Sulha

by Malka Marom

  Bejewelled and painted, the two co-wives are covered with exquisite shawls, glittering veils, and embroidered dresses, as if they are sitting in the harem of some oil-rich Arabian sultan and have to compete for his favour. Their face veils alone must weigh a few pounds and be worth a small fortune. Row after row of coins and beads—it is impossible to see what colour the cloth that carries them is. The top row of coins digs into their cheekbones and nose; the bottom row dangles down almost to their breasts. How can they breathe under all that silver and gold? Clanking like a cash register whenever they bend down to spit.

  And the flies keep buzzing from their spit to my face, to the animal dung, to the infant’s lips, to the saliva dripping from the trembling tongues of the saluki dogs, to the Badawias’ bloodshot eyes.

  Only their eyes, and their leathery feet and hands, are not covered. Their eyes watch every move I make.

  I try to ignore their eyes and their silence. I don’t like the feeling here in the tents. The Badawias seem to be sorry they invited me; to say I’m not wanted here is an understatement.

  “Don’t form opinions,” Russell had advised me. “Don’t judge. Don’t project. Don’t assume. Don’t anticipate. Don’t romanticize. Don’t take the initiative. Don’t impose. Don’t corrupt. Don’t interfere . . . Keep a diary or journal, keep writing and before long you’ll find the notebook will become a shelter, a companion, a private corner . . .”

  But I didn’t come here to be stuck in a paper shelter . . . I’ve been stuck way too long in the biggest private corner of them all—Exile . . .

  Two p.m.? Can’t be! My watch must be wrong. The angle of the sun reads . . . Can’t tell east from west here, so it could be 2:00 p.m. or 10:00 a.m.—ten or two, it makes no difference here, I guess.

  The two Badawias don’t let me out of their sight. Even when I went to relieve myself in a ditch behind a cluster of huge boulders, halfway there I noticed the girl-wife following me, silent and dark like a shadow, and only a few steps behind me. She stood and watched me take a piss, then wash my hands and face, and brush my teeth with the last drops of water from my canteen (I didn’t want to use their water without permission; a few jerricans stand here near the fire, but who knows how far their water source is from the tents). The girl-wife didn’t utter a sound. Like a dancer, she glided soundlessly behind me back to the blankets. The senior wife must have moved the blankets over next to the fire; they look like carpets now, which is what they are—hand-woven, rough wool, faded, frayed, dusty, stained, and—infested with lice and fleas. The Badawias keep scratching, and me with them now.

  I should have packed something for lice, fleabites. If the Badawias possess such a concoction, there is no evidence of it. This itchiness keeps spreading, as if God-knows-what is crawling all over the head and body. Nerves? Exhaustion? Allergy? The sun? The shade?

  The sun–shade contrast is amazing here. That walk from the blazing ditch to the shade of the tent took me from a furnace to a freezer.

  Tea bubbles in a cracked enamel pot. A horde of flies fights for space on the rim of the steaming tea glass. The senior wife fans them away, her bracelets, a dozen at least on each wrist, jingling like silver bells. How gracefully she moves. Her bloodshot eyes, torn wide with kohl and blue tattoos, spark fiercely, almost savagely. She rests a small steaming glass of tea on the sand in front of my carpet—fills her glass last, but drinks first. How can she, under her veil? She empties her glass in a deliberate manner, as if to show me the tea is not poisoned. Why? Do I look like I need such reassurance, or is it part of a ritual, a custom? Is she that mistrustful of me?

  The tea glass is scorching hot. I can’t hold it.

  “Yaa-salaam,” mutters the senior wife, breaking the silence. “Yaa-salaam—good heavens,” she says, but seems to imply, “What a pain. This guest spills precious water on the carpet.”

  “Yaa-salaam,” echoes the girl-wife, as if to say, “Amen.” Then she utters what sounds like a torrent of curses. She talks so fast, I can’t understand a word she says.

  I ask her to repeat her words slowly, wahada, wahada—one by one.

  And she, her eyes fearful, her voice high in her throat, almost like a muffled scream, says, one by one, “Take off your eyes, your dark mirror djinn-demon-monster eyes.”

  The senior wife, her voice husky and fearless, tells her junior co-wife that she thinks the women of my tribe veil their eyes with dark mirrors.

  “The sun is burning my eyes, just as the glass burned my hand,” I say. Then I wrap my kerchief around the refilled tea glass and explain that, as the scarf protects my hand, the “dark mirrors” protect my eyes. But when I offer them my sunglasses to try, to see for themselves, they both refuse, recoil, as if afraid some alien calamity will strike if they touch them.

  “Guwwa—power,” says the senior wife, urging me to drink another glass. “Drink up so your hands, your eyes will grow strong, will need no protection.” She wishes me power, it seems, so that my hand will be busy with her strong and oversweet tea and not with this notebook, another djinn-devil-monster. As soon as my hand picks up the glass, she whispers to her junior co-wife something that sounds like, “Now, go snatch the djinn-demon-monster from the hands of the woman-stranger and throw it into the fire.”

  “You throw it into the fire, I’m afraid—wallahi—afraid . . . afraid . . .” the girl-wife whimpers at her senior co-wife like a frightened daughter at a mother. But when she addresses me, her voice is strong. “What are you doing?” she demands, a wild, hostile look in her eyes. “What are you doing?”

  “Writing,” I reply.

  “What are you doing?” the child-wife repeats, the third time now, her fury growing.

  “I am writing,” I say slowly, enunciating each word carefully. I continue to scribble deliberately, like the senior wife and her tea—my own reassuring ritual.

  “Why are you doing writing?” she asks.

  “To remember and to learn,” I say.

  “You mock us.” The senior wife grunts, almost like a TV comedian imitating an Arab.

  And I also hear myself sounding like Johnny Carson doing his Arab routine on late-night TV. So flowery, formal—swearing upon my life and by Allah that I do not mock them. “Wallah, I’m offended,” I say, how can they think that I would mock my gracious hosts.

  “Yaa-salaam, she talks like a rajol—like a man,” whispers the girl-wife. Don’t men and women talk alike here? Do Badu women here skip the ceremonial bullshit? Is their talk straight, informal, because they’re isolated and communicate only with their blood-kin?

  “I did not mean to mock you,” I say, as a woman should, I guess. Next I’ll close this notebook, take off my sunglasses, my desert boots, my jeans; I’ll dress like a Badawia and lose my identity.

  “Yaa-Rabb, yaa-Rabb,” the older wife says with a sigh, “you remember—learn not from doing writing, but from generation to generation—min jil le-jil.”

  “How do you do that?” I ask.

  “Allah alem,” she replies. “Allah knows how I remembered-learned everything my mother had remembered-learned from her mother and also everything my daughter remembered-learned from her daughter.”

  “And you?” I ask the girl-wife.

  “Wallahi,” she says, “I remember everything my father did remember from his father’s father.”

  “You’ve been blessed,” I say. “Myself, I can’t remember your names, for example, because I did not write them down. But you—do you remember my name?”

  The two co-wives huddle, and all the hardware on their veils, wrists, ankles, necks (looks like real amber, turquoise, silver, and gold) jingle-jangles. I can’t hear a word they whisper to each other.

  “How can we remember your name when you did not tell us what is your name?” said the girl-wife. An out-and-out lie, straight to my face, without a blink.

  “Did I not tell you my name right after I
gave my breast to your infant-girl?” I say to the girl-wife.

  “Laa—no,” she replies.

  “Well, you see how, without writing, I cannot even remember if I told you my name or not. . . . What is your name?” I ask the senior wife.

  “It is not proper to ask questions,” she replies.

  “But did you not ask me questions?” I say.

  “Ask me, ask me,” says the girl-wife like a girl-child. “I wish to see my name.”

  “No, haraam, ayb—shameful, forbidden,” says the senior wife to her junior co-wife.

  “But who will see tomorrow?” mutters the girl-wife.

  “Are you ill?” I ask her.

  Silence.

  “Is she ill?” I ask her senior co-wife.

  “Allah yaa-aref—Allah knows,” replies the senior wife. “Everything takes the time it is inscribed to take.”

  “I wish to see my infant’s name, and mine, and also hers,” whispers the girl-wife, as if it was her dying wish. The older wife doesn’t say this time, “Haraam ayb—shameful, it is forbidden.”

  “Yalla, yalla—quick-fast—do writing,” says the girl-wife, surly and impatient. “Yalla, write, show how names look.”

  The senior wife’s name is Azzizah, meaning “joyful,” “happy.”

  The girl-wife’s name is Tammam, meaning “complete,” “whole.”

  “For, when we were born,” explains Tammam, “Azzizah’s mother saw her daughter was born Azzizah. And when I was born, my mother saw I was born Tammam. And when my daughter was born, I saw she was Salimeh—meaning ‘peaceful,’ meaning ‘whole,’ ‘complete,’ like when I myself was born, and also ‘joyful,’ ‘happy,’ like Azzizah.” Only the infant looks like her name, Salimeh—peaceful, sleeping wrapped in her scratchy carpet among the goats and the flies.

  Tammam asks me to point to her infant’s name. I hand her the notebook, but she won’t touch it. She is so afraid of this djinn-devil-monster that she uses me as a shield, crouching behind my back, peeking at the names over my shoulder. “Wallahi, wallahi,” she mutters when I point to her daughter’s name. “Come look at the names,” she calls out to her senior co-wife, but Azzizah . . . How can she light a cigarette, smoke under her veil? Her cigarette smells like hashish. Tammam also rolls a cigarette—bends down almost to the ground, sticks it under her veil . . . Smoke drifts as if her veil was on fire . . . “Show me my name. I lost it,” she says. “Show again. I lost it, I lost it.”

  I point to her name and explain that I do not know to write in Arabic, and so I write her name in English.

  “Does ‘English’ mean ‘writing’?” Tammam asks. She doesn’t seem to grasp that there are languages other than her own.

  TAMMAM

  I write it separately for her, frame it, so that she won’t lose it again.

  She asks me to turn this djinn-devil-monster notebook from side to side; from each and every side she wishes to see her name.

  “What do you see?” I ask her.

  “Wallah, wallah, I see my name is small and little and hiding in a cave like a pouch,” says Tammam. “Now I see a tree . . . il siyal (acacia?) and a black goat-hair tent, and two mountain peaks and a gorge plunging—yaa-Rabb—how deep in between . . . but now, from this side, I see a mother and father, and another mother and father and one standing here, you see? Here, one standing all alone to one side like an orphan—no, like a palm tree—no, like an eagle, yes . . .and I see edges . . . sharp edges, yaa-Rabb, sharp edges like daggers pointing . . .”

  “Bas—bas—enough, yaa-Tammam. Go away from the djinn-devil-monster,” says Azzizah, the senior wife.

  Tammam obeys her, glides away to her infant, cradles her daughter in her arms, rocks back and forth, back and forth—tears glued to her eyes. Again and again, she repeats each verse, “O hear what my mother had told me before she departed . . . Behold, my life leaves me at the time inscribed . . . And going to Allah I take my leave of you, my love, my child, my daughter, so take what is left of my life and enjoy it . . .”

  The infant’s laughter delights her girl-mother.

  How beautiful Tammam’s eyes are. Maybe, as the rumours have it, the men of this tribe hide their women because they are so very beautiful. I haven’t seen their faces unveiled, but how they carry themselves—the senior wife also, her bloodshot eyes wrinkled and sometimes fierce, but how regal and sensuous she carries herself, moving like a graceful dancer, her jewels like delicate wind chimes when she turns to the infant. Salimeh leaps to her arms, squealing, delighted.

  “What is your name?” Tammam asks me, all traces of tears in her eyes and voice having drifted away like smoke with the shifting wind.

  “My name is Leora.”

  “Leora? What does ‘Leora’ mean?” she asks.

  “‘Leora’ means ‘Light unto me’,” I reply.

  “But that is not a good name,” says Azzizah.

  “My name is not good? Why?” I ask.

  “Not good, immodest to call a woman so endearingly ‘Light unto me’,” Azzizah replies. “Only your husband can call you ‘Light unto me’ . . . and only in your tent. Aywa—yes . . . It is not a good name, for if your husband were to hear another man calling you, his wife, so endearingly, ‘Light unto me’, he would be bound to kill him . . . Our husband cannot call you ‘Light unto me’. No, wallahi—by God—no, he cannot. No stranger can call you that, but I remember now . . . Wallahi, I remember you did tell us your name was ‘Nura,’ meaning ‘light’. Yes, that is your name . . .”

  And so she has invented a new name for me, just like that.

  “How did you know I have a husband?” I ask her.

  “Every woman has a husband,” replies Azzizah, “unless . . . yaa-Rabb, did your husband divorce you, yaa-Nura? Did he cast you off?”

  “No.”

  “Pray he never will,” mutters Azzizah.

  j

  “Arik must be turning in his grave,” people said when I married Dave.

  You would be dizzier than hell, Arik, had you spun in your grave each time they said so.

  “Arik must be turning in his grave,” they said when your friend Yehoshua, in his telegram of condolences, proposed to marry me the day he heard you fell. (Yehoshua was in Washington then, when the Sinai War broke out.) Can you imagine how it shocked the mourners sitting Shiv’ah for you?

  His telegram arrived before you were shifted from the killed-in-the-line-of-duty to the missing-in-action. Your brother was so livid you would have thought Yehoshua was encroaching on his territory; that a widow was still bound by law to marry her husband’s brother, unless he released her and himself from this legal obligation.

  Almost all the mourners were secular, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from their reaction. It seems that age-old tribal laws and customs can’t be shrugged off in three or four generations. So deeply were they entrenched in tribal mentality that virtually in unison the murmurs began: “Arik must be turning in his grave . . . How could Yehoshua . . . not wait a year, or at least thirty days, let alone seven days of mourning to pass, before he offers to marry Arik’s Leora . . . As if no man but a friend as fiercely loyal to Arik as Yehoshua would be willing to be so helpful to Arik’s family, to go even as far as to marry a woman ten or eleven years his junior, still vital and attractive . . . As if his offer was Honourable and not simply an attempt to possess her . . .”

  Everyone knew that my paycheque alone couldn’t cover our mortgage payments, Levi’s and my medical care, our water, electricity, and grocery bills, and the taxes, of course. Everyone offered to help. And my parents insisted that Levi and I move from that room-and-a-half that you, my Arik, and I called home to their apartment. Your brother thought Levi and I would fare better if we moved to the Moshav that he and his circle had founded in the Negev. My mother’s aunt thought Levi and I could use a breather in Toronto, Canada, so she mailed me a pla
ne ticket. And Yehoshua, knowing how proud I was, how I liked to think of myself as independent, even of you, proposed to marry me, not only as a favour to me, you, and our son, Levi, you’d say, but because Yehoshua loved me secretly—or so he liked to think . . .

  It didn’t occur to him, or to anyone, me included, to ask a government ministry or agency for financial assistance, so accustomed were we to give, not take. Even my paycheque, hard earned though it was, caused me embarrassment. It’s hard to believe today that we were so inexperienced and short-handed, it didn’t seem unusual that a girl not yet nineteen, without any qualifications other than a high-school diploma and a few months of army service, would be hired to take charge of a community centre. God only knows where I found the audacity to run that centre of that tin-shack town that housed thousands of newcomers, some of whom had never seen running water or electricity. Some, like the Badu, didn’t know how to read or write, and ate with their fingers. Others ate an apple with a fork and knife, and could read, write, and quote philosophers, poets, and scientists in nine languages. That diverse assortment had to be integrated, or The Land would quickly become like the Tower of Babel. And the women, thousands of women—unlike the men and the youths who picked up Hebrew at work, in city streets and army service—were stuck in that town, caring for infants and children, elderly parents, and fellow survivors who made you wonder if insanity was not the sane response to the suffering inflicted in the ghettos, the mass expulsions, the extermination camps . . .

  During the Sinai War, in a newspaper ad framed in black, the newcomers of that tin-shack town conveyed how they sorrowed with their war bereaved—and with me as well . . . It didn’t dawn on them till years after that war that their government had managed to scrape the funds needed to launch the Sinai War, but not the funds required to provide them with decent living quarters, or to support those widowed and orphaned by the damned war. Twenty years or so later, these newcomers realized they had the power of majority to topple the leaders who had ruled The Nation for thirty years and install instead the leaders of the opposition—among them none other than our Yehoshua.