Sulha

by Malka Marom

  “Because I have to . . .” Have to and should—that’s Dave, and that’s what he expects from his wife. Should be with him at Christmas, should live with him in exile till death do us part—if it hasn’t already.

  “Dave, I can’t see myself staying in Canada, especially when Levi serves his army duty—high risk or not.”

  “The phone is no place to discuss such matters, Leora.”

  “Such matters are open to discussion, then.”

  “Not in my opinion.”

  That’s it. He doesn’t like waves, but we can’t have everything we want in life, can we? “This may be our last chance, Dave.”

  “Is that an ultimatum?”

  “No, Dave. I know you don’t like ultimatums. But I think it’s way overdue that you meet me halfway . . .”

  “It won’t work, Leora . . . Going back home is a beautiful dream, but it won’t work. I’d move to Israel this minute if I thought this dream of yours wouldn’t be one of those that turns to rat-shit when you try to follow up on it . . . And if you fail in this, you’ll be left with a sense of loss worse, much worse than losing Arik . . . You suffered a terrible tragedy when you lost Arik. It’s as if you had a terrible accident when you were twenty, and ever since you’ve been paralyzed, disconnected from your mind—like you are disconnected from Israel . . . The sooner you come to grips with that, Leora, the better. You are no different from most of the immigrants who come to Canada . . .”

  “What?!”

  “For once in your life listen to me, Leora. Your connection is to the people, not to The Nation. If your parents and friends were living in Toronto, we wouldn’t be talking about moving to Israel. The day your parents and Arik’s die, so will the connection you think you have with The Land.”

  “I think I have?! Next you’ll be telling me that your connection with Israel is stronger, more real, than mine.”

  “I told you we shouldn’t discuss it over the phone.”

  “Exactly.”

  “We’ll talk about this another time. Take good care of yourself, Leora. Give my regards to your parents and Arik’s . . . You better say a few words to Levi now, or he’ll be disappointed.” And, as always, he passes me on to Lev.

  Oh, I know he is punishing me for being what he wished he was, punishing me for having been born in The Land and not in exile, for having been born to pioneers and not to immigrants, for not knowing the petty skirmishes of Christie Pits, and for going to the desert—the real desert, not the movie desert of Lawrence of Arabia. And even for knowing war—real war, not movie war, armchair war . . . His favourite line is in Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence asks a Badu why is he doing or not doing something and the Badu replies: Because it pleases me. That’s it—no apologies, no explanations.

  “Because it pleases me” is the line Dave dreams of saying, while he scurries around pleasing everyone and no one, conspiring in the pretence of being a master in his homeland, in Canada . . . An unwelcome guest in Canada, he is a paid-up guest in The Land, buying a heritage on the instalment plan with his U.J.A friends. For less than the price of the landing gear of a single Skyhawk, he thinks he has roots that are stronger, more vital, than mine.

  I’m paralyzed, he says, making me a mirror of himself . . . I’m paralyzed, he says, then he tells me he won’t move to The Land because to do so would destroy my dream. He leaves me with no hope, and for my own good, of course. Must take that extra seventh sense of his to see any good in this punishment—of me, of himself.

  CHAPTER 34

  At the beach, Khamsin winds kept blowing from fifty directions and painting the daylight yellow-grey, a dusty shade between dusk and dawn. A ferocious Red Sea mounted the shore, grey walls of water breaking with a thunderous clap, before a white gusher would spike, then foam to the shore.

  The tide must have swelled much higher the previous night, leaving behind evidence of the world’s abuse of the sea. One of the cleanest, most cared for shores in the Holy Land looked now like the world’s garbage dump. Oil, as far as the eye could see; the wide expanse of fine sand was blackened and littered with pooling tar. And against the black-and-white background was a riot of colour: torn plastic garbage bags, fragments of plastic pails or bowls or plates or records; cracked glass, pieces of torn rope, cables, crates, tapes, sweaters, hats, shirts, pants, shoes, belts, buckles; and rusted strips of tin and iron mesh and barbed wire, rusted nails, screws, bolts, locks, even cassette recorders. And shiploads of condoms, and pink and white tampon tubes, tangled in the seaweed among the empty shells and lifeless fish.

  The Khamsin drove even the seagulls to seek shelter; not a soul was to be seen there, except a couple of Americans, judging by their accents. She, dressed like a bride left at the altar decades ago, a Miss Havisham, and strumming an un-tuned guitar that was missing two strings; he, a pot-bellied Swami with bushy grey hair and beard, kept turning like a slow-moving dervish, and wailing in English: “O Messiah, Messiah, Messiah! O Messiah, come on! Come!! O come already, Messiah, O Messiah!” The winds scattered her strumming and his wailing among the tar pools, the plastic chips, the condoms, the dead fish . . .

  j

  Heading to the exit from the beach, I see Tal coming toward me, almost like Arik whenever he appears in those dreams where he seems so real, so alive. I reach out to touch him and, Poof! he disappears. So I make no move to even acknowledge that I see Tal, and sure enough he doesn’t vanish.

  We used the boot scrapers that had been installed on each side of the path to the hotel, as if to make sure that no one would track into the Land any of the shit that the world was dumping on our shore.

  His kibbutz classmate, waiting for us at the entrance to the hotel’s bar, looked like she had stepped out of a Welcome to Arizona or California poster—long, sun-bleached hair, legs for days, sky-blue eyes, painted-on t-shirt tucked into tight blue jeans that were buckled at her boy-slim hips with a turquoise and silver belt. She was stuck in the sixties, littering her Hebrew with American flower-child words and inflections, and she punctuated almost every sentence with nervous laughter. Shy perhaps, she was even quicker to blush than Tal and me.

  Tal treated her with a deference subtle as the echo of a memory—of their child years, perhaps, when he wished he were not a newcomer but, like her, born in the kibbutz. She’s a third-generation kibbutznikit, he had told me; her grandparents were among the founders of their kibbutz.

  Ever since they were in Grade 2, and until they were drafted into the army after graduating from high school, they had shared the same classrooms, dining rooms, dormitories—boys and girls showered together until they were twelve-thirteen, in their kibbutz, he said. “We kibbutz classmates grew up like multiple twins. That’s why we rarely if ever intermarry, according to the social experts . . .”

  They communicated in a language of their own. I didn’t understand half of what they said to each other, even though it sounded like Hebrew; it reminded me of the first few days in the tents.

  “Are you two too stoned to know how you stink, man, I’m surprised they let you sit here,” she said, then introduced herself as Dorit and laughed as if desperately fighting a demon determined to reduce her to tears. What had happened to her?

  Azzizah would say, “Look at her and you will see what happens when a beautiful girl does not wear amulets to ward off the Evil Eye.”

  Tal didn’t seem to notice her strange laughter.

  A handsome Swiss student, who had probably flown here to dive in the Red Sea but had run out of money, came to wait on our table. Dorit ordered beer.

  “Local or export?” the waiter asked her.

  “Export,” she replied.

  “Heineken or Amstel, or . . . ?” the handsome Swiss student couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “Wouldn’t it be a groove, man, if that waiter could ask, ‘Pot or hash? Local or export? Acapulco Gold or Colombian shit’?” Dorit said when the
waiter had gone to fetch our drinks. “What was the Bedouins’ dope like?” she asked me, pulling out a tin box of tobacco and rolling herself a cigarette like a Badawia—and an American hippie back in the sixties.

  “I didn’t see any Bedouin using dope,” I replied. “Badu tobacco smells like dope. Maybe that’s why people think they smoke dope.”

  “Oh, come on. They look stoned. I have some great stuff. Would you like a joint?” she asked me. “Tal smoked, you know, only once—hash . . . Man, was he hilarious, horny as hell . . .”

  “Did you two make love?” my eyes ask Tal.

  “With Dorit? It would be like making love with my sister,” his eyes reply.

  Dorit dropped her eyes and blushed, as if our silent exchange had triggered something in her, made her feel like she was Outside. Turning her poster perfect face away, she said, “Feh, what a punishment the stink you two dragged from the desert . . . Stinks like Eilat . . . What a drag Eilat . . .”

  What was keeping her in this town, I asked her. I had no idea what a torrent—a flash flood—my question would trigger.

  First she laughed, and then she said she had escaped to Eilat “because you can save money in Eilat, man. Frontier-town perks, you know . . . Like, if you work in Eilat you don’t have to give the lousy government half your paycheque in taxes . . . And besides, there isn’t a place in The Land farther from the kibbutz than Eilat.

  “There isn’t a place on Earth, man, more boring than the kibbutz. Nothing to do in the kibbutz, man—just work, eat, sleep, and fuck. The good old days are over, if they ever existed. Man, if you heard my grandmother tell it, you’d think the kibbutz was founded by wild rebels who ran away from home, hiked over continents, came to The Land on foot, man . . . made love all night, reclaimed The Land all day, and in their spare time they gathered the tribe from all the corners of the globe, and singlehandedly defended their newborn kibbutz against tribes of marauding Arabs . . . Give me a break, man. They stopped making those movies even in Russia. And even if there is a grain of truth in these stories, they’re ancient history, man. Like, the kibbutz was an experiment. Okay, the experiment succeeded, the kibbutz was established, and you know what happens to established things, man—they become like institutions, peopled by bureaucrats. That’s what kibbutzniks are, man—narrow, petty bureaucrats.”

  She kept knocking the kibbutz, dumping on her home, Tal’s home, their extended family, as if that family—and everyone she knows, including Tal—had tuned out her grating arias years ago, and she was glad to see someone actually touched, disturbed, by her tirade, flabbergasted to hear her say that her grandfather blamed the deterioration of the kibbutz on Hitler . . . “Before his death camps, only dreamers, fiery idealists, adventurers, came to settle up in The Land, in the kibbutz,” she said. “But after the death camps, the kibbutz took in any survivor who had no family, no home, and no money to settle in the city. And they, the newcomers who came to settle in the kibbutz, changed it from what my grandfather calls ‘an adventurous and daring idealistic experiment’ to a boring established institution, man. The newcomers became a majority. They had equal votes, and you know what happens when everyone has an equal vote—like, you know, the lowest common denominator, mistaking conformity for equality, destroys anything different, special, beautiful . . . They want you to be as narrow and boring as they are, man. And if you rebel, they punish you . . .

  “You know, I wanted to study art, man, painting. So I asked for a study grant, because, you know, in the kibbutz we receive no pay for working,” she went on to tell me. “You know, a person can loaf through life or work his ass off, it doesn’t matter in the kibbutz, man. Each member receives the same allowance, like just cigarette money, you know. So I asked the kibbutz treasurer for a study grant, and what do you know, at the next general meeting that bureaucrat actually introduced my request, and my art teacher told them of my painting talent, but, wouldn’t you know, some asshole griped that my talent is immaterial; the kibbutz was strapped for funds, and short of hands, and all the young members were serving army duty, others were serving in the Knesset, the labour unions, the city youth movement . . . Then another shit-shovelling schmuck, who wants me to work in the fucking cowshed, says the kibbutz is already supporting more than enough students and artists, poets, musicians, writers . . .

  “Why not me? Man, the shit-heads voted that I have to wait, work in the fucking cowshed until the kibbutz had hands and funds to spare, meaning till I’m too fucking senile to know a paint brush from a hair brush . . . And then those assholes voted to spend a fucking fortune on a new tennis court, and a new Olympic-size swimming pool, and on plane tickets abroad for kibbutz members with enough seniority to be my parents . . .

  “You were crazy, man, stupid, to give them all your army paycheques,” she said to Tal. What liberties she took; Wallah, what amulets Azzizah would prescribe if she were to hear how Dorit bad-mouthed her people and envied city give-me-give-me kids. “Man, you know how city parents support their children even after they leave home. Like, city parents pay their children’s university tuition, set them up in business, and, you know, buy them a flat, furniture, the works. But when kibbutzniks leave the kibbutz, we get fuck-all, man, and at every home visit someone sticks it to you—‘How can you leave when you know how short of hands we are?’

  “Tal put so much money into the kibbutz’s treasury, he’s entitled to a loan, you know. But he’s too proud to ask for a bit of a loan to help him find his footing in the city. He can’t afford to see a movie, you know,” she told me, laughing her disturbed, disturbing laughter.

  Tal said nothing, but that didn’t appear to be strange to her. He was probably the silent one in their kibbutz class, and didn’t find his tongue until the Unit. The army had almost opposite effect on them. Maybe because there is no elite unit for women in our army, and Dorit was accustomed to belonging to the elite.

  Dorit got married to get out of army service, Tal had told me. She couldn’t stand the army, he said. “Her luck, Dorit was stuck with officers not half as bright as she is. It nearly drove her crazy, taking orders from them.”

  They probably didn’t defer to her, as Tal did. She couldn’t ride on her grandparents’ laurels in the army, but had to earn rank. Someone should have prepared her for that.

  “Tal told me you live in Toronto. Did you drive over to California?” she asked me, as if the drive from Toronto to California, like the drive from her kibbutz to Eilat, took less than a day.

  “No, I flew to California, like a fat city-tourist,” I replied, cracking Tal up.

  “That’s what I’m saving my money for, man—a one-way ticket to California. The place, isn’t it?” she asked me, rhetorically. She knows it all, and better than you, she thinks; like a person compelled by demons she extolled exile. “Exile, man, is our homeland. Exile, man, is where we flourish,” she said. “No way could Einstein be Einstein in The Land; Chagall, Shalom Aleichem, and Bob Dylan would get assigned to shovel shit in the fucking cowshed here. No accident, man, that Agnon, Buber, and Gershon Shalom were born and raised in exile. And you know, our Talmud was composed in exile, man . . . And even the Bible, man, some people say was edited, if not written, in exile. Shit, in the Bible itself it says that the Ten Commandments were carved in Sinai, not in The Land. And where was Moses born and raised? In Egypt, man, yet according to the Bible, no greater prophet had Israel than Moses, right? Man, nothing but wars to secure The Land did we have after Moses, then brothers’ wars for the fucking kingdom; Solomon’s prick fucked a thousand wives and fucked away the kingdom, man. Next page the temple is destroyed, and we’re expelled from The Land, and that’s when we started to thrive, man—in exile . . . That’s when we discovered Jerusalem serves us best as an ideal, a dream, a symbol, something to strive for, to long for—not to live in, possess. Not for nothing the prayer says: Next year in Jerusalem. Next year, man, not this year. This year let the Arabs have The Land; for us it
is poison, man, breeds only wars and generals with small hearts and no balls to admit The Land has served its purpose, sheltered the survivors of the death camps. Okay, now it’s time to get out of the shelter, man, out of this fucking fortress, and go home where we belong—to California, Paris, New York, and Toronto. Right?” She laughed.

  “You wouldn’t know it from where I am sitting,” I said when her mouth was busy with her Heineken. “We native-born Israelis sit on our suitcases, with one leg in The Land, no matter how many years ago we’ve dropped out. We Sabras don’t transplant like immigrants the world over.” I felt like I was seven hundred years old, cursed to see generation after generation repeat the same mistake, thinking they know better.

  “Bullshit,” Dorit snapped, and then, in that confident, know-it-all, sheltered Mayflower-child voice of hers, she said, “Our Sabra roots are nothing but a brainwashing job. We Sabras have no roots. That’s what makes us special, unique, man . . . That and being shunned. We Yehudim are like weeds. No need to transplant weeds, no need to transplant us. The Gentiles pull us out of one place, but before they know it we pop up somewhere else . . .

  “Tal wanted me to meet you. He thought you’d convince me to stay put in The Land,” she said, giving in to her crazy laughter.

  “True,” his eyes told mine. “Tell her what a mistake dropping out was for you.”

  Sure, man, I thought. I’ll pour my heart out to her and she’ll blow her crazy laughter in my face, then tell me, “Yeah, man, if it’s such a mistake, why don’t you move your ass over here for good?” Or she’ll tell me, “Sit here without a return ticket to Canada in your pocket, man, and then try to dissuade me from dropping out of the siege, the war, the fortress . . .”

  Dorit wasn’t accustomed to being shut out, even for a split second, her nervous laughter said, and she blushed when Tal and I communicated in a glance. Oh, how shut out she’d feel outside The Land—and transient even in The Land. Everyone she knew and loved when she grew up, and everyone she would meet like I did Tal, Hillel, Abu Salim, Azzizah, Tammam, A’ida, Mutt and Jeff . . . would slip past her life like the lone thorn trees along the highway, a spot of shade far in the wilderness; now you see it, now you don’t.