by Lavie Tidhar
In your history, this is how it had happened.
They buried the heart under a nearby Mvula tree. The body they preserved with herbs. Susi and Chuma carried the body the thousand miles back to the coast, and from there, by ship, to Britain, where he lies to this day, missing his heart, in Westminster Abbey.
We continued to edit. We were getting better.
19.
I remember visiting the graves of the Scottish missionaries near Chembe Village—the place Livingstone had called Cape Maclear, after his friend, the royal astronomer in Cape Town. You were with me, we had just met, it was the summer of 1995 and thunder clouds gathered over the lake in the distance. It began to rain as we looked at the old weathered headstones. Scottish missionaries in Africa, like the punch line to an old joke. Like malaria. The lake had killed them; for seven years they struggled to survive on the Lake of Stars before they abandoned their mission, retreated to Bandawe and then to Khondowe, the lake and the mosquitoes pursuing them, relentlessly.
We ran back through the hot rain. Lightning flashed. In our bamboo hut on the beach we huddled together for warmth. Your skin shone with the lake’s tears. “What if—?” you said. The thunder rolled over the lake, magnified like cannon. “What if Livingstone never found the lake?” you said. “What if Stanley never pursued him to Ujiji, never uttered those words, Dr Livingstone, I presume?”
We were in the early stages of love. What if we had never met, there on Lake Malawi, my people and her people couldn’t have been any more different.
20.
Three years later, in Ujiji, I played Bao with the descendants of Swahili slave traders and lost. We visited the baobab tree under which they stood, those two white men, Livingstone and Stanley, Stanlivingstone merged into one in our memories. “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” I said, and you smiled, tolerating me. We were living on the hill above Kigoma, Dian Fossey was a neighbour. When we went down into the town we saw nothing but refugees, amputees from Zaire, begging for a change we couldn’t offer.
“Forget Livingstone,” I said. “What if my people had come to Africa?”
21.
“The goal of our present endeavours must not be the ‘Holy Land’ but a land of our own. We need nothing but a large piece of land for our poor brothers; a piece of land which shall remain our property from which no foreign master can expel us.”—Leo Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation. 1882
22.
In 1904 the Zionist Congress sent a three-man expedition to British East Africa, to the Uasin Gishu Plateau. They comprised a British explorer, a Swiss engineer and a Russian Jew. They spent two months exploring the plateau. In your primary reality they went lost, were attacked by hostile tribes, returned at last to Europe and delivered their verdict. Jewish settlement in Africa was voted down overwhelmingly by the Congress.
We edit. We shift and change the parameters.
23.
“[The proposal to settle Jews in East Africa] is monstrous, extravagant, and unconstitutional, and opposed not only to the best interests of Christendom but of civilization at large.”—E. Haviland Burke, M.P., parliamentary debate, 1904
24.
If you drive down Lake Victoria today you will see a strip of hotels rising into the sky, at the place called Neve Nitzachon, the Spring of Victory, and a sign for the weary traveller that here, too, is a shopping mall and a rest stop, with a Mashbir department store and a McDavid branch and even an Egged bus station. The blue-white-and-black flags wave above the buildings, especially on our Independence Day, celebrated every year on the Fifth of Iyar in the Jewish calendar. It was not until 1965—in your calendar—that we were made free from the British, like our neighbours on either side, Uganda and Kenya, with whom we are periodically at war. Our independence was inevitable. We had moved en masse to this land, empty but for its people, granted to us by the power of the British empire and its King and parliament. We fled from German hostility and Russian pogroms, British contempt and the French’s frank dislike, fled across land and sea to this land-locked country in the sun.
Palestine forgot us. The British gave us the plateau but it was not enough for us. Our people bought guns across the seas and the ships smuggled them to Mombasa. From there on foot or by train we carried them inland, training in secret in the valleys.
Our land suffices for our needs. We are not without problems, but what country ever is? Our struggle for independence merged with that of the Mau Mau. Jomo Kenyatta and David Ben Gurion met in secret on the shores of the lake and signed an agreement of cooperation. Our own problem materialized in the form of the native tribes. Now they are kept behind the separation fence that our army guards, but still their terrorists attack us in our cities. Only last week a man from the Nandi tribe, passing for one of our own Ethiopian Jews and dressed as a Hasidic man in the thick black coats so strange here in this hot land, boarded a local bus and proceeded to blow himself up. For such cowardly atrocities we have no choice but to go into their enclaves, behind the fence, to search their houses door to door and line up their elders for inspection even as their youths throw stones at our soldiers. Our prisons overflow with their terrorists and still they would not give up this ridiculous demand for “their” land. We have tried to be reasonable, really we have.
Drive down Lake Victoria today and you will see a peaceful and prosperous land. Our farmers grow pineapples and bananas and paw-paw, our military’s planes pass overhead, the jets reflected in the calm surface of the water, filling our hearts with pride. Across in Uganda we must still contend with Idi Amin’s despotic regime but we are secure in our homeland. We pull into the hotel and order a McDavid kosher Hot-David frankfurter and eat it in the comfort of our air-conditioned car.
25.
When I was ten or eleven we went to Haifa, the nearby city by the sea. There, on the pedestrian street in the lower Hadar, there used to be a McDavid restaurant. They are all gone now, having been edged out by competition from American fast food chains, though I recently read in the paper that they are set to return. I remember that day for some reason, though the colours have been washed clean in memory’s uncertain rains. My father was driving the kibbutz’s car. It was humid, Haifa was a strange exotic place for us, filled with city folks and their city ways. The smell of exhaust fumes and women’s perfumes such as we did not have on the kibbutz mingled with the smells of food, of fresh jam-filled donuts coated with sugar powder, and fresh bagels with sesame seeds, and falafel frying in hot, industrial oil.
I do not remember what my father’s business in town was, but that, when it was concluded, he took me, holding my hand in his, into McDavid. It really did exist, you know, as strange as that sounds. My father bought me the Hot-David frankfurter. It came with pickles and mustard, yellow and green like the fields of the kibbutz. It was the only time I think I ever ate at McDavid.
26.
Enough, enough. Who is this interloper interjecting into our narrative, our narratives? We edit, we mix and remix. Jewish Uganda, with its suicide bombers and military occupation, never happened, but it didn’t have to happen, either. All is possible in the seas of chance and probability. We cut and paste and remix and reboot:
27.
Tel Aviv, 2011. Here on the banks of Lake Victoria couples stroll arm in arm on the beach, boys play beach ping pong, girls lie in the sun or sip cool drinks at the waterside bars. Kwasa-kwasa music from the Congo mixes with South African reggae and Malawian pop. Children the colour of olives run and laugh in the surf. Our people have come here unwillingly, persuaded by the Zionist Congress and Herzl’s mad dream of a homeland, of statehood. A backwater British colony, it were but us and the local tribes.
But we are Jews, we are used to living on sufferance. At first there was conflict but cooler heads prevailed. We were together the subjects of the British, united in a shared history of suffering. Their boys married into our tribes, their girls took our young men to their families. We did not fight the British. We bided our time until Independence, in the 1960
s. Together we formed a country for ourselves, we built plantations, planted fields, fished, returned to the way of our forefathers. Not for us the factories and shining cities of another present. We built no tall houses, no eight-lane roads or mega-malls. We are a backwater, a tributary of history, a hidden cove. We take in history’s forgotten refugees.
Come to Tel Aviv and the music welcomes you, the mix and remix of a thousand tunes and styles from across the continent. The drummers gather at dusk on Mungo Park Beach and the sound of their drums unites, suddenly and clearly, and for a moment, standing there on the shore of the lake with the sun setting in the distance, that sound is like the single vast beat of a great, unknowable heart.
A Heap of Broken Images
Sunny Moraine
“Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. ‘Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it’s written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.’”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families
“Are you going to take a picture?”
I ask it because it seems like a sensible question. The shorter of the two humans has brought his camera with him, and since we entered the houses of the dead he has held it in his hands and a little close to his chest, as though he’s afraid that someone might snatch it away from him, or that he might drop it and it might shatter.
I ask it because I am their guide and it is my task to show them what they ask to see, and I am wondering, now, if they really wish to see this.
The shorter man—I have been told that his name is Jacob but the syllables feel strange in my mouth and I have to struggle with them a little—looks at me as though he is only just now seeing me. He nods once. He lifts the camera to his face and I hear the soft whirr of its processor. And then, as though he performed the act entirely for my benefit, he shows me the image he has captured.
Here: It’s not well framed. He clearly gave little thought for the arrangement of it. Half a skull takes up the lower left-hand corner, pushed most of the way under a desk. The fractured curve of a broken spine extends into the middle-foreground, disappearing into a fold of old blue cloth from which ribs protrude. On the right, a severed arm stretches into the frame as if reaching for the skull and the spine. It clearly isn’t from the same corpse. It’s much too small. Draped and tangled over everything, heavy flowers in brilliant red and pink, green vines, and dried skin of no color whatsoever.
There are other bodies. Look closer and you will see that the floor is nothing but bodies. That you can’t see the floor at all. That you cannot, in fact, be absolutely sure that the floor is even there. If you walk into this room, you’ll walk on the dead. So we don’t invite them to walk inside, and without invitation they never do. We all stand in the doorway and I deliver the information I have to share about this place, and then there is silence.
I feel their discomfort. I was raised in the jodenja klimenji—the Way of Welcoming. It is our highest calling to give comfort to a guest, to put them at ease. But it is also our highest calling to give them whatever they ask for, within reason. And if they ask to come here, I cannot do anything for what I know they must feel. I cannot unmurder the murdered. I cannot change who did the murdering. And I cannot tell them how they should feel, a generation after the fact. There are things I wish I could say, things I would say if everything were different, but I also cannot change who I am. So we stand in silence, and the dead are also silent, and I wait for one of the living to speak.
The first sun is low and tosses our shadows out in a long diagonal across the room. The second sun is rising behind us. The light is shifting and strange, and it makes it difficult to be sure just how big the room is. How much death it can hold.
The taller one—I think his name is Aaron—points to a stack of crates in one corner next to a row of bookshelves. Another corpse is slumped against it, scraps of dried paper skin, the head gone. “Shairoven, what are those?”
“Goods,” I say. “Clothes, probably. Foodstuffs. They thought that they could buy their lives from their attackers. You must understand that such things are not strange to us; in our culture there is an idea of a blood price. Life has monetary value.”
“Why didn’t the colonists take them?”
I shrug—it is a very human gesture but I can’t help it. Five full cycles as a klimenjiani—what I have heard them call a tour guide—and I have adopted many human habits. “There are many things about what was done in those months that we do not understand.”
What I do not say is that I suspect that the killing distracted them. It must have been very distracting. It must have been very tiring, also. It’s said that all throughout the time of killing, the rank and file were urged on by overseers of death with bullhorns and amplifiers. They were given rhythms by which to work, to make it easier for their bodies to move without the burden of thought.
I have tried to understand this. When I run I think of the beating of my own heart. But then I think of blood and falling bodies and my imagination fails me. How can they be the same?
How could they have done it? Were they blind?
The flowers nod in the breeze that comes in through the open windows. It should not be as lovely as it is—all those long bones. The large, elongated skulls. The vines and the blossoms. Graceful and clean. Even the faded blood on the walls looks like an abstract mural in dark swoops and swirls. I have heard the humans say that our people are beautiful. I wonder if that is a truth that is not always true.
“We should go,” I say gently. At my sides, my hands are clenched into fists. I hope they will not see. It would shame me. “You will be late for supper at the hotel.”
* * *
Much like the killing itself, it remains a puzzle to us, that the humans come to Lejshethra for this. Why they come. Why they want to look. These are not their dead. They pay no respects, they make no offerings. They just stare with their tiny eyes, and I can never say for sure what they’re thinking.
They have told us that there are entire pathways of schooling back on Earth that deal with nothing but the killing, that try to pull it apart like a corpse and understand how it happened, why so much murderous hate could arise so suddenly in the human colonists. I have heard that they believe that it was not sudden. That it built over years, that there was tension where my people could perceive none. Two cycles ago when I first heard of this I took it to my body-sire and told her of it, and I think I was lucky to escape the back of her hand.
“Ignore such things, Shairoven,” she said to me. She turned back to the tijath she was cutting for the meal of second sun. “The humans fixate on what’s past, even after blood-price is paid. Mind your manners and ignore their habits. They can’t help what they are.”
My body-sire’s right arm is missing. Her back is a mass of crisscrossing scars. We were told—not by her, for she never speaks of those months—that she survived the massacre of her district by hiding herself under the corpses of her neighbors. There were many who survived that way, but we don’t speak much of the ones with visible scars. The blatantly accusing nature of the evidence they carry with them is a form of rudeness that can’t be erased or undone.
My body-sire makes her place secure through her denial.
I have never discovered how to tell her that this makes me so sad-angry-trapped all at once, that it makes me feel as though I am buried under a pile of corpses and I am being cut with long knives and I do not understand why. We have no word in our language for such an impolite emotion.
* * *
I arrive at the hotel after the meal of first sun to collect the humans. They have told me that today they wish to travel to the city center to see the memorial that the human government erected to the dead of the killings—or to the killings themselves, but the difference has never been adequately explained to me, and I am afraid to ask. I am afraid that my people would see it as overtly
accusatory, and I am afraid of what the humans might say.
In the groundcar on the way from my home to the hotel, I think about all the questions I would like to ask and never will. Why do you remember? What do you think? Do you feel guilty? Do you think that you should? Do you hate us now? Will you hurt us again?
Their leaders said, of course, that they did not hate us and that the killings will never be repeated. But I am not sure I find this convincing. I am full of doubt both impolite and inconvenient, and it pulls at me like a hungry child. Many hungry children. There were camps full of them after the killings, orphans all with no mate-sire or body-sire and often missing siblings. I have seen images, and in those images what stands out most are their enormous eyes. All the confusion of an entire people could be held inside such eyes. Why? This is what they would ask the humans I am going to see. In this we are alike.
I would also like to ask whether the humans live with ghosts as we do. I wonder whether it is forbidden for them to acknowledge or speak to the ghosts. I wonder whether they can put the ghosts here aside and leave them behind. In the end most of them return home to Earth; very few humans live here now. They thinned our numbers, but in the end they were the ones who ran.
In the groundcar, the humans and I ride in silence. My head is still buzzing with questions. My mouth is sealed by my raising.
Every time, this is a little more difficult.
“How long have you been a guide?” Jacob asks me eventually, and I am relieved because this is a question that I can answer without offense. I tell him five cycles, and he smiles and pats the knee of his companion.
“We’re lucky to get someone so experienced.”
I incline my head at the compliment.
“Aaron and I have been studying the massacre since college,” Jacob says after another few moments of silence. “We’re both writers—did we tell you that? We’re doing a series on what it’s like for the children of the colonists now, so this is excellent material.”
