When my mother gets back, I’ll give her the baby and go out to see what’s happening, how people are taking it. My younger brother is back home, holding two plastic bags so heavy he can barely lift them. “Mother’s gone crazy,” he says, dumping the bags on the kitchen counter. Mostly they’re full of canned goods, corn, tuna, pickles, beans, peas, ful, chickpeas. He says the store was packed and that he practically had to hit this older woman who tried to get ahead of him. He says there were loads of people there and that some of the things that Mother had ordered were sold out already. He couldn’t find any flour, for instance.
My brother takes a seat in the living room, first beside me, stroking the baby’s head and smiling at her. She smiles back. Then he sits on the sofa farthest from us, pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights one. “So, the folks have gone to a funeral?” he asks.
“Yeah. Since when do you smoke?”
“For almost a year. You know how it is at university, don’t you?” He smiles and adds in a more serious voice, “What do you say? Should I bother studying? Do you think there’s any chance I’ll get back to Tel Aviv tomorrow?”
“Sure, you’ve got to study for the exam.”
He takes a puff at his cigarette and tells me that in the beginning, when the security service knocked at his door, he thought they were rounding up the students they considered problematic, the political activists, the ones who showed up at campus rallies. But with him in the police car were students who were so good that they always made a point of keeping out of politics and just focused on their studies. My brother’s description takes me by surprise. I have the feeling I hardly know him anymore. I’d never imagined him as a smoker, and now he tells me he’s a campus activist. “And in what party are you active?” I ask him.
“I’m with the Communists.”
“The Communists? And just how did you wind up with the Communists?”
“Well, you know how it is. You’ve been, haven’t you? You meet people. Your friends are active in the party, so you decide you want to be active too, but it’s mainly because of how they treated me. Suddenly I see our problems. Suddenly I understand what it means to be hated, what racism and discrimination are. In the dorms, they make sure you’re put into the Arabs’ rooms, which are the worst rooms there are. One room for Arabs on each floor, to make sure there aren’t too many of us in any one place, to keep us in a minority status even on the floor. You know how there’s a single refrigerator for each two rooms? Well, the day I got there, I went into the kitchen to get a compartment for myself and my roommate from Djat, and this Jewish guy asked if I’d share a compartment with him. He said it was lucky I’d come because he was so worried he’d wind up having to share with an Arab.”
With my younger brother it’s hard to tell what he is, especially with his ponytail and his hard-rock clothes. Like most of the young people who join the Communist Party, my brother doesn’t know the first thing about Communism. They know it’s a party that aims at equality between Jews and Arabs, between the poor and the rich, but they haven’t a clue about its principles. We continue talking and I try to find out more about his Communism. I discover he knows who Lenin was but he’s never heard of Trotsky. He can curse the capitalists but knows nothing about the concept of a proletariat or the distribution of capital. The Communist slogans suited him, there were a few guys there from the law faculty where he studies, and that’s why he chose the Communists. He adds that there are some really cool Christian girls from the Galilee there too, not afraid to smoke in front of everyone, dressing right and joining the guys for a beer. It’s not that my younger brother is dumb. Not at all. He’s smart, and someday he’ll learn to tell the difference between them all. I don’t think I understood much about the different parties at his age either, or just what the conflict is all about. My brother asks me not to say a word to Father, ’cause he’ll kill him. Father’s motto has always been that if you want to amount to anything and if you want to do well at school, you’ve got to stay away from politics. Girls and politics. He makes me swear not to mention the cigarettes either, because Father is liable to make him stop school and come back home. I tell him he’s exaggerating, but promise not to say anything. My younger brother goes back to his studies, the baby begins to cry.
6
My little girl has fallen asleep and I put her down on my parents’ bed, the one they bought on their wedding day more than thirty years ago, the one they still sleep in. I go home, get the car keys and get in the car to listen to the news. The heat is overpowering, and it isn’t even noon. The radio dials are boiling. I try to turn them without getting burned, and pull away quickly. They’re playing the commercials now, the ones that come right before the news. Advertising air conditioners, savings plans at the bank and special deals on trips abroad or at local resorts. The news begins with an announcement that the government, in cooperation with the army, has decided to declare a general state of emergency. Officials in the security system are talking of the imminent danger of an Arab uprising and about red alerts related to certain people in the Arab sector who are planning to attack Jewish citizens and state institutions. Later, toward the middle of the newscast, they mention our village. The announcer reports an attempt to attack some soldiers who were conducting a routine patrol near the entrance to the village. “An attempted terrorist attack,” he says, “which ended without casualties thanks to our soldiers’ alertness.” He’s referring to the incident with the contractor and the worker in the pickup. Needless to say, there’s no mention of the Arab casualties, and it stands to reason they don’t have the facts anyway. There’s no way of communicating with people in the village, after all.
The situation has become unbearable. They’re up to something, it’s obvious by now, and they’re laying the foundations in Jewish public opinion. For two years now, politicians, ministers, members of Knesset and security experts have been talking about a “cancer in the heart of the nation,” an “imminent danger,” a “fifth column,” and a “demographic problem that threatens to undermine the Jewish fiber of the state.” What do they expect? What the hell do they expect? The Jewish public is already filled with hatred and a sense of danger. Just how far do they expect it to go? I look for the Arabic news on Voice of Israel. I know it’s the government propaganda channel — still, maybe they’ll give some more information — but their frequency has been cut too.
There’s a loud noise coming from the street, and I run back to see what’s happening. My younger brother is standing outside watching. It’s the funeral, judging by the noise, the largest funeral there’s ever been in this village. We can’t see it, but the cries of “Allahu akbar” reverberate through the village. A few women come out of their houses all excited and watch the funeral procession. They must have taken the bodies out of the mosque by now. My wife returns home and tells me that the high school kids came to the elementary school, entered each of the classrooms and announced a general strike and a demonstration. “I hope the younger ones go home and don’t get into trouble now, that’s all they need,” she says.
“I’m glad you’re back,” I tell her. “The baby’s fallen asleep and I’m going out to see what’s happening.”
“What for? What can you do to help?”
“It’s not for me, it’s part of my job,” I say, and feel the rush of the adrenaline that used to course through my veins when I set out to do a story.
“If things heat up, come back right away, do me a favor. Don’t be late, okay?” my wife says, and it reminds me of the days when I used to cover stories on the West Bank and it worried her. How I’ve missed her worrying.