Track Changes. Sayed Kashua
a bus. I’ll ride over and see my children, make sure they’re okay, that they’re alive. No one will notice. But there are no buses at this hour. So I would have to walk, a brisk fifteen-minute stroll, at most half an hour. I’ll put on my thermal underwear and long coat, a scarf and wool hat, and march over to the house to see my kids. First, though, I have to get control of this sobbing, catch my breath, smooth out the jagged inhalations, calm the storm that caught me unprepared, shattering the windows that I forgot to board up. She’ll definitely understand, my wife. I simply have to call her.
I called the first of two numbers on my Favorites list and hung up immediately. She’s probably asleep and tomorrow she has a long day, as usual. I texted the second number on my list. “You up?” I asked my daughter in Hebrew, hoping she wouldn’t lose the only language in which she once knew how to read. She answered right away. “Yeah, what’s going on?” she wrote, in English.
I called her cell and she answered. “Are you okay?” I asked in Arabic, a language she comprehends only in the Palestinian field-workers’ dialect that we spoke at home.
“Yes,” she answered in Hebrew and then in English: “I’m fine.”
“Are your brothers okay? Your mother?”
“Did something happen?”
“No, nothing. Just checking,” I told her, even though I wanted to say that she has a grandfather, that I have a father and mother and a village and family. “Sorry, I’m just writing a bit and suddenly, you know, just do me a favor, please, and go into your brothers’ room and check that they’re okay. Sometimes when I’m writing I imagine all sorts of nightmare scenarios.”
“They’re fine. I’m not going into anyone’s room.”
“Please, otherwise I’ll have to come over,” I begged. I asked that she stay on the line as she goes into their room.
“They’re asleep,” she whispered.
“Can you do me a favor and just put the phone next to your little brother’s mouth, as if he’s speaking to me?”
I held my breath, perking my ears to pick up the child’s respirations but heard nothing.
“Okay,” my daughter said. “He’s starting to wake up, so I think we’re done here.”
“He’s moving?”
“Yes!” she yelled in a whisper. “I have to get back to my room. Bye.” She hung up.
They’re okay. The little one is the one who worries me. It’s always the littlest that generates the most amount of anxiety, and my daughter said that he had moved, that he practically woke up, so he’s okay.
I stepped out onto the kitchen balcony to smoke, this time without gloves, in the hopes that the cold would shock me back to my surroundings and still the rhythm of my breathing.
I ground the cigarette out in the bucket of frozen water and returned to the desk, where I opened a new file: “Dad Transcript.”
Back when we lived in Jerusalem, I always woke up before my wife and kids. I liked that hour of early morning quiet. In Illinois the situation is different. I want to sleep late, to avoid waking up, as has long been my habit.
The winter mornings here are icy and dark. I try to stay still in bed, hoping for the sun to come up. I try to think about the book I have to write, about the first-person protagonist that is the me character. But swiftly I’m seized by harsh thoughts that force me out of bed to start my morning routine, rituals meant to banish the demons.
Coffee is my first task. It took me several long months to get used to the idea and the taste of American coffee, coffee that until we came here I had seen only on TV and in movies. A white filter, four heaped tablespoons, four cups of water in the designated slot, a transparent glass pot, set in its ring—and then the flipping of a switch to start the process. Only then do I go urinate. Even if my bladder is pressing I will always start the coffee machine before going to the bathroom. Ten minutes will pass before it’s ready, and I have to make the most of my time.
I’ve now developed a fondness for American coffee. I take the first two cups with milk, with the firm belief that the lactose gets the intestinal track moving. After going to the bathroom, I put on my two-ply winter coat—the inner layer providing insulation and the outer layer serving as a sort of wind and rain guard. We bought these coats together, for the whole family, over two years ago, once we understood that without proper winter coats a person could freeze to death here in ten minutes. In Israel there’s no need for special coats, not even in Jerusalem, which is considered especially cold.
Before zipping up the coat I pull on some thick thermal socks and then step into waterproof boots, another local purchase, and wrap a wool scarf around my neck and pull a hat down over my ears. I put a glove on my left hand but leave my right one bare, so that I can pour coffee into a travel mug, and then add only a touch of milk so that the coffee doesn’t cool down too much. Smoking is prohibited inside—actually it’s prohibited everywhere on campus—including the graduate student dorms and the faculty housing for visiting academics.
During our first few weeks in town, I’d walk down one of the side streets with my coffee and cigarette in hand, but as the weather got colder I started smoking on the path that leads from the kitchen to the stairs. I smoke fast in the winter, three minutes per cigarette at most. Otherwise my hand goes numb. Afterward I grind the cigarettes into a bucket of frozen water, enjoying the hissing sound that the burning cigarettes make upon impact with the ice.
Whenever people ask me: “What are you doing in Illinois?” I always say that I’m writing a book, even though ever since we’ve arrived I’ve not written a single word.
To be honest, I’ve only been asked this a few times, mostly at social events held by the department where my wife is teaching, events that family and spouses are specifically invited to and that she, having told her colleagues that she’s married, was compelled to request I accompany her to, knowing full well that I would not pass on an opportunity to feel like we were in a relationship.
“So, you’re a writer?”
I lie because I have nothing better to say.
Albeit I’ve written thirty books but only as a hired hand. Aside from one short story, less than a page long and featured in the Hebrew University students’ journal some fifteen years ago, I’ve not published a single piece of writing under my own name, and even then the editor misspelled my first name, adding a guttural vowel where there was none.
Sometimes I think about my book, the one I promised I would never write, and I imagine the protagonist in a furnished one-room apartment in the University of Illinois dorms.
Around here they only count bedrooms when specifying the number of rooms in an apartment. He lives alone, this protagonist, in the married-student dorms. He has a small bedroom, in the middle of which sits a queen-size bed on an appropriately sized box mattress, with no headboard. He has a closet, which is nothing more than an accordion-like door that opens to a narrow, carpeted, shelf-less space that houses a single hanging bar, fixed at the protagonist’s eye level, five foot seven.
In his apartment there’s also a living room and a three-seater couch, an old TV with cable access, and a desk made out of sturdy wood. In that same open space there is also a small kitchen and a refrigerator, a stove and an electric stovetop, a microwave and a coffee machine. It was all there when I moved in; I bought no new furniture aside from some plastic shelves that I got at one of the giant hardware stores, a translucent set of storage drawers that are bought individually and can be assembled any which way, like Lego. I placed them one on top of another and shoved them into my bedroom closet. The bottom one is for socks, the top for underwear.