CORINNA
S8S
"Believe me,
if
I didn't have to go home, I wouldn't go anywhere
today."
On the radio there is a debate between Knesset members who are tug–
ging at the truth like at a blanket that is too short to cover everybody's feet;
each one finds in the event proof for the justice of his deeds and his way,
while the bus comes to the intersection between Arab Nazareth and Jewish
Upper-Nazareth.
A woman on your left, with crumpled face and clothes, points at the
traffic of people and cars on the street along which the bus is slowly
advancing, and says in a thick accent:
"Not good enter Nazareth. All Arabs."
You say,
You have no shame.
Over there they called you
Jidovska
and now here you're doing the
same thing.
You're hysterical.
A young man in the seat behind you cuts the silence with an articu–
late accent: "It's not right. You always have to go into Nazareth and the bus
always goes around and around. Full of Arabs."
He is heard by the five-year-old boy sitting on his knees. Like the
name of the young driver, Abu Suleiman, written on the side of the coin–
box- that's how things become engraved.
The driver says,
"Who here has to go to the spring? No one? So maybe you can get
off here. Look at this traffic jam. It will take an hour. You'll get there faster
on foot. If no one has to go to the spring, I don't have to go into
Nazareth."
The policeman Said Khamid also gets off the bus. You say goodbye to
him on the street as you descend right into a group of German, Dutch, and
French speaking pilgrims-they are flushed and their faces are shining like
the faces of the pita-in-herbs vendor at the bakery, the orange juice ven–
dor at the grocery store, the pupils coming back from school who are
showing you a shortcut to City Hall.
In the waiting room of the mayor's office it is very quiet. The day's
newspapers are arranged on the secretary's desk. It's Independence Day
and in the festive poetry sections it's written,
"In the darkness of life Love has come,
A certain barrier before the violence
Around and within...."
A lone, lamenting poem, "I look at her small feet and ask/ How can one
stand on them in the world."
