The Body

by Richard Ben Sapir

  “Hush, hush,” said Avrahim, and on that there was no more discussion. “When things are not to be spoken, they are not to be spoken, especially if it is a bomb.” And Rani, who would be a soldier, understood.

  “Sharon has found someone?” said Mari, excited. “A beautiful man.” Mari had the dark skin of the Golbans and the blue eyes of her mother.

  “Hush, hush,” said Paula, banging the table with the wooden serving spoon. “She’s married. And until her husband can be found to get a proper divorce, she is still married.”

  “I’d go to Cyprus and get married if I were aguna like Aunt Sharon,” said Mari. “I would.”

  “No,” said Paula, “that is not the lesson. The lesson is to be careful and choose the right man, not getting married whenever you feel like.”

  “How could we have known he would have disappeared for ten years? How?” said Avrahim.

  “You know when you see the character of a man. You know when he talks about nothing but money he is no good. You see, Mari, that is what you should be thinking. A good man.”

  “Why did you bring this up?” asked Sharon.

  “I thought maybe you had met someone,” said Mari.

  “She’s married. How can she meet someone?” said Paula. “Would you like me to meet someone?”

  “You’re really married, Mom.”

  “So is Sharon.”

  “From what country would the name Folan be?” said Sharon, putting the accent on the last syllable and getting off her marital status.

  “How do you spell it? It sounds French,” said Paula.

  “It’s definitely French,” said Avrahim.

  “F—O—L—A—N,” spelled Sharon, using the English letters. The children did not understand.

  “What’s the first name?”

  “James.”

  “Folan!” said Paula, putting the accent on the first syllable where it belonged. “It’s not French. It’s Irish.”

  “It sounded French,” said Avrahim.

  “It’s Irish.”

  “From Ireland?” asked Mari.

  “Where else, silly?” said Rani.

  “No. No,” said Paula. “It could be from anywhere, practically. America, Canada, Australia, England. The Irish are like us, from all over.”

  “I thought they fought the English,” said Rani.

  “I wonder if he’s married?” said Mari. “That’s a handsome name.”

  Sharon smiled at Mari. She wanted to tell her this man Folan with the beautiful name was being sent from Rome for all the wrong reasons.

  She wanted to tell Mari there was something precious in a chiseled stone left a thousand years or so ago. A person had to be quiet to hear what it said, because the past talked in whispers of truth so random and fragile any preconceived opinion would blow it away before the opinion’s organized and determined noise.

  Dr. Folan was bringing the best-organized full orchestra of opinion in all history, the theology of the Roman Catholic Church. Rabbis and mullahs were but little nettlesome guerrilla bands compared to this grand army coming out of the West to do battle for its God.

  “Aunt Sharon is daydreaming,” said Mari, and Sharon smiled.

  “Folan is a beautiful name,” said Sharon.

  “I bet he’s beautiful, too, and Aunt Sharon and the man Folan will be married,” said Mari, giggling wildly because she knew her mother would hate that.

  Paula answered with a severe banging of the wooden spoon.

  “You’re letting her tease you,” said Avrahim to his wife.

  “Even in tease it’s not allowed,” said Paula.

  “And live happily ever after with a big American car and a stereo television,” said Mari.

  “Hut,” screamed Paula.

  “And have affairs in bars,” shrieked Mari, the wildest American thing she could think of.

  And that was too much. Mari was sent away from the table for such talk on Shabbat Eve. Later, Sharon took her some food and did tell her that handsome men could be dangerous. This she could share.

  “Did he hurt you, Aunt Sharon?”

  “No, precious. I hurt me.”

  “Mama was wrong about him.”

  “No, Mari. Unfortunately, as is often the case, Paula was so very right.”

  “Then why did you marry him?”

  “Later I will tell you that, I think.”

  “How much later?”

  “Three years, precious,” said Sharon, kissing the girl on the forehead.

  “Oh, I want to know now. I know about everything. You can tell me. Oh, you can. I know who is kissing in school.”

  “Good night, precious,” said Sharon.

  What could she tell her, that no one brought her to orgasm like Dubi Halafi? What could she say, that just thinking of his organ made her moist with want, that she knew what he was even when she married him.

  And if he were outside this very Shabbat Eve, she would whisk him over to her apartment so fast the candles would go out from the breeze. What could she tell her niece, that she tried to find other men, but none could work her body, or do so much with so much?

  Could she tell her niece that she overlooked everything because he was a sexual technician, that this man could not carry on a civilized conversation?

  Could she repeat to the girl what an Ashkenazi friend told her, that really great lays, the super-sexual men, were all bastards?

  “You screw them, you don’t marry them,” her friend had said.

  “I’m afraid he’ll leave,” Sharon had answered.

  So she had married Dubi Halafi, and two months later he left with her bank account and every bit of folding money in the house as well as her self-respect.

  There had been other men. But the only thing she could ever trust was her archaeology. She could invest everything in that, and it would return in kind. She had found in her life that her science was something she could truly love.

  When a colleague told you you did solid work, that you could trust that from him, that meant something. When a man told you how beautiful your breasts were, it meant he either wanted to get into your body or your purse.

  She wondered briefly that night if Dr. Folan, who would be arriving soon, would make some sexual overture. She already hated him for what he was going to try to do to a perfectly innocent dig.

  4

  Diaspora

  They never failed to let Warris Abouf know how lucky he was, how even Russians did not have the car he had, or the apartment in Moscow that he had, or the amount of certificate rubles he had which enabled him to shop at the Beryozka, where the quality goods were, namely, the imported goods.

  And when they stressed to Warris Abouf how lucky he was, they did not mean in comparison to other Palestinians like himself, or Africans, or Asians, they meant compared to Russians, real Russians, Caucasian Russians.

  And when they made this comparison, they did not even refer to the ordinary White Russian. They meant even Caucasian members of the KGB who did not have the blat of Warris Abouf.

  Blat was the single word the affluent Russian lived by. It meant influence and that translated into luxury goods, restaurants, off-limits cinema, apartments in Moscow, and a personal car.

  And the one thing Warris Abouf never let them think for one moment was that he was not deliriously happy in Moscow, and not for one moment eternally grateful to the only real friend he had in the world.

  Warris Abouf was very careful about that.

  Even this day at 2 Dzerszhinsky Square, sitting across from the KGB major, he had to show how grateful he was for sharing the “sensitive” information on Soviet long-range policy in the Middle East, even though he knew it was neither sensitive nor policy because it was just too benevolent.

  It could have been delivered to an open assembly of Third World students at Patrice Lumumba University.

  Warris Abouf interjected with gratitude to the Russians on behalf of all Palestinians. He reminded the major that he understood what good friend
s the Russians were and how much they trusted him.

  He better than others understood all the peoples who had betrayed the Palestinian cause. But never, never the Russians.

  And for some reason this day the major mentioned how the Roman Catholic Church might someday prove to be a prime enemy of the Palestinian struggle and then he moved quickly on to enumerating other Palestinian enemies. But Warris Abouf had seen too much.

  The dark eyes in Major Vakunin’s bone-white face had wandered around the room, and that always meant a crucial point even though the major never wanted Warris to know exactly what was important and what was not.

  The Russians were like that. They even tried to hide innocent things, as though some ancient tribal superstition dictated what you knew about them could be used for bad magic. In this respect they were often more African than Africans.

  Finally, when Major Vakunin put his red box of cigarettes on the standard green-felt tabletop of these KGB offices in front of Lubyanka Prison, central Moscow, Warris knew he would find out what he was summoned for. Vakunin always placed something or rearranged something on the desk when he came to his purpose.

  “We are looking for someone. Not just an Arab. We want a Palestinian,” said Major Vakunin. He lit a cigarette for himself and dwelled on the smoke for a moment.

  “He must speak Hebrew. And he must have a knowledge of the Roman Catholic Church, especially in the Middle East. Not chaff. Definitely not chaff.”

  Warris nodded. There were kernels and there was chaff. Chaff were those people of low intelligence or of unstable violent temperament who would be guided toward guerrilla training, where they could be lost.

  But the kernels were those people of higher intelligence and greater emotional balance and selectivity who were most of all prone to being loyal to Moscow as the one true center of world socialism.

  These people would prove invaluable in the struggle to come, which would begin when the Palestinian state was formed. They would be the cadres to fight the Peking-backed socialists, the Islamists, the pan-Arab nationalists, and the multitude of other liberation groups not allied to Moscow.

  It was Warris’ job, and the great rewards for it, to select those kernels from the students at Patrice Lumumba University. It was he who, having judged a young man or woman as worthy, would befriend them and show them through his own life-style how well the Russians loved and respected their Arab brothers.

  And he would move them off to their destinies, the kernels for further education and luxuries, and the chaff to wherever they ended up, either on some plane they hijacked, or shooting up some Israeli schoolroom, or unfortunately, as was too often the case, some other Palestinian faction.

  In this sort of separation, Warris could not have agreed more, for just these sorts of hotheads were the most disruptive to any organization or project, so ready to accuse even the closest compatriots of being traitors. It was these sorts, as much as the Israelis, who had landed Warris in Russia in his twenty-eighth year of life, facing another abysmal Russian winter, made more miserable by the Russians’ enjoyment of it.

  “Not chaff,” Warris repeated.

  “Definitely not chaff,” said the mayor.

  “So it could be a woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how soon would this person be needed?”

  “Not this afternoon, but not next year either,” said the major.

  “There have been several I have been looking at,” said Warris. “But I sense there is something more that’s wanted. What about the Catholic Church? Should the person be aware of the liturgy?”

  “The Vatican,” said the major. “Someone knowledgeable about the nuances of the Vatican.”

  “Diplomacy?”

  “The Vatican,” said the major, giving no more.

  Warris nodded. “I myself come from a Melchite Catholic family. I do not, of course, believe, but I am aware of many of our Vatican’s attitudes in the Middle East. I would imagine any other Melchite would be just as aware. Do you know what ‘Melchite,’ the word, comes from?”

  The major lit a cigarette and Warris asked for one now.

  “Melchite comes from the old Hebrew ‘Melek,’ which is the same as the Hebrew for ‘King.’ When the Israeli fascists who support the fascist Begin wanted to cheer him on they would yell, ‘Melek Yisroel,’ which means ‘King of Israel,’” said Warris.

  And seeing the major was uninterested, Warris added:

  “I was just offering something that might have been useful to you.”

  “Of course,” said the major.

  “Of course,” said Warris, and gave a little bow as he rose from his seat in the windowless office. “This will require careful thought and thoroughness.”

  He could have named three candidates for the job immediately, all students at Patrice Lumumba, but he had learned never to make anything look easy or to propose a candidate for a special school or assignment right away because there was nothing like ease or speed to make a Russian suspicious. Besides, he wanted to think about what had really happened. Undoubtedly, something had happened between the Vatican and America or more likely the Vatican and Israel.

  It could have been a meeting between two diplomats, a report from some agent inside Israel, or even a minute change in radio traffic between Israel and the Vatican. Warris knew the Russians had gotten computers from America that could monitor patterns of vast radio traffic to determine if something extraordinary was going on between two points.

  He knew they were American computers because the Russians did not stress they were Russian computers and the Russians would never have missed that kind of opportunity if they had built them.

  It could have been anything that had caused this sudden need for someone for something special. And somehow the Roman Catholic Church had to be involved. Offhand, Warris guessed that the person would be sent somewhere, somewhere where he knew the land and could blend in, somewhere where it was warm and the sun baked the earth and the people on it, where courtesy and nuances of words were appreciated, in that part of the world which he had left so long ago.

  He had only a Volga car, but this day he used the center lane reserved for emergencies or the cars of the more important people who drove Chaikas and Zils.

  Warris could get away with this because he was almost always mistaken for a diplomat, given his swarthy skin and prominent nose, especially when he spoke Russian with his lilting Arabic accent at which little children sometimes laughed.

  He taught in Russian and ordered food in Russian and made love to his wife speaking Russian. But for his son, in little quiet moments, he would speak Arabic, caressing the words as he caressed his son. Each word he gave with something pleasant, like candy, so that the son would not think the words were funny or unappealing.

  He would do this when his wife, Tomarah, was not around, lest she mock it, as she often did Arabic things, his wife with the so white skin and pink cheeks and blond hair that their son, Arkady, did not have.

  But Tomarah dared not mock Arabic when he spoke it with students he brought home from Patrice Lumumba University, where he taught international policy studies.

  She dared not mock then because if it were not for those students whom he recruited, Warris would not have a propiscka, that crucial resident’s permit that let him live in Moscow, the real reason Tomarah had married him.

  Of course, he never let her know he knew. One never let a Russian know you were onto them, especially if the Russian was your wife.

  Warris had always treated her with loving respect. She, on the other hand, could go into rages at his customs, accusing him of that lowest Russian word, being a “zhid,” which meant Jew in slang.

  She would say of all Arabs at times of extreme anger, “You are all zhids. All of you.”

  This was not an uncommon thought for Russians. At some “confidential” briefings on international events, Warris would hear the officer point out Russian heritage of some Israeli general if they were a success, and th
e Israeli, it was understood, was successful because of some possible Russian blood. Failures of the Zionist enemy were of course done by zhids.

  Yet, unmistakably, the tone was the same as for the failures of Arab allies. And if there was anything Warris Abouf could read like a street sign it was the tone in a man’s voice, or the squint in the eye, or the gesture, or where a man sat on a chair, or how the lips smiled in relationship to the eyes.

  He thought about these things as he drove along Ordynka Ulitsa and out into the less-populated areas where, on Ordzhonikidze Street, Patrice Lumumba Friendship University stood like a massive artificial insult against the gentle woodlands behind it.

  But even as he reminded himself how much he would miss the apartment, car, and blat if ever he had to give it up, he wondered what the Galilee, where his father was born, looked like in autumn.

  He wondered if someday he would take his son to the Galilee and show him his father’s house and say, “Here were the olive groves.” He did not know whether his father had olive groves, but he had told that to his son. A place one had never seen could be anything, and it did not hurt to make it grand to let the boy know he had come from important people.

  Warris’ own father never talked of the Galilee because the old man knew he could have stayed, knew he had made one inaccurate decision after the other that had landed him and his family penniless in a refugee camp outside Beirut, and his oldest son, Warris, with nothing but his wits for survival.

  Still, Warris had done well for himself. Quite well. The Russians trusted him. Someday they might let him leave with his family for a visit, if the political situation were right. Especially if a Palestinian state were established, in which they would see to it that Warris held an important position.

  After all, why shouldn’t they trust him? They gave him everything.

  As Warris pulled into a narrow driveway hidden by a ten-foot wall surrounding the compound of his apartment building, he found himself humming a tune he had thought he had forgotten. It was a simple melody and it was Arabic, and he loved the sound of his voice in the language he loved.

  And when he brought his grand Volga automobile to a stop in his own reserved spot that was supposed to be so valuable because there were so few of them that even White Russians didn’t have them, he realized how much he wanted to go home. He realized how much this was not his home.