Sulha

by Malka Marom

  “You mean, to supervise those guys who check purses and bags?” I said.

  “Yes, something like that.” He laughed, then added, “Keep it to yourself, it’s classified.”

  “Why in hell would something like that be classified?” I said.

  He looked at me as though I was way out of touch with the world where soldiers of Allah conduct a jihad—a holy war of letter bombs, suicide bombers, ambushes like those that mowed down travellers in airports and athletes at the Olympic games.

  “Sounds to me like you’ve decided to take on this job.”

  “No, I haven’t,” he said. “I don’t know if I could live Outside, even for only two or three years. At the end of that stint, they’ll probably give me the same story they did in the Unit—‘You’ve got two or three years’ experience. It would be a shame to waste it.’ Then they’ll press me to stay . . . The irony is that if I decide to take on this job, the pay is . . . Well, they try to compensate you for being homesick, I assume. If I don’t hand it over to the kibbutz, I could come home with enough cash to purchase a few good dunams of land, and materials and tools to get a farm started and build a house. This job might turn out to be the opportunity of a lifetime . . .”

  “We are in deep shit if a man like you has to leave The Land and do security work Outside so that he’ll be able to afford to live in The Land. I’d rather sell the Jeep and lend you the cash than see you take a security job Outside for the pay, like a soldier of fortune . . .”

  He laughed. “I could have bought a fleet of Jeeps if I had pocketed my army paycheque instead of handing it over to the kibbutz month after month.”

  “Where will you be based?”

  “Somewhere in Europe. It’s classified, in part to save my neck . . .”

  “When would you have to start?”

  “In three or four weeks. I’d have to take a training course in The Land. Will you be in Canada by then, or in The Land?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. There was no word for where I was now.

  BOOK IV

  The Land

  CHAPTER 33

  Frantic—the people, the pace, as if The Land were a rental property, her people credit-poor, the landlord waving eviction papers and shouting, “Pay or get out!” Even in the peninsula, as soon as the Jeep rolled onto the paved highway, horns began to honk, and the tailgating, weaving, and passing were frenzied, as if The Nation itself was late for some pressing appointment. The Jeep seemed to be caught in the slipstream, coasting to hell—Tal kept it steady on the lane. And then a resort with thatched roofs, like the Club Med in Hawaii, spinned by, and a couple of settlements, their lush green fields and trees drawing the eye, like water a thirsty traveller.

  “Eleven years of sweat and dreams,” Tal called those settlements. “They’ll have to go, if and when Egypt signs a peace pact with us.”

  It looked like the evacuation had already begun when we reached the service station by D——. The only one for hours either way, it was like a botched renovation of some dusty, ancient khan—a sort of motel for camel-riders. Long line-ups of cars, Jeeps, trucks, command cars, tour buses, and vans sat at the diesel pumps and the military pumps; the longest was at the gasoline pumps. It must have been 150˚ Fahrenheit in the sun. Steam was billowing up out of overheated engines, and melting asphalt sucked at desert boots, sandals, and running shoes.

  Hundreds of travellers lined up at the kiosk for colas that seemed to run right through them. Some couldn’t endure the line-ups at the banks of outdoor toilets and relieved themselves outside. Whenever the wind changed direction, the stench and the fumes, the flies and the noise, were unbearable.

  The fat lady running the kiosk, an accordion of chins cascading down her neck, her brows knotted in a ferocious frown, shouted from behind the cash register, “Go to Jerusalem! . . . Start a revolution! . . . Camp in Jerusalem, not here! . . . Camp in front of the Knesset building! . . . Tell your leaders to give Jerusalem to Egypt, not Sinai!”

  “That’s what they are doing, giving up Jerusalem!” someone shouted from the lineup.

  “It’s the beginning of the end!” shouted another.

  “It’s the end of the beginning!” shouted a third.

  The closer we got to Eilat, the heavier the traffic, the more tourist tents dotted the gulf coast, and the fewer Badu encampments. At the roadblock just past the green sign that read “Welcome to Eilat” was another long line-up of cars, trucks, and Jeeps. A sort of Badu bazaar stood right by the roadblock; travellers milled round mounds of jalabeeyas, kaffiyyes, copper trays, coffee bakrajs, and demi-tasse cups, miniature hand-woven saddlebags and hand-woven tents . . . Badu children ran up to the Jeep to make their pitch in broken English: “You wanna buy real, Wallah, real Badu kaffiyye, cheabbp . . . Badu jalabeeya . . . cheap, Wallah . . .Comaan, comaan, you wanna bbpictuoor-bbpolaroid of she—you—riding she-camel . . . cheabbp, Wallah, only sis dollah . . . tree dollah fer yah . . . bbpictuoor-bbpolaroid. . .”

  Polaroid! I scan the Badu “cameramen” in the bazaar, and among them I see A’ida’s husband, Abu Hasan, aiming the Polaroid camera I’d traded for the story of the blemished bride at some tourist-girl sitting on his thoroughbred she-camel. He looked to be half the man he was in the compound, almost as if there was something in his home ground, the desert, the vast expanse of open space, that adds to one’s stature. Or maybe there is something about The Land—her besieged borders, her beleaguered people—that cuts one down; not to mention the ever-present spirit of the great prophets, judges, kings, shepherds, carpenters, warriors, musicians, and lovers . . . Or maybe the Badu was made to feel small by his doing work, which his uncle, Abu Salim, believes is befitting only for a low down fellah, and a woman—not a true real man.

  The new superhighway narrowed into an old patched-up two-lane at the entrance to Eilat, the gateway to The Land. Eilat still felt and smelled like an old frontier town—dusty, temporary, in flux. Youngsters, bent under heavy knapsacks, trudged along the cracked road. A line of cement trucks blocked the lane by a construction site. Across the road, a cement factory emitted a column of dust as tall as a mountain. A moment later, we drive by the noisy port warehouses that hide the blue waters of the Red Sea. A desert field-school spins by, then a wind-blown blue and white flag planted at a navy base, with grey gunboats anchored at the piers. Farther north, huge rusty oil tankers block the sea. But north of the port, the Gulf of Aqaba-Eilat opens up, curving like a huge horseshoe, full of sailboats, speedboats, fishing boats, and yachts. Luxury hotels hug the northern shoreline almost like in Miami Beach. Here, a hundred meters east of these hotels is an Arab country at war with you—or more correctly, the sliver of no-man’s-land between the border of Israel and Jordan, between Eilat and Aqaba, the town that Lawrence of Arabia had taken from the Turks. It’s one of the most unobtrusive and quiet borders in The Land. From the Jeep you can see the tall palm trees shading the streets of Aqaba, and even the flower gardens in the winter villas there. It might as well be on the moon for us Israelis—except for border crossing soldier-of-soldiers like Tal.

  “Aqaba is just as dusty, noisy, and busy as Eilat. But Petra is much more beautiful than her pictures,” he said. It was the first time I had heard him boasting. He knew it was a dream for ordinary Israelis like me to hike to Petra, even to Aqaba.

  Reality had a hold on him as well, as was apparent from the precautions he took to prevent the Jeep and everything in it from being stolen. A wave of robberies the likes of which had never been seen was hitting The Land, at the same time as the worst wave of terrorism, Tal explained. The super-hawks among the TV commentators were saying it was no coincidence, that no one but terrorists would steal an ambulance while the paramedics were upstairs helping a heart-attack victim. The super doves maintain the crime spree is the work of our own homegrown Mafia. The cynics see it as a sign that our old dream is dead, long live the new dream—of being a country like
any other country, complete with petty thieves and crime bosses . . .

  A row of hotels—a few, like in Yamit abandoned at mid-construction—hugged the Bay of Eilat. The scorching Khamsin winds—the fifty winds—started to blow when Tal dropped me off at the hotel closest to the highway. While he went to contact a kibbutz classmate about delivering to her a parcel from home, I went in to use the pay phone.

  Electric stars dotted the ceiling of the hotel’s lobby, and the air conditioning was cranked up as cold as the desert night wind. My father picked up the phone, shouting as if it were a megaphone, and barely hearing a word. My mother heard that I sounded good. “Thank God . . . Thank God . . . Thank God, you are on home grounds,” she said.

  “Russell was trying to reach you all day today,” she added, “he didn’t say why, what for. I’ll see you day after tomorrow . . . Drive carefully . . .” she hung up—rushing already to prepare my homecoming feast.

  I dialled the phone number Russell had left with my mother, but the line was busy, busy . . .

  Like magic, I dialled the long-distance operator and as soon as I say it’s a collect call to Toronto, Canada, from Leora, I hear six-thousand-miles hissing on the line, a couple of rings, a deafening sneeze, and another, and another, and now Levi, his voice thick with a cold, chuckles and says, “Hi, sorry about that.”

  “That’s all right,” the operator says in a human voice, switches to his professional robot voice and adds, “Will you accept a collect call from Leora in Israel?”

  “Hey, Immmmmaaa! You’re back! Great! How was it? What a coincidence, I just flew in from . . .” The kid is so happy and excited to hear from his mother he forgets to accept the charges.

  “Will you accept the charges?” the robot demands.

  “Sure . . . Dad should be here any minute. You can’t imagine how down he is when you are away. It’s impossible to get a rise out of him, even when I told him he has it better than me; he, at least, has a girl to miss . . .” The boy goes straight to the intimate, as if the last time we’d talked was breakfast this morning. “. . . And I also was away for the past three weeks, flying transport sorties for Jean up in Yellowknife, Flin-Flon, Uranium. I just got in . . .” Your son will fly to the moon yet, Arik . . . How can you ground a boy who gets himself a job as bush-pilot up in the cold white wilderness of the Canadian North.

  “And I thought you were sweating your butt off on your degree . . .”

  “Don’t worry, Imma. I’ll graduate with flying colours . . .” Levi laughs and laughs, which starts him coughing—almost like Abu Salim. It’s such a bad cough you hold your breath, hoping he’ll catch his. What a beast the phone—it shrinks and expands distance at the same time. He was probably sleeping when I called—ten or eleven o’clock Sunday morning in Toronto; I couldn’t remember if Toronto was six or seven hours behind The Land at this time of year.

  “Is this a Press call or a personal,” a military censor interjects.

  “Hey, operator, what’s with this Press call . . . You’ve got your lines crossed. The other line is Press; this one is personal,” Levi tells the censor.

  We got cut off. It took only a minute to reconnect.

  “What a crazy country, I love it,” Levi says. “But, you know, The Land doesn’t look good from here. It looks like we say we want peace but we don’t really mean it—like we aren’t willing to give an inch of Sinai even for peace.”

  “It’s not the impression you get in Sinai, especially from the Badu. And Israelis are flocking to Sinai in droves to catch the sights as if soon as the peace pact is signed Egypt will close the border. It’s so hard to imagine after all these decades of war—Egypt, as a peaceful neighbour . . . But I saw Egyptian soldiers wave to me as if the peace pact was a done deal already.”

  “Gingie told me that he couldn’t escort you to Sinai. How was his former commander? How was it in the desert? What did you learn from your stay with the Bedouins?” The boy wants the whole megilah long distance.

  Long distance is no distance to him—a mere fingertip away. The cost is irrelevant to him; his dad is loaded. But he knows his imma—raised on austerity rations—is only too aware that long distance runs five dollars a minute. Dollar time, bottom-line time, black-and-white time—life is simple time—not “primitive” simple, like Badu time—time everlasting—time for a beginning, a middle, and an end, and then some — time for the echo to reverberate and shake mountains of granite.

  “I’ll tell you everything when I see you, Lev . . .”

  “You sound sad, Imma . . .”

  “Yes . . . I feel sort of like in Sinai, where one circle closes before you glimpse the opening of the next. And I know you won’t be glad to hear that it hadn’t been revealed to me whether or not to waive your exemption. I promise I’ll give you a yes or a no before this month is out.”

  “That’s terrific news, Imma. You don’t know it but you’ve decided to give me a yes. I can hear it in your voice . . .” The boy is an optimist like you, Arik. “Dad is here, Imma. He just walked in. You can’t imagine how he’s missed you . . .”

  I’ve missed him too, missed a husband to love. I was burning for him with a passion fired by another love. But passion is passion. Once awakened it demands action . . . Isn’t that why so many marry on the rebound? Any mate would do?

  “It’s Imma! Dad! Imma on the phone!”

  Dave didn’t run to the receiver. As he always does first thing when he gets home from the steam bath at the South Y, he fixed himself a scotch on ice. It seemed to take him as long as it takes Abu Salim to brew honour.

  “Hello,” Dave said.

  And goodbye went shimmering dreams. His tone of voice said it all.

  “Hello, Dave.”

  “Well, you certainly took your time.” He sounds so down, Job is ecstatic compared with him. Parking his butt in the shade, he pushes me out to the sun, saying, “Go to the desert, stay with the Bedouins. You studied Arabic all these years—what for if not for this? You are not afraid of the desert, are you? A tough Sabra like you?” That’s what he told me months ago, and he didn’t mean a word of it. He is barely able to conceal how it angered him that his wife had left him for nearly two months, roaming the desert—with Gingie’s former commander. Levi told him, for sure.

  Yet it wouldn’t surprise me if, in some corner inside him, Dave was perversely proud that his wife travelled with such a hero as Gingie’s former commander. He would expect nothing less of her.

  “How have you been, Dave?” I decided not to start an argument long-distance. “I hope Marissa came through with the cleaning, the shopping, the cooking . . .”

  “Yes, Marissa is fine,” he said. “She’s got a heart of gold, Marissa. Spoils Levi rotten. Made him chicken soup for his cold.”

  “Are you all right, Dave? Is everyone, everything okay at work? Family? Friends?”

  “Everything, everyone, is fine.”

  Fine again. That’s two. He’s giving me his version of the silent treatment. I pretend it’s Badu silence—costing five dollars a minute.

  “How are your parents?” He finally dredged up a question to ask.

  “They sound great. Asked me to give you their regards. What’s the matter, Dave? You sound so . . .” Angry? No—too strong. Dead? Forget it. Despondent, down, depressed, listless, distant, critical? No way. “So tired, Dave.”

  “Oh, it’s Sunday, you know . . . The steam bath knocks you out . . .”

  Silence.

  He’s so angry with me, he’s afraid to say more than a couple of words. Not even about world affairs, the Middle East, “his specialty.” Not even about the peace talks. And not a question about the Badu.

  “When are you planning to fly back to Toronto?” He breaks the silence.

  But just the thought of returning to such dishonest anger, the sorrow, pain, helplessness . . . “I haven’t decided yet.”

>   “But you are planning to come home for Christmas, New Year’s, I assume,” he said, as if Christmas and New Year’s were his High Holidays.

  Had I not phoned him, I wouldn’t have known that Hanukkah is not far off, let alone Christmas. There’s no sign of Christmas here, in this Holy Land.

  “Why don’t you fly here for your winter vacation, Dave, let’s have our reunion here . . .”

  “Not much notice,” Dave muttered.

  No appointment with the Angel is listed in Dave’s social calendar. Life is busy—everlasting, not like a Badu, Wallah . . . A Badu walks with the shadow of the Angel at his shoulder, lives for stories to be remembered, daimann—forever and ever. A Badu ties and unties a compound without any notice. For Dave, even a month’s notice is not enough. “I can’t just drop everything and fly to Israel,” he said. “We can’t have everything we want in life,” he adds.

  Does he mean I can’t stay, or that he can’t fly over on such short notice? He doesn’t explain, as if to test my loyalty—to Arik or to him, to The Land or to our marriage.

  It’s them or me, his silence said.

  “Levi is planning to fly over next month,” Dave breaks his silence, as if Lev was his surrogate—his surrogate Israeli, surrogate pilot, surrogate hero. Is he still testing my loyalty: my son or my husband?

  “You’ll be flying over with Levi, Dave, right? You two were planning to surprise me.”

  “No.”

  “You’ve decided to stay in Toronto for Christmas and New Year’s alone? Why?”