In prison. Learning Hebrew with Mustafa A’alem. Mustafa is an old man, but he recognises Saddiq right away. He remembers all his outstanding students as if he’d seen them just yesterday. Saddiq A’adana, you still have a lot to learn, he tells him when he’s in the tent that serves as their cell. We still haven’t done any grammar. And you don’t know how to spell. I know, that’s why I came back, Saddiq says and kisses Mustafa on the cheek. After they smile at each other, Saddiq bends his head, humble and meek. That’s how it is. Mustafa A’alem is a famous hero of the Intifada and the young prisoners treat him with great respect. They wait months for the chance to become his students, hoping to be the ones he’ll select. You’re not a boy any more, are you? Mustafa A’alem says. Come to me tomorrow at three. We’ll see what we can do. Then Saddiq remembers to call out Mustafa’s famous slogan: Know your enemy! Ta’aref el ado! When he’s said those words, he can turn around and go.
And the next day (after being humiliated and harassed) they’re already sitting together over their books as if no time at all had passed. Mustafa takes out a package of newspapers that was smuggled into the prison especially for him. And he takes out two pens. Then he dictates to Saddiq a list of new words in Hebrew that are easy to understand. And Saddiq writes the Hebrew letters with an unsure hand. When they’re finished, Mustafa goes over the words, one by one. Proof. Pardon. Solution. Retribution. Power. Payment. Compensation. Expectation. Longing, gagua, in Hebrew. It’s such a beautiful word, Saddiq says, like a baby crying for its mother. But Mustafa scolds: What’s beautiful about it? Saddiq tries to explain (he’d hardly slept all night or the night before) and says: because longing is, like you said, when you want to be in another place. When you’ve fallen from grace. When you’ve lost something that nothing else can replace.
Yotam’s father longs for his son Gidi. Every time his name is mentioned, his face turns blue and his wife thinks he’s going to choke. She brings him a glass of water and holds it to his lips while he drinks. But he’s afraid he knows what she really thinks. He believes that deep in her heart, she thinks he’s the guilty one, because he had the strongest influence on their son. He pushed Gidi to go into a combat unit, always talking about this battle and that war when the family went out together for a drive. Maybe if he hadn’t encouraged him to be a fighter on the front line, he’d still be alive.
*
I was in the late stages of pregnancy. My stomach was swollen and crisscrossed with stitches that looked like varicose veins. It turns out that Noa and I had agreed that because she couldn’t, I’d do it for her and be — what can I call it — a kind of surrogate father. But suddenly I found myself in Haifa, and my mother, who’s in charge of anxiety in our family, felt my stomach and said: Amir, you won’t make it. Right then, the space of the dream was filled with the sentence ‘you won’t make it’ in various fonts, with the white sheep that came off Noa’s pyjamas squeezed together between the letters, and the warning siren that later turned out to be coming from the alarm clock. When I woke up, I didn’t say anything to Noa. Her interpretations of dreams are usually accurate. This time, I was afraid they’d be too accurate.
*
Even now, when I look at that picture, I’m sure it could’ve turned into a wonderful final project. It’s true that, in the end, I didn’t find any Arabs and had to photograph a Romanian worker standing in front of a house, but what could I do? Madmoni’s Arabs stopped coming because of the border closure, and the other Arabs at the university who I asked to pose mumbled that they were busy. So I found a Romanian with dark skin and gave him a framed black-and-white photo of an Arab house. I posed him in front of a real Arab house in Talbieh. And I asked him to hold the picture against his chest and smile. And I asked him to cry. And I asked him to be angry. I opened the shutter. And I closed it. I knew that it didn’t come out exactly like I wanted it to, but I thought it would be enough to get the idea across.
The lecturer, on the other hand, thought it was sloppy and launched into a speech about the fact that anyone who does sloppy work is abusing his art and that we’re not great enough to ignore small details. If he’d said that in our third year, I wouldn’t have kept quiet, I would’ve told him that great teachers recognise the heart of the work and don’t get bogged down in petty details. But with all the putdowns I’d been getting the last few months that had made me feel as small as a slip of paper, I let him go on. And when he had finished trampling on everything I’d done, Yaniv, who came on to me in our first year, raised his hand and said that even if we ignore the execution, the basic idea is still problematic because art doesn’t operate in a vacuum, and doing a project like that at a time when buses are exploding is a bit cynical, especially if the Romanian, excuse me, the Arab, in the photographs is smiling.
I expected there to be uproar in class, that at least one person would defend me and say that the Romanian’s smile wasn’t cynical but sad, and that there was no better time than now to deal with the subject. But everyone just nodded and the lecturer started to move on to someone else’s work, panoramic shots of Austrian forests, and he complimented Tamar Frish on the composition, on the courage it took to photograph in that light, on the meticulous attention to aesthetics that runs through all her work, and I wanted to yell, who cares about Austrian forests? But I knew that anything I said would sound bitter, so I took my bag, got up and walked out of the room and wandered towards the cafeteria because I suddenly felt as if hot chocolate could solve all my problems. But there was some very irritating music playing in the cafeteria, and two drag queens came up to me and shoved invitations to a Purim party into my hand. The year before, I won second place after I’d dressed up as Miss Obsession. I worked on the costume for weeks. I went to second-hand clothes shops, I cut and dyed and sewed, but now those invitations with their screaming colours just annoyed me. I threw them in the rubbish bin and gave up on the hot chocolate because someone I knew was standing in the queue and I was in no mood to hear her ask me how my final project was going. I pushed open the doors, where a poster about the party was hanging, and walked into the driving wind outside — that’s what Amir calls strong winds. I wanted that wind to pick me up and carry me away, up over the Augusta Victoria Hospital, over the walls of the Old City and the Golden Dome and put me down gently on a large bed in an expensive hotel, let’s say the King David. I waited a few seconds, maybe it would happen, and when it didn’t, I zipped my coat up to my neck and trudged towards the station where the number twenty-four bus stops, thinking about what I used to say to people whose work was put down in the first year — remember, there are the pictures hanging on the wall, and there’s you and your talent, none of which gets wiped away when someone criticises you, even if the criticism is terrible — and I tried to say all that to myself at the bus stop, but it didn’t work. The only thing I could think about was that it was the middle of February already and we had to hand in our final projects in June. If they hadn’t approved any of my ideas by now, they wouldn’t approve anything and I wouldn’t finish the year, I would never graduate and I’d be a waitress till I was fifty, like those pathetic waitresses in American films with that hard look in their eyes, like those people on the bus who don’t smile. No one in Jerusalem smiles. I sat down and they all looked at my bag, afraid I’m going to blow up on them. They’re right, I am about to explode, but not on them, I muttered to myself, wiping the steam off the window and thinking: if I lived in Rehavia, I’d be home in fifteen minutes. Why did we go to live in the Castel? What would’ve happened if we’d waited till I graduated, when I could move to Tel Aviv? Why the big hurry to cram ourselves into a small space? And why haven’t we been happy lately? Everything between us is so cramped and crushed and cranky. He has bad dreams and doesn’t tell me what they are. He just says, I had a bad dream last night, and doesn’t describe it. He’s so down when he comes back from the club that he can’t even tell me why. On the other hand, last night he woke me up and suddenly told me a horrible story about something that happened to him in basic training. He had to stay on the base for the third Saturday in a row. He was so depressed that he couldn’t grab on to anything, any song that would help, and he found himself aiming his rifle at his leg so he could fire, be injured, be discharged. It was only thanks to Modi, who ran over at the last minute and shoved the barrel aside, that the bullet hit the wall and not him. Amazing. Amazing how together he looked on that hike when we first met, and actually, until we moved in together, I kept thinking he was a rock. Even now, if he’s in the mood, he can hug me until I stop shaking inside, but it’s been a long time since he was in the mood. It’s been a long time since I felt his tennis player’s muscles pressed against my body. And in the shower yesterday, I suddenly felt a twinge of desire, a longing for a simple, single-layered man. Like Liat’s Zachi. Someone whose pain won’t seep into me. Someone I wouldn’t have to be so cautious with. Who’d give me ground so I could take off. Because that’s what I want, to create art. And since we’ve been in this apartment, I can’t. Maybe because it’s impossible to create when you live with someone. I read an interview with an American writer who said he can’t work when there’s someone else in the house; that the very presence of his wife, whom he loves, bothers him. So every year he goes to a cabin in the woods for three months, leaves everything and holes up alone. Maybe I need to leave everything too. And maybe not. Maybe I just don’t have it, and it’s convenient for me to blame it on Amir. After all, without him, I wouldn’t have the strength to go on. He’s the only one who still believes in me, who really understands me. With Assi and Nadav, my two ex-boyfriends, I always felt that I had to translate everything I wanted to say into a different, more masculine Hebrew. With Amir, we can run hand in hand through the forest of nuances and he makes me laugh when I’m bitter and sings me love songs that he puts my name in, like ‘Without love, where would you be, Noa’. And we have private words that only we understand, like ‘worvous’, which is a combination of worried and nervous, or ‘you’re limirossing’, which means ‘there’s a limit, and you’re crossing it’. And when I left him a love note on the table a week ago, he called the café and asked for me, then disguised his voice and said that he hadn’t been able to sleep at night since he saw me on the street, and when could we meet, and I played the game and said, tonight, and he asked where? I said, in bed, and when I got home, he was waiting for me outside on the Zakians’ steps the way he used to. Oof, I thought and got off the bus, let him be waiting on the steps for me now. Let him open his arms for me. Let him comfort me. Let him whisper things in my ear the way he knows how. I closed my eyes and imagined his smell, the taste of his smell. I imagined how he’d hold me and I’d bury my nose in the hollow between his shoulder and his neck, and sniff.