“How’s Yonatan?”
“Fine, fine. Sit down.”
I took a deep breath, put my bag on the floor, and sat on the couch, head down.
“What happened?” she asked again, and all I did was shake my head slowly and snort.
“You want a drink?” she asked, picking up a bottle of red wine. I nodded and she went to the kitchen for another glass.
“You don’t want to tell me what happened?”
“Um-Bassem died,” I said, and I filled my mouth with wine.
Um-Bassem died. I knew it as soon as I got out of the share-taxi. There was no doubt. There were men milling around the street, looking for a rock or something to perch on, men obviously called from work for a funeral. From a distance I could still recognize a few of them — the husbands of um-Bassem’s daughters who, despite having grown up, were still recognizable by the way they moved.
I walked toward them with my head down, pretending that I had come as they had, after receiving word.
“Allah have mercy on her,” I said, and shook the hands of a few men in the street. “Ta’ish,” they said, as was customary. There were only a few dozen men present. The funerals of the elderly draw only kin.
The women’s voices could be heard from within the courtyard but I preferred to stay outside with the men. The separation is very clear in these kinds of affairs — men and women do not mix at all.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” the husband of um-Bassem’s oldest daughter said. “Go on in, put your bag down, wash your face. Don’t be embarrassed, there’s still no one but family in the house, there’s still time.”
“When did she pass?” I asked as I followed him to the house and, like him, I bowed my head and did not look at the women.
“Before dawn,” he said, looking at his watch. “But we waited for Bassem, may God help him. We’ve been telling him for a week to come immediately and say good-bye, but he hasn’t. What kind of job is it that keeps you from parting with your own mother? He just got here a second ago from the airport.”
“Amir,” I heard my mother’s voice behind me. She came out of um-Bassem’s courtyard toward me, her head covered with the colorful scarf she wore when visiting a mourner’s tent. Her eyes were puffy and red and she nearly hugged me but the look on my face and the way I shifted my gaze to the men in the road deterred her and she merely stroked my arm.
“Do you have laundry?” she asked, taking my little bag, probably hoping I did so that she could do something for me. “Are you hungry?”
“No,” I said, and I followed her into the house.
“How are you?” she asked, once the door closed and the two of us were alone.
“I’m fine.”
“Poor um-Bassem. But it’s better this way. More rest for her and for her daughters. She didn’t eat during these last months. Can I get you anything?”
“No, thank you, I had a falafel in Petach Tikva.”
“It’s good you came.”
“Yeah.”
“They’ve been waiting for Bassem all day. He just showed up now.”
“I heard.”
“So everything’s okay with you? Work?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine.”
“You have your own washing machine in the apartment?”
“Yes,” I said, and I knew she was looking at my shirt, which I hadn’t worn in over four years but had picked out of the closet that morning so that I could wear something that wouldn’t look strange to my mother and her neighbors.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” I said, walking toward the bathroom, trying to steady the tremble that had risen up from the balls of my feet to my knees and chest. “I have money.”
From the bathroom I could hear the teary voices of the women as they parted with um-Bassem. “Say hi to Daddy,” I heard the oldest daughter wail, and I assumed that the washing ceremony had been completed and that the coffin was being walked out of the house in the hands of the men.
“Amir,” my mother said, knocking on the bathroom door after a few minutes. “Amir, the funeral procession is leaving.”
Several dozen men trailed behind the coffin, which was carried to a nearby mosque on the shoulders of a few young men. The pace was brisk, as though everyone wanted to get this over with. Bassem looked a little tired but he smiled warmly whenever someone shook his hand and consoled him.
“Allah yirakhma,” I said, too, as I shook his hand.
“Ta’ish,” he said, and I could tell from his face that he didn’t recognize me.
A young man near me answered his phone, which rang with the opening chords of Umm Kulthum’s “Enta Omri.” “I’m at a funeral right now,” he whispered into the phone, “I’ll call you later. Um-Bassem. Yes, Bassem. Died today. Ta’ish, ’bye.”
A few dozen more men waited at the entrance to the mosque. The worshippers followed the body inside and began to say the prayer for the dead before burial. I stayed outside and tried to keep my eyes on the ground so that I wouldn’t see familiar faces.
“Hello, Amir,” said Nabil, a former classmate. “How are you?” he said, coming up to me and shaking my hand.
“Good, thanks.”
“Where’ve you been? We never see you around,” he said.
“In Jerusalem.”
“Oh, why? You still in school?”
“No. I graduated.”
“Wow, you were always one of the smart kids, weren’t you? So, do you make any money with this college job?”
“Alhamdulillah.” Thank God.
“So why don’t you take your mother with you? Poor thing, I feel bad for her, all alone in the village, isn’t it a shame?” He smiled and looked around to see if anyone else had heard him, if anyone else was laughing along with him. “You know, as it says in the Koran, ‘show compassion for your parents.’”
“What about you?” I asked in a dry tone, signaling that I really didn’t want to hear anything more from him.
“Walla, as our Jewish cousins say, blessed be God,” he said, kissing the back of his hand and thrusting it up toward the sky.
Nabil graduated elementary school without knowing how to read. Of the forty kids in our grade, there were ten or so who were completely illiterate. The majority just dropped out of school. Some went to trade school, with the best of the bunch learning car mechanics and the rest going into carpentry and metalwork. I couldn’t remember which route Nabil had taken, if any at all.
He leaned against the outside wall of the mosque and chatted quietly with his friends, occasionally stealing a glance in my direction. Nothing had changed. They were the same old kids, only larger. I could still see them at recess, sitting on the dilapidated benches and laughing at me.
“You got a hundred only ’cause your mother’s been going down on the principal,” they’d say. Or, “If your mother wasn’t a teacher in this school we would fuck you up bad.”
I’d often find notes with similar messages in my school bag, spelling mistakes and all. My mother was a teacher in the village’s only junior high. She never taught one of my classes, but that didn’t matter. My mother was different from the other teachers at the school. The kids cursed out all of the other teachers, ridiculed them behind their backs, but they would never dare tarnish their honor. My mother’s honor, all the kids knew, was free for the taking.
That’s how I learned that my mother used to show her tits to all the kids in the class; that my mother wore red bras and short skirts; that my mother was ousted from her village for whoring; that at night, after I went to sleep, my mother hosted all sorts of men in her bed; that she smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol; that she collaborated with the authorities; that she slept with policemen; that she slept with the principal; that they did it in the school library; that she’d been seen dancing at nightclubs in Petach Tikva; that she was sleeping with the math teacher, the history teacher, and the supervisor; that on the class trip she’d been seen peeing in the bushes and that she, for a fact, wore no underwear.