And then, with the same suddenness as when I had been heaved through the latch door, I was on my back and the shears had already begun plowing my virgin wool and I thought it was the morning coolness against my naked belly that I felt, but it was warm, and I imagined blood, the red of my blood against my white, white wool, but even worse than blood, I found that it was hot piss against my belly, which quickly turned into an icicle, a frigid spear of humiliation. And that, the humiliation, was worse than any pain I could imagine. The shearer worked over my belly, my back, each of my four legs, and under the chin. His sweat dripped and dribbled down upon my naked flesh and still I made not a sound; I think tears trundled from my eyes, but perhaps it was the fluids from him—how is one to know?
Within minutes I was flung out the opposite side of the shed and the sunlight sent prickles through my eyes. Before me, dozens of ridiculous-looking creatures stood, and I was nearly about to laugh or scream or cry when I realized that I was looking not only at them, but also myself.
Five years have passed and I am no longer a lamb, yet the feeling of the terror of those early years has resurfaced. It was only a week ago that one of the sheep had overheard some talk of how we would be taken away and sold. Not a few of us, but many.
No one dared speak of what was certainly on all our minds, that the end of Ramadan was only weeks away. Every year, as the holiday approaches, part of our flock disappears, never to be seen again. We know this, understand it to be our fate; that someday, in all likelihood, we will be chosen by a family, have our throats slit, and served for the feast of Eid. There is one hope, however, most of us share—that a good family, a family of stature, chooses us for their feast. Not the best of endings, perhaps, but still, dead is dead whether buried in a hole, or burned into ash, or churning at the bottom of one’s stomach. For the most part, I believe that we sheep handle our mortality a hell of a lot better than humans.
What was being rumored was different, however. The talk was not of dozens, but of hundreds. Now, I don’t want you to mistake me for some bitter old sheep, for I am not. I am just conveying, or trying to convey to you, the surprise at the large numbers that were being tossed around the grazing field that day.
And here we are, what was rumored has turned out to be truth.
They shove us onto the back of flatbed trucks, and they shove some more.
Legs and asses and heads and coats of wool everywhere, and the bed of the truck is slick with shit and sweat and bawling. But that is the one advantage of the crowdedness—when the weight in the truck shifts, and it often does, we are so close together that none of us really moves with it. The only advantage.
It takes much of the morning to load us onto the two flatbeds and then, northward, they drive. The sun is already high and hot and pummeling our backs and the tops of our heads. The bleak landscape of the Sinai is all-consuming. We are well beyond the central mountains that cast those elongated, mysterious and magical shadows; now all that is before us are flatlands, desert really, and for hours they are with us. By the time we near our destination, the sun is on the right side of our faces, low, allowing the slats on the side of the truck to provide us with a strip of warm shade.
It is night before we arrive, a mile from the border. They will not allow us off the trucks, afraid, I guess, that we will flee, the hundreds upon hundreds of us would scatter in a hundred different directions. But that just shows how little they truly know about us; we gather in flocks and rarely stray on our own, going to where the food is, except, of course, for a few black sheep, and who really gives a damn about them, that minuscule minority that exists in all walks and tribes and races of life.
Left to stand throughout the night, we shift from hoof to hoof in order to give brief moments of relief to one of our legs and also to try to keep warm on this night that has started out cold and only grows colder. Crammed together as we are brings little warmth. My face is pressed into the side of another sheep and I raise my head to gasp a breath of the night air. Quickly my neck and jaw lock into the vice of a cramp and I must lower my head to relieve the pain.
I begin to call out the names of friends, hoping to find at least one of them nearby so that we may talk away the drudgery of the stars. Name after name I loft into the night—J and D and M. The only answer—angry words:
“Shut the hell up with all your selfish prattle,” yells an elder sheep. “We are all in the same situation and yet you think of only yourself!”
Ignoring the harsh words I continue until, at last, M, lets out a shout.
“K-02, is that you?”
“Yes, it is. You’re M-02?” I ask, referring to his letter and year he was born.
“Yes, it’s me. I’m on the opposite side of the truck.”
“Do you know where we are?”
“A couple of the sheep said we are at the Gaza border.”
“Gaza? What are we doing there?”
“That’s only what I heard.”
“Why is it so cold?”
“It’s March…”
“Shush, you bleating idiots!” interrupts the elder sheep. “Gaza, Egypt, what does it matter?” His laugh gurgles into the night.
“A simple sweep with their knives will leave you bleating no more.”
I dare not speak, afraid to ruffle, even more, the ire of the elder sheep. A sudden, vicious shiver jolts me. I want nothing more than for the sun to rise and for them to let us off this truck, leaving us to whatever our destiny may hold.
And the sun does come up, grudgingly, but up. The back of the flatbeds bang open and all the sheep push and trample one another in their scurry to get off. What’s the hurry, I think, but I shoo that thought away, for I spent the night thinking of little else.
My legs are beyond feeling; even the pain has somehow gone away, or at least it cowers somewhere. As I am about to jump off the back of the truck, my legs give way, splaying in all directions, and I fall, hard, to the ground. Stunned, I lie there, the blue dome of the sky above me, the tan dirt beneath. One man tries to lift me, but I am difficult to move. A second man prods me with a toe of his boot; I feel it against my ribs, but there is not pain, merely a dull nudge. I make it to my feet and nearly collapse again. I am dizzy and when I look and see the beautiful azure blue ahead of me, as well as above, I am disconcerted. Looking down, the ground is at my hooves, where it should be, but the blue also seems to be at my feet as well, although distant. Then, the air holds the answer—the sea, of course, we are near the sea.
In all my distraction, the others have been herded off; my fellow sheep are a swelling cloud of white rustling the dust like a storm, away from the border, departing. Only a few sheep are near me, none of whom I recognize. I want to catch up and find my friends, particularly M-02, but the two men are flailing us back with sticks. They turn us around, away from the moving flock, and push us past the trucks toward the border.
Shouts and shots erupt behind me, and when I turn to look, one of the men whacks me with the stick and is about to hit me again, but somehow I manage to get a little life into my legs and scamper out of reach. More gunshots and the commotion swells. Suddenly, appearing before me, like a gopher popping out of a hole, is a man, soiled in reddish clay. His dirty hands reach out to me, and I try to avoid them, but I am shoved from behind and once again my legs are failing me and the dirty man has me in a stranglehold; at first, I think, stupidly, that he is about to shear me, but before I know it I am face-first in an enormous esophagus, the same color that covers the man.
Nothing, there is nothing that distresses me more than tight, enclosed spaces. At least on the back of the truck, crowded though it was, there was no roof and the open sky allowed us a little space. Not even the clipping of my hooves comes close to evoking this terror of enclosed spaces, although, I must admit, when the shearer grips the clippers in one hand, my leg in the other, my heart pitter-patters a bit. That all stems from a single incident, a couple of years back, when my front left hoof was cut too close and became infec
ted. The infection worsened; so debilitated was I, that there was talk that they might put me to sleep, the sleep where one doesn’t awaken. This tunnel is far worse than any infection.
As I fall, my front hooves dig into a side of the tunnel opening and rather than slow my fall, I become stuck, wedged, more like it, with my head on one side of the tunnel, my rear on the other. My legs are left dangling, flailing away as though I had been tossed into the Great Sea itself. But instead of water, my legs kick wildly at air. I can only imagine the sight I must be. Those wild spindly legs of mine and my head and ass stuck, all the while sound is blurred—if it is possible for sound to be blurry—like being underwater, I guess. Again, my imagination at work here, for I have never been within a mile of the sea, although once, while at the drinking trough, a rambunctious herder dunked my head underwater and held it there and the voices and the tussling of the wind in the trees and my booming heart all were garbled.
Somehow I wriggle free in the tunnel opening and drop the remaining eight or ten feet to the floor. Landing on my side I look up to see the man who pushed me down here, stepping two rungs at a time, on a ladder of sorts, something, of course, I cannot do. Each step draws protests from the rungs. Chunks of dirt fall and I turn my head away. Then his feet, without shoes, are against me.
“Get moving. We have a long way to crawl, my fat little friend.”
I lift my head and go onto all fours, but must stoop, for my back and head bang against the roof. It is difficult to move, too narrow to even turn my head and try shaking out the pieces of moist clay that fall into my ears. The man relentlessly prods me with a stick and I am tired of it and release a fart, long and sorrowful, into his face. Back off, it shouts! I hurry as best I can to escape the smell and now, at least, there is a little distance between the man, his stick and me.
There is a dim light in the tunnel and every once in a while, an air vent. My breathing comes in choppy, hysteric gasps. I see no light at the end of the tunnel and a panic overcomes me and I turn, barely able to do so in the narrowness, but I manage to run, as best I can, directly at the man, all the while my back scraping against the roof and I gather no speed, but I do catch him off guard. I lower my head and ram into his groin and he lets out a groan and falls backward. As I am about to crawl over him, he grabs my leg and I think it will snap and I begin to thrash at him with my hooves, which, if you have never met a sheep before, you should be aware that our hooves are quite heavy and sharp. But the man doesn’t let go and I don’t stop kicking and we battle on until I feel a large block of dirt drop on my back.
“You idiot sheep; you’re going to get the both of us killed!”
The struggle continues and my breath is hard to come by.
“Tunnel collapse!” he yells, letting go of my leg.
I scramble back over him and a muffled cry I hear and then only my breathing thrumming through my ears. I turn my head and see nothing but dirt and on the floor is the man’s walkie-talkie. I continue in the same direction, thinking that, surely, I must be underneath Gaza by now.
Never have I had a great sense of time, so I am not certain how long it has taken me to get through the tunnel. It could be an hour later or a day. I drop when I reach the end, where there is a thirty-foot high shaft, above which is a blue square of the bluest sky I have ever seen. Too tired to make a sound, I wait until someone looks down into the shaft. Behind me, I listen for the man, but know that he will not emerge, at least not from this end of the tunnel.
More time goes by; I may have fallen into a nap and I hear voices and when I look up there are faces staring down at me. One man yells something and I am too tired to budge or to make a sound. Seconds later a stream of cold water splatters atop me; startled, I jump, hitting my head for the millionth time on the roof. I let out a halfhearted bleat or baah, whatever, it probably isn’t strong enough for anyone to hear and what would it matter anyway?
A man is making his way down the ladder and grabs hold of me, tying a harness around my body. He shouts to the faces looking down. “Mahmoud is not here!”
“Can you see him in the tunnel?”
“No. Try his walkie-talkie.”
The man tightens the harness around me; it is digging into my belly, but I do not protest or bite his calf or thigh.
“Lift up!” the man shouts. “I am going to take a look.”
Suddenly I am off my feet and in the air going up through the shaft. The harness has a stranglehold on me; my breath is cut off. I dare not look down, for heights are not a thing I enjoy, and already a wave of nausea swells. Above me the hole grows, as do the faces, silhouetted by the sky. Near the top, two pairs of hands grab and pull me out and remove the harness. I stagger and throw up onto the ground. No one pays me any attention, for which I am most grateful. I hear the crackle of a radio and the men are talking into their phones. One man begins to yell for the others to come and help, there has been a collapse inside the tunnel and there is no answer from Mahmoud. One by one several of the men disappear into the shaft, while a growing number of others clamor around its mouth.
Slowly, trying not to draw any attention, I begin to walk away from the people gathering around the entrance of the tunnel. No one looks, or if they do, it is halfhearted. I continue at the same pace, a saunter that is not unusual for sheep. Imagine you are watching a sheep walking through a sparse field and how he stops whenever he finds something to chew on. That is me, nosing around, but also very much aware of getting further and further from the tunnels.
Behind me, a man approaches quickly; I stop, trying to act as casual as possible. He hurries past. I see him holding a young girl, her head resting on his shoulder. I see her face, a beautiful, sad face, with eyes the color and shape of dates, encased by a light pink headscarf. She is crying, that much I can tell, and our eyes meet and we hold them and there is so much sadness and confusion in those eyes, larger and even more prominent because of the tiny ponds of tears. And I wonder if she can see the tears in my eyes—from where they come, I do not know—and can she hear them plopping into the parched dust of Gaza, and if she can, what is it she hears?
No one stops me and I walk. I am hungry and come upon a fallen, limp carrot in an alleyway and gnaw on it. Against the base of a small tree, I try to rub the tunnel dirt from my nostrils, but it only pushes it further inside, and with each breath I taste the soil.
No longer am I in the city of Rafah, but the refugee camp of the same name. Cement block houses are everywhere. The alleyways are tight. I pass a cart, and the donkey pulling it turns and smirks at me. So typical of a donkey, I think, smirking at a sheep. To be honest, I have never much cared for donkeys and how they so often seem to be looking down at us. And why is that? Is it because they are laborers and they look at us as lazy animals? Well, I ask, how many donkeys have provided a man with a warm coat in winter?
I continue down the street until coming upon a school, and behind it, a couple of trees. To there I go and drop to the ground and rest my long-open eyes, too tired to even give a thought to the hundreds of my fellow sheep on the other side of the border.
I sleep down along the beach, sometimes on the sand itself, but usually not, for the fleas have taken a liking to burrowing in my wool and nipping away at me. I am in desperate need to be shorn; the heat, although it is only May, is stifling. Other than in an alleyway, there is little shade in this city of Gaza, a place I stay away from during the day because I only attract attention. Late nights, however, I do find myself out foraging through the streets for food. Remarkable how quickly I have adapted to being more nocturnal; a few short weeks and I have nearly become an owl.
Most days, I see other animals: donkeys, of course, some birds, mainly seagulls and pigeons, both of which seem no different than those I saw in Egypt. And one night, although I cannot be for certain, I heard what I thought to be a lion of some kind, and on that same night, closer to dawn, a high-pitched mewing of a peacock. I am not convinced of the lion, but I am certain that I heard a peacock, or
something else like it, unbelievable as that may sound. Back in Egypt, there were several of them, for some reason, in the sheepfold.
I do dream, and they are quite vivid at times, but this was not a dream. I was sleeping that night under an abandoned fishing boat and when I heard the peacock I stood up and started to follow the sound to where I thought it was coming from. But when I began to walk in the direction of the city, away from the echoing bend of the sea, I could not be sure from what direction the sound of the peacock came.
And on this morning I hear it again. It must be mating season, I think. I walk along the coastal road, which I have become familiar with. Once, I took it two miles, northward, ending up in Beach Camp, a sprawl, where I found some tasty offerings for dinner. I head there on this morning; daytime I feel more comfortable in the camps, where there are the always-present goats, with which I can somewhat blend in.
It is early, but the sun has begun to blush the eastern sky. This is the time I love most, and even more since I have been on my own. I do a lot of walking, but it is difficult; the sand is slow going and the streets wear at my hooves. I am in no hurry and keep to the road. Behind me, I hear the clacking of hooves; much faster than mine. Soon, next to me is a tired, old horse, without a harness or a cart behind it like most horses in Gaza, tired-looking or not. He is the first to talk.
In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees Page 10