Chains of Sand

by Jemma Wayne

  ***

  The thing about time is you need stuff to fill it. I gave myself a month. A month of nothingness. A month to prepare. A month to (if I’m completely honest) fulfil my romanticised notions about the adventures I might have if I ever stepped off the treadmill. Besides, I figured there’d be loads to do – packing up, selling up, closing up, catching up. But it turns out that I don’t have that much stuff, forms don’t take that long to fill, and as for bank accounts and council tax and utilities bills – it turns out it’s a few phone calls, it takes one dedicated morning, one morning to dismantle one’s life.

  This is all a long-winded way of explaining that I’ve spent an unusual amount of time over the past week eavesdropping on other people’s café conversations and trawling through Facebook. Which is not the healthiest thing to do if you’re a Jew amidst an upsurge in antisemitism.

  Antisemitism. I check myself sometimes, check that I am serious about this bulbous, stick-in-the-throat thought. Are people not just anti-Israel, or what they perceive of Israel, because of the conflict, because of what they understand Israel to be doing? Are they really anti-Jew, anti-me? I check, but no, I mean it, it’s there. For now mostly words, but words ubiquitous.

  I wonder what Nana would say if I told her that I feel it here, now: That what I see happening is nothing? That it is everything?

  I am afraid to ask.

  I keep telling myself I’m being paranoid. And of course it could be a subconscious passed-down survivor-syndrome-incited post-assimilation paranoia, but I swear it’s everywhere.

  Because Israel is everywhere and suddenly everyone is an expert. Everyone. Although they have no context of the history of the conflict, no idea of the geography of Israel’s tiny Jewish dot surrounded by swathes of Arab land, no understanding of the political goals of the various parties. There are pictures of dying children and that is all it is necessary to know. ‘We are all Hamas now’, apparently.

  Hamas. Who not only want to destroy Israel, but want to kill all Jews everywhere. Kill me. This is who all these British bleeding hearts align with?

  They like to say so. Loudly. As though it is the latest fad to show off. #hateblamekillthejews.

  Before this fad, I had indulgently filled my month with coffees and dinners and lunches, but now, at each and every one of them, Gaza trips off tongues, and as we dine and sip and converse, I find it harder and harder to swallow. And I get that feeling, that old teenage apprehension that I will be talked about as soon as I am gone.

  As a child it wasn’t like this. With the exception of Mr Pike and his 10 per cent off, and the one time in the supermarket that I heard a woman tell her husband who was comparing prices of wine, ‘Don’t be a Jew’, my North West London world consisted of Jewish school assemblies, kosher butchers, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Jerry Seinfeld. I don’t know if it ever even occurred to me that people in Britain, in my country, might consider being Jewish as a thing, an unusual thing, a bad thing.

  It’s like being a goose. Imagine you’re an egg, just laying around the barn with a load of other eggs and you hatch out with all the others, and since all the others are chickens you assume you’re a chicken too and everybody calls you a chicken. But as you grow up and get oily feathers and a slightly longer beak you start suspecting that perhaps you are a chicken but, maybe, well not quite a chicken. And then one day the farmer comes in and says, ‘Hey goose!’ And he’s pointing at you, and he asks, ‘Goose, what the hell are you doing in here with the chickens?’ It’s a bit like that. I see my friends holding back, holding themselves back in respect of my goosishness, tempering their thoughts, not trusting me with them. I know it is for fear they might offend, they probably imagine they are being sensitive, but they don’t see that this very assumption is part of the prejudice: I am Jewish therefore I must blindly support Israel.

  Prejudice. Am I really saying my friends are prejudiced? Yes, that’s what I feel – prejudiced against, ostracised somehow, branded as something outside of their commonality. I have felt this way only once before, in 2006 during Lebanon. Maybe that’s what started me thinking, noticing. Maybe that’s what began my slow unravelling of wholeness.

  I feel bad for these friends. I’m sure they too feel persecuted, stifled, by me.

  Far worse are the ones who don’t show restraint. These are the people who make me feel that irrational loyalty the first group assume, that inexplicable need to defend, that urge to look at pictures of Gazan children and not speak the sickness I am feeling. Around Friday night dinners I speak it, we speak it, explore it, argue over it and rarely agree. But these debates are like dirty linen, not to be laundered in public, with stains not suitable for the scrutiny of a clean, scathing world.

  One Facebook friend I went to school with posts articles almost hourly about the disproportionate force, the trapped Palestinians, the civilian deaths, the Israeli aggression. Countless others comment on the thread concurring. They use words like ‘appalling’ and ‘inexcusable’. I can’t help reading and feeling riled. Silently. Riled by the ignorance, the bias, the hypocrisy. One afternoon Robert pops up half way down one such thread attempting to voice the Israeli point of view: Hamas have been firing rockets into Israeli towns for weeks; they’ve been building tunnels from which to launch attacks; they use their own children as human shields; Israel must have the right to defend itself. But he shouldn’t have bothered because within minutes there is a barrage of responses: Hamas’ rockets don’t kill people; the Palestinians are desperate; the force is disproportionate; it’s the Palestinians’ land. And then somebody calls Gaza a prison camp, and the next person comments that after what ‘they’ went through the Jews should know better. And suddenly that feeling that has been rumbling underneath everything pushes ever so slightly more to the fore, like a splinter under the skin, the sharp end poking violently through, swelling the flesh around it, but not visible enough to be pulled. I try but I can’t quite grip my discomfort. It’s not that I don’t wish people in Gaza weren’t dying. It’s that all these people here, these people who are so angry, so up in arms, so ethically superior, they don’t say a peep when the problem is in Syria, or the perpetrators are Boko Haram, or the Saudi regime, or China. It is only Israel, only Jews, only us, only me – we are the chosen ones. We, because people don’t bother to differentiate between Israeli and Jew. Or do and don’t realise Hamas don’t. And don’t understand what they are trivialising. Like my Nana as a teenager, with a shaven head and a tattoo on her arm. And that’s why no matter how jarring the attacks, I won’t criticise Israel like Gaby does. And I won’t stop posting the saner articles emerging from the US press. And I won’t hesitate to de-friend Facebook acquaintances.

  Breathe, says Orli. It’s not black and white. Even after David she won’t blame a whole people and she won’t blindly support her own. Her new series of paintings is about division and though she isn’t yet ready to share the details she talks about internal versus external schisms, she talks about truth, the spring of truth, the way it fractures, the impossibility of it remaining whole, un-tempered. She says Gaza is hell on Earth.

  But Orli does not live in Europe. Her identity is not splintered like mine. She has the luxury of a sensation of wholeness to observe division from.

  I am unsure whether my apprehension about seeing Safia is because of the political divisions I anticipate between the two of us, or because of my dreams. I haven’t seen her since the night of the un-kosher chicken, but she is the only person who seems to have picked up on the fact that I have way too much time on my hands. She has consequently been sending me an array of amusing texts and I’m sure it’s only as a consequence of this that for the past three nights in a row she has appeared in my dreams. Not doing anything sexual. Or even interesting actually. It’s my regular anxiety dream and totally ordinary – me in an exam hall at school suddenly realising that I have neglected to do any revision. It doesn’t take a psychologist to understand that that’s about Israel, a concern that I haven’t p
repared, that I’m not ready. Except in my waking state I am ready. Every time I speak to Orli I know this with ever more certainty. And I wouldn’t even think about the dream if it weren’t for Safia being in it. But it’s weird, she’s just there, sat at the desk next to me beavering away at her own exam, but every few minutes sparing a glance in my direction, asking with one raised eyebrow if I’m okay.

  Of course I’m not going to tell her. Telling somebody they were in your dream is akin to confessing a secret obsession. But I don’t tell Orli either. And that makes me feel like I’m hiding something, like I’ve done something disloyal, and just the whisper of that idea creates a peculiar tension. I’m not sure now how to be with Safia. Coffee feels like a preamble. An overture.

  She has the sofa. And the paper. And the coffee.

  “Well thanks so much for joining us.” She shuffles a little across the leather to make room.

  “Sorry. I came from Mum and Dad’s – traffic.” I kiss her hello. Her hair is down and I catch a whiff of what smells like not quite strawberry but-

  “Extra milk, extra sugar, extra foam.” She nods at the coffee she has bought for me.

  “Coffee of champions.” I take a sip. “Thanks. So, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing really. Had a friend’s engagement party. Went to a great exhibit at the Tate. Crazy busy at work – oh hang on, sorry, that was insensitive, you’re unemployed aren’t you?”

  “Gainfully so,” I grin.

  “Sure, that’s why you’re texting me every five minutes.”

  “It’s that or watching daytime television.” The second I mention television I wish that I hadn’t.

  “Best avoided,” says Safia. Then a pause. Then, “Kind of disturbing viewing at the moment.”

  “Yes.” I take another slow sip of my coffee and pick up the menu, though I know all the dishes by heart and am not planning on ordering anything. “It is.”

  “Does it not bother you? Going there now?”

  “There’s always something happening.”

  “Yes.” Safia looks at me carefully as I pretend to study the food selection. “There is.” She pauses for a moment and I prepare myself for the conversation, this conversation, the Gaza conversation, it seems we’re doing this. But instead Safia asks abruptly, “How’s Gaby?”

  “Gaby? She’s fine. Fine. Angry with me still, but fine. Happy with Pete.”

  “It’s funny that she’s so liberal and you’re not.”

  “I’m liberal.”

  “No you’re not.” There is a peculiar focussed look in Safia’s eye.

  “Are we having the kosher conversation again? Is this because you saw me eyeing up that guy’s bacon?”

  “You’d never marry someone who wasn’t Jewish, would you?” says Safia. She leans forward so that her elbows are resting on her knees, her chin in her hands. With her head angled slightly to one side I catch another whiff of her hair. Strawberry vanilla?

  “No,” I say. “I wouldn’t.”

  She sits back. “You realise that’s racist, right?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Well you’re determining somebody’s worth by accident of birth. You’re deciding who is and who isn’t good enough for you based on their race, religion, whatever, so…”

  “Not isn’t good enough, just isn’t Jewish.”

  “You hear yourself, right?”

  Her tone has a slight waver to it. It is uncharacteristic of the jocular way we usually debate. “Saf, come on, you’re exactly the same. You know you’ll marry someone Muslim.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  I look at her sarcastically, but she doesn’t laugh. “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I just- I always thought that was the case.”

  “Nope,” she says.

  There is a strange pause between us, until a woman standing next to me accidentally brushes my head with her handbag. She apologises but she is part of a small huddle of people who have gathered next to our sofa. The café is busy and they are eyeing our almost empty coffees. If Orli was here, she would probably just tell them straight out that we aren’t leaving.

  “Food?” I say to Safia. “Another coffee?” Safia nods and I get up to order at the counter. There is no need to consult her for her preference – she will have another black coffee and a goat’s cheese salad minus the beetroot with sourdough bread. I select a fishfinger buttie. There is a short queue and I watch Safia as I wait. She has reclined back against the sofa. She flicks through the paper for a few minutes and then thumbs her phone, scrolling through something that makes her brow crinkle. Is she angry at me? In the mood for a debate? I arrive back at the table with the coffees and, disappointed, the hovering crowd edges away.

  “Territory reclaimed,” I say.

  “Hmm.” Safia takes the coffee.

  “What?” I sit down.

  “It just feels a little David and Goliath doesn’t it?”

  I laugh. “There were four of them! How can it be- Oh hang on, am I David?”

  “Not the sofa,” she grins. “Idiot.”

  “Charming.”

  “Israel. Gaza.”

  “Oh.” I pause and spend a long time carefully dispensing sugar into the top of my cappuccino so that it makes a tunnel down to the liquid below. The barista has created a heart in the foam and the tunnel looks like an arrow through it. I look at Safia and take a deep breath. “How do you figure that?” I ask her.

  “Um, unarmed children against the might of Israel’s army?”

  “You mean terrorist group bent on destruction versus democracy wanting peace?”

  She makes the Noise of Disdain, as I have coined it, the one that starts at the back of her throat, gathering momentum as it’s released.

  “Anyway, I don’t remember David picking the fight.”

  “Are you serious? Your side aren’t the ones being bombed.” Safia pulls her hair roughly into a pile on top of her head, removing the strawberry vanilla (watermelon?) sweetness.

  “No, my side are just the ones being referred to as ‘my side’. Israel doesn’t equal all Jewish people you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Jew and Israel aren’t synonymous.”

  “I know that, Dan.”

  I know she knows, but I can’t stop. I am like a wound spring. “And if you really want the David and Goliath metaphor that’s fine, except you’ve cast your characters wrong, Israel is David. The mass of hostile Arab countries surrounding the tiny dot on the map that is Israel, is Goliath. The rest of the world including our stupid press and idiots on Facebook who like slamming Israel for defending itself, is Goliath.”

  “See, Israel is your side.”

  It’s possible that there is a smile amidst Safia’s goading, but still I can’t halt myself.

  “Do you have any idea what kind of antisemitic crap is going round at the moment?” I take out my phone and start searching for deleted Facebook threads.

  “Don’t be so paranoid, Dan. You’re talking to a post-September 11th Muslim here. Care to compare the prejudice?”

  “That doesn’t make this invalid.” I am still searching but keep clicking onto the wrong app.

  “No, but it puts it in perspective. Come on, Dan, you’re being a little dramatic.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you actually feel worried by it?”

  “I feel very aware of it.”

  “Does it worry you?”

  I give up on the phone and concentrate on Safia. “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Not as in my actual safety, right now. And I don’t think the government’s about to make me wear a yellow star or anything. But as in how people secretly feel about Jews, how integrated we really are, how safe our future. My Nana was a middle-class Hungarian you know? Her father was a university professor. I know now it’s mostly just words, but remember where words can lead. It’s definit
ely another reason to go.”

  “To Israel.”

  “Yes, to Israel.”

  Safia shakes her head and makes the throat sound again. I seem to be hearing it more and more frequently.

  “Hamas started this,” I say.

  “So Israel should finish it? Just, fuck them?”

  Safia eyes me pointedly and puts down her coffee. She opens her mouth to say something else, but then stops. She takes a breath. I can see the struggle of restraint. Now she raises an eyebrow, opens her mouth again, and I have the distinct feeling that she is about to say something heavy, something true. I know Orli thinks there is no one truth, only versions of it, fractured, splintered, reflected or refracted by experience and culture or something like that; but still I want to hear Safia’s truth. Just then however, of course, our food arrives. Safia closes her mouth, looks away from me and accepts her salad. She concentrates hard on unwrapping her cutlery from its napkin case, then carefully drizzles on the dressing. We both take pains to talk to the waiter who after all our Sundays knows us by name. He tells us that in a few months the place is closing for a refurb. While I can, I tuck into my fishfinger buttie. A small trail of tartar sauce escapes the bread and leaks down my finger.

  “So cultured,” Safia says, with a half-formed, half-sure smile.

  “I didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable.” I point to her coffee stained teaspoon which has somehow made its way onto the white denim of her lap.

  She picks it up and tentatively prods my leg with it, uncertain of our level of playfulness. She says something about a mutual friend who is issuing an all-white dress code for her wedding. I laugh and say that we better practise our table manners. Forwards. Backwards. We exchange nothings. As we talk, she dabs with a napkin at the stain, but the mark remains. It is a small tarnishing of spotlessness.