Sulha

by Malka Marom

  “But just then, when I’d finally accepted it, I entered the children’s house and discovered that I was no longer a newcomer, but a kibbutz child, same as my classmates.” Tal asked me to light him a cigarette and then he went on to say that to be a kibbutz child was not exactly what he had imagined.

  “The night-light was just bright enough to show all my classmates sleeping. I tiptoed to my room and crawled under the blanket. The bedsprings creaked, and one of my roommates woke up. He opened an eye and whispered, ‘Shalom, Tal.’ Then I heard a whisper rolling from room to room: ‘Tal is home . . . Tal is home . . .’ Next thing I know, all my classmates are gathered around my bed and from all directions I hear, ‘You put us all to shame, Tal . . . You are one of us . . . We kibbutz children . . .’

  “Now, I was no longer just I, but Us and We. Mine was Ours, and Ours was mostly leased or entrusted to Us by the Nation, which was also Us, We, Ours . . . I had confused one Ours with another. And so had my mother. The boundaries of public and private were clearly defined in the city, in Belgium. Here, they were clear to my classmates—bred in their bones. They gave no thought, no words to the idea, until one bone cracked. My classmates didn’t know at first how to infuse this marrow into my bones.

  “They told me that the Nation is so strapped for cash, it’s counting bullets—bullets for Defence, security—and I blew a whole box of ammunition on fireworks. And worse, my classmates said, I blew a moral value held high by us, the Nation. Then they gave me a list of never-ever: ‘Never ever forget that ammunition is to be deployed only for the Defence of our Nation. Never ever play with any weapon like a child corrupted by war. Never ever forget that nothing frightens our Nation more than the idea that children can be corrupted by war, except the fear that we children would get killed; that is why children serve the Nation best by staying in shelters and by staying away from firearms. Never ever forget that we kibbutz children are the best the future has to offer to our Nation . . .’

  “In those days you couldn’t turn on a radio or open a newspaper without knowing how impressed the whole world was by the way the grown-ups were teaching us kibbutz children to adhere to the moral values that have elevated the kibbutz to a model of democracy and equality . . . there were no juvenile delinquents in the kibbutz, no destitute, no underprivileged—and no lenders, no conniving dealers, no underhanded pushers. That was the attraction the kibbutz had held for my father, but had he lived in the kibbutz for more than a year, he would have missed the spice and energy of the city, or so my mother thought. It would have disturbed him to see me behave like the farmers, lacking Jewish flavour, Jewish smarts, Jewish humour . . .

  “My classmates didn’t have to tell me to never ever forget that the best thing in the world was to be a kibbutz child. Or to never ever forget that, of all the children in The Land, we kibbutz children were the most privileged. That is why our Nation expected us to be better than all the children in the The Land, my classmates explained.

  “That list of never-ever generated tremendous peer pressure and rivalry. We were unaware of it, until we left for army duty, volunteered to serve in elite units, and the war claimed many . . .

  “The more classmates you lose in battle, the more you expect of yourself, your nation, your leaders, the more disappointed you get . . . the more classmates leave the kibbutz and move to pursue the I-Me-Mine of city life.”

  On the battlefield he had observed more than once or twice, Tal went on to say, how the truly courageous could be seized by such fear that they had to be hospitalized. “Makes you wonder if a person doesn’t have a limited amount of resources; instead of ‘use it or lose it,’ you lose it when you use it. Maybe that’s what happened to my kibbutz classmates, if not to the Nation. After all these decades of war, we can’t resist the urge to live it up today for it might be your last. But the longer you squeeze today for all it’s worth and fuck tomorrow, the more you reduce the odds that you, the Nation, will make it to tomorrow. So our gut is torn between two basic survival instincts. It’s schizophrenic: When you live it up, your thinking shrinks to the singular—I-Me-Mine. But when you serve in the army, your thinking had better expand to the plural—We-Us-Ours—or you won’t live to see tomorrow.”

  Tal didn’t say it in those words. His Hebrew is rooted in the Jordan Valley, the kibbutz, the Unit; mine is a dropout Hebrew, along with dropout English and night school Arabic.

  “Your Hebrew isn’t bad—a few outdated idioms, one or two grammar mistakes, a misused word here and there, but from your accent it’s impossible to tell you dropped out,” he said at one point.

  “English also, I speak with a good Hebrew accent. Now if I could get my butt to park where my accent is . . .”

  He laughed. “I can’t imagine you living outside,” he said. “A native like you. How did you happen to end up in Canada of all places? Tell on,” Tal urged me. After being gagged here in The Land for more than twenty years, he had no idea how it moved me.

  I was unaccustomed to talking about myself to anyone but you, Arik.

  A cool evening wind fanned away the heat, but my face was burning when I opened up to him.

  “I was dressed like a high-fashion model when I landed in Toronto. You wouldn’t have recognized me,” I said, forgetting I was talking to Tal, not to you, Arik. Tal laughed, so incongruous to him, to imagine me dressed like a mannequin in a glossy magazine.

  j

  I’ve got to get to a doctor. As soon as the Badawias get up, I’ll insist they ask one of their neighbouring clansmen to escort me to the nearest clinic—the one at the Haifa’ee’s Nature Conservation post is the closest, I think. I don’t have the energy to even imagine breaking through these mountains again. What in the hell am I doing here? And how in the hell do I get out of here?

  Just tell Abu Salim that you want to leave and he’ll arrange for you a ride, Russell told me. Well, tell me what do I do when Abu Salim is God-knows-where.

  CHAPTER 19

  My throat was so constricted last night, and I was plagued with such a case of shivers, that I thought I was breathing my last. It took forever for the antihistamines to kick in, and when they did they knocked me out. I slept through a whole day and night, according to the Badawias.

  Now it’s teatime, again. Tea—the Badu’s chicken soup. I’ve sipped so much tea my stomach sloshes with every move like a full jerrican.

  This morning only Azzizah is here, working her loom. Tammam went with little Salimeh to “catch the wind, ventilate . . .” It could get to you, I guess, the narrow confines of this forbidden compound—especially when your stranger-guest has been afflicted by a devil unknown to you.

  I groaned all night in pain, “and in longing for your loved ones,” Tammam told me first thing this morning. I could barely hold the tea glass then, or lift it to my swollen lips. No wonder she fled to “catch the wind . . .”

  “You surely feel better now if you write-to-remember,” Azzizah told me while weaving, weaving. “But, Wallah, how it can ail you, remembering.” She heaved a sigh.

  “How did it ail you, remembering?” I asked her.

  Silence.

  “How did you heal the ailment brought on by remembering?” I pressed.

  “Not proper to ask questions,” she replied, weaving, weaving.

  “The best of my friends, Riva, is also a darwisha—a medicine woman, not unlike you, yaa-Azzizah. So is her husband, Mottke—Wallah, he is a kebir darwish—a big medicine man,” I told her.

  “So was my father, Wallah. What a big darwish my father was,” Azzizah said, weaving, weaving . . .

  j

  Ah, yaa-Mottke, I wish you were here. I could use a doctor now, Wallah. All the shots you had advised me to take, and the pills you had insisted I pack in my desert gear, have helped fuck-all so far.

  Ah, yaa-Mottke and Riva, why don’t you get into my Jeep and ask that redheaded son of yours to drive you to these remote
mountain chains and see, like I have, why the Book mentions the desert on every second page but attempts no description. It is impossible to capture this place—in words or in a photo. The desert shows you a different face every minute, a kaleidoscope of vistas powered by the ever-changing angle of the sun. No camera aperture opens wide enough to hold the sky, mountains, canyons, and the lone acacia tree you see in most photos of this desert. As the sages say, you need background to see, to appreciate foreground . . .

  If it weren’t for Mottke, Levi would have reported for compulsory duty when he was eighteen, like everyone else in The Land.

  “But in Canada you graduate from high school after grade 13, not twelve, like the kids in The Land,” Mottke told the boy. “You are not like the kids in The Land. Recognizing it, the law of The Land entitles you to a three- or four-year deferment. But in your case I think the law doesn’t go far enough. In the cases of the likes of you, who are all too eager to be soldiers or combat pilots, I think the law should deem you unfit, and advise you to get your kicks elsewhere. We run a clean service here, or at least as clean a service as possible.”

  The boy likes to think that Mottke is like you, Arik, even though I had told him that, unlike Mottke, you had held beauty, joy, and adventure in high regard; you had bent the law, broke speed limits, and tempted the Angel whenever you straddled a motorcycle and climbed into a cockpit; you wasted rationed fuel to tip your wings over the tin-shack town during my working hours, and at all other times over the room-and-a-half we called home; and how that declaration of love touched the newcomers and our neighbours. I told our Levi that the bane of your life were civil servants—some of whom were Mottke and Riva’s best friends, old underground friends—who had nixed every plan you submitted for your dream town because they considered beauty a luxury we could ill afford; even though your design cost little more than the ugly tin-shack towns those civil servants favoured. But no matter what I told our Levi, he idolized Mottke. He keeps picking father figures.

  It bugs Dave—it reflects badly on him, Dave thinks, and you know what store Dave puts on appearances. Still, Dave was more of a buddy to him than a dad.

  “No man can take your father’s place,” Dave told the kid, time and again. It was out of loyalty to you, Arik, that Dave said it—felt it. But the boy needed a father to idolize and emulate, and he could do worse than Mottke.

  Mottke is probably one of the few people in the world—never mind The Land—who considers the rescue mission at Entebbe to be a flagrant abuse of power, trust, and sovereignty. “What right have we to land in Uganda and shoot left and right, even on a mission to rescue a jumbo jet full of hostages, be they all our people?” Mottke would tell you. “If our people want to fly Outside, to see France and have a good time in Paris, let them do it in good health—and at their own risk, not my son’s.”

  To Dave, The Land is like a movie—a vicarious adventure that is dust free, risk free, blood free. The West Bank is vital to us, Dave believes, just like Gingie—Mottke and Riva’s son—does. But let Gingie pay the price for the West Bank.

  Gingie is Dave’s boy, and Levi, Mottke’s.

  But Dave doesn’t tremble for Gingie, or for Levi.

  Mottke trembles for both boys.

  The irony! The one who trembles grew up to believe he was so powerful he could change the course of destiny. And the one who does not tremble grew up to believe he was that powerless, whatever he does, good or bad, makes no difference.

  Exile, paradox is thy name, Wallah. Dave, the man who takes as a compliment a cocktail-party comment that his wife is not at all like a Jew, secretly wishes he could wear his Jewishness like a badge for all to envy, and fear—just like Gingie . . . Dave sees the redhead as a sort of vindication for Christie Pits. Here is a pint-sized redhead, wearing a tzitzit and kippa like a ghetto Yid, yet serving in the crack commando unit in The Land—in the world, after Entebbe.

  Soon as they finished their studies in Canada, Riva and Mottke returned to The Land. Dropping out to exile is a form of suicide, Riva thinks. That’s what I tried to do when Arik got killed—tried to stop living, growing, aging, according to her. “Why do you think you keep braiding your hair just as you did twenty years ago?” she said, “And wearing the same Nimrod sandals, the same hand-embroidered shmates, as if you ran out of clothes coupons, just as you did twenty years ago in the days of austerity?” Riva thinks only a self-hating people would choose to live in exile. We are a self-destructive people, she maintains. Both our temples were destroyed, not by outsiders, but by our own, and no one could destroy the third except us. That’s why Riva doesn’t give a damn about what a Gentile thinks or writes or broadcasts about us. But when one of our own drops out or talks like a drop out, she reacts as if Samson had gone mad, shaking the pillars of his Temple, and screaming, “Let my own people die with me.”

  Riva won’t admit to feeling torn. Opposite pulls is a Diaspora-exile’s disease, Riva maintains. She hates Shalom Aleichem because he extols “exile thinking”; on one hand this, on the other that. “An exile copout,” Riva likes to say, “that kind of thinking leads to death camps.”

  For years, Riva has been telling her friends that I didn’t drop out, I just married a Canadian, next year I’ll bundle him off to The Land for good. “You see?” she told them when Dave purchased a suite at the condominium hotel in Herzliyya on the beach.

  Dave stayed in that condominium once, said he liked The Land but couldn’t stand the people. They’re no different from any Duddy Kravitz in Montreal, Toronto, or New York, he said. They’d sell their mother for a buck.

  Every year I fly over; and the taller Levi grows, the longer I stay at that damn hotel suite—alone.

  Riva, torn, for once, between marriage and The Land, doesn’t know what to advise me. She can’t stand the thought that I’d have to choose one or the other, so she stuffed The Land in my veins, sparing me exile, self-destruction, “suicide.”

  “Deep inside herself, Leora carries The Land,” Riva started to tell her friends. She took my recollection of her as the embodiment of The Land in Toronto, and switched it around.

  “Let go of your power over your son,” Riva, of all people, tells me. How can she see me as manipulative when she knows I am the reluctant holder of power dumped on me by the law of The Land? Why, I want to know, would the law so protect the only child of a family and so persecute his only parent, his mother?

  The decision is his mother’s—mine alone. Now tell me, how could Levi be an exception in the eyes of the law, but not in his mother’s eyes?

  The law is primitive, Mottke thinks, primitive as blood. Mottke speaks from both corners of his mouth at once: Rise above the blood, the primitive; but die to defend your nation, your land.

  Primitive—Wallah, what a two-faced beast. Blood is detestably primitive, but primitive art is great. Take the art; dump the blood. Pick and choose your heritage: blue and white; red is out . . .

  The primitive ignites war, Mottke believes. So how come the most peaceful tribes in The Land are the very Badu tribes that he considers to be primitive?

  Ah, yaa-Riva, Mottke, wish you were here. I feel drained, listless, isolated . . . Just the fear of isolation could sap a person’s strength. It’s tempting to surrender to the desert, to break the chain of connections and responsibilities . . .

  The contribution of my Canadian husband, Dave, to The Land dwarfed even my parents’, or so it appeared when the prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, recognized it, and honoured Dave—and other big U.J.A contributors like him—at a ritzy dinner at the Hilton in Jerusalem four or five months ago. It didn’t occur to Dave to invite my parents to the reception. Levi and I had to suggest it to him. Yes, good idea, Dave said. My parents declined with thanks. I didn’t go either. Levi accompanied Dave. Their photo with Begin, framed in silver, is displayed proudly in Dave’s den.

  Such honour is like junk food: the more it swells you,
the more you crave it. And now, at every United Jewish Appeal, Dave’s cronies will slap him on the back, no doubt, and say: What a great contribution, Dave; his latest contribution—Levi, Arik’s son, my son.

  If Dave had served army duty, he’d know what it’s like to get a furlough for Shabbat. And Levi, like a orphan, will stay at the base, or crash one Shabbat at Riva and Mottke’s, the next one at my parents’, the next at Arik’s parents’, the next at my sister’s, or Arik’s brother’s. Like a homeless, motherless, fatherless bastard, he of all sons, after the price his father paid to make Levi feel at home in The Land. The thought of it is unbearable to me.

  The Badu would say Dave and I were fated to be married these twenty years—and then fated to be divorced . . .

  So be it. My days of sitting on my suitcase with one leg in Canada and one in The Land are over.

  You were favoured by fate—Wallah, Dave. Don’t blow this opportunity to correct the mistake you made in ’48. Move to The Land with me this year, or we both must accept the consequence.

  With the setting sun, my list of fears grows, as does the crowd in my head—Arik, Riva, Mottke, Gingie, Levi, Dave, my parents . . . I tuck them all in my bundle—like Rachel did with the idols she stole from her father when she was afraid to travel with Jacob to the Promised Land, to independence . . .

  CHAPTER 20

  Magic. Azzizah, a darwisha now, grunting and groaning, searches inside her remedy sack-bag, glides over to the other side of the fire-circle at the side of her tent, squats and stares at the alum crystal “to divine,” Tammam informed me, her hand vice-like around my forearm to make sure I stay-sit right here at the entrance to Azzizah’s tent. “Not good to distract the darwisha’s divining,” Tammam explains.

  Azzizah decided to practice her medicine on me only now that the swelling is almost gone and I feel much better. Tucking her alum crystal into her bundle of Badu remedies, Azzizah now demands I rejoin her by the fire-circle at the side of her tent. She grunts, groans, and stares into my face again and again as darkness closes round the fire, and the wind delivers the evening cold.