I come back and find her dozing in the armchair, newspapers over her face and she’s hardly breathing. I move the papers off her to give her room to breathe. She opens her eyes like she’s being roused from the world to come, like she doesn’t know me. I ask her if she’d like some tea and she nods her head. I make tea for her and for myself and without her asking me I tell her all the nasty things that happened in the movie, to cheer her up. And she listens and starts to cry. She doesn’t understand anything, she thinks she does but she doesn’t really. When she starts crying I take the empty tea cups to the kitchen and go to my room. This blubbering of hers isn’t for me, I’m really too young for things like that. In the end she calms down, goes to the kitchen to make supper, I hear her moving the pans and the dishes around so slowly it’s like her arms and legs have gone to sleep.
I don’t have much appetite for supper, it’s like her tears have fallen in the food and I’m swallowing them. The thought of that gives me the shivers. I take out the rubbish, mend something in the house, a tank or a tap, all the pipes here are mouldy. A mouldy old Arab house. Then I sit down to read the papers to her, the bits in small print that her eyes are too weak for. Who’s died, who’s got married, who’s been born, and then I throw in an article on the Palestinian problem, with my comments, and the big row begins, I get up and leave.
Now it’s nighttime. I’m living alone, all my life I’ve never been so alone. Sometimes I get really homesick for the village and the fields, but I get over it in the end. I miss Dafi a lot. Some days I go up to Carmel and walk around near her house but there’s no sign of her. Maybe Adam’s worried about her, sorry that he let her come out with us at night. I haven’t seen him for three weeks now. It was the old woman who told me that we were stopping the night work for a bit but we’d be taking it up again later and for the moment I ought to stay here, and she gave me three hundred pounds from him for pocket money.
So why should I ask too many questions?
It’s a good life, really good. For the moment –
I’m independent, I don’t have to work and I’m well looked after –
So long as I’ve got money for the movies –
I’ve got movies on the brain now –
I go into the first show, come out with my head in a whirl. Where’s Bialik, where’s Tchernikhovski, what good are they to me when the real world’s so different and the real problems are so difficult?
I return home, thinking about the movie, trying to whistle the theme music. This is the quiet time in our neighbourhood, the in-between time, after the traders have gone and before the hookers arrive. I ring the bell, she opens the door, her face is grey, neither of us says anything. We’ve done enough talking already today. I go straight to my room, count the money I’ve got left. Oh God, what am I doing in this house, in this strange city?
I start undressing and suddenly she comes into the room, creeping in quietly, wearing a different dress and looking all fresh, sits down on the bed. What the hell does she want?
“Well, Na’im, how are things?”
I’m here, dammit, what do you want now?
“What was the film?”
“Don’t worry. The good guys won in the end and got married too.”
She sighs. “You’ve been getting cheeky this last month.”
She picks up my trousers and examines them, gets up and goes into the other room, pokes around in the drawers and comes back with an almost new pair of trousers. “Put these on, let’s see if they fit you. They were my grandson’s when he was your age.”
I put them on. Why should I care? Put my hands in the pockets and pull out mothballs, sniff at them.
“These are for you,” she says. “I was going to keep them for his son, but he isn’t here and he has no son.” I wonder if maybe I should say something nice to her, say maybe he’ll come back and have a son, but I just say, “Thank you very much,” think for a moment and then go to her and quietly kiss her hand, that’s the only place where you can kiss old people and that’s what they do at home in the village.
She smiles, she really likes it, you can tell.
She starts telling me stories about the Jews who used to live in the Old City of Jerusalem and how they were kind to the Arabs, who murdered them in the end. She groans and groans, then at last she shuts up and goes out.
I undress in a hurry, I get into bed but I’m not really tired. What have I done today? Nothing much. I toss around in bed for a while, remembering the movie I saw, a horrible hunchback, a magician with a burned face. Suddenly I start trembling.
I’m alone. What kind of a life is this? Stuck here in this hole. Adam’s forgotten me, Father and Mother and Hamid and all the rest of them have forgotten me. I get out of bed, go to the window to watch the ships in the bay, I already know how to tell destroyers and missile ships apart. The first hookers arrive and take up their positions. A patrol car draws up, the cops get out and talk to them. It’s warm outside. The window’s open.
I stand there watching till my eyes start to close and I fall on the bed. In the morning I get up at nine, because if even at nine I’ve got nothing to do why should I get up at eight?
DAFI
I’ve noticed before, this isn’t the first time, that I’m capable of really scaring people, even grownups, it isn’t only the maths teacher who’s started to be afraid of me, there are others too — this disturbance gives me strength. Sometimes I follow somebody in the street. I just pick somebody out, an adult, an old man, and I follow him everywhere, relentlessly, for half an hour, an hour, until he turns pale and gets angry. It drives Tali and Osnat crazy. I can even scare myself.
Once we were sitting in the cinema at a matinee and it was a boring movie, kids’ stuff. In the row in front of us there was a bald old man with a sort of beret on his head and I wondered what on earth he was doing watching a children’s movie and I whispered to Tali and Osnat, “Do you think I ought to pull his ear?” and before they had time to understand what I was saying or ask why, I’d already grabbed hold of his nasty ear by the soft and hairy lobe and given it a sharp tug. This is what frightens me. I just thought of it and it was done. So quickly, no hesitation between thinking it and doing it. The old man turned around on us at once as if he’d been waiting to have his ear pulled, because he wasn’t concentrating on the movie either, and he started cursing loudly in Rumanian or Hungarian in the silence of the dark cinema. He was sure Osnat had done it, he wanted to kill her. The three of us got up and fled before the manager arrived.
All that evening I was depressed. Osnat was furious with me, she didn’t want to talk and she went home, only Tali, silent as usual, followed me through the streets, she didn’t care about missing the film, didn’t ask me why I did it, what came over me.