back up two meters and you have to do one hundred. Always back up, ’cause it could end in a shooting, depending on who happens to be in the car. You’re driving along and two cars are blocking the road because the drivers are chatting through the open windows? Wait patiently. God help you if you honk. Just wait for them to finish their conversation. It won’t take more than an hour, insha’Allah. Just wait and when they let you pass, smile and say thank you.” Ashraf keeps laughing as he recites his survival lexicon. Then he explains that if they jump the line at the infirmary, I should just let it be. If I’m in line at the grocery shop and someone cuts in front of me, I should just stay cool. He swears that people have been killed in recent years because of things like that. Slowly his laughter dies down. “You have no idea what you’re coming back to, do you?” he says, and his tone changes.
6
My wife gets into bed in the second-floor bedroom after putting the baby down in her crib, and I stay downstairs to watch TV, zapping till the news begins on the Israeli channel. I’ve got a satellite dish like everyone else around here, one hundred and ninety channels, more than ninety of them in Arabic, and one of the Israeli channels. The whole business of the Arab channels is pretty new to me, and I’m intrigued. I’ve never come across it before. When I left the village they were still using antennas, the kind that barely pick up the Israeli channel, and with any luck, a Jordanian one. I get a kick out of zapping, back and forth. I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than five minutes watching the Arab channels. It’s pretty amazing. There must be a dozen music channels with clip after clip showing half-naked Lebanese belly dancers. At first I can’t believe Arabs would dress like that, just like on MTV. The songs come as a shock to me too, all of them seem the same and sound the same, about love, mostly, the same words, changing only slightly from one song to the next, the same rhymes, the same annoying melody, a pounding beat that I don’t like at all. But still I stare at the dancing women, with their skimpy getups and undulating pelvises.
I keep on pressing the button with the up-arrow on it to switch channels. MTV is showing Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire? and Abu Dhabi has The Weakest Link. Soon enough I start skipping right over the religious channels. At first I thought they were cool, but now I see through them right away. Soon as I spot a sheikh with a head-cover, I know he’s preaching or giving a religion lesson. There are countless channels like that, where they spend the whole day reading from the Koran and discussing what Islam does or doesn’t allow you to do. I hate the look of the announcers, I hate the way they stress their k’s when they talk. It’s something called Kalkala. I remember they told us about it in the seventh grade. You’re supposed to enunciate the k very clearly when you’re reading from the Koran, it’s supposed to come straight from the throat like you’re about to puke kkkkkk. In one of those lessons, the teacher wanted to tell us about the heretics. “Who are the heretics of today?” he asked. Some students answered they were the people who put their faith in al-asnam (the idols), some said they were the sun worshippers, or those who believe in cows, or the murderers, or the Jews, but our bearded religion teacher didn’t like any of those answers. In the end, he turned to the blackboard and wrote in gigantic letters: KARL MARX, and asked one of the kids to read what it said. The student overenunciated the k sound in Karl and the teacher gave him a beating to help him remember. Nobody understood what the hell Marx was. There are some channels, especially the official Saudi one, that are beneath contempt. Everything there seems different — the graphics, the music, the jingles. It’s like the programs I used to watch on Jordanian TV a decade ago. It’s amazing that in the age of cutting-edge television and state-of-the-art studios like Al Jazeera’s and ones in Lebanon, they still have these backward channels with moderators who don’t know the first thing about modern broadcasting. Everyone watches Al Jazeera when there’s a new war on. Later, people get tired of it, because all the wars on television look the same lately. Someone had better come up with something new in the next war. We can’t take it anymore, it’s too boring staring at a black or green screen.
I’m not too crazy about Al Jazeera. From the little I can see, they spend hour after hour talking with experts and commentators, broadcasting news that everyone’s heard already, news that most of the Arab world is used to hearing and likes to hear. They never mention the names of Arab leaders, never do any investigative reporting about rulers or important figures in the Arab world. They don’t want to upset anyone, least of all the oil magnates in the Gulf, with all their money — the money which, when all is said and done, pays for these channels. It’s pretty pathetic, really; the big name that the channel has made for itself is a hoax. It may be a revolution in the area of news coverage in the Arab world, but it still doesn’t amount to real journalism.
I switch just in time to the news on Channel One, Israel TV, which begins with another item about a cell of Israeli Arabs who’ve been picked up on suspicion of helping a Palestinian suicide bomber get to Tel Aviv. Maybe my editor will ask me to do a story about it tomorrow. I feel like they’ve been phasing me out lately. Ever since the cutbacks and the decision that I’ll go freelance and no longer be on the editorial board, I’ve hardly gotten any assignments. Maybe this time they’ll need me, because everyone else is afraid of going into Palestinian villages, not only on the West Bank but in Israel too. I’m glad that cell got caught. Maybe it’ll earn me something this month.
The doorbell rings. It’s my mother and my two aunts, my father’s sisters. “They’re here in honor of our new house,” my mother says.
“Welcome,” I say. “My aunts are here,” I answer my wife. The doorbell has awakened her and she wants to know who it is.
“Congratulations, mabruk, ma-sha’Allah, may this house be filled with children,” they say, and drag their big selves inside. I pull along the two bags of presents they’ve brought us.
My wife comes down, trying not to show how annoyed she is at the unexpected callers. I hate it when she makes those faces, as if it’s my fault, as if I want people to come visit us. “Where’s the little one?” the older aunt asks her. “Asleep already? I was hoping to get a look at her.”
“She’s in her crib, you can take a look.” My aunts follow my wife up the stairs. The two of them have trouble climbing, and the older one has to rest every other step, grasping the railing, panting, muttering, “ya Allah,” and taking another step or two. The younger one pauses every fourth step. Both of them complain about the stairs. Once they’ve taken a quick look at the baby, they slowly make their way back down and settle into the armchairs in the living room, wiping their brows with the white kerchiefs they’ve been wearing, and trying to catch their breath. It takes quite a while till the older one manages to say, “She’s adorable. Looks just like you,” and the younger one adds, “May God bless her with a brother. Is there anything on the way? You need another one, and it’s better for a woman to give birth while she’s still young. I stopped having children at twenty-eight after I’d had eight. It’s better for the woman, ’cause you never know when she’s going to stop getting her monthly.”