“I’m worried about the boys,” I said to Simon and he said, “If things get worse we’ll leave, we can do that.” As the country grew more chaotic Simon seemed calmer and steadier. His class was over and it had gone well; he’d had an article accepted; he spent more time with the boys again, throwing a ball in the park, reading them books for hours. Since the war had started Simon was the only person I could talk to without becoming defensive or outraged. There was also some kind of urgency the war unlocked. We stayed up late at night, drinking wine, talking about the war, and when we woke up in the morning we would resume our conversation as if it had never been interrupted. It was good for us to focus on something other than our mundane unhappiness. We had a common enemy: the hysteria that had gripped the entire country.
I had been to Gaza years before. We’d stayed in a resort hotel on the beach. It was cheap because even then going to Gaza carried a small element of risk; we traveled in a special armoured bus. Tourism was one of the primary industries of the Jewish settlement in Gaza; the other was flowers. When Israelis talked about the pullout from Gaza they always mentioned that the Palestinians had smashed the greenhouses, as if that was proof that the Palestinians did not deserve their independence and had no willingness for industry, only a desire for destruction. But the Israelis had pulled out infrastructure with their people; how would you run industrial greenhouses when you didn’t have enough electricity or clean water for the people of Gaza City?
I never saw Gaza City, but I remember the shoreline in Gaza as beautiful. The sand was gold and the sea was a deep purple-blue. We went for a walk on Shabbat and reached the end of the resort quickly, a wall of barbed wire that stretched from the sand to the sea. But the tide was out; we walked past the wire on the wet sand and stopped abruptly. A family was sitting on a blanket, women and children grouped together on the sand, a rough tent, a man on a horse in the background. It felt as if we had walked into a private gathering, a birthday party or celebration. They all looked at us together, steadily and without either hostility or welcome, their holiday chatter silenced. The children began to walk towards us, but the man spoke harshly to them and then lashed his horse and rode straight at us. At the last moment, he turned and galloped into the blue, broken light of the waves. As we turned back we could feel the salt spray from the horse’s hooves, could feel the salt taste in our own mouths.
27.
The war posed another problem, a petty one, which preoccupied me nonetheless. I was supposed to be going on a vacation with Simon. My mother was coming all the way from New York and had volunteered to watch the children; our reservations to Eilat were booked and non-refundable. We hadn’t been anywhere alone for nearly seven years, since my first pregnancy. This vacation would be our chance to be alone again.
I monitored the papers every day, watching for travel warnings, signs of escalation. I was afraid of getting cut off from the children, of having them in one part of the country and being trapped in another. And then there was the plain tackiness of going on vacation while other people were suffering. It seemed callous, beyond callous, unfeeling.
I caught myself rehearsing various rationalizations: after all, someone, somewhere, was always suffering, and this was only a little more proximate. I vacillated until it was time to leave. I remembered my friend Rebecca, who had initially planned to stay in Israel during the Gulf War. She left a week later, out of boredom. She was staying in a stranger’s house, she said. There was nothing to do. They spent all day in the basement with five screaming children, watching movies she’d already seen. Eventually she went home to Colorado to ski. I thought of her now as we drove south.
We were driving towards the war, though we would skirt it to the east. But the closer we came the farther away it seemed; the war receded, like the vanishing lines on the highway. The road was empty. We rolled down the windows. I looked at Simon, his hands relaxed on the steering wheel, his face in profile, side-lit by the sun, and he glanced towards me and half-smiled. His eyes were brown but there were pools of green around his pupils that I could only see in the sun. I had always liked it so much that his eyes changed colour depending on the light. It took me a second to remember to smile back, as if that reflex had become a little stiff and unpracticed. I could see his smile falter, could see the question in his eyes, before he turned his face away from me and back to the road.
We didn’t want to talk about the war; we didn’t want to talk about the children. We turned the music up and ate bad food. It was as if we’d shed ten years in the hour we’d spent on the road. All of the road trips we’d taken in the years before we had children came rushing back; stupid jokes and truckstops, late-afternoon sun on asphalt. We passed the Willy Wonka madness of the salt factories on the Dead Sea, candy-striped warehouses and mountains of salt like powdered sugar. The Dead Sea ribboned in and out of sight in the distance, and we descended into the Mediterranean savanna. The air was thicker now. It was late afternoon, and out the window the barrens looked like Africa; burnt-orange sunset and sparse acacia trees, stunted and stately, their flat crowns umbrellaed over narrow trunks. Eilat was spangled in lights.
On the way down to Eilat, we stopped at a desert park named Timna, where the earth was red and the rock striated in bands, like zebra stripes but far more colourful, every shade of beige and orange and crimson and black. There had once been a copper mine there, and a shrine to Hathor, since all this had been Egypt when Egypt was an empire. We walked aimlessly through the deserted park. I could hear Simon beside me, breathing hard as we climbed uphill, but aside from him I sensed no living thing, not even the shadow of a lizard. It was as if we were the last people on earth.
“You wouldn’t want to run out of gas here,” Simon said. “They would find your bleached bones a month later.”
We hadn’t brought enough water, and suddenly I felt frightened.
“How much gas do we have?” I said. He looked at me and said, “We’re fine. We have plenty.”
Still, there was a moment of panic when we came back to the car and he couldn’t find the keys. We had run out of water, and I could feel the pressure from dehydration beginning to build in my head.
I said, “Check the other pocket,” and he shook his head and said, “I checked it already.”
I narrowed my lips, ready to burst into recriminations, when I realized that I had the keys, zipped in the pocket of my windbreaker. I’d asked to hold them because I didn’t trust Simon not to lose them. I fished them out. “I had the keys,” I said. “Sorry about that.” I stood there meekly. Exasperation flickered quickly across his face.
It would have been good sometimes to know each other a little less well. I was like an antenna that was so sensitive it picked up everything, all the static and the noise. “Do you want to just go back?” Simon said, his voice frustrated, and I shook my head. But the night was ruined.
We drove past the narrow strip of city and to our hotel just south of town, which smelled like fish and floor cleaner. My mother’s voice on the phone sounded tired; as always, she seemed slightly offended when I asked her if the children had behaved themselves, as if I was at once calling into question the virtue of her grandchildren and her own dogged competence as a caregiver.
“They’re better off with her than they are with us,” Simon said as I hung up the phone.
It was true: she would have the children cleaner, tidier, better fed. They didn’t sound like they missed us at all, their voices tinny and faraway.
Luckily, in the morning everything felt lighter. We walked over to the beach and rented snorkels, wetsuits, and fins from a beachside stand. The Red Sea was named for the way the water reflected the red sand of the mountains, but really it was more turquoise than red, and purple in the depths, wine-dark like the Homeric epithet. The water was full of lavender jellyfish, pulsing at the core and frilled at the edges, translucent and exquisitely indifferent. The man in the diving shack told us that they
didn’t sting and I reached out a finger and stroked one; the skin was like wet silk. It was strange to swim through the flutter of jellyfish; they bumped my elbows and hips, and I needed to brush them aside with my hands, a Mediterranean traffic jam.
Near the reef, the water cleared of jellyfish. The coral itself was roped off, but you could swim alongside it. Simon swam beside me, held his breath and plunged under, pointed silently to a frill of coral deep underwater. I liked being beside him without language. I passed a drift of lionfish, fierce and ornate. Later I found the raised welt on my thigh, red and shiny like a burn. My breath was loud and rhythmic in my ears, though occasionally I inhaled seawater and came up sputtering, blowing it back out of the spout. My hands and feet were numb. I didn’t care; I wanted to stay underwater forever. There was a whole world under there, glorious and intricate, where all I could hear was the sound of my breathing. The wetsuit kept me buoyant so I felt like I was flying, not swimming.
Without the children, vast expanses of time opened up; we wandered back to our hotel wearing our swimsuits, went back to bed in the middle of the day, walked until our feet were tired. We felt hollow and light from swimming and walking. We avoided central Eilat, with its tacky hotels and crowded boardwalk; instead, we walked as far as we could into the mountains, scrabbling with hands and feet on the red sand. We were raw and eager, sunburnt and sandy, tired and glad. On a day trip to Petra we watched a wild boy, eyes lined in kohl, drive a rose charabanc through the gorge that led to the ancient settlement. We wandered around the dead stone city, marveling at how lively it was; in the caves we found bedding, pots, evidence of habitation. Ornate facades were carved onto the sandstone cliffs, and arches framed doorways that would not open.
Petra had been a dream city for so long, rumoured and forbidden. In the 1950s, young Israelis used to sneak over the border to see the city; a dozen were murdered by Jordanian soldiers while making the forbidden trip. The song that immortalized their exploits was banned on the radio for many years in an effort to contain the romance of the expedition. I remembered the tune from when I was a child; the red rock, “Haselah Ha’adom”. My mother used to sing it to me at night, though it was no lullaby. Back then I had no idea what the words meant. In the song, the red rock is the impossible place, the place no-one returns from alive. When the travelers arrive at the red rock, they have found death itself.
Looking at Simon now, I realized I couldn’t see him except through a kind of film, like old photographic negatives layered over one another. I saw him screaming at me in a yellow room and I saw his tired eyes in the hospital the day my father died and I saw him holding our son all night on the day he was born and I saw him walking away from me and I saw him walking towards me slowly with a cone of purple flowers in his hand as if he was afraid I would throw them in his face. I saw him speckled in light, like a solar system, under the crocheted blanket his grandmother knit him when he went to university. We thought of the same jokes at the same moments, we finished each other’s sentences, we knew each other’s weaknesses with the intimacy of our own. Every fight we had was a repetition of every fight we had ever had, and every time we kissed there was an echo of all of those prior kisses, so that nothing was new but everything was deep and reached back to all we had been since we had been together.
Sometimes I felt exhausted by all of this weight, and I wished that we could be fresh to each other, people without a history.
On the way back to the hotel we bought pizza to eat on the floor of our hotel room, and then stumbled down the hallway in our bathing suits to the Jacuzzi outdoors. The area near the pool was dark. “I’m not sure we’re supposed to be here,” I said to Simon, and he said, “Shhhh,” and slipped his hand between my legs.
In the distance we could hear a group of people laughing. We were hasty and silly and a little uncomfortable. As we made our way back to our room, holding hands and giggling, I realized I hadn’t thought of the children for hours, maybe even all day. It was more than not having thought of them; it was as if I’d forgotten that they existed, just for a little while, or as if they’d never come along.
When we were young we had wandered the world. We had biked around Versailles; we’d hiked the Himalayas; we’d missed our train from Madrid to Granada and sped to catch up with it in a taxi, the sky choked with stars in the black night. We had been accountable only to ourselves, creatures without schedules or obligations, strangers everywhere. It had been so long since we had felt like that.
“We should call the kids,” I said as we opened the door to our room, and Simon said, “What kids?” and leapt onto the bed, pulling back the covers so I could join him.
Later on, when we were lying in bed, Simon said, “I forgot to tell you something. I mean, not something important. Just something I thought you would like.”
“Yes,” I said. I was nestled into the crook of his arm.
“It was in a podcast about a magic trick that nobody could solve. The hosts kept trying out different theories, and hitting dead ends. Finally, near the end of the show, they called up this famous magician and they asked him. He listened to them and started laughing. When he stopped laughing he said, ‘Yeah, I can tell you how it works, but are you sure you want to know?’ And then he said something else, something I can’t stop thinking about. He said, ‘There are no beautiful secrets. You want there to be a perfect solution, you know, some particular flick of the wrist. But really, there’s gaffer tape over there, where you can’t see it, and maybe someone gesturing behind the curtain—it’s all messy and patched together and unbeautiful. So I can tell you, but that’ll spoil it forever. You choose; do you want the truth or do you want the magic?’ ”
That whole week we did not listen to the radio. We did not turn on the television. We tried not to speak of the war.
28.
The first day back after our vacation, I bumped into Jenna, smoking a cigarette outside the daycare. Outside the car her girls tussled, near the tiled fountain that fronted the YMCA as a symbol of hospitality but that had never, ever worked; the taps were permanently dry. Noor had grabbed Jenna’s pack of cigarettes out of her purse, which lay like a flaccid mouth on the ground next to the car. Noor now took out a cigarette. She looked so comical with her plump pierced earlobes and her short tight curls, her round eyes nearly crossed trying to look at the cigarette dangling from her mouth.
“Jenna,” I said, “she’s got a cigarette.”
Aisha cried out and tried to grab the box of cigarettes from Noor. They held onto it together, pulling it between them. Noor couldn’t shout because she still held a cigarette in her fat red mouth. Jenna said, “They’re always trying to steal my cigarettes. They think it’s a joke.” She leaned down and swooped a finger into Noor’s mouth, breaking the seal of her lips. The cigarette, now paper mush and wet loose strands of tobacco, fell to the floor. Jenna ground it down with her heel as Noor tried to retrieve it.
“No!” she said. “Those are mine!”
Jenna had just returned from her cousin’s funeral. He was shot at three in the morning in Zion Square along with another man, a Jew. Nobody knew if the shooting was political. Whenever a shooting happened a little shudder went through the city, and everyone braced themselves for further incidents or news that would link the murder to a new wave of terrorism; then after a few days everything went back to normal—or whatever counted as normal in Jerusalem.
But normal was over for this man’s family. Jenna said she was pretty sure he’d been in the square looking for sex. His wife had caught him having sex with a man in their house a few years earlier.
“In their bed,” Jenna said. “Can you imagine?”
The family begged her to stay in the marriage and he reformed, she said, and became religious. He started to pray again, five times a day, and they had more children, seemed happy. But now that he was dead, the rumours had begun again, and because the family was afraid that he had been HIV po
sitive they had dispensed with the usual burial rites and put him straight in the ground.
“Why would they think that?” I said. “And what would it matter? There’s no risk.”
“Nobody wanted to wash the body,” she said. “They didn’t want to catch it.”
The father was angry that his son was buried without the proper rituals. He decided to go straight to his son’s widow to ask if they had been having sex, as a way of settling his mind, as if that would foreclose the possibility of infection. And she said, yes, they did, they had sex often. Now he blamed the family for desecrating the burial.
She said, “Can you imagine your father-in-law coming to you and asking how often you had sex with his son? I would have said we did it every day, even if we didn’t.”
Jenna was wearing a striped pink and grey sweater dress, tights, and tall black boots, and she looked tired because she’d been trying to wean Noor.
“I’m taking medicine to make my milk dry up,” she said, “so she won’t want it anymore. But when she woke up last night she hit me and then cried and cried because the milk was gone. She just kept sucking, sucking and hitting, as if she just couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working, like you used to hit the TV to make the picture focus, remember that? Back when televisions had antennas?”
The skin under her eyes looked like someone had placed their thumbs there and pressed, leaving black bruises.
Arabic for Beginners Page 19