Maiden Voyages

by Mary Morris

  Chairs were drawn up to the tables, and we sat down to eat pieces of Easter cake; as we ate, we chose eggs and dueled with our neighbors in a tapping game to see which shell was the strongest. Tom sat discussing Paul Robeson with a short musician with a droll winged mustache, while I played the tapping game with a young man with big glistening dark eyes and perspiring hands. Apropos of nothing, he remarked to me, “My grandfather, you know, spoke French.”

  “Why was that?” I asked. “Was he French?”

  “No,” he said, picking up a piece of shattered eggshell with the end of his moist white finger, and then, leaning earnestly toward me: “But he was, well, an officer … ah … in the Guards … before the Revolution, if you know what I mean …”

  “Are you trying to hint that you have noble blood?” I asked sharply, and the frigid hauteur of my tone shocked me as much as it did the young man, who at once pretended that he had to reach for another Easter egg, and began talking briskly with the woman on his left. Far away, at the other end of the table, I heard someone say, “I disagree. It’s literary mitosis!”

  Then came that strange hour in a sleepless night when everything seems distorted; lights are too bright; darkness, unfathomable; conversations seem to stretch out into infinity, and the barrier between dream and observation seems to have dissolved. The hour itself seemed to last only for a minute, and suddenly it was five o’clock, the candles were drowning in pools of wax on the chaotic table, and the big square windows at the end of the room were gleaming with a pale light. From the divan in the corner came a medley of snores, and I saw the skew-eyed painter sleeping among other supine figures. My annoyance at the idiocy of the party had suddenly evaporated, and as I looked at the few people left—Lidia, our hostess, and a beautiful red-haired writer sitting whispering to each other on one hard chair, their arms around each other’s necks; the short musician and a large group of others still arguing about literature, their elbows among the eggshells and empty bottles at one end of the table—I found that their voices and faces had softened, that the advent of the dawn had given a measure of dignity and humility and happiness to their manner as the Easter service had to the crowd at the church. Some kind of passion—for company, for art, for a good time—had kept them vigiliant tonight as it had other nights, and any vigil makes dawn seem a blessing. Our hostess stretched, ran her fingers through her thick hair, then rose and opened the curtains to a watery sky the bluish color of skim milk. “See, friends, it’s the dawn of a holy day,” she said in her deep, clever voice. “Khristos Voskres!”

  I repeated the answer with the others.

  ROBIN MORGAN

  (1941–)

  An editor at MS. magazine, poet Robin Morgan has devoted her writing life to feminist causes. In the mid-seventies she traveled the country giving poetry readings and guest lectures on women’s rights. Among her volumes of poems are The Personal Chronicles of a Feminist, The New Women, and Sisterhood Is Powerful. Part of Morgans territory is psychological—the barriers within that frustrate the modern woman travelers movement through the world. This short piece puts into sharp focus the fears of the unknown that afflict women traveling on foreign terrain, far from the safety of home and family. Morgan lives in New York City.

  from THE DEMON LOVER

  Look closely at her.

  She crosses a city street, juggling her briefcase and her sack of groceries. Or she walks down a dirt road, balancing a basket on her head. Or she hurries toward her locked car, pulling a small child along with her. Or she trudges home from the fields, the baby strapped to her back.

  Suddenly there are footsteps behind her. Heavy, rapid. A man’s footsteps. She knows this immediately, just as she knows that she must not look around. She quickens her pace in time to the quickening of her pulse. She is afraid. He could be a rapist. He could be a soldier, a harasser, a robber, a killer. He could be none of these. He could be a man in a hurry. He could be a man merely walking at his normal pace. But she fears him. She fears him because he is a man. She has reason to fear.

  She does not feel the same way—on city street or dirt road, in parking lot or field—if she hears a woman’s footsteps behind her.

  It is the footstep of a man she fears. This moment she shares with every human being who is female.

  This is the democratization of fear.

  HELEN WINTERNITZ

  (1951–)

  An author of two books, American Helen Winternitz takes more than the typical journalist’s interest in a good story. For East Along the Equator, a book about travelling 2,000 miles up the Congo, she learned Lingala. She learned Amharic in Ethiopia, and Swahili in Eastern Africa. For her second book, Season of Stones, she lived for two years in Nahalin, a small Palestinian village of shepherds and peasant farmers near Bethlehem on the West Bank, where she survived during the Intifada by speaking Arabic. Winternitz, with Timothy M. Phelps, is the author of Capitol Games: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and the Story of a Supreme Court Nomination. She lives in Washington, D.C.

  from SEASON OF STONES

  The weeks wore on, and little changed except that intermittent rains were falling, rains that soaked into the dirt and turned it dark. Occasionally the clouds parted and the sun warmed the earth. It was on just such a sunny day that I returned to the village from Jerusalem, carrying with me medicines and books for some of my friends. I tried driving in first from Kilo Sabatash but found the army had been hard at work refurbishing the roadblock, closing off the shabab detour permanently by bulldozing a wide pile of dirt up against the multi-ton rocks, the refrigerator shell and the upturned car chassis, which were already in place.

  As I was turning back, I paused for a few minutes to watch a shepherd herding his long-haired goats in a rocky field below the new Neve Daniel houses. It was a warm afternoon made strangely moody by half-white, half-blue clouds lingering in the autumnal sky. The branches of the leafless fig trees stood out gray against the sky.

  I had noticed soldiers everywhere on the way out. It was a Palestinian strike day, to protest the demolition of houses in the occupied territories. Because of the strike, most West Bankers were not working in Israel but were at home waiting for trouble to come along. Aware that more rocks were thrown on strike days, I did not take the next most obvious route back to the village. I avoided the villages of Husan and El Khader, where the Palestinians did not know me well, as they did in Nahalin, and drove around past the settlements to Nahalin’s south. At Kfar Etzion, I was struck by the anomaly of an old white-bearded Palestinian wearing a white headcloth and riding a white donkey along the newly paved black road that runs between the kibbutz and the neighboring religious settlement. I was aware of details that afternoon, or I thought I was.

  At the turn into the valley by Abu al-Koroun, I met a woman I knew. I had a chat with her and admired the embroidery of her dress. All was auspicious. I continued down the road and looked for, but could not see, the flag on the minaret of the mosque. Was it down? I wondered. Had the lack of wind let it flop out of sight? But I did notice a smaller flag on a rough pole stuck in a rock wall perpendicular to the road about halfway down from Abu al-Koroun. Near the flag I came to a line of rocks across the road. I stopped and, without thinking, put the car in neutral and got out to move a few of the rocks so that I could go on to the village. I had my SEHAFI sign on the windshield and the red kefiyeh* across the dashboard. I was thinking that I had nothing to worry about since most people in the village would recognize me. Besides books for Sena, I was bringing rheumatism medicine for Halima, the Najajra grandmother with whom I had worked in the olives. The books and medicines were on the passenger seat.

  Without warning, rocks began hitting the car, the road and all around me. Hard. I was being ambushed. I twirled around and rushed for the car. More rocks came but they missed me somehow. I leapt into the driver’s seat and reversed crazily down the narrow, windy road under a further hail of rocks. Coming out from behind a grove of olives on the right and from behind the boulders on
the left were mulethamin, translated as “wrapped ones,” shabab with their faces covered in black-checkered kefiyehs so that only the slits of their eyes were showing. They chased me and stopped only when it was obvious I had outdistanced them.

  Once out of range, I stopped. I was trembling, shocked by the attack and by the realization that these were Nahalinis, shabab from Nahalin, behind the kefiyehs. This was the village where I had spent so many days and nights, where I had tried again and again to prove that I was not an enemy, that my aim was to learn about the village, not to injure it. I couldn’t tell who had ambushed me, and I didn’t know why they had done it. I only knew that if I kept retreating now, these mulethamin would be convinced that I was frightened. And I was, but I couldn’t show my fear, or I might not get back into the village. I also believed that my attackers would soften when they realized I was returning to Nahalin with no ill intent.

  I rolled down the car window and waved the red kefiyeh. I shouted that I was a journalist. Some of the mulethamin walked toward me a little and then beckoned, making big welcoming motions with their arms, that I should come forward. I did, pulling back abreast of several of them. I said again that I was a journalist, and I motioned to the books and boxes of pills, saying I was bringing medicine to an old woman.

  Someone grabbed my kefiyeh, and rocks came battering down on the car. The windshield was hit but it didn’t break. The mulethamin were attacking from the olive trees, and I went again into a maniacal highspeed reverse until I was once more out of range. The masked Palestinians stood on the road and glared at me. I sat in the car, more frightened than I had been since I first set foot on the West Bank. I wasn’t going to drive forward into the same trap again, but I also wasn’t going to retreat. I was in a quandary.

  Then, as if in answer to my dilemma, three villagers came walking up behind me from the direction of Abu al-Koroun. I didn’t recognize the trio of men, but they knew me by sight, as many villagers did. They tried to calm me, telling me not to be afraid. I was still trembling; my left leg was shaking on the clutch pedal. Two of the villagers stayed with me in the car, and the other went and talked to the mulethamin. He returned with the kefiyeh, and all three got into the car. We drove to the ambush point, got out and moved the rocks, drove past the ambush point, got out and carefully replaced the stones. The mulethamin had blended into the landscape. I asked my newfound benefactors who my attackers were, but they didn’t tell me.

  “I told the mulethamin,” one benefactor said, “that they made a mistake just now, that you are good. It is up to them whether they believe this. It won’t help you to know their names.”

  We made it into the village, and my benefactors went their own way. I headed for the house of Naim Najajra, the schoolteacher who was Ratiba’s youngest brother and who had helped so merrily and briefly with the olive picking. The driveway to Naim’s place was narrow and led to a courtyard protected by the houses of relatives. I pulled hastily into the driveway and brought the car to a screeching halt, startling Halima, who had been basking in the sun on a blanket in the courtyard. I told them what had happened, and Halima told me that the army had riled the village the day before. Soldiers had come upon the flag on the minaret and had ordered a young man to climb up and tear it down. They had fired tear gas through the whole village to keep the shabab indoors and then had sped away. The ambush I chanced upon could have been laid by rankled shabab. But whatever the reason, I was still upset.

  Halima was upset, too. She brought out coffee. I had to drink two cups of the strong stuff before my hands ceased shaking. At first, I spilled from the cup. Halima then hefted herself inside and brought out a platter of leftover lunch, chicken and rice, and tried to get me to eat it. The village hospitality never ceased, but I could not eat anything. Naim came out from his house. Halima and he tried to coax me to go sit in his cloud-painted guest room, where I could feel safe. I refused.

  Slowly I was becoming angry. The fear that had shaken me was transmuting into an anger that came from deep inside. The bunch of villagers who ambushed me could have killed me. The windshield could have shattered into glass-sharp shrapnel. A rock could have struck me in the face. Had they wanted to kill me? Were they just trying to scare me off? I didn’t know.

  I had a taste of what Israelis felt when they traveled the West Bank. Transmitted along the arc of a rock being thrown, the Palestinians’ anger was personal and deadly. There was nothing accidental about it. You were the target. But what made me even angrier and what hurt me was that I was not an Israeli settler. Although all the Palestinians in Nahalin might not be convinced, I had done nothing to harm them.

  Hussein Najajra, an Arabic teacher and relative of Naim, came out into the courtyard, and I made a speech to him about the need of the American people to understand the Palestinians and that this stoning of my car was not helpful.

  He agreed. “Whichever people did this, they were stupid,” he said.

  Halima again offered me food. “It is a shame that they threw stones on you,” she said.

  Sena arrived in the courtyard, having already heard what happened. She hugged me. “Helen,” she said, “this was unnecessary. This was not good. You should not stop coming to Nahalin.”

  I gave Sena the books and Halima the medicine. By then, I had calmed down enough to think ahead. I was again flooded with fear. Naim’s courtyard made a temporary sanctuary. I guessed there must be mulethamin in ambush on any route I would try to take out of the village, but I couldn’t stay cowering in this courtyard in a village that was on edge.

  A single stone was tossed at me as I backed out of the driveway and headed for the other side of the village, the neighborhood where Hanan’s and Hilmi’s houses were and where I was well-known.

  On the way, I saw another bunch of mulethamin milling around on the main road. Some were rolling tires toward the Valley of the Cow. My impulse was to yank the car around and head in the other direction, but that would only have taken me back to the place of the first ambush. I proceeded, and the anonymously wrapped figures let me pass. I could recognize none of them. As I was weaving down the road, avoiding the mulethamin, one stepped out in front of the car. As I stopped, he pulled his kefiyeh aside. It was one of Hanan’s brothers, and he said it would be OK for me to drive out the other way if he came with me.

  “It’s Jebha on this side of the village. We like you,” he said.

  I hoped he was telling the truth. One of their tires was already burning. The mulethamin had laid down a strip of nails across the road, which they directed me around. Just outside the village, in the high olive grove where the shabab had fought the army, mulethamin had gathered in colored garb. Others stood in the open with rocks in their hands. One of the leaders ordered the shabab to come quickly, and they came, some carrying clubs. They surrounded the car, and for a moment I wondered whether this was another, more terrible trap. But nothing happened and I drove forward, out of the village. The shabab ran along both sides of my car to ensure that nobody on high made a mistake. I was not to be stoned by this faction of the Palestinians. Jebha approved of me and Fatah had not.

  Rocks were the starkest of weapons. There was nothing to them; there was no elaboration; there was no apparatus between the thrower and the target. Rocks were direct, much more so than guns, which could be fired accurately and cleanly from a distance. Rocks were primitive, employed for millennia before mankind developed tools and weapons.

  The mulethamin could have killed me with their rocks, and I wanted to know why they wanted to. I wanted to talk to them. I wanted them to explain to me the depths of their paranoia and anger, an ugly mix, I was sure. I wanted to understand.

  The warm afternoon had passed, and the evening chill had been settling on Jerusalem, where I was holed up, shaken and writing notes about what had happened. I was wondering why, or how, the mulethamin had failed to kill me. They were close enough. Maybe they were momentarily unsure. Maybe I was lucky. Or maybe they just wanted to terrify me or warn me. I plann
ed to see Fawzi and get an explanation.

  The next day Fawzi came to see me.

  “I am sorry,” he said. He said that I had been caught in a rending fissure between the village’s Fatah and Jebha factions.

  “I talked all last night to people with importance about what happened. I said that you were writing about the village and that this was a good thing. The world needs to understand that Palestinians live like human beings. They listened. We agreed to send representatives from each one, from Fatah and Jebha, to Jerusalem to ask questions about you. To find out if you are straight.”

  Readily I agreed that the investigation should proceed, but I had plenty of doubts. I had no idea who would be judging my integrity. I assumed members of the underground leadership of the Intifada would be my arbiters, but I did not know them. Or if I did, I did not know their clandestine roles. I was jittery.

  “The problem you had was not because of you,” Fawzi continued reassuringly. “These people who attacked you thought you were against them because you were spending too much time with the Jebha.”

  A lesson had been learned the hard way. From then on, I vowed to make friends with more Shakarnas, with anybody who might think I had been taking sides.

  I had been blind to the obvious. I lost another layer of naïveté. Bucolic was no longer a word that occurred to me when I thought of Nahalin. Complex, yes. Difficult, yes. Hospitable, yes. But what was behind the smiles? Had one of the masked stone throwers previously invited me onto his guest porch and plied me with tea? How was I to know whom to trust?

  I asked Fawzi if any of my attackers would speak to me.