Track Changes. Sayed Kashua
I have my first coffee and my first cigarette.
I brush my teeth, wash my face, dress, and wait to leave the house. Usually I click through the Hebrew and Arabic Israeli news sites, and sometimes I flip on the TV and passively watch the local news or the Weather Channel. It is during those mornings, from the moment I open my eyes until the moment I leave the house, that I am assailed by the sharpest pangs of longing for Palestine.
At six thirty I head out to the bus stop near the dorms. Usually I am the first passenger on the bus. I nod at the driver, whom I see almost every day, and sometimes she nods back. Off campus more passengers board—mostly gas station attendants and salespeople coming off night shifts at one of the twenty-four-hour stores. There are no college kids on the buses at that time of day and no students on their way to school.
At a quarter to seven I reach the house. I have a key and don’t have to ring the bell or ask my wife’s permission to enter. She’s already awake, seated at the kitchen table with her coffee. Palestine drinks cappuccinos. She told me she once used to cook coffee in a pot over an open flame. When she left Tira, she turned to instant coffee, and once we could afford it she bought herself a coffee machine.
My arrival is a sign that it’s time to wake the boys. Palestine no longer asks if I’d like coffee. I take my shoes off by the door, shed my winter layers, and take the wooden steps, padded with a gray American carpet, to the bedroom level. The two boys share a single room with matching beds and a desk for the eldest, who is ten. He’s the one I wake first. I stroke his hair, say good morning, give him a kiss. He gets up quickly, says good morning, and gets to his feet, ready to wash his face, brush his teeth, and get dressed. Then I sit on the edge of my younger son’s bed, stroke his hair, kiss his cheeks, whisper gentle words in a soft voice. He refuses to rise. He doesn’t like going to kindergarten. Two years have passed and the first words out of his mouth every single day are: “I don’t want to go to school.” At first he said that sentence in Hebrew, but after three months in the United States he started to protest in English. The door to my daughter’s room, when she’s at home, is perpetually locked. She wakes up alone, wishes no one a good morning, and responds to no one when she is greeted but is always ready on time.
I head over to the garage through a side door connected to the kitchen, open the door by pressing a button, raising it a couple of feet off the ground so that the exhaust fumes don’t gather inside, and start the car so that it warms up, at least slightly, while the boys slurp down the last of their cereal. Then they struggle with their shoes.
“It’s much better for the kids,” I find myself saying out loud sometimes, sitting in my student dorm after having dropped them off, now waiting for them to finish yet another day of school.
It has to be better for them, even if they don’t know it yet. And they don’t need to know. They’re learning English, and the language will never scare them as it scares me. Even if we have to head back once the three years are up on Palestine’s contract, the kids will already be using the language as if it’s their own.
It would be better for them here, without a doubt. They won’t have to feel humiliated, won’t have to bow their heads beneath the glare of that monstrous glass ceiling. Here, so I hoped, they won’t be constantly reminded that they don’t belong, aren’t wanted, be forced to internalize their own inferiority, compelled to weigh each word spoken in school and on the street and at work out of a fear that they might somehow upset the status of the rulers.
Even if my wife and I have to return, the kids will always have the option of fleeing to a different country, into the arms of a familiar language. The notion that they may stray far from me rises painfully to the surface every now and again. I’d like to have them nearby, always, in the same village, the same town, same neighborhood, or at least a short drive away, along safe, orderly streets, with a safety barrier between the lanes of oncoming traffic. Tira was an hour from Jerusalem, and yet at times it felt so far.
The kids have never been to Tira, and my wife and I have not been back since the wedding.
Ever since we met, my wife has wanted to leave the country. When she finished her doctorate at Hebrew University she had several options for postdocs and visiting teaching residencies at a few universities abroad, but she was forced to turn those offers down on my account. I couched my opposition to any move in work-related concerns—the financial burdens of that sort of trip—but the real reason I didn’t want to go was that I knew that elsewhere it would be easier for her to leave me. I had no doubt that moving countries would lead to a separation between us. I hoped I could string things along until she managed one day to love me, just as I loved her from the moment I saw her. But her love did not materialize. And the kids arrived and multiplied. By the time we’d left, our daughter was eleven and already could ask questions we couldn’t answer. We had to protect her and keep her away from Tira to the greatest possible extent.
Sometimes, when I’m left alone in the university’s apartment dorms, I click over to a local Tira site and look through the pictures in the news articles and advertisements. I sift through the nursery school birthday party pictures and the sporting events and the murders, the burnt cars, the roadworks, the grand openings of the newest convenience stores. I zoom in on the photos and examine them closely, looking for familiar faces, hoping to find some of the kids who were in my class in elementary school.
I think I remember each of the forty-two kids who were with me from first to ninth grade. Many dropped out along the way and others were sent to the asfuriyya, the bird house, which is what we called the special-ed school that was founded in the village when we were in fourth grade, and to which the idiots, the blind, the impaired—those who couldn’t get by—were sent. We knew nothing of special education, but we knew that whoever was sent to the asfuriyya was messed up, to be avoided, not to be played with, and if he should be found walking alone on the street then it was fine to yell at him and pelt him with tangerines. Sometimes I wonder what became of each of my forty-two classmates.
I know for a fact that one student in the class died, because I read about her on that same local news site. There was not much in the way of details in that article, no name, no cause of death, no comment from the police. The news on Tira’s local site is written for the people of Tira, and they are the only ones who know to read between the lines and understand what really happened—the chain of events, the names of the suspects and their motives. The only way of knowing what’s happening in Tira is to live in Tira.
Besides news sites I also look at Google Earth, at both satellite images and roads. I sit in front of the computer and move east across the globe, toward its middle, and with precise motions of my finger I approach home. Once properly positioned, I zoom in on Tira, infiltrating, from above, the streets, and, from the spot where I touch down, I navigate my way home.
I walk down the main street in our neighborhood, the way back from elementary school to home. Some of the houses have been renovated, some are newly built, old stores have been closed, and new ones have been opened in their place. The road is filled with kids dressed in the same blue uniform, backpacks on their shoulders, frozen in time as they walk with me back to their houses. The faces of the children are not clear enough to recognize and still I try to imagine their parents and I wonder if one of them was in my class. People don’t leave Tira, don’t abandon it. They don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s always the same families, same eyes, same skin color, same gaze, passed down in Tira from the war to the face-blurring cameras of Google.
I continue to stride along the main street, avoiding the dirt path that cuts away toward the cemetery. Most of the kids in the neighborhood used to take the shortcut and follow the dirt track through the graveyard, but I was scared. Even when I circled along the length of the outer wall, I’d mumble the Fatiha that my grandmother taught me to recite and that she promised would protect me from danger. I walked fast because I wanted to prove, perhaps to the neighborhood kids and perhaps to myself, that the graveyard shortcut wasn’t any shorter. And actually they weren’t rushing to get home, those kids from my class. They lingered in the graveyard, and I would beat them even if I took the long