Track Changes Read online

  “We’ll take Route Six?” the driver seemed to both state and ask. “It’s fastest, because Route Four’s backed up. By the way, are you a smoker? I saw you smoking before.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can smoke in the cab, no problem. Just open the window.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I quit ten years ago. I used to smoke two packs a day. I kicked it one day and since then, nothing, ten years not a single cigarette. But you know what? I still like the smell, and I still miss the cigarettes.”

  I pressed the button and lowered the window halfway before even starting to smoke. Cold air brushed past my face and I tried to gauge, by its touch, the extent of my longing. I tried to inhale deeply, to smell the country, because I’d read in several books that the sense of smell is the sense of longing. I’d always read about people who recalled the scent of the earth, the oranges, the air, and the sea. I tried, but my nose did not detect any special scent, did not tap into any wellspring of memory, perhaps because the smell of the highway from the airport to Route 6 was not the smell of my childhood or my homeland as I knew it.

  Was this a betrayal? I blamed my own inadequacies for my nose not picking up the scent of longing that I’d read about in the poems. And then I rejected the accusation. No, I didn’t have to pick up certain scents in order to prove that I had longed; I didn’t have to prove anything to anyone. For many years I had yearned for home and thought of returning every day, shirking the misery of foreignness and the sadness of detachment.

  When I reach Tira, the familiar smell of home will surely assault my senses, scents of childhood and nettles after the rain. When I walk into my parents’ house, I’ll definitely burst into tears when my father’s smell—which will forever be a blend of Old Spice and cigarettes—engulfs me.

  3

  “What’s your earliest memory?”

  That was the question I asked interviewees as soon as I hit the red Record button on the recorder.

  What’s my earliest memory? Sometimes I ask myself, too.

  I remember my mother waking me up in the middle of the night, frightened and stressed, hoisting me onto her shoulders. And I remember insisting on taking my new box of crayons with me, stretching my hand out toward the place under my pillow where I’d hidden them, but I couldn’t reach. We’ve got to hurry. The buses are heading out soon, and we must drive my grandmother to the center of the village, to the square outside the old Bank Hapoalim, where we’ll wave goodbye to her and the others as they set out on the haj, the first group to be granted exit visas to Mecca.

  Or maybe it’s a memory of my back pressed against the low wall that surrounded the first kindergarten in Tira, in a part of the neighborhood far from my home, which my parents decided to send me to because of their jobs. I’m leaning against the wall and staring at some kids playing with metal toy cars with small seats and squeaky steering wheels that can spin endlessly in either direction. Close to me are seesaws in the shape of a horse and a plane, and a sandbox. I look at the other kids and cry, waiting for the moment when my parents will come and get me and failing to understand why the other kids are not, like me, standing with their backs to the wall and wailing until their parents arrive. Slowly I discover that the kindergarten teacher is standing beside me, looking over the wall. It takes me some time to realize that she is talking about me when she says, “He’s always like this. He doesn’t play or listen to stories or speak to any of the other kids.” And I look back and see that she is talking to my father, who is standing right behind me on the other side of the white brick wall. I turn to look at him and he smiles at me, tousles my hair, and waves the gray handkerchief that we are all required to carry. “You forgot this,” he says and smiles at me.

  I have no doubt that both of these events took place. I don’t know which came first but I regurgitate them often. I don’t have a lot of childhood memories other than those two, and I haven’t been able to bring up new ones, aside from those that have been carved into the walls of my mind, in a spot where the beam of my memory repeatedly falls. Those things happened; I will not even entertain the notion that they did not, even though it is unclear to me how it is that I see myself in both of those distant memories. How is it that I see the kid crying rather than being there myself, my back against the wall; how is it that I watch the kid with the leaping heart see his father, a kid that is no longer me?

  Soon, when we get close to Tira, I’ll smell the trees, the clouds, the strawberries, and the figs that I used to pick with my father, even though it is not fig season and the place where the trees once stood is now home to a row of exhaust pipe garages.

  4

  “Is here, okay?” the cabby asked. “Or do you want me to go all the way to the gate?”

  “Here’s great,” I said when I saw that we had reached the entrance to Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba.

  The taxi pulled to a stop, facing north, in the direction of Tira. Five more minutes and I could’ve been at home. I looked to the right to make sure that the share taxis connecting Kfar Saba and Tira were still parked in the same spot as they had been fourteen years ago when I last boarded one of the passenger vans. And there they were, only now with an official taxi sign, making the once-unlicensed stop official.

  “One hundred and seventy shekels,” the Russian driver said, reminding me that I didn’t have any Israeli currency.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, flipping through my wallet and waiting for a miracle that would transform my American bills into Israeli shekels. “Is fifty dollars okay?”

  “Even better,” he said, and I handed him the bill without waiting for change, even though I knew that in Israel drivers are not tipped.

  As I crossed the street in its direction, Meir Hospital looked bigger than I remembered: a few new buildings had been added, and there was now a little security hut and a metal turnstile at the entrance.

  There was no chance of me getting through the turnstile with my trolley suitcase.

  “Wait for the security guard,” a young man with an Arab accent behind me said, and I tried to check and see if he was from Tira or if he noticed that I was from Tira, though he had addressed me in Hebrew. People from Tira recognize one another. “I’ll tell the guard,” he said as he pushed through the turnstile.

  “Where to?” the guard asked before clicking open the door to the security hut.

  “I’m visiting my father.”

  “Which ward?”

  “Cardiac.”

  “Cardiac Institute’s in the tower.”

  “Is that in the new building?”

  The guard had no idea what I was talking about; as far as he was concerned the tower had always been there, built before he was even born. I pointed toward the building, which must have been erected more than three decades ago, and the security guard nodded.

  Meir Hospital. In Arabic we tweaked the name, never using the word “mustashfa”—hospital—and Arabizing the other word with a long a sound: Maaer. “He got a referral to Maaer,” we’d say, because without a referral from the local health clinic, you couldn’t just show up at the hospital, aside from in true emergencies. And a referral to Maaer, back when we were little, was something to be proud of, a sign that you really had hurt yourself. I was once referred to Maaer after I’d injured my foot. It had turned blue and swollen and the local doctor, saying I needed an X-ray, had printed out a referral to the hospital. The X-ray, though, revealed no sign of a fracture and I was deeply sorry that there were no broken bones and that I had apparently wasted my father’s time.

  When I got older I would sometimes accompany him on visits to see hospitalized relatives. Back in the day those visits were obligatory, and relatives would spend days packed into the corners of hospital waiting rooms. The women would bring food and the men would supply fresh coffee. Once, when I was in high school, I was left at the bedside of my maternal uncle, who had been in a bad car accident with his son and was in critical condition. After an all-night operation, my uncle�
�s condition improved and the next morning he opened his eyes and started to talk. When he asked about his son, everyone told him, “Alhamdulillah, he’s okay.” When he asked to see his son, those at his bedside told him that he was being treated nearby, in Petach Tikva, and that he would be fine and that what was most important now was that he focus on his own recuperation. My uncle didn’t know that his son had been killed in the crash. On the day of the funeral, all of the men from the village had to participate in the ceremony but they didn’t want to leave my uncle alone, so they asked me, as an already-mature and rather smart kid, a “good kid,” to stay by his bedside until the funeral was over and the mourning tent had been built. They said that they trusted me and that my uncle must not know that he had lost his son because his condition was still unstable, and that only once he’d recuperated from the surgery would one of the adults come and tell him that his firstborn child had died.

  “Why hasn’t your aunt come to visit?” he asked me as soon as it was just the two of us alone in the hospital room.

  “I don’t know, Uncle,” I told him. “She’s probably with Omar in Petach Tikva.”

  “If your aunt hasn’t come to see me and is with him constantly then he must be in really bad condition.”

  “No, Uncle,” I said. “No, she was here when you were being operated on. She left just before you came to.”

  “Have you seen him?” he asked, and I, who only that morning had seen Omar’s body, answered that I had and that he was “fine, totally fine. He even asked about you, and then we played that game that he likes with the chutes and the ladders. He beat me four to one.”

  “Yes, he likes that game,” my uncle said and smiled. “You know, you’re the only one I really believe. Now I can relax. I thought the adults were lying to me. Adults always lie.”

  “Never, Uncle,” I said. “I never ever lie.” And I swore to God.

  I tugged the trolley bag along gently, making sure the wheels didn’t rattle too much as I crossed the entryway to the new wing of the hospital.

  It was seven in the evening here, eleven in the morning in Illinois. Sunday morning—my children would all be at home. I hoped they didn’t go out, that my wife wouldn’t put the kids at risk. “How the hell is going to the library putting the children at risk?” I heard her argue with me. Just please don’t let it snow today, I thought, for my wife has no qualms about driving the kids around even when it’s snowing. She doesn’t know about black ice, and she isn’t willing to hear a word about how quickly people die because of it. “Everyone’s driving,” I can hear her say as I walk toward the block of elevators at the entry level, asserting vehemently that were it up to me, the entire state would be shut down at the first sign of snow.

  Seven in the evening is when the stores on the ground floor close. A young saleswoman from the gift store was bringing in a metal wagon on which there were balloons that read “Mazel Tov” and “Get Well Soon.” The grate in front of the bookstore was being shut, too, and only the café across the way, a franchise of a larger chain, was still open. It dawned on me that I should have brought my father a present. After all I hadn’t seen him in fourteen years.

  “The Cardiology Institute?” a tired woman in her fifties in a pair of green scrubs asked as she came out of the elevator. She looked like a nurse, but I wasn’t sure I was able to categorize hospital employees by their garb. When I was little I thought that in a hospital only doctors wore scrubs, but little by little I realized that even the floor cleaners, who sometimes greeted us in Arabic, or the guy with the limp pushing the empty wagons, wore some sort of scrubs.

  “Cardiology’s on the fourth floor.”

  5

  My father is small. My father is pale. My father’s eyes are sunken deep in their sockets. I look at him and try to follow his inhalations, tracing the rise and fall of his chest as the respirator pumps air in and out, recognizing the exact moment when his lungs fill up and empty, watching for movement, however slight, beneath the thin, Star of David–patterned sheet that covers him. That’s what I did with each of my kids when they were babies, what I still do with my youngest son before I leave his bedside every night, even though he’s nearly five. When I can’t see visible signs of respiration, I bring my ear to his mouth and listen, eyes shut. And if I don’t hear anything, I draw even closer, to feel his warm breath against my right cheek.

  I’d like to feel my father’s breath on my cheek, but the oxygen mask prevents me from doing so.

  I have been so scared of this moment, so preoccupied with it. Ever since I can remember starting to remember, my father’s death is what I’ve feared most. In all of the dark scenarios I conjured, it was always his heart that gave out, even before I understood the danger of the cigarettes he smoked.

  “Heart attack,” I’d hear people say in my youth, when speaking of a sudden death. “Heart attack,” back then meant certain death. When I was little I didn’t even know it was possible to live after one. “Sakta qalbiya,” they would say, and to me the phrase sounded like the falling of the heart: “Sakta qalbiya,” and how can you go on living after the heart has fallen out.

  “What happened to me?” my father asked in a soft voice once he’d pulled down his oxygen mask. “You had a heart attack, Dad,” I answered softly, and I could see in his eyes he started to remember.

  “Is that you? When did you get here?” He tried to smile.

  “I came in the evening. You were asleep.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Two.”

  “In the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’re your wife and your kids?”

  “They send regards.”

  “They’re in Tira?”

  “No. I came alone.”

  “Have you been to the house?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Can you get me some water?” he said with a dry throat as he tried to wet his lips with his tongue. There was a bottle of water on his bedside table. I brought the bottle to his lips. He was able to raise his head, and he opened his mouth with difficulty. I could see no way of offering him a drink without pouring some into his mouth.

  “What are you doing?” a nurse scolded me in a Russian accent as she walked into the room. “Are you trying to kill him?”

  She flung open a drawer and pulled out a black straw. “Here, slowly, put this in his mouth and he can drink. Slowly.”

  I did as she instructed and Dad gently pursed his lips and sucked up some water.

  “No,” I told the nurse in a whisper, trying to control my voice so that the rage pulsing in my temples would not be exposed.

  “No, what?” the nurse asked.

  “No, ma’am, I am not trying to kill my father.”

  “What?” she snapped impatiently. She had no idea what I was talking about. “When he’s done drinking put the oxygen mask back in place, okay?”

  “You’ve already killed me anyway,” I imagined his whisper.

  My father fell back asleep. Was it the same sleep that he once treasured? The same sleep that he would announce the commencement of on Saturday afternoons and that we would have to respect, keeping quiet, refraining from running around the house, slamming doors, bouncing balls out in the yard. The sleep the violation of which, we knew, might well bring punishment? Is the sleep of one who’s dazed by medicine akin to the sleep of one who sleeps in his bed? Is the sleep of one who prepares ceremoniously for it, showering, brushing teeth, urinating, and putting on pajamas, or perhaps remaining in his underwear, akin to an imposed sleep? Are the dreams of those in the hospital identical to the dreams of those in their beds?

  “What do you think about when you get into bed?” was one of the standard questions that I asked my clients. Generally, people said they thought about the things they were supposed to find truly important: their kids, their grandkids, their wives, their countries. That was why I asked them. I never expected them to say anything except what they would like to be remembered for after their dea
ths.

  The written memory must be made beautiful, and if I felt that the material I was given during an interview might tarnish the image of the protagonist of the memoir in the eyes of his or her readers, I edited their dreams, erased and added sentences, and even, as necessary, invented new dreams and new thoughts to accompany them in bed. I inserted into their life stories memories and dreams that they had never dreamt or recalled and, generally, when I sent them a draft for approval and correction, they liked the reflections they saw and were convinced the words were faithful renditions of the truth as they had experienced it, accurate depictions of the way they drifted into sleep.

  One of the first people to hire me to write his life story told me that ever since he’d moved into an old-age home his technique for summoning sleep was to conjure every woman he had ever desired. Those memories, he said, are his most beautiful ones and they bring him a sense of joy even though they are often memories of unrequited lust. Every night he starts at the beginning, from first crushes in grade school, and moves forward chronologically until he loses the thread or falls asleep, whatever comes first. I transcribed the memory word for word from the recording, and then I highlighted and erased it. Although I did not put it in his memoir, which was full of stories of valor from the many battles in which he had fought, it’s the only story of his that my memory has saved.