by Jemma Wayne
“I’ll be right back,” he tells her, squeezing her hand when she reaches for him to stay. “I’m just getting some water.”
“There’s some right here,” she murmurs as he opens the door, but he pretends not to hear.
In the hallway he opens the seal of the envelope but doesn’t pull out the documents inside. More than anything he fears that it is the application forms returned with a section they have spotted that he hasn’t filled in, or has filled in wrong, or is not able to. He decides to eat something first, for fortification. In the kitchen he turns on the light and moves without any real decision to do so to the pita bread and hummus in the fridge. He is being careful to be quiet, concentrating on opening the door softly, not rustling the packages, and he doesn’t at first notice Batia sitting, sipping tea at the table. It is only when he closes the fridge door that he sees her in the shadows, but even then he doesn’t jump. Instead he turns on the tap until it runs cold and fills a glass with water before taking it to the table where he sits opposite his mother.
“It has arrived,” she tells him.
“Yes. I haven’t opened it.”
“So you should open it.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“What reason is there not to? Open it, and either you’ll cry or I will. At least then maybe one of us can sleep.”
“How long have you been sitting here, Ima?” he asks her.
“Just two hours.” As if in proof she taps the half empty pot of tea next to her, the remaining contents of which have now been brewed too long and have turned a dirty, mud-like colour that will taste bitter on the tongue. He nods and moves to the counter where he fetches the envelope. Sitting back down, he places it between them.
“If I can, I will go,” he tells her, fingering the open seal.
“If I can, I will stop you,” she replies.
“You can’t stop me, Ima. Even Abba isn’t trying to.”
“Your father doesn’t realise you plan to leave us forever.”
Udi drops his head. He stares at the envelope. Suddenly he feels tired, as if he is back at the base and has been fighting all day, or wading through sand all night. “I can do better in London,” he tells her carefully.
Batia shakes her head and makes a distinct tsking sound at the back of her throat.
“I won’t have to go to the army,” he coaxes. “You won’t have to worry about me when there is another war.”
“Life is a war,” she answers, but her eyes have softened.
Udi picks up the envelope and pulls out the contents. It bodes well, he thinks, that the bulk is thick. Neither of them speak as he reads the covering letter. Batia holds her small glass of tea in both hands but doesn’t sip it. Eventually he reaches the end. He re-folds the paper. He looks directly at her.
“I’m going,” he says.
Batia exhales deeply. She stands, collects her glass and teapot and takes them to the sink where she pours out the stale contents and washes the containers meticulously. Then she returns the sugar to its airtight container and wipes the spot on the table where she has uncharacteristically spilled a drop of tea. All the while Udi waits for her to speak.
“You will do well in London,” she says eventually. He opens his mouth to respond but she puts up her hand. “Time to sleep, Udi,” she says, and kisses him on his forehead in what might be blessing, or else goodbye. And then she is gone. And it is silent.
Guilt comes first.
Then relief.
And then an unfamiliar sensation that washes over him and creeps slowly into a growing exultation that culminates finally in a loud clap of the hands that he cannot resist, despite the late hour. He feels an urge to run or jump or hit something, though all he does is stand and let the energy shoot through him, cracking, an undetectable amount more, the broken tile beneath his feet. And then he returns to his room, replaces the envelope in his desk drawer, and climbs into bed next to Ella who wraps her lean arms around him.
***
Avigail strides angrily through the Jerusalem streets. She is late for her writers’ group and cannot concentrate on the relationship between gender and peace about which she is supposed to be speaking. She is thinking instead of Udi. And their father’s unfathomable support of his desertion. And their mother’s unprecedented silence. And the fact that with Ari away, it was left to her to argue with Udi alone.
Had his reasons been different she might have understood. Not liked it of course, but understood. If he had political motives, for example. But for money? He is not destitute, he is not scrabbling for food like so many in Gaza, or living in tents in mud fields like their parents once did. He is a strong, capable, Israeli man in a society where strong, Israeli men rule. He has choice, and responsibility, and no excuse. But, ‘Don’t tell me what I owe to my country,’ he had argued angrily. ‘It’s my blood on this land, not yours. I don’t need you telling me what I owe.’
It is the first time he has ever mentioned what happened to him in Gaza. Avigail thinks about it at least once a day, more when he is on miluim. And she thinks about Ari. And Ezra, even though he was a jobnik and has never been in actual combat because still he wears a uniform. And she thinks about her children.
They did not stay at her parents’ for dessert. The children were disappointed but there was a lot of traffic, Avigail explained to them, and to her mother, unprecedented jams. They left before coffee, before Udi could talk any more about Ben and the job and the flat, before she had to observe another minute of her mother standing silent and stoic. But in the car, until the girls fell asleep, she and Ezra were silent too. Udi’s departure was not the announcement they had been planning that Friday. For weeks they have been discussing their own declaration, plotting carefully the manner in which to reveal it, and Friday was supposed to have been the night they told her family that she is pregnant again, this time with a boy. Avigail has filled many days imagining the thrilled creases that will flood her father’s face. It is not easy to make him smile, not a true, through and through smile; but this would. A boy. During long bus journeys or queues in the grocery store she has been drip-feeding herself these daydreams, hugging them to her. Occasionally expanding into visions of her mother’s simultaneous excitement and panic, the entreaties to attend this doctor or that pre-natal class, or to read a particular new book that will help her control and protect every detail of the pregnancy and birth of her unborn son, since she will not be able to protect his life. All the mothers she knows are the same, no matter the generation. They cling to the small influence they have, while they have it.
“We’ll tell them next week,” Ezra had consoled.
“But we’re telling your parents tomorrow.”
“We’ll wait. It’s just a week.”
She had nodded. And stroked her slightly protruding belly, and cheered herself at least with this. Another week of keeping the future to herself, a possession of her own.
She puts her hand on top of her stomach again, now, as she nears the old converted church where her writing group meets.
Several women are already gathered and they greet her with chatter and enthusiasm. There is the playwright Gal Shwartz, who during her last production was hounded by critics for daring to explore the relationship between victim and oppressor; there is the religious poet Ronit Esther, badgered by her own community for daring too much and by the left-wingers for daring too little; there is the activist Mira Peled who spent three years living in Hebron attempting to protect the remote dwelling Palestinians who lived there from settlers, soldiers, stones, guns, raids on their land; there is the Palestinian feminist author Layla Habash; the Mizrahi journalist Liat Gov, the Ashkenazi graphic novelist Dana Kuntsler… Avigail cannot look around the room without being overawed by the talent and bravery it contains. She might, if she was so inclined, feel dwarfed by it. But this is Avigail’s favourite hour of the week, a fleeting pause in which she can stop being a mother, a daughter, a wife, even a woman, and simply be a writer, a thinker, Avigai
l Shammash, whose words are judged for their accuracy and insight and not in the context of the roles she as their creator plays. They are doing something here, she feels. They are extending the feminist discourse into a multi-cultural context, and they are filtering the political conversation through a feminist lens. Their exchanges are exciting.
The format is for each of them to take turns presenting an issue for discussion by the group. So far they have dealt with everything from feminism in Israeli art to modern slavery. Avigail has led the group twice, the first time exploring the pinkification of young girls, the second time the psychological consequences to Israeli society of the Hannibal manoeuvre. Today she is supposed to be talking about peace and the unique relationship that women have to it. It is a topic that has fascinated her for years – the basis in fact of her postdoctoral thesis and the thread that links much of her published works – so it is not difficult for her to think on her feet; but she is distracted. When she had considered the topic originally, she had planned to approach the issue from a psychological stance, an exploration of Israel as a society in collective trauma and an analysis of the female role in healing it. But that was before Udi’s disclosure, and now, sitting forward in the empty chair the others have left for her in their circle, she finds herself talking instead about the Women in Black.
Avigail has been a member of the Women in Black since she moved to Jerusalem after leaving the army aged 20. It had felt then like penitence. Now it’s an imperative. Ezra doesn’t like it. Or rather he does like it, he admires it, respects the aims and the principles, but he doesn’t like Avigail putting herself so physically on the line. He has grown used to her doing so in her writing, on paper and in the ether, and he supports her throughout the Twitter storms and the newspaper letters; but this is different. This is a protestation of body as well as soul. One of the other women in the room is a member too – a Palestinian historian from the east of the city. Together they have stood on street corners to mourn the lives of those lost in war, they have held vigil to protest the occupation, they have worn black and clasped placards Friday after Friday ignoring curses and comments and occasional globules of spit. Her parents do not know. Ari and she avoid the topic – to him, it is traitorous. And Udi has, she is sure, seen the occasional photo she has posted on Facebook, but he has said nothing. For her it is not every week. Life is busy and she supposes that this is why these days there are not so many of them – even the founders are getting old – but it remains so simple, and so beautiful: women from across the divides shouting silently together. Peace is more important. Life is more important. We refuse to be enemies.
Everyone here is familiar with the group and it is a good starting point for discussion. It sparks debate about why it is intrinsically a women’s group, whether it would exist if it was not, and then onto why so few women have occupied leadership roles at Middle East peace summits, and how many of these women were Sephardi, and how many female leaders around the world have actually given the command to go to war, and a raft of other issues that rile and enthral them. In the midst of it, Avigail wonders whether she has underestimated her brother, whether Udi’s decision to leave Israel is actually a protest against its patriarchy, or the occupation, whether for him this is the only way to escape it because with a father like Oz, it is too hard to stay and say so.
It will be a challenge to bring up a boy. Ezra is practically doing cartwheels at the thought of it, but Avigail feels troubled in a way she didn’t when she was carrying the girls, challenged with a responsibility to equip her son, his generation, with the tools to be different from the rest. Again, she puts her hand to her belly. A couple of the women in the group notice and smile knowingly, but Avigail leaves it there, gently stroking the life inside of her as she leaves the church and walks towards the bus that will take her home.
Avigail would rather not ride the bus – she far prefers to drive, her destiny in her own hands – but this section of Jerusalem is difficult to negotiate by car so she has taken to using the Egged line for the weekly journey. Today she takes a seat near the front and ignores the raised eyebrows of the men around her. They are all dressed in black. Black trousers, black coats, black boots, black hats, black beards. Black eyes examining her. But it is not a mehadrin line, which have thank goodness been discontinued. It is not necessary for her to board through the rear door and sit with the other women at the back. It is not her responsibility to uphold their lingering, self-enforced segregation. The first time that Avigail took this bus she didn’t even notice the division and it was only when one of the men told her to move that she became aware of it. Now she sits in the front out of protest and refuses requests to relinquish her seat for any man. Avigail is orthodox but this is not a synagogue and she will not accept discrimination. Still buzzing from the meeting she takes out a notebook and while they are fresh scrawls a few thoughts she may incorporate into a future article – persistence of ‘the other’, feminism as a way to universalise plights of marginalised, possibility of progress. Then she digs into her bag and opens a book she has just started reading entitled: Raising Sons.
The bus jolts as it comes to the first stop. She looks up. Everybody does. It is unthinkable not to check who is boarding, what they are carrying. But when she sees only another black-shrouded Haredi man and his similarly clad son mounting the steps, she relaxes and buries her head again in warnings about the dangers of early day-care, the double edged sword of competitive sports, and the importance of a present father figure. She is lucky, Ezra is present. Even her own father attempted to be so. In his own way. She looks back up. The man and the boy have not sat down but are standing over her. The man’s expression is surly, impatient, but at least here is a present father, she hears herself thinking, glancing quickly at the son before taking a breath to receive the predictable instruction.
“You should be at the back,” the man informs her. “Women sit at the back.” He strokes the white, fringed tzitzit at his waist, a garment worn to help remember God’s commandments. “We will sit here.”
“No,” Avigail replies, smiling. “I am happy here, thank you.”
“Get up,” the man repeats, louder this time.
“Thank you, I am fine here.”
“You should not be sitting amongst men.”
There is a murmur of concurrence from the other men around them. Mutterings about her stupidity and about not knowing her place. This is new for Avigail. She has been confronted before on this bus but those times were brief altercations with single irate men, curt but fleeting reprimands, disdainful looks but no further words. No vocal derision from the collective. The collective against the ‘other’. Avigail closes her book and sits up straighter in her seat.
“This is a public bus,” she says slowly, loud enough for the onlookers. “I can sit wherever I like. There are plenty of empty seats for you.” Determined to retain an aura of composure Avigail now reopens her book and trains her eyes to it. For a moment there is silence. It is over. She is sure it is over. In a moment she will take out her notepad and write down that thought about the collective. But suddenly she feels a wetness on the side of her face.
The man has spat at her.
The man has spat at her?
“I am not asking you, I’m telling you. Get to the back, slut.”
Avigail’s chest feels suddenly tight and her voice stuck somewhere below her throat, but she does not move, she cannot move for this man. Besides, she cannot quite believe what has just occurred. The disbelief is sticky, disabling. But she notices the calmness in the eyes of the man’s small watching son, the opposite of disbelief, certainty, as though such aggression is nothing new, for him. Nothing wrong. Underneath her book her hand moves protectively to her belly, and then to her cheek where she wipes away the hot liquid.
She should go to the back. Ezra would want her to go to the back.
But she should not go to the back. None of the women in the church she has just left would ever go to the back.
> Slowly she puts down her book, turns once more towards the man, reaches hard to the back of her throat, and she tells him: “No.”
“Move.”
“I will stay here.”
His voice is growing wilder. “Move.”
Avigail looks away. She stares straight ahead, unbreathing.
There is silence.
The bus pulls to another stop and somebody gets on. Momentarily everybody turns to see who it is.
She has triumphed, she tells herself, she has remained calm, dignified. She has remained true. She holds still. The new passenger sits down, a woman, at the back. The bus starts again.
Then all at once the headscarf she wears when travelling to religious parts of the city is flying through the air.
Avigail spins around but for a moment disbelief takes hold again. She cannot work out how, why, what has happened. Her mind is slow. She sees the scarf land on the arm of the man’s son and in her mind she wants to reclaim it but she finds that her body cannot reach out, and now she realises that her hair is being tugged, tugged, the book is falling from her lap, and she is being yanked from the chair, pushed to the floor, and dragged into the aisle by this man, and by other men too who are still muttering at her, and decrying her stupidity, and have taken it upon themselves to enforce their interpretation of God’s will.
Only when the bus stops and the driver moves to disperse the group is she able to escape from the black, leather boots that have been beating rhythmically, as if in prayer, against her body, leaving their marks on her back, her limbs, and her belly.
The driver calls for an ambulance and orders everyone off the bus, and obligingly now they traipse past, off, away. Not one passenger stops. Not one person comes forward to help her. Not even the women, in black, at the back.