Taking the skillet to the roof does it all. Ibrahim can see. Whatever ocular deficiency our cousin found in him is indiscernible by us, if one exists. His eyes are very like ours. He watches the smoke rising in between us with a beetled brow, much like our mother would, flickering his lashes much in the same way, over eyes similarly lit, sleek as two oil-soaked black olives.
Our mother was once beautiful, and so was he. Although he is stooped and thickened and begins to wrinkle, his hair retains the pigment of his youth, a Nordic blond, some new or ancient history of influx dyed into his locks. The black smoke billows in the wind, tilting aside, unveiling the pillar of the quarry dust, far-off, white, stolid. Black waves in, and again rises.
We have talked to him before, but only as messengers from Imma. These are our first words to him which we ourselves compose:
We would like to go air out the house. Would he mind the skillet?
“I could douse it if you like,” he says.
He could do what? We don’t know the word.
“Such clever children?” he says. “Your own language?”
They probably teach it in the seventh grade, our eldest says, setting the skillet on the tar.
“Tar burns,” Ibrahim says. He reaches through the smoke, his plaster-whitened fingers graying, ungloves our sister of our mother’s mitt, and slips it on his own hand. He bends and takes the skillet by the handle.
The column of smoke scatters and regroups as Ibrahim straightens again, then slowly travels west, towards a water tap that curves out of a segment of our building’s silver pipes, though every shine in twilight appears copper. As in the same time, yesterday, the solar panels duplicate the sunset. Copper spokes our bikes. A copper droplet quivers from the tap’s ridged copper nose. We rise and follow as the column from the skillet, unreflective black, inclines east as though resisting, as Ibrahim walks on.
Though the roof is not so sprawling, the journey is long. The sun sinks lower in the sky. On any other day we would be gaining in abandon as we lost the light. Perhaps the mention of the middleschool grade has made us tired, all the hard work still ahead. The eyelids wish to close as if the worker is our teacher.
Is this not one too many radical shifts for children so young as we, in so short a time? We should turn and leave. See the stains on his shirt, see that rigidity in the attire.
But again we hear our mother’s words. He might not expect or like it.
He is our partner in mid-conversation. We would not like to leave him wounded. The door connecting our home to where he works is nothing special. He is as locked in here as we by our Pladelet.
So what to say? And where to go from here?
Our next to youngest comes up with a subject. “Do you play an instrument?”
“Why yes,” Ibrahim says.
His gloveless hand appears behind him and undoes the button in his slacks’ back pocket. He comes up with a pen, and tosses this over his shoulder. In the shadow of the trailing smoke the pen sails in an arc. It is a common pen, a ballpoint cartridge cased in bright blue plastic, which we catch. We hand it to the baby. He puts the barrel in his mouth. Ibrahim throws another, and another. Some we seize out of the air, some we collect from the soft tar. He throws one still enclosed within a pouch of cellophane. His fingers seem to feel this too late.
“No!” he calls out as the thing bumbles towards us. “That one don’t take,” he says. “I shouldn’t have thrown it. The ink has never moistened the tip. A virgin pen knows only to gash the page.”
The Roberto Touch
INWARD THE STONE was pale and scrolled with grooves, like soft Galilee cheese, grated and gouged. The tunnel turned, the outside light began to flinch. Another turn, darker. A lengthy explanation for this subterranean network had been given by the guide, but Shulee wasn’t academically inclined, although the details of a lesson were welcome to grab her attention if they could. From the guide’s launching speech these words had made it in: Ancient Rome, Bar Kokhva, Akiva, and escapeway. They rattled in her mind as she crawled through the tunnel on all fours. The atmosphere in here was close, thick with a scent as off-putting as it was fascinating. What was it? Many things at once. Gravel, ground up with some living exudation—sweat, and something faintly dungy, footnoted with ammonia.
How would it be to use the escapeway for its intended design? How could you stand it? Bar Kokhva had managed. This very rock floor would have pressed these jagged dimples into his knees and palms. This selfsame darkness would have slowly commanded his eyes, this moisture weighted his garments. But this terror in the heart would have stood for a threat far worse than claustrophobia, the Ancient Roman methods of authority. They who raked the flesh off poor Rabbi Akiva’s prayerful old bones, the tissue off the sage who was remembered for having said: And you shall love your fellow as yourself In this very stink the rebel would remember the seer’s dying cry: Hear, Israel, Adonai our God, Adonai is one! And the sorrow in this call would mingle with the tragedy of this fetor constituting his last air. But perhaps a rebel leader wouldn’t have odors on the brain. He would have more reason to be desperate, more cause to quash his fear. He would be armed.
“Mmm, how Roberto loves you!”
A hand cupped her buttock while the girlish voice moaned; on the last syllable the hand squeezed and let go. This time the touch had truly caught her unawares.
“Koos amak!” she said, with the hiss and snarl fitting the slur. The potency steadied her even as the Dress Patterns teacher whined faintly in protest, far in the dark ahead. The provocateur behind added a rude fingering. The narrow tunnel didn’t allow turning around to crack her a good one on the chin, so once again Shulee passed the squeeze on to a buttock of the pair ahead and, once again, there the practice died. Every time it ended with Yona Rodelheim’s tight ass. No fighting spirit, no healthy spite, no sense of duty to the joke, only a choked, bleated lament.
“Enough.”
The eleventh-grade girls of Keeshor Vocational Religious had started off stooped and gradually come to this crawl. The Roberto touch had been set into motion soon after the guide had led them into the hole, advising the students to imagine the Romans at their backs. The practice would have been the brainchild of a girl from Clerical, who was known even outside her division for her love of AS Roma’s top goal scorer. At first the touch was passed on with enthusiasm, cascading forward in bouts of giggles and snorts. As the light lessened and the walls contracted, the sounds of provocation were becoming isolated, the responses progressively tense, the Dress Patterns teacher’s voice in their aftermath increasingly spiritless in her declaration: “This simply will not repeat itself!”
One wished the time required to cross the mountain through its heart would have been defined in advance of the crawl. But what difference? When anyway you weren’t able to read your watch. The one Shulee had taken on the trip was of the cheaper models from Uncle Chelomo’s case, a band like stretched pink bubble gum, and hands that gave only a feeble phosphorescence, short-lived, gone by now. Had she covered far less distance than she thought, with far more ahead than she would allow herself to conceive of? No, the exit lay just beyond the next turn. This was quite possible. But if the tunnel would soon be over then the teachers would again stand. Why in the world then had she cut loose with words of such power as to guarantee a girl’s suspension from school? The curse was simply the strongest that came to mind in a moment calling for strength. Not only Arabic but invoking the private parts of an opponent’s mother. Would such a milksop as that Dress Patterns teacher even know the meaning? Maybe not, but she would know the type.
The ceiling grazed the crown of Shulee’s head. She ducked her head and continued. Would she take the tunnel over a teacher? A teacher over the tunnel? Her ear was grazed. She groped, found the turn, and followed it. The ceiling dipped lower. She tried to manage the new conditions by crawling much as she had done until now, only the torso lowered in the manner of a lizard. In the first try she understood this way of life required a s
ustained, sinking push-up. Her arms collapsed. She dropped to her belly and lugged her body by her forearms like no animal she could think of except for a paratrooper. The surfaces continued to close in, dank on every side. She trained her thoughts away from the smell.
Bar Kokhva. Release the language from the old-fangled mold and it made all the sense of words now: Ben Kokhav, Son of Star. Hadn’t she sung the great name countless times? In rousing minor key on the annual festival of the Lag BaOmer bonfire, before the orange shape licking a black spring’s night, every year of her life until, when? Until never and at no time. Who ever sang the hero songs at the fire? The bonfire and the singing children circling in a hora maybe went together in picture books. In life, any songs that night came out of the radio your uncle planted on a rock. The melodies were much more interesting to the hips. If you danced, it was never in a circle, but alone in a merry shuffle, or in a pair.
Bar Kokhva in that case stood for a good time, his yearly bonfire an occasion for all ages in the city to stay outdoors after dark and do their favorite things in the sight of high fires. Greet, talk, eat, play, sip a soda and court, connect and go off on a search, the air moon-cooled and aromatic with the smoke of kindling and grilling meats. Radio sounds and conversations roaming from the neighbors’ fires, and those in nearby lots. Before you reached the age of courting your high point was the effigy. On the eve of the holiday, you would draw the final touches on the dummy’s face in marker, and at the fire’s peak toss into the flames whoever you had sculpted in his full bad looks, Nasser, in her childhood days, with limp arms of cloth, or the evergreen perennials you still saw now: Eichmann, Arafat, Hitler, Hafiz al-Assad, the ink features quickly eaten and the rag stuffing next.
So there was the message, and plenty good it was. The Nation of Israel lives, destroys its enemies, and loves a party. Did anyone think to sing of Bar Kokhva while they were at it? Not in her neighborhood. Then why the hero song thrumming in the mind? Because in school you learned it in the early grades, and she had always liked music. She still remembered the lyrics word for word.
“Oh, come,” the tall man thundered. “He who’d sooner sever his own finger
Than suffer idols in God’s Place.”
Hailed by Akiva, followed by the brave,
Bar Kokhva, freedom’s arrowhead!
“A star!” gentle Akiva cried. “Shot forth of our father Yaakov
And alighted in our midst, a man of our times, our guide hereafter.”
Hailed by Akiva, followed by the brave,
Soaring eternal, freedom’s arrowhead!
“Fie!” quoth the cynic. “Grass will shoot up from your cheeks, Rabbi Akiva,
Ere the star of true redemption shine!”
But green the palm fronds flourished in the arms of rebel Israel,
And though Edom reddened our valleys yet the arc of valor flares today.
Hailed by the man of peace, joined by the brave,
Ablaze eternal, freedom’s arrowhead!
Too bad that period was discontinued with her enrollment at Keeshor, although the kind of music she liked now they wouldn’t teach.
The passageway narrowed again. The floor became more pitted and the pits more full of moisture. All talk had ended, replaced by perfect lightlessness and quavering breaths. She shoved her belted canteen from hip to rump and pushed through. Another turn in the tunnel was approaching. She knew this before any part of her was chafed. She reached through the dark and there it was. She slipped around the protrusion. Some extra guiding sense was kicking in. Anything could become known. On her next move forward she began to plummet, no, sink, hand first, into cold water. She was becoming submerged, or just her forearm. Her palm hit rock, sliding on slime. In a heartbeat she pulled herself out, shaking drops off her fingers.
“I could have broken my jaw, you ugly,” she said to the classmate ahead, that Yona again, a vexing presence even unseen and silent. “You couldn’t warn me?”
She heard the toes of Yona’s sneakers, scraping onward in the dark, farther up than she had expected. She dragged herself forward with fresh haste, ignoring the sharpened impact of the stone’s grain, glad for the little scare having awakened her. She advanced rapidly, yet sensed no gain, until ridged heels of rubber suddenly grazed her chin. There, she had caught up, but now would have to slow down. Why should she? The crawl had flown by in the catchup moments. Her palms no longer felt battered, merely informative, succinct in their rapid reports. A rebel leader’s thoughts move fast. He must execute many decisions in no time. He must never allow an obstruction.
In the full dark Shulee lifted a hand and reached out. She found what seemed like the back of a knee, both tender and taut, and over this she closed her fingers, flutteringly, then hard.
“Mmmm,” she said, with high emotion. “Who but Roberto could love you so much?”
Yona stopped and would not move on.
Knuckles crashed into the swelling of Shulee’s caff. A chin lodged in her backside. She felt another, muffled impact as the girl behind was also collided into. Shulee pushed against the shoes ahead. She couldn’t see them, but she knew them, orange Pumas. They wouldn’t budge.
Then Yona Rodelheim whispered something.
“Move,” Shulee said.
“I can’t,” Yona said.
Voices began to tumble forward, each query occluded by the next.
The sharp weight lifted itself from Shulee’s calf. “Come on,” the girl behind her said, as if the trouble were her fault. The impression was corrected at once by Yona, whimpering again.
“I can’t. I can’t anymore.” She called out for her mother and then simply stayed where she was.
Within seconds the tunnel was clogged with despair. Shulee screamed. The sour air left the lungs hungry. She tried to punch Yona’s legs, but was not able to establish good momentum. Her own ankles were grasped. She kicked. The hands receded. Yona’s crying became higher and thinner until it was no longer like a voice, more like an instrument of warning, a police whistle. The pressure built in Shulee’s throat again but now, like Yona, she remained silent, the suppressed cry turned back on itself, flooding the thoughts with an appalling insight, black as the dark.
They would never see the bus. This was no passage but a fall into Gehenna. They had been swallowed, eaten, the pick of the plate. And for what crime? For wanting nothing but to stand again. This was all she wanted.
“I want to stand,” she cried out. She had never said anything truer. She wanted to say it again. “I want to stand.”
Many behind concurred. Many wanted this with her. They joined the shout. She shouted with many, while others began to greet their Maker: Hear, Israel. Adonai, our God, Adonai is One. Blessed is the name of His honored kingdom, forever. Apparently even the girls ahead of Yona were paralyzed by what carried towards them. They joined both shouts, and the ordeal dragged out.
Later it would be revealed that the Dress Patterns teacher had had to coax the foremost crawlers, each by each, out to the target chamber, that when the way to Yona finally had been cleared, she could not be talked out of her surrender. The hired escort, an old but sinewy Civil Guard man, reentered and bodily dragged her out.
In reconstructing the event, some wondered how he could build up the proper leverage, confined. The elbows couldn’t bend enough. Yona’s pants knees were eroded, but so were everyone’s. Perhaps he’d simply been persuasive. It was proposed that he had trained his weapon at her forehead. An exchange indicating so had been picked up through the cacophony by several sources, unallied. Yona Rodelheim couldn’t be made to weigh in.
Once she had been dislodged, each newly mollified girl passed the message of delivery to a recipient behind. Gradually the tunnel was unclogged.
A chalky palm beckoned to Shulee. She crawled towards it, reached, was hoisted out and to her feet, and pushed aside as a new head emerged.
She stood in a stone cell. A ventilation notch let in a dim sand-colored light. All of the faces here acquir
ed stony tints. The girls confederated into little bands, some still crying, some passing furious opinions nose to nose, some cramming close like mute litters of cubs. Yona was sitting by a wall, not one but two teachers standing over her, demonstratively calm.
Alone, Shulee kicked out a foot, then stomped. Her breathing slowed but wouldn’t ease. She scraped the other foot forward and stomped again, and the same again, shoes punishing the grit, grit punishing the shoes. Lucky her, lucky all of them, to have been delivered to the inside, with one of them a proven cork. Predisposed to becoming stuck. Little had they known, as they had filed one by one into the tunnel, a saffron-yellow efflorescence striping the velvety green meadow around, which in the heat of noon had seemed to swell and fall like the rib cage of a sleeping cat, curled around them.
Would it be the same on the other side? Of course not. Rather, even lovelier after this punishment. And more achingly tantalizing, more profoundly out of reach right now, as she stood trapped in a miserable notion of responsibility for the whole disastrous episode.
Why was she responsible? Because she had awaited her turn at the tunnel’s entrance beside Yona Rodelheim, and entered behind her. She shouldn’t have chosen a place so near a girl who played on her nerves. Why had she chosen that place? It was only natural. They were meal partners for the length of the trip. They had pooled their money. They had shopped together for provisions to last the whole three days. Well, why had she partnered with a classmate she disliked? Because she had had no choice, that was why! If her most recent hordeolum infection hadn’t kept her home from school for a week with her eyes under warm compresses and her lonely ears bathing in radio hits, she would have been present in class the day the alliances were forged.
Why hadn’t anyone signed her up with their name? That was the real question. Did her own classmates really expect her to believe they had thought Yona and she were friends, so had said nothing when the teacher made the match in Shulee’s absence? Shulee Bouzaglo a friend of Yona Rodelheim? The mute? Practically, tongue-tied to the point of strangulation. Oddball! An oddball! Sure, Shulee herself was regarded as a bit of an independent. A maverick! A life force. She was a godsend when the lesson dragged especially low. How they all laughed! Whereas, Yona Rodelheim? A scarecrow, if humans were crows.
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