Another senior security official appears on the screen, his face disguised to conceal his identity, to talk about the role of Israeli Arabs in terrorist attacks on Jews. He says they’re much more dangerous than the Palestinians themselves, because they’re more familiar with the Jewish cities and liable to cause greater damage. The same senior official notes that the agenda of today’s meeting with the minister of defense included a discussion of the need to announce a state of national emergency.

Just what do they mean?

Then they put on the water commissioner, who announces that the good rainfall of recent months has not eliminated the national water shortage. The Water Council is weighing the possibility of declaring a state of emergency in the water supply.

Something’s wrong. I can tell. I know the Israeli media. A closure on an Arab village, and according to my younger brother he’s not the only student who was sent home, all the Arab students were sent home from the university; so it stands to reason the Israelis have surrounded some other Arab villages too, if not all of them. I know it’s the kind of story the media wouldn’t pass up. I know the government must have issued a gag order.

My father says that every time there’s been a war, Israel has surrounded the Arab towns and villages within its borders and kept watch on them. But usually it was the Border Police and the regular police who did the job. They never used the army — or tanks damn it — the way they’re doing now. My father says maybe the Americans have thrown Israel some important information about an operation — in Syria, maybe — and Israel wants to make sure that life inside the country remains calm. As if anyone else is going to do anything. As if any one of us would ever do anything. Very soon, when they realize we haven’t done anything wrong, they’ll get out, the way they always do.

My daughter is already asleep. My younger brother goes back to his studies. He says he might as well study because the closure is going to continue and they’ll have to give the Arab students a special makeup exam. I carefully lift my daughter out of my mother’s arms, and she says that even though it’s warm I ought to cover her head on my way home because she’s perspiring and is liable to catch cold. My older brother gets up too and calls his son. We walk out of our parents’ house. The air outside is completely still. It’s stifling. Some guys continue driving up and down aimlessly, keeping their loudspeakers at full volume. Why are they doing it damn it? A series of loud explosions takes my breath away for a moment but I soon realize it’s just a wedding. I’ve got to get a grip.

I tuck the baby into her crib. My wife gets into bed and asks if I’m coming. “Pretty soon,” I say, and go up on the roof for a cigarette. I can hear the music from the wedding hall. I study the fields to the north and see the bluish lights of the army jeeps. Every now and then, when the wedding music fades out, you can hear the engines of the tanks. They never turn them off.

PART THREE. The Paper Didn’t Arrive This Morning Either

1

She’s waking up now, on the morning of the second day that the village has been blocked off. Very slowly, she picks herself up and sits on the right side of the bed, her side. I can feel her yawning, rubbing her eyes and stretching her arms. She doesn’t know I’m already awake, or that I didn’t sleep a wink all night. She gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom. I hear her turn on the light. She won’t shut the door behind her. She’s never closed a bathroom door in her life. I hear the familiar trickle and the paper being torn and the wiping. I’ve always hated listening to her flushing the toilet and pulling her panties back up. Sometimes I think she deliberately tugs at the rubber band around her waist and lets it make a loud sound just to annoy me.

She brushes her teeth. It takes her exactly three minutes. She looks at her watch before starting. That’s what the dentist told her ten years ago, and ever since then she’s made a point of it, morning and evening. Three minutes on the dot, not a second more or less, with the same motions the dentists taught them in those special lectures long ago.

She doesn’t like using water left in the kettle from yesterday. She pours it out in the kitchen sink, turns on the faucet, refills the kettle and puts it on to boil. She tries starting the flame with the long lighter a few times, and I can picture her pulling her hand away quickly with each attempt. Finally I hear the flame. Now she heads for the baby’s room. First she’ll pull up the blinds. The baby will wake with a start, try to open her eyes but finding the light too painful she’ll blink and put her hands over them. I can hear her say, “Good morning, sweetheart, good morning, good morning,” trying to sing it. And the baby groans again, as if she’s about to cry, but holds back. Gradually, she’ll wake up, in her crib. She’ll fall back on the blanket, she’ll try to sit up, then she’ll fall back again and turn her head to the right and to the left, and finally she’ll stand up in bed, holding on to the high wooden railing that keeps her from getting out on her own.

She’s coming back into the bedroom now. I lie on my back with my eyes closed. She’ll be raising the blinds. She always pulls hard at the cord. It’s her way of telling me it’s time for me to wake up. I remember how I used to hope she’d find a different way of waking me. With a kiss, maybe, or maybe by stroking my hair, and maybe when I opened my eyes I’d also hear her “Good morning,” but those hopes were short-lived. She pulls hard at the aluminum blinds and furiously unleashes the sunlight that blasts me each morning with all its might. She thinks I’m only now waking up. I open my eyes, and I can see her standing over the bed. It must be almost seven. The alarm clock froze a long time ago. Sometimes it springs back to life and its hands suddenly advance by a few notches, only to stop again. Sometimes the second hand tries to climb up, and you can see it struggling to reach the next second, but it can’t. It tries for awhile, then gives up and stops short. She doesn’t really need an alarm clock anymore and we haven’t had to buy a new one. Every morning she’s the first to wake up, right on time, and she wakes up the rest of the household.

She’s wearing her dishdash, the kind all the Arab women wear. A black one with red and green embroidery near the top. I used to hate that dishdash and I thought that if she went to bed naked or with any other type of pajamas, a two-piece, maybe, everything would be so different, but she’s never parted with her dishdashes and there was no chance of her running out of them. Because almost every time her parents visited us, her mother made sure to bring along a new one. When the baby was born and her mother spent a few nights with us I discovered that she sleeps in a dishdash too. She crosses her arms, placing her right arm on her left hip and her left arm on her right hip, grabs the edges and, with one quick move, pulls it over her head.

Now she’s standing there in nothing but her undies, and I wonder as I watch her undress if I’ve ever been attracted to her. With one hand she stretches the skin of her back. The other arm is raised to let her look behind her from under her armpit and examine her backside. It’s a movement that repeats itself every morning, and I’ve never been able to figure it out. Why doesn’t she use the mirror damn it, just six feet away from the bed? The baby’s crying interrupts her movements and she quickly puts on her bra and runs to the baby’s room while hooking it with both arms behind her back. “What’s the matter, sweetheart? What’s wrong? Shhhh,” she calls out, and picks up the baby. I can picture her clasping the baby with one arm to the left side of her body, and the baby spreads her legs and encircles her mother’s stomach, hanging on to the white bra with both hands.