by Nora Gold
Then she goes into the kitchen, searching for food. She opens and closes cupboards. There is nothing in any of them. Empty, empty, empty, as she slams them shut one after another. Not a single crouton. The same thing in the fridge and freezer, too. Not a single stalk of limp celery, or a freezer-burned but still suckable popsicle. Nothing. In desperation she looks in the cupboard under the kitchen sink, where the cleaning supplies are kept. There, buried at the very back, behind two big plastic bottles, spray cans, sponges, steel wool, and silver polish, she sees a small unfamiliar-looking can resting against the wall. It’s SPAM. SPAM! What is this doing here? SPAM is made of pork which, although she is not strictly kosher, she has not eaten for the past twelve years. Even her father, who did not keep kosher, would never have eaten SPAM. How did it get here? Maybe it was brought into the house by one of her father’s caregivers. She looks at the can of SPAM with disgust. Canned meat. Canned pork meat. Ground-up pig. Yuck. She closes the cupboard door.
But then she opens it again. Because she knows this is all there is to eat in this house. And she’s starving. She is so weak she feels faint. Survival above all. She removes the square-shaped can, hooks her finger through the metal loop, rips off the top, and stares at the pink, spongy mass inside. It doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to meat. She sniffs it. It smells awful. She sets the can on the counter and turns away. But then she sniffs it again. Now it doesn’t smell quite so bad. It’s not that terrible, she thinks. When Daddy was in the army, he ate worse stuff every day. He’d probably have been grateful for some meat, even this kind. She smiles. One of his favourite jokes was about a yeshiva student who has been drafted into the Czar’s army, and asks his rabbi what to do if they serve him pork and there’s nothing else.
“Eat the pork,” says the rabbi. “But don’t suck the bones.”
So, holding her breath, fighting the impulse to gag, and telling herself, It’s just meat — it’ll give you strength, she eats every last bit in the small tin. It’s not that bad, she decides, once you get used to it. Not that she plans to. And she didn’t “suck the bones.”
She sneezes. Then twice more. This house is freezing. She’d better go back to bed. Leaving the kitchen, she passes the thermostat but deliberately avoids looking at it, like snubbing a former friend. She carries the candlesticks upstairs, feeling, as they light her way to bed, like someone in a nineteenth-century novel. She places the candlesticks on her night table, blows them out, and gets under the covers. She is almost contented. But then she feels nauseated and wonders what, in fact, she just put into her body. Spam in computer language means garbage. Is this what she just filled her body with? With virtual garbage? She pictures the inside of her body — the inside of limbs and organs — filling up with flashing smiley faces selling pornography, get-rich-quick schemes, hate propaganda, and endless other mental garbage. Are these her insides now? Or maybe, from eating SPAM, she has become half-human-half-pig? What a horrible Friday night. Among the worst of her life. Feeling miserable, she falls asleep.
— 3 —
It is very dark when she awakens panting and sweaty. Wild animals were chasing her down a forest path. They were gaining on her, and she woke up just an instant before they pounced and tore her to pieces. Although she is awake now, she keeps panting: it is hard to catch her breath, as if she has really been running, really been chased. She does not want to go back to sleep now: she is afraid of dreaming again. To sleep perchance to dream. She leans over and switches on the lamp near her bed to see if the electricity is back, but nothing happens. She lifts the phone. Dead.
“Shit,” she says. Her stomach aches with hunger. Never mind, she comforts herself. Everything will be back to normal in the morning. This is just one of those strange, abnormal nights. Like “A Night,” the Yiddish poem by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern. A night you just have to get through. Survive. Same as the long, hellish night Israel is experiencing now. Lying in bed, she muses not just on suicide bombings and the threats to Israel’s physical survival, but also about what is happening to Israel’s soul. Last week in Ha’aretz she read that the Israeli government recently “appropriated” — in other words, stole — some land belonging to Abu Ghosh, an Arab village just outside Jerusalem that for years has lived in peaceful and friendly harmony with Israel, even sometimes demonstrating impressive loyalty. Now the Israeli government reciprocates this loyalty by stealing some of their land. It’s disgusting. It’s outrageous. As is that euphemistic verb, “to appropriate,” when it is utterly in-appropriate to steal.
Yesterday she read about another Arab village where a grove of olive trees was uprooted by religious settlers. In response, several dozen Israeli peaceniks, including some prominent writers, went to this village and fought with the settlers, preventing further uprooting; but already considerable damage had been done. Don’t uproot what’s been planted, goes a line in “The Honey and the Bee Sting,” and there is also in Jewish law a prohibition against uprooting fruit trees, even in times of war. Talk about those settlers being selective when it comes to their religious observance.
Reflecting on these recent Israeli actions against Palestinians, she is ashamed. Ashamed and grieved. What was it Maimonides said about grief? “If a man” — of course a man! thinks Judith — “wanted to wax wroth about the ignorance of man, he would never stop being angry, and would have to lead a life of grief and affliction.” That is how she feels now: grieved and afflicted. She feels it burning inside her like a cancerous ulcer eating away at her stomach. A cancerous ulcer like the occupation. A moral decay at the core of our country, eating away at us — devouring us — from within.
Not that the Palestinians are exactly moral paragons, either. There are Palestinians like Jaber who believe Jews are “the sons of dogs and monkeys” and should be wiped off the face of the earth.
Where is there hope? What can one cling to?
Then she smiles. Samah. Samah was her partner when she worked on that dialogue project in Israel for Jewish and Palestinian teens. The leaders of the dialogue groups always worked in pairs, one Jew and one Palestinian, and she and Samah were matched together. Samah was, like her, a feminist, and a few years older. They had different points of view, obviously, on certain issues, but they had real respect for each other, and genuine affection, too. That was building, instead of destroying. That was increasing the peace in the world, rather than the hate. That is the only hope.
She feels drowsy. No, she tells herself. Don’t fall asleep. If you fall asleep, you’ll have another nightmare. But how can she keep awake without caffeine, without electricity, and without having to leave this bed, which, though no longer warm, is still the warmest place in this house? Then she knows. She’ll play with words. Whenever she was ill and bedbound as a child or teen, this is what she did. She picked a word and played with it. What word should she pick first?
“Exile,” she says aloud. As she says it, it sounds like Eggs Isle. Eggs on a desert isle. An island full of eggs. Eggs in Hebrew are baitzim. Baitzim means eggs, but also testicles. So broken eggs are broken testicles. No babies can come from broken testicles. So there can be no future. No future for the Jewish people. In Eggs Isle. In Exile.
She laughs. This is fun. What word should be next? Dunhill. She snickers. Dunhill is a brand of cigarette. Something cancer-causing, potentially fatal. And if you add a g to Dunhill, Dunhill becomes Dunghill. Like the dunghill outside Dung Gate — one of the gates to Jerusalem’s Old City — where camels in previous centuries dumped their dung. Which formed a hill. A dunghill. Dunghill University, she sneers. The real name of the shitty school I attend.
She is happier now, but colder. Especially her hands and feet. Her teeth chatter. She burrows deeper under the covers, pulling them tighter around her, but it does not help. It must be forty-seven degrees in here, maybe less. Fuck Suzy. If she hadn’t given that three-thousand-dollar RA’ship to Elizabeth, if she had kept her promise, then this house wouldn’t be freezing cold. And she wouldn’t be freezing and sta
rving, while Suzy does just fine in her warm, plush, carpeted house, with its fridge crammed full of food.
There is a loud growling sound: it’s her stomach. She doesn’t feel at all hungry, though; just weak and light-headed, like she could laugh and laugh and never stop. Her stomach continues making noises. Like the wild animals in the forest who were chasing her. As if they were all inside her stomach now. Along with the pig she ate for supper tonight.
I need help, she thinks. But she doesn’t know how to get it. She can’t call Bobby or Cindy, or even her friends in Israel, because the phone is dead. I’m alone — ’mAlone. She laughs, more and more shrilly, and can’t stop. Her face feels wet. She touches it — it’s tears, her face is soaked in tears. I’m falling apart, she thinks. Maybe I’m going mad. She doesn’t think so. But then again, almost by definition, mad people never think they’re mad; they always think that they’re okay and everyone else is crazy. So how would I know? How would I really know if I were mad? Around the bend? Insane?
No, she decides, I’m not mad. Just lonely. And a person can’t go mad from loneliness, can they? From not having one person to talk to closer than six thousand miles away who understands what I am doing with my life? Or from losing the people I love, one after another after another? A person can’t go mad from that, can they? Or from living far from home in galut? Of course, one can go mad in galut. Which sounds like the title of a movie: Sleepless in Seattle. Going Gaga in Galut. But can one actually go mad from galut? From living for a protracted period in a spiritually unnatural condition like exile? Maybe. After all, there is the Jerusalem Syndrome, where people who come to Jerusalem for the first time become clinically insane, believing themselves to be Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed (and sometimes all three). Perhaps I have the opposite of this. Perhaps there is a psychiatric disorder called the Galut Syndrome, a mental illness caused by living in exile, a place intrinsically antithetical to one’s emotional and psychological health. A syndrome that would likely be exacerbated on Friday nights spent alone, the way werewolves go especially crazy whenever there’s a full moon.
This is probably all that’s wrong with me. I’m feeling crazy now, but I’ll be okay once I’m back home in Jerusalem. In just seven and a half weeks. Only fifty-two days.
A half-hour later, Judith is sitting up in bed. On the night table the Shabbat candles are lit, and she feels peaceful and content. With a pencil and paper she is doing gematriya, the Jewish system for relating numbers and words. It all started because of only fifty-two days. She began playing with the number fifty-two. Fifty-two weeks in the year. Fifty-two is composed of a five and a two. Five plus two equals seven. Seven is the number of days in the week. The seventh day of the week is Shabbat, which is today. Which feels, as they said in high school, “cosmic.”
Numbers, she thinks, tell the truth. They never change or die like words and people do. They’re perfect, unchanging, and eternal. Something like the language of God. She learned gematriya three years ago in a half-day workshop at Beit Ha’am in Jerusalem, and hasn’t done it since, but when she started doing it tonight, it came back quickly. First she wrote the Hebrew alphabet vertically, one letter under the other. Then next to each letter she wrote its assigned numerical value. The first ten letters, from aleph to yud, have values from one to ten. Aleph equals one, bet (the b sound) equals two, and so forth. The letters following yud have values in increments of ten. So the eleventh letter of the alphabet, kaf, is worth twenty. The twelfth letter, lamed, thirty. And so on up to kuf, which is one hundred. After that come the last three letters of the alphabet: resh, shin, and taf, with values respectively of two hundred, three hundred, and four hundred. If you need to go higher than four hundred, you just combine letters to add up to the number you want.
The Hebrew words she plans to do gematriya on are important. They’re the Hebrew words for Friend, Peace, War, God, Love, Hate, Life, Death, Goodness, Evil, Trust, Betrayal, Exile, and Redemption. She picked these words because, to make it through this night, and also through her fifty-two remaining days in galut, she needs to know what things are worth. Gematriya will tell her the true value of things. She carefully calculates each of these words and then studies the result. It’s interesting. For example, Love, ahava, has a numerical value of thirteen. Which is also the age at which, according to Jewish law, one is considered an adult and therefore morally responsible for one’s actions. Is this implying a connection in life between love and responsibility? Also interesting is the word Friend. The male form of Friend, chaver, is 210, but the female form, chavera, is 215. Does this mean that to a woman a female friend is more valuable than a boyfriend? Possibly. Feminists have been saying that for years.
Now she writes the letters of the English alphabet vertically, and next to each letter a number: A equals one, B equals two. To parallel Hebrew gematriya, at the eleventh letter of the English alphabet, K, she starts going up ten at a time. K equals twenty, L equals thirty. Up to one hundred, which is S. So T equals two hundred, U equals three hundred, and so on until Z, eight hundred. Eight hundred Z’s, she thinks. In Hebrew, eight hundred letters of the z sound is eight hundred zayins. But a zayin is also a penis. So picturing this, eight hundred penises, she laughs. She laughs and laughs, she can’t stop laughing, and the next thing she knows she is sobbing, then screaming, “What’s the point? What is the point?!” She sits awhile, calming down. When she’s calm, she calculates the numerical value of God, and all the other words she just did in Hebrew, but this time in English. She also calculates Bobby’s name in both English and Hebrew, and her own.
When she’s finished, she takes a deep breath. This is the moment of truth. Now she’ll compare the Hebrew and English. Now she’ll find out if things are worth more in Israel than in Canada: for instance, is love worth more in Hebrew than in English? Is an Israeli man worth more than a Canadian one? A Moshe, for example, compared to a Bobby? She starts laughing again — something about this question strikes her as very funny — and it takes several minutes till her laughter subsides. Again, when she touches her face, it’s wet with tears.
She goes down her list word by word, comparing the numerical values in English and Hebrew, drawing a square around each word that achieves a higher score in English. Love, for example, is 495 in English and only 13 in Hebrew, so when it comes to love, English wins. Around all the words where the Hebrew word trumps the English, she draws a circle. Then she surveys the results.
English wins on Judith, Bobby, Love, Trust, Goodness, Evil, God, War, Truth, Betrayal, Exile, and Redemption. She contemplates Judith, Bobby, and Love. Does this mean she should stay here with Bobby in English-land, rather than look for someone in Hebrew? Also, she can’t understand how War won in English. It’s counterintuitive: almost everything she knows about war she’s learned in Israel. But English winning on Betrayal feels correct. In Israel she was never betrayed like she was here. As for Exile, this one’s obvious. Of course Exile wins in the language spoken in exile rather than in the language spoken at home.
She looks to see where Hebrew wins. Hebrew wins on Death (because of all the wars?), but it also wins on Hope. This makes sense: Hope, Hatikva in Hebrew, is the name of Israel’s national anthem.
Last but not least, Hebrew wins on Life. And, as if this were the overall score of the entire exercise, like one’s final mark in a course, this feels very true to her. Life is better there than here.
She is dizzy and lies down, pulling the covers up to her neck. She also feels drowsy, and now she isn’t afraid of falling asleep. But first she wants to sing something, like singing herself a lullaby. It’s the kaddish, the mourner’s prayer one recites after the death of a parent, thrice daily for eleven months. “Yitgadal v’yitkadash …” she begins: “May God’s great name be magnified and sanctified.” But as she continues singing this prayer, entering into it through its secret gate, she has the odd sensation that she is not reciting it for her father. Coming to the end of the kaddish — “May the Lord who makes peace in heaven ma
ke peace as well for us” — she knows she has been singing it also for herself. As if a part of her has recently died.
— 4 —
Monday morning, she drives to Dunhill. The sun is shining, and it is a glorious winter day with a crisp, clean feeling in the air. She is going to meet Cindy and Darra, to plan their presentation for Hetty’s class next week. She reassures herself that she won’t be anywhere near any of the Anti-oppression Day events. She must protect herself. She doesn’t know exactly where the line between madness and sanity is, but she knows that on Friday night, if she did not actually cross that line, she was dancing right on top of it. Luckily, when she awakened on Saturday morning, the sun was shining, the storm was over, the electricity was back, the phones were working, and her street had been cleared of the fallen electrical pole. Without even showering or properly shovelling off her car, she drove to the nearest open restaurant, a diner, and ordered an enormous breakfast: pancakes with syrup, scrambled eggs with hash browns and onions, toast with butter and strawberry jam, a large cinnamon bun, a yogurt, fresh fruit salad, orange juice, and coffee. She ate as much of it as she could — which was not much since her stomach had shrunk — and brought the rest home.
She hated being at home, though. After the warmth of the diner, her house was terribly cold. So she packed some schoolwork and a pannier of food and spent the day at the University of Toronto library, studying there in snug comfort until it closed at midnight. By the time she got home the house was thirty-eight degrees, and after two hours of tossing and turning in her almost freezing bed, she went downstairs to the kitchen. To heat some leftover pancakes, she turned on the electric oven. (Her father had refused to buy a microwave: he was convinced they emitted carcinogenic rays.) While waiting for the oven to warm, she got an idea. She carried into the kitchen from the living room the two bottom cushions of the couch, a throw pillow, and a ratty old blanket, and built herself a little nest in front of the stove. When the oven hit 350 degrees — a good temperature for defrosting foods and bodies — she opened the oven door, lay down, pulled the blanket over her, and curled up like a cozy contented dog in front of a fireplace.