Homesick

3

ALL OF A sudden I heard a boom, says an eyewitness in a cardigan who was breathing heavily. All of a sudden I heard a boom, says a salesman from the shoe shop, an involuntary smile twitching on his cheek. A boom? What boom? An explosion doesn’t go boom, just like a dog doesn’t go woof-woof. At the café they say Noa never got there, and the shift manager tries to allay my blatant fear. The police blocked off the street, so even if she wants to, there’s no way she can get through. Among the casualties are women and children, the announcer says, his face all puffed up. And the thought flashes through my mind, what about Noa? Is she considered a woman? The ticker moves across the bottom of the screen. City centre telephone lines crash from overload. But more than an hour’s gone by. She’s had enough time to get out of there and call. The telephone shrieks. Is it her? No, her mother. More uptight than I am. Yes, I heard. No, she hasn’t called me. No, she doesn’t take the number eighteen bus. She takes the one-five-four. She’s probably stuck there and can’t call because the lines are down. At Bezalel? There’s no one there to talk to. The office is only open on odd-numbered days, and only for an hour or so. Yes, it’s outrageous, I know. No, Tel Aviv’s no better. You’re right, Yehudith, those should be our biggest problems. Right, the first one to get the all-clear signal will let the other one know, OK? OK. I put down the receiver and start pacing, unable to turn off the TV and unable to watch it because I’m afraid there’ll suddenly be a close-up of a stretcher with Noa on it. The man in the picture on the living room wall is still staring at nothing at all. Maybe he’s waiting for a phone call too. Noa’s right. That picture is a depressing sight. If she gets out of this OK, I’m taking it down. Why did I say ‘if’? I look in the fridge for something to eat. The sticker ‘Create or Stagnate’ screams at me from the corkboard. I find two rubbery dried apricots. I sink my teeth into one of them, toss the other into the air. And catch it. Sima’s Lilach is sobbing, screaming. Her crying splits walls. In my little workroom, the book Psychopathology is open at the chapter on post-traumatic stress disorder. I browse through it till I get to the chapter on behavioural therapy for worry. I don’t read, just put it down belly up, open at the right chapter. The phone screams. Now it has to be Noa, and I am going to give her a piece of my mind. Why didn’t she call sooner? It’s Hila. Noa was supposed to have called her in the morning from the café to set up a day for Reiki, but no sign of her yet. And the café isn’t far from Jaffa Street, you know. Yes, Hila, I know. Are you watching TV? Yes. The mayor’s giving a speech into a sea cucumber. ‘The horrendous sights …’ ‘On a day like this …’ ‘We did everything we could …’ People are crowded around him like fans around a football player. It’s terrible, Amir, Hila whispers into my ear, just terrible. How much hate does a person have to have to do such a thing? It spreads so much bad karma in the world. Didn’t they ever hear of non-violent protests? If they would just march, lock arms and march, no one could stop them. I don’t know, Hila, I don’t know if things like that work in the Middle East, I say, and hear myself sounding as hollow as a political analyst on TV. She’ll be OK, won’t she? Hila begs. Let me know if you hear anything from her, Amir. Promise? Yes, I promise. Bye, Hila. Bye. The Minister of Something-or-Other Affairs promises, on live TV, to bring the full weight of justice to bear on the terrorists and those who send them. The fans are pushing. The camera is shaking. The broadcast switches back to the studio. They rehash everything we already know. What if she doesn’t call? Scenarios start to sprout in my mind and I can’t trim them down. Noa with an amputated leg, Noa with crutches, Noa in a hospital bed with me beside her reading her the end of A Hundred Years of Solitude, trying to absorb the fact that I have a handicapped girlfriend. And another one: Noa’s dead, someone informs me, a police officer. He calls and offers me his condolences. (Is that how it works? They offer their condolences even before you know you need them?) Then he asks me to come to the hospital. My trip to Shaare Tzedek Hospital — no, to Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem — is ceremonious. Cars make way for me as if they know. Her family is already waiting at Hadassah Ein Kerem — it’s not clear how they got here before me. A quick hug with her father. A three-way hug with her mother and sister. They’re all weepy and I can’t shed a tear. Why not? And why does that whole scenario infuse me with a kind of sweetness, why does it excite me? A knocking at the door saves me from the answer. Three quick, demanding knocks. I open it. Sima apologises for bothering me. I just wanted to ask if Noa’s all right, she says, brushing her hair from side to side with one hand. In the other, she’s rocking Lilach. Why are you standing outside? Come in, I extend an arm and she comes in. Dressed nicely, sharply creased black trousers, a pink shirt with buttons down the front, one of them open right over her cleavage. Is that what she wears at home? I take a quick look at the living room through her eyes. The two pillows on the sofa. No underpants on the floor. It’s a good thing I managed to tidy up a little in the morning. Did you hear anything from her? she asks, putting Lilach down on the rug. The fear starts creeping again. No, I haven’t heard anything. Tell me, that café of hers, isn’t it near …? Yes. And …? She never got there, I checked. Allah yestur, God help us, Sima says and puts her hand on her breast, her fingers slipping under her shirt through the open button. Meanwhile, Lilach discovers my tennis ball. She feels it with her fingers and tries to eat the yellow fuzz. Sima bends down (plain white bra) and takes it out of her hand. It doesn’t taste good, she tells her gently, it doesn’t taste good. She hands me the spit-soaked ball and says, with the same gentleness, don’t worry, it’ll be OK, it’s not her bus. Sit down, why are you standing, I say to her and ask myself till what age will my heart respond so quickly to maternal gentleness? I wonder if even when I’m eighty, I’ll want to rest my head between the breasts of every woman who talks to me that way. Have you called the emergency numbers yet? Sima asks and points to the screen. I look for a pen that works and manage to copy down only one number before the broadcast switches to ‘our correspondent, Gil Littman’ with the first pictures from Shaare Tzedek Hospital. Gil Littman taught us field studies at school, and all the girls in the class used to put on lipstick before his lesson. Now he’s talking to the hospital’s Deputy Director, with drips and white gurneys racing past in the background. They’ll probably postpone Avram’s operation again, Sima mumbles to herself. Who’ll have time for his kidneys now? You never know, I try to reassure her, staring at the screen and thinking: just don’t let any black hair pop up now. No black hair. I start imagining again: I’m at Noa’s bed stroking her hair, kissing the veins on the back of her hand, and she doesn’t wake up. Doesn’t wake up.

Thirty-four injured, Sima says, repeating the number the Deputy Director has just said as if it were a mantra for self-relaxation. Thirty-four.

As I dial the first number on the page, I recall those stories from Memorial Day programmes about mothers who feel in their bodies, even before the army officers knock on their doors, that their son has been killed. Did Yotam’s mother feel it too?

I check to see what I’m feeling inside my body, and find turmoil.

*

On days when there’s a suicide bombing, Jews don’t answer you. Even if you ask, ‘How much does this juice cost?’ they don’t answer. And if they do, you can tell from their voice how scared they are. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, wherever you go, the radio is screaming words like ‘savages’ or ‘murderers’. And you want to scream back at the radio. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I feel shame in my heart, and pride too, and I don’t understand how I can feel both those things at the same time. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I calculate how to save more money than Nehila and I are already saving. Maybe we should rent out a room in the house. Maybe we should sell some of her gold jewellery. Maybe our oldest boy should leave school and start working. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, even I am afraid of buses. Every time our van is behind a bus, I think there’s going to be an explosion and I picture the back of the bus flying through the window and the glass slicing into our throat. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I say to myself: calm down, Saddiq. There’s already been one bombing. It’s not logical for there to be two on the same day. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I think about my cousin Munir, who went to study medicine in Italy and met an Italian girl from a rich family and married her. He sends us pictures of his big house that has a beautiful garden and a pool, and he’s standing there with a completely shaven face, and even though it’s only a picture, you can smell his expensive cologne. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I think about my mother and what she always calls Munir: a traitor. She says: a person should die in the place where he was born. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I want to go back to bed and get under the winter blanket and be a child again, not a father who has to go to work, put food on the table and think every day about what tomorrow will bring. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I love my wife again. Even though she’s fat from all the babies she’s had, even though she has wrinkles around her eyes. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I stroke her hair before we fall asleep and kiss her forehead. On days when there’s a bombing, I want to smoke, even though I gave up, and drink a bottle of whiskey, even though it’s not allowed. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I don’t listen to music, but I eat a lot. I eat everything my wife puts on my plate and go to the pots to see if there’s anything left. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I remember the chief prison guard, Eli Barzilai, and hope that asshole was on the bus that exploded. But I also remember one girl soldier who heard me crying in my cell and gave me a Marlboro Light from her pack, and I hope she decided to take her car today.

*

At first, I ran around taking pictures of everything like a madwoman. Small groups of people, large groups, bloodstains on glass. The area looked like the palm of someone who squashed a mosquito that had food in its mouth. I finished three rolls of film one after the other without stopping, without thinking. Without even feeling. It’s a good thing Schwartz Photos was open and he still had Fuji 200. Schwartz’s son gave me a you-must-be-crazy-to-be-taking-pictures-today look, but I didn’t care. The main thing was to get back to the scene and start looking for mistakes. I saw a sign on a shoe shop right above the skeleton of the bus that said EXPLOSIVE SALE. I noticed other photographers, like me, who were looking for the right angle, hiding behind their cameras. I tried to document the first signs of life going back to its regular routine. The first violinist to take his violin out of its case and play a heart-rending melody to the cold stones, and to me. The first falafel stand to reopen. The first man to buy and eat half an order, tahini dripping down his chin. The first European traveller to stop and look at the frame of the bus for a few minutes and then continue walking down the pedestrian area. And I wasn’t the least bit scared. Not that I’m brave or anything. Just the opposite. Every little noise in the house at night scares me. Once I even convinced Amir that there was a burglar in the living room, and he went to see, armed with a tennis racket, and found that it was a small plastic bag making all the noise. But during all the time I spent on Jaffa Street, I wasn’t worried for even a minute. I was completely engrossed in my work. It wasn’t until the end of the day, on the bus going home, that I suddenly got scared.

And that was when I took the best picture, the one I’m looking at now.

At that hour, the number one-five-four bus is usually full, and I have to stand for half the trip, holding on to a post or the back of a seat and regretting that I’m not wearing more comfortable shoes. But when I got on this time, most of the seats were empty. The few passengers looked suspiciously at me and tried to figure out how dangerous I was and what was in that bulging bag I was carrying (a camera, folks, calm down). I sat down in the seat behind the driver, the one reserved for old or handicapped people, and hoped that more people would get on at the next stop. No one did. The driver, wearing a blue sweater over a white button-down shirt, passed the empty bus stop without pulling in to it. I remembered A.B. Yehoshua’s story, ‘Galia’s Stop’. The hero is on a bus, going to see his childhood sweetheart, and at some point the ride becomes a total hallucination, and it turns out that the bus is moving through the streets without a driver.

Suddenly, I had an idea. I went to a seat at the back of the bus, attached my flash, switched to Fuji 800 film and started snapping. I explained to the astonished passengers that it was for a project I was doing at photography college and I promised not to photograph their faces. They were too exhausted to argue with me. Two or three raised an eyebrow, but the rest just ignored me and sank back into their coats.

The pictures turned out to be grainy. Slightly blurry. From the people sitting and standing, you might guess they’re on a bus, but it’s only a guess. The backs of two necks fill the centre of the frame, one thick like a man’s, the other thin and wrinkled, like an old woman’s. The windows reflect each other, and my image with my camera in front of my face is caught in one of them. The driver isn’t in this shot. The angle I took it from makes it seem as if the bus is moving along without a driver. The ‘Break in Case of Emergency’ hammer is in the upper corner of the frame. An ad for the Kupat Holim Sick Fund is on the left. And the blurriness anaesthetises everything. It’s hard to explain. When I developed the picture, I felt that I’d succeeded in doing what’s so hard to do when you deal only with the external, only with what you can see: catching the inner sense. A week later, I named the picture ‘After a Terrorist Attack’ and hung it proudly on the wall of our classroom.

My fellow students actually complimented me on it before the lesson, but the lecturer stared at it for a while, sniffed twice and said: aesthetic, very aesthetic, in a tone that was leading up to a ‘but’, so I beat him to it and said, but what? He didn’t smile. He just said, I’m asking myself, Noa, where are you in all this? And I, a perfect idiot, pointed to my reflection in one of the bus windows, and he, his bottom lip drooping in disappointment, said, yes, very nice, but that’s not what I meant. What’s missing here is the emotion, Noa, what do you feel about all this?

*

After a suicide bombing, they usually put up a roadblock and don’t let us go out to work. And there are no surprises today either. I wipe the steam off the window and look out. Najib and Amin are trying to convince the soldier to let us pass. They show him all the permits, all the papers, but he keeps moving his head from right to left and smiling an evil smile. I told them it was a waste of time, but they’re stubborn. What can you do, hashaba, the boys want to make all their mistakes on their own. Now the soldier is fed up and he points his rifle at Amin and yells something at him. I can’t hear what it is, because the window’s closed. Najib and Amin fold their papers and put them in their pockets, turn around and jump into the car. Cold air rushes inside when they open the door, and I hug myself to stop shivering. They curse the Jews, the rayis and the rain. Because of the rain, the car keeps sinking deeper into the mud. I get out to help them push. The rain trickles in between my shirt and my neck, and a drop rolls down my back to my ass. Yallah, I say, trying to get Amin and Najib, who are getting tired, to push harder. They push a little more and the car starts to move. Good for you, ya Saddiq, they tell me when we’re back in the car, you have the strength of a young man. Shukran, I thank them, but their compliment doesn’t make me happy. Not even a little. On an ordinary day, it would, but not today. Today, the land registration certificate and the large key are in my bag. Today, I’m supposed to go into the house I was born in and take something that belongs to my mother. Today was supposed to be an important day. A special day.

And in the end — a roadblock.

And that word, roadblock, machsom. A Jewish word that the Arabs use all the time. As if we didn’t have a word for it in our own language. The same thing’s true of the words for fruit-picking and cream and the word for rolls, which I can see now on the right, written on the sign over a store: Manayish Rolls and Arabic Kubez. At least we use our own word for traffic light, ramzon, even though we only have one ramzon in the city, the one we’re stopped at now.

Shwaya, shwaya, take it easy, I tell myself when the light turns green and the driver tries to go around a puddle in the middle of the intersection. Be as patient as a sabra, ya Saddiq. You waited fifty years. You can wait another week.

*

The morning after the terrorist attack, the teacher came into the classroom, bit her lip and said, children, Daniel won’t be in class today because his brother was hurt in the bombing yesterday and he’s with him in the hospital. I am asking and sincerely hoping that all his friends will help him in the days to come and save him a copy of all the handouts I give you. Wait a minute, I thought, and took a good look at everyone’s face, was it like this when she told them about Gidi? Did Dor keep digging around in his ear? Did Maya keep on drawing those blue butterflies in her notebook? Did the teacher not say anything for a couple of seconds, and then ask, in her normal voice, for everyone to take out their bibles? Yes, I answered myself, and instead of feeling hurt, I actually felt good. As if a fat man who’d been sitting on my chest suddenly got up. Which made me think that if Daniel’s brother dies from his wounds, maybe Daniel will be the class’s new bereaved brother and everyone’ll feel sorry for him and whisper about him and watch him all the time to see how he acts, and they’ll finally leave me alone. Then I was ashamed for thinking that, it’s not nice to want someone else’s brother to die, but I knew that after school I’d go to Amir’s place and tell him exactly what I’d thought because that’s what’s so great about being with Amir, that you can tell him things like that and he doesn’t get all upset like my mother, who says her eyes are swollen from an infection, but it’s because she cries all the time, or like my father, who sleeps on the sofa sometimes, not in their bed, or like when they hardly talk to each other.

The teacher asked us to open to the First Kings, Chapter 21, about Naboth’s vineyards, that we’d started studying last week. ‘And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying: “Give me thy vineyard,”’ she started reading, and I asked Dor to put the book in the middle of the desk because I forgot to bring mine. ‘“Give me thy vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house; and I will give thee for it a better vineyard than it; or, if it seem good to thee, I will give thee the worth of it in money.” And Naboth said to Ahab: “The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee.”’ After those two verses, she stopped, closed her book and asked: who can explain why Naboth refuses to give his land to the king?

All of a sudden, without my thinking too much about it, my hand moved away from the desk and my finger was waving in the air. At first, the teacher didn’t notice. She was so used to my not participating that her eyes skipped over me. But no one else wanted to answer, and when she looked around at the whole class again, she saw me. Yotam?! she asked, looking like she was sure I was raising my hand just to scratch my forehead. Yes, I said, and started talking. Without seeing them, I could feel everyone turning to look at me. I said that Naboth can’t take the King’s offer because he was born and raised on that land, and giving up his home would be like wiping out everything his father and mother did, and then he would be violating the commandment to honour his father and mother, which is one of the Ten Commandments, like we learned, even though his parents might be dead already. I said all that without stuttering even once, and the words didn’t get stuck in my throat like I thought they would, and none of the letters got switched around. Very good, the teacher said when I was finished, you’ve raised an interesting and definitely original point. Maya, did you want to add something?

I didn’t listen to the rest. I was so tired from talking that I couldn’t concentrate. I wanted the lesson to end so I could go to Amir’s apartment. I knew he’d be really happy that I spoke in class. The last time I was at his place, after I beat him twice in a row in chess — once was the fool’s mate, he hasn’t been focused at all lately — I told him that I didn’t talk in the lesson because I was afraid I’d stutter, and he said he’d been like that too: every time he moved to a new city, a new school, he wouldn’t say word at first, he’d just watch how the other kids acted, like a spy hiding behind a newspaper. So when did you get over it? I asked and tried to imagine him as a kid my age. It went away by itself, he said and started setting up the white pieces for another game. Don’t worry, one day you’ll have something really important to say, and then you’ll talk. Meanwhile, you’re learning how to listen, which is just as important.

*

Listen, Amir,

How can I explain this to you. It’s like you’re driving in a car, and all of a sudden there’s a bump and the car leaves the road and floats in the air for a minute, and your stomach sinks and electricity flashes through your temples. Or like when you dive right in and kiss a girl for the first time, and you don’t know whether she even wants to. Or like … OK, enough comparisons, bro.

Yesterday

I

Bungee

Jumped!

Hold on. I know you’re not crazy about stuff like that. But listen for a second. Listen and then you can put me down. Yesterday, we came to a small town called Palacio, near the border with Peru. The minute we got off the bus, they shoved flyers at us with a blurry picture of the bridge you jump off. All those big operators had the same flyer with the same terrible picture. It’s incredible how they don’t have the slightest bit of business initiative here. Please, I said, and pushed them out of my face, talk to me the day after tomorrow. But the New Zealanders who got off the bus with me went wild about it. Where is it? How much does it cost? When does the shuttle leave? Seems they’ve been bungee jumping from the day they were born (did you know that bungee jumping was invented in New Zealand in the 1940s?), and they get their thrills collecting certificates saying they bungeed at bungee-jumping sites all over the world. Sick, yeah? I thought so too. But the next day, I went with them anyway because there was nothing else to do here and also because of Jenny, a very dark-skinned girl from New Zealand who I liked from the minute she got on the bus with a backpack that was twice her size.

I sat down at a table at a small kiosk by the foot of the bridge. It looked out on to the bridge you jump from and also the river where the boat waits after you jump (you can ask the operators to plan the length of the rope so that your head lands in the water or not). I watched the New Zealanders climb on to the bridge, one by one, tie the ropes and rings around themselves, stand right on the edge of the ramp, bend forward a little, and then (with the help of a little push from the operators), jump. The first to jump, a huge guy named Rod, let out a bloodcurdling shriek that echoed and re-echoed through the mountains. I stood up like the fans in Bloomfield who stand up when they think there’s going to be a goal. I was sure he’d crashed on the rocks and that the parts of his body were like islands in the stream. But no. His bald head dipped slightly in the water and he bounced back a few times like a human yoyo till he got steady just slightly above the river, and the boat picked him up and brought him to shore. That stomach-flipping shriek of his convinced me that my decision not to jump had been right. But the ones who jumped after him were a lot calmer. Some of them blew kisses into the air before they jumped, like movie stars. Some stuck their hands out in front of them like they were diving into a pool, but my Jenny was the absolute best. She stood like a stork, one leg raised behind her, and spread her wings before she jumped.

After she jumped, my lower back started to itch. If that tiny little thing can do it, maybe I could get over my fear?

Wait a minute. Do you even know that I have a thing about heights? I don’t think so. Big surprise, right? There are things you still don’t know about me, even after seven years of friendship. It’s not exactly a fear of heights, more like the desire to jump. Every time I’m standing in a high place (like on the balcony of your old apartment in Ramat Gan) I get this strong desire to jump. Not to float. Not to fly. To jump and crash. I remember the first time it happened. It was in Italy. My mother and I went up the Tower of Pisa, and on the seventh floor (the Tower is built like a wedding cake, every floor is a layer that you can walk on), I suddenly had the urge. There was no railing. Or barricade. I could’ve taken three steps forward and found myself in the air. I was so scared I might do it that I flattened myself against the wall and pressed my hands against the concrete. I remember the cold feel of the stone. My mother was pestering me to get going: there are two more floors, she said. I told her I couldn’t move. What do you mean, you can’t move? she asked and came over to me. I can’t, I repeated. I knew for sure that if I moved, I’d jump. There was a small commotion. Tourists pointed at us. A Japanese guy took pictures. Finally, they had to bring two security people to peel me off the wall and drag me downstairs.

From that day on, everyone in my family knew that I had a fear of heights, and I went along with the diagnosis, even though I knew I had no fear, just the strong desire to jump.

Weird, huh? Just doesn’t make sense, does it? After all, I love life and never, not even during the worst parts of basic training, not even after Adi and I split up, did I ever have thoughts like that.

I’ll be damned if I understand it. Psychology probably has a name for it, right?

So why am I telling you all this? One: because it’s night here and Jenny has a boyfriend in Auckland so she’ll do a little kissing, but she won’t come to my room, and my room’s small, no windows, and someone’s snoring on the other side of the thin wall and I’m in a confessional mood.

And two: so you’ll appreciate what I did after Jenny jumped.

I got up, paid the kiosk owner for the three Fantas I drank and started walking towards the bridge. The New Zealanders, who’d all finished jumping and were drinking beer at the table next to mine, cheered me. Go, Modi, go! Rod yelled in a thick, hoarse voice that didn’t have the slightest resemblance to the shriek that came out of him when he jumped.

As soon as I got to the jumping-off spot, I started to change my mind. The operators were three young guys, and when I got there, they were just starting to chew coke leaves. The ropes lying around looked old, with split ends. The iron rings were in an advanced state of rust and the whole bridge looked too narrow to hold the apparatus they’d put on it. OK, Modi, I thought, bungee jumping is cool, but why here, of all places? There’s not a single bus on this whole continent that leaves on time. The men are almost always drunk. And a week ago, the train you were on stopped for two hours and the driver poured cold water on the tracks to cool them off (what the hell’s the point of cooling off train tracks?).

I took a quick look at the river. It was a lot further down than I’d thought and the rocks were too close. One little swerve, and I get banged up. The New Zealanders waved at me from the kiosk. Jenny was with them already, her hair still wet from her quick dip in the river. That’s it. Too late to change my mind.

I let the young guys tie me and hook me up and put cuffs around my legs. I put on the ridiculous protective vest they gave me and I told the one who asked that I didn’t want my head to touch the water. I hate it when my head gets cold.

We moved forward, me and the guy who was helping me, step by step until we got to the edge of the ramp. He grabbed me hard by the arm and asked if everything’s all right, if I feel OK. I looked down. First at my knees. Then at my shoes. One shoelace was loose, so I tightened it. And then, very gradually, I moved my eyes downward a bit more. The whole flowing river was spread out in front of me. The boat that was supposed to pick me up was waiting. Near a rock. And then — it came over me again. That same desire to jump that I’d had on the Tower of Pisa. That same craving to take one more step. But this time I could do it!! The guy with me asked me in English: Are you OK? I nodded. He said to me: you can jump now. And then I fell.

It’s hard to describe what happened then. I closed my eyes, so I can’t tell you what the river looked like. I can only say that after about ten metres I felt help-me shivers or orgasmic shivers settle on a spot on my lower back and spread from there like two arrowheads through my body. Then, before I had a chance to scream, the cable pulled me up. There was another second or two of hovering, and then, the landing. And the jerking around. And the nausea. And there’s the boat, ready to pick me up. They offer me some papaya juice, but I don’t take it. Then they bring me back to the kiosk. Jenny kisses me on the cheek. I collapse on a black plastic chair and put my feet up on another chair. I drink water from someone else’s glass. And look at the next guy standing on the edge of the ramp waiting to jump off. It doesn’t faze me in the least. Just the opposite. That nice ‘after’ feeling flows through my body, from head to toe, and suddenly I have the feeling — and it’s an even more wonderful feeling than what I felt when I actually jumped — that no tall building in the world, no balcony without a railing, will ever scare me again, because I’ve already been there, I’ve satisfied the urge — and come back (although I still have to check out this dramatic announcement in reality).

It’s weird, but I hadn’t really absorbed that it happened until now, when I’m writing, as if someone has to say or write it in Hebrew for it to be true, and if it’s in English — which is the language I’ve been speaking here for the last week — it can only be a scene from a film.

It isn’t only Hebrew that I miss, bro. It’s you too.

Maybe you can still find a break in your timetable and come here between classes?

Even with all the munchies and the bungees, the nights on a trek can be pretty long. And the days too. In one really infinitely long trip, I’ve been alone so much that I’ve starting talking to myself out loud.

By the way, I’ve noticed an interesting anthropological phenomenon. Hostels have three kinds of room: with a double bed (for lovers), with twin beds (for friends) and one bed (for singles). In the first two kinds of room, the walls are bare, there’s nothing on them except nail holes. But in the rooms that have one bed, the walls are full of graffiti — curses and declarations of love and confessions and quotes from songs by Pink Floyd, Kurt Cobain and even Aviv Geffen.

Bro, what you wrote about the assassination was very moving. The truth is that the rumour got here before your letter did. New muchilleros brought newspapers from 5 November in their backpacks. But I couldn’t connect to what people were feeling until I read your letter about the graffiti they wrote all over the square where he was killed. But still, I’m sure I can’t even begin to understand what you’re all feeling. When the most important decision you have to make is whether to order scrambled or fried eggs for breakfast, and the worst war you find yourself in is with the hostel owners about how much to pay for a night, everything looks far away and blurry. Like when you watch the world news round-up and see something horrible that’s happening in Somalia and then forget it two minutes later.

But maybe it’s good to forget sometimes, right?

Which reminds me — be careful with those nutcases of yours. I don’t know, something about the way you write about them has me a little worried. Especially that Shmuel. Sounds just like a cuckoo’s nest. I’m not saying you have to leave, just tie a cable to your back so you can pull yourself up if you fall into the abyss. I don’t want to remind you what happened the last time you weren’t careful, and this time, bro, it’ll be a little harder to get there from South America to shove the barrel aside.

By the way, have you told Noa about that yet? You have to fill me in so I won’t blurt out something by mistake in front of her when I get back (if I get back).

And now that we’re talking about her, how is she, really?

I was surprised when you wrote that she’s a lot more difficult than you thought and that you’re not sure she’ll ever be happy. Well he-ll-o, Amir! You’re just finding that out? Of course she’s difficult. Like all your other girlfriends were. That’s how you like them, right? I mean, if she was cuddly and easy, you’d be bored, right? Admit it.

I see you nodding slowly and smiling a little smile to yourself, and swearing at me for being right, and then going to the bathroom, stroking Noa’s hair on the way, and sitting down on the toilet, reading this letter from the beginning and thinking: what happened to Modi? What’s with this letter? It’s not like him to make speeches. The truth is that you’re right. I just read it over from the beginning and noticed that it’s a little different. It must be this windowless room. And Jenny’s boyfriend from Auckland. And the rain that’s been coming down for two days.

But it’s not so bad — that’s what’s so great about travelling –

I’ll be in another place very soon.

Yours,

Modi

*

Modi bungee jumped.

Wow.

From some bridge in Ecuador. He’s ecstatic. I got a five-page letter from him about it.

Lunatic.

Look who’s talking. You wander around Jerusalem looking for terrorist attacks. Don’t you get scared sometimes?

Truthfully, no. When I have a camera in my hand, I work. All I think about is light and composition and stuff like that.

And it doesn’t drive you crazy, all that glass and blood and tears?

Are you any better? With all your loonies?

I didn’t say I was better.

You didn’t say it, but you thought it.

No I didn’t.

OK, you didn’t. Tell me, why are you so aggressive?

I’m aggressive?

Yes. Why are you against me?

I’m not against you, I’m worried about you.

No you’re not, you’re worried about yourself.

That’s not true, I’m worried about you. Promise me you’ll call next time.

I’ll call.

Do you swear by Diane Arbus?

I swear by Diane Arbus. Why are you making such a big deal about it?

Because I think you’re putting yourself in danger on purpose, that you’re looking for it, that you like flirting with death.

It’s not fair, what you’re doing now.

Why not?

Because I told you already, I was a different person at sixteen, and there’s no way it’ll happen again.

Okay.

Besides, I asked you not to mention it.

OK, I’m sorry. (How is it that this ends up with me apologising? Unbelievable.)

(What does he want from me? He should give me some space.)

(Why is she quiet now?)

(He’d like me to sit home all day, like him.)

(Why do I always have to be the one to apologise? Let her do it for once.)

(Why is it his business what I do? He should leave me alone.)

(She should be the first one to say something.)

(He should be the first one to say something.)

What are you thinking about?

Nothing, this conversation is making me tired.

(Terrific, now she’s turning her back and here we go, another night without sex. We haven’t had sex for two weeks. We haven’t had sex for two weeks. We haven’t had sex for two weeks.)

(We haven’t laughed for two weeks. All that death around us has crept inside us.)

(That’s why I walk around starving, even a strip of Sima’s white bra turns me on.)

*

Those doctors. They act like they’re God, dressed in white, looking through you like you’re a window, but when something goes wrong, all of a sudden they’re the smallest, the most pathetic, the most sorry-but-things-like-this-happen. Damn them. They let Avram wait three months for the operation, even though he hasn’t been able to sleep for a year and a half because of the pain. They promised it’d be a simple operation, no complications. One of the most common operations in the hospital, Dr Zehavi told Gina, you have nothing to worry about. He’ll be home in three days, a new person.

The minute I saw the doctor walking toward us after the operation, I knew something had happened. It was as if the whole man had turned into a back. No face. No stomach. Just a back. All four of us went over to him together, but for some reason, he decided to talk to me. Maybe because he saw that I wasn’t part of the family, and he had less to be afraid of with me. It’s going to be more complicated than we thought, he said and sank further into his back. Avram’s blood pressure dropped during the operation, probably because of the anaesthetic, which means that the amount of oxygen to his brain decreased dramatically for at least five minutes. And it seems that he’s allergic to one of the anaesthetics, which adds a toxic effect, that is to say …

But the stones, what about the stones? Gina burst out, demanding that he look at her.

We removed his gall bladder, but we’ll have to wait and see how his brain function is affected by what happened.

What brain? What does the brain have to do with it? Gina asked, waving her finger in the air, it’s a stomach operation, isn’t it, doctor? That’s what you told me. You said it’s a simple operation, that’s what you said!!

Mama, calm down, don’t yell, Menachem said and put his hand on her arm. It’s a good thing he came, I thought. He’s the only one in that family who can handle her.

Can we go in to see him, doctor? Moshe asked and pointed to the locked door.

No, it’s too soon, the doctor said. Actually, he’s still being operated on. I suggest that you go home to rest and come back early tomorrow morning.

And I suggest, doctor, that you don’t make any suggestions, I was surprised to hear Menachem say, so angry that his beard was shaking. The doctor swallowed the insult. I could see it pass through his Adam’s apple to the indentation between the arteries in his neck and settle in his chest. No problem, he said and put on his gloves, you can stay and I promise to keep you informed of developments.

He went back to the operating room with the same stooped walk, and Gina collapsed on to a bench. I sat down right next to her. That woman had been mean to me so many times, had put me down for the way I cook, had contradicted me in front of Liron, kept talking to Moshe about single women even after we got married, but even so, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her now. Avram was everything to her. She married him when she was fifteen and he was thirty, and she’s looked up to him ever since, even though he’s short. She doesn’t know how to write a cheque without him. Doesn’t know how to change a light bulb. Now she swore at the doctor in Kurdish, out loud, so the whole department could hear. And she also grumbled a few words to Moshe. Sometimes, it’s probably easier to get angry than to be worried, I thought. And put a hand on her shoulder.

*

Sima asked Noa to watch Lilach for just a few hours at their house. And now Lilach’s fingers are drumming on Noa’s face. She holds her close and inhales her smell. Drowns in the green of her eyes, and feels a shiver of pain deep inside. But only a shiver for the time being, and she can push it aside. There’s still a fire burning inside her that water can’t put out. She still wants to know what it’s all about. To shout. To run through the streets. Far. Very far. It’s too soon for her to keep her passions inside. Not to mention Amir, who doesn’t even know what his passions are. And now he’s afraid that psychology isn’t one of them. And lately, the air between them has been leaden. He’s as quiet as a school during the summer vacation. And she comes home late on purpose, to avoid confrontation.

Noa puts Lilach back into her cot and slowly lulls her to sleep. Despite everything, she’s glad Sima asked her to babysit. It’s nice to know that she’s good at it. That there’s at least one little creature in the world who doesn’t think she’s hard to be with.

Suddenly, there’s a knock at the door.

She walks across the room to the door and looks through the peephole. The Arab worker is standing there. Breathing hard, as if he’s been running. Lilach starts to cry, startled by the unexpected visit. Noa picks her up and asks: who is it? It’s Madmoni’s worker, Saddiq replies, without adding another word. What could he add, his name? What could that possibly mean to her? She goes back to the peephole. And looks through it again. Madmoni’s worker is standing in the same place. He has gentle eyes. And grey stubble on his face. And he’s wearing a funny, long belt that reaches the floor. But still, because of Lilach and the number eighteen bus, she doesn’t open the door.

*

A day later, the Zachians occupied the Surgery Department at Hadassah Hospital. The eight brothers plus all their wives plus the older grandchildren — they all came and took over the waiting area. The men prayed with Menachem, the women made a circle around Gina and whispered stories to her about this one’s cousin and that one’s nephew, who went through exactly the same thing and ended up fine. The children ran around in the hallway and kept asking for coins to put in the snack machine.

We were all waiting for our turn to go in and see Avram.

The first ones to go in were Gina, Menachem and Shuli, Oved’s wife, who was once a nurse in Poriya Hospital and so everyone thought she was a big expert. They stayed in the room for maybe an hour, and when they came out, Gina was leaning on Menachem and Shuli looked at us and twirled her finger next to her temple. Without saying a word, they split into two delegations. Menachem, with Gina on his arm, went to update the men. Shuli signalled the women to gather round her and she spoke in a low, self-important voice: Papuka Avram. He’s majnun now. They poured all kinds of stuff into his brain, and now he’s talking crazy. We went in to see him. He didn’t say hello. Didn’t recognise us, not even Gina. He kept asking if we knew where his son, Nissan, was. You know who Nissan is? All the women nodded obediently, but Shuli told them anyway. He was their first child, even before Menachem, and he died of some sickness on the way to Israel. Now, all of a sudden, he can’t stop talking about him. He has a demon inside, papuka. The whole time: where’s Nissan? where’s Nissan? who took Nissan? Shuli described Avram’s pale face, his dreamy look, the deep wrinkles in his face, which she thinks are even deeper now. Meanwhile, I went to look for Moshe. I saw him standing on the edge of the group of men and I watched his reactions. I know him by heart: the way his eyes close, really fast, when something hurts him. The way he beats his fist on his thigh twice when he’s cross. The way he scratches his ear when he doesn’t know what to do. I also knew that at some point, when Menachem finished giving his speech, his eyes would look for me.

On the way home, he held the wheel tightly with both hands. People always drive carefully when they’re coming home from a hospital, and besides, the road from Ein Kerem to the Castel is narrow and covered with all that slippery sand that spills out of the trucks leaving the quarry, and it was a dark night (the Mevasseret council has enough money to light every little street and alley, but not enough to light the main road to the Castel? Who are they kidding?). He started to relax a bit when we got closer to our neighbourhood, and he took one hand off the wheel, put it on my knee and said, thank you. For what? I asked, and he kept on stroking my knee and said, for everything you’ve done these last couple of days. I didn’t do anything special, I said, and he turned into our street and said, yes you did, don’t argue, do you always have to argue? He smiled, and so did I, because I really am like that, and after we parked behind the bus, Moshe switched off the headlights, switched on the small light inside the car and turned his whole body around to me. He asked if he could put his head on my lap for just a minute and I said, yes, even though I was thinking it wasn’t nice to keep Noa waiting, it had already been three hours, and he bent down slowly to the right until his neck touched my thigh, and I stroked his hair without saying anything, because I felt that he wanted to talk, and after a minute he said, I don’t understand how it happened. The man goes in for an operation and comes out sick. I know, I said. And Moshe went on: besides, why’s he talking about Nissan all of sudden? I haven’t heard that name for twenty years. Did he love him very much? I asked. I don’t know, Moshe said, he never talked about him, only once, when my mother saw some boy on television and said he looks just like Nissan, and he said to her, what are you talking about, Nissan was a lot better looking. And that was it? He never mentioned him again? I drew a question mark on Moshe’s forehead. He said no and went on: my mother says there’s demon inside Papa. That’s why he’s talking about Nissan now. A demon? I kept myself from laughing. I think it’s stupid too, Moshe said, but she wants to call an exorcist, some old man who used to do that in Kurdistan. An exorcist?! I said, shocked. You know my mother, Moshe said, just try talking sense to her. Yes, I agreed, and smoothed down Moshe’s right eyebrow. I could have made fun of her, but I didn’t want to spoil the mood, so I just said: let her call him. The worst that can happen is that it won’t help and it won’t hurt. Moshe said: you’re right, it won’t help and it won’t hurt. We sat in the car like that for a few minutes, not helping and not moving.

Once, we used to do that a lot. Sometimes he’d fall on me and sometimes I’d fall on him. But for the last few weeks, with this whole business about the kindergarten, we’d pulled away from each other into ourselves. Now, in the car, I could feel again how much he’s mine and how much I’m his, and I let that feeling spread through my body like hot chocolate. Let’s go, he said and opened his eyes, Noa’s waiting, and I was glad he was the one to say it, not me. All of a sudden, I was ashamed of the dream I had about Amir the day before yesterday — his hand slipping under a dress that wasn’t one of mine, stroking the inside of my thigh. Who needs Amir when I have such a teddy bear, I said to myself, and helped Moshe get up. We got out of the car, closed the doors quietly and walked together to the house, close together, not the way we’ve been for the last few weeks with him half a metre in front of me. While I was looking for the key, he leaned on the door and looked at me gently, as if he couldn’t care less if he had to wait like that the whole day, his whole life, but when my fingers got to the bottom of my bag, Noa opened the door and said, I’m glad you’re back, I was beginning to think something had happened. Before I could ask, she answered, the kids are fine, Lilach’s been sleeping for a couple of hours and Liron’s in the shower. I’m going to dry him off, I said, but Noa grabbed my hand: wait, you didn’t tell me, how’s Avram? Not good, I said, and Moshe added, not good at all, and he started to tell her the bad news. Meanwhile, I went to check on the little prince, and when I came back Noa said, I just told Moshe that I have an uncle, my grandfather’s brother, in fact, who had the same thing and a month later the effects of the anaesthesia wore off and he was fine. Yes, we’re all praying for that to happen, Moshe said and started to peel off his coat. Here, I said and took a fifty-shekel note out of my wallet and handed it to Noa. Are you crazy?! she said, pushing my hand away, don’t be silly. I insist, I said. What’s the matter? she said; if anything, I have to pay you for letting me be with that sweet little girl. Anyway, if you really want to pay me back, bring us some of your cooking. The smells that come in through the hole for the water heater make our mouths water. It’s a deal, I said, laughing. Then Noa grabbed her head. How could I forget?! she said.

What?! Moshe and I asked at the same time.

That Arab, Noa said. Madmoni’s worker. The one who tore Gina’s bags. He knocked on the door and wanted to know where the old man and woman who live upstairs were, why they’re not at home. I asked him what he wanted with them. He said he needed something from the house.

That’s it, Moshe said, I’m going over to talk to Madmoni right now. What does he mean, he needs something from the house? It’s his house all of a sudden?

Really, he looks pretty pathetic, Noa said, trying to calm him down. He’s an old man.

Pathetic my foot, Moshe said and put his coat on again. I don’t want him here hanging around the children.

*

Amir already knows how it’ll end. One day, when he takes his eyes off the road to fiddle with the radio, he’ll swerve right into an oncoming truck. And smash. That’ll be it. Over in a flash. The radio will stop on the classical music station and the sounds of a requiem will fill the air. An ambulance siren will blare. Traffic will pile up in the opposite lane because of drivers slowing down to stare.

He’s already been saved from similar scenarios at the last minute. He’s managed to pull the wheel to the right or the left. And prevent disaster. But he knows it doesn’t matter. He can follow all the safety rules and drive slowly all the way: in the end, it’ll happen anyway. He can see the headline in his imagination: ‘Died Trying to Change the Radio Station’, or ‘Musical Death’ (if the editor doesn’t have enough space). Yes, it’s no use fighting it. It’s a lost cause. Even if they send him to Gaza on reserve duty, even if he gets a disease that has no cure. It’ll end because of music. That’s certain.

(And, he thinks, there’ll be a circular justice to it, because music is what saved his life twice in the past. Well, saved his life is a slight exaggeration, but whenever his spirits had sunk as low as they could go, in basic training, for example, he grabbed on to a song that was being played on the radio at the time, or a tape that Modi had edited for his twentieth birthday, and let the sounds flow through him, to start the countdown from the beginning again, to remind him that he didn’t have to be so sad, that not everything in his life was bad, not everything was black.)

As for Noa, she’d already visited the cold side. And come back.

When she was sixteen, she’d had enough and taken almost a whole bottle of Advil. And thought: a few minutes of nausea, and I won’t have to suffer any more. I’ll just lie down and die. And thought: Mum won’t cry. Not even when she finds me dead in my bed. And her conscience? Half a pang at best. And her dad? I wonder how many days it’ll take before he’s out the door. Two? Three? No more than four. And the people at her school. For two years, they’ve been acting as if she isn’t even there. They think she’s weird. She dances like a boy, philosophises about everything. And the whole world — evil at its core. Hopeless. Corrupt. Why live in such a world any more? A world without love.

In the end, her stomach was pumped. The doctor agreed not to put ‘suicide attempt’ on her file so the army would take her (funny, he thought he was doing her a favour). Her parents sent her and themselves to the most expensive psychologist they could find. And agreed that it would be best not to let the story get around. People wouldn’t understand, and they might put a label on her. They’d have to waste energy on an explanation instead of dealing with the real situation.

Even six months later, no one could define the real issues. They formulated a few rules. Made promises. Her mother surprised her by wetting a few tissues. Then they bought the psychologist a plant, a farewell gift, and spoke about the subject as infrequently as they could. Her parents went back to their comfortable routine. Suddenly, without a word of complaint, they had enough money to buy her materials and she started to paint. She splattered the canvas with all the colours bubbling inside her.

For hours, she’d sit in front of her easel, dipping her brush, drawing a line, losing her sense of time. There was always another painting to finish. Another painting to start. Another reason to leave the Advil bottle in the bathroom and focus on her art. Meanwhile, the boys in her class started showing an interest. Her beauty, which was beginning to show, saved her from loneliness. Her eyes looked straight ahead into other eyes. Her dresses got shorter and shorter, showing her thighs. In no time at all, she didn’t have to hide behind trees at breaktime. In no time at all, the boys were showing off for her every day. Pimply-faced teenagers hanging on every word she had to say.

Of course, she didn’t tell anyone what she’d done. She preferred to pretend the Advil night had never happened. If she could keep up the pretence that life was great, maybe she’d really start feeling that way before it was too late.

(It wasn’t until years later, when she and Amir were lying on top of the blanket in a rented bungalow, that she suddenly had a feeling that made her happy and frightened at the same time. She had to be totally open with him, he had to know. So she said: there’s something else I haven’t told you. And he said: so you’re really a man who had a sex change operation that really worked? She laughed and said, don’t be an idiot. Not that kind of something. She moved closer to him so she could whisper the rest. And spoke the words. Straight into his chest.

*

Rami the contractor said that if I show my face around there one more time, I can forget about all the money coming to me, even though he likes me and even though I’m his best worker. I don’t know what your story is, he said, but it has to stop, tifham? Rami likes to mix Arabic words into his speech, ya’ani, to show that he’s an ordinary guy. And no one corrects him, even though he makes a lot of mistakes every time he opens his mouth. OK, I told him. You have nothing to worry about, Rami. You won’t hear any more complaints. Anyway, I said to myself, the old man’s in the hospital and the old lady’s with him, and I don’t want to sneak into the house like a thief. I want to walk in and say: hello, the land you’re living on is mine. Your cooking, your fighting, your lovemaking — you do it all on my land, fahmin?

Ever since my mother said that the house I saw was ours, everything that used to be has come back to me. Not shwaya shwaya, not slowly, but all at once, as if a wall fell down in my mind and let everything in. All of a sudden, I remember the house where our neighbour, Salman el-Sa’adi, lived. His door was always half open, at night too, and he kept chickens in his yard. On very windy days, chicken feathers would fly over to our place and a brown feather would come in through the window and drift slowly on to the floor. I also remember his son, Wasim, who was the first friend I ever had. We used to climb trees and chase each other and have fist-fights, and after every fight my mother would lock me in the house, ya’ani to punish me, but only for a day, and then we’d go back to running around together and playing marbles and looking for ants’ nests so we could block them up with stones and see what the ants would do.

I also remember the day everyone ran away. I’d forgotten that day for almost fifty years. Maybe it was too painful to remember. How Mama put all our belongings into two big sacks — clothes and small pots, and some rice and olive oil — and sent me to Salman el-Sa’adi to ask if they had something that we could carry water in and I ran through the field and tripped on a stone and my knee bled, but I still kept running. Everyone around me was running, loading things on donkeys, swearing at each other, pointing to the hills. That’s where el-yehud, the Jew, would come from, they said. From there. I looked at the hills but didn’t see anything but the sun setting, and I kept on running till I got to their house, and Wasim’s mother gave me a big leather pouch covered in fox hair and said, give this to your mother, may Allah protect her, and on the way back — my knee was still bleeding — Kamel, who drew the water for the village, grabbed my hand, stuck his fingernails into my flesh and yelled at me, lawen, where to, where are you running to? Anyone who leaves his land has no life, no life. Halas, ya Kamel, leave the boy alone, someone who was tying a mattress on a donkey yelled at him, and Kamel swore and let me go. I ran all the way home, sure that my mother would be happy that I’d brought her a container for water, and she’d be proud that I kept running even though I was bleeding, but when I came in, she didn’t look at me. She was busy with Marwan, my brother, who was crying, why aren’t you taking my football? It’s all right, she told him, we’ll come back in two weeks and your ball will be waiting for you here. No it won’t, inti cazab, you’re lying! he said and kept on crying. Then my father went over and slapped him hard and said uskut, shut up, ya walad, you baby. That was when I started to understand that something serious was going on, that this wasn’t a game. My father never hit us. He was a quiet, shy man, and if he slapped Marwan, then something important was happening. Keep an eye on your little brother, my mother said, and pointed to Marwan, whose cheek was still burning from the slap, and go and pick some figs we can eat on the way. I took Marwan by the hand and we got small a bag. I climbed on to a branch and handed him a fig, then another fig, and he ate one and put one into the bag, ate one and put one into the bag, and we didn’t go home until the whole bag was full.

I’m looking at the fig tree now, from the ramp. They completely knocked down Salman el-Sa’adi’s house and built a big villa where it used to be, three storeys. Only stones are left from the mosque, at the bottom of the wadi. They built a synagogue where the village square used to be. But the tree is still there, in the same place.

When we went into the house with the figs, our fingers sticky sweet, we found my mother and father and Nabil sitting on a crate, trying to lock it but they couldn’t, so we sat on it too to help, then we walked through the house to check that we hadn’t left anything important, and then we closed the door and loaded the sacks and crates on to two donkeys and started to walk in the procession with everyone else. First, we walked very quickly, then slowly. I remember — yallah, it’s amazing how fifty years suddenly shrink in my memory, as if someone put them between two rollers and pressed — I remember that I asked Mama: where’s Wasim? Because I didn’t see him there. And she said, Wasim’s father has a brother in Gaza, and they’re going to stay with him. It’ll be better for them there, but don’t worry, ya ibni, we’ll all come back to the village in two weeks and you and Wasim will be able to fight again.

Fifty years passed and I still haven’t seen him. To tell the truth, I’ve never had a friend like Wasim since then. That’s the way things go. The friendships you have when you’re a child, they’re the strongest. In prison, when I was there, I asked the Gazans if they knew Wasim, but no one did. No one had ever heard of him. I wonder what he looks like now. Whether he got married. How many children he has. What kind of job he has. Maybe he went to Egypt. Or Qatar.

And I wonder what Mama left in the house when we ran away. What didn’t she put into the two big sacks we loaded on to the donkeys? What is it that’s so important to her that she wants me to bring it back to her?

Halas, as soon as the old man and woman come back to the house, I’ll go in and find out. I don’t care what they say. And I don’t care what Rami says. Let him fire me if he wants. Let him kill me if he wants.

*

When Sima thinks about ‘the end’, she thinks about her mother, even though she doesn’t believe in such things, it’s nonsense and she knows that very well. She likes to imagine how it would be to meet her in heaven (that tzaddikah would never be sent to hell). How she’d kiss her on both cheeks (if her mother only kisses one, she knows she’s about to get told off. How she’d disappear into her arms, like a gift into its wrapping. How she’d rest on her large breasts for a moment and listen to her heart beating. Then she’d tell her about all the things she hadn’t lived to see. How much her grandson loves to climb trees. How her granddaughter is already crawling around on her hands and knees. And how her daughter Sima listens to songs in French and is never scared. Later, when darkness falls on the trees in the park, she’ll tell her secrets she’s never shared. Like she used to when she was little and they sat in the kitchen. Oh, if only she were sitting in the kitchen with her now with the clock ticking quietly on the shelf, she’d tell her things she never even tells herself. For instance, that sometimes she’s sick and tired of Lilach’s crying. That sometimes she asks, why did I need another child, why was I in such a hurry to have more? And if her mother wasn’t shocked by that confession, she’d tell her about the students who were living in the apartment next door. About Amir who, she was embarrassed to admit, she was slightly attracted to. When she’d stood next to him a few days ago, his elbow had touched hers. Unintentionally, that’s true. And she felt a kind of flash in her chest she hadn’t felt in a long time. Naturally, she didn’t do anything. Didn’t make a peep. His girlfriend is lovely and she babysits for Lilach. Almost every week. And that day, there’d been a terrorist attack. But still, Mum, a flash in my chest. What do you think of that?

Moshe almost killed his buddy in basic training. During an exercise with the whole platoon. The buddy was supposed to jump, but he did it a second too soon. Moshe was shooting at a cardboard figure and didn’t see that someone had walked into his line of fire. Stop! Stop! someone yelled. He froze on the spot. Put the safety catch back on. The commander came running over like a madman. He slapped Moshe’s helmet: what did you do, you idiot?! Then he leaped right into the ditch where Moshe’s buddy was lying in a pool of blood. The wind whistled. Dust clouds whirled. All the soldiers stopped breathing, couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Moshe closed his eyes and for a long, long, long minute, he was sure he’d killed a human being.

It turned out that the bullet had scratched his buddy’s ear and he needed a stitch or two. The next day he was back in the field, as good as new. They kept Moshe in detention for twenty-eight days. Inspections all day long, inspections of every kind. When he got out, he wiped the entire event from his mind. When his friends in the neighbourhood asked why he’d been confined to the base, he told them that the military police had caught him without a beret. That was the only thing he could think of saying. And he never talked about it again.

Not until this week, when he took his hallucinating father home from the hospital in the afternoon. He suddenly remembered it, the exercise with his platoon. He bit his lip. Why was he remembering it now, of all times? And he had that same strange feeling he’d had when his commander jumped into the ditch to see if the soldier was dead: as if an ice cube were climbing slowly up his back to his head.

*

Come over, Sima called me through the water heater hole, you have to see this.

Gina brought an exorcist to get the demon out of Avram.

What?!! I said, shocked.

Yes, it’s really amazing, Sima said. It might be good for that project of yours? On God and all that.

I wanted to tell her that the project had been scrapped a long time ago, but I grabbed a camera and ran out instead.

In the end, of course, they didn’t let me take pictures. The exorcist, Hacham Yehieh ben Amar, Yehieh ben Amar the Wise, said that demons don’t like cameras and asked me politely but firmly to put the camera back in its case. I also remembered that the witches in Bolivia wouldn’t let anyone photograph them either, so I didn’t argue (one of those witches sold a yellowish love potion in a small bottle to a friend I was travelling with. We laughed about it for hours, trying to decide whether to put it in the tea or just pour it down the sink, and the next day, she met the love of her life).

Gina, tie Avram’s hands together, Hacham Yehieh ordered, and Gina did what he said. Now his feet, he said. Gina raised an eyebrow. Sorry, Hacham Yehieh apologised, it’s so that if the demon wakes up, he won’t kick us, God forbid.

Sima and I stood on the side smirking at each other. Hacham Yehieh saw us smiling and gave us a strange look that seemed to rebuke us but also hinted that we were accomplices. He looked pretty weird, that Hacham. I would’ve expected a certified exorcist to have a tangled beard and wear a long white robe, but Yehieh had on stonewashed jeans and a rainy-grey sweater, and he fussed around Avram with quick steps that made him look almost like he was dancing.

Avram was passive, completely out of it. Somehow, his eyes followed what was going on in the room, but without offering an opinion.

Now, Hacham Yehieh said and sat down at a safe distance from Avram, now bring … but before he could finish the request, a tub full of water was put in front of him and Gina handed him a towel. She knows the drill, I thought.

Hacham Yehieh put his hands into the tub and asked Gina to cover it with a towel. Sima jumped up and did it for her. She tucked the edges of the towel carefully under the tub and shot a look at Gina to check that she was doing it right.

Hacham Yehieh closed his eyes and started mumbling in a language I didn’t understand. I think he’s calling the demons now, Sima whispered in my ear. Even though I’d been warned not to, the temptation to pull my camera out of its case was enormous: a ray of sunlight had just come through the window, with dust motes drifting through it, and there was Hacham Yehieh, with his intense piety and Gina, with her wrinkles, and in the background the colourful cloth hanging in their living room, and a picture of Avram looking twenty or thirty years younger, wearing an old-fashioned white undershirt and holding one of the boys, maybe Moshe, in the air.

No, I told myself, and kept my hand close to my body. Gina would get angry. And Sima would never forgive me.

For a few minutes, nothing happened. Hacham Yehieh mumbled. The towel moved a little. Outside, two dogs barked a conversation. And then, all of a sudden, Avram started to tremble. At first, it was a slight trembling in his bound hands, then it got stronger and moved to his arms, his shoulders, and finally his whole body was shaking violently. Gina let out a terrified scream. It really was very scary. No external force was shaking him. He himself was looking at his arms in total shock.

Now Hacham Yehieh went from mumbling to shouting. I didn’t know what he was saying, but some of it sounded like pleading and some of it like threats. His hands were moving under the towel as if they were battling something. His face contorted in real or fake suffering, and shrill, chirping sounds came from the area of the tub, although we couldn’t tell who was making them. Calm down, Noa, I told myself. Those can’t be the voices of demons. There is no such thing as the voices of demons. Hacham Yehieh must be a ventriloquist and those voices are coming from his stomach. It’s coming from his stomach, I gestured to Sima, but she was totally mesmerised by what was going on under the towel and didn’t notice me. Small bumps began appearing on the surface of the towel, like the kind you see on boiling hot pizza, hills rose and fell, rose and fell, as if someone or something was trying to get out and couldn’t. OK, I thought, trying to calm myself down, maybe it’s his fingers, maybe he’s pushing his knuckles against the towel to create that effect. But no, there are too many bubbles. It can’t be that he’s raising his fingers in six different places, unless … unless what?

Very slowly, the hills flattened out and Avram’s shaking subsided. And Hacham Yehieh stopped suffering and spraying water all over the place.

Amir won’t believe me when I tell him about this, I thought. He’s at home all week, and the day they have their own episode of X-Files here, he goes to Tel Aviv.

Hacham Yehieh opened his eyes and motioned with his head for Sima to untie Avram’s hands and feet and take the towel off the tub.

I almost fell off my chair: the water was full of blood.

He wounded me, that momzer, Hacham Yehieh grumbled and asked Gina to bring him a bandage. Sima was so shocked that she cried out when she saw the deep cut that split one of his fingers. OK, that doesn’t mean a thing, I thought sceptically, he could have cut his finger himself. All you need is a paper-cutter up your sleeve.

Gina wound the bandage around his finger, shooting worried looks at her husband, who’d gone back to staring at the world with vacant eyes.

He’ll be fine, Hacham Yehieh said. You have nothing to worry about, Gina. There was an old demon inside him, a stubborn old demon who’s been wandering around here for almost fifty years. The demon cut me, but I drove him away, and now he knows not to start up with Yehieh. I’ll write something for you to put in an amulet he can wear on a chain around his neck so the demon doesn’t come back.

Gina nodded admiringly. I started to nod too, automatically, but caught myself in the middle and stopped.

Won’t you be fine now? Hacham Yehieh asked Avram, to prove what he’d said. Avram nodded obediently. Now do you remember what happened to Nissan? Hacham Yehieh asked him, and we all tensed up. Avram didn’t say anything. The sunbeam, which had been getting shorter the last few minutes, made its final retreat from the room. I suddenly remembered that there’d been a time when all the kids in my Girl Guide troop used to talk about seances. None of them ever took part in one, but everyone knew someone who’d been to a seance and seen the glass move across the letters.

Nissan’s dead, Avram said, interrupting my nostalgia. Nissan’s dead, he repeated and gave Hacham Yehieh a puzzled look. What made you mention him now?

*

There’s a demon wandering around Maoz Ziyon. From nightfall till dawn. And he’s black, not white, like you picture a demon. And he’s all alone.

For the first few years he tried to be likeable, initiate a dialogue, squeeze through open doors. But everyone — men and women, old folks and children — screamed when they saw him and drew back. When he tried to compliment one woman on the aroma of her cooking, she promptly had a heart attack. They saved her in the end, but he decided: he wouldn’t try to be anyone’s friend any more. And that meant giving up the pleasure he held most dear: listening to the residents whispering to each other, the demon was there, the demon was here.

Sometimes, sitting on the park bench, the old people still talk about it: how a ghost used to wander around the Castel at night. And they start arguing, each one trying to convince the other that he’s right (while the demon listens with pleasure from a safe distance, behind a tree): I saw him myself, my eyes can still see. He’s something the women and children made up, so how could that be true? He’s a refugee from World War II. What are you talking about, he first showed up here in the fifties. What fifties? Your memory’s out of control. My memory’s out of control? Your memory’s like a fisherman’s net with an enormous hole. A fisherman’s net with an enormous hole? Nothing you say is true. You were born crazy, Simon, and you’ll be crazy when they bury you.

When the conversation collapses on its own (the old people are tired and the sun is glowing gold high in the sky), the demon withdraws. He disguises himself as a shadow and slips through the alleyways until he reaches the palace he calls home: the cage of used cartons behind Doga and Sons.

Only once or twice a year, when a gap opens in someone’s soul, does he take advantage of the opportunity and slip into it. Such a perfect place to hide. So warm and pleasant inside. He can play all sorts of pranks, make them all look like fools. Scramble memories. Break rules. And hope that stupid Hacham Yehieh is called upon. So he can trick him: retreat and come back again later on.

*

And while I’m trying to stop the Arab, to push him out, and Gina goes to the kitchen and comes back with a frying pan to hit him on the head with, and we’re both yelling terrorist! terrorist! so the whole neighbourhood can hear — Avram, who’s been snoring on the sofa all morning, stands up suddenly, looks at him, barks uskuto! at both of us and walks over to him. He touches his shoulders, his hands, then his face, moves his finger over his cheeks, his nose, his forehead. The Arab is so stunned, he doesn’t move. Just stands there with his certificate and his rusty key. Not breathing. Then Avram gives him two light slaps, the affectionate kind, and moves a little bit away from him, the way you move away to look at a painting, and then he moves back, looks at him with dreamy eyes and says, Nissan, ya ibni, my son, welcome, and hugs him tight. Over Avram’s shoulder, the Arab gives us a what’s-with-him look, and Avram squeezes him tighter and keeps on saying, ya ibni, ya ibni Nissan, and the worker, who’s starting to feel uncomfortable, hugs him back with one hand, and with the other, points at Avram and says, my name is Saddiq, not Nissan. I never heard of this Nissan, and what’s wrong with this old man? Gina recovers first, curses Yehieh under her breath and explains to the Arab: Nissan was our first child who died when he was two, the day we moved into this house, and Avram, he’s my husband, he has a demon inside him this week, he thinks Nissan’s alive and that we all know where Nissan is but we hide it from him on purpose, but Nissan’s dead. Avram, Gina says, putting her hand on his shoulder and trying to pull him gently out of the embrace, Avram, Nissan’s dead, kapparokh. Don’t you remember what you said to Yehieh? I didn’t say anything to Yehieh! Why are you lying?! Avram yells and pushes her hand away, Nissan’s here! This is Nissan! He moves away a little and points at the worker. Come in, ibni, he invites him with a sweeping gesture of his hand, sit down, we’ll get you something to eat, something to drink, we’ll make a place for you to sleep.

Avram, listen to me for a second, I say, trying a more direct approach, he’s not Nissan, he works for Madmoni, you know Madmoni, your neighbour, the one who’s adding on to his house now? This is his worker, and his name’s not Nissan, it’s Saddiq. Who’s she? Avram points at me with a surprised look, then asks Nissan-Saddiq, who’s this woman who talks so much? Do you know her, ya ibni? Did you ever see her before? The worker looks at me, embarrassed. Avram, that’s Sima, Moshe’s wife, Gina says trying to remind him, and she points at our wedding picture hanging on the wall. Avram stares at the picture. Little Moshiko? He has a wife already? How could that be? You know about this, Nissan? Avram asks the worker.

Halas, I tell them. With all due respect, like they say, enough is enough. I’m calling the police now. Let them come and take you out of here, Mr Saddiq. How can they take me out of here when it’s my house? Saddiq asks quietly and waves his certificate in the air again. I ignore him and go to the phone. Avram rushes over — just a few minutes ago he was lying on the sofa and couldn’t move a finger — and steps between me and the phone. You’re not calling anyone, he yells, no one is going to take my Nissan away from me, do you understand? No one! If you call now, I’ll grab a knife from the kitchen and cut you and myself, do you understand? I stand still and look at Gina. She signals me with her eyes to let it go. OK, I say to Avram, OK, you don’t need a knife, no one’s going to take Nissan away from you. Avram doesn’t calm down. He stands between me and the phone for a while to show that he doesn’t trust strangers. I don’t move. Gina doesn’t do anything either. Slowly, his eyes stop darting back and forth and he goes back to fussing around the worker. You want something to drink? Maybe black coffee? How many sugars do you take in your coffee? And Saddiq answers: no sugar, I like my coffee bitter. Avram gives him a big ear-to-ear grin and says, just like your father. The worker nods and says Aiwah, and starts walking around the house. He knows that we can’t do anything to him now, so he allows himself to touch the stones, to go in and out of the rooms, to open and close the windows. He touches the wall that separates the bedroom from the living room and says to Gina, this wall didn’t used to be here, right? Gina says yes, we built it twenty years ago, and he nods without enthusiasm and says, I knew it. Look, I’m starting to remember, there, where the television is, that’s where my mother’s cooking stove was, that’s where she cooked so the smoke would go out. Where you cook is no good, madam, the smoke stays inside. Gina doesn’t answer him, no one answer him, we all look at him, hypnotised, starting to understand that maybe he isn’t lying, maybe he really did live in this house once. He goes into the bedroom and the three of us follow him. He points: look, this is where my mattress was, and that’s where my big brother’s mattress was, and my little brother’s next to it. We slept very close to each other because it was cold at night, not like now with the heating you have. We only had a little coal heater, and sometimes the coal would get used up and we had to rub each other’s back and hands to get warm. My mother would go to the neighbours to get more blankets, but the door to the house wasn’t where it is now. It was on the other side, behind your sofa. It’s still there, an iron door, you know that, don’t you? Of course we do, Avram answered quickly in a voice full of pride, you remember everything, ya ibni, you remember, and you, Avram said, turning to me, you lunatic, aren’t you ashamed to say that to Nissan? Look at how well he knows the house! Only a child knows his house like that, isn’t that true, ibni? Yes, abui, the worker answers him, playing the game and calling him father, knowing that as long as he’s Avram’s son, no one can touch him. He takes a few sips of the black coffee Gina gives him with hands that shake from old age and says, thank you very much, really, thank you, and then he puts his bag down on the floor and pulls out a toolbox. He takes a hammer and a chisel out of it and explains to us while he works. Fifty years go, my mother left something in there, above the picture where you put that hamsa, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to take it out now.

Before we can answer him, Avram says, of course, ya ibni Nissan, what’s mine is yours, take what you need, do you want me to bring you a ladder? Gina and I look at each other. The chisel is about to gouge the wall, but we’re both afraid to open our mouths because if we do, Avram will cut himself, and meanwhile, he goes to get Saddiq a ladder and comes back and they both open it in front of the wall and start taking down the hamsa, and Gina comes closer to me and whispers, Sima, ileh amokh, don’t you have to get back so the babysitter can go? I jump at the chance while the two men are busy and won’t notice, and I tiptoe to the door, put my hand on the knob and press it quietly to open it, then I close it behind me without shutting it all the way, and run down the steps to our house without looking back. I go inside panting and say to Noa: call the police.

*

I touch the stones, stroke them like you stroke a woman you love, but I don’t feel anything in my heart. I tell the Jews, there was a wall here, this is where my mother used to cook, that’s where the mattresses were and the heater next to them. I just say it, without feeling, like I’m telling Rami the contractor about how we’re doing on the frame. How long I’ve waited for this day, this moment, how much I’ve dreamed about touching these walls, walking on this floor, and now I don’t feel a thing. Here’s the old door. Here’s the window I used to look out of to see Wasim waiting for me, whistling. Everything’s here, even the old fig tree. But the smell, the house is full of their smell. The smell of that old man who thinks he’s my father, and of that woman with the wrinkles around her eyes. Their smell is in the walls and the floor and the sofa and the door and in the air and everywhere, even in the coffee. So why did I come here? My mother was right not to let us go to the old house when everyone else went, in ’67. What for? It’s better to dream. To sing songs. It’s better not to smell this smell. Not to see that they’ve taken down the pink curtains my mother made and put up new blue curtains, that they’ve built a new wall in the middle of my parents’ bedroom, that all our things have disappeared, the small rug from Damascus, the lamp from Hebron, the one I almost broke once, everything’s gone. The crazy old man says that only his son who grew up in this house could know everything so well. Right? he asks me, right, my Nissan? Of course it is, I tell him and ask him to bring me a ladder. Aiwah. Of course, he says. At least I can do this. At least I can bring my mother what she asked for. This, I won’t give up. It’s a matter of honour. I don’t care what that young one with the tiger eyes says. I don’t care if she goes to call the police now. They’re like putty in my hands, all of them. I’m Nissan, the crazy man’s son. And no one can touch me. I’ll set up the ladder in front of the old door, the door that doesn’t lead anywhere now, take the hamsa off the wall, take the chisel out of my toolbox and start banging.

*

In the end, the policemen came, three of them, and their chief, who was even shorter than me, almost a midget, asked immediately: where’s the intruder, miss? I pointed upstairs and said, you hear that banging? That’s him, there, taking apart the whole house. Armed? the midget asked. No, he doesn’t have a weapon, I said, and I don’t think he wants to hurt anyone, even though he has a chisel in his hand. O-o-kay, he said, and turned to the others, who drew their guns: no shooting without a direct order from me. Is that clear? Shooting?!! I said, scared, what do you mean, shooting? You don’t have to shoot anyone, officer, they are three old people in the house. With all due respect, miss, let me decide whether they’re dangerous or not, the midget said and signalled his men to follow him. I asked Noa to stay a tiny bit longer with Lilach and went out straight after them.

A bus that had pulled into the stop across the street let passengers off, and they all came over to see why a police car was parked here. That’s the way it is around here, everyone has to know everything. It’s OK, I gestured to them, everything’s fine. The policemen started going up the stairs and I grabbed the midget by his sleeve just before he got to the door and said that maybe I should go in first, so they won’t get scared. Absolutely not, he said and smashed the door hard with his shoulder, like you see in those TV series, but the door was slightly open — that’s how I left it when I sneaked out — so he kept right on going all the way into the living room. The other two policemen tried not to laugh and went in after him, and I locked the door. Thank God, Gina said and blew a kiss to the ceiling, thank God you came. Thank God for what? What are you talking about? Who asked them to come? Avram said, letting go of the ladder and walking over to the midget. Ah … the midget stammered and pointed to me, this lady here called us, she said an Arab broke into your house. Broke in? Who broke in? Avram said and grabbed him by his shirt. Ya ahabel, you idiot, this is my son, Nissan. I invited him in, and I’m overjoyed that he’s here. And who’s this? the midget asked, pointing at me. Avram looked at me and a spark of recognition flashed in his eyes. No one, he said, some crazy woman. She talks a lot but doesn’t understand much. She’s my daughter-in-law, Gina interrupted him (and I thought: the Messiah must have come, Gina’s saying something on my behalf?), and this is Avram, my husband. He’s a little … he had an operation, you know, and since then, he has a demon inside him, he thinks this Arab in Nissan, our son. He’s not your son? the midget asked, rubbing a button on his shirt. Of course not, Gina said. Nissan died when he was two, when we first came to Israel and moved into this house. And you claim that he is Nissan? the midget asked Avram, who was nodding impatiently as if even asking the question was an insult. O-o-kay, the midget said, walking over to the ladder and looking up at the Arab, who was standing on the highest rung. So all I can do is ask you, sir, who are you? I’m Saddiq, the Arab answered without stopping his work even for a second. And what are you doing here, if I may ask? This is my house, Saddiq said, and picked up the key that was hanging around his neck. Your house … interesting … the midget said, smiling crookedly. So if it is, maybe you could explain what all these people are doing here? They’re my guests, Saddiq answered as he pulled out the first brick and pointed to us: he’s my guest. She’s my guest. And that woman’s also my guest. They’ve been guests in my house for fifty years now. O-o-kay, the midget said and stuck his finger in his belt, I’m beginning to understand. And you have some papers that prove this claim of yours? Yes sir, Saddiq said and pulled the certificate out of his pocket, bent down and handed it to him. This is the land registry certificate from the Turks, he explained to the midget, it says here that this house belongs to the A’adana family, which is my family, and also all the land around it, half a dunam. The midget studied the certificate for a few seconds and then, as if he’d suddenly lost his patience, threw it on the floor and started waving his hands in the air: I don’t give a shit about the Turks! If you don’t have an official document from the Israeli government, then as far as I’m concerned, you’re trespassing! And you — he pointed at us — have to decide if you want to file a complaint against him. If you do, I handcuff him right now. If not, don’t waste our time. The Israeli Police has enough work without you wasting our time.

If that’s the case, I said, then I want to file a complaint. That man has been wandering around outside our house and bothering people for five months already, and now he has the nerve to …

No one is going to file a complaint against Nissan!!! We heard a voice shouting from the kitchen, and Avram came out with a bread knife in his right hand. I warned you, miss!!! he barked at me with murder in his eyes, I warned you not to do it!!! The two patrolmen jumped between me and Avram. I was so scared that I took a step back. Gina tried to calm him down, she put a hand on his shoulder. He pushed it away, put the knife on his Adam’s apple and said in the voice of a guy selling ice lollies on the beach, I’m cutting! I’m cutting!

In the name of Allah, say something to him, Gina begged Saddiq, you’re the only one he’ll listen to.

Saddiq hesitated for a minute, shot a quick look at the policemen and got off the ladder. Ya abba, he said and walked over to Avram, put the knife down. We don’t settle things with knives in our family. That’s not what you taught us. Avram looked at him, stunned, and then broke like a vase. He fell on to Saddiq’s shoulder with a heartbreaking scream: did you see? Did you see how he called me father? I told you he’s my Nissan. And you didn’t believe it, you didn’t believe me! Saddiq hugged him back with one hand, and with the other he gently took the knife from him and handed it to the midget. But the gesture scared the midget, who jumped back, whipped out his gun, fired a shot at the ceiling and then aimed at Saddiq.

That was the first time I’d ever heard a shot. I didn’t know how much it hurt your ears.

Why are you shooting? Saddiq yelled in panic and threw the knife on the floor, I wanted to give it to you, sir, just give it to you!

Plaster fell from the ceiling into the midget’s eyes. These contact lenses, he hissed to himself, why the hell did I buy them? and tried to take out a stubborn speck that had lodged under his lashes. One of the patrolmen went over to him, and while the midget pulled his lower lid down, he blew gently into his eye. They seem so good at it that they must have done it before. Thank you very much, Zabiti, the midget said, blinking. Sir, Zabiti said in an intimate tone that suited the moment they had just had together, I think, sir, that you’re making too much of a big deal out of what happened here, sir. Oh really, the midget said nastily, and what exactly do you suggest? We all tensed up waiting to hear what Zabiti, who had a tiny little scar on his forehead, would say. I think, sir, that we just have to arrest this Arab and figure out what to pin on him later. Why take risks, sir?

The midget nodded and Saddiq grabbed the ladder. Yes, the midget chuckled to himself and pulled the handcuffs off his belt, if the worst comes to the worst, we can charge him with interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty. Sure. Didn’t he interfere with us taking our lunch break? Wait a minute, Avram shouted and stood in front of the ladder. What do you think you’re doing? No one is taking my Nissan. That’s enough, sir, the midget said and signalled for his assistants to get into the act, that’s enough. Zabiti and his buddy walked up to Avram and each took one of his arms and dragged him to the side. Zabiti’s scar was blazing in the middle of his forehead as if it had suddenly come to life. Don’t hurt him, Gina cried, he’s an old man. If anything happens to him, I threatened, we’ll file a complaint against you, do you hear me? Avram kicked the air for a minute, then gave up and stopped moving, but he kept on yelling: Help! Help! They’re taking my Nissan! The midget ignored him and went over to Saddiq. Saddiq, an older man with soft eyes, made no sign that he was going to fight, and the midget was about to handcuff him when all of a sudden, the television crew came in.

In seconds they’d all burst into the room like locusts: a cameraman, a lighting man, a reporter wearing a tie and a man who was holding a big furry microphone. I couldn’t work out where they’d come from, but then I remembered: the community station has this hotline. If you give them a story that gets on the air, they give you a fifty-shekel coupon for the shopping centre. Someone must have heard the shot and called them.

Ladies and gentlemen, the tie started talking to the camera, and all the people in the room shut up, out of respect for the occasion. Ladies and gentlemen, drama at high noon. Our neighbourhood, which went through a difficult time a few months ago when it lost one of its sons in Lebanon, is back in the headlines tonight with gunfire in a private home, apparently related to terrorist activity. All the details are not yet known, but we are trying to find out now: what happened? Why were shots fired? Is this incident related to the recent suicide bombings? This is Sharon Dadon, Mevasseret On the Air. We’ll be right back with the latest updates.

The cameraman turned the camera on the midget. The tie told the microphone man to start recording right away, what was he waiting for. The microphone man looked down and pressed whatever button he pressed. The tie looked into the camera and said: we’re here with the highest-ranking police officer in the field. What details can you add, sir?

The midget cleared his throat twice and smoothed down a couple of rebellious eyebrow hairs: Unfortunately … he said with his chest puffed out self-importantly, but then he stopped talking and rubbed his chin. Avram was standing very close to Gina, as if the demon inside him was also afraid of the cameras. Saddiq kept on banging the wall with his chisel, trying to attract attention to himself.

I ran my fingers through my hair and thought about how when Moshe comes home at night, I’ll tell him about all of this and he won’t believe me. Not a single word.

Meanwhile, the midget tried to get started again: Unfortunately, he said, for obvious reasons, I am prevented from saying any more about this incident. All I can say is that the police will do everything it can to wrap up this case quickly while looking out for the interests of the public.

But even so, sir, the reporter persisted, perhaps you could shed a little light on what happened here during the last hour. Is there any truth to the rumour that shots were fired? Was anyone injured?

No comment, the midget answered authoritatively, and in order to stress that he meant it, he closed his eyes and repeated: no comment.

I can tell you what happened here, sir, Saddiq said suddenly from the top of the ladder.

The cameraman moved quickly towards him, bumped into the sofa and swore in English. The lighting man, the man with the microphone and the reporter followed him and stood around the ladder. Then perhaps you’ll tell us, the reporter said, how everything started?

Everything started an hour ago, Saddiq said. No, actually everything started fifty years ago, when the Jews came in and threw my family out of this house. On the night they drove us out, my mother left something here. And today I came here, to my house, to get what belongs to me.

I un-der-stand, the tie said in the tone of someone who didn’t understand a thing. So how did things deteriorate into shooting?

The shooting’s because of him, Saddiq said, pointing his chisel at the midget.

Because of me?! He threatened me with a knife, the midget said, breaking the official silence he’d imposed on himself just half a minute ago. That man broke into a private home, harassed the tenants and threatened to kill me with a knife.

Liar! He didn’t threaten to kill you, Avram broke away from Gina’s embrace and all the media’s attention switched right over to him. That man on the ladder is my son, Nissan. He came home to see me, his father. And all these people want to take him away from me. So I came out with the bread knife and told them that if Nissan goes, I cut.

And that’s when the shot was fired? the tie asked, and you could hear a little bit of disappointment creeping into his voice.

No, what are you talking about? Avram explained slowly, as if he was speaking to a child. Nissan here took the knife out of my hand and gave it to the policeman, and then the policeman shot at him for no reason.

The tie turned to the camera and motioned for the lighting man to turn the lights on his face. He squinted and said: It’s still too early to say, but from the testimonies we’ve heard in the field, it is possible that we’re talking about a police foul-up. And if so, it won’t be the first foul-up the Israeli Police has made recently, and perhaps, perhaps we’re talking here about a syndrome, a syndrome that some higher-ups are calling ‘the shoot first, think later syndrome’, while others are calling it …

What syndrome? What syndrome?!! the midget interrupted and tried to squeeze between the reporter and the camera.

Hey! the cameraman yelled.

Please, the tie said to the midget, you’re interfering with the media trying to do its job.

And maybe you’re interfering with me trying to do my job? the midget said, not moving from where he was. The two of them stood facing each other, like in a western. You could have cut the tension between them with a knife. A bread knife. But before either one could draw, some neighbours from our street burst into Avram and Gina’s living room. Somebody must have seen the television crew coming in and called everybody. Dalia’s Nissim was there. And Razi, who used to deliver for the supermarket. And Avi from Avi’s Flowers. And some other old people who always sit on the bench near the park and hassle the girls walking by. They stood in the middle of the living room, took a quick look at Saddiq, another one at the cameraman, and started yelling: Death to the Arabs! Death to the Arabs!

The lighting man turned on the spotlights. The cameraman rushed around trying to arrange the setting. The policemen started pushing the demonstrators out. By force. Watch the lamp! Gina yelled, watch the lamp, but everyone knew that Razi the delivery man was not the calm type. Once, he cracked an egg on the head of a woman who wanted to give him a tip, and now he gave Zabiti a little whack right on his scar, and Zabiti pulled out his club and a commotion started. Gina and I ran into the kitchen, behind the counter, and watched what was going on from there. I had a weird feeling — as if I was watching a film, the kind they show on the movie channel at two in the morning — as if none of it was really happening. Avi Flowers jiggled Saddiq’s ladder to shake him off it, but Avram went over and slapped him. Razi the delivery man and Zabiti had grabbed each other’s collars and were shouting at each other, don’t touch me! don’t touch me! The tie reported to the camera on the violent demonstration. The horny old men from the park bench started chanting: Po-lice State! Po-lice State! And everyone else joined in. The midget chased after Dalia’s Nissim, trying to get handcuffs on him. Gina said, call the police! Call the police! I told her that the police were already here and dragged her a littler further into the kitchen, just in case. The big picture fell off the living room wall and the glass frame shattered into a million pieces. Avi Flowers stepped on one of them and started screaming, I’m hurt! I’m hurt! And his blood dripped on to the carpet. That’s the end of our carpet, Gina said and called to Avram to let go of the ladder and come into the kitchen. A big black dog ran into the living room and started barking at the cameraman, of all people, and the tie raised his voice so he could be heard over the general uproar: the Israeli Police have once again demonstrated how powerless they are when dealing with situations of this kind. We are seeing once again how lack of judgement creates new problems instead of solving existing ones. Once again …

Halas with that ‘once again’, Zabiti said and snatched the camera with one hand (the other was still holding Razi’s collar). The tie suddenly looked helpless without the camera. The cameraman mumbled in English: this is un-fucking-believable, un-fucking-believable, and then went up to Zabiti and yelled at him in English: are you out of your mind, man?! Do you know who I am?

Chief, Zabiti suddenly called in a scared voice, there’s this guy here talking English. The midget, who was busy chasing the black dog, dropped everything and went over to Zabiti, his face pale. You know what the orders are about foreign media, chief, Zabiti said. Sure I do, the midget said, but are you sure he was speaking English? Zabiti nodded. Ask him where he’s from, the midget said, ask him who he works for. Vere are you, pliz, Zabiti asked in English. First give me back my fucking camera, then we’ll talk, the cameraman answered. O-o-kay, the midget said, climbed on to the coffee table, stood on tiptoe and announced: attention, ladies and gentlemen, until further notice this area is declared a crime scene and is off limits to the media. That’s denying us freedom of speech, the tie protested. Shut up, Zabiti told him, grabbed him by his tie and pulled him toward the door.

The rest of the people followed them out. The horny old men got tired. Dalia’s Nissim must have had to go back to Dalia. Avi Flowers was a little dizzy from the slap Avram gave him and he wasn’t sure now who was against who. And, besides, now that the television was gone, nobody was having fun any more. They left, one after the other, mumbled I’m sorry in Gina’s direction, wished Avram good health and kissed the mezuzah. Even the dog went out with its tail between its legs. Only the cameraman kept on demanding his camera back. But the midget refused to give it to him and told him, in Hebrew, that the Police Department’s office of confiscated property was open on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays, between nine and one, and on Tuesdays till two. Fuck you, the cameraman said and left too, without kissing the mezuzah.

Zabiti, the midget, and the third policeman who hadn’t said a word, leaned on the wall and licked their wounds. The midget talked to someone on his walkie-talkie and his tone got more apologetic by the minute.

Avram and Gina’s house looked like those houses you see on TV after a tornado has passed through them, or maybe a hurricane, I don’t remember what they call those storms. The carpets looked like rags. The table looked like a chair. The chairs looked like beetles lying on their back. And with all the plaster sprinkled on the sofa from the shot, it looked like a doughnut covered with powdered sugar.

I wanted to get out of there and get back to Lilach, but I knew that if I left now, Gina would never forgive me for not staying to help. So I took the broom out of the cupboard and started sweeping. Saddiq, who’d kept trying to make himself small during the whole commotion and let the Jews fight each other, went back to working with his chisel. I watched him working quietly, and all of a sudden I could see what he must have been like as a child. That happens to me with people sometimes. It happened to me with Moshe when we first met. It happened to me with Amir only a week ago (what a handsome little boy he was!), and now it was happening to me with that Arab. I could see him running around this house with laughing eyes, bringing his mother water from the well and fighting, not seriously, with his brothers. I was ashamed about pushing him and shouting like I did when he asked to come in. After all, what did he really want? To walk around the house he was born in and take something that belonged to him? When I went to Ashkelon a year ago and asked the family that bought our house if I could take a look around, they treated me very well and even invited me to stay the night. On the other hand, I thought, how could I have known? Today, any Arab could be a terrorist. After another few bangs, he dug out the second brick and exposed something behind it. Allah yasidni, God help me, he mumbled to himself and shoved his hand into the wall to take out what he’d found.

I stopped sweeping. Gina stopped crying that her house was ruined. Avram stopped asking Saddiq if he wanted more coffee.

Even the midget asked his chief on the walkie-talkie to call him back in a minute.

*

The minute the television people left, I knew I didn’t have a chance, that without the camera I was finished. It didn’t matter whether they called me Nissan or Saddiq, a dog’s tail can never be straight, and a policeman won’t fight an Arab without putting handcuffs on him.

But I still kept on working. I banged with the chisel till there was a crack between the bricks, and then I pulled out the loose brick the way you pull out a slice of cake. There was an empty space behind it, as quiet and cold as a grave. I stuck my hand inside and at first I didn’t feel anything, but when I stepped on to the next rung of the ladder and pushed my hand in deeper, I touched something. A bag. I pulled it out, and everyone in the house stopped talking. The policemen. The old man who thought he was my father. The young woman with the tiger eyes. They all wanted to see what was in the bag.

Inside the crumbling bag was another bag. The second bag was made of stronger cloth, the kind they make cement bags out of. The opening was held together with a thick rope tied in a complicated knot. I opened it, twist after twist. I used my teeth too.

The chief stopped talking with his generals and came over to the ladder too to see what was in the bag.

My mother hadn’t told me what she’d left there, but I could already see it in my head. What do people usually hide inside walls? Either weapons or money.

I pulled a gold chain out of the bag. A thin, delicate chain exactly the right size for a small woman’s neck. Even though almost fifty years had gone by, it still glittered in the light. Allah carim, dear God, I thought with fear in my heart, this is Grandma Shadia’s chain. All the old people in the family, my mother’s brothers and sisters, always used to talk about this chain. It had been handed down from mother to oldest daughter, from mother to oldest daughter for maybe a hundred, two hundred years, from the time the family was living in Lebanon. And no one knew where it had disappeared to during the war. Except for my mother, who knew and kept quiet about it. The chain slithered through my fingers like a snake. Why didn’t you tell anyone, ya umi? Maybe you were ashamed of leaving it behind like that. Of forgetting the thing that was most important to the family and running away. And now what? Maybe you don’t care any more. Most of the old people are dead already, and the ones still alive, their memories disappear like salt in water.

I’m asking you to hand over that chain, the short policeman said, coming closer to me and putting a foot on the first rung of the ladder.

I looked at the old man, at my saviour. I waited for him to wave the bread knife around again, to yell and save me. But suddenly his eyes were empty, and he looked at me as if I was air. Then his expression changed again, as if I was another one of those people he didn’t know, and all he said was, I’m cold. Then again, I’m cold. His wife said, come Avram, you’ve had a long day, maybe you should rest, and then she took him by the hand like he was a little boy and pulled him along to their bedroom.

I demand that you hand that chain over to me or I’ll be forced to arrest you, the short policeman said and took his handcuffs off his belt again.

I looked at the young woman with the tiger eyes. She looked back at me. I felt as if she wanted to say something on my behalf. I even thought I saw her lips move. But she didn’t say anything, and in the end, she even stopped looking at me and fixed her eyes on the hole in the ceiling made by the bullet.

This chain is mine, I said and put it into my pocket, it belongs to my family.

The other two policemen also moved closer to the ladder. That chain is stolen property, the short policeman said, and you’ll give it to me now. Later on, if you win the trial, you can go to the confiscated property department. It’s open on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays from nine to one and on Tuesdays till two, he said and smiled like an asshole.

Suddenly, my mouth was full of the words I hadn’t been able to say when the television crew was there, all the sentences that had been stuck in my throat like cement. That’s a sad joke, I said in a strong voice, like Gamal Abd al-Nasser in his good days. What’s happening here is a sad joke, but one day it’ll end, one day the strong will be weak and the weak will be strong, and then none of you will laugh any more, believe me, none of you will laugh.

Maybe some day that’ll happen, the short policeman said and grabbed my arm hard, but meanwhile, mister, you’re under arrest.

They put the handcuffs on me, dragged me out of the house and slapped me when I tried to resist. They pulled the chain out of my pocket and threw me into the police car. They blindfolded me with a handkerchief and slapped me again, harder, for the fun of it, and cursed me in Arabic the whole time — the Jews always curse in Arabic — and took me to the Russian Compound, to an investigator who wanted to know what organisation I belonged to, Fatah or Hamas, or maybe to the Popular Front, and I told him I’m just one man, alone, no organisation. He slapped me — the third slap — and kept at it. Isn’t it too bad for your family? he said, your children? Give me the name of your chief now and I’ll make sure you won’t get more than a year inside, and I said, what chief? What do you want? I didn’t do anything. What are you charging me with? And he said, oh man, we’ve got ourselves a smart-arse here, and without warning, like a football player kicking from where he’s standing, he gave me the fourth slap and yelled, who do you think you are? You have two choices, either you co-operate willingly or you co-operate unwillingly, which will it be? And I said, I didn’t do anything, no one sent me, I don’t know what you want from me. He got up and paced around the room to make me nervous. Then he went out and said to the guards waiting outside, take him to a cell, and the guards came in and blindfolded me again and dragged me through hallways that smelt of detergent. They took off the blindfold and gave me a fifth slap, you stinking Arab, and threw me into a small cell with Arabic writing on the walls and the smell of piss. But I didn’t care, because my heart was filled with happiness that I’d been in my house, that I’d gone back to my home and did what my mother asked. I’d gone into all the rooms and found the chain and made a big stink and they filmed it and it would probably be on television, on the evening news. For the first time, they’d see an Arab talking on television about his home, and the whole world would listen. The whole village would be proud of me.

There was a small TV set outside the cell, for the guards. I couldn’t see the screen because the guards had turned it towards them, but I could hear. From the kind of talking I heard, I guessed the news would be on very soon. First there was a quiz with organ music and loud applause after every sentence. Then they talked about food, and a woman talked about a British film they made in a large castle not far from London. Then there was the sports announcer, and I put a hand behind my ear so I could hear how many goals Liverpool had scored against Everton. Then, half an hour before the time I guessed the eight o’clock news would go on, there was trumpet music all of a sudden, and the guard called his friend, hey, there’s a newsflash. Looks to me like something happened.

There was hope in my heart: maybe the newsflash was about me? Maybe they’d tell about the policeman who shot at an Arab inside a house?

It turned out to be a suicide bombing. In Jerusalem. Lots of injured people. The number of dead unknown. The second bombing in the capital coming hard on the heels of a previous attack, the broadcaster said, and then the rest of the news started. I kept on listening. I hoped that maybe between reports from one hospital and another, they’d stick in a little item about what happened in el-Castel today, but they didn’t say anything about it. Abadan. A lost cause. I was done for. I felt like someone who tried to jump on a donkey and fell off the other side. What did I make that whole scene for? What good did it do? I couldn’t even bring my mother the chain. And what would Nehila do now? Where would she get money to buy food? There was nothing left in the house that she could sell. And little Imad would be starting school next year. We needed money for his books, for clothes. And who’d bring the money if not his father?

One of the guards who was watching television came over to my cell, looked at me with red eyes and spat in my face. You son-of-a-bitch, you’re all sons-of-bitches. Force is the only thing you understand, only force.

I went to the back of the cell and sat down on a stained mattress.

He kept spitting at me and called his friend to join him: come on, man, a little target practice.

I covered my face with my hands. I felt as if someone was sticking a needle into my vein and injecting me with hatred.

They kept on spitting, collected all the saliva they had in their mouths and throats and hurled it at me. It was a ‘bulls’-eye’ when they got my face, a ‘hit’ when they got my body. I knew that game from my days in prison.

*

A storm is raging around us: Ovadia goes over to Ronen to ask him something about black holes, then changes his mind. Then goes over to him again. And changes his mind again. Joe and Zachi are having a loud, aggressive argument about whether you can move backwards to capture a piece in draughts. Nava tries to calm them down before one of them grabs someone else by the throat. Gideon the speechmaker is making a speech to the entire room. He’s holding a tattered book he took from the club’s small library and reading, putting the stress in the wrong places, something by A.D. Gordon. Some of the people in the room cheer him on. Some order him to shut up. Shmuel and I try to ignore all of it. We’re engrossed in conversation, our heads bent, our voices lowered. A thin, invisible bubble surrounds us, separating us from the commotion in the room. But what hurts you, Shmuel? I ask him, and he suddenly stops talking. He’s just finished giving me another lecture on his theory of colours, and out of an uncontrollable urge — how many times can you listen to the theory that the world is divided into red, white and transparent — that direct question suddenly comes out of my mouth. He takes off his cracked glasses and wipes them with his shirt. Without them, he looks younger and more lost. He puts his glasses back on, stares straight ahead and says nothing. His knee is jerking nervously, and he says nothing. It’s possible that he didn’t hear. And it’s possible that it’s too soon. That not enough trust has been created between us for him to share with me what’s really bothering him. But how can trust be created when every week I have to remind him all over again what my name is? Besides, maybe his theories were not meant to hide anything deeper, maybe the theories are the thing itself. And why is he the one I’ve latched on to? Of all the suffering people here, why him?

Look, my friend, he says, trying to please me, as if he senses that I’m about to give up on him, you asked me a tough question. And it’s not that I don’t know the answer. I know it very well. So what’s the problem, Shmuel? I ask, and immediately regret the question because there he is, taking off his glasses again and turning his face away from me, wrapping himself in that silence of his. Don’t push him, idiot, don’t push. The problem is, he says to me — thank God, I haven’t lost him yet — that what I’m about to say will make you doubt me. You’ll say to yourself that Shmuel is crazy, disturbed. And what do you think I say to myself now, with all your weird theories? the cynic inside me replies, while I myself am silent. If he wants to, he’ll talk. The pain, he finally says after another silence and a twitch that closes his right eye, the pain isn’t actually my pain, but all the pain that exists in the world. Oh no, I wince, he’s going to come out with a new theory. Should I interrupt him now? I don’t mean the ‘world’ in cosmic terms, he reassures me, but more the people who fill the world with their pain. You see, in every person’s chest there is a sun of pain and sorrow, and that sun radiates fiery rays. If you’re well protected, those rays don’t penetrate you. But if you’re not protected, the pain of the people close to you enters you and burns you from inside. And you just don’t have any sunblock to slather on your skin? I ask, and realise right away that my tone is wrong, that my attempt at humour is inappropriate here. I don’t have that layer of skin, he corrects me without any anger. There’s no protective skin between me and the misery in the world. To tell you the truth, he says, bringing his mouth to my ear as if whispering a secret, I did have skin like that. But a few years ago, it melted away and left me exposed to all the rays that strangers radiate at me. Wow, I say and put my hand on my chest to stop the pounding of my heart, what you’re telling me, it doesn’t sound easy. No it isn’t, Shmuel nods, scratching his head fiercely, hurting himself. From the other side of the room, Nava signals to me with her hand on her watch that the time is almost up, we have to start arranging the chairs. Why the pressure? Doesn’t she see that I’m in the middle of a conversation? Tell me, I say, ignoring her and turning to Shmuel, can you give me an example? An example of what? he asks, watching Nava fearfully as she hurries the other members to leave. An example of a person, I say, talking faster, a person you find it hard to be near because you feel that his pain is too strong, that it’s blazing too hot for you.

You, he says, and smiles a nasty little smile. Since when has Shmuel been nasty?

Me?! I say, my voice choked. I was sure he’d mention someone in his family or that girl who shattered his heart when he was seventeen. But me? Yes, he says, and his smile spreads to the sides like hands. When you came here, your sun was sending out pleasant, caressing rays. But lately, my friend, I sometimes have to stop talking in the middle of a conversation with you just to relieve the pain you make me feel. O-ka-a-y, I say, stretching out the ‘kay’. I don’t have anything else better or cleverer to say. Shmuel is quiet and I think: am I hurting him even now, this minute? He sees Nava approaching and stands up, frightened. I squeeze his hand — again that limp handshake of his — and he moves away, leaving me and Nava with a weak wave of his hand and his usual parting words: see you next week, God willing.

After he disappears up the steps, I go over to the coffee corner and try to stabilise myself: calm down, Amir, he’s crazy, he’s talking bullshit. Your question must have been too nosy and he decided to hurt you deliberately. I say all that to myself, but deep inside me, I suspect he’s right, and that shakes up all my inner organs. One of my kidneys crashes into my spleen, my liver into my pancreas, my pancreas into my appendix. I feel it happening inside my body even though I don’t know exactly what the appendix is, but during our training session, when Nava asks if everything’s all right because I look a little pale, I say yes, everything’s all right because I don’t trust her enough, I don’t feel that I can share anything intimate with her without being afraid that she’ll apply one of her theories to it. But still, she probes: I saw you and Shmuel having a long conversation, she says. Yes, so what? I attack and she retreats, gives up and goes on to Ronen. Suddenly I’m sorry she doesn’t insist, because how can you keep something like that to yourself? You have to talk to someone about it. But Ronen is chattering excitedly about his science class, and the conversation moves away from me, further and further away, until it ends with Nava looking sharply at her watch, and a minute later we’re all climbing the urine-saturated stairs. She locks the heavy door and we each go our own way, Ronen to his motorcycle, Chanit to the bus and Nava to the large, mysterious van that’s always waiting for her outside.

The Fiat’s right headlight has popped out again, and I push it back into place. I toss the rolled-up crossword puzzle into the back seat, sit down behind the wheel, try in vain to get my heart beating normally again, and start the long drive back to Mevasseret.

*

It’s outrageous, Dad said. And Mum said, yes, that an Arab should walk around the neighbourhood for months like that without anyone stopping him? And Dad said, a fiasco, a plain fiasco. I was eating an omelette and thinking that this was the first time they’d agreed on something since Gidi. Dad thinks that it’s time to take apart the museum in the living room and move it to Gidi’s room, and Mum says over her dead body. Mum wants them to keep meeting with that woman from the Ministry of Defence, and Dad doesn’t. But they don’t talk about all that. They have this way of arguing without words. Mum takes out Gidi’s yearbook to look through it and Dad gets up and leaves the room. Dad makes appointments with the Parents’ Forum for Security and Mum makes noise banging pots in the kitchen on purpose to show him what she thinks about it.

But they agreed about the Arab and I was so glad that they finally saw eye to eye on something that I didn’t want to spoil it, so I didn’t tell them that the Arab was just an old man with a limp, and that’s why no one suspected him. All I did was take a slice of bread and put a piece of my omelette on it along with a slice of tomato and two olives and hoped they’d keep on being nice to each other and maybe after breakfast they’d even sit close to each other in front of the TV like they used to, but then Dad said, it just goes to show that we have to chase those terrorists down everywhere. Here, in the territories and in Lebanon. Mum sighed and said, but so many children die doing it. Dad declared as if he was giving a speech in front of his Forum, that’s how it is, that’s the sacrifice we have to make for security. Mum said, I don’t believe you really think that. It’s only talk, right? Dad said, what do you mean? Mum looked at him and decided to hold back and not tell him what she meant. But Dad started to cough, a little cough at first, and then with his whole throat, and Mum asked, should I get you the inhaler? Dad got up, his face red, and said, I don’t need any favours from you, don’t bring me anything. And Mum started to go to their room anyway to get the inhaler, but Dad grabbed her hand and said, I told you not to go, didn’t I? They looked at each other as if they’d act differently if I wasn’t there, and the truth is, I really didn’t want to be there any more. I didn’t want to hear him tell her to say again that it was his fault and that’s that. I didn’t want to hear her answer as usual, what are you talking about, that’s not what I think. I got up from the table and Mum asked, where are you going? You haven’t finished eating. The truth was that I wasn’t planning to go anywhere, just up to my room, but the minute she said the word ‘going’, it made me feel like going, so I put on my coat and she said, you’re running away to those students again? I said, yes, so what? Dad tried to say something, but instead of words, coughing came out, and Mum said, really Reuven, go and get your inhaler, and he ran to their room, coughing without a stop, leaving the two of us alone. Mum stood in front of me and didn’t say anything for a minute, trying to decide whether to let me go or not. Then she took the Beitar scarf off the hook and gave it to me, saying, wear this at least, so you don’t catch cold. I put it around my neck and held it by the ends, and she asked with an angry expression on her face: tell me, have you told that student that I want to talk to him?

*

The traffic’s moving, but I’m all jammed up, even when I pass the airport (the thought flies through me, I could fly to Modi now). I drive past Ben Shemen. Past Latrun. On the radio, a woman broadcaster with a feathery voice asks the listeners, tell us what’s happening on the roads, and I think that if I had a mobile I’d call and report on the internal jam that I’ve had for a month already, without any visible accident, but I don’t have one. There’s no money for airtime when you live on air, and anyway, I’d already reached Shaar Hagai, with the hills close to the road on both sides, which feels different every time. Sometimes it’s like a woman’s vagina taking you in warmly, and sometimes, like today, it’s grey and threatening and suffocating and you feel as if snipers from the Jordanian Legion from the War of Independence are standing on the hills. In another second, they’ll shoot out your tyres and you’ll end up like one of those rusted tanks on the side of the road. You wonder, where’s the Burma Road, where’s the Burma Road, but here’s the turn to Shoresh, and I’m still driving, still alive. The radio isn’t picking up anything now except for the stations devoted to the newly religious. A woman is home, as we say, her honour is in the home, the announcer whispers into the microphone, with God’s help, he hopes … but I turn off the radio before he can say what he needs God’s help for. I start up the hill to the Castel, and the Fiat sputters a little but keeps climbing. With God’s help, Noa will be home and I’ll be able to tell her about Shmuel. Yes, she’ll know how to put the crosshairs on the target. She’ll take me in her arms, soft and perfumed, I think and turn on to the bridge, ignoring Doga, glide down Anonymous Hero Street and park the car behind Moshe’s bus. From the end of the paved path, I see that there’s a light on in our house, which means nothing because Noa always forgets to turn off the lights when she goes out. Lately, when I walk up the path, I imagine going into the house and catching her cheating on me. I don’t have an exact picture of the man. I can only see his back, and her face, peering over his shoulder, is contorted with passion, then surprise when she sees me. And the weird thing is that the whole scenario doesn’t make me angry. Just the opposite. It gives me a feeling of intense pleasure, especially when I imagine myself waiting contemptuously until the guy gets dressed and goes. Then I put all my CDs into a bag and take down the picture of the sad man and leave the apartment without looking back. This time too, the closer I get to the door, the springier my steps get. Excited, I decide not to peek through the window and burst right inside. Noa isn’t in the living room, but I feel her presence in the air. And I think someone else is here too. Amir?! she calls from the shower in a voice that’s too innocent, and I start walking to the bathroom. Maybe they’re already having their ‘after’ shower. The curtains hide their bodies and I suddenly remember that scene from Psycho, but I don’t have a knife. Hi, she says, pulling the curtain open. There’s no one with her. She’s alone. Alone. My fantasy shatters into a thousand pieces that fly into the air in slow motion. I lower the toilet lid and sit down. You won’t believe what happened, she beats me to it. Almost every one of her stories starts with ‘You won’t believe what happened’, and then it turns out to be about a cup of coffee that spilled on her in the cafeteria or a report on Hila who, for the fifth time this week, has found the love of her life. But this time she tells a story that really sounds unbelievable. Some Arab, she says, one of Madmoni’s workers, went into Avram and Gina’s house and claimed that the house belonged to his family in ’48, and that his mother left something of hers in one of the walls. Gina wanted to throw him out, but Avram jumped up and said that the worker was Nissan, their little boy who died when he was two, and that no one was to touch him.

What?

I swear. Avram’s been loopy ever since his operation. Did I tell you about the exorcist Gina brought? It turned out that he didn’t help a lot.

Wait. Where are you in this whole story?

I was babysitting for Lilach. And at some point, Sima came downstairs and called the police because the Arab started taking bricks out of their wall.

And the police came? I ask, licking a drop of water that had splashed onto my lip.

Only the police? The whole world was there. I mean, at first the police came and went upstairs with Sima, and then, a few minutes later, there was a gunshot.

A gunshot?!

Don’t get upset. No one was hurt. It was just a stray bullet one of the policemen shot.

But right after the shot, the whole neighbourhood showed up. You wouldn’t believe it. A demonstration, yelling. Then even a TV crew came in.

TV crew? How did they know to come?

I don’t know. But they came pretty quickly. Maybe they’ll show it on the news today.

Wait a minute. Did you photograph anything?

Are you joking? I wish. I was stuck downstairs with Lilach. She cried the whole time and I had to calm her down. Except for pulling out a breast and letting her nurse, I did everything. But don’t worry, I have an idea for a project.

She turned off the water and asked me to hand her a towel.

What idea? I ask and move aside so she has somewhere to stand.

To get in touch with Arabs who were driven away from the Castel in ’48, she says. And ask to photograph them, their whole families, against the background of the house they used to live in. The house that has a Hebrew street sign next to it. And a sign over the door in Hebrew. And a laundry line that has army uniforms hanging on it. They’ll stand the way families stand in classic family portraits, and maybe I’ll even ask them to smile, to make the point even sharper. What do you think?

A gorgeous body, I say. She’s standing in front of me, naked and smooth.

About the idea, she says and flicks me gently with her wet hair.

A great idea, I say truthfully, and add: but I’m not sure about the smile. That could look cynical.

You’re right, she says, walking past me on the way to the bedroom. I’ll just photograph them both smiling and not smiling. Then we’ll see what works better.

Just a minute, I say, wanting to clarify something that bothers me, you didn’t tell me how the business with Madmoni’s worker turned out.

A disaster, she yells, and her voice is swallowed up momentarily in the sweatshirt that she must have been pulling over her head. They confiscated the chain he found in the wall and arrested him too. Not that he’s dangerous or anything. You should’ve seen him, an old man who just wanted to visit his house. Even Sima felt sorry for him in the end.

While Noa’s getting dressed, I think about that worker and remember that when my family moved to Jerusalem, we had to move again three months later to a different apartment on the same street. I don’t know why. Something about the lease, if I understood correctly the English my parents spoke in cases like that. Anyway, we piled up boxes again and wrapped glasses in newspaper and waited for the Chen Brothers, the movers, who were actually father and son, not brothers.

A few weeks after we settled into the new apartment, I was coming home from school deep in thought, and instead of going to the new place, I walked unconsciously to the old apartment. The buildings looked pretty much alike, and I went into the hallway without suspecting anything. I slowly climbed the stairs to the second floor. Maybe I was even humming a Tislam song to myself on the way up. When I reached the door that used to be ours, I opened it and breezed inside. The new tenants hadn’t changed the interior of the house, and an old brown sofa that we’d left behind was still in the centre of the living room. I was immersed in thought, and the scene I was seeing was probably familiar enough not to make me suspicious, so I threw my schoolbag down at the door, like I always did, said hi to my mother and collapsed on to the sofa. All of a sudden, a woman I didn’t know ran out of the kitchen wearing an apron over her clothes and looked at me, shocked. Excuse me, she said, who are you?

Who are you? I retaliated.

What do you mean? I live here! she said, putting her hands on her hips.

I looked around at one piece of furniture after another, one picture after another, and comprehension started to sink in. And with it, the burning sensation of shame rose in my throat. Wait a minute, she said with a new spark in her eyes, I know you. You’re the son of Danny and Zehava, the couple who lived here before us, right? Yes, I admitted and stood up. So what happened, the woman said amiably, did you miss your old house? No, of course not, it’s just, ah … I’m sorry, I stammered and ran out of there as fast as I could.

What are you thinking about? Noa asked, coming into the living room and interrupting my escape.

About your idea, I say, thinking that I still haven’t talked to her about what happened in the club today.

Let’s turn on the TV, she says, maybe they’ll show what happened at Avram and Gina’s.

OK. I obey, and look for the remote under the cushions, thinking to myself that I have to talk to her about what happened with Shmuel I have to talk to her about what happened I have to talk.

By the way, she says before I can say anything, Yotam was here and said that his mother wants to meet you.

Fine, I say, turning on the TV. A small map with street names appears in a corner of the screen. Suddenly I heard a boom, an eyewitness wearing a cardigan says, breathing heavily. Suddenly I heard a boom, says a salesman from a shoe shop, an involuntary smile twitching his cheek. A boom? What boom, I think, why a boom now?

Chorus

Dying to live one

’Cause of Liat

Two

The view

Three

To be free.

Four

I want more

I want more.

Don’t wanna die

in a terrorist attack

No way.

Not today.

I like my life.

I wanna stay.

Dying to live five

Wanna survive

Six

All those chicks

Seven

My idea of heaven

Eight nine,

I like it here just fine.

Don’t wanna die

in a terrorist attack

No way.

Not today.

I like my life.

I wanna stay.

To fall asleep on the beach

one more time

would be sublime.

Eat ribs that are prime

And make love till the end.

Till the end.

Don’t wanna die

in a terrorist attack

No way.

Not today.

I like my life.

I wanna stay.

Music and lyrics: David Batsri

From the Licorice album, Love As I Explained it to My Wife

Produced independently, 1996