What am I afraid of, for heaven’s sake? I’ll be thirty soon. What am I afraid of? A punishment? It’s been ten years since he last struck me. My mother returns with another glass of water, and warns him apologetically that there is no ice, no refrigerator and it’s as cold as she can make it. Impatiently, he grabs the glass from her and drinks it, grumbling, muttering garbled words. My body is overcome with fear, not because of the situation in the village, and not because of the roadblock or the lack of food and water, but because of my father’s anger. I’ve always tried to do as he asked, but I haven’t always succeeded, and whenever I failed to do something, like pulling out the weeds under the trees which once grew where the new houses now stand, or when my grades weren’t good enough, I’d get a beating. I can still hear the sound of those lashings, of the branches he’d use to flog me.
The floggings with tree branches were not the most painful punishment I received, but they were the harshest ceremony of all. Father would decide on the punishment. He didn’t just lash out in a fit of fury or irritability. He planned the punishment, and would tell me to come out into the yard and choose the branch that would be best for flogging me. I was supposed to bring it to him with the bark removed. He would inspect it first, try it out through the air, then tell me to lift my shirt and turn my back toward him. He’d try it on me once or twice and if he wasn’t satisfied he would send me to find another one, and promise that the disrespect I showed by choosing the first branch would earn me an even bigger punishment. My father preferred branches from the lemon tree that once stood in our yard. He liked them nice and thick on one end and tapering off on the other. He liked to hold them by the thick part and to hear the noise they made in the air and the noise they made as they hit your body. You weren’t allowed to cry, because that would only increase the number of lashes. You weren’t allowed to run away, because that could really have ended in catastrophe. You weren’t allowed to make him miss. He’d tell me exactly where to stand, to turn a little, to bend over. But I knew then, as I do now, that he did it so we would be the best children in the whole village.
6
Boom, boom, boom, boom—the sound reverberates through the whole house. I wake up shrieking uncontrollably and jump out of bed. Boom, boom, boom, it continues. It is clearly the sound of shooting, but not the noise I am used to. It is very loud, much louder, the sound of shelling. My wife is on her feet too, and I shout, “The baby, the baby,” and the baby begins screaming at the top of her lungs. I hear her screaming and I lie on the floor with my hands above my head. The sound lets up for a minute. “Hurry down,” I shout to my wife, and rush into the baby’s room. I pick the baby up, hug her in both my arms and try to protect her head. I run down the stairs, and the noise begins again. It’s the loudest shelling I’ve ever heard. I bend over, trying to keep my head hidden, and continue running downstairs. “Into the bathroom,” I yell to my wife. “Get into the bathroom.” For some reason I figure that is the safest place in the house. At least it’s on the lower floor. We go in and I close the door behind me. The baby is screaming and I can’t see her face in the dark.
I put the baby into the bathtub. She screams and I bend over her. My palms touch the bathtub floor and my body hovers over her without going beyond the sides of the bathtub itself. It’s the safest place to be, I think. My wife is whimpering nearby, on the bathroom floor. She’s lying down too. “Put your hands on your head,” I tell her.
Another round of shooting, continuous. Judging by the noise, they seem to be shooting at our house, or nearby. Our house is exposed only on its northern side. If the shooting is coming from that direction and not from the roadblock, the bullets will have to go through three walls to reach the bathroom, and to hit me and the baby they’d also have to pierce the bathtub. The baby continues crying and I try to calm her down. “Shhhhh, Baba.”
In between rounds I tell my wife to switch with me. She gets into the bathtub and leans over the baby. I lie down on the floor. When the shooting resumes I give off a scream, convinced I’ve been shot in the back. I try to protect myself by pulling my head toward my legs while lying on my side, with my head toward the bathtub. Another round, then a lull, then another round, and another lull. When the shooting lets up we can hear babies and children and parents shouting in houses nearby. I think of my parents, my older brother, his wife and his little son. Their house is more exposed than ours and it’s higher up too. I hope they haven’t been hit. I try to concentrate and to make out the voices between rounds, but I can’t.
Another round of shooting, and somehow it’s less scary than the previous ones. It’s amazing what people get used to. Sounds of shooting again, and I wait for a lull, knowing somehow that it will arrive. I try to reassure my wife and daughter. “It only sounds like it’s near, but it’s very far away,” I say confidently, though it’s not what I really think. “They must be shooting at a target,” I tell my wife. Her weeping is the only sound in the room. “Shhhh, it will be over any minute, stay down, it’s okay, they have nothing to do with us, it’s just an echo, they’re shooting in a different direction. It will be over soon.”
The last lull is much longer. Between the children’s crying and the parents’ yelling, we can hear the hum of the tank engines not far away. What the hell are they doing? What are they trying to achieve? Who are they shooting at? What’s wrong with them? What do they want now? God. We stay in the bathroom even though there’s no more shooting. I dare to get up off the floor now, with my arms still covering my head. I stroke my wife’s hair. I can feel her trembling. “It’s over, you see? That’s it. But let’s stay here till daybreak. It’s not that long.”
I lie on my back on the bathroom floor. It’s almost completely dark. There’s a faint light coming in through the upper window — moonlight, maybe, or tank headlights in the distance. What do they want damn it? Maybe this is just a military drill, or they’re just trying to scare us, as if we’re not scared enough already? And maybe they’ve entered the village with their tanks, maybe this was the operation they’ve been waiting for and now it’s behind them. I lie there waiting for the power to come back on too. They must have completed their mission, they must be getting orders to withdraw and put an end to the closure imposed on the village. “Looks to me like it’s all over,” I tell my wife. “Looks to me like they’ve finally finished whatever they set out to do, huh? Tomorrow everything will be fine, things will go back to normal.”
My heart freezes when I hear the knocking on the front door. I shudder and I can’t breathe. I feel my pulse surging all at once and it takes a few seconds before I realize it’s only my father at the door. “Is everything okay with you?” he shouts from outside. “Are you okay?” He calls my name. “Yes,” I answer him, and try to calm down, taking a deep breath and attempting to overcome the tremors that grip my body. Leaning forward, head first, I feel my way toward the front door, turn the key in the lock and let my father in. “I just wanted to check if everything is okay,” he says. “Listen, I was sure they were shooting right here, behind the house.”
Where does he get the courage to be outside now? How can he stay so calm? His speech is unchanged, while I do my best to control the quiver in my voice. “Your mother was worried about you, so I came to check. Your brother is fine too. I knocked on their door before. His wife was crying and the boy, poor thing, couldn’t stop crying and shaking. I told them to come be with us. You too. Our house is the safest, though it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any more shooting. Looks like they stopped. In any case, just come over if you’re scared. It’ll soon be morning anyway.”