Now that you know that, why do you keep talking about Morocco? They won't be teaching my books in the literature departments, but there was that thesis by the girl who came to interview me, about Sephardi writers, a sociology thesis. They were analyzing the Indians, they succeeded. How do you feel, do you feel discriminated against? But for me it is fine, more than what I expected, or is it the case that publishing poems all over the world is worthless? More than maybe any other Israeli poet I am turning into the most well-known Israeli poet since Amijai, they've even translated me into Chinese, Urdu. I've been published in Pakistan! It is incredible.
This is an obsession, you should go to a psychologist. That seems like a good idea to me, send all Israeli writers who have written more than three books about the kibbutz to a psychologist. There are a lot. But you are all still surprised that we talk about Ashkenazim and Sephardim. I for one speak about this five times a week, since the second Intifada began only the Ashkenazim are on television, only the Ashkenazim write in the newspapers, now important things are happening and you have to let the people that matter talk.
But, but, what I want is a story, a real story, and the problem is that I don't see it here. I don't see the plot. What I have isn't enough. Maybe that's just reality, but you can't write a book about reality, that's not enough, Alberto. You had better hope that something happens that you can write about, maybe in five years, something will be discovered, put the project aside. But I have to write now, while it is hot, I can't wait five years. I feel like I have to do something now, I can't wait. We finally get on the plane. I'll keep going from there.
On the plane I ask myself why I need to write about my life, why talk about the story of the inheritance? I could write something more imaginative. Why this obsession with describing everything that happens in my family?
"Sir, please turn off your computer before takeoff," says the flight attendant and I continue with the pen, I'm trying to capture something I can't see, understand that it isn't a coincidence, it isn't a coincidence that I live in Jerusalem and not Madrid, and not Paris, the same way that it is not a coincidence that Silvia lives in Paris, maybe there is some mission I need to complete. Maybe I have to write something else, maybe a poem that will save me from this insanity in my head. Why do I take notes without stopping, even in the bathrooms, in cafes in European capitals, capitals that were so recently full of Jews and now have so few left. What happens when I write a poem in Hebrew in Málaga or in Granada, or when I write a poem in Spanish while I'm walking through a Jewish neighborhood in Sevilla? Am I saving the world? The Talmud says that the world depends on writing, even on a single letter.
I wonder if all these thoughts could end up in a novel, or maybe they'd be better in an article, or if they are even important. Maybe they're not. Paper will take anything, but the reader can handle very little. They can read almost no books, even the most famous end up forgotten, and books that sell millions of copies go unread, or are read only in part. The page can take anything but apparently the reader is more intelligent, few people will leave in the middle of a movie or a play but it is easy to leave a book in the middle, thinking that one day you'll come back to it, but you never do.
So, if there is no plot, then there won't really ever be a storyline, or maybe there will be, maybe Yosef's story will become clearer while we get to know the family better, and maybe I'll even let this book sit for a couple years so that I can write a more logical ending, a more complete ending.
ISRAEL
I live in airports. I'm looking for the meaning in my death. From Orly to Newark, Barajas to Hong Kong, Tangier to Lod, I fly on all the planes, I keep them from crashing, I stop them to ask the passengers if they are tired, I free them, and I see them there, the new wandering Jews. They live in airports, they're religious, ultra-orthodox, secular, converts, assimilated, but you know that they are Jewish, with their laptop and there attention to the flight announcements, as if they were watching the Hejal, the tablets of the law.
Looking for their next destination, the next place to go. They go to sell oranges or French fries. They go to sell watermelons, flowers, blouses, t-shirts, ideas, but they know that that isn't why they travel, they travel because they have to be connected to disparate parts of the world, all the nitsosot, all kinds of parallel lines that sustain the world. They've done this for years, gone between cities and countries, and have paid in blood, have paid in the deaths of their children, they've paid with the loss of their family. They have paid by going back to cities where there are no Jews, but they need to go back, and still do.
I see my brothers traveling to Morocco, a journey of four people and twenty airports, they don't know that the story of our half-brother is half-invented, that they had to go to Tétouan to rearrange something in their souls. That's what Rabbi Najman said, every journey is a tikkun, and you travel to places where you have to fix something, and we seem to have left things to repair all over the world. With all our journeys, we have had to return to Israel to be repaired. All journeys go towards Israel, that's where I'm going, from one airport to another.
Isaque, who heals the sick with memories of minerals, pieces of fruit, sparks from disappeared worlds, minerals that exploded in Atlantis and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. With air, they return in the form of diluted drops, in rocks, in the bones of animals, in the human imagination that believes that there are things that can be cured.
Fortu tries to heal people in pain, he gives them drugs that destroy disease, years ago those doctors were persecuted by the authorities in Atlantis, by priests that only used natural products and homeopathy. Today it is the opposite. They must learn from each other in order to be complete.
My brother Alberto is the witch doctor of our tribe, he wants to cure with words, but the sick don't know that they're sick or what they are sick with. They are sick from not reading enough poems, not reading psalms, or singing songs, and those that read still don't internalize the poems that they read.
And women heal the world when they have children. They don't need anything other than that. But today they want to give the world more than children, their influence is becoming stronger, and this is good.
From here, from the distance of years of death, I see the world another way and I no longer get angry. I don't get mad about the fact that they sent me to die, or get mad at the ones that killed me, children with rocks, rock by rock, I'm lying down on rocks, because of a rock they threw at me. I'm not mad at the world or its suffering, or its tikkun, because everything brings tikkun into the world. I travel from airport to airport, and when the planes take off I bless them, I send them on their way, to build bridges between men, and rivers below the bridges.
For many years I asked myself what had happened to my father, what he was looking for in Israel at the age of fifty-four? What could he find there? That his sons hadn't followed behind him, or that they went one by one? And in the end he found his peace in Ruth. Everyone made fun of her, her religiousness, living in Har Nof with her ultra-religious husband, but she was his peace. Her children, the grandchildren playing around him and that drove him crazy, maybe he felt like he was getting back top something mysterious that he hadn't felt even in his childhood, another incarnation of Tétouan and its Jewishness. From the 18th century, when people were born and died in the same house, when the goyim were there, but among those who know and remember the pain of Sefarad, those that know that you can only trust the pain of another Jew.
Sometimes he told me that wealth distances people. Money distanced him from his cousins and his father, and I was young and didn't understand what he was talking about. Look, it's great being rich, going to play tennis, when so few can afford such an expensive sport, travel abroad when no one took vacations. See the world, he said, that's what is most important.
And now you can see the whole world in a second, all the beautiful and luxurious streets, the ones that are w
ell-known, the ones that are dirty, Via Veneto in Rome, the streets of Bombay, the Istiklal in Egypt, Broadway, Oxford, and everywhere, What do I see? People running everywhere, moving things from one side to another, moving their bodies from one place to another, moving the world without stopping, because nothing is where it belongs, but you move the weight to a good place and then another person comes and you change the place, and then another, and then another, and you don't know about the two that came first, because you feel obligated to leave the office to drink a coffee and because you can't handle it any other way anymore, but you would be able to handle it if everyone stayed in the same place for one hour out of the year on the same day? Then I could return to the world.
What does it mean, to go back? I'm here, I'm always here, but people, if you stop for a single second you could see me and all your families, we are here, very close, but you're afraid. Maybe that we'll ask for money? But we don't need money anymore. You were afraid that we'd see you here in the airports, and that we would say what you were doing and thinking, thinking about how to steal more and more money, but brothers, I don't judge you, and I don't want any part of the inheritance, I don't need it. I don't have anything to do with that, I only want to talk a little bit, to say some words, to explain myself, to ask for forgiveness if I have offended you, to talk a little bit about our childhood games, about the apartment where we played, do you remember? Who was it that found the key to that apartment that Papá wasn't renting, where we would go to play?
We ran all over the house, it was the forbidden house. Do you remember, Isaque, you held me in your arms there, because I was afraid, and in your arms, Silvia, I felt safe, one hundred percent safe, I knew that with you two nothing could happen to me, and when they threw rocks at me at school I knew that you were out there somewhere, in Gaza, even in Gaza I felt you close to me and knew that nothing could happen to me, no rock could touch me. But they did attack me, and they did kill me with that rock. I don't understand how a man of twenty years of age could still feel the arms of his brothers, and that he could think that that feeling would save him. But a strong Israeli soldier, twenty years old, is still the child that he was, inside, feeling what he felt as a child.
I am not sure if what happened was supposed to happen, but that was my life, and when I see everyone running from one side to another I know that I had a full life. Twenty years are a lot, and in reality what is time anyway? There isn't a big difference between twenty and eighty years, why do we work so hard to lengthen our lives, what for? We are afraid of death, that's why. Fear paralyzes us, we are slaves to this fear, and that is why instead of living our lives fully, instead of taking care of the poor and the sick, we spend all of our money putting off death, and it is not to save our lives, because lives must be saved when there is still life left. And not just to put off death.
✺
"Be careful, sister, there are rocks coming your way."
"Rocks have followed us since before we were born."
"They come to the city of lights, rocks that follow the Jews, rocks of sand, rocks of marble, sacred rocks. Salt from the cursed city.
"And that is what I have done since I arrived. I leave the city every day. Every day I'm heading out of the city.”
"You see the city in which peace is far away, like the rock of life.”
"I have been leaving for thousands of years, brother, but I can't leave the city.”
"A rock has followed me my whole life and now my body lies beneath a rock. My family comes and put small rocks on my grave, and I don't want rocks, I want a son, I want to be a father, to be father to a son.
ZOHRA
It was the day I became a gynecologist. I called my mother to tell her, and my grandmother told me that she wasn't doing very well.
"Why didn't you call earlier?" I asked, but I remembered that she didn't even know how to use a telephone. My mother was in a coma most of the time, that's what my grandmother explained, and I, her daughter, a doctor, could not help her. It was ten in the morning. I called Marcel. We hadn't seen each other for weeks, but we had stayed in touch by telephone. I told him that I was going to see my mother, who was sick, and he suddenly said:
"You're not coming back."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because I have a feeling. You're going to stay in Morocco, you'll stay and work as a doctor there. I know you. I have a feeling.”
"No way!" was my first reaction. “No way, I told you already I'm coming back to you, it is only a matter of time.”
“Time comes and goes, it comes and goes.”
"Fine, I have to go, I love you, I'll call you. I want to go by train, I'll see how I can do it in the fastest way possible. You already know how much planes terrify me, and with all the accidents lately, I'm even more terrified. I'll go by train.”
I said goodbye to the nurses, and one of them, a Moroccan, told me that there was a bus that goes from Paris to Algeciras.
"It goes from Gare du Nord, and I think that there is one that leaves at four.”
I called SNCF, and they told me that to get to Algeciras I would have to change trains six times if I left at two, but that there was a night train leaving for Madrid at eight that would arrive at five, and from there I could take the Talgo to Sevilla, and from there go to Algeciras. I called the bus company and they told me there was space on the bus to Algeciras, that it left at two, and would arrive in Algeciras at four the next day, depending on traffic. In the past that same bus went all the way to Tangier, but now it stops in Algeciras. I reserved a seat. I remembered how I came to Paris on a bus, because it was cheaper, now the price difference didn't matter to me as much. I ran home and packed my suitcase, packing very little, the few things I had since I was still a student. But I had just become a doctor. They had offered me a job in the hospital where I had just finished my residency.
When I arrived at the bus I saw that there were already passengers inside. The bus came from London and went all the way to Algeciras. A three to four day journey.
When I got on the bus I could smell those already there, the smell of alcohol, but they were quiet the whole journey. The English didn't live up to their reputation of being very noisy.
The driver announced that the next stop was Bordeaux, then San Sebastian, Burgos, Madrid, Málaga, then Algeciras. The bus was very comfortable, I was lucky to be sitting alone, I had a double seat to myself. I brought a pretty thick book to read for the journey, it was by Philip Roth, Operation Shylock. Marcel had given it to me. I realized that almost all of the authors I liked to read were Jews. Modiano, Jabes, Bashevis Singer. But I also really like Tahar Ben Jelloun. Sometimes I wondered if he weren't a Jew. There is something Jewish about his books, he always seems to be talking about Jewish food when he talks about food, his Moroccans always seem Jewish, like the Moroccans I see in the flea markets on Sundays, eating Merguez sausage one after another and speaking French mixed with Moroccan Arabic. Moroccans, Tunisians, and some Algerians from small towns like Tlemcen or Ain Temouchent, but never Algiers, they're already city people and never eat in popular restaurants, they eat in the quality French restaurants, and like all Jews in history they are more French than the French.
"A crazy book," Marcel had said, about the book. I remember reading his books in the past. They were fun but they also had parts that bored me.
I lay down in my seat and covered myself with the light blanket I brought. All my thoughts were of Marcel's words, that I wasn't going to return. He said it as if he knew something I didn't know yet. Or maybe I did. But I wanted to be the one to announce the news when the time came. The women need me there, here there are thousands of gynecologists, here I could be a gynecologist with a good salary, but there I could help the women of my town, women that needed my help. The salary would be much lower but what happens is that all the doctors from Africa come to study here and then they stay instead of returning home. In the end Morocco loses th
e citizens it needs the most. I'm not saying it is easy, and I'm not judging anyone, But if I can't be a mother, I could at least help the women in my town to be mothers, this is more important than salary and all the comforts Paris can offer.
And other than that, Paris was bringing me down. It was drowning me. It was no longer the city I first came to...or maybe I just see things differently now. It isn't just the beauty of its streets, buildings that seem like parts of museums. Suddenly I see people's faces more, faces that haven't seen sun, just like the city's sky. It is as if the whole city is full of depressed people that can't connect to the world, can't even give a smile to the person in front of them.
The faces on the metro were taking me over, every day I traveled in the sun of my Tangier and my Casablanca, from Tétouan and from Chefchaouen, I remember that Farid, my high school boyfriend, had told me that he missed the sun, so I told him I liked the clouds. I like the clouds because they make people more serious. The sun turns everyone into clowns, clowns that don't go anywhere. You see, sunny countries, like Morocco, are undeveloped, but when you have cold you have to find solutions to many problems, come up with technology to survive. This forces you to advance. I remember that he told me:
"Yes, but what good is all that technology if they don't know how to be happy?"
Ten years of studies in Paris had to go by before I understood how intelligent that sentence was. He must have heard it from his grandmother, because it seemed like such old wisdom. What do you live for? What is progress for? In the end only the black Africans laugh in Paris, or the Arabs, or the Jews, not everyone, some, those that haven't yet turned French. Their children will be like Parisians, absent, expressionless, full of culture and customs, but without laughter.
And later I realized that you see so few babies in Paris with their mothers, just women and more women, alone. Who has babies anymore? I saw births in the hospital, but what do they do with the babies later? It is like they disappear, why don't we see them? And if you see them it is only on Sundays, a mother with her child, or with two, never more than two, and if you watch them a few minutes the mother starts saying don't do this, don't do that, a smack, sometimes she hits them, only small beatings, but this is the violence of the strong against the weak, in full daylight, without anyone caring, without anyone stopping. And later the kids they hit go all over the world with Doctors without Borders, they end up on the television talking about kids in Algeria or Brazil.
Gates to Tangier Page 11
