The Palestinian in the Back Seat

“I’m depressed,” my very pregnant daughter-in-law said recently, beginning a long tale about her unsuccessful search for cleaning help.

Now, aside from being very pregnant, my daughter-in-law works full-time and has two children under the age of four. I therefore made her problem my problem: I suggested that I arrange to bring over my own extremely proficient and cheerful cleaning lady, Sarah. My daughter-in-law was thrilled.

So there I was in the car at 6:30 in the morning, my husband beside me, and Sarah in the back seat heading from my home in Ramot, in Jerusalem to Mod’in, about 20 minutes away toward Tel Aviv. To save time, we took the back road, instead of the main Jerusalem/Tel Aviv highway.

“Not good,” Sarah shook her head. “Too many checkpoints.”

I turned to look at her, remembering something I find easy to forget.

Sarah is a Palestinian Muslim Arab.

The first cleaning lady I ever had was a Palestinian. She worked for me for years, and was the best help I ever had. Then I moved, and the Intifada started. There began a long string of Eastern European women. A Russian Jew who was a pharmacist. A Ukrainian woman who was a writer. A non-Jewish Pole (the second-best cleaning woman I ever had.) But with time, the Jewish women thankfully learned Hebrew and found proper jobs in their professions. The Pole tearfully decided to return home when one too many buses exploded. I couldn’t blame her. And, as luck would have it, at that very moment, the Interior Ministry, in its infinite wisdom, decided to crack down on foreign workers, deporting them at an alarming rate.

And so it was that the major political, social and cultural events of our time had all conspired to get me on my hands and knees to deal personally with the plentiful Middle-Eastern dust that was accumulating at an alarming rate on every available surface in my home.

I did my best, bravely, for a number of years. But I wasn’t happy and suffered my inadequacy in silent despair. And then one day during an aerobics class, my friend Ruthie—who has the cleanest house in Ramot, maybe even the entire dust-laden Middle East—asked: “Does anyone need a cleaning lady? Mine has extra hours.”

Along with everyone else in the class, including the instructor, I clamored for the phone number.

“I don’t know if it will make a difference, but I should tell you she’s Palestinian.” The clamoring was replaced by a hem here and a haw there.

“But she’s worked for me for years,” Ruthie went on. “Even during the Intifada, when they were closing down the city, she came by foot from the Old City—a two-hour walk.” I took her number.

Naida was good. She was very good. But one day she called and said she couldn’t make it. Would I be interested in having her mother come instead?

Well, Naida, a bare-headed, slim young woman in Western clothes, was one thing. But her mother, Sarah, was quite another: a hefty mother of ten, grandmother of 32, with hennaed hair hidden by traditional head covering. But seven hours later, when my house sparkled as it had not for years, I knew this was going to work out.

And it had. Wonderfully. And now, here we were, an Israeli couple with a Palestinian Arab woman in our back seat, heading for a roadblock manned by armed Israeli soldiers.

“You have an identity card, right?” I gulped, realizing that I had always assumed it, but didn’t really know.

“Of course,” she assured me. Only…she didn’t have it with her. It was at the home of one of her children, among whom she was presently rotating on a monthly basis since giving up her own home in Anatot. “Two many roadblocks from Anatot,” she said. “Easier to live in Jerusalem.”

Up ahead, the cars had already started slowing down as one by one they pulled into the army checkpoint to be inspected.

I tensed. How, exactly, were we going to explain the presence of a Palestinian in the back seat with no identity card?

“Tell them I’m your aunt,” Sarah suggested anxiously.

I looked at her, overcome with sadness, understanding for the first time what life must be like for her. She didn’t deserve this and neither did I.

And yet, there was no question in my mind that we Israelis had absolutely no choice. I thought about Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. I thought of the couple who had housed combustibles in a baby bottle. I thought about the Palestinians who had blown up pizza parlors and city buses. Altogether, they would perhaps fill a room, and yet their solitary, despicable acts had changed the lives of people all over the world for the worse, injecting new fear and suspicion and hatred into human intercourse, depriving us of our shoes and our water and the right to freely employ or to be employed. Sarah and I were both victims of the new world.

“Tell them I’m your sister,” Sarah said.

I glanced at my husband, the thought briefly flickering across my brain that my son had been manning checkpoints just a few months earlier, during his compulsory army service. How could we possibly lie? But then, when we told the truth, would they make us turn around and go back? I considered my happily expectant daughter-in-law who was waiting for us ten minutes away. And I thought about Sarah, who had woken up at 4 a.m. to be in my car at 6:30, and how she would return home without a day’s much-needed pay.

The car rolled slowly over the speed bumps, until it stopped completely in front of the checkpoint soldier, a young woman with an Uzi draped casually over her slim shoulder. I saw her glance at me and at my husband. Then she peered into the back seat for what seemed like forever. Finally, she raised her hand, nodded, and waved us through.

Naomi Ragen is a novelist and playwright. She lives in Jerusalem.