Hell is divided into compartments too, but even the highest compartment there offers nothing good. You die, and get resurrected a million times a day, and to make sure you suffer, they burn you in fire so intense you can’t even imagine it. I’ll burn, I’ll melt, and then I’ll be resurrected and I’ll burn again and melt again. There are these gigantic people there who never ever smile. They just stand over you and burn your skin off with a branding iron, the way they do with animals. Anyone who goes to hell hasn’t a chance of getting out.
On Judgment Day the entire planet will explode, and a thick cloud will destroy all living things. Then we’ll all move somewhere else. Everyone there will stand in line on a thread that’s thinner than a single hair. People from every period in history, anyone who ever lived on earth. There will be prehistoric hunters alongside doctors from Hadassah hospital. The deeds of every one of them will be weighed, and any deed can wind up deciding your fate for better or for eternal fire. On Judgment Day, nobody recognizes anybody, not even parents or friends. Everyone’s caught up in his own reckoning. Your father will come along and say, “Please, I’ve been good to you. All I need is one more good deed to get into heaven.” And you’ll refuse, because who knows? Maybe that’ll be the one deed you need to save yourself. Everything you’ve ever done appears before you, from the day you were born till the day you died. The angel on your right shoulder will report all the bad deeds, and the one on your left shoulder will report the good ones. Or vice versa.
I tried to believe in God, to become part of the big circle of people in white constantly circling the black stone. I tried to become part of the ocean of humanity moving toward the mosques. I recalled how I’d prayed as a little boy. I tried to reconstruct everything they taught us at elementary school. There were moments when I was afraid of being alone in the room, and I started to cry. Adel hardly came back from the mosque at all, and I couldn’t stop thinking about my wife and baby. At night, when the streets became a little less crowded, I’d put on the white hat and set out to buy some gifts for the family. The sidewalks were filled with women and small children. Without removing their shoes or clothes, they lay there on pieces of cardboard. Adel put us up at one of the fanciest hotels in Mecca, very close to the Kaba, and from the window of our air-conditioned room, I could see the black stone and the people shoving and crowding to get up close and kiss it. Adel made it. He’s large. He dislocated his shoulder but he managed to kiss the stone. “The fragrance of perfume from heaven,” he said, before he fell asleep.
Our two weeks there were over. The bus ride back was unbearable. Everyone buys enormous woolen blankets in Saudi Arabia, because they’re good and they’re inexpensive. The Jordanian guide who held on to all the Israeli passports and counted us each evening told us not to buy more than two blankets each, but some of the women bought as many as ten. Adel and I were the youngest on the bus, and we wound up having to stand the whole way home. We hardly said a word to each other the entire trip. There was a point when Adel wanted to get out right in the middle of the desert, to get away from the Jordanian guide and return to Mecca. He was sure the Mahdi had arrived and was afraid of missing him. “Maybe he’s in Jerusalem already,” he said when we reached Jordan, but the Israeli soldiers at the border and the clerks who addressed us with overdone politeness assured Adel that the Mahdi hadn’t come yet.
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
On Independence Day, my wife didn’t feel well, and I took her to the hospital. Camouflage efforts that had lasted for years were shattered in an instant. The soldiers at the entrance to the village asked me to stop by the side of the road. Me they’re stopping? The youngest Arab ever to learn to pronounce a p? I have almost no accent. You can’t tell by looking at me. I’ve got sideburns and Coke-bottle sunglasses. Even the Arabs mistake me for a Jew. I even speak Hebrew with the housekeeping staff. It must be my wife, I think to myself. She’s somewhat Arab. Sometimes, when we go to a shopping mall or places like that, I hope people will assume she’s Moroccan or Iraqi, and that I’m a western Jew who likes eastern women.
The soldier asks for our papers, and I tell him I used to have a Jewish girlfriend, I studied with Jews, and all my friends are Jews. I know all the Jewish expressions, even army slang. I shut up, and hand him my vehicle license and my driver’s license. Cars pass me, some with flags and some without. The people in the cars look like they’re sorry for me, and I feel so ridiculous with my sideburns and glasses. On the radio, the military station is blaring Hebrew songs, and I feel like such an idiot for believing I’d done everything to make sure I didn’t look suspicious.
I hurry to get past the barricade, turn off the radio, and mutter a few swearwords at the police, at the Jews, at the State, at Tira, and at my wife. I decide I shouldn’t be taking it out on her. Poor thing. She must be in pain, and the last thing she needs now is for me to be carrying on. I’ll be good.
I ask how she’s doing and she says everything’s fine.
There are only Arabs in the emergency room. Women who seem older than they are, with head scarves and plastic thongs, drag themselves through the corridors. Sometimes they bite on the edge of their scarves. They seem lost, not knowing where to go. Why the hell do they have to look like that? Why do they even go out of the house? And why are those plastic thongs still being sold anyway?
Just don’t let anyone think I’m one of them or that I’m like them. Just don’t let them call out my wife’s name when it’s her turn, or announce it on the PA system. Sometimes, when that happens, I don’t get up right away, as if it isn’t really my name, or as if it might be my name but they’ve copied it wrong in reception. So wrong in fact that it took on a new religion and nationality.
My wife doesn’t know the first thing about any of that. She doesn’t give it a second thought, which surprises and annoys me. She’s capable of talking to me in Arabic even inside a crowded elevator or at the entrance to the mall, when we’re being processed through the metal detector. She plays with the baby in Arabic in public places. I don’t understand why she insists. The baby doesn’t understand a word anyway, whether it’s in Arabic or in Hebrew.
My wife goes in to be examined and I wait as far away as possible, at the end of the farthest bench. I take out a book in Hebrew that I keep for situations like this, and start reading. It’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew, not just any book. If a doctor happens to pass by, he’s bound to be impressed. And I don’t open the book at the beginning but toward the end. The last thing I need is for them to get the impression that I just started reading it now. I stare at the book, not only to conceal my identity but also to avoid eye contact with the others. That’s all I need now — for some creep to arrive, someone who went to school with me once, in a button-down shirt and clutching his keys, his mobile phone, and his cigarettes all in the same hand. All I need is for him to decide on a sudden display of emotion and kiss me. I look down, and from time to time I cross my legs and turn the pages.
“Excuse me,” someone addresses me. She’s young, dark-skinned, and fat. Behind her are two more women. They all look the same. Must be sisters. Their religious garb hides some of their ugliness. The woman stresses the words wildly: “She is in a birth condition,” she says, and I don’t know where to hide.
What should I tell them now? Maybe I should answer in Hebrew. I do that sometimes. Arabs turn to me in Hebrew, and I answer them in Hebrew, because how should I know they’re Arabs? True, you can tell, but if they didn’t recognize me, maybe I could pretend not to recognize them either. Then again, with those three, you can’t miss it. They’re Arabs from head to toe. Maybe I ought to give my “I haven’t the faintest idea” shrug? Because I really don’t have the faintest idea what they want from me. Why me? Why not someone in a white coat? Is it the book? Did they think I was a doctor on his break?