Abu Rodeis—August 1, 1968.
Last night I slept on a folding cot in the Kantara Customs House, not for from the Suez Canal. This morning I got up at dawn to catch a ride with an army convoy to this place, about two hundred kilometers due south on the Gulf of Suez, where my cousin Mendel is stationed.
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* * *
Most young native Israeli Jews are named after martial and ethical heroes of the Bible, or have made-up names out of the Hebrew dictionary, like my own given name. In contrast, Mendel is saddled with a name out of the dead East European Diaspora. I assume it has caused him his share of chagrin. It is a burden, for not only is it odd, but it means that he commemorates in the flesh the memory of a man of whom nothing remains, not even a photograph. This was my uncle's father, my mother's father, my grandfather. My uncle has told me that Mendel is turning out to look something like his namesake. That may be, but what I note right away is that he takes after my aunt, in her handsome, happier days, before the kibbutz took its toll.
I haven't laid eyes on my cousin since the last time I was in Israel, three years ago. Then he was a gangly, somewhat unprepossessing teenager—his Adam's apple protruded. In the interval he has put on brawn. He looks dark and fit and sympathetic in his uniform, and accepting my aunt's cookies the delivery of which it was my mission to accomplish, he embraces me and makes me welcome. I can stay as long as I like, he says. Although he is in the officer candidate school here, he has several free days each week. Do I want to go down to Sharm el Sheikh? We can skin-dive there and enjoy the extraordinary marine life.
We keep looking at each other curiously as he shows me to my quarters in the civilian sector of the base. He remarks that I don't seem to be fazed too much by the sun, for an American, and I remind him that I am a Sabra, native-born, just as he is. The sun, at midmorning, is murder. “I forgot,” he says, smiling. He is a kibbutznik from birth, one of the “New Jews,” but contrary to the findings of anthropologists who have made close studies of such communally-reared children, there is no lack of affect in him, at least not toward me. With a flourish, he permits me passage through the screen door of the villa in which I will be staying.
“Villa” is local usage. The single-story concrete barrack is one of a group of identical structures forming a compound surrounded by concertinas of barbed wire. This housing, Mendel explains, was constructed specially for the Italian and Yugoslav engineers whom the Egyptians brought in to find the oil and sink the wells. The “villas” are luxuriously equipped with running water, electricity, and screens, and I have the choice of any bunk and mattress, for the place Mendel has brought me to is vacant. The outhouse is over there, at that trench, Mendel indicates as he drives me in a jeep back to the military camp. We eat lunch (cucumber-salad sandwiches and Tempo soda pop) in a noisy mess hall with girl and boy soldiers at long flyspecked tables. Mendel is in a hurry. Late for a lecture, he gulps his food and drink, grabs a notebook, leaving me to my own devices.
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* * *
August 2
This seems to be a combination Klondike boom town, frontier kibbutz, and manned station on the surface of the moon. I'll stay here a day or two.
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* * *
August 4
The Bedouin who have an encampment nearby shoo their goats off the airstrip when they hear the droning of the daily DC-3. The incoming flight appears every morning from behind a ridge in the east, circles around over the water, and makes a precipitous, bumpy landing. In the afternoon, there is an outgoing flight by the same plane. So far, that's the only air traffic I've noticed. The last couple of mornings I have walked in the direction of the strip after breakfast to attend this little ritual and to watch the colors change before the heat and the flies become intolerable. The grimy, grinning Bedouin leave me alone once I have convinced them that I am not interested in the seashells they try to sell as a sideline.
The loudest noise, then, around the airstrip after the plane has landed and its crew and passengers have departed in jeeps, is of the goats munching at clumps of prickly scrub. The sun has come up over the closest ridge. It is still low enough, however, so that every object throws a shadow many times its size—the goats, myself, pebbles in the ground. Colors change every five minutes. The sky, from pink, to pearl, to blue. The water of the Gulf of Suez, from lead-gray to deep blue. The hills across the Gulf, from black to gray to brown, a brightly-lit brown relief map in which every detail, ridge, and contour, miles distant, stands out as soon as the sun climbs and its light falls on Africa direct. I have scanned the face of the opposite continent through binoculars I borrowed from Mendel. It appears uninhabited, lunar. In the late afternoon, the light falls the other way. Then the Sinai hills and mountains are similarly detailed, while those in Africa blur and merge and become a jagged silhouette reflecting the rose and purple colors that flash for minutes at a time across the sky, and the water, as the sun sets.
I leave the airstrip when the flies discover me. By this time, the freshness has gone from the bone-dry air, the first act of the color-show has ended. By midday there will be no colors at all: just a white glare that fills the sky and consumes everything under it, compared to which the midday light in Jerusalem—that I thought was hard—is temperate, beneficial. Wearing a kibbutznik “idiot's cap,” I walk back to the base. I take a celery sandwich and a Tempo in the mess-hall, and then retire to my bunk to give an ear to the melodies of the Voice of Cairo, to read and doze. The radio is Mendel's, an old plug-in Phillips. Outside, the temperature will reach 115° Fahrenheit. A dry heat, not muggy, as in Tel Aviv.
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When the heat is turned on all the way, activity at Abu Rodeis diminishes but doesn't stop entirely. The civilian geologists and engineers pull up in their Land Rovers in a compound separate from the one I am in and retreat to air-conditioned trailers. The propane cooling devices make a noise like idling motors. There are also a couple of oil rigs right in the camp, which never stop sucking the stuff out of the ground, clanking so monotonously night and day that this noise, too, is absorbed into silence by the heat. Flies bump languidly against the screens. From the shelter of my barrack, I can see no human movement. Mendel, I know has lectures; these are indoors.
But more goes on, even under the sun when it is at its highest, than I first assume. Half-asleep on my bunk, narcotized by the furnace-like atmosphere and the Arabic singing, I become aware of a new sound: a thud and then a crunch in the distance, at irregular intervals. I get up and stand by the screen door. They are practicing on the artillery range. Yesterday, at about the same time, I heard crackling that was probably small-arms fire.
I must go out into the fiercest heat of the day to use the latrine. I make the trek in the blinding glare, relieve myself over the trench with its gagging smell of lime, teeming flies, and convenient stack of Mickey Mouse comic books in Arabic. This wooden shack is a horror, but at least it affords some shade. I dally there a moment, breathing through my mouth and bracing myself for the sun. On the way back, I meet a small group of marching soldiers. Their rifle butts clank against their canteens, boots scrape the soft asphalt; no one speaks.
More than half of the troops here come from kibbutzim, Mendel says. He doesn't know whether this is the result of official policy, but I think it must be, since kibbutzniks make up an insignificant fraction of the Israeli population at large.
The young kibbutzniks are better suited to this life than the city-bred soldiers, or the immigrants. They behave as if they were at home. Girls from the city, for example, don't ordinarily go around in khaki blouses, khaki shorts, and sandals or shit-kickers. That is the constant costume of the girls and boys on the base, however, and most of the girls move as if they have seldom worn anything else.
Of the army people, almost everyone, with the exception of the senior officers, looks to be under twenty-five; that means almost everyone is at least a couple years younger than I am. The civilians are older, from what I have seen of them, which has not been much. I understand they are working for a government-subsidized company. They are supposed to be searching for more oil and jacking up the efficiency of the existing wells. Usually they keep to themselves. They have their own mess, and the only occasion at which I have seen them mix with the troops is when a movie is shown.
Social life copies aspects of life on the kibbutz: the same routine of dutifulness, the egalitarian ways, the communal eating, probably gossip and a certain lack of privacy, the evening hours of scheduled recreation for those who are not dead-tired, but all this enhanced, revivified, or maybe travestied, by the youthfulness of the population, the ever-present guns and tanks, and the spectacular setting in nature.
Into this strange little society in the wilderness I have come, and have been neither accepted nor rejected. Some of them know I am Mendel's cousin, and greet me casually. Others ignore me, not out of hostility, I believe, but as they might ignore each other, through familiarity. During the worst hours of the heat, I have been keeping to my bunk, and in the early morning and late afternoon I walk around and see the sights, maybe trying to pass the time of day with this one or that one. In the evening, I unobtrusively eavesdrop on conversations, arguments. It is possible that I am not such an odd addition to the scene.
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Altercation between a girl soldier and a couple of her male comrades, privates first-class like herself, over a proposed visit to the famous Sinai monastery of St. Katherine's.
Girl: “But why can't I go, if I want to?”
First Boy. “The monks won't have it, that's why.”
Girl: “It's unfair! It's not normal!”
First Boy: “We must respect their religious beliefs.”
Girl: “Izzatso? Well, what about in Israel, when the religious discriminate against everybody, and tell everybody do this, don't do that? I guess we have to respect their beliefs too, huh?”
First Boy: “That's not the same thing. I'm against that.”
Girl: “Could you kindly tell me what the difference is? It's not clear to me.”
First Boy: “Well. . .”
Second Boy: “The difference is, one, these are Gentiles, not Jews, and two, we are the occupying power here. We shouldn't step on their toes if we can help it.”
Girl: “Amnon, have you ever thought of going into the diplomatic service?”
First Boy: “Yeah, that's right. That's the difference.”
Second Boy: “If we behave ourselves, maybe they'll spontaneously suggest that a woman or two would be OK.”
Girl: “Yeah, if she doesn't sleep over.”
This girl—muscular, blonde—like many Israeli girls manages to combine a whining tone with twice as many words per minute. In France, too, the young women speak faster than anyone.
“Ha! Do you think I care?” she concludes. “Let them meditate in peace.”
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* * *
To allay boredom, and the anxiety that I feel whenever I have nothing to read, to help kill the time between eleven in the morning and three in the afternoon, I have been lying on my bunk and rationing myself to a chapter a day from a book called Yesterday and To-day in Sinai, written by a Major C. S. Jarvis and published in London in 1931. I found this book under some trash in a corner of the barracks. It is in poor condition, with pages and illustrations ripped out; in spite of this, I am grateful that it has come my way.
“To my wife,” Major Jarvis says in the dedication facing the title page,
who has assisted me with this book,
and who has helped me to see
the humorous side of a
lonely life that is not
always amusing
Jarvis was governor of Sinai following the First World War, after the Peninsula had been taken away from the Turks by Allenby's army. The Major was responsible for law and order and modernization from the Canal to the border of the Palestine Mandate. In effect, he seems to have been the unofficial king of Sinai, acclaimed by the Bedouin Arabs. He dispensed justice, distributed wheat, made tours of inspection, received tributes and honors. He writes with a recurrent sense of irony—conscious or unconscious, I can't quite tell—at being the representative in this Godforsaken spot of an empire that is soon going to disintegrate, but is still proud of itself, has a lot of spunk left, can put on a good show. I like the Major. He is paternalistic and a racist, but that is not so important as the fact that he can make me laugh, and that he took the trouble to learn something about the demography, history, archaeology, wildlife, etc. of the territory under his supervision.
To begin with, Jarvis rejects the term “desert” for the Sinai—at least for all but its southernmost extremity of granite mountain ranges. According to him, the definition of a desert is “a place devoid of water and vegetation.” But recent surveys show there is water, in addition to the numerous oases, and the archaeological evidence proves there were civilizations here once. Therefore “the correct designation (for most of the Sinai) is a wilderness, lacking chiefly a virile and hard-working population to make it, if not exactly a garden, a much more attractive place than it is at present.”
Jarvis doesn't believe that the people he has been living among and has gotten to know have it in them to undertake this transformation: “Perhaps the most marked characteristic of the Sinai Arab is his absolute loathing of work in any form.” Jarvis puts down the typical adult as a cunningly ingratiating loafer who will exert himself physically only to abuse his wives or pursue a feud or lawsuit. However, if a young Arab boy can be rescued from his people soon enough, and trained to serve as a British civil servant up at El Arish or in the camel constabulary, the outcome can be quite different, for
The Arabs of Sinai are absolutely ignorant and uneducated, but this does not mean that they are brainless. I have always held the view that the average Arab is born into this world with a very good brain, but that it becomes atrophied by disuse.
In the dry, still heat, I laugh out loud, and remember that the history books say that in 1903, the British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, toyed with the idea of giving some land around El Arish to the Zionists. Herzl was excited and enthusiastic, but the delegates of the pogromized masses in Russia, who were the heart of the Zionist movement, wouldn't hear of anything but the real Land of Israel. In any case, no more came of the El Arish scheme than of Birobidjan, Argentina, or Uganda.
It's true, Jarvis concedes, that as between the nomadic Bedouin, on the one hand, and the fellahin of the Delta and the French- and English-speaking merchants and educated classes of the towns of Egypt and the Levant (whom Jarvis is prepared to commend for their hard-working and cultured qualities, respectively), a distinction should be drawn. I remember T. E. Lawrence says the same thing. Yet like Lawrence, Jarvis finally gives the impression that all differences and similarities aside, it is the nomads who are the pure, true Arabs, and what he has learned about them he can pass on to his readers as a dose of the facts about an entire people which has lately been much in the news.
The truth of the matter is that the Arab is not a first-class fighting man; this may be due to the fact that his natural repugnance to discipline causes lack of cohesion and there is nothing to hold a force together once the enemy have administered a check. . . . The Arab, therefore, like the Irishman, is credited with qualities he does not possess.
Yet:
With all his faults there are certain attractive qualities about the Arab . . . that make him irresistible to a certain type of Englishman . . . such Englishmen are apt to take the Arab too seriously—far more seriously than the Arab takes himself—and in course of time to become so imbued with the Arab cause, whatever that may be, that they are willing to sacrifice their lives for it; and this is far more than the average Arab would do himself.
So what? Isn't this far more than any man in his right mind would do? Stretched out on my bunk, in the heat, I can't imagine myself choosing to die for a cause. Is this a failure of the imagination? Or does it just signify that I'm a coward, who hasn't changed since I used to run away from the Irish kids who wanted to fight, back in Roxbury? Would Jarvis say that the half-million or so British soldiers who were slaughtered, maimed, and gassed in one offensive during the “Great War”—the “Great War” is the prime historical event in Jarvis's experience—would he say they were man enough to sacrifice themselves for a cause?
But obviously I'm being unfair—stupid, even. Isn't Jarvis ironical, a skeptic? And, in the context of these questions, it is painful for me to remember how frantically I tried to escape from the safety of America, at precisely the time that the big war was exploding here last year.
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On Arab “psychology,” Jarvis repeats a lot of what Lawrence said in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Jarvis is less poetic, more amusing. This sort of humor is good for a limited number of laughs. In the midday heat, even laughing takes something out of you.
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Late afternoon. A demonstration in the field for colonels and generals, to which Mendel has gotten me invited as “Press.”
The spectators sit in a makeshift grandstand waiting for the tanks to be let out of their parking lot, where they are kept in orderly rows with mittens fitted over their cannons. When they start to move, the ground commences trembling. I count thirty tanks moving, then racing across the field, chewing up rock and sand in their treads, generating an angry noise. In the open turret of each of these things, exposed to the waist, stands the cadet commander of a five-man crew. One of these exposed figures, wearing steel vest, leather helmet, earphones, and goggles, is Mendel, but though he has told me the number of his tank, I can't find it. I can't even focus the binoculars on any single tank long enough to read its number, for they move in and out of patterns with unexpected speed, raising dust, turning, stopping dead, springing forward, like tawny-colored cats romping in a sandbox. Meanwhile the turrets swivel and the cannon move back and forth as if feeling about for something in the air. This goes on for a long time. I can't understand what is happening. When I am on the verge of asking the gentleman beside me whether this is an exercise in maneuvering for position, the shooting starts. For some reason, it takes me by surprise. A tank will suddenly dart out from the milling pack and the dust, and, still moving, fire a shell at the moving target—which is a big oil can rolling down an incline on the far side of the practice field, near the beach. The explosive CRACK! of the cannon as each tank takes its shot makes my ears ring, but that is nothing compared with the concussion of the occasional direct hit. This follows a sound that is at once a scream and a roar. When the smoke drifts (which seems to be immediately) what was a barrel before is now a ripped, twisted piece of scrap, a tangle of metal on fire.
Most of the shots are near-misses and ricochets. I don't know if the gray-haired officer who is sitting next to me grimaces at each shot because he thinks the exercise is going badly. A burning stench reaches the grandstand. I leave early, before the show is quite over, hyped-up, impressed, nauseated.
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* * *
Today Jarvis pleased me again.
One of the pictures that has not been torn from the book, and which proves that the Major was not among those Englishmen who went native, shows him in the wilderness somewhere, wearing a coat, high collar, tie, and jodhpurs. A mustache points up from his lips and a long, straight pipe is clenched between his teeth. Jarvis is leaning on a shotgun. On either side of him Bedouin servants—trained beaters, I learn from from the text of the chapter—display the quail that Jarvis killed that day.
Jarvis describes the habits of the animals that live in Sinai, this deceptively barren-looking place. He tells how your servants should prepare and cook the various types of game that abound at certain seasons. He recounts how he once spent several days stalking a beautiful specimen of the extremely rare ibex (a wild goat, I gather) among the crags in the vicinity of St. Katherine's only to have it escape when Jarvis, for a careless moment, let himself get between the wind and the animal's super-sensitive nose.
Jarvis the administrator, anthropologist, hunter, and naturalist gives way in successive chapters to Jarvis the historian and archaeologist, and Jarvis the agnostic, with his own small comment to make corroborating something in the Bible.
As the only land bridge between Asia and Africa, “it is not surprising,” in the Major's opinion, that Sinai is the place where more armies have fought more battles than anywhere else, “not excluding Belgium.” Some of the armies that have fought in it or passed through have been: Pharaonic, Hittite, Assyrian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Mohammedan, Crusader, Mameluke, French, Turk, and British. The civilizations in the way were often devastated, until today there is none. Artifacts of agriculture, religion, cosmetology, and war are scattered around the sites of burial mounds and ruined, buried cities. Jarvis notes these things with restrained enthusiasm. He lets his readers in on some of his own modest but not uninteresting finds. The professional archaeologists have only scratched the surface, according to him. At least in this respect, the Peninsula is a precious treasure. As an example of the kind of work that should be done, Jarvis refers briefly to the excavations and surveys of Israelite fortifications carried out by young Lawrence just before the Great War. Another English team has discovered wall-inscriptions in a mine near the Red Sea, which are in a “Proto-Sinaitic” language, and are the oldest alphabetical (non-hieroglyphic) writing known, dating to roughly the fifteenth century before Christ, or two hundred years before the Exodus from Egypt.
I detect a trace of pride when Jarvis finally comes to speak of the redeeming fact that the region he is governor of was the scene of important happenings in history other than military. For though he seems to have been an agnostic, he accepts the events of the Book of Exodus, including the Law-Giving, as being based on real occurrences, citing some of the English, and even German, scholarship that convinced him. What he can add from his own knowledge is mostly by way of explaining naturally some of the “miracles.” For example, manna falling from heaven is satisfactorily explained by the fact that sometimes flights of Sinai quail flock so thick that birds drop out of the sky, like locusts. This doesn't occur often; yet Jarvis has observed it more than once, and tells where in the Peninsula he saw it—as it so happens, places that coincide with the best information and guesses concerning the route of the “Israelites.”
This question of the route seems to have been a touchy one that experts and amateurs liked to dispute. According to Jarvis, the most creditable theory is the one that makes the route go through the middle portion of the Sinai. This is where he made his quail-manna sightings, and where there is enough water to provide for thousands of people, who it is believed did not constantly wander for forty years, or however long it was, but settled down when they had the chance and their leader let them. Archaeological remains reinforce the middle-route theory. Without bothering to hide his opinion that they aren't worth much, Jarvis also notes some rival theories. The “northern” theory, for example, has the Israelites traveling parallel to the Mediterranean coast, on the Via Maris that connected Alexandria with Phoenicia and the Levant, by way of the town that is now El Arish. Jarvis rejects this “northern” theory, among other reasons because the much-traveled highway would have made the Israelites vulnerable to armies, marauders, and camp-followers, who liked to travel on it, and anyway it would have offered too many distractions for a people that had serious spiritual and natural business to attend to.
A third theory is that the Israelites took the longest, most difficult route imaginable: they followed the tracks of dried-up riverbeds into the mountain ranges of the southern tip of Sinai. Jarvis has to dismiss this theory, but with some misgivings. It means denying special claims that have attached to St. Katherine's and to the mountain that the monastery stands at the foot of. The old Christian tradition, implying a “southern” route, puts St. Katherine's on the place where Moses heard God speaking out of the Burning Bush. The mountain adjacent, therefore, would be the actual Mount Sinai, since Moses had instructions to bring the Israelites back to this holy ground to praise God and receive the Law.
The reason Jarvis slightly regrets having to dismiss this sentimental notion is that he wouldn't want to discourage his readers from visiting the monastery and its mountain. They “are well worth the rather arduous journey.” In fact, I see from the table of contents, Jarvis thought St. Katherine's deserved to have a whole chapter devoted to it; in the copy of the book that I have, however, this chapter is missing. So too are most of the pages in the last chapter, “Practical Advice on Camping and Sightseeing.”
When I come to the end of what there is of Jarvis's book, I am sad, and sorry that a vandal got his hands on this copy. Whoever it was spared a photograph, in the camping and sightseeing section, captioned “Author's Wife at Shore of Gulf of Suez (Red Sea).” The woman who Jarvis says cheered him up sits in the driver's seat of an open motor-car. She's a young European with bobbed hair. When did the Major retire, I wonder, when did he die in his English country house with its archaeological knick-knacks? Did his wife remarry? The photo of her is in black and white, of course, that time has made into not much more than a grayish image. It gives no idea of what the shore of the Gulf of Suez (Red Sea) really looks like.
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* * *
The post doctor gives me a bottle of Kaopectate. He tells me that what I have is not uncommon among new arrivals. Predictably, it is called “Nasser's Revenge.”
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* * *
Mendel's leave has been indefinitely postponed. He recommends in the meantime that I visit St. Katherine's monastery.
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August 10, 1968
Outdoors, under a planetarium sky, Some Like It Hot is about to be projected on a portable screen. Saturday night, and most of Abu Rodeis is here, sitting on chairs brought over from the mess-hall or sprawling on the sand in a funnel-shaped crowd that extends from the glowing screen out into the darkness. In the first row squat the Bedouin children and men, solemn and enthralled.
It is an old, flickering print that we view tonight. The sound track blasts fuzzily through a pair of loudspeakers, totally incomprehensible I'm sure to most of the Israelis, with their school-book English. A word, sometimes an entire sentence of the gabby, fast-talking script, escapes me, too, and I find myself squinting at the Hebrew subtitles. Whoever wrote them seems to have decided, rather than make a hopeless effort at keeping up with the dialogue, to convey the main complications of the plot for sure, translating jokes and other business only when there was plenty of space and time. Thus a lot of the repartee goes unrendered, including some of the words that I miss in English. But in spite of the scratchy, booming sound, and the fact that I haven't heard much American for almost a year, I actually miss surprisingly little of this movie, which I've never seen before. My acquired, adopted language is the one that has made the deepest grooves on my brain.
Two unemployed musicians scrounge the streets, trying to figure a way of surviving the winter. Within the very first frames of the movie, I experience a sensation that must be homesickness. This is unexpected, and strange, because the scene of the action—gangster-ridden Chicago in the Depression—is unknown to me and the characters are burlesque inventions. Yet there it is, for a moment, that shock of familiarity and regret. The movie is excellent, well-made, and soon I am paying it close attention: my nostalgia passes, replaced by a certain pleasure that is not so complete as to prevent me from being aware of the response of the audience around me.
The Israelis are enthusiastic moviegoers. I think the statistics put them as high in the world standings for movie tickets purchased per capita as for highway accidents. Yet typically, once the house lights dim and the movie goes on, they are unruly and inattentive. A favorite activity, very ingratiating, is rolling empty Tempo bottles down the aisles. At the shows here in Abu Rodeis, however, the audience behaves itself.
What do the army boys and girls by the shores of the Red Sea make of the blowing, falling white stuff that causes Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon to shiver and turn their collars up? The soldiers may be mystified, but they keep quiet, watching the screen and reading the captions, and at moments becoming as entranced by the images as the Bedouin are continuously. Marilyn Monroe's parody of sex-appeal produces absolute silence. When the transvestism begins, the girl soldiers titter. The strictly visual comedy, such as the play on sleeping arrangements in the Pullman going south to Florida, draws big laughs and a lot of applause.
Intermission to change reels. The civilians who are sitting in a group near Mendel and me pass a flask around among themselves.
Now, as the plot of the movie thickens and the crisis arrives, the audience howls. It has followed the development faithfully and is rewarded by understanding the hilarious mechanics of mistaken identities, close shaves, etc. Yet its understanding is not equivalent to mine. Tony Curtis, a bush-league Jewish musician impersonating a Wasp millionaire, entertains Marilyn Monroe on a yacht anchored off Palm Beach. Inspecting the salon of the boat, Marilyn, referring to a stuffed gamefish over the mantle, asks in a baby voice, “What kind of fish is that?” Curtis, flustered, bethinks himself and comes up with the answer. “That fish? It's a herring.” The line is correctly translated in the subtitle, but no one in the audience laughs, except me: no one “gets” it as I do.
They roll up the screen when the movie is finished. Some of the crowd disperses, the civilians leave. Mendel, helping to load chairs on a truck for return to the mess-hall, tells me to wait, he'll bring me something for tomorrow. It has been arranged that I will go up to St. Katherine's with the troops who are relieving the Israeli garrison there.
Some among the movie crowd who remain are dragging driftwood toward a smudge in the sand and starting a bonfire. A girl sprinkles gasoline on the flames which leap, shooting sparks into the air. The sky is immense, moonless, full of prehistoric stars burning cold and steady. A guitar materializes. Lying about on the sand, the Israelis sing and clap their hands. A boy blows into a harmonica. They form a ring, arm to shoulder, and start dancing barefoot around the fire, singing while they dance. Lights and shadows dart over their bodies. They prance, and dip, and change directions, breathing fast and laughing. They kick sand, and I grit my teeth against the tugging watery pressure in my gut.
Mendel, back again, gives me a package wrapped in newspaper. Now they are singing an old song, about the seasons, that I remember from my childhood in Palestine. Most of the other songs have been unfamiliar to me. I thank my cousin and say goodbye to him.
The package from Mendel contains: a blanket, a canteen, a pair of boots, one set of freshly-laundered fatigues, a pair of khaki shorts. I prepare this stuff and my Air France bag for my departure in the morning, and then switch off the light and switch on the radio, and lie down on the bunk.
At night, the Phillips pulls in the BBC from Cyprus. The News of the World program broadcasts excerpts of Nixon's speech in acceptance of the Republican nomination. On the borders of Czechoslovakia, the armies of the Warsaw Pact countries are holding maneuvers again. Dubcek and his colleagues say that they are not alarmed and that the integrity of Czechoslovakia is assured. In the darkness, the radio tubes glow.
This is the way I used to lie on my bed at night, with the lights out, listening to the Red Sox game on the radio, fantasizing that I was Ted Williams.
A taste of the joy of performing physically with grace and effectiveness is a heady thing. Seductive, too, for it may lead some to make an ideology of it. Isaac Babel, enamored of the Cossack horsemen, rode with them and used his gift to praise them, without excessive irony. Rapists in the service of the Revolution, grown men playing baseball for a living—to each misfit, his idols and his supplementary activity in which he can fleetingly believe himself the master rather than the slave of the body that through no fault of his own he has been sentenced to pass his life inside of.
Here are today's cricket scores.
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* * *
Twelve heading out to St. Katherine's in four open jeeps just after dawn—eleven Israeli soldiers, and myself. Two of the jeeps are Willys, made in the U.S., two, rather larger, are Russian, taken in the war. Each jeep carries three passengers. I half-sit, half-loll in the rear of one of the American vehicles, among the knapsacks, beside the strut of the mounted machinegun.
The little convoy speeds south along the sea in the direction of Sharm el Sheik for a few miles, then takes a sharp turn inland, off the highway and onto a dirt track that has been worked over by tanks but is still fairly hard and straight. Presently, after the last oil derrick has been left behind, this track peters out. The trail-blazing jeep (the one I am in) bumps along at a slower pace and lower gear until the driver reaches a wide expanse of parched soil and sand stretching away into the distance between ledges of granite. The jeeps begin traveling in a wadi—a dried-up riverbed. In the spring, according to Jarvis, when the snow melts in the mountains further inland, these gullies can be filled in a flash by a torrent of water. Now, in August, there is no sign whatsoever that I can see indicating that water has ever passed over this ground, let alone into it: everything, including the occasional tamarisk bush, is perfectly arid brown and yellow, between ledges and cliffs that grow steeper and higher as I travel deeper into the tip of Sinai, under a blue-white sky.
To drive along these wadis requires special skills. In some spots the surface is hard enough, but in others it is nothing but deep, soft sand. The object is to weave a path along the riverbed that will avoid the sandtraps. This is tricky, because the sandy sections are camouflaged by a crust that looks (to me) reliable enough, but which cracks immediately under the weight of a jeep, causing it to sink to the hubs, and sometimes bog down. Wadi-driving demands expertise and good eyesight. It also calls for quick decision-making, since it is crucial to maintain speed, no matter whether the surface is hard or soft. Sitting among the knapsacks, bracing myself against the machinegun, I figure out this driving technique for myself, understand the necessity and rationale of it.
Riding in a jeep that is being driven skillfully through the wilderness is not unlike being on board a small sailboat that is tacking in a strong breeze. The driver seldom steers straight ahead. He is always swerving, experimenting, trying another course and another gear. When the jeep hits a sandy patch in spite of his best judgment, the tires spew sand behind like the foaming wake of a boat, and the jeep shudders, shimmies, and leans precariously, as if it were going to capsize. The first couple of times that the jeep is travailing this way I believe that in fact we are in danger of tipping over. The driver, seeming to have lost control, lets go of the wheel. But that is only the standard operating procedure; most of the time it succeeds, the jeep finding its own way out of the difficulty. At these times, holding on to the machinegun with diminished concern, I can hear the passengers in the other jeeps laughing through the revving of the motors and the grinding of gears. Do the drivers occasionally stray, just for fun?
I am inclined to doubt it, because if the jeep doesn't nose its own way out, it will get stuck, and in that case the convoy must make a halt in the heat while the jeep is extricated. This happens half a dozen times at least during the morning, and it can be a tough job getting the jeep out. If the group of men beside and behind it don't push at exactly the right moment, the wheels spin instead of catching, the jeep sinks deeper, and then it must be dug out with entrenching tools. “OK, boys—now push!” the driver shouts. With my hands against the hot metal of the fender, I push like the others, and grimace in the sun, and spit sand. When the jeep is unmired, you have to run after it and jump on any which way.
Toward midday the convoy arrives at an oasis. The jeeps are parked in the shade of the green and brown date palms, and the soldiers wash the grit from their faces and hands. Someone says not to drink the water—it's brackish. Instead they drink out of canteens, and eat sandwiches and fruit prepared back at the Abu Rodeis mess-hall. For a couple of hours I rest with them quietly in the shade, waiting for the heat to subside. There are flies here, but they are not numerous, nor are they very active.
_____________
I don't know any of the men around me. They may have been posted at the Canal before, and spent the night at Abu Rodeis on the way to St. Katherine's. Their anonymity is protected by the handkerchiefs and goggles that everyone wears against the sand while traveling—I wear the lightweight plastic goggles also, they are shaped to accommodate eyeglasses. I can't tell the soldiers apart by rank, either, because their chevrons are covered with dust, and no one seems to be giving orders.
On what appears to be a common impulse, they get up and get ready to go when the sun begins throwing somewhat longer shadows. The oasis is left behind, the skidding, bumpy ride across the sand is resumed.
“How long before we hit the Playboy Club?” I hear the soldier who is in the “shot-gun” seat ask the driver, after an hour or so.
“We'll be there soon.”
The jeeps hum along, now over a harder surface, with the cliffs towering above them, luridcolored and rose like the terrain of the Dakota badlands in old Technicolor adventures.
The horn of one of the jeeps begins sounding insistently. The convoy stops and a soldier walks over to the leading jeep.
“Say, shouldn't we have passed the Playboy Club by now?” he asks the driver.
“It's around the bend, another fifteen minutes,” is the answer. “We overstayed at the oasis, that's all.”
“You sure you know where you're going?”
“Sure I'm sure. Just don't worry your head, OK? Let's go.”
The jeeps get under way again, and about fifteen minutes later the driver stops of his own accord and turns off the motor. The other men dismount, pull their handkerchiefs down around their throats, crowd around the lead jeep.
“I think we took a turn up the wrong wadi, after the oasis,” the driver says matter-of-factly.
“We didn't take the wrong turn.”
“OK, let's not fight. He made a mistake, but we're all going to pay for it.”
“Are we lost? We are, aren't we?”
“Quiet.”
A map in a plastic slipcover is taken from the glove compartment, unfolded, and spread out on the hood of the jeep, with a compass. Several of the men put their heads together over it. All four motors have been turned off, and the silence is palpable, making the arguing voices seem small, especially at a certain distance. I walk a hundred yards or so toward the nearest granite wall, that rises almost sheer and perpendicular from the hard sand. Utter silence. No oil rigs clanking, or Red Sea surf breaking softly, or any animal life except a sunbathing lizard that catches my eye and vanishes in the same instant as I begin taking a leak. The urine is absorbed in the ground as into a sponge.
“There's no way we can make it by sundown,” the lead driver is saying as I return. He is having trouble refolding the map.
“Don't you think I know that? Let's just make time, OK?”
The motors screech and roar to life, the convoy turns around, and begins speeding back over the tire tracks that it laid down. My jeep is number two in line now, consequently the dust is heavier. The speedometer needle touches fifty, I think—I'm being bounced vigorously, and what with the dust on the instrument panel, it's hard to be sure. But the speed is definitely faster than before. The convoy is racing, and at the same time the sun is slanting, and the shadows move quickly, claiming more and more of the area of the wadi-bed. The high surrounding rocks begin to turn purple, flashing with mineral veins. Soon the sun falls behind the top of the ridge; and the entire wadi-bed is in shade, while the sky remains bright blue. The air is noticeably cooler.
_____________
At this point a horn begins sounding again. “Now what?” the driver says. Behind us, a large Russian jeep has stopped. It is almost completely obscured in a cloud of what I realize is steam. By the time the other jeeps have halted, one of the passengers in the stricken car has succeeded in getting its hood up. He is being careful to stay away from the boiling geyser that is spewing from the radiator.
Another crowd scene as the men plod over to take a look and consider what to do.
“Yofee,” someone says. “Marvelous.”
“It's one of those no-good pieces of junk.”
A smell of scorched rubber.
“No, they're good machines. The only trouble is, you see, the thermostats are set for Siberia.”
Water from a jerry-can is sprinkled over the radiator. The steam spreads, then blows away. On the inside of the raised hood, a plate with serial numbers and the words in Cyrillic script, gorki works ussr.
“What's the story?”
“This radiator pipe is about to blow, friends,” says the voice of a soldier who has crawled under the front end of the jeep.
“Ya, chabibi.”
The sky is dark blue now, it is actually getting cold.
“What are we going to do?”
“We'll just have to spend the night, let it cool down completely. If that pipe goes, we're in a nice situation.”
“What, right here?”
“This is as good a place as any.”
“Shouldn't we at least try to reach the oasis?”
“I wouldn't chance it. Besides, in the dark we could get good and lost.”
“You may be right.”
“OK, boys, we're bivouacking.”
The other jeeps are backed up and then parked in such a way as to form a large square.
“Some of you guys go gather tamarisk, before it gets too dark.”
The dry, sun-bleached tamarisk branches snap off easily in my dirty hands. I carry a load of this wood in my arms and dump it on the ground inside the enclosure made by the jeeps. The stars are beginning to come out. I wash my face and hands in canteen-water, and rinse my mouth, gritty with sand. A soldier has dug a hole and heaped up the tamarisk. Now he puts a cigarette lighter to it, and the flames shoot up, explode almost, as if the wood had been drenched in gasoline. Within the squared circle of the jeeps, it is bright—the men's faces weirdly lit. Beyond, the darkness. Someone starts making coffee, and someone else gives me a mess kit and a K-ration. They lie around the fire, eating.
“We'd better post guards tonight.”
“What for? There's nothing out here except Bedouin.”
“Just the same, let's do it. Rafi, you take the first two hours with Mordechai. I'll take the second watch with Roberto. Any volunteers for the third?”
“Yeah, OK.”
“I'll keep you company.”
They spoke before I could.
“Let's bed down, folks. I want to get an early start tomorrow.”
They unroll their blankets and sleeping bags in the lee of the jeeps, near the fire. The ground is hard.
“Ain't this swell?”
“Man, I should've stayed at the Canal.”
“Stop kvetching. How about those stars, huh?”
“Any Sputniks up there?”
“The Star Room at the Sinai Hilton.”
“Here, let me give you a hint.” He shows him how to scoop the sand so that hips and shoulders can lie more naturally. I follow this example and get quite comfortable, rolled up in my blanket, using the Air France bag for a pillow.
Some of them are playing cards. The sentries stand at the edge of the illuminated area, holding their “Uzzi” submachine guns. The fire crackles vivaciously. Tamarisk bushes, I remember Jarvis noting before I fall into a deep sleep, sometimes ignite by spontaneous combustion in the summer sun. Jarvis has seen lone bushes burning in the wilderness. This would not explain, however, the bush that Moses saw, that burned without being consumed.
In the morning, where the fire was is a pile of ashes. I get up refreshed. After only twenty-four hours, the stubble is prickly on my neck, chin, and cheeks.
The convoy resumes following its own tracks. Presently yesterday's oasis comes into sight, and we bear right and, this time, take the correct wadi, which soon is so firm beneath the tires—rock-like, really—that there is no need for goggles and masks. The jeeps begin climbing a long, gentle grade. Around mid-day, we arrive at a large tent beside an oasis that is smaller, but greener, than the first one. On the walls of the tent these words have ben carefully inscribed, in whitewash: “Cafe Pleyboy.” A Bedouin with a dagger in his belt is coming forward to greet us, preceded by children in rags.
“There's Abdul.”
We have lunch here. Sitting under a tent-flap, we are served flat bread, an oily paste, salad, dates, and coffee by women of whom nothing is visible except hands and eyes. Abdul ceremoniously directs the introduction and removal of the dishes, while the boy and girl children cluster around us, squealing and staring. They look as if they have never been washed. A kid in rags and sneakers, smiling through his widely-spaced buck teeth, totes a rifle that is almost as big as he is.
“Look at that old Mauser,” one of the soldiers says. “My dad has one like that at home.”
A child just out of infancy watches in silence, actively sucking its thumb. It looks like a girl-child, and is almost naked. At puberty, the females metamorphose into walking tents, with eye-slits provided.
The dates are sticky-sweet, the coffee strong and bitter. I lick the residue of the dates off my fingers and dip them in the water of the oasis. A flock of goats in the vicinity, one ship of the desert. Abdul, resolutely refusing at first, throwing his hands up in a gesture of refusal, is prevailed upon to accept payment, and so we take our leave, the ragged filthy children running after us for the longest time.
Now, all afternoon, the jeeps climb, climb perpetually, and the landscape changes again. Where before it was a badlands that reminded me of cowboy movies, it is now a scene of some intensely ancient geologic cataclysm. The granite boulders, cliffs, and escarpments are as if frozen in the midst of liquefying earthquakes, lava and cinders streaming motionless and silent between the cracks and in the open spaces. There was a convulsion here once, and the evidence of it is awesome even to the young, brash soldiers, even to me. We drive up, always up (my ears are popping), without saying anything. The jeeps, in low gear, climb along the edge of deep pits and canyons, working, their tires hugging the rocky incline. The air takes on a chill well before twilight. I put on a sweater, my muscles aching pleasurably. In the failing light we crawl along a narrow track that is little more than a crevice between huge masses of granite. The headlights are turned on, throwing yellow cones of light into the desolation, picking out sudden turnings, and then spotlighting a Bedouin, standing full in the middle of the trail as on a stage, hands on hips, dressed in a shining white robe. We stop and there is palaver in Arabic, then this romantic figure waves us forward in the semi-darkness, which for me is almost full darkness. The stars are coming out again. We pass some vague forms of tents, a row of cypresses, a garden with vines, the inky trunks of palm trees, and then abruptly the track ends. We are facing a perpendicular wall of stone, at the top of which I can see, by squinting, the regular geometric pattern of medieval battlements, as on top of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. The driver of the first jeep leans long and hard on his horn. “Hey, Moysheh, open up!” someone yells. Presently a square of yellow light appears, as of a window opening, high up in the ramparts, the shape of a human head and shoulders is framed in that light, then disappears, and a moment later the great portals of the monastery swing open with creaking to let us drive inside.
