He inhales. The smell of his desire. Odours emanating from his skin. Of perfume. A feminine fragrance left on his skin by her kisses. How he would love to let himself go, to dissolve into this woman-scent. To flee, to flee …
— Flight is impossible, Arik. All through the war I was unable to flee. If my parents called me, I hid in the barn.
Arik smiles despite himself. All those hours spent in the hayloft of his father’s barn … He too, fleeing. The horses, agitated. He would rise and tend to them, soothe them with a carrot or …
— An apple.
The smell of fruit drifts from Rita’s skin.
— Taste it, Arik.
He tastes Rita’s body. Strange flavours tingling on his tongue. Seductive. Sweet. Bitter. Tastes of victory and defeat. Love. Hatred. Joy. Grief. Tastes of anger. Vengeance. Against the whole world. Tastes of anguish. His own anguish at his failures. As a moshavnik. As a soldier. A politician.
Suddenly, he shivers. Is he still naked? He’s almost forgotten. He presses himself against Rita. His withered body. His throat raw from incessant vomiting. He’s thirsty. And so very hungry. Everything tastes good when you’re hungry. The perfumed body of this woman. Her breasts heavy with milk.
A drop of milk in his mouth. Tepid. Forbidden. Mixed with the acrid tastes of gunpowder and tear gas. How many times has he heard it said, The Arab suckles his hatred of Jews from his mother’s breast? Sentences whose only motive is to incite violence. And here he is, suckling!
What is he drinking? Hatred also? Love? Regret? Life? Death? Is she poisoning or curing him with her mother’s milk? He drinks, and the desire to devour this creature mounts within him. Her voice. Her body flowing in and out of his, settling in his, separating from his. He is here. There. Man. Woman. Israeli. Palestinian. Predator. Prey. He loves. He detests. He no longer knows where he begins and where she ends. Whether theirs are two faces or one. Which face he wears. Which one she does.
He tears himself from her breast. Traces Rita’s features with the tips of his fingers. Finds Vera’s eyes. Lily’s mouth. Gali’s hair … And somewhere, between her breasts, Gour’s heart. His cherished son buried amid the almond blossoms the little boy-poet planted there. It grows among the ruins. Spreads its perfume into Rita’s lungs. But burns in him! Burns like a wound dressed with alcohol.
He sits up, his chest on fire.
— It burns, doesn’t it? Run, run!
— Run where?
— As far as possible. We’ll follow the setting sun.
— I can’t see the sun.
— Then we’ll follow the moon.
— I can’t see the moon!
— Then we’ll follow the stars.
He runs. Wearing Rita’s body. Carried along by her lightness of being. The low murmur of her footsteps. The sand trembles. He is solid matter. Antimatter. A particle and its opposite. Something between what exists and what does not.
Is this what it is to be woman? To swim like a corpuscle in men’s veins? To search for a soul at the bottom of this huge, sick body, and inject it with perfume that burns? To chastise men for their violence without ever being able to hate them? Why then, does she not hate him? He would hate himself if he were her. Wait: he is her! Fetus body and womb. Why has she let him inhabit her body like this? Is she not afraid he’ll parasitize her? Or is she the parasite? Is she Death? Vengeance? Anguish?
— And if I were love, Arik?
He runs for hours and hours. Savours his emancipation from his own body, his obesity, his uselessness. The burns of her perfume subside.
— Breathe, Arik.
He breathes.
A light kiss on his left eyelid. A point of light. Faint, at first, it gently illuminates the darkness. A kiss on his right eyelid. Light haloes the black.
— Open your eyes, Arik.
The night brightens.
He sees. Sees! He feels the skin that envelops him. At his touch, it changes. Disintegrates. Reassembles just beyond his reach. Is she a ghost? A phantom? He scrutinizes his surroundings. The source. He’s still at the source. But has he not been running for hours? Has he been going in circles? Is there no end to this fluid mass that follows him wherever he goes?
The sound of distant galloping. The Arab boy’s mare. She is suspended in the meadow. Wild and free. Cuts through the half-light. Her skin glows like satin. Her mane licks the wind. She gallops. Unbridled. Sleek. Cresting the waves of wheat. Clearing a Milky Way.
The horse enters a village on the horizon. Is it a horizon or border? What border? No checkpoint, no soldiers. Simply a feeling. A limit. An invisible line. And if he crossed that line?
— Cross it, Arik.
A young man appears on the horizon. Arik recognizes him immediately. It’s the boy from the market. He’s grown. He joins the mare, murmurs something in her ear, rubs her neck. She’s still the same. Hasn’t aged. Is eternal. Suddenly he bows down and kisses the right hoof of the mare, then her left.
Until this moment, Arik has never realized a human could love an animal so much. He thought he alone knew how to love horses. He thought he’d passed this love on uniquely to Gour. And that this love died with Gour. But this Arab’s love preceded his! Is there nothing he possesses that wasn’t first owned by peasants?
Like two lovers, the man and horse disappear over the horizon.
— Arik, Arik …
— Leave me alone.
— They’re here.
The earth trembles. Shadows rush towards him, wearing the colours of the Israeli army. He signals to them. The soldiers reach him. No one looks him in the eye. They pass him by. Turn towards the village. Bullets fly. Ricochet off the rocks. Fill the sky with flashes of light. The soldiers lay siege to the village, awaiting further orders. Further orders are slow in coming. Silence descends. And boredom.
War is boring. A series of long waits and morbid weariness, war is.
Wait for GO! For the next push.
Wait for GO! For the next death.
Wait for GO! For the next hail of bombs.
Hold your fire for the ceasefire.
Arik has a pretty good idea about all this, he who is always more bored than anyone else.
Terrible company, boredom is, when you’re twenty and have a gun in your hand. Camped around the village, the soldiers wait. Some of them are smart enough to sleep. Others play cards. But some of them feel a tingling in their ears. On the backs of their necks. Down their arms. A terrible tingling that stirs the sauce of impatience, fear, lightness in the chest. That explodes in savage sores. That demands to be scratched. Until you draw blood.
Suddenly, one of the scouts sees a shepherd. At last, a distraction! A wink to his comrades. A burst of fire from his machine gun. The sheep run off, terrified.
The shepherd’s distress.
The soldiers’ laughter.
Then … silence. More waiting. More boredom. Is there no respite from this ennui?
Which is when the white mare appears. She crosses the field, lowers her beautiful mane. Grazes calmly. One of the soldiers leaves his unit. His skin is itching so badly he’s unable to sit still. He needs to shoot. If he doesn’t fire, the itches will kill him. He fixes the sight of his weapon on the glossy animal. Yes. Die. Die! Blood must run. He can’t stand the boredom any longer, the sores proliferating everywhere on his body.
He shoots with the frenzy of fingernails scratching at an insect bite.
He shoots like he’s scraping. Like he’s sanding. Like he’s peeling.
When the mare goes down, he breaks into insane laughter.
The man who kissed the mare rushes to her side. Other soldiers rise to their feet. Which of them will shoot the peasant? One, a little wilier than the others, finds a good perch, lies flat on his stomach, his rifle braced in his forearms.
A bullet whistles.
The man’s silhoue
tte crumbles. And all his poems crumble.
A terrible cry bursts from the village. Shots striate the sky. The soldiers, emboldened by their comrades, advance through the fields. Riddle the windows of the village houses with bullets. Crush the fruit and vegetables underfoot. Beat the villagers who rush to save the orchards. Other soldiers gather in the centre of the village and count the goats drowned in blood.
— Boredom is the most murderous of feelings. How many have been killed, Arik, to appease the pent-up idleness of fevered men?
— Shut up.
— The orders will come eventually. The soldiers will empty the village as you would a pantry before cleaning it out.
— Stop.
— Slowly. Methodically.
— No!
— The men will be herded. The subjected chained. The resisters neutralized.
— Not another word!
— The women, children, and the aged loaded into trucks.
— Are you trying to kill me?
— No, Arik. I killed once and for all.
— Leave me alone, witch!
— Don’t you wish to know who I am anymore? My story doesn’t end here.
— Where, then?
Here he is in the barn of his childhood. It’s as though he’s seeing the horses of the moshav for the first time. Their abused bodies. Worn teeth. Heads lowered, tethered to the walls of their stalls. Their defeated looks speak to him: You are no more free, nor the master of your destiny, than we are, they say. Imbecile! You’ll die in that grotesque body of yours. Your skin in tatters. Your face drained.
— No! No! No! It’s not here that everything ends!
— No … it’s here that everything begins.
A torch flies into the barn. Flames ignite in the straw. Lick the walls.
— Who threw that torch? Who?
Arik dashes into the barn. Gour will never forgive him if he lets the horses die. He opens the stalls. Unties the animals.
— Run! Run! Save yourselves!
The horses remain, stunned, as flames form an infernal circle around them. Arik whips them.
— Save yourselves, you stupid animals!
— Arik … Arik …
— No!
— It’s too late. The horses have been dead a long time.
— Why? Was it for revenge?
— For freedom.
I, too, was twenty years old when they wanted to make an assassin of me. But I killed death instead. Once. Twice. A thousand times. Fire devoured the horses in the barn and devoured me with them. May 14, 1948, it was. The day the poet in me died was the day the country was born. The day my country was born, I killed myself.
Since then, I die and am reborn. I am the woman-nightingale. The woman-voice. I criss-cross the country. Its hills. Valleys. Deserts. Lakes. Rivers. I paw and trample the earth. My only rider is the fury of women. Their dreams. Desires. Nightmares. I killed the horses and committed suicide.
— Traitor!
— Rita. I am Rita. It was the poet who gave me that name.
I am born the day of my death. A stillborn child, in a stillborn country. I dress myself up in the lives of others. I roam the Earth. Float through the sky. I gather souls. Carry them on my back and on my wings. Every time my wings catch fire, I kill myself and rise again, reborn, from my ashes. Deep lines are chiselled in my face. One for each life. One day I’ll be nothing but lines etched on the face of death. Stories erased. Destinies beaten into the cheeks of this land. On that day, I will at last be no one. Do you recognize me now?
— Who are you?
— Her.
A female soldier stands apart from her comrades. They are brutalizing the village and its inhabitants. She refrains from joining them. Turns and looks at the devastation.
— And her.
A young girl in the settlement searches for her balloon. It’s floating over an empty soccer field. Beneath the artificial turf, a mass grave.
— And her.
An adolescent woman in uniform moves towards the surveillance tower to take her shift by the wall. Today’s task: shove women and children in the back.
Voices.
— Where are the voices coming from?
— From the source. They are the echo of all the arrested beginnings. All the voices in me. Every time I die, I return to the source.
— What source?
— The source that leads to another end.
— Are you my end?
— I am the beginning and the end. Did Vera not tell you?
— Are you my mother?
— I am your mother and the woman your mother was never able to be. In one of my lives, the Arabs called me the Gazelle; the Jews called me the Eccentric. I cared for victims and their murderers. Jews and Arabs. Once, I sewed up the wounded chin of a boy who’d fallen off his donkey. His mother had travelled for kilometres rather than take him to the clinic in their moshav. Her name was Vera. Her son, Ariel.
— It’s you? Still you! How long have you been haunting me? Give me back my mother! Give me back my Gali! Give me back my Lily! Give me back my life, you stealer of lives!
— I am her, and her, and her —
Golda, the iron woman. Hannah, the woman of light. Rita. Poem. Voice. I am. Warrior. Philosopher. Woman-of-war. The one who reads books to you as you lie on your deathbed. I am all the beautiful and perverse lives birthed by this country. I am the raptor and the sweetly singing nightingale. The white mare, the black mare. To come to terms with death, I’ve mastered the spirits of men.
Say nothing more, Arik. I understand the secret language of eyes. I have solved the mystery of faces. The torment in your gaze. You. Vera. Lily. Gali. Every crease. Every altered dimple. The drooped eyelids. The lips split by wounds. The breathing suppressing rage. Don’t hide the stench, Arik. I can detect the odour of hearts. Clothe myself — like a silkworm — in the waves that saturate space. Discern the wretch hanging out with innocents.
In all my lives and deaths, I let myself be devoured. Bitten. Chewed. Sucked into the bowels of snakes. I’ve squeezed my body against my soul. Drunk the semen of toads. Nursed murderers of children. Made rapists cry out in their ecstasy. From my animal-woman body I have forged a blade to skin the monsters who think themselves men.
— I am not a monster. I am human. Enough suffering. Enough death! What good is war if there can be no taste of victory? Is it so terrible to always want more? To always be hungry? Why settle for a mouthful when we can lick the plate? Why limit ourselves to a full belly when we can gorge on everything? Why tighten our belts when we can spread out like water on a smooth surface? All my life I’ve been told to suffer, to restrain my gluttony. Why deprive myself of so much pleasure?
— Is it pleasure you want, Arik?
Suddenly, the sound of a body plunging into water. The water he thought he’d left behind long ago. Water that follows him, nibbles at his ankles. Water infested with tentacles desperate to strangle him. Water that erases him entirely whenever he tries to free himself of it. He’s tired. Tired of fighting the current. The water is warm. Irresistibly warm. He wants nothing more than to sink into its warmth.
— Let the tide carry you away, Arik. Carry away everything that clings to your skin. Everything you’ve vomited. Everything you’ve swallowed. The toxic pelts eating away at you. And if I wiped away all the layers of your body? Your memory? What would be left of you, Arik?
A hand between his legs. She spreads them apart. He resists.
She bathes the insides of his thighs. Massages the folds of surplus skin.
— What if I freed you from your pleasures? What would be left of you, Arik?
She caresses him. Rinses him. Caresses him. Rinses him. His desire increases. His pudgy toes flex. His wasted muscles stiffen under the pull of his heavy skin. His drooping breasts harde
n.
— What are you doing? What are you doing? Stop!
— Giving you the pleasure you desire.
She cups her palms between his legs. Nothing exists now except the rise and fall of her hands. The squeezing that pulls and releases. Squeezes. Pulls. Releases. Squeezes. Pulls. Releases. The tempo increases. The friction burns.
Suddenly, a warmth. His rigid member. His veins filled with blood. His whole body is covered in the caramel warmth of hot milk. Steaming milk.
Arik tries to free himself. Full lips close around his member. Coat it with saliva. Rob him of the little control he has left. Lead him towards the place where his fantasies run wild. His passions. His irruptions. To where his impulses boil. The temptation to drive a bulldozer over all who loathe him. Judge him. Block him. Even his friends! To the place where resentments and old grudges mix. Where the beast withdraws to suck marrow from the bones of its prey. The place he thought forever buried in his fat. The woman is twisting him with her lips. Without mercy. Twisting. Wringing him out. Drop after drop.
The night turns to indigo. Indigo turns purple. Purple to red. Red to orange. Orange to yellow. Yellow to white. A blinding white. A pitiless white. White on white on white!
He’s going to come. She’ll swallow all his strength. She’ll take everything. Strip him of power. Rob him of everything. Everything that is him. Everything he has built!
— Vera! Where are you! Save me, Vera!
The terror mixes with pleasure. Terror before the secret wish that has inhabited him from childhood. The wish to free himself of the beast. That someone would open him up and deliver it from him. Once and for all. But no, not yet. Not right now. There’s nothing in him but the beast. Nothing!
— Then be nothing, Arik. Is that such a bad thing? To be nothing and start afresh?
— Gali! Gali! She’s devouring me.
— Be nothing, Arik. You’ll never be hungry again.
— Lily! Get me out of here. I’m begging you. My Lily!
— Come, Arik. Come!
— Lily! Lily!
— Come!
— Lily!
His cry shreds the whiteness. Silhouettes shimmer in the light, just beyond his reach. They’re all there! Uri, Gilad, Inbal. His grandchildren. They’ve grown! What sad faces. The women are there, too: Vera, Lily, Gali. Their translucent figures.
I Am Ariel Sharon Page 11