by Malka Marom
You can see nothing outside the rim of the fire-circle light, the night is so dark—and so cold: the wind is blowing cold shivers at my backside, while my front side is fire-hot when Imsallam Suleman Abu Salim asks me, “From where did you get this beaded necklace around your neck? From where did you get this silver band on your finger?”
Silence.
A show-nothing mask is pasted across the Badawias’ eyes.
Demons lurking in the darkness like the mountains in daylight echo after him, “Who gave you the necklace and the ring?”
“Surely you know who gave me these gifts,” I say, shaking inside.
“Say-tell who presented you with the necklace and with the ring,” he says, the fire dancing on his face. And the demon-mountains echo, “Say-tell . . . say-tell.”
“But . . . you know. You know. . . . Azzizah—Azzizah and Tammam, your wives . . .”
“No! No wife of mine gave you her necklace. No wife of mine gave you her ring. No wife of mine gave you her name. Necklace . . . ring. . . . No . . . Whenever a person asks you, ‘Say-tell who gave you this necklace,’ you must reply, ‘A friend from Sinaa.’ Say-reply—repeat after me,” insists Abu Salim.
“A friend from Sinaa,” I repeat.
“Aywa—yes,” he says. “Whenever a person asks you, ‘Say-tell who gave you the ring,’ you must reply, ‘A friend from Sinaa.’ Say-reply-repeat after me. Repeat . . . Repeat.”
“A friend from Sinaa . . .”
“‘Where in Sinaa?’ the person will ask, and what will you reply? Repeat. Repeat. Repeat after me: ‘In the vast expanse of Sinaa.’ ‘Which friend? What is her name? The name of her tribe?’ the person will ask, but you must reply with silence. Repeat again, one more time.”
Again and again, Abu Salim rehearses my replies. He won’t let me write to remember. “Writing could evaporate in smoke. This you must never forget,” he says. “Repeat again, one more time.” He drilled me as if his wives were secret agents, the ring and necklace smuggled like top military secrets. If they would ever be traced to him, he would be charged with spying . . . or drug trafficking, or . . .What in the hell do the Badu smuggle across borders?
Scares the hell out of me, his badgering: “Repeat . . . Repeat,” as if his life and mine were at stake. So I take off the necklace and the ring and I ask him to safe-keep them for me.
“Gems of trust you take off . . . How ignorant you are,” says Abu Salim. He tells-orders me to put them back on. And then again he starts . . .
“Who gave you this ring? Who gave you this necklace? . . .”
j
Together with the ring that sealed our marriage, Dave gave me his promise: Next year we’ll move to Israel. I took it as a gem of trust more valuable than any jewel Dave could give me. He even stapled to the ketuba—the marriage contract—three return tickets to The Land. But the next year his father had a heart attack and Dave had to take over the business. The year after, one of his partners pulled out and Dave had to restructure the business. Then his mother suffered a stroke and needed looking after. “Next year, we’ll move to The Land,” he said after that, year after year, like the observant have said, day after day, for the past two thousand years, “Next year in Jerusalem . . .” Now Dave says Israel has become just like America and we might as well move to Phoenix, Arizona.
Why did he marry me? I don’t know. He says he had never met a girl as beautiful as me, but the girls around Dave were much more beautiful, and definitely less trouble. I was a wreck, war-widowed and with an infant son who clung to me. He had no idea whom he was marrying, and neither did I. I didn’t know him then, I doubt I ever will.
I had no idea he expected me to weep when he showed me Christie Pits. I was bound to disappoint him, having been raised to do, not weep. I had no tears for Arik, not even when his bones were buried, and none under the wedding canopy with Dave—where I felt I was betraying Arik.
“One tough cookie . . . tough as nails,” Dave called me that day he had driven me to Christie Pits.
The world changed for me that day, narrowing from a conglomeration of countless tribes to two: those who had lived through war, and those who hadn’t. Dave was not of my tribe, but one of the things I loved most in him was that he didn’t know war, except from movies and books.
His den is lined with war books, even Clausewitz, and shelves full of histories of the First and Second World Wars, in the Pacific and in the European “theatre,” as they call it. But it is the Middle East wars that take up a whole wall full of shelves. Dave has read it all, and talks of war as an academic does of poetry. His war experience smells of books, of leather-upholstered armchairs, and of a cozy fire crackling in the fireplace. I wouldn’t mind it a bit if he were not a super hawk, eager for Israel to “bomb the shit out of the Arabs.” And who should do the bombing? My son?
What gave him the impression that I’m a wild Sabra? I don’t know. I’ve had no wild moments with him. What I do know is: Dave loved it that I am a proud Jew, as he called it, but he wished I could keep my pride under wraps. So did his closest friends, the survivors of Christie Pits, his fellow veterans.
Dave was no hawk in that war, allowing a few Gentiles into his camp. He introduced them to me at a cocktail party, a week or two after we got married. I had a few laughs with his friends, and then one of the Gentiles congratulated Dave for having got himself a great gal—nothing Jewish about her, or something like that, he said. He obviously expected Dave and me to take it as a compliment. And Dave came through, “Thank you,” he said without a sliver of cynicism, by rote, force of habit, without thinking. That’s a good strategy for surviving cocktail parties, but what did I know then of such tactics. I was new to pretence, to the meaningless scripts of peaceful coexistence. “How are you?” “Fine, thank you. Couldn’t be better, and you? . . . Good, glad to hear it.” There was a rhythm to the ritual, but it was alien to me.
Dave didn’t like to make waves, I knew even then. Appearances were important to him. Usually his appearance was elegant, understated, and unruffled. But how could he be unruffled by that Gentile’s compliment?
“Would you risk your butt to hide me,” I asked that Gentile, “if Jews were hounded here in Canada, like in Nazi Germany? Or do you think I could pass, if I worked at it, and saved you the trouble?” Something like that I told him. I felt sick. I was dying to go home, to The Land. No plane was fast enough.
“Let’s get out of here,” I whispered to Dave. “Let’s go home . . .” The Land, I meant, but he thought I meant to Briar Hill. As he was helping me with my coat, I heard one of his Jewish friends, a Christie Pits survivor, whisper to him, “Tell your wife to smarten up and remember where she is . . .”
That night Dave started to teach me how to kill the very thing that he loved in me. I was making more than waves, to his way of thinking. By addressing that one Gentile as I did, Dave seemed to think I had stirred up anti-Semitism in all the Gentiles at that party, now each Gentile would tell two friends, and so on. Singlehandedly, I had loosed upon this Canadian earth a fucking anti-Semitic plague. Such power one Jew in exile had, it seemed.
I wonder now if what happened there, at Christie Pits, left Dave believing that the only real power a Jew has is the power to stir up hatred for Jews.
Tone it down, he told me; button it up and keep a lid on it. It? The Sabra wildness he claimed to love in me? I’m a bit of a WASP, he says—or, more correctly, a bit of a Goiyishe copp—because I don’t have the seventh sense, that extraordinary gift that Yahodi like him, born and raised in exile, possess. “It’s like radar,” he told me. “A way to detect danger, to sense what’s bad for the Jews.”
Where was that extraordinary radar during the Shoah? I asked him, outraged. How could he believe—boast!—that exiled Yahod possess any such sense, after what happened There?
“It’s no use even trying to explain it to you,” Dave said.
D
id he know even one Gentile who would risk his or her life to shelter him? I asked him.
He’d never thought about it, he said. “It serves no purpose to question it,” he said. “Everyone can be a hero in a hypothetical situation, but, when it’s for real, no one knows what risk he’d be prepared to take.”
Exile is this uncertainty. Exile to a Yahodi is more than just exile.
Strange, how even though The Land is torn by war, and Canada is blessed with peace, Dave, not I, grew up in an atmosphere of uncertainty. And what a difference that makes. Even today it stands between us, a barrier wider than different languages or tribes.
A different time zone—seven hours behind The Land, and this desert, is Toronto—evening here, morning there . . .
Every morning, Dave read the Globe and Mail carefully, hoping to find that Canada had finally opened a door for a Jew, if not to become a prime minister, then at least a faculty dean, or maybe even a provincial cabinet minister or a judge. But when the newspaper did finally report that a Jew had risen to a judgeship, Dave told me it was not good for the Jews: if this Jewish judge made one unpopular decision, the Gentiles would take it out on all Jews. And if he made only just and popular decisions, such brilliance was bound to engender envy and resentment of all Jews. That is why it is bad for the Jews when a Jew is awarded the Nobel Prize.
A good edition of the morning newspaper didn’t use the word “Jew” at all, according to Dave, unless a Gentile used it to say something like “the long-suffering Jews.” Even that was iffy: Some Gentiles can’t stand the thought that Jews are outstanding in anything, even suffering.
But no edition of the Globe presented as many problems to Dave as one that mentioned The Land. On the one hand, he believes that if the Jews in The Land were not outstanding soldiers, The Land would fall. And that is one thing that Dave would not like to see, his feelings about today’s Israelis aside. On the other hand, Jews being outstanding in battle is much worse than Jews being outstanding in suffering . . .
The rescue at Entebbe, though, was good for the Jews. Why that particular outstanding operation was good for the Jews is probably beyond the understanding of lesser mortals lacking the “seventh sense.”
The worst possible item the Globe could report, or allude to, or imply, is that a Canadian Jew is torn between his loyalty to Canada and to The Land. Dave said it was an expression of anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism is not supposed to exist in Canada. Anything that suggests it only rocks the boat . . .
Dave talks about making waves and rocking the boat as if he thinks that all the Yahod in Toronto are huddled in a boat riding just at the waterline; the slightest wave could capsize us. But when I’d urge him to abandon that boat and fly home to The Land, he’d tell me, “It was always like this,” as if anti-Semitism were a rule of nature, or a divine act that couldn’t be changed by man. The sooner you accept it and learn to live with it the better.
The man was dead, desensitized, or he wouldn’t—couldn’t—tell me “It was always like this,” without any feeling, any fight, muruah—balls. That’s what exile does to you.
Aywa, it was clear to see why one of the names for God is The Place. Maybe Dave and I thought, felt, or hoped that we would complete each other, and that wholeness would make up for The Place.
I don’t know why I married him. Sometimes, when he’s at the log cabin, busy repairing last winter’s damage and preparing for the fast-approaching autumn—splitting wood, fixing the roof, replacing the chimney, re-chinking the logs—his unruffled appearance is defeated by the sweat, the heat, and the beauty of the place. And I glimpse the Dave I married—Dave in the right place.
Levi follows Dave like a shadow up north. And Dave sees the boy as a legendary child of a legendary father and mother. In turn, that elevates Dave, or so he feels. How Dave did it, I don’t know. The man was buried under umpteen lids, yet he instilled in Levi the conviction that he, Arik’s son, is of the aristocratic Yahod, in and out of The Land. And Dave elevated me even higher—out of this world, out of his reach; Arik’s widow, the eternal flame burning for Arik and for him. Even in the realm of myth and legend Dave sees himself in second place.
“You don’t know how lucky you are to have your mother for a mother,” Dave would tell Levi. But the child wanted a mother like Allan had, and Ron and Jeff, and all his Toronto friends.
“I want a fat mommy,” he’d whimper whenever I’d say, “Oh, come on. It’s just a sore throat. In a day or two you’ll be all right . . .”“You are not a good mommy. I want you to be a fat mommy!” he’d whine when I wouldn’t chauffeur him around. “You’re old enough to take the bus, travel by yourself, on your own power like a man. You can do it, I’m sure.” And then I’d tremble until I’d see him back, safe, in Briar Hill.
That’s what Dave loved in me. But now that I hesitate to give Lev my consent to serve high-risk duty, both he and Dave call me a fat mommy—a Jewish mother—as if a Jewish mother was not good for the Jews.
Dave doesn’t know war. Who would have thought when I married him that what I had loved most in him might end up killing my son.
CHAPTER 7
“Does your husband sleep one week at Azzizah’s tent and one week at yours?” I ask Tammam. She stokes the fire, as it is about to be engulfed by the darkness that dwarfs us even more now that only the girl-Badawia, her infant-daughter, and I are here at the maharama—the place of the women—by the fire-circle in front of Tammam’s tent.
“No,” she replies. “One night he sleeps at Azzizah’s and one night here.”
“But I am here two nights, and both nights he went to sleep at Azzizah’s tent. Why? Is he displeased with you?” I ask.
Silence. The girl-wife unfastens the gold chains I gave her. One she draped round her neck, the other round the infant’s—limp with sleep. “Mabrouka . . . mabrouka—may you be blessed,” she whispers twice, once to her infant, once to herself. Then she hands me the tiny safety pin that was hanging from her infant’s bracelet like a charm, and she says, “This is Salimeh’s gift to you.” Next, Tammam takes off her most beautiful bracelet—turquoise embedded in silver—and presents it to me, insists I keep it. “You must. You must . . .”
“Why? Will Abu Salim favour you more because you gave me this bracelet?”
“No,” replies Tammam. “No bride was more favoured than Abu Salim has favoured me.”
The bride-price that Abu Salim paid for her exceeded the sum that any man before him had paid to purchase a bride, Tammam said. Her father had purchased all her jewels, veils, dresses—“all my possessions, with the bride-price he had received from Abu Salim,” she says.
“Is that the custom?”
“Laa—no,” the girl-wife replies. “Only a good, loving father like my father would not keep his daughter’s bride-price for himself, or for to purchase brides for his sons . . . Wallah, I miss my father. I wish I was a maiden back in my father’s tents.”
“Does your father know you miss him? His tents?”
“Yes,” replies Tammam. “Every father knows how his daughter misses him, and every mother too. But my mother died soon after she birthed me. My father’s wives mothered me. It was my father’s wives who arranged my marriage to Abu Salim. But my father did not buy even one bead for his wives with my bride-price.” Stepmothers fare no better here than in “Cinderella,” it seems.
“Why did your father agree to this marriage arranged by his wives?” I say.
“What questions you ask, Wallah. Not proper to ask questions. Dir balak—watch out— Abu Salim will kill you if you betray his trust. He will track you down no matter how wide and far you escape. No one remembers better tracker than Abu Salim.”
“Do you wish I did not come to visit-stay with you?”
“No,” replies Tammam. “You were fated to visit-stay with us, or you would have died on your way up the mountains, and your escort-guardian would have died
on his way down.”
“Who told you that my escort-guardian did not die on his way back?” I ask her.
“No one. That is how I know that he did not die,” replies Tammam.
j
Soon after Tal left the maq’ad, Abu Salim loaded my desert gear onto his she-camel. He chose to walk up the steep winding path to his tents. He kept up the walking pace, ahead of me. But as soon as he heard me huffing and puffing, he waited until my breathing steadied, and only then did he continue ahead. He didn’t ask me the purpose of my visit, or how long I intended to stay. He said not a word till a turn or two before we reached the tents, then he told me to lock up my valuable things. “One can never tell who may wander into the tents while you women are out tending goats,” he said. “And when the goats return home to the tents—the encampment—you women will be talking and talking and the goats will eat everything that is not locked safe.”
“I carried no lock to the desert,” I said. “But I did carry money and passports. Could you lock them up for me, or would it burden you?”
“Are you certain you wish me to safe keep your passports and your money—valuable things?” he said.
“Since I trust you to keep safe my honour and my life, I think I will also trust you to keep safe my passports and my cash,” I replied.
Abu Salim chuckled. Still, he told me to count the money three times so that I would not say later that money is missing. I remembered, then, Russell telling me that a thoroughbred she-camel costs as much as a brand-new Rolls Royce. I don’t know if Abu Salim’s she-camel was a Rolls or a Chevy. But he reacted to my sleeping bag as if I had carried a lousy mattress to a palace of a thousand and one bedrooms, each equipped with a lavish four-poster bed.
“Put it away. There is no need for a sleeping sack here,” he told me, then assigned me to sleep in Tammam’s tent.