Sayed Kashua - Dancing Arabs

We have a small home. Our daughter sleeps with us in our room, and there’s a small kitchen and a small bathroom. When a Jew is killed, our landlady bakes basbussa and brings us a portion in a small dish. She takes off her head scarf and stuffs it in her mouth to muffle the sound. Then she gives muted cries of joy.

Our landlady is a refugee from the village of Malcha. Sometimes she climbs up on the roof and looks down at her home. It’s still there, two meters away from the mosque. In 1948 she escaped to the southern part of Beit Safafa, which had become Jordanian, and since 1967 she’s been working at the Hebrew University. She’s head of a department, which means she’s in charge of the toilets on the law school campus. When the war broke out, her brother was praying at the El Aqsa Mosque, as he did every Friday — and was killed. He was a plumber, and he had a small Fiat. His sister used to call him every time our pipes were clogged. When our daughter was born, he arrived with his wife and children and brought us a present.

I’m lying on the sofa, trying to entice myself with the fashion channel. Bridal gowns flash in front of me. I try to think back on my own wedding, but I’m too drunk for that. One of the landlord’s brothers has just gotten married. They kept the guest list small, with no music and no food. The two families only spent half an hour together.

There’s shooting again, and another power cut. It wakes up my wife. I can’t understand why it’s the quiet that causes her to wake up. Or the darkness. She calls me from the bedroom, trying to talk loud enough for me to hear, but not so loud as to wake the baby. “The flashlight is on the TV,” she says.

In summer the shooting and the shelling are louder, especially at night. You sit there trying to imagine exactly where they’ve landed or to picture the helicopters homing in on a target, tilting downward and shooting. The pilots are the best. They must be my age, but with a good physique and a nice face. They’ll finish their nightly assignment, step out of the plane, and take off their helmets, and with an impressive flick of their wrist they’ll fix their hair. Fair hair, blond maybe, but it’s hard to tell in the dark. Especially since the alcohol throws me off.

Another salvo of shooting. My wife bends over, and her silhouette on the wall frightens me for a moment. “It’s as if we don’t belong.” She yawns. “We’re onlookers, like strangers, doing nothing.”

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll call the power company,” I tell her. “It can’t go on this way. I’ll sue them.”

I’ll sue my father too, for planting hope in my mind, for lying to me. For teaching me to sing:

“We’ll march through the streets, for united we stand Let us sing to our glorious nation, our land.”

I’ll sue him for telling me that the Lebanon War was the great darkness before the great light. I laugh at him when he says, every time they shell Gaza or Ramallah, “That’s it, that’ll be the end of them.” I remember how we once sang to being free and united. Father’s voice would rise as we sang:

“Let the revolution come. Let victory be ours.”

I can never forgive him for giving us the idea that we’d defeat the enemy with tires and stones.

I haven’t an ounce of hope in my heart. I’m filled with hate. I hate my father. Because of him I can’t leave this country, because he taught us there was no other place for us, and we must never give up; it would be better to die for the land. I picture him and tell him everything that’s on my mind. I say that if it weren’t for all the nonsense he drummed into us I would have left long ago. Now he’s drunk, like me, but he clings to hope. If he loses that, he’ll die. Hope is dwindling, but somewhere it can still be felt. Even when he cries, as Nazareth comes under attack, it sounds like the distress of someone who expects the great redemption to come soon — just the way he described it in what he wrote while he was in detention.

I don’t remember the date of the last demonstration I attended. I don’t remember what it was about: Land Day, Nakba Day, or just some Arabs who were murdered at some intersection. I remember how my father and his friends worked all night. They drew slogans on big signs. I stood there, bringing them colored markers whenever my father asked me to. The only person I recognized was my math teacher, and he acted as if he didn’t know me. They wrote: YA PERES, YA SHARON. THIS IS OUR COUNTRY AND HERE WE ARE. They wrote: THE CHICKEN OF THE GOLAN HEIGHTS IS BEHAVING LIKE A LION IN LEBANON. (Father said it was directed at Assad.) They wrote: REJOICE, O MOTHER OF THE SHAHID . ALL CHILDREN ARE YOUR CHILDREN. My father and his friends drew flags of Palestine and asked me and my brothers to color in the squares: green, black, red, and white. That was when I finally learned how to draw a flag, and we fought over which one should be on top, the green or the black. Father said it didn’t matter, because it’s the thought that counts.

The next day, I couldn’t remember what the reason was, but my father said we should be taking part in the demonstration too. A pickup truck with loudspeakers set out from our house, and my brother and I and some of Father’s friends followed it with our signs. I could hear his voice over the loudspeakers, and people started joining the group that was marching behind the pickup. It seemed to me that everyone had turned out. The crowd swelled till it turned into an enormous body marching forward. My brothers and I tried to keep our place near the pickup, near Father. When we passed our home again, Mother and Grandma were waiting there with pitchers and bottles of water and gave some to the marchers. Mother said, “May God bless them,” and I could tell she was crying. She signaled the pickup to stop and gave my father a drink of cold water from a glass, just the way he liked it.

“What’s going to happen?” my wife wants to know. “War?” I wish she’d come back to bed because I’ve just begun undressing the first female combat pilot.

From the neighborhood up the hill above us we can hear the noise of Jews. Under the streetlights along their road I can see them advancing toward our house. The crowd is growing larger. They’re marching down the road above us. The house we’ve rented is pretty isolated. It’s the closest to the Jews. The landlord, who lives above us, knocks on the door and says, with a flashlight in his hand and tension in his face, “The Jews are attacking.”

The Jewish voices grow louder. Under the streetlights along their streets I can see them streaming toward our house. It’s becoming dangerous, so the landlord invites us to stay in his parents’ old home in the center of the village. We’ll be better protected there.

My wife starts crying, and I say, “We’re going home.” I take the baby out of her crib. She screams. I wrap her in her blanket, and we’re off. I hope they haven’t blocked the exit yet, but if the police cars are there already, I’ll tell them I’m a citizen and that I’m only renting here. I’ll show them my ID. I got it at the Ministry of Interior in Netanya. I’m not really Palestinian. I’ll tell them the baby’s sick.

I heave a sigh of relief as we reach the lit-up part of the city. They’re not going to recognize me. I’m counting on the fact that I look like a Jew. Let’s just hope they don’t see my wife. Couldn’t I have picked someone with a lighter complexion? She speaks softly to the baby, trying to calm her, and I shout at her to shut her trap if she wants to come out of this alive. The Jews haven’t reached the entrance yet, and the ones we meet peer into the car suspiciously, but when they see me they let us go. We’ve got to get out of here right away. Lucky I’m not one of those who hang prayer beads on the mirror. Lucky I don’t have a hamsa or letters in Arabic. I’ve got a pretty Jewish car, a Subaru, not the typical Peugeot or Opel Ascona. I’ve always known how to make myself inconspicuous.