by Malka Marom
I couldn’t fall asleep, and my tossing and turning disturbed him. But he wouldn’t let me uncap the bottle of sleeping pills, or even the 777 brandy. He said he’d tell me a bedtime story instead.
I thought he was joking. But he drew me close to him and started: “Once upon a time . . .”
I laughed. I couldn’t remember the last time, or anytime, that anyone had told me a bedtime story.
“You want to laugh or to sleep?” he said, laughing himself. “Are you ready?” Like Abu Salim, in the sing-song voice of storytelling, he went on to tell: “Once upon a time, there was a land far away and so cold that all the birds had to fly south every winter, otherwise they would freeze to death. But one winter, when all the birds were well on their way to the warm lands down south, one bird remained behind, limping and helpless. One of her wings was injured. Days passed, and nights. Snow covered the grass, and our poor little bird limped frozen. She could find no shelter from the snow. Then, just as the snow reached her poor little neck and she saw her life pass in front of her eyes, our poor little bird heard a bell, clang-clang . . .
“Clang-clang . . . Rosalinda the cow was coming round the corner, and as she passed our poor little bird, her bell clapped, sounding like thunder to our little bird. But, wonder of wonders, heat suddenly wrapped our little bird and melted the snow around her. Happy that she had been spared, our bird burst into song . . .
“Just then a wolf heard her joyful voice and couldn’t believe his ears, thinking that his rumbling stomach, winter starved, was taunting him. Still, he followed the chirping voice and found the bird, pulled her out of her warm berth, and—chick-chuck, he swallowed her in one gulp.
“Which goes to show you: first, not everyone who shits on you is your enemy; second, not everyone who pulls you out of shit is your friend. And third, whenever you find yourself knee-deep in shit, you shouldn’t sing.”
He sleeps like a seasoned commando fighter deep behind enemy lines. I can hardly hear him breathing. He is fearless in sleep, confident, trusting me to watch over him, as if I am a platoon buddy on guard duty. And I, like I did in the tents when sleep eluded me, write-to-remember . . .
The sun, gliding up the mountain chain across the gulf in Saudia, slicks the Red Sea gold. The mountain chain on our side glitters like a giant hall of mirrors reflecting a hundred rising suns, and in this forever of tomorrows, Tal sleeps.
Flies, coming to life with the sun, dance on his face. He turns and tosses, as if they are but dream flies, then grabs the top sheet and pulls it over his head—shrouded in white, a man dead to the wonder of a roaring sea in the middle of the desert.
The Red Sea is bluer than the Mediterranean. A forest of mongrob bushes is anchored to the seafloor, even though their roots shoot up in the air, like windpipes. The lush green of the surviving salvadoras belies the fact that it hasn’t rained here in the past six or seven years. Stretching endlessly north and south, the two mountain chains flanking the gulf look like fraternal twins—the one in Saudia draped in purple haze, the one on our side changing colour with the angle of the sun.
All too soon, the sun reaches its summit and bleaches out the blazing sunrise colours. The mountain chains look dun-coloured, like cardboard, and the gulf becomes a silvered stillness, so narrow, it seems, a person could float across and, with a few lazy strokes, touch Saudia. People say, though, that the gulf is infested with sharks.
As the sun descends behind the mountain chain on our side, the peaks in Saudia blaze sunset colours and the blue waters of the Red Sea are purpled. The more beautiful the moment, the more it pains me that I cannot share it with anyone—except Arik . . .
Around the clock Tal probably slept whenever he returned from missions and raids, and his kibbutz-girl, Ephrat, must have been happy to have him home—even asleep.
“A woman knows she loves a man when she cannot help but submit to him altogether,” Azzizah once told me. “When that happens, she feels complete, whole, even if her man does not love her.” Azzizah believes that a woman loved is but a woman flattered, but a woman loving is a woman complete, whole.
War is an aphrodisiac, you’d think, if you saw how people fall in love in war movies. In real life, statistics say, people make more babies in wartime. And even in wartime The Land is a sensuous, steaming blue place. But God knows how anyone could feel whole in wartime, complete enough to welcome a love that smells of that smell that hangs over a land where generation after generation of young men fall; where parents, thinking their sons will die before them, indulge them; where women, thinking their men will die in the next war, don’t assert themselves as equals but cater to their men, denying them nothing.
Not everything that serves her nation serves a woman well, Wallah.
Tal’s girl, Ephrat, denied Tal nothing for days, weeks, months, years, most likely. I see her waiting, trembling, for him to come home. As soon as she’d hear he’d gotten a furlough, she’d pretty herself, would fill their room with flowers, would bake him his favourite cake. He’d eat a bite, tell her it’s great, what a dream to be home. Then he’d take a shower, ask her how she’s been, and before she’d reply he’d fall asleep. The whole furlough he’d be too wasted to give of himself to her. But she’d say nothing, and deny him nothing. After his knees went and he was discharged from active duty to return home for good, she would expect her due, but as much as he wanted to give it to her, Tal didn’t know how.
All too regular are the stitches and dull the coloured threads that form the tapestry of ordinary home life. Tal is a warrior, not a weaver, and he needs the chaos of the heroic, the extraordinary, the Angel, to live.
Is that how it happened, the rift that brought on their separation?
If peace ever breaks out here, the whole country will get divorced, and the men will take off, questing for danger, for a dose, a fix, of that Extraordinary stuff.
In the cold rays of the sinking sun, the salvadora trees, nearly chopped out of existence by the Badu, looked like desolate survivors; and the mongrob bushes, like dropouts and drifters, hiding roots in their wind pipes; this cove like an orphaned beach and Tal’s sleeping face like the face of indifference; and the darkness, like a fire dying—Tal’s fire, my fire, God’s fire.
I was too excited to sleep. And sick of writing-to-remember—hoping-to-forget, like an exile dreaming of what was, what could have been, and closing my eyes to what never was, never could be . . .
I ran to the Jeep, aching to leave him to his sleep here and find my way out of this dark, cold, wasteland. I hated the idea that I had to rely on him to lead me out of this wilderness, as if he were Moses.
The longer I sat in the dead dark Jeep, the more alone I felt, the more I hated him, the more demons I saw in his face, the more humiliated I felt, the angrier I got. Finally, I climbed out of the Jeep, grabbed the water jerrican by the front tire, and arced a stream of water into his sleeping face.
Even before the jerrican was half-empty, he sprang to his feet and, like a madman, half crouching, clutched the loaded Beretta in both hands, and aimed at me as if I were an enemy infiltrator.
For a moment I just stood, defiant in anger and too stunned to move or utter a sound. I’ve never seen a person spring to action so fast out of a dead sleep; he was graceful like a jungle cat and had even managed to dodge most of the splash. His white t-shirt looked dry, but his face was dripping wet, and water was streaming from his hair down his temples and in the runnels between veins engorged from the adrenalin of fight-or-flight. It wasn’t funny. I don’t know why I laughed.
He turned his back to me and disappeared into the darkness outside the rim of the fire-circle.
I thought he had gone to calm himself down in private or to relieve himself. I waited and waited, and saw no sign of him. I walked to the rim to the darkness to see where he was. The moon was not visible yet, but the sky was overloaded with stars; no half-measures, no subtleties in this part of
the world. Nature deals only in extremes here—drought and flash flood, broiling hot days and freezing cold nights. Colder still are the waters of the Red Sea; otherwise the cove would be enveloped in fog, like the lake up in Algonquin, when the air is colder than the water. There, in the freezing waters of the foaming gulf, I saw him.
“Taaaalll!” I shouted to him, but, like in a nightmare, I couldn’t hear my voice, so loud was the rush of the waves swelling in high tide. Then I lost sight of him.
“Taaaalll!” I called out, a wail of regret for splashing him, for laughing in his face.
Out of the darkness he appeared, still steaming after dousing his temper in the gulf.
“Don’t you ever fucking do that again!” He backed me toward the fire-circle. “You don’t know how lucky your are—lucky you’re still breathing, lucky I’ve been trained to control my instincts, lucky most Unit operations are carried out at night!” He was calming down now and loosened his grip on my forearms. “Lucky I’ve had months of training to resist shooting the first thing that moves There, behind enemy lines, in the dark and to wait until you see the man’s face . . . It’s you or him, more often than not, and you have to shoot. But you never forget. You lose a piece of your soul when you kill a man . . .”
“You lose a big chunk of your soul when your man gets killed. Poor you. Poor me. Come on, Tal, let’s dump the victim shit into the Red Sea, let the waves engulf it like they did Pharaoh’s chariot. What do you say?” I heard my voice now, foaming like the whitecaps.
He stared at me across the shimmering heat of my fire-circle, as if he had lost a portion of his inheritance, a spark of the eternal fire that moved David to sing and to dance and to play the harp, even after God had told him that his hands, too stained with blood spilled to secure The Land, were not fit to build the Temple. But David didn’t live to see God fucking over his Chosen people at the Shoah. Any son of David who still had a piece of soul to lose today, could have sung and danced circles around King David. If there was any sign of grace in these days of madness, it was standing in front of me. Beads of water and the sweat of self-restraint trickling down his face and neck; he stood there looking like God’s tear, God’s remorse.
“Do you like to sing, to dance?” I said. “You and I can dance circles around King David . . .”
Now he looked flabbergasted, exasperated: “Are you out of your mind? Sing and dance! You wasted a jerrican of water!”
“Only half a jerrican,” I said, correcting him.
It seemed odd that a man who was so wet was also thirsty, I thought, as he picked up the jerrican. Part of me said that he wasn’t too wet for revenge, splash for splash. But no, I reasoned, he hasn’t had a drink of water for the past few hours, and besides, he’s too earnest, serious, for such childishness, I thought. Before I had a chance to think further, he splashed the rest of the water from the jerrican into my face, and onto the only clean clothes I had left and the parka he had lent me yesterday. That got through to him: he laughed and laughed as I tried to wrap my freezing bones in a sleeping bag and discovered I had dumped more water on his sleeping bag than on his sleeping face.
“Looks like you will have to dance to keep warm,” he said, still laughing.
“All right. Come on, let’s dance,” I said.
He doubled over when my fist connected with his gut; he was solid muscle, but he didn’t bother to flex for a woman. He cursed and laughed, at the ready now, with wide-open arms. Each step I took toward him, he countered with a step back . . . I gave him a pretty good chase up and down the beach, round and round the fire . . .
At the place of honour, close to the fire but away from the smoke, we wrapped ourselves in the one dry sleeping bag and opened a bottle of local brandy, brewed coffee, lit cigarettes . . .
“Didn’t you hear the click?” he asked me.
“What click?” I replied.
He shook his head, picked up the Beretta, showed me how you load the clip, the magazine, said something about releasing a safety catch, and then I heard the click of a gun cocked to fire. He couldn’t get over the fact that I hadn’t hit the dust, “the natural reaction.” He seemed to know the exact measure of muruah and discipline it took not to run for cover—and not to pull the trigger. He had survival down to a science. “I’ll never forget this jerrican business,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“‘Never forget’ are parting words . . . You didn’t come for me to take a look, make love, sleep and leave, did you, Tal?” I said without thinking. I was sure he’d laugh, but he said nothing.
Silence. Not at all like Badu silence. His opened the door to the emptiness of loss. And I couldn’t close it.
“Best we part, you said to me forty days ago. Why didn’t you leave it at that, Tal?” My voice sounded like it was coming from far beyond the reef, beyond the Gulf, carried on the night-cold wind and seeking the warmth of our fire. “I met you, loved you, parted from you, missed you, longed for you—but the circle was closed. I didn’t think I’d see you again—except in my remembering, and I’m good at that—as good as you are at soldiering, maybe better . . . for the better part of my life it sustained me—it’s quite the life-raft, let me tell you . . . Amazing what remembering can do; creates a life of its own, a life that has no boundaries, bends to no laws of nature or man. Everything is possible in my remembering, everything is attainable, everything and everyone is alive . . . In my remembering I can be married to Arik and to Dave at the same time; I can straddle continents; I can see what was, what could have been, and say to myself, What a fool I should have, could have, why didn’t I . . . If only . . . I wish . . . Why didn’t you leave it at that? Oh, yaa-Tal . . . ‘Had I not seen the sun, I could have borne the shade, but light a newer wilderness my wilderness has made . . .’”
“Is that what happened in the forbidden tents?” he said.
“No, that’s what happened in our forbidden Jeep forty days ago, or in my remembering of it. Or maybe only here, when you aimed your Beretta at me. And I put up no Defence. Such is my trust in you, yaa-Tal, complete trust—or love-submission, as a Badawia friend of mine would put it. Such love makes you feel complete-whole, she believes. Have you ever felt that?”
“Yeah, man, I feel complete-whole, one with the Universe,” he replied in English, imitating the foreign volunteers at his kibbutz.
He was famished now and thirsty, but wouldn’t drink more than a glass of water, just in case we decided to stay here at the cove tomorrow.
“Too bad we can’t stay longer, the Jeep has to report for Army duty day after tomorrow,” he said, cracking me up. That was a new one.
“It’s no laughing matter,” said Tal. “Jeeps are military vehicles—yours, too; that’s why you didn’t pay tax when you bought it. The army is counting on your Jeep to show up when it’s called.”
And if the Jeep fails to report, will the army jail it for deserting? Jail me for absconding? Jail Gingie for waiting a month to tell Tal that the Jeep was called up?
Tal divided his dry clothes between us, then started to prepare a feast—breakfast, lunch, dinner, all lost during his sleep . . . The hot peppers he added to the Spam—kosher turkey—made us thirstier still, but it was delicious on top of hash-brown potatoes . . . and the egg salad, tuna salad, avocado salad—and beer! He had brought beer, and enough juice to quench the thirst of a platoon for a week.
Later, as we were sharing a cigarette and a beer, he told me he had received a few job offers recently, one of which he might accept.
“What kind of job?”
“It’s classified,” he responded.
“So, that’s why ‘never forget,’ your parting words. You’re going back to combat duty,” I said.
Silence. Even the Red Sea, at low ebb now, was but a whisper, a hiss, and a crackle, almost like the fire-circle.
“Did they promote you to colonel in the Unit or at General HQ? You’re lea
dership material, according to Yehoshua—Arik’s friend, the cabinet minister. Remember him? But that must be the last thing you aspire to, the rank of a general . . . Your place is in the kibbutz, you told me . . .”
He laughed, then repeated, “It’s classified.”
“That’s more than Arik told me before he went. For all I know, the Sinai war was classified for him, too . . . If I had known he was being called up to take part in the launching of an all-out war, I would have parted from him altogether differently on that morning he went. I would have cleared up a few things—the sorts of things a girl-wife leaves for tomorrow, thinking life is full of tomorrows and today is simply full—the baby is crying, the dishes are piled up high in the sink, the car won’t start. How in the hell could he fly a plane when he couldn’t start a stupid Mini Austin, I thought when he finally drove off.
“I phoned the whole fucking air force that night to find out what had happened to Arik . . .”
“You didn’t let a person sleep even then,” Tal muttered, and I had to laugh. Laughter sparked in his eyes when he added, “Do you like to sing, to dance? I’ll never be able to sing or dance, or draw a gun, without seeing you facing a loaded Beretta and not flinching . . .”
Barefoot, we danced to the beat of the waves, our eyes closed to the future and the past, and even to the present. A moment or two later, the sea and wind conspired to kill our fire-circle, and we turned to rescue a few embers, build a fire closer to the sandstone mountains that held this cove in a protective embrace. And now when we leaned our backs against the sandstone, it felt like being in a cave, illuminated by a fragrant fire that protected the entrance. But whenever the winds from the Gulf came calling, the fire smoke nearly choked us. So we became the protectors, taking turns to guard the fire at the entrance with our backs. I’d fold into him and warm up my back, then he’d fold into me and I’d protect him from the night wind. After a couple of turns at windbreak duty, he cursed the icy darkness and took a swig or two of brandy to warm up, lit a cigarette and went on to say that he had been pressed to take on the job of heading the security for all our embassies and government agencies in Europe.