Track Changes. Sayed Kashua
sat on a high bar stool, tucking into my second beer. My carry-on suitcase was pressed against the side of the stool and every now and again I touched it offhandedly to ensure it was still in place. Noticing this, the bartender said that ever since airlines had started charging for stowed luggage anyone who can takes carry-on. “It saves twenty-five bucks,” she said. “But it isn’t really about the money, because a sandwich and a drink here cost about the same.”
“Can I get a shot of Jameson?”
“A shot for eight or a double for twelve?” the bartender asked.
“Double, please,” I said. “Neat.” I had a total of five hundred dollars to cover the entire trip, and that had to include presents, however small, for the kids and maybe for Palestine, too.
“Here you go,” the bartender said with a smile, and I smiled back. She was young and beautiful, or at least that’s how I want to remember her. The age of servers and bartenders in America always surprised me, and I wasn’t sure if it was a pleasant surprise or not. When we started taking the kids to local restaurants on the first Friday of every month, I started noticing that the servers and bartenders here can be old. In Jerusalem, they are always young, and the chance of finding a server over the age of thirty is possible only at what are called Oriental restaurants, which operate mostly during the day. I didn’t know what to make of the elderly servers in America, who were sometimes in their sixties and seventies. Sometimes I thought that it’s good that there’s no age discrimination and hats off to the American public for creating an equal opportunity job market. But other times I felt a deep sorrow bubble up inside me when someone my parents’ age served me water in an ice-filled plastic cup—with a wrapper-capped straw, of course—and said, “Here you are, sir.”
The cups of water in America are enormous, at least in the usual chain restaurants, which are by and large what we have in the small town where we live. My sons love TGI Fridays and Buffalo Wild Wings. My daughter always says she doesn’t care where we go, that she’d rather skip the whole scene and stay at home. And I say that I’d rather she come along and join the rest of the family once a month, that it’s important, and she always relents. The servers in these restaurants have a set routine. They deliver the tray of cold water to the table and then hand out the menus and ask if they can get you something to drink. The soft drinks come in three sizes and the refills are free. Once they arrive with the drinks, they expect you to be ready to order. First courses and mains arrive together. Then they come back once more and ask if everything’s okay and if they can get you anything else. Once you’ve said, “No, thanks, everything’s fine,” then they come back while you’re still eating and set the bill on the edge of the table, usually in a padded folder with an inside pocket for the credit card. Around here they don’t wait for you to raise your finger and request the bill. “Take your time, whenever you’re ready,” they always say with a broad smile. Elderly servers, though, sadden me, because it’s hard work: you have to stay on your feet for hours on end, scurrying from kitchen to table, serving, seating, and cleaning. People of that age should be living a different life, free of the financial burdens that force people to work long shifts till they can no longer stand on their feet. I don’t know why such things upset me, as though my life were so different from theirs. Maybe it’s because I fear that their fate is what awaits me. After all, in order to buy the plane ticket, which cost over a thousand dollars, I had to use my wife’s credit card, the Israeli one, and divide the payment into twelve equal installments, the most they’d let me do without interest.
The bartender’s face showed no signs of distress. Sometimes I feel like I can read people’s faces and know their backgrounds, their bank balances, and whether they were bullied or did the bullying during their school days. Sometimes I worry about the way in which others might read me.
I wanted a cigarette so badly, but in US airports there are no smoking corners whatsoever. The smoker is officially despised here, cigarettes the habit of beggars and criminals. Nonetheless, I asked the bartender, who said she was sorry, but no, there’s no smoking zone here in O’Hare. But she’d heard that down South, in the Atlanta airport and others, they still had smoking rooms, somewhere after the security check. I looked at my cell and saw that I had an hour before boarding. I couldn’t step out for a cigarette, though, because then I’d have to go back through security and although I knew I’d probably make it in time, I couldn’t take the chance. I couldn’t afford to take any undue risks, not today. The lines could be too long. I’ll smoke in Paris, I figured. There had to be a smoking zone there and I had a two-hour layover in Charles de Gaulle before catching my connection to Tel Aviv.
I planned on nursing the whiskey. I couldn’t afford another. Two beers and a double shot of whiskey ought to do the trick. I’ll just drink slowly, I told myself, and save the last sip for the last minute. That way I’ll board the plane with as much alcohol as possible in my bloodstream. And aside from cheap wine they don’t offer beer or any other kind of alcohol on flights anymore, at least not in economy.
“So, where you off to?” the bartender asked.
There was no trace of an accent on her tongue, at least not a foreign one. I have an accent and always will. My ear is not attuned to the American vowel sounds and there are some words I don’t even try to say like the locals, knowing in advance that I’ll fail. And yet I can always recognize a foreign accent, in any language. People with a foreign accent carry a different expression on their faces, an expression that is hard to describe in words.
“Home,” I said.
“Where’s that at?”
“Jerusalem,” I said, figuring that she must have heard of it and that it would spare me the rest of the explanations.
“Ohh, that’s awesome, that’s a place I’ve always wanted to visit. How long have you been away?”
“Almost two years. Actually, a bit more than two years.”
“You live in Chicago?”
“Not remotely,” I said, trying to be entertaining. “Urbana-Champaign.”
“So, you’re a Fighting Illini, then?” she asked.
“Go Illini,” I said, masquerading as a foreign academic whose unique services had been sought by the university.
“You must miss it, though, huh?”
“Very much.”
“You going home to let the family spoil you a bit?” she said with a sweet smile, asking a question suited to a younger man, not one fast approaching forty.
“Totally,” I said, as the locals do.
“The food must be great over there, right?” she asked, and I nodded, “Best in the world.”
“How long will you be abroad?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I still didn’t know.
The sky was starting to darken and the time on my phone showed ten in the morning as the plane touched down at Ben-Gurion International Airport. The American phone—its roaming data restricted to domestic use only—would not update to local time, 6:00 p.m., without a wireless connection. It had been more than twenty-four hours since I’d left my wife and our two boys for Tel Aviv. As for my daughter, well, I’d knocked softly on her door and called her name, but she had not come out of her room. Maybe she really had been asleep and hadn’t heard.
A day before departure, I told the kids that I was going back to the old country for an important job. I told them that a rich customer had offered me a serious sum of money to write his autobiography. I told them I was going back simply to meet him and record his life story and that I’d do the rest of the work upon my return. My middle son asked me yet again what an autobiography was and when I explained it to him he still didn’t understand why I write them for other people and why they don’t write their own stories themselves.
I