Never mind, I’ll hang the curtains tomorrow. It’s just a matter of drilling a few holes and tightening a few screws. The tricky part is getting the measurements right and making sure the curtains are straight. Tomorrow we’ll all be sleeping together, tomorrow our normal lives will be getting back on track. The week we both took off so we could move is over, and in two days we’ll have to get back into our routine. Maybe that’s what we need most right now: a routine that will put our lives in order, that will restore the proper rhythm of things, the natural flow. My wife will be teaching at one of the schools in the village and I’ll be going back to the paper, half an hour’s drive away from here, forty minutes at most. Tomorrow I’ll take my wife’s brother, Ashraf, to our old apartment to pick up some boxes we left behind. It’s still ours. We paid rent on it till the end of the month, tomorrow.
5
My wife, my mother-in-law and my daughter arrive in the morning with Ashraf in the pickup he borrowed from one of his friends. By the time we get back with the boxes, they’ll have finished cleaning. There isn’t much left to do, just the floors, actually.
“Coming home?” Ashraf says, and sniggers. “Coming home to your birthplace, eh?” He and I get along pretty well, in fact. Not that we see each other very often. Every now and then he used to visit us and then stay for the weekend. Almost every time he came, we’d have a beer at one of the nearby bars. He finished college not long ago — economics — and after he gave up on finding a job in his field he started working in one of the mobile phone companies as a customer-service rep for Arab customers.
Dozens of workers are congregating in the village square, each holding a plastic bag. They lunge at every car that stops, hoping it may belong to a contractor or anyone else who’s looking for cheap day laborers. Ashraf’s pickup looks particularly promising. It reminds the workers of the contractors’ pickups. When we stop at the intersection, to yield the right-of-way to cars coming in the other direction, the workers converge on all the windows. I signal, with my hand and my head, that we’re not in the market for workers, but they don’t give up, and I hear them say things like, “Fifty shekels for the whole day. Please.” And, “Ten shekels an hour, any job you want done.” They don’t let go of the car till it lurches away and crosses the intersection. Ashraf goes on smiling. I think that’s how he overcomes the awkwardness of the situation. “Don’t feel sorry for them,” he says, and I’m not sure who he’s trying to convince — me or himself. “Now they’re begging, but deep inside they’re convinced that every Israeli Arab is a traitor and a collaborator.”
On our way out of the village, the pickup joins a long line of cars, dozens of them inching forward. “Another roadblock,” Ashraf says. “Got your ID on you?” I nod, and he says, “Is this what you’re returning to? Believe me, I don’t get it. How can you return to a place like this for no better reason than to own a bigger house? You don’t know what you’re coming back to, my man. This isn’t the place you left, when was it — ten, fifteen years ago?” He laughs again. “Did you hear the shooting yesterday?” Little kids in cheap old clothes surround every car that comes to a halt, some of them offering rags for sale, others chewing gum, lighters, sets of combs and scissors and packs of tissue. As they approach Ashraf’s pickup, he rolls up the windows and signals them to move away. “Do you have any idea how much money they make?” he says. “They put on that pathetic face, and instead of going to school they come all the way from Qalqilya and Tul-Karm on foot and beg. Every single one of them makes at least a hundred shekels a day. I don’t even make a hundred a day.”
The pickup plods along and we can see the policemen at the roadblock. Ashraf says the people on the West Bank are the sorriest lot in the world, and he chuckles. “Ever since the Intifada, they have nothing better to do than to call us at work and give us an earful. That’s how they pass the time of day, I’m telling you. They just call every service phone with a toll-free line. They can drive you crazy, and you have to be courteous, answer by the book, ‘Cellcom at your service. This is Ashraf speaking. How may I help you?’ Sometimes I feel like cursing them, cracking jokes with them, slamming the phone down in the middle of a call, but that’s out, because they’re always monitoring our customer-service calls. They keep dreaming up new ideas. This week, for instance, there was an onslaught of callers from Nablus. All of them want their phones to ring like one of Diana Haddad’s new songs. Where am I going to find them a Diana Haddad ring tone now? In Jenin, they figured out this week that you could set your mobile to call from abroad too. Thousands called in, as if anyone is really going anywhere. They can’t even get from Jenin to Nablus. They call just because they feel like it. Every time they hear there’s a new service, they all call.
“Once this little girl phoned in and just sobbed away. I could hear the heavy shelling in the background and the little girl told me she was alone in the house, her father was out and she didn’t know where he was. I have no idea how she wound up dialing my number. Maybe it was the last number her father had dialed. Makes sense. After all, they call Cellcom all day long. And there she is, crying, and I spend hours trying to reassure her. If they’d caught me, I’d have been fired on the spot, but I stay on the line with her till her father, or somebody, gets home when the shelling stops. I mean, you could actually hear the war in the background and you picture this kid all alone over there, scared to death, screaming, and me, like some military training officer, there I am telling her to get down, to take cover behind a wall, under a table. A military commander, that’s what I was for her, I’m telling you,” he says with a laugh.
As we approach the roadblock, we pull out our ID cards. The policeman glances at them and hands them right back to us. “Lucky they didn’t ask us for licenses, ’cause this pickup isn’t registered in my name and we’d never hear the end of it.”
“Does this have to do with yesterday’s shooting?” I ask. Ashraf laughs. “What makes you say that? They’re just looking for some workers. So you heard the shooting yesterday? It was right next to our house, from a passing vehicle. Gang shooting. What’s that to the police? They don’t give a damn. All they care about is security stuff. But yesterday some guys I know must have come back drunk from some club in Tel Aviv and drove around our neighborhood. I was awake. I was standing on the balcony and I saw them. Suddenly one of them pulled out an Uzi and shot a few rounds. He must have been very happy. You’ll get used to it.”
Ashraf goes on laughing the whole way, telling me about my village, his village, the new village I no longer know, and his disdain is unmistakable from the word go. As we continue driving, he explains the best way to behave to avoid getting into trouble. “You’re driving along a narrow road and a car comes in the opposite direction. There isn’t enough room for both of you. You drive right back, insha’Allah, even if he only has to back up two meters and you have to do one hundred. Always back up, ’cause it could end in a shooting, depending on who happens to be in the car. You’re driving along and two cars are blocking the road because the drivers are chatting through the open windows? Wait patiently. God help you if you honk. Just wait for them to finish their conversation. It won’t take more than an hour, insha’Allah. Just wait and when they let you pass, smile and say thank you.” Ashraf keeps laughing as he recites his survival lexicon. Then he explains that if they jump the line at the infirmary, I should just let it be. If I’m in line at the grocery shop and someone cuts in front of me, I should just stay cool. He swears that people have been killed in recent years because of things like that. Slowly his laughter dies down. “You have no idea what you’re coming back to, do you?” he says, and his tone changes.