My tears hadn’t dried yet, but I could tell right away that my father wasn’t about to let me stay home. I had no choice. I’d have to go back to the school.
“Look at Adel,” my father said. “Why isn’t he crying?” Then he laughed at me. The sonofabitch knew they took Arabs off the bus at the airport. He’d taken the same bus when he went to the university. “Nobody ever told me to get off,” he said. “They didn’t notice I was an Arab. Every time the soldiers told an Arab to get off, I’d get up and shout, ‘Take me off too, I’m an Arab!’ and I’d hold up my ID card and wave it proudly. What’s the matter with you? What a jellyfish you are. Some soldier jerk can make you behave like this? Just look at yourself.”
I took that bus line hundreds of times after that. Each time, I’d feel the fear again. It didn’t let up until we’d passed the airport. The only time they ever made me get off was on that first trip. After that, they didn’t notice me anymore. I felt sorry for the Arabs who were taken off, and I thanked God they hadn’t picked on me.
In my second week at the school, I shaved off my mustache. I told Adel we had to learn to pronounce the letter p properly. He didn’t care. The Bible teacher gave me a tip: “Hold a piece of paper up to your mouth. If the paper moves, you’ve said a p,” he said. Adel laughed at me, and when the paper moved, he said he couldn’t tell the difference. He was convinced there was really no difference between b and p, that it was all in my head, and that Hebrew is a screwed-up language. He didn’t see why they had to have two different letters for the same sound.
In my second week at school I bought myself some pants in a Jewish store. I bought a Walkman and some tapes in Hebrew. After that, I’d always have my Walkman and a book in Hebrew whenever I went through the airport. I didn’t come across the Polanski kids anymore. They were liable to recognize me. I took a cab whenever I needed to get to or from the central bus station. Adel and I stayed friends, but I never invited him home again.
Shorts
At school, I got to play with real guns. I knew how to use a carbine and an Uzi: snap the magazine in, cock the weapon, hold the gun to my shoulder, position myself like a sniper, and shoot. On school trips, the teachers would have weapons, and I soon became the student in charge. The weapons were heavy, and I was the only student who was prepared to carry them. I felt proud to be walking around with a gun across my shoulder.
Our history teacher was a left-winger. He always let me have his gun and asked me to walk close to him, because someone once made a comment about it, and he explained to me that it was his responsibility. He wouldn’t let me carry the magazines, even though he could have trusted me blindly.
Pretty soon I started sitting at the back of the bus with the other kids and singing their favorite bus-trip songs. I started taking the lead, and they’d join in the refrain. I knew the words by heart. When I was in elementary school, we had one favorite song that we’d chant over and over again—“Dos, dos ya chauffeur, al 199”—a song that urges the driver to go faster, 199 kilometers an hour. “Don’t worry about the cops. We’re the children of Palestine. Palestine is our country, and the Jew is our dog, knocking on our door like a beggar.” We sang without understanding a word. Once, our history teacher in Tira asked if anyone in the class knew what Palestine was, and nobody did, including me. Then he asked contemptuously if any of us had ever seen a Palestinian, and Mohammed the Fatso, who was afraid of having his knuckles rapped, said he’d once been driving with his father in the dark and they’d seen two Palestinians. That day, the history teacher rapped every single one of us on the knuckles, launching his attack with Mohammed the Fatso. He whacked us with his ruler, ranting, “We are Palestinians, you are Palestinians, I’m a Palestinian! You nincompoops, you animals, I’ll teach you who you are!”
On our class trips, whenever we slept outdoors we’d light a fire, and some kids would play the guitar. Nobody in Tira had ever played a guitar. We sang Beatles hits, and Israeli rock band songs too. Mashina, for instance. I knew already who they were, and I forced myself to learn their songs. I couldn’t stand that music at first, but within a few months it grew on me and I started liking it. Whenever I’d go home on vacation I’d scream at my brothers, who still listened to Fairuz and Abed el-Halim. When my father took me to the bus stop in Kfar Sava, I’d beg him to switch to a Hebrew radio station or at least to lower the volume. It wasn’t that I was ashamed. I really couldn’t stand them anymore. I told him my ear had grown used to other things.
On the trip to Wadi Qilt, I was carrying an Uzi and walked with the first group of hikers, with the teachers and the guides. Suddenly we heard something. The guide held up his hand and told all the kids to stand behind him. The history teacher yanked the gun off my shoulder, and I fell and hit my elbow. The teacher snapped in the magazine and cocked the weapon. And then we saw it was another group of schoolchildren.
It was my old class from Tira. I recognized them and they recognized me. They had a new teacher, one I’d never seen before. He asked his students to stand to the side to let us pass, because the passage was too narrow. I held my bleeding arm, lowered my gaze, and focused on my elbow.
The kids from Tira called out my name, and I pretended not to hear them. “Hey, look, it’s him. Over there, in the shorts,” they said. I passed by them quickly. A few of them said, “Hi, how’re you doing?” and I wanted to dig a hole and hide. I nodded and kept going. Later, when some of the kids asked me if I knew them, I said I didn’t. “But they knew your name,” one of them insisted, and I said it was a common name among Arabs.
Once an Arab, Always an Arab
My father says, Once an Arab, always an Arab. And he’s got a point. He says the Jews can give you the feeling that you’re one of them, and you can really like them and think they’re the nicest people you’ve ever known, but sooner or later you realize you don’t stand a chance. For them you’ll always be an Arab.
Sometimes when I’m at home, I steal a few of my father’s books. I hate reading Arabic, but I owe it to myself to look at those books. To understand why Mahmoud Darwish is considered great, and why Emil Habibi was awarded the Israel Prize. The last book I stole was Hamarat al-Balad by Salman Natour. This young Arab — a poet, maybe, or an author — writes about life in a Tel Aviv pub. He describes all the left-wing Jews, who are really very nice to him. They listen to him with great interest and introduce him to new friends. Pretty young girls sit beside him and sometimes even kiss him. He recalls how at one stage he thought he could blend in completely. I feel like an idiot for ever thinking I could blend in too.
My father used to say I’d be the first Arab to build an atom bomb. He really believed it. Adel says no way. He used to think so too, but even if he were the smartest person in the world, they’d never let him study that kind of thing. There are some things an Arab can never become. The two of us were sitting in the guard’s room. We were alarm monitors that night. Every night since the Gulf War started two students had to stay up and wake the others if the alarm went off. Adel said he wanted to be the one to wake the girls because there were bound to be a few who slept in their underwear. The thought appealed to me, but I laughed at him anyway. In the drawer under his bed he had some girlie magazines. Sometimes, when there was nobody around, I’d lock the door and look through them, and all that time I’d think to myself, The guy’s a pervert.