“Are we there yet?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “We still have a ways to go.”
She went back to sleep. The sky was flooded with a limpid light. I saw my younger self—hair tangled, knees covered in dirt—resurface on the horizon. My face was streaked with tears. The falcon, too, reappeared. I watched myself lift my gaze to take in its elegant circumnavigation. There I am, I thought, taking in my slight figure, simultaneously dead and alive. It occurred to me that the borders of my life would forever be stitched to hers: her death would be my death; her life, mine. An obvious thought and yet, as I took in her frail figure, I was of two minds: I experienced her as both myself and not me. I suddenly felt terribly uneasy in my body. The bus seat felt too constricting, the ride interminably long. I needed fresh air. I needed to move my limbs. I looked down at my thighs. They were strong, muscular. I had filled in. I was healthy, and yet I felt I could see through them to the legs of that other me, stick thin, my knees a knobby pair of bones. I remembered Ellie feeling unsettled in similar ways when we had gone together to her childhood home in Jerusalem, the site of her primordial wounds.
I squeezed Ellie’s hand and she drew a deep, relaxed breath. I thought again of the journey we’d made together through Israel and Palestine: the long bus rides, the intermittent power outages in the West Bank, the militarized control of Palestinian civilians, the dizzying heat of the sun, the scent of exhaust and body odor, the hours spent standing in the labyrinthine cages at the checkpoints in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Jenin.
The bus began to exit the highway, and the feelings of unreality that had grabbed hold of me suddenly magnified. I felt a rising sense of panic. Throughout the ride, it had occurred to me at intervals that we were moving in the wrong direction, that we were going to Málaga instead of Marbella. In fact, the bus driver had said as much, but I hadn’t heard him, hadn’t wanted to hear him, hadn’t wanted to register the fact that we were about to arrive in Málaga when we were meant to be going to Marbella, a place I had avoided returning to for twenty years. Even now, two decades later, with Ellie by my side, I felt atomized remembering how carefully Omar had wielded terror and tenderness as tools of domination. He’d made me aware of my body for the first time, aware of the wild whirlpools of pain and pleasure that can run through my veins. He’d pulled my head back, pinned my hands to the floor against my will, and I’d felt a frightening clash of sensations: a riveting tremor running across my skin, a base-level instinct to lie immobile until he was through with me, dread at the thought of what else he might do when he was done, and a thrill at the transgression I was being subjected to, a transgression I’d learned to crave. I could hardly stand my thoughts, the onslaught of memories. I reached over to Ellie and stirred her awake.
I told her to wake up.
“We’re here?” she asked groggily.
“Not exactly,” I said. “But we need to get off the bus.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, searching the landscape with a confused gaze. “The light is so bright,” she said, squinting. “Do you have any water? I’m really thirsty.”
I told her I didn’t. I explained to her that we’d gotten on the wrong bus and were headed away rather than toward Marbella, and that while I’d suspected as much, I’d felt too anxious at the thought, too disoriented to ask the driver which way we were headed. She let out a loud laugh. Of course, that laugh was saying, We’ve been disoriented for so long, getting lost is a foregone conclusion. We pressed our heads together and giggled like hyenas, tears streaming down our faces.
The bus pulled into the station and the driver shut the engine, pumped open the doors. We got a waft of dense, hot air. We got up and stood in the aisle. I told her that I’d seen my child-self through the bus window, walking across the landscape, and that I’d realized that by enabling his own desire Omar had succeeded in suppressing mine deep into the future. “The thought split me in half.” I sighed. “I couldn’t come to grips with the fact that we were moving in the wrong direction.”
“Don’t worry,” Ellie said, leaning against me sleepily. “Every time I return to Israel I feel completely fragmented, like parts of me are dying.” She said that she always gets on the wrong bus when she lands at Ben Gurion Airport, that she unconsciously travels away from her home even when she knows her mother and stepfather were waiting to receive her, even though someone had changed the sheets on her bed and put warm food on the table.
I reminded her that the apartment in Marbella had been vacant for two decades. I told her that it’s possible that, like her apartment in Jerusalem, the apartment in Marbella had had every intention of being a home, a sacred abode where the most beautiful aspects of the external world were reproduced to create a balanced, harmonious microcosm, but that the walls had turned evil, that their natural disposition had shifted, likely due to what had passed between Omar and me. I told her that I’d had the feeling while living there that the apartment was campaigning against me, as though it had acquired a vigilant and vengeful nature. I thought again of the bruised version of myself that I’d seen walking across the arid landscape among the striated rocks that stuck out of the dry earth like swords. I said that at times I’d had the impression that the apartment’s walls were moving in on me; that the walls were attempting to squash me, to evacuate all depth from my life, to convert me into a surface designated for attack. I told her that when I’d looked in the mirror I’d occasionally seen reflected a different expression on my face than what I felt I was expressing. I’d seen terror, remorse, fright. I’d seen my mouth open wide, my lips drawn back, my teeth exposed, my tongue flat against the base of my jaw. I was screaming and yet there was no sound. I felt nothing.
Ellie shivered. “You’re giving me chills!”
I turned awkwardly in the narrow aisle and put my hands on her shoulders. It was taking those ahead of us in line forever to gather their belongings and descend from the bus.
“So, Málaga?” she asked, throwing her head back against my chest.
“Málaga,” I confirmed.
When we finally deboarded, we stood on the street in the long shadow cast by the station. As we scanned the roads, the taxis lined up against the curb, the square pink buildings, the unassuming bars on the corners, Ellie told me that for years she’d felt that it was almost impossible to record the passage of her pain into speech. That her identity as a Jew whose ancestors had been persecuted through the ages in Europe, whose grandmother had come to Israel in the late twenties when the war was still a rumor, made it difficult, if not impossible, to record the layered geography of her nation’s pain, a nation born of violence, a national project executed out of fear and the memory of unthinkable violence, complete annihilation. She had inherited pain through stories her neighbors and distant family members told about surviving the Holocaust, and from her grandmother’s stories about the Arabs’ killing sprees in Mandatory Palestine, the maiming of Jews during the 1929 Hebron massacre—“They chopped off our doctor’s fingers,” her grandmother would say, a conversation, Ellie told me, that repeated itself, that more often than not collapsed into a senseless argument between her and her family about who had outinjured whom in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To archive the region’s pain, she told me, and the events associated with that pain—its trigger episodes—was extremely difficult because, coupled with pain’s own resistance to language, there were silencing political forces that kept certain key realities out of the realm of public discourse. “It was forbidden,” she had said, “to acknowledge the suffering of Palestinians, to accept the glaring fact that the insurmountable and gruesome affair of the Holocaust, caused by Aryans, conducted with the silence of the Christians, was directly influencing the fate of Palestinians, legitimizing the project of their extinction on what had been their land, land they were forbidden from returning to.” The names of their villages had been wiped from the map; their reality, their history made invisible, and with it, their right to exist on that land. Ellie said that
, as an Israeli citizen and a Jewish person of Sephardic and Lithuanian descent, her empathy for the plight of the Palestinians—her belief that they had a right to self-determination—was considered an unforgivable transgression by her family and community. “You care more about the Arabs who are trying to kill us than you do about your own family,” she’d been told. In order for her to practice her humanity, she told me, she had to betray the unacknowledged gag order that was thought to be necessary for the survival of the Israeli state. And that meant that she was alone in the world, trapped in an absurd paradox: she was complicit in the violence enacted against Palestinians at the same time that she was disowned by her family for denouncing the crimes of the state and the hypocrisy of the people who denied Palestinians their dignity, their humanity, their basic civil rights, who treated Black and Mizrahi Jews as second-class citizens.
I told her that I understood the feeling of being forced to decide between one’s own sense of integrity and the assumed modes of well-being expressed by one’s community, that when the two are at odds with each other it feels as though one-half of us is dying. I told her that despite the pressure to do so I had never been able to bring myself to hate Omar. What would bother me for the rest of my life, I told her as we stood on the corner searching for a place to eat, is that I hadn’t come to know the nature of Omar’s pain. The question haunted me. What had happened to him? What had been done to him? How had he been made to feel invisible, unreal? I had no way of knowing now, but I wished that I did. I wished I had known the hidden geography of his grief, because that knowledge would have liberated our story from the simplistic tale of good and evil.
“It’s an impossible position to be in,” she said, “to process your own loss of dignity without demonizing him or subjecting him to the dominant narrative of the Arab man.” Then she pointed at a bar across the street, and said, “In the meantime, we’re back to what we do best: killing time over beers!”
Killing time, as if time weren’t killing us, I thought, as we stepped off the sidewalk into the sun. But we were happy, content to be together wherever that bus had taken us. We were born to kill time together. That was the pleasure of our friendship. Drinking beers, eating fish, smoking cigarettes, talking while we waited for this or that bus, train, airplane, elevator—whatever it was that was going to transport us from A to B.
“Málaga!” Ellie exclaimed as we approached the bar. “As in the birthplace of Picasso?”
“The very one,” I replied.
The wind had picked up. The low-hanging clouds that had bloomed in the sky were moving overhead at breakneck speed. The bar where we took refuge was offering a menú del día. It was dark and narrow, with a high ceiling, cracked wooden chairs, an old register, a slot machine tucked in the back under a staircase that led to a quieter upstairs where people could sit and eat their food undisturbed. The waiter, a sweaty man with stubble and hollowed-out cheeks, told us to sit anywhere we wanted before he dashed off to the back. We sat next to two couples who were speaking in Hebrew.
“What are they saying?” I asked Ellie.
I had the strange feeling that I could somehow decode all the years that had passed since I’d last been to Andalusia if I could only understand where this pair of couples was coming from, what they were doing in Málaga, this place that holds the ghosts of all of our ancestors, ancestors who fled or disappeared or were tortured to death, who were present in so far as they were absent on this land, who had left behind their belongings and temples of worship. I wondered if this pair of couples, whose flat glances moved over us quickly, had come to Spain to reinhabit the past, to salute the dust of our ancestors, to conduct a ritual of collective mourning. I felt time folding and unfolding as if in a dream. I hoped someday our people might return to this land arm in arm and convert the tyrannical laws of the universe into the steady laws of poetry; I felt a mild, passing happiness bloom in my chest where the trapdoor had been.
“What are they saying?” I insisted.
But Ellie wouldn’t yield to my request. “I’d rather not know,” she said, and leaned away from them.
I wanted to tell her not to be so self-loathing, but then again, my request wasn’t exactly innocent. I was trying to understand something about myself through them—and who were they anyway, just a pair of couples we happened to be sitting next to because we’d taken the wrong bus and ended up in Málaga instead of Marbella. They sat there indifferent to us, disengaged, concerned only with the quality of their meal. They were not susceptible to the devious assaults of the past.
I tried to get the waiter’s attention. “Te escucho,te escucho,” he kept saying from behind the bar, but every time I started to communicate our order to him, he turned and walked into the kitchen, where a rotund, middle-aged woman with a hairnet and a blue apron was frying the fish of the day—my favorite, bacalao. So I got up and followed him to the back. I heard Ellie yell after me.
“Can you ask for a beer and some bread?” she said.
She didn’t speak any Spanish. I was our translator, our sole ambassador. It was up to me to get our point across, and what we wanted in that moment was a ration of bacalao to share, some patatas bravas, a couple of cañas, and bread.
I got our order in and sat back down. The food came flying over our heads ten minutes later. It was delicious. The fish and the potatoes perfectly fried, covered with the sweet bitterness of freshly pressed olives. We ate to our heart’s content. The two hours until the next bus to Marbella sped by.
As soon as we got on the bus, Ellie fell asleep again. She’d passed out before the bus had even left the station. She’d pulled her sweater over her head, a black cotton one. She couldn’t cope with the sun. She was too fair. She was better off in Oxford—the sun barely showed its face there—though she resisted it because the place resisted her: a lapsed Orthodox Jew, a queer postcolonial scholar dating a woman.
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. I was so sick of being on buses and trains. I’d been on the road for months. It hadn’t been easy touring my second novel. I’d gotten sick several times while traveling, had acquired a terrible cold that seemed incapable of healing. It would retreat for a few weeks and I’d feel exhilarated, victorious, until the congestion began blocking my airways again, leaving me defeated, invaded, sultry.
I’d spent my last few hours in Oxford sitting with Ellie in a sauna, trying to inhale moisture back into my lungs. She’d talked to me for hours about how alienated she felt there, how the very stones of the city seemed to refute her right to exist because they’d been walked on for so long by a very specific brand of human: wealthy, elite, with a reserved discourse that she felt certain was capable of strangling her direct nature like a boa constrictor. All business, she told me, was conducted politely, even the business of discrimination; it was conducted with the intention of leaving no trace.
My own days in England had been filled with a series of minor incidents that acquired an inconspicuous quality by virtue of their frequency. It was a hot, clammy May, one of the warmest springs in decades. In Oxford people were spread out on blankets in the parks, wearing sun hats and drinking champagne, idling, indulging their bodies, allowing themselves to feel momentarily aimless. Every morning I walked along the river. I took pleasure in watching the cows pile up against one another on the grassy banks, in the shade of willows. The swans, regal birds of the queen, glided by in the cool water. I laughed each time I saw a swan, each time I thought of the queen. I could not help but think of her possession of those birds as a deliberate strategy for inserting her image, the scope of her power and influence, into the insipid repertoire of the everyday. The swans, too, were a symbol of nationalism, a polite intimation of England’s timeless colonial agenda. And they were everywhere, those birds, in the parks and on the sidewalks, in the museum gardens and the universities, a quiet but steady reminder that whiteness was in charge.
I thought about how once I’d left behind the pastoral air of Oxford, and the cl
oser I’d come to my departure for Marbella, I’d felt curiously distant from myself. I’d begun to experience the world with a detached lucidity, with an uncanny sense of unreality. Bristol, with its damp, milk-colored sky, its port and reinforcing boulders, its warehouses-turned-restaurants, felt oddly familiar to me despite the fact that I’d never been there before. I felt as though I’d seen the city in a dream. I became convinced that I wasn’t actually seeing Bristol but remembering having seen it. In the hotel, the desk manager, a young Italian man who spoke broken English, who was hard at work covering up the gaps in his grammar with a flirtatious act that only further revealed the faults he was trying to conceal with his false confidence, asked me to pronounce my name several times. Each time he insisted that I was mispronouncing my own name, a statement he maintained despite my protests. It was an outrageously absurd claim, grating in a way that called to mind the whining of the hotel fridge, the horrible squealing sound the faucet made every time I turned it; none of it disastrous on its own, but together they unmoored me.
I carried on. I showered—there was no tub, no proper shower, just a retractable shower head screwed into the wall above a tiled floor with a large drain—and put on fresh clothes: a pink silk shirt and gray jeans. I pulled on my boots and left the hotel to attend what I’d been told would be a live interview about my book at the BBC headquarters in Bristol. This was my second interview with the BBC. The first, in London, had been conducted at a speed that left me startled and confused. I was on with another guest, an American film critic, and we were asked a quick succession of questions on subjects ranging from Childish Gambino’s This Is America to gender reassignment surgeries in Iran; we had less than one minute to respond to each one. One minute, I’d thought to myself, when Donald Glover had studied—had inhabited—the history of violence and the image of the Black body in white America from the days of slavery and Jim Crow straight through to the twenty-first century to compose his music video. It was possible he’d spent years thinking about the composition of each frame, the seconds he would allocate to each gesture. It troubled me, as it always had, to know that what artists spent years synthesizing and elucidating for the public would be dissected in a nanosecond; our attention span, narrow and impatient, resists prolonged engagement, eschews the transformative power of art, the task of collective mourning and ritual celebration that art is capable of undertaking.
Savage Tongues Page 5