Sayed Kashua - Let It Be Morning

I don’t have the patience for their arguments anymore, I’m really not interested. I know the situation is bad enough even without a Palestinian Intifada or the Israeli occupation or some suicide bomber hiding out in our village. Things are bad in any case. For us, for the Palestinians, it doesn’t make any difference. We’ll always have wars in this godforsaken place. Take any six feet in this place and you’ll find too much damage, too much turmoil, too much chaos in every part of our lives, which means the wars will never end. The real wars in this village are the wars over honor, over power, over inheritances and over parking places. Actually I sometimes think it would be a good idea if war did break out, to distract the inhabitants from their cruel and never-ending little fights. To me it doesn’t matter anymore so long as they stay away from me, so long as nobody comes to me when the next disagreement breaks out.

I go into my brother’s office and close the door behind me. “So, have things calmed down?” my brother asks. I nod. “Yes, I think things are going to work out. I just overreacted, sorry I scared you.”

“No, it really is serious. But what could actually happen?”

“I don’t know.”

I was debating whether to tell him they’d brought our younger brother home from the dorms in the middle of the night, and not just him, but all of the Arab students at the university. I decide not to because he’s liable to tell the others, and we shouldn’t create panic for now. I ask my brother for a little money. “A few hundred shekels,” I say, “maybe even a thousand if I may.”

“You may,” my brother says. “There are no ATMs, everything’s being done manually, so nobody will know you’re overdrawn. Strange, your salary hasn’t come in this month.”

“I know,” I mutter. “There was a problem with the accounting because of this new job they gave me. It should have been in my account by now.”

“Lucky for you that you came now,” my older brother says. “All hell will break loose here today. The money hasn’t come in from the main branch. They wouldn’t let the armored car into the village, despite the security escort. And it’s Sunday, so the safe is almost empty. Mark my words, unless the money arrives, pretty soon we won’t have enough to give people.” He’s laughing now. “They’ll kill us. I told the manager I didn’t care. I was getting out of here. I don’t have what it takes to fight with these people.”

“Listen,” I tell him before leaving. “When you get off, come over to Mother and Father’s house. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“See you there.”

Now I know I’m overreacting. I get into the car and immediately turn on the radio. The news will be on in a minute. I drive around, deciding not to go back home yet. The news is all about red alerts coming from the Arab villages and towns. The announcer says that security sources are trying to persuade the government to declare a nationwide state of emergency. The tone is the usual one of the news reporters, and it sounds like something that would hardly be noticed in normal times. But today it’s different, it’s obvious something’s going on. Maybe Israel is planning another large-scale attack on the West Bank. Maybe they’ve decided to get rid of Arafat and they don’t want any clashes with the Arabs within Israel, some of whom are bound to take to the streets. They don’t want to have to deal with us on top of everything else. Maybe they’re just trying to take preventive measures. And maybe that’s really why they sent the Arab students home. Maybe the security people were worried about campus demonstrations and decided to make sure it didn’t happen, to prevent clashes between Arab and Jewish students. There are all those studies now about the Arab students, dubbed the “proud generation” because they have the audacity to stand there with flags on Naqbah Day or on Land Day. I try to convince myself that everything’s going to be okay, but it doesn’t work. They sent in the tanks damn it, so maybe it’s not going to blow over as soon as people think. Maybe something big really is happening in this area. It wouldn’t do me any harm to stock up on things, would it? I’ll tell my wife I had the day off and say I didn’t know what to do with the time on my hands, so I decided to do the shopping. I’ll say I had no idea what we had in the house, so I bought a bit of everything.

I’ll do my best not to arouse the suspicion of the salespeople. A shopping spree might create the wrong impression on a day like this. People might think that as a journalist I know something that shows we ought to be getting ready for something big. They might get the idea that I have some secret information about a war that’s about to break out in the region. I decide to make the rounds of the different grocery stores and to buy a little bit in each one. I’ll start with the ones in the more distant neighborhoods, where I don’t usually shop. I cruise the streets and stop at the entrance to the first one I see. There’s an older woman standing there, someone I’ve never seen. That’s good, because it must mean she doesn’t know me either. A bag of flour is the first thing that occurs to me. That’s what you buy when you’re stocking up, isn’t it?

I take one and pay for it, say thank you and proceed to the next grocery store. “Hello,” I say with a smile, trying to seem as natural as possible. I ask the salesman for another bag of flour. If he has one of the big ones, a fifty-kilo bag, that would be great. He does. I pay for it and move on to the next store. “Could I have a bag of rice, please?” I take it, say thank you and move on. All of the stores are running low on dairy products. The trucks from Tnuva Dairies and all the other dairies haven’t been able to make the morning delivery because of the roadblocks. I take a few liters of milk, two packages of cheese, some banana yogurt for the baby and a few bottles of my wife’s favorite soft drink. In the pharmacy, I take all but one of the cans of formula for one-year-olds. By the time I get to the stores in my own neighborhood, the trunk and both seats are piled high with groceries. I stop at the one nearest my home, smile, greet the owner, who is one of our neighbors, and ask for nothing but a pack of American cigarettes. He asks if they’ve removed the roadblocks yet, and I shrug as if it’s no concern of mine.

I’ll pick up my wife at school today. I’ve got time. First I’ll unload all the groceries from the car. I’d rather she didn’t see the bags of flour and rice. I’ll cram them into the little room that we use for storage. I pile the dairy products into the fridge, and feel I’ve overdone it a bit. We’ll pass the expiration date before we use them all up. We hardly eat at home damn it. We usually skip breakfast, so we won’t even get to the dairy things. I put the canned goods and the formula in the kitchen cabinets and feel bad about spending money I don’t even have. Fuck, if the ATMs were working, even my brother couldn’t help me withdraw money from my account. It used to be so convenient to be able to pick up the phone and find out if your salary had been deposited in your account yet and what the balance was, but now it seems like a nightmare. He’ll realize soon enough that the paper is hardly paying me anything. I shouldn’t have lied to him about the problem with the accounting department. Damn it, I can’t go on lying this way. I’ve got to transfer my account to a different branch, one in the city, maybe. I’ll say it’s closer to work and that I spend most of my day there anyway, so it’ll be easier for me to get to my branch directly from work. It shouldn’t be too complicated to transfer an account from one branch to another. It’s not as if I’m changing banks. I hope you don’t need to close an account before you can move it to a different branch, I mean I hope it doesn’t actually have to be in the black. Not that I owe the bank very much, but I don’t have even a small amount in my account right now. I can’t believe I’ve spent almost all of the thousand shekels today to stock up for a war that won’t happen. Everything’s probably blown over by now, I tell myself and go check if the phone’s working yet. It isn’t.