I lower my voice and whisper to them in Arabic that they should speak with the nurse, and I point toward the nurses’ station.

“Ahhh,” the younger one says, and shouts out in Hebrew, “Because she is in a birth condition!”

I can feel my face on fire, and I try to conceal it with my book. When my wife comes out, I’ll murder her. She’s the only reason I find myself in this situation. As if I have the strength to deal it right now. When she comes out I’m going to make such a face that she’ll never dare take me to a hospital again.

The Road to Tira

The road to Tira stretches between two rows of cypress trees. They run close together, two tight rows. Then, all of a sudden the cypresses disappear, the fields are divided by a straight horizontal line, and beyond those are the unruly rows of houses, uneven and menacing. Bakeries, restaurants, vegetable stores, garages, spare parts outlets, watchmakers. Everything looks cheap and crowded and empty.

The Jews driving through Tira on their way to Tsur Yigal and Kokhav Yair don’t stop to shop anymore. There’s a war on. Some of them are scared, and some are getting their own back. So much of Tira was built to cater to them, but they’ve run away. You don’t see them anymore, not even on Saturdays. You don’t see their women with the short shorts or the girls with the tube tops. For years they overran the village every Saturday, so you could hardly move. Only the store owners would come out of their homes on weekends. Everyone else stayed out of the way. The older kids would come to the souk to watch the Jewish girls. Sometimes I’d do the rounds myself. The Jews have all disappeared now, with their shouting, their plastic bags, their potbellies, their cars, their keys, their hats, and their sandals. Now, at least, there are no more traffic jams.

We don’t need them anymore. The people in Tira have become rich enough. They’ll get through this war, they won’t starve. They build another floor, and another, and they buy expensive cars, jeeps, and trucks and computers for their kids. They send their kids to extracurricular classes too. Some people even send their kids to Jewish extracurriculars. And one neighbor even built a swimming pool outside his home and bought his younger son a Ferrari convertible. It’s all thanks to the Saturday earnings. Some people in the village had only worked Saturdays, and that was enough for them to live like kings. Now it’s only the Jewish druggies and pushers who dare come to Tira to shop.

The Hebrew textbooks still speak of the small village. One of the questions goes like this: “What do the people in your village do for a living?” and the right answer is still: “They’re farmers.”

People continue to get married and to have children. The wife of my older brother — the one who’s named Sam for the SAM missiles — is expecting. My younger brother, the one who’s two years younger than me, has bought tiles for his bathroom. If everything goes according to plan, he’ll finish his shell and get married within a year. There’s one shell left.

My parents built three shells, even though there are four of us, because the fourth one is supposed to get their house. But they know that at least one of us won’t come back. Now they’re worried that the youngest, the one who’s six years younger than me, may wind up staying in Tel Aviv. He’s studying there, but he also works there all week long, taking care of chronic patients at the hospital. He’s broken off with us in Tira. He’s let his hair grow long, and he wears earrings. He dresses differently and listens to different music. Sometimes we talk on the phone. The last time we did that, we made a date to meet in Tira. He finally said he’d come to see the baby, but he didn’t. He phoned and asked us to give her a big kiss for him, and to put the receiver to her ear so she’d learn to recognize his voice.

This brother and I get along very well. Sometimes I think he must hate me for the things I did to him when I was little. I hope I was little enough. When I get very anxious about it, I call him up and ask him to forgive me and tell him I want to know if he hates me. He always says he loves me more than anything in the world.

I’m six years older, but if he returns to the village before me, he’ll get my shell and I’ll get my parents’ house. Since the house is old, my parents have added a larger piece of land to go with it, to be fair and prevent any problems later on. My father always says, “God help you if you fight among yourselves. That would be the worst thing that could happen.” People have been fighting over land for fifty years now: brothers against brothers, cousins against cousins. Some of them lost their lives in the process, and the survivors are still taking revenge. The wealthiest people today are the ones who managed to take over two meters of the souk on Saturdays.

Almost everyone carries a weapon nowadays. My father went to get the muffler fixed once, and they offered to sell him a shotgun for a thousand shekels. He almost bought it, for self-protection.

The neighbors’ young son, Ayub, was arrested. I remember him as a shy seven-year-old. My mother says he’s an arms dealer. They sent the whole country out to Tira last week. They blocked the roads, they broke into the house, and they pulled up the floor tiles, one by one. My parents knew all along that Ayub was an arms dealer. At first they thought the reason he hadn’t been arrested was that he was a civil servant. He had a Uzi, and almost every night he’d shoot a round. “Brrrrr.” My mother imitates it. “Automatic.” She didn’t think he was dumb enough to hide the weapons at home, but that’s just what he did. They found a lot. She stood by the fence and watched. Fifty pistols maybe. The police and the soldiers were there the whole day. They combed every corner. They entered our plot too with dogs and metal detectors, but they didn’t find anything. The dogs sniffed every flower, because they were after drugs. My mother says the police even climbed up on the roofs of my brothers’ homes and searched in my shell too. “Aren’t you ever going to finish it?” she asks. “When are you coming back?”

Nelson Mandela

My parents have enormous pink sofas in their living room. I sink into one of them and light a cigarette from the pack my father has left on the table. I move my head back and forth like a sprinkler, trying to disperse the smoke. Our house is ugly. There are electric wires sticking out of the living room wall, and a bell that never rings. Next to it is a clock made of gold-covered plastic, inspired by a lion’s mane. Hanging next to the clock is a deer’s head, also made of plastic. There used to be two sabers too, but they broke long ago. Three brown wooden plaques hang unattractively on the wall across from me, with the inscription Allah in black lettering. On the wall to the left, there’s a painting by Ismail Shammout with the inscription Uda (Return), and next to that is a picture of a mother and a baby with a flight of ravens hovering over them.

The ugliest tapestry in the living room was woven by my mother. It shows two Japanese women in kimonos sitting near a blue lake with white swans floating in it. She made the Gobelin when she was studying at the teachers seminar in Haifa. She always says she was the first woman to study out-side the village, and the fact is she’s now the oldest woman teacher in Tira.

When I was at the university, I invited Yossi for a meal at my parents’ house. Yossi was my first Jewish friend after boarding school. He marked a new period in my life and proved I didn’t have to be stuck with Arabs my whole life. After the meal, he joked about how our sink was in the living room, though the thought of watching the soccer match while shaving appealed to him. When we first met, Yossi said he found it hard to say the word Arab, because it sounded like a curse. Later, we became good friends.