Moon

“Mute but not deaf. They told me we’ve got someone like that around here.”

The tanned left elbow of the driver of truck number 17 protruded out the window, directly above the large, faded emblem of the Jerusalem municipality. With his right hand, which was leaning against the steering wheel, he held on to a strip of dog-eared cardboard covered in six widely-spaced lines scribbled in small, shaky print lettering. The driver read aloud:

“My name is Said Mussa Tzalach. I work in the Jerusalem Municipality in the sanitation department (you can contact the assistant director Aaron tel. 34666). I am mute but not deaf and not retarded. I understand Hebrew well. You can ask me questions and I will respond by nodding or shaking my head, or with hand motions. My address is Burj Al-Luqluq, Bab Huta, Old City (turn right after the Lions Gate).”

The driver examined the short sentences once more, rolled the gray square between his sausage-like fingers, checked if anything was written on the other side, and returned the cardboard strip to Said Mussa Tzalach, who rose on his tiptoes and stretched his arm up overhead, barely managing to reach the thick arm which was stingily extended to him from the window of the truck.

In Said’s shirt pocket, next to a sharpened yellow pencil stub, there was another square of cardboard with a similar message in Arabic, but instead of listing the job in the municipality and the phone number of the assistant director of the sanitation department, it referenced Mohammad Dib ibd Sleem, the mukhtar of the Dom people.*

Twenty large trucks were parked in two rows in the large parking lot. The electric light cast by the streetlamps surrounding the lot were swallowed up by the light of dawn, which was growing brighter. The motors of three of the trucks revved up one after another, their tail pipes emitting black clouds of exhaust. The three trucks began making their way haltingly toward the iron gate that the night guard opened for them; it groaned and screeched forward. The drivers of the other trucks waited in their high cabins for all the workers to be assigned.

Facing the booth with the drivers’ office, at the far end of the parking lot, stood the workers who had still not been assigned to the trucks whose rears they would have to repeatedly mount and dismount even as the stench grew stronger over the course of the morning. The workers smoked, yawned, and shifted their weight from one foot to another. Some of them stood alone; others were gathered in small segregated groups of Jewish and Arab workers.

[…]

Several additional trucks rolled slowly toward the gate to exit the parking lot. A worker or two was visible above the clouds of exhaust at the rear of each truck, holding on to the leather straps that hung above their heads. Truck number 6, which collected the garbage from the Beit Hakerem neighborhood, also passed through the gate, its rear bearing only the long, thin silhouette of Yosef, the surly, taciturn Jewish worker with large teeth protruding like a horse, whom Said had worked alongside for the previous two weeks.

Pcchhh! Pcchh!

Directly above his head, the driver tapped with his left hand over the emblem of the municipality. Said rocked the upper half of his body forward to show that he was not deaf.

“Okay, so listen up, my man,” the driver said toughly from his seat on high, and then he added in a more neutral tone, parenthetically, “Mute but not deaf and not retarded. Nice. Why not. Listen up, my man. The name is Said, right? So listen up, Said, and listen well – today I got you instead of my two regular guys. I’ll bet you know them, the fat and the skinny one, Mahmoud and Imad. God only knows what happened to them, why they decided to disappear today of all days.” The driver snapped his fingers, and from the loud percussive sound it was clear that he was an expert at the noisy conjoining and releasing of the thumb and middle finger. “They’re surely up to something together, and tomorrow they’ll come to me with long faces claiming they were sick, as if they’re to be pitied. And the whole time they’re chirping away like old birds, plotting God-knows-what in Arabic.” An expression of self-satisfaction spread across his fat face at the thought of the brilliant idea that was about to come out of his mouth, “Maybe they want to be terrorists, eh? Eh? What do you say, Said? But I gotta tell you the truth, they work fast, that duo, that Laurel and Hardy.” The smile broadened, and the driver chuckled. “But no matter, listen up now. It makes no difference to me that you’re alone today. I’m working at the same pace as usual, even faster. You hear me? You understand?”

Said bobbed his chin up and down. Yes, he understood.

“I don’t care about anything, you hear me? By eleven-thirty we’re gonna be done with the dump, the vehicle already rinsed. By twelve-thirty I’m home, showered, in bed with my wife. Today she’s not working – she took a vacation day. In honor of the moon the Americans are flying to. In honor of the moon!” He tossed his head back incredulously. “She never misses a day of work, and suddenly she went and took the day off. But you know what? Maybe it’s actually for the best, her staying home. So she won’t get jumped by that maniac son-of-a-bitch, the one the police are searching for. She, my wife, she – you listen up, man, my wife is…”

The driver coughed and stopped himself.

“You, as far as I’m concerned, can go scratch your balls. You hear me?”

Said did not respond.

The driver coughed again, lifted his glance to a point somewhere above Said’s head, and asked, “Tell me, Said, are you married? You got a wife?”

Said loved to describe the drivers to Jamila. They’re all called David or Moshe, he would tell her, and they’re all fat. He enjoyed mimicking them before her sparkling eyes, imitating all the various ways they would make it clear to the workers how nice and comfortable it was for them up there in the cabin, and how miserable it was to be a worker down below, chasing after the advancing truck in the heat and the cold to empty out the heavy, stinky bins: They would hold their noses demonstratively, drape a fringed curtain in the cabin, smoke a pipe, make a show of taking off their jackets behind the closed window on a particularly cold winter day, fan their faces effeminately in a heatwave, scan the sports section when the driving was slow.

Married or not married? He could nod or shake his head – or ignore the question entirely, but then the driver might think he was deaf or retarded after all. Said began to shake his head no. The driver broke out in a complacent grin, and Said abruptly changed the direction of his head and felt a light prick at the bottom of his neck.

“Is that a yes? And why not, come to think of it, why not? Good for you. Never mind. Listen up, my man, listen up. Our route is very straightforward. The shortest route for the best driver.” The faint sense of abashment Said had noted a moment earlier on the fat face had disappeared entirely.

“So it’s like this, you hear me? Emek Refaim, one-way, superfast until the swimming pool – drag out all the bins. We continue a bit until the train track roadblock, then head back in the other direction, dump all the trash, all chic-chac, you know what that means? Superfast. You’re gonna do it chic-chac, even though you’re all alone here, you understand? You hear me?” The driver had already stuck his head out the window and drawn his right hand out beside his left, charting their route in the air. “After that, you hear me, Said? A bit more up the small streets by the cinema, you won’t believe it when you see how I maneuver this tank around there as if it were a Vespa, I could do it with my eyes closed, and then we do the same thing on half of Bethlehem Road, and then about another fourth of Hebron Road and that’s it, homewards, to the dump. Capisce?”

The driver smacked his thick hands swiftly together.

Said signaled with his head that he understood.

“Yalla, let’s go, Saidovich, the clock is ticking. Hop on back, we’re off.”

*

Said’s finger had already traveled along that path many times on the map that hung on the wall of the drivers’ office, advancing along Beit Tzafafa Road, which the Jews now called Emek Refaim. Though more than two years had passed since the day the Jews had conquered the eastern side of the city, he and Jamila had still not gone back there to see the street and the house ornamented with green ceramic – the house with the small servants’ quarters on the roof, where the two of them had lived from the spring of 1946 to the spring of 1948.

About a week after he’d started working in this job, which the mukhtar had arranged for him in his meeting with the mayor of the Jews, he sketched for Jamila the drivers’ office and the map hanging there on the wall. In his sketch, the main street stood out as if it had become, in the intervening years, even wider and more prominent. On another page he outlined two dark figures lifting their heads from the road toward the green tiles and beyond, over the roof of the building which had housed, on its ground floor, the widow Umm Ibrahim’s stationery store. She had resided in one of the three apartments above the store; another apartment housed her oldest son Ibrahim and his wife; and the third was home to Anton, the young bachelor son, who wanted to travel to Italy or France to study art — the one who referred to the main room of his apartment as his studio, with its canvases and tubes of paint and an easel in every corner. Jamila examined the two sketches from up close.

“No,” she said in a whisper, and yawned. She turned around, approached the bed, crept under the blanket, covered her head. In the space of just a few seconds the rhythm of her breaths had already subsided.

That night he’d awoken a bit before three. He’d drawn back the curtain from the skylight – beyond the glass pane lay the tiles of the alleyway. Yesterday’s rainclouds had scattered, and the moonlight illuminated the room. After he put on his work clothes with an old brown sweater on top, he sat at the table, rested a cutting board in front of him, and rhythmically diced four tomatoes, three cucumbers, and an onion. There was still plenty of time to chop the vegetables again and again, and he piled the green, red, and white cubes into two equal piles – one which he’d leave for Jamila in a tin pot with crooked sides, and the other which he’d pack into a pita spread with olive oil and seeded with pepper kernels, to keep in the gray cloth bag he tied to the hook at the back of the truck. The diagram of the drivers’ office which he’d sketched for Jamila was lying on the table to his right. One tiny cube of onion, nearly translucent, slid down from one of the heaps of cut vegetables. Said touched it lightly with his finger, and it skidded to the middle of his map.

From the direction of the bed he continued to hear the regular rhythm of Jamila’s slowed breathing, but when he turned his glance in her direction he saw that she was sitting upright, her dark legs folded underneath her and her long, thick hair, ruddy from henna, cascading down in all directions onto her clean white nighttime galabia. She took two more deep breaths, mimicking the rhythms of sleep, smiled, and then, as if in slow motion, pointed with her hand around-around to the four walls painted turquoise. On the wall behind her, which was part of the foundation of the northern wall of the old city, hung an old photograph of the boxer Mohammad Ali when he was still Cassius Clay, with the gold medal he’d won in the Rome Olympics hanging from his neck. After she had pointed to all four walls, she folded her arms and looked over at the wooden crate in the center of the room. Two dictionaries rested on it, one Arabic-Hebrew and one Arabic-English, and inside were a nearly empty bottle of whiskey, the previous weekend’s newspapers in Hebrew, and some glossy magazines from Europe and America. She drew her finger to her nose to acknowledge the stench that was rising from the open sewage pipe, which, in spite of all the benevolent messages from the municipality of the Jews, had still not been upgraded to an underground sewage system.

Afterwards she pointed to her corner work station with its small mat where she’d sit all day long painting in bright hues the wooden squares she collected from the trash heap of a carpentry shop in Wadi al-Joz and sold on Saturdays to Jewish tourists near Bab al-Khalil or Bab al-Amud; when she smiled at them, she would rest her palm over her mouth to conceal the gaping hole where she was missing a tooth. With her outstretched arm she invited Said to take in the apartment beyond the thin eastern wall, home to a large Dom family – distant relatives of theirs. During the days, loud voices could be heard from that direction, but now they heard only the crying of an infant. In a very quiet tone, so her voice would not reach the infant beyond the wall or the one who may have already risen to calm him, she said, “Here it is good for me.”

And so as not to leave any room for doubt, she nodded her head up and down with three swift motions and drew her lower lip above the upper one.

*

The truck drove quickly down the empty street. Said raised his arm and held on tightly to the cracked leather strap that hung down from the iron rod at the back of the truck. The driver made a sharp turn, and he let his body loosen and hang by the brown strap. They passed a large expanse of grass — the sign at the entrance read Independence Park — and a tall man came out, half-walking and half-running, dragged by a big black dog. When the truck completed the turn, Said’s found his firm footing again on the iron stairs. To his right he saw the YMCA building, whose bell tower was visible from much of the city; to his left he saw the King David Hotel. In the issue of the Jerusalem Post he had glanced at a few days earlier at the newspaper kiosk next to Bab al-Amud, it said that they had just opened a new pool there, with water heated from within. That evening, after he told that to Jamila, she removed from the crate an issue of an American women’s magazine which he’d found on a fence in Beit Hakerem. She opened it to the centerfold, which featured a group of seven women in revealing bathing suits, all of them pretty and long-legged, standing next to one another and smiling broadly. The one in the middle had dark skin, and Jamila passed her finger over her.

The German church at the beginning of the main street looked closed and abandoned just as it had twenty-one years earlier. The driver slowed down and pounded against the outside of the front door: Get started.

By the time they reached the building with the green ceramic ornamentation, Said had managed to jump out of the truck three times on the right side and twice on the left, dragging the full garbage bins to the edge of the sidewalk. When they came to this building, he stalled in the only way possible: he turned first to the opposite side of the street, to the bins in front of the fence surrounding the villa where a senior English officer had lived with his family until 1947. From the blue and white sign that had been affixed to the fence he understood that the magnificent two-story building set back from the street was now part of a large elementary school. The well-tended garden that had surrounded it was no longer there. A new, lighter building had been adjoined to three sides of the old building, dwarfing it in size. Said noisily dragged four bins to the edge of the sidewalk. The driver honked.

“Idiot! Those bins are empty, this is a school, it’s summer vacation now. Leave them alone, go to the other side of the street, hurry up, time is ticking.”

Said dragged the empty bins back to their places. Only now did he notice that they were indeed very light. From the porch of one of the houses, a woman called out to him, “Tell me, do you enjoy making that racket? What, are you deaf? Let us sleep. We’ve got enough on our nerves already.”

He bypassed the truck and crossed the street. The building with the green ceramic ornamentation had hardly changed, nor had the building next door, which was identical except for the color of its ornamentation—blue not green—and the pharmacy it housed instead of a stationery store. The closed iron shutters of the store now had rusty patches, and near the entrance to the stairwell—where the garage had been—now stood a bakery. Above the shop window was a sign that read Koch Bakery, and through the glass Said saw that the garage, where the large Ford used to be parked, had been divided into two: a store and a back room, where the light was on.

“Retarded or not, come on Said, get a move on it, what are you daydreaming about? Bakery cakes? Get on with it, man!”

He dragged two full, heavy garbage bins to the edge of the sidewalk. The truck began to creep forwards, and he ran after it, grabbed on to the handle, climbed up onto the step, and looked back. From the space between the two similar buildings he would be able to see, in just a minute or two, the southern wall of the small apartment at the back of the roof where they had lived back then – on a rooftop and not in a basement. From the small window of that apartment they were able to make out the distant buildings in the village of Beit Tzafafa, and to the east, in the narrow space between the wall of a nearby building and an adjacent tree, they could just catch sight of the very top of the trains entering or leaving the station. When Jamila heard the sound of a train, she’d stand at the sink in the corner of the room, facing the window, and gesture to him with her thumb to stand behind her, or whisper to him, “Come.” And he would draw close to her — as if to check that they were still exactly the same height, that nothing had changed and everything was still okay — and he’d take hold of her hips and hoist her up, feeling her body, smelling her scent, seeing her neck strain and twist from behind, and knowing, even without seeing her face, that when the horn sounded, her nostrils flared, her chin tilted outward, her eyes laughed.

No wall and no window.

The realization that the thin cracked walls of the small apartment on the roof had apparently been destroyed or had crumbled—that Jamila was right, there was nothing to search for here—was actually a relief to him. The truck stopped. He jumped down to the street, but instead of approaching the next garbage bins, he turned back and looked over again at the roof of the building.

The wall and the window were still there. A tree he did not remember had sprung up in the intervening twenty-one years – it towered over the roof of the building and concealed the southern wall nearly entirely. Said stood on his tiptoes and craned his neck right and left. The window that was above the sink was still painted the same dark blue.

“Where are you, eh, Said?”

Said returned to the back of the truck. After he’d mounted the step and grabbed on to the leather strap again, he moved over to the left, shifted his body aside, and in the large sideview mirror he met the glance of the driver, whose eyes were sunk deep into his fat face. With a folded arm that rose and fell, a gesture he’d learned on his first day on the job, he signaled to the driver, “Go on, go on.”

                              *The Dom people is known today as members of the Domari Society of Gypsies.