Is That My Old Shirt?

“Is that my old shirt? You can have it, I don’t like it anymore, it’s horrible.”

“I like it,” Shira says from the no man’s land of puberty, thrown off by the disapproval of her older sister.

“Ronit, be nice!” I say, and then bite my lip. Don’t get involved, I know, but I always do anyway.

“I’m always wrong! She’s always right!” Ronit retaliates.

It is now the middle years—after Rabin has been assassinated, and the word peace has left the country, or maybe it is an ancient concept that needed to be buried alongside him in his grave.

“Moshe, tell her!”

Ronit is going on the high school Holocaust tour to Poland, and she doesn’t want to take her warm coat because it’s not fashionable.

“But you’re asthmatic and it’s cold there! Imagine you were in the Holocaust, you would be grateful for any coat!”

“Ima, if I was in the Holocaust, I would have died immediately because of  my asthma—and I want a nice coat for when we go to the Krakow mall in the evening!”

“I’m just going to the garden to pick a lemon.” Moshe escapes, but returns in his irritatingly calm way, with his perfect lemon-garnished salad, and we eat, keeping the conversation going around our three grunting and grumbling teenagers. It’s hard, but still I smile because I’m all about everyday normalcy, this home, that I so craved as a child.

Moshe goes upstairs to pack for his conference in India. His flight is later tonight.

“Ima, can you drop me at the youth movement, so I won’t be late? Let me off here! There’s Sharon, we’ll walk together!”

“Okay, don’t come back too late, school tomorrow!”

I watch Shira walking away from me, arm in arm with her best friend Sharon, in the sisterhood of new breasts hidden under their large blue youth movement shirts, that are just like the one I used to wear in my Zionist youth movement in London when I was her age. We, too, sat in circles and sang songs about the homeland: “Hoy artzi moladeti,” (oh my country, my homeland). We sang, transporting the green quilted fields of England that we summer camped in into the distant imagined Israel, the unknown Biblical homeland, so that I, like so many Jews before me, could use these songs to escape the hardships of the Diaspora. In this case, not pogroms or poverty; just the end of my mother and stepfather’s marriage, that sank under the pile of children, work files, and anti-Israel political fliers on their heaving sofa. But now I am the mother, and now, I think, as I drive along my Negev village streets, that there is such a gap between that old youth movement with its songs of homelands, and this—the real Israel, with its wars and occupations.

I drive past the houses in our village that have, like our teenagers, mutated into something else. They have been enlarged into Swiss chalets or Mexican style villas by the builders from the surrounding Bedouin shanty towns. They mix cement and drag bricks, sweat pouring down their faces, the way the Jews built the pyramids in Egypt. “To build and to be built,” Ben-Gurion said.

I park and go into my semi-detached fawn-coloured house that we bought all those years ago, as a young couple when Moshe got a job at Ben-Gurion University. We didn’t enlarge it; we just threw down colourful Bedouin rugs on the stone floors. I go to help Moshe find his spare glasses to pack for his conference. He has also mutated over these middle years, from his Kabbalistic texts and the concepts of broken vessels and tikkun that he studied when I fell in love with him so many years ago at university in Jerusalem. He has moved on to religious anthropology, and now he studies the influence of Jews on New Age and esoteric groups, found far away; he goes to a lot of conferences.

After Moshe leaves in his taxi to the airport, I drive Ronit into Beersheva, the nearby town, to the municipal art centre that is in an old Arab building with a courtyard surrounding an olive tree. This is where Ronit and the other geeky kids copy, with dreamy concentration, the European Impressionist classics from books. Their art teacher is from a kibbutz, and he dreams of seeing the real Cézannes, when the kibbutz rota gives him his turn to go to Europe. Ronit sees them every summer at the National Gallery when we visit my mother and her new husband in London. When we’re there, we sit on her sofa that still heaves with piles of anti-Israel fliers, as well as fliers about some stray people and great places to take the grandkids. The plans don’t work out in the end, because my mother is busy helping needy strangers.  

I am late for my work meeting, but I turn around to watch Ronit’s head bent over her colours in our Beersheva art centre and I see how from here in the harsh Levant light, the Impressionist fields look even more enticing. As I dreamt of making Ben-Gurion’s desert bloom at her age, Ronit dreams of studying art in London next to the originals.

I continue on the way to my meeting at the social work department of the university, driving through the Beersheva streets that have not bloomed but instead mutated into a mall-pocked city surrounded by sprawling Bedouin shanty towns that live off its dregs. In the distance I see the train station that enables an escape, on the hour, to Tel Aviv—a real city. I rush to my meeting at the Ben-Gurion campus, where I teach social work courses and conduct research, from my sleek office, on social problems in communities in the Negev. I am late as usual.

I park and rush forward, my fashionable red leather bag meant to defy middle age bouncing against my broadening middle. I rush over the lawn under Moshe’s office window that is high up in the humanities building, with its spidery letters naming the American donors. He used to always be there, looking down at me like a friendly esoteric God, but now he is on the way to a conference, and his window is dark and empty. I charge past the Jewish students showing off with loud laughter, juggling, walking on tightropes, and playing guitars, trying to get back to their childhoods to block out the things they don’t want to remember from the army. I rush past the benches in the alcoves where the female Bedouin students, with covered heads and modestly downturned eyes sit, their young Bedouin men wooing them like doves. I pass the ultra-Orthodox girls pushing prams and reading study notes.  They are all on the same university lawn, but everyone is locked inside their own stereotype. Yet each one is also unique, or at least that is what we teach them in the social work department, although they look doubtful when they hear this.

I slip around our large meeting room table to an empty chair, late again.

“Nice bag,” says Miriam. The envy over each other’s grants and publications has spread to new bags.

“Thanks!”

“Who will make tea?”

“I will, because I am from England,” I say.

We must discuss some university-wide sexual harassment complaints. There is a group of Bedouin boys who uploaded pictures of Bedouin girls on Instagram and the fathers have taken the girls out of the university. The Bedouin lecturer says he will talk to them, he knows their grandfather, the leader of their tribe. Next there is a complaint about a plump old professor who, when teaching secular Jewish poetry of the Middle Ages, gleefully talks of the sexual imagery of erections, causing the religious girls to leave the room.

“But it’s freedom of expression! What about Shakespeare?”

“More tea?” I ask, filling the kettle.

Tami, the statistician in our department, is arguing with the Bedouin lecturer: “I don’t understand why you get the corner room, just because you are a man.”

“But why should you get it? Just because you are a woman? And I’ve been here longer, first!”

“Everything in Israel is about territory,” I joke. “There is enough space for everyone,” trying unsuccessfully to dislodge their wounded inner children from deep inside their bossy helping-profession bodies.

“Nu! How long does it take to make tea?”

“Sorry! But I found a packet of biscuits!”

We smile weakly at each other, passing around the stale biscuits.

On the way home, I stop at the new mall to buy some plastic storage boxes to store Moshe’s old red-bound religious books that still line the safe room in our home. He doesn’t use them anymore and we need the space for his new anthropological ones. I go into the kibbutz factory that has been privatized. Now they have branched out into plastic storage furniture, in primary no-nonsense colours, loud as Israelis. I miss their original white plastic chairs, that were so simple and flexible, that just wanted people to sit on them and talk, in circles.

And so, from teenage battles to work battles, the middle years pass fast, and there is a photo of Ronit in her thin but fashionable coat at the Warsaw Ghetto, swearing it will never happen to Jews again. And then she finishes school and enlists in the army, and we go to the mall to buy socks, olive green vests, and a flashlight, and we all wave goodbye to her on the bus on the day of enlistment. And I watch her huge rucksack recede on her clenched shoulders until she is just a small spot, a dot on the radar, another soldier, and not our skinny, bossy, tough, fragile, little daughter. But in the army, the buildings are very dusty and she doesn’t have her art class to calm her, and she is discharged from the army for health reasons. Since she can’t be a soldier in Israel, she decides to go to an art course in London, to be near the real pictures she has copied so carefully in the municipal art centre in the old Arab house in Beersheva. She sleeps on my mother’s sofa on top of the strewn anti-Israel pamphlets.

Next, Shira is recruited. Again, I fold piles of olive green army laundry, and I make lots of food, and I buy extra socks, shirts, and thermal vests when Shira, who loves the army, becomes a proud officer, guiding young girls through basic training.

And then it’s now, and now is now, and there is only the little one, Davidi at home. But he’s already so big, studying for his Jewish history matriculation, and Moshe is away at a conference again, so I rush home from my university meeting to help him study.

I drive home to our village on the new highway under the desert sky blasting down its last gold-flecked rays. Suddenly the dishevelled stray grasses by the roadside shiver, as a rocket siren screeches out of the sky’s blue shards. I stop the car, as we do when there is a missile, and fling myself face down onto the acrid desert earth. My hands covering my soft skull, my eyes inside the growth of sparse grasses, that close up look like the forgotten hairs on an a woman’s face. I raise my head and gasp to see the long curving neck and small head of a camel standing there in front of me in the desert, looking at me without interest. And then she walks on knowing that the desert is hers, not ours.

When I get home, I brush the sand off my clothes. “History is so boring!” says Davidi, emerging from the safe room.

“No, it isn’t! It’s important. Everything we do today is based on history! The past helps us manage decisions in the present.”

“Well, in that case it looks like we’ve learnt nothing!”

I stare into my computer, trying not to worry about the upcoming war, about Shira in the army, Ronit studying so far away in London, and Moshe in his midlife years, rollicking in a new age conference in India. I try to be, like the camel, and like Moshe’s Jewish Buddhists, in the present. To be here, in this warring homeland, with my smallest son, who is sensitive, a body like a question mark, like the son in the Haggadah who doesn’t know what to ask.

We settle into our computers, but then there is another rocket siren, and we run to the shelter room, where Moshe’s red and gold leather-bound ancient Jewish texts are now stored in the new coloured plastic boxes I bought. Maybe the books give us another layer of protection from the bombs, but maybe they don’t, because he has abandoned them, or they have abandoned us, it’s not clear which.

We are fine, don’t worry, I write back to Moshe, thinking of his three new grey hairs on top of his three other ones, and of his need for the freedom to leave and to return.

Great, must go, we are setting off for the next Indian temple!

He sends a picture of his research group in the family WhatsApp, the men all dressed in orange Hari Krishna-like robes over jeans, the women in bright saris, that make their smiling European faces look even more fetchingly pale. They are all laughing, behind them is an elaborately-painted Indian elephant, and behind the elephant is an elaborately-painted temple with lustful gods looking down.

“What is happening to Abba? He looks weird!”

“He’s at a conference. Let’s go over the wars again,” I say firmly, trying to be in the present while trying to keep Davidi in the past.

“Since its Declaration of Independence in May 1948, the State of Israel has fought and won eight recognized wars with its neighbouring Arab states, and two major Palestinian uprisings, known as the first and second intifadas, and a broad series of other armed engagements rooted in the Arab-Israeli conflict,” reads Davidi.
“Great, let’s move on to the Temple Mount.”

“Because of the Temple Mount restriction, the Kotel is the holiest place where Jews are permitted to pray outside the previous Temple Mount platform, which is the presumed site of the Holy of Holies. In Muslim tradition, the Temple Mount is believed to be the site where the Prophet Mohammed tied his winged steed,” continues Davidi, reading from the text.

“So the Jewish and the Muslim holy places are just by chance in the same space, and that’s the base of all the wars, right? Grownups are so stupid!” he says, disgusted with history.

“Let’s move on to the State of Israel and the Balfour declaration,” I say firmly.

“The British Balfour Declaration of 1917 aimed to limit Jewish immigration from Europe,” says Davidi. I nod, remembering the picture of Balfour, the English gentleman, in a suit by a camel, looking at his pocket watch next to the gold framed declaration in the British Council library in Jerusalem, during the years I lived there and met Moshe, both of us students.  

Ahmed, the gardener from the nearby Bedouin township, stops his truck outside our house, and his two small sons from his third wife jump out, helping him to rake the lawn. Usually, he brings the grown sons from his first wife. Bedouins are polygamous, while our men tend to return to each wife before moving on to the next one. I bring out chocolates and drinks to assuage my guilt at the children weeding our garden while my spoiled son studies inside. Ahmed goes to get the neighbour’s lawnmower, which is better than ours, treating our village like a shared Bedouin tribe, rather than a set of individual houses.

I put my orange cake into the oven for my book club this evening. Before Rabin died, it used to be my Bedouin-Jewish women’s empowerment group, but now it only has Jewish women. Maybe the Bedouin ones couldn’t afford the huge meals of rice, meat, and pastries that they insist on preparing as hosts, while we Jewish women just hastily laid out an orange cake. Then the Israelis left, not having time for such frivolous evenings as book clubs, having jobs, homework, and Bedouin gardeners to manage. Eventually over the years, it became a small book club for native Engligh speakers. We sit by the whirring fans in our gardens like expats in the colonies, reading our sensitive personal English novels about how history, usually wars, interact with women’s lives, and then we move on to gossip about our husbands, children, and wrinkles.

Davidi is up in his teenage bedroom that is like a cave to prepare for his drama exam, and I go upstairs to prepare the bedrooms for everyone’s return because soon, this weekend, everyone is coming home! Ronit and Moshe are returning from abroad, and Shira from the army. I lay out the new pyjamas I bought in the new Beersheva mall for my two, now grown, girls—two pairs for the price of one—on the beds that they will return to this weekend.

“Ima, stop buying us pyjamas!” they always say, affectionately. But I don’t—maybe because I’m just so tired myself, tired of all these family wars and temples that are surrounded by the national ones that Davidi is learning about.

I hear Davidi in his room that I am banned from practicing his drama matriculation monologue from the play Angels in America. “Can’t you see that I am gay!” he shouts. And I can see, and I catch the whiff of adolescent cigarettes as I move on to Shira’s room, where her pile of olive green army vests is neatly folded. I move on to Ronit’s bedroom, where I hang up her summer clothes that she doesn’t need in London, and I artfully spread out an empty sketchbook that I bought for her—for her interior world, so that she will know she is now really home.

Next morning, I sit with Davidi at the kitchen table to continue discussing our national history. “Davidi, one more time, tell me the wars, and then I must pick up Shira.”

“1948, the Arab Israeli war; 1967, the Six Day War; 1967-70, the War of Attrition; 1970, the Yom Kippur War; 1973, South Lebanon; 1982, the Lebanon War; the First Intifada, 1987-1993; the second one, 2000 to 2005; 2006, the Lebanon War; the Gaza War, 2008,” says Davidi.

I rush to pick up Shira, turning on the news on the radio, which is fast forwarding the way it does before a war, like at the end of a football game. There she is, Shira, in her khaki uniform with her officer’s energetic walk, and as she gets closer to the car, I see her face shining with exhaustion and meaning.

“Hi, Ima! How are you? I need to buy a waterproof watch so I don’t have to take it off in the shower, because there are only a few minutes to shower, so can we stop on the way?”

“Of course, give me a hug! Of course, anything you need!” I say, a fluttery proud mother.

“So, how is it?” I ask.

“Well,” Shira says, gathering her breath the way she used to when she returned from nursery school to translate her day into a story for her mother. “There’s an officer I adore, she is so great, and then there’s Raya, my best friend, and our soldiers are so lazy, we must do everything for them!” she says happily.

At home, Davidi’s face lights up when he sees his sister. She bends over his studies to help, then falls asleep immediately on our new green sofa, still in her uniform.

Later, Shira’s childhood village friends from the youth movement come, and they all settle on our torn old garden swing where, when they were little we used to read them stories about overcoming hardships. They eat my orange cake, and I put out nuts and Coca Cola, hugging the once chubby nursery school faces that I remember, now folded into their new soldier faces like babushka dolls. They proudly rattle off the new army slang that they now live within, as if they have entered their own private country. Davidi, with his thin question mark body, tries to take in all of this, which is also his future.

“What about peace initiatives?” I ask, the next morning, back at the table with Davidi.

“Luckily, there’s only one, an agreement with Egypt, so it won’t take long.”

“What about Oslo?”

“Oh, yes, but that didn’t really work. . .”

“You still must learn it. Most things in history don’t work, but they are still history, and also there was peace with Jordan directly after.”

Next, I rush to the Friday morning Women Wage Peace rally by the Beersheva mall, where I stand with the usual small, spindly group of women who smile at each other, holding up banners in our freckled female arms, asking about the kids, the husbands.

“Peace now! Women for peace! Wars have taken too many of our children!”

“Who will you make peace with? With terrorists?” asks a woman walking by with her shopping bags that might contain pyjamas for her own children like I bought for mine.

Next, in preparation for everyone’s return, I clean the house, my body swivelling through the house’s histories. I dab the cracked windowpanes through which the palm trees, like hooded eyes, watch me walk down our creaking old stairs, my hands caressing the banisters, like a child’s head, a teen’s back, a husband’s hidden skin.

I sit down to rest on the old swing, feet in the prickly desert grass, and I watch Davidi sitting under the light of the kitchen table,  mumbling dates of temples and wars, and then he slams his notebook closed and wanders over to me.

“Thanks, Ima, for sitting with me,” and he bends over to give me an uncharacteristic kiss. “When is everyone coming home?” he asks, dropping down by me, as if to understand who will look after me next.

“I’m ready for the exam! I’m through with Israeli history!” Davidi says. But it’s not through with him, I think, looking at the newsflash on my phone.

Moshe returns from his conference, with Indian fabrics, statuettes of brightly painted gods, and beaded temple vessels as gifts. His face is distracted, like the kids when they come back from summer camp. He is checking his phone, writing emails, eyes far away. He is still there, although he is also here, the way the Jews in Davidi’s history exam are at the same time in the east and in the west.

Next Ronit arrives from England, a suitcase full of secondhand art student clothes. I take her to the mall for underwear and non-vintage clothes, and then to the local café. She spouts her new, radical theories at me, and I nod, lost in the wonder of her delicate but fierce and beautiful face, which so eloquently and smoothly shoots out all of these fancy words: “settler colonialism, global history, material feminism.” Everything is wrong here, she explains, and I nod in agreement, but my eyes rove around our café. There’s a table of Bedouin men with black coffee brandishing phones and worry beads; two women in defiant pastel hijabs and jeans; two Russian immigrant women with huge slices of chocolate cake laughing; old couples from the old age home, their Holocaust numbers peeping out from under their cotton shirts when they raise their hands to eat strudel; and the young Ethiopian immigrant waiter with dreadlocks. Not everything, I think, but then I jolt to attention as Ronit talks about a new English boyfriend who has taught her Foucault, and the limitations of the concept of the state. But then our huge Israeli breakfast arrives with the cappuccino of milky comfort and jolting caffeine, mounds of small, chopped salad, and soft motherly omelettes, and Ronit smiles and munches, forgetting the theories. She is home.

“Could you get me a smaller size?” Ronit asks, from behind the curtain in the lingerie shop we go to next, and I bring her a smaller one, fingering the satin and wondering if I’m too old for it and if Ronit is too young.

“I bought you flannel pyjamas—nice and warm, at home!” I say, and she smiles.

“Oh, he’s very clever, and handsome! He’s not Jewish, of course, but Catholic. It’s similar,” she chats on, climbing back into her clothes and handing me a pile of underwear and a new nightdress to pay for.

So now everyone is home, and each creaky old room has its child back, and the house is again full of words, shouts, thumping down the stairs, and clearing up, and Moshe’s cooking smells of the special spices he bought in India filling the house.

“What fun!” I say, laying the challah on the table in the garden, scattering the extra white plastic chairs that we keep in a pile for when everyone is here around the table, and take out my phone to photograph this moment in history—all here together.

“Moshe, smile!”

“Ima, stop! Just enjoy the meal, no need for photos!”

“I’m documenting for the family albums!”

“We are all here! In the present. You don’t need the history!” They gang up on me, feeling the garden’s prickly desert lawn under their bare feet, their mother’s worried eyes like the anxious desert moon that always hovers above them, and they sigh, imagining climbing away over the wall like the vines at the end of the garden.