In the end, after we hadn’t spoken to each other for maybe a month, Father forced me to make up with him. I went and asked his forgiveness because I was younger. I kissed his thin hand and he patted my shoulder like patting a dog and he just said, “You … Bialik, you.” And he smiled a bit.
Nuts –
But when the university term started and he still hadn’t found a place I too began to hurt. Faiz sent papers from England to try to enrol him at some university there but Adnan had no strength left. He really began to think that maybe he wasn’t college material. He thought maybe he had a talent for something else. Now when I left the house in the morning I sometimes met him in the alleyway beside the house. He looked very thin, his clothes were crumpled, returning from nights spent prowling around Acre and the other villages. He’d found himself new friends. We’d stand and talk for a while, I in my working clothes and he still wearing his suit and the white shirt with the black collar. I already felt more friendly towards him. I didn’t know that he’d decided to leave us, that at night he was already checking out the roads and the gaps in the border fences. Some time later he disappeared. Somebody said he’d been seen in Beirut. Although we were sorry he’d gone and Father was terribly worried about him we thought maybe it was a good thing for him to get away for a while from the Jews, who bothered him so much.
We never imagined that suddenly he’d want to return.
ADAM
It’s a real art, you don’t appreciate it, to live this kind of double life among us, to live our world and to live its opposite. And when you’re talking again in your Friday-night armchairs, unable to keep off the subject, quibbling about elite groups and voluntary suicides and frustrated fanatics, I want to laugh or cry (but in the end I say nothing, just angrily stuffing another handful of nuts into my mouth). What are you talking about? Today he’s a worker in my garage, humble and patient, smiling and reliable. And tomorrow — a savage beast, and it’s the same man, or his brother, or his cousin, the same education, the same village, the same parents.
There, for example, was this ghastly terrorist attack starting at the university, and I watch my workers closely. I employ thirty Arabs and I have time to watch them, because I no longer concern myself with cars, only people. You ask yourself, what are they thinking? Does anything matter to them? Do they have any idea what’s happening?
They know. The news spreads fast. In the garage there’s a fussy old yeke, Erlich, the cashier, who hates music during working hours. He thinks it’s barbaric. And Arab music irritates him most of all. He’s already started coming to work with cotton stuffed in his ears, because sometimes there’re as many as twenty radio sets in the garage blaring Arab music at full blast. And when this nasty business starts he takes a little transistor out of his briefcase and, trembling with irritation and tension, shouts “Turn that music off, bloody murderers” and within a few minutes all Arab music is gone from the garage. They know where to draw the line, they tune their sets back to Radio Israel or the army wave bands. They’re on our side after all, you say to yourself. But after a while you see that something in the tone of the newscasters and commentators makes them nervous, they switch the radios off, preferring not to hear the news, working quietly, a little closer together perhaps, in no hurry to take the cars out on road tests. The boys are uneasy. They stop laughing. And someone working by himself in a dark corner quietly tunes in to a foreign Arab station, and a few others go over to him to hear the story, a sort of thin smile on their faces.
So, then, they’re on the other side.
But during the lunch break they sit in a corner eating their bread, starting to laugh a little, and this at a time when we’re crazy with suspense, they talk among themselves about trivial things, it doesn’t concern them at all. And as the gunfire of the shoot-out comes over the radio they come to me with practical questions, do the tyres of the Volvo need changing or just repairing?
They’re in a different world, they don’t even ask how it’s ended.
But when it’s time to go, after they’ve put away the tools and washed their hands, they wait for one another, which is unusual for them, and they leave the garage and go to the bus stop in a tightly knit group.
And next day I understand why. A first cousin of Hamid, a brother of one of the workers, related to most of them, led the terrorists there. And it seems they knew this from the start, they sensed it. And yet they gave no sign, didn’t bat an eye. Perhaps at home, when they’re alone, they’ll weep for themselves.
NA’IM
And suddenly the nervous voice of a newscaster breaks into the music and the singing. Something’s happened. The Jews start to huddle around the radio. Hamid gives us a look and all the Arab music is switched off. We too begin to hear the details. Something at the university. An attack on the registrar’s office at the university. They’ve taken hostages.
My heart stands still. That’s him.
Adnan has returned. The whispered curses of the Jews. The bright ideas. Everybody has ideas about what should be done. And we make ourselves small. Walk about quietly, we have nothing to do with all this. Trying to behave naturally, only working feverishly.
At ten past twelve they threw the body of a clerk out the window. Such cruelty. One of the Arabs smiles to himself, a thin, faraway smile. I slip down under one of the cars and try a thousand times to tighten a screw that keeps slipping out of my hand. I’m not here.
All around the usual talk about the death penalty and revenge. Our brother. What’s he doing? Where does he get the guts? This cursed pride. And why don’t the damn Jews take better care of themselves?
A cabinet meeting. The army. The Ministry of Defence. The same old story. Time for our lunch break. Drying our hands, taking our bags and sitting down on the floor to one side. I sit beside Hamid and keep close to him. He doesn’t say anything. As silent as usual. The others talk in low voices about other things, arguing about the new Volvo, about automatic gear boxes. I have no appetite, I want to cry but my eyes are dry.