Kashua Sayed - Second Person Singular

The lawyer had known that it was high time he got married. He had just passed the bar and was working at the public defender’s office, where he had done his internship, and was planning his next move: the opening of his own practice in east Jerusalem. He knew that he should get married or at the very least engaged before starting out on his own. The east Jerusalemites did not trust bachelors. They were considered less serious, less trustworthy, and, more importantly, completely off-limits to any Arab woman. Even for the purposes of business, no Arab woman would step foot in a bachelor’s office. There’d be too much gossip. And women, he’d learned during his internship, were a slice of the market that he could not afford to lose — not so much as clients, but as the wives, mothers, and sisters of prisoners who sought his counsel. Palestinian families often sent a woman to Jerusalem to find a lawyer: they had a far better chance of getting through the checkpoints without the proper paperwork.

He liked her immediately. She was beautiful, he recalled, and now an unbidden thought set in: perhaps most people would still consider her to be so. The lawyer remembered how angry his sister had been when he called her the next day and asked whether her roommate had a boyfriend. She stammered and said, “Brother, she’s not for you. She’s not like us.” She had no idea that that was exactly what he was looking for, someone not like us . He learned from his sister that the roommate was not in a relationship, at least not one she knew of. No boys came to visit the roommate in the dorm, but his sister made clear that it was possible that none came because of the restrictions that she, his sister, imposed. She went on to say that this girl wore short sleeves and tight jeans, that she went to parties and cafés, and each word only spurred the lawyer on further.

The lawyer was bashful. He was nearly twenty-five at the time and had never had a girlfriend. He had been attracted to many of the Arab students while in school, but he never struck up a conversation, making due with heartache and wistful thoughts before bed. The lawyer had no sense of how he looked. No one had ever told him if he looked good or bad and he himself was not a good judge. He always felt that different mirrors, on different days, provided different perspectives. Photographs didn’t help, either. Like the mirrors, they showed something different each time. Sometimes he felt he looked good, but most of the time he was sure he looked bad. He was not too skinny or too fat. He felt his body was average, normal, not muscular — after all he never worked out — but not flabby, either. His height was average and he wished he was a bit taller, and his skin, like everyone in his family, was light, at least for an Arab. He liked being light-skinned but, much like with his height, he wished he was a bit lighter-skinned, and he would have been happy to have blond hair, or at least chestnut-colored.

Either way, he wasn’t very much preoccupied with his looks: the lawyer knew that his profession, and his success in that profession, would determine who he would marry. He did not have much money and he had bought a used Fiat Punto with the little money he did have, but having graduated at the top of his class, from the best law school in the land, his potential earning power was unquestioned.

One week after their chance encounter, the lawyer went back to the Mount Scopus dorms. It was the middle of the afternoon and the lawyer knew that his sister didn’t get out of class until six. He knocked on her door and no one answered. He decided to wait and walked around among the buildings. Within minutes he saw the roommate walking alone from the bus stop to the dorms. She was wearing blue jeans and a white shirt with some kind of flower design on the front. There was a bag slung over her shoulder and it hung down to her knees. Her hair was long and curly and she was small, about five foot four, which was exactly what he liked. In those clothes, as opposed to the semiformal dress, she looked boyish. He saw her go into the building and decided to smoke a cigarette before going up to knock on her door. While smoking, he rehearsed his lines and tried to imagine her responses. They started out as charming and then got increasingly more barbed. He almost called the whole thing off but in the end he ground out the cigarette and bounded up the stairs with his heart racing.

“Who is it?” she asked from the other side of the door. He said his name and identified himself as her roommate’s brother. She opened the door a crack and looked at him.

“She’s not here,” she said. “She doesn’t get back till six today.”

“I know,” the lawyer said, flustered, stripped of all of his rehearsed lines. “Please,” he said, pushing a bar of chocolate through the barely open door. She took the chocolate from his hand and said, “No problem, I’ll give it to her.”

“No,” the lawyer said, shaken by the sound of his own voice. “It’s for you.”

He still recalled the scorn he had seen in her eyes. She stood behind the door, did not invite him in, and said she was not interested in receiving anything from him. “If you want me to give it to your sister, I will, but if you don’t, please take this back and go away. I don’t know you.” She extended the chocolate bar in his direction, but the lawyer just nodded his head and hurried out of the building.

He berated himself all night long. He went back to his rented apartment in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and waited for the call that was sure to come from his sister. He had nothing but contempt for himself. What had he been thinking? That he would offer her chocolate and she would invite him in for coffee and then fall head over heels for his charms? What charm? He was such an idiot. What a miserable decision, one that would make him look ridiculous in front of his little sister. He, the collected, deliberate one, how had he dared do something so dumb? He chain-smoked, tried to distract himself by watching TV, then by reading, then by looking through his casework, but his mind was trained on the sound of the soon-to-ring phone. He envisioned his sister coming home after class, walking into her room, and hearing from her roommate, as she waved the incriminating bar of chocolate in her hand, that her rude nymphomaniac brother had come by unannounced earlier that afternoon. When the call failed to arrive, he figured that either his sister had not yet returned to her room or that her roommate had left before she came back. At close to ten at night he decided he couldn’t wait any longer and called his sister, expecting the worst. But she sounded natural, asked how he was doing, and said nothing about the events of earlier that day.

“Are you alone in the room?” he got up the nerve to ask, trying to verify whether the roommates had seen each other.

“No,” his sister answered, and he could hear the sound of her door opening and he understood that she had walked out so that they could continue the conversation in private. But she said nothing about chocolate or her roommate.

“I’ve been thinking about coming to visit you,” he said, feeling things out.

“Too bad you didn’t,” she said. “Maybe you could come tomorrow. My roommate’s in class till eight. You want to come at six?”

The next day, at seven in the evening, the lawyer showed up at his sister’s place. He was intentionally late, because he never spent more than an hour in his sister’s room and he didn’t want her to know that something was up. They sat on his sister’s bed and talked, and his sister ate the meal he had brought for her. He, unable to eat, pored over the photos hanging above her roommate’s bed. Some of them, he decided, were taken in the courtyard of her family home and the others in the living room. Her parents seemed rather old and she appeared to be their youngest. Judging by the furniture and the state of the house, their financial situation seemed standard small-town Arab. Her mother wore a flower-embroidered head covering, as women her age did. If all of her siblings were in the photos then there were three sisters and two brothers, and a few little ones, perhaps nephews.