Ordinary ride on the bus

Khulud

Life in Fragments

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• armed conflict
• racism

On the bus, she sat towards the end next to a Russian lady in her early fifties, with a bag-on-wheels full of vegetables and fruit. A faint smell of sweat came from her direction, but Maisoon wasn’t bothered by this natural human condition. Maisoon imagined her a professor of Russian literature in her native land, coming here with false dreams, ending up cleaning people’s homes so that her children could attend university. An Ethiopian man in his forties sat by himself, looking out the window, indifferent to the fact that the seat next to him remained empty, avoided by passengers like a contagious disease. Two soldiers, kids really, were standing by the back door; their weapons – a natural extension of their bodies – casually slung on their shoulders. Four teenagers in the back were listening to George Wassouf’s Kalam Ennas on a mobile phone. A blond woman in her forties sat in front of the teenagers with a sour expression on her face, sending backward glances of irritation.

The clear, bell-like voice of Fairuz replaces the scratchy one of George Wassouf now, singing Habbaytak fi Essayf. The boys are quarrelling about a game of basketball they’d just finished playing, their voices rising above, bouncing back from the roof of the bus and toward the blond lady, whose irritated expression is replaced now with tightly-packed disgust. The Russian woman shifts in her seat, mumbling something to the window. Maisoon is singing softly with Fairuz, while her eyes are transfixed on the slow, unconscious movements of the right hand of one of the soldiers. It was closely engaged with the gun, caressing it as a silent lover, feeling its un-shiny, metallic curves. Those religious movements of the hand were reflected through an invisible mirror in the movements of the other soldier’s right hand. Together, the two hands were performing a sacred dance, bowing to the power embodied in the horrific potential of those pieces slung so indifferently across their shoulders.

The blond woman turns sharply around and in a shrill voice demands from the boys to turn the music off, it’s a annoying her. The boys snicker and turn the music down a notch. But the woman is unsatisfied, “don’t you understand Hebrew? I said turn it off! I’m riding a public transportation and don’t need to hear this on my way to work!” Maisoon shifts in her chair to face the woman, opens her mouth to speak, but someone else’s words beat her to it. Surprised, she hears the strong voice of the Russian lady, struggling with her heavily accented Hebrew, red cherries rising to her face, “Why can’t you just let them be? They’re not annoying anybody. Can’t you enjoy the beautiful music? I’m sure if it were Jewish boys listening to Ninet Tayyeb you’d be sitting there quietly. It’s because they’re Arab, right?” The red cherries now jumped to the cheeks of the blond woman, “Who asked for your opinion?! And who asked you to come here in the first place? Go back to your Russia.” Maisoon could tell the Russian lady weighed her options, and elegantly opted for a thin smile and restrained silence. For what can one reply to such ignorance? The boys were now sitting in silence, looking straight ahead as if the conversation didn’t touch them. The music was turned down another notch, but still playing. Maisoon felt relief at their unknowing courage. The blond lady sat with tightly drawn lips now, defeated that nobody came to her rescue. When the Russian lady made to get up, Maisoon touched her hand and whispered, “Toda.” The lady returned by giving her a flutter of a smile and a soft shrug of the shoulder.

Three stops later, Maisoon got off the bus, making sure to keep as much distance as possible in the all too crowded space from the weapons. Taking the bus has become a dangerous adventure – physically and imaginatively, but Maisoon preferred to face these demons than to ride a taxi. There was something about the furiously raw collisions of different histories narratives music languages ethnicities cultures that reminded her of the simultaneous fragility and explosiveness of existence in this place.

* Based on my own experiences riding the bus, this is a fragment from my Novel in Progress.
To read additional fragments from my "Life in Fragments" novel-in-progress, visit http://feministpalestinianwriter.blogspot.com/search/label/Life%20in%20F....