Let It Be Morning Read online

But I wasn’t fired. The newspaper continued using me as a reporter in the West Bank, mainly because I was the only one who could deliver the goods, who could go into the Palestinian cities and villages and come back with stories. But ever since then they’d been keeping an eye on me. Every sentence I wrote was inspected, every word double-checked. I got used to being summoned by the editor-in-chief and being required to provide an explanation for every piece of information I submitted. I learned the rules soon enough, to steer clear of what people were saying and to focus on dry descriptions, sticking to the assignment, as I was told. I adopted the lingo of the military reporters: terrorists, attacks, terrorism, criminal acts. Some of the journalists in the Hebrew press—non-Zionist left-wingers—allowed themselves to lash out against the occupation and against the restrictions imposed on the Palestinian inhabitants, but I no longer dared. The privilege of criticizing government policy was an exclusively Jewish prerogative. I was liable to be seen as a journalist calling for the annihilation of the Zionist state, a fifth column biting the hand that was feeding it and dreaming each night of destroying the Jewish people.

  I tried to survive. I’d always been a survivor. I knew how to adapt to my surroundings, working and doing what I wanted. Except that ever since those two bitter days in October, the task of survival had become tougher. I had to be twice as careful, to listen to quips and jabs by colleagues who’d never spoken to me like that before. I smiled when the secretary asked, almost every morning, “So, did you throw any stones in the entrance?” I smiled at the guard who inspected my bags at the entrance to our office building, I laughed when my colleagues talked about the self-indulgent Arabs who were living in Israel and had no idea what it was like when a combat plane is hovering over your house, when a tank heads right into your neighborhood. I laughed out loud, trying to conceal my discomfort, when we’d go out for a bite at the nearby restaurant and one of the others would invariably wink at the guard at the doorway and say, “Better frisk him carefully. He’s suspicious.” I said thank you every time someone told me that “Israeli Arabs really ought to say thank you.” I agreed with my roommates when they criticized the Arab leadership in Israel, I denounced the Islamic Movement when they did, I expressed my grief over every Jewish casualty after a terrorist attack, I felt guilty, I cursed the suicide bombers, I called them cold-blooded murderers. I cursed God, the virgins, Paradise and myself. Especially myself, for doing everything I could to hold on to my job.

  But I decided I’d had enough. Somehow I came to the conclusion that it would be much safer to live in an Arab village. Somehow it seemed to me that if I lived in a place where everyone was like me, things would be easier. I’d watch them get married and have children, and I’d feel more comfortable. I needed to return to a place, however small it might be, where Arabs didn’t have to hide. Especially since so many people were returning anyhow. Very few were leaving, and apart from those who’d been banned, everyone would come back sooner or later. I didn’t see any point in telling my wife about my feelings. She’d never have understood.

  I’m not going to stay with my in-laws for long. My wife and I hardly look at each other as I try to reassure everyone by telling them, as calmly as I can, about the feverish pace of the work being carried out on our house so it can be ready soon. When I finish, I don’t dare repeat the invitation for my wife and baby to sleep over at my parents’ home. My wife had objected to that idea even before we got here. She said she needs her privacy, and that she would feel uncomfortable in my parents’ home, using the bathroom, for example. It was a declaration that seemed to me like a kind of punishment. I promise to come back to see the baby when she wakes up, and add that my parents have missed her and would also enjoy seeing her, so maybe I’d pick her up for a few hours in the late afternoon. “I’ve got to go now,” I say. “I left the workers alone in the house.”

  4

  I thought I heard some shots, a few rounds. Must be a wedding, or maybe it’s the soldiers in Tul-Karm or Qalqilya, both close by. Even though it’s just a village, the noise in this place is much louder than in the city. It’s after midnight now, and the cruising cars never let up. You can hear them trying to go faster, revving up the motors, ignoring the makeshift speed bumps the neighbors put in, even though they’re just forty or fifty feet apart, but the young drivers won’t miss a chance to build up speed. The really loud screeching of tires, brakes being slammed and motors being pushed to the max are not quite as loud, since they come from a few blocks away, where there are no speed bumps and hardly even any buildings. That’s just how it is. It’s always been the younger generation’s favorite form of entertainment. In the intermittent silences between cars I hear a hodgepodge of noises, some from television sets, some from people talking. I could swear I hear the sound of children playing. What is it with them, being up at such an hour? I remember when we were kids how we’d always show off about how late we’d gone to sleep the night before. I remember I’d always gone to sleep early, or to be precise, I’d always gone to bed early.

  Tonight too, I’ve been in bed for two hours already. I was sure I’d fall asleep as soon as I shut my eyes. It had been a tough day. Everything was supposed to be finished by today. Tomorrow is our official moving-in day. Tomorrow I’ll be sleeping with my wife and baby in our new house, together, the way families are supposed to. I don’t know whether the thought reassures or terrifies me. First thing in the morning, my wife and mother-in-law arrived at the new house and started cleaning. Mother joined them, and the three of them spent the next few hours scouring the floor, removing spots of paint, not an easy job. I was in charge of various small but tiring jobs, like putting handles on the doors or hooks in the bathrooms or hanging curtains. I didn’t get to the curtains, because the women needed me to dismantle windows and blinds so they could clean them and the frames underneath. Then I was supposed to put them back in. It isn’t easy to remember which part of the window goes in first. Make even a small mistake and all your work will be wasted. I hated the windows and I couldn’t understand why there should be so many in one lousy house.

  Never mind, I’ll hang the curtains tomorrow. It’s just a matter of drilling a few holes and tightening a few screws. The tricky part is getting the measurements right and making sure the curtains are straight. Tomorrow we’ll all be sleeping together, tomorrow our normal lives will be getting back on track. The week we both took off so we could move is over, and in two days we’ll have to get back into our routine. Maybe that’s what we need most right now: a routine that will put our lives in order, that will restore the proper rhythm of things, the natural flow. My wife will be teaching at one of the schools in the village and I’ll be going back to the paper, half an hour’s drive away from here, forty minutes at most. Tomorrow I’ll take my wife’s brother, Ashraf, to our old apartment to pick up some boxes we left behind. It’s still ours. We paid rent on it till the end of the month, tomorrow.

  5

  My wife, my mother-in-law and my daughter arrive in the morning with Ashraf in the pickup he borrowed from one of his friends. By the time we get back with the boxes, they’ll have finished cleaning. There isn’t much left to do, just the floors, actually.

  “Coming home?” Ashraf says, and sniggers. “Coming home to your birthplace, eh?” He and I get along pretty well, in fact. Not that we see each other very often. Every now and then he used to visit us and then stay for the weekend. Almost every time he came, we’d have a beer at one of the nearby bars. He finished college not long ago—economics—and after he gave up on finding a job in his field he started working in one of the mobile phone companies as a customer-service rep for Arab customers.

  Dozens of workers are congregating in the village square, each holding a plastic bag. They lunge at every car that stops, hoping it may belong to a contractor or anyone else who’s looking for cheap day laborers. Ashraf’s pickup looks particularly promising. It reminds the workers of the contractors’ pickups. When we stop at the intersection, to yield the ri
ght-of-way to cars coming in the other direction, the workers converge on all the windows. I signal, with my hand and my head, that we’re not in the market for workers, but they don’t give up, and I hear them say things like, “Fifty shekels for the whole day. Please.” And, “Ten shekels an hour, any job you want done.” They don’t let go of the car till it lurches away and crosses the intersection. Ashraf goes on smiling. I think that’s how he overcomes the awkwardness of the situation. “Don’t feel sorry for them,” he says, and I’m not sure who he’s trying to convince—me or himself. “Now they’re begging, but deep inside they’re convinced that every Israeli Arab is a traitor and a collaborator.”

  On our way out of the village, the pickup joins a long line of cars, dozens of them inching forward. “Another roadblock,” Ashraf says. “Got your ID on you?” I nod, and he says, “Is this what you’re returning to? Believe me, I don’t get it. How can you return to a place like this for no better reason than to own a bigger house? You don’t know what you’re coming back to, my man. This isn’t the place you left, when was it—ten, fifteen years ago?” He laughs again. “Did you hear the shooting yesterday?” Little kids in cheap old clothes surround every car that comes to a halt, some of them offering rags for sale, others chewing gum, lighters, sets of combs and scissors and packs of tissue. As they approach Ashraf’s pickup, he rolls up the windows and signals them to move away. “Do you have any idea how much money they make?” he says. “They put on that pathetic face, and instead of going to school they come all the way from Qalqilya and Tul-Karm on foot and beg. Every single one of them makes at least a hundred shekels a day. I don’t even make a hundred a day.”

  The pickup plods along and we can see the policemen at the roadblock. Ashraf says the people on the West Bank are the sorriest lot in the world, and he chuckles. “Ever since the Intifada, they have nothing better to do than to call us at work and give us an earful. That’s how they pass the time of day, I’m telling you. They just call every service phone with a toll-free line. They can drive you crazy, and you have to be courteous, answer by the book, ‘Cellcom at your service. This is Ashraf speaking. How may I help you?’ Sometimes I feel like cursing them, cracking jokes with them, slamming the phone down in the middle of a call, but that’s out, because they’re always monitoring our customer-service calls. They keep dreaming up new ideas. This week, for instance, there was an onslaught of callers from Nablus. All of them want their phones to ring like one of Diana Haddad’s new songs. Where am I going to find them a Diana Haddad ring tone now? In Jenin, they figured out this week that you could set your mobile to call from abroad too. Thousands called in, as if anyone is really going anywhere. They can’t even get from Jenin to Nablus. They call just because they feel like it. Every time they hear there’s a new service, they all call.

  “Once this little girl phoned in and just sobbed away. I could hear the heavy shelling in the background and the little girl told me she was alone in the house, her father was out and she didn’t know where he was. I have no idea how she wound up dialing my number. Maybe it was the last number her father had dialed. Makes sense. After all, they call Cellcom all day long. And there she is, crying, and I spend hours trying to reassure her. If they’d caught me, I’d have been fired on the spot, but I stay on the line with her till her father, or somebody, gets home when the shelling stops. I mean, you could actually hear the war in the background and you picture this kid all alone over there, scared to death, screaming, and me, like some military training officer, there I am telling her to get down, to take cover behind a wall, under a table. A military commander, that’s what I was for her, I’m telling you,” he says with a laugh.

  As we approach the roadblock, we pull out our ID cards. The policeman glances at them and hands them right back to us. “Lucky they didn’t ask us for licenses, ’cause this pickup isn’t registered in my name and we’d never hear the end of it.”

  “Does this have to do with yesterday’s shooting?” I ask. Ashraf laughs. “What makes you say that? They’re just looking for some workers. So you heard the shooting yesterday? It was right next to our house, from a passing vehicle. Gang shooting. What’s that to the police? They don’t give a damn. All they care about is security stuff. But yesterday some guys I know must have come back drunk from some club in Tel Aviv and drove around our neighborhood. I was awake. I was standing on the balcony and I saw them. Suddenly one of them pulled out an Uzi and shot a few rounds. He must have been very happy. You’ll get used to it.”

  Ashraf goes on laughing the whole way, telling me about my village, his village, the new village I no longer know, and his disdain is unmistakable from the word go. As we continue driving, he explains the best way to behave to avoid getting into trouble. “You’re driving along a narrow road and a car comes in the opposite direction. There isn’t enough room for both of you. You drive right back, insha’Allah, even if he only has to back up two meters and you have to do one hundred. Always back up, ’cause it could end in a shooting, depending on who happens to be in the car. You’re driving along and two cars are blocking the road because the drivers are chatting through the open windows? Wait patiently. God help you if you honk. Just wait for them to finish their conversation. It won’t take more than an hour, insha’Allah. Just wait and when they let you pass, smile and say thank you.” Ashraf keeps laughing as he recites his survival lexicon. Then he explains that if they jump the line at the infirmary, I should just let it be. If I’m in line at the grocery shop and someone cuts in front of me, I should just stay cool. He swears that people have been killed in recent years because of things like that. Slowly his laughter dies down. “You have no idea what you’re coming back to, do you?” he says, and his tone changes.

  6

  My wife gets into bed in the second-floor bedroom after putting the baby down in her crib, and I stay downstairs to watch TV, zapping till the news begins on the Israeli channel. I’ve got a satellite dish like everyone else around here, one hundred and ninety channels, more than ninety of them in Arabic, and one of the Israeli channels. The whole business of the Arab channels is pretty new to me, and I’m intrigued. I’ve never come across it before. When I left the village they were still using antennas, the kind that barely pick up the Israeli channel, and with any luck, a Jordanian one. I get a kick out of zapping, back and forth. I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than five minutes watching the Arab channels. It’s pretty amazing. There must be a dozen music channels with clip after clip showing half-naked Lebanese belly dancers. At first I can’t believe Arabs would dress like that, just like on MTV. The songs come as a shock to me too, all of them seem the same and sound the same, about love, mostly, the same words, changing only slightly from one song to the next, the same rhymes, the same annoying melody, a pounding beat that I don’t like at all. But still I stare at the dancing women, with their skimpy getups and undulating pelvises.

  I keep on pressing the button with the up-arrow on it to switch channels. MTV is showing Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire? and Abu Dhabi has The Weakest Link. Soon enough I start skipping right over the religious channels. At first I thought they were cool, but now I see through them right away. Soon as I spot a sheikh with a head-cover, I know he’s preaching or giving a religion lesson. There are countless channels like that, where they spend the whole day reading from the Koran and discussing what Islam does or doesn’t allow you to do. I hate the look of the announcers, I hate the way they stress their k’s when they talk. It’s something called Kalkala. I remember they told us about it in the seventh grade. You’re supposed to enunciate the k very clearly when you’re reading from the Koran, it’s supposed to come straight from the throat like you’re about to puke kkkkkk. In one of those lessons, the teacher wanted to tell us about the heretics. “Who are the heretics of today?” he asked. Some students answered they were the people who put their faith in al-asnam (the idols), some said they were the sun worshippers, or those who believe in cows, or the murderers, or the Jews, but our
bearded religion teacher didn’t like any of those answers. In the end, he turned to the blackboard and wrote in gigantic letters: KARL MARX, and asked one of the kids to read what it said. The student overenunciated the k sound in Karl and the teacher gave him a beating to help him remember. Nobody understood what the hell Marx was. There are some channels, especially the official Saudi one, that are beneath contempt. Everything there seems different—the graphics, the music, the jingles. It’s like the programs I used to watch on Jordanian TV a decade ago. It’s amazing that in the age of cutting-edge television and state-of-the-art studios like Al Jazeera’s and ones in Lebanon, they still have these backward channels with moderators who don’t know the first thing about modern broadcasting. Everyone watches Al Jazeera when there’s a new war on. Later, people get tired of it, because all the wars on television look the same lately. Someone had better come up with something new in the next war. We can’t take it anymore, it’s too boring staring at a black or green screen.

  I’m not too crazy about Al Jazeera. From the little I can see, they spend hour after hour talking with experts and commentators, broadcasting news that everyone’s heard already, news that most of the Arab world is used to hearing and likes to hear. They never mention the names of Arab leaders, never do any investigative reporting about rulers or important figures in the Arab world. They don’t want to upset anyone, least of all the oil magnates in the Gulf, with all their money—the money which, when all is said and done, pays for these channels. It’s pretty pathetic, really; the big name that the channel has made for itself is a hoax. It may be a revolution in the area of news coverage in the Arab world, but it still doesn’t amount to real journalism.