by Malka Marom
“Twice before, Wallah,” the others tremored behind her, like a chorus in a Greek tragedy.
“Yes, twice before,” the Badawias’ leader said to Jum’ah; then quickly as if she feared he’d stop her before they were exonerated, she added, “The first time the Green Patrol had visited our home-compound, they went on to round up nearly all the goats of all the herds owned by our clan. And just when the herds were rounded up in our home compound, a truck arrived to cart the goats away. I swear our clan had paid the ransom money that the Green Patrol demanded for our goats, Wallah. The Green Patrol has surely spent our ransom money, we thought the second time we heard the green Jeeps of the Green Patrol; that is why again the Green Patrol comes to round up and cart away our herds.
“But the second time, the Green Patrol blew into our home compound like a wind, Wallah. Like the wind, the Green Patrol collapsed the tent poles in our compound, but in such a way that the tents fell on the fires burning in front. It took the fire but a moment to swallow a tent that takes a woman three years to weave, yaa-Rabb, and fed by the tents, the fire tongues rose and spread to swallow our provisions also, and our clothes as well. Only two carpets the Green Patrol had allowed us to salvage from the fires. That is why we all are weaving new carpets and new tents.
“Today, also, we were going to weave on the hill where we do our weaving, when we heard the Jeep. And because the sun was high and no man was in the compound, we thought the Jeep was green. But because each time the Green Patrol had punished us more than the time before, ya’ani—that is— first they carted away our herds, next they destroyed our homes—we thought this time it would be our children’s turn, if not our maidens’, or even us women’s. Therefore, quick-fast, we did not pause even to put out the fires before we escaped and went into hiding. We did not think it safe to leave our hiding place until we heard the Jeep leaving our compound. We fled like senseless goats, perhaps, and perhaps like senseless goats we baa and tremble now. But that is how the Green Patrol had reduced us, I swear, Wallah.”
“Yes, I heard you,” Jum’ah muttered as if his eyes, his blood, told him it was not just a story to spice up life; his tribeswoman would not be that afraid if it was just a story. But his head insisted it was unbelievable, it made no sense.
To me also it made no sense at all.
The curse of Arab curses: Yekhrab beitak—May your house be destroyed—the punishment of punishments: nothing less than that was the destruction of their homes, the burning of their tents. No way would the Green Patrol be a party to such a curse. Men like Tal and Hillel served in the Green Patrol. That’s why Russell had wondered if Awaad had not been stretching the truth when he had accused the Green Patrol of setting fire to his tents. There was little doubt, though, Russell told me on the phone last night, that the Green Patrol had harassed Awaad and his clan, but neither Awaad nor Russell knew why.
“We would be safe here in these desolate West Bank hills, we were told,” the Badawias’ leader continued. “But with the Green Patrol you can never tell. Aywa—yes—green is no longer the colour of bounty. Green is the colour of misfortune, Wallah, of despair, yaa-Rabb. Our men would be too proud to tell it to you. But now that you heard it, tell one and all in our tribe—not how powerless our men, but how powerful the Green Patrol. Tell them also that we are scraping the bottom of the well here, and that we have nowhere else to go, and that we long to return to our home grounds in the Negev.”
Her voice kept rising as overhead a pair of fighters were taking a dive that looked like it would end in a crash right there in the compound. The Badawias, and even the children, reacted like city people do to traffic noise. And when the jets shot up and out of sight, the Badawias and the children laughed at Jum’ah and me like city people do at country hicks.
“There is nothing to fear,” their leader said, her fearful eyes addressing mine. “Nothing to fear,” she was saying when I was thinking of Arik, and of Levi, diving in one of these jets . . . “Nothing to fear,” she was saying. “Nothing to fear . . . the pilots practice like that every day, but not once did they drop a shell or a bomb outside the fire zone.”
Whatever they dropped, the pilots dropped it so low that it had no time to whistle. It didn’t take long for the air to be full of what smelled like burning rubber or tar.
“Napalm,” Jum’ah whispered to me, as if he didn’t want the children to know their compound smelled of a weapon he considered to be unclean—a weapon that smelled of jungle warfare, Vietnam, wasted lives, abuse of power, and defeat. Or perhaps he whispered because he felt that he and I were bound now by what we were witnessing—and by shared culpability.
“I can’t understand why we’ve been that rough on Awaad’s clan, can you?” Jum’ah asked me in Hebrew.
I don’t know if he said we because Badu also serve in the Green Patrol or because he—like Russell—thought that his sheikh might be in collusion with the Green Patrol, and he, Jum’ah, believed in tribal responsibility, collective guilt, blame and maybe punishment as well, as Badu have for centuries, and Awaad’s clan to this day.
Yet not one person of Awaad’s compound lumped me in with the Green Patrol. Badu may wait a hundred years to avenge. But Awaad’s people, it seemed, separated the individual from the tribe—because their clan was small and powerless, and they themselves were separated from their tribe? Or because a human being has a deep need to have faith in human kind? Such a deep need that Awaad’s people believed the Green Patrol was only an instrument of fate . . . that’s what Jum’ah and I were to discover later.
“Nothing to fear, the smell, the smoke, the heat will soon drift away,” the Badawias’ leader, her eyes bulging with fear and her voice quivering, muttered to me.
“We’d better declare this area off-limits, or move this target-practice range somewhere else, before pilot error incinerates Awaad’s people,” Jum’ah added between spells of coughing. A rush of heat in wake of the explosion burned the oxygen out of the air.
Jum’ah didn’t snap at the Badawias now when he told them that I had travelled a long and far distance to bring provisions for them, and information for Awaad.
“Allah shall reward her,” the huddle muttered, Badu-proper, still sweating in fear of my green Jeep.
“Sit-stay. Awaad will soon return,” the Badawias’ leader said. The others started to help her clean her tent.
“But first, brew tea and coffee,” said one of the Badawias, and then they couldn’t decide whether they should wash up first, or collect the carpets they were weaving on the hill first, or collect the goats . . .
They were pumping the brakes. Fear, like a stalled car pushed downhill, gains a tremendous momentum that propels us all, governing our actions and emotions, dreams and thoughts, like an immutable law. We Yahod have shared the Badawias’ momentum for centuries, rushing headlong down a preordained path of old habits, customs, and beliefs that most of us had left in the ghetto, and new ones not yet clearly defined. The Badawias, too, were being carried beyond their old ways—their way of life, their rituals and ceremonies, even their submission to fate or to Allah.
They submitted, it seemed, but like Sunday drivers facing a hill too steep for them—with the same sort of desperate readiness. I could see it as they attacked their chores with a frenzy bordering on panic.
Gone was their Badu time everlasting; gone was their gliding Badawia composure. Gone was also their suspicion and distrust of strangers.
Up until now, I believed that Defences go up when you feel threatened, that you even develop a seventh sense, like Dave. But here I was learning that the opposite holds true—that fear overrides Defences. Le’havdil—there’s no comparison—yet here I began to understand how Defenceless my clan was in the pogroms, and how the grandparents I wished I’d known, and the uncles, aunts, and cousins I knew only from stories, had smelled in the boxcars rolling toward the death camps . . . how even the wise and the clever ones in my fa
ther’s family, and my mother’s, couldn’t see that they would not be spared . . . and how it could happen that basic survival instincts—fight or flight—didn’t work for millions.
By sunset, the Badawias were all kohled and veiled, their clothes washed and dry, their children bathed and combed, their herds rounded up and fed, the provisions I had brought divided. Rice was bubbling on cooking fires and pitas were being prepared. Jum’ah and I were sitting on a welcome-carpet when “our” Badu, the one Tal and I were certain was Awaad, returning with the men of the Badu clan, walked past the compound.
“Awaad!” the Badawias’ leader called after him.
“Go fetch him,” she told her children when he didn’t turn even his head back, but the children, sensing his anger, pretended not to hear her.
His anger permeated the whole compound.
Only the infants dared utter a sound during supper. The serving trays were nearly empty when Awaad—yes, the one Tal and I were certain was Awaad—looking furious with Jum’ah, joined the fire-circle, his own fire-circle and the Badawias’ leader, his wife’s. Jum’ah rose to his feet and walked to the darkness beyond the rim of the firelight.
“You offended him . . . offended our guest,” Awaad’s wife muttered—to Awaad, herself, her children—I couldn’t tell.
Fire shadows danced on Awaad’s furious face when he started to eat the leftovers, and his wife started to roast honour-coffee.
As soon as the others heard the daqq-daqq-daqq of coffee beans being pounded to fine powder, they started to drift from their fire-circles to Awaad’s.
“Drop the curtain,” Awaad ordered his wife. A minute later, a burlap flap divided their tent into two sections; then, two separate coffee fires were built and lit, one outside the front of each section. The men and the children gathered around the fire-circle in the men’s section; the Badawias, the maidens, huddled inside the women’s section, where the place of honour, at the opening, close to the fire and away from the smoke, was reserved for me.
“It’s been a long time since we had a woman-guest,” Awaad’s wife explained. But soon after I folded my legs on her welcome-carpet, Awaad ordered his wife to dispatch me to his fire-circle. She grunted and grumbled under her veil, then told me, “You’ll rejoin us later. The fire-circles are not far apart. Sit facing us women and it will be like you are sitting with us.”
Jum’ah didn’t join the fire-circle. His cigarette glowed in the darkness, though he could not help but see Awaad serving coffee-honour to make a sulha—a forgiveness. The delicate porcelain cup he handed to me Awaad left half-empty, in recognition of my generosity and to preserve his dignity. I sipped two such cups, then, after the third, I shook the empty cup and rested it upside down on the ground, just as Abu Salim had taught me.
“Ghule—tell us—what El Bofessa had told you to tell us,” Awaad said. He couldn’t wait now, it seemed. Neither he nor I acknowledged in any way the hours he wasted in the run around he’d given Tal and me all morning. His face fell when I strung a long string of regards-blessings from Russell. The longer the string, the worse the news, Awaad obviously knew, as did the others around the fire-circle. One by one, the men asked me to relay to El Bofessa, his wife, his children, their regards and blessings, and the women also, from behind the burlap curtains, one by one. But when the maidens started, Awaad snapped, “Bas—enough.”
Silence. Jum’ah lit another cigarette. Its glow was now so far into the darkness I could hardly see it.
“Ba’ad idhnak—with your permission, I will cassette-record for El Bofessa to hear,” I broke the silence.
“You have my permission,” Awaad snapped. He waited until I pressed the record button, then he exclaimed, “Oh, El Bofessa, a hawk to his friends, in support of them will run over fire, even flames . . .
“Now, say what El Bofessa had dispatched you to tell . . . ghoule—tell,” Awaad urged me.
“El Bofessa is serving reserve duty,” I said. “That is why he dispatched me to inform you that you are to stay right here in this place. For he fears the Green Patrol will confiscate the remainder of your herds if and when you return to your home-grounds in the Negev.”
“Laa!—No!” protested the Badawias.
“But I thought the man in charge of the Green Patrol was El Bofessa’s friend,” Awaad said. “Surely El Bofessa told his friend, the head man of the Green Patrol, that we are scraping the bottom of the well here, and that our tents are pitched too close to a fire zone, a target-practice range . . . And that we have no other place to go.”
“Oh, life, who has sat me down square on hot ashes, why have you dashed me this way!” implored a Badawia from the women’s section of the tent.
“I am sure El Bofessa asked his Green Patrol friend why is he so bent on confiscating our goatherds,” said the Badu with the hollowed cheeks, addressing me.
“‘It is against the law to own goats in the Negev,’ that is what the man in charge of the Green Patrol told El Bofessa,” I said. An infant, crying, startled the other infants in the women’s section. Veils and necklaces jingle-jangled as they do when Badawias uncover the nursing slits of their thowbs.
“You mean all the goats the Negev over are illegal?” asked the Badu sitting to the right of Awaad.
“But surely El Bofessa told his Green Patrol friend that we Negev Badu have been raising goats for more years than a man can count, Wallah,” said Awaad. “Surely El Bofessa told his friend that we Badu cannot live without goats. What will we sacrifice for the holy days, and for honour of guests, and for the sealing of marriage? How will a man purchase a bride if he has no goats? How will a woman weave a tent if she has no goat hair? What will we use for milk and for meat and for clarified butter? Surely El Bofessa told his friend all that . . .”
“Oh Allah, may this head of the Green Patrol die from your sharp-poisoned spear, or the venom of a sidewinder in flight through the sand dunes,” cursed one of the elders. He spat behind his back, then added, “And if two daughters has he, may the better abscond, and the other, her guardian rape on the ground.”
“Patience . . . patience,” Awaad muttered to himself and the others. “Patience is the key to relief. Tell on,” he urged me.
“Aywa, the man in charge of the Green Patrol fears your goatherds would turn the fertile fields of the Negev into a desolate desert again. That is what he had told El Bofessa,” I said.
“Again?” said Awaad.
“Yes” I replied. “It is your goatherds that have turned a fertile Negev into a desert in the first place, the man in charge of the Green Patrol told El Bofessa; you Badu are not the sons of the desert, but the fathers of the desert, he said. But El Bofessa consulted with grazing experts in and out of The Land, and in and out of books, and he learned that goatherds, small like yours, are harmless to the Negev desert. Therefore, El Bofessa wonders if you will permit him to hire a lawyer on your behalf. For he, El Bofessa, thinks, the only place you can fight the Green Patrol, and maybe even win, is in the court of law, of justice. ‘Bear in mind, though,’ El Bofessa had told me to tell you, ‘that you may have to wait a few months, if not a few years, for your turn to be heard in the court of law.’”
“Where will we wait?” they asked me, from the men’s fire-circle and the women’s, and how do you fight in a court of law? And what is a lawyer? And how much money will this lawyer cost? And where will we find such a sum of money? “And anyway, no lawyer hired by a Badu will have the power to break a law created by the Green Patrol.”
“You mean the goat law is not new?” Awaad cried out when I told him the goat law was twenty-six years old.
“Why is the Green Patrol acting on this law only now, only on our clan? I am sure El Bofessa asked the man in charge of the Green Patrol,” said the Badu with the hollowed cheeks.
“The answer to that lies partly with your sheikh. That is what the man in charge of the Green Patrol told El Bofessa,
” I said, my face burning hot and my back freezing cold.
“Cannot be,” said the Badu sitting right of Awaad. “We talked with the sheikh two times, but not once did the sheikh say-tell it was not lawful to own or to raise goats.”
“Aywa,” concurred Awaad. “It was right after the Green Patrol had demanded too much money to ransom the herds they had carted away, that we went to the sheikh. And the sheikh told us that the Green Patrol demanded the money not to ransom our goats, only to pay a fine for the water we were taking from the neighbouring kibbutzim.”
“So we told the sheikh that no matter how much money we had offered to pay the kibbutzim for water rights, the kibbutzim refused, saying that because of the drought, they—the kibbutzim—had no water to spare,” said the elder sitting right of Awaad. “We had no water to drink, yaa-Rabb, when the kibbutzim were watering fields, day and night, fields stretching wider than our home ground.”
“We would have as much water as the kibbutzim have if we moved to the new tribal grounds, the sheikh told us,” said Awaad. “And so next day, all the men of the clan went to see the new tribal grounds. And just as the sheikh had told us, we saw streets being paved, and houses being built, and Badu children already learning in a new school. And maybe a hundred Badu women and children, and even men, crowded in the waiting room of a new clinic, for the Badu doctor who was working there was also teaching in the big hospital in Bir Sab’a. If we move to live in this new place, our children will grow up to become doctors or engineers, or builders, or even electricians or plumbers—that’s what our tribesmen who moved to live there said. And after that they showed us how the electricity was working, and the gas and the plumbing.
“Wallah, we saw that the sheikh had told us no story when he had told us the new place was good,” Awaad said. “That is why I, and all the men of the clan as well, thought it would offend not only the sheikh but the tribesmen who had already moved to live in the new place, and moreover, also shame the women of our clan, if we were to tell the sheikh that we could not move to live in the new tribal place because of the women.”