Word: watchman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...morning, after studying in the mosque, I went for firewood. Because we are poor, we can't buy wood. I didn't know there are minefields. When I opened my eyes, I was in the hospital without my legs." The simplest impulse is perilous. Rahmat Khan, a school watchman, describes how a breeze blew his hat across a playground. He chased it, tripped a mine and lost both legs...
That night, the Greek instructor's recitation room was trashed, all the windows were smashed and several other windows on campus were broken. This was just the beginning. The students let loose in the daily prayers, disrupting the service with "scraping, whistling, groaning and other disgraceful noises." A night watchman, set to guard campus property, was attacked with a shower of stones. The administration was not happy, and an explosion of "crackers" the next day during prayers didn't help their mood either...
...teenager addicted to politics, I would do my shift as night watchman along the perimeter fence of Kibbutz Hulda, secretly listening to the news on a portable radio. Through the night, I would wander between the transmissions of Jordan, Syria and Egypt. Whenever they referred to Israel, they used the term the Zionist entity. The announcer would say "the so-called government of the so-called state" but would stop short of pronouncing the word Israel, as if it were a four-letter word. The Arab world, primarily the Palestinians, dealt with us as if we were nothing more than...
Gravitas accumulated; he wrote as a waiter, as a night watchman, as a fellow and a teacher at Stanford and then at Syracuse. His third book of short stories will be out soon, and also a novel provisionally called In Pharaoh's Army, about his Vietnam service. A couple of years ago, the Hill School invited him back and, on the unanimous vote of his former classmates, gave him his high school diploma. Selections from his self-advertising reference letters were read at the ceremony...
...tells us, or is she his lonely step-mother, as we read in "The Search for Water"? Is Martin a runaway boy who shows up at John's Kansas house one day, or a grade school teacher in New York? An obscenely rich club-hopper or a Midwestern night watchman who barely can scrape together enough for rent...