David Grossman - Sleeping on a Wire - Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

“As for electricity, we took our own money and put in a solar system — we’re the only solar-powered town in the country — but the system is not sufficient. For instance, in this house there are two panels, and that can operate a small, 12-volt television and lights. There’s not one electric heater in the entire village and no electric appliances. We bought our village council a television and VCR and computer, but we can’t operate them all at the same time. If you turn on the computer, you have to turn off the television, and so on. You’re always running from appliance to appliance. There can’t be any street lighting at night, either. But it’s better than the way it was five years ago, when there wasn’t electricity at all. At night we’d light alcohol lamps. A child can’t read for long by an alcohol lamp. We’ve just put in a light at the school. Up until now there was no light at the school and we wanted one. We brought a cellular telephone to the village, so in case of emergency we can call for help. We try to improve things bit by bit.”

Asem Abu Elheija reports all this in an even tone, in a quiet voice, not in sorrow and not in accusation. His clothes, hair, and face are still coated with dust from the trip home. A pretty girl and boy, his brother’s children, play peek-a-boo with me from behind his back, their cheeks red as peaches and their eyes alive, as if they had not yet set foot in their fate.

“There’s no normal access road to this place. Even though we’ve been pleading with them for years to allow one. We’ll do it ourselves. We don’t want money from the government or from anyone. We’ll go down to the road and ask for contributions. That’s how we built the minaret on the mosque. We’ll do the road the same way. There are a lot of people willing to contribute. Anyone who has driven here is willing to give. Imagine what it’s like in the winter. And think of how it is if someone is suddenly ill or has a heart attack. Or a woman in labor on that road. We already had one case of a baby dying along the way during birth.

“Without a permit we can’t pave a road. If you do, they’ll come the next day and plow it under, like they did in Elariyan — people paved 700 meters of road and they came and plowed it under. So I don’t know what to tell you. We don’t even have a sign that says EIN HUD. Every time we make one, they throw it away. So in the end we gave in and didn’t put up the sign. If you write us a letter and address it “Ein Hud,” they’ll return it to you and stamp it ADDRESS UNKNOWN. If you write “Nir Etsion,” they’ll bring it to us. That’s how it is when you live in a house without a permit which they can demolish at any time — you don’t belong to anything; we’re not included on any of the official maps of the country, only on the maps of the army and the nature reserve. You know, we’re terrorists, or animals.”

Three days later I returned. I felt something that belongs, perhaps, to that individual private balance between fullness and emptiness, between physicality and absence. A feeling that grew ever stronger. So I returned and met with another member of the village, Mohammed Abu Elheija, who had been born in the displaced Ein Hud. I waited for him in the central square of the artists’ village at Ein Hod. Around me were slight plaster figures, like stone silhouettes, headless. The figure of a featureless man sunk to his knees in the ground; one leg and one crutch. I’d seen all of them here before, but ever since I was in Ein Hud, Ein Hod echoes back to me.

“When I was young I didn’t know Israel,” Mohammed Abu Elheija told me. “True, we’re in the center of the country, but I didn’t know anything. My village was my country. When I went to Haifa to study at the Arab high school, I was like a boy alone. A boy on the side of the road. One day, in ninth grade — I remember it very well because it hurt — there was a sewage pipe in the school that descended from the third floor, and apparently they flushed up there, and I stood by it, and what did I know about sewage, we used to go in the field, so I put my ear to the pipe to listen, and a group of children there laughed at me. I heard a lot of water…

“And what do you think there is today? Here the same degeneracy remains. Here in Ein Hud the school has two rooms. That’s the whole school, two rooms! In one room all the children in first, second, third, and fourth grades study, and in the second room are the children in fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades; don’t even ask about the quality. What kind of generation can you produce under such conditions? We’re always behind in the race. I won’t even mention films or theater. My son, thirteen years old, has never been to a movie.”

Facts: Only four out of the fifty-one unrecognized villages in Israel have an elementary school. Only one has a kindergarten. In the rest, the children must walk ten to fourteen kilometers a day to the closest recognized village. Since most of the villages have no paved access roads, the children have to walk through forests and over dirt roads, in all kinds of weather. As a result, children under the age of seven have no educational framework at all, and girls of all ages are kept from school by their families, lest they be harassed and the family’s honor tainted. These circumstances ensure that only 20 percent of the children in these villages reach high school. The illiteracy rate reaches, in some cases, 34 percent. *

We went for a brief walk around the artists’ colony. Abu Elheija related that buried somewhere under the village is a church from the twelfth century. Salah ad-Din’s victorious armies covered it with earth and built a house over it. I thought of the mosque and sheikh’s grave that had been turned into a restaurant. I asked him if he knew that the people of Nir Etsion are the children of the surviving Jews from Gush Etsion, people who became refugees in the same war that turned his parents into refugees. “They are refugees,” he said distantly, “yes…but I was not the one who made them flee.”

He rushed through the streets of Ein Hod. “There are people who have not come here since ’48. My grandfather never came. To the day he died, in ’82, he believed that he would return for good. For us, the young people, Ein Hod was something theoretical, a place where the old people once were, and it was there and wasn’t there. Only in ’76, when I was twenty-two, did I come here to work for the first time. Renovations. I renovated old houses. You know what ‘old’ means. Even when I went in, I didn’t feel any emotion. To this day I don’t feel anything about what was here. Why don’t I? I can’t tell you. Here’s an example: I never in my life mentioned Ein Hod to my children, never said it was once ours. They never heard it from me. Why? I don’t know. Let the analysts analyze it.”

He is thirty-seven, father of seven, with a degree as an engineering technician from the Technion, thin and introverted. His speech is even and a bit ironic. We pass his grandfather’s house. A two-story stone building. A small staircase. Nice yard. The door bears an odd sign: CHILDREN MAY ENTER ONLY IF ACCOMPANIED BY ADULTS. I peeked out of the corner of my eye at his stony face and considered how much strength it demanded not to tell the story of the old Ein Hud to his children. True, he himself had not been born here, but his father had been evicted. His whole family had been evicted. For a moment I made an attempt to walk through the village of my father’s childhood, in another country, with his memories. I tried to be there when the house was taken, when the whole town was taken. And when a strange but apparently friendly woman appears on the balcony of the house that was yours…

But he was no longer there to see her. He strode in haste onward, waving his hands in the negative, to erase something. “It’s not pleasant for me to be here…it’s sufficient that I know it from the outside. I’m not curious to see it on the inside. On the contrary, when I have to pass by here, I do it at a distance. I have inside, I guess, something that keeps me away.”