The Expelled

by Mois Benarroch

  “Yes, we are listening, although you are boring us.”

  “Sorry.”

  “We want to know what happened, not the digestive problems of each passenger.”

  “But can you tell me who you are, are you the police, secret agents?”

  “We want to know who the leader was.”

  “I don't know that I don't know if there was a leader.”

  “Who gave the order?”

  “What order?”

  “If you were or weren't abducted.”

  “I believe I am in a democratic country, and I'm entitled to a lawyer.”

  “Not in this case.”

  “Why not...”

  “Sometimes it’s like that.”

  “It's not like I have anything to hide. I can tell you everything I remember, but...”

  “We want to know when they started to eat passengers.”

  “What?”

  “To eat human flesh.”

  “I don't remember that. I didn't eat the flesh of any passenger.”

  “Of a back person, perhaps...”

  “Not me.”

  “Alright, go on, go on.”

  “Am I being accused of something?”

  “Go on with your testimony.”

  “But am I being accused of something?”

  “Not for the moment. You are not accused of anything.”

  “What do you mean for the moment?”

  “Continue your story and you will understand, maybe you will remember.”

  “What is this? A movie? A novel?”

  “Go on, continue we don't have all the time in the world.”

  Ok, I’ll continue. So someone decided to change the course and turn around. The driver told us that he'd been driving in the same direction for three hours and saw nothing, not one house, not one tree, only an endless line of grass. “I haven't even seen this in Scotland”. And without really discussing it, he turned back the way we came. But I didn't see any cars on that way either. When he turned back, the scenery on the same road had changed, the grass suddenly turned into a forest full of trees. We all saw it, or at least that's what I think, and we all got scared, but nobody said anything about it for over an hour, until a bird jumped on the road, well, that wasn't a bird, it was bigger than the bus, it jumped on the road and continued flying. Not everyone saw it because the ones who were asleep woke up when the driver hit the brakes, but the bird was already gone. They all asked what it was, “what is it, what is it”, you could hear them say, but no one answered. After that we were silent for a long time, we were panicked, terrified.

  And in the silence, watching the trees passing, I fell asleep. I slept three or four hours, because when I woke up it was already nighttime. We had been traveling for almost twenty-four hours. I dreamed I was in a hotel and in this hotel I was with my daughter and my wife. They had changed our room while I was out of the hotel and I asked my wife what the new room number was. It was room 899. And I asked what the code was to enter the room, then my daughter came and whispered it in my ear, it's 9696. So I went to the elevator and pressed the button to go up to the eighth floor, but the elevator reached the ninth floor. I got out of the elevator and into another, but it took me to the thirtieth floor. I changed elevators again and this time I went down to the eighth floor. And I went to my room.

  The numbers in this dream intrigued me, but when I woke up I heard the Tadeuz family arguing, it's that family that's right on the border between front and back, the children were front people and the parents back people. They were arguing, and the son said it was better not to mess things up.

  “What do you want,” the son said, “do you want them to throw us in the back?”

  “No,” the mother replied, “we're one family, you can ask them to move the line of the border and that way we could become front people, just that.”

  “And who do we ask?”

  “You can vote and change the line.”

  “That seems simple, but what if they vote for us to become back people, that could happen too, I don't think they like us very much, we are on the border, and then we'd all be worse off.”

  I realized that I wasn't the only clueless person that wasn't sure of the time. Each watch I looked at gave a different time, and then the sun started rising suddenly because I think it was eleven or twelve. My watch showed eleven thirty. And at dawn we found ourselves in front of a wall. The driver stopped abruptly and we all leaped forward. When the back people saw that they were in front, they apologized before anyone could say anything and they went back to their place, we were all scared.

  “Where did this wall come from?”

  “I believe it wasn't here before.”

  “It is the wall of our sins, for having killed Cash.”

  “It's those back ones, they're criminals. How could they kill Cash?”

  The driver had gone forward and had badly hit himself against the glass that did not break. He said his shoulder hurt, but that he was fine. He had a bump on his forehead, but it didn't hurt.

  “What I want to know is how much time has passed since the accident, if it was an accident, if I stayed in the hospital for a long time, one month, one year, you can't tell me that? And I'm hungry.”

  “What do you want to eat?”

  “Can't you at least tell me how long it's been since the accident?”

  “What do you want to eat?”

  “I want the following: a cabbage and watercress salad, and for the dressing virgin olive oil with a 0.3% acidity and balsamic vinegar of Modena, as a starter, and then for the main dish I want brown rice and beans, on one side of the plate, and on the other side fried tofu with onions, seasoned with tamari sauce, and if possible épeautre bread.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I'm a vegetarian.”

  “Look, we have tuna and cheese sandwiches here. So, you can choose.”

  “Two of each, I'm really hungry.”

  “We'll pass it to you from the small little door that's on the lower right side of the door that's on your left.”

  “You won't even let me see you. So much mystery... You could send me a photo of yourself, here are the sandwiches, thank you, and thanks for the mineral water.”

  So, we got off the bus and went to see that wall, it was a gray concrete wall. Right to the level of my hips, some funny guy had drawn a window through which you could see a field and a dairy cow, like in Switzerland. Then we heard voices on the other side. They said hey, hello, is someone there, things like that.

  “And who are you?” I asked.

  “We're from the bus.”

  “And what's that wall?”

  “It's something against terrorism, they announced it on the radio,” many of them responded, sometimes simultaneously, from the other side of the wall. But from our side I was the only one who spoke.

  “These sandwiches aren't bad, especially the tuna, although I don't know how I'll feel later, I haven't eaten fish for years, and mayonnaise even less. And thanks for the water.”

  “Well, I didn't know anything about that.”

  “I don't know, they said we had to quickly build a wall because there were a lot of terrorists on a bus, and it was dangerous. They have one of those huge machines that put a wall in a few hours.”

  “And what should we do?” I asked.

  “I think you have to go back.”

  “Yeah well, we already did that.”

  “You have to turn back twice and maybe you can get to the sea.”

  It was a woman who spoke, she had a somewhat whiny voice, like my aunt Esther's.

  “They say they're on the bus with an atomic bomb and that they've abducted the passengers.”

  “Oh, yeah?!”

  “Maybe it's you, are you on a bus?”

  “Yes, we came on a bus but they haven't abducted us.”

  “And how do I know that's true? Maybe you're the terrorist. Can I speak with other people?”

  “They are all a little upset fr
om the sudden halt in front of the wall. And some are already praying, they say that they have to pray to the wall. And they pray to saint Cash. You can do it on the other side. Did you also come on a bus?”

  “Yes, we came by bus, we're going to the sea, from sea to sea, and land in the middle. The land only makes room for the seas...”

  “And we, the men and animals, are in the middle.”

  “Yes, how did you know how it went?”

  “It's from a poem I learned in school.”

  I returned to the bus and told the driver what was happening. The concrete walls were twenty feet high. I decided to go along the wall to see where it ended, it was difficult to walk because the wall was very close to the trees. I walkt, I mean, I walked over twenty minutes when I decided to go back, I saw another wall, perpendicular to the one on the road, but I didn't follow it from fear that the bus would leave me behind. When I got back there was a discussion going on with the people from the other side of the wall about the idea of jumping over it and changing buses, but to do that they needed a ladder, and the front people suggested that the others could perhaps be terrorists. So we asked them if they had any food.

  “Do you have anything to eat?”

  Then I saw a cow's head dropping a few inches from where I was, and another followed, and the third almost dropped on my head but I moved to the side and hit myself against a tree. They were all olive trees. And some of them were split in two because of the wall, trees in two worlds. I thought.

  “Don’t you have anything other than heads?”

  Then, it started raining cow tails.

  “Alright, enough, enough, we got it.”

  Then they brought out a grill and with olive tree branches we prepared beef cheeks and brains. The food wasn't so bad. Without anyone saying anything and without asking for permission, the back people came and ate with us. After eating, they left and sat in their place. They didn't think they could take part in the decision-making process. One of them gave me a notebook and asked me to keep it. I have it here. And I'll read it all to you, if you don't tell me who you are, I can tell you it's not very peachy, there are no flying cows or elephant heads in here, so let's start.

  2.

  The Expelled

  Maybe everything ended the day I was born. On that one October day. But now I see it all differently, I see my innocence as someone who sees a train that doesn't know how to stop at a station. I remember, I reminisce on those flashes from my twenties in the literary group Marot in Jerusalem when I saw myself as a Jean Cocteau but the world had already decided I would be a Baudelaire, a poet cursed by his people and his innocence, cursed by his ignorance. I say it now that I'm on the threshold of the success that I've always longed for, and a few months away from publishing my first novel at the publishing house Destino. Destiny, destiny has arrived even in the form of the publisher's name, it was all about destiny. The days and hours and backaches from typing so much and trying so much, to find those liberating words.

  Maybe it all started the day I was born, for having been born in a country that had disappeared from the map of my people, the Jewish people. Without realizing, the people and its conscience had wandered off to Warsaw and Berlin, leaving Africa off the map. So when I was twelve years old, I came to Israel, what I call the immigration that ended it all. Since then they ask me if I'm really from Morocco, and sometimes they don't believe me when I say yes and they argue with me, and not even my ID card convinces them. I don't care anymore. Or yes, yes it matters to me but my expulsion from the Jewish town has become part of me. That day in 1972, that morning of unprecedented dawn, that morning I became a black man, a colonized person, although I still had blue-green eyes and white skin, those blue eyes that my daughter wanted for her. Why didn't you give me the color of your eyes? The color of the eyes change sweetheart, yes they do.

  Without realizing I had become a completely different person, and each look that defined me, without my knowing, made me more and more a foreigner and someone else. But I didn't know that and thus, what I tried to do was to stop being different. In order to stop being different, I had to stop being born in Morocco, something that no one knows how to do yet. Or if someone knows and has done it, he hasn't told us how.

  That's why now I remember my twenties, the eighties of the twentieth century in the group of poets and artists, the fights, the discussions, the madness, the women, the men and my innocence. My sweet innocence. We met every Friday at Binyanei Hauma, the poet B-S was on guard duty there on weekends. His shift began Friday at two p.m. and ended on Sunday at seven a.m. That's how he spent all his weekends and how he earned a living. We, the poets, started arriving at the huge empty building, with rooms and stairs, around five, and at ten p.m. we were four or twenty, or sometimes more. It's in these settings that we had the idea of publishing a magazine and it's also there that Roni says I tried to rape her on a drunken night; they were unusual nights. Usually, the discussions were focused on theoretical, messianic and religious topics.

  In 1981, when the group was created, I was the most published member, and everything seemed to predict I would be a Cocteau and not a Baudelaire. I had already published a dozen poems in the weekly magazine of the Navy, BaMahané, a poem and a short story in the number two newspaper of Israel, Maariv, two poems in Hadarim magazine, in which they published the most famous poets in Israel, in that remote time when poetry was important and it sold in tens of thousands of copies, and it was debated, and two poems in Iton77, another prestigious magazine. The others were unpublished poets. But within a few years they all won awards and got published with the best Israeli publishers while I, with my insolent attitude, still hadn't published anything until 1994. I wanted to be a Cocteau, not only for his precociousness but for his Enfant Terrible, but the terrible thing was my luck and the attempt to move a literature that even today has no room for Les Enfants Terribles.

  Now I am even afraid to meet people, the nice and the polite ones are the worst. On every corner, they become my enemies. Each article, each word, each book creates more enemies. If there is a coup, my name would be the first to be exposed. By both the right and left-wing people. I am an extremist, but I'm an extremist with nothing more to it, or as someone said I'm a Moroccan extremist, as if being Moroccan was enough to cast you to the extremes of existence. But I don't need to be on my guard all the time, most of them, my future enemies, are scared of my name, they are sure that I'm going to hit them or that I'm going to scream or lose it like a mad dog. When we met, either because they see me at a literary evening or somewhere else, they tell me they didn't expect me to be so nice. Well, of course, I'm not saying I'm the most pleasant person on earth, but I'm sociable in society. What little society I had left.

  I must have realized it back in 1975 when I traveled to Spain to visit my cousin. I stayed there for a month. During that month, besides falling in love for the first time with Sara, I made tons of friends, and I'm still in contact with some of them. What happened in that month? I never stopped to analyze it. It scared me. The lone wolf had turned into a social animal. Things got worse in the next two trips in 1977 and in 1982, and then I stopped going to Spain. How could that be? I spoke fluent Hebrew and I was in "my" country, then how was it that in Madrid I made loads of friends and in Jerusalem I lived as a recluse, a leper, an expelled. I couldn't face that alarming dichotomy. But the years went by and the facts grew and were filled with branches.

  The expelled. That's the name they gave the Sephardim who arrived in Morocco after the Inquisition, and the Jews who lived in the country were called the settlers. The expelled considered themselves more important and in less than a hundred years they were able to impose, after endless arguments, their laws and their way of seeing Judaism. Especially when it came to Kashrut laws. That's why I was born an expelled person. Or I was possibly an expelled before I was born.

  I recall the word, acrobat. Words for me are like trees in my garden. Each word is a different time and stage of my life. We we
re acrobats when my brother and I jumped from our bedroom closet to the bed and my mother came screaming at us that we were acrobats.

  B-S walked around Binyane Hauma every two or three hours to check that there were no trespassers in one of the rooms. But we were the trespassers. We entered through a back door and we had to knock for several minutes because B-S was on the first floor and the door on the ground floor. Sometimes D-S went with him, I was scared of roaming around those stairs. I think I went with B-S just one time. In those days, D-S the Uruguayan, who had actually introduced me to the group, and I, read Borges behind the waiting room overlooking an office where we sat, I imagined it as an empty and frightening maze. Us, both Spanish speakers. We discussed Borges and Cortázar with the Israelis, who weren't widely translated into Spanish. Thanks to my translations of Jabès they learned to know this writer who is still so unknown in Israel because of a catastrophic Hebrew translation of The Book of Questions that nobody could read and that blocked the translation into Hebrew of his other books.

  I think in 1984 I had translated about 70 pages of that same book and had sent a letter to Jabès, a letter I have kept so well that I can't find it anymore, I did it for my love of art and to deepen my reading of this writer who had become one of my mentors, but they chose another translator although my translation was not only better but also impossible to compare. I even gave a lecture at the University of Jerusalem on what I had translated and that had been published in magazines, as well as other chapters of his work that have never been published in book formats. But at that time, and even today, you couldn't conceive that a Moroccan could be a translator and it wasn't just that, the Moroccan doesn't know languages, he is uneducated and cannot translate, because in addition to not knowing French and even less Spanish, he doesn't really know Hebrew and doesn't know the correct Ashkenazi Hebrew syntax. Language is a weapon of domination and often today, yes, even today, you find an article ridiculing the language of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who has a fabulous and anti-Zionist Hebrew but does not exactly match with the Hebrew that is considered legal. So all the writers born in Iraq or Morocco are always attacked for their language and for their Hebrew.