Читать книгу Track Changes - Sayed Kashua - Страница 8

The sky was starting to darken and the time on my phone showed ten in the morning as the plane touched down at Ben-Gurion International Airport. The American phone—its roaming data restricted to domestic use only—would not update to local time, 6:00 p.m., without a wireless connection. It had been more than twenty-four hours since I’d left my wife and our two boys for Tel Aviv. As for my daughter, well, I’d knocked softly on her door and called her name, but she had not come out of her room. Maybe she really had been asleep and hadn’t heard.

A day before departure, I told the kids that I was going back to the old country for an important job. I told them that a rich customer had offered me a serious sum of money to write his autobiography. I told them I was going back simply to meet him and record his life story and that I’d do the rest of the work upon my return. My middle son asked me yet again what an autobiography was and when I explained it to him he still didn’t understand why I write them for other people and why they don’t write their own stories themselves.

I hugged the kids and promised to be back soon. My wife offered me a ride to the nearest bus stop and though I was happy for the offer, I declined, knowing that if she took me it would mean bringing the kids, too. And I believed that each and every car ride with the children, however brief, was a danger best avoided. I took the bus to Central Station and from there I took another to O’Hare.

As the plane taxied toward the terminal at Ben-Gurion I checked to see if there was a Wi-Fi connection. When we’d left the country, there had not been free internet at the airport, nor had we needed it. Back then we still had Israeli phones with a 3G package, which I’d asked the provider to cut at midnight on the night of our departure. That same night I searched online for my father’s current cell phone number and wrote him a long text message to explain that we were going to the United States for work, that my wife and I had both been offered excellent opportunities, and we had decided to leave for a few years. We have three kids I also informed him: a daughter and two boys. And then we shut off our Israeli phones and boarded the plane.

Now I wanted to send my wife a short message. Just a quick: “How’s it going?” containing no hint of longing or love. She’d understand that I’d landed and would respond with a soothing: “All good.” Or if something had happened, she’d call.

One of the flight attendants reminded all passengers to stay buckled until the aircraft came to a full stop and the no-seatbelt sign had been turned off. The freedom to rise, as always, was announced with a ding, signaling the start of the race to the cabin doors. The goal was to exit as fast as possible, to push a single step closer to the doors. Seated in a window seat in one of the rear rows of the economy class, I had no choice but to shuffle aggressively forward like the rest of the passengers, as though a fire had seized the tail of the plane. I had to use my elbows to break into the current of traffic, otherwise I would have been the last person left on board. The race continued in the jet bridge that led to the terminal: the competition being to see who could get first to passport control, some moving in a fast gait, some at a full gallop. I tried not to join in but could not stop myself, for it is after all a war, and there is disdain here for the losers.

“Father’s name?” asked the policewoman in the booth at the front of the Israeli passports line as she eyed my papers. I answered, and she handed over my passport with a slip permitting my entry to the country tucked into its pages. Once through passport control the passengers surged toward the duty-free counter, where the goods purchased upon departure were stocked in giant storage rooms, an arrangement that exists only in Israel’s international airport.

Friends and family thronged the arrivals hall, eyeing the passengers as they came through the doors. Some clutched bunches of colorful balloons, and one young woman held a bouquet of flowers. I looked for the cigarettes I’d put in the front pocket of the suitcase and before lighting up I thought to myself, not for the first time, that if I’d managed to go without smoking for the duration of the flight it could well be the first step toward quitting. Maybe. I lit the cigarette and took a small drag, wary of the onset of dizziness, which strikes me whenever I first smoke after an hours-long break. I hoped that I didn’t stink of alcohol and that the smoke would help cover the tracks of the drinking I’d done during my layover at de Gaulle, where I’d also smoked as much as I could in the glass cage that I shared with the other similarly condemned passengers, whose Arabic came in an array of dialects.

January—and darkness comes early.

The weather, though, was nice, even quite warm when compared to the Midwest. I didn’t need the jacket I’d brought. A sweater would have sufficed.

Walking toward the taxi stand, I cupped my palm over my mouth and sniffed but was unable to say definitively what my breath smelled like. The first taxi driver in line waited outside his car and cast me a hurrying look. He smiled a forced smile in my direction and popped the trunk. “No need,” I told him. “It’s only a small bag.”

“As you like,” he said in a Russian accent.

I sat on the right side of the back seat and set my bag down to my left.

I wondered if the driver was scared and promptly found myself immersed in all of the old fears. Nothing had changed. I did not want to trigger feelings of anger, suspicion, or discomfort in a Jewish driver with a Russian accent who was in the process of discovering that he was transporting an Arab. It’s possible the matter would cause not so much as a flutter of excitement and that he regularly drives Arabs to villages within the Green Line and that he is one of the many Israelis who makes the pilgrimage to Tira on Shabbat for the weekend market, which I learned about only a few years ago from an Israeli TV program. A market that draws thousands of Israelis every Saturday to the city, which I will always call a village, searching for a variety of food and merchandise and principally looking to spend their day of rest in the fanciful atmosphere of financial prudence, clinging with blind faith to the notion that all things Arab are by definition cheap. And what reason would the taxi driver have for fearing to enter an Arab town in Israel proper? True, he has a Russian accent, but the accent seemed like a function of age and not a reflection on the number of years he’d been in the country. If there’s a formula that can take the two variables, age upon immigration and accent, I’d use it in order to estimate that he had made aliya twenty years ago. He certainly works with Arab drivers, knows to differentiate between different sorts of Palestinians, probably has already learned to say a few words in Arabic, and yet I was incapable of saying to him that I wanted to go to Tira, the site of my birth, home to my parents and siblings, whom I have not seen in years. I was not able to say to him that I wanted to go home and take a shower, remove the yoke of foreignness, change clothes, and rest from the twenty-four hours of travel before embarking on the assignment for which I had come. Instead I asked him to take me to Kfar Saba, speaking the name of the city in a way that any native Israeli would recognize and categorize but not this driver, who as a new immigrant lacked those skills, even if his newness was two decades old.

“We’ll take Route Six?” the driver seemed to both state and ask. “It’s fastest, because Route Four’s backed up. By the way, are you a smoker? I saw you smoking before.”

“Yes.”

“You can smoke in the cab, no problem. Just open the window.”

“Thank you.”

“I quit ten years ago. I used to smoke two packs a day. I kicked it one day and since then, nothing, ten years not a single cigarette. But you know what? I still like the smell, and I still miss the cigarettes.”

I pressed the button and lowered the window halfway before even starting to smoke. Cold air brushed past my face and I tried to gauge, by its touch, the extent of my longing. I tried to inhale deeply, to smell the country, because I’d read in several books that the sense of smell is the sense of longing. I’d always read about people who recalled the scent of the earth, the oranges, the air, and the sea. I tried, but my nose did not detect any special scent, did not tap into any wellspring of memory, perhaps because the smell of the highway from the airport to Route 6 was not the smell of my childhood or my homeland as I knew it.

Was this a betrayal? I blamed my own inadequacies for my nose not picking up the scent of longing that I’d read about in the poems. And then I rejected the accusation. No, I didn’t have to pick up certain scents in order to prove that I had longed; I didn’t have to prove anything to anyone. For many years I had yearned for home and thought of returning every day, shirking the misery of foreignness and the sadness of detachment.

When I reach Tira, the familiar smell of home will surely assault my senses, scents of childhood and nettles after the rain. When I walk into my parents’ house, I’ll definitely burst into tears when my father’s smell—which will forever be a blend of Old Spice and cigarettes—engulfs me.