Sulha

by Malka Marom

  Whoever this Badu was, he has been waiting for hours in this spot to meet Russell, Tal’s gut feeling insisted, whatever this Badu claimed. But he did not wave or call us back, as Tal thought he would, when we were about to drive away.

  Up and down and around this spot we drove. We saw no sign of another Badu. We must have burned half a tank driving around, searching for Awaad. And we were starting to check our watches. By three o’clock that afternoon, at the very latest, we had to be back in Tel Aviv and the Jeep had to be available for army duty or inspection. And only when we had no time to spare did Tal agree to check the spot that Russell had mentioned on the phone, one last time. Sure enough, the Badu was still sitting there.

  With silence this Badu parried my questions. “Wallah, he is a true Arab,” Abu Salim would say. “True Arabs trust no strangers—write-to-remember, yaa-Nura: all questions from the mouths of strangers must be parried with silence or agile words. For to give information to a stranger is to hand him a shibriyya—dagger. He might admire the shibriyya’s handsome handle. Or he could, with its sharp edge, pierce your honour, and then your whole tribe would be bathed in shame. Such shame must be avenged . . .”

  “It would be a shame if we would fail to meet with Awaad, very soon,” I told the Badu, “for we have to leave for Tel Aviv in an hour’s time, and the Jeep is loaded with provisions for Awaad’s clan, even medicaments,” I had to show him the sacks and the cartons and the bundles of the winter clothes, before he agreed to climb into the front seat of the Jeep. And even then the Badu said only that he could try to find an Arab who knows most everyone who dwells in the vicinity.

  Trust begets trust, I muttered to Tal in Hebrew.

  Doesn’t work with Arabs, said Tal. Still, Tal blindly followed the Badu’s directions: Not a word did the Badu offer to explain why he was directing the Jeep, not through the dry riverbed, but up to the high ground, as if he feared a flood would flash through the wadi any second when the sky was innocent.

  The high ground, heaving like a wounded beast, was scabbed with boulders, and so torn by floodwaters, the Jeep nearly rolled over more than once or twice too often. The Badu skipped out of the Jeep—“For to better find a safer path,” he said. “For to destroy the Jeep,” Tal muttered. “The Badu is wasting his sweat, though; the Jeep is taking the high ground like a seasoned commando beast.”

  Hill after hill the Jeep groaned, dove, climbed, and tilted from side to side. And the Badu, walking ahead, kept looking for the Arab who knows everyone in the vicinity, and calling out his name. But the hills seemed to be deserted. There was no response, not even an echo.

  Then, suddenly, a man appeared—from nowhere, it seemed; a Badu or an Arab, I couldn’t tell, nor could Tal. As soon as the Jeep crawled over to him, the Arab disappeared as he had appeared—into nowhere.

  Tal pressed the brake but left the motor running. “Today’s terrorists have learned to appear and disappear like that from yesterday’s smugglers and raiders,” he explained when the Badu vanished as well. Five minutes later he sounded the horn, non-stop, until the Badu reappeared—alone, gesturing for the Jeep to follow him. We followed without question, even though the Badu was leading us deeper and deeper into what Tal called terrorists’ breeding ground. Tal had loaded his Beretta and tucked it into his belt long before the Badu met the Arab.

  The terrorists’ breeding ground looked like ghost pasture land, so ravaged by drought and plundered clean that there was not even the smell of a rotten morsel to draw a bird of prey.

  And the sun was already high enough to erase colours, shadows, and depth. One hill looked like another to me, and Tal—I had never seen Tal coiled so tight.

  “We are turning back if we don’t see Awaad’s compound from the crest of the upcoming hill,” Tal decided, but when the wadi below the next hill was also bare of tents, he didn’t quit. And like the Badu, Tal kept saying, “This next hill is the last.”

  It was when the Jeep crawled to the crest of the hill after “the last . . . and this time I mean it . . .” that we finally did see a compound of six or eight tents made of sackcloth, pitched at the foot of the swelling hill on the opposite bank of the dry riverbed. Tal stopped the Jeep and, looking like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, snapped at the Badu, “What in the hell is going on!”

  But the Badu was running like hell to the compound.

  “What did you see, Tal?” I yelled over the noise of the engine, as the Jeep dived downhill, right after the Badu. The compound bounced with the Jeep, then it blended with the sun-bleached boulders and rocks in the shimmering distance.

  I didn’t know how good Tal’s eyesight was until we drove into the compound and found the tents deserted. Not a soul in sight, yet cooking-fires were burning. That certainly didn’t look right.

  It didn’t seem to surprise the Badu, though. “The stupidity of women knows no bounds,” he said in Badu Arabic. Then he went on to explain that often when a child-shepherd finds a few goats missing from the herd, and fears his mother will beat him for his negligence, he runs back to the tents, crying such tears of woe that all the women in the compound lose their heads. “Sometimes they even forget to take their infants with them before they run to see if the whole herd is lost or injured,” said the Badu. “You can be sure that if even one man was in the compound he would not leave the fires burning.”

  As soon as I started to translate his words for Tal, the Badu went to look for the women and children, or so it appeared.

  Reality by now seemed to slither and change skins like a snake. One minute the Badu was Awaad, next minute he was not; abia—cloaks—appeared and disappeared into shimmering terrorists’ breeding grounds; fires were smouldering in tents abandoned only ten-fifteen minutes ago, by the looks of it. And the wind carries sound a great distance in these barren hills, like in the desert, yet there was no sound of women, children, or goats. The only sound we heard was the Badu shouting, “Awaad!! Awaad!”

  “The tent dwellers must have heard our Jeep before they abandoned their compound,” I said to Tal. “They would have left someone behind if they needed access to a Jeep, and they are bound to know that a Jeep gallops faster than a camel. Even Badawias isolated in forbidden tents know that.”

  “You sound like a Badu tracker,” said Tal. “What do you make of this?”

  “I’d say these Badu left their compound because they couldn’t or didn’t want to receive guests. But Badu who don’t want to receive guests cover their fires with sand or gravel, leave no clues that they were here but don’t want or can’t afford to extend hospitality.”

  Most tents were almost bare and just swept clean. A sackcloth was spread like a welcome-carpet next to each fire. The water jerricans were half-full, and the cooking utensils and serving trays stacked on the bare ground had just been washed, but not the tea glasses, and the flies knew where the sugar was stored. The knots in the flour sacks were tied low, and only two or three tents had a bit of rice, a few onions and cans of tomato paste, and goatskin bags of clarified butter that weighed next to nothing.

  The tent dwellers—half prepared to pack up and leave, and half prepared to stay—were drinking tea when suddenly all of them took off. Why? Where?

  The tents offered no clue.

  Their water source was nowhere in sight. As far as the eye could see there was no trace of a tree, a bush, or a shrub to feed a fire or a goat.

  And now, just as the Badu came running back, shouting a torrent of I couldn’t understand what, in a cloud of dust a camel-rider galloped into the compound. A handsome Badu in his late teens or early twenties, wearing a red kaffiyye, blue jeans, and yellow t-shirt. He dismounted, rushed over to our Jeep, gave it a quick once-over, ignoring or not hearing the torrent of words the Badu who had led us to this compound was spewing faster than floodwaters.

  The camel-rider took a close look at one of the fire-circles, and kicked another. Whatever the Badu
told him annoyed the camel-rider, or so it seemed. “I heard you . . . I heard you . . .” he muttered to the Badu, as he walked over to us.

  “Let’s go, unload the Jeep. I heard you are pressed for time,” he said to Tal and me in Hebrew. But it was the air about him, not only his Hebrew, his manner, his attitude, that breathed of familiarity—of home and trust.

  “Yes. Three hours from now at the latest, this Jeep has to show up for reserve-duty or an army checkup at a base near Tel Aviv,” said Tal.

  “You are cutting it close,” said the camel-rider, unbolting the back door of the Jeep, as if he couldn’t wait to unload the provisions, see us leave—Why?

  “Is this Awaad’s compound?” Tal asked him.

  “Yes,” replied the camel-rider.

  “Are you of Awaad’s clan?” I asked him next.

  “No. I’m of Awaad’s tribe,” said the camel-rider. “My name is Jum’ah,” he added, extending his hand, his handshake solid.

  “Is he Awaad or of Awaad’s clan?” Tal asked Jum’ah—meaning “Friday”—pointing to the Badu who kept pacing back and forth at the tent farthest from us, by the Jeep.

  “Are you Awaad or of Awaad’s clan?” Jum’ah shouted to the Badu.

  “Laa—No!” the Badu shouted back.

  “Did you happen to see anyone from this compound on your way here?” I asked Jum’ah next.

  “No,” he said.

  “The tent-dwellers can’t be very far from here if their fires are not yet dead,” said Tal. “Shouldn’t take long to track them down, don’t you think?” he asked Jum’ah.

  “I’m not as fast a tracker as I was before I served as commanding officer, first lieutenant in the Engineering Corps,” said Jum’ah, pulling out of his wallet an Israeli army I.D. card, as if we had to see it to believe that a Badu—a true Arab—could have the rank of a commanding officer in an army known to have the highest ratio of commanders per soldier. None ranked higher than Jum’ah, you’d think, had you see how he beamed with pride. It was such a rare and hard-earned achievement; a personal and tribal feat; a triumph over decades of tribal animosity, mistrust and prejudice; a personal leap over centuries of illiteracy. “You didn’t see many I.D. cards like this one,” said Jum’ah.

  “No, I haven’t. All honour to you,” said Tal, then, while we unloaded the Jeep, Jum’ah told us that he was stationed up north at our border with Lebanon, and that the situation up there was such a mess, he couldn’t wait for his furlough, but when it finally came and he returned home, he remembered that he had to defer to his elders even more than to his army commanders. So he took off on one of the family camels to get away from it all.

  “In these hills?” said Tal.

  “No. I was on my way to the Judean Desert,” said Jum’ah, and then he talked about the desert, and about the drought, and about . . . I don’t remember what else. On and on Jum’ah babbled about everything without any prodding from us. But not a word did he volunteer about the mystery that stared us in the face—live fires in a ghost compound.

  Jum’ah certainly had a clue to this mystery by now, or he would have been searching for one. I had no doubt about that. If we asked him why he wouldn’t share it with us, we’d be sure to offend him, if not alienate him altogether. He might want us to treat him as our equal, but treat a Badu—a true Arab—as an equal, and he thinks you treat him as your inferior. You have to elevate him or he thinks you reduce him. So you have to lay it on thick when you jack him up, make an ass of yourself—and of him. It robs you both of dignity.

  We didn’t press Jum’ah to answer any question he obviously didn’t want to, or couldn’t, touch. We trusted he was as straight with us as his umpteen conflicting loyalties allowed him to be.

  The provisions we unpacked made such a large heap on the ground, it was hard to believe they had all fit in the Jeep. Jum’ah was still huffing and puffing from the effort of unloading the Jeep while talking almost without a breather, when he volunteered to escort us to the main road.

  “One of us had better stay here until Awaad or someone of Awaad’s clan shows up,” I said to Jum’ah. “We were dispatched to this compound by a good friend of Awaad’s with information we had been instructed to impart to no one but Awaad or someone of Awaad’s clan,” I explained. “I wish you were of Awaad’s clan.”

  “So do I . . . I understand your bind,” said Jum’ah. This bind was probably child’s play to him . . . God knows how many loyalties tugged him in different directions—loyalties to his Badu elders, his Israeli commanders, his old world, his new world . . .

  Now Jum’ah walked over to the Badu, who was pacing in front of the tent farthest from us. If Jum’ah doesn’t persuade the Badu to tell us that he is Awaad, then this Badu is not Awaad, Tal and I decided. But no matter what we decided, we couldn’t shake the feeling that this Badu was Awaad, even when Jum’ah came out of that conference to tell Tal, “Seems we have no options but to split up. That Badu will drive with you to the main road. I’ll stay here with Leora, back her up until she gets on a bus or a cab in Beersheba, tonight or early tomorrow at the latest.”

  “We have another option,” I said. “We can track Awaad’s people. It shouldn’t take all that long. The Jeep will report for reserve-duty a bit late.”

  “And Jum’ah also will report for duty whenever it suits him, as will everyone else,” said Tal. “The only other option we have is to retreat without completing this mission. Awaad will get his information another time, from someone else.” Tal wouldn’t venture into these West Bank hills for this mission again. Neither would I. But neither of us would retreat now, like frightened strangers, from this or any place in The Land.

  “That Badu doesn’t have to escort me to the main road,” Tal said to Jum’ah.

  “He doesn’t want you to escort him!” Jum’ah shouted to the Badu.

  Swearing and cursing, the Badu re-joined us to demand Tal give him a ride back to the place we had found him on the main road.

  Tal agreed, then asked Jum’ah if he had any reservations about staying to back me up.

  “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right,” Jum’ah said to us, looking as edgy as we felt.

  It didn’t occur to any of us that Tal should be the one to stay and I the one to drive away. If only we had known how unfortunate this would prove to be . . .

  CHAPTER 36

  As soon as Tal and the Badu left, Jum’ah started to follow the tracks that led from the tents. He kept running in one direction, then another, as if he couldn’t decide which tracks to follow. Then, suddenly, he dashed out, shouting at the top of his voice. I followed him until my lungs quit. The distance between us was wide when I saw black figures—a group of Badawias or maidens—running away from him, then running toward him; back and forth, back and forth.

  Back and forth, back and forth, as if torn between courage and fear they ran and paced even after they reached their compound—ten, fifteen, Badawias and maidens clutching wailing infants, and with whimpering children trailing behind them. Their bloodshot eyes darting from one direction to another, their thowbs reeking of that unmistakable smell of fear. And their veils, hanging in disarray below their faces and their braids, revealed their lips—blue, as if frozen, though the sun was relentless. Back and forth, back and forth, talking as fast as they paced, a compulsive torrent of words through chattering teeth, all at once. Then a Badawia wearing a nose ring like Azzizah’s—a silver half-crescent—their leader, it seemed, started to curse. Following her the Badawias raced from tent to tent, to my Jeep, to the tire tracks, then round and around the heap of provisions we had stacked on the ground.

  “She brought these provisions,” Jum’ah told them, pointing to me. Then again and again he asked their leader, “What happened? What happened?”

  “Sit-stay, coffee will soon be served,” muttered the Badawia, like a robot programmed to receive guests. “Fetch this, fetch
that . . .” she told the maidens and the children, then something about goats, I think; she was talking so fast that even Jum’ah couldn’t understand what she said.

  “They’re not accustomed to be so over-pumped with adrenalin,” Jum’ah muttered in Hebrew. I don’t know if he was angry because it pained him or shamed him to see women and children of his tribe so afraid, or if he meant to fight fear with fear. But he nearly threw them into a panic—berating, warning, demanding these Badawias tell him what happened to “rob you of your adabb—nobility, character, dignity.”

  They huddled shivering and sweating as if they couldn’t decide if it was winter or summer, let alone if Jum’ah was their guest, or the master of their compound and destiny. Before he became more annoyed or downright mean with them, the Badawias urged a maiden they called the poetess to “Ghule, ghule—tell him—what happened, tell him the Jeep was green . . . the Jeep was green.”

  “Green is no longer the colour of bounty,” the maiden said. That’s all.

  “Green is no longer the colour of bounty, meaning . . . meaning . . . meaning, what?” Jum’ah demanded, like a Badu after a poem recited. “I am your tribesman,” he added.

  The Badawias’ leader tried to explain. But neither Jum’ah nor I understood what she was saying until she clamped her fists to her jaw to stop her teeth from chattering.

  “We thought the Jeep was coloured green,” she muttered, as if that explained it all.

  “Yes, the Jeep was—is—coloured green. Many Jeeps are spray-painted green,” Jum’ah snapped as if he thought their fear stemmed from their ignorance, superstitions, backwardness.

  “Wallah, we are but women,” the Badawias’ leader said, shifting from leg to leg, as if the earth under her bare feet was packed with snow or with smouldering coals. “We heard the Jeep, when it was far, far in the far distance. But we knew the Jeep was green . . . not only because the Jeep sounded like the green Jeeps of the Green Patrol, but also because shadows were shrinking and not a man was in the compound. For that is when the Green Patrol had visited our home compound in the Negev—twice before.”