34
I’d been anxious about coming to Kafr Qasim but within a few weeks it was as if I’d never known any other life. Al-Amari faded into memory. Bilahl and Rana and Lulu and Father seemed to me almost like characters in another play. Of course I missed them and worried about them, and thought a lot about Mother and Grandfather–when you’re alone, you live with the people close to you inside your head–but they seemed to belong to the past.
My room was almost as big as the whole of our flat in the camp. The floor tiles were level, the walls white, the bed was more comfortable and much, much bigger. I was addicted to the reliably hot and muscular jet of the shower. I loved the big kitchen, the new kettle, the fridge (a whole shelf of which was mine), the colossal TV with its perfect picture and sound, the stereo, on which Amr Diab sounded better than ever. And I liked the family. The father, Razal, owned a pharmacy in the centre of the village, on the main road. His wife Wasime was an English teacher in a local school. She was pregnant. Their first son was a six-year-old boy called Atta who gave me a poster of Zidane when I told him that he was my favourite player. But after a month I was too busy with my worries and my work to pay much attention to the comfort and the kindness around me.
I sold Dayek the day after we arrived. That first night I found a place for him in a building under construction, left him some grass and carrots and wished his smiling face goodnight. The next day I walked him by foot out of the village. I asked some of the workers I met whether they knew anyone who wanted a donkey, and they sent me to their bosses, who passed me on to their friends, who made phone calls, and found a buyer in a packing-house a few kilometres away. I almost couldn’t believe it when I received four new hundred-shekel notes: in the West Bank you wouldn’t have got half of that for a donkey. But when I turned my back on Dayek, my fellow-traveller, my only friend during a long and lonely week, a wave of pain broke over me. Another separation.
It was late afternoon by the time I got back, but it had been the most profitable day of my life. When Razal opened the door to me, pretty much the first thing he said was, ‘Have you heard about the attack?’ My stomach, and probably my face, fell. Halil’s cousin had told me that they wouldn’t know anything about me. It took me a moment to realise that he was talking about a new attack–and that was a surprise too. There hadn’t been an operation for a while and I’d come to think that if we couldn’t arrange one, no one else could.
‘What?’ I asked him eventually.
‘An attack,’ he said. ‘In Tel Aviv.’
Danny Ronen’s face looked fatter. Either it was the widescreen TV or he’d put on quite a bit of weight. A shooting attack. Two killed. Not serious. Who were these clowns who made it all the way to Tel Aviv and then only managed to kill two? In a restaurant? I almost asked Razal and Wasime, but stopped myself in time.
‘Only two killed,’ said Wasime.
‘Lucky,’ said Razal.
‘Will there be a curfew now?’ I asked.
They looked completely at a loss.
‘I mean in the West Bank,’ I said, in a sneeze of nervous laughter.
‘Probably,’ said Razal. He was going to say something else, but didn’t. I’d told them I was from Ein Rafa near Abu-Gosh and that I’d come here on the bus. Maybe they knew I was lying. My looks and accent weren’t things I could disguise and I’m a pretty unconvincing actor. But at least I was trying to pretend, and that in itself might have been good enough for them.
Next day it was Noah’s Ark, which I hadn’t seen for a while, and I asked Razal and Wasime whether I could watch TV. ‘Only if you’re watching Noah’s Ark,’ they said, ‘because that’s what’s on in this house.’
But as we waited for Tommy Musari on the turquoise sofa that was so soft it threatened to engulf us whole, we were amazed to hear that the programme had been cancelled. Instead, said the presenter, with deep solemnity, Channel 2 would screen a special programme to commemorate last night’s attack. Wasime emitted a scream. ‘A special commemorative programme?’ Razal growled. ‘Attack? What attack?’ said Wasime. ‘That shooting? They call that an attack?’ I looked from husband to wife. I was too surprised to speak. The programme started, and within a few seconds the mystery was solved. Max Caspi from the show Mad Max had been in the restaurant at the time of the shooting. So they had to have him do something, didn’t they? Even if only two people had been killed. Instead of Noah’s Ark, Max Caspi and friends in the restaurant. You could see why the shahid had only got two–the camera showed the broken window through which he’d fired. What an amateur! Why hadn’t he taken a small shotgun, shot the security guard and then sprayed inside with an Uzi?
Max, with his thick black-framed glasses and thicker black hair, which everyone knows is a wig, was raging at the camera.
‘This piece of shit came from Tulkarm to scare us. But we will not be scared!’
Max’s friends clapped their hands.
‘Not of him, not of any of the other pieces of shit sitting in their caves in Tulkarm and Jenin and Nablus and Hebron and Gaza planning their next outrage!’
Max stood there in his wig, jabbing his finger at all the pieces of shit who were planning operations against him. How utterly terrifying. I wanted to laugh. Then he and his singer friends started performing tragic ballads in the restaurant, and the camera pulled focus from the shattered window to the candles sitting on top of their piano and I just got too f*cking angry to bear it a moment longer. If they’d just keep going a little longer, I thought, maybe I’d get a lift into Tel Aviv and finish the job off properly. I got up and went to my room.
During those first days I’d walk around the village, or down the main road to the football pitch, where I’d watch Hapoel Kafr Qasim train or play matches. I didn’t see much of Razal or Wasime or Atta: I preferred to eat in my room, either something I’d brought or meals that I prepared in the kitchen when the family were finished there. Because I had so much time on my hands I usually responded to the muezzin’s calls and went to pray in the mosque, which was where I befriended a couple of guys who taught me the rules of the game in Kafr Qasim. They explained to me that there were two main types of Palestinians in Kafr Qasim. The ‘IRs’–Illegal Residents–were ordinary people like them and me, who the Border Police were trying to catch and expel (they told me to watch out for checkpoints or random searches). And there were also the ‘collaborators’–drug dealers and mafiosi who lived in villas and did whatever they liked with impunity. The locals didn’t think much of either type. There were plenty of Kafr Qasimis willing to inform the Israeli authorities about us, but also plenty who liked the Israelis even less than they liked us. I was told that forty years earlier the Jews had slaughtered fifty villagers for no reason at all and successfully covered it up.
My friends at the mosque introduced me to Sa’id, who came to the first and fourth prayers every day and managed a packing plant for Shimshon, a company exporting fruit and vegetables. Every day his packing-houses received tons of tomatoes and watermelons from the south, mangoes, bananas and avocados from the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights, citrus fruits from the Sharon, parsley and basil from the West Bank and much more. ‘We sort everything out according to the orders, store what needs to be stored, deliver what needs to be delivered to the airport and ports. It’s hard work,’ he warned me. ‘And the worst of it is that you’ll never want to look at a fruit or a vegetable again.’
‘I’ll give it a go,’ was my answer–as if I had a choice.
The packing-houses were some way outside the village, in the fields spread out east towards the brown hills, but still in Israeli territory. It was where I’d sold Dayek (I met the buyer, and my old friend was doing fine). But Sa’id hadn’t been kidding. My body was not prepared for the shock of the work. I’d done physical jobs before, but this was relentless. One after the other the trucks came in, packed with crates of carrots, cucumbers, potatoes, radishes, bananas and tomatoes, and the smell of it was terrible, especially the tomatoes. At home, a few fruits in a bowl give out a pleasant scent. In huge warehouses piled to the roof with it, the smell almost made you pass out. And besides, it was summer, and summer in Kafr Qasim was very different from summer up in the mountains. The heat was a nightmare, and carrying boxes of fruit in it was a double nightmare. It was my job to shift the boxes from the trucks coming into the deck to the forklifts. Two handlers worked on each truck that came in, one on the truck, the other on the deck. Eight in the morning to five in the evening, sometimes longer, with almost no breaks.
I was just a single ant in a huge anthill. The forklift drivers ferried the boxes to the storage rooms; other teams loaded the produce from there into huge containers for the cargo ships, or into smaller containers destined for the airport; others operated forklifts in the cold-storage rooms–they were sick most of the time because of the cold and therefore made better money. I made enough. In Al-Amari I could have lived very comfortably on my wages. But even in Kafr Qasim it was good enough. And if the work was hard, it gave me a reason to wake up in the morning at least, a daily routine. It developed my muscles and I made a few friends, like Majed Hashem from Kalkilya, a blond, bright-eyed guy with arms like a gorilla after years at the warehouse, and Ibrahim Hasuna from Bani Naim near Hebron. Ibrahim was short and skinny but also very strong. He had a black moustache and hair, sang Lior Narkis songs all day–Jewish crap:
Oh, sweet soul, the only one who knows me–
With you, I’m the whole world,
With you, I’m the whole universe,
Without you, I’m half a person…
Majed and Ibrahim weren’t close friends. Unlike the guys from the mosque, they weren’t religious and knew nothing about politics (girls and football: that was what they talked about) and I hardly saw them outside of work. But I enjoyed our days together in the packing-house–the condescension of the locals and our constant fear of the Border Police forged a bond between us.
Rana, I can smell that it’s you…I can feel your fingers on my face.
Say your name.
I’m sorry I left. I’m sorry I didn’t come back. I’m sorry. But please say something…
‘Sorry, Dr Hartom, I’ll be right there…!’
Svet? Is that you, or Rana?
If I’m dreaming, this dream is never-ending…
With the peak of the summer behind us, the air began to move and suddenly it hit you that air wasn’t just a suffocating blanket but something you could actually breathe. Of course, I was missing home, and Lulu and Rana, and even places like Ali’s café in Al-Amari. But after two months of working in the packing-house life had settled into a routine. I grew used to the village, the people, the job, and never saw any Jews. Maybe that was why everybody seemed so relaxed. Who knows how long I would have continued in this comfortable routine if my back hadn’t gone?
I’d had a few little warning twinges, but I’d just ascribed them to the new stresses on my muscles. And then one afternoon, it was like my whole body had suddenly seized up. I couldn’t move. Even sitting on a chair, doing nothing more than breathe, waves of pain were shooting through me. I couldn’t even answer the floor manager when he asked me what had happened. Was it my back? I nodded. He told me to lie down on the floor and raise my knees to my stomach. I wasn’t the first worker it had happened to, he said, and I wouldn’t be the last. I lay there for a few minutes with my back on the cool floor and sipped slowly from a glass of water he’d brought. Gradually I began to feel better. I managed to get up and walk slowly. Breathing became easier and the pain faded away. I signalled to the floor manager that I was able to carry on and slowly but successfully made it through to the end of the day. In the small hours of the night I was woken by an overwhelming pain.
I didn’t know what to do–who I could call, where I could go in the middle of the night. I lay there drowning in my suffering, waiting for the time to pass until dawn.