And finally Winter, with its bitin’, whinin wind, and all the land will be mantled with snow.
After the ambulances left for the hospital, everyone cleared out of the road while they waited for a tribal council meeting at the home of the injured men to decide how to proceed. Although the village women weren’t directly involved in the meeting, children stationed at the open windows and doorways ferried the news to the rest of us, waiting in our homes to see what would happen next.
According to the reports, many tribal members had argued for a full-on assault involving the entire tribe, but thankfully, calmer heads prevailed. Instead, the parties settled on what was called an atwah, in this case a three-day cooling-off period during which both sides agreed to monetary compensation in lieu of battle, and everyone was relieved because people died in these kinds of situations every year. In fact, my mother-in-law’s first husband (Dr. Muhammad’s father) had been killed in a fight similar to this one. Thankfully, though, this time the clubs were stowed away; the attackers’ families were safe again, and we could go to the grocery store, which was on the opposing tribe’s turf, without fear of an attack. I could still get my nefarious Pepsi fix and nobody died. Who could ask for more?
Happily, the next weeks went calmly; there weren’t any more fights, and I didn’t see any more soldiers in my driveway. The children’s cousins started school—all cute in their striped uniforms—and Amani even convinced me to let her try out fourth grade instead of home school. But when I went with her to her first class, we entered the classroom just in time to see the pretty, gentle- looking teacher smack the hell out of a doll-like little girl in pigtails for forgetting her notebook at home. It was Amani’s first and last day at school.
The construction workers had finally finished the garage, electricity and the stairs, and were then focused on finishing up installing the heating system before winter set in, hoisting the large, industrial looking boiler and fuel tank up to the roof to connect it to the radiators below.
Although the cooking routine remained under control, thanks to Huda’s daughters and the babysitter, who covered for me on the days I had to work, I was looking forward to the day the house would just be finished already and the workers gone. I’d been troubled by the persistent feeling that I owed them more than the money we were paying them—nothing sexual, of course, but the feeling that they must be taken care of—water, tea, food…Somehow I never felt that I did enough for them, perhaps a feeling mirrored from my on-hold marriage. It was this feeling that I needed to take care of the needs of men because they were men…(after all, Ra’eda didn’t expect me to make her lunch every day) filled me with a bitterness disproportionate to the actual effort required of me, as if I’d somehow overdosed on “feminine domesticity” pills.
It didn’t help that the workers were completely incompetent. Unfortunately, it was only after they’d accidentally flooded the house with hundreds of gallons of dirty water that they admitted the important fact that they’d never actually worked on radiators before. They did finish the project, eventually, though, and although by the end we’d shelled out a cool 15,000 dollars, I felt relieved, especially as the first cold evenings set in and Khalid finally set about teaching me how to fire up the thing.
We both trudged up to the fourth floor where the boiler sat in all its glory, flanked by a tank of diesel as big as my car, and a quarter full. The smell up here was heavenly—a mixture of curing cement, wet rebar, seeping fuel and fire, and I breathed it in as deeply as I could without looking like a huffer. Interrupting me from my olfactory reverie, Khalid explained that once I flipped the “big switch” downstairs, all I had to do was come up, make sure that the tank was open to the boiler, and push the start button. That was it.
Okay, I thought. Easy enough. I tried it, and sure enough, there was a satisfying whoosh of the ignition, and the boiler’s round window flashed white, then red, its roaring inferno pushing blessed heat into the rooms below. Let there be warmth!
And on that night, there was. On the second and third, too. However, when the chill of the fourth night descended, something was wrong. I flipped the “big switch,” and nothing. No satisfying tick-tick-tick of the radiators accepting water and steam.
I started to pray.
Putting on a pair of flip-flops and a jacket, I grabbed the flashlight and crunched up the cement and rebar ramps leading up to the roof. When I got there, however, the boiler—shiny, awesome, expensive—was dark and silent. I reached down and pushed its own start button, just as Khalid had shown me. Still nothing. Shit, I thought. I’ll have to tell Khalid it’s broken…As I turned to leave, though, my flashlight glinted on the fuel gage. Empty. Two thousand Shekels (more than five hundred dollars) had lasted for exactly three nights of heat for what amounted to a small, two-bedroom space. I might as well burn the money bill by bill.
I told Khalid about the problem the next day, expecting him to find a leak, a diesel thief, something wrong. After he and his friend Omar poked around awhile upstairs, however, the only suggestion they could come up with was that I should seal off half of the radiators to conserve heat. Conserve? How could it be possible to burn through what must have been hundreds of liters of diesel in just three nights?
I was frustrated and worried. On one hand, I noticed a definite tone in Khalid’s and Omar’s voices, a look between them as if I’d somehow managed—probably due to a mixture of womanly stupidity and foreign decadence—to consume more fuel than a semi on a cross-country haul. What the hell?! I doubted that it was even possible to use that much heat, even if I’d turned the entire first floor into a sauna. But the fact that they weren’t considering that there must be a mechanical problem or a leak in the system made me suspect that there might be a thief somewhere in the system, perhaps siphoning fuel from the long line leading up to the tank and that was a scary thought. Plus, there was the pressing problem that the weather was by then getting seriously cold.
Still not budging on their assessment of the problem, and without any modifications on the heating system that I could see, they called for the diesel truck to pump up more fuel to the tank, trickles dripping from the makeshift coupling outside the front door. It was a problem, particularly because I had to shell out another two thousand shekels, which left me with a mere three hundred for the rest of the week (about eighty dollars). For a family of four, that was stretching it.
Three days later, with half the radiators shut off, the tank was empty again, this time the problem vaguely chalked up to some kind of miscalculation; some mysterious incompatibility of house and design that made the boiler completely useless (unless I was willing to spend two thousand Shekels every three days all winter long).
When the real cold came the following week, I closed off all of the first floor’s rooms except the kitchen, bathroom, and family room, and hung heavy blankets over the house’s inside arches to make a single, heatable space, and fired up one of the locally produced space heaters, known as a soba. This was little more than a hollow metal box containing a propane tank and a hose, faced with a large, exposed vertical burner, but it really cranked out the heat. I’d just have to forget the fact that it was also dangerous as hell.
Still, it was better than freezing, and I just happened to have brought along a carbon monoxide detector from America (an unexpected benefit of my obsessive “what-if” packing philosophy). All I could do was try to forget that we’d just wasted $15,000, although I did find it odd that my husband’s family members weren’t as horrified as me by the waste. Still, then again I sensed that there was an unspoken assumption that I had unlimited money to burn—which certainly wasn’t the case. Regardless, I tried to be grateful that we were at least warm and comfortable, and as we all slept, spread out on our mattresses under the fiery glow of the soba, in our now, one room home (for the rest of the winter anyway), I realized I was.