Читать книгу Track Changes - Sayed Kashua - Страница 15

Two months have passed since that trip. It’s now mid-March and the temperature is still close to zero degrees, Fahrenheit.

I plug the earphones into the jack on the recorder, even though I’m alone and no one can hear. I press Play and the small plastic wheel starts to turn. A whispery quiet—and then my voice.

“Your first memory?”

“I didn’t bring you here from America to talk about my first memory.”

My father’s voice reverberated in my ears and a tremor radiated up from my toes, a new sensation, a wave that surged up through my body and broke in my throat and eyes. I stopped the cassette and cried for the first time. A different sort of crying, unrecognizable to me—a wailing that I tried to stifle with a pillow. The kids, I had to check in on the kids. I’ll call Palestine, I figured, even though it’s already after midnight. She was definitely asleep, but I’d have to wake her. It wasn’t the worst crime; she’d have to understand. I’ll just ask her to check on the kids, see that they’re breathing. Or maybe I won’t wake her. I’ll just go over there. I’ll take a bus. I’ll ride over and see my children, make sure they’re okay, that they’re alive. No one will notice. But there are no buses at this hour. So I would have to walk, a brisk fifteen-minute stroll, at most half an hour. I’ll put on my thermal underwear and long coat, a scarf and wool hat, and march over to the house to see my kids. First, though, I have to get control of this sobbing, catch my breath, smooth out the jagged inhalations, calm the storm that caught me unprepared, shattering the windows that I forgot to board up. She’ll definitely understand, my wife. I simply have to call her.

I called the first of two numbers on my Favorites list and hung up immediately. She’s probably asleep and tomorrow she has a long day, as usual. I texted the second number on my list. “You up?” I asked my daughter in Hebrew, hoping she wouldn’t lose the only language in which she once knew how to read. She answered right away. “Yeah, what’s going on?” she wrote, in English.

I called her cell and she answered. “Are you okay?” I asked in Arabic, a language she comprehends only in the Palestinian field-workers’ dialect that we spoke at home.

“Yes,” she answered in Hebrew and then in English: “I’m fine.”

“Are your brothers okay? Your mother?”

“Did something happen?”

“No, nothing. Just checking,” I told her, even though I wanted to say that she has a grandfather, that I have a father and mother and a village and family. “Sorry, I’m just writing a bit and suddenly, you know, just do me a favor, please, and go into your brothers’ room and check that they’re okay. Sometimes when I’m writing I imagine all sorts of nightmare scenarios.”

“They’re fine. I’m not going into anyone’s room.”

“Please, otherwise I’ll have to come over,” I begged. I asked that she stay on the line as she goes into their room.

“They’re asleep,” she whispered.

“Can you do me a favor and just put the phone next to your little brother’s mouth, as if he’s speaking to me?”

I held my breath, perking my ears to pick up the child’s respirations but heard nothing.

“Okay,” my daughter said. “He’s starting to wake up, so I think we’re done here.”

“He’s moving?”

“Yes!” she yelled in a whisper. “I have to get back to my room. Bye.” She hung up.

They’re okay. The little one is the one who worries me. It’s always the littlest that generates the most amount of anxiety, and my daughter said that he had moved, that he practically woke up, so he’s okay.

I stepped out onto the kitchen balcony to smoke, this time without gloves, in the hopes that the cold would shock me back to my surroundings and still the rhythm of my breathing.

I ground the cigarette out in the bucket of frozen water and returned to the desk, where I opened a new file: “Dad Transcript.”