Sayed Kashua - Let It Be Morning

When I discovered that the mattress was wet, I started sobbing in silence, lost and confused. I couldn’t fall back asleep. I couldn’t stop thinking feverishly about ways of concealing the terrible thing that had happened to me. I stayed in bed with my eyes open until morning, waiting for my brothers to leave the room, and only then got up. I could see the stain, and there was nothing I could do to erase it. I turned the mattress over, but that didn’t solve the problem of the sheet. I had to get it into the washing machine too somehow. But what would my mother think if she discovered me taking a sheet to the wash for the first time in my life, and how was I going to explain what I was doing? I stuck my finger up my nose and scratched the inside till it started bleeding. I had hurt myself more than I’d intended to, and let the blood drip onto the sheet. I walked out of my room with the sheet carefully folded. You could see the blood, but not the stain. The blood covered my face. With one hand I held the sheet and with the other I tried to stanch the blood. My mother had a fright, and I explained that it happened sometimes. I hurried into the bathroom, shoved the sheet into the washing machine and rinsed my nose. Mother brought me some cotton and told me to hold my head back. She said it must be because of the heat, and she gave me a packet of cotton in case the bleeding started again while I was in school.

I was shaking all the way to school, holding my legs together more than usual so they rubbed against one another as I walked. I felt that the other kids making their way to school like me were laughing at me, figuring out the truth. I tried to get rid of those thoughts and to understand what the hell it was. I knew for sure that the answer had nothing to do with regular pee.

The following nights were especially tough. I tried not to fall asleep but it was no use. What I did do was remove the sheet before going to sleep and hide it under the blanket. If it happened again, at least I’d have a dry sheet so I could hide the stain on the mattress.

I did fine on the exams and got the highest grades in my class again. When they were giving out the report cards, the teacher made the whole class applaud me, which I didn’t like at all.

He had dreamed up a new program where the stronger students would help the weaker ones over the summer vacation. How I hated the idea and how I hated the teacher at that moment. And even more than that, how I hated being teamed up with Bassel. That was all I needed, teaching English, Hebrew and math to the one student I hated the most in the whole class. The teacher knew we were neighbors with nothing but a fence between my home and his but I’d never visited Bassel and he’d never visited me. Even on days when we happened to leave for school at the same time, I’d stay some distance away from him, on the other side of the street, stepping up my pace to avoid him and the gang that followed him to school. Bassel didn’t seem too happy at the idea either. He hated studying, and he certainly hated me too. But I’d always done whatever my teachers told me to do. I’d never dream of opposing anything they suggested.

We met twice a week at first, exactly as the teacher had ordered. He’d also made sure that Bassel’s parents knew about the plan. They treated me with great respect, and his mother kept saying things like, “These are the young men you should be spending your time with. Why aren’t all your friends like him, good students and respectful?” She always brought in a tray of cookies and something to drink, and made sure to keep Bassel’s brothers and sisters out of the room so nobody disturbed him while he was doing his homework. Bassel didn’t cooperate at all. I sat next to him and read to him from our schoolbooks and solved the math exercises, but he didn’t seem the least bit interested. He was just waiting for the hour to be over so he could be rid of me. He sat there, shaking his head in disgust at whatever I said, and never asked any questions even though I knew he hadn’t understood a word of my explanations.

We’d sit there at the desk on our wooden chairs, not talking about anything except the homework. After a few sessions, things began to change. Bassel started asking me why I didn’t shave like everyone else. Once he showed me how he shaved his mustache with his father’s razor, and said it wasn’t scary at all if you just know how to do it, and that you don’t get cut, and that he could show me how if I wanted. He was even prepared to do it for me the first time. I said I’d rather not and that maybe I’d start in the summer vacation, before we went back to school. Gradually we began talking less and less about the homework, and our sessions became much more enjoyable. At first I pretended not to listen when he talked about girls and about the breasts that some of our classmates were developing.

I refused to go along when he asked me if I had any hair growing and if anything hurt in my chest or my throat. He would chuckle and say I was still a little boy, and slowly I began playing along with him, and enjoyed it. He pinched my chest, and it hurt so badly that I had to grimace. He laughed out loud when I said it didn’t hurt. “Why are you so scared?” he asked. “It’s that way with everyone.” His parents did everything to make sure he got through school, but he always flunked at least three subjects. On one of the shelves in his room was a reference book titled The Human Body. Bassel said he’d show me all kinds of neat things, and he pointed to drawings of boys’ and girls’ bodies with their genitals showing. He began talking about erections and pointed to the drawings. He talked about the pleasure of it and the fun, and about how it completely distracts you from your schoolwork. He told me about his dreams, all about girls, and about how he’d wake up with the most wonderful feeling he’d ever felt, and his dick was hard and there was something coming out of it and that it’s the best thing that ever happened to him.

I liked Bassel a lot. It was the first time I’d ever felt like I had a friend, the first time I understood that what was happening to me at night happened to other people too. He taught me to shove toilet paper into my underwear to prevent the staining and laughed when he heard I had thought I’d been peeing in my sleep. I couldn’t believe I was telling him those things, couldn’t believe I was telling anyone. I began enjoying those wet dreams too.

Bassel and I never discussed math again, or Hebrew language or English. All we talked about was our bodies. We pored over the book and I felt I knew everything. My way of thinking changed completely, and I let him shave off my mustache, after I’d asked my mother if it was all right. Instead of twice a week, we’d meet three or four times. Instead of one hour, we’d stay alone in that room for several hours. I told his parents he was progressing nicely and that he was even enjoying the lessons. They were delighted, and he told me that his father wasn’t beating him as much since I’d arrived on the scene.

I felt really attached to him. I loved it when he laughed because of me, as if I were a little kid. He’d lock the door from the inside, take off his pants and his underpants and touch himself, with me watching. “See?” he’d say. “It’s the greatest thing in the world.” Then, at his request, I’d take off my clothes too, and he’d ask me to do the same thing. Sometimes he touched me himself. That’s what everyone does, and me, what an idiot I was not to know anything about what the other boys in the class were doing. I did everything he asked; even when he told me to undress and he would rub against me from behind, I did it. I was glad to be giving him pleasure, glad I’d met him and that I could finally say I had a friend, and what a friend: Bassel, the boy that all the kids in class were afraid of, that they all tried to be nice to. Instead of his doing the homework I gave him, I’d do the homework he gave me. He promised, in return, that he’d share a desk with me the following year. At our last session, the day before school started, he asked me to get to school as early as possible and take the front desk for both of us. “Take the one right in front of the teacher,” he said, “your favorite place.”