Now my father is lying on the big sofa, resting the upper part of his body on two pillows. With one hand he’s half scratching and half picking his nose, and with the other he’s holding a cigarette. My mother is washing something in the kitchen. My older brother and his wife come in and sit down. She’s pregnant, in her fifth month, and they don’t know yet if it’s a boy or a girl. The brother who’s two years younger than me is talking to his fiancée on his mobile. It’s a special deal called Family Circle. They bought two mobile phones and they can call each other for free.
Time for the news. My father turns up the volume, moves his hand away from his nose, puts out his cigarette, and lights another. Mother puts a bowl of strawberries on the table and sits down on the carpet at Father’s feet. There’s no room on the sofa, because Father is taking up three places.
“There are no men in Hebron,” my father says. He always provides a running commentary on whatever we’re watching on television, analyzing it out loud, to make sure we don’t miss anything. Every now and then my mother mutters Azza, azza—Oh, no — and sometimes she says mujrimin, criminals. My father says if there were any real men in Hebron they’d get their act together and force the settlers out of there. “How many can they kill? Let them kill a hundred thousand. In the end, they’ll be out of there. Five lunatics are terrifying a whole city. What spineless nothings they are!”
It’s March 30, Land Day, and people turn out to join in a general protest against the expropriations and to commemorate the people who were killed in the 1976 riots. My wife and her parents went to visit their village, Misskeh, where Kfar Warburg is today. They rented a bus and went as a group. They do it every Land Day and every Independence Day. It’s like an annual outing. Men, women, and children dress up, take their food and their barbecues, their meat and their alcohol, and head for their village. You can still see what’s left of the mosque and the school building. The women gather vine leaves and look for hyssop in the fields, the men play backgammon in the ruins of the mosque, and the younger ones drink beer and smoke joints in what’s left of the school.
My father says he doesn’t understand why they bother going there. If they really loved their village, they wouldn’t have run away in the first place. Those cowards are to blame for everything that’s happened. Better to die defending your land. And why did they sell what they owned there? My father refers to the sale of expropriated lands to Jews as land liquidation. Anyone who sells has given up. “What kind of men are they?”
In the evening, I join my wife and daughter at her parents’ house. They’re back from their picnic. My older brother blocks me with his car and comes over to give me the keys. I enjoy driving his car. At least the radio works. True, it’s only a short drive, but still it’s one of those rare opportunities to listen to music in Tira. I hope it’s tuned to the military station, because I’m not very good with these dials. I turn it on and listen. My brother doesn’t know how to take care of a car. He can’t drive. I’ve been in the car with him a few times, and it always ended in a fight. I don’t have it easy with my older brother.
The radio is playing “Abu el-Halil”; I can’t believe I’m hearing that song. How could the cassette have survived so long? It’s the song we used to listen to in Father’s car when we went into the mountains to pick hyssop. I used to know the words, and I discover I still do. I sing along with the tape, as if I’ve never stopped listening to it. “Ya Amina, ya abu el-Halil … open the Nablus Gate for us and let us all enter.” Then came another song I used to love, about putting the shame behind us and restoring our honor with stones and with blood, about children who are fearless. I laugh, now, at the quality of the recording and the quality of the music.
I lower the volume and drive through Tira. It’s Friday, and late, but people are still roaming the streets. Lots of youngsters are in their cars or walking, and I wonder where all of them are heading, and on the night of Land Day, no less. There was supposed to be a general strike, but the stores opened even before noon. People can’t afford to lose the income. Besides, strikes scare the Jews who drive through on their way to Tsur Natan and Kokhav Yair. They’re good customers.
On the wall in my wife’s old room there’s a picture of Nelson Mandela, taken long ago, when he was behind bars. The Mandela of those days was young and strong, with a full black beard. Next to him is the drawing of a hammer and sickle, and the red Soviet flag. There are photos of models and beauty queens too, and Egyptian singers like Ihab Taufiq and Amer Diab, and women in bathing suits and dresses dating back to the eighties. The most up-to-date one in the room that my wife shared with her five sisters is of Brandon from Beverly Hills 90210. She hung it up there when she was in high school. All the sisters are married by now, and the room with the peeling walls is where we stay on our rare visits to Tira.
My mother-in-law has put the beds together in one of the corners, under the pictures of Ofra Haza and a celebrity model. Ever since the wedding, two years ago, we’ve had the same sheets waiting for us, the same thick pillows, solid as a rock, and the same scratchy woolen blanket that forces us to sleep fully dressed even on the hottest summer nights. It’s very hot in Tira. In the past, people would sleep up on the roof in summertime, but they’re too scared now. They don’t feel safe anymore. You’re not supposed to leave your front door unlocked. The village is infested with thieves and criminals and rapists, especially now that they brought in all kinds of collaborators — and their weapons too.
My wife’s old room does this to me every time: Suddenly I’m terribly attracted to her, as if we just met. She always puts on one of her mother’s faded robes, and I can’t resist. We always make love in her room and continue to hold on to each other in our sleep. In her room, my heart fills with love. She’s pretty as ever in my eyes, pretty as she used to be, when we first met. She says these are our best times together, the ones in Tira.
Very soon her parents are going to be renovating the house and tearing down this room. The house has always been in bad shape. Before the first time we went there, my wife cried. I was about to ask her parents for her hand, and she was ashamed to show me where she lived. She kept hoping neither one of us would have to use the bathroom, which is the most shocking part of the house. Her father had knocked ten steel nails into the wall over the sink, for hanging sponges, and wrote the name of each member of the family over one of them. Not sponges you buy but loofahs, the kind you make yourself. Seven of the nails have nothing on them anymore. The only pieces of loofah still hanging there belong to her parents and her youngest brother. He’s two years younger than us. He’s been plodding away at one of the colleges for the past few years, studying economics, and there’s a good chance he’ll graduate soon. He has his own room under the house. It used to be a storeroom for oil and olives, and it had an oven too. Then, when he grew older, they put a bed in there, and he moved in. He covered the bare walls with red scarves of the Hapo’el soccer team, and with pictures of the Chicago Bulls, Michael Jackson, Fairuz, and Lenin, and with Land Day posters, like the one of a man sitting under an olive tree holding his blond grandson, who’s covered in a kaffiyeh, and the inscription WE’RE STAYING PUT.
They’re remodeling the top floor for him now, and the parents will get their storeroom back. They don’t need more than that, my mother-in-law says, and it’s time for their only son to have a home of his own. That way he’ll be able to get engaged, be married, and have children.