7
I hardly write for the paper anymore now. Cutbacks, they say. Less than a year ago, I had a position and a contract. My name was featured at the top of the masthead with the other members of the editorial board, and now it appears under the heading “regular contributors.” In a lousy month I don’t get more than ten small items into the paper. But still I keep going there each morning. It’s become a bit embarrassing lately. My spot with the computer has been given to a perky young fashion reporter. I don’t have a desk either, but I go there anyway. I want them to see me, to remember that I still exist, that I’m still ready to do my bit for that shitty rag. Mostly I sit in the smoking room going through the papers, turning pages till around noon, then make the rounds of the nearby streets. I never eat out anymore. On rare occasions I allow myself to sit in a café and order a short espresso, and then I usually spend at least an hour sipping it, browsing through the papers.
For the first time in my life, I’ve begun looking at the financial supplements before the other sections. Stories about mass layoffs, bankruptcies, the poverty line, the monthly unemployment figures reassure me to some extent. The Arab towns and villages have always held the lead on those unemployment and poverty ratings, and for me this has been a comfort of sorts. My wife and I are managing okay for now. The return home salvaged the situation, and was actually the smartest step I could have taken. We don’t have all that many expenses, don’t even spend much for food, because we eat at our parents’ houses. We can really make ends meet on my wife’s salary alone, even though teachers’ salaries are among the lowest in the country, or perhaps the very lowest.
Last month I got four hundred shekels for the only story of mine that got published all month. And even then, my editor made a point of reminding me that “for a story like that I normally pay two hundred.”
I’m dumbfounded at all the want ads in the supplements, considering the constantly rising unemployment rate. I’ve been reading the ads very closely lately. I started by looking for a position as a reporter, a proofreader, a copy editor. Anything as long as it has to do with journalism. But no go. Every now and then when I’d go back to the paper, I’d phone the people who’d placed those ads looking for energetic youngsters in search of an interesting job, and for whatever reason one phone call was enough for them to decide I wasn’t right. In the beginning I rang some of the ones looking for young academics or stipulating that the job was “suitable for a student.” I’d send in a résumé without even knowing exactly what the job was, but I never got a reply.
Nobody in my family knew what I was going through and I saw no point in telling them for the time being. Including my wife. Every day I’d leave the house early in the morning and head for the paper, only to return in the afternoon pretending to be this exhausted guy coming home from a hard day’s work. My wife did notice that I no longer had any full-length articles and that my name hardly appeared in the paper, but I told her that I’d been promoted to the news desk and that I was now responsible for several of the reporters covering the West Bank. What I’d really been given was the job of a rewriter, a kind of subeditor whose main job is to train new reporters, and all I write are items that require a lot of experience, the kind that can’t be assigned to beginners. We haven’t begun to feel the loss of my salary yet. The real deterioration only began last month and we haven’t noticed it yet because our expenses are so negligible. But I know things can’t continue this way. I can’t go on fooling everybody. I’ve got to find another job. I’ll keep doing whatever I can to make sure my name does appear in the paper occasionally, but I’ve got to find another source of income. I can’t pretend to be working, I can’t continue going there every morning. I’ve got a feeling that pretty soon one of the guys in charge is going to ask me diplomatically to stop. I know that my coming there actually upsets some of the people, but above all it upsets me.
I’ve got to look for the kind of job that someone like me has a chance of getting. If need be, I’ll work in construction. I know it will be tough at first, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Who said the solution has to be construction, though? I bet I could find a job caring for an invalid. They always want Arabs for those. An old person, maybe, or retarded. That would be the best solution as far as I’m concerned. Nobody needs to know about my new job. Nobody in my family will have to feel humiliated. I can’t afford not to work. I can’t afford to find myself without a livelihood. I want everything to go well here. I know how important that is to everyone.
People around me are forever discussing the money that others have. I don’t know whether it’s deliberate or not, but almost every time I come to visit they start talking about how this one’s son or that one’s son built a thirteen-hundred-foot home. My mother-in-law is taking an interest in houses, and sometimes I think she’s compiling a list of every person who’s building something — where it is and how much it’s costing. She spends a lot of time on cars too, and always has tales to tell about relatives who’ve bought a new Mercedes or a Volvo or a Jeep. She knows when women in the village started to take driving lessons, how many they’ve taken and how many driving tests they had to take before getting their licenses. The stories I hear at my in-laws’ home in the evenings about people with a lot of money certainly don’t jibe with all those stories and figures in the business supplement I read in the mornings. I’m mystified at how people can just go on building and buying new cars when the situation is so bad. I never hear any stories about poor people who can’t even build a single room for when they get married. All I hear in my in-laws’ home are great success stories. Sometimes my mother-in-law makes a point of mentioning, as she describes yet another young man who built a house and bought a shiny car for his fiancé or his new wife, that he had once asked for her daughter’s — my wife’s — hand in marriage, but they had turned him down. Her voice is sad as she tells me this, and it makes me feel very uncomfortable, especially in the presence of my wife, who doesn’t say a thing. Sometimes my mother-in-law says, “I suppose she was young then, and we’re not like everyone else. We wanted her to finish school first. She was good at school and we didn’t want her to just get married and stay at home.”
My father-in-law, on the other hand, specializes in real estate and livelihoods. He knows who has bought land from whom, how many acres the deal covered, how much money changed hands and which lawyer handled the transaction. He knows how much certain people make per day, per week, per month and per year. He never mentions people’s education. Educated people aren’t that interesting to him. He values people by their income. He can spend a very long time calculating, for instance, how much the barber at the shop across the street makes in a year. He counts the people coming into the shop, at least forty a day, and nearly a hundred on weekends, not to mention the Id el-Fitr and Id el-Adha holidays, and haircuts for grooms, which cost almost three times as much as a regular cut. He calculates the wages the barber pays, the expenses, scissors, machines and various scents and lotions, and establishes firmly just how much he makes each month. Minimum is the word he uses to conclude his findings concerning people’s incomes. He admires garage owners who’ve made it big, and moving-company owners, money changers, building contractors and the proprietors of hardware stores, shoe stores and clothing stores.