Authors: Edeet Ravel
R
AFI PHONED EARLY ON
F
RIDAY MORNING
. “Are you coming to South Lifna?” he asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Do you want a ride? It’s lonely going down on my own. I was supposed to take Dudu but Hagari’s sick, he can’t come.”
“I was planning to go with Odelia. But maybe I’ll call her— she already has a full car.”
“I’ll pick you up at noon, then?”
“Fine.”
“Have you made any progress with Daniel?”
“I may have something.”
“I’ve been asking around, too.”
“Any luck?”
“I’m not sure. My youngest brother’s girlfriend, maybe. But I have to talk to her in person. How are you, Dana?”
“I’m restless.”
“Well, we have a long day ahead of us. What will you do until noon?”
“Volvo wants me to read to him.”
“Can’t he read himself?”
“He says his shoulders get tired.”
“What will you read?”
“I’m not sure. I think he has something by Appelfeld.”
“That should cheer you both up.”
“Actually, those books have a calming effect on us. What about you?”
“I’m taking my daughter swimming. See you at noon.”
I spent the morning reading to Volvo, as promised. He lay on his bed with his eyes shut, but I could tell he was listening to every word. He would have been happy for me to go on all day.
“That’s it, Volvo. I have to go out now,” I told him.
“Where to?”
“Just out with some friends.”
“You are a person of many mysteries.”
“I’m not, really.”
“Just one more chapter.”
“You can read the rest yourself, Volvo.”
“It’s not the same.”
“You’re not blind. You’re not paralyzed. I don’t know why I read to you.”
“I like being read to. Don’t you think I deserve some crumbs of pleasure?”
“We all deserve some crumbs of pleasure. I have to go now.”
“I’ve been thinking lately that I might be gay.”
“We’ll talk about it another time, Volvo.”
“I had a very erotic dream last night involving Alex. It took me entirely by surprise.”
“Well, Volvo, that would be great. Any change would be good for you. I have to go, though. Rafi’s coming to pick me up.”
“Does his wife know?”
“Why don’t you call and ask her?”
I went to my flat to get my camera ready. Rafi knocked on my door a few minutes before twelve. “I’m looking for Dana,” he said when I answered.
“I think I have everything.”
“You don’t have to bring water, I have a whole crate in my van. Dana, you look as if I’ve come to arrest you.”
“I shouldn’t be going down with you. I should be going with Odelia.”
“Well.”
“Yes, well.”
“I’m really happy you’re coming down with me,” he said.
“We’re just friends.”
“Friends! Don’t exaggerate … Aren’t you going to lock your door?”
“Oh …yes,” I said vaguely, and looked for my house key in my knapsack. I often left my door unlocked. “I can’t find the key. Hold on.”
I went back inside, took a spare key from a glass bowl in the kitchen, and locked my door.
I followed Rafi to his van, climbed up to the passenger seat. “I spoke to Coby yesterday,” I told him as we set out. “I’ve seen him around, but we never talked before. But there was a mouse under Jacky’s sink, five mice actually, and Coby sent the guard, Marik, to get the mice. Marik once saw me naked by accident, ages ago, and he’s still embarrassed every time he sees me. After he got rid of the mice I had dinner with Coby and he said he has a cousin in Intelligence, he’s going to ask him about Daniel.”
“How did the guard see you naked? Through the window?”
“No, on the street. The air from the sidewalk grate blew my dress up. As luck would have it, that was the one time in my life I wasn’t wearing underwear.”
Rafi burst out laughing. “You’re full of surprises, Dana.”
“Maybe Coby’s cousin is the one.”
“That would be great, Dana. Seat belt, please.”
“But Coby said he isn’t optimistic.”
“Why?”
“He says if the army has a reason for not telling me where Daniel is, his cousin will have the same reason. He thinks Daniel is a spy. What a laugh.”
“That really does seem unlikely. Who could he spy on? He doesn’t speak a word of Arabic, and instead of blending in, he stands out. Besides, I don’t think we have a lot of spies these days. Espionage is mostly technological now.”
“I feel I’m getting closer. I feel I’m really getting close, after all these years. I just have to find the right person … Where are we meeting, by the way?”
“The gas station. We’re going in through the southern end of Lifna.”
“Too bad we’re going on Friday instead of Saturday. All the fanatic settlers will be out.”
“The rabbis really wanted to come. There’s supposed to be a joint prayer session. So we’re compromising by starting late, to accommodate people who work Friday morning.”
“I’d like to photograph that, the praying. I have some very good photos of the cave-dwellers from the summer.”
“I’d like to see your photographs. Where do you keep them?”
“In shoe boxes, under the bed.”
“Are they mostly color or black-and-white?”
“Depends. I’m not really that good.”
“I think you are.”
“How would you know?”
“I have your book.”
He was referring to
Seaside
, the book of photographs Beatrice had produced. She had chosen my beach photos for
the collection: our families on the beach, Palestinian families on the Coastal Strip beach, back in the days when there were fewer curfews and it seemed there might even be peace. She’d chosen her favorite photograph for the cover: a father with two girls, one in each arm, walking into the sea, the water already up to his knees. The faces of the two girls were turned toward the camera, tiny faces just above their father’s shoulders, one under a white sun bonnet, both girls smiling blissfully, as if to say,
Can anything be more perfect than this?
The father can only be seen from the back, a streak of dark fuzz running down his spine. Is he a Palestinian father or one of our fathers? I won’t tell.
Rafi said, “I didn’t know Palestinians swam with their clothes on. Your book made me realize that I don’t know the most basic things about them.”
“Some wear bathing suits.”
“Hard to believe there was a time you could go to the strip just like that, and take pictures at the beach,” Rafi said, shaking his head.
“I had so much fun. You can’t imagine how great it was. We got along really well—they were always inviting me to come home with them. I played with the kids, we built sand castles. People were in a good mood back then.”
“How did you communicate?”
“That was never a problem. Most of the men knew Hebrew, and some of the women spoke a little English. And there’s always sign language to fall back on. I should learn Arabic, but it’s such a hard language.”
“If you had it in school from first grade you wouldn’t find it hard.”
“Yes,” I said, “compulsory Arabic from first grade. Then we’ll know the Messiah has arrived.”
“A few years ago we actually had the illusion that things were
getting better. There was talk of making Arabic compulsory, and we really believed it might happen.”
“I want a child,” I said, remembering the little bcobys I had held at the beach. “You’re lucky you have a daughter.”
“I can give you a child if you want, Dana. My wife wouldn’t object.”
“Two wives!”
“No, one wife. But I’d help you out as much as I could.”
“I feel I’m going to find Daniel soon. I want his child. And I can’t believe Graciela wouldn’t mind, no matter what she says. She’d mind a lot. Any woman would.”
There was an uncomfortable silence in the car. We’d brought up the forbidden topic. “Just an altruistic offer,” Rafi joked, trying to break the tension.
“I’ll keep it in mind. Free sperm. You’re right, you don’t get that kind of offer every day.”
But we were still embarrassed. I wanted to reach out and touch his hand, but I looked out of the window instead.
At least eighty cars were already parked at the gas station near the border of the South Lifna Hills. People were standing in small groups and talking, or buying coffee and snacks at the little convenience store, or using the washroom. The gas station was on an isolated strip of road; you couldn’t see any towns or cities in the distance, only neat, alternating bands of green and taupe, and beyond them the indistinct mauve dunes of the desert. Near the station, scattered randomly as though abandoned or misplaced, were the usual mystifying objects, the exact nature of which no one could guess: some sort of steel tower; a cement cylinder; equipment and machines that appeared to have been designed for complicated engineering feats. I took a photograph of these unidentified bits of civilization; they captured the improvised feeling we all carried within us. We didn’t know where we were going and we wondered
how we’d lasted this long on such flimsy foundations and muddled efforts. The myths we grew up on tried to compensate us, but myths were slippery by nature. In fact we were lost, walking on air, inside air, falling.
The organizers handed out tape and flyers in three languages: messages of peace printed in bold letters on white sheets of paper. We taped them to our cars and then we taped numbers on our fenders. Rafi’s van was tenth. Then the organizers gave instructions, explained the mission. I didn’t listen carefully. The instructions didn’t vary much from activity to activity: no violence, no getting into arguments with army or police or anyone else we encountered. All interactions would be handled by trained negotiators. A lawyer spoke to the crowd; the cave dwellers’ hearing had been postponed, which meant their eviction was on hold. It was good news, she said, relatively speaking.
I wandered away from the gathering and caught a glimpse of Ella leaning against her blue car and staring out into the distance. She was holding a cup of coffee in one hand and tentatively touching her cropped hair with the other. The sign taped to her car window read:
Everyone has a right to a home.
I took a photograph of her with my zoom lens; she looked as homeless as any cave dweller.
We didn’t leave until two o’clock because one of the lawyers who was involved in the South Lifna trials had been held up in court; he’d been trying to stop the deportation of foreign activists. When he finally arrived, we returned to our cars and headed out across the invisible border between our country and the occupied territories. The landscape changed at once: green was replaced by gray and pale brown; there was no irrigation here. The hills on both sides of the road rose and fell gently, as in a child’s drawing of mountains. As we neared South Lifna, we saw distant figures watching our procession from the mountains, tiny people against the pearl blue afternoon sky. They were not allowed on the road; this was a
restricted highway, built for the settlers, and it was off-limits to Palestinians. Despite the distance between us, we felt their gratitude; you could tell they were happy we’d come from the way they stood there, their bodies very still, as if they were afraid to break the spell of good luck that had brought us here.
The army had been trying for years to get rid of the cave dwellers. They didn’t like the idea of Palestinians scattered throughout the hills, three or four families on one hill, five on another. You couldn’t enclose them, it was hard to control their movements. And the government wanted the land.
The army tried expelling them: they put them on trucks, blocked wells, destroyed tents. Possibly they found it difficult to understand why anyone would want to live in caves and tents, in such difficult conditions. And at first I wondered, too, when I spent the night in one of the caves the previous summer, in an effort to stop the latest evictions. These were large natural caves, dark mouths on the sides of the hills. I slept just outside the cave, because I couldn’t bear the damp and misery inside. I had never seen such poverty up close. I quickly understood that the cave dwellers needed clothes and medical care and better food and more utensils and plastic sheets for the floor of their caves and waterproof mattresses and toys, but they loved their homes, and I could see why. The hills were like huge friendly turtles, turtles you could love as intensely as you loved any human. The cave dwellers had been on these hills for over one hundred years. In court their lawyers explained that the caves were their homes, and they had nowhere to go. The nearby town, Lifna, had no place for them and they didn’t fit in there: they were shepherds and farmers.
Apart from their difficulties with the army, the cave dwellers were continually assaulted by the settlers. One cave dweller had already been killed in a dispute over a stolen sheep.
Our caravan of cars was stopped twice by the army, but for less than an hour each time. But three kilometers before the path that would take us to the cave dwellers, the army stopped us again, and this time they said we would have to turn back. The officer in charge had a friendly, worried face and he peered at us apologetically through his round metal-rimmed glasses. He wanted to let us through, he said, but the settlers from Elisha were blocking the road. “They’ve driven their cars onto the road, and they won’t let you through. You’ll have to go back. I don’t want a mess here.”
We could see the settlement of Elisha in the distance, eighty or ninety suburban houses with triangular burgundy roofs arranged in stiff clusters on a hilltop. The houses looked out of place in this ancient landscape, like small Monopoly pieces; houses without a past, without a future, suspended in a fantasy world their inhabitants claimed was God’s. Volvo’s family lived in a settlement like this one.
“We’re not going back, we have permits, we have blankets to deliver,” the main organizer said. He was a young man with floppy black hair. Beatrice knew him well; he taught in her department.
“All right, I’ll see what I can do,” the officer in charge said. “Maybe we can get tow trucks to tow their cars away.”
We wandered along the road and waited. The rabbis who had come to pray with the Palestinians began to worry; they had to be home before sunset.