I Am Ariel Sharon

by Yara El-Ghadban

  He loved horses so much, our Gour did. The joy on his face when he entered the stall in Nahalal. A beautiful grey mare for his nine years! What year would that be, my love? Here in this grotto, time has neither rhythm nor form. Too bad you aren’t awake. You could recite all the dates. Days. Hours. All the events. Incidents. Moments.

  You have a sense of history, and of your role in that history. Events are meticulously recorded in your journal, your correspondence preserved and organized with obsessive meticulousness. Funny, isn’t it, how we tend to pass over the joyous moments, while the unhappy ones are chiselled deep in our memories?

  Gour is nine, so it must be … 1965. Yes, that’s right. You’re a major-general and the director of military training. We’re savouring life and, tucked away in our little apartment in the heart of the oldest moshav in the country, loving without trepidation after the loss of Gali. After years of being held back, you’ve finally assumed your rightful place at the head of the army. We’re putting our family back together. Our attachment to each other, Gour and I, grows stronger. He’s living the sort of childhood that was never available to you, loved by his friends and by us, appreciated by our moshavnik neighbours. And even though the forty deaths at Mitla still weigh on your conscience, you tell yourself: they didn’t die in an ambush. You didn’t sacrifice their lives in vain. They didn’t die at Egyptian hands. They died for their country. And besides, more than two hundred of the enemy were felled by our machine guns. In the calculus of death, we come out ahead.

  Yes … 1965 … 1966 … Years of deep sleep. Of contented exhaustion. Happy mornings infused with the scent of dried flowers. Running wild with the children in the nearby hills. Resting after the day’s battles.

  Years of victory. Conquest. This, despite occasional outbreaks of revolt and resistance. Despite the refusals to submit. Despite the stubbornness of the Palestinians. Israel; prouder, more headstrong than ever. Neither the waste of young lives under your command in the deadly ravine of the Sinai, nor that of Arab civilians in your campaign of reprisals, keeps us awake at night.

  It’s before everything falls apart.

  Sleep is one of those things we appreciate only when it doesn’t come. When it turns its back on us. When a bullet smashes into Gour’s head and our dreams expire like his breath. After 1967, there’s no more night, no more peace, no more sleep. The year Israel conquers the West Bank, and the West Bank takes its revenge, white night after white night until nothing remains but the endlessly passing train of hours. Without rhythm. Without relief.

  Arik, Arik? I don’t hear you snoring anymore. Are you still breathing? Arik, don’t leave me. Gour will not come back. He’s so, so far from us now. Beyond death. With his mother, and neither you nor I can join them. Their light is an accident in our war-filled life. Their departure an accident, too.

  The logic of life makes such sense when you think about it. Gali was killed on her way to Jerusalem, in the Aston Martin you gave her with the steering wheel on the right-hand side. Gour was killed by an old war trophy from the Occupied Territories, a hundred-year-old hunting rifle purchased from a West Bank villager. How can gifts be so fatal?

  A breech-loading rifle that hadn’t been fired since the turn of the century. A marvellous toy as tall as the boy who’s come of age in the shadow of his military father. A toy, until the morning it falls into the hands of a friend of his. Two boys playing at war, as boys do when they’re the sons of soldiers.

  Suddenly, the gun goes off.

  A terrible scream.

  An earth-shattering scream.

  The bullet no one suspected was in the chamber snuffed out Gour’s life as if it had been waiting for the cruellest moment to exact its revenge. You were on the telephone, I was out shopping for Rosh Hashanah … We will mourn New Year’s forever.

  For months the story of the rifle haunts you. To whom did it belong? Who loaded it fifty years before? A hunter? A peasant? A rebel who’d never accepted his defeat? Did whoever it was know that that bullet would kill the son of the Bulldozer of Palestine? The Butcher of Beirut? The King of Israel?

  Is this the revenge of the disappeared and razed villages? Of houses reduced to dust? Of uprooted olive groves?

  Is this the spiteful laughter of the natives? Have they bewitched objects? Cursed the land? Will it always be hostile, this land?

  You almost go mad.

  I, who never prayed, confide in anemones. I beg them to heal you each night you go out to see the horses. You ask them questions you don’t dare put to me, let alone to yourself, you who are so suspicious of questions. I don’t know what it is you say to the horses. You leave in a gallop, as you used to do with Gour. You disappear for hours into the rocky hills. When you come home to bed, you snuggle up against me and curl a strand of my hair around your finger. If you pull out a hair by accident, you apologize and hold me tighter. My lock of hair in hand, you rock to sleep, but sleep leaves you at sunrise two or three hours later. You leap out of bed, grateful to the new day rising and saving you from your ghosts.

  And now here I am, one of those ghosts. Alone in this cave, the only one left to see you through your journey. Years pass. Vera came. Vera left. She almost managed to keep you in her forest. She almost managed to kill you, and now here I am, still here.

  I’m not Vera, my love. When you looked at me it was always her I saw in your eyes. I’m not Gali, either; you sometimes looked for her in mine. Let’s be honest for once. I am not the woman of your childhood, nor of your adolescence. I wasn’t there at the start. I spent my youth fighting the story that preceded mine. I wasn’t the first to arrive on the scene. Which may be why I didn’t stay until the end. My life was an interlude. A moment of pause. A parenthesis within yours. I was dropped into a tale told by a different fairy, one who’d had you under her spell all along.

  My story begins in 1947.

  I’m ten years old. I’m still in Brasov, the youngest in the family. Papa’s little hotel is no more, has been a sad memory for a long time. No more skiing in the Transylvanian mountains. No more tourists. Our Hungarian heritage, like our village, has been assimilated into Romania’s.

  As an adult I’ll be accused of being cold, of lacking empathy towards the Palestinians and everything they’ve lost. But as a child, I’d come to know the cost of war and its aftermath.

  Borders shift. One day you’re part of the Hungarian Empire, and one world war later you belong to a new country. We who had always been Hungarian are suddenly Romanians! Villages change hands. People, belonging: it’s a game. Those who win get to name the countries and continents.

  After the Second World War, we have it figured out. We’re not Hungarian and we’re not Romanian. We’re Jews, with a capital J! One after another, members of our family leave for Palestine. Now it’s our turn to name the territory and take over the villages.

  Cold?

  Cruel?

  Truth and power have this in common: they make a mockery of kindness.

  In the new country, you start seeing my sister, who has joined the rest of the siblings. Gali lives in the boarding school of the Mosenson Youth Village, next to your father’s field. She writes to me about her life there, and that of the other emigrants. The more she tells me, the more I’m impatient to be there with her. Among Olga, Yaffa, Eliezer, and Yitzhak, Gali is the only one who doesn’t treat me like a child. She confides in me, talks about the Russian boy who waters the orange groves. She writes to me as if we were the same age. Tells me about your amorous adventures. The rendezvous among the wells. The hole you made in the school fence so she could sneak out. I imagine you, from Romania, laughing and scheming in the orchards like the canaries that sing at my window.

  You’re nineteen. She’s sixteen, and so very beautiful. Luminous, with a childlike smile accentuated by her boyish haircut and her golden curls. You love to tangle your fingers in her hair, she tells me.

  —
Gali, my Gali … Your hair swallows me whole!

  This habit you have of twirling my hair in your fingers, does it come from those first moments of love?

  Gali suffers so much in your absence. During those turbulent months before the country is born you go on secret missions with the Haganah. She writes to say how much your taste for combat troubles her. The pleasure you take in reprisals against the Arabs. Your need for vengeance. And yet …

  You were born in Palestine. In 1928, the year of your birth, Israel doesn’t exist. You are Palestinian! Imagine that! To live and grow up a Palestinian Jew, like the Samaritans of Kiryat Luza, nestled in a valley on the West Bank in the shadow of Nablus. Refusing to choose between faith and nation.

  Better still: living like a simple peasant.

  Neither naming nor renaming yourselves.

  Naming and renaming neither the land nor its people.

  What am I saying? Forgive me, my dear. I’ve no idea where these thoughts are coming from. Ever since I’ve been a rock, time has passed so slowly. The water dripping on me digs little holes and then fills them with other stories, other voices. Over the years, my body has amalgamated with the earth, my veins welded to the stone. I am the loose gravel on the cave’s floor. My Hungarian skin has the marly tint of clay and ancient limestone. I hear the voices of indigenous peoples.

  They call us pioneers. But pioneers of what? It’s in the nature of humans to believe themselves masters of their destiny. To storm across the chessboard with the presumption of queens and kings. But Vera understood and so did Gali that we were pawns in a game played by the gods. Is that what compelled my sister to become a psychiatric nurse, and then drove her to her death? If only I’d been as wise as her when I was young. I certainly was not.

  I write irritated replies to Gali, and invariably end up tearing them into pieces. Her worries about you annoy me. She’s loved by a young and intrepid man ready to go to war for her and she complains? She recounts your exploits but equivocates, and tempers them with reservations and shades of grey. When I read about your accomplishments, strange sensations came over me. Excitement. Envy. Melancholy. And … a delicious kind of pain. For a long time I’ll feign indifference to conceal this fact: that I was in love with you before I even met you.

  Gali: her sweetness, her frailty. A vulnerability that melts your heart. She awakes in you such empathy, such altruism. Only she can make you slow down, brief and ephemeral though these times are. Sometimes I hate her simply for that. Gali is the light against your darkness. She spreads innocence over the world, disarms the most recalcitrant minds with a simple hug. You’re the brawler, the bad boy, the undisciplined fighter. She’s the angel who attends to your wounds and soothes your loneliness.

  In the months leading up to the 1948 War, the two of you are inseparable. You already envision the house you will have, the orchards you’ll plant. To the great joy of your father, you want to study agronomy. Gali wants to go into nursing. Vera — surprise, surprise — is besotted with her, although you keep your relationship a secret and marry between two tours of military service without your parents’ knowledge. How can your mother not approve of this young bride walking in her own footsteps? Gali is intent on a career in medicine, enough said. But Gali will never set foot in an operating theatre. She becomes a psychiatric nurse, holds the hands of the wounded, whispers comforting words into their ears. Every now and then she might change a gauze bandage. Who can compete with that?

  1953, you are married.

  1956, Gour is born.

  In the intervening years, I too emigrate. For a time — the most beautiful but also painful period of my life — we’re always together. I live nearby, look after my nephew, take my meals with you, help Gali around the house …

  Oh, how handsome you are, my Arik. Handsome as your shadow at night, a shadow obscuring the ravages of age and your overeating. At thirty years old, you are exactly like the country. Lean and swaggering with the confidence and impatience of a born leader awaiting his destiny. Heedless of anyone who tries to hold you back. You’ve had enough of rationing and keeping an eye on the horizon. You’re as twitchy as a racehorse before the gates open. Once the signal to start is given, there’s no holding you back. I’ve seen all there is to see of man’s grotesque nature. No one is a mystery to me. And you are the most handsome, most seductive open book I’ve come across yet.

  I watch you day and night, until it hurts so much I have to hide in my apartment, get out my paints. When my brush betrays me and all that is bothering me shows up on the canvas in dark colours, I take your binoculars, the ones I pinched from your house, and go outside. Perched on a hilltop, I dream of you, wiping tears from my eyes, my only consolation the flight of birds and these binoculars you cherish pressed to my eyes as they are so often to yours. I live for these moments of escape, anything that allows me to ponder our every chance meeting, every hello or kind word from you. Tiny shocks rip through my body whenever you pay me a compliment. And if you happen to plant a kiss on my cheek, I bite the inside of my lips in order to hide my emotions.

  Ah, I’m pitiful! And it kills me when anyone feels pity towards me. Who would have guessed that my devotion to you would spur such consequences? Or have we always known that it would, but never wanted to admit it? Not a day has gone by since my arrival from Romania, not a day has passed in this place I’ve kept secret since my childhood, without you. A place in which I am blonde, like my sister. Delicate. Innocent.

  I’d rather be anything than the little brown sister. I want to be the fairy. I detest the sly fox who smiles at me from my mirror. I rail against the destiny that gave me this mouth starved of kisses and Gali such virginal lips. I turn to you like a sunflower to the sun. I desire you before I even know what the word means. My brothers used to slap my face because of my insolent expression. Gali would mock me when she caught me looking at my reflection in the mirror. But nothing could change what I saw: that I am also beautiful. More beautiful than my sister. An untamed beauty. An indomitable beauty that makes men tremble. Nothing like Gali’s porcelain loveliness.

  Porcelain breaks easily. It must be kept behind glass. There to be admired. Not me! Life has tempered me, given me a harder veneer. I’m made of grass and wood. Men can do what they like with me, to me. It infuriates me that you should succumb, like so many others, to this fragility to be adored from a distance and handled with care. Go ahead, love my sister. Fail to see what to me is as clear as day. That you’re too strong for her, Arik, and she’s too weak for you.

  I want you to sculpt me with your hands. Burn me. Shape me. Fashion a cauldron out of me. Bathe yourself in me! I long for the day when the porcelain breaks. She will break. Sooner or later you’ll realize the mistake you’ve made.

  The country is never not at war. The militias have been organized into a formidable army. Recruits are sought everywhere. When it comes to killing, men and women are equally welcome. I respond to the call to arms. I work as a police artist, for the department of judiciary identity before it’s integrated into the information sector.

  Did it ever occur to me that I might be assigned to your brigade? Maybe yes, maybe no. The line between wishing and planning is such a fine one. Gali never wanted me to pursue a military path and neither did our parents. When she hears of my intention to join, she bombards me with long speeches about the gift I’m squandering. She who insists I study art. Who encourages me to take courses in interior design and even ornithology.

  — You’re too beautiful and you love beauty too much to go to war, she cries. You love music and museums and nature too much!

  Is she talking about me or her? Is she reproaching me for my love of beauty or is she envious of it? She spends her days among people broken by mental illness, helping unfortunate men and women let down by nature. It feels as if Gali hates it that I’m ignoring the splendour that surrounds me. Is she jealous of the time I’ll be spending with you, participati
ng in the thing beyond agriculture that you care about most — combat? I would be, if I were her …

  All I recall now is an immense happiness, the feeling of my heart enveloping the whole of me, the conviction that, unlike the other paratroopers under your command, were I ever to jump from a plane I’d float up to the stars. Finally, I have you all to myself. The army belongs to us alone, the army in which you finally discover the affection your parents never provided you. From that time forward, I am a part of its great embrace.

  The idea that we might find warmth and comfort among sanctioned murderers repulses my sister. But what does she know, after all? Before love, hatred unites people against one another. Put a gun in women’s or men’s hands and they are equals under the canopy of death.

  What does she know of the sweet satisfaction of violence after imagining all the ways your enemy might be put to death, the taste of his blood? What does she know of the irresistible appeal of weaponry? Tanks call out to you. Summon you into their bellies, to deliver them of their bombs. Machine guns seize you at night. Cold. Trembling. Beg you to rid them of their cartridges. To give them life. To let fire flow from their mouths. Once you hold the means of death in your hands, nothing in the world matters except the desire to deploy it. To throw a grenade as far as possible and harvest souls.

  I enter your world as though I was always made for it. I penetrate where Gali cannot follow. There where the planting of clementine trees and land mines is not a contradiction. Not a conflict. Joining the information sector places me in your shadow realms. Another kind of intimacy. I no longer know where state secrets end and those of the heart begin.