Chains of Sand

by Jemma Wayne

  ***

  He does not cry but Ella can see in his eyes the boy who wants to, could hear it in his voice when he called to say he had a one-day leave, asked to see her. They have not met in many weeks and spoke only once before he left for miluim. She has been mourning him, mourning their lost future, wearing nothing but black. But she could not say no.

  He looks strong standing at her door in his army fatigues. His body does not shake, or fail, or ask to be held. His hands are sturdy when he puts down his gun. His words are sure when he says he wants her. But when they are in bed he will not take control, will not bend her forwards, he wants her to be on top, dominating him.

  Afterwards, she raids the fridge for leftovers of her mother’s cooking and stacks them up on a plate that she brings to him in bed. Her parents had left that morning for their annual visit to their cousins in the north so for once they have space and they are alone and could, if they chose to, undress their intentions and desires as well as each other. But Ella tells of the essay she is struggling to write, and of a funny incident with a customer at work, and of the latest gossip from their friends. She does not ask about where he has been sent or what he has seen. She does not ask about London. She does not once mention marriage. She tries to smile frequently, to feed him lots, to run him a bath despite the water shortage, to make sure he knows that he is loved. It is what he needs and she has grown used to putting him back together, though she has always kept such handiwork to herself. And will do. Even now. Despite her shattered heart, it is better for Udi to believe that she is the insecure one, she the one who depends on him.

  ***

  “Let me tell you a story,” says Tomer.

  They are back on the Lebanese border, playing cards on top of their bunks. Shimon has already lost his stash of cigarettes and stormed out to buy more. The rest of their roommates are occupied in other sections of the base. Udi has just told Tomer about London. He hadn’t wanted to think about it. Not now, not while there is nothing he can do to make it happen. And not since seeing Ella. But the topic has materialised and Tomer has taken issue. Udi tried to explain: it is the money, the economy, the shitty jobs. “It’s different for you,” he had urged. “What do I have?”

  “You have Is-ra-el.”

  “I need more.”

  “There is no more. Israel is the greatest country in the world.”

  “Come on, Tomer.”

  “Let me tell you a story.”

  Tomer lays his hand of cards on the mattress. It is a full house and Udi cannot beat it. Tomer takes the cigarettes from the pool in the middle and shuffles the deck. Udi takes one of the cigarettes back from Tomer’s hoard and lights it. “Okay,” he says. “Enlighten me.”

  “So okay, do you know the story of Joshua and Ulla?”

  Udi almost chokes on his cigarette. “Fuck off, Tomer. You’re going to try to talk me out of this with biblical mumbo jumbo? I don’t even believe in God.” He says this while unconsciously reaching his hand to his pocket where tiny pieces of shrapnel still remain. It is only out of habit, but he has become used to rolling them in his palm, like prayer beads.

  “This is basic talmud,” Tomer insists. “Just listen, it’s a good story.”

  “Okay,” Udi says, waving his hand impatiently. “Y’allah.”

  “Okay. So Joshua ben Levi was a rabbi who lived in a time when the Judeans were being persecuted by the Romans and being denied their independence,” Tomer begins. “Ulla was a freedom fighter and Joshua hid him in his attic.” Udi nods to convey that yes, he is still with him. Tomer is studying for his philosophy doctorate at the Tel Aviv University and sometimes supposes that others will not understand the things he has already learned. “So when the Romans knocked on Joshua’s door they told him that if he did not turn Ulla over to them, then many others would be captured and executed. So, what should he do? It was legal, according to the biblical precedents, it was legal for him to turn Ulla over, but was it right? In the end, Joshua let Ulla decide, and on hearing the predicament, Ulla chose of his own accord to give himself up. Good, right? He saved everyone’s skins. It was the best outcome for the masses. Well maybe, but then Elijah stopped talking to Joshua.”

  “Elijah the prophet?”

  “Right. And he used to talk to Joshua okay, but now he tells him that acting legally wasn’t enough, he would only communicate with people who were truly moral. And he stopped talking to the rabbi. So you see, it’s not enough to act according to the law, or even to be good. Jews must aspire to be perfect, in even the smallest of interactions, and Israel must aspire to be a true light amongst nations.”

  “Okay. It’s a good story,” Udi says. “Now what the fuck does that have to do with me?”

  “Because you can see it. And I can see it, in your face, all the time, Udi. You don’t like it when what we do here doesn’t feel just, even when we’re well within our rights to do it, and we are well within our rights, we are the most moral army in the world.”

  Udi raises his eyebrows.

  “I know that’s why you want to go. But that is why you should stay. So that we can build Israel.”

  “Have you seen Tel Aviv lately?” Udi coughs. “Israel is built.”

  “Not shovels and hammers, Udi. Real building. We’re 66 years old, that’s nothing. We need people like you.”

  “Tomer, I want to go to make money-”

  “Bollocks, you want to go because- ”

  Shimon comes rushing into the room and the blackness of his face hushes them. He lifts his hands into the air. “You haven’t heard?” Their own expressions reveal that they haven’t. “There’s been an attack on Kibbutz Malkiya. A Katyusha rocket. They don’t know yet if people are hurt.”

  Udi and Tomer need not look at each other. Without consultation their cards and philosophy are abandoned and their minds are back here, again, back now, again, narrowed again to this.

  Malkiya is a small community a short drive away. Udi was there two days ago.

  Nobody will blame them, but the town is on their border, the border they are patrolling, responsible for, the border the three of them crossed just weeks ago to find out if something was being planned.

  His parents will know already. They’ll be watching the news, worrying, waiting for confirmation that no soldiers were involved, hanging on for the beeps. They will know the politics. The context. The reaction of the world.

  Udi, a soldier, knows nothing. He will do. He will say yes and do. But there are no orders yet.

  He takes his mobile phone outside of their underground base. He has not spoken to his parents since being away. Despite the insistent image of his mother hovering by the car, he has not picked up the phone. He could not. Staring at it now he sits on a pile of superfluous sandbags without dialling. He fingers the shrapnel in his pocket. Qus. Y’allah.

  Batia’s voice is full of panic and relief. “Thank you for phoning, Udi,” she tells him, too profusely. “Thank God you are okay. When can you come home?”

  “Four days to go,” he tells her. Prickling and softening. “I’ll be back for dinner on Friday.”

  “I’ll make tabyeet,” she says. “And sambousak.”

  Instinctively, Udi smiles. Although his body is pumping with the adrenalin of impending action, although he is exhausted, and also fearful, and also ready, and although he has so far resisted the pull of his mother’s voice, the danger in calling her, for a moment he allows himself to hear it, her, home. She continues to talk and he lets her. He imagines his family standing around a table filled with food. He can feel his sister kissing his cheek, hear her children careering wildly around the garden. Catch Ella in the corner, smiling. His mother talks on and he tastes sambousak. He can sense his father’s solid, decisive presence, and hear his brother’s laughter. Batia continues. Something about making sure he eats enough and has he spoken to Ari and…He closes his eyes…

  Then suddenly there is the sound of bullets.

  “What’s that? Udi, what’s that? Udi?
Can you hear me?”

  He can hear, but he is no longer listening. Or tasting, or dreaming. Stuffing the phone into his pocket, with gun in hand, Udi races from the sandbags to the trenches that lead to the lookouts at the top of the hill. One of the men from his unit is flat on the floor. Another is on the radio crouched behind a sandbag and indicates for Udi to stay down. Udi crawls towards the overhang and waits for the signal. He sees Tomer running out of the base below him, Shimon just behind. Tabyeet and sambousak and the gentle nagging of his mother are already a million miles from his mind. London is even further. There is only sand and dust and Israel, and the need to survive.

  ***

  Then

  7

  They are in the east of the city. In a narrow street where the angle of the sun on stone cobbles gives the whole place a coating of rust. There is a faint smell of sewage, and something else, something cooking, deep-fried with a lot of oil.

  They shouldn’t be there. Dara slips a flattened pack of cigarettes out of the wallet in which she has squashed it and offers the crumpled sticks to Naomi and Rachel. They each take one, in unison, then spark the lighter and inhale a shallow drag. Resisting the splutter, Dara leans against the rust-tinted wall behind them, her pert bottom and golden head just grazing it, allowing her back to arch and press forward her breasts. She is wearing her regulation school t-shirt, but she has shrunk it by leaving it overnight in a sink of hot water and it is now tighter than it should be. She cannot help glancing into the window of the building opposite to regard her curves. Dara is 15 and already ‘developed’, as her mother would say. Her legs have shot up, and her breasts have shot out, and her hips have somehow softened. Her hair is long with sun-bleached blonde strands streaking through golden brown and she has been told by Shmuel that she looks a little like Julia Roberts, when she was younger, in her Pretty Woman days, though without the red. Unlike Julia Roberts, Dara is not wearing makeup and knows she doesn’t need to. Not because her skin is clear and her lips are full without it, although they are. But because she is acutely aware of the unspeakable allure of sexuality mixed with youth. It has blinded the boys in her class, the teacher too; she is able to do anything.

  Naomi, Rachel and Dara have bunked the last lesson of school so they can come here. They have told each other that they want to see this worn down, worn in, worn out part of the city. All three of them are studying art and have grand ideas about finding truth in humanity. They have decided that this is where they will find it, in East Jerusalem where the Arabs have not built high-rise apartment blocks like the ones they live in, where poverty is abundant and written on faces they can paint. It is only incidental to them, they say, that this is a neighbourhood their parents have banned them from walking alone, that the Arab men here stare at them with an intensity laced with danger. This is their second visit. They speak to each other here in English instead of Hebrew. They come early, before it is dark.

  Dara’s brother would kill her if he knew where she was. At least he would if he were older. She has grown up quicker and suddenly he looks like a little boy to her. He is athletic and lanky, but not filled out, his face not yet really in need of a shave, although he runs the wet razor encouragingly over his fluffy cheeks, in preparation. In just a few years, even if his hair hasn’t come in, he will be considered a man and he will join the army. But for Dara he lacks the appropriate masculinity that is now required for her to take him as seriously as she used to, to talk as they once did.

  When she has finished her cigarette, Dara takes out her sketchpad. Her mother is a psychologist and has told her about collective trauma and mob mentality and so Dara does not fear or despise the Arabs as much as some of her friends do. They see them often enough although they are invisible – working on construction sites, as cleaners, the dark faces in the mirrors of taxis – but that is on the other side of the city, where their presence feels controlled and sanitised, and tallied in blue card. Not here. Here they occupy the foreground. This is their territory. She can smell their open drains.

  Naomi and Rachel have spotted a young Arab boy playing amongst a pile of rubble and they are scribbling furiously, but the image feels patronising to Dara, offensive somehow. She has moved away from them, a little further up the winding street that bends to the left and darts off like a rabbit warren. She sits on the dusty floor and stretches her legs out in front of her. She is wearing cut-off jeans that come to her ankle, but they ride up as she balances her sketchpad on her knees and reveal a glimpse of the slim curve of her bronzed calf. Passers by in full-length skirts and covered heads glance at her disapprovingly. Dara looks up. She is trying to catch the shadow that the canopy opposite is throwing against the cobbles, but the light won’t stay still, the shading is wrong, too stilted. She scrutinises the image on her pad before finally turning the page to begin again. When she looks up this time, a man has walked into the shadow. Out of the canopy. From under it. Behind him, she now notices a selection of tired posters pasted onto the window below. She cannot read Arabic but sees pictures of computers. The man stands still, territorially marking the shop’s doorway. He is looking directly at her.

  Dara does not move. She has an urge to stand up, to run even, but she doesn’t. The man is wearing dark jeans and a dishevelled white t-shirt. Unlike her brother, his arms pull at the sleeves as though the thin material is struggling to contain a masculine power that simmers underneath. The man’s skin is dark, his hair short, almost shaved, matching the generous stubble around his mouth from which a half-smoked cigarette is hanging. It is one he has rolled himself. Unbranded. Imperfect. He breathes deeply and does not splutter.

  Dara pretends to be consumed by her sketching but after a few moments she cannot resist lifting her head again. The man is still looking at her. She can feel the heat of his eyes tracing her exposed calf, her denim-clad thigh, her developed chest. She feels that she should cross her arms to cover herself, but instead, she adjusts her stance so that he can see her better and rests the end of her pencil between her lips. She is testing herself, or him, or something: the complexity of the city, or her womanhood, daring to touch it. She feels his eyes linger, then slowly they move again, upwards, until finally they reach her own. Dara does not look away. She never looks away, never allows herself to be the first to buckle, it is something she has been practising. The boys in her class have such an inflated sense of themselves, all machismo and testosterone; she likes to assert for them a challenge. Shmuel calls her difficult, high maintenance. Dara waits for this man to lower his eyes. His stare, however, is rubber-banded. It stretches on, tugging tighter and tighter. He takes another casual drag of his self-made smoke and there is amusement in the way that he watches her, as though he is sure of himself, here, and knows that she isn’t. There is something else too. Something elemental. Hot. Dara feels it bouncing between them across the rusty, dusty ground, though it is possible too that it is simply the beginning of the long summer heat. Her tight t-shirt feels a little damp at the armpits.

  When Naomi and Rachel fall giggling into her, Dara watches as, at last, the man loosens his stare, glancing down to the ground where he stubs out his cigarette. Released, she allows herself to be dragged up from the floor and back down the narrow road in the same direction from which they have come. Her friends are giddy, and loud, and in a rush. If they are late their parents will ask questions. Understandably, she supposes, since the bombs.

  Eighty-two Israelis murdered in one month. Dara’s father says this over and over, his hand touching his head, as though it needs holding up. Another 15 in the past two weeks. The last bomb at the market where her mother shops.

  When Dara glances back at the man she cannot help but wonder what he thought when he saw the bloody Jerusalem chaos flicker urgently across the news channels. He, one of them. When he stares at her this time, her chest tightens, her voice dissipates, fear touching her tongue.

  And then in the same moment, he smiles. With that same hint of amusement as before, that same air of co
nfidence. She doesn’t smile back. She tosses her light-licked hair over her shoulder and links her arm through Naomi’s. But later, when she is home, watching TV with her too-young brother, she remembers that smile only, and not the other thoughts that for a tainted moment exploded inside her head.

  It is almost a week before Dara returns to the east of the city. This time she is alone. It is Friday lunchtime and her mother thinks she is at the mall with Naomi and Rachel, but she has not even told these best of friends where she is going. All week the tail whip of excitement has lingered in the pit of her stomach, and it feels as though this visit should be kept clandestine, coiled. In the depths of her backpack lie a rapidly warming can of Diet Coke, her school pencil case containing drawing pencils, a battered sketchpad, Don’t Call it Night by Amos Oz, a newly bought, un-crumpled packet of cigarettes, and her wallet. These are Dara’s tools. She has anticipated both a long wait and none at all; for either she is in need of occupation.

  She walks for a long time before she finds again the winding road and the computer posters and the canopy. This part of the city feels maze-like to Dara, riddled with turns and archways and unfamiliar alleys that seem to rise and dip and flow into the next as though they are all connected, and all lead nowhere. She strides forward however and imprints each bend purposefully into her mind: the cracked parts of stone walls, and graffiti, and half-erected houses, and windows without glass; crumbs for her to track back by. As she progresses, time evaporates, centuries unravel, modernity turns to dust.

  He is there.

  Standing exactly as before, smoking, he sees her as soon as she rounds the corner, though it is not clear whether he watches her so closely because he remembers, or because he would watch any girl with fair skin and light hair. Despite her preparations, Dara is not ready. She wonders if she should walk on a bit, pretend that she has passed this way again only by chance, on her way to the Arab market that for a blonde-haired tourist – which she could easily be – is a thing to do. But in the end she refuses to fluster and sits resolutely opposite the canopy, delving into her backpack for her sketchpad and pencils. She can feel the man observing her again and in the small alley her movements seem suddenly exaggerated and disproportionate. She glances up purposefully, squinting through the sun as if to study the shadows before her. The man is still standing, amused, in her periphery, and it is difficult to pretend that she hasn’t noticed him. Or intended it. He crosses his sandaled feet and leans an elbow against the shop front, regarding her with an absolute nonchalance that is laced with lightning. Dara squints again. With determination she makes a series of fluid markings that are still too stilted and she forces herself to stare at them on her pad, slowly counting a minute, two, three, before looking back up. She has waited too long. He is gone.