Sulha

by Malka Marom

  “Is it because of that, that you deem it not proper to ask questions?” I couldn’t resist.

  “Laa—no. It is because it is not good to know too much,” Tammam says. “That is what I had heard from my mother’s mother, who heard it from her mother’s mother, that knowing too much makes you too old too soon.”

  “It is not only that,” says Azzizah. “Knowing is like rain—too little leaves you impoverished and parched like the worst of the drought. But too much, like the worst of the flash floods, destroys, uproots . . .”

  CHAPTER 16

  Salimeh, hungry, trying to extract a nipple, a breast, out of her mother’s layers and layers, cried and cried. But Tammam—God knows how she could sleep so deeply—was on her stomach, her breasts hidden. Gently, I woke her up.

  “Wallah, I am glad you are here,” she whispered, half-asleep, breast-feeding her infant.

  Across the fire from me, she sleeps now, enveloped with her infant-daughter in the same carpet-blanket. Her husband, Abu Salim, went to sleep by Azzizah’s fire-circle tonight also . . .

  A sliver of a moon and a dusting of stars only sharpen the contrast of the darkness circling the light thrown by my flashlight tucked in the folds of my sleeping bag, rolled up into an improvised night table.

  j

  I stayed behind in the mess hall so that the reservniks could get undressed without a woman disturbing their privacy.

  “You still here?” the Turk says, as he walks in at the first coffee break of his night shift, wearing more layers than a Canadian in midwinter, yet shivering all the same. He warms his hands on a mug of coffee, curses the cold desert nights. “They’re keeping the light on for you at the barracks.”

  “Wouldn’t it be more convenient for everyone,” I say, “if I stretch out here, on a bench, or in a sleeping bag?”

  “No,” says the Turk. “The nightshift takes our coffee breaks here. It would inconvenience you, and us as well.”

  I waited in the mess hall until the only sound was the generator, clanking electric power.

  White mosquito nets were hanging over all the field beds in the barracks, except two. In one, at the far corner, Tal, half-asleep, laughs as he motions to me that mine is the field bed at the farthest corner from his. I tiptoe over to that bed and see it is less than arm’s length away from the mosquito net that veils the dark Adonis.

  Just then one of the reservniks turns the light off. But the security lights spill into the barracks through the windowpanes. So I take off my desert boots, and slide under the blanket with my clothes on. The barracks smells of feet, sweat, toothpaste, and cigarettes. One man coughs, another clears his throat, then a choir of snoring starts. A couple of lizards cling to the ceiling; a third shoots across and hides in the corner above the dark Adonis. He turns toward me and, through his mosquito net, he whispers, “You sleeping?”

  “No,” I whisper back.

  “I can’t sleep,” he says. “My wife is taking driving lessons. It’s not safe.”

  “Why, I heard it’s safer than ever to learn to drive in The Land these days,” I whisper. “I mean, you can’t get a driver’s license if you don’t take driving lessons from a certified instructor.”

  “Exactly,” whispers the dark Adonis. “The driving instructors are not safe. Men, all of them, sitting almost on top of my wife when they teach her to drive, bound to touch her here and there, and my wife . . . my wife is very beautiful and . . . very hot blooded. She needs a man. And I am stuck here.”

  “Your wife probably talks about you when she takes her driving lessons, like you talk about her now,” I tell him.

  “Do you think so?” He lights himself a cigarette, then says, “Me, I am stuck here. But you . . . it wasn’t your idea to roll up in a Jeep in this part of the desert, of all places, was it?”

  “Yes, it was,” I reply.

  “But there is nothing to do here,” he whispers, “No night clubs, like in Eilat, and no restaurants, no movies, no swimming pools. My wife, she also likes the desert. But I take her to the best hotel in Eilat, not in a Jeep—a Jeep has no shock absorbers; the ride is too bumpy for a woman, especially here, the wadis are full of potholes and dust. Me? I wouldn’t roll in dust if I could help it. But to each his own madness, to each his own dream.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Madness or dream?” whispers the dark Adonis.

  “Oh, shaa, already! Let a person catch some sleep,” one of the reservniks snaps, then mutters a string of curses.

  “Ah, shaa, yourself!” the dark Adonis snaps back. “What’s your rush? From sunrise to sunset you rush rush rush. Nighttime, you can’t wait to catch some sleep—catch a dream, big, small. But daybreaks, and the sun melts all the dreams . . .

  “A puddle of dreams you rush to dream,” he whispered to me. “That’s what I discovered when I caught such a hit in the Yom-Kippur War, laid me up for months. All the dreams melt in the sun, I could see then.”

  The generator kept clanking, and the lizards darted hungrily or slept upside down on the ceiling. Trying to sleep in that barracks full of men, snoring, mumbling, grinding teeth, dreaming . . . took me back to the hiking days in the youth movement; we travelled light, carrying only one light blanket—none of us owned a sleeping bag—but no one ever suffered from the cold, for we all pooled our blankets and slept in a cluster, often boys and girls side by side, all adhering to the honour code—no fucking, no teasing, no necking, no matter how tempted we were. And if you had to take a piss, you couldn’t without unravelling the whole cluster. I was so busy trying to lie still like dead wood in that cluster, I couldn’t sleep . . . Here, too, I couldn’t toss and turn without waking some one in that barracks. So I tiptoed out.

  It’s like the plague of darkness outside the periphery of the security beams. Bone-chilling, the air, already heavy with dew. There is no one round the johns, no one in the mess hall. A pot of coffee simmers on the stove. I help myself to a mug, light a cigarette, leaf through a stale Yediyot newspaper I find on the table. Then Tal shows up. “Anything new?” he whispers.

  “What are you doing up so early? I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

  “No, I was up. I wondered where you disappeared to.” He also helped himself to a mug full of coffee and joined me at the table.

  “Did you catch any sleep?”

  “Yes. You?”

  “Couldn’t, too much excitement in one day, must have pressed a few buttons, their commander.”

  “Yes. Amazing how he even sounds like my father. He’s lucky so many under his command made it to this table. All too many of mine didn’t make it across the Canal . . .” Tal lit himself a cigarette. “And three got killed a year later, in a reconnaissance mission led by me. Two got killed a few months after that, in a mission led by the commander who got killed at Entebbe. You lose a commander like him, and so many who covered the distance with you, it makes you wonder why you were spared. Can’t be for what I am doing now, especially these days.”

  “That’s what my father used to say when I was little. He is the only one in his family, and his little Polish town, to come to The Land way back in the pioneering days; the only one who didn’t perish in the death camps. ‘Why? What for was I spared? Can’t be for what I’m doing, especially these days.’ My father was tormented by that question. High and low my father searched for an answer. Nearly drove him mad.”

  “Did he find it—the answer?”

  “I don’t know. I never asked him. And he never asked me how I could live in Canada, drop out of The Land and live outside—especially after what the outsiders did to us There, and the price that Arik paid here, to make sure it would never happen again. He loved Arik, my father. And Arik . . . it was Arik’s idea to name our son Levi, so that my father’s family name would live on.”

  “You don’t have brothers?”

  “No, only one sister. She lives a good,
normal life here in The Land with her husband and children, only fifteen minutes from my parents’ place.”

  “Is that the answer, you think?”

  “You’re asking me, Tal? I don’t even know why I’m going to the desert. Do you?”

  “One of the guys who survived the Canal crossing withdrew to the desert soon after his regular service,” he replied. “Another sleeps whenever anyone drops in. A third became a workaholic. The religious fanatic, Gingie, became more fanatical. And I . . . a drifter. I never thought I’d see myself doing that. The old excuse that it’s only a reaction to the regimented life I led in the kibbutz and the army doesn’t hold, not after six months. You should have seen the list of books I was planning to read when I got out of the army, became a civilian . . . I didn’t read one, not one book in six months. Facing death I didn’t see myself painted in this non-colour. Facing death . . . Do you know what motivates a man to run into fire?”

  “What?”

  “The strongest motivating force, according to studies, is not courage or conviction, but peer pressure. We live in a small country; if you run away from battle—even a winning battle—the whole country knows it the next day. And if someone in your unit is injured or killed in that battle, you will not feel comfortable showing your face in the street—even though chances are no one will take you to task. Nearly every man in the street has faced in himself the urge to run away from fire. Still, and don’t take this personally,” Tal hesitated, then said, “the only men I know who dropped out of The Land were deserters before they dropped out.

  “‘The Land is not worth dying for,’ they said. If they weren’t bullshitting themselves, they had beitzim—balls—muruah. Not many men can resist peer pressure, no matter what their personal conviction. That’s what I like to think my drifting is. I mean, on good days I wonder if this drifting is not a rebellion against peer pressure, and values, taboos, imposed on me . . . On bad days drifting is like exile—alien, strange. You’re not in the right place wherever you are; home is nowhere, not even in the kibbutz.”

  “Is that why you took leave of absence from your kibbutz?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have children, Tal?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Was Gingie with you on the rescue mission in Entebbe?”

  “No, Gingie was deep in Syria then, driving through a terrain much more difficult than the airstrip at Entebbe. How did you know I was in Entebbe?”

  “I didn’t. Gingie didn’t cross the Canal with you in the Yom-Kippur War, did he? He was not yet nineteen years old then.”

  “Yes, he did. It was the first time that Gingie went through fire with me. After the war he drove my command Jeep. You know he can barely reach the pedals, he’s so short, but he’s a wizard with a Jeep—one of the best drivers in the Unit. That’s why he is called to serve reserve more often than most men. Keep it to yourself, Leora. Everything connected to the Unit is classified, top secret. But only a fanatic like Gingie can clam up totally about the Unit. He wouldn’t open up a crack—except to your son, perhaps. ‘My kid brother,’ Gingie calls your son, you know. You raised them like brothers, Gingie told me.”

  “Only for five or six years, while Gingie’s parents studied in Canada.”

  “How old was your son when Arik fell?”

  “Six months old.”

  “And you?”

  “Nearly twenty years old.”

  “Young. You must have gone straight from high school to the wedding canopy . . .”

  “No, from high school I went to boot camp. My unit received more punishments than training in boot camp. Our commander would bark, ‘Right turn, left turn—march,’ and I or another would pipe up, ‘What for?’ Boot camp was child’s play for us—even the punishments. It was nothing compared to the paramilitary training we went through in the youth movement. The commanders in boot camp were glad to be rid of us. But the border kibbutz that we were assigned to loved us. They gave us all the shit work that you kibbutzniks hate.”

  “Your unit belonged to the Nahal Corps?”

  “Yes. Many from our corps live in that border kibbutz we served in.”

  “But you . . . you didn’t like kibbutz life?”

  “No. I loved it. But Arik was a city boy—a city man; he was eleven years older than me. And he didn’t want to wait till I finished my army duty to get married. It’s almost as if he had a premonition that he didn’t have much longer. He fell eighteen months after we were married. He was only thirty-one years old.”

  “Not so bad.”

  “Yes. Arik is the oldest in his cemetery block there up on Mount Herzl military cemetery. His gravestone is there . . .”

  “Many of my friends are there.”

  “Now Arik’s son, my son, Levi, wants me to waive his exemption from high-risk front-line duty. What do you think, Tal? Should I give him a yes or a no?”

  “That’s for you to decide.”

  “I don’t even know if I have the right to decide, let alone what to decide.”

  “Yes, life is not a prick, life is hard all the time.”

  I burst out laughing. “You mean, practice doesn’t make it easier.”

  “No, as a matter of fact, the longer you ‘practice,’ the more men you lose, the harder it becomes to make a snap decision that might cost yet another life. But someone has to do it, as they say, until peace reigns in this region, if ever . . . That is, if you think The Land, the Nation, is worth defending at any cost.”

  “That The Land might fall is unthinkable to me—as unthinkable as losing my son, Arik’s son, in Defence of The Land. It sounds selfish, but . . .”

  “It’s to your son’s credit, his striving to follow where his father left off, don’t you think?” Tal replied.

  “Sure. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it if it were not for one little detail—that his father got killed when he was your age,” I said.

  “My father got killed in a senseless accident when he was my age,” said Tal, as if that was a wasted death, not redeemed by some heroic cause, like Arik’s.

  “Do you think the Nation would have fallen had we not launched the Sinai War?”

  “I think . . . I know for a fact,” he replied, “that we are living in a state of war that’s been draining us for more than thirty years. Someone has to serve high-risk duty in the front line; if your son is exempted, the burden falls heavier on the shoulders of his best friend, Gingie, and on me . . .”

  The night shift pulled into the base, and the morning shift pulled out. Tal probably knew why I asked the commander if I could speak with him in private, but made no effort to stop me this time.

  “We’re short of gasoline,” I told the commander.

  “How short?”

  “The gas tank is nearly empty and not a drop in the jerricans,” I replied.

  And without further questions, the commander went and filled up the Jeep’s gas tank and the two spare jerricans. “Army fuel won’t stain your carburettor red first or second time,” he said, “but make a habit of this and you’re stuck with a red-stained carburettor for life.”

  Tal and I thanked him and all the reservniks at the checkpoint while the Moshavnik was doing the paperwork. A few men were leaning on the crossbar that blocked entrance to the gravel road, a few sat on the barrels, a few leaned on the gateposts. Their base, nestled among sandstone Mountains, seemed much smaller in daylight, and much closer to the checkpoint. It was only a quarter past seven in the morning, but already the sun shrank the distance, diminished the depth, and radiated such heat that Marble Cake’s face looked more like strawberry and chocolate swirl.

  Fifteen or twenty minutes east of the checkpoint, a command car overtook our Jeep, and the Turk at the wheel told us, “You left without your passes, your identity card, your passport .
. .” Then he handed us the papers—and a bag of oranges: “From the Moshavnik, from his orange groves.”

  “But he also has flower fields. Where are the flowers?” said Tal, grinning.

  “Try drinking flowers when you run out of water,” said the Turk. “Have a safe journey. Enjoy your vacation.”

  j

  We had guests today! Not long after we bathed, neighbouring Badawias came to visit.

  I thought at first I was seeing double triple when all around me Badawias appeared, veiled and bejewelled, just like Azzizah and Tammam. They’re sort of like soldiers in uniform, these mountain Badawias, if you can imagine soldiers breast-feeding infants, or lugging kids on this hip or that, with toddlers holding on to their thowbs—tribal dresses. And flies-flies-flies attacking a child’s running nose, the milk drops at the corner of this and that infant’s mouth, this child’s urine drip, that infant’s diarrhoea, and then the rim of all the steaming tea glass . . .

  “Where are your gifts for our neighbouring clanswomen?” Tammam nudged me.

  “Yaa . . . I didn’t know I had to bring gifts for your clanswomen,” I replied.

  “You came here knowing nothing,” Tammam whispered, as if it was the height of ignorance to separate the individual from the clan, the tribe.

  Tammam and Azzizah cover up for my ignorance by presenting to their neighbouring clanswomen all the beads and embroidery thread I had purchased at Dressmaker’s Supply in Toronto and lugged six thousand miles from Canada to present to Azzizah and Tammam and little Salimeh.

  As a creature from beyond this world, an alien from Mars, the neighbouring Badawias regarded me. The more they appeared to be afraid of me, the more it delighted Tammam, even Azzizah. Those two treated me as if I were a trained monkey: “Take off your djinn-demon eyes. Put them on . . . Write-to-remember. Show them. Show them how you speak . . . Write . . .” The least I could do was to return hospitality, right? I showed each neighbouring Badawia what her name, and her children’s names, look like in writing-to-remember on pages torn from this sketchbook and handed it as an extraordinary gift to each neighbouring Badawia. Azzizah and Tammam were delighted.