Sulha

by Malka Marom

  “Let’s have our papers back,” Tal said, and I’m sure they heard the patronizing voice of those sons of whores.

  “But look at how low this major stoops,” the corporal said to the rookie, derision, hatred in his voice. “Look at his birthdate. Now look at hers . . .”

  “Yuuuh, she’s as old as my mother,” said the rookie.

  “He’s ten-eleven years younger than her. No one but a working cock would be caught with a woman so many years older than him. He must be working for her. You know what the likes of him are called?” the corporal asked.

  “No, what?”

  “Gigolo.” The corporal flicks off his flashlight. “Gigolo, a male whore . . . Sells his cock for her Canadian dollars, and a visa to Canada, and the Jeep. Bet you her money paid for this Jeep . . .”

  “The hatred at the borders has poisoned our patrolmen,” Tal said after they finally returned our papers and we drove away. There was bitterness in his voice.

  “Well, at least they didn’t say, ‘I wouldn’t touch her even if you paid me.’” I tried to make light of it. “You know, Arik was eleven years older than me, and Dave is twelve years older. People here pressed Arik not to marry me. I was too young for him, they said, and too young is trouble. But that’s nothing compared with the shit people dump on my colleague in Canada, married to a man ten years younger than her.”

  “Here . . . it’s taboo,” Tal said, hesitating, as if he only now realized what a line he crossed to embrace me.

  “I had a thing about our war widows,” he said quietly, as we headed to the town Yamit—which, Tal knew, was inspired by the model of Arik’s dream town.

  “I don’t know a man in The Land who doesn’t have a thing about ‘our war widows’,” I said.

  “Neither do I.” He told me how he used to see the war widows in his home kibbutz, “like memorial candles, flickering constant, silent.” The only war widows he had known before he was drafted were not widows like his mother; there was something untouchable about them, he felt, something that made him tremble. He didn’t know what it was. Until one day, when he was not yet nineteen and still in training, he received a few hours’ furlough and decided to explore the city. He got off the bus to stretch his legs for a bit when a boy, five or six years old, ran over to him, grabbed his hand, and said, “I knew I’d find you. Come. What are you waiting for? Mother is waiting.” Thinking the kid had done something he shouldn’t and had grabbed a soldier to protect him from his mother’s punishment, Tal went along. The kid dragged him to the mother’s flat, shoved him in front of her, and said, “Look. I found a father. So enough already, stop crying already.” His mother apologized, then explained that her husband had fallen in the war of attrition; her son, only four years old then, feels the loss now, when he sees his friends doing those things that sons do with fathers. He wants to see his father just once, he says, just for a moment. She showed him every photo she had of his father, but the boy said that the man in the photos was not his father. He pictured someone big, much bigger than him, not smaller, like in the photos. And besides, the kid didn’t want a paper father; he wanted a father who plays soccer with his son, who carries his son on his back and swims with him far out into the sea, where the lifeguard allows only boys with fathers to swim . . . The boy knows that fathers doing army duty wear a soldier’s uniform. So, every week, he brings home a soldier or two. He’ll grow out of this phase soon, she said, looking like no memorial candle.

  “I felt like moving in with them, like adopting that kid and his mother,” said Tal. “Then, it dawned on me that all she needed was another one. All of a sudden it hit me that tomorrow, next week, next month, I could go, just like her husband. War widows began looking like the shadow of the Angel,” Tal said. He stayed away from them; he understood now why they made him tremble—at least, he thought he did, until he came back from his fifth or sixth mission, one in which he had lost a friend.

  “A friend who had joined the Unit after his regular service. He was a few years older than the others—had a wife already, and a couple of children. And I was . . . I was twenty years old. I saw his widow, and I remembered every word her husband had told me about her. All the dreams her husband had dreamed for her, himself, and their children. I knew her loss better than most people, I thought. I had gone through a year and a half of training with her husband, had gone through fire with him, fought side by side with him. In some ways, I knew her husband better than she did, and missed him just as much, if not more. But I also remembered the bullet that hit her husband whistling past me. And how happy I felt that it didn’t have my name on it . . .”

  When we embraced, Tal and I embraced the man within the war-hero, and the woman within the war widow.

  In Yamit he insisted on picking up the tab for coffee, as if my paying for a cup would make him a gigolo. He and I were the cafe’s only customers. The owner was about to close it when we walked in.

  “You couldn’t find a seat in this place before this town of ours, like a sacrificial lamb, was put on the table of the peace-talks with Egypt,” the owner of the café said, seating himself at our table. He began to pour his heart out—just like that, before he knew our names. “You know, sometimes, when this place is empty, like now, I tell myself, it’s just a bad dream, a nightmare. As soon as I wake up, I’ll find that, just like before we of Yamit were offered up like a sacrificial lamb, all us Israelis are one big family. . .

  “You know, in the last war I battled with the Golani, and not once did it occur to me, I swear to you, that I was risking my butt for the people of Galilee or the people of the Jordan valley, their towns, kibbutzim, moshavim. To me they were family. The last thing I expected from this family is that they would even think of sacrificing everything I laid my life on the line for, everything my buddies lived and died for, everything my wife and I dreamed of, worked for, mortgaged for. It can break you when it happens. . .

  “What gets you is the crumbling of that trust in the family—that gets you much more than the dream of a home and garden in a dream of a place. Such friction in the family might ignite a civil war—a brothers’ war. . .

  “And here, in Yamit, in almost every home, husbands and wives are fighting day and night.”

  You wouldn’t have suspected any of it, sitting in that café, sipping another cappuccino, this one on the house. Radiant light and soft music spilled out of open windows; whiffs of honeysuckle, rose, jasmine, and sea salt drifted on the breeze; a couple of lovers, walking by hand-in-hand, wished us “good evening.”

  “That couple are among the few who are of the same mind. Both believe we’ll never give up Yamit,” said the owner. “Most others can’t agree: One is willing to trade Yamit for a promise of peace; the other is not. In one house, one says, ‘I put everything I have into this place. They’ll have to kill me before they move me out of here.’ But the other says, ‘No one will ever pay us more money for our house and garden than the Nation will, it is guilt and shame compensation but what the hell, we’d be able to retire on it . . .’ ‘Stop fighting,’ the children cry. They don’t want to move away from their friends, school, teacher. . .

  “And at the same time, outside your window, Arab men from Gaza, El-Arish, or Rafah are already bickering over your house. ‘I was first to claim this house’; ‘No, it was I, by Allah, it was I’; ‘No, it was I,’ says a third, pulling a weed out of your lawn as if your garden was already his.

  “My wife wanted to shoot him. ‘I’d rather destroy this house, this whole town, than give it to these Arabs,’ she says. It drives her crazy the situation. She went to stay with her parents, took the children with her. I never thought it would happen to me, to my children.

  “And already the camping grounds at the dikliya—the palm grove—are closed. The only place you can camp overnight here these days is on the beach, in those fenced-in areas.” With that, the owner of the café invited us to stay overnight in his h
ouse. And only now did he introduce himself: “I’m Amos.”

  Amos thought that Tal was my husband, not my gigolo.

  I could almost touch Arik’s presence in Yamit. Just like in Arik’s model, the public space was on the first floor of Amos’s house. No wall separated the living room from the kitchen and dining area; and the private space was upstairs. But Arik had tremendous respect for the desert sun and winds; his windows were narrow slits, almost like those slits in Badu tents, which afford a gentle cross-breeze.

  “Be they narrow or wide, the fine desert dust blows even through the concrete blocks, you’d swear,” said Amos. “During a sand storm, no matter how tight you seal windows, doors, shutters, and concrete walls, the floors and every surface in the house are covered with sand.” He was watering the tropical jungle that grew on the window ledge in his son’s bedroom. (That’s where Tal slept; I had his daughter’s bedroom.) His separation from his wife and children was temporary, Amos believed, or so it seemed. The tricycles were still parked at the entrance, and in the master bedroom, his wife and children looked very happy in the photos on the dresser. The scarred plaster behind the headboard of their double bed was a testament to the passion of their lovemaking—or to how shoddy the plasterwork was.

  The morning revealed Yamit.

  Oh, how Arik would have loved to see it, flaws and all. Amos’s house butted up against the next house. And some houses were semi-detached—compromised, like in Arik’s model, to cut building costs.

  Arik had railed against such compromises.

  He would have probably called the grey stucco an eyesore, and been grateful that it was nearly hidden by the network of climbers. The bougainvillea was old enough to reach to the second floor; the climbing roses framed the kitchen windows; the honeysuckle shaded the terraces in the backyard; and the jasmine hedge screened off the front courtyards. Only the fig trees and the grapevines gave evidence of Yamit’s newness and how determined her inhabitants were to be rooted to her shifting sands.

  A tangle of roots was probably fighting for room under the flowerbeds, and the sprawling lawns that absorbed the harsh sun and reflected a gentle green light onto the houses.

  Arik would have liked the way the houses curved on both sides of the paths, which led to the public square. The wide square he would have envied—multileveled, and with palm trees, benches, a playground equipped with all the toys, and a bubbling fountain that worked—and a huge memorial for all who fell in battle here.

  East of the square, across a wooded area, stood the school and the library, and, bordering the square to the southwest, was a huge L-shaped structure that housed a supermarket, department store, movie house, offices, bicycle repair shop, beauty salon and barbershop, kiosk, bakery, and Amos’s café, with a bus stop at the back.

  The communal parking lots, and the only road that allowed traffic, were situated on the periphery of the town, only a few meters inside the security fence that bound Yamit.

  Outside the fence, to the west, sand dunes spilled down to the sea, and palms shaded the sun-bleached beach, stretching wide and long as far as the eye could see.

  Had it not been for the skeleton of an apartment building, “abandoned by the builders ever since the peace talks had begun,” Amos said, you could easily forget, especially when the paths came to life with schoolchildren, that you were strolling through a town that might be evacuated if or when she is traded to Egypt for a promise of peace—“or most probably destroyed,” Amos said.

  “But nothing will ever be the same again in The Land, even if we keep Yamit. It changed everything, the willingness of so many to sacrifice Yamit. Like in America, it’s each man for himself, not one big family any more. Even real peace with Egypt would be no consolation to me for losing that, never mind all the rest I stand to lose . . .” Amos couldn’t see the emptiness in his life, the emptiness in his soul, ever being filled.

  “To me, loss is loss. The soul is no perennial rosebush, where you prune a branch and another grows to bear more blossoms,” Amos said. The thought of such renewal is almost an insult to everything he holds dear, he said. “I can see no phoenix rising from the ruins of Yamit, can you?” he asked Tal.

  “Peace with a neighbour like Egypt is no phoenix to sneeze at,” Tal replied. “I wouldn’t hesitate to trade Yamit for that, had the mainstay for our Defence, for our survival here—our secret weapon, you could say—not been to hold on to a settlement at all costs.”

  Tal sounded like my father then. It’d been years since I’ve seen my father so torn; he argued with himself, like he used to argue with God: “How can we even think of giving Yamit to Egypt, even if Egypt were to keep her word, wage no more war against us?” he boomed one day. The more hard-of-hearing he gets, the louder his voice is. “I say this, not because Yamit is like Arik’s dream town and mine, but because Yamit is a Jewish settlement. How can we give away a Jewish settlement when for more than thirty years we have ordered our boys to hold a Jewish settlement at all cost . . . How many boys who followed this order are buried right next to my son-in-law Arik?

  “Is it time for change of values, even basic values? Am I being just an old man fearing that such change will kill a good thing and give birth to a monster? Or is the opposite true? Will this change give birth to a good thing and kill the monster? Is it against what we Jews hold to be most sacred—life—to order our boys to hold a Jewish settlement at all cost, to the last man? Is a Jewish settlement just real estate, overnight you raise, overnight you trade off? Is even Jerusalem just real estate? Is life not more sacred than Jerusalem? Does life not come before and above Jerusalem?

  “Would my grandson, Levi, end up like his father, Arik, if we give Yamit to Egypt, or will he be spared?”

  CHAPTER 18

  Where do all the flies disappear to after nightfall?

  Wherever —good riddance.

  I doze on and off all day. My neck is covered by welts, like blackfly bites up in Algonquin, Canada, at the stinging hot and itchy stage, and my eyes—swollen, almost glued shut and sore as hell, especially when the wind shifts fire smoke to my direction. Doesn’t help to wear my djinn-demon eyes, but I keep them on. The Badawias are all too worried as it is.

  “It is a good sign that she writes-to-remember now,” the senior wife mutters to Tammam, talking as if I were not here, by the fire-circle at Azzizah’s maharama—the place of women. “It means she is not as ill now as when she felt too ill to write-to-remember.”

  Not exactly, but what a switch from my first day here when Azzizah cautioned Tammam to stay away from the writing, as if she thought it might be some instrument of the devil.

  What worries them much more is that their husband, Abu Salim, hasn’t returned from wherever he went this morning “to do more important things than work.” And he hasn’t dispatched anyone to explain his tardiness.

  Explanation, information, is power, Wallah.

  The two wives had expected Abu Salim to show up, as he had done since I’ve been here, soon after the neighbouring kids return with the goatherds at sundown. But night fell and the desert vastness contracted to a circle of firelight that expands and shrinks, expands and shrinks, at the whim of the fire tongues, and still no sign of Abu Salim.

  Tammam’s stomach and Azzizah’s rumbled hungry, before mine for once, and they decided we would eat supper without him. Just rice, plain and dry; they skipped the samn, thank God, and there was no dip of fried onions and tomato paste, and no pita, lazy or regular.

  Aside from this variance, Abu Salim’s wives continue to obey his dictates and wishes and to anticipate his likes and dislikes. But until my strange ailment started to worry them, the atmosphere was not as tense; there was even a sense of liberation in the compound. I was wearing a clean layer of clothes. It felt good not to itch and scratch, and I hated the thought of sleeping in infested carpet-blankets, as Abu Salim had told-ordered me to do. So I unrolled and unzipped
my sleeping bag and said to the Badawias, “With your permission, I’ll be sleeping in my own sleeping sack tonight.”

  They giggled under their veils and their eyes popped wide with amazement and fright, as if it was wonderful that I would ask the permission of women, and that I would want to sleep in such a strange contraption, but alarming that a woman, even a stranger-woman, would even think of doing what she wants and not what she is told to do by a male—be he even a child-boy.

  “Abu Salim will be very angry with you, and with us, if you disobey his wishes,” said Azzizah. And Tammam added, “He will punish us if we permit you to disobey him.”

  “How would he punish you?” I asked them, like an idiot. It’s so hard to grasp, even here, where it’s staring you in the face, that a tribe, a way of life that has endured for centuries, would put their women-mothers-daughters-sisters-wives at the mercy of any and all male relatives, even for such basic staples as flour and rice. Abu Salim comes and goes, but his wives stay put. Imsallam Suleman Abu Salim has a say, a voice; his wives, a whisper, barely audible. He carries money, not on veils, for decoration, like his wives, but in his pocket, for purchasing power.

  “I think he went to visit his brother or sister,” said Azzizah, “He will get back in but two-three days, Inshallah.”

  “Maybe he went to meet my brother, yaa-Rabb, take what is left of the rest of my life and enjoy it, yaa-my little Salimeh.” Tammam yawned and yawned like when anxiety-fear depletes your oxygen reserves.