“Listen,” I tell him before leaving. “When you get off, come over to Mother and Father’s house. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“See you there.”

7

Now I know I’m overreacting. I get into the car and immediately turn on the radio. The news will be on in a minute. I drive around, deciding not to go back home yet. The news is all about red alerts coming from the Arab villages and towns. The announcer says that security sources are trying to persuade the government to declare a nationwide state of emergency. The tone is the usual one of the news reporters, and it sounds like something that would hardly be noticed in normal times. But today it’s different, it’s obvious something’s going on. Maybe Israel is planning another large-scale attack on the West Bank. Maybe they’ve decided to get rid of Arafat and they don’t want any clashes with the Arabs within Israel, some of whom are bound to take to the streets. They don’t want to have to deal with us on top of everything else. Maybe they’re just trying to take preventive measures. And maybe that’s really why they sent the Arab students home. Maybe the security people were worried about campus demonstrations and decided to make sure it didn’t happen, to prevent clashes between Arab and Jewish students. There are all those studies now about the Arab students, dubbed the “proud generation” because they have the audacity to stand there with flags on Naqbah Day or on Land Day. I try to convince myself that everything’s going to be okay, but it doesn’t work. They sent in the tanks damn it, so maybe it’s not going to blow over as soon as people think. Maybe something big really is happening in this area. It wouldn’t do me any harm to stock up on things, would it? I’ll tell my wife I had the day off and say I didn’t know what to do with the time on my hands, so I decided to do the shopping. I’ll say I had no idea what we had in the house, so I bought a bit of everything.

I’ll do my best not to arouse the suspicion of the salespeople. A shopping spree might create the wrong impression on a day like this. People might think that as a journalist I know something that shows we ought to be getting ready for something big. They might get the idea that I have some secret information about a war that’s about to break out in the region. I decide to make the rounds of the different grocery stores and to buy a little bit in each one. I’ll start with the ones in the more distant neighborhoods, where I don’t usually shop. I cruise the streets and stop at the entrance to the first one I see. There’s an older woman standing there, someone I’ve never seen. That’s good, because it must mean she doesn’t know me either. A bag of flour is the first thing that occurs to me. That’s what you buy when you’re stocking up, isn’t it?

I take one and pay for it, say thank you and proceed to the next grocery store. “Hello,” I say with a smile, trying to seem as natural as possible. I ask the salesman for another bag of flour. If he has one of the big ones, a fifty-kilo bag, that would be great. He does. I pay for it and move on to the next store. “Could I have a bag of rice, please?” I take it, say thank you and move on. All of the stores are running low on dairy products. The trucks from Tnuva Dairies and all the other dairies haven’t been able to make the morning delivery because of the roadblocks. I take a few liters of milk, two packages of cheese, some banana yogurt for the baby and a few bottles of my wife’s favorite soft drink. In the pharmacy, I take all but one of the cans of formula for one-year-olds. By the time I get to the stores in my own neighborhood, the trunk and both seats are piled high with groceries. I stop at the one nearest my home, smile, greet the owner, who is one of our neighbors, and ask for nothing but a pack of American cigarettes. He asks if they’ve removed the roadblocks yet, and I shrug as if it’s no concern of mine.

8

I’ll pick up my wife at school today. I’ve got time. First I’ll unload all the groceries from the car. I’d rather she didn’t see the bags of flour and rice. I’ll cram them into the little room that we use for storage. I pile the dairy products into the fridge, and feel I’ve overdone it a bit. We’ll pass the expiration date before we use them all up. We hardly eat at home damn it. We usually skip breakfast, so we won’t even get to the dairy things. I put the canned goods and the formula in the kitchen cabinets and feel bad about spending money I don’t even have. Fuck, if the ATMs were working, even my brother couldn’t help me withdraw money from my account. It used to be so convenient to be able to pick up the phone and find out if your salary had been deposited in your account yet and what the balance was, but now it seems like a nightmare. He’ll realize soon enough that the paper is hardly paying me anything. I shouldn’t have lied to him about the problem with the accounting department. Damn it, I can’t go on lying this way. I’ve got to transfer my account to a different branch, one in the city, maybe. I’ll say it’s closer to work and that I spend most of my day there anyway, so it’ll be easier for me to get to my branch directly from work. It shouldn’t be too complicated to transfer an account from one branch to another. It’s not as if I’m changing banks. I hope you don’t need to close an account before you can move it to a different branch, I mean I hope it doesn’t actually have to be in the black. Not that I owe the bank very much, but I don’t have even a small amount in my account right now. I can’t believe I’ve spent almost all of the thousand shekels today to stock up for a war that won’t happen. Everything’s probably blown over by now, I tell myself and go check if the phone’s working yet. It isn’t.

The doorbell rings as I’m about to leave. A twelve-year-old boy is standing in the entrance with some tissues, some lighters and a picture of the al-Aqsa Mosque. “Special for you, sir, tissues for two shekels, a lighter for half a shekel, ten for four. Have some, and may Allah protect your children, sir.” I look at him, standing there and begging, with tears in his eyes. I try not to pity him, to remember what Ashraf told me about the hundred-shekels minimum that those bastards make each day thanks to their knack for making us feel sorry for them. I remind myself that I don’t have money to spare and that if I buy from him even once, he’ll be back at this address every time. “Sorry, I don’t need any,” I say. And he goes on begging, with his eyes all moist. “Please, sir, for my parents, and may God bless you and your family, may God bless your relatives who’ve died, please, sir, take something.” I shake my head and lock the door, trying to block out the voice of the boy who runs after me as I get into my car and drive off. I feel a pang in my chest.

It’s the first time I’ve picked up my wife from work. I mean, the first time since we got back. Before that, I’d pick her up almost every day. The paper wasn’t far from the school where she taught and I didn’t want her taking buses. Here she can manage. She could even come home on foot. It’s not far at all. It’s almost one-thirty, and they’re about to finish the sixth period.

My wife teaches in the same school where I used to go. She went there too, but a few years after me. Some kids are playing ball in the yard. Their teacher is sitting on a chair under one of the trees that kids in my class planted on Tu b’Shvat, Israeli Arbor Day. The teacher’s gaze alternates between the kids and her watch. I go upstairs and start walking down the long hallway past the classrooms. I look inside as I pass, in search of the one where my wife is teaching. I can hear the Hebrew lessons and the kids echoing the teacher as loud as they can, “abba” (father), “imma” (mother). Third grade, I tell myself, that’s when they start learning Hebrew. Every now and then I nod in the direction of one of the teachers who taught me, or someone I met at our house when a group of teachers came to welcome my wife after we moved back. Ustaz Walid, the history teacher, sees me, interrupts his lesson and invites me into his classroom. He shakes my hand and declares to the students, “He was like you once, one of my students. But he did all his homework, he was a good student, and look where he is now. He’s a distinguished journalist, who appears on TV. And you don’t want to wind up as factory workers, you want to get to the university too, right?” To which the whole class replies at the top of their voices, “Yes, Mr. Walid.”