Sulha

by Malka Marom

  “Let him be,” Riva muttered—so unlike herself, my eyes searched hers for an explanation. “I’ll clear it later,” her eyes told mine.

  Turning to the lawyer, Riva asked if he had Yehoshua’s unlisted phone number. “Yehoshua is—was—so sweet on Leora, he wanted to marry her,” she told the lawyer and the editor.

  “One word from Yehoshua and Awaad’s troubles are over,” Riva told me, as if she suddenly saw me as having more persuasive powers than Queen Ester. It wouldn’t take more than one word from me over the phone to persuade him to grant me half his kingdom.

  “The only time I asked him to use his influence, he did me a hell of a favour and agreed to dust off Arik’s model dream town, buried in the archives of the Technion, and bury it somewhere in his ministry,” I told Riva, “If that’s how far he’d go for Arik—”

  “The hour is getting late, Leora, you’d better call Yehoshua now,” said Riva.

  “Don’t tell him that you are the war widow who was at Awaad’s compound,” the lawyer cautioned me. “Don’t threaten him with the press,” the newspaper editor said.

  Yehoshua’s unlisted number yielded only his male secretary or bodyguard. Whoever he was, he wouldn’t put me through, so I gave him my name and Riva’s number, and asked him to tell Yehoshua it was urgent.

  Less than five minutes later, Yehoshua returned my call. “Are you all right, Leora?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I replied, and then I said I was calling because I’d heard he had the power to help a Bedouin clan.

  “Straight as ever,” Yehoshua said, sounding annoyed and disappointed that even I, like every two-bit favour-seeker, was taking advantage of his cabinet position. “Shoot,” he snapped.

  As soon as I mentioned Awaad’s clan, he gave me the number of the commader of the Green Patrol. “You are sending me to the very man who has caused nothing but trouble for Awaad’s clan,” I said, and I was just starting to tell him what troubles the Green Patrol had unleashed on Awaad’s clan when Yehoshua cut me off, saying, “You better live in The Land before you talk to me about wrong done to a Bedouin clan. You drop out of The Land, after the price Arik . . .”

  “Awaad’s people are running out of drinking water. Lives are at stake—”

  “Good night,” Yehoshua said, hanging up.

  “We know what he said,” Riva muttered, handing me a glass of whiskey.

  Whiskey, like the water Arik’s commander offered to me the night he came to tell me that Arik fell . . .

  So, this is my longed-for, my dream land, and for this I am expected to sacrifice my son, leave my marriage, and move up to The Land—alli—ascend—ollim Allu, Allo N’a’alle—up, up, up—to the wilderness . . . I don’t know why I return year after year, like a ball rolling back to the feet that kicked it . . . Would I be moving forward by making a soldier of my son? Is it necessary to make soldiers here—or is it just running in place? Can’t we preserve one tribe while still preserving another—Or is annihilation of one or the other an inevitability, yaa-Rabb?

  “There was a man, but look he is no more . . . Not on a silver platter shall the state be delivered; no, each man shall have to pay with his blood, each man shall have to pave with his bones . . .” The same tired old eulogies they dump on Arik’s grave on Memorial Day. “There was a man,” they recite, and then they go on with their lives in a paradise fertilized with bones.

  I remember your bones, Arik. They pressed too hard, too heavy on me, you thought, raising yourself up on your elbows, but I welcomed them . . . Your bones were too heavy only in your coffin . . .

  “Ytgadal ve’yitkadash sheme Rabba—recite the mourners’ prayer, dust to dust, shovel—shovel—yaa-Rabb, you are of blessed memory now, Arik. Zikhro livrakha—third person—venerated, removed, departed, a man no more, a dream man. Feel his breath on your face and reach to touch him, and you awake with a new name, a new ring on your finger.

  Your clothes smell musty and of mothballs, my Arik . . . even though, year in, year out, on the first day of spring, I spread them out to the sun, smooth away the creases of winter, and caress the memories, the promise, the dream that lingers . . . Caress the shadows—not the real thing . . .

  Your Leora, when was she lost, Arik? It happened so fast. It wasn’t too long ago I used to walk—like Azzizah and Tammam—barefoot on the sun-baked sands. . .

  CHAPTER 39

  At the hotel I find a heap of pink message slips, saying to call my mother the minute I get back. On the first ring, my mother tears the receiver off the hook and snaps, “Who is it?”

  “Me, Leora. What’s the matter, Imma?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. What’s wrong, Imma?”

  “I was just going to phone the police . . .”

  “The police! Why? What happened?”

  “Oh, you’ve lived in Canada too long. Perhaps it’s all right in Canada, but here, in The Land, never tell me that you are going to stop in the West Bank for an hour or two before you head home, then disappear for two days. Your Abba, your sister, kept telling me that you must be all right because no news is good news. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that you were in trouble, in danger . . .”

  And what was I going to tell her, that she is psychic, that a couple of Palestinian children have learned to hate Jews with such venom, they threatened to massacre a Bedouin clan for receiving a Jewish guest. I was so mired in hatred, prejudice and bigotry I forgot love exists.

  “I love you, Imma.”

  “Won’t get you far. My tits are dry.” She laughed.

  “Did you hang up on someone who phoned you from Beersheba around noon the other day?”

  “Oyi, it was you, Leora. Sounded like a man. A catastrophe the telephones in this Land.” A catastrophe to my mother is not “the situation” in this Land, and not the West Bank, but the telephone lines.

  “Go to sleep, Leora. The sun will soon be up,” she said, and hung up, as though Herzliyya was long-distance, like Canada . . .

  j

  It was long after midnight when I tried again to reach Tal.

  “Hello!” A female voice answered, shouting above Bob Dylan wailing about how it feels to be away from home, like a rolling stone, and above a crowd feeling good, laughing, partying.

  “Is Tal home?” I ask her.

  “What? What? I can’t hear you!” she shouts. A catastrophe, the phones here, just like my mother said.

  “I’d like to speak with Tal!” I shout.

  Tal must have dragged the phone to some quiet corner, in his bedroom probably. He said Ephrat and a bus full of friends from his kibbutz had come to the city to attend the demonstration over trading Sinai for peace with Egypt. “Jum’ah phoned me to say you left with Awaad. What happened?” he asked me. As soon as I started to tell him what happened, someone must have opened the door and the hoopla spilled into his room. He said, “What? . . . What? . . . I’ll come over with the Jeep tomorrow. The Jeep call-up was only a drill . . .”

  Only a drill!

  He couldn’t hear, couldn’t talk, and had to get back to his guests. Abu Salim has nothing on him when it comes to hospitality.

  Ephrat is like a guest to him now, a visitor. And what am I? A relic, like the biblical Hebrew tense, that makes the past the present and the future?

  j

  Dave called, saying Riva had just phoned him from Tel Aviv. She told him I could use every friend I have in this world tonight. “What happened? What’s going on?” he asked me, the worry clear in his voice. I told him he was right, I had severed irreversibly my connection to The Land, to myself, and to Canada. “I’m neither here nor there.”

  “But to be Outside is the ultimate freedom,” he said, offering pop psychology.

  I wanted to tell him about Awaad, and Yehoshua, but the words wouldn’t come, only the sobs—defeat, despair, loneliness, self-pity, shame, guilt.


  It frightened him to hear the “tough one” in the family crying. I could hear the trembling in his breath, the fear that the marriage was challenged, would be lost. Maybe that’s what moved him to tell me that he’d heard his friend Schaeffer, “a big wheel in construction, was planning to build a row of duplexes in Jerusalem. It makes no economic sense to invest a quarter of a million dollars or more in a duplex we’re going to live in only six months a year, but what does economics have to do with this? Israel is still a special place, an emotional decision, and Levi will need a place to call home. And if Schaeffer is building, at least you can be sure the standard is going to be Canadian. The building lots, I hear, are in that section of Jerusalem that is becoming a Canadian colony . . . Schaeffer has sold five duplexes already and is keeping one for himself. I’ll ask him to hold one for us—if you want, that is . . .”

  If it’s not too late for us, he meant.

  Jacob sorrowed but could find no solace, no comfort, no relief; for deep inside he knew his love child, his dream child, was not dead . . .

  j

  At 4:30 a.m.: Riva called to say, “Let’s have a pyjama party.”

  “I’m all right,” I told her.

  “But I’m not. Mottke and I were too rough on you tonight, punished you for barging in with the Awaad story. No, for being with Awaad when—we needed you with us. . .”

  She made it here, to this hotel on the beach at Herzliyya, in less than twenty minutes. And she had stopped on the way at a bakery and brought with her fresh black bread, butter, cheese, and a thermos of honour-coffee. She tore off a chunk of bread, layered a half-inch of butter on it, and stuffed it into her mouth, looking like a lunatic delighted to find that she can still surprise me—her friend, her colleague, her student, her therapist—after all these years

  “It’s for my future grandkids,” she says, as she pulls out of her bag the cassette recorder she brings to the seminars, the therapy sessions, and the support groups she conducts. She pressed Record, as though sensing the times are coming to an end, as horses are reputed to sense the coming of an earthquake. For, only the story remains, Wallah.

  She slurped her coffee like Abu Salim, with much noise, then went on to say, “Day before yesterday, when you were at Awaad’s, Mottke and I were watching the evening news when the bell rings and someone sounding like Gingie says, ‘Open up. We can hear you’re home.’ It’s not like Gingie to lose a key, but we open the door, and there stands Gingie with a girl who looks not a day over sixteen and beautiful like innocence itself. ‘Meet Naomi,’ he tells us. ‘In a month she will be my wife’.”

  “Oh, Riva, mazel tov! What a wonderful surprise,” I interrupt her. She shook her head to dam her tears . . . who would have dreamt that Riva would be afraid to lose her son to her daughter-in-law. My Riva, the pillar of The Land, the underground fighter—a regular Yiddish Mamush. Gingie getting married, ya Rabba, I taught him to ride a bike . . .trembled for him . . . And here he lives to love, to get married . . .“Sh’ehiyeh bemazal, Riva. Sh’ehiyeh bemazal—May the union be blessed with good fortune.”

  “Now you see why Gingie loves you,” Riva says, dries her tears, blows her nose. “That’s how Gingie wanted me and his father to react. He expected us to wish him mazel tov. I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t know where my head was. Mottke and I are getting too old for Gingie’s surprises. We haven’t really recovered yet from his turning to a religious fanatic, and now his criminal record . . . But he was standing by the doorway, looking so happy, and she so beautiful . . . I should have wished them mazel tov. Instead I said, ‘Come on in, children. Why are you standing at the door? Sit down.’ And after they did, I said, ‘So . . .’ and Gingie laughs and says they just went through the whole story with her parents but, well, here’s the short version: A month ago he went to one of the elders in his yeshiva and asked him to find him a wife. A few days later, this elder invites him over and introduces him to Naomi. He and Naomi met three times at this elder’s place; twice the elder sat in the room with them, and once he sat in the hallway, where he could see them but not hear them. This evening they decided to get married. So, first, they went to tell Naomi’s parents, and now they came to tell us.

  “‘Naomi’s parents wished us mazel tov,’ Gingie said when Mottke and I sat silent. But it smelled of the ghetto to us, Gingie’s story, smelled of bondage, of helplessness, of servitude, of everything we struggled to free ourselves from. And here our son Gingie, of all people, as if he was demented, blemished, crippled, went to a matchmaker like the ultra-orthodox fanatics that Mottke hates.

  “Mottke was burning inside, I knew. If I wish them mazel tov now, Mottke will explode in front of the girl and humiliate Gingie. So I turn to her and I ask if she, like Gingie, chose to become observant, or if she was born into an observant home. And the girl replies that she was born into a traditional home; her mother keeps kosher, but she prays in the synagogue only on the holy days. Her father, though, prays in the synagogue every Shabbat, but he wears no kippa or hat except in the synagogue. Then she said, ‘My parents would have preferred me to be traditional like them, but I went all the way—it was all or nothing for me; that’s how I am.’

  “‘How old are you?’ I asked her, thinking how could such a young girl be so generous; instead of saying she thought her parents were hypocrites, she said, ‘All or nothing; that’s how I am.’ And Gingie is beaming to see me like a regular mother-in-law grilling the bride.

  “‘I’ll soon be twenty,’ the bride replies. She’ll be reduced to tears, if Mottke opened his mouth now, I think. So I step on Mottke’s toe under the table, but he couldn’t contain himself any longer . . . What pain, what disappointment, what anger . . .

  “‘And how are you planning to support her? You have a criminal record but no skill, no trade, no profession,’ Mottke said, dumping on Gingie in front of her. ‘In less than a year, no doubt, you will have a child. Every year a child, like your fanatic friends. Do you expect her parents and us to support you all, like your fanatic friends, are you going to live like a shnorer—a freeloader? And she looks like a fine girl. Do you know what a child every year might do to her? And you, every Monday and Thursday are serving reserve or building illegal settlements or sitting in your yeshiva day and night. In five years she’ll have five children to raise all by herself . . . How will you support them when you can’t support yourself?’ That was restrained for Mottke. And Gingie—Gingie was in heaven: both of us were behaving like regular parents.

  “‘You had no means of support when you married Imma,’ Gingie responded. ‘You were still fighting in the Underground when you married Imma. You didn’t even know if you’d live to see tomorrow . . .’ Things like that Gingie said, as if all of a sudden now he was Mottke’s equal. As if all he had to do to be his father’s equal was to get married . . . He should have known better.

  “You know, Mottke was never the ‘my son is my best buddy’ type. Maybe he should have been. But Mottke and I were not kids when we had Gingie. We waited too long, perhaps. And now, remember how it bugs Mottke to hear anyone gush about the good old days. Well, he started to gush like that—maybe because he knew this was one thing Gingie wouldn’t touch. I couldn’t look at him when he told Gingie, ‘If you knew how your mother and I had waited for you, how your mother and I had dreamed of having a son like you. You are our dream son, Gingie. Still we waited to have you until we were not in the Underground, until the State was born. We wanted you to be free of the burden destiny had imposed on us. We took you into consideration, even before you were born. We waited until I was sure I’d finish medical school.’

  “‘Who asked you to?’ Gingie should have said to his father. But he had that happy look on his face—that look that true believers have—and he was also happy with his girl-bride. He said nothing. He had no idea that his father had kept anything from him. Later, Mottke meant to tell Gingie. Later, after Gingie made it through the Unit. . .
But then he served reserve duty so often Mottke didn’t want to add to his burden. Now, though, Gingie is getting married, and marriage smells of continuity, permanence. Maybe that’s why Mottke went on to what really bothered him.

  “‘And let’s say you do finish your study at your yeshiva studies in five, even ten, years. What can you do then?’ Mottke asked his son, ‘Will they let you serve as a rabbi, with your criminal record? Will they let you teach children? Or will they let you be a shohet—a ritual slaughterer—is that what you aspire to be?’

  “Gingie, being Gingie, told his father, ‘I aspire to be a good human being, Abba.’ Then, as if he remembered his father didn’t understand his language, he came down to earth and told Mottke that he planned to study Torah while living off the land, ‘like you and your friends did.’

  “That’s all Mottke had to hear. ‘My friends—your mother and I—we settled and lived off our land, not Arab land,’ he told his son. ‘We didn’t kick Arabs off their land to build settlements. We purchased land in the free market with hard-earned cash. Desert land, malaria marshes that no one wanted, that no one dreamed could be reclaimed. No one except us. You want to follow in our footsteps then do as we did. Settle in the Galilee, in the Negev, the Jordan valley. Settle in our land, not on Arab land. Not in the West Bank.’

  “‘Yehuda and Shomron,’ Gingie said, correcting his father.

  “‘The West Bank,’ Mottke insisted.

  “They couldn’t even agree now on the fucking name. Those two who had debated as only a chess master and a Talmudic scholar can. Those two who love each other like King Saul and Jonathan were fighting now as if for the kingdom and the crown, as if driven by some wild primal demon, a man’s demon.

  “‘Yehuda and Shomron is our land, Abraham’s land, Isaac’s and Jacob’s land, King David’s land . . . the Promised Land, more than the rest of the country,’ Gingie told his father.