by Mary Morris
“No,” he said flatly. Clearly this was not something that could be talked about within the village.
I asked whether I had ever been in any of their houses.
“Perhaps you have by chance,” he said, offering no clues to their identity.
Fawzi was perturbed not just by my account. He hated seeing the village fighting itself. “We should put these things away. Now is not the time to be fighting inside the village. The fight is much larger than just our village. It is not a game that we should be playing now. We have to be more serious. The enemy is not you, and it is not the other Palestinians.”
Talk had been bouncing around Jerusalem that the different Palestinian factions were rubbing against each other on the West Bank as a whole, trying to gain ascendancy in the national and international arenas.
I was going to have to prove my neutrality on yet another level. I gathered once more proof of my writing and my identity. A few days later I was summoned by telephone to an office in East Jerusalem. Fawzi was not there. Two men whom I had never seen before were seated at a table. One was tall and thin with a sharp face. He did the talking. He started by asking me the details of the stoning. He paused and looked at me hard.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Tell me everything, because I will be hearing the other side. Others saw what happened in Nahalin. I will be hearing the truth. Any lies will finish you.”
I was telling the truth, but that did not stop me from squirming in my chair. I had no idea what my attackers might say, and it seemed that my questioner was from the Intifada’s leadership. What would happen to me if lies about me went up through the Palestinian ranks?
After a few more questions about my motives for traveling on the West Bank, he ended the questioning abruptly. “That is enough. Go now and do not remember what I look like. Do not tell anyone about me.”
I said that I wanted only one thing, which was to talk to some of those who had stoned me, disguised or not. I wanted to make them realize I was not the enemy.
“If you have told the truth, they will understand,” he said. “Don’t make the mistake of asking me too many questions.”
He rose as I did and walked stiffly toward the door, as if something in his legs caused him pain. He opened the door and closed it quickly behind me. I heard a lock click.
Back in my apartment I waited to find out whether I was doomed or saved. Four days after the meeting he telephoned.
“You have done excellently. Now don’t worry. You will be safe everywhere you want to go around Bethlehem and the area. You have my word. I am the man from Fatah.”
He hung up. I took this cryptic message to mean that he represented Fatah and could guarantee that members of his group would not bother me. I suspected the ambushers had been among them.
* A kerchief worn as headdress.
GWENDOLYN MacEWEN
(1941-1987)
A wide-ranging and thoughtful writer, Gwendolyn MacEwen published one travel narrative, Mermaids and Ikons: A Greek Summer. In her storytelling and poetry she displays a commanding interest in history, politics, and magic. In Canada she is best known for her poetry; she won the Governor General’s Award for poetry for The Shadow-Maker in 1969. At 20, her first poetry collection, The Drunken Clock, was published, and she wrote two novels and one story collection. She also published plays, a translation, and a children’s book. The excerpt that follows, The Holyland Buffet, is from a collection of fact-based short stories entitled Noman’s Land. All of the events in the selection are true and Kali is a woman whom MacEwen met while traveling through the Middle East. MacEwen was born and lived in Toronto.
THE HOLYLAND BUFFET
“The most amazing thing I saw in all my travels,” Kali was saying, “was that streetcar in Cairo.”
“I thought you never travelled,” said Ibrahim the Syrian, who was sitting across the table from her in a new vegetarian restaurant called Mythological Foods. “When you get mad, you always swear that you’re going to pack up and go to India. But you never go, so I assumed you never travel.”
“Ah, but I have, you know. I have been to two holy lands—Israel and Egypt. I have also been to Greece, which is not really a holy land. But to get back to that streetcar—”
“Tell me about Israel,” Ibrahim said. “I want to comprehend the enemy.”
“On my first day there I took a walk alone along the beach at Jaffa, which means The Beautiful. Some boy about eleven or twelve came up and asked me the time—everybody there asks you the time, don’t ask me why—and when I told him he attacked me and threw me to the ground and starting punching me all over. We punched and kicked for a while until he finally got bored and walked away. I never knew what it was all about, except that because I was wearing shorts I probably offended him.”
“Bloody aggressive Israelis,” Ibrahim said. “That’s all they know, how to punch and kick their way through the world.”
“The boy was a Palestinian Arab,” Kali said. “He thought I was an Israeli.”
“Then the story is entirely different,” said Ibrahim. “It needs reexamining.”
The mythological food arrived at their table and they dug in. Ibrahim showed her how to eat a dish of dark brown powder with an indescribable smell.
“This is zaatar,” he said. “We’ve been eating it for centuries in the East. You dip the bread first in the olive oil to moisten it, then into the zaatar—so.” He popped a piece into her mouth. “Jesus Christ ate this all the time,” he said. “Him and his disciples. This is the bitter herbs they wrote about. Anyway, tell me more about Israel.”
“It’s really the streetcar I want to talk about,” Kali said.
“Never mind the streetcar.”
“Well I was walking through this village called Lifta, outside Jerusalem, and I was wearing shorts again, so I looked like a sabra again, and a whole tribe of little Arab boys came screaming up the mountain path toward me and started pelting me with stones. Stoned outside of Jerusalem, can you imagine, in the twentieth century, and me a Kanadian. In the clinic they put something called a spider clamp into my head where the worst wound was, and covered it with bandages that looked like a turban. They said now I looked like an Arab, and told me not to do anything exciting for a few days. I tried not to do anything exciting, but the Israelis are hooked on speed—I mean anything that goes fast, the faster the better. So I had this wild motorcycle ride with a guy who thought he was doing me a favour by giving me a ride up to Tiberias, and every moment I thought I was going to die, which was of course the whole point, the thrill. Then I walked around Tiberias with the spider clamp rusting in my skull, holding my thoughts together as it were, keeping my head from flying apart in a hundred directions; then I brooded and felt biblical in a small hotel, and the next day another guy offered me a ride in his motor-boat in Lake Tiberias. I should have known better. He rode at top speed to the middle of the lake and informed me that now, two minutes either way, meant the difference between Israel and Jordan, life or death. Then he laughed and laughed like a madman and started going around in crazy wild circles. Can you imagine—this maniac in the middle of the Sea of Galilee and us going round and round and the laughter so loud they could probably hear it on both shores.…”
“Bloody insane Israelis,” said Ibrahim, and passed her a plate of ripe green figs.
“Well all the guys are on the make over there,” Kali said, “and I was a female tourist traveling alone, so what could I expect? Come on, it would be the same in your country.”
Ibrahim addressed his full attention to the figs.
“Oh wait,” Kali remembered, “I knew I forgot something, I forgot to tell you about the Holyland Buffet.…”
“What?”
“The Holyland Buffet. It was this crazy little place at the foot of the Mount of Loaves and Fishes. Nothing more than a little shack, really, with a counter in the front and a few shelves behind full of orange drinks and cigarett
es and halvah bars. I must have been the first person the owner had seen for days, because—”
“Wait!” Ibrahim cried. “Wait wait wait! I have a cousin in Jordan who has a place called the Holyland Buffet, just outside of Bethlehem!”
“Well this one was in Israel.”
“It’s impossible that there are two!” Ibrahim cried, his face getting very red. “It’s just impossible!”
“Well, I didn’t know if the guy who ran this one was Arab or Israeli. Anyway, as I was saying, I must have been the first person or maybe just the first woman he’d seen for days because he leaned over the counter after he served me my drink and clutched my wrists and pleaded Come with me to Haifa! The lights, the cabarets, the people! I said that I couldn’t, and I didn’t even know him. He said that didn’t matter, we’d have a wonderful time anyway. To Haifa, to Haifa together! I wonder where he is today; what a beautiful man.…”
“There can’t be two Holyland Buffets,” Ibrahim said, and proceeded not to listen to her as she went on.
“And then there was old Ephraim, the painter who lived in the old village of Safed in the mountains. He wanted to seduce me too, although he went on for hours about Eisenstein and Isadora Duncan and Stanislavsky and all the others he had known who were black-listed in the States. Now in Israel the tourist bureau warned tourists against having their portraits done by the infamous communist Ephraim, so he ended up with more business than anyone.…”
“Let’s change the subject,” said Ibrahim, dejectedly sipping a Turkish coffee. “What about Egypt?”
“At last we’re getting to what I wanted to tell you in the first place. The streetcar—”
“Who cares about a streetcar? What happened in Egypt?”
“Well of course, it’s even worse there for a woman to walk around alone. When I went every day to the museum in Cairo because there was so much to see, the guards thought I must have been playing some really sexy game with them; it was inconceivable that I would go alone to a museum every day—why? What was my real reason? I could not possibly have travelled half-way around the world to stare at statues and mummies of the dead lords of Egypt, the gold of Tutankhamen, the most exquisite sculpture imaginable. No, I was indeed a tart, a slut, a whore. So they kept plying me with sugary tea and cigarettes, and they smiled and joked among themselves, and when I didn’t want more sugary tea they offered me Misra-Cola and more cigarettes and endless offers of escorted tours around Cairo. Within a few days I had acquired a reputation of being one of the loosest women in the city, a tramp, an easy lay; and of course each one of them boasted to the others of his conquest of this piece of garbage, this foreigner. I don’t know how I got to actually see what I wanted to see in the museum, but somehow I did.”
“Would you like some halvah?” Ibrahim asked. “It’s the lovely kind with chocolate marbled all through it. Here, have some.” And he popped a piece into her mouth. “Now, what else?”
“The pyramids,” Kali said. “Not the pyramids themselves—what can one say? But the washrooms, the horrible little washrooms that had no doors on the cubicles and no doors closed to the outside, and you had to pay the guard—a man—to go and pee, and you sat there in the shameless light of day staring at the Great Pyramid of Giza from the vantage point of a toilet seat, for Christ’s sake. I remember it well; I have tried to forget.”
The waiter at Mythological Foods produced the bill for the meal, and Ibrahim frowned darkly as he checked it over.
“It’s amazing and disgusting what they think they can charge for food that has been eaten since before Jesus Christ walked the earth, before Ulysses set sail from Ithaca, before there even was a Holy Land,” he said.
He paid, and they left. Outside the sky was a frail blue, the colour of Roman glass.
“But you come back from these travels, and it’s wonderful,” Kali mused. “You come back to Kanada, and the jet going from East to West interferes with the world’s turning. You realize there are other times, arrested sunsets, moments that go on forever, cities whose walls trap time.…”
“That bill was too high,” Ibrahim muttered. “We’d have gotten a better meal at the Holyland Buffet. The one my cousin owns. In Jordan.”
They waited for a streetcar; they were both going in the same direction.
“Now will you listen to my story, the one I was going to tell you in the first place?” Kali asked.
“All right, but make it fast.”
“Well there I was, standing in the middle of Cairo one afternoon, hot, mad, and completely disoriented, with people screaming all around me and donkeys braying and a chaos that exists nowhere else in the world—when what should I see?”
“I don’t know. What did you see?”
“What should I see, coming toward me with the slowness and grace of a dream, its colours an unmistakable dark-red and yellow, the sign on its metal forehead a magic name recalling a distant, mythic land.…”
“What did you see?” Ibrahim’s mood was black.
“A King Street streetcar.”
“A what?”
“A King Street streetcar. From Toronto, Kanada. The city gives old ones away to Egypt and I guess other places, when they’re too worn out to use here. There it was, coming toward me, this great, fabulous beast. Try to imagine it, Ibrahim, try to imagine what I felt.”
But Ibrahim was too angry about the meal, about the bill, about the second Holyland Buffet which was in the country of the enemy, and about the coldness of the day in this country of his exile, to pay much attention to what she said.
ANNIE DILLARD
(1945–)
The recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1974 for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book of recollections of a year spent alone in the country, Annie Dillard has traveled widely, gaining a reputation for going into areas well off the beaten track. In her writing, she excels at reflecting a sense of innocent wonder without abandoning the quality of “active waiting” that anthropologist Margaret Mead calls the secret of understanding. In the following excerpt from a collection of short essays titled Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, Dillard shows that women are not bound by their gender to react in ways expected of them. Born in Pittsburgh, she is the author of several volumes of non-fiction and the recently published novel, The Living. She teaches poetry and creative writing at Western Washington State University.
from TEACHING A STONE TO TALK
THE DEER AT PROVIDENCIA
There were four of us North Americans in the jungle, in the Ecuadorian jungle on the banks of the Napo River in the Amazon watershed. The other three North Americans were metropolitan men. We stayed in tents in one riverside village, and visited others. At the village called Providencia we saw a sight which moved us, and which shocked the men.
* * *
The first thing we saw when we climbed the riverbank to the village of Providencia was the deer. It was roped to a tree on the grass clearing near the thatch shelter where we would eat lunch.
The deer was small, about the size of a whitetail fawn, but apparently full-grown. It had a rope around its neck and three feet caught in the rope. Someone said that the dogs had caught it that morning and the villagers were going to cook and eat it that night.
This clearing lay at the edge of the little thatched-hut village. We could see the villagers going about their business, scattering feed corn for hens about their houses, and wandering down paths to the river to bathe. The village headman was our host; he stood beside us as we watched the deer struggle. Several village boys were interested in the deer; they formed part of the circle we made around it in the clearing. So also did four businessmen from Quito who were attempting to guide us around the jungle. Few of the very different people standing in this circle had a common language. We watched the deer, and no one said much.
The deer lay on its side at the rope’s very end, so the rope lacked slack to let it rest its head in the dust. It was “pretty,” delicate of bone like all de
er, and thin-skinned for the tropics. Its skin looked virtually hairless, in fact, and almost translucent, like a membrane. Its neck was no thicker than my wrist; it was rubbed open on the rope, and gashed. Trying to paw itself free of the rope, the deer had scratched its own neck with its hooves. The raw underside of its neck showed red stripes and some bruises bleeding inside the muscles. Now three of its feet were hooked in the rope under its jaw. It could not stand, of course, on one leg, so it could not move to slacken the rope and ease the pull on its throat and enable it to rest its head.
Repeatedly the deer paused, motionless, its eyes veiled, with only its rib cage in motion, and its breaths the only sound. Then, after I would think, “It has given up; now it will die,” it would heave. The rope twanged; the tree leaves clattered; the deer’s free foot beat the ground. We stepped back and held our breaths. It thrashed, kicking, but only one leg moved; the other three legs tightened inside the rope’s loops. Its hip jerked; its spine shook. Its eyes rolled; its tongue, thick with spittle, pushed in and out. Then it would rest again. We watched this for fifteen minutes.
Once three young native boys charged in, released its trapped legs, and jumped back to the circle of people. But instantly the deer scratched up its neck with its hooves and snared its forelegs in the rope again. It was easy to imagine a third and then a fourth leg soon stuck, like Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby.
We watched the deer from the circle, and then we drifted on to lunch. Our palm-roofed shelter stood on a grassy promontory from which we could see the deer tied to the tree, pigs and hens walking under village houses, and black-and-white cattle standing in the river. There was even a breeze.
Lunch, which was the second and better lunch we had that day, was hot and fried. There was a big fish called doncella, a kind of catfish, dipped whole in corn flour and beaten egg, then deep fried. With our fingers we pulled soft fragments of it from its sides to our plates, and ate; it was delicate fish-flesh, fresh and mild. Someone found the roe, and I ate of that too—it was fat and stronger, like egg yolk, naturally enough, and warm.