The Remainer liked Emil Habibi a lot. When Emil won the Israeli State Prize for Literature in 1992, and accepted it from the Prime Minister of the time, Yitzhak Shamir, at a glittering official ceremony, The Remainer was happy, and said, “Comrade Abu Salam has surpassed their writers and raised the status of Arabic literature, sitting over their heads with his legs dangling, as if he were sitting on a rock with his legs hanging over the sea. And now, of course, he’ll have some influence, after catching the biggest fish in the land, the Literature and Culture Fish. I swear by Almighty God (he was always swearing by Almighty God) that this man has raised our heads up high, higher than anything except the Israeli flag flying over all our heads.”
Then he cried. The Remainer cried that day from too much happiness. He cried to and for Emil Habibi. Husniya saw him cry, she saw the tears of joy on his cheeks, which were the color of bereavement. She added her own tears, asking, “Do you want more, Abu Filastin?”
Finally, The Remainer wiped away the last tears from his eyes, and replied to her, “Don’t be in too much of a hurry, Hassuna, my dear—keep your tears till the day they’re needed. We might need a lot of tears tomorrow.”
Like The Remainer, Husniya loved Emil Habibi and the Communists. She was invigorated by the lives of the comrades. She used to say that stories about a comrade smelled like the sweat of peasants in the harvest season. She could smell their scent in a statement, or a poster, or a news item in the al-Ittihad newspaper. She used to say, “If it weren’t for them, what happened to us in our country would have had neither color nor flavor!” She was constantly reading Abu Salam’s writings, and never missed an opportunity to follow what ‘Juhayna’ wrote, but since the breakup of the Soviet Union and the dispersal of the local comrades she had used the newspaper after reading it for things that would soil it, like a believer going against her faith.
One day, Husniya surprised The Remainer by saying, “Abu Filastin, after you stuffed my head with Abu Salam’s ideas, I’ve used the al-Ittihad newspaper to clean the windows!”
At first, The Remainer was shocked by Husniya’s words. If Husniya had said that in front of him only a few years ago, he would have ripped the windows from the walls and dashed them to pieces. Now, though, the matter really raised serious questions for him. Why is it that the pages of the al-Ittihad newspaper clean the windows when our comrades’ ideas and essays have never cleaned the minds of the people in our country? he wondered. Then he cried, “Clean the glass of your windows with the Communists’ ideas! Marxism is a better cleaner!”
He liked this outburst, which he considered an ideological plea for help. For the first and last time in his life, he wished that the sea would disappear and the country turn to desert, that a wind would arrive from every direction, laden with all sorts of dust—including both the local nuclear dust, which would probably come from the Dimona reactor in the Negev, as well as that imported from even more arid deserts—to deposit its load on the windows of all the houses, old and new, that the state had claimed as ‘absentee properties.’
The Remainer smiled as he whispered to himself, “This is a wind that will raise the sales of our party’s newspaper to the skies!”
Then he repeated, “Marxism is a better cleaner!”
The Remainer gave a loud laugh, then cursed the state of the Left in the country with tears in his eyes. Husniya repeated her previous question: “Can I help you with a tear or two, Abu Filastin? For God’s sake, take two drops for yourself, man! I’ve got enough for any disaster. I’ve been collecting tears since 1948!”
2
Aviva Dies Twice
Aviva, our next-door neighbor, died. She died one night in our presence. She had a nervous attack, the second in a week. This time it caught her early: it came before dawn broke, like a warning, announcing to us that sleep was forbidden, and encouraging us to be on our guard. Most of us reacted to our neighbor’s shouts and started awake. Some of us slept through it, then woke to an unexpected after-attack. We all tossed and turned to the interrupted rhythm of Aviva’s shouts, then some of us, including me, went back to sleep.
The Remainer—who sometimes leads our awakening, and who always gives the call to wake while taking his breakfast—said that as the night went on he was half awake, half asleep, his anxiety divided between carefully balanced expressions: he would pity Aviva a little, and would curse her a little. He would blame himself for coming back to the country, then curse his luck and blame it for the choice he had made for himself and his family—a repressive, stifling neighborhood that made it difficult to breathe. On the one side, there was a Jewish woman inhabited by her past, the horrifying details of which she regularly doled out to us—as if the large share of the nakba we’d had to suffer wasn’t enough, so she had to give us an extra portion of a past that had no connection with us. And on the other side, there was Hilmi Matar, our Palestinian neighbor from Lydda, an unpleasant and irritating hashish addict, whose proximity increased our misfortune.
That extraordinary night, the details of which were lost amid Aviva’s cries, our neighbor heard the voices of soldiers whispering to one another. As subsequently related by my father
