Sayed Kashua - Let It Be Morning

Another round of shooting, and somehow it’s less scary than the previous ones. It’s amazing what people get used to. Sounds of shooting again, and I wait for a lull, knowing somehow that it will arrive. I try to reassure my wife and daughter. “It only sounds like it’s near, but it’s very far away,” I say confidently, though it’s not what I really think. “They must be shooting at a target,” I tell my wife. Her weeping is the only sound in the room. “Shhhh, it will be over any minute, stay down, it’s okay, they have nothing to do with us, it’s just an echo, they’re shooting in a different direction. It will be over soon.”

The last lull is much longer. Between the children’s crying and the parents’ yelling, we can hear the hum of the tank engines not far away. What the hell are they doing? What are they trying to achieve? Who are they shooting at? What’s wrong with them? What do they want now? God. We stay in the bathroom even though there’s no more shooting. I dare to get up off the floor now, with my arms still covering my head. I stroke my wife’s hair. I can feel her trembling. “It’s over, you see? That’s it. But let’s stay here till daybreak. It’s not that long.”

I lie on my back on the bathroom floor. It’s almost completely dark. There’s a faint light coming in through the upper window — moonlight, maybe, or tank headlights in the distance. What do they want damn it? Maybe this is just a military drill, or they’re just trying to scare us, as if we’re not scared enough already? And maybe they’ve entered the village with their tanks, maybe this was the operation they’ve been waiting for and now it’s behind them. I lie there waiting for the power to come back on too. They must have completed their mission, they must be getting orders to withdraw and put an end to the closure imposed on the village. “Looks to me like it’s all over,” I tell my wife. “Looks to me like they’ve finally finished whatever they set out to do, huh? Tomorrow everything will be fine, things will go back to normal.”

My heart freezes when I hear the knocking on the front door. I shudder and I can’t breathe. I feel my pulse surging all at once and it takes a few seconds before I realize it’s only my father at the door. “Is everything okay with you?” he shouts from outside. “Are you okay?” He calls my name. “Yes,” I answer him, and try to calm down, taking a deep breath and attempting to overcome the tremors that grip my body. Leaning forward, head first, I feel my way toward the front door, turn the key in the lock and let my father in. “I just wanted to check if everything is okay,” he says. “Listen, I was sure they were shooting right here, behind the house.”

Where does he get the courage to be outside now? How can he stay so calm? His speech is unchanged, while I do my best to control the quiver in my voice. “Your mother was worried about you, so I came to check. Your brother is fine too. I knocked on their door before. His wife was crying and the boy, poor thing, couldn’t stop crying and shaking. I told them to come be with us. You too. Our house is the safest, though it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any more shooting. Looks like they stopped. In any case, just come over if you’re scared. It’ll soon be morning anyway.”

My father’s visit does reassure me. The very thought that you can walk around outside, that they’re not shooting at everything within sight of their night-vision binoculars, is comforting. They really aren’t interested in ordinary citizens like us. They’re looking for specific people. A soldier is a human being, after all, I tell myself, and a human being can’t shoot at someone else just like that. There’s no chance they’ll shoot at random. Nobody wants to kill people for no apparent reason.

My wife would rather we didn’t go out at this hour. She wants us to stay home for now. We’ll come out of the bathroom, but we’ll stay on the bottom floor. I get two blankets from the bedroom. We put the baby on the sofa and cover her. She’s fallen back asleep. I sit down beside my wife. Every noise makes us turn to look. I feel her body, which is still shaking, and cover her with a blanket. “That’s it, it’s over. Stop trembling, I’m telling you, the worst is over. The whole thing is over. Finished.”

“You were right. We really did need to look at the whole thing differently. You were right. We really did need to expect the worst.”

“There’s no point in waiting any longer. I’m telling you, we’re through with all that. You’ll see, tomorrow we’ll have water again, and electricity and the telephone lines will work, and on the news they’ll tell the whole story behind this. We’ll go back to work, and everything will be okay.”

She leans her head on my shoulder. Her warm cheeks make me shiver, and it feels good. For the first time I can feel her seeking reassurance from me, seeing me as a haven for her emotions. For the first time I feel her turning to me for protection. I hold my arm around her shoulder and, like a doting mother, tuck in her blanket. I kiss her tear-stained cheeks. She falls asleep with her head on my shoulder and I stay beside her, feeling the warmth of her body and her breathing on my neck.

The darkness changes shades and turns pale, but there’s still no light outside. Very slowly I loosen my hold on my wife’s shoulder. Gently I move away and let the sofa take the place of the shoulder on which her head was resting. I look for the pack of cigarettes that I left on the dresser. I light one and stand by the window. Apart from the sound of engines in the background, it seems like the dawning of a particularly mild summer’s day.

I go into my office on the lower floor and turn on the radio, keeping the volume down, to listen to the six A.M. news. It begins with an item saying that Israeli Arabs from our village had attacked IDF soldiers. It’s the first time Israeli Arabs are referred to as terrorists. According to the news, people in our village opened fire on an IDF patrol in the area. “There were no casualties to IDF forces. The soldiers returned fire at those who had fired from within the village.”

It’s becoming pretty clear to me now that this business is not over. On the contrary, according to the reports, it’s getting worse. I find it hard to believe anyone shot at the soldiers. Who in this village could do such a thing? There’s nothing organized here, no Hamas, no Jihad, no front of any kind. Maybe soldiers heard an explosion and decided someone was shooting at them, but it’s much likelier that the army has concocted this story of a shooting as a good excuse to retaliate. And what about the military patrol they mentioned on the news? And what about the closure? They must have been instructed to use the word patrol . Otherwise what would they say? How could they suddenly start talking about roadblocks and closures?

The news reports keep on referring to things being completely peaceful in the cities of the West Bank and Gaza, and to intensive meetings between Israelis and Palestinians. It occurs to me that maybe this lull and those meetings they keep talking about are yet another kind of media double-talk for something altogether different. And why wouldn’t they lie about what’s happening there if they completely ignore the new reality of our village, and perhaps this applies to all the other Arab villages inside Israel as well? But the few Arab radio stations that I manage to pick up, like Voice of Cairo and Jordanian Radio, also speak of meetings and of calm in the territories. Why would I expect an Arab radio station or an international one to discuss Israeli Arabs? Who are they anyhow?