Sulha

by Malka Marom

  The wind rushed past my ears, moulding my clothes to my body, making them almost invisible.

  Tal could see me approaching.

  I could feel his eyes on my face, my breasts, my thighs, as my Badu jewels jingle-jangled like wind chimes and the mountain chains all around seemed to swell and dip to the beat of the drum in my temples. Sweating and shivering, I struggled across the remaining distance, as the sun and shade I carried within me—Nura and Leora, observer and participant, stranger-guest and woman—warred for dominance.

  And Tal also held back, I felt—to protect his reputation and mine, my husband’s, my tribe’s, and my Badu hosts’. He sat with the Badu round the fire-circle as if nothing but the duty to escort me had compelled him to cross the distance alone. His face told of fatigue, exhaustion, the strain of staring through desert dust and sun for hundreds of kilometres. For days he hadn’t shaved, and his hair, clothes, boots were grey with dust and grease. Out of his greyness, his eyes lit up when they met mine. I averted my glance—modest-proper.

  “Brukha ha’ba’ah—Blessed be she arriving,” he greeted me in Hebrew when I reached the fire-circle.

  “Barukh ha’nimtza—Blessed be he found here,” I returned his greeting. I had spoken in reflex, it was such a common Hebrew greeting. But it was only now for the first time that I noticed it was a blessing—that we Yahod, like the Badu, valued our greetings. I felt like I had new eyes—my vision sharpened by the wary vigilance of weeks with the Badu, and by love, perhaps.

  Abu Salim invited me to sit in the place of honour, close to the fire and away from the smoke that was blowing into Tal’s face. He was coughing like the Badu elders sitting next to him, until the wind shifted and decreed a new place of honour and a new place of coughing. The wind and the warmth radiating from the fragrant fire had no effect on me as I shivered on my separate plane.

  Tal went to the Jeep and returned with his army parka, dropping it over my shoulder. The Badu probably took it for some Yahodi-Israeli ritual wherein the parka of a woman’s escort-guardian, like the abaiah Salim had dropped over his blemished bride, symbolized protection. His parka smelled of The Land, the sea, the meadows steaming after the Yoreh—the first of the rains.

  Pouring honour all around, Abu Salim broke the silence to tell me, “I had asked your escort-guardian how fared your kinsmen, but he neither understands, nor speaks, Badu Arabic. Therefore, I give you permission to exchange words in your language.”

  “Allah ysalmak—May Allah repay you,” I responded Badu-proper. And to show his clansmen how well Abu Salim had taught me adabb—manners—I waited, taking a long, proper pause, before I translated his words to Tal: “Abu Salim gave me permission to ask you in Hebrew what brought you all the way here. Not bad news, I hope.”

  Tal had no idea what an expression of trust it was for the Badu to give permission for me to speak in a language foreign to him. In my peripheral view, I could see him frowning as if I had turned docile, submissive. He frowned like a hawk, like one who sees nothing wrong in behaving like the Romans when in Rome, only in behaving like the Arabs when in Arab territory.

  “I meant to pull you out before we lost you to the desert. Are you all right?”

  “Yes . . . You didn’t come here bearing bad news, did you?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I’m happy to see you . . .”

  “Ditto. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Soon . . . The first of the rains have come to The Land, haven’t they?”

  “Yes. The first to break the drought, let’s hope. How did you know it rained?” His frown deepened when he saw my head dropping, modest-proper like a Badawia’s.

  “The Jabbar came bearing good news. It rained in Israel!” I informed Abu Salim.

  “Allahu akbar—Allah is great.” The mountains echoed the elders sitting round the fire-circle.

  “Inshallah, we will see the last of the drought this coming winter,” said Abu Salim, by rote. Ever since his son’s wedding, he has behaved as if he has saved a son but lost his story; as if nothing he could do would change the version that would remain after all else dies; as if all was written now and was nothing like he had dreamed it would be.

  For a moment, I feel he will confiscate all my cassette recordings and writing-to-remember and burn them, as if to cleanse by fire the remembering of Badu from generation to generation, forever—daimann. But, just then, Mutt and Jeff, barely able to restrain their excitement, cry out, “Ask the Jabbar to give us a spin in the Jeep!”

  “Too risky. It wouldn’t take much for the Jeep to tip over and wipe out these kids,” Tal tells me, after I translate. I can’t believe my ears. Tal and I covered this whole peninsula in this Jeep, and this is the first time he has mentioned the risk.

  Jabbar, the Badu named Tal. Jabbar—a man of great valour.

  And that’s exactly what Tal wanted the Badu to think of him. That’s why he decided we would traverse the treacherous wadi leading up to Abu Salim’s maq’ad on a moonless night beset by a plague of darkness. The more courageous, daring, fearless, they consider him to be, Tal believed, the more they’ll think him unforgiving of anyone who holds Yahodi blood and honour cheap, and the better care they’ll take to make sure that no harm befalls me in their tribal ground. He nearly killed us to impress the need for my safety on the Badu.

  “Come on, Tal. A spin in this Jeep with a Jabbar would mean a lot to these two kids . . . Hillel gave them a ride in his Jeep.”

  “I’m not Hillel,” said Tal. He is adamant. He’ll explain later, he says, but now he suggests we leave, and the sooner the better.

  So I tell Mutt and Jeff and the others round the fire-circle that the Jeep is not equipped with a safety bar, and that, were it to tip over, it might crush the youngsters; that is why the Jabbar has decided it’s too great a risk to take them for a spin.

  “Prudent . . . Aywa, prudent,” mutters Abu Salim. “Tell him the children’s blood is not on his head, nor on his son’s, nor his son’s sons’ head.”

  Word for word I translate, but still Tal hesitates, as if there is trickery in the Badu’s words. In this, he hasn’t changed in all these weeks.

  “I know these Badu kids. They are okay,” I reassure him. Then, as if against his better judgment, he motions to the children to get into the Jeep, snapping at me, “Five minutes, and we’re out of here.” He couldn’t wait to get away from that Badu fire-circle that smelled of war to him.

  “When Arabs fight Arabs,” he once told me, “they cover their faces with kaffiyyes, so that no one can tell who has killed whom and so no one can avenge blood. But when Arabs fight us, they’re not afraid to show their faces. They know us . . . they know we don’t believe in blood revenge. It took us a bit of time to realize that the Arabs thought we were weak, that we had no muruah—balls—because of that. Now they know that reprisal will follow every terrorist action, but often too quick and too hard. If we are not careful we will soon be like them . . .”

  “Us, them”—entrenched in the language. Theirs, ours—The Divide . . .

  If I had learned anything in the forbidden tents, it was that the Divide can be bridged, one on one, if not by “us and them.”

  I remained in the maq’ad while Tal took Mutt and Jeff for a spin. Soon after the wind dispersed the Jeep’s dusty contrail, Abu Salim told-ordered me to follow him. Badu-proper, I asked no questions, but simply followed Abu Salim in a daze of confusion and excitement sparked by the friction of quick transition to and from different lifetimes, centuries, cultures, and genders.

  Abu Salim stopped by his she-camel, and there—away from prying eyes—he pulled out of the pocket of his jalabeeya the wallet I had asked him to safe-keep for me on that moonless night when Tal and I had arrived at his maq’ad. The wallet bulged with my passports and “just in case” money. “You better count the money, make sure not a dollar is missing,” Abu Salim said, in je
st or in earnest, I couldn’t tell.

  I stuffed the bulging wallet into my knapsack and asked him not to offend me, not to add to the sorrow I felt on leaving.

  “Laa!—No!—Every parting leads to a greeting, and every end to a start,” he said, sounding like some TV guru.

  “Are you ready? Now I shall give you knowledge of preparing to start,” Abu Salim told me, as I was about to climb into the Jeep. I pulled my pen out, told Abu Salim I was ready, and on the canvas door of the Jeep I scribbled his preparation for starting: “Bismillah el rahman el rehim—In the name of Allah the merciful and the compassionate: That is what you must say at the start of a journey, or a greeting message, or at the start of everything . . . “Say it!” Abu Salim insisted, and after I did, he said, “Now you are prepared to embark . . . Peace be with you . . .”

  Before I could return his blessing, the mountains thundered and trembled. The engine clanked a crescendo, and then uttered a deafening silence. Grease and gasoline billowed, choking the lungs. I tried to unhook the clamps that fasten the plastic windows to the canvas doors, but my fingers were sabotaged by the bouncing, tilting, and sliding of the Jeep, as though the gravel were ice, pocked by potholes, and no guard rail around the slopes, dropping to canyons too deep to see bottom.

  Tal was in his element now, one-on-one with the roller-coaster wadi. Nose down, at top speed the Jeep threatened to roll over; Tal touched the brakes and, ass-backwards, the Jeep dove; and just when it looked like we were plunging into the purple abyss of the next world, it spun and slid, carrying us headlong toward the granite mountain ribs . . . The gear in the back was jiggling loose, and the wind whistled through every crack in the canvas top and rusty frame. With an explosive whoosh, the canvas door on my side burst open, and Tal spun us in the opposite direction so that I wouldn’t fly out. I braced myself as the Jeep slid sideways, burning rubber, kicking up more dust than a whole herd of goats, and a barrage of gravel and granite.

  “Are you all right?” He shouted over the noise of the engine.

  “Yes. You?”

  “What?! What?!” He is exhilarated, flushed with the lifeblood of challenge, adventure, danger, the extraordinary . . .

  “Shushhhhh, the whole desert can hear you. Badu ten-fifteen minutes from here can hear you. These mountains are dotted with Badu compounds and lookout points, and now, in the slanting rays, is the best time to see . . .” I scan the mountain crests, the cliffs, the slopes, at every bend on the wadi but can’t tell from the riverbed which is our lookout point. I see no sign of Azzizah, Tammam, little Salimeh, no lone acacia, no sign of life.

  “Don’t lean on the door! The damn latch is loose!” Tal yelled out at each turn of the dry riverbed. At every one, I waved my kaffiyye, just in case it was the bend below the lookout. And at every green spot I saw spinning of top of a granite cliff, I yelled out to him, “Stop! Stop!” But I saw no black shawl waving back. And after a few stops he said, “If you tell me what you’re looking for, I might be able to help you find it.”

  I had no doubt he’d find the lookout point in no time. He knew the terrain by heart.

  “Did we pass the bend of the wadi directly below a lone acacia tree, or is it still ahead of us?”

  “Why do you ask?” He answered a question with a question, like a true Yahodi.

  How I wanted to reply, to share with him everything I had learned and experienced—most of all, the feeling that the bridge over the Divide was within reach. And I was aching to ask him: Did your friend Hillel tell you about the hornet’s nest you dropped me into? And about the rumour that demanded vengeance? Why didn’t you drive over to the maq’ad and get me? Were you bedridden from more surgery on your knees? But the Badu’s warning silenced me: “Woe to you and your children’s children—for five generations your blood will be exposed if you betray to anyone what you saw, heard, sensed in our tents.” I couldn’t even tell him that, without betraying trust, exposing his and my blood—not without permission from Abu Salim or from his son or from his son’s sons. A Badu gag order, after all the years I had been voiceless in The Land . . . every word I groped for came in Badu Arabic, English, or Hebrew.

  “I wish . . . but I can’t . . . can’t say a word about the tents. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Yes. It must be hard to articulate,” he said. “That often happens. After a gruelling mission, the mind blanks out the minute you reach home base and you can take a breath without fear that a bullet will make it your last.”

  “It wasn’t like that at all . . .” What brings you here, instead of Gingie, this time? How have you been? I wanted to ask him. But I sensed he was about to reach out to me. As I was about to receive him, I saw he had changed his mind—withdrew, as if he feared God would strike us dead . . . As if it suddenly hit him that he must have been out of his mind to traverse this desert himself for—what? . . . As if he saw the dust on my abaiah and smelled Badu, Arab, enemy . . . As if I had stepped out of a Purim play, bejewelled and bangled with Badu finery. And like that on a cheap Purim mask, my hair was braided straw; and like a borrowed Purim costume, my layers of clothes were layered with dust, dotted with spark holes, stained by ashes, and caked by mud. My desert boots and the bottoms of my jeans were ringed with mud from the waterhole down by the dry riverbed that twists and turns at the foot of the mountains—but on the other side, in another century, where water is wasted as if there is no tomorrow and silence and stories roll on and on into the forever of tomorrows.

  How Tammam would love to ride in this Jeep. All that is new and untried draws her. It would have amazed the Badawias to see the glance he shot at me when I finished my cigarette and, instead of putting it out in the wobbly empty pop-can wired to the hole that was once an ashtray in the dashboard, I flung the cigarette out the window.

  “You shouldn’t litter,” he advised me, and I stifled a laugh. He saw the desert like a stranger, didn’t use it like a Badu—like you use a person you really love. He saw it as some ancient relic too precious to use, even to touch, or a holy ground you take your shoes off before entering . . . like the welcome carpet the Badu fold their legs upon only fifty meters from the ditch they use as a garbage dump and open sewer. A thing and its opposite, like sun and shade, the Badu, their desert, their way of life, Wallah. . .

  Badu law is as blunt as Badu manners are subtle. We Yahod are the opposite—our manners blunt, our law subtle . . . Different worlds, and I couldn’t switch off one and switch on the other. Instead they merged, and I shivered and sweated by turns.

  Azzizah and Tammam would have left the lookout point by now to round up their parched goats, I was thinking, as round and round the Jeep went, round one mountain chain after another, all looking the same, all leading nowhere, it seemed. The engine, like a jackhammer, throbs in my temples and the exhaust fumes spin me dizzy—

  “You better stop, Tal.” The mountains sent back the memory of clanking and shouting and the wind returns the nauseating fumes. As he switched off the ignition key, I ran behind the Jeep and vomited; when I caught my breath, out I spewed a volley of curses in Badu Arabic, English, and Hebrew. Tal laughed as he handed me a water canteen he had filled in Eilat. The water was still cold and fresh—clear, not murky, not tasting of mud, and there was not one goat hair in the whole canteen.

  “Take it slow,” he kept saying, as my hands shook. “It’s probably the bends—and fatigue, and one cigarette too many on a stomach that didn’t appreciate the Badu’s diet, by the looks of it.” I had disappeared down to the bone, he said, all cheekbones and legs like the tall, slender women Giacometti sculpts. Blood rushed to his face as he spoke, so unaccustomed was he to travelling alone with a woman, to commenting on her looks.

  “You must be exhausted, too. When did you leave the city, or did you set off from your kibbutz?” I asked him as I sponge-bathed my face and neck with my dampened kaffiyye. It felt great, but the dust trails my kaffiyye painted on my face cracked him
up. I laughed with him. “First drop of fresh water I’ve had in . . . What day is today?”

  “Day forty of your stay here in Sinai, give or take a day or two.”

  “Feels like forty years, and four days, at once. But, really, what’s the date today.” I couldn’t imagine him counting the days. He pulled the number forty out of Exodus, I thought. He liked to believe that the magnet that had drawn me to Sinai was the urge to return to The Land—through the door our ancestors, the Children of Israel, had used to repossess the Promised Land, “Sinai is not a bad door,” he had told me a few days after we had crossed that threshold. “A bit rusty, but it might strip you of pride . . .” Pride is the difference between a newcomer and a dropout, he believes. “Both are just as homesick, but a dropout comes to The Land arrogant and proud, like a husband who takes his wife for granted,” he had told me, “whereas a newcomer comes to The Land humble, like a lover courting. That’s why most newcomers succeed where most dropouts who want to return to The Land fail.”

  “Well, you can’t say I’m returning to The Land proud and arrogant this time,” I said. He remembered and laughed.

  “If we give it a bit of a push now, barring the unforeseen we’ll make it to Hillel’s post before nightfall. You’ll be able to take a long hot shower,” he said. “And if the phone is working, you’ll be able to call anyone you wish in The Land—even in Canada.”

  You could become jet-lagged, just from the thought of crossing a thousand or so years, let alone oceans and continents, in less than a minute. You dial a few numbers and, presto, Nura, the stranger-guest, is Leora: Levi’s mother, Dave’s wife, Arik’s war-widow, his parents’ daughter-in-law, my parents’ daughter, Riva’s dropout friend . . .

  Oh, Arik, don’t tell anyone but, Wallah, what a vacation I had in the tents—a vacation from trying to overcompensate for your loss with your parents and mine, your brother and my sister, your son and mine; from overcompensating for my dropping out and for my marrying Dave; from overcompensating Dave for my requiem years . . .