by Jemma Wayne
“There’s a hell of a lot of business to be done out there,” Sid continues. “Clive and I were over last month having a look, weren’t we mate?”
Clive nods. “Fucking overrun with buggering Russians now. And wanking French. Well that’s only gonna get shittier now isn’t it? I’m telling you, there’s a market there for some cunting cheap housing. I could set you up with a couple of contacts if you want?”
“Um…” I say.
Clive is eager to write the names of his contacts on one of his business cards, and I give him one of my own. “Ignore the bank stuff,” I say, writing my personal email on the back.
“Fucking free fucking man,” he grins.
I can’t help laughing.
“So,” says Clive. “Are you a Gooner?”
We talk for a long time about football, property prices, football again, Charlie’s pretty young girlfriend who’s 30 years his junior, the potential advent of mansion tax, ‘Ed buggering Miliband’, House of Cards, football again. By the time the second bottle of champagne arrives I’ve all but forgotten the previous jarring comments. I feel again the bonding sensation of earlier, the conviction that despite their relative coarseness, these men are all Jews, like me, with the values I assume we share. Just as it will be in Israel. No hoodies to avoid when walking past an estate. No yobbos in the pub waiting to start on anyone who dares to look. The waiter pours a glass for Charlie to taste and approve, which he does, and they raise their bubbling glasses.
“L’chaim gentlemen,” Charlie declares.
“L’chaim,” I agree. “To new friends!”
“To wanking cheap flats in Israel!” Clive adds.
“To a year of success and safety,” Charlie says solemnly and I nod with equal solemnity. It is impossible to ignore what is going on. It is no longer below the surface. “May we all feel safe on our streets, in our homes, in our professions, and on the fucking television,” Charlie continues and I nod with them all again. “Up the Jews eh, and down the fucking Mussers!”
This time I have not misheard.
The others laugh raucously and clink glasses, but I don’t know what to do.
In my hand is the champagne bought for me by Charlie, I am seated on the luxurious leather of the exclusive club to which I have been invited as a guest. I cannot speak. I cannot be so rude as to speak, to object. But I cannot say nothing. It is right there in front of me: the beginning, the justification, the reason, the excuse. Not even the biased British press coverage, nor the deli, nor the rockets can give license to this. Hatred for a whole religion, culture, people? Isn’t that what we’re fighting against?
The conversation moves on. I have said nothing. Now it is too late. Clive is asking me something but I remain stuck in that previous moment. Spiralling suddenly backwards over the past months. Reminded of that turmoil I felt for so long at the bank, that sense of fraudulence, of miscellany. I am a Jew, but not like the black hats and not like Gaby and not like these men; a Brit, but not like those who march against me; and an Israeli, but not yet. I am nothing and everything, every part of me watered down, clinging like a leech to the skin I am trying to shed, burrowing into the fresh layer I am attempting to grow. Insisting. And I am too British-ly polite to reject any of it. I put down my champagne flute on its coaster.
“Thank you for a lovely evening,” I say, standing.
“Off already are you?” Charlie asks. “Can’t handle the bubbly eh? Well good to have met you, Danny-boy. And good luck in the homeland.”
The rest of the group break off from their heavily gesticulated conversations to add their farewells, but I negotiate an obstacle course of chesterfields, almost backing into the fire to avoid making physical, palm-pressed goodbyes. Charlie however stands up to see me to the door, and although every fibre of my being wants to turn from him, tell him how backwards and prejudiced and wrong he is, no matter his toughness and his experience, I cannot bring myself to refuse his extended hand.
Over the days that follow, I find that it is no longer with nostalgia that I bubble-wrap my life. Instead I cut through boxes and tissue paper with the dissection that I feel myself. I can’t wait to go. I can’t wait to get away, to no longer be confronted by the mess of my own identity, my Britishness, my passivity, this part of myself that I despise. No IDF soldier would sit when he should stand, stay silent when he should speak. But the days filter slowly like sand in a timer. I hardly speak to Orli and this prolongs the grains further. But she is in Jerusalem, painting, finding for herself some element that is missing. I wonder what she is doing there. How she is collecting her ideas, her inspiration. I wonder why she has turned off her phone. I wish sometimes she would let me share the process, let me in on her thoughts before they are there on the page for everyone.
I have attempted to explain to my family my own thoughts, again, but they still don’t understand. I think they had imagined that the conflict was divine intervention, God conspiring to devastate an entire region all in order to make me stay at home.
Safia has not asked for any more of an explanation. We’ve texted but she has been busy with work. We haven’t met. We haven’t talked about the protest. The more I think about it the less sure I am that it was her. Perhaps it was my own projection. Perhaps it was because of the dreams. Perhaps even if it was her, there is nothing to be surprised by, saddened by. We don’t agree but of course we don’t agree. Of course we don’t agree? It is complicated and too hard to unravel.
It was Charlie and not me who spoke against Muslims. But I said nothing.
Safia did not create the Hitler sign. But she stood beside it.
In her texts she asks after Orli. She asks about my flight. She says she will be at my party to say goodbye.
***
Now
20
With Ella at his side there is nothing Udi can think of that could persuade him to return to Israel. So he will have to travel a little further to the treatment centre, so he will have to wait a little longer between sessions, so there might be slightly less hi-tech equipment; so then he will work that much harder on his own. It is not a high price for freedom.
Batia has begged him to reconsider. He feels guilty for her distress, for her continued distress, and sorry for Ella whom his mother shoots with barbed glances, but actually she seems distracted in her persistence, or weary of it. She spends a lot of time on the phone. In any case his father is on his side. Oz has seen the restaurant, and he has not joined in Batia’s pleas. They have not actually spoken about it directly, but yesterday Udi overheard him on the phone to a friend in Israel telling him that England has done his son good. Udi would stay if only to hear more of this approval. He would stay for a million reasons smaller than this.
It is a Thursday when Chaim calls. Udi is still in hospital and growing restless. He has hardly been out of bed in weeks and doesn’t even have a TV or Wi-Fi for Ben’s iPad to occupy him in the small room he shares with another patient. He has books and some old magazines, but mostly his time is filled with talk. Often he dozes or just lays back and listens to the familiar, throaty, Hebrew vowels that fly back and forth across his white-clad bed. His family have become something of a joke at the hospital. There is an Israeli-born doctor in his wing and he pops in every day to visit what is now in jest referred to as ‘the Israeli quarter’. Udi has heard a few muttered insults from passing nurses when this doctor or his family are about – something about it being another occupied territory, something about wondering whether Palestinians in Gaza get as good treatment as this. But he knows that there will always be those who hate Israel, and most of the staff are friendly and welcoming and blessing-sent. He has just finished physio when Chaim calls. His family are out having dinner somewhere nearby so he is alone in his room, examining the scars down one of his legs and the pins that remain in the other.
“I’m coming to England,” Chaim announces. “I heard what happened you crazy fuck. I’m coming to see you. Should I bring shesh besh or cards?”
Udi laughs. “Bring both. I am so fucking bored.”
“I heard your leg is fucked.”
“It’s nothing, a tiny scratch.” Udi’s leg aches as he says this.
“So you’re staying then?”
“Of course.”
“That’s smart,” Chaim tells him. “You should. I’m coming too. I need to get out.”
Udi pauses. He had expected his friend to remind him that Israel is the greatest country in the world. “What’s news at home?” he asks.
“You know, it’s the same,” Chaim replies. “Except everyone’s in Gaza. Dov’s based near your brother I think, on the border. He says they’ve been in twice and are going again.”
“What?” Udi pulls the phone away from his ear.
“This week maybe.”
“What? Why are they going into Gaza? And why the fuck is everyone there? Dov’s done his service this year.”
“Udi, they’re calling up everyone,” Chaim answers. “There’s probably a call up waiting for you. Ask your mother.”
Udi peers out into the corridor and sees not his mother, but Ella. She is standing holding a doggy bag of restaurant food but has suddenly frozen, her arm suspended in rigidity on the door knob. He waves her to come in but she darts away in the opposite direction. “Chaim, what the fuck’s happening?”
“How do you not know? Even I watch the news for this.”
“Chaim, y’allah.”
“Fuck Udi, we’re at war.”
“We didn’t want to upset you,” begins Ella. She has returned with Ben and his mother, a team. “We wanted you to concentrate on your recovery.”
“Who is there?”
“Your brother,” Batia replies starkly, cutting as always to the heart. “He called us this morning. So far he is okay.” “Tomer and Shimon are there also,” Ella adds. “Your unit was called up practically on the first day. Dov too.”
“How could you not tell me?”
Ella touches his arm in apology, but Udi is not really angry at them. He is angry because all at once his head is full with much more than whiteness. All at once he is back in the bunks with Tomer, he is patrolling the fence with Shimon, he is in the dark, in a bush, in an explosion, his legs melting. And all at once, he wants to go home.
He wants to go home?
How did he not foresee this? After all of it? The months and months of planning and longing and dreaming and working. He knew there would be another war, there is always another war. But he didn’t expect to feel this, this... “Is there a call up for me?” he asks.
Batia nods. “But of course you can’t go.”
“Udi, the doctor says you won’t be able to go to the army again,” Ella tells him. “Not in combat. Your leg will never be strong enough.”
“Thank God,” mumbles Batia in Hebrew.
He sits himself up straighter and punches his frail leg. “Where my brothers go, I go.”
“You can’t,” Ella repeats gently.
“Thank goodness you can’t,” Batia declares more firmly. “Udi, can you not see this has been the reason for it all?”
“Ima, there is not a reason for everything,” Udi shouts. “I am a fighter. How can I not fight for the land for which my friends are spilling their blood? For the land that has my blood already? I have to do something. I know I can do something. It’s my duty. I cannot just sit here!”
“You don’t have to sit here,” Batia replies. “You can come home, to Israel. You can help the country by living in it. You’ve done your fighting, now do your living.”
This is the very least that he will do. This, suddenly, is as to nothing. “Call the doctor,” he says to Ben, ignoring the two women who seem so happy in his impotence. Ben nods and stands up from the chair at the back of the room from which he has been listening to but not understanding the heated Hebrew. “Tell him I need to make arrangements to finish my treatment in Israel.”
Both women smile, but Udi refuses to indulge them. He will, he knows, forgive them their feminine fears and tugs on his existence, but not yet. “Where is Abba?” he demands.
Only his father will understand the mixture of pride and shame he now feels. He is returning to Israel, but not as a soldier, as something less. It is a cruel trick: that distance from his homeland, and danger to it, are what it takes to make him know the bond it has already scorched irreversibly onto his heart through so many years spent in the heat and the sand.
When Oz arrives at the hospital that evening he says nothing about Udi’s change of mind. There is no reprimand, no words to suggest disappointment or Udi’s failure, no accusation of a deficiency in resolve. Oz sits for a long time in the chair next to Udi’s bed, first listening to Udi, then in mutual quiet, and then finally, he speaks.
“In Iraq, my family were called Jews,” he tells Udi slowly. “In Israel I am called Iraqi. Here in England, I am Israeli. But you know Udi, only this last one I truly am. These other things, they are just a part of me. Israeli is the whole of it. Sometimes you must be outside to know where the inside is.”
It is the first time since Udi was a boy that he has looked at his father and wanted, with that resolve of the young, to be like him. His lined face seems suddenly full of experience not fragility, his unmoving principles a product not of obsolete thinking but truth, his judgement not criticism but love. Udi opens his mouth, but he cannot think of anything to express the admiration he feels, so in the end, he simply holds out an open palm. His father takes it. “Good,” Oz says. “Y’allah.”
***
The practicalities of reversing his immigration are far less arduous than was the task of securing it. In just a few phone calls it is possible for Udi to eradicate all evidence of his life in London until all that is left are his memories, and a shattered leg, and the nut stall.
Ben helps him to tie up the last of the loose ends. There is money in his bank account that must be withdrawn, a credit card bill bearing the cost of Ella’s ring that must be settled, a mobile phone contract to terminate. The flat above the restaurant is cleared by Jonny under Ella’s direction: his clothes packed neatly away in a single hold-all; his notepad, filled with plans for the restaurant, placed with the few books he owns in a canvas bag Batia has produced from somewhere; and the pots and pans and other homely items he has accrued delivered in a large brown box to Ben and Jonny’s mother who promises to get a good price for them at her next car boot sale. There is no car to return to his cousins. Udi worries about this. He makes phone call after phone call from his hospital bed to the insurance company which tells him that they cannot yet make a payout because there is still dispute over which driver is to blame. Udi cannot wait. He does not want to leave England in debt to his cousins but the doctors have made arrangements and he is booked on a medically supported flight back to Israel in two days time. Besides, he cannot bear to be here when the world is collapsing there. Ben thinks he is mad. He cannot understand why a war, sirens, terror, why this should be what makes Udi want to return. But who can explain that kind of a call? How can he describe the urgency with which he feels it? It pumps through his veins, he tells Ben.
They watch the news now constantly on a portable TV. They worry about Ari. They worry about their friends. They worry whether it will ever be possible to contain a people consumed by so much hate that they dig underground and hide rockets behind children.
They worry too about Avigail. It takes days for anybody to tell him but he had already found it strange that she had not been on the phone harassing him, mothering him, smothering him. Then one afternoon there is a flurry of other people’s phones buzzing and his parents excusing themselves and finally it is Ella who explains. Avigail has – as he knew – been against the war from the start, and now Ella tells him that she has been writing more articles, attending protests, becoming a Voice, a Voice Against. She pushes, pushes people to think and question and condemn. Her blog posts have been going viral. Oz, says Ella, has been ashamed. He has not been speaking to her and even Ba
tia could not support the strength of her dissent. Yes, think of their humanity, Ella had overheard Batia telling Avigail in one of their many phone conversations, care about their children, want to help them, but not at the sake of our boys, her boy, Ari.
But now Avigail is in hospital. There were counter-protestors at a recent demonstration, says Ella, and Avigail was followed home by an angry right-winger. She was beaten with a flagpole. She was bruised by white and blue.
Udi cannot stop thinking about her. He imagines Ezra bringing the kids to the hospital to see her. How will he prepare them to see her bruises? (And why, it occurs to Udi, is she still in hospital for just bruises?) How will he explain to them that the person who did this to their mother does not represent the whole, but that that person is part of the whole, and it is this whole that their soldiers must protect from others who would destroy it? And that those who seek such destruction are not a uniform whole either: they are four-year-old girls, and women with metal under their dresses, and men with guns and bombs and pebbles and dreams and tunnels and rage and pride and determination. And that the right-wingers can’t see this and their mother can, and that is the problem. And that the Palestinians won’t distinguish either, but would kill Avigail in a heartbeat, while her bleeding heart for them makes those on her side doubt, and blame, and makes Israel vulnerable, and that is the problem too.
At night he thinks of Avigail lying on the ground while an enraged patriot stands above her, and he thinks of Ari, and of the dead kidnapped soldiers, and Palestinian boys on beaches, and his friends. He imagines Shimon chasing another cross for his gun, of Tomer restraining him, and of both of them missing his third pair of eyes, his trigger. He feels he has let them down, wide awake he dreams of it, and in the dark he longs for the heat of the Israeli air to suffocate the coldness of these images that come to him in the English night. Only during the day does he manage to doze. The doctors say this is not unusual after a trauma and prescribe him sleeping pills. He is therefore asleep when, the day before his departure, Ben appears in his room.