We’d sit there at the desk on our wooden chairs, not talking about anything except the homework. After a few sessions, things began to change. Bassel started asking me why I didn’t shave like everyone else. Once he showed me how he shaved his mustache with his father’s razor, and said it wasn’t scary at all if you just know how to do it, and that you don’t get cut, and that he could show me how if I wanted. He was even prepared to do it for me the first time. I said I’d rather not and that maybe I’d start in the summer vacation, before we went back to school. Gradually we began talking less and less about the homework, and our sessions became much more enjoyable. At first I pretended not to listen when he talked about girls and about the breasts that some of our classmates were developing.

I refused to go along when he asked me if I had any hair growing and if anything hurt in my chest or my throat. He would chuckle and say I was still a little boy, and slowly I began playing along with him, and enjoyed it. He pinched my chest, and it hurt so badly that I had to grimace. He laughed out loud when I said it didn’t hurt. “Why are you so scared?” he asked. “It’s that way with everyone.” His parents did everything to make sure he got through school, but he always flunked at least three subjects. On one of the shelves in his room was a reference book titled The Human Body. Bassel said he’d show me all kinds of neat things, and he pointed to drawings of boys’ and girls’ bodies with their genitals showing. He began talking about erections and pointed to the drawings. He talked about the pleasure of it and the fun, and about how it completely distracts you from your schoolwork. He told me about his dreams, all about girls, and about how he’d wake up with the most wonderful feeling he’d ever felt, and his dick was hard and there was something coming out of it and that it’s the best thing that ever happened to him.

I liked Bassel a lot. It was the first time I’d ever felt like I had a friend, the first time I understood that what was happening to me at night happened to other people too. He taught me to shove toilet paper into my underwear to prevent the staining and laughed when he heard I had thought I’d been peeing in my sleep. I couldn’t believe I was telling him those things, couldn’t believe I was telling anyone. I began enjoying those wet dreams too.

Bassel and I never discussed math again, or Hebrew language or English. All we talked about was our bodies. We pored over the book and I felt I knew everything. My way of thinking changed completely, and I let him shave off my mustache, after I’d asked my mother if it was all right. Instead of twice a week, we’d meet three or four times. Instead of one hour, we’d stay alone in that room for several hours. I told his parents he was progressing nicely and that he was even enjoying the lessons. They were delighted, and he told me that his father wasn’t beating him as much since I’d arrived on the scene.

I felt really attached to him. I loved it when he laughed because of me, as if I were a little kid. He’d lock the door from the inside, take off his pants and his underpants and touch himself, with me watching. “See?” he’d say. “It’s the greatest thing in the world.” Then, at his request, I’d take off my clothes too, and he’d ask me to do the same thing. Sometimes he touched me himself. That’s what everyone does, and me, what an idiot I was not to know anything about what the other boys in the class were doing. I did everything he asked; even when he told me to undress and he would rub against me from behind, I did it. I was glad to be giving him pleasure, glad I’d met him and that I could finally say I had a friend, and what a friend: Bassel, the boy that all the kids in class were afraid of, that they all tried to be nice to. Instead of his doing the homework I gave him, I’d do the homework he gave me. He promised, in return, that he’d share a desk with me the following year. At our last session, the day before school started, he asked me to get to school as early as possible and take the front desk for both of us. “Take the one right in front of the teacher,” he said, “your favorite place.”

I was so happy. I got to school before everyone and sat at the desk in front of the teacher. I put my bag down on the other chair, though that was unnecessary, since nobody really wanted to sit next to me. He’d arrive any minute now, and they’d see who I was sharing with. Bassel was one of the last to arrive, after the teacher had already come in. He was surrounded by his old cronies. I saw him in the doorway and gave him an enormous smile. I waved at him, and he laughed back. His whole gang laughed. He walked right past me, and I whispered, “Bassel, I reserved a place for you.” He looked down at me and didn’t say a word. Then he headed for his regular place at the back. I looked at him. He was just whispering something to the kids who were with him, and they looked at me and tried to stifle a laugh, to avoid being punished. He was moving his lips, and all I could make out was, “Asshole.”

I sit there in the car. Bassel comes full circle in his BMW and drives back toward me. I see him in the mirror. I’m not going to look in his direction. He slows down as he passes me and honks. Unthinkingly, I turn to look. Four men are gazing at me and laughing. Bassel waves.

8

Dinner is ready. There’s an enormous pot of cooked meat on the white plastic tablecloth outside, along with a big bowl of vegetable salad and a few other salads and spreads taken out of the fridge to be eaten before they spoil. We’re waiting for Father to get back from town hall. A car pulls up at the front of the house and he gets out. His face is grim as he walks toward us. He greets us and takes his place at the head of the table without another word. Mother takes his plate and heaps meat onto it. “You haven’t had anything to eat today, and the meat came out delicious.”

We start eating and wait to hear Father’s report on what transpired at the meeting. He doesn’t volunteer anything, and finally I have to ask him.

“They decided to hand over the Gazawiyya and the Daffawiyya,” the people from Gaza and the West Bank, Father says.

“They did?” my older brother asks. “Is that what the government got the mayor to do?”

“No,” Father says. “The mayor has no idea what they want, but he figures, like everyone else, that the main concern of the police is the Palestinian workers. He’s right.”

“So what are they doing? Just how are they going to hand them over?” I ask.

“If the electricity stays disconnected till tomorrow morning and the roadblock stays in place, they’ll hand over the illegal workers to the security forces. But only the adults, the ones over fourteen.”

There are hundreds of workers from Gaza and the West Bank in the village. Many of them work for contractors from the village and others work inside the village itself, in construction, sanitation or gardening. They generally sleep on straw mats at the building sites, and a few lucky ones get to spend the night in large groups in warehouses belonging to their employers. In the past they could work inside Israel, but ever since the first Intifada they can no longer work there unless their employer has Israeli citizenship. In fact, workers coming from the cities and villages have become one of the most important sources of income for people in our village. Anyone who ever did a day’s work as a construction worker has turned into a contractor, farming out work to people from Gaza or the West Bank, thanks to his Israeli citizenship. Besides the dozens of new “contractors” sprouting up in every Arab town and village inside Israel, many also transport workers to Tel Aviv, Netanya and other Israeli cities. Many of the drivers become their would-be sponsors. The workers clean, cook, work the assembly line, and the Israeli driver, the only person legally entitled to collect their salaries, distributes it after taking his fat cut. To a large extent, it is the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza are responsible for the prosperity of the village.