by Malka Marom
Quickly, before God strikes him dead, I run out of bed and I tell him, “But they are here, Abba—even inside me in the compartment, they are breathing, moving . . . Feel, you can feel them. Feel,” I say, taking his hand and placing it on my chest where you can feel the compartment inside shaking.
“Oh, my child,” says my father, his face sad. “You are not afraid, Leora, are you?”
“No, Abba. I am not afraid.” And really I am not afraid.
The kettle whistles on the Primus like a train on tracks of fire—flames rise up from the sides. My father says, “Come, Leora. Have some cookies and tea.” So I have some cookies and tea, then go back to bed. My mother stays up very late, she has to sew sleeves. She gets paid by the number of sleeves she sews by machine in the factory, and at home by hand at night. While she sews, my mother, in a voice that flutters on her breath like an angel, sings the lullaby that her mother sang to her.
Her mother hangs on the wall across from my bed. The glass that covers her starts to drip like candle wax—drip, shimmer, and blur—and in that blur my father appears and says, “Cookies and tea . . . Nothing . . . Cookies and tea . . . Nothing . . .” again and again like a train in flames, gathering speed, faster and faster, chugging “Cookies and tea . . . Nothing . . . Cookies and tea . . . Nothing . . .” I’ll die if I don’t jump off, I know. The teacher told us at school about the trains.
“Stop it. It’s a nightmare . . .” I tell myself. “Stop it. It’s a nightmare . . .” again and again. But my voice has no sound. And now the train, speeding like mad, is chugging “Stop it. It’s a nightmare . . . Stop it. It’s a nightmare . . .” faster and faster.
Quick-fast, before it’s too late, I jump off the train. Run as fast as I can, struggling for breath and sweating because the Swastikas run after me, and they have trained dogs. I run and run. Cry and cry for help, but I have no voice. The train comes after me, even when I run downstairs. Four steps at a time I skip. Still, at each landing, at the door of each neighbour, the train whistles louder and louder, and even louder at the Marimskis’ door. With all my might I try to escape from our apartment building. But just as I reach the front entrance, the neighbours whisper to keep my mouth shut or they’ll lock me up. They think I know that the second-floor neighbours are an illegal uncle and aunt, and that the neighbour across the hall is fighting Underground in the Palmah, and that the other neighbour is fighting in the other Underground, in the Etzel. All our neighbours are hunted by the Tommies, and their lives are in my hands.
I swear I breathe not a word to anyone. Yet, one night, late, Mrs. Marimski knocks on our door and says, “I have a premonition my son is dead.”
My parents know that her son is fighting Underground. They stay with her all night. At five o’clock the next morning the newspaper arrives, and there, in black and white, it says that Mrs. Marimski’s son was killed by the Tommies.
“He was only seventeen,” Mrs. Marimski whispers, looking at me as if it were my fault.
“No. I swear, I breathed not a word,” I want to tell her, but, like in the nightmare, my voice has no sound. I can’t even say that perhaps I talked in my sleep and the Tommies heard. Now he is dead. And I’m sure that even my parents think I betrayed him. They’ll let the neighbours lock me up.
When all the grownups tear their clothes in mourning, I run away—to the sea. And when it gets dark, I run to the boulevard.
The power is not off tonight. Lovers are burning the benches, and up in the balconies people are playing cards, or cracking sunflower seeds, or even singing and dancing as if nothing happened—as if nothing happened Here or There, only in our apartment building. Now for sure I’m not going back.
Instead, I go and sit on a vacant boulevard bench. My eyelids are so heavy, I can open just a crack to see the street-lamp overhead starting to drip like candle wax—drip, shimmer, and blur—and in the blur I feel the mark of Cain on my forehead . . . Maybe because I talk in my sleep. Or because I sneak a look when the skeleton children gobble up the school lunch so fast, like the goats when we couldn’t go out to feed them because of the Tommies’ curfew.
The skeleton children don’t understand Hebrew. Still, the teacher whispers when she says, “They are afraid you will steal their food. That’s what happened to them There.” Then she explains and explains, and after all her explaining she says, “You understand, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I say. And really I understand—I understand that I understand nothing. People are getting killed Here and There, and still people are playing cards on verandas, even singing and dancing, and lovers are burning boulevard benches. And a mark of Cain is stamped on my forehead.
After the War of Independence, in ’49, a cease-fire was called. Just when the siren was howling for everyone, everywhere, to stop, stand, and remember, I think my father is going to die. All of a sudden he loses his booming voice, and in a scary whisper he tells my mother and me to stand at attention in our tiny kitchen. And his strong, huge construction hands are so shaky. When he finally succeeds in striking a match, it can barely meet the wick of the thick white memorial candle. Desperate for air, he’s gasping deep before he tells us that his mother and father and his brothers and sisters, and everyone in his family and in his little Polish town died today. “Today”—his lips are quivering—“today, when we bury sons and daughters who had sacrificed life for the rebirth of the Nation . . .”
My father is not aware that the official day to remember them from There is not today. And I’m too stunned to tell him. He looks like he’s going to die any minute, any minute. Blood drains from his face, and air from his lungs. But I can tell he’s struggling with all his might not to cry. My father never cries.
When he whispers, “Now I will say Kaddish—the mourner’s prayer—for my mother and my father and my . . .” his whisper cracks. But I see his teeth guarding his quivering lips. He pauses forever before he starts to recite.
Instead of a quivering whisper, out comes the thunderous wail, held in his throat year after year.
“Yitgadal ve’yitkadash.” Again and again the same words. “Yitgadal ve’yitkadash.” My father’s face is blood red, glistening with saliva and tears. “Yitgadal ve’yitkadash.” My father wails and wails the same words his father had recited in prayer, praising God, raising God, sanctifying God . . . Seeing God in a grain of sand.
And after you went, Arik, my father recited the Kaddish at the first minyan, early at dawn, every day for a whole year, like a father for his fallen son. To him you are a son.
“Leave it, Leora,” my mother tells me, as I’m about to clear the dishes. Her fingers start tapping the table top—a war drum. Her eyes, clamped to my father’s, demand he fire the first shot.
He shakes his head and ever so reluctantly, in that loud voice of the hard-of-hearing, he tells me, “Worries your mother, Leora, your going to Sinai tomorrow.”
“You’ve just returned from Sinai,” my mother interjects.
“Three months have passed since I returned from Sinai,” I correct her, a girl on the defensive.
“Yes,” my mother fires back, loud for my father to hear. “Three months of such coming and going. No sooner did you return from Sinai to The Land than you flew to Canada . . . only to fly back to The Land with shmates, knapsacks, sleeping bags, desert boots, like the foreign students. Here, you buy a fakklapte—beat-up—old Jeep . . . take shots and pills to ward off TB, cholera, typhoid, malaria, any plague the doctors think you might catch in the wilderness . . . Why? . . . Why are you going to all this trouble to look for trouble, stay in Arab tents—enemy tents?”
“Bedouin tents,” I mutter to stop her before her fear for me infects my confidence and resolve.
“What? . . . What?” my father shouts, his hand cupping his ear.
“Leora thinks the Bedouins are not our enemies because they serve in our army”—that’s how my mother amplifies for my father. “Le
ora lived so long a time in Canada, she no longer remembers that Bedouins of Jordan serve in the Jordanian army and even that the Sinai Bedouins had served in the Egyptian army, maybe in the platoon that shot Arik down.”
“It’s one thing to visit Bedouins for an hour or so, like you did three months ago when you entered their tents by accident, but to prepare and buy and pack like for a visit-stay of months . . . Worries not only us, but also Arik’s brother and your sister,” my father booms.
“Do you know what your sister’s husband told us?” my mother says, in a voice barely audible for my father—and the neighbours. My father moves his chair closer to my mother’s when she continues, “It is not only crazy, your sister’s husband told us, but out-and-out stupid, asking for trouble, to stay, a woman alone yet, with Bedouins—primitive, if not savage enemy Arabs encamped in some God-forsaken part of the Sinai desert. Even if you were to fire SOS flares, no one would see them, let alone come to your rescue . . .
“You should go to a psychiatrist, not to the desert. That’s what Arik’s brother told us.” My mother eyes, drooping with weight of worry, seek a spark of reason from mine.
“Arik’s brother, of all people,” my father says, shaking his head. “Remember what he used to say? ‘Go to the desert, not to a psychiatrist. There is something clean about the desert—clean, cleansing, liberating . . .’ Who would have thought then that a dreamer like him . . . legends are made of dreamers like him who turned the Negev desert into fertile land, would . . . You know, he told us that the Negev Bedouins are stealing dry the irrigation water we’ve rationed to farmers, and chopping for firewood any branch or twig they can lay an axe on . . . ‘The nomads are not the sons and daughters of the desert, but its father and mother,’ he told us . . .”
“Is it running to, or is it running from, that drives you to go to Sinai?” my mother interjects.
“No one really knows what compels one to venture to the desert, until one truly enters it,” my father says before I can reply.
“I would have gone to Sinai, as you do, had I been your age,” my mother mutters.
Like that my parents give me their blessing.
On my way to my Jeep, from the sidewalk I see they went out to their balcony. Side by side they lean on the railing to take an extra look. Who knows if it won’t be the last one, they think. I see it in their sad waving to me. Shalom . . . Shalom . . .
CHAPTER 2
I have parted from everyone but you, Arik. From this window, here, in the hotel room, you can see lovers’ fire-circles, like the ones you and I used to light right here, on the beach of Herzliyya. Do you remember how we would wait for the coffee to bubble and simmer seven times before adding the cardamom, and the wind would blow a few grains of sand into the feenjon, our lips would add sea salt to the mugs, and only then would the coffee taste just right. Oh, I wish you were here . . . Tonight, more than ever, I wish you could travel with me not only in spirit, but also in body . . .
Early tomorrow, barring the unforeseen, I’ll be heading to the compound of the mountain Bedouins who have forbidden all strangers to enter their tents ever since time remembered—until three months ago, when they invited me. Why did they break their age-old restriction? Your guess is as good as mine. Professor Russell asked me, “Did they convert you to a Badawia—a daughter of their clan? . . . By what rite?” I kept my promise—breathed not a word of what had transpired in the tents—except that I had been invited to visit-stay. Russell spared no effort and time to prepare me for this visit—even though he finds it hard to believe the mountain Badu would invite me or any stranger to stay in their forbidden tents. He thinks I misunderstood their Badu Arabic.
Maybe I did. Maybe I just heard what I wanted to hear.
I don’t know what compels me to venture to Sinai this second time—yesterday’s justifications and rationalizations don’t hold tonight. But, thank God, so much brain power is packed into this place (after all, The Land is inhabited by the descendants of King Solomon the Wise) that I can’t bump into a person who doesn’t volunteer a seamless explanation—your brother’s: “It’s sheer madness . . .”
Even the hotel porter took a swipe. Into this room he walks, sees the desert gear piled up in one corner, and the suitcases stacked in another. “Which corner do you want me to cart off to the storage room?” he asks. “The corner of adventure, of keif?” He points to the desert gear. “Or the corner of galut—exile?” he says, pointing to the suitcase he carts whenever I fly to The Land. Year in, year out, I fly in and out of The Land—in and out, in and out, like the waves below. Wave after wave beats and retreats, beats and retreats, again and again, like a lover longing to possess the shore. Even when I’m here, I long to be here. I can’t shake the feeling of exile, even here in Herzliyya, where I know every shifting current and tide. Even here in The Land that we—you, my Arik, and I—had touched as one would a lover.
Oh, but what a jealous and demanding lover, The Land.
“There was a man, but look, he is no more. No. Not on a silver platter shall the State be delivered. No, each man shall pay with his blood. Each man shall pave with his bones . . .” Such eulogies are dumped year after year on the stone that bears your name, my Arik.
Just another training flight, I thought, so damn classified was the Sinai War. Night fell, and there was no blackout, except on the news—and the phone was silent. Well, I thought, Arik’s playing in the hangar with the new jets, like a child with new toys. He doesn’t know how late it is. And I waited by the window, watching for the arc of your headlights.
As the darkness gathered, our upstairs neighbours argued at the top of their voices about some textile strike; the burning issue of the day when the war was still “classified.” Oh, I’ll never forget the angry shouts, the clock, the dark, the waiting for headlights to beam in our window.
I clung to the window long after the voices stopped, leaving quiet and the clock ticking on into the night. The cold night seeping through the dark glass was too ominous to take. So I called the base. It was bad form, I knew. If every pilot’s wife called whenever worry prompted, every hand at the base would be busy with telephones, not planes. A good pilot’s wife wouldn’t call. But I did. I couldn’t get through. They were busy with the war that I didn’t know about as yet. I dialled and redialled for hours. And when I finally got a line, they told me you were sleeping. Sleeping, yes. They wouldn’t—couldn’t—break it to me on the phone. I was kept in the dark about that. Nor did I suspect that war demanded all their time and attention. It was only the second all-out war we had engaged in, and we didn’t have it down to a science yet. Disorganization meant they had no intention of sending anyone to tell me anything that night. But I kept phoning—every pilot and ground-crewman I knew, and the drowsy wives of the whole damn air force. An hour or two later, your base commander showed up.
The minute I saw him I knew.
“A terrible tragedy,” he said. And I remember thinking: What’s wrong with me? I feel nothing. The emptiness was strange, and the puzzlement it caused absorbed me. I couldn’t squeeze a tear, not even when I glanced over at our little Levi’s crib.
“Should I bring you a glass of water?” the base commander asked. And I remember thinking: What an idiot. A glass of water? What in the hell for? Later he said, “You will remember Arik just as he was, always.”
I couldn’t hear it, couldn’t see then how hard it had hit him. He’d served with you for the whole eight years of the air force’s history. It wasn’t much of a force then. So small it was, like a tight-knit family flying makeshift planes patched together from recycled junk by ingenious ground crews who crossed their fingers each time their creations took off. I can see now how upset your base commander was; he felt so personally responsible that he had to come to tell me himself, no matter how heated the battle that night, or how much he feared for the safety of the others he had sent aloft. And, in the morning, he said, he would info
rm your parents.
“I’ll inform them tonight,” I said, thinking your mother would have had a premonition that her son had fallen in battle. She didn’t. Deep inside, a part of her—the part that responds to the order in classic works of art, music, and literature—held on to the belief that you would be spared because your brother had been badly injured in the ’48 War of Independence, and because of the loved ones she and your father had lost There, in the Shoah. To your parents you were like Joseph to Rachel and Jacob. And when I told them straight—“Arik fell in battle, killed in action”—they looked at me as if I, like Joseph’s brother, was repeating a malicious lie.
And then life further echoed that story. Three days after your casket was buried at Mount Herzl, two representatives of the religious authorities tell us that no one is to mourn you because you are not among the killed-in-action, but among the missing-in-action.
“Great! Wonderful! Arik, like Joseph, is alive in Egypt. Imprisoned. A prisoner of war!” I cry out, fucking delighted in a roomful of mourners, all of whom react as if I have swallowed false hope dished out by messengers as false as the false Messiah, Shabtai Tzvi.
“Get off it before it drives you mad, breaks your parents and mine,” your brother said. “Face reality, not only for their sake and yours, but for Levi, Arik’s only living trace . . .” And then the strangest thing happened. To all those who believed you dead, you became larger than life. A terrible loss to the whole nation, you were now part of The Price. Compounded by thousands, The Price had gained a tyrant’s power; it wouldn’t let the living live, or the dead die.
“The wife of a man missing in action is not a widow,” stated one of the two religious reps before they left. “For seven years, she is to be agunah—anchored to him, bound to await his return.”