Who’s our boss anyway? It was a long time before I figured out who the boss of the garage was. At first I thought it was the old clerk who sits there all day in the little office, the only place where there’s no pictures of naked women. But they told me he was only the cashier, just a clerk.
Then I had my eye on one of the Jewish mechanics who was in charge of the work and gave out orders, he was the one who dealt with the customers, testing their cars for them. But they told me he was the foreman. In the end they pointed him out to me, the real boss, the one that everything belongs to, his name’s Adam, about forty-five years old, maybe more than that, with a big beard. Maybe it was because of the beard I didn’t realize he was the boss. I didn’t think he belonged to the garage at all, I thought he was some kind of artist or professor. What’s the beard for? How should I know? I never guessed that everything belonged to him.
He wears partly working clothes and partly not working clothes. A white shirt or a nice clean sweater and blue working trousers. Most of the time he isn’t in the garage but driving around in a big American car, an old car but very quiet. Uses the car to fetch a new engine or some complicated bit of equipment for the garage. When he arrives he’s surrounded straightaway by a bunch of mechanics, they follow him, talking to him, asking him questions, consulting him. And he looks all the time like he’s about to drop, he always looks tired, thinking about something else that’s got nothing to do with the garage. But in the end the circle closes around him and he stands there in the middle, listening and not listening. Standing there patiently, looks like all he wants is not to touch them and not to be touched. If he talks at all it’s quietly, with his head a bit bent, chewing the end of his beard like he’s ashamed of something. He’s not even interested in women and sometimes we get some really attractive high-class chicks coming into the garage with neat little cars and they spend half the day wandering about and getting in the way. We’re so busy watching them we start dropping tools. Even the ones lying underneath the cars watch them. And they run after Adam as well, trying to talk to him, trying to make him laugh, but he isn’t the type that laughs easily. He hardly notices them. He looks through us ordinary workers like we’re air. He doesn’t really care about the work in the garage anyway. But when he walks around the place we all start to move faster and we even turn the radios down, though he’s never said anything against Arab music. Sometimes when there’s a difficult problem they ask him to look at an engine or listen to it or bring him some part that they’ve taken out, showing it to him and asking if it’s any good or if it should be changed. He looks and listens, his hands in his pockets. And then, so sure of himself, without hesitation, he tells them what to do.
But sometimes he can spend the whole morning standing at the lathe cutting out some missing part. Consulting Hamid, who seems to be the only one he really respects.
He doesn’t concern himself with the accounts. He goes into the office only when an argument starts there, when some customer gets a nasty shock because of the price they’re asking. He checks the bill again but he’s as stubborn as a mule and he doesn’t knock off a single cent. I sometimes sweep the office at the end of the day and I overhear the arguments. They say to him “You’re the most expensive in town.” And he answers “It’s up to you. Nobody’s forcing you to come back. Do you want me to show you the price list?” And he smiles, partly at them but mostly to himself.
Once, just before work was over, when I was sweeping the garage for the second time I came to a place where he was standing talking to somebody and I waited quietly for him to move. The workers were already changing their clothes and washing their hands and the garage was nearly empty. He stood there talking and just didn’t notice me standing there with the broom. I’m sure he didn’t know who I was, or that I’d been working in his garage for more than a month.
I stood there leaning on the broom and he stood on a pile of dirt listening to some important-looking guy who talked and talked. It’d been a crazy day and I’d already cleaned the garage maybe five times. All the time they’d been bringing in cars that wouldn’t start, cars that had been driven too fast and had skidded in the rain. There was no end to it. At last the important-looking guy in the suit who’d been talking about politics went away, but Adam stayed where he was, thinking hard. I was afraid to say anything to him. Suddenly he noticed me standing just a few feet away from him waiting with the broom. “What do you want?” I got all confused. He scared me staring at me like that.
“Would you mind moving a bit? I must sweep under you …” And he smiled and moved a bit and I started sweeping where he’d been standing in a hurry so he could move back there if he wanted to. But now he was watching me, staring at me like I was some kind of freak. Suddenly he asked:
“Who brought you here?”
“My cousin, Hamid,” I said at once, trembling and blushing and not knowing why. What could he do to me anyway? After all he gives me only a tiny wage that one way or another goes straight to my father. And he doesn’t really scare me that much, it’s just that big bushy beard of his.
“How old are you, boy?”
Him too — “boy” — damn him.
“Fourteen years and three months.”
“How is this? Didn’t you want to stay on at school?”
I couldn’t believe it. How was it he knew about the school? I started to mumble “Yes, of course … but my father didn’t want …”
He was about to say something but he kept quiet, still staring at me. And I started carefully moving the broom and cleaning around him, piling up the dirt in a hurry. And suddenly I felt him touching me, laying his hand lightly on my head.
“What’s your name?”
I told him. My voice was shaky. No Jew had ever touched my head before. I could’ve recited a poem for him. Just like that. If he’d asked me to. He really hypnotized me. But he didn’t know such a thing was possible.
And since then he’s smiled at me every time he sees me. Like he remembers me. And a week later they took me off sweeping and taught me another job, tightening brakes. Not too difficult. I started tightening brakes for them.
DAFI
So tired. What do you think? At night I lie awake, snatching maybe one hour of sleep in the morning when Mommy’s already dragging me out of bed. And until she sees me sitting at the table drinking my coffee she doesn’t leave the house. It’s odd, but at first the tiredness isn’t so bad and I’m not even late for school. In the first class I’m fairly lucid, anyway most of them are asleep, including the teacher. But the crunch always comes in the third class, just then, at around quarter past ten, I feel all empty inside, my heart sinks, my breathing gets heavy, I feel dead. At first I used to go outside by myself, to wash my face and try to sleep on a bench somewhere. Near the outhouse I found a sort of alcove and I tried to catch some sleep there, but it wasn’t safe because Shwartzy’s always snooping around (what the hell does he think he’s doing patrolling the girls’ toilets?) and once he caught me there, the sneaky bastard, and sent me back into class on the double. I started looking for other places to sleep but it wasn’t any use, the school wasn’t designed to furnish sleep for its pupils. It really was depressing, after all I needed only a quick doze, quarter of an hour maybe, to bring me back to life. At last I had a wonderful idea, I’d sleep in the class during the lesson, and I even found a suitable place, at the end of the fourth row a pillar sticks out and this makes an ideal hiding place, especially if you push the desk right up against the wall. That way you can escape the teacher’s notice, present but not present.