Eshkol Nevo - Homesick

Lilach started to cry. I picked her up. Don’t worry, sweetie, it’s just the wind, I lied to her. I was cross with myself for lying. So what if she doesn’t understand, you don’t have to get her used to lies from the time she’s little. Look, I pointed to the TV, it’s the finals. I took a green grape and put it in her mouth. She shoved it away with her hand and pointed to the black grapes. No problem, have a black one, you don’t have to throw it on the floor, I said, and pulled some black grapes off the bunch for her. She chewed them happily, one after the other, then went back to watching Wheel of Fortune with me. In the finals, the engineer from Yavneh won a Mitsubishi, free petrol for a year and a music system for his car.

*

I remember the day Nasser resigned like it was yesterday — that’s what Mama says when we’re sitting in front of the TV watching the programmes in memory of Rabin. Everyone knows that she’s going tell the same story we’ve heard already, but we still want to hear again, because she always adds new details that would be interesting even to people listening to it for the hundredth time. Sometimes, when she’s in a good mood, she makes little digs at us, her children.

Everybody had gathered around the TV in Jamil’s café, she starts, and I make the sound lower on our set, out of respect for her. It was an ugly brown TV with a tall aerial like a tree and terrible reception, she goes on. Every few seconds, a big white stripe would move across the screen from top to bottom, and the button for the sound was broken, but it was the only TV in the village and no one wanted to miss out. People were standing on the tables with their backs up against the wall, anything as long as they could see. HaShabab , the boys, she says, giving me an accusing look, were standing so close to the young girls that some of them took advantage and touched places they shouldn’t, may Allah show them the right path, and Jamil ran around in the crowd with plates of hummus and beans and bottles of fizzy drinks. People had big appetites before Nasser talked. Ya’ani , everyone knew from the rumours and Jewish newspapers that the war was lost, but no one thought he would … just like that, out of the blue. Everybody thought another one of his great speeches was coming, like the ones he gave that made your whole body shake when you heard them. Oh God, he knew how to talk, that Nasser. Raising his voice and lowering it, choosing the words like a poet. But that day, the minute he walked on the stage, you could tell from the expressions of the people standing behind him, his advisers, that something was wrong. His face was as white as noon, and his forehead was sweating so hard that even on Jamil’s poor TV, you could see the drops, and all of a sudden the café was completely quiet. It’s hard to believe, but even Marwan — she looks at my brother, who’s talking to his wife, Nadia — was quiet. Nasser went up to the microphone and started reading from the page in a weak voice: Brothers! he said — I remember the first sentence perfectly — we always speak frankly to each other, both in victory and in hard times, when the moment is sweet and when it is bitter, only in this way can we find the right path. Then he explained how the Americans helped the Israelis in the war, how the Israeli Air Force attacked first and the Egyptian soldiers fought like heroes, and the Jordanian soldiers also fought like heroes, and finally he said that he, Jamal Abd al-Nasser, was to blame and was resigning from the presidency, and, beginning tomorrow morning, he would be placing himself at the service of the people. When he finished and picked up the pages and walked off the stage, you could see one of his advisers wiping tears from his eyes with a handkerchief, and then, all together, the men in the café wiped the salty drops from the corner of their own eyes with their little fingers, even the biggest, strongest men, Najh Hasein, Allah Yerhimu, who’d been in a Jordanian prison for ten years, and Husam Mernaiya, who was the boxing champion of Ramallah three times in a row, and even your father, the hero — and here she looks at my father, who looks down — you have nothing to be ashamed of, that’s how it is, when they give a person hope and then snatch it away from him, it’s harder than if they hadn’t given you anything to begin with, and that Nasser, with his laughing eyes and beautiful words about the great, strong Arab people — he was like a father for us, a father who made us believe that there was light in the world, that before we went to heaven, we would go back to our village, to our land, and our heart would not be like the seed of a bean cut in half, and we would stop wandering from place to place like gypsies.

She picks up the key that she wears around her neck, the key to the old house, kisses the rusty iron, and continues.

Then the Egyptians went into the streets and lay down on the roads and begged, and Nasser cancelled his resignation and went back to being president. But it wasn’t the same any more. He was sick and weak by then, and three years later, he died. Everyone went to Jamil’s café again — the prices there were in liras now, not dinars — to watch his funeral.

She takes a sip of her coffee, checks to see that everyone is listening, and continues.

And I’ll tell you what’s strange: now Itzhak Rabin is dead, the Rabin who finished off Nasser, the Rabin whose soldiers shot above our heads in ’48, the evil Rabin, Rabin the devil, and instead of being happy, instead of dancing in the street and clapping, I’m sad. Look at his granddaughter, a pretty girl, crying. She looks like her grandfather, the way Marwan’s Raoda looks like her grandfather. I can’t help it, I’m sad for her. All the leaders, they always have a bad end. And what will happen now?

*

When our teacher talked about Rabin’s murder, she had exactly the same expression she had when she told the class that Gidi had been killed, and right away it made me suspect that maybe that expression, the serious look in her eyes, the way she bit her lips, all that was just a mask she puts on when she thinks she has to be sad. When she finished, she sat on the edge of her desk and asked us to talk, to say what we felt. Like it always is in those situations, when you don’t know exactly what to say, everyone repeated what she said, except in different words. I didn’t raise my hand. I haven’t talked in class for a while. It started after Gidi’s shivah , when I came back to school and didn’t understand what they were talking about in class because I’d missed so many lessons, so I decided I’d rather be quiet so nobody would notice that I didn’t understand, and after that, I got so used to not talking that even if I wanted to say something — let’s say at the trial they had in Bible class for King David, when they got to the part where he sends Uriah the Hittite to war — the words stuck in my throat and I had the feeling that if I opened my mouth, I’d stutter. Even though I’d never stuttered in my life.

When Alon said that the murder was terrible and horrifying, and Rinat said that the murder was horrifying and terrible, I thought to myself — when you don’t talk, you have more time to think — that it was weird how my world had turned upside down in the last few days. Till the assassination, my world was made up of my house, where we weren’t allowed to listen to music or laugh, and everybody else, who tried to be really nice to me but kept doing their own thing, kept being happy when Beitar won on Saturday, or complained about the prices at Doga. And now everything had turned upside down. Everybody on the street is worried, they walk slowly, talk quietly, and in my house everything is as usual, they don’t turn on the TV, they don’t care. Like Mum said to Nitza Hadass last night, everyone cries over their own dead.