Kashua Sayed - Second Person Singular

The lawyer walked back to his office and stashed the two notes in his attaché case. He prayed that the graphologist would rule that the two samples did not match. He imagined the man telling him that one of the notes was a forgery or that the two samples were remarkably similar but in no way the same. His heart would be flooded with warmth and he’d run out of the office and buy his wife the most expensive present he’d ever bought her and then go home and kiss her and hug her and whisper the kind of sweet nothings he had not uttered in a long while.

He stood by the window and looked out at King George Street. A supply truck rumbled down the empty street. Jewish men in white shirts and black hats walked past under the window, clutching their tefillin in velvet bags that looked like black pillows, adorned with gold and silver thread. All of a sudden the lawyer was sorry he had left the house without saying good-bye to his kids, without kissing his daughter and tickling his little son’s stomach until he laughed the way only babies do. He sat down at his desk, looked at his computer, and scrolled through the morning’s headlines on one of the many news sites. Then he went to Google and asked it to search for why women cheat .

The lawyer read through the results avidly, attaching scientific importance to the most superficial of claims, even the ones that appeared in the glossiest, most shallow publications. He was furious when he found out that women cheat nearly as often as men. The rationale was different: they wanted attention, empathy, and support, and when the husband did not provide those things, they sought them elsewhere. According to one article, women seek sexual satisfaction outside the house because their husbands are often tired and uninterested, just as their own sexuality hits full stride. A sexologist said that her years of therapy had taught her that women want to feel attractive and desirable and that all too often their husbands see them differently, as caretakers of the children and the home. Other women sought wealth — gourmet restaurants, diamonds, invitations to glittering parties. Private eyes weighed in on the matter, too, and said that from their experience female adulterers were far more cautious than their male counterparts. Marriage counselors agreed: women are more discreet, and they are better liars.

The lawyer fit all of these facts to his own situation. He went from site to site, feeling more humiliated than ever before. Going back to the search page, he typed in the word hymen and soon enough realized that his assumption that his wife had been a virgin when they got married was utterly baseless. He read all about hymenoplasties and how immensely simple and popular the procedure had become. He read about blood capsules that could be surgically inserted so as to satisfy the groom’s mother, too, on the wedding night. The notion that she had fooled him from day one was more painful than the subsequent betrayal. The lawyer had never thought that the matter of his wife’s virginity was important to him, but now he learned that it was, more so than anything else in the world. He remembered how he’d always told his friends that he pitied all those Arab men who said they would never date a girl who had a boyfriend. What an idiot he had been then, during those conversations, and what an idiot he was now. Only recently he had sat with a friend, the accountant, and laughed at him for saying that he was worried about the Arab-Jewish education he was giving his daughter because he was afraid that as she approached puberty she would think, like the Jews, that it was only natural to have sex before marriage. The lawyer could not say why his opinions and beliefs, the things he had thought to be a result of his nature, had changed so rapidly. Experience had taught him that he was a conservative. Yes, a conservative, and from now on he would not be apologetic about it. What an idiot he had been when he spoke out, time and again, against the treatment of women in the Arab world, saying that it was widespread misogyny that held those societies back. What an idiot he had been, quoting Israeli writers and leaders. It was not the financial situation, he had said, parroting those public intellectuals, not the occupation, not the rotten education system, but simply the treatment of women. Only now did he realize that their goal had been to bring ruin to Arab society. Only now, for the first time in his life, did he understand what honor meant. He, who spoke out against and even lectured now and again about honor killings, he, who opposed the phenomenon and labeled it barbaric, only now saw the error of his ways. He wished someone from her family would kill her. But who would do it? Which of her married brothers would risk arrest and a life of destitution for his children? He wished she was dead. But what about the kids, he wondered, and his heart broke at the thought of them mourning their mother.

STRUDEL

The lawyer walked along King George Street as it came slowly to life. The buses whooshed past with greater regularity, but were still half-full. The sidewalks were crowded with people, though mostly those belonging to the lower class: construction workers, sanitation workers, dishwashers, security guards, and saleswomen. “What’s up?” a security guard asked him near a bus stop, and the lawyer, who knew that the security guards checked the Hebrew of passersby, and who always answered crisply and with a generous smile, now merely nodded, but that, too, sufficed. The guard did not ask to see his papers.

The lawyer knew that the bookstore would probably be closed at this hour, but still decided to try his luck. He stood before the locked door and read the store’s hours. Looking at his watch, seeing that the store would open in fifteen minutes, he decided not to go back to the office but to get a cup of coffee and then return to the bookstore.

“Good morning,” Oved chimed as the lawyer walked into the empty café.

“Good morning,” the lawyer said, sitting down at the bar.

“Coffee will be ready soon,” Oved said, and the lawyer nodded and looked over at Oved and the Arab worker as they got the café ready for the day. Oved pulled a tray of apple walnut strudels from the oven and slid in a tray of cheese bourekas in its place. The Arab worker transferred the strudels onto a glass tray and separated them with a spatula. “The machine will be up and running in a second,” Oved apologized and the lawyer said it was fine, he was not in a rush, and that he would wait if he wasn’t in the way.

“Not at all,” Oved said, “make yourself at home.”

The lawyer tried flipping through the weekend edition of the papers. He turned the pages and stared at the headlines, but made no attempt to try and understand what the articles were about, his eyes bouncing from picture to picture and from paper to paper.

“So, everything all right with you?” Oved asked, setting a cup of coffee in front of the lawyer.

“Sure, everything’s fine,” he sighed, making Oved laugh.

“You can smoke,” he said. “It’s fine so long as no one’s in yet.”

The lawyer’s phone rang and he pulled it out of his pants pocket and answered. Seeing that the call was from the graphologist’s office, he walked out of the café as he spoke. No, he told the graphologist, there was no need for an official report. Yes, the bill should be sent to the office as always. He knew there had been no need for an expert’s opinion, yet hearing the man tell him that the two notes were identical and surely from the same hand only intensified his pain. Up until then he had been able to tell himself that the whole thing was just a figment of his imagination.

He walked back into the café with a fallen face, and Oved, who noticed his expression, kept silent. The lawyer drank his coffee quietly while his thoughts bounced around inside his head. He put out his cigarette when he saw Sara, one of the elderly regulars, enter the café along with her Filipina caretaker, her constant companion.