Sayed Kashua - Dancing Arabs

I’ll be a candidate selected by consensus. I’ll be a Member of Knesset. The media will love me. They’ll find it hard to believe that a Moslem MK can talk like that, without a trace of fanaticism, gently, almost without an accent. I’ll express myself well, and I’ll represent the views of an entire community. Even the Jews will consider me an honest man. I’ll get along very well with the right-wing parties and the ultra-orthodox. I’ll become prime minister — the first Arab in the Islamic Movement to be made prime minister. I’ll bring peace and love to the region. The economy will flourish. There will be no war on the horizon. I’ll turn the Middle East into a superpower. I’ll be head of the Asian Union, and Israel will market maklubah, za‘atar, and gefilte fish in New York’s fanciest malls. The naked girl I left behind yesterday will never believe it. She slept with the mightiest leader in the world!

It’s the night of Purim, and two Arabs are taking over the dance floor. “They shouldn’t let Arabs dance here,” I tell Shadia, who’s standing there with me behind the bar. She chuckles and agrees with me. “It’s disgusting. In Nejaidat or any other village like that, people like that would be raped. I’m telling you, they simply grab those kinds of people and fuck them whenever they want to.”

They really are ugly, especially the short one with the mustache. He swivels his ass, crammed into those cloth pants of his, making a mockery not only of himself but of anyone dancing next to him — of the whole bar, especially Shadia and me. If he wasn’t so clueless, he wouldn’t dare to dance. Why should Arabs like him be dancing disco anyway? Don’t they realize how different they are, how out of place, how ugly? Especially the short one with the mustache. He doesn’t give up. Just keeps popping peanuts into his mouth and shaking his ass. Thinks he’s a regular celebrity model, and every girl dancing near him is a whore. Every time the ugly dwarf orders another beer, he points at one of the girls and says, “She’s Russian, isn’t she?”

“It’s my last shift,” Shadia says. “I can’t stand the sight of this place anymore. I can’t stand the sight of all these Arabs. They’ve destroyed the place, they’ve driven out the paying customers. The ugliest people in Jerusalem come here, good-for-nothings who think they’re God. I swear I feel like calling in a few people from Nejaidat, just to come in here and knock these guys senseless, the little shits. Especially the one with the mustache.” She giggles and covers her mouth with the back of her hand.

Shadia was the first Arab girl I’d met who knew about Tom Waits. She happened to sit next to me at one of the lectures in the philosophy department seven years ago. I was putting a new cassette in my Walkman, and she recognized it. That changed my whole perception of Arabs. Because of her, I realized there’s a different kind; they’re not all the same. But apart from her, I’ve yet to meet an Arab who likes the same music I do.

She lives in the Old City and only goes back to Nejaidat on holidays. She says nobody in her family will talk to her. Every time she goes there she imagines it’ll be different, and then she sinks back into her depression. She wrote a book and sent it to several publishers in Egypt but never got an answer. She doesn’t think they’ll accept it; her writing is too difficult for them to digest. Only two people liked what she wrote. One of them is dead already, and the other was Mahmoud Darwish. She says she’d always wanted to write about her childhood, but the problem was that sometimes in Nejaidat a whole week would go by with nothing happening. People would pass one another from time to time and ask, “How’re things?” and they’d answer, El-hamdulila.

“How many times can I write el-hamdulila in the same book?” She smiles. “I spent the whole year writing, for hours on end, day in and day out. But when all was said and done, my entire childhood took up barely forty pages.”

She’ll quit her job at the bar. Maybe she’ll go to New Zealand. She gets along well with sheep. She doesn’t stand a chance here. She can’t find a job. She worked for a while as curator at a prestigious Ramallah gallery, but there’s a war on now. Everyone at the bar comes on to her, especially the Arabs. They think they’re really sophisticated when they say, “Give me an orgasm.”

She can’t stand it anymore, the way they look at her. As if because she’s an Arab and she works at a bar, she must be a whore. If anyone says anything, she gives him a really hard time. She raises the roof with her screaming. The last thing she needs is for false rumors to reach the people back in Nejaidat. Even in the streets of the Old City, if anyone says anything as she passes by, she walks back and knocks him over with her yelling.

Shadia carries a knife around with her; she stole it when she was in first grade. When there are problems, she hides the knife up her sleeve. It’s a switchblade, not like my Lederman with its nail clipper, its screwdrivers, and its spoon. Shadia laughs at me when I tell her about my knife. She says she could write a good story about these things — about an Ashkenazi nerd who entered the world of crime. There was a guy called Husni in her class. He’d robbed a bank once. She couldn’t believe he did it. He wasn’t capable of stealing an eraser. Someone shot him when he came out with the money, just some sonofabitch with a pistol. A Jew. They didn’t do anything to him, didn’t even arrest him.

It was her last shift. She couldn’t go on this way anymore. It was the night of Purim and the place was so sad. Not a single good-looking person. The regulars come in, take a look around, and leave. I can understand them. I’d never go to a place where the dancers were so ugly. Shadia and I don’t dance like them and we don’t look like them, and both of us arrived with a premonition. It was Purim night and we smelled trouble. For the first time, I was wandering around with something in my pocket that could open into a knife.

“The owner had better pay a bouncer to get them out of here,” she says, and I nod. “I for one would never come back here. And I don’t mind having to pay for my own liquor. What about you? Are you staying?”

I look at the bar, at the beer stains, the lemon, the lupine spikes in the ashtrays. We’re not emptying the ashtrays today. We don’t want anyone to stay. Facing me at the bar is a man in a suit. He must be past fifty. Sometimes he says he’s a lawyer, sometimes he tells us he studied medicine in Frankfurt. He orders another glass of white wine, and as he puts it to his thick lips, it brings out the deep wrinkles in his rugged complexion. Like cracks in the desert soil after an earthquake. Now he’s putting on his glasses to write down a phone number for the girl next to him. She’s a stranger, a volunteer in one of the human rights organizations. She’s short and heavy-set, looking for men the whole time and not particular.

There’s no way I can look like them. If I convey what these Arabs convey, I’m in serious trouble. But it’s out of the question. People aren’t scared of me, and they’re not put off by me. Or maybe they are, except they manage to hide it. I bet there are lots of girls who got the wrong idea, as if I was coming on to them, and I must have been as disgusting as the rest of them. I can’t believe it.

Every time our paths cross, Shadia and I manage to pick up our relationship. She keeps telling me about her loneliness and her sadness. But despite all the loneliness and the sadness, she always manages to make me laugh. She’s one of the few who can get me to laugh out loud, not just to smile politely. Out of loneliness, she bought a bird and stuck it in a cage in the center of the house. There are two sticks in the cage, and the bird jumps from perch to perch all day long. It helps Shadia unwind, but still she thinks she’ll probably release the bird before it dies of boredom.