Of course I wept and cried and pleaded but it didn’t do any good. My mother kept quiet, she didn’t want to get into a quarrel on my account, she couldn’t tell me why it was Adnan and Faiz and not Na’im, she couldn’t say it was because they were the children of another woman, an old woman who died years ago and Father gave her his word before she died.
It was so hard at first getting up in the morning. Father used to wake me up at half-past four, afraid I might not wake up by myself, and I really didn’t want to wake up. Darkness all around and Father touching me, pulling me gently out of bed, sitting there and watching me getting dressed and eating breakfast. Leading me to the bus stop through the village that’s just beginning to wake up between electric lights and firelights through side streets full of mud and puddles among donkeys and sacks. He turns me over to Hamid like a prisoner. They put me on the cold bus with all the other workers, Mother’s homemade bread in a plastic bag in my hand. Slowly the bus fills up and Muhammad, the driver, takes his seat and starts running the engine and shouting at late comers. And I look out through the steamed-up window and see Father sitting there hunched up under the awning. A wrinkled old man wrapped in a black cloak raising his hand to everyone who goes past, starting to talk to somebody but all the time watching me sideways. And I used to get really angry with him, laying my head on the rail in front of me and pretending to be asleep and when the bus started moving and Father tapped on the window to say goodbye I’d pretend not to notice. At first I really did sleep the whole journey and I used to arrive at work dead tired. Yawning all the time and dropping things. Always asking the time. But after a while I began to get used to it. In the mornings I woke up on my own and I’d be one of the first to arrive at the bus stop, sitting down not far from the driver, no longer feeling sleepy. At first I tried taking a book with me to read on the way but they all laughed at me, they couldn’t understand it, me going to work in a garage with a book, and a book in Hebrew at that. They thought I was crazy. So I gave it up. I couldn’t concentrate anyway. Reading the same page over and over again but not taking it in. So I just look out at the road, seeing the darkness disappear, the flowers on the mountains. I never tire of this route, the same route day after day, an hour and a half there and an hour and a half back.
At four o’clock in the afternoon we’re already standing at the bus stop waiting for Muhammad’s bus and from all over the city the people of our village and villages nearby are assembling, construction workers, gardeners, bin men, kitchen workers, manual labourers, domestic help and garage hands. All of them with plastic bags and identity cards ready at hand in shirt pockets. Jews get on the bus too, Jews of all kinds with heavy baskets, most of them get off at the Acre Road. And in Acre more Arabs get on and some Jews as well, a different kind, immigrants from Russia, and Moroccans too. They hardly understand Hebrew. And on the way the Jews thin out and the Arabs too and in Carmel the last of the Jews leave the bus and only Arabs are left. The sun on our backs is nice and the road flies. Haifa disappears from the horizon, Carmel is swallowed by the mountains, the electricity pylons thin out. No smell of Jews now. Muhammad tunes the radio to a Baghdad station that broadcasts verses from the Koran, to entertain us. We go deeper into the mountains, driving among orchards on a narrow road twisting among the fields and there’s nothing to remind us of the Jews, not even an army jeep. Only Arabs, barefooted shepherds in the fields with their sheep. Like there never was a Balfour Declaration, no Herzl, no wars. Quiet little villages, everything like they say it used to be many years ago, and even better. And the bus fills with the warbling of that imam from Baghdad, a soft voice lovingly chanting the suras. We sit there hypnotized, silent at first and then crooning softly along with him.
ADAM
One of those Friday night debates, fruitless conversations among the plates of nuts and the dripping olive oil, when they start on that political crap about the Arabs, the Arab character, the Arab mentality and all the rest of it, I get irritable, start grumbling, lately I’ve lost patience with these debates. “What do you really know about them? I employ perhaps thirty Arabs in my garage and believe me, every day I become less of an expert on Arabs.”
“But those Arabs are different.”
“Different from whom?” Getting up from my seat angrily, not knowing why I’m so agitated. Asya blushes, watching me tensely.
“They depend on you … they’re afraid of you.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
But how can I explain? All entangled in my ideas. I sit down again, saying nothing.
Hamid, for example –
My own age perhaps but with the body of a youth, very thin. Only his face is wrinkled. The first worker I ever had, he’s worked with me nearly twenty years. Silent, proud, a lone wolf. He never looks at you straight, but if you catch his eye you’ll see that the pupils are very black, like coffee grounds in an empty cup.
What’s he thinking to himself? What does he think about me, for example? He hardly ever says a word, if he does speak it’s always to do with work, engines, cars. Whenever I try to draw him out on other subjects he refuses to talk. But his loyalty is really unique, or maybe it isn’t loyalty. In all these years he hasn’t been absent a single day, and not through fear of getting sacked. He’s a permanent employee with full rights. On the first of the month Erlich gives him four thousand pounds in cash, which Hamid stuffs into his shirt pocket, without counting it, saying nothing. What he spends this money on I can’t imagine, he always appears in scruffy clothes and worn shoes.
An expert and senior mechanic. These last few years he’s worked in a small shop that he built for himself in a corner of the garage, and that’s his kingdom. He restores old cars. A complicated professional job requiring precision, imagination, golden hands and infinite patience. He dismantles old engines, some of them completely wrecked, drills and cuts out new parts and breathes life into them. He works without rest, no radio beside him, no casual conversation or joking with the other workers, no teasing the customers. He’s the first to return to work after meal breaks but he also stops working the moment it’s time to go, he’s never been prepared to work overtime, he washes his hands, picks up his empty plastic bag and goes.
Two or three years ago he suddenly became religious. He brought from his home a dirty little prayer mat and every now and then he’d stop work for a few minutes, strip off his shoes, go down on his knees and bow towards the south, towards the lathe and the tool racks on the wall. Reciting passionate verses to himself, to the Prophet, who knows? Then putting on his shoes and going back to work. A strange kind of piety, grim somehow. Even the other Arabs in the garage used to stare at him darkly.
Because in spite of his solitariness he is a kind of leader to them, even if he doesn’t try to have too much to do with them. He walks among them aloof and silent. But when I need a new worker he brings me a boy or a youth within two or three days, as if he’s the chief of a whole tribe. Eventually I realized that most of the Arabs in the garage are in fact his relations, close or distant cousins.
I asked him once, “How many cousins have you got?”
A lot, he’d never bothered to count them.
“And how many of them work here?”
“How many?” He tried to evade the question. “There are a few …”
In the end he admitted to at least ten, in addition to his two sons. This surprised me very much because I never imagined that those were his sons, he didn’t seem to have any special tie to them.