by Malka Marom
And then an ambulance, or one of our Clinics-on-Wheels that served the Badu, switched on its top light to let us know it’s heading toward us.
“Lucky the Jeep is rolling now,” Tal muttered, as he switched on the Jeep’s headlights.
“Flash the lights to signal distress,” I suggested.
“What’s with you? That’s a United Nations Jeep,” he replied. To Tal, the U.N. soldiers sheltered and aided Arabs who make no secret of their intention to destroy Israel, even here, on the borders and roads that we have entrusted to the U.N. for peacekeeping.
But, to me, at that particular moment, the United Nations was a Canadian soldier—glad to assist us any way he could, including an offering to us of a Canadian cigarette and a cold Canadian beer. Never before had I so wished to see a Canadian. Never before was I so glad that a part of my Canadian tax money was allocated to the United Nations.
“Pull to a stop, Tal.”
“We’ll make it on our own power. No need . . .”
“Stop!” I snapped. “Don’t make me beg.”
Only then did he pump the brakes. But he wouldn’t signal distress, wouldn’t budge from his seat. “I won’t be a party to it,” he said, keeping his door shut.
I got out of the Jeep, ran to the middle of that Common Road, and waved my arms to signal distress. But the U.N. driver flicks his headlights on and off, sounds his horn to blast me out of his lane.
“The bastard is not slowing down, Leora. Move aside!” Tal cried out, as if the U.N. driver was a Tommy and we were back in the British Mandate days.
I would rather die than live as if it was for nothing, the price we paid. I didn’t budge even when it now looked like the U.N. driver was amusing himself by playing chicken with me.
“It’s not legal for you to stop on this road!” the U.N. peacekeeper snaps, before I could explain why I was blocking his lane. “Go back to your Jeep! Drive away, or I’ll give you a money penalty,” he tells me in English, sounding and looking like a Scandinavian who wished he was ice-skating now in his native Finland, Sweden, Denmark, or anywhere but here, driving alone at this bewitching time of day on a road thousands of kilometres away from his home, his family, his wife. A gold wedding ring glittered on his finger, and his open collar revealed a gold cross on a gold chain. Heat rash covered his face, and sweat oozed over it, like salt on a raw wound. His eyes were protected by Ray-Bans, like mine; his hair was fair, like mine; his uniform was blotched with sweat and dust, like my clothes; his lips were chapped, like mine.
“I am sorry to detain you, but we are down to our last litre or two. I was hoping you had gasoline to spare,” I said in English, doing the polite and proper, WASP routine. Small wonder he was suspicious.
“I saw you driving full speed before you stopped. No one drives at full speed with only a litre left. The checkpoint soldiers permit no one to drive on this road without adequate fuel. Your checkpoint soldiers told you, I am sure, that it is not legal for you to stop on this road.” He sounded like someone who is sick and tired of being taken for a sucker by the locals.
“You can check our Jeep and see for yourself. We have no more than one or two litres of fuel,” I said. Tal looked at me as if he thought that I was the last of the naïfs in the Middle East. But the U.N. peacekeeper seemed to think that Tal’s look was directed at him.
“I can see from here that your gas tank is full,” the U.N. peacekeeper said. And before I could ask him how in the hell he could see how full or empty the tank was, he adds: “I see your license plate is yellow, Israeli, and I know that Israeli Arabs never, never send a woman to ask a man for gasoline—only you people would do that. And you people know how much gasoline to carry to the desert. You people just want more gasoline—more land, more everything. I have no extra gasoline.”
“The poor bastard is afraid we are laying an ambush for him,” Tal said in Hebrew. “Look at how he holds his radio transmitter at the ready. From where you’re standing you can’t see it, but his automatic is ready to fire. So don’t scare him.”
“Would you tow my Jeep, or radio to my people that we cannot clear this Common Road without assistance?” I asked him, as nice as could be.
Yet the poor bastard snaps, “Assistance! Assistance you’ve already received from your checkpoint soldiers, I am sure. You people help your own people, and only your own people. Drive away now, or I will give you a money penalty for stopping.” He lets go of his radio transmitter and his automatic weapon, and pulls out a ballpoint pen and a clipboard stacked with forms—the fine, the “money penalty,” I assume. He fills in a box or two, looks at me as if waiting to see me skip back up to the Jeep. When I don’t, he seems to wonder if the tank is really empty, or if I am bluffing to get more gas, or if I am laying an ambush for him.
Bluffing, he decided, it seemed, as he filled in another box or two on his “money penalty” form. Then he stopped, as if it had finally dawned on him that the checkpoint soldiers kept a logbook of names, license numbers, and entry and exit times. Our meeting spot could be calculated almost to the kilometre. He’ll be in deep shit if we don’t clear off this road before the U.N. transfers it to Egypt. His radio transmitter will be very busy with inquiries from his UN checkpoints, Egypt’s, and my people’s . . . God only knows what commotion would ensue if Tal and I were apprehended by Egypt in these peace-talking days. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for this poor UN peace force soldier once you saw how the Common Road linked his destiny to Tal’s and mine.
“If you have a siphon, you can transfer gasoline from my tank to your jerrican,” he said finally, looking like he didn’t want my thanks, appreciation, or any acknowledgement of his generosity. Getting me out of his life was thanks enough. I don’t know why he decided to offer us fuel. I like to think it was an expression of generosity.
The desert is a place where good and bad are wedded like sun and shade, where a stranger is always received and always shut out, a place where the common language is often silence or guns, where the horizon is wide and the boundaries narrow. A place where I had lost Arik and found Tal.
CHAPTER 13
Hauling bucket after bucket of water from God-knows-how-deep in the waterhole wasn’t as easy as Tammam made it look. It didn’t take long for me to feel the cumulative effect, not only of the weight, but also of the rope. It was like pulling a line of thorns.
“Abu Salim owns the water rights to this bir—well—and three others. Only this one has not run dry as yet,” Tammam told me, her leather-tough hands scuffed from again and again pulling and dropping the dented bucket. It’s really a waterhole encircled by rocks, round and smooth, but still rough enough to fray the rope that rides them like a pulley.
The fraying marks the history of this waterhole, showing how full it was when the rope was new and how far down the drought has forced the rope to travel. But at least the waterhole is shaded by the mountains, the breeze there is cool, resting there is a pleasure—luxuries you forgo once you embark on the path that leads from the well to the tents; a blazing hell, uphill all the way, steeper by the step, and not a spot of shade except the ones thrown by Tammam and me, shrinking by the minute, or so it seemed.
Don’t believe anyone who tells you that a desert broiled by the August sun wouldn’t bother a desert nomad. At each uphill step Tammam, the girl wife, cursed the desert, the summer, the pitiless sun turning the gravel to coals that seared her bare feet and squeezed from her streams of salt-sweat that greased her grip on the water jerricans and stung her eyes.
And she had to watch where she were going; the path narrowed or angled away every few feet; she and I could kiss this world goodbye if we didn’t watch every step.
I had no idea how segregated, cut off from the rest of the world these mountain Badawias, until I walked this path. Its direction is almost opposite to the path leading down from the tents to the maq’ad. Men receive guests in the maq’ad; women and childr
en draw water from the well. The slopes that separate their paths—jagged granite ridges—would be a challenge for mountain goats to scale.
Tammam wouldn’t let me help her carry even one jerrican, except for a few steps. “Not proper for a guest,” she insisted, carrying all three. One in each hand, almost dragging on the ground, her back doubled under the weight of the third that was strapped to her head sort of like a papoose. Every few steps she took a break, not just to relieve the burden from her hands and back, catch her breath, wipe the rivulets of sweat that stung and blinded her eyes, and curse the desert heat, but also to wait till I stopped huffing and puffing.
She and I were giddy with relief when we finally made it back to the welcome-carpets spread in the shade Azzizah had created by propping up the side flap of her tent.
The senior wife, Azzizah, knowing how drained her junior co-wife Tammam was, tried to pacify Salimeh with the nipple of her withered breast, but the parched and famished child wouldn’t take it. “Oh, let her take what is left of the rest of my life and enjoy it,” said Tammam. The senior wife relaxed her hold on the child, and little Salimeh crawled straight to her mother’s milk. And only now did Azzizah pour a bit of water into her cupped hand, and bit-by-bit quenched her thirst.
“Not even one neighbouring woman was to be seen at the well,” Tammam reports to Azzizah. “At daybreak the neighbours must have heard that my brother is cutting his distance short, and already they are keeping their distance long.”
It is a mystery to me what she means. Is it a parable? A riddle? A poem? Or are the neighbours staying away out of fear of her brother? Should I, too, be afraid?
Azzizah spits. “Patience is better than worrying,” the senior Badawia says under her veil. “Maybe the neighbours’ water-skins are still full today, because yesterday their tents were empty of guests, their evening was short, their night was without spice, their fires did not burn long—or maybe they went to fetch water when the paths to and from the well were still cool and moist with dew. And maybe”—Azzizah chuckles under her veil—“maybe the neighbouring Badawias stayed and gossiped at the bir, for there is no cooler place in the desert than the well when the mountains still shade it. But then, maybe, like us when we first saw our stranger-guest approaching, wearing her djinn-demon eyes as she does today, our neighbouring Badawias fled in fright when they heard or saw her coming with you closer and closer. It could also be that our neighbours made themselves scarce because their men-folk had told them what they had said to Abu Salim—ya’ani—that is—that our stranger-guest, being of the tribe that rules this desert, had been dispatched here by the authorities.”
Me. A spy. Can you imagine?
What could possibly lead their neighbours to think that the authorities would dispatch a spy to this God-forsaken place? What could these Badu be hiding in their forbidden mountains? Treasure or information smuggled from Arabian deserts and kingdoms? Is that what Abu Salim and his clansmen do that’s more important than work?
Their neighbours’ suspicion doesn’t amaze me as much as Abu Salim and his wives’ disregarding it. Ever since I entered their tents I have wondered how they could invite me—or anyone connected to their foreign rulers—to their forbidden tents. (If I live to be a hundred, I’ll probably never see foreign rule as benign. So deeply entrenched are these childhood impressions, preserved like the scar from a terrible blow, I am shaken by the thought that anyone here or anywhere would distrust, despise, resent me, my tribe, even half as much as I had the Tommies.)
I wanted to assure the two Badawias that I was neither connected to the authorities nor dispatched by them. But I thought the more I tried to assure Azzizah and Tammam of that, the less assured they’d be. I underestimated them.
Azzizah and Tammam transcended the divide—of the tribal, the bad blood . . . That is what I was to discover soon, after this little misunderstanding:
“If it would please you, let one of the water-skins be for you to be bathed with,” said Azzizah, her eyes addressing mine but her words echoing through time, almost straight out of Genesis. Ah, I thought, she is storytelling the Badu version of the day her ancestor and mine, Abraham, received his stranger-guests.
“Let your bathing be in my tent,” Tammam went on to tell me—the Badu version of Abraham’s guest-receiving story, I thought.
“In her tent or mine, as you wish,” said Azzizah, her eyes seemed to inquire how I liked this story-legend, and did I wish to hear the rest of it?
“Aywa—yes—tell on,” I urge both Azzizah and Tammam. But, in response, the two Badawia co-wives stare at me — astonishment and disappointment in their eyes.
“She did not understand,” Azzizah mutters to Tammam. Now Azzizah turns to me and, as she keeps repeating “Bathing . . . washing . . . fahemti—understand?” Her hands mime a woman soaping her breasts. And, pointing a finger at me, she adds, talking like Tarzan or Jane in Badu Arabic, “You—bathing—washing—”
“Yes, that is how I bathe-wash,” I reply, barely able to keep a straight face.
“Good. That is how you can bathe now, here in Azzizah’s tent, if you wish, or in my tent,” says Tammam.
“That is what I have been trying to tell you, to offer to you,” says Azzizah.
I was too moved for words, and I had no idea then what a surprise this promised bath would turn out to be. More than anything just then I wanted to convey to the two Badawia co-wives what their offering meant to me, what memories and longings it stirred. But I didn’t know how.
It was an invitation to enter the cherished landscape of the forbidden other. Gaining entry to the forbidden tents was, to me, like visiting Ahmed’s forbidden home in Qalqiliya. The houses and purple hills of his hometown were a mere ten or fifteen minutes’ journey on my father’s bicycle, as I’d learned from the single time my father had taken me to buy cracked olives and za’atar, virgin olive oil and fresh-baked pita in the Qalqiliya markets. That trip had another purpose, I realized then. It was not only to buy food, but to face and defeat the fear that threatened to steal our freedom, the fear that we would be killed by our Arab neighbours, in their hometown or our own. The bloodier the hatred of our Arab neighbours toward us, the friendlier and more loving I imagined life inside their forbidden homes. Ah, I would be so loved in those places, I thought, by Ahmed and his parents, and by the Arab prince who employed Ahmed’s father and mine. The more threatened I felt by the radio reports of violence in the streets, the more powerful I imagined my position in those forbidden palaces. The more burdensome my chores at my Kfar Sabba home, the more palace servants I appointed myself in Qalqiliya’s forbidden homes. It was at once a hopeful and a shameful dream, and I carried it as a secret in my heart.
And now I was being welcomed into and offered the precious gift of water in another forbidden palace.
I had yet to see a drop of drinking water wasted here, or a Badu washing anything but hands before digging fingers into the communal food tray. Since I arrived, only little Salimeh has had a change of clothes—but not a bath. Like Tammam, Azzizah, and Abu Salim, I have slept in the clothes I have worn all day since I entered this compound. I felt dusty, clammy, and lousy, and I probably smelled like I could use a bath. Maybe that’s what prompted the Badawias’ offering. I was dying to take a bath, but not here, not after seeing what it takes to fill a water jerrican, let alone to lug it up here to the tents.
“With your permission I’ll bathe at the waterhole,” I told Azzizah and Tammam, a breath after blessing them for their water offering.
That shocked them.
“Shameless she does not veil her face . . . shameless she wants to undress and bathe at the bir,” Azzizah muttered. “Never in my life did I meet a woman so shameless, so ignorant. Does not even know it is not proper to bathe at the well.”
“For you can never tell who might wander to the well just as you are undressing, bathing,” Tammam, her eyes addressing me, went o
n to explain, doling out her words, wahada, wahada—one by one. “Not only did I tell you, but with your own eyes you saw that, at a distance all too far to carry water, we Badu pitch our tents, so that no one would stare us in the face . . .”
“Knowing nothing—nothing—she came here, knowing nothing,” Azzizah was muttering under her veil.
One of the all too few things I did know when I came here was that, in Badu Arabic, like in ancient Hebrew, there is no word for “privacy.” Yet look at how these mountain Badawias guard theirs—from each other, as well as from their neighbours and strangers. Both their tents open up to the east, in such an angle that you cannot see the opening, the interior, from one tent to another, nor the fire-circles of one tent from those of the other.
“It is not good to bathe at the well, even if you were to know for certain that no one would happen to stare you in the face there when you are bathing. For there are bad winds at the well,” says Azzizah.
“Bad winds? At your water-source?” I answer.
“Aywa—yes. Azzizah knows, for she is a darwisha—a healing woman, daughter of a darwish,” says Tammam, exhausted still from dragging the water she and Azzizah were offering for my bath.
A part of me was glad not to go back to the waterhole in this heat. Yes. I accepted their offering. I rationalized it, of course. Not just with piddly little justifications: They can’t wait for me to bathe because they can’t breathe near me I’m so stinking filthy. But with big rationalizations: Rejection of his offering moved Cain to kill his brother, Abel . . .
“I like both your tents equally well; therefore, I ask you to advise me, in which one would it be proper for me to bathe?”
“In mine,” Tammam was first to reply, “for Azzizah always has women guests, not only her daughters, but many Badawias in need of a darwisha, whereas I never had a woman guest before you came and, by my fire-circles, you sat, feasted, even slept.”