Sayed Kashua - Let It Be Morning

“I’m telling you they’ve shot someone already. I mean, I have to check it out first, but it’s a closure, and it’s worse than anything I saw in Ramallah or Nablus or Jenin. It’s more like Gaza. They’ve sealed off one hundred percent of the village,” I tell him.

The call to my editor is cut off. “Hello…Hello…” I’m not even sure he heard my last sentence. For a moment I think maybe he cut me off deliberately, but he wouldn’t pull such a thing on me. It’s not as though I call him all the time, and he knows I wouldn’t dare call him unless it was important. I try calling again, and get a recorded message: “Thank you for using Cellcom. The subscriber you have called is temporarily unavailable.”

The phone is out of order. At least it wasn’t the editor who cut off the call. Must be a technical problem. They’ll fix it right away. Sometimes when you’re under a power line or something like that, there’s no reception. I’ll wait a few minutes, and then I’ll dial again. But the phone is still dead. I get out of the car and turn to one of the people walking toward the crowd. “Excuse me,” I say with a very appreciative expression. “Excuse me, would you happen to have a phone? Mine’s dead.”

The guy nods and pulls a phone out of a leather pouch attached to his pants. He hands it to me and asks, “What’s going on in the village?” without seriously expecting an answer, just trying to make conversation. “I don’t know,” I say, and turn on his phone, but I get the same announcement. “Your line’s dead too,” I say, smiling. “Must be a technical hitch at the company.” The guy tries for himself. “ Wallah, that’s strange, first time it’s ever happened.”

It could still be a technical problem. Maybe the lines are jammed or maybe there’s been some catastrophe. On days when there’s a terrorist attack, cellular exchanges crash. It happens all over the country. I’ll go back home and call from there, I think. Except that my car is stuck in the middle of the road among dozens of others and it will take an hour for them to move now. Everyone is waiting for the roadblock to be removed so they can get to wherever they were going outside the village.

I’ll call from the bank, I think. My older brother’s the manager of one of the departments there. I’ll go into his office and phone. They’ve got to send a photographer in right away, before those damn tanks pull out. Without a good picture, I can forget about a cover story. The bank is very close by, a few minutes’ walk from the edge of the village. The commotion and the traffic jam just keep getting worse. People are pacing back and forth without the slightest idea what they’re doing or what’s happening. They talk among themselves, registering surprise and some concern and mainly agitation and impatience.

“What’s happening?” my brother asks as I enter the bank.

“I heard there’s a roadblock at the exit from the village. Anything wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him, and follow him toward his little office with the metal blinds. His office is empty, and the bank is pretty empty too. It’s still early in the morning, and except for two older women leaning on the teller’s counter there are no customers yet. My brother has hung a picture of himself with the deputy manager of his bank, not of the branch, but of the entire bank. My brother, in a white hospital gown, lying in bed, an IV in his left arm and his right hand shaking the deputy manager’s, with both of them smiling at the camera.

The deputy manager had come to visit after my brother was shot. The bank has been robbed countless times, but he was only shot at once. One of the robbers got edgy because there wasn’t enough money in the till and he took a shot at my brother, who was standing behind the counter. He was lucky, everyone said, just one broken rib. The bullet missed his heart by a few millimeters. Usually they shoot in the air or spray the windows with bullets. My brother was in the hospital for a few days, had some operations and recovered. A miracle, everyone said, a miracle from God. After that, he changed a lot. He became more religious, started fasting on Ramadan, praying at home and then going to the mosque too, and not just on Fridays. His wife also started praying. To tell the truth, she started before he did, on the day he was shot, in fact. The first time it was in the hospital, in the lobby outside the intensive care unit where my brother was. He joined her only after he left the hospital. But they’re not completely religious. I mean, he does pray, but he can also go swimming in a bathing suit, and his wife doesn’t wear the veil, or even cover her head with a colored scarf. But that’s only because she’s still young. Someday she’ll start wearing a veil too, like her mother, like my mother.

“My mobile phone’s gone dead,” I tell my brother. “Can I use yours?”

“We don’t have a connection either,” my brother says, and presses the speaker. The busy tone echoes through his office.

Icheck my phone again, and it announces that the line is still disconnected. I breathe heavily as I march back from the bank toward my parents’ home. I’m beginning to feel the stress. To think, I finally have a juicy story, and now I can’t even make contact with the paper. And what kind of a story is this anyhow? If it were all a mistake, they would have fixed it by now. Besides, what kind of a mistake could cause the army to send such large forces in and to seal off the village?

I’m beginning to feel like a jerk. I’ve got to calm down. Nothing’s happened. I’m jumping to conclusions again. My fears are getting the better of me and sapping my common sense. What am I so worried about? It’s just a fucking roadblock, that’s all, and maybe it’s nothing more than a drill, or maybe they’ve had warnings of a Palestinian terrorist cell hiding in the village? Why a cell? I bet it’s just a single person. Maybe they have information about a serious operation and the soldiers can’t take any chances. And maybe the whole thing is over by now and people are already on their way to work, the way the mayor promised. When am I going to stop acting like a child? I hope I didn’t overdo it with my older brother.

I’ll go home now. There’s no point going back to the car, because everything’s blocked and there’s no way I’ll be able to get the car out till the others start moving. It’s the first time I’ve walked such a distance within the village since I came back. I hardly go anywhere on foot. The only walk I take is from our house to my parents’ house next door. I hardly leave that area if I can help it, not even to go to the grocery store. I try to get my wife to go instead. Sometimes I have no choice and I do find myself in the center of the village, on Baghdad Street next to Saladin Square. They’ve started naming the streets and squares here lately. Sometimes I go to the pharmacy or buy a falafel or some cookies or fruit.

In the evenings, the village center is packed with cars and people and there are dozens of youngsters on the town hall steps, smoking and cracking sunflower seeds. From a distance, it looks as if they’re not even talking to one another, just staring at the cars going by. The cars in the center move slowly, aimlessly. People just cruise around in their cars and greet one another, roaming about and studying the passersby. I hate being visible, because I know how they stare at me. Who is this guy anyway? Does he live in this village?

This is no place for strangers. Not that I’m a stranger; I was born here and spent eighteen years of my life here. But still, there are rules. Initially, when I’d bump into people, I’d try to look away, to pretend I hadn’t seen them, but lately I’ve started studying them, looking at them the way they look at me, and sometimes I spot a familiar face or find myself smiling at someone peering at me from a passing vehicle, remembering that we’d been in school together, and I wave automatically. I’ve taken to greeting every familiar face with salam aleikum too, regardless of whether I can place the person or remember his name and what relationship we had, if any. Even though I don’t leave the house much, I realize that from week to week, from day to day, I recognize more and more faces. I know that the number of times I say salam aleikum is growing by the day. These things happen and I have no control over them.