Last update - 00:00 13/04/2007
Nouveau riche
By Sayed Kashua
"Aiiiiiii!" A piercing scream reverberated through the house and woke me in a fright. "It's mom," my daughter said. "She's in the bathroom." "What happened?" I shouted, rushing in a panic to the bathroom and trying to open the locked door. I attempted to batter it in with my shoulder, like in the movies, but the door stayed put. "What happened, are you alright?," I shouted, and tried the shoulder thing again.
"No," she said. "I'm not alright. Do we go abroad once a year?!" she yelled from behind the door. "What's with you? What are you talking about?" My wife emerged, her face flushed with anger, holding a newspaper. "This is what I'm talking about," she said, thrusting the paper into my face. "About this," she repeated, pointing to a headline: "Arab screenwriter spends NIS 300,000 a year."
"Oh yes, that," I said, scratching the back of my neck. "That's why you're screaming? You gave me a real scare."
That morning the paper had an article listing the weekly expenses for certain Israeli personalities, to which I had been asked to contribute. They told me I would get a bit of money for it, so I agreed. Afterward they called and asked about other family expenses, and one of the things I told them was that my wife and I take a trip abroad every year at a cost of 2,000 euros.
"In addition," the paper wrote, "he vacations with his wife four to five times a year at a cost of NIS 3,000 each time." The truth is that the article made me smile a little. And don't think it's not true - I really did tell the paper those things. They were quite reliable. I was the liar.
"Four to five vacations?!," my wife protested. "On holidays you take us to Tira and call that a 3,000-shekel vacation?" Then she laughed: "The only reason we go there at all is to save money. Food, drink - everything is at your parents' expense."
Contrary to my wife, the article made me happy. Until then, I was afraid that I would end up as the poorest one in the survey. Somehow I inflated my spending in order to occupy a place in the middle. It never crossed my mind that in the end I would lead the list, with NIS 300,000 a year. Not only did I lead, I won by a knockout. Just so you'll get the picture, the person in second place spends NIS 169,000 a year.
"Alright," I said. "So I blew things up a little. What's wrong with that? What's better, for people to think we're poor or for them to know we're rolling in it?"
"If you ask me," she replied, "it's nobody's business how much we spend, and especially how much we don't spend."
"OK, that's already a different question," I said. My wife and I have different world-views. What she calls private, I call the public's right to know. Maybe I overdid it a little, but so what? Exaggerations have become a way of life, particularly when it comes to people's economic situation - otherwise, how can you survive? On the days when my overdraft reaches a level that prompts the bank to call and ask when I'm going to cover it, I can sit with friends in the evening and feed them stories for hours about how I'm trying to make up my mind about which new car to buy. It's always between the new Volkswagen Passat - "People say it's terrific" - or the BMW 3 Series, "because you can't go wrong with that." In the months when my bank account is balanced I indulge myself by calling up real estate agents to ask about five-room apartments in Jerusalem - "but only in Old Katamon and Baka."
I don't know if there's a connection, but I've just remembered a childhood story, or maybe more accurately a secret that Grandma once told me. In those days right after the war, after her husband was killed, leaving her with a stack of orphans, there was nothing left to eat in the house, she said. She, who would never ask anyone for help, left the kids with her eldest daughter and went out at dawn to work in the fields for pennies, not returning until dusk. But, she said, no one knew what she and the children were going through: she never allowed anyone to pity them. She would fill the cushions with shreds of newspaper and plastic bags, and when the neighborhood women came to call on a Friday they heard rustling sound when they sat down on them. "Oh," Grandma would say apologetically, "I hid a bundle of money in there. It's a good thing you came or I would have forgotten about it."