by Malka Marom
The Badawias’ faces are covered with veils at dinnertime also, and yet they polish off their rice while my territory is still full. I turn the tray around—turn my territory over to them.
“Wallah, I had my fill,” I say, three times, and only then do they stop urging me to eat, eat.
Only the Badawias eat the leftovers. Their husband doesn’t touch even a grain of rice in my territory. And when Abu Salim sees how I devour the pita bread, he tells Azzizah to prepare a bowl of dip for pita. Fried onions and tomato paste never tasted better and I polish off the bowl.
“Wallah, I had my fill,” I say.
“Laa—no, a guest who has had his fill would leave a bowl more than half full,” says Abu Salim. “Your guest did not have her fill. You should have prepared more,” he tells Azzizah. Then he orders Tammam to fetch coffee beans.
“But the coffee beans to honour guests are in your guest-receiving-place—your maq’ad,” says Tammam, her girl-eyes betraying that Abu Salim rarely, if ever, has made such a fuss over a woman-guest. She looks to Azzizah for an explanation. “Women-strangers are not women . . . but not men also,” she mutters to Azzizah, adds a torrent too fast for me to understand.
“Oskoti—hold your tongue,” snaps Abu Salim at his girl-wife. Then, turning to me, he says, “Your Arabic teacher taught you well, but he is not an Arab; I can tell by your manners. And by your accent, I can tell he taught you in Syria.”
“No, he taught me in Toronto, Canada, but he is an Arab from Syria,” I say.
“Cannot be,” says Abu Salim. “A Syrian is but a Syrian . . . A Jordanian but a Jordanian, a Palestinian but a Palestinian . . . Like Egyptians, Lebanese, Iraqis, and all the rest, all are fellahin—peasants. Only we Badu are Arabs, true Arabs.
“Are you ready?” he says all of a sudden, “Are you ready?” His face casts longer shadows than the sinking sun.
“Ready? Ready for what?” I whisper.
“Ready to record on the cassette, like El Bofessa,” replies Abu Salim. He turns to his wives, tells-orders them not to utter a sound for as long as the Record button is pressed. And now in the singsong voice of Badu legend-telling, he says, “It was from the wind that circles the earth that Allah had created the Badu. And so, like the wind, the Badu roams and wanders, and like the wind, the Badu is free . . . And from the arrow Allah created the horse. And so, like the arrow, the horse is fast, and, like the arrow, the horse gallops straight . . . Then from the heavy cloud that bears blessings unto the earth, Allah had created the camel and so, like the cloud, the camel is heavy and, like the cloud, the camel bears blessings . . . And then Allah had picked a bit of dust from the earth and created the donkey-mule—demeaned and oppressed till dust . . . And when the donkey stood and defecated, Allah had created from the donkey’s defecation, the fellah—the peasant.
“Now, play it back,” Abu Salim orders me.
Again and again his wives wish to hear the playback. Again and again Abu Salim tells me, “Forbidden to record and photograph the women. Only the men you can record and photograph . . .”
“Why?” I say.
“Stay here and you will learn, Inshallah,” says Azzizah.
Tammam opens her eyes wide, as if a djinn-demon had suddenly possessed her senior co-wife, Azzizah. The last thing we need is a stranger-guest, Tammam thinks, it seems.
“She, the stranger-no-stranger guest, Nura, presented us, your wives, with wristwatches,” says Tammam, openly breaking her promise to me. Again Tammam empties my duffle bag. But now she looks at the heap on her carpet as if it is a heap of bribes and corruption.
Abu Salim stares at the heap and says, “You favoured us too much, Nura. A favour is as heavy as a mountain; brought over on a donkey but returned back on a camel.” Abu Salim and Azzizah were raised on the same parables, it seems. Tammam looks young enough to be their daughter, or granddaughter.
It is Imsallam Suleman Abu Salim who decides which wife gets what. His mother had named him after King Solomon the Wise. And, like King Solomon, Imsallam Suleman Abu Salim divides the presents, share and share alike, to each wife. It is for Tammam, and not for Azzizah, that Abu Salim picks the more colourful and glittering of ribbons, beads, and clothes.
“Not good . . . worthless,” says Abu Salim as Azzizah had, but only when he sees the one and only toy I brought for his infant daughter, a stuffed animal, a Canadian beaver. “Worthless . . . not good. The infant girl will grow up thinking animals are harmless,” says Abu Salim. His face beamed with delight when he saw the binoculars Professor Russell had suggested I buy for him. “My eyes are too old now to see far,” says Abu Salim.
“No, a Badu who suckled on the heart of a crow can see through mountains till the day he dies,” says Azzizah.
And Tammam sits there, cradling her infant in her arms, as if she can’t understand what the hell has gotten into her senior co-wife, and their husband also, now that he ordered Azzizah to fetch the fragrant firewood.
And if Azzizah had hit a rock with a shepherd staff like Moses, it wouldn’t have surprised me more than the stack of fragrant firewood she fetches. It’s beyond me where a person can find a stick of firewood here. Only a lone tree on this rock, and all around only tall granite cliffs, boulders, stones, sand and sky . . . maybe a bush or two down in the wadi leading to the maq’ad. Firewood is probably as precious as water here. It looks like Azzizah saved it for a special occasion. She and Abu Salim seem to know something about which Tammam and I don’t have the foggiest notion.
What is it? . . . Not proper to ask questions.
A complete stranger they’d invited to visit-stay with them, no questions asked—not even “What is your name?”
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“Lee—what? . . . Orrrra? . . . How do you spell it?” I’m asked in Toronto.
Laura, or Lorna, or Lee, my Canadian relatives called me at first.
I was dressed in the latest fashion when I first landed in Toronto. I didn’t want my relatives in Canada to think of us in The Land as poor cousins. I landed wearing nylons and high heels—purchased in Tel Aviv, a pair of delicate suede pumps the salesman had showed me were featured in some high-fashion magazine. In these delicate shoes I stepped off the plane right into the slushy Canadian snow. Real snow was not at all like the snow in the movies, I discovered that day; real snow was soupy and brown, and the air was so cold—I had never imagined such cold. Levi and I were shivering, even indoors, when the heat was raised way too high for the Canadians. They said it was the blood—too thin, or too thick. I think it was the trauma of drastic change, sudden loss, grief, homesickness . . .
But I loved my great-aunt Sheina and her husband, Eizer. He was fluent in many languages, Hebrew among them, which he spoke with such a Diaspora accent, I could hardly understand a word. He had retired from the successful tailor shop and store he had founded; his son was running it now. But still he wore a three-piece suit, even at home, complete with a tie and a gold watch and chain; his white goatee was immaculately groomed, and his head always covered by a kippa or hat. He was observant and he’d get up at four o’clock in the morning to study the Talmud, or the Mishna, Gmara, the Bible and one of its many interpretations, most of which he knew by heart.
His wife, Sheina, my mother’s aunt, the sister of my “picture grandmother,” embodied, in my eyes, the grandparents I wished I knew—even from stories; the grandparents that my mother couldn’t tell me about, it so pained her how they had perished There, in the Shoah. Maybe because Sheina looked sort of disembodied by the vicissitudes of her long life, which seemed to have shrivelled her, all but her remembering and her spirit. A spirit that shined through her skin, which was almost like onion skin, so translucent; and lit up her eyes, which were hazel like mine; and illuminated a way of life buried under the ashes There, and under the mountains of skeletons, and the continent of shame.
Nine years older than her sister, my mother’s mother, Sheina
remembered the day when her mother birthed my grandmother, as well as the day when my mother was born, and the days when they bolted the shutters, and the trap door to the cellar in which they took shelter during the pogroms. Sheina also told me that her father, my mother’s grandfather, had seven daughters, like Shalom Aleichem’s Tuvya. But, unlike Tuvya, her father was a gevir; endowed with a gift of seeing far, not only in business dealings. And so, years before his seven daughters were of age, he looked for seven husbands. From town to town he travelled, since he was exporting and importing grain and coal, not only from cities and towns, but also from Austria, Hungary, and Poland. And wherever he happened to be on Shabbat, he went to the synagogue, prayed and listened. By and by he discovered who was the most brilliant of boy students—the talmid hakham—in this or that province. Seven such outstanding boys he found, and through all their years of schooling, he paid for their tuition, for all their needs—theirs and their families—as part of his daughters’ dowries. Like that he found my great-uncle Eizer, and my mother’s father, my grandfather Yossef. Yet, until they got married, he kept his daughters in the seclusion of his home and his synagogue. Sheina, like Azzizah and Tammam, didn’t know how to read and write. She learned to pray by remembering—from generation to generation. Her mother’s tongue was Yiddish, and so was her love language. A tayere neshome . . . mine tayere kind—Precious soul . . . my precious child—she called Levi and me. She saw nothing wrong in my marrying Dave a year after Arik went, while still grieving, still unable to comprehend inside my inner self that Arik was gone.
There were only a handful of Sabras—native-born Israelis—in Toronto then, or so I’ve heard. I didn’t meet even one, until Levi caught tonsillitis. I took him to the doctor, and in the waiting room I found a mother and son, both red-haired, both speaking good Israeli Hebrew. That’s how I met Gingie and his mother, Riva. It turned out that she and Mottke, Gingie’s father, had known Arik’s brother in their Underground days.
Mottke was specializing then at the Western Hospital in Toronto, and Riva, Gingie’s mother, was doing her doctorate in psychology at the University of Toronto. I looked after Gingie while they were studying and working.
And after Dave and I were married, come summer, Levi and Gingie would move with me to the log cabin that Dave had leased by a lake in Algonquin—a provincial park as big as The Land, if not bigger . . .with lake after lake, river after river, amid vast forests. Oh, how we could have used such a wealth of water in The Land, not to mention such a treasure of treasures—peaceful borders. That’s what I thought first time I drove to that cabin. Never before had I travelled hundreds of kilometres by car in one direction and seen no ruin, no town rebuilt in a defensive cluster surrounded by walls or security fences. No bullet-pocked walls, no border minefield, no loops of barbed wire, no military installations, no army base, not one soldier. And no one afraid to live tens of kilometres away from the nearest neighbour.
But, the first summer Dave leased the cabin, the nearest neighbour moved to Muskoka, where there was a gentlemen’s agreement not to sell a parcel of land or a cottage to a Jew. Good riddance. The new neighbour had a couple of boys the same age as Levi and Gingie and they taught Levi and Gingie how to canoe, portage, navigate, and survive in that wilderness.
Dave was crazy about Israel then. Riva, Mottke, and I loved to see The Land through his eyes. It flattered us, did us proud, the picture Dave would reflect to us. We never tired of the stories he told of the summer he first flew to The Land and met Arik, Levi, and me. It was in the summer of ’56, only a few months before the Sinai War.
Dave flew to The Land for a study mission, with a group of Torontonians. Their group leader had advised them to pack, for their stay in Israel, Nescafé, if they liked coffee with their breakfast, and salami if they liked meat for lunch or dinner. “And if you think that lugging a salami to a Jewish country is as ridiculous as lugging ice to Iceland, you’ve got another thing coming to you in Israel,” their group leader told them. “You are flying to a Jewish country where a bowl of chicken soup, never mind coffee, is a luxury rarely available.” “Oh, cut the fundraising crap,” Dave thought when he heard it. He couldn’t imagine that Jews in a Jewish state, of all places, lived in conditions found in third-world countries.
It was news to Riva, Mottke, and me, the reality seen through his eyes—how The Land, smaller than some of the lakes in Canada, inhabited by a fraction of the number of people who live in Manhattan, was besieged by neighbouring enemy-nations inhabited by more people than in the whole of Canada—four times more . . .“Just to fly there for a week made us Canadians feel like heroes . . .But you had to be there to believe how fired up the Israelis were, by their destiny . . . You could get a sunburn just from talking to them,” Dave would tell us. We lapped it up.
No one in his study mission expected to find in the Holy Land a beach like in Rio de Janeiro, and sidewalk cafés, like in Paris, crowded with great-looking girls—Jewish girls—and Israeli men, direct, warm, friendly, uninhibited. Dave had never met so many extraordinary people per square foot. Nearly all—even the taxi drivers, the hotel waiters, and the construction workers at the lecture hall—would tell him, “Why waste your life in Canada. Come join us. All you have to do to be what you were born to be is to be here in The Land.” Dave saw us Israelis like that.
It was during that study mission that Dave walked by a barbershop, and on the sign above he saw his family name printed in Hebrew and English. It’s not a common name. His father and uncle have been checking phone books for years in search of relatives lost in the Shoah.
“Do you have an unlisted phone number?” Dave asked the barber.
“Me no speak English,” said the barber. “You speak no Hebrew?”
“No.”
“Yiddish?”
“A bissle—a bit,” said Dave. But his Yiddish was sprinkled with so many English words, and the barber’s with so many Hebrew words, they got nowhere until Arik happened to drop in for a haircut.
“You are not listed in the phone book, are you?” Dave asked the barber, and Arik translated.
“No. Soon I’ll apply for a phone. Meanwhile you can use the one in the pharmacy only a few steps from here,” replied the barber.
“Is that your name on the sign?” Dave asked the barber next.
“Yes, I haven’t changed it,” replied the barber. And after Arik translated, the barber explained to Dave that many in The Land followed Ben-Gurion’s example and changed their names to Hebrew.
“Ben-Gurion changed his name?” said Dave.
“Yes, from ‘Green’,” replied Arik.
“My son also changed his name to Hebrew,” said the barber, “but I kept mine, thinking I might have family somewhere in exile, and how will they find me if I changed my name . . .”
“Same as my father’s name and mine,” Arik translated for Dave.
It soon developed that Dave and that barber were related. Right there and then, the barber closed his shop and dragged Dave and Arik to his home to celebrate with him, his wife, his children, his neighbours, his friends, the family’s reunion.
Later that day, Arik brought Dave home. Levi loves to hear Dave tell how a small electric fan barely ruffled the mosquito net draped over the crib where he, Levi, lay fast asleep. Only a baby could sleep through this noise, Dave thought to himself as Arik led him to the balcony; you couldn’t hear your own voice for the radios blaring through wide-open windows and the conversations carried out like shouting matches over the din of the radio broadcasts. Then, all at once, everyone fell silent and only the radios squealed now—the news, in Hebrew. Dave understood not a word . . . Dave understood not a word even of the Haftara he had chanted at his bar mitzvah.
Dave is twelve years older than me, and only a year older than Arik. Yet he seemed much older, exile old, and sweating in a tie and a jacket bearing a crest with the maple leaf and the Star of David intertwined.
“Take off your jacket, your tie. Feel at home,” I told him.
He had studied Hebrew not in school but in a heder, Dave told us soon after the news broadcast. Heder, to Arik and me, was a Hebrew word loaded with ghetto; and with a striving to transcend the ghetto, the pogroms, the poverty; and with a love of Torah, with enlightenment, with Bialik’s poetry, with Shabbat. But, to Dave, heder was a room in the back of a synagogue, reeking of stale snuff, spittoons, and dour old men with long white beards who got angry with him and his classmates whenever they would laugh. Bar mitzvah Hebrew that they didn’t understand their teacher whipped into their memory with a strap and a ruler. There was no love, laughter, or understanding in the heder Dave knew; it was forced labour after school hours—a punishment for being Jewish.
To get to the heder, Dave had told us, he had to pass by a place called Christie Pits, where Gentile thugs would gang up on him and his Hebrew-school classmates and beat them up, humiliate them. And it was just as humiliating to take the long way round and avoid Christie Pits, he said. Doing that made him and his classmates feel like cowards.
“Why did you remain in Canada then? Why didn’t you and your Hebrew-school classmates move to The Land?” Arik asked him.
“I nearly did,” Dave replied. “In ’48 I was all set to move to Israel, join the battle for Independence. But when my parents heard I signed up, they told me they’d donate a plane to the Israeli air force if I’d stay in Canada. A plane will serve Israel better than you, they told me. I agreed. And they kept their end of the bargain.”
“No plane could ever serve Israel better than you,” said Arik to Dave.
Now Dave is pushing Arik’s son—my son, Levi—to be the fighter pilot he never was. Dave doesn’t want Levi to make the same mistake he made.
CHAPTER 6
The special-occasion fire is crackling, fragrant, warm, and so bright you can read and write by it. I pick up the notebook. No one objects. Tammam stacks the cooking utensils and the bowls and tray, but doesn’t bother to wash them up. The flies disappear with the sun.