Читать книгу Track Changes - Sayed Kashua - Страница 18

“It’s much better for the kids,” I find myself saying out loud sometimes, sitting in my student dorm after having dropped them off, now waiting for them to finish yet another day of school.

It has to be better for them, even if they don’t know it yet. And they don’t need to know. They’re learning English, and the language will never scare them as it scares me. Even if we have to head back once the three years are up on Palestine’s contract, the kids will already be using the language as if it’s their own.

It would be better for them here, without a doubt. They won’t have to feel humiliated, won’t have to bow their heads beneath the glare of that monstrous glass ceiling. Here, so I hoped, they won’t be constantly reminded that they don’t belong, aren’t wanted, be forced to internalize their own inferiority, compelled to weigh each word spoken in school and on the street and at work out of a fear that they might somehow upset the status of the rulers.

Even if my wife and I have to return, the kids will always have the option of fleeing to a different country, into the arms of a familiar language. The notion that they may stray far from me rises painfully to the surface every now and again. I’d like to have them nearby, always, in the same village, the same town, same neighborhood, or at least a short drive away, along safe, orderly streets, with a safety barrier between the lanes of oncoming traffic. Tira was an hour from Jerusalem, and yet at times it felt so far.

The kids have never been to Tira, and my wife and I have not been back since the wedding.

Ever since we met, my wife has wanted to leave the country. When she finished her doctorate at Hebrew University she had several options for postdocs and visiting teaching residencies at a few universities abroad, but she was forced to turn those offers down on my account. I couched my opposition to any move in work-related concerns—the financial burdens of that sort of trip—but the real reason I didn’t want to go was that I knew that elsewhere it would be easier for her to leave me. I had no doubt that moving countries would lead to a separation between us. I hoped I could string things along until she managed one day to love me, just as I loved her from the moment I saw her. But her love did not materialize. And the kids arrived and multiplied. By the time we’d left, our daughter was eleven and already could ask questions we couldn’t answer. We had to protect her and keep her away from Tira to the greatest possible extent.

Sometimes, when I’m left alone in the university’s apartment dorms, I click over to a local Tira site and look through the pictures in the news articles and advertisements. I sift through the nursery school birthday party pictures and the sporting events and the murders, the burnt cars, the roadworks, the grand openings of the newest convenience stores. I zoom in on the photos and examine them closely, looking for familiar faces, hoping to find some of the kids who were in my class in elementary school.

I think I remember each of the forty-two kids who were with me from first to ninth grade. Many dropped out along the way and others were sent to the asfuriyya, the bird house, which is what we called the special-ed school that was founded in the village when we were in fourth grade, and to which the idiots, the blind, the impaired—those who couldn’t get by—were sent. We knew nothing of special education, but we knew that whoever was sent to the asfuriyya was messed up, to be avoided, not to be played with, and if he should be found walking alone on the street then it was fine to yell at him and pelt him with tangerines. Sometimes I wonder what became of each of my forty-two classmates.

I know for a fact that one student in the class died, because I read about her on that same local news site. There was not much in the way of details in that article, no name, no cause of death, no comment from the police. The news on Tira’s local site is written for the people of Tira, and they are the only ones who know to read between the lines and understand what really happened—the chain of events, the names of the suspects and their motives. The only way of knowing what’s happening in Tira is to live in Tira.

Besides news sites I also look at Google Earth, at both satellite images and roads. I sit in front of the computer and move east across the globe, toward its middle, and with precise motions of my finger I approach home. Once properly positioned, I zoom in on Tira, infiltrating, from above, the streets, and, from the spot where I touch down, I navigate my way home.

I walk down the main street in our neighborhood, the way back from elementary school to home. Some of the houses have been renovated, some are newly built, old stores have been closed, and new ones have been opened in their place. The road is filled with kids dressed in the same blue uniform, backpacks on their shoulders, frozen in time as they walk with me back to their houses. The faces of the children are not clear enough to recognize and still I try to imagine their parents and I wonder if one of them was in my class. People don’t leave Tira, don’t abandon it. They don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s always the same families, same eyes, same skin color, same gaze, passed down in Tira from the war to the face-blurring cameras of Google.

I continue to stride along the main street, avoiding the dirt path that cuts away toward the cemetery. Most of the kids in the neighborhood used to take the shortcut and follow the dirt track through the graveyard, but I was scared. Even when I circled along the length of the outer wall, I’d mumble the Fatiha that my grandmother taught me to recite and that she promised would protect me from danger. I walked fast because I wanted to prove, perhaps to the neighborhood kids and perhaps to myself, that the graveyard shortcut wasn’t any shorter. And actually they weren’t rushing to get home, those kids from my class. They lingered in the graveyard, and I would beat them even if I took the long way at a stroll. I could hear the sounds of their laughter rolling through the cemetery wall, and I couldn’t understand how they dared to laugh. Were they not taught that laughter in a graveyard rouses the wrath of God? It took me a while to realize that they weren’t looking to shorten the distance home; they were just looking to get rid of me.

Did they want to get rid of me because I was the kid who reminded them of the homework we’d been given? The one who scolded them when they talked about girls? The one who refused to copy and refused to let others copy off him? The one who followed the teachers’ orders, never broke the rules, and freely reminded others of what the religion teacher had to say about the words they use, the wicked thoughts they think, the talk of the sex they’d seen in movies and the papers?