It could still be a technical problem. Maybe the lines are jammed or maybe there’s been some catastrophe. On days when there’s a terrorist attack, cellular exchanges crash. It happens all over the country. I’ll go back home and call from there, I think. Except that my car is stuck in the middle of the road among dozens of others and it will take an hour for them to move now. Everyone is waiting for the roadblock to be removed so they can get to wherever they were going outside the village.

I’ll call from the bank, I think. My older brother’s the manager of one of the departments there. I’ll go into his office and phone. They’ve got to send a photographer in right away, before those damn tanks pull out. Without a good picture, I can forget about a cover story. The bank is very close by, a few minutes’ walk from the edge of the village. The commotion and the traffic jam just keep getting worse. People are pacing back and forth without the slightest idea what they’re doing or what’s happening. They talk among themselves, registering surprise and some concern and mainly agitation and impatience.

“What’s happening?” my brother asks as I enter the bank.

“I heard there’s a roadblock at the exit from the village. Anything wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him, and follow him toward his little office with the metal blinds. His office is empty, and the bank is pretty empty too. It’s still early in the morning, and except for two older women leaning on the teller’s counter there are no customers yet. My brother has hung a picture of himself with the deputy manager of his bank, not of the branch, but of the entire bank. My brother, in a white hospital gown, lying in bed, an IV in his left arm and his right hand shaking the deputy manager’s, with both of them smiling at the camera.

The deputy manager had come to visit after my brother was shot. The bank has been robbed countless times, but he was only shot at once. One of the robbers got edgy because there wasn’t enough money in the till and he took a shot at my brother, who was standing behind the counter. He was lucky, everyone said, just one broken rib. The bullet missed his heart by a few millimeters. Usually they shoot in the air or spray the windows with bullets. My brother was in the hospital for a few days, had some operations and recovered. A miracle, everyone said, a miracle from God. After that, he changed a lot. He became more religious, started fasting on Ramadan, praying at home and then going to the mosque too, and not just on Fridays. His wife also started praying. To tell the truth, she started before he did, on the day he was shot, in fact. The first time it was in the hospital, in the lobby outside the intensive care unit where my brother was. He joined her only after he left the hospital. But they’re not completely religious. I mean, he does pray, but he can also go swimming in a bathing suit, and his wife doesn’t wear the veil, or even cover her head with a colored scarf. But that’s only because she’s still young. Someday she’ll start wearing a veil too, like her mother, like my mother.

“My mobile phone’s gone dead,” I tell my brother. “Can I use yours?”

“We don’t have a connection either,” my brother says, and presses the speaker. The busy tone echoes through his office.

5

I check my phone again, and it announces that the line is still disconnected. I breathe heavily as I march back from the bank toward my parents’ home. I’m beginning to feel the stress. To think, I finally have a juicy story, and now I can’t even make contact with the paper. And what kind of a story is this anyhow? If it were all a mistake, they would have fixed it by now. Besides, what kind of a mistake could cause the army to send such large forces in and to seal off the village?

I’m beginning to feel like a jerk. I’ve got to calm down. Nothing’s happened. I’m jumping to conclusions again. My fears are getting the better of me and sapping my common sense. What am I so worried about? It’s just a fucking roadblock, that’s all, and maybe it’s nothing more than a drill, or maybe they’ve had warnings of a Palestinian terrorist cell hiding in the village? Why a cell? I bet it’s just a single person. Maybe they have information about a serious operation and the soldiers can’t take any chances. And maybe the whole thing is over by now and people are already on their way to work, the way the mayor promised. When am I going to stop acting like a child? I hope I didn’t overdo it with my older brother.

I’ll go home now. There’s no point going back to the car, because everything’s blocked and there’s no way I’ll be able to get the car out till the others start moving. It’s the first time I’ve walked such a distance within the village since I came back. I hardly go anywhere on foot. The only walk I take is from our house to my parents’ house next door. I hardly leave that area if I can help it, not even to go to the grocery store. I try to get my wife to go instead. Sometimes I have no choice and I do find myself in the center of the village, on Baghdad Street next to Saladin Square. They’ve started naming the streets and squares here lately. Sometimes I go to the pharmacy or buy a falafel or some cookies or fruit.

In the evenings, the village center is packed with cars and people and there are dozens of youngsters on the town hall steps, smoking and cracking sunflower seeds. From a distance, it looks as if they’re not even talking to one another, just staring at the cars going by. The cars in the center move slowly, aimlessly. People just cruise around in their cars and greet one another, roaming about and studying the passersby. I hate being visible, because I know how they stare at me. Who is this guy anyway? Does he live in this village?

This is no place for strangers. Not that I’m a stranger; I was born here and spent eighteen years of my life here. But still, there are rules. Initially, when I’d bump into people, I’d try to look away, to pretend I hadn’t seen them, but lately I’ve started studying them, looking at them the way they look at me, and sometimes I spot a familiar face or find myself smiling at someone peering at me from a passing vehicle, remembering that we’d been in school together, and I wave automatically. I’ve taken to greeting every familiar face with salam aleikum too, regardless of whether I can place the person or remember his name and what relationship we had, if any. Even though I don’t leave the house much, I realize that from week to week, from day to day, I recognize more and more faces. I know that the number of times I say salam aleikum is growing by the day. These things happen and I have no control over them.

It hasn’t been long since we moved back here, but I can go into stores in the village center without being questioned, as if I’ve been shopping there all along. People are less suspicious. Some of the salespeople recognize me by now and greet me when I walk in. The first time I went to buy a falafel, for instance, the vendor didn’t ask me a thing. He just looked at me, studied me and decided I was a stranger. I tried to be polite, the way a stranger ought to be. The second time he felt he could ask me whether I was a local. When I said I was, he wanted to know whose son, what I did for a living, whether I knew so-and-so, who my wife was, whose daughter she was, what she did. The third time, he felt he could inquire how much I made at the paper and how much my wife made as a teacher. I lied. The figures I gave were much too high. Twice the highest salary I ever made at the paper when I was on the editorial board. I could afford to lie, about journalism at least. Nobody has a clue how much a journalist makes. When it comes to teachers, on the other hand, everyone knows the answer.

I don’t like being questioned this way by salespeople, some of whom are half my age. I’ve never asked anyone how much he or she makes a month, it’s been more than ten years since I’ve discussed my personal life with a salesperson and I’ve almost forgotten how it goes here. Other salespeople or just people who happened to be waiting in line at the bank or the pharmacy or the infirmary, as soon as they find out who I am, also want to know what I’ve been doing all these years, what it was like to live in a Jewish city. Did I have any male children? Almost invariably, the people who interrogated me declared that coming back to the village was a smart move. They found it hard to understand how anyone could live anywhere else. They looked at me as if I were an alien and congratulated me on my decision to return. “Is there anything better than living among your own? With your family?” was something I heard over and over again.