by Meir Shalev
What do insomniacs do? There are those who bait traps for sleep, put up signposts to guide its way. They try various pills, warm milk, infusions of leaves that are reputedly effective, and infusions of grapes known as wine and cognac. That, for example, is what the man’s wife does as she waits for him in their house and their bed and he doesn’t arrive. She drinks, lies down, drinks some more, reads, waiting for him and for her sleep. And maybe this is better than lying awake together, sharing their insomnia, both of them knowing that they can’t sleep because of their neighbor in the bed, and both close their eyes and pretend the other has drifted off.
And there are couples who need each other then, because orgasm, it is said, leads to sleep. And if they don’t want each other, they make do alone, with their own bodies. But these two do not, and it has been years since this woman has slept with her husband.
Sometimes the man comes into the house, lies down in another bed, in a room that is not the bedroom, and sometimes thinks he has dozed off. But then he wakes up to the reality of being awake. In other words, he slowly shuts his eyes, lies there knowing he is asleep, and suddenly realizes he is awake. Not just his heart, like the sleeping woman in the Song of Songs, but all of him. His limbs are limp like a sleeper’s limbs, his breathing is relaxed like a sleeper’s breathing, his eyes are closed like a sleeper’s eyes, and sometimes he even dreams a sleeper’s dreams, but then he senses that his eyes are open, looking inside him, and his dream is not a dream but memory and thought.
He gets up and gets dressed and goes out to stand guard. So it goes, night after night. My man walks around outside. And I, in the empty bed, wait.
FIFTEEN
“Why did you wake up, Sarah?”
“Because of you. You’re making a ton of noise.”
“We’re getting ready for a hike.”
“What hike? You didn’t say anything about it.”
“A hike for guys. Me and Isaac.”
“Just the two of you? It’s not kind of dangerous?”
“We’re not alone. We’ll also take two boys and a donkey, and also God will come.”
“Really?”
“That’s what he said.”
“If I know him, he’ll show up only on the last day and say he forgot to bring food. You better bring some sacrifices.”
Silence.
“And where are you going?”
“ ‘To the place that I shall show thee.’ ”
“To the place that who shall show thee?”
“God. That’s what he said.”
“And what about me? I also want to come.”
“This is a hike for guys. I told you. Isaac, the boys, God, the donkey, and me. Women, girls, mothers, she-asses—not invited. You sit in the tent, you don’t go out hiking.”
“Everything was nicer when I was called Sarai and you were called Abram. Ever since God changed our names something went wrong in this family.”
Silence.
“And when are you getting back?”
“In a few days.”
“A few days is a long time. What are you going to do?”
“What guys do. We’ll walk, navigate to a place that he will show us. We’ll get there. We’ll sit on one of the mountains and look at the scenery. We’ll talk, we’ll be silent, we’ll remember, we’ll be nostalgic for things that happened five minutes before. We’ll set fire to the wood on the first try, we’ll learn to tie knots: tight sturdy bindings. We’ll teach each other things that men have to learn.”
I can recite them: to walk silently, track footprints, camouflage yourself, see and not be seen, and walk in darkness—and maybe “see a great light,” like Isaiah says—and know which plants to make tea with, and how to feed hay to the cows, build a chicken coop, “tend the flora and dance the hora, just like the uncles do.” Little bonus there for you, Varda, an old song from the Yishuv, after all you’re not so interested in people, you deal with issues. A gender song for you—when the uncles do that stuff, what do the aunties do? To know the sounds of the night, to find the path, to fathom the eagle in the sky, the serpent on the rock, how a man has his way with a maiden. And how to dig wells, build an altar, kindle a fire, go barefoot, sharpen a butcher’s knife, how to lead—the boy in the saddle, his hands gripping the reins, smiling with excitement that mothers do not understand.
Here are tracks of a rabbit, Isaac, and these of a hyena, its hind legs are smaller than the forelegs, and these of a ram, with a cloven hoof, here, he walked here. You can see his tracks from here to that thicket. See this stone, with the lichen facing down—that tells you he flipped it over with his hoof.
You’re not that interested in these stories about rocks? A shame. Because stories about rocks are the most historical history of the Yishuv. Cornerstones, keystones, milestones, slingshot stones, smooth stones, rough stones, gravestones. Huge hailstones from the sky, stones you put under your head for a pillow, for dreaming dreams.
And here’s the North Star, here’s Ursa Major and beside her the Little Bear, Ursa Minor, we’re all here—one God, two she-bears, four mothers, and a father and son. What’s with the two she-bears, Abraham? Shtayim dubim? The Jewish people have just started speaking Hebrew and already you’re making mistakes? Feminine masculine? We’re in the Bible, Sarah, in case you’ve forgotten. Here in the Bible even the mistakes are holy.
That’s it. They got up early, saddled the donkey, sallied forth. How words change. Today the word for “saddling” in biblical Hebrew means “bandaging a wound.” Packed from head to hoof—water, food, tent, shade canopy, wood, butcher’s knife, tools, and cooking implements—and went. “And the two walked off together.” I believe I already told you that Eitan loved the sound of the biblical word “together,” yahdav, and played with it all sorts of ways. “You’re the teacher here, Ruta,” he said on the eve of their departure for that hike, at dinner with Grandpa and Dovik and Dalia, “you’re the teacher and I barely managed to finish the tenth grade, but I will explain something to you about grammar that I think you don’t understand: just as yeladav means ‘his children’ and begadav means ‘his clothing,’ yahdav means ‘his togethers.’ ”
Dovik laughed, Grandpa fixed his gaze, the patched eye and the good one, on Eitan, with affection and wonder: What else will this weird golden butterfly say or do at our family table? This fine-feathered bird who landed among us geese and chickens? I laughed, even Dalia managed a smile. The eve of the disaster, the last supper of its kind. We would have these loud and lively dinners, seasoned with stories and jokes and riddles, knocking salad off someone’s fork, stealing their last bite or sip. Dovik is someone who really loves to eat. He eats a lot and chews a long time and sighs with pleasure and plans every last bite in great detail. Therefore it’s great fun to ruin it for him. He would assemble on his fork a small sample of each salad vegetable, and a bit of yellow and a bit of white from the fried egg, a sliver of cheese and a hint of herring, and then, a second before it entered his mouth, I would stick out my fork and knock everything back onto his plate, and he would laugh and get angry.
We would report about the day just ended and make plans for the next, and Eitan, my man, my first husband, was always at the center: speaking, imitating, making formal announcements. Dovik would look at him with admiration, Grandpa Ze’ev with love and curiosity. His two sons had left home, one of them, my father, was dead, and God had sent him Eitan in their place.
I peeked in to make sure Neta was covered, and we went to bed. Oddly enough I don’t remember if I had sex with Eitan that night. Probably yes, because we did it a lot then, at every opportunity, and if so, it was the last time for many years. The twelve blighted years, the evils were preparing to arise from the Nile and enter my bed—here we are—like the sickly cows of Pharaoh’s dream. And before dawn I heard Eitan getting ready, and I got up and went to the kitchen to say goodbye.
And you didn’t sense that something was about to happen?
No, Varda, no. I already told you. I
didn’t have any premonitions or female intuitions, and I didn’t feel that this was a final farewell, that this would be the last time I would see my child alive and my husband as he was. But like all mothers and wives, I worried a little for my son and husband. I even gave them the concerned-mother speech:
“You decided where you’re going?”
“More or less.”
“Can you maybe tell me?”
“The Negev.”
“You already said so. Where exactly in the Negev?”
“What’s with the ‘exactly,’ Ruta? We’re going hiking. Quality time for father and son. We’ll sit under a tree in one of the wadis.”
“Because you yourself always say that if you go on a trip you have to supply details of the route at home.”
“You’re right,” he said, “but I told you, this time it’s not a hike with a route, but camping, and we don’t know where yet. We’ll decide when we’re out there. Someplace around Nahal Tzihor or Nahal Tznifim, we’ll find us a nice acacia, we’ll pitch a tent in its shade, build a fire pit with stones, make friends with birds, learn how to build a sand table. Navigate in the hills with a map.”
“Why does a six-year-old need to navigate with a map?”
“You prefer a six-year-old with a PlayStation?”
I got ornery. “I know that area. Nahal Tzihor and Nahal Tznifim are half the Negev. You don’t know where that beautiful acacia is exactly?”
“Wherever God planted it. When we get to it, we’ll know it’s the one, and if there’s reception I’ll send Dovik a text message with our coordinates and he’ll show you on the map exactly.”
“And if there won’t be reception? Why is it so hard to tell me now where you’ll be?”
“Wherever the steering wheel takes us, to the place God will tell us.”
How did I not understand, I, the Bible teacher, what was happening? And Eitan kept talking: “Not everything has to be planned, where we’re going, where we’ll be. Not everything has to be known in advance. You can improvise and go with the flow.”
As you see, he succeeded in upsetting me. On the other hand, Eitan was the best possible person to go on a hike with. He was an outstanding driver and a superb navigator. He never got stuck or lost. He was also a technical guy, knew how to fix the pickup if it broke down, a strong guy with a lot of experience, and underneath his levity and unworried pose he would plan every detail, as responsible and organized as a watchmaker. That’s how he was when he put a pot on the fire, went to kill somebody, planned his wife’s birthday, or took a hike.
He went out to the pickup, loaded and arranged the equipment, covered it, tied it down. In the nursery, he told me once, we have everything we need for a hike and also for ambushes and lookouts: ropes, boxes, jerricans and all kinds of containers, a pickax for digging or bashing someone’s head if necessary, pruning shears, a shovel for hot coals and burying poop in the sand, hefty plastic bags for garbage, rakes and brooms to cover your tracks, and tarps for shade and camouflage and lying down on.
I saw him loading the pickup with quiet efficiency, and I relaxed a bit. I also remembered the last time they left me home and went to the desert without me, and I smiled to myself. That was a year earlier. They had announced on the radio that a meteor shower was expected that night, and Eitan said, “Yalla, Neta, let’s drive down to the desert, we’ll see them falling from the sky.”
I asked, “What about me? I want to go too.”
Eitan said, “No way! A zillion people will go to see them in the desert, because the nights there are totally dark, and who do they get? You! Shining as bright as the sun. Instead of watching the meteors they’ll be looking at you, through grimy binoculars.” I told you, Varda, my first husband was an irrepressible romantic, and also a very funny guy.
“It’s all done. You want to get Neta or should I get him?”
I went upstairs; I picked him up wrapped in his blanket and laid him on the backseat. I hugged and kissed him on the cheeks and forehead, but he was fast asleep and didn’t feel a thing, and Eitan gently lowered the front seatback to keep him from falling or flying off. I hugged Eitan and kissed him too, and that was it. They drove away and I made myself some coffee because it was almost my usual wake-up time. I wasn’t worried, but I thought about them. Neta, as I knew, would sleep soundly the whole way down and wake up only when they got to the tree, and I imagined Eitan driving in the wadi and choosing that acacia out of all the others. I knew better than anyone how picky he was about the right shade tree to sit under, especially if the hike was in the desert and the tree was an acacia: it had to be symmetrical, it should have a beautiful silhouette, you needed to be able to stand under it without getting smacked in the head by a thorny branch, and there shouldn’t be too many fallen branches under it because they can cause a flat tire or punch a hole in your shoe.
“The thing about an acacia,” he once explained to me, “is that when it’s a good tree it’s also beautiful, and when it’s beautiful it’s also good. The pomegranate is also like that, and the cypress and the oak, but it’s not that way with all trees. The fig, for instance, can be ugly as sin, but good, with wonderful fruit, and also the opposite, a beautiful fig tree with shitty fruit.”
“ ‘Figs so bad they could not be eaten,’ ” I quoted him from Jeremiah.
He laughed. “Your Hebrew is a bit beyond me. But I’ll write it down, so I won’t forget.”
I know: he picked them out a good and beautiful acacia, parked the pickup by the side of the creek bed, and together they covered it with the tarp so it wouldn’t broil in the sun and to camouflage it—so nobody would see it who didn’t need to see it.
I remember the principles: alter the shape, conceal colors and bulges, any glint of glass or metal. I’m guessing they also tossed twigs and dry branches on the tarp and a few fistfuls of sand and dirt. Then they pitched a small tent for the next two nights. Not just against the cold, but mainly against mosquitoes and snakes and scorpions.
And I can hear it: “We don’t want guests, right, Neta? So go over to the dirt road, please, and when you get there look toward the pickup and the tent, tell me if you can see them.”
Eitan fixed something to eat and said that at the hottest time of day you don’t do anything, just chill out in the shade, which is what they did. They napped a little, woke up, talked, kept quiet, got into the atmosphere of the place.
“Drink some water, Neta.”
“I don’t want any.”
“Drink, it’s important.”
“But I’m not thirsty.”
“Drink even if you’re not thirsty.”
“But why?”
“Because it’s hot and dry here, and you don’t feel yourself sweating and drying out. You see those two rocks over there? One small and one big? Those were a father and son who traveled here before us and didn’t drink enough.”
Eitan took a few pictures with his old camera, of the tent and the tree, and Neta and him, together and separately. There were digital cameras available, and Eitan did like new gadgets, but stuck to his ancient Pentax. He said he liked the guillotine sound of the old cameras and didn’t like being able to see the result right away in a digital camera and keep trying till you got it right.
Photography should be like sniper fire, he said. With all the planning and concentration and responsibility for the consequences. With old cameras, once the bullet is shot there are no regrets, no taking it back or shooting it again.
Then they looked at a field guide and together identified birds: warblers, rosefinches, and black-something, there is such a bird. I forget if it’s a blacktail or blackback or blackbelly or blackhead.
“In a couple days he’ll get used to us and eat from our hand,” Eitan said to Neta, just like he said to me on one of our hikes, before we were parents and it was just the two of us. Lucky I wasn’t there with them; I would surely have upgraded his grammar, with that schoolteacher Hebrew I keep slipping into.
Toward evening, when t
he sun calmed down and no longer wanted to kill anyone, they went for a walk, to get to know the area and how it looked in this light, because “Tomorrow morning you won’t recognize it, Neta, in the desert the landscape changes with the time of day.
“Come, I want to show you something,” he said to him. I so loved that sentence of his. Always, when he said, “Come, Ruta, I want to show you something,” there’d be something beautiful awaiting me, something funny, something good.
“Come, Neta, look. This is the hour when the sun is no longer strong and all kinds of animals start coming out to look for something to eat. Let’s take water, and something to nosh, and the camera to take pictures of ourselves and the scenery, so we can show them to Mommy when we get back. Come, I’ll lead us to the top of that hill over there, and you’ll lead us back down here. So look around and remember how we go, because it’ll get dark, and if you don’t find the pickup and tent we’ll have to stay in the desert forever.”
How do I know all this? The truth is, I don’t, but I know enough to guess. I’m sure that Eitan repeated and emphasized what he would also tell me on hikes, that you have to turn your head around every so often, to see and remember what the path looks like in the other direction. He preferred circular routes, not the back-and-forth kind, but sometimes there’s no choice and we have to retrace our steps, and trails look completely different going and coming.
“That’s another thing I love about you,” he once said to me, “that I can take you twice on exactly the same walk, once in this direction and once in the other, and you think it’s a new place you haven’t been before. You’re easy to please.”
They went. The two of them yahdav. Together. First in the wadi, and at a certain point they climbed diagonally to the top of the ridge. “To get to the ridge we have to go diagonally, Neta, the way animals do, and it’s best to walk on their trail and not leave a new line of footprints.” I can recite that to you too, because I also hiked with him. “You climb at a diagonal, and you don’t stand on the open ridge like a putz but a little lower down on the slope, because we don’t want to be seen from kilometers away by someone who shouldn’t see us.”