Sulha

by Malka Marom

  “I’d settle for a bit of sense down here,” Tal muttered. “Egypt can’t support her fifty million inhabitants in the style we’ve led the Sinai Badu to be accustomed. We win a few battles and we think we can dictate terms, not only for peace, but for a way of life . . . Would you like Egypt to dictate to you how to treat the Badu or any person who lives in your land? This desert belongs to Egypt. Or are you with Gingie in the belief that it’s part of ‘Greater Israel’?”

  “Here’s to this beautiful gem of a post we built in Egypt, like in our slavery days in Egypt.” Hillel raised a full glass to that. His post, living quarters, infirmary, and office were built to look like Abu Salim’s maq’ad, Hillel said, then laughed cynically. “We built nothing but the very best here in Sinai. Time and again our government gives Sinai to Egypt, only for us to re-conquer Sinai. Time and again we forget,” he added. Then he lit another cigarette.

  Hillel was puffing away, so were Tal and I, and the smoke couldn’t escape on the breeze here, like in the compound. Here, like in tents, the night wind was cold, but here all the windows were closed against it. Through the smoke, Tal gave me a strange apologetic look, then he said, “The forgetting that got us into trouble is forgetting that the Sinai War was a mistake. We wasted too many lives to protect this buffer zone. We lost fewer men in the ’67 war when we didn’t have Sinai as a buffer zone. We occupy a desert much bigger than our Land, and we grew accustomed to power, just as your Badu grew accustomed to our hospitals, our water and schools. We were better off without all that power, and maybe the Sinai Badu would also be better off without our schools, helicopter ambulances, water . . .”

  “Oh, I wish I was a dreamer like you, yaa-Francawi,” Hillel interjected. “Francawi,” Hillel called Tal, because Tal’s parents came from the French-speaking part of Belgium, I assumed.

  “If you know the Badu, you know the Arabs, yaa-Francawi, I’ve been here five years and learned that the Arabs see us as strangers who pose a threat, not only to their way of life, but to their future, their story . . . The minute they see us vulnerable or weak, they’ll pounce with all they’ve got. But who can hang tough forever? Who wants to hang tough forever? I wish I believed in miracles, yaa-Francawi . . . who was it who said that you must believe in miracles in order to be a realist in The Land?”

  “My father,” said Tal. “He was quoting Ben-Gurion, I didn’t know it till long after my father got killed . . . Can you imagine what miracles we could work in The Land if we invested in peace merely half the effort we invest in war? I didn’t check the Badu as you did, but I know the Negev Badu are true Arabs as much as the Sinai Badu. Yet they serve in our army, sit in our Knesset and on our labour unions and town councils, they live in peace with us. That’s more than good enough for me . . .”

  The two of them were engaged in men-talk while doing woman’s work—Abu Salim would have collapsed from laughing to see the Jabbar and Hillel prepare supper, like Tammam and Azzizah. Well, not exactly like them—each ingredient and dish lent the fragrance of home to Hillel’s place. That supper tasted like suppers used to taste when I was a child, when food tasted like food—tomatoes like tomatoes, eggs like eggs, bread like bread . . . And, like in a dream—the dream that taunted me in the tents—the table was heaped with fresh vegetables, cheese, lebben, bread and butter, plates, forks, spoons, knives . . . They had diced tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions; grated in carrots and radishes; added pitted olives, green and black, a dash of salt, olive oil, and fresh lemon juice—just like my mother does. The omelette was as fluffy as hers, and Hillel’s generosity and hospitality as boundless as the emptiness beyond Abu Salim’s maq’ad.

  And, like in the Badu compound, I couldn’t phone anyone anywhere. The phone at the post, a field phone, was reserved for incoming calls—except for emergencies.

  “The Canadian wants you to phone him as soon as you can,” Hillel said, addressing me this time. “The Canadian,” Hillel calls Professor Russell, like the Badu call him “El Bofessa.” “The Canadian inquired about you on the phone, regularly,” Hillel shook his head. “The Canadian abused your trust . . . inexcusable, not to mention the rumour to you, and to so blatantly admit it to me, without shame or compunction . . .”

  A Mountain Badu would kill anyone who defamed him as Hillel did Russell—even before he went on to tell about the day he returned to the post from a home visit up north, in Haifa, and first heard that Abu Salim had finally tracked down his son, Salim. Next he heard that Tal had dropped by the post the night before and had left him a note, requesting he watch over a woman friend who had been invited to stay in Abu Salim’s forbidden tents. A day later he got a phone call from the Canadian, asking, “Did you hear, by any chance, if a war widow who had dropped out to Canada made it again to Abu Salim’s forbidden tents?”

  “‘Yes, she did,’ I told the Canadian,” Hillel said. “‘Son of a gun,’ the Canadian mutters, ‘that woman has more muruah than ten men . . .’

  ‘Did you tell her what she was walking into? A rumour that might end up in a double execution?’ I ask the Canadian. ‘No,’ the Canadian replies. Inexcusable!” Hillel looked at me as if he expected me to echo him in denouncing Russell.

  It seemed ridiculous for Hillel to be ranting to me—who was kept in the dark about the mission that would claim Arik’s life—about the sin of omission.

  Tal expected the same reaction from me as Hillel did, or so I read in his eyes—bloodshot, like the Badu’s. The desert, knowing no discrimination, favours all eyes equally, puts all hearts to the same test. Isn’t that why the Badu hold in high value such qualities of heart as generosity and nobility, courage and endurance?

  “A woman’s place is inferior to man, but not her heart,” Abu Salim had told me, as did his wives—even his grandsons, little Mutt and Jeff, quoting him perhaps. For sure, Tammam and Azzizah suffered from no inferiority complex, and neither did A’ida or any Badawia I had met in the forbidden mountains—a place I would never have revisited had Russell not encouraged me, for whatever reason, it didn’t matter now.

  True, Russell should have told me of the rumour, even if, as many of those rumours that swarm in the desert, this one, too, was as harmless as a fly. And, yes, Hillel exposed his blood for generations when he attempted to make up for Russell’s error in judgment; but it was likely not the first time an error in judgment had backfired on Hillel. This one cost nothing compared with others. Why, any day any one of us could put a foot wrong . . .

  Both Hillel and Russell have rolled in the desert for years to study-understand the Badu—the true Arabs—but have been admitted only to maq’ads—guest-receiving-places—where Badu men say, especially to important guests, whatever they think their guests want to hear. So each stranger-guest who visits the same Badu maq’ad leaves with a different story. Russell’s story has been told and published the world over. Hillel’s—only his friends, relatives, and tourists know of Hillel’s Badu knowledge. People tend to take the written over the spoken word, even though it came from Bible that the Lord sayeth, not scribbleth . . . Russell probably treats Hillel, not as a worthy rival and colleague, but as he had treated me—with that aloof disdain of an Anglo-Saxon newcomer trying to out-native the natives. And from what I’ve seen so far, Hillel wouldn’t suffer it gladly. I’d bet Hillel wouldn’t suffer gladly anyone who treats him like a Badu treats a woman, like he and Tal treated me.

  All evening, the two of them ignored me like the Badu in the maq’ad, so I kept my mouth shut like in the maq’ad, and just listened, observed, spoke when spoken to, and formed assumptions to fill in the blanks.

  The minute you shut a person out of any circle—family, friends, or the hub of power—that person will start to second-guess those who have closed ranks.

  The heart, afraid of chaos, darkness, loose ends, craves closure, light, order. Isn’t that why the least predictable rulers are the most terrifying?

  No one can keep a woman guessing lik
e a Badu, and no one can second-guess a man like a Badawia. Azzizah once told me she had learned to second-guess Abu Salim so well, she had stripped him of all his power; and, seeing that, she stopped. “Even when the heart fears the dark, it is better to gather patience and wait. Better still is to trust completely, submit,” she had told me. “For fate rules over men and women alike.” It was fate, Azzizah believes, that had compelled A’ida’s son to drag me over the line into the tents. She would laugh to hear Hillel say that El Bofessa expected me to be his eyes and ears in her compound. He couldn’t have picked a stranger-woman more blinded and deafened by ignorance, Azzizah would tell Hillel. So would I—but I said nothing.

  I couldn’t really speak for Russell. I hadn’t known him for more than a few weeks—he’s a distant relative I’d rarely seen until I first ventured to Sinai this last spring. And I had known Hillel for only a few hours—and Tal for all of seven days. The Badu, I have known just long enough to realize that I don’t know them. And, really, whom do I know? Even Riva, Mottke, and Gingie I can’t say I know intimately; how could I, when, for the past twenty years, more than twenty years now, we have lived on different continents. We meet once or twice a year, and I call them long distance at least once a month, when I discover that I don’t speak the language—the day-to-day language, the language of intimacy. And how could I begin to know the Canadian Yahodi I married when I can’t forgive myself for marrying him. And Levi, when I can’t forgive myself for dragging him to exile when he was an infant . . .

  Who would have thought that exile meant being shut out from everyone, even yourself?

  And The Land, like a proud lover—jealous and monogamous—won’t take you back once you are unfaithful with another land. It is as if she is afraid, like a vain lover, that you will see how the years have ravaged her. She might let you in for a visit, but as soon as she grows tired she kicks you out, giving preference to those who stayed with her in sickness and in health and to the newcomers who have no memory of her beauty twenty or thirty years ago. The vain bitch dooms her dropouts to remember her forever young and innocent, vital and full of hope, dreams, and promise.

  As if silence were a sin, Tal and Hillel stared at me. “Doesn’t it bother you at all, Professor Russell’s abuse of your trust in him, if nothing else?” said Tal.

  “I got over it weeks ago,” I replied.

  “She’s caught a dose of Bedouinism,” Hillel said. “Apathy is the symptom of Bedouinism. A professional hazard—it hits most of us when we sit in Badu tents a bit too long . . . “You’ve got to fight it,” Hillel told me. “Give in to apathy now and, before you know it, someone will kick your face in, and you won’t feel it. You won’t care.”

  Only a minute ago, he and Tal shut me out, as if I was invisible; now they expect me to assert myself, not only like a woman, and not like any man, but like a man who had seen his father allow himself to be kicked from ghetto to ghetto and then to the camps. The meek could not inherit this land. Chances are they’ll get killed crossing the street on a green light.

  “I don’t understand half of what has happened to me in the past few months,” I heard my voice, sounding like that of the androgynous stranger the Badu thought I was—a woman but not a woman; not a man but like a man; a Yahodia but not like a Yahodia; not a Badawia and not a Canadian but like a Canadian and like a Badawia—my voice slid from one gender, tribe, and place to another. “Maybe I’m on a roll in terms of grace—if there is such a thing. I don’t know why the Badu invited me to enter tents they forbid all other strangers to enter. Or why Yahodi men I hardly know have favoured me with their desert experience, not to mention their time and hospitality. No matter what Russell’s motives were, I will not spit into a well that has watered me . . .”

  Just then a commotion erupted outside—screeching brakes, running steps, and frantic whispers.

  “Sounds like tourists scared of the night,” Hillel said. “Like moths they’re drawn to our electric lights.” He rushed out to silence them before they woke up the whole post.

  “Would you have entered the tents if Professor Russell had told you that you stood a fifty-fifty chance of witnessing a double murder?” Tal asked me. “Did you have the stomach for that? The muruah? That’s what Russell should have told you instead of prodding you to enter these Badu tents. ‘There’s no shame in deciding to cancel or postpone.’ That’s what Russell should have told you. Then, if your decision had been to go and give it a try, you would have been sitting here, not with self-abnegating gratitude to Russell, Hillel, and me, but with a sense of accomplishment and confidence in yourself, your ability, your endurance and judgment. That’s what Russell has denied you. The opportunity to gain self-confidence may seem like nothing much in Canada, but here it factors in survival. Egypt celebrates her defeat in the Yom-Kippur War as a great victory because she managed to shake our confidence for a week or two.

  “A test of pride is what Hillel’s letter represented to you. How could you leave without losing face? You gain nothing from passing that test, only more pride—the empty pride that makes a person cocky, arrogant, and aloof to mask his fear.” Tal seemed to forget he was talking to a woman dropout on whom the fate of The Nation did not depend. Only a person who believed that our main resource was ourselves, could give me such a lecture.

  He reminded me of Arik then—of what was, and what could have been . . . and of the arrogance of those early days when right and wrong seemed to be as clear-cut as life and death . . . What priorities we had then. How ambitious we were. How much we demanded of ourselves. That’s all we Yahod have, we believed, after we saw what happened There to Yahod who expected a drop of decency, humanity from others, a drop of compassion from God.

  Hillel returned, beaming, “Some Yoram just learned never to take a leak on a viper. Good thing vipers are too lazy to pounce on every tourist foot they meet or we’d be busy with nothing but dispensing antidotes here. They work like magic, these antidotes, but a Badu, no matter how fast he gallops a camel, usually arrives here too late. No punishment worse than standing helpless while a Badu you know, like, and respect dies of a viper bite before your eyes . . .”

  “Dies? I thought the Badu could teach us how to treat snakebites,” I said. The calmness in my voice, words pouring out like dark honey from a near empty-jar, my heart pounding even slower, as in high-alert, life-and-death emergencies, was my own antidote. How could I have stayed in this snake-infested wasteland when just a mention of a viper makes me brace myself, like for an outbreak of war? “The Badu are expert snakebite healers,” I had heard or read somewhere. The idea of a viper kept me up nights before I went to the desert, but once I got there I forgot they existed. And even when Mutt and Jeff had waved an empty dried-out snakeskin in my face, I didn’t give it another thought. Perhaps anticipating danger generates more fear than living with danger; or fear of fear itself blocks my fear of the deadly—the dead—the angel, Wallah.

  And Riva thinks that I don’t give a damn if I live or die. The desert is just an escape, like Canada, she thinks. She knows me better than I know myself, she thinks; maybe that’s why Riva can’t see past the Leora she thinks she knows. I’m afraid of life, Riva thinks, but death is really what I am afraid of.

  Isn’t that why I dropped out? Isn’t that what keeps me from dropping back in—that and not pride, as Tal likes to believe. Isn’t that why I married Dave, sprinting for a safety island? Isn’t that why I fear to give Levi my consent to serve?

  Just look at what ripples this fear has, the effect it has on Levi, Dave, my parents, Arik’s, and me. It has kept me from living, that’s all.

  Now, if only you could overcome this fear of the Angel just as you did your fear of vipers . . . If only you could see in its empty skin the ribbon that binds us all.

  CHAPTER 32

  It was late, closer to dawn than to dusk when Tal and I reached this cove—a dream cove for lovers, carved by sea and desert, wind and wave,
at the foot of the sandstone mountains that flank the shore of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aqaba–Eilat.

  And, as if it was only last night that we had last camped overnight—and a lifetime ago, both at once—we set camp in the same order. Parked the Jeep to shield the fire-circle from the cold night wind. Placed the cartons of provisions and cooking utensils by the back wheels. The water jerricans by the front tire, so that we could wash up next to the side mirror and away from the sleeping bags.

  But this time Tal brought pillows. Yes. Even white pillow-cases and sheets, like a soldier who vowed during gruelling desert manoeuvres and missions that, if he lived to travel the desert in civilian life, he’d never again rest his head on a rock or snuggle up to stones for comfort. He combed out every rock and stone from a patch of sand here at the cove, like a Japanese gardener. Next he levelled the sand, flattened the sleeping bags, zipped them open like a double bed, tucked his handgun under a pillow, and made up the bed to meet army regulations, smoothing away every crease. It’s as long a journey from soldier to man, I thought, as from stranger to woman.

  I half-expected him to turn his back to me, like the boys had done in the old days when we girls changed our clothes. But he stared at my naked body, as if to memorize it, as if he was leaving for battle with a feeling he’d never come back. I cursed that war souvenir—his, mine—that wouldn’t let us submit to love without fear of loss . . .

  Oh, take what is left of life, and enjoy it, Wallah . . . His eyes caressed my naked body, then his hands. And then I drew him close to me, and deep. I kissed his lips, his solid torso, then buried my face below . . . He reached for me and tasted his seed on my lips. And then, without words, he knew how to tell a woman how beautiful she is, how precious to him, how strong his love for her—infinite, like the stars above, constant like the waves on our shore, enduring, like the sandstone mountains . . .