My wife doesn’t give much thought to questions like that. She’s never really had a chance to know the world outside the village. She’s all of twenty-three. Soon as she graduated from high school she entered Beit Berl Teachers College, like all the good girls do. The best thing a girl can do is become a teacher. Girls who attend Beit Berl succeed in retaining their honor despite going to school. The college is very close to the village. They go there each morning and return home in the afternoon. Unlike women who go to a university, they don’t have to stay away from home, and everyone knows what bed they slept in. The Beit Berl girls are considered the best match. They’re in high demand. You could say they’re both well educated and respectable, besides which they find convenient jobs, which allow them to get home early and to be on vacation precisely when their children are. That’s more or less what my parents explained to me about my future wife before they went to ask her parents for her hand. “There’s nothing better than marrying a teacher,” my mother said, and she still says so.
I doubt my wife knows who Berl Katznelson was, the man that Beit Berl College is named after. In fact, I’m pretty sure she thinks he was a hero and an exemplary educator, because that’s what it says on the sign at the entrance to the college.
The bell rings. They’ve replaced the large copper bell, the one the principal used to operate with an iron rod. They have an electric bell now, one that plays a catchy theme song from a famous movie. The children are delighted. They pick up their chairs and put them on their desks, then rush out of the classroom. My wife packs her bag and is the last to leave. The children emerge from school, running. Some of them stop at the kiosk near the front gate, jostling and buying grape-flavored ice pops.
“So what’ll you do?” my wife asks. “Won’t you go to work today?”
“No,” I say, and I understand she thinks the roadblock was only put there for the morning and that things are back to normal. I look at her now, among her students, and suddenly she seems so small, so young. We’ve had some nice moments, I think. We have. I’m sure of it. I march down the school hallways with her. A few other teachers wave to us. I know they’re watching us. I wonder what they think. I’m sure their thoughts about us are good ones. It crosses my mind that to an outside observer we must seem like the perfect couple, who’ve done everything by the unwritten book of the village. For some reason, this thought gives me new hope. Why not, in fact? What, just because of money? Someday soon things will all work out. I know they will. I walk out of my elementary school with a little smile on my lips.
9
As always, we’re eating supper at my parents’. It’s been almost two months since we moved here, and we still haven’t cooked so much as a single meal. My wife and my older brother’s wife are sitting in the kitchen talking about the schools where they work. My older brother’s wife is a teacher too. She teaches science in junior high. They’ve known one another since their college days. My three-year-old nephew is chasing a ball from the kitchen into the living room. Every few minutes he screams, “Goal,” and my brother cheers. My mother’s in the living room, holding my daughter in her arms and rocking her to sleep. My father’s in his customary spot on the sofa, looking preoccupied, a bit more than usual, scratching his palms and waiting for another newscast. In Hebrew this time.
There isn’t much to do in this village except sit around with one of our families, mine or my wife’s. Actually, the two houses we were born in, my wife and I, have become the two focal points of our lives. And we’re not the only ones. Everyone here is like that. The life of my older brother and his wife, for instance, revolves around the homes of his in-laws and our parents, even though they tend to cook at their own home from time to time and to have dinner on their own too. Whenever they do, it upsets my mother. “I don’t mind that she cooks,” she says. “Every woman likes to feed her husband, but why don’t they let me know? What am I supposed to do with all the food I cooked? Isn’t it a shame to let it go to waste?”
My wife prefers to eat at her parents’ house. She says she feels more comfortable eating there, and she doesn’t get the feeling that someone is watching her the way she does at my mother’s.
Even though I enjoy my brother-in-law’s company, and even though he’s really the only person outside of my immediate family that I talk to in this village, I don’t feel comfortable staying for too long at my wife’s parents’ place. Certainly not now, certainly not when my wife is mad at me, and the devil knows what she’s been saying about me to her mother, who generally looks like she resents me and makes me feel I’m the reason for her daughter’s unhappiness. I suppose it’s true, but I can always claim that the reverse is true too, except I would never complain and I would always take what I have coming to me without trying to change things or improve them. And when it comes to my relations with my wife, I’d say I’m a believer.
My wife constantly blames me for the fact that we’ve returned to this stifling, bleak village that has nothing to offer her. She mentions my brother and his wife, who take their son from time to time and head for a shopping mall in one of the nearby cities. We go sometimes too, even though I’ve never figured out why people enjoy spending time at shopping centers, and I’ve never understood the smile on my wife’s face as she strolls through the shops and along the food court, even if she’s not about to buy anything.
Every time one of her friends or relatives goes abroad, she goes into mourning, and I’m the object of her litany about how I stole her dream of traveling to a different city, a different country. I’ve stolen her dream of big hotels and even bigger shopping malls. We’ve never taken an airplane, we’ve never left the country. I’ve always said we don’t have enough money to pay for such a trip, and that’s the truth, even though it’s not what my wife would like to hear. I’ve never felt I needed those trips. Never gave it a second thought. On the contrary, I find it hard to picture what it is that makes them enjoyable. For some reason, as far as I’m concerned, leaving the country is something I could only do in one direction. I mean, when I think of a plane and of another country, I think of it only as a way of emigrating, of escaping, of deciding never to return here — not ever, not even for a visit.
True, there isn’t much to do here even if you’d like to. Unlike the city, which offers lots of stimuli even though I hardly ever feel like doing anything there either. And yet, I don’t feel more bored here, and I don’t get the urge to do more than what the village routine has to offer someone like me — hanging out in your parents’ living room.
There are several cafés in the village, all for men. But generally the men there are much older than me and they pass the time playing cards and tawlah. I don’t like those games, to tell the truth. I’ve even managed to forget the rules, which I learned from my father long ago. My father sits in cafés every day. Every afternoon he dresses up, as if he’s been invited to an official event, and heads for the café where he’s been a regular for decades. He plays with his usual partners, the same three teachers he’s been playing against for as long as I can remember. He spends his afternoons there, coming home in time for evening prayers. My brother-in-law Ashraf told me there’s a place called the Purple Butterfly too, at the outskirts of the village where you can order alcoholic beverages. Ashraf burst out laughing when I suggested that we go have a drink there. He said the only people who ever went there were the heavy drinkers that everyone in the village knows. “What’s gotten into you?” He laughed. “Are you nuts? D’you want to come home with an eye and a foot missing, and be ostracized by your family?”