“Your bottle, you want your bottle, here’s your bottle.” She pours some warm water from the kettle into the baby’s bottle, takes some formula out of an upper cabinet in the kitchen and counts the spoonfuls out loud as if singing to the baby:

“Wahad, tneyn…” checking with her tongue to make sure the milk isn’t too warm, handing it to the baby, putting her back in her crib and returning to the bedroom to get dressed.

She pulls her pants up to her knees, then pulls one side up, struggling to get past her wide hips, then the other side. I’m always surprised to see how in the end her pants do close easily over her stomach. She puts on a white blouse I bought her when we were engaged. To tell the truth, I bought something else and took a receipt and she returned what I’d bought and chose a white button-down blouse with a collar shaped like two big triangles, like a butterfly’s wings. She pulls her sandals out from under the bed while trying to amuse the baby, and shouts from a distance, “Milk, you’re drinking your milk, Mommy’s coming, my pretty, you’re so pretty.” And she blurts out at me as she heads back from the bedroom to the baby’s room, “Well, what’s up, don’t you want any coffee? It’s seven-fifteen already.”

2

I know the paper didn’t arrive this morning either. For a few hours now I’ve been trying to concentrate, waiting to hear the paper being delivered. Maybe they’ll come on a bike, maybe by car. I’ve been waiting to hear the thud the paper makes as they hurl it at the front door, but I haven’t heard it. I go downstairs and try to turn on the TV with the remote, but nothing happens. The red lamp under the screen is turned off. This time I don’t even bother checking the fuse box. I know they’ve cut off our power too.

I can’t see the road from my house, but I can hear the commotion. “Shu sar? What happened?” the neighbors are shouting from their windows, and the ones walking in the street shout back, “They’ve killed two people,” “They shot at people,” and “They must have caught some suicide bombers.” I tell my wife to stay home for now, and put on my pants and shirt and go to my parents’ place. They’re up too by now and are standing in the doorway that faces the street. Mother is clasping her hands together and cursing the Jews, and Father is puffing at his cigarette and saying that people say some workers were shot trying to get across the roadblock. My mother asks me not to leave the house. “What’s the point? What can you see out there anyway?” Their neighbor’s son, Khalil, who works as a nurse at the hospital in Kfar Sava, is returning in his car. My father signals him to come closer, Khalil parks outside his house and comes toward us in his white jacket. He had thought that if he approached the soldiers in his white jacket, they’d realize he was a nurse who wants to get to work. It’s just as well that he didn’t cross the roadblock, he says. There was a pickup there with a couple of workers in it. The owner, a contractor, tried to break through the barbed wire with his vehicle and took a tank shell. Just like that, no questions asked. He and the two workers died on the spot, and some of those behind the roadblock were hit by shrapnel. The Israelis didn’t send an ambulance and they wouldn’t let them be taken to hospital. The injured were picked up and taken to the infirmary. One of them was in a bad way — what could they do for him at the infirmary? He needs an operation urgently. The infirmary barely has a thermometer.

“And what’s going on now?” Father asks.

“The whole village is out there. The mayor and his cronies are asking people to move away and are trying to keep things quiet. The parents of the contractor and of the two workers, one of them from the village and one from the West Bank, are trying to get through with spades and knives, to get back at the soldiers. One worker’s father fainted and had to be taken to the infirmary too.”

“Maybe now they’ll get out to avoid a confrontation with the mob,” Father says, and Khalil, in his jacket, explains there’s no chance and that, on the contrary, they’ve been bringing more and more soldiers in, and they’re standing there with their pistols and their machine guns and the barrels of the tanks as if they’re expecting a war. “Allah yustur,” he says. “They’re up to something. What are they thinking? And they’ve cut off the power, to boot. They’ve gone completely crazy.”

3

“It could take time,” I tell my parents and my brother. “We’ve got to get things ready before it’s too late, to buy enough food for at least a week.”

For some reason, a week seems to me now like the longest that the thing everyone calls a roadblock — and nobody really knows if it’s a siege or a closure or the devil knows what — can continue. My father laughs and says I’m overreacting. My mother and my older brother agree with me. My brother says that, who knows, there might be confrontations with the soldiers and they’ll declare a closure, looks like they’ll stop at nothing now. I tell them they shouldn’t buy too many dairy products or too much meat or anything that needs to be refrigerated, because there’s no telling when the power will go back on.

My father says we’re exaggerating. True, he hasn’t come across a tank shell since ’48, but it must be a regrettable mistake of some soldier who misinterpreted a command when he saw the pickup coming straight at him and thought it must be a terrorist and a car bomb. Those soldiers have been in the territories and in Lebanon, and all of them are so panicky they can’t tell a loyal Arab from an enemy. My father says the soldier will get told off by his commanders in no time. He’s convinced that right after the incident they’ll be issuing an apology and the soldiers will leave. The power will be back soon too, because if it isn’t just an ordinary malfunction it must be that they cut the power because it was much easier for the soldiers to operate in the dark. They’ve probably finished their mission by now, and if it hadn’t been for that idiot contractor with his pickup, everything would have been behind us by now.

My father has full faith in the state, he always has. When we were little, everybody assumed that he’d been appointed supervisor in the Ministry of Education because of his qualifications. He doesn’t really have an academic degree, and he barely finished the teachers’ seminary in Jaffa. Every now and then I’d get into a fight with students whose parents had told them that my father was in cahoots with the authorities, and I’d always scream at them that they were just jealous, and sometimes I cried when they said he was collaborating with the Jews. Because it wasn’t true. He just had a few good friends. Besides, I knew everyone liked him. When we were little, I remember how whole families used to come to see him almost every day with gift-wrapped things, and they’d talk to him very respectfully and ask him to find a job for their children or to fix situations that they couldn’t fix themselves. My father was a good person and he helped people, and it had nothing to do with the presents. He always said he didn’t want those, and that he only took them because the people insisted.

When I grew up, I realized there was no way an Arab would get a senior appointment in the Ministry of Education if the government didn’t have a vested interest in him. It’s still that way, in fact. My father says he’s never informed on anyone and that all he ever wanted was to help the students. He says he got the job thanks to his good reputation and not because he’d collaborated with the security service. Granted, he doesn’t have an academic degree, but we’re talking about thirty years ago, and who had an academic degree in those days? Who even got as far as the teachers’ seminary in Jaffa? It was true. My father was no collaborator. All he did was vote for the Labor Party and host some parlor meetings in his home. It meant inviting some of the Jews that we used to see on TV to come here and talk, and Father got the whole family to vote like him.