Sulha

by Malka Marom

  It was still dark, an hour or two before dawn, when Awaad and his wife got up. I told them there was no need to escort me farther than the main road, where I could grab a bus or a cab. But Awaad insisted that my blood was on his head until my guardian released him from responsibility for my life. His wife agreed with him. Then she rolled up the most beautiful welcome-carpet she had woven and stuffed it into a burlap sack.

  “But surely to hear my guardian’s assurance over the telephone in Bir Sab’a is good enough,” I told them. Awaad’s wife agreed; Awaad couldn’t help but see how she hated to part with her welcome-carpet. Still, Awaad muttered, “Yemkin—perhaps, maybe,” and he hoisted the burlap sack up onto his back.

  The Badu with the hollowed cheeks escorted Awaad and me to the main road. It shamed them both that their clan was getting rid of their Yahodiya guest, it seemed. In silence they walked, Badu-proper, a few paces ahead of the women, until we reached the main road. There they stood guard in front of me until there was no sign of a vehicle on the road, and no sound of a vehicle approaching. Only then did Awaad tell-order me to follow him across the road.

  “Ma’assalame—Peace be with you,” the Badu with the hollowed cheeks muttered, turning back toward the compound. Awaad told me to rest my legs by the roadside, “for it might take a long time to stop a bus, taxi, truck or car,” he explained.

  I don’t know if the buses didn’t stop because Awaad was standing kilometres away from a bus stop. Or if the Arab vehicles didn’t stop because he was standing with a Yahodiya. Or if the Yahodi vehicles didn’t stop because he was a Badu, “a true Arab.” Or because he was hitchhiking like a monarch reviewing a parade. I don’t remember how long we stood by the roadside before a couple of burly Yahod driving a minibus stopped to give us a lift.

  As soon as the minibus gathered speed, Awaad whispered to me to grab hold of my seat—“for every turn and bump can throw you off balance.”

  The soldier manning the roadblock didn’t wave the minibus through. I was wearing a kaffiyye, and the man’s shirt over my jeans was large enough to pass for the smocks or the dresses many Arab girls wear as tops. And the burly Israelis in the front seat were wearing the same Western clothes that many Arab men wear. Yet, the soldier told only Awaad to show him his identity card and to untie the burlap sack.

  “Is it really necessary to rub it in like this?” the burly Yahod protested. “Since when do we have a road-block here?” they asked the soldier.

  The soldier said nothing and neither did Awaad. The soldier was checking the identity and the sackcloth bag of a vacant body, it seemed; Awaad had departed to the river beneath the river that the Badu keep secret from strangers.

  j

  Transplanted palm trees were fanning shade all along the new boulevard in Beersheba. And sprinklers were spraying the green lawns, and mothers were pushing strollers to lush parks . . . What a change! Who would have imagined it . . . Not many years ago, when Arik and I were courting, Beersheba was a dusty desert donkey town. Even in Arik’s expansive dreams, Beersheba had no place, and now the town was green, and teeming with people rushing to apartment blocks, factories, schools, hospitals and army bases, market places, restaurants and city hall . . . All mingled here—Badu men in abia, Palestinian Arab women in veils, tourists in shorts—and tearing by on a big shiny motorcycle, a Hasid in a black kapotah, white socks, and a motorcycle helmet, his black earlocks and beard flying.

  As many women as men were pushing and shoving in front of the kiosk at the bus terminal, yet Awaad told me it was no place for a woman. “Wait there,” he said, pointing to the front of the flower shop, where it was less crowded—and where he could watch me. For a long time Awaad waited behind the crowd at the kiosk, until the man behind the counter shouted to him in Arabic, “What do you want?”

  “Two Coca-Cola,” Awaad muttered.

  “What what?!” the man behind the counter shouted.

  “Coca-Cola, two,” the crowd in front of Awaad replied.

  Then, while the money Awaad had saved by hitching to Beersheba was being passed hand-to-hand from Awaad through the crowd to the man behind the counter, the two Coca-Cola bottles were being passed in the same way from the counterman to Awaad. The Badu handed me the bottle as if it contained dust that he had personally scraped off the moon.

  It was with this sense of accomplishment and triumph that Awaad led me to the banks of pay-telephones. Too proud to say he didn’t know how to read the numbers on the dial, or maybe even how to dial, he told me, “You will telephone but I will speak.”

  The only working phone was in the souvenir shop. We were going to take our place at the end of that line when the proprietor told Awaad, in fluent Arabic, that he would have to wait outside while I used the phone.

  “But I am the one who has to speak in the telephone,” said Awaad.

  “In that case you will have to speak in another telephone,” the proprietor said.

  “Why, do you think I will break the telephone? Do you think I do not know to speak in a telephone?!” Awaad cried out, his bloodshot eyes burning. He was back from the secret river beneath a river now, and he looked like he was not going to budge; he’d crossed one too many centuries already today. His anger was restrained and showed little of the frustration, humiliation, and uncertainty that he must have been feeling. Still, Yahod were not accustomed to seeing an Arab asserting his manhood, and some of the customers hurried their children out of the shop as if they thought Awaad was a terrorist dangerous, volatile.

  “I did not mean to offend you,” the proprietor told Awaad now to mollify him, “I asked you to wait outside only because you carry this sack. You know how many booby traps are dismantled in this terminal each and every week?”

  “So, you think I am a terrorist, I see. Why? Because I am an Arab?” Awaad thundered to be heard above the rumble of the buses. He didn’t say he was a Badu, nor that his tribesmen served in the Israeli army, or that the sack he carried had been checked and double-checked at the roadblock. “So, you, too, think I am a terrorist,” Awaad said as the others left the store.

  “You see how you drove my customers away.” The proprietor sighed. “I knew you will drive them away. They will call the police, you know. Suspicious-looking bundles have to be reported to the police.”

  “Good, good,” Awaad said. “The police will see I am not a terrorist.”

  “Where is your brain?!” the proprietor lashed out at me in Hebrew now. “How could you let this Badu Arab carry a sack into a bus terminal.” Let him, the proprietor said, as if Awaad was a child-boy, not a full-grown man. Then the proprietor told me that Arabs have such pride and such a temper, this Badu Arab was liable to kill him if he were to tell him now that he could use the phone, even while he carried his sackcloth bundle. “So you better wait outside with his bundle,” he said in Hebrew to me. And before I could tell him that Awaad doesn’t know how to read the numbers on the dial, he switched to Arabic and told Awaad that he was welcome to use the phone but only on the condition that I wait outside with the sackcloth bag.

  “But the man I have to speak with in the telephone does not know Arabic,” Awaad said.

  The proprietor now looked like he would have paid us to get the hell out of his store, out of his life. “No, no, one of you will have to stay outside with the sack,” he said when Awaad put the burlap sack containing the welcome-carpet outside the store. “People call the police when they see bundles unattended. It is the unattended bundles that contain the time bombs.”

  Awaad didn’t bother to conceal his contempt or his surprise. “So, you were not afraid of the sack when I carried it. I see, you were afraid of me,” the Badu said. “You were afraid of me . . .” The Badu laughed. “Why were you afraid of me?” he asked the proprietor, and then he opened his abaiah—cloak—to show him that he didn’t even carry a shibriyya—dagger—and next he dragged in the burlap sack to show him the “time bomb” that h
is wife had stuffed inside.

  “How much do you want for this carpet?” the proprietor asked Awaad as if it was business as usual now that the bomb scare was over.

  And Awaad seemed to be so happy to see that his wife’s weaving was appreciated in this land of Coca-Cola and telephones, he was going to present the welcome-carpet to the proprietor as a gift, I thought.

  But when the proprietor saw how happy Awaad looked, he probably thought the Badu was seeing a fortune in his pocket already, so he told Awaad that the carpet was stained, even a bit frayed; it would not fetch a large sum, even in the Bedouin market.

  “Yes, yes,” Awaad muttered, looking deflated, and then he told the proprietor that he’d have to speak in the telephone and only then would he know if the carpet was for sale.

  “You mean the person on the telephone was promised the first right to purchase your carpet?” the proprietor asked Awaad.

  Silence. Information is power, Wallah. In no way did Awaad betray that he might have to sell his wife’s welcome-carpet for his bus fare and mine.

  And now the proprietor offered to speak Hebrew for Awaad on the phone. It would be better if he, a man, not me, a woman, spoke for him on the telephone, he told the Badu.

  Awaad agreed. “Tell him how to find your guardian in the telephone,” Awaad said to me.

  The proprietor planned to tell my guardian that the carpet was worthless, it seemed, when he got on the phone. But, after all that, Tal was not to be found at work, or at home. So I gave the proprietor my parents’ phone number, and after he shouted, “Listen, I’m calling from Beersheba . . .” he told Awaad that my guardian told him she knew no one in Beersheba and then she hung up.

  Just like my mother, I thought.

  “But her guardian is a man, not a woman,” Awaad said to the proprietor, as if saying so betrayed us both.

  The proprietor swore that he had dialled the number I gave him, and then he said that he didn’t want to purchase the carpet, he didn’t want to speak for anyone on the telephone.

  And now Awaad looked at me as if he thought I had betrayed him and the proprietor.

  So I told him, “When you were not in the compound, was your wife not my guardian?”

  Awaad laughed and told the proprietor, “Wallah, the truth is with her.”

  “I better phone now,” I said, meaning to call Riva or Mottke, but the proprietor wouldn’t let go of the phone.

  “Just give me the number,” he said, dialled, then shouted, “Listen, I’m calling from Beersheba, don’t hang up, hold on . . .” And after he asked Awaad what he wished to say, he shouted to Mottke, “Listen, some Arab in my store asked me to ask you if you’ll assume responsibility for Leora’s life . . . No, she’s all right . . . She’s all right, I tell you! Hold on . . . Hold on . . .

  “I knew it, I knew it,” he said to me in Hebrew, then, switching to Arabic, he told Awaad that my guardian wanted to know if the Arab was demanding ransom money.

  “Ransom money, for what?” Awaad said.

  And in reply, the proprietor shouted to Mottke, “No, the carpet is not for sale. She’s all right, I told you . . .” And then he told Awaad that my guardian was demanding to speak with me, to hear if I was alive.

  “What’s going on?” Mottke asked me on the phone.

  CHAPTER 38

  “What was the phone call from Beersheba all about? Sounded like you were taken hostage. What’s going on? . . . You look terrible . . .” Mottke said as I walked into his place and Riva’s—only an hour and a half after I parted from Awaad; that’s all it took to cover the distance from Beersheba to Tel Aviv, by cab.

  As soon as he heard me out, Mottke got on the phone, and first he called his old Underground friend, one of the top lawyers in the Land, and told him he needed his assistance with an urgent matter that just came to his attention, could he come over as soon as he found a free hour or two, and could he bring with him his unlisted phone numbers. Next Mottke called his chess partner, the editor of a leading afternoon newspaper, and told him the same thing. After he had made his calls, Mottke informed me that they would be coming over this evening with the unlisted phone numbers of the “gangsters”—as he calls the members of the newly elected “rightist” government.

  “What for?” I ask him.

  “From whom do you think the head of the Green Patrol is taking orders?” Mottke nearly snaps my head off.

  “But Awaad’s sheikh might be involved in this, not only the Green Patrol,” I said. “You can’t go over the sheikh’s head without Awaad’s permission. Awaad and his clan will be punished for that. Insubordination is not lightly tolerated in Badu tribes. You can’t just—”

  “Awaad’s people have nothing to lose,” Mottke said, cutting me off. “Neither will we if the gangsters who ordered the Green Patrol to destroy Bedouin tents, like Cossacks in the pogroms, remain in power much longer . . .”

  I was so sure that Riva would tell Mottke to settle his account with Gingie and “his gangsters” at his own expense and not that of Awaad’s people, I decided to keep my mouth shut, like a good dropout.

  But when Riva came home from work and heard what I had witnessed, and what Mottke was planning to do about it, she seemed relieved to see Mottke riled up about something other than Gingie’s fanatic Kippa, Yeshiva, or the criminal record he had been slapped with for erecting an illegal settlement in the West Bank. And then, frowning as if it had suddenly dawned on her that Mottke was not well or he wouldn’t have come home early, she asked him, “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, just a bit tired . . . I’m not the young surgeon I used to be,” he said, “and you?” his eyes caressing Riva.

  “Drained.” She and Mottke hardly see the sun, so many hours they work—he, with people terribly burned by fire; she, with war-bereaved burned out by loss. But it’s their son’s—Gingie’s—service in the Unit, more than anything else—the wear-and-tear of fear for him, the sleepless nights, the stressful days—that had stolen the spring from their steps, the shine from their eyes, the inspiration from the myth of their invincibility. “Will they be coming for supper?” Riva asked Mottke.

  “No, they’ll be here soon after the evening news,” Mottke replied. As ever, life takes time out for the national obsession to be on top of news events. “In tomorrow’s news reports, the gangsters’ abuse of this Bedouin clan will be fully exposed,” Mottke decided.

  “You are moving too fast for Awaad’s good,” I told Mottke.

  “Now you are thinking of Awaad’s good?” Mottke finally revealed why he was angry with me. “Where were you when Awaad needed you for his good? How could you allow a couple of Arab kids to intimidate Awaad’s people? Why didn’t you stand up for Awaad in Beersheba?”And Riva said she could understand me sleepwalking through life in Canada, but not in The Land, and definitely not in the West Bank, “and in Beersheba—really, Leora, why didn’t you stand up for Awaad?”

  Because Awaad had his own legs to stand on, I wanted to tell her, and because a woman would be cutting his legs off by standing up for him . . . because I was Awaad’s guest, and because Awaad was my guardian . . . because Awaad’s values and way of life were not just a romantic dash of local colour, or an intellectual exercise, but what made Awaad, Awaad. Take that from him and you rob him of the only thing he has left to lose. That’s what I wanted to say, but doubt silenced me. Maybe I really was too passive, or seized by the Badawias’ fear; fear is contagious. And maybe I was stunned, overwhelmed by what I had witnessed in Awaad’s compound—every detail of which I had imparted to Riva and Mottke . . .

  I had incited them to move way too fast, the way front-line fighters who had belonged to the privileged elite—to the ruling establishment—for more than thirty years would move. If Riva and Mottke knew what it was like to belong to a powerless minority, to be Defenceless and afraid like Awaad’s people, like our people in the ghettos There, t
hey seemed to know it like a man knows what it’s like to be a woman. I understood Dave better now, his inhibitions, lack of self-esteem, and yearning for dignity . . . The dignity that Arik had put his life on the line for, that our son Levi couldn’t wait to battle for, that Riva and Mottke had devoted their lives to restoring and upholding. And wasn’t it to assert their own dignity that the two Palestinian kids had threatened to slit the throats of Awaad’s clanspeople, and mine, the same dignity that Awaad’s clan was scraping rock bottom to hang on to?

  Riva urged me to get out of my “filthy” clothes and jump into the shower—“while I prepare supper,” she said, handing me one of her freshly laundered and pressed caftans.

  I had no mind, no stomach, for supper or for a shower now. I phoned Russell instead. He had expected me to call yesterday, he said. “How did it go with Awaad?” he asked me. So I told him. And in response he just said that he had to get off the phone. His unit was engaged in night maneuvers, he explained, saved for last that he had full confidence in me.

  “But I don’t know what the sheikh will do to Awaad if Mottke goes over the sheikh’s head. Do you?” I said.

  “I will take care of the sheikh,” Russell replied. Just like that, he turned Awaad’s clan into a charity case, to be rescued by the white hats, as if life is a western movie.

  The doorbell rang as I phoned Tal. His city roommate answered and told me he didn’t know where Tal was or when he’d be back. He sounded like a friend covering for a spouse who fucks around.

  Mottke waited for Riva to serve scotch to the lawyer and beer to the editor, and cheese and crackers, olives, and nuts . . . And then Mottke told his friends why he had invited them.

  They heard him out without a comment. Then the newspaper editor said, “I don’t think we should start anything before we make sure the sheikh won’t take it out on Awaad’s people.”

  “Awaad’s clan have nothing to lose.” Mottke gave him the same argument he had given me.