Sulha

by Malka Marom

  “Did your clan—your tribe—compensate your father and brother for the thoroughbred she-camel they had to exchange for food?” I ask Tammam.

  “No, Wallah. Our reputation was enhanced a hundredfold by the hospitality we extended to our tribesmen from the Gates of the Wadi during that latest war,” she replied.

  “Did you ever visit-stay with your tribesmen at the Gates of the Wadi, before or after that war?” I ask the Badawias.

  “No, I never left these, our mountains—our home ground,” the girl-Badawia replies.

  “Neither did I,” says Azzizah, “nor did my mother, Tammam’s mother, her mother’s mother and mine.”

  “The best home ground in the world is our home ground, my brother told me, and he knows, for he has travelled far and wide beyond our home ground,” Tammam says.

  Azzizah, refuelling her fire-circle, not with goat and camel dung, but with the fragrant firewood she reserves for special occasions, starts to grunt and groan again. “The alum also revealed—”

  “Yaa-Rabb—my God—what else did the alum crystal reveal to you. Tell, yaa-Azzizah,” cries out Tammam.

  “The alum revealed that maybe—yumkim—the cause of your ailment is your fear that your husband was fated to marry another wife.” Azzizah’s eyes are tearful from the fragrant fire smoke as she addresses me. “Therefore, I shall cast a spell to spare you from the most terrible fate of sharing your husband with another wife . . .”

  “Aywa, it is not good,” agrees Tammam.

  “Wallah, I would not have suspected it from looking at you two,” I say.

  “We two are more fortunate than most,” Azzizah replies. “I would rather my daughter be blind in both her eyes than be married to a man married to three wives, or even two . . .”

  “Cast your spell, yaa-Azzizah,” says Tammam.

  Silence.

  Azzizah glides into her tent, muttering something that casts a spell on Tammam, it seems. The junior wife picks up a blackened poker and taps and beats the trio of rocks set in centre of the fire-circle to hold cooking pots. Beats and taps, drums a slow gentle rhythm that changes tone with the striking of the various rocks. The echo bouncing from mountain chain to mountain chain surrounding the compound, sounds like the heartbeat of the desert. And the dancer emerging from Azzizah’s tent, draped in a huge black cape bordered with red embroidery that covers her veils, shawls, thowbs, and jewels, seems to have been conjured by the rhythm, like water from the sand. Out of the aridity of age and isolation has sprung a dancer vital, free as the Hamsin—the fifty desert winds.

  Silence.

  Tammam picks up the poker and holds it at a right angle; one end disappears under her veil, and it becomes a shepherd’s flute. Her eyes close. Her fingers grope for invisible holes in the blackened poker and out comes the piping of a shepherd’s song, the likes of which I have never heard. As Tammam plays her flute, Azzizah is stilled. And as she undrapes herself, shrugging off the voluminous red-bordered cape, she looks angry, pained, sapped of power. She is dying to run away, escape, it seems, but cannot. Tammam plays such a compelling flute she pipes you to the limit, and then a breath beyond it, and another still, until the granite mountain chains tremble in response. You feel that if you don’t hang on, brace yourself; you’ll be drawn into the vast unknown.

  j

  I dream I want to write my name in Hebrew, from right to left, but can’t for the life of me. Can’t breathe, sweating and drenched with dew, I wake up and pick up my pen . . . What a relief to find I can write my own name.

  CHAPTER 21

  So bright is the sky tonight, you could read and write by it, and the moon is not yet completely full . . .

  The night was moonless when Tal and I drove up the wadi leading to these mountains—ten or twelve days ago, judging by the moon.

  The Badawias hardly mentioned Tal, or our journey—our going in circles and in zigzag, as Abu Salim had called it. Their imagination wouldn’t scale the confines of the familiar. It is forbidden for anyone, except their blood-kin to escort them, therefore, Tal must be my brother, cousin, nephew, uncle . . .

  Did Azzizah divine that he isn’t? Was it to purify me of straying with him that the Badawias had offered to bath me?

  Tal was quite sure that the drought had not yet forced Abu Salim to move his maq’ad from the spot Professor Russell had circled in red on the tourist map. I don’t remember the scale, but it was thousands of times vaguer than the maps Tal had borrowed from the Unit.

  Never before had I seen a map so detailed, so up-to-date. One glance, and Tal knew if the nearest waterhole was dry or not. He could travel on those maps for hours, virtually see the terrain in three dimensions; see the colour of this mountain or that wadi at this or that hour, and the length of the shadow this cliff or that tree would throw at this or that hour—even a lone acacia, like the one standing at the edge of this forbidden plateau, which Tal had never seen before “on the ground,” as he called it. He was curious to see “on the ground” the “dead space” his maps concealed. It was an enigma to me that he could see on the map what was concealed, measuring how many kilometres from this point to that, triangulating coordinates, reading mysteries like headlines. It took years of reconnaissance missions and counter-terrorist raids behind enemy lines to acquire and hone such map-reading skills—skills he tested and retested as we roamed the interior of the peninsula, almost as if he feared he had lost them, and with them the best of himself, in the months it took his reconstructed knees to heal.

  It was partly to test his new knees that he had jumped on the opportunity offered to him by Gingie to escort me to the desert instead of the redhead, Tal said. The doctors had refused to declare him fit, insisting he had not yet fully recovered from the reconstructive surgery. He thought they were being overly cautious, overly protective of their reconstructive work, and he couldn’t wait to prove them wrong.

  Soon after we entered the interior of the peninsula, he asked me if I’d mind taking a bit of a detour. He wanted to give his knees a test at one of his old training grounds. There’s a bit of a climb, he said, as we neared a remote hilltop. It looked like a hell of a climb from the dry riverbed at the bottom, but even the few steep spots would have been manageable had he not been bounding in the lead, bugging me to keep pace, as if the Nation would fall if we didn’t make it to the summit in record time. His knees were as good as new, he said, laughing at me for hauling along a camera like a tourist. He waived me off mockingly whenever I aimed the Pentax at him, but he stayed in the frame and even offered a bashful smile by the sheer wall that towered to the flat, tabletop summit that looked like Masada from the distance, but without the welcoming path.

  “It’s a bit of a sweat to scale this mountain wall, but what do you say we give it a try?” Tal said. Twice before, he had scaled this mountain wall to that summit, he told me, both times with men who served with him.

  “I’m not a draftee in the Unit,” I said, “let’s get back to the Jeep.”

  “No man is drafted to serve in the Unit,” he said. “The army sticks to the Book on this one. Devarim—Deuteronomy—if I’m not mistaken: ‘Who is the man that is fearful and faint-hearted, let him go-return to his house . . . lest his brother’s heart be faint as well . . .’ Volunteers only serve in the Unit.

  “This climb is not as difficult as it looks,” he insisted. And really it wasn’t—at least not until a toehold started to crumble underfoot, and then another, and another.

  “Step light and fast. This mountain wall is made of a chalk-like substance. It crumbles easily,” Tal cautioned me. More like powdered sugar, I thought, as it crumbled under his gut when he was lying flat at the edge of the table top, trying to reach my hand and hoist me to the summit.

  “Move back, quick, before gravity and this fucking table top carry us into the next world,” I snapped, cursing myself for my blind trust in him.

  “Grab
hold of my hand. Come on, Leora, before your foothold goes. Imagine yourself as light as a feather—too light to crumble the ledge . . .” With that, he hoisted me to the summit—a sweaty, dust-covered feather, trembling with disbelief.

  “Are you crazy?! How the hell are we going to get off this fucking mountain alive?!” I vented at him.

  You could see nothing from this vantage point—nothing but deserted wilderness.

  “Nothing but promise. You are looking at the Promised Land,” he said. “Aaron, the brother of Moses, is buried on this hilltop,” he informed me.

  “I’ll be buried here too. I’m not going down that crummy slope,” I said.

  I could have killed him when he led me to the opposite side of that table top and I saw a gentle slope, simple downhill jog. Then I saw the toll his concession to me was taking on his knees.

  “From now on we only go up, and stay up,” I said. He shook his head, smothering his laughter, as if, like water, laughter would douse the fire of his anger. He needed the energy, the tremendous power anger supplies. But he laughed when I offered to carry him piggyback. For a moment or two he put his full weight on my shoulders, and I felt he was solid muscle. It was hard to imagine him light as a feather. When I managed to hold him up, he looked surprised, glad, relieved.

  “You have the stuff it takes to make it into the Unit,” he said.

  What was this stuff I had? To back him up in a crunch? To entrust my life to him? Was this test of his knees really a test of trust? A need to see promise in emptiness?

  j

  Tal intended us to stay a lifetime, not overnight, when he called it a day, you’d have thought if you saw how he went about setting up camp. He took charge by force of habit, it seemed. I didn’t mind. It was something to behold how he checked a cove or an inlet we decided to set up in until he found an area of level ground, clear of anthills, scorpions, and snakes. Then, one by one, he’d clear sharp rocks and stones that might trip you and bruise your bones when you stretched out. Racing against the sinking sun, we’d comb the wadi for driftwood. In the last purple rays, we’d build a fire and spread our sleeping bags on the ground by the fire-circle, like welcome-carpets. He’d park the Jeep so that it would shield the fire-circle from the cold night wind. Next he’d unload the cartons of provisions and cooking utensils and place them by the back wheels. The water jerrican he put by the Jeep’s front tire, so that we could wash our face next to the side mirror, and far from the sleeping bags. “From now on, wherever we camp overnight, we must place the same things in the same spots so that we won’t waste time and energy looking for this or that, or break a hip, nose, or wrist tripping over a jerrican, pot or pan,” he said. And he did all that, night after night, no matter where we camped. Every campground looked the same, such a craving he has for order, for a constant, for home . . .

  j

  Tal’s craving for the extraordinary got us into the “spectacular” wadi.

  “I saw an interesting shortcut on the map, through a spectacular wadi. What do you say we take it?” he had asked.

  “Let’s go for it,” I said, excited, elated. Travelling with him was like travelling with Arik back in the days when nothing was impossible.

  At first, the wadi had looked like many we had crossed. Circles open, circles close, mountain chains spin forty-sixty kliks an hour, and just when it seems the Jeep is going to crash into the mountains, they part, and another circle opens up. But this time the mountains opened onto a black gorge, plunging down to a tiny blue dot, barely visible, at the bottom. It caught Tal by surprise. He pumped the brakes, standing up. Too stunned to fear or feel anything, I waited for the Jeep to overturn, to roll on its canvas top and crush us. He pumps and pumps, and the tires don’t grip. The Jeep keeps sliding, tail up, and the gear in the back spills to the front. I keep shoving it back, but the noise tells me how futile it is. Jerricans and boxes of utensils and provisions, cans, cartons, bottles, pots, pans—all tearing loose, crashing, banging . . . the gear will tear our heads off if the Jeep doesn’t stop skidding.

  “Watch out, Leora! Brace yourself!” Tal is working the steering wheel now, like crazy. And the Jeep slides sideways, front and tail bumpers scraping the mountain walls. Then, the Jeep tilts to the side, nearly rolling over, rolling tail down, bumping, scraping, skidding—slows down, stops.

  The wadi smells of burning rock, burning metal, and burning rubber.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, you?”

  “Hafffffffiiiiiifffff,” he replies, and the echo trembles in that wadi, a mountain fissure opening to a different geological era. Way up, the sky is a sliver of blue squeezed between two towering walls. The sun has never been here, the cold and dark as old as time. In the shade, we can see history in the mountain walls—layers and layers of years, decades, centuries, in countless colours and shades. We can touch time here, polished smooth.

  There is no sign of a white flood line. The floodwaters must have filled this canyon to the top, polished it smooth, as they gushed with a force that ripped away mountains along the way—boulders too large to clear this narrow. An avalanche of huge boulders blocked the exit at the bottom end. And the same slippery bedrock that mocked the tires blocked the way back to the entrance at the top. On both sides, mountain walls scraped the sky. The Jeep was trapped.

  “I didn’t expect this wadi to be that ‘interesting,’” Tal said, clearly kicking himself. I had no doubt he had seen this wadi in three dimensions after reading his classified maps. But, more than once or twice before, his maps had underestimated the danger.

  “That was great driving,” I said, my teeth chattering, in shock as if it sunk in only now how close we had been to being killed.

  “Where did you learn Morse code,” he said, rubbing my body to draw the blood back to my face.

  Just then the Jeep started to creak and to roll, and the two of us jumped out and grabbed a couple of rocks to wedge under the wheels. As if it mattered now . . .

  I averted my eyes from his; I didn’t want him to see how sorry I was to lose this desert beast—this heap of rusted bumpers, dented green fenders, faded canvas flopping over a homemade wooden frame, plastic windows too scratched by wind-driven sand to see through, a hole in the dashboard where once was a radio, and two patched-up front seats joined together by the sleeping bags stuffed in the gap between them.

  Tal picked his way down the avalanche of boulders and rocks, spry as a mountain goat. If his reconstructed knees were hurting him now, he gave no sign of it. Ordinary surgery had extraordinary effects in this spectacular wadi, it seemed. He went all the way to the exit at the bottom. Halfway back up, at the impossible obstacle—a crater between boulders, almost twice his height, he stopped and became so absorbed in surveying that obstacle that he seemed to be in a trance. Then, like a man possessed by demons, he began to choose rocks and stones to build a couple of ramps for the Jeep’s wheels to cross.

  “Beware of scorpions and snakes sheltering in the crevices,” he cautioned me when I arrived to lend a hand.

  Those improvised ramps would support the Jeep if they’d support his body weight, he thought, or so it seemed as he jumped and stomped on each ramp. Any wobble or slide, he corrected with a rock or a stone.

  No one will believe these ramps, I thought, as I reloaded the Pentax and snapped a long view of them from way below, close to the blue exit, my back glued to the mountain face as I scan for a better perspective . . .

  “Staaaay wherrrre yooooou arrrrre . . .” The wadi echoes Tal.

  He must be far from certain that the Jeep will clear the wadi on those ramps we improvised or he wouldn’t leave me out. I’m to seek help in case he gets pinned under the Jeep, it seems.

  “Waaait, Taaal!” I call out to him.

  But even before the echo stops bouncing, he’s behind the steering wheel, aligning the wheels to the ramp, and releasing the handbrake . . .

/>   The Jeep starts to roll, nose down, dead silent—no engine, not a breath . . . He must be standing on the brakes.

  Stone by stone, rock by rock, the Jeep keeps crawling, tilting from side to side, creaking, complaining . . . I hold my breath until the wadi roars with a sparked-up engine . . .

  j

  “Abu Salim has just returned from his journey. Ashkor Allah—thank God,” Azzizah muttered, half-asleep when the saluki dogs ran to the top of the path that leads to the maq’ad.

  “Yaa-Rabb . . . yaa-Rabb . . .” Tammam moans under her carpet-blanket.

  “Go back to sleep,” Azzizah mutters to herself or to Tammam. “Abu Salim has decided to sleep at his maq’ad tonight.

  “Rohu! Rohu. Go. Go to the maq’ad,” Azzizah ordered the salukis, and they took off like a shot.

  “Is it the behaviour of the salukis that tells you that Abu Salim has returned and has decided to sleep at his maq’ad tonight?” I ask Azzizah.

  “Ah, Wallah, I have been married to Abu Salim for so many years, I can sense-see through mountain to his heart,” Azzizah whispered in reply. “Patience is better than thinking,” she counselled to herself, Tammam, or me.

  The Badawias and little Salimeh are sleeping by the fire-circle in front of Azzizah’s tent. Tammam was too tired this evening to move to her tent and start a fire to stave off the cold night air for little Salimeh. It’s really a punishment to leave a crackling fire-circle by which you have been lying around, sipping tea, casting spells, and fighting off sleep. Soon after sundown the Badawia can’t help but give in to sleep. Dusk doesn’t stretch here for hours, like summertime up north in Canada. The birds would probably be chirping still at this hour in Algonquin—here you hear no chirp; the birds probably think it’s way past midnight, but to me it feels like nine or ten o’clock—hours before my bedtime.