by Malka Marom
The goats sleep in Tammam’s tent. She, her infant, and I “bed” down by the scorched fire-circle outside her tent. Last night she wouldn’t let me write by flashlight. “Blow the torch out! Blow the torch out!!!” she said, stress and fear sparking in her voice, her eyes. Tonight she played with the flashlight beam, catching a wildcat flashing yellow eyes on top of the boulders that grow on the mountainside.
The night is long and lonely when everyone else sleeps and you can’t. And ever since I synchronized my watch to Azzizah’s and Tammam’s, I have had no idea what time it is. As soon as I switch off the flashlight, the cold of desert night creeps into my bones, and the lice itch like hell, and I pray a scorpion or snake doesn’t crawl into the carpet-blanket . . . I took a sleeping pill last night; felt like a dope-head all morning. I should have brought some escape reading—printed with fluorescent ink. Has anyone invented such a thing?
Tammam sleeps with her infant cradled in her arms. Both sleep wrapped in one carpet-blanket, the same carpet-blanket Tammam sat on all day. Both sleep in the clothes they wore all day. If Tammam took off her veils and her jewels, I didn’t see it. The carpet-blanket covers her head—and the infant’s.
The temperature drops thirty degrees, if not more, at night. It takes only one day and one night here to see that Jacob didn’t exaggerate when he told Labban, “Heat ravaged me by day and frost by night.” Did our forefathers live like Abu Salim and his wives?
Wallah, I miss my father . . . Wish I was a maiden back in my father’s tents. “Ma tovu ohalekha Ya’akov—How good are your tents, O, Jacob.” Rachel, Leah—Tammam, Azzizah—Sarah, Hagar—Ishmael, Isaac—Arab, Jew. Both direct descendants of Abraham . . . like Moses: Mousa, in Arabic, Moshe in Hebrew—married Jethro’s daughter—a Badawia.
Here I can feel the hardships—or, more correctly, only a taste of the hardships—my parents experienced in their pioneering days, when they lived in a small, threadbare leaky tent from the day they landed in The Land until my mother was eight months pregnant with me.
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“What do you think? Should I waive Levi’s exemption from high-risk duty?” I asked my mother a few days before I set out on this journey. It was Thursday evening. My father was still at work, at a building-supply store now, no longer in construction.
“I can’t think now. The supermarket is about to close and I have to buy produce for Shabbat,” my mother says.
“But you’ve had months to think on it, you love him as much as I do,” I say.
“And as much as the nation his father gave up his life to defend,” my mother says, cutting me off. I think she loved you, Arik, like a woman, not like a mother-in-law.
“You mean you are torn?”
“If you want to discuss it now, come with me to the supermarket. We’ll talk on the way.” My mother feels her arthritis when she walks downstairs. The supermarket is kitty-corner to where my youth movement’s shack used to stand. Gingie was working on my Jeep, outfitting it for the desert, so I suggested we grab a cab.
“You grab cabs here, stay in hotels. You have no idea how life has changed here in The Land,” my mother says. There is such a spark in her eyes, I have no doubt she is dragging me to the bus and to the supermarket so that I’ll see how life has changed here and understand why she thinks I should or shouldn’t give Levi my consent.
The meek don’t get on the bus here, let alone inherit the earth. The line-up was long at the bus stop. It was evening rush hour. And when the bus arrived, they charged, nearly trampling my mother. The bus pulled away before she and I managed to elbow our way in. The next bus pulled in before the line-up had a chance to regroup, but this one stopped meters from the curb, and the first step is too high for my mother. The bus driver doesn’t move to lend her a hand, hoist her up into the bus, so I give a push from behind. Then a fresh batch charges in, and the driver takes off with such a heavy foot on the gas that all of us in the aisle are flung to the back. My mother’s fall is cushioned by the crowd squashing her. No one gets up to offer her a seat, and when someone gets off at the next stop, five race for the vacated seat, shoving my mother out of their way. The force of the next acceleration flings us farther back; the driver shifts to second gear and we are propelled in the opposite direction. I am bracing myself for the shift into third when my mother, charging to the exit door, snaps like a paratrooper commander: “Follow me. Quick-fast, Leora! Jump out as soon as the doors open . . . Jump before you get caught between the doors and break a hand, like Arik’s mother did . . .”
My mother’s intention behind this expedition is starting to form in my mind. Territorial skirmishes are a part of daily life now, and daily life and its assumptions have become a strategic weapon.
The bus driver, it seems, was out to punish the passengers who drove him crazy, day in, day out, when he had better things to do with his life, which he nearly lost in the last war and might lose before the next stop. Terrorists rig buses with explosives every day of the week. No one can figure out how those who recently machine-gunned a busload of passengers slipped through security, but my mother has a theory: “Those terrorists eluded capture by pretending they were old enough to be grandparents.” My mother has no doubt about that.
“You see?” she tells me after my handbag, but not hers, was searched at the entrance to the supermarket.
“Stupid! . . . I could have been a terrorist, for all you know,” she tells the civil defence guy on handbag duty. She could have been talking to the wall. “Like that, our elderly are dismissed here these days,” she mutters. “In the health clinics also, whatever the elderly tell a doctor or a nurse falls on deaf ears; even the receptionists treat us as if we’ve outlived our use. And in the hospital, Arik’s mother was treated as if healing her was a waste of effort, time, medicine, money, because she will soon die anyway. That’s a very bad sign, Arik’s father thinks, and you know what a student of history Arik’s father is. From history he learned that a people who ill-treat their elderly have no future.”
“Don’t tell me you believe the lessons Arik’s father learns from history,” I tell my mother. “Don’t you remember, he learned from history that it was ruthless, irresponsible to declare a Jewish state in ’48? Remember Arik telling us his father was sure the Arabs would finish us off the day the Tommies pull out of The Land?”
“It would break Arik’s heart if he saw how our elderly are treated,” she says.
“No, Arik would say we are new at having elderly here. Give us a couple of days and we’ll learn to treat them better than most,” I told my mother. Here I am again, I thought, keeping Arik alive by expressing his opinion, feelings, doubts . . .
“You know, I forgot how young we all were in those days. I wasn’t much older than you are today the day Arik fell . . .” My mother was transformed that instant by some recollection from her youth, or by sheer necessity.
Her eyes, fearless as ever, fired menacing shots at everyone and everything they met, and she was psyched up for battle: her elbows sharp for the push, her hand at the ready for the grab; her cart poised for action. The supermarket was yet another war turf. Whenever I allowed someone to pass me or to cut in, she would look at me like she thought that I had lost my survival instinct in Canada, and that this was a training mission to reignite my self-preservation.
The air in the supermarket, like that in the streets, bristled with angry frustration and frantic animosity, as if the people had been cooped up in shelters, and now, during a tentative cease-fire, had to make up for lost time. The people behind the counter were on the defensive, seeing each customer as out to abuse him or her. The shoppers were desperate but wary, as if they thought the supermarket might run out of food, like in the days of austerity and rations, and meanwhile was out to cheat them.
No one bought a loaf of bread without squeezing the crust and smelling it first, and the staff at the meat and fish counters were inspected carefully, in case the blood
, bile, and guts on their aprons weren’t all that fresh. The fruit and vegetables, stacked in pyramids that were reconstructed hourly, did look good and fresh. Still, all hands seemed to grope for the prize in the middle of the bottom row. My mother, though, trusted the bottom row even less than the top. The supermarket didn’t stay in business by being dumb, she told me. Exactly where it is most difficult to reach is where the supermarket sticks the rotten produce.
On to the last testing ground. My mother pushed me and the cart to grab a place in the shortest line-up at the checkout counter. We were squeezed to the back by all, except one. Dressed in a dusty paratrooper’s uniform, he looked like a field commander transported in a time capsule to a battlefield bereft of gallantry and honour; there were no brothers’ keepers here—no covenant, no compass, no sides for or against; no hope of peace or victory; no threat of defeat; no sorrow, no joy, no purpose; there was no need for him to be here.
No one in the line moved aside to let him check out first. As I moved our cart to make room for his, my mother stopped me, snapping in my ear, “What’s with you! Everyone here is a front-line soldier. Serving active duty, he is entitled to shop in the Shekem—the army’s supermarkets and department stores—where prices are cheaper than in civilian stores. Obviously money is no object for him.”
“He probably thinks he won’t live to spend it,” I mutter.
“Naa,” says my mother. “Youngsters his age just say it, like we used to, in cynical jokes and songs, like, ‘If I die, bury me in the winery of Zikhron L’Zion . . .’ But, deep down, youngsters think they are immortal. Our Levi, too, or he wouldn’t nag you for your consent . . .”
“I wonder whether he nags me, hoping I won’t give him my consent—counting on me to know that deep down he fears his life will be cut as short as his father’s.”
“No, you made sure he conquered that fear,” says my mother. “You think I don’t know . . . don’t know what a gift you gave your son, don’t know what it cost you . . . But it’s Levi who has no idea what you go through. Not till he lives to parent a child his age will Levi realize the price of letting him climb into a cockpit, even of a civilian plane. It’s beyond me where you drew the courage . . .”
“From you,” I told my mother.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You did a terrific job raising that kid.”
“Yes. Best thing I did in my life. But it has used up my courage. I have nothing left for deciding on that damn consent.”
“Give me your hand,” my mother says. She puts her fist into my hand, then says, “There. I gave you a fistful of courage. Now you can decide.”
CHAPTER 8
What a surprise the morning dew was. It has fallen in such bounty, the carpet-blankets are soaked through. Shivering with cold, I was about to unroll my waterproof, warm, dry sleeping bag, and crawl into it. If that offends the Badu, well, it’s either that or catching pneumonia, I was thinking when I saw Abu Salim’s white kaffiyye glowing in the dark, the salukis trailing him, panting, shivering.
“Wake up. Wake up,” Abu Salim whispered, bending over his girl-wife, Tammam.
Was it his voice I heard yesterday morning—or was it the day before yesterday?—whispering, “Wake up, wake up”? I didn’t drift back to sleep this morning. If Abu Salim was aware of it, he took no notice. And there are no walls here, no doors. Tammam and her infant were sleeping under a heap of dew-drenched carpet-blankets only a meter or two from mine. I couldn’t help but hear Abu Salim trying to wake his girl-wife with whispers of endearment, Ayuni, galbi—my eyes, my heart.
Tammam didn’t stir until Abu Salim murmured something that sounded like “If your brother comes while I am gone . . .”
“Yaa-Rabb,” Tammam moaned, as one would, “Oh my God.” She turned to her sleeping infant-daughter and, like yesterday—oh, it would make your hair stand on end if you heard how she whispered, “Take what is left of my life and enjoy it . . .”
“Surround yourself with dignity while I am away . . .” Abu Salim whispered.
Her jewels jingle-jangled as the girl-wife heaped dew-damp dung, firewood, and twigs into the scorched fire-circle. One match after another Tammam struck, but only they caught fire.
“Sabar—patience—ayuni, galbi—light of my eyes, my heart—patience is better than thinking.” Abu Salim counselled her, and lacking no patience—and with bountiful matches and a few dry twigs—he started the cooking fire. Blowing life into it, he also started to cough—terrible coughing spasms that wouldn’t quit. It must drain him. He should quit smoking, see a doctor. Or at least use a bellows for the fire. His wheezing, spitting, and coughing awakened his infant daughter, Salimeh.
As soon as she started to cry, Tammam, cradling her in one arm, breast-fed little Salimeh. With the other hand, she brewed tea and rinsed glasses, as if Abu Salim was not suffocating—choking red, his face glistening with beads of sweat, his bloodshot eyes bulging out of their sockets. His girl-wife didn’t seem to see it. With the self-absorption of the young, she babbled about her brother to herself or Abu Salim, to their infant daughter or me, I don’t know which. For an instant it looked as if the girl’s indifference to him so pained Abu Salim and aggravated his cough that it would kill him.
Just then his senior wife, Azzizah, rushed over from her tent with some cough remedy she had concocted, making him cough even more, until she rubbed his back to stop it. Her layers and layers of veils, shawls, and long flowing thowb covered up her body and face, but not her love for Abu Salim—unrivalled by her junior co-wife, Tammam.
In no way did the girl-wife indicate she vied for Abu Salim’s favour or love. Neither wife treated the other as a rival; rather, they seemed to be allies—friends, sisters. And, in a way, Abu Salim also treated his wives as if they were sisters, or mother and daughter.
“You see Azzizah and yet you do not learn from her,” Abu Salim told his girl-wife. “Had you done as Azzizah does, stored your firewood in your tent, your firewood would not be drenched through with dew, and you would be able to light a fire in the morning without your husband having to expand not only the last of his matches to kindle it, but the last of his breath, causing him to cough.”
“It is his cigarette smoking more than anything, that is causing him to cough,” Tammam said, her beautiful eyes catching mine. “That is what I have been told, not only by Azzizah, who is a darwisha—a healer, daughter of a darwish, son of a darwisha—but also by my brother, who once saw a Yahodi darwish—a Jewish-Israeli doctor—driving a huge white Jeep with a huge machine inside that can see your lungs coughing, and your ribs, even your heart.”
“But not your soul. No machine can see the soul of a man,” says Abu Salim. “Yet with such nothing-machines you Yahod—Jews—win the hearts of our Badu young, and even some of our Badu elders.
“One Badu elder, or so I had heard people tell, went to consult a Yahodi darwish who had such a machine. And after the Yahodi darwish looked through the machine, he told the Badu elder that the desert’s dust and sand and fire-circle smoke, and even morning dew, were not good for his lungs. ‘But the desert, the dew, and the fire-circles are good for my soul,’ said the Badu elder to the Yahodi darwish. ‘Is cigarette smoking also good for your soul?’ the Yahodi darwish said to the Badu elder. ‘No,’ replied the Badu elder. ‘Cigarette smoking is my weakness. A man without weakness has no soul, no capacity to understand, to forgive, to love.’”
Last thing I expected to hear from this fierce-looking mountain Badu.
Nothing here is as I had expected it to be. Even time . . . drags and speeds here, at once. It feels as if I entered this forbidden compound only a minute ago and that I’ve been here forever, sipping over-sweetened tea brewed over a fire fuelled by goat and camel dung.
And overhead, now that dawn has lifted the sky, the white tail of a jet plane, flying too high to be heard, looks like a wisp of hair in the va
st blue. Flying high or low, the aircraft that took to the sky this morning links this isolated Badu compound, and the remote mountain chains that surround it, to grounds familiar to me, and lends a sense of security—to me, not to Abu Salim.
“Shufi, aywa, shufi—look, yes, take a good look,” he tells me, pointing to the wisp of white hair in the sky, dispersing now. “It evaporates almost like the morning dew. Aywa—yes, the dewdrops that come and go, yet never fail to give life to the plants and herds that sustain our Badu way of life, rust your Yahodi airplanes and Jeeps, your tanks and cars, if you fail to waterproof them. But a camel, Wallah, a camel needs no gasoline, no waterproofing . . . A camel can traverse vast deserts without water for days and with great speed, aywa, a camel can gallop at thirty or forty kilometres an hour in wadis that no Jeep can traverse. And what do you get from tending Jeeps? Nothing but dirty hands. But, Wallah, what knowledge you gain from tending camels—there are no caves in the desert, no rocks, no plants, no animals that a Badu, even a Badu child-boy or girl, does not know from tending camel and goat herds. Aywa, a Badu is not a Badu if he does not possess this knowledge, valued most highly ever since anyone can remember until your tribe, Israel, took rule of this desert in a stunning victory you won fighting from airplanes, tanks, and Jeeps.
“Aywa, ever since anyone can remember, and to this day, Arab kings send their sons to learn from us Badu adabb—nobility, character, manners. But now our Badu young prefer your airplanes and Jeeps to our camels and goats, aywa. Now they think power is derived from such vehicles—and from cassettes of songs sung by singers who know nothing about the desert, nothing about our Badu way of life. Yet such cassettes our young now prefer to the words we Badu press from our hearts into poems, legends, stories . . .
“In one generation, Wallah, our way of life is bound to die if your tribe, Israel, continues to rule in this desert and to ride in our wadis and skies with your tayyarat and sayyarat—airplanes and Jeeps—and your unveiled maidens that entice our Badu young to stray more than any witch or demon.” Abu Salim spits, covers his spit with a fistful of sand. His eyes go to his girl-wife, Tammam, as if she embodied the Badu young who stray, as if she were his weakness, without whom he would not have the capacity to understand, forgive, love.