Mohammed is standing there, and I hope he can’t hear any of what we’re saying. Maybe he’s deaf after all. Our eyes meet and he quickly lowers his gaze as if I were a Border Policeman or who knows what. And the boss, who must have picked up on my discomfort and our mutual glance, smiles again and explains, “Don’t pay any attention to the way I talk about him. Mohammed and I are like brothers, right, Mohammed?” He turns to him, and Mohammed smiles. “He’s been with me for two years now. An excellent worker. And I look after him, take care of everything he needs, food and drink, and my old clothes so they don’t stop him at the roadblocks. You know I could do time if they caught him in my car. I’m employing a ticking bomb, brother, a terrorist.” He laughs. “Ask him. He can’t live without me. Isn’t that right, Mohammed?”
3
It’s late afternoon, and the traffic is heavier than I’d expected. New cars are cruising along. The cars are full, of young men, mostly. Almost all of them have two passengers in front and three in back, well dressed. The cars look like they’ve just been washed. I merge into the lane. Traffic is slow, especially on the main road of the village, where my wife’s family’s home is.
It’s the hour when the high school lets out. That’s how it was when I was a student, except that back then there would be lots of guys out looking for a bride, trying to impress the girls or use their only chance to see them close up, not from inside a car. I remember the dozens of guys waiting at the entrance to the school and joining the throng of kids streaming out.
The thought of it makes me smile, but the smile soon gives way to sadness, a fear that maybe I too, in my dirty old car, will be taken for one of the guys coming to impress the young girls. I’ve got to get to my in-laws’ house already, damn it. I remember well how I used to look down on those guys. Some of them even came to school with cameras and shamelessly took pictures of the girls they were interested in. They’d take snapshots so they could get the mother’s approval before asking for the girl’s hand. There were even more people at the gate to the junior high. Getting engaged to a very young girl was considered a greater achievement. Half the girls in the ninth grade were engaged, and if it hadn’t been for the Israeli law, which doesn’t allow marriage before the age of seventeen, they certainly would have gotten married before they were out of high school.
A girl who was properly raised was supposed to walk straight ahead and pretend not to notice if anyone honked at her, to move firmly forward without turning to look in either direction. The ones who turned to look were loose, and the ones who smiled as they did were regarded as a lost cause, practically sluts.
I steal a glance, a few small peeks so they don’t suspect me of being one of the girl-watchers, and I see them, congregating at the edge of the road, older than children but barely into adolescence, looking different from what I’d expected. The boys look like Israeli high school students. Their clothes are so different from what we used to wear at their age, which was only ten years ago. Everyone wears jeans, everyone has gel in their hair, and their shirts are the latest fashion. When I was their age, we all dressed the same, in clothes that were made in the village, cotton pants and blue shirts. It wasn’t until I’d been at the university that I happened to hear about brand names like Levi’s or Nike or Lee Cooper. The designer men march along the right side of the road, and the girls along the left. The number of girls wearing a veil is even more surprising. I don’t remember a single girl wearing a veil when I was at school.
It’s unbelievable what ten years can do. Actually, I hardly recognize the place. I know a place that answers to the same name, I know faces that continue to be known by the same names too, but for some reason I don’t really feel like I’m going back to an old familiar place. I’m going home, to a new place.
I greet my wife and she nods. Her mother is standing in the kitchen, which is right at the entrance, and when I hold out my hand, she extends her arm. Her hands are covered in oil. I shake her elbow. My wife’s father is wearing pajamas with blue squares and brown stripes. He’s sitting on a mattress, staring at the Arabic channel. He tries to get up to welcome me, but I hurry over to shake his hand so he doesn’t have to go to any trouble. “The baby’s asleep,” my wife says, pointing to her parents’ bedroom. I go in and look at her. How I’ve missed her, even though it’s been just one day since we returned home. It’s the first night I haven’t slept in the same room as my little girl. The beds in my in-laws’ bedroom are far away from one another. Twin beds, one on each side of the room. My daughter is on the bed on the western side. I fix the blanket that’s covering her, and don’t dare kiss her on the cheek, for fear she’ll wake up and I’ll be accused of harassment again.
The relations between my wife and myself could be described as delicate. Not that they were ever great, but somehow each of us managed to find the right space, the right position, so as not to get in the other’s way. My wife didn’t like the idea of returning to the village. In fact, she hated the idea, and she hated me all the more on account of it. On our last trip home from the city she said that if she’d known I’d wind up coming back home to the village, she’d never have agreed to marry me, and she added that the only reason she’d agreed to marry someone like me was to be far away from there. She didn’t care that our economic situation was getting worse, that life in the city cost a fortune, to the point of becoming unbearable. The rent we were paying was dollar-linked and just kept soaring, till it amounted to more than half our joint income. And she wasn’t all that bothered that it had become uncomfortable just to walk down the street. She was willing to put up with graffiti calling for her deportation, for her death. She didn’t notice how our neighbors in the apartment building began looking at us differently, or else maybe she did notice but had decided to put up with it because of how much she loved the city, or rather, how much she loved being far away from the place where she’d been born. She didn’t show any signs of concern when someone sprayed the wall of our building with ARABS OUT = PEACE + SECURITY. More than anything, she hated the village. She never explained exactly why, she just used to say, “You don’t know the people there. You don’t know what it’s turned into.” Since the day we got married and left the village together, she hasn’t wanted to spend more than a day visiting there, no more than a few hours, in fact. The idea of sleeping over, either at her parents’ or at mine, was out of the question, even though they kept begging her to stay, especially on holidays. Sometimes I got the impression there was some deep dark secret that explained why she detested the place so much, especially when she’d come out with such strange sentences like, “You have no idea what people there can do to anyone who isn’t one of them,” or “How would you know? If you were a woman, things would be different.”
But I just couldn’t stay in the city any longer. For two whole years I procrastinated about going back to the village. A little more than two years had gone by, actually, since everything started going downhill. I can recall the day when I was sent to cover the Arab demonstrations in Wadi Ara after the cabinet members put in an appearance at the al-Aqsa Mosque. I must have been the only journalist on the scene working for an Israeli paper, since as an Arab I had no trouble getting into the villages and standing around with the demonstrators, the only journalist who was actually standing on the side that the police and soldiers were aiming their guns at. I saw the injured being taken to the local infirmary, the masses of people huddling at the entrance to the small clinic, to see if their loved ones had been brought there, find out whether they were alive, whether they’d been injured. I was the only journalist who saw the fear in the eyes of the veiled women whose hearts would skip a beat every time someone was brought in, who would cry every time a shot was heard. I was there, and I knew that nobody had expected the police to react so harshly, so relentlessly. Like me, the demonstrators had always thought of themselves as citizens of Israel, and never imagined they would be shot at for demonstrating or for blocking an intersection.