Fauzi's contract

Two houses, south of Tel Aviv, 2000

After the Yom Kippur fast there was an atmosphere of civil war. The demonstration that left from Hatikva neighborhood, turned into a riot and another parade left from Bat Yam and threatened to close Jaffa in a pincer movement. Jaffa was still raising smoke from the first week of the Al Aqsa Intifada. Since the police had closed off all the approaches to Jaffa, the rioters veered off in the direction of the Shapira neighborhood, whose Arab population was composed mainly of collaborators who had been housed in apartments leased by the Ministry of Defense. The rioters flowed into the streets and showered stones on every house suspected of having Arab tenants. It was a miracle that nobody was hurt. When we arrived with the truck the next day, the neighborhood looked as if after a pogrom.

On the Sunday after the stormy Saturday of Yom Kippur, in the beginning of October 2000, the month of the Al Aqsa riots, my wife, my son and I took up residence in a house I had built for us in the Shapira neighborhood. Despite the fact that in architectural terms, the house had in any case been planned to be “unfinished”, it was still very far from actually being finished. And the person who was supposed to finish the house was Fauzi, who was due to arrive with Jamil, Izaat and Yussuf, all of them from Khan Yunis.By Thursday the army had closed the border crossings to the Gaza Strip and the workers started the weekend without receiving their weekly wages. On Friday morning, Fauzi called and said that he hoped that everything would be over in a day or two. When I called him on Sunday, he told me that there had been explosions all night long and that the children were hysterical. I told him not to worry about the work. It was his. In the meantime, the most important thing is to look after the children. We agreed that I would transfer the money via the bank. This was the worst possible solution because the Palestinian Authority took 40% of every transfer, and apart from this, a war had begun and nobody knew if the Israeli bank would actually transfer the money.

After we had parted from the porters, I took the dog out for a walk. I met Yaacov Giladi: I opened the gate and he took the opportunity to slip inside in order to have a look at the new neighbor. Because of his advanced years (he was over eighty), we sat down. Yaacov had come to Israel from Salonika with his parents in the beginning of the Thirties. They had left a large family there which all perished in the Holocaust. In the beginning they had settled down in the Hatikva neighborhood but very quickly moved to the Shapira neighborhood, where Yaacov had spent his entire life and raised his family. Prior to the founding of the State, the place had been an isolated island in the heart of an area of Arab orchards. Yaacov related that on one summer evening in 1942, he had taken a walk in the street, carrying in his arms his eldest son who was then a year old baby. When he passed by an empty lot between the houses, he heard a single shot that came from the nearby orchard. When he looked back on his child, he saw to his surprise that a huge hole had opened up in the baby’s head. Now he stares with astonishment at an imaginary point on the back fence of my yard and tells me that there was the precise point the shot that killed his baby was fired from. “Never mind”, he says to me, “a long time has already passed. We can console ourselves with the fact that each time, we push them further away. Just think that at one time this wall of yours was the border between us and the Arabs, that there were Arabs from here to Gaza. And today, where are we and where are they”. I looked at my fence and tried to imagine the land stretching away from it – Salame, Yazur, Abu Kabir, Jaffa, Gaza, Khan Yunis. From there you can continue on to Gibraltar. It is possible to contemplate that had my house been built in 1942, maybe Yaacov Giladi’s son would be alive today. But, after all, we bought the plot a little more than fifty years later, in 1995, about a week before Rabin’s assassination. This had been virgin land, part of the orchard that Meir Getzel Shapira, a Jewish land dealer from Boston, purchased in 1924 from an effendi living in Abu Kabir. In contrast to Shapira’s other prestigious project, which would later be known as “A Certain Alley” and “An Anonymous Alley”, this new neighborhood was targeted at the Jewish proletariat that had emigrated to Israel from the Balkan and Black Sea countries, at the black laborers who had come to build the White City. Shapira cut down the orchard and turned the area into a sort of schtetl: he divided the area into small streets with small plots of 250 square meters along them, on some of which he built shacks covered with tar paper. Our plot was situated on the southern border of the neighborhood and was sold in payments to a drawer of water who drilled a well there, built a small shack and sold water to the residents. When the War of Independence broke out in 1948, he fled to America. Later on, the well dried up, the plot was sold by his daughter, and after a few more failed speculative turns, came into our hands. We started to build in the last October of the 20th Century.

Since the War of 1967, Israeli architecture has been a combination of Jewish creation and Arab labor. Below the corporate scale, most of the construction in Israel is carried out by Palestinian contractors and Palestinian laborers, from both sides of the Green Line. In this regard, my house was no exception, even more so since my intention was to build it at half the price of the average construction cost, at $500 per meter, including VAT. As an architect, I knew in advance that this house would be built mainly by Palestinians and I was also well aware of what this means: architects call it “tolerance”. This does not refer to the value of Tolerance as it usually appears in public or political discourse, but to the measure of Tolerance of the architect to the difference between the plan and the execution, and the margin of error that he is prepared to permit the craftsmen. In the nature of things, when relationships such as employee-employer, supplier-customer and contractor-architect are multiplied by the relationship of controlled-controller and occupied-occupier as well, the architectural “tolerance” could be re-charged with political implications. I see all this when I look at my house, because I see the fingerprints of all the people who had built it, most of them Palestinians. When I look at the house, I see their labor, their efforts and their endeavors, and sometimes their mistakes, their omissions and their sabotage as well. As a house of which many parts are in exposed concrete and in clean construction, there is no doubt that the main handprint belongs to Haider, the structure contractor. Haider is an Israeli Palestinian, a superb and clever professional from the village of Zalafa in Wadi Ara. The work with him led to a complex friendship. I cannot write about him. Afterwards Abed appeared, the head of a group of plasterers from the village of Habla near Kalkilya. I chose him because in principle, we set for ourselves the rule “to choose the cheapest offer” (because even terrible work is better than nothing), and Abed’s offer was scandalously cheap. The work started on the right foot. Abed was a man with one blind eye, but absolutely fascinating. He dreamed of building a wedding hall in his village with the money he saved from his work for the Jews. When we signed the agreement between us, I proudly gave him a copy of "A Bed of a Stranger", a poetry book by Mahmud Darwish in the Hebrew translation of Mahmud Hamza Rnaim, which my wife had published in the same period. Abed didn’t know the work of the Palestinian national poet (and so the Hebrew translation didn’t exactly mean anything to him), and from here on, his other faults also began to reveal themselves. He was apt to leave his workers at various building sites all over the Tel Aviv area and to travel between them on public transport. He was never there when needed and his workers did terrible work: they forgot to make weep holes and the lines were always crooked. “It looks like that because of the sun”, he would insist. “It looks like that because you only see it with one eye”, I would laugh at him. One of his workers, a bearded redhead who would pray for hours, was caught at our house one day in a surprise police raid with an out-of-date work permit. To his luck, a moment before he was arrested, the police were suddenly called to another place. My connection with Abed came to a close in a small Intifada: his workers blocked the drains in the yard with concrete and I was left owing NIS 1700. Months later, I dreamt one night that Israel was conquered by the Syrians and the commander of the Syrian occupation Force came to my house (fat, looking like the Israeli politician Fuad Ben-Eliezer and smoking king-size American cigarettes). Next to him in the jeep I saw Abed, smiling at me with his one eye. He had come to collect the debt.

After Abed’s departure, the group from the refugee camp in Khan Yunis was formed: Jamil, who did everything was the first to arrive; after him came Yussuf, his elder brother, who did the hardest tasks with the chisel and pneumatic hammer; then Izaat arrived, who looked like a poet and did the easiest tasks, mainly throwing out rubbish, bringing water and painting; and finally Fauzi arrived, who did the fine finishes and the artistic repairs. Fauzi was the leader of the group, not because he was the strongest, but because he was the nicest. In fact, he wasn’t a boss; he was a sort of spokesman, ambassador. We immediately became friends.

After Abed's workers blocked my drains I was forced to carry out new drillings, under very difficult approach and work conditions. In the end, I managed to find Oren, who was the only one I found with suitable equipment. During the drilling we came up against a concrete lump. I called Yussuf. Yussuf worked a long hour with the pneumatic hammer while stuck in the hole with his head down and his legs up while three Jews stood over him - Oren the drilling man, the plumber Lior who volunteered to give advice, and myself. While Yussuf was in the hole, struggling with all his might to shatter the concrete lump, he could have heard Oren and Lior cracking jokes about the stupidity that, according to them, was embedded in the character of all the Arabs. I made an all too reasoned and polite objection and regretted it. “You Ashkenazi Jews don’t understand anything”, said Oren, who was an extremely handsome Yemenite. I didn’t expect a more conciliatory position from Lior: his father, who also worked on the site, told me that in his youth in Tripoli, Libya, he saw the corpse of his grandfather hanging on a spit at the head of a parade after a pogrom. “Even your Chinese already understand better than you”, he says and calls to Yu and Chin, the two ceramic gluers who came here from the academy for gluing ceramics in Beijing (who had got me used to broken Hebrew and who lived in a deserted Arab hovel in Abu Kabir, or as they called it: “Aku Babir”), nodding and surprising me with their recitation of standard Hebrew: “stupid Arabs”. They laughed and gave Jamil, who had just come from the grocery, a friendly pat. Jamil, on his part, also laughed. Every time he saw Yu, Chin, or any other Chinese, he would double up laughing, just from their appearance.

A month later, in July, a little before the Camp David meeting between Yassr Arafat and Ehud Barak, Jamil came to work one day with a black eye. When I returned home, I told my wife that I suspect we are in trouble. Jamil used to tell me about his private life and the problems in his marriage. He didn’t stop telling me that he would divorce his wife, but I never took him seriously. Neither was I completely convinced by the way he described his marital problems, and I ascribed them more to the fact that he was simply madly horny and had ceased to be attracted to his wife. In any case, one day, in a moment of anger, and after eleven years of marriage and nine children, Jamil told his wife “get lost” three times. He got the black eye from her brothers, who in the nature of things refused “to return her to her mother”. Jamil didn’t leave them much choice. He informed them that, in any event, he was leaving and taking a new wife from Egypt. In the end, the matter was settled with the return of the dowry: $3,000 changed hands and the woman was removed from the house by force. The children remained with him. I was shocked. Jamil was three years younger than me. Even if he wasn’t one of the main beneficiaries of progress (to put it mildly), he was still aware of its existence. He had a television. How could he live with such dark norms? I walked among the workers on the site and asked each of them for his opinion, and it very quickly became clear to me, to my surprise, that I was working with a gang of polygamists. Even the delicate Izaat (whom I was sure that if he had grown up in Paris and not in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, would have become a poet or an artist and not a construction worker), even he had two wives waiting for him in Khan Yunis.

Fauzi was the only one married to one woman, even though nobody had the shadow of a doubt that such a wonderful guy could have succeeded in making even a hundred women happy.

A little more than two weeks after Yom Kippur, Fauzi called again. The money had been transferred safely and what was left of it after the commission the Palestinian Authority charged had been divided amongst the workers. But in the meantime, Fauzi said, his roof had been damaged by a shell. By a miracle nobody was home, but all his wages had gone on repairs and he had no money left, even for flour. He asked me if the work was still his. In a humanitarian outburst, I told him that the work was his. We closed a new contract over the phone and I sent him an advance. A few weeks later his cellular phone was cut off. A year and a half has already passed since then, maybe a little more. We did some of the things ourselves, my wife and I. Some of them I left. Fauzi still owes me a few weeks work. The work is still waiting for him.

Notes

1. This text was originally published in: Zvi Efrat (editor), Borderline Disorder, the catalogue of the Israeli presentation at the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2002.

2. The photo with the tiger (the house is on the background, in the center of the photo, next to the palm tree) was taken by Gila Kaplan and was reproduced on the cover of the catalogue of "Darom" (South), a Hebrew fiction series edited by Haim Pesah for Babel. The other photos were taken by Orna Marton and me.
3. After the publication of this text, in 2003 or 2004, Fauzi succeeded to pass the checkpoint and worked for two more days. I told him nothing about the text, nor to Haider, who paid me a visit few months later. I spoke with Fauzi few times on the phone. He told me that his daughter had a serious medical problem. I transferred to him one more advance. Over the years, his means to communicate have gradually deteriorated (and my means of paiment too). Then, in 2005, or in 2006, his cel-phone was cut. I have not heard from him since.