LITMIR.BIZ

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couldn’t reach. We’ve got to hurry. The buses are heading out soon, and we must drive my grandmother to the center of the village, to the square outside the old Bank Hapoalim, where we’ll wave goodbye to her and the others as they set out on the haj, the first group to be granted exit visas to Mecca.

      Or maybe it’s a memory of my back pressed against the low wall that surrounded the first kindergarten in Tira, in a part of the neighborhood far from my home, which my parents decided to send me to because of their jobs. I’m leaning against the wall and staring at some kids playing with metal toy cars with small seats and squeaky steering wheels that can spin endlessly in either direction. Close to me are seesaws in the shape of a horse and a plane, and a sandbox. I look at the other kids and cry, waiting for the moment when my parents will come and get me and failing to understand why the other kids are not, like me, standing with their backs to the wall and wailing until their parents arrive. Slowly I discover that the kindergarten teacher is standing beside me, looking over the wall. It takes me some time to realize that she is talking about me when she says, “He’s always like this. He doesn’t play or listen to stories or speak to any of the other kids.” And I look back and see that she is talking to my father, who is standing right behind me on the other side of the white brick wall. I turn to look at him and he smiles at me, tousles my hair, and waves the gray handkerchief that we are all required to carry. “You forgot this,” he says and smiles at me.

      I have no doubt that both of these events took place. I don’t know which came first but I regurgitate them often. I don’t have a lot of childhood memories other than those two, and I haven’t been able to bring up new ones, aside from those that have been carved into the walls of my mind, in a spot where the beam of my memory repeatedly falls. Those things happened; I will not even entertain the notion that they did not, even though it is unclear to me how it is that I see myself in both of those distant memories. How is it that I see the kid crying rather than being there myself, my back against the wall; how is it that I watch the kid with the leaping heart see his father, a kid that is no longer me?

      Soon, when we get close to Tira, I’ll smell the trees, the clouds, the strawberries, and the figs that I used to pick with my father, even though it is not fig season and the place where the trees once stood is now home to a row of exhaust pipe garages.

       4

      “Is here, okay?” the cabby asked. “Or do you want me to go all the way to the gate?”

      “Here’s great,” I said when I saw that we had reached the entrance to Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba.

      The taxi pulled to a stop, facing north, in the direction of Tira. Five more minutes and I could’ve been at home. I looked to the right to make sure that the share taxis connecting Kfar Saba and Tira were still parked in the same spot as they had been fourteen years ago when I last boarded one of the passenger vans. And there they were, only now with an official taxi sign, making the once-unlicensed stop official.

      “One hundred and seventy shekels,” the Russian driver said, reminding me that I didn’t have any Israeli currency.

      “I’m so sorry,” I said, flipping through my wallet and waiting for a miracle that would transform my American bills into Israeli shekels. “Is fifty dollars okay?”

      “Even better,” he said, and I handed him the bill without waiting for change, even though I knew that in Israel drivers are not tipped.

      As I crossed the street in its direction, Meir Hospital looked bigger than I remembered: a few new buildings had been added, and there was now a little security hut and a metal turnstile at the entrance.

      There was no chance of me getting through the turnstile with my trolley suitcase.

      “Wait for the security guard,” a young man with an Arab accent behind me said, and I tried to check and see if he was from Tira or if he noticed that I was from Tira, though he had addressed me in Hebrew. People from Tira recognize one another. “I’ll tell the guard,” he said as he pushed through the turnstile.

      “Where to?” the guard asked before clicking open the door to the security hut.

      “I’m visiting my father.”

      “Which ward?”

      “Cardiac.”

      “Cardiac Institute’s in the tower.”

      “Is that in the new building?”

      The guard had no idea what I was talking about; as far as he was concerned the tower had always been there, built before he was even born. I pointed toward the building, which must have been erected more than three decades ago, and the security guard nodded.

      Meir Hospital. In Arabic we tweaked the name, never using the word “mustashfa”—hospital—and Arabizing the other word with a long a sound: Maaer. “He got a referral to Maaer,” we’d say, because without a referral from the local health clinic, you couldn’t just show up at the hospital, aside from in true emergencies. And a referral to Maaer, back when we were little, was something to be proud of, a sign that you really had hurt yourself. I was once referred to Maaer after I’d injured my foot. It had turned blue and swollen and the local doctor, saying I needed an X-ray, had printed out a referral to the hospital. The X-ray, though, revealed no sign of a fracture and I was deeply sorry that there were no broken bones and that I had apparently wasted my father’s time.

      When I got older I would sometimes accompany him on visits to see hospitalized relatives. Back in the day those visits were obligatory, and relatives would spend days packed into the corners of hospital waiting rooms. The women would bring food and the men would supply fresh coffee. Once, when I was in high school, I was left at the bedside of my maternal uncle, who had been in a bad car accident with his son and was in critical condition. After an all-night operation, my uncle’s condition improved and the next morning he opened his eyes and started to talk. When he asked about his son, everyone told him, “Alhamdulillah, he’s okay.” When he asked to see his son, those at his bedside told him that he was being treated nearby, in Petach Tikva, and that he would be fine and that what was most important now was that he focus on his own recuperation. My uncle didn’t know that his son had been killed in the crash. On the day of the funeral, all of the men from the village had to participate in the ceremony but they didn’t want to leave my uncle alone, so they asked me, as an already-mature and rather smart kid, a “good kid,” to stay by his bedside until the funeral was over and the mourning tent had been built. They said that they trusted me and that my uncle must not know that he had lost his son because his condition was still unstable, and that only once he’d recuperated from the surgery would one of the adults come and tell him that his firstborn child had died.

      “Why hasn’t your aunt come to visit?” he asked me as soon as it was just the two of us alone in the hospital room.

      “I don’t know, Uncle,” I told him. “She’s probably with Omar in Petach Tikva.”

      “If your aunt hasn’t come to see me and is with him constantly then he must be in really bad condition.”

      “No, Uncle,” I said. “No, she was here when you were being operated on. She left just before you came to.”

      “Have you seen him?” he asked, and I, who only that morning had seen Omar’s body, answered that I had and that he was “fine, totally fine. He even asked about you, and then we played that game that he likes with the chutes and the ladders. He beat me four to one.”

      “Yes, he likes that game,” my uncle said and smiled. “You know, you’re the only one I really believe. Now I can relax. I thought the adults were lying to me. Adults always lie.”

      “Never, Uncle,” I said. “I never ever lie.” And I swore to God.

      I tugged the trolley bag along gently, making sure the wheels didn’t rattle too much as I crossed the entryway to the new wing of the hospital.

      It was seven in the evening here, eleven in the morning

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