At first, I did not pay much attention to him. Nor did I read any sign of annoyance on the faces of the other passengers who were, I suspect, busy thinking about other things. No one complained or said a word about the man or his mumblings. No one paid him any mind until he stomped his foot so hard it shook the floor of the carriage. Then he did it again and people began to exchange startled looks. Eyebrows went up and eyes rolled.
Finally, my curiosity got the better of me and I turned to look at my neighbour. He continued to stomp on the floor to the same slow syncopated beat while he went on reading and rocking back and forth, like a clock striking midnight.
All of a sudden, the man stopped reading and his foot stopped stomping. He looked around at us as if our faces would tell him why we were so surprised. His gaze eventually settled on me. He stared, and then glared at me in genuine astonishment.
‘Israeli, no?’
I shook my head.
Without relinquishing the look of surprise on his face, he smiled. ‘Jew?’ He did not wait for me to answer but put his index finger on a line in his book. He began to read the words beneath his finger as it crept across the page.
I gently touched his wrist to stop him and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir. I don’t speak Hebrew very well.’
My words made the man even more curious. And when I told him the same thing in correct Hebrew, my apology came across like an outright lie. That is how it always is whenever we try to apologize for not speaking a language by using the right words in the language itself.
That only encouraged my neighbour to go on with his questions. ‘Egyptian, huh?’ he asked in Hebrew.
I shook my head again. Maybe he thinks the Camp David Accords have somehow made the Egyptians learn Hebrew?
Then he turned to look at me squarely. ‘So where are you from then?’
I decided to put an end to his confusion. ‘I’m Palestinian.’
With the innocence of a child and the wonder of a sage, he called out in Hebrew, ‘You are a Philistine? A Palestinian?’
Then he began to rattle on in Hebrew. With some difficulty I was able to grasp this: he was on his way to meet his son and go to synagogue. He promised to pray for both of us, because he loved Palestinians and hated war.
When the train stopped at Green Park, the man closed his book and leapt energetically for the door. Before he stepped off, he turned to look at me with a huge, genuine smile on his face. ‘Shalom!’
‘Salam!’ I called back.
A heavy-set man comes walking down the aisle. The shaggy red beard on his face makes him look like my grandfather’s old goat. The man goes on toward the rear of the plane. A woman about his age approaches. She is wearing jeans and a light blue blouse, unbuttoned low. In her cleavage, a little Star of David glitters and gleams. She also walks back toward the rear.
Suddenly, a black man in his twenties appears. He looks like a Falasha. I imagine his family emigrating from Ethiopia as part of the airlift between 1984 and 1991. Maybe via Sudan, part of the secret deal with Numeiri. I really don’t want him to sit next to me. I do not want to spend these next five hours sitting next to someone like him, with the two of us poring over every moment of Middle Eastern history together. The guy walks by, and I begin to relax.
The next one up in the line slowly creeping toward the back is an old lady. If this woman sits next to me, it won’t be any fun at all. But, at the same time, it won’t be so annoy—
My thoughts are interrupted by shouts from among the seats on the other aisle. ‘Rotza leshevet po, Ima!’ A little girl’s voice shrieks, ‘I want to sit here, Mama!’ I cannot see the girl from where I am sitting, nor the mother, who tries to explain to the girl that the seat she wants is not hers. ‘Ze lo hakiseh shelakh!’ The girl screeches out over and over, ‘But I want to sit here, but I want to sit here!’ I now can hear two small fists pounding on a seat, as she bawls, ‘Rotza leshevet! Rotza leshevet!’
As the stewardess tries to resolve the problem, I go back to watching the passengers as they shuffle by. Some I hope will sit next to me. Some I hope will not. I imagine that I am the one who decides who will sit where, what they should look like, and even what opinions they are allowed and not allowed to have.
A woman in her sixties appears, walks toward me, then walks past. A young North African man reads the seat numbers above my head and makes me nervous. Then he walks on, making way for a large man in his fifties. Another man approaches, panting and out of breath, like he is lugging around a body that belongs to someone else. He is carrying a black book and putting on a pair of thick glasses. I watch him carefully as he sits down in the seat directly across the aisle from me in the middle row. When I realize what sort of book he is reading, I say to myself, Please God, don’t let him stomp his feet when he reads!
A seventy-year-old woman comes up and stops right next to me, but she does not look up at the seat numbers overhead. Suddenly a beautiful blonde appears right behind her. Her arrival makes me reconsider the calculations I have been making.
I hope she sits next to me. The words repeat in my mind like a mantra. I couldn’t care less about the kinds of questions she is probably going to toss at me. Flinging my fear to the wind, I decide I am ready to go to hell itself, as long as I get to sit next to her.
I struggle to get a better look at the woman and notice that she is desperate to find her seat and is not going to wait for the old lady to clear the aisle. She is in such a hurry that she leans over the old lady. Like a lover late for an assignation, she murmurs, ‘Excuse me, sir — is this row 19?’
‘Yes, miss. No one is sitting in A. Is that what you’re looking for?’
The old lady walks past and the aisle opens up to reveal a pair of bare legs. She is not wearing much on top either. She is courteous when she asks to squeeze by me. My seatmate. Lucky you, Walid!
I stand up to let her through, not yet believing my good fortune. This blonde is going to be my companion through the depths of the night. She will drift off beside me and I will wake her up at dawn so we can watch the sunrise together. I will even exchange pleasantries in Hebrew with her, if she wants. ‘Boker tov, adona!’ … ‘Boker tov, adon!’
Why is this woman in such a hurry to sit down? Did they seat her next to me deliberately?
The more I think about it, the more paranoid it makes me. At the check-in desk, the attendant took my passport and looked at it. She did not even attempt to disguise her uneasiness. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she told me. ‘There’s been a mistake with your reservation. The plane is overbooked.’
‘How is that my problem? I made my reservation three weeks ago.’ That’s all I actually said, even though what I really wanted to tell her was that I had been waiting decades to take this trip. I never had the chance to say this because she immediately began to tell me how sorry she was. British Airways would assume all responsibility. She would try to find a prompt solution for my problem. I should relax and not worry, if they could not find me a seat on this plane, they would find me one on the next flight.
‘When would that be?’