I was born the day of my death. A tiny blue cadaver in the arms of Houriyya, the midwife.
— Houriyya is an Arabic name.
— Yes, it’s an Arabic name.
— Are you Arabic?
— What about you, Arik? Are you Jewish?
— Stupid question!
— What does it mean to be Jewish?
— To suffer.
— Have you suffered?
— I’m suffering now!
— And what does it mean to be an Arab in this country?
— I don’t know what it means to be an Arab! What does it mean to be on the losing side? Let them tell you how they feel in this country.
Houriyya felt life. In her hands, babies who should never be alive are born. Me, I fell out of my mother’s womb, dead. Everyone but Houriyya gave up on me. Hourriya massaged my belly. Whispered to me in Arabic. Pinched my bottom. Kissed my blue lips. Suddenly, a nightingale crashed against the window. I opened my mouth and screamed.
— She’s alive! My grandmother cried.
Houriyya went outside without saying a word. She picked up the dead bird lying in the grass and put it in my cradle.
— Little nightingale. You’ll soar high, very high, until the day when you fall again. Other deaths will come. Other lives, too. You will follow the river to its source, traverse plains, climb hills, chant your name like a call to exiles. You will be. Bird. Horse. Poem. Death will never again leave you. You are the stillborn child of a stillborn land.
My mother breaks into tears. My father falls on his knees and prays. My grandmother grabs me and chases the midwife from the house. So I might live, Houriyya has exhausted her every miracle. Since her death, I wander among the dead. I wear all the faces. The faces of those this country kills and rears. One day, I too will use up all the miracles. Only Houriyya will recognize me. I am Rita. The woman-voice. The woman-nightingale. The stillborn child of a stillborn land.
— Stop saying those words! Every birth is violent. For this country to be born, others have to die.
— So come.
— Where are you taking me?
— To my birth. To my violence.
Don’t frown, Arik. Like you, I come of age in a house of settlers. Like you, my brothers work in the fields and the orchards, and I with the cattle and the goats. Like you, they put a knife in my hand whenever we go to the market, where Arabs and Jews intermingle. Like you, I believe olive trees grow on our side of the fence. But then one day I come across olive trees moving along the dusty road that runs down our portion of the moshav. A forest of olive trees, hovering above the ground. Their roots like a thousand feet — a thousand long, thread-like toes. They swarm in unison, barely touching the soil. A corps de ballet in synchronicity. Branches waving in the air. Where are they going? There, where the ballerinas will be in shadow? On the stage behind the curtain? In the dark? The olive trees hover. Their felty leaves twirl and pepper the road. They mix in with the villagers on the military trucks. Shoes and shawls are strewn along the road with the leaves and crushed olives. Time passes. The uprooted trees disappear, and then —
— It appears.
— What appears, Arik?
— The forest. Right at the edge of our moshav. A forest of olive trees. As if it had always been there. Ha!
— Why are you laughing?
— Why not? Trees that move by themselves? That can be torn out of the ground without dying? That travel from one end of the country to the other? It’s ingenious! These uprooted olive trees taught me something critical: anything can be moved, even trees. If anything can move, everything is possible. I could change the axis of the Earth if I wanted to!
— Then you could make the olive trees lie, if you wanted to.
— What do you know about it? Everything in this country moves. Men. Women. Villages. Roads. Houses. Borders. Names. Even the centuries. Savvy is the man who can predict the direction of the wind. Me, I’ve learned how to do so. I’ve learned how to move borders. Reorient the roads. Have them go where I tell them to go. Until no highway, no exit, no shortcut does not lead to Israel. East. West. North. South. Gaze skyward. Plunge into the heart of the country. Everything belongs to me. History and the ruins of history dance to my beat!
Everything moves. And nothing moves. Not life. Not death. Those who are born are already dead. Those who die have never been alive. Everything is moving, disappearing.
So we dig. We sink our shovels into the flesh of ancient villages. We strip temples and empty mines. Dump the pottery shards into a museum somewhere. Dig ourselves a history. Excavate a great black hole, a junk-room where we place our lies. Let them ferment. Make miracles of them. Get drunk on miracles. Spew up miracles to make a country of miracles.
Everything ends as soon as it begins. Everything dies the moment it’s born. Even the simplest things. Waking up in the morning. Going to market. Working the land. Giving birth to a boy or a girl. Everything is suddenly strange.
Par for the course are all the strange happenings called accidents of circumstance. A temporary interruption. A detour. A bump in the road. Water. Stones. Plains. Desert. Even anemones! Which ones are blessed and which are cursed? Nothing is simply water, stone, a plain, a desert, a flower, in this country of the miraculous.
— Only the naive believe in miracles. Me, I see what I have to see. I don’t shift my gaze. It takes a clear-sighted seer to guide this gang of the blind. When they want miracles, I create some. With my fat fingers, I knit and unravel this country till it fits us like a glove — and for my trouble, my courage, they hate me. And you. You blind me. Paralyze me. Reduce me to a diseased and fetid corpse. Give them back! Give me back my eyes as you did my voice!
— I don’t have them, Arik.
— Give me back my body!
— I don’t have that, either.
— Give me back my life!
— I can’t return something to you that was never yours. Life started before you and will end long after you do.
He hears water splashing. A damp silhouette brushes against him. Rita takes his hand in hers and places it on her breast.
— What are you doing?
Frightened, Arik withdraws his hand. Rita doesn’t let it go.
— Touch me. I’m lending you my body.
He lightly grazes her moist body. Her feminine curves. Her face.
— Go on, inscribe my features in your memory. Provide me a face in the darkness. I’ll be your mirror. Do you recognize me, Arik?
— No.
— Who were you before all the miracles? Who would we be were we ordinary people living in an ordinary country with other ordinary people — if we said to hell with miracles, to hell with promises? If we took pleasure in finding the same tree at the same crossroads, year after year?
Ordinary. The word sounds false in Arik’s mouth. His face lights up. The word squirms on his tongue like a worm. Life drains from his face. Is this what it means to die? To have memory bleed out until nothing is left of him? Has he ever been ordinary?
The worm chews a hole in a drawer to which he doesn’t have the key. Must he die in order to find that key? He thinks of all the Palestinians who have languished in camps at the outskirts of the country for the past seventy years. Of the pathetic, rusted keys of their houses handed down from generation to generation. Unremarkable keys that nevertheless make a mockery of all his maps, roads, settlements. But not him. No. He’s never been ordinary. The word is not a part of his lexicon.
He’s a Jew, a Zionist, an Israeli. Child of a persecuted people. A Chosen People. A child of exile. Of ascension. Exceptional. The heir of an exceptional history.
Jew. Zionist. Israeli. Suffering is his cornerstone. He grew up naming the martyrs of the First Crusade from the Memorbuchen, the “memory books” of his father’s library. The massacres of the first millennium fade
into those of the second. The pogroms of the Russian Empire are inserted like so many other digressions in the accounts of the Yizker bukh and other remembrances of the Second World War.
Devastated lives.
The ruined dream of a Yiddish homeland.
Revived.
Lost again.
Revived again.
The names of martyrs recited for a thousand years.
Ritual after ritual.
Commemoration after commemoration.
Tragedy upon tragedy.
Jew. Zionist. Israeli. His own life is a tragedy. A scroll of the names of victims of bygone times and places uncoiling in no particular order. No time. No place. Its binding logic the cult of suffering. Unique, incomparable, exceptional suffering.
Jew. Zionist. Israeli. Destined to live apart from other peoples. Apart, even, from the rest of the Jews in the world. Most of all, those who want no part of the indivisible trinity, of being Jew, Zionist, Israeli. Who neither claim nor condemn Israel. Who aspire to no kind of liberation. Neither for themselves, nor the Palestinians. Sybarites who know nothing of suffering. Neither their own, nor that of the Palestinians. Who observe the suffering from a distance. Despair of it without lifting a halting finger.
Arik, at least, knows where the challenges lie. He learned to suffer even before confronting his own pain. Fought in the name of that suffering. History is the nail pricking him in the ass whenever he dares to sit down and enjoy a little happiness. How can he be ordinary when suffering is tattooed on his flesh?
In the beginning, he did not understand this. Why remain cautious and sad when he’s happy? Why be wary of success? Why live as if defeat — or, worse, complacency — is always on the horizon? Why should every war won be nothing but a time bomb, an existential threat? As though each Israeli anniversary brings the country one year closer to its disappearance? Why, every Passover, did his parents and children say, do they say now, will they always say, “Next year in Jerusalem,” when they’ve been eating, fucking, shitting, and sleeping in Jerusalem since 1967? Why, his entire life, since the day he was put on this land, for the duration of his growing up on this land, and until, no doubt, he dies on this land — if this woman ever does let him die — has he always been, is now, and forever will be, an exile?
He can’t fathom it. But then his naivety gives way to cognition, his cognition to disenchantment, the disenchantment to cynicism, his cynicism to consciousness of the tarnished obligations of power. What had always seemed incomprehensible to him suddenly makes sense: without suffering, he would no longer know what it is to be a Jew, a Zionist, an Israeli.
His life. The arrival of his parents. His struggles. His battles. All the ignoble acts he ever committed — and he knows it, that certain of his acts have been ignoble — were undertaken in pursuit of the affirmation and renewal of this suffering. How to conceive of oneself as a Jew, a Zionist, an Israeli, otherwise? To divvy up the indivisible trinity of suffering, why would he do that when it carries so much weight?
Ordinary? No! He isn’t, could never be, ordinary!
Now Palestinians are ordinary. They live simply. Take life as it comes. Live in the umbrage of their delights. Their sorrows. Their gains. Their losses. Rooted, nothing and no one will ever tear them from the soil. The land acknowledges them, as they acknowledge the land. The land is always faithful to them.
Settlers. Pilgrims. Crusaders. They come. They go. Like the seasons. Temples are razed. Realms crumble. Caliphates. Even gods. But the peasants are there. Wake up every morning. Welcome the dawn. Work the land. Kiss the hooves of their horses before riding to the market. The merchants too, arriving at the souk in Old Jerusalem before the crowds do, each one sweeping the portion of the alley in front of their shop. Welcoming the villagers arriving for bread and provisions.
Someone must see to the daily business of living while believers prostrate themselves as they follow in the footsteps of Christ, or weep at the Western Wall. As tourists live out their fantasies of the Holy Land and the Orient. Someone needs to pick up after the enlightened. Water the orchards after the departure of the zealots, kings, and warriors.
The Palestinians remain, their presence as dependable as the beating of their hearts. A stubbornly ordinary people in a land infested with biblical legend. With miracles. With myths conjured behind the walls of castles a million miles away. Dreams harvested in the ghettos of foreign cities.
They’d come up against megalomaniac conquerors drunk on glory long before the Nakbah — because for Palestinians, the birth of Israel was well and truly a catastrophe — megalomaniacs easily dislodged by subsequent ones, their mania rapidly deflated by peasant life and its serene rhythms unaffected by the intemperate moods of emperors. But never had they faced such strength, omnipotence, tenacity. The invincibility of suffering. Its power of convocation. Invocation. Revocation. Its capacity to crush all resistance, from within or from without.
Its nimbleness.
A suffering that folds and unfolds time and place effortlessly. That manipulates the layers of history like an accordion. Draws sorrow from a bottomless well and dresses it in conviction.
And they were swept away, these stubborn, ordinary Palestinians.
Like so much dust on the surface of a sacred object.
— I’ve never been ordinary. I will never be ordinary. To be ordinary is a death sentence in this country.
— Let us die, then. Why not? Let’s be ordinary together. We often are.
When I was young, I was beautiful. Ordinary. The earth danced under my feet when I skipped in the field. Horses neighed excitedly, their ears pricked up so they might hear my voice and fly in the wind.
— I loved horses too …
— I know that.
Rita pulls away from him. She gathers water in the palm of her hand and lets it run gently over Arik’s white hair, massages his scalp. Repeats the gesture. On his face. His shoulders. His torso. Every limb.
— Come, Arik.
— Where to?
— Where it’s still possible to be ordinary.
— Where’s that?
— In the marketplace. Come quickly! The villagers are arriving with their horses. How do Arabians trot, Arik?
— As if they were the masters and the villagers their servants. Oh, I envy them …
— Who? The villagers or the horses.
— Both.
— Turn around. To the left. In that quiet corner of the market, do you see him?
— Who?
— A boy, standing apart while the other urchins clown around in front of the girls. He only has eyes for his mare.
— There’s no boy.
— He’s right there.
— I see nothing! You blinded me. Have you forgotten?
— Oh, Arik! There are other ways of seeing. Be strong. Look inside yourself.
An image rises up in him. The boy, obviously an Arab peasant boy, whispers softly to the mare. The white mare tilts her ears towards the boy’s breathing. Heaves a guttural sigh. It’s familiar, this scene. His father, Shmuel, is at the market. So is he. They would have arrived together on their cart to buy provisions. Every week, the trip to the market was both exciting and terrifying. The 1930s, the Arab Revolt in full fury. The rebellion against the British, masters at the time, has degenerated into a General Strike. Outlaws like Abu Jilda, heroes to the peasants, are quickly executed by the Brits, soon to be replaced by other bandits risen from the revolutionary ranks: Izz ad-Din al-Qassam and his brigades. Al-Qassam! When he was a child, the name kept him from sleeping. Worse, the name would follow him throughout his life, stamped as it was on homemade rockets launched from the shantytowns and camps of Gaza. Sixty-nine years later, the name haunts him still.
Suddenly the boy turns towards Arik. You’d have thought the mare had slipped a word in the boy’s ear about the stranger watchin
g them. Has the boy noticed him? Are they laughing at him, the boy and his mare, sneering at his nakedness? His filth?
— Calm down, Arik. It’s me they’re looking at. The Jewish girl with golden tresses.
— What game are you playing at? This is not my story. Not my story!
— It’s an alternative one. Did you not ask me who I was? It’s another story of yours. Don’t you want to know if there’s another you breathing under this mass of flesh?
Rita scrubs the mounds and fissures of Arik’s skin with a rough stone. She bathes him. The dirt on him dissolves and, with it, his shame. Rita’s attentions become more insistent. Waves of good feeling shake him to his teeth.
— Listen, Arik. What do you hear?
He listens like he’s never listened before. Behind the sounds of the marketplace he hears the sizzling of black, red, and yellow rocks under the sun’s rays. The rustling of palm trees. The gurgling of oryx drinking at the edge of the spring. Farther off, from a grotto at the end of the desert, he hears Lily’s voice mingling with the dewdrops. Forming stalactites. And even farther beyond, an echo behind the hills. The rounded sound of Arabic vowels linked like so many pearls. A necklace of words. A poem.
His breathing takes on the rhythm of Rita’s caresses. His heart pounds behind his eyes, or is it the boy’s Arab heart he hears?
— He has the gift of words.
— Who?
— The boy. He’s reciting Arabic poems I don’t understand. For two years, we were in love. At the marketplace, he would bring me fruit from his father’s farm. He told me my name is the same in Arabic and Hebrew. That we shared the same heaven. Counted the same fluffy clouds, each from our own window. At night I’d wander about his village. We slept on straw, with his mare. In a little spot hidden away. No one existed but us and the horse. Then war broke out. Childhood deserted us. The boy no longer came to the marketplace. I no longer went to his village. No more horse between us. Only distance, and a million stories and poems.
— Where is he?
— He’s here, in me. An almond blossom between my lungs. Smell it. Can you smell it, Arik?
I Am Ariel Sharon Page 10