by Malka Marom
Some of the goats and saluki dogs move back and forth between sun and shade, as if they can’t decide which curse is worse. Others, parched, hungry, edge toward the water jerricans and feed bags, but fffllliiinnnggg! Tammam throws stones at their feet. They move away, only to circle back when Salimeh cries, distracting her girl-mother, her father, and his senior wife.
No matter what they do, little Salimeh cries on and off, as she has done since her father’s coughing spasms startled her from sleep—like an infant in pain from teething or hunger. Little Salimeh needs not only mother’s milk but also solid food three times a day. I should have loaded my Jeep, not with trinkets, but with cases of baby food, and powdered eggs and milk, and tins of sardines, salmon, tuna . . .
I’m famished. The Badu eat only one meal a day, in the evening, rice or pita. Their camels and dogs eat twice a day. Morning and evening, Abu Salim feeds them. And now Azzizah, taking pity on the goats, puts out some feed on tattered sackcloth.
The two tents—Tammam’s and Azzizah’s—are pitched thirty meters apart, give or take. Both are fronting east. Pointing to the northwest is the only spot of green—the lone acacia tree, braving the winds near the edge of the plateau. On the opposite edge, in the southwest, is the top of the path that leads to Abu Salim’s maq’ad. And almost directly opposite, in the southeast, you can see the top of the path that leads to the waterhole. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Badu consider this plateau to be choice real estate because of its symmetry. They love and crave the order and harmony inherent in symmetry, you can see it in the patterns and colours of their hand-woven welcome-carpets, and camel saddles, and their hand-embroidered thowbs—dresses—and abia—cloaks.
The latrine—the ditch, or, more correctly, a bit of a crack in the hard granite ground that traps layers and layers of wind-blown sand and gravel—is by the outcrop of boulders at the foot of the cliffs that tower in the east and shade the first fire-circle of the day. The Badu move the fire-circle with the ever-shifting sun and shade.
You don’t see their water source in this sketch of this forbidden encampment. I have yet to walk the path leading to it. “Is your water source as far a distance from the compound as the maq’ad?” I asked them.
“Not very far going down to it empty, but all too far coming back up full,” Azzizah replied.
“Why do you pitch your tents so far from water then?” I ask her.
“Not proper to ask questions,” she snaps. And, really, their water source is their most precious and envied inheritance, especially now, in this sixth or seventh year of drought. Hell, I wouldn’t ask my closest friend where she kept her most valuable inheritance. Why did I ask them?
Little Salimeh, as if feeling the pain of the whole world, bursts out crying again. Tammam, crying with her, offers her a breast, but the child screams, her red face covered in tears and saliva; she is kicking, wriggling out of Tammam’s arms and almost into the fire.
“My milk ran dry! My milk ran dry!” Tammam screams. “Yaa-Rabb, Yaa-Rabb—my God, my God—my milk ran dry!”
“Your milk turned sour from worrying,” Azzizah tells her junior co-wife. “Patience is better than worrying.”
“My milk ran dry, and you talk of patience!” snaps Tammam. “You . . . you feed the infant with patience, not milk.” The girl-mother plunks her infant on Azzizah’s lap and walks toward the lone acacia tree. Her sun-bleached desert appears to be as infinite as her sun-bleached sky; her compound, confining.
Spewing a slew of curses, Abu Salim disappears, perhaps to the ditch. His camels, their front legs hobbled, munch gravel not far from the fire-circle. Azzizah pulls out a withered breast from the nursing slit at the side of her thowb. Her purple nipple is wrinkled like a dried prune, yet little Salimeh accepts it.
“What would so worry Tammam that her milk turns sour?” I whisper to Azzizah. Her bloodshot eyes drill holes through me, her eyebrows knot.
“You came here knowing nothing . . . nothing,” she mutters, and leaves it at that.
“Is Tammam ill? Is that what worries her so?”
Silence.
“Is Tammam pregnant, afraid she will die, like her mother, soon after birthing her second child? Is that what worries her? Is that why she keeps telling her infant daughter, ‘Take what is left of the rest of my life and enjoy it’?” I ask Azzizah, breaking the silence.
“Not proper to ask questions,” Azzizah replies, then says, “It is the drought. The drought first dried up the milk of the she-goats, then the milk of the she-camels; now the milk of Badawias the desert over.”
Raving mad, Tammam returns to the fire-circle—or so it seems. With her shibriyya, the dagger she used last evening to pry open the tin of tomato paste and to chop the onion, she chops at the ground by the cooking fire; her jewels jingle-jangle furiously. She chops and scoops out the gravel—chops and scoops, chops and scoops, jjjjinggggle-jjjangggle; chops a hole about a third of a meter wide and deep, into which she puts the red-hot ashes from the cooking fire. On a tattered old rag she pounds flour, salt, and water into a wad of dough. Anger powers her fists. Azzizah doesn’t say a word to calm her. The dough is now flat as a pizza, and oval-shaped, yet Tammam pounds still. Out of the tattered old rag she scoops it, plunks it on top of the red-hot ashes, then layers on more ashes and adds a final topping of gravel. Now she picks up a fire poker and tamps down the gravel over the grave in which she has buried the dead treat. Tap. Tap. Tap. Jingle-jangle, jingle.
“What are you doing, yaa-Tammam?” I whisper to the girl-wife, her girl-infant cradled in Azzizah’s arms, fast asleep.
Silence. Tap, tap, tap . . . Jingle-jangle, jingle . . .
“What is she doing?” I whisper to Azzizah.
“Wallah, I never never, never, saw a woman so ignorant as you,” whispers the senior wife in response. “You do not even know how to be a lazy woman.”
“A lazy woman?” I ask her, thinking I didn’t hear right.
“Aywa,” replies Azzizah. “Tammam is preparing lazy pita. One pita from one piece of dough, not five or six pitas—five-six times more work, but five-six times better pitas—”
“Hush!” snaps Tammam. Tap, tap, tap . . .
“She hears, by the sound of her tapping, if the lazy pita is done,” explains Azzizah.
The tea is brewed, and still Tammam taps.
“Sounds like it is done,” the senior wife whispers to her junior co-wife.
“Not yet,” mutters Tammam.
“My hearing is getting old.” Azzizah sighs.
It sounds to me like cardboard buried under the gravel by the time Tammam decides the lazy pita is done. She scoops off the top layers of gravel and ashes and, using her shibriyya dagger like a fork, digs out of the smouldering cavity a flat chunk of steaming charcoal, which she plunks on the dented bronze tray. Now, she bends over, like when she is lighting a cigarette and doesn’t want her veils to catch fire. Gravel and ashes cloud out from the sides of her veils as she blows to dislodge sand, gravel, and ashes from the loaf of lazy pita.
Soon after devouring most of the loaf, Tammam pulls her breast out of the nursing slit of her thowb to see if the lazy pita restored her milk.
The fire and the sizzling heat work such optical illusions that, for a moment, I’d swear I was seeing an apparition—a shimmering ghost dancing and thrashing directly across the fire. Then, just when I feel the onset of an adrenalin rush, I realize it’s Abu Salim re-joining the fire-circle.
Now, through the veil of fire-smoke, he looks like Jacob, the day he first caught sight of Rachel.
Azzizah’s glance drops to the ground, the hurt heavy in her eyes, like Leah’s.
Tammam, like Rachel, rounded up her goats and Azzizah’s, as shepherd-boys from the neighbouring compound came to lead her goatherds and Azzizah’s to water and pasture.
A cloud of dust trails after them, and you can’t shake the feeling t
hat our ancestors walked here only yesterday.
I get a real taste of those long-ago days as I bite into my bit of the lazy pita—embedded with grains of sand. Every nerve explains why the Badu-young prefer the loaves of bread they see in the restaurants that dot the coastal highway, and at the airport, not far from the mountain that people believe is Mount Sinai. At its feet, at the Santa Katerina Monastery, a lousy imitation of the Burning Bush that never consumes itself draws hundreds, thousands, who cannot help but see the red light-bulb that “burns yet doesn’t consume itself . . .” Still, it doesn’t stop the longing for what never was—except perhaps in myths, you say to yourself in Santa Katerina. But here, this morning, when the dew washed clean the desert, I could almost touch those long-ago days—be they myth or not—days when the world was a purer place, when underneath everything there was a sacredness, when a pillar of fire-smoke-dust pointed the direction to The Promised Land.
This morning I can also feel the strain in Jacob’s tents—Rachel’s and Leah’s—and the passion.
And the flies-bugs-lice. God, what I wouldn’t give now for a good long shower, a clean change of clothes, a big breakfast, a long walk—a straight answer to the question: Why would Tammam think me the first of the vultures to come here? Why would vultures come here? To prey on what? Why would Tammam look mystified when Azzizah tells me, “You would be wise to stay here,” and when Abu Salim presents me with a kaffiyye—headdress—exquisite, heavy with red embroidery?
“Invite a guest and honour him, but whether he’ll partake of your hospitality or not, only fate will decide,” Azzizah mutters, almost as if she could sense how I wished I could take off in my Jeep now.
Abu Salim spits behind his back, and then he addresses me, “You go in circles like a Badu forced by drought to wander from waterhole to waterhole, grazing-ground to grazing-ground.”
“You would be wise to stay here,” Azzizah tells me again, and Tammam’s eyes pop wider in amazement.
“What makes you think I go in circles?” I ask Abu Salim.
“You strangers look at the dust of our abia—cloaks—and you think we Badu know nothing,” Abu Salim replies, rolling another cigarette.
“From the Gulf of Suez to the Gulf of Aqaba–Eilat,” Abu Salim glues the fine cigarette paper with a lick of spit, his bloodshot eyes addressing me, “round and round you went, in circles and zig-zagging ever since you and your escort-guardian entered this Sinaa Peninsula—not from the east, by way of Aqaba–Eilat, but from the west, by way of El-Arish–Yamit you entered.”
“Wallah, it’s true, how did you know?” I ask him.
“Are you ready?” he responds, like a monarch ready to dictate to his scribe.
“Yes.”
“Good. Write what you hear me tell you to write, so that whoever reads it will know that, without you or anyone else telling it to me, I know that from the desert town Al Arish or Yamit, you and your escort-guardian went on to the Sulphur springs, then to the Common Road, the wadi of the bitter waters, the ever-shifting sand mountains, the ancient temple at Sarabit al-Khadim, the ancient turquoise mines, the greatest of all the great dry river beds, Wadi Feiran, the man-made oasis at the monastery Santa Katerina, the tip of the peninsula, Ras Muhammad, the spectacular wadi . . . Too narrow and steep to traverse is the last wadi, even by camel; you have to dismount and walk very carefully for one wrong step could start a rock slide. Yet I am sure you crossed it by Jeep.”
“We did, Wallah. How did you know, yaa–Abu Salim?” I heard it in my voice—“amazement” is not the word. Abu Salim wasn’t telling me half of what he knew, by the look his wives gave me.
“Like the fellah you ask, ‘How did I know?’” says Abu Salim, one eye amused, the other annoyed, disdainful. “Aywa, it is a true story, or so I have heard. Six or seven years ago it was, before the onset of this drought, it happened that a fellah lost his camel,” Abu Salim elaborates in the singsong voice of Badu storytelling. “His precious she-camel galloped away, far into the desert. The fellah went to search. High and low he searched, and farther than far, the desert over he searched. And then one day he met a Badu. And the Badu asked the fellah, ‘Are you looking for your camel?’
“‘Wallah, yes,’ said the fellah.
“‘And is your camel a low camel, with a short neck, red hair, and blind in the left eye?’ asked the Badu.
“‘Wallah, yes,’ said the fellah, thinking in his heart: ‘This Badu is all too familiar with my she-camel. He must have stolen her away for himself.’ But the fellah was not completely sure of it. So he asked the Badu, ‘Where did you see my camel?’
“‘I did not see your camel, only her footsteps,’ said the Badu.
“Now the fellah grew even more suspicious. And he told the Badu, ‘Only her footsteps you saw and you know she is a low camel, her neck short, her hair red, her left eye blind?’
“‘Aywa—yes,’ replied the Badu. ‘By her footprints I knew your camel was lost. For any rider astride a camel would move with purpose, in a straight line. But your camel, yaa-Fellah, zigzagged from this bush to that. And by the leaves that your camel chewed, only on one side off that bush, I know your camel is blind in the left eye—for a camel chews on the right side of the bush only when blind in the left eye. And by the footprints that were so very close to the bush, I know your she-camel’s neck is short. And by the hair your she-camel left on a branch, I know her hair is red. And by the urine marks in the sand I know your she-camel is short, yaa-Fellah. For a she-camel urinates against her tail. And whipping her tail until she was done, your she-camel left clear marks on the sand. Not large and wide as a tall camel, but narrow and small I saw, and I knew the lost she-camel is short.’
“Yes,” Abu Salim waited for my pen to stop.
“And by the layers of dust I saw on your Jeep the night that you and your escort drove into my maq’ad, I knew the circles and the zigzags you had made from gulf to gulf. And from the way you were leaning to the left, as you were approaching the fire-circle, I knew that your escort drove most of the way. And from his desert shoes, I knew that he was of the Yahodi border crossing soldier-of-soldiers. And by the way he dismounted the Jeep, I knew that his knees had been injured. And from the late hour he decided to drive into my maq’ad, and from the Badu words he had asked you to teach him, I knew that he saw only the dust on a Badu’s abaiah, and therefore he thought he could outwit us Badu.”
“You see?” Tammam’s eyes said, meeting mine. “I told you Abu Salim is a tracker better than the best of trackers.”
“Is it possible for the best of Badu trackers to track a man who disappeared in the desert twenty-one years ago?” I ask Abu Salim.
“It is possible, until it is impossible,” he replies.
j
“Oskotu—utter not a sound,” Abu Salim tells-orders his wives. Next breath he tells-orders me to record his words for El Bofessa—Professor Russell. “Oskotu—not a sound from you, women, while I record,” he orders, as I’m about to press the red Record button. His infant daughter won’t obey him. She whimpers even in her sleep. Azzizah collects the child and glides over to her tent.
On and on, for nearly a full side of the cassette, Abu Salim issues a torrent too fast for me to understand. He sounds like a person directing his anguish, frustration, and anger at the whole world.
Before he redirects it at her, Tammam decides to leave. She couldn’t have taken more than a couple of steps when he stops his harangue to snap at her, “Where are you going?!”
“To the child and Azzizah,” she replies, in that arrogant voice the young use when the old get on their nerves.
“Stay here!” Abu Salim orders her. “You have a guest . . .” He waits until she obeys him, re-joining the fire-circle, then he tells her to shut up while, on and on, he resumes his recording.
She picks up her embroidery work and jabs at it and squirms, as if it’s hell for her to sit so impriso
ned and gagged for five minutes, let alone for however long he intends to record.
“Something doesn’t feel right in this forbidden encampment. I wouldn’t stay with these Bedouins if I were you,” Tal had cautioned me soon after we parked at Abu Salim’s maq’ad. I’m glad I stayed, but, now, something definitely doesn’t feel right here.
Fear.
My fear . . .
CHAPTER 10
“Leora!” Tal cried out just as a motorcycle swerved in front of the Jeep and over to the next lane.
“You startled the hell out of me,” I snapped. The wind and the clanking engine garbles my words; his also. “Bolt your window. I can’t hear you,” I motioned to him.
“Keep your hand on the wheel. Your eyes on the road,” he motioned back.
The wind tousled his hair over his furrowed brow. He looked like a kibbutznik now—a kibbutznik who can’t chew gum and walk at the same time; a kibbutznik unaccustomed to city life, to the fast-paced jockeying for position—pushing, shoving, swerving in and out.
North of the country club, a heap of fresh flowers swelled on the roadside. This memorial bears no plaque. It is not long ago that a busload of families who had chartered the bus for their annual picnic were killed in this terror attack. Now even the Israeli Doves travel armed here on the coastal highway, a major artery here, not unlike Highway 401 in Toronto.
Tal was armed as well. I hadn’t noticed it until the wind flattened his t-shirt to his gut, outlining the handgun tucked into his belt. It was sad, but small wonder that he was trying to hide the need to carry a gun when we were just fifteen minutes from downtown Tel Aviv.
I turned east onto the highway that leads to Jerusalem and Mount Herzl, and only then realized I didn’t know which road leads to the Gulf of Suez, or even to Yamit. “Turn back?” I gestured to him when I saw him shaking his head.
“Keep going,” he motioned back. “I’ll direct you.”