by Malka Marom
“Are you afraid of Abu Salim?” I ask her.
“No,” Tammam replies.
“You?” I ask her senior co-wife.
“Wallah, I am, for I love him,” replied Azzizah.
In no apparent way did Tammam betray to her senior co-wife that she had overheard the exchange of whispers that came from Azzizah’s tent.
“Did Abu Salim go to fetch this blemished camel or blemished bride?” I asked Tammam when she and I were alone at the ditch. She looked at me as if she didn’t know what I was talking about, as if she had wiped it from her mind, and it’s dormant now in the realm of denial.
I won’t be able to stay here much longer. I’m not feeling well.
j
BBBBBBOOOOOOOOOMMMM! A jet breaks the sound barrier. And under that fractured sky, Tammam and Azzizah, weaving on a loom pegged to the ground like in Methuselah’s days, wait for their husband, like Penelope did. Time and time again they decide that they’ll wait for just so long but not much longer. Now they decide that if Abu Salim is not back in the compound by the time the sun clears the shade from their loom, and if my stranger’s remedies fail to cure the ailment that plagues me by then, Azzizah will consult the alum crystal to foretell a remedy to heal my ailment.
Azzizah has been weaving a camel-saddle for her son Salim nearly every day for months and months. Or so she told me. Long wool threads in the colours of her desert mountains, stretched tight in long neat rows, are secured at each end to spikes she had hammered into the ground, weeks, perhaps months, ago. Not one spike has budged, so hard is the ground of this plateau. Tammam, helping her today, returns the runner, bulging with threads of many colours, back to Azzizah’s side of the loom. Every move they make is accompanied by the jingle-jangle of their jewels and veils.
Crouching close to the ground, they weave a colourful geometric pattern, like an enlarged version of the beaded necklace gift of trust that Azzizah presented to me the first day I stayed here. Both the miniature and enlarged versions look like the design of Agam. His tapestries, paintings, and prints were probably inspired by a camel-saddle he saw belonging to one of Azzizah’s clansmen. “From generation to generation we Badawias remember how to weave this pattern for our clansmen’s camel saddles,” Azzizah told me.
Back-breaking work, this weaving like their great-great-grandmothers; even Tammam can’t crouch for very long without taking a break to stretch her legs and rub her back . . . and keep her infant-daughter a safe distance from me.
“Blood is blood—a-daam daam,” Azzizah mutters, her bloodshot eyes addressing me, worried I’ll die on her.
“We can be better sisters than blood-sisters, but if it was fated that you breathe your last here in our compound, your clan, sure to lay the blame for that on my clan, is bound to attack my clan to avenge your blood, for a-daam daam—blood is blood—yaa-Rabb,” Azzizah sighed, “such a strange ailment as yours never, never did I ever see in all the many years that I have been a darwisha—a medicine woman. Nor did I ever hear of such a strange ailment as yours, even from my mother, who was a darwisha, daughter of a darwish, son of a darwisha.”
And really, picture a face with eyes almost swollen shut like Mr. Magoo’s, and lips protruding almost as far and wide as Donald Duck’s. With the sunlight and fire smoke that is everywhere, the only relief came in sleep. But as soon as I would doze off, Tammam would wake me up to see if I was dead or alive.
A few hours ago—was it a few days ago? — the swelling spread from my neck, eyes and lips to my jaw. I thought I’d caught the mumps; but then the swelling shifted to my cheek, my forehead. Now my face looks distorted, as if the mirror had grown bunions, and my bones ache like in the early stage of flu. My forehead is burning, yet I’m chilled. Is it malaria? caught from murky jerrican water?
I took some anti-malaria medication—not, as prescribed, two weeks before I ventured to the desert, but like an idiot, when I got here.
I’ve already swallowed my emergency antibiotics just in case this swelling is God-knows-what infection; and my emergency antihistamines, just in case it’s some damn allergy; and my emergency painkillers on top of that. Now I probably look and sound like I’m zonked out of my skull.
The Badawias stare as if they wish I’d go somewhere else to die.
“Woe to us if the alum crystal reveals that fate holds in store for her to die of her ailment in our compound.” Azzizah sighs. “Her tribe is sure to blame us, attack us Badu, to avenge her blood.”
“Wallah, how it dries your spit, the fear of your blood exposed,” mutters Tammam, hugging little Salimeh. “Take what is left of my life and enjoy it, my child, my daughter . . .”
“Ana assifa—I am sorry—to have encumbered you with such worries,” I apologized, then I told them I would pack up and leave, go down to Abu Salim’s maq’ad—guest-receiving-place—and wait there until I could catch a ride.
“Stana—wait!” snaps Azzizah, spewing a string of curses on fate for inflicting me with such a strange ailment, and for inflicting me on her. And another slew of curses on my husband for allowing me to travel to her compound. And yet another volley of curses on her husband, for inviting me to visit-stay in their compound, then riding off and leaving me alone with them.
“You cannot leave, go out of our sight, until Abu Salim gets back,” she informs me, the sun obliterating depth, stealing the third dimension from the surrounding mountain chain, a cardboard backdrop in the glare. “For until Abu Salim gets back, your blood is on our heads.” Azzizah strings a few more curses on my tribe for its might and power and rule over Sinai, and on her tribe and clan for its lack of might and power and for being reduced to live under the frangi—foreign rule—of my tribe.
She and Tammam can probably weave here only when the cliffs shade this flat ledge chiselled into the slope by desert winds that reshape all in view here, except the Badawias’ way of life.
I couldn’t bring myself to ask the Badawias if it was possible to dispatch a neighbouring camel-rider to fetch a friend of a friend of my son’s stationed at the post that houses the health clinic by junction of Wadi E. and Wadi M.; all too many mountain chains away from this one, and a journey through treacherous canyons. And besides, I look worse than I feel. Not to mention that that friend of a friend of my son’s might not be there.
Tal had referred to him as the Haifa’ee—the one from Haifa. The Haifa’ee had served with him and Gingie in the Unit, Tal said as we approached that junction. Tal wasn’t sure if the Haifa’ee was employed by the military administration, or by the Society for the Protection of Nature, or by the Red-Shield of David—the Israeli Red Cross—only that he was stationed at that post.
Half a dozen ambulance-helicopters could land at once in front of that post, so wide was that junction. The architect who had designed the post must be one of your colleagues or students, Arik. Like you, so mindful of the environment, from a distance you couldn’t tell the stone walled post from the mountainside behind it.
A few camels and one Jeep were parked by the front of that post, and Tal wondered if the Haifa’ee had parked there for a change. “Whenever you phone him, you are told he is out,” Tal said.
He decided not to stop, not to intrude on the Haifa’ee or to allow the Haifa’ee to intrude upon us.
But on his way back from Abu Salim’s maq’ad, the hour was late, the night moonless, and the terrain tricky. The minutes stretched long, I imagine, until he reached that post by the junction and found his friend the Haifa’ee at the post. After a good supper, a cold beer or two, and half a pack of cigarettes, he probably told the Haifa’ee, as he had told me, that he didn’t feel right about leaving me at Abu Salim’s maq’ad. . .
Tal’s intuition was off, warped by the war, the Haifa’ee probably thought, as I did.
But three days later, or is it five days later, the Haifa’ee hears from a camel-rider that he must dispatch my escort-guardian to Abu S
alim’s compound, quick-fast, before I get carried away by longing . . . and wishful thinking . . .
j
He fell on me like rain on a land plagued by drought. Out of the blue came this man, Tal, “dew” in Hebrew, who restored me as rain does a desert land and, like dew, evaporated only from the surface.
Life had never afforded him the opportunity to travel with anyone from outside his circle, the kibbutz and the army, until the day we met.
A new sphere opened up for both him and me that day—a sphere we referred to as “The Jeep.” And maybe because we were travelling in the interior of a wilderness where manna dropped from heaven and mountains parted for you at the moment of impact, we believed the Jeep was invested with metaphysical powers.
From the start, not one moment in the Jeep was like another. Gears were shifted by him, and by me. We took turns at the wheel, but rode out the bumps together. Classified maps and information were declassified. The gap between our seats was filled with sleeping bags so that we could sit closer together; could talk without yelling over the rushing winds and the rumbling motor—at least, that’s the rationale we gave it the first day.
It was on just such a beautiful day that Tal had first set foot in The Land. “I thought we landed in paradise,” he told me soon after we passed the Haifa’ee’s post. Tal was a city-child in Belgium, six years old the day he and his parents flew in to the kibbutz. “In that same day my family grew from three to three hundred and sixty,” he said, and everything that his extended family—the kibbutz—had, was his for keeps.
“Mine, for keeps?” He was incredulous at first. “For me it was a dream come true to ride, not a wooden carousel horse but a real horse, to gallop in open space—my fields, my horse . . . And you didn’t have to ask your parents for money to buy a toy or a sweet. And your parents didn’t have to pay money for anything. My mother didn’t have to drag parcels from the market. There was no marketplace in the kibbutz. Fish, you could net from your lake. Eggs, you could gather from your chicken coop. Tomatoes came from your garden, melons from your fields, bananas from your plantation, milk from your cows, honey from your beehives. My parents and I had found the fabled land of milk and honey, just as my father had said we would. A child born in the kibbutz takes it all for granted, but for me, the kibbutz was paradise.”
Tal, obviously unaccustomed to tell his story on our first day, needed no prodding to tell it now, on our last wadi crossing. “Back in Belgium, in wintertime, it was grey and cold, and windows had to be kept shut. But here, in the Jordan Valley, wintertime was—is—bright and warm, and windows are wide open. And summertime is like the Garden of Eden. You swim nude in the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River, with your kibbutz classmates, no grown-ups. We lifeguarded one another. And no grown-up forced a child to do anything—not even homework, in this Garden of Eden. No teacher patrolled the classroom during exams in this paradise. If you cheated you were stripped of honour, not by a grown-up, but by your peers—your classmates, your roommates. We kibbutz children roomed with our classmates in the children’s house, a mini-paradise, where the child had full autonomy. Boys and girls roomed together; classmates shared everything, even our parents.
“Four or five o’clock in the afternoon, we’d visit our parents in their living quarters. And if your own parents didn’t indulge you with their undivided attention, you walked over to visit a classmate’s parents. Six or seven o’clock in the evening, the whole kibbutz, children and grown-ups, would gather in the dining room, which was bigger than any restaurant in Belgium. The pots in the kitchen were so big that a child could play hide-and-seek in them.
“Shabbat, the kibbutz would swell with so many guests that dinner was served in two or three shifts. And even though all kibbutz members were secular, on the eve of Shabbat, everyone in the dining room would wear a festive white shirt or blouse. After supper, everyone would gather on the great lawn for a play by the national theatre—the Habima—or a concert by the Israeli Symphony Orchestra, or some dance recitals, concerts, plays, and puppet shows performed by members of the kibbutz. But everyone had seen and heard so many rehearsals that the performances would put most of the audience to sleep.”
His performance would be a surprise, Tal decided at age nine or ten. In secret, bit by bit, he borrowed the gunpowder from a box of ammunition to make fireworks.
“Fireworks? How did you know how to make them?” I asked.
“Same way I knew how to swim and how to speak Hebrew—by osmosis,” Tal replied. “The difficulty was keeping everything secret. On a rare quiet evening, as soon as it got dark, I set off the fireworks, but the minute they exploded, the siren howled and the whole kibbutz shifted to red alert. At that time, years before the ’67 war, there wasn’t a day that Syria didn’t pound the valley with heavy artillery from the Golan Heights; and Jordan always unleashed artillery barrages, and terrorists to boot. Their activity often singed the night sky, but never fireworks. My classmates had never seen fireworks, except in the movies. I wanted them to see the real thing—the real, colourful paradise.”
It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone in his kibbutz would mistake his fireworks for enemy fire, Tal went on to say, driving slower and slower, almost as if he didn’t want to reach Abu Salim’s maq’ad, where he and I would part.
“Saper—tell on,” I urged him, like the Badu do a storyteller. “Ghul—tell on . . .”
“There wasn’t a child in the kibbutz who couldn’t tell, just by the whistle of a bullet or a shell, its calibre and target,” Tal went on. “Far or near, whenever the siren howled, everyone was supposed to take cover in the nearest shelter. Everyone, that is, except the grown-ups, who were assigned to treat the injured, or release the livestock if the barns caught fire, or secure the kibbutz against infiltrating terrorists. The kibbutz will never forgive me for triggering a false alarm, I thought, or worse: the kibbutz will forgive me because I was an outsider, a newcomer from Belgium—I was a boy who wanted to be like all my classmates, a native-born kibbutznik.”
He ran away that night and went into hiding before anyone in the kibbutz suspected that the siren was a false alarm. “I stayed in hiding for two nights and two days,” he said.
“No way,” I said. “No way could you hide in that valley for more than half a day, if that. Not in the valley I know, the border kibbutzim I remember. Even if you had the courage and the cunning to scrape together enough water and food to sustain you for two nights and two days, heads would be counted in the shelters of your kibbutz. Life would be on hold throughout the whole valley until you were found. Such consequences must have flashed through your mind before you went into hiding . . .”
“No. All of that would flash through the mind of an Israeli child, born and raised in The Land,” said Tal. “You Sabras—native-born Israelis—can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to be a newcomer to The Land, to the kibbutz.
“My fantasy in hiding,” Tal continued, “was that my classmates would find my hiding place and beg me to come home. ‘Only if you promise,’ I’d say in response, ‘that all would be forgotten, especially that I’m a newcomer,’ and that never again would they laugh at my mother’s broken Hebrew or at her Belgian accent and foreign ways . . .”
His mother was a city woman in Belgium, Tal explained. To her, the kibbutz was a group of farmers who had come through for her and her children when her husband was killed. A reliable bunch of farmers, and heroic, but also crude, provincial, narrow. “And worst to her were the farmers’ children—a wild, undisciplined bunch whom she regarded as a very bad influence on me.
“It surprised me, to put it mildly, how much I missed that wild bunch after two nights and two days in hiding. I was also tormented by the thought that my mother would be sick from worry for me.
“I headed to her room after nightfall. Everyone in the kibbutz was fast asleep, it seemed. Her door, like all the doors in the kibbutz, was unlocked; she didn’t go to sle
ep as early as the farmers. But she had predicted to the minute when I’d show up. A cup of steaming chocolate was waiting for me on her table, and supper, piping hot.
“‘How did you know?’ I asked her.
“She told me that the whole kibbutz had known for two days and two nights where I was hiding. It had taken only minutes for the farmers to locate my hiding place. After that, they took turns keeping a watchful eye on me. Not for a second in two days and two nights was I out of their sight, she told me. As soon as I came out of hiding, a farmer came over and told her that I would, no doubt, come to hide now under her apron. ‘These farmers know you as well as your own mother,’ she told me. However, she said I would find no protection under her apron this time. She had never dreamed that I could be a bad influence on the wild bunch. Now, for once, she agreed with the farmers. One child learns from another in the kibbutz, they told her, and she agreed. My escapade had to be turned into a lesson to all the children in the kibbutz. I was to be made an example of.
“I was too stunned, too humiliated for words, or for hot chocolate and supper. My mother could see it. Still, she wouldn’t let me sleep that night in her quarters. My father wouldn’t want me to hide under her apron, she said. Before I left, I asked her if the whole kibbutz knew also that I was preparing fireworks.
“‘No, that was a surprise!’ she replied. ‘A surprise that fell hard on the whole kibbutz, the whole valley.’
“‘Because it triggered a false alarm?’ I asked her.
“She didn’t know, she said, she couldn’t understand the farmers. They take so much in stride: No matter how heavy the enemy fire, they don’t evacuate the children; they don’t give up. They sleep in underground shelters. They drive armoured tractors. They plant a forest of barbed wire around their living quarters to keep out terrorists. All this is natural, but a child sets off fireworks, and it shocks them. She said she would never figure them out; she would always be a newcomer. So will I, I thought as I left her room.