Sulha

by Malka Marom

  j

  The classic desert vista—a vast expanse of sand—was nowhere to be seen in the interior of the peninsula. The wadis—the dry riverbeds, the desert’s roads/no-roads—wound around the jagged mountain chains, closing in, and then opening to release you. Closing, opening—closing, opening—circle after circle, hour after hour. It’s a tremendous surprise when the circle of mountains parts to reveal an ocean of sand.

  Sand dunes speckled with fool’s gold, glittering enticingly in the sun, sprawl gentle, clean, untouched—except by the wind twirling the crest here and there. The heat sears the nostrils like frost, and not a shrub or a tree is evident, even at the banks of the dry riverbed that forked a wide opening onto this ocean of dunes.

  The fork to my left led to waterholes, dried up in the drought, judging from the looks of a Badu who ambled toward us from that direction. He was dragging his camel and in the August heat he was wearing a heavy winter kaffiyye and a winter parka, over a tattered sweater, over an ankle-long jalabeeya—layers to keep the sun from drying him up like a raisin. The shibriyya—dagger—buckled at his hip underlined the fierceness conveyed by his bloodshot eyes and craggy face. His lips were parched white, yet he wouldn’t touch our water canteen until he had greeted us with an endless stream of salutations.

  “Yaa-Badu, I’m getting thirsty just looking at you,” I told him. He laughed, exposing a mouthful of brown teeth. Then he dropped his head back, lifted the canteen like a water-skin, high above his lips. After a couple of gulps, he said, “Bas—enough” and screwed on the cap. “Keep the canteen,” I said.

  “Allah shall reward you,” he said in response, tucking the canteen into his faded camel saddle. Then, he pulled out a pita, and, as if the whole desert was his maq’ad—guest-receiving-place—and Tal and I his guests, he peeled off his parka and sweater, spread them on the ground like welcome-carpets, and said, “Ogodu—sit down.” Folding his legs, he offered us his pita: “Eat . . . Eat . . .”

  Tal and I had packed enough provisions for a platoon. We spread my white kaffiyye on the ground, like a tablecloth, and served the Badu a banquet lunch—sardines and tuna, pickles and olives, crackers, and, for dessert, oranges and grapefruits, courtesy of the reservniks. And water, of course, from our jerrican; the Badu drank now as if he thought he’d better save every drop in the canteen we gave him for his journey. To where? What brings him to this deserted sand furnace? Smuggling? Even after we shared with him our water and food, the Badu is cagey, not volunteering any information about himself or about the water scarcity.

  “Ask him no questions, and he’ll tell you no lies. Respect him but suspect him,” Tal muttered to me in Hebrew.

  “The Tommies also used to talk like we weren’t there,” I say to him in Hebrew; then, switching to Arabic, I ask the Badu if he happens to know where could we find the nearest waterhole.

  “Aywa—yes,” replied the Badu, pointing to the horizon in the southeast—or the southwest, for all I knew. Then in a patch of sand he draws a map of the dunes, and of the wadi bordering the dunes—which, he assures us, should take us to the waterhole.

  “His map is pretty accurate,” said Tal. In one stroke he drew on the Badu’s map a line straight across the dunes. “That’s the route I’d take. The roundabout way is a waste of gasoline.” We had purchased two extra jerricans of gasoline from a Badu driving a blue pickup, who charged us nearly ten times the going rate in The Land. Tal suspected the gas was diluted. And he didn’t trust this Badu either. “He draws a good map, but he’s probably giving us the runaround. No Arab would divulge straight stuff to a couple of strangers, no matter how much water and food they shared with him.”

  “Makes me sick, such cynical stereotyping, coming from a peacenik yet. Your knees aren’t the worst of your war souvenirs. Can your trust be reconstructed? Even if we don’t find the waterhole, he could be mistaken or his information could be outdated.”

  Tal looked at me as if he thought me a child living in a dream world. He loved my innocence. I loved his knowledge.

  “Not good to drive like he pictured, straight through the sand dunes,” the Badu told me, “Ahhsan—better—to drive around the dunes, like I pictured in the sand. Wallah, these sand dunes are full of many Jeeps and trucks, and even tanks that sank in the sand, or ran out of gasoline, or melted in the heat. Aywa, it is the worst time of day now to cross the sand dunes, for the sun is too high to tell direction. Many many people lose their way in these dunes, even in the best of times . . .”

  “We’ll let out some air out of the tires, and the Jeep will cross this sand ocean like a dune buggy,” Tal said after I translated the Badu’s words. A dune buggy on recon: we had loaded up with provisions for almost every calamity that could befall us, even with flares he had taught me how to fire back at the sulphur springs, just in case he got pinned under the Jeep.

  Before we parted from the Badu, Tal showed him a small pocket compass. The Badu looked at it in puzzlement, turning it from this side to that. “Can I tell him what it is and how it works, or would that also make you sick?” Tal asked me, sarcastically. Then he explained to the Badu in Hebrew how to read north by this instrument called a compass and I translated into Arabic.

  “Allahu akbar—Allah is great,” the Badu exclaimed. He then cautioned us to wait or, better still, take the roundabout route he had recommended, adding that this manmade north-finder couldn’t be as reliable as the North Star or as your own shadow. Tal had no argument for that.

  There was no stopping to check the compass once we ventured into the dunes. The briefest of pauses in shifting gears, and the Jeep swallowed a bellyful of sand. As we cut through that granular ocean, the magnetic fix went all to hell; the compass read north as well as I did—every direction was north. And in every direction sand dunes led to dunes like giant ice-cream cones sprinkled, like the Badu said, with rusty frames of command cars and Jeeps, and black shreds of tires, and charred wing or tail housings—off your plane, Arik? Did you ditch in this ocean of sand?

  The searing wind razored our faces with its invisible load of sand. But nothing bothered Tal. He seemed to thrive on the challenge, the risk, the adventure. Vitality lit his face and engorged every muscle. He seemed built for the motion: accelerate, clutch, pedal, shift, four wheels, high gear—and a roaring sprint up to the breaking edge of a dune, with the front wheels shooting for the sky, for the blinding sun. Then, just as the gear in the back threatened to crash into our heads, he’d press full speed down a sand hill, giving us the momentum to clear the next peak ahead. One burst of momentum flung open my door, and when I reached out to close it a bottomless abyss waited below. The wind had chewed away the slope.

  Sun above, sand below—the Jeep leaps over crest after crest and dives into trough after trough. A fairy mist of fool’s gold swirls around us, and beyond the next breaking dune the wind whipped it into a giant dervish, gold-bedecked and speckled. Another dune, and another, and the sand rippled down to the gentle slope that takes us—full circle back to the spot where we had entered the dunes.

  I collapsed into laughter at the sight of the same Badu—sitting on the same parka, spread like a welcome-carpet in the same wadi, next to the same camel, and looking like nothing a stranger did would ever surprise him.

  Tal, furious and cursing in seven languages, pulled a U-turn. Sweat blotches blossomed on his t-shirt, veins bulged in his glistening neck, his jaws quivering with anger. I decided to say nothing.

  The shadows were starting to stretch now. Tal opened his door and threw it wide, using the angle of its shadow like the needle of a compass—one he could check only by leaning far out the door opening, while driving full speed. By the time we cleared the dunes, he had swallowed a lot of sand—and accolades from me.

  Exhilarated, and tired of driving, we pulled to a stop in a deserted oasis tucked in a bend of Wadi R. As soon as he switched off the engine, a blessed silence engulfed us and the small cluster
of date palms, a green miracle standing tall and proud at the bank of a riverbed that hadn’t seen rain in seven successive years.

  “What do you say we camp here tonight?” He was savouring a long-awaited cigarette, a warm bottle of beer, and the array of colours that the slanting rays were teasing out of the sandstone slopes surrounding the oasis. At sundown I gathered some driftwood. We built a fire. From his paratrooper’s bag, he dug out a feenjon and a small round canister. The oasis was perfumed with coffee and coriander.

  “How come you didn’t get married?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “Didn’t find her yet . . . Maybe because I was preoccupied with other things . . . Maybe because no girl could match the allure of the Unit.”

  “That’s what Samson said before he met Delilah,” I muttered, and he laughed, tugging my braid like a boy in Grade 9 taunting the girl he loves, hates, fears, fucks in his most secret thoughts.

  He said he’s a very good cook and volunteered to prepare dinner. Well, he was certainly inventive. What I would give now just for the black and green olives, or the diced pickles and salami that he mixed into the pasta he cooked that night, adding a bit of olive oil, salt, pepper, oregano, rosemary. He opened a bottle of local dry red Cabernet, then local 777 brandy to accompany a dessert of oranges and grapefruit flambé—so help me.

  So highly classified were the nine years he served in the Unit, he hardly said a word during his furloughs at home, he told me. Such silence might be golden for the security of the Nation, “but not for your personal home life.” He had seen it wreck the best of relationships, and even now, he said, it keeps him apart from everyone but the men who had served with him. “And the switch from the Unit to the kibbutz where the price of an error wasn’t a life—yours, your men’s, or your enemies’ . . . It wasn’t easy to adjust to a normal sense of responsibility. And it was very difficult to accept the authority of a person who hadn’t earned your respect. You know how it is in the kibbutz—members vote for this person to head the banana planation, or that person to take charge of the laundry, not because this or that person is the best qualified, but because of popularity or animosity. If we ran the army like that, the Arabs would have finished us off in less than a week.”

  “Are you planning to sign up for another stint when your knees are healed?”

  “No. I love the kibbutz, flaws and all. It’s the place for me.”

  “So why are you taking a leave of absence from this dream, now that you can finally realize it?” I asked him, for the third or fourth time since the day we met. Still he hesitated. He lit a cigarette, puffed and puffed. The darker the night closed in on us, the brighter our fire-circle became . . .

  “I was living with a girl in the kibbutz,” he finally replied. “Her name is Ephrat. We lived together for three years, but we were together only on the occasional Shabbat and holiday that I was home on furlough. It was very different to have a normal life together. I loved her, very much. But I couldn’t . . . I mean, we couldn’t live together and we couldn’t live apart. The kibbutz is a small community. We bumped into each other ten times a day. She said she didn’t feel free to see another man while I was there, and so she asked me to take leave of absence from the kibbutz till everyone stopped staring and whispering each time she was seen with another man . . .”

  “Aren’t you carrying gallantry a bit too far?” I said—I could almost hear Riva saying: I wonder if what really compelled him to take his leave of absence and maybe even to break his relationship with Ephrat, and to drift, was his craving for the extraordinary and the ordinary of life, both at once . . . It’s textbook case, straight out of Returning Heroes 101 . . .

  Ever since Riva’s son Gingie had become observant, he had turned the most ordinary to the extraordinary, and to the divine, with his rituals and prayers. After a couple of months of that, the divine, too, became ordinary, and his craving for the extraordinary got him a criminal record for erecting an illegal settlement in the West Bank.

  j

  In his whole life Tal hadn’t had as many photos snapped of him—even of him refusing to be photographed—as he did on our journey.

  On this our last night, before we built the fire, before we set up camp, before I forgot to give him all the rolls of film I shot so he could take them back to the city with him, I went to fetch them from the brown knapsack at the back of the Jeep. The knapsack was open; the cameras and lenses were all there, and the unused film in their yellow, blue, and green casings. —but not one of the black canisters of film I’d shot, ten-fifteen rolls.

  “Did you transfer them to your paratrooper’s bag?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  We searched every bag, box, and corner in the Jeep. There was no trace of them.

  “Where did you last handle that brown knapsack?” he asked. We backtracked through memory to every circle we covered, every pissing stop we remembered, even to the place where he didn’t want to stop—where, in a wadi, half-hidden by a boulder, I spotted a rare treasure: a dry tree stump to cook over and keep us warm all night. “Leave it,” he said. “We have a sackful of driftwood, more than enough for one night.”

  “So, we’ll give it as a gift to the mountain Badu,” I cajoled. We had to move the brown knapsack to make room for that stump, and while I had it in my hands, I pulled out the Pentax, to finish the roll and tuck it in with others we had shot in the side pocket. “Dai—enough. Let’s go,” he’d had enough of my detour. I fastened that side pocket too fast perhaps. And that wadi was bumpy. The canisters must have bounced out of the Jeep.

  “That spot is a mere stroll from here, only a few kilometres,” he said. He handed me the Beretta, flipped my braid across my face, and strode off to track down those canisters. Before I could open my mouth he was swallowed by the night.

  “Those damn film rolls can wait till daylight. What’s with you, Tal! Come back!”

  “I’ll be back in no time,” he responded from the darkness—almost the exact words you said, Arik, the day you went.

  I’ll be damned if I let that old war souvenir fuck me over now, I told myself. I lit up that stump, cleared the sharp rocks and stones away from the fire-circle, spread out the sleeping bags like welcome-carpets, parked the Jeep sideways against the cold night wind, unloaded the water jerrican, food provisions, cooking utensils. And when that inlet at the bend of the wadi looked like our camping-ground, when everything was in the same place, with everything in order, I started to prepare a feast: tuna in cream of mushroom soup on a bed of rice never smelled better; and, for dessert, I roasted the last of the sweet potatoes and carrots, spiked with a bit of honey and brandy.

  Then I waited.

  I tucked my wristwatch in the knapsack. Time disappeared for a while. But then, the bottle of wine was empty, the stump half gone, the feast cold and soggy, and still no sign of him. He has x-ray vision, I told myself; he could see in dark of night, there in Entebbe, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan . . . He has tracked terrorists and guerrillas for nine years; film canisters are child’s play to him. He is one of the best recon men in the Land. It’s a moonless night, but a skyful of stars is as good a map as any.

  It’s a mere stroll, a mere few kilometres, from here, so what is keeping him so fucking long? Where in the hell is the North Star? Did we find that wood stump north or south of this inlet? Why are those damn photos so damned important to him all of a sudden? That stubborn son-of-Moses will track them down, even if it takes till the Messiah comes. Nothing is impossible to him. Is this yet another test? Or does he really want the damn photos—to validate this dream journey of ours?

  Where is his damn romantic gallantry now?

  How could he leave me alone in this wilderness, in this vast dense darkness?

  The darkness was closing in, edging tighter, shrinking the fire-circle light. The stump crumbled to ashes, and still, no sign of him. Only the sackful of driftwood left. A
twig, a branch at a time, I fed the fire, and watched it shrink and expand, shrink and expand . . . A silent wind was blowing smoke in every direction, cloaking the brilliant sky, stinging the eyes, stealing the breath, searing the face, but the darkness beyond it was cold and threatening.

  And creeping into that darkness beyond the winking fire-circle faces ballooned and burst, ballooned and burst . . . Arik appeared, his pilot’s cap jaunty—the prick. I’m done waiting for him—for any prick. One more cigarette, then I’m going to sleep. Or to fire the damn Beretta—

  Now, Imma! Abba! What’s that noise in the darkness, a rustling coming closer . . . Too close—

  “Hi, Leora. Shalom . . .”

  Over the fire-circle he leapt, like a madman, and took me into his arms. His lips tasted of salt, his hair dripped sweat mixed with sand and dust. His pockets were full of film canisters—new souvenirs . . . dream souvenirs . . . ordinary souvenirs. Extraordinary.

  j

  Tammam rolled over in her sleep, almost to the rocks that ringed the fire—a heap of coals still glowing red-hot. She rolled right back, but it smelled like her carpet-blanket, thowb, shawls, or braided hair had got singed. It alarmed her, and me, until she smothered the glowing ember on her hand-woven carpet-blanket.

  “You should not be sleeping so near the fire,” she muttered to herself, and/or to me. “But the night is so very cold and long if you are not so near the fire.” She wrapped herself and her infant daughter in that same carpet-blanket, and lay down, again very near the fire, but she kept tossing and turning, waking up, hearing things from all directions—camel-riders dismounting at the well, then camel-riders dismounting at Abu Salim’s maq’ad. All I could hear was the wind, the hissing and crackling of the fire, and the distant echo of a wild cat in heat.