Sulha

by Malka Marom

  “Yehoshua is deploying dirty tricks to drive the Bedouins from the Negev,” said Tal. “To clear space for the military installation we’d have to be moved from the Sinai to the Negev if and when we sign a peace pact with Egypt . . .”

  “I can’t believe it . . . even of this new Yehoshua . . . would kill Arik, if it were true,” I added, sad-glad to see a black chuckle in his eyes.

  The Jeep was already broiling hot to the touch, even at the coast, where the morning August sun was tempered by a sea breeze.

  “There was no time, I see, to clamp on a couple of racks for the jerricans,” I said.

  “No. The jerricans didn’t rattle too much on the way here, and in the wadis it doesn’t matter if a jerrican or a knapsack bounces on your head—each knocks you out just the same. All the gear will be secured to the floor,” said Tal, climbing into the Jeep through the passenger’s door. From there we stuffed my knapsacks, duffle bag, sleeping bag, and parka into the back of the Jeep. It was much faster and easier than unhooking and unlacing the canvas flaps at the back or sides. I climbed into the driver’s seat, and I could see that he had packed a toolbox as large as the one Russell had carried in his Land Rover, and an even larger first-aid kit. But only four jerricans.

  “Aren’t we a bit short?” I said.

  “No. Two for water, two for gasoline. More than sufficient,” Tal replied.

  Plenty, if jerricans multiplied like rabbits, I wanted to say. But instead I told myself, Tal knows the desert and you do not. The gut instinct that said we were travelling too light was informed by fear, I reasoned, by fear and by that craving for more, more, more—that insatiable craving to fill the emptiness of loss. I was setting out to close that circle once and for all, and it was opening up, growing wider with my efforts.

  “We better get going,” said Tal, and waited for me to move. It was as if a new law of The Land decreed that a man shall sit in the passenger seat only when another man is driving.

  I stuck to The Land I knew. “I am itching to drive, to be in control of this Jeep, at least. You too?”

  “No,” Tal replied, handing me the ignition key, but leaving his door open. The sea breeze kept blowing out the matches he struck, so I waited until his cigarette was lit, his door closed, his window open.

  The Jeep rolled out of the parking lot, away from the sea, and on to the coastal highway. Soon, we were passing the Monument Boat. More of a dinghy than a boat, it was painted black and white, bore a plaque and had been raised on a sandhill fashioned to resemble a pedestal. But still it looked abandoned, left on that sandhill because it was too old for the sea and too new for the museum.

  Traffic zoomed past the boat, only a school bus slowing as it approached. The teacher was probably telling of the days when the Tommies ruled The Land and slammed the doors shut, even to the survivors of the death camps . . . The schoolchildren probably yawned. Oh shit, Exodus again! They’d have seen the movie umpteen times on TV.

  Here and there, west of the coastal highway, were the dunes where the counsellor in the youth movement had dragged us to remember the boat people.

  Into three sections, the counsellor divided the dunes. One he designated as The Land; the second, as The Sea; the third, as The Next World. Then, after nightfall, he divided us into three groups. Those designated as the Underground Fighters had to smuggle the second group—the Death Camp Survivors—past the third group—the Tommies—and into The Land. Whoever got caught by the Tommies had to go to The Next World, as did the Tommies who got caught by the Underground Fighters.

  The counsellor sat on the water jerricans all day. After nightfall, he would say, “The boat people had no water, and neither did you. The boat people carried on despite it all, and so will you. The boat people measured up to the task, and so will you.” His words were not mere slogans to us youngsters. Our generation was not battered to a stupor by banalities. The times were epochal. The extraordinary was as ordinary as our own parents.

  Oh, but how earnest we were. What a humourless generation was ours. It was a dream night for youngsters to slip out in pairs. From horizon to horizon the sky glittered with the promise of love. In starlight, the dunes curved like an erotic backdrop, not a battleground. And we were juiced up like goats and rams in heat. But no one broke free of the mould that had shaped us to serve The Nation first and foremost. And no one giggled, uttered a curse, or even, heaven forbid, whimpered or groaned.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Yaa-Nura, did you write-remember to bring us the gifts you had promised when you first entered our tents?” whispers Tammam, the girl-wife.

  She wants to see what I brought to the tents. But the older wife keeps telling her, then me, “Haraam—not proper. Do not untie.”

  “Is it proper for a guest to tell her hostess, ‘No, I will not show you my presents’?” I asked her.

  “No, it is not proper,” replies Tammam. “Let us see the gifts now . . .”

  The senior wife hushes her and turning to me she murmurs, “Allah shall bless you for asking what is proper.” Then, cutting her words wahada, wahada—one by one—she tells me, “A proper guest presents her gifts upon her arrival, but modestly she must leave her presents inside the tent, where the goats will not eat them and where the mistress of the tent will observe them but not see them.” To her junior co-wife, Azzizah adds, “Aywa—yes—it is not proper for the mistress of the tent to see her guest’s gifts because she welcomes guests for the Honour, not for the gifts.”

  Tammam tells her—God, how fast they talk when they don’t want me to understand, or when they are irritable—Tammam sounds like a teenage girl telling her mother to get off her back. It doesn’t seem to bother the senior wife. “Will you show us your gifts or not?” Tammam snaps.

  “What is it proper to do now?” I mutter.

  “Whatever will please a guest is proper for a guest to do,” replies the senior wife. She is curious also to see her presents. Yet when I empty the duffle bag onto the carpet, she gets up and glides away—to the ditch? Is she angry? At Tammam? At me?

  “Yaa-Azzizah, come back, look at all the many gifts,” Tammam shouts to her.

  Azzizah doesn’t turn around, does not even glance back. A gust of wind flaps her dresses and veils in our direction; she’s walking against the wind, so maybe she can’t hear.

  Only ashes and stones remain in the scorched fire-circle. The saluki dogs run herding patterns around the goats, trying to keep them close to the tent, and dust chokes the lungs. The infant starts to cough; as soon as she cries, her girl-mother nurses her, the presents scattered now over her carpet. “What is for me and what for Azzizah?” says the girl-wife Tammam.

  “Whatever you and Azzizah decide,” I reply. “What did you mean when you said earlier, ‘Who will see tomorrow?’” I add.

  Suddenly, all glint of recognition leaves her eyes. It is as if I were some ghost. She sits among the barking salukis, the goats, and the flies, bejewelled and kohled, and wearing an exquisite embroidered dress. Around her are stones, sand, and goat dung, and facing her is the carpet covered with presents. She nurses her infant, crying, delighted, “Yaa-Allah, yaa-Allah” and sorting out gifts—one by one, she heaps them all to one side—all for herself? Why does she pretend that I’m invisible?

  I scratch like a monkey infested with lice, and she looks straight at me but doesn’t seem to see me. “Did I say something wrong, improper?” I ask. “I didn’t mean to intrude, to bother you in any way,” I add.

  The girl doesn’t respond—not a word—not a grunt of recognition. I have never seen anything like it. She doesn’t seem to take in the stranger-woman scratching like a monkey. But where could she have seen a monkey, even a photo of a monkey? It is hard to grasp that Tammam and Azzizah have never seen a book, newspaper, magazine, movie, TV; have never been to the zoo, or walked on a sidewalk, seen a street, a house, a chair, a bed, a kitchen, a bicycle, a garden, a ros
e, a green lawn, a forest, a restaurant, a bank, a store, a policeman, a doctor . . . It is hard to grasp that people can live so isolated only a journey of two days by Jeep from Eilat, yet we know next to nothing about them.

  Azzizah seems to appear from nowhere, doubled over under a sackful of grain. Her back is sore; she rubs it to soothe the pain when she straightens up. The goats stamp over to the sack, driving the saluki dogs mad. The mountains echo Azzizah’s call—“Eerrrrjjjjuuuuu-yaa-rrruuckooo . . .”—as she shoos away the goats, like Ahmed used to. Her back might be killing her, yet she glides light on her bare feet over sun-hot stones, lifts and empties the sack. The goats finished the grain off too fast for me to see what kind she fed them. Where do they buy grain? Where do they store grain here? “Do you transport the grain from far away or from nearby?” I ask Azzizah.

  “From far away Abu Salim transports the grain on camelback,” she replies. “But nearby, we store the grain in one of the many caves.”

  Shadows shrinking—it must be close to noon. The Badawias serve for lunch what they served for breakfast—tea. They take their tea like my father—three pregnant spoonfuls of sugar to a glass, maybe even four. Not exactly a balanced diet, especially for Tammam, who is breastfeeding her infant.

  “Look, Azzizah, look how many presents, all good, beautiful, look,” Tammam bubbles as if Santa Claus, not I, had invested the time and thought, care and sweat, not to mention money, to purchase and lug from Canada everything she and Azzizah had asked me to purchase for them, and more.

  But it was Azzizah’s response that surprised me more than Tammam’s.

  “Look, Azzizah, look how beautiful the sweaters for little Salimeh,” says Tammam.

  “Beautiful, yes. But not good, worthless. Salimeh will soon outgrow them,” says Azzizah to my face. “Not good, worthless,” she says when she sees the black yarn. “It is not wool,” she complains. “Worthless . . . not good,” she mutters.

  Only now I notice how worn Azzizah’s clothes are; faded, frayed at the hem, dusty and stained like the carpets, and full of tiny burn holes from her cigarettes and fire sparks. But the embroidery work looks like a precious antique. It blinded me to the rest. By comparison, Tammam’s clothes look new, well kept.

  “Aywa—yes—worthless, not good, the yarn, the sweaters. But did you ever see such rainbow beads?” Tammam says to Azzizah.

  At Dressmakers’ Supply they thought I owned an embroidery shop. Here Azzizah mutters that I didn’t buy enough rainbow—iridescent—beads, and not enough beads of each colour, and not enough embroidery thread . . . Next, Azzizah sees the gold chains I brought—three, eighteen-carat gold, one for each wife and a tiny one for Salimeh. “The ring is missing.” Azzizah frowns now.

  “Where is the ring on the chain like yours?” Tammam asks me; finally she acknowledges my existence. And what am I going to tell her? That in The Land only war widows of my generation wear wedding bands on chains?

  I told them that I didn’t write-remember when I met them three or four months ago, but I’m writing it now so that next time I visit I’ll not forget to bring the missing gold rings.

  “By the will of Allah, it shall come into being—not by will of man, woman, stranger, or Badu,” said Azzizah, in one word: “Inshallah.”

  “Which one is for me and which for Azzizah?” Tammam asks me, pointing to the wristwatches.

  “You and Azzizah decide,” I reply.

  “You can have them both . . . Not good, both worthless,” mutters Azzizah to Tammam.

  “I want only one,” says Tammam, turning the watches from side to side, not able to choose. “What do you think of this one? . . . And that one?” she asks me, like the widows accustomed to having their late husbands make all the decisions.

  “It makes no difference which one. The two watches are identical,” I reply, “identical also to mine.”

  “Identical inside perhaps, but not identical outside,” says Tammam. “Look, this watch looks like a bird flying, the other like a deep wadi, and yours like a mountain peak. Even the red shepherd running fast to gather straying sheep is a faster runner in this watch. But a faster runner will lose his breath, so maybe that watch is better?”

  “The watches are not synchronized,” I explain, and then show her how they are all identical now.

  “Yaa-Allah, yaa-Allah!” exclaims Tammam. “Show me how to move the wadis and mountains.”

  “The watch will break,” Azzizah tells Tammam when the girl-wife tries.

  “Yaa-Allah, yaa-Allah, look, Azzizah, look how you make a bird fly, how you erect a tent . . . bend a wadi!” Tammam’s excited high-pitched shouting startles her infant. And Azzizah pulls out her withered breast to pacify Tammam’s child.

  The girl-mother seems to be completely engrossed with the watch. “How do you call the hour of the flying bird?” she asks.

  “Fifteen after three,” I reply. Corrupting her? Too late to worry now.

  “Wallah, Azzizah, look, the hour of the flying bird is called ‘fifteen after three’,” says Tammam. The minute she learns a new thing, the junior wife shares it with her senior co-wife. “Look, Azzizah, the hour of the deep wadi is called ‘five minutes before one’, the hour of the mountain peak is called ‘thirty-five minutes after five’ . . .” The girl is fast—too fast?

  “Who taught you to read a clock?” I ask her.

  “You did, wallahi. What a good teacher you are,” she replies.

  “I think someone else was a good teacher before me,” I say, and Tammam tells me not to worry, she and Azzizah will not tell their husband that I taught them the name of the hours.

  “Why hide it from your husband? Does he forbid you to learn how to read time?” I say.

  “What is the name of the hour now?” Tammam says in response. But ever since she and I moved the wadis and mountains to make the watches look the same, every watch shows a different hour.

  “I don’t know. Do you?” I reply.

  “You see, worthless. The watches like all the other presents,” says the senior wife Azzizah. And now she takes off her beaded necklace—incredible beadwork; it looks like a miniature Agam painting—and she presents it to me. “We Badu call this necklace galb, meaning ‘heart’,” she says, as if only the name is of value.

  I refuse to accept it. “This gift is not good . . . worthless,” I say, and Azzizah cracks up. But then she spits and tells me she’ll dump all my gifts into the fire if I will not accept her gift. So I put on her necklace.

  “Mabrouka, yaa-Nura—May you always be blessed,” Azzizah tells me.

  “Allah shall reward you,” I say in response.

  The girl-wife stares at her rings—three, four bands on each finger—then examines all the silver on her ankles and wrists, hides the tangle of necklaces under her shawl, takes off the turquoise ring, winces as she puts it back on her finger, then takes off one of her silver bracelets and puts it back on again. Again and again, she takes off a piece and puts it on again, wincing all the time.

  “Aywa—yes,” mutters Azzizah. “A gift—a favour—is as heavy as a mountain, brought over on a donkey but returned on a camel.”

  And now Tammam hands me one of her silver rings, thinks for a moment, then hands me her turquoise ring also—as if the silver band was not sufficient.

  “Wallah, more than sufficient,” I assure her.

  Her eyes light up. She takes her turquoise ring back, sticks her silver band on my finger, and mutters, “Mabrouka—May you always be blessed.”

  The goats nearly trampled little Salimeh. That child speed-crawls one moment, then boom! she crashes . . . Like Levi at that age when Arik went.

  For days, weeks, that child was crawling, and looking for Arik behind this door, that door, like he used to whenever Arik played hide-and-seek with him. His tiny face would light up whenever it sounded like Arik was skipping up the stairs that led to our apa
rtment. But the steps would pass by our front door, or a relative or friend would enter, and Levi would cry and cling to me as if he feared that I, like Arik, would disappear if he let go for a second . . .

  j

  Levi was clinging to me when we boarded the El-Al plane, as though he knew it was nothing like the air force plane his father used to take him and me joy riding in. The air force was very informal in those days, sort of like a family concern.

  It was a sad winter day, that day I first flew out of The Land. Raindrops, like tears, streaked the window of the El-Al plane—a prop plane, mostly empty. Very few among us Israelis had the means, in those austerity days, or the inclination, to fly abroad. Touching another land was almost like betraying your lover. And so small a village was The Land then, the pilot of our El-Al flight knew Arik, Levi, and me. We received the royal treatment, till we landed in London, where I had to switch airlines. (El-Al didn’t have landing rights in Canada then.) So, in London, the El-Al crew escorted Levi and me to the transit lounge. Soon after we parted I discovered that my flight to Toronto was delayed—mechanical failure or weather conditions. I don’t know how Trans-Canada had arranged for Levi and me to stay in London without a visa. The ground hostess spoke English too fast for me to understand and, when I asked her to speak slower, she addressed me as if I was an imbecile who was hard of hearing.

  “We get you a taxi to take you, and baby, to very good hotel in London city,” she told me. “You no have to pay for taxi, hotel stay, or food. You, and baby, eat in hotel.” She was almost shouting. But she meant well. She scribbled the name and address of the hotel on a note she gave me just in case I got lost—which of course I did, even before I left the airport.

  How Arik would enjoy this airport, I thought, as I wandered with Levi cradled in my arms through the maze of corridors, lounges, restaurants, bars, and shops, thinking Arik had never seen so many planes landing, taking off, refuelling, parked in one place. And so many people under one roof—bigger than any in The Land—dressed in fancy clothes, like in the movies, rushing so fast, in so many different directions. And not one familiar face in a crowd. No one said “Shalom” in greeting or parting, or “How cute your infant, how old is he, what’s his name?” No one stopped to tell me what a terrible blow to the nation is Arik’s loss, or that he probably hadn’t fallen into Egyptian hands and probably wasn’t being tortured in some Egyptian prison. . . I was never more certain of that than when I passed by the check-in counter of Egypt Air and saw the Egyptian Arabs, not very far from the check-in counter of El-Al. (Terror attacks then were carried out only in The Land.)