Inside, Jinin went up to the second floor. She immediately headed for the office for ‘reunion’ applications. She could hear Ayala’s voice—this was the official to whom her application had been referred—ringing out tensely inside. It seemed to be lacking the element of shouting that had stuck in her memory from the first time she’d gone for a review and had asked to meet her to renew Basim’s residence permit. The memory had never left her on subsequent visits, as the Israeli civil servant began to take an interest in the details of her married life, broadcasting them to the ears of the other officials in the section in her booming voice.
Suddenly, Ayala emerged from her office and noticed Jinin. She stopped, turned sharply toward her, and shouted, “Att Jin . . . ?”
“Ken, ani Jinin!” replied Jinin before she could finish the question, sparing her the need to articulate the two last letters of her name, which would raise her blood pressure even further.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’ve come for a review!”
“I gave you a phone number to call. Did you?”
“Slikha, sorry, madam, but the number was out of order.”
Ayala made no comment but hurried away into the office opposite, leaving Jinin to fume with anger. A short time later, she came out again with a quiet smile on her face. She told Jinin to come into her office.
“You know that the new amendments to the ‘reunion’ laws don’t allow us to grant your husband the right to work, but I’ll renew his residence permit and try my best to secure an exemption so that he can work. Come back in three months.”
Jinin could find nothing to say. She interpreted Ayala’s promise as a sort of verbal contract, although she had no confidence in it.
She left the building.
The three months that Jinin had called ‘Ayala’s promise’ went by, following which she returned to the Ministry of the Interior. She waited in front of the same office door with the same tension and anxiety as the last time, as the same echo of Ayala’s shouting rang out, with disaster expected at any moment. She didn’t dare knock on the door or go in to confront the woman she regularly described to Basim as having a face like the Israeli laws on the Occupied Territories. She temporarily suspended her hatred for Ayala, and resolved to pull herself together and be brave. She knocked on the door, opened it, and went in. Ayala greeted her with an unexpected smile, and gestured to her to sit down, before surprising her with an unexpected verbal assault to compensate:
“Yes, what’s the problem? Do you have an appointment?”
“I came to arrange an appointment.”
“What for, dear?”
As if she doesn’t know! Jinin thought. “To renew the ‘reunion’ application, of course. My husband’s permit is about to expire.”
With a controlled irritation, Ayala took several papers from a file on her desk, proceeded to help Jinin to fill in the boxes, then returned them to the file.
“Come back with your husband in two weeks’ time, with documents to confirm your place of residence,” she said.
Two weeks later, Jinin went back to the Ministry of the Interior, with Basim this time, and the requested documents and papers: water and electricity bills, everything to prove that she actually lived in Jaffa. Ayala received them with uncharacteristic kindness. She didn’t look at the papers and didn’t ask Basim any questions. She spared Jinin the trouble of translating her questions for him, or translating his replies, and she spared him the suffering he would endure if he had to answer her questions himself in Hebrew. He would have spat out his words like someone expelling their last breath.
Jinin thought kindly of Ayala that day. In fact, she cursed herself for thinking badly of Ayala, and started to make excuses for her previous behavior. Jinin’s visits to Ayala’s office became more frequent, and the pair became like good, rational fellow citizens in a rational state that didn’t discriminate between its citizens.
Then came a particularly fateful visit. Ayala confirmed Jinin’s application for an extension of Basim’s residence permit without hesitation. Jinin decided to call Basim as soon as she left Ayala’s office to tell him the news. She took advantage of the sudden state of happiness that she found herself in, and the fleeting smile on Ayala’s lips, to ask her, as she was on the point of leaving, “Can my husband now work legally?”
Ayala’s expression changed, her smile disappearing in a sudden stroke of anger. She trembled like someone possessed by a blue ifreet (though those little devils were said to avoid possessing people in the country because it was holy). Ayala turned into a bundle of emotions sitting on a chair in an office. She screamed at Jinin, “Hamuda, ha-ishur ha-zeh hu lo ishur ‘avoda!,” “It’s not a work permit, sweetie!”
Her shouting caught the ears of everyone in the office. Ayala threw the residence permit on the desk. Jinin took it and ran out, her ears still ringing with the shout that made a mockery of every yell she had previously heard, making them seem like whispered conversations between lovers.
On the way home, she recalled the exasperated roar that Basim let out when the insolence of the Israeli Ministry of the Interior officials became too much to bear. Now she did the same thing, repeating what he had said: “Really, these people are the sons of sixty-six prostitutes!”
And she continued
