I Am Ariel Sharon

by Yara El-Ghadban

  The unfortunates of one or another minority fold up their tents, gather up their children, and flee by any means available. In carts, by boat, even on foot. Some to Europe. Asia. The Far East. Others to the Americas. Most take the road leading to the countries of the Caucasus.

  Go! To the Black Sea.

  The Caspian.

  Beyond the mountains to the borders of the empire.

  There, where the war won’t reach you.

  The shopkeepers go to Baku and Batumi. The Zionists emigrate to Palestine. But those who wish to live, truly live, they take the road to Tiflis.

  Tiflis has it all. Arts, culture, science … It’s Jerusalem, New York, Istanbul, Tehran, Beirut, Damascus. All cities, all civilizations, all peoples, rolled into one: Ottomans, Tatars, Persians, Romanians, Byzantines, Russians …

  You think I’m exaggerating? That it’s only nostalgia talking? What do you know, Arik? Hmm? For you, there’s no history before Israel, before the farm at Kfar Malal, before the project of establishing a homeland for the Jews. And if it’s necessary to skip a few millennia to make it happen, then so what?

  He was keen on history, your father. He never missed an opportunity to tell me about Tiflis’s past. He’d have recounted it to you, too, but once we were in Palestine he avoided the subject because he didn’t want to make me sad by talking about our life back then … Those four years. Short. Too short … Our studies at the univer —

  I’m sorry! Please, forgive my tears, synulya. I’ve been holding them back for so long, I’m drowning in them. Happiness is so cruel! I was happy, so very happy in Tiflis. How can I express the joy I felt the first time I set foot on campus?

  I’m in Tiflis, the Queen City of the Caucasus, the City of All Cities! The forest seems confining to me now. How had I not suffocated in it all those years? I’m a giant! I hold the entire forest in the palm of my hand. A country in miniature. A childhood in miniature, in the snow globe I place on top of my human anatomy papers and drawings. I contemplate the wild, young girl I was in that all-enclosing forest and shake the globe to make it snow, again and again, all the while conscious of who I am presently, a woman of the world living a real life, and free for the first time!

  Oh! It’s snowing, Arik. It’s snowing.

  Hold out your hand. Catch the snowflakes.

  These are my dreams. My reasons for joy.

  All my vanished joy …

  Here’s one: a snowflake in the shape of a star. A window, a slice of memory. Do you see us in there, your father and me? Yes, that’s Shmuel, and that’s me. Two university students. Brimming with confidence, our futures seem boundless. Shmuel is studying agronomy, I’m in medicine. How beautiful am I? See me sitting on the train, my back straight, my head high, a stack of textbooks on my lap.

  It’s morning. I’m on my way to class. I feel his eyes on the back of my neck, a hot spot, a ray of sunlight burning my skin. I turn around. Our eyes meet. He’s two rows behind me on the other side of the carriage, a young man with an oval face. Black beard and moustache nicely shaped. Round glasses, tight vest. Tall. Thin. Tie a bit crooked but a good, clean shirt.

  I recognize him from a meeting organized on campus by the Jewish Students Association. He was arguing for greater political engagement rather than letting ourselves be content with community work. The Jewish students are becoming radicalized. They feel less and less Russian, choosing instead a heritage they know little about, except for religious holidays with the family and a few Yiddish expressions sprinkled in with the Russian. Hebrew? Might as well be Latin!

  Poor Shmuel. At first, his zeal doesn’t get him very far. He doesn’t understand that a person can be Jewish without being Zionist. He grew up in Belarus, as I did, but instead of climbing pine trees he ran about the streets of Brest with other Jewish children of his age, some of them the sons of Orthodox rabbis and nationalist zealots, others orphans from the ghettos taken in by the gangs. He lives all the escapades and misadventures our Yom Kippur dinner guests recounted in Galevencici.

  In his case, the stories are not simply anecdotes ending when the dinners do, but go on for entire nights. The evening begins with plans and strategies. How to hold the British to their promise of giving us Palestine. How to get the greatest number of Jews there in the shortest possible time. How to divide up the land upon arrival. How we need to revive the Hebrew language, change the names of the villages, not hire Arabs, not buy their goods. Create an exclusively Jewish economy. What is to be done if the Arab peasants refuse to leave? Or if other countries refuse to recognize the state of Israel? How do we build an army? How do we win wars? All the questions and all the solutions are on the table. The talk will go on until the sun rises over the Promised Land.

  While I wander about in my forest, he runs errands for merchants warily scraping by. And when the First World War forces his family to move to Baku, he distributes pamphlets to workers coming out of the factories. As an adolescent, he volunteers for Zionist activities when he’s not studying Hebrew and the Torah with his father. If he chose agronomy, it’s because he wants to prepare himself for his own ascension to Eretz Yisrael, convinced men’s power rises from the land, from their attachment to the soil, from the sweat of their brow. The only way to build a nation? Root oneself in the country, possess it, transform it into something unrecognizable to anyone but Jews.

  No, Arik, your father never understood young lapsed Jews who spoke only Russian and lived like Russians. Who were so assimilated they responded to his passion with a shrug of their shoulders. But, note, this didn’t stop him from marrying one of them! He fell in love with my strength. My determination. That’s what he tells me when, in Kfar Malal, the deprivation shows too clearly on my face.

  So there he is, behind me on the train, this man who treats both authorities and the student association like a bunch of slackers. He stares at me so intently that I turn away and concentrate on the seat in front of me. We exit at the same station. I head off to class. He approaches.

  — You were at the association meeting. Allow me to introduce myself: Shmuel Scheinerman.

  — Vera. Vera Schneeroff.

  — A pleasure. I often go to the meetings, but this is the first time I’ve seen you.

  — I really don’t have much time …

  I look down at my textbooks.

  — Medicine! he says.

  — Does that surprise you?

  This time I look at the book he is holding.

  — Alexandre Dumas.

  — Do you know his work?

  — Just his name. There was something by him in my father’s library.

  — Probably this one. An account of his voyage to the Caucasus in 1860. It’s a gem. The section on Tiflis is amazing. It almost makes me want to stay here.

  — You don’t live in the city?

  — Yes, for now.

  I found out only later what he meant by that. It was as if he’d already decided I’d be his life companion and he was preparing me for our coming exile, because what for him is a kind of ascension — the aliyah, the rise to the mother country — can be nothing but banishment for me.

  Shmuel is a practical man who proceeds resolutely to whatever he desires. He never hesitates to show his true colours, even if it means losing friends. He prefers clarity to tact, in love as in politics, and he’s letting me know he has no intention of spending his life in Tiflis. He’s giving me an ultimatum, even though we’ve only just met — and it’s incumbent on me to decide! He walks with me to the faculty. Doesn’t leave until he’s made a date with me.

  I have such admiration for Shmuel, for his intelligence, his convictions. He opens my eyes, takes me out of my cocoon, out of the forest still in my head. I have so many first times with him. First time making love, first night at the opera, so many long nights, so many discoveries. A walk in town with Shmuel is never just a walk. It’s a lesson in histo
ry, geography, politics. How many of the pastel balconies in the Betlami quarter leak? How many of them need only a good strong wind to be brought crashing down upon our heads? And yet, when I’m in their shadows with Shmuel, all danger disappears. All those hours spent hiking along the Narikala Ridge that looks down over Old Tiflis? Wandering along its sinuous edge. Taking a whole day to make the ten-minute walk from Meidan Square to the foot of the cliff below the fortress. Where did she go, Arik, that sparkling young woman so much in love?

  Her ashes are scattered in the streets of Tiflis.

  Her heart is buried under the rubble of the Muslim observatory — sorry, Umayyad, Shmuel corrects me — where he kissed me as we climbed to the citadel.

  Her hands caress the Persian engravings in the Academy of Arts and Letters.

  Her feet tread the open market on Chonkadze Street, and the cobblestone streets of Lagidze and Shavteli.

  Her eyes are riveted on the frescos in the Sioni Cathedral.

  Her knees, exhausted from hurrying up hilly streets in high heels.

  Hurry, Vera! He’s waiting for you in front of the Imperial Theatre. Ah! The Moorish opera house. We met there so many times. So many travels. To Andalusia. To the hell of Faust, Shmuel’s favourite opera.

  That Vera is still there. Her soul in every brick, every arabesque, every tree in the Tiflis botanical garden.

  These days, when anyone thinks of Georgia, Joseph Stalin, that beast, that gruzinskiy kham, comes to mind! The barbaric son of a barbaric country, they tell themselves. Memory is short. Tiflis existed long before that butcher. One day I’ll leave the woods and return there.

  Shmuel walks the streets of Tiflis the better to master them. Me, I give myself up to them with my eyes shut. They are my new forest. I feel myself among their trees. The war will not reach us in Tiflis, and even if it does catch us, I’ll be a doctor and able to care for the victims. We’ll spend the rest of our lives here. Man of ideas that he is, Shmuel will be satisfied dreaming of Israel. Though once our studies are completed and our family started, he’ll abandon the fantasy of realizing the aliyah to others. Besides, what would we find in Jerusalem that we don’t already have in Tiflis?

  Every time Shmuel talks about emigrating to Jerusalem, this is the question lurking at the tip of my tongue, but I never ask it. He sees only obstacles and dangers ahead. He seeks answers, solutions, the most direct route to Palestine. When the Red Army arrives in Tiflis in 1921, he’s almost happy. He’s just received his degree in agronomy. He has the means and a pretext for leaving.

  — I have two years left, Shmuel, only two years before I become a doctor.

  — It’s now or never!

  How many times have I heard that futile phrase? For weeks and weeks, I postpone the inevitable but the pull of the tide is too strong. The Red Army gains ground and Zionists like Shmuel, nationalists and religious fanatics too, are in the sights of their new masters. Any sovereigntist movement rising from the ashes of the old empire is crushed. Despite everything, I hang on to the hope that Tiflis will protect us. That on its canvas of a thousand stories, ours will have its place. Our future, too.

  Shmuel dreams of painting his own canvas. He wants to rewrite the Jewish narrative, to reshape men and women and fashion a people out of them. What hope does my ambition to finish my medical studies and live among the Georgians have in the face of his grand dream? Anyone observing us at a distance would see two sides of a single coin. He the town, me the country: two ambitious Russians made one by the strength of their characters.

  But that isn’t the case.

  When being Jewish obliges me to fight, I fight. For survival. To defend myself. But I never wanted to change the world. I just want to live, to take advantage of all life has to offer.

  Not Shmuel.

  He belongs to that race of men willing to go to war for an idea. And how seductive are such men when they set about reshaping the world with their words …

  Shmuel extols the virtues of backbreaking physical labour, considers it a virtue, a vocation. Bah! Only city rats talk about country life in such terms. He’s never had to chop wood, to work the soil, to haul bucket after bucket of water from the river to the house. He’s read a ton of books, I’ll give him that, but he’s never had to shove his arm up a cow’s birth canal to pull a calf, or to fork and spread manure all day long until you reek of it yourself. He’s never stooped for hours, pulling weeds and examining each stem, every leaf, every insect and worm. He’s never got up in the morning, his neck stiff from checking the sky for hints of the weather. He’ll learn all that in Palestine. Not before.

  In Tiflis, he finds the prospect of the challenges we’ll face after aliyah exciting. Nothing can slow down the train in his head that’s so rapidly approaching. At the time, it strikes me as funny, listening to his dreams of living on the land, of living thanks to the land. His imagining the exotic fruits he’ll grow in Yeretz Israel, the idyllic life we’ll have there. I should have set him straight, told him the truth about living in the country or on a farm, things I know so much about!

  But Shmuel speaks with the arrogance and authority of a man in love with his own knowledge. He explains agronomy to me with a confidence only he possesses: nothing I know about country life is of any value, given that we’re about to revolutionize everything! Deep down, I know as much. This man who has heart palpitations every time he climbs a steep hillside — and Tiflis had many. This man who never carries anything heavy. Whose nose has smelled nothing but ink and textbooks. Whose fingers are good only for pressing on the strings of a violin. This man who practises his Latin and French and German. Such a man will not make it as a peasant for long. But what can I tell you, Arik? What from anyone else’s mouth has the ring of fantasy, takes on an air of inevitability when it comes from Shmuel’s lips.

  He has an aura that shrugs off all restraints. He floats on his grand ideas; the more robust and audacious they are, the less absurd they seem. I want to fly, too, to be free of gravity. In his company, I discover unsuspected talents in myself. He promises me that I’ll complete my studies there, that once we have a piece of land in the co-op and our house is built, I’ll be able to enroll at the American University in Beirut and attend to my Jewish compatriots in a country that is our own.

  I believe it. Idiot that I am, I believe it.

  1918: at eighteen, I love him.

  1921: at twenty-one, I marry him.

  For the rest of my life, I carry the world on my shoulders for the sake of this love.

  He dies in 1956, at the age of sixty; the physical labour he admires so much ends up killing him. It falls to me to complete his project. Manage the farm. Combat the storms. Survive war after war. Alone. I stagger under the weight of his dream, while my own dreams are crushed beneath my feet.

  Does it surprise you, Arik, that I consider my life to be a series of broken dreams?

  Me, your mother.

  Me, the pioneer who completes the ascension of Yeretz Israel.

  Me, whose callused hands transform the sterile soil of Kfar Malal into an orchard.

  Me, who hides a club beneath her bed and keeps a rifle close at hand, in case any Arab dares approach the fence around our farm.

  Me, who fends off anyone who contests our right to live on the land in their place.

  Me, me, me! Me, who gave my youth, my strength, to this country, who nourished it — bore its child prodigy, its protector and its king!

  Does it bother you that I miss Galevencici, and Tiflis, and Russia, their countrysides, their wars, their follies? Perhaps you’d prefer still to be the little boy who spies on me through the keyhole, my head bent over the letters I write all day long? The child who, starved for affection, asks his mother why she locks herself in her room and cries over her notebooks. Why she never lost her Russian accent, never threw out her old medical manuals? Why melancholy infuses her eyes at moments of great tri
umph?

  You were born in the Promised Land, sure of your place in Israel. What do you know of deracination, of exile? How can I explain that you’re the son of a disillusioned immigrant, shipwrecked in a strange land among a hostile people who neither need nor want to be remade in his image? That the fantasy of this land means nothing to a woman who wants to be a doctor, who aspires to be rich in one of the great cities of Europe? Who finds this ancient people to which she is condemned to belong entirely banal? Who recognizes herself neither in their habits nor in their features, still less in Hebrew, the archaic language they insist on reviving?

  In the 1920s, Shmuel and I are in Kfar Malal, with a bit of land and nothing more, and surrounded by socialists. They expect everyone to think along the same lines. These same fools fled the Red Army and then, landed in Palestine, established a society of workers — an egalitarian society, with no rich and no poor, where everyone works for the common good. We have to bow to the dictates of Yvel, the Orchard Committee and the Workers’ Party, which parcels out the land, as well as their acolytes — who irritate us with their propaganda, confiscate pieces of our property on behalf of the neighbouring colony whenever it suits them, and force us to plant orange and lemon trees instead of watermelons. All this drives Shmuel mad with rage.

  He hates authority figures, hates anyone who pretends to knowledge or power or legitimacy, and especially those who think they’re in the right. Ha! Obviously — ochividno — the only authority he acknowledges is his own. The only legitimacy is his. He’s always right. Of course.

  He’s a capitalist, a conservative, and a nationalist at a time when just one party, a single vision, dominates. How do you expect them to love him? Those who wish to be included must submit to the socialists. Shmuel, well, he feels beholden to no one. But for the conviction that we have a right to the land, he has nothing in common with the other inhabitants of the moshav. He delights — and I mean delights — in contradicting everything his neighbours and their directors say, do, or decide. The Jewish Fund, the Centre for Agronomy, the Kfar Malal Council, it’s a long list.