I hate those situations, and I sometimes get annoyed at my wife for making me do the kinds of chores that force me to keep going down to the center and to bump into people. I’d prefer for her to do those things instead, but I know it would be considered odd. Fact is, I’ve never seen a woman at any of those stores, and if there were any, she was usually there together with her husband or a male relative. An Arab woman would never go out to buy hummus or falafel on her own. It was unthinkable. The first time I was made to go down to the center of the village, it was to fix my wife’s wedding ring. One of the stones had fallen out three weeks earlier, and I couldn’t procrastinate any longer. She just went on and on about that stone and that ring. She said it was a bad omen, that the damage to the ring was mostly a sign that there was something wrong with our marriage, which was falling apart. I reached the iron gate. I tried to push it in, but in vain. The gate was locked. The salesperson sitting on the inside looked at me, tilted his head forward, and through the loudspeaker of the intercom next to the gate I could hear him ask, “Who are you?” Only after I gave him my name, my father’s name and my last name did he smile and press the button and signal me to push the gate, which gave off a squeaky sound. Another iron gate came next, but so long as the first one was not completely shut, he didn’t press the button that would open the second one. For a few very scary seconds I was locked in a steel cage. This place must have been robbed a million times, I thought.
“Ahalan u-sahalan,” the salesperson greeted me, getting up and taking my hand. “I’ve heard about you. You just returned to the village a short while ago, right? You may not know this, but your father and I used to be close friends. Nowadays, because of business, we hardly see one another, but he’s like a brother to me.” The salesperson looked my father’s age. His large head was covered with white hair and his enormous body filled the pink director’s chair on the other side of the counter. All of the gold in front of him was yellow, shiny. On the back of the chair he had placed a green prayer mat with two mosques depicted on it. In his one hand he shifted the beads on his masbakha as he inquired about me and my wife, expressed his approval of our return and asked how he could help. I handed him the ring. He said it was nothing, he could fix the damage on the spot, in just a few minutes. My parents had bought the ring from him. He told me they had bought the jewelry for my brother’s wedding from him too. “I have the best merchandise anywhere around here, and I gave your father a great price, same as I’d give my own brother.”
The wedding jewels replaced money as the groom’s mohar payment, and represented a pretty big expense for the groom’s parents. The salesperson felt obliged to note that my parents had not skimped and had bought the most expensive ones. Both for my wife and for my older brother’s. “I want you to know,” he said, “that your parents are exceptionally fair. They bought your wife the very same things they bought for your older brother’s wife, and it’s only a wise person like your father who’d do that, because you know how it is, women look at one another and get jealous. They did the smart thing. They asked for the identical set for your wife. I had to place a special order.” He laughed. Me he’d never seen before, maybe when I was little, he said. But he saw my father and my older brother in the mosque every Friday. “Tell me,” he asked as he handed me back the ring, “which mosque do you pray at?”
“At home,” I muttered. “I pray at home.”
“I guess you haven’t had a chance to get to know the mosques around here. I’m telling you, come to our mosque, together with your brother. That would be the best. We don’t have a lot of politics, or a lot of fanatics. I know your family, it’s what would suit you best. Your family are like us, not like some of those crazies.”
Yesterday, two more stones fell out of the wedding ring, the one I had fixed recently, and another one. My wife wants me to go have it fixed again, even though she figures it probably won’t hold.
6
I pass by the mosque, which means I’m back in my own neighborhood already. The older people at the entrance don’t seem the least bit worried. Rolling their Arab tobacco and licking it tight, huddling there together all day waiting for the next prayer hour. What else do they have to do, actually? At least they don’t feel alone, and they can spend hours talking about people who died two thousand years ago. I blurt out a salam aleikum to which they respond with an aleikum salam, and I raise my hand. I’ve got to calm down. Truth is, I’m much calmer already. Some bulldozer must have slashed a cable and all the mobile phones went dead because the lines were jammed. Maybe an antenna has been damaged. Everything will be all right. Maybe I shouldn’t go to my parents’, maybe I ought to check the exit first, see if the roads are open already and retrieve my car. People in the street don’t seem to think it’s anything serious. There’s cheerful music inside the houses, Egyptian pop. I recognize it and it makes me happy, even though, on the whole, I hate the trend. Every now and then, a car drives by and brakes just before the makeshift speed bumps that were put there to deal with reckless young drivers and car thieves who like to show off their loot by racing through the streets at crazy speeds. Some of the neighbors simply poured cement down in the shape of a small mound opposite the house, while others preferred to slow things down by digging a ditch from one side of the road to the other. Housewives are mopping the house and pouring the dirty water into the street, the way they do every morning. Where on earth, I ask myself, did I get the idea they were closing off the village?
My parents’ home is the first one on the northern edge of the village, then my older brother’s, then mine. The two brothers’ houses look exactly the same, and on the remaining piece of land they’ll build the fourth house, identical to ours, for my younger brother when he finishes school. All his life, my father has loathed fights over land, especially among brothers, which is why he made sure, long ago, to divide it up evenly among us. “So nobody says I gave one more or less than the rest,” he tells us. I don’t think my parents have heard anything about what’s going on. I’ll tell them I overslept and that I just came to say good-bye on my way to work. “Good morning,” I say, and they both answer. My mother is preparing something in the kitchen and my father is sitting on the pink sofa staring at another newscast on Al Jazeera. They don’t seem surprised to see me, despite the unlikely hour of my visit. My father sits up to greet me. “What do you think?” he asks me “Have they arrested anyone yet? What do they want anyway?”
“I hope God takes the lot of them,” my mother says, and wipes off the counter. “Hungry?”
“Not really. Maybe I’ll have a bite a little later,” I say. So my parents do know, and I try to check whether it’s because of something they saw on TV, because they couldn’t possibly have gone out yet. Where would they be going, anyway?
But none of the events in the village has been mentioned on television. My heart starts beating hard again, and I try to keep my body from trembling when my mother curses the Jews and says they’d almost had a heart attack the night before when someone came banging on their bedroom window at about three A.M. “Who could be knocking at such an hour?” my mother says. “We were sure something terrible la samakh Allah had happened to one of you or your children.”
It was my younger brother. He’d knocked on the door first, and when they didn’t hear him he knocked on their bedroom window, right over their heads. My younger brother was dead tired. My father says they could hardly make sense of what he was saying about what had happened, except that the security guards at the student dorms had come with the Border Police, had ordered all of the Arab students out of their rooms and had escorted every one of them home.