The Inbetween People (12 page)

The ceremony took place in the Negev desert, in southern Israel. I am sure you remember the holiday we took in the south, that winter when Avi was a very small baby (how you resented vacationing in winter when there was very little work to be done in the gardens! And yet in the end you liked it—the rainy days, the sound of the rain in the desert, the dull thud of water against the roof when the three of us sat indoors playing cards or board games. And then there were the hot afternoons, sitting on the shores of the Dead Sea, watching the approaching black clouds, and the occasional flash of lightning over the mountains of Jordan). The place where we stayed is not far from here as it happens.

It was a long journey. Avi encouraged me not to travel, it being such a long way from the kibbutz and given that I have been unwell recently, but obviously I insisted on attending. I left early this morning, brought a packed lunch so that I would not need to waste time stopping in the heartless fast food restaurants that have sprung up on the roads here, beckoning the traveller with their neon lights and promises of steaming hot coffee. This country is very different from what it was when you were here; it has succumbed to cheap Western capitalism, perhaps this was inevitable all along.

After an hour on the road, I knew I had made the right decision in taking the trip for I’d forgotten how endless the sky in the desert is. You do forget you know, I am sure you can scarcely imagine it now, and I was glad for the opportunity to see it again. As I drove I was reminded of the northern skies, the grey January evenings of my youth, and I wondered about how I’ve never gone back; I wondered about going back, or coming back, whichever it is. I’ve never managed to decide.

Immersed in these thoughts my car wove its way through the orange desert, sputtering up the steep hills, towards great staring caves carved out of mountain rock, then plunging down towards the vast desert valleys, where riverbeds empty of water wind their way through the stone, great snake-like shapes where in winter the fallen rain hopelessly searches for the sea. Avi will spend much of the next three years in this place, meet new people, friends, comrades, and I was conscious of this throughout my journey. In many ways I gave him away to the desert, for he is an adult now and must make his own way.

Please don’t be angry! Don’t tell me that you should have been here, rage at me, write me another letter where your very anger explodes from the pages, declare your contempt for me for yet again informing you of an event after it actually occurred. You see, this was Avi’s event, not mine.

I am sitting on the balcony of my hotel room. The breeze is warm, the palm trees tower above me, ghostly under the pallid light from the stars. Voices drift upwards through the night air, for even at this hour there are people floating in the sea. I shall stay here tomorrow; upon arrival I decided I would stay an extra day, for the days here are filled with life and blinding light. How alive I suddenly feel! Such a short time I spent in the desert, yet—now that I have returned—it seems that the most memorable moments of my life are filled with it: can you imagine how it was for me, a young chap from northern England, the eldest of seven children, fatherless from a relatively young age, who left school at just eleven though hungry for an education, for something to remove me from the simple poverty in which I spent my youth. Can you imagine what it was like reading books and articles about the homeland, the pioneers, the return, the kibbutz movement! How I devoured the very words. And then the Yom Kippur war, finding the courage to leave home and travel there, discovering the kibbutz and leaving it again. Try to envision what it was like after leaving it, not knowing where I was going, to what frontier I would be sent, though it scarcely mattered—for they were all unknown entities to me.

And then seeing the desert for the first time! The thrill of those days: the first time my pale virgin hands handled a gun, the power that was conveyed to me in one moment, the heat, sweating under the thick uniform, the convoy of tanks as we moved across the desert in unison, dust ballooning in our tracks. The smell of gunpowder and of the dead. The strangeness of the food, the painful diarrhoea and the tightness in the stomach on those hot desert days, followed by evenings filled with whispered plans and new resolutions under the starry desert skies.

And finding you.

How vast is the silence of the desert. How immense, the whispers of its breezes and its boundless silence, telling me that I know it, I’ve always known it. And yet how empty it is, so that all at once, on the night when I give Avi away to this place, there is sadness for things gone: your leaving, battles fought, won, lost, bodies that melted in the heat, hurriedly buried, thus remaining a part of the desert; the sand and the stone and the endless stare of the sun. There is sadness for those who died, even the enemy, for you cannot know what it is to shoot a man or to come across a fallen comrade, you cannot know anything about how quickly the body disintegrates, collapses into nothing. You cannot know the groaning, the manner in which it comes again, years later whilst asleep, the stench of wasted flesh splashed on your uniform, matted in your hair.

I do not feel inclined to sleep tonight, though my eyes are dry and red from lack of sleep and November dust. I shall wake early tomorrow, if I sleep at all, watch the dazzling desert sunrise, live again the moments I existed in the desert.

I will leave the day after tomorrow, weave my way through the desert, it’s stone caves and endless secrets, past the sea. Do you remember the Dead Sea, how you floated on the water and stared at the desert sky for hours? It has receded, this sea, in fact it recedes more each year, succumbs to the rays of the sun; the land it leaves behind stares blindly, vacantly at the sky, as if it doesn’t quite understand, as if it shall always await the return of the sea.

Many of us know what it is to wait.

Daniel

C
HAPTER
16

T
here are incidents people do not like to recall, almost impossible to speak of. It was morning, the sun already harsh against his eyes, so that Saleem raised his hand over them and watched me as he spoke. You don’t need to tell me, I said. After all, I’ve been there. I know what these places are like, especially at night. No, he said, no, let me tell you.

You’d been to this place before, most recently on a rainy day, a day so wet that the excess water ran in streams through the saturated alleys that separated the makeshift huts. The women were huddled indoors throughout that visit, in their huts; they aren’t houses, you said, they are nothing like houses. Have you been inside the huts there, you asked, yes, I said, I’ve been inside. So you know the smell there, you said, you can recognise the smell, that mixture of spices and squalor?

The children had made the best of that wet day, playing with old orange crates, pretending they were boats, using thin sticks for oars, and you smiled when you saw them for they were far from the sea, its tides and its fresh breezes. You patrolled the camp on that visit, up and down through the wet winding alleys, a cold gun in your hand.

You’ve been to this camp before, but never at night and never in this heat. For it was late spring, a time when the hot winds blow from Arabia; it was so hot, you said, it was impossible to describe.

Tell me what happened, I said, and you stared out at the lake and then you began to speak.

Your convoy travels to the camp in silence, crawling through the night with just an occasional splutter from the jeep, but they know you are coming, they know you are out there. There has been a bomb, and your orders are simple: it is known that the culprits came from that camp. You and your fellow officers have three names, your own orders are to catch one of these names. You look on them as names, and you believe these names know you are coming. There are signs: there is a dog barking in the distance, promptly silenced, there are lights that are distinguished against the black night, there are the black shadows against some of the huts as you approach, shadows that disperse into nothingness.

But your name doesn’t foresee your imminent arrival into his home, his life. The jeep comes to a halt and you creep into the night, the cold metal of the machine gun against your skin, your finger against the trigger, ready to move quickly—you are taking no chances in a place like this. They know where the hut is, some of the other soldiers, they have been there before. They know these alleys, wind in among the huts effortlessly, until it becomes clear to you that one of the huts has been singled out, marked; and in moments there are soldiers on the tin roof, and the hut is surrounded. In the time it takes to blink, strike a match, take a breath, this small hut is surrounded by armed soldiers and there is no means of escape. And you, you are one of the soldiers who are to search inside.

I remember your voice as you described that room. You began to describe it, but then it cracked, you lit a cigarette. Let’s make more coffee, you said, and you turned away from me, and when you began to speak your voice was strong again. You placed your hand against the coffeepot to test the temperature.

I know those rooms, I said. There is no need to describe that room to me.

You don’t know this room, you said.

They are all the same, I said. Whoever has served in the territories knows how those huts are inside at night. You looked at me, stirred sugar into the coffee, gazing into its dark depths. Perhaps you are right, you said. But I like to think that each home is individual, for individuals live in them, they have made them their own, despite everything. You poured the coffee, thrust a glass towards me and the rich fumes came to me in the heat.

It is the smell, the sharp smell of poverty. It gets you on the way in, and it closes against your throat, like a warm hand pressed there. You gag. Plenty of times, as a child, you thought you saw poverty, believed you had poor friends who had almost nothing. But you know in this moment, this smell, this smell that greets you on your way in, this is poverty.

You run into dead air, into the stench of sweat and nothing and hopelessness, burst through the door into their room—there are six people inside that room. They stay with you, these people, years later you remember their faces, you see them at night. There is an old woman, her face against the wall, she doesn’t turn when you enter. She merely starts keening, weeping, her voice rising in a crescendo of anger, grief and fear. There is a child, a young boy who begins to cry and crams his hand into his mouth. There are two young men, mere teenagers, still dressed in their work clothes of heavy blue cotton, as if ready to arise and run to wherever they are told to go; sharing a wool blanket, the type that scratches the skin, they barely find time to raise their heads as you enter. And there is a couple. They stare at you in confusion, squinting into the light of your torch, and you know that they were making love, that they are still entwined, struggling to break free of each other, and somehow maintain their dignity. All this you see in an instant.

Though there is dirt on your shoes, you step across the blanket, towards the man, you know he is the one you need to catch, the man who only moments ago was making love. The woman is crying now, please don’t take him she says, but you grab him by the arm, he is struggling with his trousers, and you pull him; there is a pounding on the roof from the soldiers that stand on it, you drag him towards you, he struggles against you, but he has no choice except to follow. You retreat through the room towing him after you, you stumble once and your hand rests on the sleep-warm blanket that covers the young boy, whose eyes are closed and whose face is wet with tears. He is only young this boy, but you see his future, on his face, carved there in that hopeless moment. Then you continue through the room, shoving the young man through the doorway, out into the night. The woman calls after him, but he doesn’t turn and his back remains strong beneath your grasp.

You emerge into the night air—it is hot, the wind is full of dust, but it is fresh after that room. The prisoner comes with you, he has no hope of escape, he is surrounded and he knows it. Your fellow soldiers cover you, it is possible that this young man’s comrades will try to rescue him, shoot at you and your convoy, so you do not relax for even a moment. You walk through the alleys, and presently a fog begins to descend, for it is still springtime, and the hot wind is lifting, the rain is coming. You raise your face to the sky, there are no stars now and rain clouds are approaching. You push the prisoner in front of you. Before you, a woman comes out of the doorway of her home, wiping the drops of rain that are on her doorstep with a mop—she raises her head to watch you and she is not afraid. She is the only other person on this wet street, besides soldiers, for the inhabitants of this camp now know there is a raid being carried out. She calls out to the prisoner, salutes him with her hand, and he responds; but one of the soldiers kicks him and he is quiet again.

After that you walk for a long time, into the haze of the night, away from the camp, you are waiting for a convoy to arrive and pick you up; exhaustion descends upon you, and nothing seems real, maybe because of this half rain that falls, the last rain of the season. The prisoner’s back is warm against your hand, and at that moment, perhaps due to the absolute silence around you, broken only by the sound of footsteps and the occasional muffled cough, the light that shines off the wet road, the air seems free of enmity, fighting, war, and it is almost impossible to believe that the man in front of you is your enemy.