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

Afterward an old woman fords the roaring flow, erect, balancing a tall bucket on her head. A wonder of concentration and direction. Her hands lie at the sides of her body, holding her dress around her thighs, and the bucket does not move. She looks right, looks left, strides swiftly, and the bucket does not move. Hundreds of generations of the oppression of women have, one might say, molded her and her burden together. I drink a first cup of coffee, the sweetest of all, and eavesdrop on the conversation of the men behind me. There were once two sages, Rabbi Haya the Great and Rabbi Shimon Ben Halafta, who “forgot words of the Targum”—the Aramaic translation of the Bible — and “went to the Arab market to learn from them.” There they eavesdropped on the people until they recalled the meanings of the forgotten words. In Faradis, even an Israeli who knows no Arabic would be able to puzzle out the conversation: “Al me— ruh from department to department , jib me a red form… ” “Wahada mush a primitive zalameh, you know, a zalameh in modern dress .” “Ana ahadit from him twenty cartons of tomatoes , daf’at him a down payment…” “And they fi idhum an arrest warrant , wa-ana shaef, mafish a judge’s signature! ” “An-nas amalu in two days, all the concrete and all the electricity…” And this is how they talk among themselves .

I listened. I made a mental note of the Hebrew words — VAT, income tax, down payment, bank guarantee, social security, license, fines — an instrumental Hebrew screwed onto Arabic like a metal joint or, more often, like a clamp .

I thought of the rich, sensitive Hebrew I hear from people when they speak to me. The words of Zuhir Yehia of Kafr Kara came to mind: “Our soul is not here. Maybe our soul has gone dormant here with you. Our soul is there, with the Palestinians in the territories. All our soul is there, and our body is here. I try — in order to preserve the body — to kill the soul. Or to push it aside. I don’t know when it will awaken. I don’t want to endanger the body. Maybe one day it will awaken.”

When? I asked .

“Listen, today I’m more accepting of the fact that Kafr Kara will not be in the Palestinian state. But even if I’m not there, it’s okay. It will make it much easier for me if there is a country like that. My soul will reawaken if there is a Palestinian state.”

“And in the meantime?”

“According to legend, on a scale the soul weighs heavier than the body. But with us the body is heavier. There is a soul, but in the meantime it is waiting. It’s as if you are in love with someone — maybe this is not a modern example, but it could happen with us — and suddenly the family decides that you have to marry someone else. Even if it’s brutal, you accept it and say, It tastes all right. You can’t go on saying that it doesn’t taste good.”

A few weeks later I read an article by Emmanuel Kopelevitch, formerly the Director of Arab Education, about how spoken Arabic in Israel has borrowed Hebrew words. According to Kopelevitch, there are some three thousand different Hebrew words in regular use in Arabic. Sometimes those using these words are not even aware that they are borrowed from Hebrew .

The article contains a list of “the sixty-two most common Hebrew words in the Arabic of the State of Israel.” Here are some of them: health fund, cab, traffic light, computer, appliance, permit, mail, cold cuts, vacation, VAT, station, report, form, office, membership card, director, theory (the written part of the driver’s license examination), pay slip, driving test .

The list goes on. It includes the names of tools, automobile accessories, kinds of foods. Taxes. Forms. Appliances. Objects. Legal processes. Punishments. Various government functions. These are the impressions left on the language by this long association — which is still only a material one. A physical one .

I was the only Jew in the little coffeehouse. I was a minority. Each of us is a minority in at least one context in his life, and we all know how it feels to be the exception in a given situation, so there is no need to waste words on it. But there was one moment when the buzz of conversation around me suddenly swelled, and someone by chance bumped into my chair, and a passing motorcyclist revved up his bike too close to me, and there was the sound of choked laughter behind me. None of these, apparently, was directed at me, but something welled within me, and in my distress I bent down to my briefcase to take out my notebook (maybe I just wanted to hold on to a pen so as to draw security from it), and suddenly I understood how I would look — sitting in an Arab coffeehouse, my eyes behind dark sunglasses, recording the background conversations. I knew that if I were to take out my pen I would frighten them. They would be scared, there would be a silence, a few hearts would stop for a moment, and people would hastily reconstruct what they had said, to check if they had said something that might be misinterpreted. For a long moment I had the malicious itch to pay them back for the previous annoyances. The temptation was very strong, and from within that temptation I also realized with certainty how many times each of those sitting around me had been the victim of such simple, cheap, opportunistic malice, when within one of “us”—as within me at that moment — the domination gland secretes a single drop into the bloodstream .

“On October 31, 1948, when I was twenty years old, the Israeli Army came to my village, Ikrit. We received the soldiers as guests. With food, drink, and song.”

“Song? What were you so happy about?”

“We were glad that none of our people had been hurt in the fighting. That the war had not touched the village. Up until then we had had very good relations with the surrounding kibbutzim. We weren’t for Qawukji [the commander of an Arab guerrilla force during the War of Independence] and we weren’t for the Israelis. We were a Christian village, we knew that neither side cared much about us, and we wanted to live. During the week after the Israeli soldiers came, we continued to feed them. Our mothers and wives would draw water from the spring, two kilometers from the village, and bring it to the soldiers to drink. When the soldiers wanted to go to the spring themselves, we showed them the best way, so they wouldn’t tread on the mines that Qawukji’s army had laid. And in fact none of the soldiers was hurt.”

I met with Aouni Sbeit in his home in Rama, a Galilee village of Muslims, Druze, and Maronite Christians. Aouni is sixty-three today, father of eight and grandfather of nineteen. He is a popular folk poet, making a living from composing lyrics for weddings and celebrations, an affable, paunchy, warmhearted man, wearing a white kaffiyeh on his head, against the heat. He leans on a cane, a tractor having run over his foot; Sbeit is now receiving physical therapy. Perhaps he is too tired to go to Ikrit?

“Too tired? For Ikrit?” He laughed, showing a full complement of white teeth.

The car has trouble following the deceptive twists in the road. Low-lying Levantine oaks and carob trees line both sides. Red peppers dry on the roofs of small villages. Aouni Sbeit (who speaks only Arabic) cannot wait for us to reach Ikrit; along the way he begins telling his story, knowing every date and name involved in his tragedy by heart.

“Then, on the fifth of November 1948, the army commander, whose name was Ya’akov Kara, came and said that he had received orders. No one knew who had given them. We did not see the paper. Orders. The children and women and old people are to be evacuated from the village, because the army wants to fight Qawukji’s army, which is still in the area, and doesn’t want civilians to be hurt.