Track Changes. Sayed Kashua
scurrying from hideout to hideout in the neighborhood that I knew so well, employing to my advantage my perfect knowledge of the battlefield. Bullets whistled past my ears but never hit me, and every shot I fired found its mark.
When I was a kid, I defended my home in Tira; when I became a father, I defended our home in Jerusalem; but when I moved to Illinois, I wasn’t able to defend a thing. I didn’t know where to hide, where the forces were positioned, where the enemy assault would come from.
My attempts at lulling myself to sleep while imagining myself as a soldier defending the family home no longer worked. Back in the day I would emerge victorious from every battle or at least fall asleep while still maintaining the perimeter, the enemy unable to strike the home I was in. But ever since the move to Illinois I surrender before the battle has even begun, a surrender to the brigades of insomnia.
My mother and my older brother and his wife, whom I was meeting for the first time, shared a bench outside my father’s hospital room. My mother’s eyes were swollen from crying, and her sobbing intensified when she saw me. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” she cried and seemed not to know if she was allowed to hug me.
“What are you doing here?” my older brother asked. “Why’d you come?”
“Stop it,” my mother ordered. “Not now, not in the hospital. He’s your brother. Enough.”
“You smelled death and came to take some of the remains?” my brother said. And Mom cried and begged in the name of Allah that this was not the time, that we are brothers.
“Enough,” my brother’s wife said, too, taking his hand.
“You want to make a scene in the hospital?”
“Go home,” my mother urged him and turned to his wife. “Please, take your husband home.”
“Let’s go,” his wife said, tugging his hand. “Let’s go home.”
When I first arrived at the hospital, my mother accompanied me to the room in the intensive care section of the cardiology ward, where my father’s shrunken body lay, hooked up to masks and wires, as a metallic rectangular machine filled and emptied his lungs at a predetermined rate. I didn’t know if I was allowed to approach him, touch him, hug him, or hold his hand as I’d seen in the movies. In the end I touched him gently, but he didn’t respond.
Mom filled me in on the medical details, which I did not fully understand. I managed to grasp that they’d taken him to the hospital due to weakness, vomiting, and intense back pain. And that at first they didn’t know what was wrong and simply wanted to monitor him and run a few tests, but during those first days his condition worsened and on the morning of my arrival he was stricken with sharp pains in his chest. An EKG showed he was having an acute heart attack, and he was taken to the operating room for a heart catheterization in two arteries or maybe it was veins. I’m not sure. My mother also said that in the interim the tests from before the heart attack started to come back, and they showed that my father has an advanced stage of lung cancer, which has already spread to the bones and the liver.
“How’s your wife? And the kids? I understand you already have two?”
“Three. A girl and two boys. They’re okay, they send regards.”
“How’d you find us?”
“I asked at information,” I told her, even though I knew she meant: Who told you? How did you know? Who are you even in touch with?
I didn’t tell her that my father, two days earlier, had sent me a short message over Skype, right after I’d accepted his friendship request. He only wrote, “I’m in the hospital,” but I knew right away it was his heart.
My mother encouraged me to go home, take a shower, eat, rest up after the long journey, but I insisted on staying by my father’s bed. After all, that was the reason I’d come, the reason I’d asked Palestine for permission to buy a plane ticket, explaining to her that the situation was grave and even lying and saying that I’d spoken to my father’s attending physician in the hospital, who said that if he were me he would come back immediately. She consented. She would have done so without the lie, too, allowing me to go over our budget and break our unwritten agreements, signed, over the years, in long silences.
I’ve come the whole way just to be by his side, I practically begged my mother, even though I knew she wasn’t sure if she ought to leave me with my father.
“My body’s still ticking on an American clock,” I told her, because I wanted her to go already. “Tomorrow, tomorrow morning I’ll come home,” I promised her, hoping I would manage to keep my promise.
My father’s condition, the doctors say, is critical but stable.
From Mom’s explanation I was able to grasp that after the catheterization Dad’s lungs filled with fluid and he wasn’t able to breathe. They hooked him up to a respirator and drained the liquid from his lungs. After a few hours, during which they thought they might lose him, the doctors were able to take him off the respirator and leave him hooked up only to the oxygen mask. Mom said it was important to keep an eye on the oximeter, and she showed me how to read the screen. “If it goes under eighty,” she said, “call the nurse immediately.” Another thing I had to keep an eye on was the nearly empty urine drainage bag, which dangled over the side of the bed. “When he starts expelling,” my mother said, claiming to have discussed this in detail with one of the cardiologists from Tira who works at Meir Hospital, “we’ll know that he’s getting better. An excellent cardiologist, that Ahmad, do you know him? He was in your grade. Maybe one grade behind you. He helped us a lot today. If he swings by, be on your best behavior and be grateful, although I doubt he’ll come because senior physicians don’t work night shifts.”
I watched the saturation levels on the oximeter, though I did not understand their significance. Sometimes they went up to ninety-two and sometimes they went down to eighty-five. The monitor, which presented my father’s condition in shimmering graphs and flickering numbers and lights, started to beep, and a nurse entered the room, silenced the beeping with the pressing of a button, and then turned down the volume of the machine to practically zero. Had she not silenced it, it would probably have continued beeping, because a red light flashed incessantly. I did not inquire of the nurse what the beeps and silences meant; I figured they knew their trade and I didn’t want to interfere.
I returned to the couch, which was positioned beneath the large window that spanned the length of the room and looked out on a high-rise construction site. It was now six in the evening in Illinois. My wife had responded to me earlier to say that everything was okay and that I should “pass on her warmest get-well wishes.” My youngest son was probably in the bath at this stage of the evening, and I figured I’d send him a message later, once he’d put on his superhero pajamas and was getting ready for bed. Usually I’m there with him till he falls asleep. Maybe I’ll even talk to him a little bit later, I thought. My daughter will be up later than the boys, but there’s not much chance she’ll want to talk to me. The weather app showed it to be ten degrees in Illinois and fifty in Kfar Saba. With a single tap I changed it from Fahrenheit to Celsius, which seemed more appropriate here. No snow predicted for tomorrow in Illinois and a light rain possible in Kfar Saba.
The nurse popped into the room once an hour, and each time she stepped in I stood up. She looked at my father, at the instruments and monitors, noted the urine volume in the bag, and jotted down some figures on the clipboard attached to the foot of the hospital bed.
“You can get yourself something to drink, if you want,” the nurse said, surprising me at close to five in the morning by addressing me directly. “There’s a little kitchenette there with coffee and tea, some bread, and cottage cheese and chocolate spread in the fridge.”
“Thanks so much,” I said apologetically, in light of the earlier incident, after I’d tried to give my father a drink straight from the bottle.
“Did