My mother is the first to go into my room. She lines up three mattresses on the floor. The children are using the double bed. She returns to the living room and announces that she’s going to try to take a nap. My older brother’s wife gets up too, says, “Good night,” and joins my mother. “I’ll go to sleep too,” my wife says, but before heading for my parents’ bedroom, she joins me in the kitchen and asks if I’m hungry yet. “No,” I tell her. She looks at me now the way she hasn’t looked at me in a long time. “Good night,” she whispers, and I feel that if there weren’t so many people around, she might even have given me a kiss. I feel the blood rush to my cheeks and my face becomes flushed. “Good night,” I reply, and keep my eyes fixed on her until she reaches the bedroom.

My father and my older brother enter the children’s room. My older brother stretches out in his boyhood bed, and my father uses mine. My younger brother quickly takes the opportunity to ask me for a cigarette and sits down next to me at the kitchen table. I reach out and fiddle with the saltshaker, an item that has never been replaced. My parents never bought a new saltshaker because there was never any need to. My mother always put a few grains of rice into it with the salt to soak up the moisture, so the salt didn’t become lumpy.

“You know,” my younger brother says, “normally I’d be out in the streets of Tel Aviv now with my friends. Whenever we finish an exam we go out drinking. We do the most drinking after exams,” he whispers, and turns around to check if the coast is clear. He continues whispering, even though I myself can barely hear him. “Tel Aviv is an amazing city, I tell you. After exams, we don’t just have beer the way we usually do. We go completely crazy. I’d waste four hundred shekels on booze right now if I could. I’d go for the pricey whiskey or Jägermeister. Do you like Jäger? It’s great with lemon, you know. I don’t really understand why you came back here. I don’t understand you. I’d never come back. No way. I’d stay in Tel Aviv for the rest of my life, or run away to some country in Europe, or to Canada. The Canadians are easy with visas. I’d marry someone local and become a full citizen. Sure, they have their xenophobes and the anti-Muslims, but I’m telling you, from what my Christian friends tell me, the ones whose brothers emigrated there, what they call racism in London, say, is about the same as what we would call left-wing opinions here. It’s a whole different world. The problem with London is that the pubs close at about eight P.M. I don’t get it. If I want a night out on the town with some friends, we only get started at about eleven or twelve.

“Tell me,” my brother asks, looking straight at me, “why are things like this? Do you ever ask yourself why we have to be this way? And the problem is that it isn’t only us, it’s all the Arabs. Why?” He takes another drag, rubs his eyes hard because of the smoke that gets into them and continues. “Sometimes when I see all those music festivals on Cairo TV, or Beirut or even Jordan, you know, I tell myself, isn’t it great, how those people have festivals with the best Arab singers? You just buy a ticket and go to a performance. I’ve always dreamed of going to a concert in some Arab country or to celebrate Id el-Fitr in Damascus, say. Wouldn’t that be great? The whole country celebrates it, like an official holiday. I mean, it’s not like here, where they won’t even give you a day off to celebrate your holidays…. But I find myself feeling sorry for those people, know what I mean? All those kids dancing at concerts or celebrating Ramadan. Every time I remember what kind of a regime they have, I feel sorry for them when I see them dance, and I don’t understand why nothing changes in their situation. How could it be that all the Arab countries are like that?”

I look at him, and he smiles, giving off a kind of “Hmmmm.” I continue playing with the saltshaker and don’t say anything, though he’s expecting a response. “I never think about those things,” I tell him after a while.

“I’m not like that, I’m not like you,” he says, squashing his cigarette in an ashtray and exhaling the last coil of smoke through his nostrils. “I don’t feel like sleeping next to Father,” he says. “I guess I’ll take the sofa and you’ll sleep on the bed, okay?” I nod and know I won’t get any sleep tonight. “I’m not tired yet,” I tell my brother.

“Neither am I. But I guess we ought to try and get some sleep, to make the time go by faster.”

My brother lies down on the three-seater, which is barely large enough for him. He puts his head on one armrest and his feet on the other. The house is almost silent, except for an occasional cough or the sound of breathing.

I take off my shirt. It’s filthy already, even though I just put it on a few hours ago. Ever since the closure began I haven’t been able to shower but at least I’ve put on clean clothes, in the hope that they would offset the dirt. I reach for the back of my neck and scratch it gently. A thick layer of dirt gathers under my fingernails. I take a toothpick from the holder on the table in front of me and try to scrape away the dirt caked between my nails and fingers.

I don’t want to stay here either. I’ll leave as soon as I can. How can I possibly stay on here with neighbors who attacked me the way they did? How can I keep running into them? How can I go back into the grocery store after what the owner did to me today? How can I even feel safe in a place like this? I’m getting away from here, and that’s final. I feel now that I can let my wife in on what I’ve been going through. When she spoke to me before going to lie down, I felt I could tell her everything, that I don’t really have a job anymore. I felt she would have hugged me and comforted me. She would even have said something to make me feel better. I’m going to do it, to tell her everything, and we’ll turn over a new leaf. I’m sure she’ll understand what I’m going through. I’ll find another job, and I’ll go on moonlighting at the paper, in the hope that something better will turn up. There’s no telling what’s going to happen. But I’m going to find something else, anything. And who knows, maybe one of the places I sent my résumé has been trying to get in touch with me over these past few days, but can’t. We’ll live in a small apartment in a downscale neighborhood. We could even rent a one-room apartment for now, and put baby’s crib next to us. We can live in a single room till she turns one. After that, we’ll figure out something. By then I’ll find something else, I’m sure of it, and things will get better and we’ll be able to afford to move to something roomier. A two-room apartment with a small kitchen will do fine. We don’t need a living room. Nobody comes to visit us anyway. A small kitchen with a table for three is plenty.

I’ve got to get out of here first chance I get. I’m sure my wife will be pleased. She hated the whole thing to begin with. She’ll find another job. There’s always a shortage of Arabic teachers, especially if we move to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. She could work in Jaffa or in East Jerusalem. Very few of the Arab inhabitants in the mixed cities finish high school, so there are no local teachers, and there are always vacancies, and the outsiders are the ones who call the shots in the school system. Her best chance is in the Arab neighborhoods in Jewish cities. But we would not live in such a neighborhood, which seems as bad as here — worse, in fact. We’d do better living in a different neighborhood. In spite of everything, it’s much safer living in a Jewish neighborhood. The fact is that despite all the shit we had to put up with there, nobody ever attacked us, at least not physically. At least they have policemen and law enforcement. Now that I think of it, I lived there for more than ten years and I never — but never — heard a single shot.

2

Suddenly a strong light fills the entire house. I hear myself yelling in fear — a short yell — then I bend over and cover my eyes. This light is very painful. My heart is pounding even though I realize now that it’s simply the power that’s come back on. The sudden brightness wakes my brother, who’s been sleeping on the sofa facing me. “Yeah!” he says. “Is that it?” Almost all of the light switches in the house have been switched on. The light went on in my parents’ bedroom too. The two children wake up and immediately start crying. My father emerges from the children’s room, and my mother from hers and my father’s bedroom, smiling broadly. She applauds softly, like a little girl who’s just received a new toy. “Elhamdulilah,” she says. My wife and my older brother’s wife stay in the bedroom with the children and try to calm them down, but I can hear how happy they are.