2

I wake to the sounds of the TV. My parents continue to be early risers, even though neither one of them works anymore. I’ll stay in bed a little longer. I haven’t much to do anyway, and it’s still too early to go see my little girl. My mother knocks softly and opens the door a crack before I’ve had a chance to answer. I see her eyes looking at me. “Good morning,” I say, to signal that I’m awake.

“Good morning,” she says, opening it some more. “The workers are here, and your father would like you to go up there and keep an eye on them.”

“No problem. I’ll be up in a minute.”

The room is chilly. The ceiling is high and the walls thin and damp. “This has been the longest and rainiest winter in three decades” was a sentence we kept hearing over and over again on the weather forecasts. Winter was officially over, and we were in the middle of spring. I pull a sweater out of the bag I haven’t even unpacked yet and go into the air-conditioned living room. My parents installed the air conditioner after we’d left home, and didn’t see any point in opening a vent into the children’s room. Just the living room and their bedroom. “Good morning,” I say, and my father, sitting there with his cigarette and coffee, answers, “Good morning,” without looking away from the screen. He’s watching the Hebrew news, and when that’s over, he zaps to Al Jazeera, where they have news all the time.

Breakfast is already waiting on the kitchen table. “Come to eat,” my mother says. I look at my father and he looks at me. I know it’s going to be difficult for the two of us to sit at the table together. My return must seem as odd to him as it does to me. “In a minute,” he says, and I go and sit down at the kitchen table, in my regular seat, the one farthest away from Father, with my back to the TV, sipping tea with naana mint. The tea is too sweet. I had forgotten how sweet my mother makes it. It’s a family rule, you drink tea with two spoons of sugar, coffee with none. There’s no room for personal taste, it’s a recipe handed down to her by her mother, who got it from her mother. “I don’t eat breakfast,” I explain, and she frowns in unmistakable sadness. “But I’ll have something a bit later,” I say. “In an hour or two.”

Fifty steps separate my parents’ house from the one where I am about to live. The noise of the floor-polishing machine rumbles in my ears even before I go inside. Today they’re putting in the stairs. For over five years, there was just the outer shell. Only recently, after I’d announced that I was returning home, did my parents resume working on it, full steam ahead. It’ll be ready pretty soon. In just a week, with any luck, or two at most, my mother said, and there’s money too. My parents cashed in a savings account and they’re putting it all into the house now, so I can move in. That’s the way it is around here: good parents build homes for their children.

I walk into my future home, carrying a copper tray with two cups of tea for the men who are putting in the stairs. They turn off the machines for a moment. The one who seems to be in charge walks over to me, takes the tray and puts it down on the step he’s just finished making. “Are you the owner?” he asks, and shakes my hand. “I’m Kamel.” He gestures toward the younger guy, who puts down an enormous slab of marble and comes over to drink his tea. I study him and nod a greeting. He has a wide cleft all the way up from his lower lip to his nose. It doesn’t look like an accident, more like a birth defect, and if he hadn’t answered my greeting, I’d have assumed he couldn’t talk. His voice is strange and squeaky, reminding me of the deaf kids’ class at the far end of our elementary school. “Thanks for the tea,” he says. His boss must be used to it by now, because he quickly makes a point of offsetting any apprehension or uneasiness I might be feeling. “Mohammed is an A-okay guy,” he says. “We’ve been working together for two years. Like brothers, eh, Mohammed?” Mohammed lowers his head and tries to smile. I’m uncomfortable with the whole thing, slightly embarrassed even, as if we’re dealing with some creature whose owner owes it to us to explain right away, before I panic, that he’s just a harmless pet and not some wild beast, heaven forbid.

I’m going to have a big house, bigger than any of the rented homes I’ve lived in till now. There’s no comparison. I try to persuade myself that the change might be for the better, that maybe I’ll make it after all, that it might actually be nice to finally have a home of my own, considering that I’ve been dreaming of one my whole life. I walk up the stairs, to the floor where the bedrooms will be. The contractors have put in the marble slabs on that floor already. They have just one floor left, the one with the laundry room and the roof. The steps are a bit crooked, and some of them stick out. A few others broke as they were being installed. I don’t know whether to say anything. To tell the truth, it doesn’t really bother me much. I go into the bedroom. The walls haven’t been painted yet. The en suite bathroom is all ready, and so is the one that will be for the children when the time comes. There isn’t much more work to do, actually. Once the stairs are in, they’ll put in the railing and then paint it all. The carpenter has put in the kitchen cabinets too, and he’ll be installing the doors in a couple of days.

I won’t even have to leave the house at all, I think, and have a cigarette in the bedroom. I won’t even go to the grocery store. I’ll just sit here at home, oblivious to everything. I could easily disappear, easily fix my life in such a way that nobody will know I’m back, nobody will notice I’ve come back to this lousy village. At least I have a big house to bury myself in. Wasn’t it the oppressive feeling that I had run out of steam that made me come back here in the first place — a what’s-the-point feeling that had been haunting me for the better part of a year and just kept getting worse? What was left for me in the big city anyway? Nothing, nada, just a sense of apprehension. I’d never felt secure there, even at home, and I don’t intend to deceive myself into thinking that I’ll feel any more comfortable here. But at least I won’t have to pay rent for a place to be apprehensive in.

The stairs man and his worker are at it again. I stand at the bedroom door and watch. “Hurry up, you idiot,” the boss says, as he waits for the bucket full of brown slurry that the harelip with the submissive expression hands over to him. The whole scene makes me uneasy. The boss, who must be about my age, tries to make conversation, a big smile splashed across his face. “We never see you in the village at all. I was surprised to see you, and of course I know everyone your age around here. The younger generation, the children, I don’t always know, because the village keeps getting bigger, but I know every single person your age. You must have studied in Germany. A doctor?”

I shake my head.

“So what did you study?”

“Journalism,” I tell him.

“So you’re a journalist?”

I nod.

“For the Jews?”

“Yes.”

And soon enough I find myself getting into a conversation and breaking the promise I’d just made to myself a minute ago, not to make contact with anyone. How can I keep that up in a place like this?

“I’m telling you, there’s no place like home. I’ve worked for the Jews too, and believe you me, even though you make a lot more money, it still feels different, you know what I mean, the way you come in every morning with the tea on a tray, with them you could be working for a week and they won’t come near you. Not all of them. I’m not saying they’re all like that. But now, with the things getting more and more tense and all, it’s just getting worse. They can’t tell the difference between people like us, living inside Israel, and the ones living on the West Bank. An Arab’s an Arab as far as they’re concerned. I bet you thought I was from the West Bank too when you came in and saw me in my dirty coverall. I bet you were scared,” he says with a laugh.