Every time one of her friends or relatives goes abroad, she goes into mourning, and I’m the object of her litany about how I stole her dream of traveling to a different city, a different country. I’ve stolen her dream of big hotels and even bigger shopping malls. We’ve never taken an airplane, we’ve never left the country. I’ve always said we don’t have enough money to pay for such a trip, and that’s the truth, even though it’s not what my wife would like to hear. I’ve never felt I needed those trips. Never gave it a second thought. On the contrary, I find it hard to picture what it is that makes them enjoyable. For some reason, as far as I’m concerned, leaving the country is something I could only do in one direction. I mean, when I think of a plane and of another country, I think of it only as a way of emigrating, of escaping, of deciding never to return here — not ever, not even for a visit.
True, there isn’t much to do here even if you’d like to. Unlike the city, which offers lots of stimuli even though I hardly ever feel like doing anything there either. And yet, I don’t feel more bored here, and I don’t get the urge to do more than what the village routine has to offer someone like me — hanging out in your parents’ living room.
There are several cafés in the village, all for men. But generally the men there are much older than me and they pass the time playing cards and tawlah. I don’t like those games, to tell the truth. I’ve even managed to forget the rules, which I learned from my father long ago. My father sits in cafés every day. Every afternoon he dresses up, as if he’s been invited to an official event, and heads for the café where he’s been a regular for decades. He plays with his usual partners, the same three teachers he’s been playing against for as long as I can remember. He spends his afternoons there, coming home in time for evening prayers. My brother-in-law Ashraf told me there’s a place called the Purple Butterfly too, at the outskirts of the village where you can order alcoholic beverages. Ashraf burst out laughing when I suggested that we go have a drink there. He said the only people who ever went there were the heavy drinkers that everyone in the village knows. “What’s gotten into you?” He laughed. “Are you nuts? D’you want to come home with an eye and a foot missing, and be ostracized by your family?”
According to Ashraf’s stories, some people from the Islamic Movement had tried to set fire to the Purple Butterfly a few times. In fact they actually did burn it down once, and the owner had insisted on rebuilding it. The pub is holding on, and continues to be the only place in the village where they sell alcohol — thanks to the protection of a gang that charges the owner a monthly fee, not to mention a free run of the bar for the gang members. “They deserve a place where they can have a drink too, don’t they?” Ashraf says, and laughs, the way he always does when he tells me those stories. “Something close to home that could get them through withdrawal without their having to go all the way to Tel Aviv for a swig of arrack.”
Apart from driving through the streets with radios blaring full blast, the favorite pastime of people around here is weddings. In summer, weddings are an alternative to discotheques. That’s where bachelors can fan their tails and do their mating dances, that’s where they can really let go and sweat, and stomp their feet for hours on end. The weddings provide another setting, another arena for the machismo match. Bachelors like Ashraf spend almost every summer evening at weddings. He told me that he and some of his friends used to go to Tel Aviv regularly and try their luck at the dance clubs they’d read about in the papers or heard about from the other students, except they never got past the bouncer and had to make do with spending yet another night at one of the dives that admitted just about anyone. “We’d go into places that you wouldn’t believe. You’d have the feeling a murder was just waiting to happen, someone was about to waste an enemy or something,” he chuckled. “There’s nothing like weddings. It’s the best bet. Trouble is that if you wind up at an Islamic wedding, you’re done for. Sure, everyone’s a Muslim, and everyone’s becoming religious lately, but I’m talking about the ones who decide that instead of a wedding with music and dancing they’ll invite a sheikh to read verses from the Koran and a religion teacher to lecture about the shocking behavior of today’s young people at the promiscuous weddings taking place right here in our own village. Lots of people are into that nowadays, and you can’t tell anymore what to expect. Sometimes we have to do three weddings in a single evening before we find one without a sheikh.”
True, there isn’t much to do around here, least of all for someone like me. I don’t go to the mosque, I try to stay away from weddings, I don’t play cards with men my father’s age and I have no desire to visit the only club in the village. But I’m not bored. I mean, I haven’t been particularly bored since I moved here. On the contrary, I suffered more before. I don’t even miss the nights when we’d go out to look for kicks. At least I’ve been spared those embarrassing moments, those moments of drunkenness when I could find no rest for my soul. I’ve been spared the mornings after the nights of drinking, when I felt miserable for not being able to keep my thoughts to myself the night before.
10
“Sh…sh…sh…” my father mutters. The main newscast on Israel TV is beginning. I hate watching the news on Israeli national television. Tanks appear on the screen, and planes and fire are everywhere, and in the background they’re playing a military march heralding a war that is about to break out any minute. Everyone is sitting around in silence. My younger brother interrupts his studying and comes out of his room to watch the news. He’s got an exam in two days.
They don’t mention the words closure or roadblocks. Instead, there’s talk of red alerts or of backup forces being brought into the area of the Arab villages in the Triangle area on the West Bank border. The West Bank has actually been peaceful today, and the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are continuing with their meetings in Jerusalem. The announcer starts with the economic crisis and the heat wave sweeping over the country, then moves on to the news in full.
Something’s wrong. They haven’t even shown any tanks or fences. All they talk about are alerts — and they’re talking so naturally, as if they’re something that’s been in the news for two years running. The chief of police for this region arrives in the studio and makes no mention of the new situation. He speaks of Israeli Arabs who have helped the Hamas. Again there’s talk of the security risk, and the growing extremism of Israeli Arabs. The finger is pointed toward the leadership, the Islamic Movement. Nothing out of the ordinary.
“Maybe it’s a secret operation,” my father says. And my younger brother answers, laughing, “How secret could it be when the whole village knows about it? If they’d wanted to surprise someone, they could have come in and arrested him quietly. Is this what you’d call secret?”
Father says they’re bound to enter the village tonight and arrest the ones they’re after. “’Cause there’s no way you can keep anything hidden in this village. Nobody gives a damn and everyone cooperates with the police and the security forces. It stopped being considered betrayal long ago. So if there’s anything going on, the General Security Service is bound to know all about it — where and when and how. I’m telling you, they’re about to send in one of their select units, and two jeeps, maybe, in the middle of the night. They’ll pull it off and leave as if nothing’s happened.”
“They’re just on our case,” my older brother says. “Could you imagine anyone in this village pulling off a suicide or joining one of the Palestinian organizations? It’s never happened, has it?”