36
The doctor told me that if I didn’t want to ruin my back for ever, I could no longer work in such a strenuous job. After four days off I returned to the packing-house and talked to Sa’id. He agreed to train me as a forklift driver but couldn’t promise work. And so it was. Except for a single day when I covered a sick driver and suffered every minute through inexperience, the packing-house never called me again. I went back to asking around for work–in the mosque, guys I’d met at the packing-house, even Razal and Wasime. One evening my friend Ibrahim from the packing-house called me at the house.
‘Fahmi, I’m in hospital.’
‘Ahalan Ibrahim–what’s the matter?’
‘My wife’s in here with a burst appendix. She needs an operation.’
‘Oh. When is it?’ I wasn’t sure why he was telling me this.
‘Tomorrow morning. Listen, do you want to replace her at work, until she recovers? It’ll be ten days, maybe two weeks. She’s a cleaner.’
‘Where?’
‘In a park in Rosh Haayin.’
For the Jews. Cleaning for the Jews. It didn’t sound that attractive.
‘Going to work for the Jews?’ I heard Bilahl sneer. ‘For this we worked so hard? So you can clean their offices like a miserable servant?’
‘I’m not anybody’s servant. I’m stronger than them. I’m just taking their money, that’s all.’
‘Hello?’ Ibrahim was saying.
‘That’s how they rule us: they make us dependent on their money.’
‘Easy for you to say, but how do you want me to live?’
‘Live on faith. Study Islam and go to the mosque, and Allah will help you. How do you think I’ve lived all my life?’
‘And where are you now, Bilahl? Are you dead? Is Allah helping you now, brother?’
‘Fahmi? Hello?’
‘Just give me a second…Let me think about it.’
‘What do you need to think about?’ Ibrahim was right. I didn’t know anything about cleaning and I didn’t like Jews, but it was better than sitting at home and feeling sorry for myself. And I needed the money.
‘Do you have to lift heavy stuff?’
‘A mop is heavy stuff?’
‘What about papers? I don’t have a blue ID.’
‘They never check. You just have to be out of the park before eight. Look, Fahmi, my wife hasn’t got an ID either, so make up your mind. I need to get back to her.’
Oh, your smell, Rana. Is that you? Oh, I love your smell…
‘Good morning, sweetheart. How was your weekend? Did you have guests?’
Oh, Svetlana…I thought it was…
‘Oh, look! Your nostrils twitched! It’s this perfume, I knew it. I hope you don’t mind, I asked your girlfriend what perfume she was wearing. You like it, don’t you? You like my smell now? I just wanted to cheer you up. It’s funny, I spent the weekend waiting for work…’
Dear Svet. Don’t you get a chance to talk at home?
‘Another thing about you in the paper. You and the Croc. And your brother. I just refuse to believe it. I shrug it off now. OK, gonna flip you now…’
The Croc…with his red eyes and green car. Not a bad guy, really. I can see him on the beach, but I can’t seem to reach…or am I getting closer?
‘Are you smiling because of the massage, Fahmi? Or something else? Are you smiling? You don’t know how I’ve been looking forward to seeing you…la la…!’
I waited near the mosque after the first prayer and boarded a minibus full of construction workers. After a brief ride to the business park we passed through its gates without being checked. Inside, there was a one-way road lined with office buildings and warehouses. The minibus let the noisy builders off in front of an unfinished building and I was left alone. The driver asked whether I was Zahara’s replacement and parked the minibus outside a building near the entrance to the park which housed several restaurants.
‘OK, here’s the schedule,’ my new boss said. ‘First, this restaurant.’ He fished out a bundle of keys and signalled for me to follow him. ‘Opens at eleven. You’ve got two to three hours to get it done.’ He showed me cleaning materials, explained what needed cleaning. ‘At eleven the owner, Shimshon Almozlino, will be here, so you’ve got to be done by then. At eleven,’ he continued, pointing to a falafel stall at the edge of the complex, ‘you come here from Shimshon’s, OK? Quick clean, half an hour.’ Bilahl was right, I was thinking. What the hell was I doing here?
Was I really going to clean toilets and falafel stalls for the Jews? There was something terribly wrong about this. ‘After the falafel you can take a break, but be careful,’ he said, waving a hand at a big new building of tan stone: the orange Orange offices. ‘There are armed guards in the Orange building who keep an eye out for Arabs. They’ve already arrested some.’ He measured me with a long look. ‘And the Border Police sometimes do the rounds looking for IRs. I don’t care who you are. To me, you’re just Zahara’s temporary replacement, but I suggest you be careful.’
I said nothing. We walked on to another new office building. ‘Three o’clock you come here. You’ll need this to get in.’ He handed me a keycard and after a brief exchange with the guard we went on in and up to the third floor, where a second card opened the offices of a high-tech company. Then another building, another keycard, another identical high-tech company’s office. Five until seven: two more hours of Jews. ‘Have you got everything?’ he asked. ‘Because you look like you’re in shock.’ ‘No, no, I’m fine. I’ve got it.’ ‘When you finish here, you wait for me downstairs at seven-thirty, OK? Even a few minutes earlier. From eight there’s a guard at the entrance to the park who checks IDs, so we want to leave before that, yes?’ I nodded. ‘What time do you wait for me downstairs?’ ‘Seven-thirty.’ He scrutinised me. ‘You look in shock, kid.’ ‘Not in shock,’ I replied. One more mention of shock and I’d bury him under the foundations of one of these half-built offices, among all his Jewish pals. ‘Beware of the Orange guards,’ he said. ‘And look out for the Rosh Haayin private security patrols when it gets dark. And the Border Police. Any questions?’ We’d arrived back at our starting point.
‘How much do I get?’
‘Two hundred shekels a day, cash, when I drop you off at Kafr Qasim at night. Any problems, I’m Samir.’ He turned and beeped his minibus locks open with his key-fob. ‘Good luck.’
‘They’re not standing outside any more, at least. I think they wouldn’t put up with it after the guy got in…
‘All right, we’re finished now. Let’s turn you over…careful of the tubes…’
One tube for piss, one tube for air…
‘Back in two hours, sweetheart…’
I thought I wouldn’t last a day but I made it through the whole two weeks until Zahara recovered and reclaimed her job. It wasn’t hard work, because there were breaks during the day. My back gave me a few worrying little spasms on the first day and then I never heard from it again. Not having any expenses, I managed to save a little money: I’d grab an illicit breakfast from the restaurant’s refrigerator, and was given a falafel from the stall for lunch. The lunch breaks I usually spent napping on the site where the builders from Kafr Qasim worked. There was a room with plywood on the floor, covered in blankets, which the workers–Palestinians and a few Romanians–didn’t mind me using.
The easiest work was in the never very messy offices of the high-tech companies: I vacuumed the carpets, cleaned the kitchenette, washed a few dishes, bagged the garbage and replaced the bin liners. It was all meant to take four hours. I did it in two. The girls were pretty, and smiled at me; there were always cookies and pretzels to steal from the kitchenette; the toilets were new. Every evening after the last place was empty, I put the cleaning things back in their place and went into the small toilet for a long, satisfying, symbolic crap.
So once again I had a routine. The morning trip, the restaurants, the nap, the high-tech offices, the mop, the Hoover, the farewell message of my concluding shit. I returned to the village at seven-thirty, received my two hundred shekels, used twenty of them to buy shawarma and Coke on the main road and pocketed the rest. Sometimes I’d sit in the shawarma place with the builders who rode back with me, and sometimes I met friends. But most evenings I went home. I couldn’t stand the locals looking down at us. The glances that said we were contemptible refugees. As if those complacent white-haired old fatsos with their beads, backgammon, blue ID cards and stinking tobacco were doing us a favour by not calling the Border Police. F*ck them, with their Israeli friends who hate them and mean them every bit as much harm as they do us. My people? No: f*ck ’em.
From the Israelis’ most dangerous enemy to the least of their servants. It was a humiliating comedown, but I kept at it. I told myself that I wasn’t working for the Jews but for Samir, that Israeli money was going into Palestinian pockets, and to remind myself that I wasn’t a traitor to my people I would commit petty crimes: I took food and drink from the kitchens and pens from the desks. Reparations on a tiny scale. Once I saw a hand-held computer on a desk and fitted it into the palm of my hand, pushed the buttons, caressed the orange plastic. I almost took it.
But always there was Bilahl in my head, sneering at my insistence on seeing the glass as half full. I held the glass up and examined it. Which was it? Half full or half empty? It was both, dear brother. I worked for them, but I never forgot who they were. I didn’t pretend not to see the looks the security guards gave us whenever we talked Arabic among ourselves or simply clustered together at lunch. How could Bilahl say I was bowing my head to them, or not doing enough for the cause? What was he doing? There were likeable people in the offices, but I made it a principle not to like them, not to cross the line.
Only once did I cross it. I was in the office I cleaned last. It was evening and most of the workers had gone home. Except for the humming of the computers and music from one of the more distant rooms, it was completely quiet. I ate a few biscuits and drank a cup of coffee in the kitchenette, and then headed out to bag the garbage and replace the bin liners. I was clearing the used coffee cups from the desks when I saw the orange gadget again. I picked it up from its cradle and fiddled with its buttons.
‘You can have it,’ said a voice from behind me.
I spun round in alarm. ‘What?’
‘You can have it.’
Just an ordinary Israeli guy with a big Israeli nose and heavy-lidded eyes, who I’d seen in the office a couple of times. But as he stood in front of me and spoke, and I connected his voice to his face, I suddenly realised I’d seen him before. I dredged up rusty Hebrew from the depths of my brain.
‘I can have it?’
‘Yeah. I noticed you looking at it. It’s not working. But you can have it if you want.’
I looked at the little orange device. Was he doing this to humiliate me? I put it in my pocket and kept looking at him.
‘What?’ he said. ‘I need to get back to my desk. Do you mind?’
I moved aside and he flopped, rather wearily, into his chair. For a moment I stayed where I was, examining his face.
‘What?’ he said again. ‘The Palm is yours. What now?’
I knew what it was now. Noah’s Ark. I wanted to ask him about it. But he was just some arrogant, self-satisfied Israeli. Why bother?
‘Nothing. Thanks,’ I said, and beat a retreat, his eyes crawling all over the back of my neck. I kept thinking about him on the way home and the rest of that evening. His Noah’s Ark had been a few months ago. He’d had some weird name, which Tommy Musari kept repeating. And his partner in the couple (‘Two by two! Two by two!’) had been some imbecile girl from the army…I put his Palm on my shelf and tried to recall how the show had gone. First time I’d ever seen someone who’d been on Noah’s Ark. Pity he was such a son of a bitch, but what else would you expect from a Jew?
Yeah. What else?
‘Well, Svetlana?’
‘Well, Dr Hartom…there’s nothing much to say. He’s been the same for weeks.’
‘Well. We’re getting near the point where we can make a pretty accurate prognosis…’
‘But there’s still a chance he’ll come out of it?’
‘There’s always a chance.’
‘But what kind of…? What percentage?’
‘Svetlana, please. I’m relying on you to keep me informed of any changes whatsoever. Anything at all.’
‘Yes, Doctor.’