Sulha

by Malka Marom

  This highway was not congested. A diesel tanker, “Flammable” blazoned on its side, crawled from a roadside diner onto the highway with complete disregard for the Yield sign and stuck to our tail, zigzagging behind, blowing diesel fumes and blasting my ears off. I waved him into the passing lane, but he kept sounding his horn. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to warn me that something was wrong. Just as I was about to pull off the highway, Tal hoisted himself over the gap between our seats and shouted over the tanker’s horn: “Don’t touch the brakes! The man is a lunatic. Step on it until you catch a good distance from him, then get off the highway.”

  The road felt slippery, even at eighty kliks. The Jeep was tuned for crossing desert wadis. The loosened bolts, cables, and screws were cranked so tight that the pedals, clutch, and gearshift required muscle. The steering was quick to the touch—too quick for paved roads. I felt as if I were pressing full speed on an icy road in Canada. I don’t remember when the tanker passed us. I just remember how relieved I was when the Jeep pulled to a stop on the soft shoulder.

  The tension showed in Tal’s face. But his hands, lighting a cigarette, were steady, unlike mine.

  “And I wanted to drive, to be in control.”

  “I wouldn’t take it personally. It’s a national disease,” Tal responded. “Now you see why more people get killed here in road accidents than in all the wars and terrorists’ attacks put together,” he said. After a hesitation, he added, “My father was killed in a road accident many years ago . . . Whenever I see such a lunatic I remember that my chances are better in the battlefield than here on the roads.”

  “That’s obscene. I mean, I saw the statistics but—”

  “Yes, obscene. But true,” he said. “Your services would be in demand here, way more than Gingie’s mother’s. You’re wasted in Canada.”

  “So, Gingie told you that I’m a social worker who—”

  “A social worker? No, Gingie told me you work with bereaved parents, widows, orphans—not the war-bereaved, like his mother, but accident-bereaved . . .”

  “Was your father driving alone the day he was killed?”

  “Yes. He died alone . . . but he lived long enough to realize his dream.”

  “What was his dream?”

  “To come up to The Land. Settle in a kibbutz.”

  “Where did he come from?”

  “Belgium . . . If my parents had moved to The Land a year before the War of Independence, I would have been born in The Land, in the kibbutz.”

  Tal was thirty-one years old, I knew now. Years younger than he looked. Thirty-one years old means he had battled in the ’67 war, the War of Attrition, the Yom-Kippur War, and, in between, took part in reconnaissance missions and commando raids behind enemy lines.

  “Did Gingie also tell you that I am forty-two years old?”

  “No. I figured you were in your forties when Gingie told me your first husband, Arik, fell in the Sinai War,” he replied. “But when I saw you in the hotel lobby, I thought you looked closer to thirty. That’s why I hesitated to approach you, to ask you if you are Leora.”

  He was like the kibbutzniks I remembered now, I thought, laughing to myself. Those kibbutzniks would tell a woman over forty that she looked closer to thirty, not as a compliment or a come-on, but as a matter of fact. And, like those kibbutzniks, I had to pull his story from him. Tal was obviously not accustomed to telling it. Everyone knew everyone’s story in his kibbutz, most likely; he was probably unaccustomed to talking about himself, doesn’t know how to tell his story.

  “How old were you when your parents—you—came up to The Land?”

  “Six,” Tal said; “seven when my father got killed.”

  “Did your mother remarry?”

  “Yes. A redhead like Gingie. My brothers, half-brothers, are also redheads. Both are serving regular duty now. One just made it to the Unit.”

  “No—”

  “That’s what my mother said when she heard it. ‘No! One in the Unit for nine years is more than enough.’”

  “You served in the Unit for nine years?”

  “Yes, with a few interruptions, for training courses, a field command, and the Yom-Kippur War.” Tal butted his cigarette underfoot. The dry thistles and thorns in the roadside ditch could easily ignite into a brushfire.

  “What is your job in civilian life, Tal, in the kibbutz?”

  “I’m on leave of absence from the kibbutz.”

  “Why?”

  “We have a day or two in this Jeep, right?”

  “Yes.”

  He filled the gap between our seats with our sleeping bags so that we could continue to talk without having to shout over the noise of the engine, the traffic, the wind.

  We switched seats and, now, in his driving, I saw what a commander Gingie had.

  Tal drove like a person magnanimous by nature, discipline or habit. For the first time that morning, he didn’t look awkward, embarrassed, or uncomfortable. Confidence suited him. He looked handsome now—a hundred untold stories were ploughed into his face.

  j

  “Where did Abu Salim ride off to? . . . To work?” I ask his wives after he left abruptly, without a word.

  “Only women do work, women and fellahin,” replies Azzizah. “Men have more important things to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Not proper to ask questions,” Azzizah responds, as she refills the teapot with the last drops in the jerrican. “YaahhAhh . . . the older I grow, the farther the waterhole and the faster the water skins empty.” She heaves a sigh.

  “I will fetch water,” says Tammam. She is picking at something—lice?—in her infant’s hair.

  “I will go with you.” I can’t wait to stretch my legs, wash my face, and maybe even take a sponge bath. “Is it the custom to pitch your tent some distance from your water source?”

  “Aywa—yes,” replies Azzizah, spinning camel hair into weaving threads.

  “It is a good custom,” says Tammam. “For had we pitched our tents right by our bir—waterhole—all the women who fetch water from our well would forever be in our face.”

  “Aywa, fetching water is woman’s work, made difficult by the distance from the bir to the tent,” says Azzizah. “Yet it is good to distance our tents, because it is forbidden for strangers to enter our women’s tents, but not to quench their thirst at our waterhole.”

  “And also because we Badu would be bound to extend not only water, but shelter and food, to friend and foe alike. For we Badu are measured by our hospitality. Yet, few of us can afford to be as hospitable as we wish to be,” says Tammam.

  Azzizah chuckles under her veil. “Years ago, my tongue was as blunt as Tammam’s. Now it is almost as smooth as the tongue of a man.”

  No water in the compound, except a few drops in the teapot. Doesn’t seem to bother the Badawias. Me—just the thought of it dries up the spit in my mouth. The constant desert wind, an emissary from the sun, dehydrates you before your throat feels it. I’m all too aware of it now.

  “Were you ever so parched you thought you would die?” I asked them.

  “A proper Badawia will never roam thirsty, for she will never leave her goats, never allow them to wander far from the bir—water source,” Azzizah replies. “But once . . . only once, I strayed. Once, when I was a maiden tending my mother’s flock a distance of three days and nights from my mother’s tent, I heard Abu Salim calling my name in the night. Abu Salim was but a boy himself then, tending his mother’s flock, but even as a boy Abu Salim knew how to cover tracks. No one ever suspected we strayed.”

  “Were you too young then to become pregnant?” I said.

  “Wallah, what questions you ask,” says Azzizah, chuckling. “I did not become pregnant until I married Abu Salim. For many years I bore him only daughters. Four lived and five died. And Abu Salim wanted a son, so
he divorced me.”

  “Only to marry her again,” says Tammam.

  “Aywa—yes,” says Azzizah. “Time and again Abu Salim divorced me, only to marry me time and again. For whomever he married bore him only daughters.”

  “So why is he called ‘Abu Salim’—‘father of Salim’?” I asked.

  “Because my last-born was a son, and I named him ‘Salim,’ meaning ‘peace,’ ‘perfect peace.’ For then I knew that Abu Salim would not divorce me ever again, and I would not lose my daughters to the service of his new wife. My son I would never lose, for his wife is bound to live here, in his parents’ compound, just as my daughters went to live in their husbands’ compounds.” Azzizah heaves a deep sigh, then mutters, “Two of my daughters come to visit me often, for their husbands’ compounds are pitched only a day or two by camel from here. But the other one, and my son, Salim, I have not seen for nearly a year.”

  “Is your son staying with his sister, far away from here?” I ask her.

  “Not proper to ask questions,” replies Azzizah, dropping the curtain. This much and no more would she reveal.

  And Tammam eyes mirror the distance, revealing nothing.

  Silence. In a tiny hammock-like sling extending from her head and swinging down her back, Tammam carries little Salimeh toward the lone acacia tree rooted by the spot the Badawias call “the lookout point.”

  Azzizah grunts and sighs, her blood-shot eyes sorrowful.

  “Why are you sad, Azzizah?”

  Silence.

  “What got into Tammam?”

  “Her longing,” Azzizah replies.

  CHAPTER 11

  The sky was a cloudless backdrop for the August sun. The thorns and thistles, and the wildflowers were scorched brown, but the orange groves and fields of carnations and gladioli, avocados, tomatoes, and eggplants cultivated in between the new sprawling suburbs of the Shfelah—the plain—were green. You wouldn’t know there was a drought. Sprinklers by the thousands rained on the cultivated fields as Tal and I drove by. Then, all of a sudden, they were switched off. The water rations had been used up, Tal explained.

  “The water for these fields, for the whole country, and the Negev, Sinai, and Judean deserts, is draining our reservoir, the Kinneret—the Sea of Galilee—at an alarming speed,” said Tal, as we drove by that green stretch. “Another year of drought and it won’t take a miracle to walk on the waters of the Sea of Galilee—not at the deepest point, anyway. In the shallows, you can already walk on the rocky bottom, and it’s not a long swim from any bank to the deeps this summer. You can skip across the Jordan River this summer.”

  The Jordan Valley, rimmed by the Golan Heights and the Galilee mountains, is home to Tal. The Sea of Galilee is a stroll away, and the Jordan River runs—trickles, these days—through the lands of his kibbutz. No one is taking long showers this summer, he said. To conserve water, the kibbutzniks had installed a new irrigation system regulated by a computer to release just the right amount of water and fertilizer directly to the roots. Not a drop of water is squandered to the wind—not on the lawns, the flowerbeds, the banana plantations, the cotton fields . . . The textile mill is also equipped with computerized machines, as is the dairy farm and the plant that processes and packages the dates grown on the kibbutz.

  Like this, Tal let me know that the kibbutz, not only Yehoshua, had changed with the times. And yet, a few kliks later, it appeared that, like the kibbutz members I remember, Tal had very little cash on him. We had to take a slight detour to pick up his paycheque and a bit of an advance. He also wanted to check the Jeep; it had sprung an oil leak—half a drop a minute, if that. “Probably just a loose bolt,” Tal said, “but, with an old Jeep, even overhauled like this one, you can never tell.”

  “Maybe it’s a sign,” I said, thinking about the desert ahead.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” he said. A few kilometres later, he pulled in to a Delek service station that looked like any new Texaco, Shell, or Esso station at a busy intersection in Canada. “That’s my workplace these days,” he said, as he pulled up in front of the service pits.

  I don’t know why that surprised me. It was not uncommon in the kibbutz to see “leadership material” like Tal, or cabinet ministers like Yehoshua, working in the garage or in the communal dining room. It was uncommon, though, to see a kibbutznik working in a city service station. Even if the per diem the kibbutz offered him to study in the city were peanuts, he would moonlight only to buy a book or a tool he couldn’t borrow.

  “Are you a student, Tal? Is that why you are on leave of absence from your kibbutz?” I asked him.

  “No. I’m a recovering soldier,” he replied, as if soldiering were an affliction or an addiction. And then he added, “Recovering from surgery to reconstruct a pair of knees.”

  “Wounded?”

  “No, just wear and tear.” He got out of the Jeep with a slight hesitation — almost like my mother, who never steps down without bracing herself for the inevitable shot of pain from her knees, worn out by age and arthritis.

  “No one in his right mind would go with you, or me, to the desert,” I muttered, and we both laughed.

  He wasn’t treated like an employee by anyone at that service station, and he certainly didn’t behave like one; rather, he exhibited the same authority with which he drove—that of a commander, outstanding among the extraordinary, elite among the privileged elite. One thing about the kibbutz hadn’t changed, apparently: Some members are more equal than others. After all, God is not a communist. He doesn’t dispense equally to all, and Tal got more than enough to spare, it seemed.

  He didn’t object when a young man, built like the hefty roughnecks you see in the movies, but with a face like a cherub when he smiled, suggested playfully to Tal, “Let a real mechanic repair the Jeep.” More seriously, he said, “There’s something I want to discuss with you. You won’t believe what happened here this morning. You won’t believe the news I heard.”

  “Leora, meet Shabbo, my employer,” Tal interrupted. “Shabbo is the ‘real mechanic’ who gave Gingie the okay to buy your Jeep.”

  “Only a temporary, part-time, employer,” Shabbo corrected Tal, as we walk over to his office.

  “Shabbo? Is that a Brazilian Portuguese name, or is it a nickname?” I ask him.

  Shabbo looked at Tal, as if waiting for permission to reply. Tal nodded, and I half-expected Shabbo to tell me he served in the Unit. Instead, Shabbo said he was a mechanic in the Unit, where he picked up his nickname. Like a shablool—a snail—he’d always be curled under a chassis, or the hood of a command car or a Jeep; and also because he’d always keep his tail in the home base of the Unit. He couldn’t go out on missions and raids because his medical profile was stamped “Not Fit for Combat Service”—a faulty heart valve, Shabbo explained. As if he had to excuse his service at home base.

  Would Levi feel the need to explain, if I deny him his wish? Let Levi live to feel inferior, like Shabbo. It’s The Nation’s heart that’s damaged if Shabbo feels he must explain. The Nation itself is a casualty of war if a person is valued according to how high the risk in his military service.

  Shabbo dispatched one of his “real employees” to bring a tray of coffee to his office. “You wouldn’t object if Tal were to put your Jeep to good use for two-three weeks, right?” Shabbo asked me, once we had seated ourselves around his desk.

  Tal laughed. “All right, Shabbo, what have you got up your sleeve this time?” he said, his eyes still laughing. Turning to me he added, “Shabbo is one of our up-and-coming entrepreneurs. His dream is to be a multi-millionaire.”

  “In three years, you and I can each be a multi-millionaire, easy,” Shabbo said to Tal. “All you have to do is to get in with me on this deal—fifty-fifty. Don’t laugh, Tal. Remember the Mercedes? The guy who owns that big, blue Mercedes, one of my best regulars? Do you know how he made his millions? Our Defence m
inistry contracts him for jobs, big jobs . . .

  “Well, this morning, his Mercedes pulls in and he tells me, ‘Come, Shabbo, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.’ So we walk over to the diner, and he starts to grill me, like: How did I get started in the service station? How much do I still owe to relatives, friends, the bank? How much do I gross a year? He says he might have a business proposition for me. He has to know first how I operate. So I tell him how I operate, and he tells me I’m a natural . . . Here I bust my butt eighteen hours a day and he tells me I’m a natural. All right, I think, let him think I am a natural, the main thing is: We’re in business.

  “But then he asks me what I did in the army, what corps I served in. All this he wants to know when I can’t even tell him the Unit exists. So I say, ‘Why are you asking?’ And he tells me that, for the job he has in mind, he needs someone who knows how to take charge, command operations, move men and equipment. So I think: What do you know, Tal lucked out; my turn will come another time. So I tell him, ‘I know the man for you.’

  “‘Is your man like you, a natural in business?’ he asks me. So I tell him, my man is a kibbutznik—served in the standing army six years on top of the three regular, just got discharged with honours, decorations; ranked major, has a good head. He’ll do better than any natural. But the Mercedes says, ‘Naa, kibbutzniks know how to spend money, not to make it. But why don’t you two hook up, become partners?’ So I tell him, ‘No problem, if the job is right.’

  “‘The job is a subcontract for the pull out from Sinai. Is that right enough?’ he tells me. Can you imagine, Tal? ‘Peace with Egypt is in our pocket,’ the Mercedes says. ‘This is classified, but the army is pulling out of Sinai right now.’”

  “No way!” said Tal.

  “That was my first reaction, too,” said Shabbo. “‘No way!’ I told the Mercedes. ‘Nothing is signed. The newspapers are full of ultimatums Egypt gives us every Monday and Thursday, that she’ll pull out of the peace talks if we don’t give Gaza and the West Bank to the Palestinians, and every foot of Sinai to Egypt, and sovereignty over Jerusalem . . . Why, you can’t crack sunflower seeds in a group today without people yelling and screaming and knocking heads over whether or not it’s suicide to give Sinai to Egypt, let alone the rest,’ I told him. But the Mercedes tells me, ‘The government decided already, it’s fixed; the people are the last to know.’ So I think to myself: The guy has friends in high places; he’s one of the biggest contractors for Defence; he must know what he is saying; why, in the Unit, we knew classified stuff that the people don’t know to this day.