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

I ask, “Change the kids’ diapers?”

“No. Not that.”

“Why not, really? They’re disposable, after all. It’s easy.”

“No, um, it’s not for me. What am I…No. Stop it! We already had an argument about that!”

“I really don’t like him to change diapers,” she says.

And he: “Bathing them, too. I can’t do it alone. Together — yes. Stand with her — yes.”

“And feeding a child? What about that, Abed?” She’s provoking him.

“Not that. Only a mother knows how to do that. I lose patience with the kids after a few minutes.”

She: “That’s an easy out, Abed.”

He: “Even when a woman asks you to help her, she doesn’t want you to do everything. What’s a man who does everything? A man who cooks?”

And she, patiently: “I’m not asking you to change Sumu’s diaper. But help me wash the dishes? Why not? That I’m willing to have you do.”

“Thanks very much.” He brings the exchange to an end and smiles. The crease between his eyes deepens for a minute and goes into shadow.

“In my parents’ generation,” Tagrid relates, scurrying to the kitchen, pouring coffee, bringing cookies, “the division of male and female roles was not open to question. My mother did not even ask for help. The circumstances dictated she put everything she had into the home. Father worked hard. When he came home, he’d sit down in front of the television, and when he wanted the channel switched he’d tell us to do it. We liked to help him. Mother had no social life. Her relationships were only within the family. Outside the family was forbidden. And no hobbies. No aspirations. No self-fulfillment, other than raising children.”

“And what is her attitude toward your way of life?”

“Ever since I’ve been on my own, Mother has had less and less to say to me. Her advice isn’t relevant for me. It’s for a different type of woman, a more traditional woman — be acquiescent, always agree with your husband, don’t stand your ground. Mother always says, ‘It’s woman’s nature to be weaker and to forgive, and not to argue all the time.’ And she always says, ‘Don’t be so principled ,’ and in that my mother is really no different from many women my age.

“But don’t misunderstand me, I have no complaints about her. Mother is a wonderful woman, she gave to us with all her heart. She gave us all of her. If I could only have her natural wisdom. You have to understand Mother within her generation — they lived their lives without my conflicts. There was no consciousness of repression. There was nothing to spur them to rebel, not even to criticism. You’ll think it’s funny, but I envy them for that, because they received solid values and forms of thought and behavior at home. They were not exposed to other elements that presented them with the opposite, with the temptation. They had security and serenity, and I—” She chuckles. “And don’t think that Mother has no gripes about us. Our way of life is perhaps not what she wanted. And she always complained that she had no daughters at home, because we studied and then went to work and married right away and had careers…Because just as I miss having a mother who is a friend, she misses having a daughter who is a friend. Things I do hurt her, and I remember that when I wanted to go for my master’s degree she yelled at me: Stop! That’s enough! You’re already twenty-two, get married! What will become of you! And every time I refused someone who came to ask for my hand, she would scream at me.”

“She’s just saying that so you’ll think a lot of guys wanted to marry her,” Abed interjects, straight-faced.

“My grandmother once tallied it up for Abed. It came to thirty.”

“Maybe they were all bused in together?”

“And what happened in the end?” Tagrid smiles. “I had to battle society, I suffered and argued, and afterward my sisters had it easy. Now I have a sister who’s two years younger than me, twenty-seven, and they don’t pressure her to marry at all.”

I quoted what I’d heard from Rima Othman of Beit Safafa. She said that in London she had met “Arabs that are completely outside.” “A boy and girl from the Sabra refugee camp in Lebanon. They originally come from Acre. The girl told me, It’s not good that you Israeli Arab women have identified with the intifadah to the point that you’re putting off marriage. You have to have a lot of weddings, make a lot of children. They said that if someone from their refugee camp is killed, they immediately hold a wedding on his grave, and the dead person’s mother dances.”

“As regards the children”—Abed clears his throat—“that is, how many we’ll have — we have a dispute about that.”

“What dispute?” Tagrid asks. “How many did you want?”

“Not a lot, but as many as possible.”

“I’d actually be satisfied with as few as possible.”

Abed: “Me too. Six. Okay, five.”

“Abed!”

“What are you shouting about? We’ve already got 50 percent, almost.”

“If the next time I have a boy, you’re out of luck.”

He gags. “But children grow and leave home…”

Tagrid turns slowly to him, with all the resplendence of a sunflower. “When I have you, Abed, I don’t need the children!”

We all laugh. We even laugh too much. And I laugh, too, as if it all was the warm laziness of the afternoon and honeyed stings between the young man and woman. As if a Jew and two Arabs in Israel can have a friendly laugh over a joke relating to the “demographic threat.”

“We have no desire to have more children ‘for the homeland’ and at the expense of our own lives,” Tagrid says. “I’m not selfish, but I think that if I have three children I’ll be able to educate them better and bring them up properly; they’ll contribute to society much more than nine that won’t receive a good education, that we won’t be able to support.”

“May our holy womb be blessed!” I quote a headline that was printed, until just a few years ago, in the Israeli-Arab press. “Victory will come not on the battlefield but in the delivery rooms!”

Tagrid listens attentively. She meditates. “No. I want very much to have a small family, so I can devote time to things that are important to me. It is important to me to have a career. It is important to me to be a sociologist. It is important to me to work for Israeli-Arab society. If I have a lot of children, I’ll be stuck at home. My ambitions will die.”

“If I were hearing that for the first time, I’d get mad,” Abed sighs. “But I’ve gotten used to it.”

“Admit that it was no surprise to you! Admit that before our wedding we spoke about it explicitly!”

“I talked about that when you weren’t here,” he says, his face somewhat forlorn.

“You’re so fair!”

A few days later I woke up in the village of Iksal, near Nazareth, between Mount Tabor and the Nazareth heights. I wandered the streets — a village of no beauty, cubical cement houses and potholed roads, with electric poles running down the middle. But the yards are thick with apricot and guava trees, palms, figs, and pomegranates. Bare-legged women doused their houses with jugs of water, scrubbed the steps, and beat out rugs. A young woman sent out a clean and polished boy, smoothly combed, and half hid behind her door, leaning on a straw broom, watching him until he was swallowed up by a band of boisterous children. I walked after him, partly for her, partly to test myself — when exactly would the moment come when I no longer remembered her kiss on his cheek and he turned, for me, into shabab , a faceless young Arab.

In this very village, a month before, a young woman was murdered. Her brothers and father are suspected of burning her alive because, they claim, she became pregnant by a strange man. When I asked people about her their features slammed shut. “You know our culture,” said Leila D. “The Arabs cannot tolerate a disgrace like that…they had to kill her…” “Still,” dared a girl sipping morning coffee with three older women, “they could have taken her to the hospital in Afula to have an abortion, no?” The three women bowed their heads, did not respond.