My Little Brother

My little brother has tied his fate to a different world. He’s moved out of the village, like me, but he doesn’t mix with the Jews. He doesn’t have any friends, either in the village or in Tel Aviv. My little brother doesn’t talk. He’s always been like that. He can spend entire days without saying a single word. His teachers in the village used to think he didn’t understand what was going on in class, because he never took part, never raised his hand in class to give an answer. Sometimes, after parent-teacher day, my father would yell at him, “What are you, a sissy? Why are you so shy?” My brother would hear him out and wouldn’t answer. His grades were always fine, so they left him alone.

My little brother doesn’t like people, especially strangers. When anyone knocked on the door, he’d head right for his room, even if he was the only one home. And if he happened to come home from school and heard strangers talking inside the house, he’d always wait outside under a tree till the guests left. Anything but meeting people face to face. He was capable of spending hours in the rain or in the heat just to avoid it.

My little brother never answers the phone. That’s just how it is. My parents have finally given up on him and stopped telling him off. When the phone rings, he’s off to his room. He stays in there with his music — his not-Jewish and not-Arab music.

For some reason, my parents think my little brother loves me. They think we’re both kind of strange and different, so sometimes when I’m at home they ask me to try to talk with him, see how he’s doing. “Ask him how his studies are going,” my mother says sometimes. “Ask him how things are going at the university, if he has any friends, if he needs money, if he manages okay with the food and with his roommates.” When you ask him something, he can just keep nodding, and it’s hard to tell what he’s really thinking. But he mails my parents the transcripts with his grades, so they don’t worry, they know he’s doing all right.

My little brother is an artist. He draws portraits and still lifes. He doesn’t show his paintings to anyone. Sometimes, when I’m at home, I go through his drawers and his notebooks and look at his silent drawings. He wanted to study art, but our parents said it wasn’t practical, and that a person needs to have a job first, a profession. Art is a hobby; there’s nothing you can do with it. My little brother didn’t argue. My parents checked out his grades, decided he was cut out for nursing, and sent him to nursing school.

After that, he hardly ever came home. In the daytime he studies and at night he works. On ‘id el-adha, he took a day off from work and came to the village to see my daughter. It had been nine months since she was born, and he hadn’t seen her yet. He smiled at her and tried to pick her up, but he didn’t know how. He tried to play with her but gave up because he knew it wouldn’t work. He didn’t want to play with her in front of everyone. That wasn’t his style. He stared at her, and eventually he took her to his room. I have no idea what they did in there. Must have stuck earphones on her head. Anyway, when he brought her back, she was all smiles.

My little brother and I were the only ones in the house who liked to play soccer. I knocked him down once and he broke a front tooth. After that, he stopped going out of the house. He didn’t want anyone to see his broken tooth. He stopped going to school and told our parents that he was quitting. He wouldn’t even go to the dentist. For almost a full year, he stayed home and didn’t see any strangers. It was the tooth that made him stop talking too, because he didn’t want to open his mouth.

And since he stayed away from people, he stayed away from barbers too. It’s been ten years since then, and his wavy black hair is almost down to his ass. He combs it and ties it in rubber bands. My parents have given up. They don’t try to talk him into getting his hair cut anymore, but I’m the only one who tells him it looks nice, because it really does. He likes to look at it in the mirror and to play with it. He takes off his shirt and studies his thin, tall, muscular body, trying to hide it with his hair. His tooth is still broken. That’s why he’s stopped laughing, though sometimes he smiles with his mouth closed. When he straightens his lips, you can tell he’s smiling.

Sometimes I buy him new CDs. I bought him a Discman before he went off to school, because I knew he’d never make it without his music. He straightened his lips and looked very happy.

My little brother has to get back to work now, before the guests arrive, before anyone comes to visit because of the holiday. He’s in his room, packing his bag, and I go in with the baby. “She’s cute,” he says, and I see his broken tooth, which has gone yellow by now. It’s been so long since I last saw it. For some reason, I thought it wasn’t broken anymore — that he’d grown, that he’d had it fixed — but he had never gone to the dentist. He tried to hide his broken tooth with his hand, pretending to play with his hair, or to scratch the tip of his nose, making a fist and talking into it. The fist makes an echo.

“How are you?” I ask.

“I’m okay.”

“How’s school?”

“Okay.”

“How’s work?”

“Okay.”

“Do you still paint?” I ask.

He nods. “I paint at work,” he says.

My brother works at a hospital in Petah Tikwa, in an internal medicine department. He says he really likes his job, and that it’s what keeps him going in life and at school. My brother isn’t embarrassed to show me his tooth anymore. He can see I don’t stare at it. He knows I listen to him, and I really want to hear what he’s saying.

He has a good job. He spends the whole night on a sofa that doubles as a bed, the kind you find in rich people’s homes, listening to music and painting. He sits on that comfortable sofa facing the three beds in the last room in Internal Medicine B. His job is to wait for them to die. They don’t talk, they don’t move, they’re hooked up to life support. Sometimes a chest rises, but that’s the only movement. Usually they die within a day or two of arriving in my brother’s room, but there was one guy who was in a bed for two months before he died.

My brother says you can see when they die. They tremble. He rocks his body, to show me how people die. When someone dies, he calls a doctor, and after the doctor signs the papers, he disconnects the machines and puts a name tag on the person’s chest and head. That’s all my brother does. Sometimes the nurses go to sleep and ask him not to wake them if anyone dies, and he stays with the dead person until morning. Someone dies on almost every shift. One night, all three of them died, and he became depressed because his shift was over early and he didn’t know what to do.

My brother only paints them dead. He turns off the blipping machines and writes it all down before notifying the doctor and the nurses. The people in those beds are old, with awful bedsores. He says the room stinks, but he’s gotten used to it. The nurses are supposed to wash them every day, but my little brother says it would be much more dignified not to wash them at all. He saw the male nurses use their feet to turn the patients over when they’re being washed. Sometimes, he paints the male nurses. They’re disgusting, he says, especially the Arab ones. My brother doesn’t talk to them, doesn’t even say hello. His only responsibility is to the patients.

My brother has a drawing in his portfolio of a woman who died the day before, but he won’t let me see it. He says it’s a nice drawing, one he really likes. He calls it The Rich Woman because all her teeth were implants.

Egypt

The war has become part of our routine, and I try to put myself to sleep with thoughts of war games. I see myself commanding a whole division, putting everyone in ambush positions and telling them not to move without an order from me. In the morning I wake up and realize I’ve lost the war again. I’ve been shot at, and my whole division is dead. The war is with me everywhere, even in my sleep. Sometimes I jump up in the middle of the night and check to see who’s shooting at my bedroom and who’s shooting at the baby. Sometimes the phone rings and it takes me awhile to realize it isn’t a shelling.