Chains of Sand

by Jemma Wayne

  Udi closes the safe and transfers the ring from his hand into his buttonable jean pocket. He has showered, tidied, and dressed in a freshly laundered shirt that Ella once told him makes him look like Vince from Entourage, who she loves. Ella’s flight is due to land at ten past eight. At six, Ben and Jonny meet him in the restaurant. At the sound of their shouts up the stairs Udi carefully picks up a thick brown envelope he has removed with the ring from the safe and closes its seal.

  “There’s the man!” Ben enthuses as Udi appears from the stairwell. “Are you going to do it now at the airport, or later?”

  “At the airport,” Udi replies. “Straight away.”

  “Big day,” says Jonny.

  The three of them sit at an empty table and ask one of the waiters to bring coffee. Udi sees Jonny glancing at Ben. They are wondering why they are here, why Udi has requested they meet.

  “So, everything okay?” asks Jonny slowly.

  “Everything is fine.” It is hard for Udi to articulate quite what he wants to say, to cast aside jokes, to speak to them unlike kids, unlike cousins, unlike what they have always been, but he is determined. “I just want to say to you both,” he starts. “That I know how much you have done for me, and I appreciate it all. And I want to give you this.” He throws the brown envelope at Ben.

  “What is it?” Ben fingers it tentatively but Udi only grins so Ben unpeels the seal, pulling out a thick wad of well-thumbed notes.

  “It’s rent. I have a job, thanks to you, so I can pay rent. And don’t argue, I want to. And I can afford to. My bosses pay well, you know.” He grins but immediately both of his cousins make to protest. He interrupts them. “Take it or I’ll hit you,” he says, reverting back, raising his hand in a mock threat, relaxing them.

  “Okay, okay,” Jonny says, feigning fear. “Thank you.”

  He pockets the envelope and when they stand to hug, Udi notices that though Jonny will always be the older brother, the years have unravelled or caught up or merged or rearranged themselves, because this time, next to Ben, he feels neither old nor young.

  The airport is the furthest drive that Udi has so far made in England, but he declines Ben’s offer to accompany him. He wants to do this alone. Besides, he has been Being British pretty well. He knows to approach roundabouts from the left, he knows that the fast lane for overtaking is on the right, he knows that nothing is sign-posted properly. Other drivers do seem to swear at him with some frequency, but he is good at that too.

  Ben has written out directions for him in case the Sat Nav goes awry and Udi leaves plenty of time to make it to the airport. He wants to be there waiting. With a sign. And flowers. And a kiss. It’s corny, it’s like the stupid romantic movies Ella adores. She will love it. Udi imagines her brushing her tumbling dark hair out of her face when she sees him, smiling with surprise, then giggling as she leans forward to smell the flowers where inside one of the buds, she will discover the ring. He can almost hear her laughing already. He can almost feel her wrapping her arms around him.

  The motorway however is bumper to bumper. There are road works a few exits before the airport and for miles ahead all lanes are at a standstill. Udi hoots impatiently, setting off a chain of responsive sounds, but there is nothing he or any of the other trapped drivers can do. Some have even clambered out of their cars to walk their dogs on the verge.

  Ella will come out and find no one.

  Udi manoeuvres onto the hard shoulder and quickly speeds along it until he reaches the exit a few hundred metres ahead. He intends to pull over once he is off the motorway, to consult his Sat Nav for another route to the airport, but a few cars have followed his example and are tight on his tail, hurrying him to make a decision at the roundabout, urging him to turn left or right. Both ways are jammed with traffic and he refuses to be delayed further by making the wrong choice, so at the edge of the roundabout he switches on his hazard lights and puts the car into park, ignoring the raging drivers who swerve around him. Now that he can concentrate, he manages to instruct the Sat Nav to avoid the motorway and another route of side roads and high streets pops onto the screen. It promises to get him there with five minutes to spare. Udi turns off his hazards and signals right. He is about to move but a red beamer at the exit to his left inches out, unsure whether Udi is moving now or still sitting. Udi flashes his lights to make it clear that the beamer’s driver should stay where he is, Udi is going, moving forwards, Ella is waiting and he is on his way. He squeezes down on the accelerator.

  And that is when, for the first time in many weeks, guns explode inside his head. Red flashes before him. A toxic, rancid stench invades his nostrils. And all at once he is tumbling fast and hard through the air, then lying flat on hot sand while cold, metallic arrows whiz past his ears, numb his burning body, and with their terrific sound, obliterate the light.

  ***

  Now

  16

  I take the tube home. It’s my last time so I breathe in the experience with a conscious, deliberate nostalgia, but I won’t miss this. For six years my morning commute has been defined by it: jostling elbows, surly faces, sweaty bodies crammed so tightly against train windows and each other that, although I know it’s trivialising to do so, I would often think of carriages on their way to Auschwitz. Or the images shown once in school assembly by the Animal Rights society. Night-time journeys were even worse. Now that I think of it, perhaps this is what it all comes down to – the tube, lulling us, lulling us, lulling us into a state of apathy, detachment, acceptance. Softly moving underground. Bullets in the dark. Occasionally at night there were encounters with drunkards who shouted obscenities while the rest of us pretended we couldn’t hear. Or beggars making the same tired plea to each carriage, trawling for money, for food, for anything, for a sign that we who kept our eyes firmly on our papers or Kindles or mobile phones were not ghostly apparitions already dead, but alive. I look up at my fellow nightriders now. Perhaps for the first time. There is a small group of middle-aged women bedecked in caps that have been decorated with ears and horns to resemble livestock. They are carrying placards: STOP LIVE EXPORTS. STAND UP FOR SHEEP. I will never be able to understand that strength of feeling. That pull, fierce enough to get people off the sofa and into Hobbycraft for marker pens and pieces of card, then onto the streets of Westminster where they are fervent and angry, authentically angry, enough to be there, sometimes in the rain, travelling home late with sodden placards. Not that I don’t like sheep. I’m sure I’d be suitably appalled if one of these ladies told me about export conditions. Every time I drive past the Falun Gong vigil outside the Chinese Embassy, I’m full of admiration-

  The train jolts to a halt in West Hampstead. As is habit, I immediately pull out my phone. There are three messages. One is from an old university friend who has just heard I’m leaving and wants to meet for a farewell drink. The second is from Orli telling me not to call because she’s going to be painting all night but that she’ll call in the morning when I’m no longer a soul-selling banker and finally free. This last part makes me smile. But the third message is from my mother, left at around five o’clock in the midst of one of her panics: she knows I’m moving to Israel, she’s not trying to stop me, but am I really sure I want to quit such a good job, and perhaps I should just speak to my boss before I go, just to lay the ground for a possible return, just in case. And am I eating?

  I shake my head. Mum has continued to worry and chastise and guilt and support and admire and smother in equal doses ever since meeting Orli. It’s as though she can’t resist the stereotype of ‘Jewish Mother’. Sometimes I’m sure I can hear an ever so slight tinkling of humour in her lectures and it makes me wonder if she’s aware of this role fulfilment, if perhaps, actually, it’s all done in jest, or as a performance. But when I challenge her she refuses to agree. ‘No, Daniel, my heartbreak is not one big game. Thanks for asking.’ Although it’s almost ten thirty I call her as I walk home, assuring her as she answers that my boss doesn’t hate me for leavi
ng and has indeed promised me an open door. ‘That’s nice, Daniel,’ she says. ‘But have you seen the news?’

  I stay awake most of the night playing on my iPad, the news flickering away on the TV. I put my family and Orli into their astronaut suits three times. Orli asked me not to call and by now I know to heed such requests, familiar enough with the change in temperament that comes from disturbing her amidst a flurry of creativity. But I need to talk to her. Just after six in the morning I hear the familiar shuffling of Robert’s feet on the way to the bathroom, his cupboard doors opening and closing, toast being burnt, coffee being poured, and then the hurried sounds of Robert grabbing his briefcase and dashing out of the flat in the usual, sudden realisation that he is late. Even today I take pleasure in the unprecedented luxury of not having to get up, not having to repeat the same unthinking routine I have observed religiously for over half a decade. I find myself out of bed however less than an hour later. My shower is long and fanciful with scented tubes of stuff I’ve collected as freebies over the years and will not pack with me to take to Israel. I’m killing time. When she’s painting, Orli works into the small hours and may not rise ’till noon. Ambling into the kitchen in my tracksuit bottoms I make a coffee and spend a long time concocting a green juice made largely from spinach and avocado, and an omelette. This is the first day of a new beginning and I am pleased with my healthy start. I take my breakfast into the living room where again I switch on the TV. But of course this is a mistake. I still haven’t spoken to Orli but the news is buzzing with her. Or rather not with her, but her home, her scent.

  Overnight there’s been an escalation. It’s been bubbling for weeks. First the hunt for the kidnapped Israeli teens who we now know were killed almost instantly. Then the revenge attack on the Palestinian boy. Then rockets, and incursions, and yesterday 80 Hamas rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel and now the Israeli Air Force have attacked around 50 targets in the Gaza Strip, and it feels like only the beginning. I had to do a bit of googling to find out about the Gazan rockets, the official news is focussed almost entirely on Israel’s actions. But I need to know the ‘aggravating factors’. The defence. It is certain that I will need one, this a fact I learned alongside other studies at university, though it wasn’t a classroom based lesson. I picked it up walking past a demonstration that was calling for the boycott of my diminutive Israeli professor, and another time noticing pro-Hezbollah graffiti scrawled over a Jewish Society notice board, and seeing a cartoon in the Guardian of a giant fist dripping with blood having punched a small child, a fist emblazoned with Stars of David, like the one I wear around my neck. Now, every time there is tension in Israel I feel myself holding my breath, both hoping and not hoping for a substantial enough ‘reason’.

  There are visuals of Palestinian homes reduced to rubble.

  And of crying children.

  And Israeli jets in the night sky.

  I can’t finish my omelette. My juice is too green.

  I want to check Orli is okay. Or rather, I want her to tell me that everything is okay, and will be okay.

  My phone rings.

  “Are you watching this?” says Gaby. “Have you seen what’s going on?”

  “Hi Gaby, how’s married life?” I attempt to say lightly. She has been back from honeymoon for three days.

  “Well they’re at war, Dan. You’re going to a war zone.”

  “Gaby, calm down,” I say automatically, though all night a tightness has been building in my stomach. “Tel Aviv’s nowhere near any of it.”

  “They’ll end up calling up reservists.”

  “I won’t be one yet.”

  “This time. This time. For God’s sake, Dan, can’t you see this isn’t an event, it’s a way of life? You’re moving to Israel, fine, I get it. Just wait a few months.”

  “Gaby, listen…” I begin. But she is not listening. She has slammed down the receiver and is probably dialling Mum because a few minutes later my phone rings again and it is our mother. Despite my lay-in I am suddenly overcome with an overwhelming fatigue.

  ***

  Gaby waits until the office is empty before accessing Facebook. She hasn’t been back long and her desk is littered with cards of congratulations. There is also a newly framed picture of her and Pete on their wedding day, a cliché she has amusedly embraced. She finds herself glancing at the image often. She opens her news feed. They are not really supposed to use social media at work but everybody does. Besides she has her own office, carved out in a glass corner overlooking the cobbled surface of Middle Temple Lane. Nobody will notice, or care. But she is staying late anyway to meet Pete in an hour and prefers to read the message she hopes has arrived alone.

  Gaby reached out to Avigail Shammash a week ago. She is the jewel in Gaby’s collection. Ever since Daniel announced his intention to move to Israel she has been collecting everything she can: articles, information, a million contradictory truths. She doesn’t know what she intends to do with it all, really, wave it in front of Daniel until he will see? But it was sometime amidst her first thrust of research that she stumbled across an article by Avigail Shammash. Bold. Brave. Provocative. Feminist. Gaby has been following her blog ever since, but she has only just reached out. Over the past week they have exchanged a flurry of communications. In the last one, Gaby made a proposal. Now, as she moves the mouse to see if there is a reply, she notices her wedding ring sparkle. As though bizarrely dazzled by the light, she finds herself pausing to wonder how long she and Pete will wait before trying for a baby. She wonders if Daniel would come home for the birth. She wonders if he will have a child, if he will live to have a child, if such a child would also join the army.

  She clicks. The message is there.

  Gaby, thank you for your invitation.

  It is tempting to accept. Today we had three sirens. My girls were at school for the first of them but I couldn’t bear it so I collected them and now they are home. Bedtime was difficult. You must understand our kids play in the streets here. I know in America, in England, you worry about children being taken and teenage thugs and muggings and things, but our children play in the streets. Now though, they are scared the noise will come again and we will have to run again to the shelter. They are scared next time it will be more than noise. My youngest wakes up in the night crying and even though I bring her into bed with me her body is clenched and trembling. Some of the Arabs here in Jerusalem are rooting for Hamas. Yesterday there was anti-Arab graffiti at the bilingual school here – it is a Jewish and Arab institution. Words of hate on this institution of tolerance. It would be a good time to take the children away, to come to London and speak to your group. I was asked by one of your universities last year, but then there were boycotts, and I was cancelled. You know my brother is there already, in London? But of course I must stay. This is the time to stay, and to speak. I do not believe we will be hit, not really, not in Jerusalem. This is what I tell the girls. And also that we, Israel, we are doing far too much hitting. Far too much killing. We are killing so many.

  Of course when I say this now, when I write this, I am hated. Somebody wrote ‘Death to the Left’ under one of my articles online, and there were other things. The newspaper asked me if I need security but I think no. What message would it send my girls: if you speak you must be protected? No, we speak to protect. That is the problem here. They say if we question, if we mistrust Israel’s need for such force, then Hamas will win and Israel will cease to exist. But they do not see that if we don’t question, Israel has ceased to exist already.

  It is getting crazy.

  I used to think we had to fight the extremists on their side only. Yes we had some too, but few, and marginalised. There is a growing religious influence, you know. I remember recently there was a Simchat Torah celebration in the army and female soldiers were ordered to leave it, ordered to dance in a separate area. Soldiers! But it is everywhere. In the government, in the IDF. On the buses.

  My friend is a university professor.
She expressed empathy for the Palestinians in an email to her students and now she has been rebuked. Another friend, this one teaches high school, asked for a minute’s silence in her lesson in memory of the hundreds of Gazans who have already been killed. The head teacher told her ‘Shame on you. What about our boys?’. But what about empathy? It didn’t used to be like this. Something is happening here. It is us versus them now, like McCarthy, or Stalin. We are losing our ability to see another side, to just recognise the suffering there, let alone to take responsibility for it. And those of us who try are silenced. Well I won’t be silenced.

  I don’t know what ‘us’ I belong to now.

  I do not really know you so I can tell you my secret. I am pregnant. Again. It is very early, I don’t know yet if it will be a girl or a boy, this time, but there will be another life. And I cannot bring this life into this country without trying to remind our people of who we are and what we set out to do. Israel is the best place in the world for kids, you know. They play in the street still. But for the first time I don’t know if it is the right place to bring new life.

  If you are happy, I will come when this war is over. By then there will be a bump to see and I will try to skip the queue at the airport!

  Avigail

  Gaby sits for a moment to re-read the lines. She is disappointed, but of course it makes sense for Avigail to want to stay, to stand up, to make a difference. Gaby hopes that if she was in the same position she would do this too. Is this what Daniel is doing? She allows this thought to permeate for a moment. But no, it isn’t his fight. Avigail is trying to change her country from within. Daniel is flocking to it blind to what needs to be changed. He has been blinded. By something. Not a wedding ring. So perhaps by the bright desert light.