by Malka Marom
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Later, with a sweep of his hand, Tal levelled the sand, then unzipped our sleeping bags and spread them out like a double bed, the army bag on the bottom, like a mattress, the down bag on top, a blanket, all tucked and without a single crease, stretched smooth. . .
“Good morning,” Tal greeted me, though the sky showed not even a promise yet of dawn. And then he opened our cover and read me as if I were the morning paper—with his eyes, his lips, his hands. “Extra good edition this morning,” he whispers. “Just look at this article . . . and that.” The next one he finds engrossing and reads it through to the end . . . Then he starts from the beginning again, pushing his morning edition out of my reach. “Wait till the next edition . . .”
“Why? This edition looks outstanding.”
“But it’s hot off the press.”
So I let the ink cool off a bit. Then I read him—slow, slow . . . savouring each article, and he waits until I’ve finished. Then, just as we are about to light a cigarette, his wristwatch alarm beeps. Beep . . . beep . . . beep, echo the sandstone mountains.
j
The night Tal and I reached Abu Salim’s maq’ad was moonless and the hour late. Six or eight Badu men, one more fierce-looking than the others, were sitting around the fire. We parked the Jeep where the Badu parked their camels: outside the fire-circle light. Huge rocks were arranged in a semicircle for the comfort of Abu Salim’s guests. They shielded us from the cold night wind, and when I leaned my back against them, I could still feel the warm rays of the midday sun. We all sat on hand-woven carpets—not stained and frayed like up here in the tents—and fragrant wood was feeding the fire, not dung. And coffee was brewing in an old, almost black, brass bakraj. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of those fierce-looking men sipping coffee from tiny white-porcelain cups.
The Badu called Tal yaa-Jabbar—a man of great valour, “for only a man of great valour would dare traverse mountains so treacherous by Jeep on a moonless night,” said one. Another, a toothless Badu with seashell earrings, said only one or two men dared drive a Jeep through the last few bends at dark of night; even a camel will often hesitate to cross that stretch. And the Badu with two fingers missing from his right hand, three from his left, asked Tal how could he see this and that crevasse, this and that bend . . .
So impressed they all seemed—all except one. He looked like the whole desert was his domain. He also looked like no benevolent ruler.
“I am Imsallam Suleman Abu Salim,” he said and then he asked me if I was the woman who had helped the sick Badu child-boy reach the darwisha.
“Yes,” I said. Is that why Abu Salim invited me to visit-stay in his forbidden tents?
Abu Salim invited Tal to stay-sleep over in the maq’ad, until daylight at least. But that place smelled of enemy to the Jabbar.
Tal whispered in Hebrew that he didn’t think it was wise for me to stay alone with that bunch—not in the maq’ad and not in the tents.
The mountains thundered when Tal took off, and the Badu sat as if they were watching a thriller: the Jabbar was the good guy, and the night, the desert, the mountains, were the villains. And as if Tal—the Jabbar—could hear them, they called out to him to watch out—a sharp bend was coming, a steep slope, a pothole, a crater, yaa-Allah, a narrow ridge, an abyss to the east . . . They continued to guide him until the mountain echoed a lonely hyena, then the barking of saluki dogs. And then the legend-telling lilt of the Badu with one missing eye. “Wallah, did you see?”
“Wallah, we did see,” the mountains echoed.
“Wallah, did you see the Jabbar flying, though the night is moonless . . . flying through the wadi . . . through the sharp bend . . . the narrow ridge . . . the abyss to the east,” the Badu repeated, again and again, until the legend was carved on the mountain.
BOOK II
The Tents
CHAPTER 22
“A Jeep is climbing up the wadi,” Tammam announced while we were at the loom. Like the wind, she took off with little Salimeh; Azzizah and I trailed in her wake. We stopped at the spot the Badawias call “the lookout point”—from which Azzizah and I neither saw nor heard any sign of a Jeep.
“I can hear only the wind rushing. My hearing is getting old—slow, like the hearing of strangers,” Azzizah said. “You cannot hear the Jeep, can you?” she asks me.
“No,” I reply.
“Aywa, Abu Salim has told me how slow is the hearing of strangers,” says Azzizah. “So slow, you can smoke up a whole cigarette and, maybe when you finish smoking it, you will hear the Jeep Tammam hears now, Inshallah.” She rolls a cigarette for herself—seemingly to test how slow or fast my hearing is, and hers. She takes a puff—listens; another puff—listens . . .
You can see nothing but shimmering haze here, at this island in the molten mist. The sun is too high now for me to make out the mountain chain across the canyon that plunges so far below the lookout point you cannot see bottom, even if you stand upright and lean over—
“Dir balak—watch out.” Azzizah cautions my every move; she and Tammam take turns holding little Salimeh. Curiosity could be fatal here.
The only spot of shade is right under the acacia, the solitary green on this plateau. And the shade it gives is flimsy, tattered. It looks like Abu Salim’s camels have browsed all the leaves they can reach, leaving only the thorns on the branches, and on the ground. “These thorns can spike right through your shoes, so dir balak,” Tammam cautions.
Only in the early hours of the morning, and in the late hours of afternoon, can you see from this lookout point, and the view it gives is a single bend in the dry riverbed that leads to Abu Salim’s maq’ad.
“Long before you see who rides in that bend, you can hear who is approaching the bend, especially Tammam. For Tammam’s hearing is young, therefore sharp, sharper than mine, and even Abu Salim’s,” Azzizah explains, takes a puff, but the wind has put out her cigarette. She doesn’t bother to fight it, just tucks the dead cigarette into the pocket of her qunah—long black veil—that covers her forehead and falls back almost to the ground.
“Night time I can hear a distance much farther than daytime, and farther still on moonless nights,” says Tammam, spreading one of her shawls as a welcome-carpet for her, Azzizah, and me.
Now she’ll tell Azzizah of the night she heard Azzizah urging Abu Salim to purchase a blemished bride/blemished she-camel for the price of rights to waterholes, or smuggling routes. That’s what I assumed. But she makes no mention of it.
“I can also hear the Jeep!” Azzizah exclaims. By this time Tammam can hear whose Jeep it is. I have yet to hear anything that sounds like a Jeep.
“It is Hilal’s Jeep,” says Tammam. “Maybe my brother is riding with him . . . Oh, my child, my daughter, take what is left of the rest of my life, and enjoy it . . .”
“Maybe Hilal is driving-coming to the maq’ad to take our stranger-no-stranger guest, Nura, back to her home tent,” says Azzizah. Then, addressing me, she adds, “People will say our hospitality fell short if you cut your visit so short.”
“Aywa—yes. I bid you stay, I bid you stay,” Tammam inches off the turquoise ring her father had purchased with her bride-price and hands it to me. “I bid you stay . . .” All her most precious jewels, the girl-Badawia would give for a crack in the wall that confines her, Azzizah, and their clanswomen to this tiny world encircled by granite. They are exiles in their own home ground, these Badawias, as I am.
I do not, this time, ask the Badawias why they want me to stay, or why they had invited me. “No need to bid me stay with your ring, yaa-Tammam.”
“You mean you are going to stay?” the girl-Badawia entreats me.
“Yes,” I assure her. “What makes you think this person you call Hilal is driving to the maq’ad to take me home?”
“He is your tribesman,” Azzizah replies. “Abu Salim had told us Hilal is a Yahod
i stranger-man of the authorities . . . a stranger-man thin and long, and walks bent like a quarter-moon. That is why he is called Hilal—meaning, ‘quarter-moon.’”
“Today, as always, Hilal is driving to the maq’ad to see if Abu Salim has broken the law forbidding the cutting down of trees for firewood,” says Tammam. “Then he stays to hear a story, poem, legend—and to tell how unruly are the women, even the maidens, of his Yahodi tribe. ‘So disobedient and obstinate,’ Hilal had told Abu Salim. ‘No man could rule them; they rule man. Aywa, one Yahodiya named Golda Meir even became the sheikh of the Yahodi tribe, and the ruler of our Sinaa desert.’”
“Hilal is ill-fated to have been born a stranger,” says Azzizah.
“I hear a horn tooting!” Tammam cries out as if she has heard the angel Gabriel blowing his horn.
“It is the horn tooting of my grandsons! My grandsons are riding with Hilal,” says Azzizah. “Can you hear it now?” she asks me. I do, in the far distance, and the rumbling of a Jeep, finally.
Standing only a few meters from the edge of the lookout point, Azzizah and Tammam point to the spot where the Jeep was turning into the bend of the dry riverbed, conjured out of the haze that drifted above the dream-ocean in which we were ensiled.
Azzizah and Tammam never entertained the sliver of possibility that it was a figment of their imagination, just wishful thinking, just auditory hallucination that Azzizah’s grandchildren had caught a ride to Abu Salim’s maq’ad with Hilal.
Elated, the Badawias lit Azzizah’s special-occasion fragrant firewood in Azzizah’s special-occasion fire-circle, round which they spread Azzizah’s special-occasion welcome-carpets; they adjusted their veils and shawls and gave little Salimeh a bit of spit and polish. Then, they waited. Waited. Tried to keep the toddler from getting dusty-dirty again. Cursed and spat and waited, grunting, sighing, lamenting.
“It is not proper to keep Azzizah waiting too long to be paid respect by her grandsons,” Tammam explained. “Abu Salim should have told-ordered them to come here long ago . . . It is not proper . . . not proper . . .”
“Not waiting for two grandchildren, but surrounded by many, many more I would have been all the time if fate had held it in store for me,” Azzizah says, lamenting her fate. “I lost not only all my daughters—each one blood of my heart, fruit of my love, milk of my breast, each one from seed to flower I raised, only to lose her the day she died or the day she got married and moved to live in her husband’s compound—but her children . . . O, Wallah, had fate held it in store for me to have eight sons and one daughter, not eight daughters and one son, eight more tents would be pitched in this compound, teeming with life, my many grandchildren would fill this compound. And I would not be pained now from knowing in blood, yaa-Rabb, how homesick my daughters are, how they wish they were here, together with their mother and father and sisters and brother. How it pains them that I miss them, that I am all alone now like a childless woman after birthing and raising so many . . .”
Tammam’s eyes welled up with tears, as did mine.
“The salt of your tears and mine is one and the same, O my sisters,” Azzizah heaves a sigh, her eyes wet.
Silence. Waiting as the shadows stretch longer and longer. The special-occasion fire-circle demands more and more special-occasion fragrant wood. The longer she is kept waiting, the less she curses, spits, grunts, laments; the more lifeless Azzizah becomes, as if the only way she can accept her fate is to resign from life.
“I hear your grandsons approaching, yaa-Azzizah,” whispers Tammam.
Silence. Flies buzzing. Fire hissing. No sounds of footsteps. Azzizah frowns, as if she thinks, this time, Tammam hears dreams approaching. Her jewels jingle-jangle as she rejects a cigarette with the flick of a wrist. Tammam accepts it. I also light up one. Take a puff—listen. Take a puff—listen, like Azzizah did at the lookout point. Tammam fills the teapot and places it on the red-hot firestones.
“Now . . . now I hear my grandsons approaching,” mutters Azzizah. Her eyes reflect that she is pleased her hearing was slower than Tammam’s by only half a cigarette, and mine by a full one.
The child-boys run to Azzizah. She bends to heap a long string of greeting-blessings on their heads. The oldest one, not older than ten or eleven, returns a breathful, then, in the next breath, adds regards from a clanful. The younger one, seven or eight, joins him, and saves for last regards from his mother. Both go over to Tammam. The girl-Badawia whispers greetings-blessings in their ears. They then heap greetings-blessings on little Salimeh. They fold their legs and sink to the special-occasion welcome-carpets. Both babble too fast to understand, one interrupting the other—like Mutt and Jeff. There is energy and mischief in their eyes as they sneak looks at me.
“Say each word wahada, wahada—one by one,” Mutt tells Jeff. “Abu Salim said we . . . have . . . to . . . talk . . . wahada, wahada—one . . . by . . . one. . . in . . . front . . . of . . . the . . . woman . . . stranger-no-stranger,” he adds, enunciating each word so deliberately that all of us laugh.
“Guwwa—power to you,” says Azzizah, serving a steaming glass of tea to Mutt—she calls him Faraj and Jeff, Imbarak. They both wear striped jalabeeya—shirt-dresses—frayed, stained, covered with dust. Their curly hair is almost grey with dust. Amulets draped around their necks, their feet bare. Neither one flicks away the flies that pester the corners of their eyes, their lips, the rim of their tea glasses, and Faraj’s—Mutt’s—dripping nose.
“Did you see my brother on your way, or at the maq’ad?” Tammam asks Mutt and Jeff, her voice hard, her eyes soft.
“No,” they reply, almost in unison.
She heaves a sigh of relief—or sorrow, I can’t tell. Her eyebrows knot in a frown, like a person worried, disappointed, apprehensive.
“Did you hear anyone tell how far a distance my brother has yet to ride before he dismounts at our tents?”
“Laa—no. No one mentioned your brother,” says Jeff.
“Ghul—tell what you saw, what you heard in the maq’ad,” says Azzizah.
“I want to tell . . . I want to tell!” demands Mutt.
“Ghul—tell on,” says his grandmother, Azzizah, chuckling under her veil.
“Aywa, I wish to tell that Hilal came to bring word to the woman-stranger-no-stranger from her son in a paper called letter.”
Oh, my God—
“Ba’ad idhnikum—with your permission—I’ll go to the maq’ad, get my son’s letter,” I told the Badawias.
A letter, a phone call, a knock on the door—and that’s it, the end of the world as you know it. Nothing is ever the same . . .
“We brought the letter,” says Mutt, and Jeff pulls out of his pocket a white airmail envelope, bordered by red and blue teeth, and bearing Canadian, American, French, or English stamps, I couldn’t tell. Tammam snatched the envelope from Jeff just as he was about to hand it to me.
“I want to see your son—his name, his words to you,” the girl-Badawia explained.
Azzizah spits, then tells her grandsons, “You cannot trust Hilal, nor anyone who works for the authorities.”
“But Hilal handed the letter to Abu Salim and Abu Salim told-ordered me to dispatch it to her,” says Jeff, pointing to me. It takes every drop of self-discipline I have to restrain the urge to grab the letter from Tammam’s hands.
“Hilal told me,” cried out Mutt, “Hilal told me that strangers don’t press their words to their loved ones in poems recited like us Badu—”
“Aywa,” Jeff interjects, “strangers press their words on paper. Then they insert the words-pressed-on-paper into a paper pouch. And then they glue on a picture called ‘stamp.’ You see, this letter has many stamps, meaning: many permissions to cross many borders. And then the strangers, they take the paper pouch with all the many stamps to an airplane, and the pilot brings the letter to the authorities, to Hilal.”
“You ca
nnot trust the authorities,” mutters Azzizah.
“Laaaaaa! Tammam! Don’t open it! Don’t open the pouch! It is bad luck, bad luck! Hilal said it’s bad luck to open the pouch, unless it is addressed to you!” Mutt and Jeff shout over each other.
Startled, frightened, Tammam threw the letter. The wind blew it to the rim of the fire-circle. I lunged to retrieve it.
“You ruined it! Ruined it! Now Abu Salim will say I’m not a man. I cannot be trusted even with paper—” Jeff lashed out at Tammam when he saw the letter was singed in spots. “Women can’t be trusted even with paper. Hand it to me. Read it from my hand!” the little tyrant demanded, grabbing the letter from my hand. In the bit I held fast I saw that the handwriting was not my son’s and that it was signed “Hillel—the Haifa’ee, as our mutual friend, Tal, refers to me.”
“Let me have the part you tore, and I’ll knead the two pieces into one in my writing-to-remember,” I tell the little prick.
He spits like Abu Salim, curses all women.
“Aywa, as life must end, so women are lesser than men,” his little brother declares.
“Oskotu—shut up you all!” demands Tammam.
Silence.
“Like vultures they are descending upon us today,” Tammam mutters, as if possessed by her old demons. Transfixed, she laments, “Oh, take what is left of my life and enjoy it . . . yaa-Rabb . . . yaa-Rabb . . .Oh, life who has sat me down square on hot ashes, why have you lashed me this way . . .”
“Esh hassal—what happened?” Azzizah asks the girl-wife.
“Hushshsh,” Tammam hisses. “A camel-rider is approaching. Not on the path from the maq’ad, but on the path from the well,” Tammam explains. “I think he is my brother . . .”