‘How was it, then?’ Myriam asks when I come back from a few days in the West Bank and Jerusalem. ‘What’s Ramallah like?’ My cousin Eyal is also interested: he has only been there as a soldier, never as a visitor.
I think about the new Ramallah house where Ghaith’s family lives, its five sleek storeys with a bathroom on every floor, a hot-tub downstairs, and bright, blocky designer furniture. They have their own swimming pool in the garden. I think about a bus I took from Bethlehem; its front bumper was hanging off, and the gearstick was wrapped in yellow electrical tape. A pregnant woman near me retched repeatedly into a pink plastic bag, and behind me two sick children were crying; one kept coughing and choking, and his drink splattered over the stained, sticky floor and ran down under the seats. At the checkpoint all but the woman with the children were asked to get out. As we waited for the soldiers to check us against our IDs, the pregnant woman leant her head on a concrete barrier post and moaned.
My aunt is watching me. ‘It’s complicated,’ I say carefully.
On the bus back to Jerusalem from Ramallah, in the seats across from me, I watched a girl painting her mother’s nails a deep maroon. When the bus reached the Qalandiya checkpoint, all of the men and most of the women rose from their seats and walked to the front and down the steps. They straggled along towards the processing hall, with its turnstiles and steel barriers. The bus driver waited while two soldiers conversed outside the open door. Eventually one of the soldiers turned to the bus, put a foot on the bottom step and heaved up her weight to lean in through the door, calling ‘te’udot’. The remaining passengers held up their blue East Jerusalem identity cards, and I, redundantly, my maroon passport.
On the far side of the checkpoint, the bus stopped again. The girl was tightening the lid on her nail varnish, and the women gathering their bags. The driver explained that he had to wait for the others, and pointed out a nearby bus that would leave sooner. I followed the other women to the new bus. In the seat in front of me, the woman held out a hand to her daughter again. For a short way the road was smooth, and the girl painted with a concentrated speed. Once we left the bit of even road by the separation wall, the drive became too rough and the mother turned away from the girl to look out the window.
Casually and implacably, despite the mundane brutality and banal oppressiveness of that architecture of power, small, irritable, human needs continued. The individual and the nation had shrugged a little, uncomfortable in this new concrete and razor-wire outfit, and then adjusted, and now it is out of sight for most Israeli Jews, and genuinely out of mind. Israeli citizens are not supposed to go to Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank. But now my aunt is reluctantly curious. ‘What do they say about us, then?’ she asks. ‘Do they hate Israel? What do they think of us, your friends?’
I think of the Sno Bar, where I met Ghaith, out near a new Ramallah neighbourhood being built on the hillside. We drank Taybeh beer; our chips were served with plastic packets of ketchup and mayonnaise. ‘I see the boycott of Israeli goods is in full swing here,’ I’d said, turning over the mayonnaise packets. They were made by the Israeli company Ossem, which owned the factory at Kibbutz Beit Hashita.
The Sno Bar was full of ‘internationals’. Ghaith and his father complained about there being more internationals than Palestinians in Ramallah. The employees of NGOs and the UN, Ghaith said, earned two or three times the wage of local people, although it was local people who trained them and did the real work. His father had snorted with disgust. In one way, in the matter of restricted visas, he said, he was in agreement with the Israeli government. If people worked here, they should spend their money here, instead of buggering off to relax on the beach in Tel Aviv.
The peace process was a lucrative business, the Palestinian Authority a sham. ‘We should dismantle the whole thing,’ Ghaith said. ‘The PA is doing Israel’s dirty work; the whole thing is corrupt.’
I am not sure how to present this to Myriam. Whatever I tell her will reinforce what she already thinks. ‘They have their own attitudes,’ I say, hedging. I don’t tell her about the divisions of wealth and poverty, about the tension in East Jerusalem; I don’t mention going to Bethlehem, or getting lost in Hebron. ‘Ramallah is full of internationals,’ I say. ‘UN, NGOs – it’s very safe, very quiet.’ I intended to reassure her, to say something neutral, but the word ‘internationals’ acts as a trigger.
‘Why do they all go there?’ she exclaims angrily. ‘Aren’t there other places? Why do so many people go to help the Palestinians? Why not Darfur, Somalia?’ This leads her to the newer unhappiness over African asylum seekers. Every day hundreds cross into Israel, she tells me. ‘And they’re not really refugees. They just hear Israel is easy, and they come here for work.’
I hesitate, yawing at the edge of the gulf that we pretend isn’t there, but which lies split open between us. Whether I keep silent or speak, neither will close it up. As always, as her guest, I struggle with my obligation to respect her hospitality. I understand what has sparked her reactions. My cousin has just been laid off, and he and his wife have three children to support. My other cousin is barely holding on to a part-time job in an old people’s home. She is a single parent with three children. Myriam is trying to help with what little she has left of her pension – making mortgage payments, buying them a car, and providing frequent childcare. Of course she resents resources going to others; of course she wants to protect jobs, even though migrant workers and refugees are not taking jobs that Israelis want to do: they are taking the low-paid work that Palestinians used to do before the Intifada, before the closure of the border with the West Bank.
Myriam is afraid, and angry, and alone. She is in pain, and anxious about my cousins, and still grieving over my uncle David’s death. My simultaneous feeling of outrage and sympathy settles into a leaden helplessness. It doesn’t matter what I say – it doesn’t make any difference. Why point out that Jews have been refugees, too, and migrant workers, and economic migrants; that migrant workers and asylum seekers are the same the world over? What purpose would it serve to tell her about the settlers’ rubbish thrown down on the market in Hebron, or the pregnant woman leaning her forehead on a concrete post, groaning, while soldiers examined ID cards at the checkpoint? And why tell her what the security guard said to me at the central bus station when I got back to Tel Aviv? She might have said the same thing. He was young, Ethiopian, wearing a kippa. I waited till last to go through, as there was no X-ray machine and I thought I might need to unwrap and show him things I’d bought in Jerusalem. I explained that I had been shopping in the shuk.
‘Any weapons?’ he asked, taking me for a resident.
‘No, no weapons,’ I said.
‘There have been a lot of Arabs today,’ he said, giving my bag a cursory poke and handing it back. ‘Loads of Arabs.’
To say nothing to Myriam might be an acquiescence to attitudes that appal me, but to object is a pointless provocation, and, I know privately, grossly hypocritical. I am capable of hostility, too, whatever my liberal intentions; I have been inculcated in the same way, and have some of the same responses. My prejudices and fears are not so very different from hers, even if I handle mine in other ways.
There is a simplistic anti-racist dogma that demands you confront prejudice wherever you encounter it, but encountering it in yourself requires something else. Perhaps it’s a life-long struggle that you can’t ever win, but you go on doing battle anyway. And perhaps you get tired of the battle, you become exhausted, you can no longer be bothered – or the circle of your care shrinks and shrinks. You cannot simply undo the deep fear you learned as a child – it rises up uncontrolled when you feel threatened or at bay. You respond instantly, unwittingly, to the patterns that burned into you, patterns you are hardly aware of because you were exposed to them so young, like the wasp’s warning colours and dreadful mask. I was stung when I was three or four years old, several times; there is a good, learned reason for my fear of wasps. That man
tried to assault me when I was ten, so perhaps there would be good reason for a mistrust of men – and for an extreme aversion to Y-fronts. But he was Arab; I knew that without being told. I had already learned my apprehension of ‘Arabs’ from others, before that event – from a hand tightening on mine, from my grand-father’s scar, from bullet casings and razor wire on the beach, and from half-heard news stories about the PLO. I don’t blame my parents. Their fear was learned in childhood too, cumulative and unconscious, and reinforced in adulthood, and during their army service. Their learned apprehension is something they too have struggled against.
You can come to know how it operates in you, and why, to make conscious what lies dangerous and barely suppressed just below the surface. That’s a defence, also, against imagining into being its opposite, too – the kind of sexual or political or cultural fetish I made, in an instant, out of Abu Omar’s grandson. In that Romanticised, exoticised moment of desire, I endowed him with extraordinary properties, and dehumanised him utterly.
Perhaps this is why I could not afterwards remember his name. He could have no name, because he was a product of my need. He will always be beautiful in my memory, because he is other, because he is not-me, and because he represents my unconscious fears and desires, a dangerous terrain that I am afraid to know too well.
What can I say to Myriam? I know that if I were to describe the hospitality I received from Abu Omar, from Randa and Ghaith, she would surely say, as she said about the man who changed my tyre the previous year, ‘Nu, so there are some good Arabs.’ It would not affect her feelings about the undifferentiated mass of ‘the Arabs’. What I am doing and where I have been travelling is a provocation to her – and it is therefore harder, and it costs more for her to offer me hospitality than for me to accept it. She welcomes me into her home despite what she herself is appalled by in me, despite what I am doing, which to her is treacherous and dangerous. She must be raw with aggravation, but she does not tell me to go and never come back – I am family. She welcomes me because hospitality is, to her, something unbreakable. Also, I realise, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, that she loves me. I watch her, sitting exhausted and shrunk in the huge chair, with her tired, angry face, and she looks up at me and gives me her ironic, lopsided smile and that ineffable Israeli shrug, and the breach, the gulf, is sealed up, and none of it matters, because I love her too.
4 – Telling tales
My mother’s younger sister, Hamutal, lives in Eilat, a resort city at the northernmost tip of the Red Sea. She’s a scientist, a researcher in plant senescence. When I travel south to visit her, she gives me a tour of the labs and the experimental date palm plantations where she works just north of the city. I understand her explanation of senescence in an approximate way, as a metaphor for my own questions – what makes a thing die? It’s not so much a question of what process kicks in so that it stops regenerating, as what process ceases, and why. What about love – what makes it end? What makes it slow down and stop? Or what process stops, making it impossible to go on – a habit of denial, a loss of will? In her fifth-floor apartment she has dates in the fridge that are still fresh and edible long after they should have begun to deteriorate. I hesitate, uneasy, when she offers them to me to eat.
The last time I stayed with Hamutal I was eighteen. It was late August, and I was heading back to England after eight months in Israel, but I wanted to go back with a tan, so for four days I burned myself in the desert sun, which at midday reached 50 degrees. Now, more than twenty years on, down on the beach, as if nothing has changed, the Heineken Bar is still blasting ‘Mama mia, here I go again, Ah, Ah, how can I resist you...’
I buy an iced coffee at the beach bar, and find an isolated bit of sand, away from the hotel crowds, to spread out a towel. A few minutes later, coming ashore after a brief swim, I stand up without first looking where to put my feet, and tread on a sea-urchin. Caught in the thrum of its deep, throbbing pain, something goes still and quiet inside me. For a moment, I know exactly what James Wright meant when, in his poem ‘A Blessing’, he wrote that if he stepped out of his body he would break into blossom.
At the hospital gate, the security guard checks my bag. ‘You cut your foot?’ he says, seeing that I am limping.
‘Sea urchin,’ I explain. He shakes his head, not understanding, and stands back for me to pass.
The triage nurse asks what is wrong, and I show her my foot.
‘What are you doing here?’ she says. ‘Go home and put your foot in a bowl of water. Twenty minutes – soak it in fresh water for twenty minutes; it’s all you need.’
As I limp back past the barrier, the security guard says, ‘Finished so quick? What did you do?’ I slip off my sandal and show him the purple-black lines of broken-off spines in my foot. ‘Why you didn’t tell me?’ he says. ‘What you need is lemon.’
The other guard comes over. ‘What she did do?’ he asks in English. He too looks at my sandy, purple-barbed foot. ‘No,’ he says. ‘What you need is to piss on it.’
I catch a cab back up the hill, to the tall apartment building where my aunt lives. When I was a child, this building stood on the boundary between the town and the desert. Now the city has grown well beyond it.
The cab driver pulls up to let me out. He is from France, and has been delighted I know some French. ‘Tell me your name,’ he says, as I take out my wallet.
Not again, I think – another marriage proposal. It is getting a little predictable. Earlier, in Tel Aviv, a Greek cab driver looked at me with bulging eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘What are you doing just visiting?’ he said in English. ‘You should come here to live with me.’ When I told him why I was in Israel, he exclaimed, gesturing, both hands off the wheel, ‘Israel must-to-be-strong; Israel must-to-be-a-Jewish-state.’ Some of his best friends were Arabs, he said, but, in case I had not understood, he repeated ‘Israel must-to-be-strong.’
Another cabdriver, mournful, pointed to the picture of his dead wife hanging from his rear-view mirror. ‘She was a good woman,’ he said me. Then, turning his head to look at me, he asked, ‘What are you doing here? You should come here to live. You should marry me and stay – that’s what you should do.’ He’d just avoided a stalled truck by driving half on the pavement. Please watch the road, I wanted to say.
Two days later, it had been an Iranian cab driver, about fifty. ‘You’re a beautiful woman,’ he said. ‘Why are you single? You should not be single. Will you marry me and take me back with you to Wales?’
Cab drivers are always watching. They are truth tellers, messengers, Mercury figures: they know things about their new homeland, a few days after they arrive, that people born and raised there will never have an inkling of. Watching you, they know all your secrets. I hand this one my fare of fifteen shekels, and open the door. The heat blasts into the air-conditioned interior.
‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Listen, I’m a fortune teller. Tell me your name, and your birthday, and I’ll tell you your fortune.’
I pull the door shut again. ‘Why do you need my name?’ I ask.
‘For the gematria,’ he says. ‘You understand? Numérologie.’
‘OK,’ I say. I give him the Hebrew version of my name, Yasmín, and my date of birth. ‘But that’s no good,’ I add. ‘I don’t know my birthday in the Jewish calendar.’
He waves his hand dismissively. ‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘I can translate it. Just a moment...’ and he tilts his head and closes one eye. I wait, as his lips move. Then he opens his eye and turns back to me. ‘You have had some difficulty with your father?’ he asks.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Not particularly.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ignoring my answer. ‘It will be better. Everything will be better. Within the year you’ll have money. And by your birthday you’ll have love, a man.’
‘Which year?’ I say. ‘The Jewish year?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘By March.’
Up in the flat, I fill a basin and take it int
o the spare room. I sit down at the computer, with my foot in the water, to look up what should be done about a sea-urchin sting. I am not convinced by the triage nurse’s quick dismissal, but the information I find online is alarming and contradictory: urine, fresh water, salt water, surgery, the necessity of removing all spines or risking nerve damage... Panicked, I stop reading. I look at my foot. As soon as it’s out of the water, it begins to throb with pain. The sole is speckled now with black dots like seeds of a sabra fruit.
It hurts terribly, but when I submerge it again, the throbbing pain recedes, and I sit like that all afternoon. Forced to stop, completely, for the first time in days of travel and enquiry and observation, suddenly I am sick of it all. I am tired of everything: of trying to explain myself, of anxiety, of the constant duality, of being careful what I say. I am tired of struggling in my clumsy, childlike Hebrew, of making mistakes, of the brash aggressive noise of Israel, full of beautiful forbidden young men and lonely immigrant cabdrivers, and above all I am tired of my own loneliness and need.
The fortune the cabdriver has offered me is a painful one. He watched me; he recognised what I was. So did the others. And was it so evident? He asked if I had some difficulty with my father, and I said, ‘No, not particularly,’ but that was a lie. I do have some difficulty with my father. It was because of him that my mother left – I am certain of it. It was because of him that I was born in England, not Israel, because of him that I keep returning and leaving, unable to stay, unable to stay away. One moment down there on the beach, stung, startled, I thought I might break apart with love, and the next moment all light descends into doom and dark endings. Suddenly I can’t wait to leave.
As soon as I leave, I am homesick; I want to go back. It always happens, every time. This time, however, I have brought home with me stories, photographs, papers and memorial books from the kibbutz archive, and when I piece the history together, when I find out almost by accident how the kibbutz was founded, I am not sure I ever want to go back again. My grandfather, it emerges, was not what I had thought him, and nor was the kibbutz. Though its members would no doubt vigorously deny it, the kibbutz was complicit in the displacement of hundreds of people from the Jezreel Valley – not during the war; not during the lead-up to the war, but a decade and a half earlier.
Losing Israel Page 9