Adel helped me with the math final. It wasn’t hard. I took the test and signed up for the two courses with the easiest admission requirements. Sometimes I’d have a cutlet and rice at the university cafeteria. I never thought about the war in those days.

That Morning I Got Up, Made Some Coffee, and Decided to Get Married

It had been four years since I’d spotted Samia in the bus station near the dorms. She was a refugee but with a blue ID, which meant their village had been destroyed in the war, and some of her family had wound up in Tira. I recognized her and she recognized me. We’d gone to the same elementary school, but had not been in the same class. We’d never talked. I shook her hand and introduced myself, and she smiled. Said she knew me. She looks okay, I thought. I got on the bus before her and took my seat in the back. I was hoping she’d sit down next to me, and she did. I never would have dared to sit down next to an Arab girl. I’m well-behaved and shy.

“Do you know how I get to Hadassah?” she asked.

“Yes, you go to the central bus station and take the Twenty-seven to the end of the line. I’ll go with you,” I answered.

It was her first day in Jerusalem. I knew she needed me. I was an expert, I knew everything there was to know about public transportation, and the names of streets and places in Jerusalem. I could show her around, maybe do the Old City, even though I didn’t enjoy going there, but I’d take her wherever she wanted, even to El-Aqsa, if that’s what she felt like doing. I’d buy her a present. I’d show her what a good person I was, even if I had screwed up now and then, especially when it came to school.

She’d understand that I’ve had it rough, that I’ve been depressed. Maybe she’s been depressed too. She only knows me from Tira. She knows I’m smart. She’ll be surprised to hear I’m studying philosophy, and I’ll tell her it’s because I love the subject, and that the job market in hospitals and lawyers’ offices is very tight. But she’ll probably wind up dating a medical student. That’s how it is; doctors marry nurses. I’ll tell her I intend to do a doctorate in philosophy.

After we got off, I walked her to the Twenty-seven bus stop, and waited with her till the bus arrived. I knew what it was like to take your first bus trip on a Jerusalem line. Before we said good-bye she told me where she lived, and I gave her my room number. As soon as I got back to the dorms I went looking for her room in the long and narrow buildings. She wasn’t there.

How did I even dare? Idiot. What could I have been thinking? In the end, she won’t want to see me, and I’ll get into trouble. I’ll fall in love just the way I did the last time. I won’t be able to keep my mind on anything else, and I’ll screw up my studies again. I’m going to blow this new chance to prove that I can still make it, that I can take exams the way I used to and get the best grades. I haven’t recovered yet from the previous fiasco, and here I am repeating it. I’ll never learn.

When I got back to my room, Samia was on the stairs. “I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “It took me an hour to find the room.”

* * *

We’ve been together for four years now. It’s about time. I’ll drink my coffee; then I’ll wake Samia up and tell her we’re going to be married. Until yesterday she was living in the dorms and I was living in the Nahlaot neighborhood with Jewish roommates. Now that I’ve moved into an Arab neighborhood, we’ve got to get married if I want us to go on sleeping together. The owners, who live upstairs, would never allow us to sleep together unless we’re married. That’s it. We’ve got to do it. I know she’ll never ever leave me, so why put it off?

I didn’t know anymore back then whether she was staying with me because she loved me or in order to make it clear to me that I should forget about her ever leaving me. She kept saying I’d promised her we’d get married. I would never break that kind of a promise. It could wreck her life. Everyone in Tira knew by now that we were together, and it was all because of my lack of consideration. As far as she was concerned, she shouldn’t be walking hand in hand with me, let alone sleeping with me. She told me that a Tira bride who isn’t a virgin is sent back to her parents on her wedding night. Once, her aunt had a heart attack when a daughter of hers showed up at home on her wedding night, but all the bride wanted to do was to pick up her hairbrush.

I couldn’t believe Samia’d work up the courage to sleep at my place on that first night in the Arab neighborhood. She cleaned the house, and we told the owner we were engaged. With Jewish owners, we wouldn’t have had to explain. Samia used to visit me in Nahlaot and slept over whenever she felt like it. My roommates liked her, and for them it was natural. Not like with the Arabs in the dorms, always gossiping and spreading rumors. Well-founded rumors, but what business was it of theirs? “You, what’s it to you? You’re a man. What’s the worst that could happen to you?” she always said.

Samia has one more term paper to submit. Then she’ll go back to Tira, because what would an Arab girl be doing away from her own village? Her father has already found her a job in the municipality. She says there’s nothing for her in Jerusalem. And her parents are already suspicious of her latest excuse, the term paper. They say she could be working on it at home.

I look at her in her sleep. Pretty. Facing the wall, as always. It’s still early, and she spent all of yesterday cleaning, while I connected the appliances and opened the extra bed I’d bought long ago.

“Get up,” I say. “We’re going home to get married.”

“What, now?”

So I took two days off from work and went home to be married.

My father had no objection to the wedding, quite the contrary. He liked the idea. He didn’t mind that I was only twenty-two. He said Samia is from a good family. Communists. Friends of his.

My mother is happy: a girl with a diploma. Maybe she’ll reform me too. Maybe she’ll gradually succeed in persuading me to go back to the university. “How many courses do you have left? Isn’t it a shame for those three years to go down the drain? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, to have a wife who’s better educated than you are? I have to hand it to her for agreeing.”

My grandmother knows the refugees. Used to work with them picking fruit. “They’re the best women in the village,” she says. “Bring her here so I can see her.” Even though she can hardly see anymore.

Father says nobody in Tira gets married this way. “It can’t be done in two days. Even if we agree, her parents won’t. They have their self-respect, don’t they?” He says we won’t succeed in finding a hall overnight or inviting people. And I explain that I want it to be small. As far as I’m concerned, the only person we need at the wedding is the sheikh. But my parents wouldn’t dream of having anyone badmouth them or give anyone a pretext for saying they’re not as good as everyone else. “Isn’t it bad enough that the poor girl is marrying someone with no home of his own? Are you sure her parents agree?”

Samia’s parents agree because they have no choice. The rumors have finished them off already. Her mother had gone to pay a condolence call and overheard people discussing her promiscuous daughter who was studying in Jerusalem. In the mosque where her father prays every Friday, they mentioned her in the sermon. Not by name, but they spoke of parents who send their daughters off to university, where they turn into prostitutes.

My parents won’t give up. They settle on one hundred guests on each side, and Father closes a deal with a restaurant owner. They buy gold the way people used to in Tira, and give us money to buy clothes in Tel Aviv. Samia buys a dress on Shenkin Street, and I get a suit at Zara in Dizengoff Center. Nobody in either one of the families understands why we’re getting married like this. The sheikh arrives and I sign his papers seven times. Her father signs for her, which is the custom. We’re married now, and all I want is for everyone to finish eating so we can go home.