Sulha

by Malka Marom

  “It’s a shame,” says a soft-spoken voice from behind me—Tal looks like he has seen a ghost over my shoulder—“ what a shame to travel so far and reach the tail end of the world when there’s no light to see what a beautiful tail the world has. If I were you, I’d bunk overnight at our base, and tomorrow, when the Common Road is ours again, I’d return to the gulf and drive to the beach just north of the turn.”

  “Look at this reservnik and you’ll have an idea of what my father was like,” Tal whispered, leaning close to my ear. I saw a fellow who gave off the feel of a teddy bear, worn out and frayed, sort of like an old security blanket.

  “Nothing to see there,” the dark Adonis cuts in. “There’s nothing for hundreds of kilometres around. But it’s warm in the barracks. And there’s hot water to shower off the sulphur, smells like rotten eggs. I’d camp overnight in the base if I were you.”

  “Too cold tonight to camp outdoors,” said a reservnik with a birthmark on his face, wrapped up in an army doobon—parka—like most everyone else, including Tal. “Too dark now to find firewood,” he added, “and the cook on duty at the base tonight is, in civilian life, the head chef at the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv.”

  Tal presented our pass to the Adonis by his window.

  “Keep it. We’ll check you out tomorrow,” said the one with the birthmark. “Marble Cake,” the Adonis called him, as did the others—rank and file all, it seemed. There was no sign of a stripe on any shoulder or sleeve.

  “Doesn’t your base have a commander who has any say about inviting two—terrorists, for all you know,” Tal said.

  “I am the commander,” said the one who gave off the feeling of Tal’s father. “Let him consult with her,” the commander told his men. And they allowed us a meter or two of privacy.

  “You’ll be the only woman at the base if we stay the night. They might billet you to a barracks full of men. Did you ever sleep in a barracks full of men?” Tal asked, looking as exhausted as I felt, and he was clearly drawn to this reservnik who reminded him of his father . . .

  “No, but what the hell. Let’s camp here overnight,” I whispered.

  “You got yourselves a couple of guests,” Tal said to the reservniks.

  Nothing but a black void beyond the belt of light surrounding their base—or so it seemed from the inside. The powerful security beams, fed by a powerful droning generator, picked up only dust particles and a tiny desert mouse that scuttled into the base through a hole in the mesh security fence and disappeared under the Jeeps that were parked next to crates, barrels, and rolls of cables piled in heaps only a few steps from the barracks.

  It was just a three-barracks base—mobile barracks, squatting on blocks as if ready to be hauled off at a moment’s notice. You wouldn’t have suspected it from the outside. From the checkpoint, the base looked huge—and permanent.

  The barracks closest to the gate was “off limits” to us, according to the commander. He and his men bunked in the second barracks, he said, directing us to the third, the “kitchen mess hall,” he called it. He stomped the sand off his desert boots on the straw mat by the entrance. Tal and I followed suit.

  It was clean and tidy inside—and strictly kosher, like in every army base. Two sets of dishes on the shelves, two sets of cutlery, two sets of pots and pans—one for meat; one for milk. And over the two sinks, it had two taps for running water—hot and cold. The stove was restaurant size. In the mess-hall section, there was one table, with room for only one chair at the narrow top and bottom; at the long sides, benches without back support could fit five, or seven squeezed in tight. The commander sat at the head of the table; Tal on one bench, I on the other. Directly across me sat the dark Adonis. Leaning forward so that I could hear him over the commotion, he said, “I checked the showers. Give it an hour and the water will be good and hot. The shower stalls are in the open because only men are based here. But no one will look; I’ll make sure of that. I’ll close off the stalls with blankets if you want.”

  “Thank you,” I said, flushed by the male sparks all around me. “How many men are based here?”

  “Bad luck to count troops,” replied a reservnik wearing bubble-lensed glasses. His Hebrew sounded like Russian.

  “Russki,” the Adonis called him, “it’s all right.” He turned back to me, “Twenty, twenty-four men are based here.”

  They all had to file in sideways behind us, the space in the mess hall was so cramped, and only when there was no standing room, even in the kitchen part of the barracks, did they realize that no one was out on patrol duty, guard duty, checkpoint duty, and God-knows-what duty they served in that barracks that was off limits to Tal and me.

  Shifts changed at various times, in various numbers, without as much as a signal or a nod from the commander or anyone else. “How do you know when, and whose turn it is?” I asked the commander. He scratched his head like the man who was asked if he slept with his beard under the blanket or on top.

  “After serving together for twenty-seven years, you just know when and how,” piped Marble Cake, and the barracks shook with the laughter of men who had known each other—and served one month each year side by side—since Tal was four years old. All the men except the Russki and the dark Adonis, as well as two or three more who seemed to be in their mid-thirties. Replacements, the commander called them.

  “Not all of us made it to this table,” the commander said when the laughter died. His eyes went to Arik’s wedding ring, strung on the gold chain around my neck. I didn’t want him to ask me, When? How? Children? Remarried? Dropped out? I didn’t have the strength to get into that now, so I covered my neck with the white kaffiyye draped on my shoulders. And the Russki thought I was cold.

  “A shot of vodka would warm you up in a minute. But there is no vodka in this Jewish army base of ours.” The Russki was amused by the thought of an army base without a drop of booze.

  “We do have liquor on the base,” said a deep bass voice that belonged to a tall, rangy reservnik who looked like he had gone on a crash diet just before being called up. His crumpled fatigues were hanging on him like a scarecrow’s costume—“The Turk” his fellow reservniks called him. He handed me a glass of sweet sacramental wine. “Liquor on an empty stomach makes a person dizzy,” he cautioned, handing me a slice of bread. “Eat it first,” he said, “Eat . . . Eat . . . Don’t be shy . . . eat, then gulp the liquor and you won’t feel the cold.”

  Tal was laughing inside, it seemed, one moment; the next, he had tensed as if I was public property confiscated from him for the war effort. The men were claiming me here, with their eyes at least, as their own woman. Innocent, Shabbat-bride, home, family, love—I was all of these to them, but not a person. The air sang with the festive goodwill these attributes stirred. And, after years of being needled, gagged, shunned by my own for dropping out, deserting, betraying, a part of me so enjoyed being claimed by my own, I didn’t want to lose it.

  One by one the commander introduced his men, as if they too were emblems of something larger, as his names for them showed: the Turk, the Pollack, the Hungarian, the Electrician from Tiberius, the Accountant from Beersheba, the Photographer from the artist colony Ein Hod, the Carpenter from Nes-Ziona—himself, the Taxi Driver from Jerusalem. Marble Cake owns a bookstore in Tel Aviv; the Moshavnik grows and exports oranges and gladioli; the Kibbutznik is an expert on breeding and raising carp in man-made ponds, and the Russki is a newcomer to The Land and to the community of scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, and also to reserve duty.

  “What a shaft, reserve duty here. Thirty days and thirty nights stuck far away from everyone and everything. Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!” The dark Adonis kept banging the table with a clenched hot fist, rattling everything and everyone—except the Russki. Even the commander seemed to be wary of this dark Adonis, shutting him out of the introductions. Why? Was the Adonis a gangster or a pimp from the Kerrem? Or was
it his dark skin, his Arab-ghetto origins? Was street prejudice spilling into the army? A Chukh-chukh, my brother-in-law would call the dark Adonis. “Chukh-chukhs hate the Arabs who had expelled them and confiscated all they had possessed in their Arab lands of origin. But check the military cemeteries and you’ll see they don’t volunteer to serve in elite, high-risk units; they know that idiots like us are all too glad to be heroes. Tell it to a Chukh-chukh, though, and he’ll accuse you of being prejudiced, spreading out-and-out lies—that is, if he doesn’t just pull out a knife and slice your tongue off . . . Chukh-chukhs talk with knives and with fists . . .” Is that why no one at the table told the dark Adonis what they thought of his rattling steam—no one except the Russki.

  “You are stuck, stuck, stuck in the Soviet Union, believe me,” said the Russki to the Adonis. “Nowhere in Russia was I as free as I am here, even on army duty.”

  “Yeah,” agreed the Electrician, irritation in his voice. “My father also came from Russia, also suffered there, struggled there, and when he came up to The Land, he received kadahat—fuck-all except malaria. Fifty years later, you Russkis come up to The Land and you receive a dream of a job, and an apartment complete with a telephone, and a car and all the modern conveniences, duty free. Yeah, you’re free here all right.”

  “This is the first time you serve reserve, so you don’t know what a vacation reserve duty is, the best vacation a man can have,” the Carpenter told the Russki. “Thirty days away from the pressure of work, whining kids, nagging wife. Thirty days of a quiet head. Thirty days for the wife to appreciate what a load you carry at home, not to mention at work. Thirty days for her worry about unpaid bills, and spanking the kids, and fixing the stove now that the Electrician is here serving reserve duty.”

  “And how she greets you after thirty nights,” said the Turk. “And thirty days a year of army exercises keep you in shape—trim, young. And it’s like family, the closeness of the men in your unit.”

  “Closer than family.” Marble Cake said to the Russki. “No one could ever replace the ones you lost in the death camps, or the ones you left behind in Russia, but here you will not go through life alone. The men of your unit will join in your celebrations and will be the first ones beside you in your times of need.”

  “It’s too bad your first time serving reserve has to be in a base too far for our wives and children to drive over and visit us for a few hours, as they usually do, even when we’re on high alert, like in ’67,” said the commander, and the reservniks chuckled.

  “You know, we were combat soldiers in ’67, front-line soldiers,” the Accountant told the Russki. “We had to dig in, but it was so quiet that if we hadn’t switched on the radio we wouldn’t have suspected that such an unbelievable turn of events was taking place; not only did Egypt demand that the U.N. peacekeepers vacate the whole of this buffer zone—the whole of Sinai—but the U.N. complied, exposing us to Arab armies aiming to push us to the sea.”

  “That’s what our wives and children were hearing on the radio, on top of the hour every hour for one week, then another,” said the Hungarian. “I will never forget how tension was mounting by the minute, and our leaders were still afraid to make a move because we were so outnumbered. Not one of us could leave our position even for an hour, let alone for Shabbat.”

  “So, after two weeks,” said the Carpenter, “we decided that if we cannot go home next Shabbat, our families will come to us. What a picnic we all had together with our families. You wouldn’t have suspected that an all-out war was imminent.”

  “But a week later,” muttered the Moshavnik.

  “Speak up. Speak up,” the Turk urged the Moshavnik, almost like the Badu do; turning to Tal and me, he added, “Wait till you hear this.”

  “A week after that picnic,” continued the Moshavnik, “my wife had had it with that ‘imminent’ state of war, as the radio called it, which had dragged on for three weeks. She had to work the orange groves and flower fields now all by herself, like ten men. It tired the hell out of her. So she decided to take the day off. Early dawn she packs the children into the car, and off she goes to visit me. The roads are empty, but she thinks nothing of it, because, by now, nearly all the nation’s men were away, like me, in defensive positions along the borders . . .”

  “She was sick and tired of the same radio bulletins, the same news of war to finish us all off once and for all, every hour of every day,” Marble Cake cut in. The reservists knew one another’s stories by heart, it seemed, like couples married for twenty-seven years. “For her, the radio was like the fellow who cried wolf.”

  “Yes,” said the Moshavnik, “my wife was looking forward to a beautiful day; she was heading to the place we had held a picnic the week before. I would be there, she thought. But when she arrived, my wife saw that my unit had moved. Where to? She had only one clue. My unit, my division, belonged to southern command. She figured my unit had moved to another position farther south. And so, farther south she drove to look for me. It was like a game of hide-and-seek for the children, and my wife also enjoyed the drive.”

  “It was a very beautiful morning,” said the Turk, “blue and quiet.”

  “For an hour or two, my wife felt like she had the country all to herself. And then she started to pass one tank after another. But that was only to be expected in the situation, my wife thought, especially so close to the border, where she was driving. So she thought nothing of it and continued to press south. Then one tankist stopped her and asked, “Where are you heading, maydeleh?’

  “Maydeleh—my girl—the tankist called her. And really my wife was but a girl then, and more shy than today. Too shy to tell the tankist that she was looking for her husband, my wife tells the tankist that she is just taking the children for a drive.

  “‘A drive?! We’re in the middle of an all-out war, and you are taking your children for a drive?!’ The tankist shakes his head. But my wife tells him, ‘That’s what my mother has been saying for the past three weeks.’

  “So the tankist hands her his transistor radio and my wife hears: ‘. . . in a pre-emptive strike this morning, the Israeli air force struck a heavy blow . . . and heavy battle in the south . . . and according to the latest reports from the east . . . our forces in the south are advancing . . .’ All the tanks that my wife had just passed were with our forces in the south, which were advancing—my wife was fully aware of it now.”

  “She trembled for the children now, and for her husband, and for herself, and also for the tankist who stopped her from advancing ahead of our advancing forces,” said the Turk. “The tankist didn’t laugh when he saw the jalopy she was driving. ‘You must have courage to spare if you drove this all the way here,’ the tankist told her.”

  “We called the car Charlie Chaplin, ’cause every time we saw it we laughed,” interjected the Electrician.

  “Soon as my wife heard the tankist say she had courage to spare, she knew he couldn’t spare even one man to escort her and the children back home. So she said to the tankist, ‘I’ll be all right. Don’t worry, you take care.’

  “‘Ah, maydeleh, there are no girls like our girls,’ the tankist said, and he told her, ‘Drive back home as fast as you can. And the minute you see a fighter plane not ours, jump out of the car with the kids and dive into the ditch by the roadside.’

  “My wife followed his instructions. But Charlie Chaplin heated up. The car stalled. And the ditch was no place to wait for the engine to cool down, my wife thought, because the sky was busy now with planes flying too high to see if they were ours or theirs.

  “The only risk worth taking now was to get the children to a proper shelter, the sooner the better, my wife thought. So all the time that the engine was cooling down, my wife pushed the car on a road fried by the sun, the asphalt sizzling under her bare feet. As always, she had left the house barefoot. She liked to feel the land skin to skin, if you know what I mean.”
r />   “It was no ‘Six-Day War’ for this unit,” said the Turk. “We didn’t return home after six days, and not even after thirty . . .”

  “Yes, for weeks my wife had to look after the children, and the house, and the fields, and the groves, all by herself,” said the Moshavnik. “I don’t know how she did it. And six years later, in the Yom-Kippur War, it was much more difficult. On top of everything else, she couldn’t export the gladioli and the oranges because the Arab states threatened to cut off their business ties with any nation that dealt with us.”

  “My wife figured she could save the oranges by storing them in refrigerated depots. But it’s now or never with flowers, like with people. And all the gladioli died in the fields,” said the Moshavnik. “And now my wife didn’t know if she should plant a new crop.”

  “All the nations, bar none, deserted us, abandoned us really, in that ’73 war, the Yom Kippur war,” said the Accountant. “Almost like in the days of the death camps.”

  “‘They don’t deserve our flowers,’ my wife said to herself. Then, when she heard that the Egyptian air force was pounding my division, she thought, ‘Let the world outside our tiny Land have a winter without flowers.’

  “But after the cease-fire,” the Moshavnik went on, “I returned home and saw her in the fields, sweating over a fresh crop swelling already with buds. ‘Let us have a winter filled with flowers,’ she said.”

  Tal shook his head when our eyes met. I couldn’t read them as yet, couldn’t tell if he didn’t want me to ask him, even with my eyes, any questions about that, or any war.

  “We didn’t return home till winter from a war that started on Yom Kippur,” said the cook on duty as he sat down next to me.

  “I know you are hungry. Supper will be ready sixteen minutes after I finish this cigarette,” he said to Tal and me. The others didn’t laugh, even though the only preparation he had made for supper so far was to tie an apron over his faded fatigues. If he really worked as chef at the Hilton in civilian life, it was probably as the short-order cook, not the head chef, as his army buddies had claimed. He took a long drag, savoured it like a man who cannot smoke on the job, “I used to love Yom Kippur. This day that God checks out the columns of your good deeds and your bad in his ledger book is the only day of the year I could make it into his good book; the only day I do nothing but catch up on my reading and my sleep. It’s my favourite holy day also because it is the only day in the year on which the radio and TV are off the air from sundown to sundown. And the silence in Tel Aviv is such a contrast from the daily noise—and such a wonder to the tourists at the Hilton, once I overheard a tourist saying, ‘You’ve got to be here to believe that three hundred thousand city Jews could be so quiet for twenty-four hours.’ Can you imagine what a shock it was when the radio announced a general call-up?”