Dancing Arabs

My father wasn’t scared. He knew Gamal Abdel Nasser would get him out. And he didn’t get worked up about the way they treated him in the interrogations — the beatings and all. Sometimes later, when he watched television, he’d recognize one of the guys who questioned him. There were lots of well-known people about whom he could say, “That guy hit me once.” To this day, he still rubs his hand up and down his cheek as he says it.

Father did everything he could to get out of jail. Once he cried for hours to convince the wardens that he had a toothache, just so they’d take him to the hospital. Father says the sonofabitch dentist knew there was nothing wrong with him but pulled one of his teeth anyway, without an anesthetic. “It was worth it just to get out for a while,” he always says.

In the album there’s one picture of my father sitting with someone on a high balcony. They’re wearing heavy jackets and their hands are buried inside. They’re freezing, struggling hard to warm up. Father says they sat on that balcony on the day of the Battle of Karama and counted the helicopters transferring wounded soldiers from Jordan to Hadassah hospital, he and his friend Halil from Tur‘an. They were both detained for the same incident, but he didn’t tell us what it was. It said in the papers that they’d bombed the university cafeteria, but Father says the papers always lie. Fact is, the day he was released, he bought a copy of Ha’aretz and it said that, according to Moshe Dayan, the student they’d detained posed a tangible threat to state security and was not going to be released in the foreseeable future. My father was released pretty quickly. It took Halil seventeen years. He was given a life sentence, but the Ahmad Jibril prisoner exchange saved him.

A few days after Halil was released, Father loaded the four of us in the backseat, and we set out on the long trip north to Tur‘an, Halil’s village. Father asked people where Halil lived. Some of them said they didn’t know, because there was this crazy “rabbi” of theirs, Kahana, who promised to make sure the released prisoners were sent back to jail, so people were afraid to talk. People in Tur‘an had a strange accent, and all of us laughed at them behind their backs because they stressed their ks. Father and Halil exchanged long hugs and kisses. I’d never seen such kissing. Halil didn’t know we’d be coming, and his mother was pretty frightened to see us there all of a sudden. But then they said we were all one family, that Halil and my father were like brothers, and they invited us to stay the night. Halil and his whole family had that strange Tur‘an accent too. We could hardly make out what they were saying.

While we were there, Father said that he and Halil and one other student from Jaljulya had once rented a house in Jerusalem from Rehavam Ze’evi’s mother. Ze’evi was commanding officer of Central Command at the time. He was well-known for his right-wing philosophy, and everyone called him by his nickname, Gandhi. When his mother opened the door she said, “I’m Gandhi’s mother. You must have heard of him?” and the guy from Jaljulya answered, “Sure, Gandhi the Indian,” and the two of them — Father and Halil — couldn’t stop laughing. Gandhi was married by then, and my father got his room. He says the library in that room was really something; he took a few books of revisionist philosophy by Jabotinsky. There were lots of war books too. His mother was nice and only asked them to make sure the neighbors didn’t find out they were Arabs. My father says she must be dead by now. She was very old even then, and used to volunteer at Shaarei Tsedek hospital every day, cutting gauze.

After the Six-Day War they left Gandhi’s mother’s house, and when the army opened the way into the Old City, Father and Halil were among the first to go visit the Dome of the Rock. Father says they were very disappointed, because they’d been expecting to see a holy rock suspended over the mosque. Later, my father became a Communist and started distributing the party paper in the village when he went back there on weekends.

My father believed in Trotsky, in Lenin, in the Russians, in Yuri Gagarin, and in Valentina. He still remembers whole speeches by Nasser and can recite them by heart, even though there was only one radio in the village back then and everyone had to crowd around it to listen. To this day, the phrases In the name of the nation and in the name of the people are my father’s favorites. My mother loved Nasser too. She was in high school when he died, and she always tells us how they carried a mock coffin through the village and held a mock funeral. My grandmother says the Jews put poison in his cigarettes. That he didn’t just die, the way they say, it had all been pla

My father says there’s no comparing Nasser and Sadat. The day Sadat was killed, we were on our way home from Tulkarm. They a

My father doesn’t understand how my brothers and I came out the way we did. We can’t even draw a flag. He says kids much smaller than us walk through the streets singing “P-L-O — Israel, no!” and he shouts at us for not even knowing what PLO stands for.

Anemones

My parents got up early for work. My mother was first. Since I was always up before my brothers, I was in charge of getting the morning groceries: a loaf of bread and 100 grams of hard cheese. The grocery store was just across the way, but I preferred to run the errand as early as possible, because I didn’t want to be stuck with the Gazazweh, the workers from Gaza, who showed up there every morning. I almost always did get stuck with them, though, and even the few times when I arrived early enough, I’d see them getting off their buses just as I was leaving. Their buses stopped right near the store, engines still ru

When I returned with the groceries, Father was always in the bathroom. That’s where he’d smoke his morning cigarette, which he’d put out in the cup of coffee he had in there. I always went in after him and removed the cup with the cigarette butt. A bathroom, after someone has had coffee and a cigarette in it, has a special smell. My father had a special smell. I know that smell of morning in the bathroom, know it very well. It wasn’t unpleasant. I liked it. I hardly saw Father in the morning because, right after his cigarette and coffee, he’d take his plastic lunch box with the sandwiches Mother had made for him and leave for work.

My father worked in a place he used to refer to as the packinghouse or Kalmaniyya. I didn’t know what it meant, but I assumed my father picked fruit.