Sulha

by Malka Marom

  I didn’t know we had such a huge army; a desert full of army tents at the ready for peace or for war; prefab barracks on wheels; weapons camouflaged by nets that undulate for kilometres like wind-swept wheat fields; and kilometres of practice rigs, target ranges, and simulated battle conditions—man-made mountains, canyons, and canals; and flags flags flags—blue and white and every colour of every unit, as if life were a movie, war were a game.

  The higher the sun climbed, the more flooded with illusions that wilderness became. You could swear a sea—so calm, it shimmered like a mirror—stretched as far as the eye could see. And, just like the Red Sea in the Story of Stories, it parted for our Jeep to pass on a dry paved road, reverberating with the thunder of the mighty hooves and wheels of the Pharaoh’s chariots.

  “Couldn’t be an earthquake, could it?” I asked Tal.

  “It’s a convoy heading our way,” he replied.

  I couldn’t see a sign of a convoy then. You couldn’t tell up from down at that hour, almost like in a whiteout in the snow-covered Canadian wilderness. So brittle was the air that it almost cracked, fragmenting all distant images, until a dark dot zoomed in out of nowhere.

  “It’s the first of the convoy,” Tal explained. He knew that the huge army truck, carrying a load wider than the two-lane road we were travelling on, was heading toward us, even though it looked like a cracked-mirror reflection of a camel galloping in place. Blink, and it seems as if the Jeep is going to crash into a skyscraper reflecting the sun’s blinding rays. Tal pulled over at a safe distance; still, the slipstream rattled the Jeep like a bomb blast. No sooner had we recovered than we were hit by another, and another . . .

  The convoy rolled north with no end in sight. The parade of monster double-load trailer-trucks shrouded with swirling camouflage nets stretched back into infinity, raising dust, diesel fumes, scorching heat; and rumbling with such thunder that Tal had to yell for me to hear him. “Look at what we are giving up for a piece of paper from Egypt that might be good for nothing but wiping butt . . .” He considers himself a peacenik, but he sounded like a hawk—a hawk who looked sorry for the soldier-boys assigned to that convoy. “The older you get, the younger the new recruits look,” he shouted, as if he was as old as Methuselah.

  “Do you think peace with Egypt is in our pockets, as Shabbo said? Is that why this convoy is pulling out of Sinai?” I asked him at the top of my voice.

  “They could be heading north to shore up our Defence at our border with Syria and Lebanon,” he shouted. Then, as if he suddenly remembered that he was out of the army, that his time was his own, he switched on the ignition, released the brake, turned the Jeep’s tail to the convoy, the paved road, and floored the gas pedal, like a person intoxicated with newfound freedom.

  There was no clock in the Jeep, no radio, no safety bar, no locks on the doors and windows. Winds from all directions blew in through the cracks between the canvas top and the steel frame. The fenders had a few dents and the bumpers rust spots. But the tires were brand new and the engine had been completely overhauled. Spare parts were stored in the toolbox; wine and brandy in the provisions cartons; combat rations and field dressings in the first-aid kit. The Jeep was no place to be careless.

  I couldn’t find a sliver of shade by which to navigate. The sun was directly over head, and that part of the desert was so flat and barren; not a trace of a Badu’s fire-circle, tent, goat, camel; not even a chewed-up skeleton, a thistle, a thorn, let alone a bush or a tree; and not a single landmark, not a wadi, or a knoll. There was nothing to bar the wind from sweeping away all tracks. The ground was packed hard, almost like a super-highway paved from horizon to horizon.

  “Perfect grounds for tank warfare and exercises.” Tal raced ahead, turned left, then right, as if signposts were staked at every turn.

  “Where are we going, Tal?”

  “Don’t lean on the door, it’s only canvas,” he tells me in response. Asking him how he could tell north from south was like asking a musician with perfect pitch how could he tell A from C.

  “Are we heading south, parallel to the paved road?” I ask him, hoping he’ll reply: “Yes. We’ll get back to that road in ten-twenty minutes. The last of the convoy should be gone by then.”

  But he replies, “We are heading west.”

  “West! We can’t be heading west,” I said. “The Egyptian border lies only a few kilometres west of the road we just left, according to the map. And according to any report except Shabbo’s, Egypt is still at war with us. We are heading south, right?”

  “No. We are heading west,” he insists, grinning. And in the pit of my stomach, fear is growing, seeded by a suspicion that he’s really heading to Egypt, like a madman looking for trouble—and that I must have been out of my fucking mind to go to the desert with a man I don’t know.

  “Tal, we better head back to the road.”

  “Soon,” he says, racing to a damn battle zone, judging by the smell of gunpowder that is growing stronger.

  “Tal, it smells like we’re heading into gunfire. We better turn back.” I get no response from him. So I raise my voice above the rushing wind and clanking engine and I yell, “Tal! smells like gun powder!”

  “Yes, it does,” he yells back, pressing ahead into the wind.

  “No, you are heading straight toward the gunfire.”

  “I don’t hear gunshots, do you?” he says, shifting a hand from the steering wheel to give my cheek a quick stroke, as if I were a girl-child who was doing exceptionally well for her age, as if to say with avuncular arrogance, “Don’t lose heart, kid. You couldn’t be in better hands.”

  The patronizing bastard—“Turn the Jeep around, Tal. Why take unnecessary risks?”

  “All right, brace yourself,” he says, pumping the brakes. Then, he shifts to overdrive, and—wonder of wonders! Just as the ground disappears from under the Jeep and we seem to be heading nose first into hell, I see a burst of gushing water shooting skyward and splashing down to the centre of a steaming pond, surrounded by a tall, thick hedge of cane shoots. Real cane shoots! Real water! Real sulphur springs! That’s what smelled like gunfire. A green secluded spa, smack in the middle of a drought-plagued desert perfect for tank warfare.

  This wondrous dreamscape he thought he had to sweeten with the element of surprise, lest I dismiss it as a mere piss puddle. To me, Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes were just water, but this desert pond was a wonder to touch, celebrate, experience—even if it killed me.

  The lush cane shoots (God only knows how they could live here) screened off the wind, making that green spa a sauna. And the gravel felt like smouldering coals. The sulphur water stung like fire sparks, and the deeper I entered it, the more cuts, scars, and knotted muscles I discovered, as if I had been desensitized until now.

  “Great for the knees,” said Tal, the Jabbar—the man of great valour, Wallah. “Don’t! . . . Don’t! . . . Don’t you dare splash . . . Don’t swim near me, Leora! This is no place for water games!”

  No, only for fire games. . . For thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of men from all the corners of the earth have battled in this desert, and for what? Even the water here is fit only for patching up gashes and tears. Generations of warriors have bathed in that pond to heal their wounds, and still the water was clean—a white gusher untainted by the wellspring of blood. That was the wonder in that wilderness.

  There was one little detail that Tal had overlooked.

  So accustomed was he to travelling in that part of the desert in a military vehicle, he didn’t know there were no civilian gas stations there. And it was forbidden by law to borrow gasoline from the army; just to make sure no one was tempted, military fuel was dyed to stain a civilian carburettor red. Tal didn’t know what punishment awaited a civilian with a red carburettor, only that it was inescapable. Anyone who noticed that tell-tale red was bound by law to report it. That’s what he told
me as we approached the checkpoint at the entrance to the Common Road—the Caravan Route, as Abu Salim calls it. Both gasoline jerricans were jiggling empty in the back by then. And in the gas tanks about ten litres, he said. The needle on the gas gauge pointed to empty.

  “How far to a civilian gas pump?” he asked the sergeant at the checkpoint.

  “Two hundred and fifty kilometres, give or take,” the sergeant replied. “But you are going nowhere for the next eight hours.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you arrived here five minutes late,” said the sergeant, as if the road were a plane that had taken off five minutes ago, with everyone in that part of the desert on board; everyone except for the sergeant and a few soldier-boys, looking homesick, sun-scorched, and, like their roadside tents, so covered with dust that you couldn’t see the khaki or the colours of the flag hoisted atop the rickety command barracks, ruffling in the wind, almost like an apology. “My instructions were to block entry five minutes ago,” the sergeant explained. “Your Jeep couldn’t clear this Common Road before the U.N. (United Nation) guys shift this blacktop from us to Egypt. You’ll have to wait here till the U.N. shifts this Common road back to us.”

  “Eight, nine, ten hours from now . . . Oh, come on, let them go,” one of the soldier-boys said to the sergeant.

  “What a dream—a Jeep, a woman, a vacation in Sinai,” said another.

  “Come on, clear them, before our fucked-up officer gets here,” the other soldier-boys urged the sergeant.

  “Let’s see your military passes.” The sergeant relented, opening a ledger and entering our names, Tal’s I.D. numbers, my passport number, the Jeep’s plate number, the number on Tal’s license to carry a handgun, and the numbers showing on his digital wristwatch. “Minus ten minutes, so press full speed, non-stop, and no detours. The U.N. slaps you with a hell of a fine if you don’t drive straight through, even when the road is ours,” he cautioned, as he handed back the military clearance Tal had secured.

  “Go! Before the officer wakes up,” the soldier-boys said. “Go already, go!” They slapped the Jeep’s back fender as if it were the rump of a cowboy’s horse, sure to clear the Common Road, like in the old Western movies, just as the enemy came within range. An obstacle like an empty gas tank was all too predictable in such a script, because the United Nations (read: the Cavalry) would, at the very last moment, come to the rescue.

  It turned out almost like that. The angel that protects idiots must have been watching over Tal and me.

  “Go already, go!” said the soldier-boys. But Tal, obviously itching to go, hesitated.

  “Go, already. What’s with you?” the sergeant said.

  “We might not have enough fuel to . . .” I start to say, and before I can add another word, Tal fires a look at me, as if I’d betrayed to the soldier-boys that he can’t get it up. Next thing I know, he bolts out of the checkpoint and onto the Common Road, red-faced and angry. It pissed him off, I assumed, that he of all people, a major with nine years’ service in a unit independent of logistical support from the rest of the army, miscalculated something as basic as fuel supply.

  “It’s only human to err,” I tell him. But that only adds fuel to his fury.

  “Your very humanity can kill you here,” he snaps. As can human error, which nearly finished us off in the Yom-Kippur War, I think. And only last week, a terrorist-guerrilla fighter masquerading as a frail old woman asked a boy scout to help carry a bag of groceries rigged with explosives. That scout’s humanity killed him, all right.

  “But when your very humanity is a threat to your survival, isn’t it next to a miracle that your humanity survived,” I said, then urged him to turn back to the checkpoint.

  “Don’t look at the gas gauge,” he responds, racing ahead.

  “Why? Is the gas gauge inaccurate?” I ask him.

  “With my luck, it is. I can always count on luck to come through in the crunch,” he says, like every warrior spared by the grace of God, luck, fate . . .

  “Must have been my luck, not yours, that brought on this—”

  “No, it was my mistake.” He cut me off.

  “My mistake too.” I had counted on the Badu, as Tal had counted on the army. “The Badu are storing gasoline in the desert’s sands,” Russell had told me three-four months ago, when I first ventured to the peninsula. “The Sinai tribes are hoarding truckloads of food supplies in caves all over this desert. And deep in the sands, the Badu are storing heaps of gasoline drums and spare parts for every Jeep, Land-Rover, and Peugeot pickup truck they can buy or steal . . .just in case the peace talks lead to war. Yes, whoever tells you that Bedouins never prepare for the future, or that Bedouins are basically happy because they have zero expectations, zero disappointments, doesn’t know the Sinai Badu.”

  But it was inconceivable to me, even as I was experiencing it, that we could roll in Sinai for hundreds of kilometres without seeing a sign of Badu; inconceivable that this Common Road, of all places, would be off limits to the Badu, of all people, or to anyone who couldn’t secure a pass from the Israeli army, or from the Egyptian army or from the U.N. Peacekeeping Force.

  There was nothing here, but promise—of peaceful coexistence, cooperation, sharing . . .

  “Is it because of the peace talks that we have been sharing this road with Egypt?” I asked Tal.

  “I don’t know,” he replied.

  “Is this road always empty, or has it been cleared of traffic for the transfer with Egypt?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why is there no sign of Badu life in this patch of the desert?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would the U.N, Egypt, or Israel designate this part of the desert off limits to the Badu? ”

  “I don’t know.”

  Again and again, he said “I don’t know,” as if Egyptian troops were lying in wait for us in the stretching shadows, ready to apprehend us, and the less I knew the better. It would have been better still if I didn’t know that he had served in the Unit, and better still if I practiced to be an imbecile like him.

  “Are you afraid, Tal?”

  “No, but at least one of us is still normal, still afraid,” he replied.

  The Jeep conked out just then. Tal skipped out, lifted the hood, and checked; slid under the chassis and checked; squatted by each tire and checked, as if the Jeep had died because of some mechanical malfunction that he could repair. Last, he checked the gas tank, climbed back into the driver’s seat and informed me, “The gas tank is empty. But the Jeep is okay.” Yet still he turned the ignition key and pumped the gas pedal—again and again, again and again, as if it were February in Canada and one more try would convince the engine to start.

  “One more try and you’ll flood the—whatever it is you flood in a Jeep,” I said, without thinking.

  His luck held. Next try, the engine started, running on the last few drops.

  My eyes were riveted now to each spot where the road curved or dropped. And soon my watchfulness was rewarded:

  Egyptian troops! Only about a hundred meters west of my window, so close.

  Egyptian barracks rush by, one after another, almost like train carriages, rushing by at the other side of the barbed wire—the other side of the border, according to Tal. Another flock of flags—were it not for the fact that none was blue and white, the Egyptian bases would look no different from the Israeli bases. Same barbed wire; same sun-faded barracks and tents; same dust shrouding troops. Some looked young enough to be my sons; others, dressed in shorts, with a towel slung over a naked shoulder, looked like Israeli soldiers itching to take a shower after a grinding day of war manoeuvres.

  For the first time, I feel how deeply rooted in us is the longing to transcend the loneliness imposed by man, nature, or God knows what . . . For the first time in my life, I see Egyptian troops, up close, and, like a ch
ild who turns her head to the window and sees beings from outer space, I wave to the Egyptian soldiers across the barbed wire—wave across the decades of grief, across the decades of fear, killing fields, rivers of blood.

  Hello . . . Hello . . .

  One Egyptian soldier waved back, then another and another—across the decades of war, the decades of siege.

  Hello . . . Hello . . .

  “That happens sometimes during cease-fire,” Tal said. “Sometimes the lines are close enough to exchange jokes, curses, cigarettes, even names. Then the cease-fire breaks, and it’s back to ‘us or them’.”

  The waving soldiers looked like prisoners behind the barbed wire. Did one of them fire the shot that downed Arik’s plane? Did the father of one? Did he see Arik’s plane plunging to the sands of this desert?

  God only knows what hold this place has on me. I hate the hold the dead have on any place of last resort, any last stand—the Wailing Wall, Masada, the Stations of the Cross—places that trigger not only strong emotions, revelations, hallucinations, but wars that turn men like Arik into mere statistics.

  The next bend reveals nothing but a lone acacia, its branches twisted by the lashing winds. And east of the road, the last slanting rays tease the colour out of the stones, and the peaks of the mountain chain glow like the Pharaoh’s staff with stripes of gold and purple, bronze, turquoise, yellow, red, and copper-green, spinning by at top speed. The Jeep will roll on for eight days on one drop of fuel, like the miracle of Hanukkah, I imagined, as the road twisted and turned, sloping like a river drawn to the sea.

  It was past Abu Zenima that I saw the Gulf of Suez for the first time. As wide as the sea the gulf stretched to the north and the south, and to the west it spilled beyond the horizon. But not one fishing boat was in sight, not one ship, tanker, sailboat, or gunboat. The gulf was deserted like the Common Road and the wilderness around it. We were the only people on earth, it seemed.