Keys of Babylon (32 page)

So I went to Fatoosh. The taxi dropped me under a palm. All I had to do was step out from the car and sit down under a parasol. A boy came up and took my order. Then when he brought my coffee he placed it too near the table edge. But I wasn't paying attention. I was looking around. Office girls eating salads. A few men on their own, smoking at smaller tables. They had already noticed me, every one.

So this was Fatoosh. I went to the Ladies and passed through the dark little bar with its awnings and rugs, the pipes with their glass bulbs on the table. And I thought of Robin in the saloon, the propellers of the fan overhead, her shoulders bare. Robin would have liked Fatoosh. She smoked all the time and would have investigated it here, although I don't think women are allowed. To smoke, that is. Mind you, it's nothing strong. They say the tobacco's mild, and that each smoker can mix in ingredients of their choice. Lemon or mint to cool the throat.

I said to David once, when we were outside, sea gazing, what about a pipe? I had had two glasses of the Baron's white. I don't think David heard. But if Robin were here, we'd do it together. Two Scherezades, Robin and I, with no one to hear our stories.

When I arrived back at my table there was a disturbance. Someone had knocked my cup over, and the coffee had spilled everywhere. A waitress was cleaning up. And the men were still looking at me. Lizards, I thought. With lizard throats. A little like my own. I wear a silk scarf now. David has bought me quite a collection.

Oh, it's you, I heard a voice. A young woman stepped from behind the palm tree. It was a girl I had spoken to once on the bus. A tall girl, Arab blood I had supposed, who had sat opposite me all the way from Zichron. Her English was quite good.

I'm sorry, she laughed, and I noted the laugh. My friend is so clumsy.

Her friend was a dark-skinned man. Thirtyish, stylish tee shirt that said ‘System Ali', jacket hooked over his shoulder, a Gold Label in his other hand.

My apologies, he beamed. Of course, I've ordered another.

In the end, they took me back to Zichron. I was amazed. The man drove what he insisted was a Ford Mustang. Five litres, he said. I had it imported. Hold on.

When we started, I could feel the whole car sway.

Fishtailing, he laughed, as I looked in surprise across at him. As you say in America.

The girl was in the back seat. She was wearing a leather miniskirt and her knees were pushed up into the air. How her foal's legs gleamed. She showed a tiny blue triangle. Like the sea. On the bus she had been dressed in uniform.

During the journey they both asked me questions. I think they were intrigued. I told them about 9/11. I explained as best I could how Sachs had survived the banking crisis, and about the imaginary apartment in Battery Park City. Its big windows, its river walks. I told them about it in impossible detail. Until it became real in my mind.

In the end, I was wracking my brains. What more could I say? What else from my life that was somebody else's life? Of course I said nothing about Kazimerz and Krakow. There was nothing to say. Then I remembered the automobile.

David owned an Impala, I said. We would drive those straight Florida highways. When it rained the car was like a barge in a river of rain. A barge on the Hudson.

And I could see David, both hands clutching the steering wheel, staring ahead, eyes wide, through the streaming glass.

Impala? the man said. And whistled.

Super Sport, I added.

Mm, he said. V8.

It was a Chevrolet, I said helpfully.

Oh Yes. Drove my chevvy to the levee, he laughed. And looked across.

When we pulled up at my gate, the girl climbed out after me and stretched. Skinny as a Haifa street cat. But the honey of her.

We'll see you again, she laughed.

And so they do. A week later they walk into the garden where I'm waiting under the olive tree. David and I always used to sit here as night fell. Blue evening sun. Yes, darkness comes quickly in Zichron. The cedar seeds hang like black stars, there are lights in the wineries and the polytunnels on the plain below. Sometimes the pneumatic drills sound after dark. There is so much building here, the older people in the supermarket throw up their hands.

The girl is Ranie, the man Feroz. To put me at ease, they tell me they are both Christian. And I smile and say nothing because I have never told anyone my religion. It is not part of my dream. But others dreamed it about me. As to David, he had no time for those orthodox Williamsburg couples, the men in ringlets, the women's hair tied tight under their wigs.

Yes, they are intrigued. When I told them about David walking north in Manhattan on 9/11, the dust on his shoulders, they seemed to think he was a hero. They were sure they had seen him on TV. And I was thinking the same thing. There was a famous image of a man covered in dust on that morning. A survivor, staggering through the choking clouds. That's the man I was describing. Because David didn't go to work that day. He watched it on TV in his study.

And those figures, falling from the twin towers? I thought one might be me. Falling and taking so long to fall. Yes, that must sound strange. But it's what I felt.

I'm not sure why I let Ranie and Feroz think David was a hero. A survivor. But other people make up their lives. Other people have dreamed my life. Why shouldn't I do the same?

Ranie is so stylish. She makes me feel stiff as olive wood. She tucks herself into the back seat and soon Feroz says we are on the Yitzhak Rabin highway. Traffic is slow.

I like speed, he says. This isn't speed.

For a while we are stuck behind a van carrying sheep. The sheep's faces are pushed against the wire netting of their pen. Feroz drives close to the van and the sheep stare at us as we stare back into their yellow eyes.

They told me to bring a swimming costume, so I had to buy one specially in the high street. I suppose we're going to the beach. I haven't swum since Florida but I'm not scared. Not bothered either about showing my body on the beach, my olive tree body with its grey leaves.

Feroz plays CDs and looks at me to check my reaction. Arab trance, he says. Electro. Good stuff.

And yes, I like it, like it because it repeats itself over and over. Round and round the music goes. Just a few notes, and Ranie is laughing and singing in the back while Feroz is impatient with the traffic. When they talk to one another it's in Arabic, although I don't pretend to be able to tell Arabic from Hebrew.

It's comforting that I can't understand. That I'm cut loose from language. As our speed picks up I'm free to look out at the landscape, the soldiers at bus stops, the helicopters like black wasps.

Now I can tell we're not going to the beach. We seem to be heading inland. The earth is dry and thin with ribs of rock and dark boulders choking the streambeds. Stone is winning its war with water.

After two hours we are in the desert. Rock like rust. Grey and gold grit. But Feroz slows and we drive off the road. Below us are a few huts made of planks and plastic sheeting. There is a camel too, and a lorry supported by flat stones.

And here they come. The children have seen us and they are running uphill from the hovels, running barefoot over the famished earth, the soil like cement dust. We stand outside the car and the heat seems to suck all the air from my lungs and Ranie gives me sweets and a few shekels and then the children are swarming around saying
mun-nee, mun-nee
and their enormous eyes are pleading, their faces filthy, their clothes in rags, impossible rags, and we give them all we have and show our empty hands and then we are back in the Mustang and it fishtails as it starts, oh yes, I have learned that word just as Feroz learned it, and one of the children touches the car and recoils in shock and the tyres send a cloud of dust and gravel down the hillside, and the bigger children are running after us and laughing, laughing in this parched and barren place, and we are back on the desert highway and the three of us are laughing although I don't know what we are laughing at, no I have no idea at all.

The camel never lifted an eye.

There, says Ranie.

And I look.

There.

A gleam. There are saltbushes now. Even trees in the sulphur-coloured rock.

Again a gleam.

We're there, she says.

Ah, I say.

We thought you'd like it. Because we love it. The Sea of Salt.

The Dead Sea, I say.

Very dead, says Feroz. But fun.

Ranie takes me to the women's changing room, which is a shock. So much olive wood. So many grey olive leaves. But it's all part of the dream, I say to myself, and soon we are walking down the path to the water where Mr Mustang is waiting for us in his striped Speedo's. Feroz is thicker round the waist than I had expected. At the tide's edge there are people daubing themselves with black mud. Some of them are completely covered, their teeth flashing in their faces.

Don't get the water in your eyes or nose, laughs Ranie, and she winces in over the stones, and I follow as best I can and do what another woman is doing, lowering herself into the water, dark here where the lake bed has been churned up.

And then I am floating. My head facing Israel, my feet towards Jordan's bare hills. Floating in the steaming air, the sulphur in my nose, the salts already slippery, a kind of soap on my skin, slippery because the dead cells are peeling, that's what Ranie says, the dead skin being burned away.

Ranie and Feroz are swimming east to where the water is clear. But I think I will stay here in the shallows. Floating. Floating in a dead world. Floating under the red cliffs, under the scrolls of red rock. As Robin floated in her pool, blowing smoke rings at the sky. Just as David is floating, I think, in his shadowy room, and the Bedouin children are floating in their sea of bitter dust.

They say my name is Rachel. They tell me I am seventy years of age. I know my name is Rachel. I know I am seventy years of age. But no matter how much I know I know I know nothing.

I stop at once. Then crouch down. Nothing is moving. Nothing but a blade of grass five yards away. The only blade that shivers. Something has brushed it. Or someone has passed by. As I look, the grass stops trembling, that one grass stem, one arrow in a lynxskin quiver, and soon it is invisible amongst the other grasses that grow out of the sand. And there is no sound at all. Not a breath in this crater under the ridge. All the world, my home world, silent.

I guess a cricket has leaped from that stem into the marram. Making it shake. It's hard to tell because the sun is strong. But I love those crickets. I love to see them perch on my wrist. Such grave faces they have, under their paint, their faces squeezed into helmets. And I love to feel the crickets thinking. How they think. They might explode with their thoughts, surely, because such crickets have many thoughts. They would be like broom pods crackling in the heat. Shellfish in the fire.

But the wolf has paid no heed and the wolf would know and she is not concerned. Now she looks around and wonders why I have stopped. The sun catches her right eye and her pelt is the colour of an oystershell. A bee-eater, all red and blue, flashes past. Yes the wolf would know. That's why I never feel afraid when the wolf is with me. Because the wolf hears the unhearable. Brush of the buzzard's wing. Cricket flight. And the wolf sees the unseeable. I know my eyes are keen but I am blind compared to the wolf. What she sees I will never know yet I know she sees it. Yes I wish I was a wolf. A poor wolf, unhearing, unseeing, but still a true sort of wolf.

I have tasted her breath and it is a scorching wind, hot as this sand dribbling under my skin, the sand path that comes up from the beach and across the plain and over the ridge and into the crater and runs on behind me into the hollows and hillocks and becomes a green way and vanishes into the trees, the first line of trees of the forest, the forest that masses behind the dunes and seems to grow no matter how many trees we cut or burn. Tall birch. Willows with moss. The forest I visit only with the wolf, so dangerous it is, my father tells me, my brother warns. Yet I go there. On my wanderings I have come to the trees, paused, and stepped in to that darker world of perfumes, sighs. How I long to say what I have seen. To make my stories and tell them at the fire.

Now up we go to the crest. It is all sand here. But roses grow out of the sand. Only the rose faces are visible, the stems buried, the thorns hidden. So that the crater side is white with rose petals. Children's faces, I always think, as if someone is pulling them into the ground. How good it is to come here in the afternoon, yes this afternoon, and lie on the incline amongst the roses. Somewhere there is water for them. But they need so little. They hoard the dew, my mother says, the droplets from the sea frets that roll up the slopes and vanish. And their lives so short.

Sometimes there are lizards here but not today. Just one snail, with horns like father's divining rods. Don't worry, snail. I'll leave you be. And the wolf climbs ahead with her paws in the sand and even she finds this difficult. How she sends the roses to their ruin. But she is never mindful of the trail she leaves. Perhaps that is her one mistake. Not like me. I take care where I step. Everyone says I float upon this ground. That I never leave a sign. Now, I don't disturb a petal as the sand flows beneath me in its streams, but even my breasts under the vest must drag against its warmth.