Maps of Women’s Goings and Stayings 9780804780230

Citation preview

MAPS OF WOMEN'S GOINGS AND STAYINGS

Nostalgia Jewishness is a lullaby for old men gumming soaked white bread. J. GLADSTEIN, modernist Yiddish poet

CONTRAVERSIONS

JEWS AND OTHER DIFFERENCES

DANIEL BOYARIN, CHANA KRONFELD, AND NAOMI SEIDMAN,

EDITORS

The task of "The Science of Judaism" is to give Judaism a decent burial. MORITZ STEINSCHNEIDER,

founder of nineteenth-century

philological Jewish Studies

RELA MAZALI

Stanford University Press • Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford junior University

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mazali, Rela. Maps of women's goings and stayings I Rela Mazali. p.

em. -

(Contraversions)

Includes bibliograhical references. ISBN

o-8047-3292-2 (alk. paper) -ISBN o-8047-3293-o (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Women-Social conditions. 4· Women travelers. HQ1161 .M39

I. Title.

2. Spatial behavior.

2002

305·42-dC21

2001042609

Original printing 2001 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 10

09

o8

3. Social mobility.

II. Contraversions (Stanford, Calif.)

07

o6

05

04

03

02

01

Typeset by )ames P. Brommer in 10/14.5 Minion and Copperplate

For all the builders of the talking house

ITINERARY

FIRST VISIT: SECOND VISIT: THIRD VISIT: FOURTH VISIT:

The House and the Longing

1

Janie's Room with Zinnia 26 StoryTails

61

The Princess in the Caravan

83

FIFTH VISIT:

The Princess in the Caravan Too

SIXTH VISIT:

The Indian in the Longing

SEVENTH VISIT: EIGHTH VISIT:

FearLedge 213 Bookmaps and Housebooks

TENTH VISIT:

Balls, Bats and Cars

TWELFTH VISIT:

158

The Mountains and the Hills and the Toilet

NINTH VISIT:

ELEVENTH VISIT:

116

287

The Sea and the Desert Gibraltar

244

312

350

For maps of visits 1 to 8 and 10, see the Ninth Visit. Housekeys for all the visits are hanging behind the maps.

190

MAPS OF WOMEN'S GOINGS AND STAYINGS

FIRST VISIT: THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

Many of US feel comfortable with Our real names and identities. Almost all of us are actual people, all women, only a few of our stories imagined. We have been gathering over about five years SOME OF US PREFER ALIASES.

now. On magnetic tape, in yellow spiral notepads, on the circuits and screen of the personal computer that I share with my daughter, most of us never having met and probably never to meet each other, gathering in text. Place us, though, as in a house in a warm climate. It's an inviting house. Used that is for inviting no less than for staying. You're invited too. It has a fruit full, semi-tended garden. It should stay simple, but furnish it with textures and smells that you only begin to guess at from books and movies and magazines. And from old stories you vaguely know of, that evaporate when you reach for the details. Just beyond the edge of the familiar, things unexperienced recollected, anciently retained, ancestral. Strangely known and sensuous. We are coming as if into the house, each at her chosen times. We could be sitting down for a while somewhere in the cushion color combination, sipping something cool and subtly spiced that the neighbors taught one of us to mix and biting into a gaudy fruit. Or arriving from a long absence to hugs and happy calls of her name. Or newcoming making her place, learning to step over the floorboard just inside the doorway with the irritating creak. "I wish I knew what we were doing," Miriam says. I don't. Wish that is, or know for sure either. I'm content and excited to wait and see and listen. To one of

us rising at some point, collecting her loose, light garment, going out for an hour or good. Moving between cooking and sleeping places. Going to nap or swim or to bike to town. Coming back with bread and cooking oil and chick peas and tampons and a new job. Possibly to make enough money for the next stretch of her trip. One or two of us bringing her child for a stay. In fact Hannah's daughter, now grown, has already become one of us in her own right by now. Gathering and scattering in the pulse of our running, extended exchange, we can stretch out legs, sometimes massaging each others' cracked soles with a light possibly scented local oil, sometimes staying carefully polite and apart. Place us cross legged on the floor or on the rather unique kind of seats used in this faraway part of the world. Slicing and thinking around the kitchen table or raking and clipping and discussing in the yard. Cutting each other's hair with onionsmell singing from the pan with the improvised handle. Each sweeping up her own. Trying our best but not always able not to judge each other. Murmuring into the nights, peaking frequently into loud, shared laughing. Sometimes into anger and estrangement. On occasion stomach pits dropping into fear at mid-morning despite the lucid light. We are here examining, each in her own way, her ability to move. Physically, geographically. Her chin or arm through air. Her steps across a floor or a continent. Her bike cross country. A car, not necessarily although preferably hers. To propel her self on her own of her own volition. So simple, so basic, so evasive. "Moving the body means life;' says Nawal el Sa'adawi, whose account of jumping up and down in prison and moving her legs and arms every single morning there has taught me to exercise every day in my large third-floor bedroom. She is a doctor and a healer and a writer with a good working knowledge of life, and this part is on page 83 of her Memoirs from the Women's Prison, translated into English by Marilyn Booth and published by the Women's Press Limited in 1986. But every place is the women's prison. Free, uninflicted and unrestricted moving which by this sound knowledge is living, has been scaled down for women. Rationed. Limited not by oceans and mountains but minds, by the culture of our containment. We are meeting in this house in comparison. It is a talking house, made that is of and for our talking, which I am prompting and recording and retelling as faithfully as I can. Yours too if you want. To come in. Or at least as much to go out. It won't confine us. It's walls are moving. Shifted like a pregnancy from

2

FIRST VISIT

secret inner places, imperceptibly growing tissue, life accommodating. Mapping us moving. Tortoise-shared, wherever we go it goes. And some of us have moved her self enormous distances, literally wandered the earth. Some of us intend to. Some of us intended to. Some of us won't or don't dare drive a car. She may still cover a lot of ground driven there by others though. One of us was actually doing the driving when it was her father who was taking her thousands of kilometers away. This inviting talking house of ours may well be the one, or near the one, at Caux on the mountain above Montreux. The one, that is, that June kept for Count Bernard du Plessis van Maesdyck and his parents in 1957 and '58. She cleaned it and helped rebuild it and did the cooking and the washing between trips to Tunisia and southern Italy with Bernard, who finally took along a gun for self defense, when he made a second run to India in the camping van. All this was before she happened onto what was in the closet, which we will certainly have cleaned out and aired by now if this is the house we are gathering in, when June still thought she could bring her son and daughter there to live with her. She stopped planning on that after she'd seen what was in the closet. How could she bring her children into that? A typist, retired by the time we've started our talking, once a Shakespearean scholar and performer, delegate to the United Nations and the World Health Organization concerning the rights of mental patients, seventy-three when I first met her, a Quaker (lately non-Christian) since age twenty-nine, mother of four children of four fathers, living on her own in Geneva, June says, "I thought, but that's the house I've been drawing all these years. It's a three-hundred year old chalet which was sliding down the ravine and he rebuilt it when his Dutch family were trapped in the war in Holland there." She's referring to the second world war. And to the Count du Plessis van Maesdyck. "He was working on the house and getting food for his family because their income was blocked from Indonesia and so on. It was above Montreux. Montreux is near Lausanne, you know, in Switzerland, at the end of the lake. And I saw a slide of this house and since I was a tiny little girl and also in ... waiting for ... in telephone booths or something ... I always draw the same house on a certain hill with white flowers sticking up from the mountain and the sun coming. I sort of fiddle with that. Well this was exactly it. So I thought, 'well my goodness, what's this?' "This man was giving a showing of slides of Mount Athas and India. He brought these slides with him on the New Amsterdam boat because his father

THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

3

was head or director of the company. And he'd shown them on the boat and he'd been showing them all over the United States at universities and so on. "I saw this marvelous slide of an Indian woman with her sari flowing back and the sunrise obviously just touching her. I turned around, looked at this man and he had the face of a... " She didn't say of a what. And I admit I didn't make a point of asking. "What he needed desperately was someone to arrange for him to give the showing of his slides, 'cause he was living off of this really, while travelling in America. And someone had said that I could do this for him very helpfully you see. So I actually went to bed, wrote twenty-eight letters to people I knew at different universities and so on and he made a very good living in the West Coast of the United States like this." I understand her literally. That is, that bed was where she wrote the letters. I can picture the crumpled sheets and a growing pile of pages in a careful well formed script that she took care not to crumple before she folded them and addressed the envelops. It goes without saying, her saying I mean, that she didn't ask a percentage of this very good living she helped him make. "I was by that time absolutely determined to get to India and China. To get to India to meet Ghandians and then since Richard Nixon wasn't doing much about it, I was going into China to make friends and influence people, you see. As an individual and eventually take my children. But I had to get there first, I hadn't a single penny. So I asked him when he was going next and he said, 'Well, this winter.' I said, 'Do you mind if I come with you?' He said, 'Well that should be all right.' And my poor little daughter was in the car. And she said, 'But Mother, India's so far away!' And I said very soberly, I remember, I said, 'Well honey, you know I have to go to India. And anyway, I can always fly home in two days.'" As it turned out it took ten years. That is, to meet her daughter again. "She was ten years old.'' June says, "She knew all this Ghandi business and all, I mean she had to live through quite a lot of it. "It's a very exciting thing;' she's saying later, "Some of my grandchildren have got it too. The excitement of... the feeling of responsibility. And it keeps us so involved and busy, you see, that there's no way you can get old or go through adolescence in a funny way or anything else. It's a very thrilling thing. It must be at least as thrilling as war, I should suppose, and it's in many cases as dangerous. I had the feeling that this was what I was meant to do, see." June's deep brief laugh is very slightly self-deprecating, apologetic. She is speaking English with a vaguely southern apparently Northern California accent. "Getting out to find the cause-now you'll really laugh-cause and

4

FIRST VISIT

cure of human violence. I really wanted to be with Ghandians and study non-violence as best I could. And then go on in and teach Shakespeare and whatnot in China. So I asked him if I could go and he said, 'well all right."' This was soon after Divorce when she says, "Mother and Daddy were not paying my way back to university. I knew that I couldn't continue working in this ten cent store and the whole thing was too much for me. I sold everything I had. First of all I had somebody come in and look at what I had. Just furniture and my big radio and the car... no, my husband had the car. We didn't even have a house anymore. We didn't... I didn't really have anything. And when Mother saw how little this man was going to give me for all these things, after my daughter was supposed to choose what she wanted to keep, she said well she would buy it all. And believe it or not it was some incredible small sum and I had enough to pay for the boat going across and he said that living with his parents and with him I would more than earn my keep by taking care of the old people, doing the washing and all the rest of it." She is talking very fast and getting a little hoarse. We stop and drink peach juice for one or two quiet minutes. She's sitting on the bed with her back against the wall. She needs to put her feet up for awhile-they tend to get swollen in the middle eastern heat. I'm in a wicker chair and the little tape recorder is between us near the edge of the bed. "I left San Francisco and drove across the continent with him and got on the Holland-America line-New Amsterdam-he was up in first class and I was down in whatever class with two ladies in the same room. And I got over there," to the house at Caux, whose surrounding mountains were thickly populated, June explains, with princesses and dukes and earls, fled to Switzerland for the duration of the war, "and indeed started canning cherries and preparing the meals for his family, doing all kinds of things and was offered two excellent jobs in two very good schools there but I wanted to go to India." Which she never did. "Women in the former British colonies of the West Indies often live out their lives in quasi-communal domestic units;' says Lydia. So you can just as easily fit our house into the Eastern Caribbean islands she's writing about. None of us lives out her life here. Still, this house is clearly related to the women-owned homes on the islands, apparently known as 'yards' or 'houseyards'. "The houseyard as a social institution is grounded in the slavery era." Lydia M. Pulsipher is saying in: 'He Won't Let She Stretch She Foot': Gender relations in traditional West Indian houseyards. This is her contribution to a

THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

5

book called: Full Circles Geographies of women over the life course, which was edited by Cindi Katz and Janice Monk and published in 1993 by Routledge. Between page 107 and page no Lydia gives a description of, "the domestic spaces of slaves and freedmen," which were, "clusters of houses and outbuildings around central activity areas, interspersed with economic plants and animals and inhabited by people linked through kinship and friendship." And often, "two houses will be joined to create more interior space;' and, "the yard will contain other structures such as detached kitchens, ovens, tool sheds, animal pens, work benches, showers, privies and laundry facilities; and the entire complex will be arrayed with a variety of useful plants: coconut and fruit trees, vegetables, ornamentals, medicinals:' Visitors at this house-all of us are, in fact-usually take our time to start finding the way around. I take my time to start piecing together a fairly coherent sense, not to say portrait, of whichever woman or women I'm talking to. Or to find out who's staying over at the moment. You can take your time too, to attach names to voices or life-stories or faces. Or to make out the maze of bags and knapsacks and beds, or to check out behind the shed whether someone finally fixed the rake. You might feel lost when you first come in or when you get back from an absence. It won't be like you left it. With all of us moving, it moves too-the house. Whenever it is you're arriving, some of us, inevitably, have already left. And might still be back, which remains to be seen, but in any case have usually left behind some stuff and echoes. And some-recently arrived-haven't had a chance to meet you yet. And those who have actually been here all the time, might not recognize you, not at first. Or you might not recognize them. Trying to place the women you're reading, you place yourself-in bewildering but somehow familiar surroundings. Realizing you're lost is how you realize you're moving. It's acceptable, your bewilderment, your bewilderness. You can accept it. At least for a while. Stay disoriented. You'll find it familiar too-the bewilderment and the housestructured in ingrained ways you'll find you know how to make sense of, almost instinctively. Take your time, you'll find bearings. Build it, this house as a place made and administered by individual women. None of us come here as standard, officially acknowledged families, like the ones that lived in the houseyard of the Jewish-Yemenite family I married into at twenty-one. Still, in many ways ours could be a lot like that one was, before it got sold oti bit by bit. Now torn down, it was just off the TelAviv beach, between the cracking minaret of Hassan Beq Mosque and the

6

FIRST VISIT

sensual overload of the large Carmel Market. My mother-in-law, one of seven sisters and step sisters and one brother, had spent her young adulthood in the first of the five one-room wood structures built for married siblings and their families, around the two-story, two-roomed house owned and occupied by her mother and stepfather, who was the neighborhood iceman and summer watermelon vendor. A wooden chute along the side of the ground floor ice shed, used for sliding out the uncut blocks, served as clandestine slide for the toddler grandsons and maybe at least the boldest of the granddaughters. The married siblings and their children shared several outhouses between them as well as the dirt and tiled yard space which was sub-divided by rows of canned white-jasmine plants, mint, coriander and basil. Cooking with the last, called scent, was unthinkable. Sprigs of it were picked, kept on hand for hours and sniffed, especially by the elderly. The youngest of the children were baby-sat by their still unmarried aunts and older cousins, under Savta's supervision and the threat of punitive confinement in Saba's ice shed, while their mothers washed floors and toilets in richer houses and most of their fathers molded, loaded and laid bricks, outside of the houseyard. "I just could not stay in this lovely house with its lawns and everything. I had all this money and a lovely, adoring, sexy husband who just loved me and we had our radio program on Shakespeare for schools, half an hour a week, and I had a huge vegetable garden," June says. She's just finished her peach juice and put down the glass. "This was just after the war. I had everything under the sun but I did not have my independence." Only in my notes, apparently between tapes, she says that after her first marriage she made a vow to herself never to marry again, and back on tape she explains, ''I'm too independent. It seems that I just function best and feel best, feel most myself, when I'm by myself" Towards the end of her marriage, she says, "I needed to be alone a great deal more. A great deal more. I was stifling insaneness." "I looked at these people and I felt strangled, suffocated. Physically as well as emotionally. To spend the rest of my life with these individuals I had known since I was ten years old? Growing up in Capetown, which was a very suffocating, incestuous, golden ghetto Jewish community. I told my mother;' Miriam says, '"There's so many things I've got to do, I've got to travel, I've got to see, I've got to do! All you want me to do Ma is to get married and live next door to you: And she said, 'Yes, what's wrong with that?' and I said 'hnuuunnnhhh;" Miriam gasps for air for long seconds, "No, no, no, I can't! "The womenfolk, my mother and her cousins were all brought up in the

THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

7

same house that I was brought up in. The men used to come twice a year on an oxcart. It used to take them a week to come from the Kalahari Desert to Capetown." Capetown, off the Kalahari Desert, in the new free surging South Africa. There's a site for our inviting house. "Pesach and Rosh Hashana," Miriam says, calling the Jewish holidays by the Israeli Hebrew names that have been her acquired language for many years now. Her grandfather and grand uncles were Polish Jewish wool farmers in the Kalahari Desert. One of the brothers' winning lottery ticket had sailed them from Lodz, Poland, to the Kalahari and to their first heads of sheep. Her grandfather had started what for many years after was the only blanket factory in Capetown, whose woolsmell, bales jumped on up and down, clacking looms, Miriam remembers with all her senses. Much like I remember the leathersmell smooth touch dusty light echoing footfalls of my uncle's leather warehouse in Chicago. Or the assorted newsmells of cotton undershirts and socks and sturdy leather shoes piled meticulously into the open, partitioned wood display cases of my grandfather's dry goods store in a Kansas City slum. All these smells are distinctly discernible in our house. Miriam says, "In my family there are no outsiders. This sort of brother and sister marry brother and sister my grandfather married his niece. My mother was like a tribal chief, you know:' When we start our talking Miriam is sixtythree, fighting an immobilizing and long-term illness that has so far resisted diagnosis. Adapting her travelling style to the new constraints, she is still on the travels she began, almost always on her own, over forty years ago at age twenty-one. She and her sister, Doreen, jointly own, operate, and do the buying for, what is nowadays called an ethnic shop. For many years the only one in Israel, where they live, it existed independently of category, classification and competition to which it too has had to adjust in recent years. Miriam is speaking a mixture of English and Hebrew, both with a British South African accent. The mini-tape batteries get progressively weaker while we talk into the night and a lot of added background noise is caused by the strong November breeze blowing off the Mediterranean onto her rooftop veranda. Her apartment, a short walk from the shop, is on a little quiet street just off the beach, in a sixty-year-old deteriorating and constantly renovating section of mid-Tel-Aviv. Much like you might imagine the talking house, except that you should probably try to place it in a somewhat noisier, less distinguished area. The concrete building is unexceptional and squarish, constructed on concrete stilts over tarmac so that cars can park underneath.

8

FIRST VISIT

Leaving no garden. And we don't have a rooftop veranda. In the kitchen, the spice cupboard and garbage pail are chronically overfull. But you may get used to their joint slightly offensive odor even when it gets stronger in the heat. The living room is on the north side of the building so it's cooler. There's no air conditioner, which is rare in Israel, even in this neighborhood. Maybe it's because of a certain degree of neglect which accumulates where people keep leaving. The pile of sticky dishes in the sink seems like a permanent fixture even though most of us do our share. The two or three whose attention it always somehow accidentally slips are enough to tip the balance towards some hurtful arguments and a usually dirty sink. Not picturesque. Not even dramatically grimy. A regular dirty sink. Lots of houses have got them. This one too. Miriam's childhood home might not have though. There are wind chimes clanging in the tangle of plants on her veranda while she's saying, "Age twelve, belonged to a Jewish club or something like that and then it was youth movements, Habonim, Shomer Hatza'ir. They used to meet in our house. We had this old house, we had an old hayloft." Her voice drops and the recording blurs here, "over where the horses were. But we used to meet below. Everything happened in our house. It had a huge wall around it," now another blur; she is speaking very fast, "built by the slaves;' she says only barely audibly, "and a huge big gate." Imagine us at our talking house coming and going through a huge gate somewhere near the foot of Table Mountain and up and down a tree-lined, gracious driveway. And then like as not bypassing the large main house and striding on towards the slaves' quarters. Ours. Strikingly similar in many ways to the house where Bashan lived with her mother and seven sisters and brothers in the 195o's on the outskirts of Gary, Indiana, USA, even though her ancestors had long been freed from slavery. "We had like a pot-belly stove and this is back in uh the late uh fifties! You know, we didn't have plumbing. We had to use the pump where you go outside and pump the water up and in the winter time it'll freeze. And it just it never was enough to eat in the house, you know:' She is even taller than June and strikingly graceful. The Wednesday my daughter was born she found the boys, my two sons, home alone when she came to give the apartment we rented in Tel-Aviv its weekly cleaning. Now Bashan easily swings the eight-year-old up her full height and hugs her when she comes to our house to give me her words. Possibly filling one of the shacks, in Capetown or in Gary, some of us seated outside on the steps or on the chairs and seats we've constructed and

THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

9

collected, one of us may be reading aloud in a clear voice to whoever else is there and interested at the moment. All of those who come to the talking house understand and speak English. No coincidence; it's the most commonly used worldmap, almost obligatory for travel. For a few of us, though, it's an acquired medium. In any case, think of a text in Hebrew, translated from, and by the same token commenting on, an original in medieval Venetian. The oral rendering is decipherable to some of us and guttural, often staccato incantation to others. Readings from-and-on the Book ofBalkacz, unpublished manuscript in medieval mercantile Italian, researched, translated, and discussed in modern Hebrew. The translation is in the process of being re-translated to English. But for our talkings, running for at least five years now, imagine recitals from the Hebrew. Intermittently, one of us might interpret for anyone who is interested and speaks none. For instance, at the end of a paragraph. The Hebrew translation has them, even though the original doesn't, tentatively surmised from the flow of rarely punctuated mercantile Italian words. We might pause after reading this one on page sixtyeight of the translated manuscript, again about a house, one more possible configuration of our talking inviting one. "Such was the way he described it. His home, easy to depart. To merge from straight into the dense growth and then, invisible by the wiles of wanderers, to move from through the vast forest lands and beyond, either climbing steadily on along the northern mountain ridge or descending back down the rift valley. It would have been very difficult, he said, had anyone so wished, to follow his progress. As such, then, his was an inverted home. A place mainly left and returned to only to releave, whose content was located not in but outside of and stretching from it. An interval:' Or someone might ask to interpret another paragraph, a little further down the page, about Balkacz, the male traveller, "An enquiring merchant might be told, 'Balkacz, he can act as guide-man if you don't mind a bit finger-taps-temple. Cain we call him. He knows how to go where he wants. A lot he goes: But of course, in no way would his informants be committed to his-the merchant's-safety, of which fact he-the merchant-would be well aware. He would realize the need for caution, the danger of placing his body, his goods, his fates in the care of this finger-taps-temple guide-man. Nevertheless, he would at the same time appreciate that Balkacz was unknown to the authorities. Unregistered by the dynasty and its tax collectors. By the governors of travel permits. To the villagers-the merchant would be

10

FIRST VISIT

easily able to tell-the man seemed only marginally curious. A restless one, going and coming. A version of village simpleton. The family, he could ascertain, apparently provided no visible grounds for gossip. He could conclude the simpleton status an old one and uninteresting." "Uh-huh, the family;' one or two of us would definitely interrupt the interpreting or reading here. "An unseen, unnamed woman and child or children who stay home. Any other arrangement would have been non-standard enough to make both gossip in the village and a detailed explanation in the book." "The nature of his pursuit: I have seen in him frequent, repeated attacks of belief in an ability to commit something meaningful by which he is strongly saddened for not knowing what is meant. I have seen how these symptoms cause him to go. He goes not as an action meaningful of itself but as a tangible proof to himself that he can, at any moment he so wishes, exit the existing repetitive order. Exiting an existing order, he has said to me, is vital to any action of meaning. He goes also he says as practice in paying precise attention to what it is that he wishes every moment and step, a practical form of closely following and mapping his will and self, through which he might learn what is meant." This is on page eighty-three. And the same or another voice would probably break in again here to comment that the 'existing repetitive order' he wanted to be in a position to exit whenever, was definitely another euphemism for this hidden, stationary woman, relative to whom this man could exercise his freedom of absence, of movement, of search. A woman "is likely to be restrained in her mobility-a transcultural, class- and gender-specific practice that for centuries has not only made travelling quasi impossible for women, but has also compelled every 'travelling' female creature to become a stranger to her own family, society and gender," Trinh T. Minh-ha says, in her piece, Other than myself/my other self, in the book Travellers' Tales: Narratives of home and displacement, published by Routledge in 1994 and edited by George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam (on page 15). Miriam says, in English, "This social pressure of having to get married, of getting, you know, and if you're already twenty-two and you're not married, or twenty-three, I mean this whole social pressure of doing the right thing, of getting married and to a nice family and a nice Jewish boy. I wasn't, I didn't really have much self-confidence. I didn't have self-confidence but I kind of revolted against this all. I've got one brother older than me and a

THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

11

brother younger than me besides my sister:' It is Doreen whose thin, strong hands (she herself calls them scrawny) have hammered and crafted the broad thick silver bracelets at Miriam's wrist and two of the rings she is wearing. "And they always seemed to have all the freedom because they were boys and I didn't have freedom because I was a girl. 'You can't do it because you're a girl.' When I was at school I refused to buy women's clothes. My mother wouldn't buy me boys' clothes so I used to wear my brother's cast off clothes but, he was, my brother used to;' she rotates her legs, "walk like this." Shoes too? Now her laughter is infecting, "he was pigeon toed." If it's winter and you choose to annex our house to the one that Miriam and Doreen own jointly, in the Upper Galilee, in the old city of Tzfat, fuel and heating facilities could prove problematic. "It's one hundred and fifty years old." Miriam says, "It's got so much feel about it." The old Tzfat houses are built of stone, with thick walls and high vaulted ceilings and deep window ledges you can easily sit in. "It's the most beautiful house in Tzfat;' she says alternating English and Hebrew as she describes it, "opposite the cemetery, you know, down in the Sephardi quarter, and all we did to the house when we came was only water for the well and we just put water and put electricity and a couple of years without electricity and water in the well. My mother used to come and see us cupping up water for the little prim us stove, going up to the ice factory up the road and putting having our ice to keep the butter or the, the ... She used to say," Miriam demonstrates her mother's indignant whisper and the tale becomes inaudible here except for the last quoted exclamation,"'... white!' 'Ma, okay, you just don't have to tell your friends in Capetown, that's all: "We lived there for five years, from Pesach to Sukkot and then we closed Sukkot to Pesach;' to travel the continents, each on her own, and incidentally do the buying for the coming season at the shop, their goings and comings regulated by the cycles of Jewish holy days and seasons which, two generations back, had governed the men's periodical emergence from the Kalahari. About two and a half decades before I got to know Miriam, I was in the Israeli army. Stationed in Tzfat when she and Doreen first opened the shop. I remember walking past with a friend and stopping and peering in for long stretches of incredulous time. More than once. I never saw it open. What I did see through the window was enchanted and deeply incongruous in the in-turned, stubborn town. Magically ludicrous. Until we began our talking, I had actually classified the memory as imagined, disbelieving that it could

12

FIRST VISIT

be real. Who could its customers be? Who could be expected to buy any of this beautiful unfathomable paraphernalia? The neighbors, immigrants to Israel from the island of Jerba, off the Tunisian coast, used to bring Miriam and Doreen a loving gift of Jerba couscous every Saturday. You can set it down, the fragrant, flat-topped, aluminum, double container-a sieve of couscous steaming over a pot of spicy broth-on our eating table. It's badly and beautifully scratched and recently re-sanded. There's no veneer. It can take the heat. We like to use good food besides our good stories for nourishing selves and each other. You can let it stand on the table for a while, the couscous pot, till the soup cools just a little, till it draws all of us or whoever's in the mood into the room and gradually starts up a beat of clinking china bowls and spoons and talkings. "Tickle me." Imagine one of us ask after the meal. "What?" you can imagine the answer. "Tickle me." "Are you crazy? Aren't you too full?" "Oh come on. Come on, tickle me." "Why?" "What do you mean why? Why not?" "What for?" "Please. I like it." "I'd feel pretty absurd. I really I... wouldn't be comfortable with it." "But I would. Come on." "You're acting like a child." "So?" "Why me?" "No one else is available right now. Please." "And what about you?" "Me?" "Mm-hm. You." "Me tickle you?" "Me? You know I hate it. No, tickle you." "Me tickle me?" "Mm-hm." "I am." "Then why didn't you say so? Good."

THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

13

"See?" "Now, I do. Good." "But it won't tickle:' "See? Tickle, tickle, tickle." "Nothing. Not a chuckle:' "Are you sure? It works on me. In fact it's excruciating." "Positive." "Try again." "I did. This morning." "No, I mean really. Try a different place or something." "Well ... the floor's a little hard and that chair is sort of overstuffed and claustrophobic. The bathtub maybe?" "Come on, you know what I mean. Those ticklish places like right up under your arm." "I tried there:' "Maybe your technique needs adjusting. It's probably a little different from tickling me, our tastes may vary just slightly." "Oh come on. Please:' "You're a healthy adult woman. I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be capable of your own tickling. Why should I have to do it for you? Actually, I'd planned on reading the paper." "Please? Come on. Please tickle me:' "Don't you think you could find a way to do it if you really wanted to and let me read in peace? It's not very complicated. What's so hard about that? See. See how easy it is? Not that hard, is it? Not all that complicated. Not impossible to master. A fairly simple motor skill:' "Oh!Oy!" "Maybe you didn't try here. Some spots get a much better reaction. Or here, right here is very effective." "Enough. Oy! That's enough:' "Please. I can't. Please!" "But for some reason it requires non-reflexivity. There's no do-it-(to)yourself option." "Stop!"

14

FIRST VISIT

"Seriously. Very uniquely, tickling reveals a fascinating link between knowing and sensing, between mental agency and reflex-level response. How is it that identical touching does or doesn't tickle you depending on whether you are or aren't the one responsible for its application? How is it that getting tickled depends on not doing the tickling? Or how is it, in other words, that you can't tickle yourself? And how is it, I wonder, that even when you know I'm going to tickle you and even when my hand is poised to do it, almost touching, and even if you tell me where and when on the count of three, one, two, three ... you're still ticklish to it by virtue of the simple fact that it's not your own mind activating the touch, inside the touch so to speak." "Okay stop oy okay!" "And taking that one step further, how is it that you'd still be ticklish to my touch even if it was your hand guiding mine, controlling it, applying it where and when you decided. It's not a simple question of control, it's the coincidence of giving and receiving the stimulus that short circuits ticklishness. "So when you want me to tickle you what you want is a stimulus that you're not carrying out. You want sensations that aren't of your own making. That aren't your creation or your artifice, that to you aren't artificial. Uncontrived by you, they're opaque, concrete, direct. Maybe above all sensuous. In put to your senses that's not out put by your mind. Real, as it were. Not made up. Unimagined. "They affect your whole body, all of you right to the tip. You're at the rim almost outside yourself. Beside yourself. Trying to get a laughing edge on your littleness, on the boredom or at least the anti-climax of constantly knowing what you're doing the split second before you are. An outside, unyou, is giving you sense-contact with your perimeter." "I used to look at these cars which used to go through Capetown covered with dust with 'Cape to Cairo' written on them, I used to read the newspapers, apply for advertisements 'I'll look after your child if you're going by road'... I don't know what it was, I can't put... Used to hear when the whaling ships used to come, the Russian whaling ships. They used to play Russian music. You could hear it in the whole town because from the docks the main road leads from the docks. The main street going up toward the mountain;' the recording is very bad here and only a fragment of the sentence is audible, "from the time of the Dutch." At this point Miriam's voice becomes clear and emphasized. "And suddenly all these exciting exotic people. I mean, here you had people who could speak Russian in the big shops

THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

15

translating. And these different-looking people coming to buy thick velvets and furs and things." Things to tickle us, to take us beyond boredom, things to place among the touching textures and colors of our houseyard, things unimagined, real. "And then I was a social worker and I was working in an area that was the worst-I think at that period probably-urban slum in Africa, because South Africa was the most developed country in Africa. And at the age of nineteen I was a social worker from a protected environment, protected home with a big wall around it. And I was suddenly faced with things like prostitution, drug addiction, unmarried mothers;' the interference increases here as the first tape ends. It subsides on the next one, "and I became fascinated with this area. It was not very far from us. And also, you know, the smell of slums. You'd go into a house early in the morning and you smelled alcohol and drugs and;' the background noise rises here again perhaps in rhythm with a rising wind, "unwashed children and old people." More things for our house. "First, well, I just wanted to take everybody home. "That was the first reaction because we didn't live very far away. And then of course I made good friends with the people. And there were also Indians living there, there was a wonderful Indian restaurant. And just the life, the vitality, the vibrancy of this area, which was so different from the gentility. It was always something which I knew was outside there I couldn't get. The only thing which really has life in South Africa is the blacks. The Jews there adopted the English way of life. They were colonial genteel English but ate gehakte Ieber." She's using the Yiddish for chopped liver, a traditional eastern European Jewish dish. ''And when I was working there, the pacifist campaign started. Now you know, Ghandi spent quite a few years in South Africa and his son;' the noise is bad here, "Ghandi," and here, "Indian National Congress and there was a big influence there. And we started, we used to go and sit in segregated carriages, whites blacks, blacks in whites, telephones-white black. We were going to buy a stamp one day in the post office and this big wooden board... whites one side blacks the other. Somebody came up to me and said, 'Hey, you belong in the other side, the white side.' I said, 'You're wrong, I'm black."' It's Orna who says, uncomfortably, slowly, ''I'm afraid to look in my journals.'' It has taken a long time and repeated, gentle but precise questions to find out why. ''I'm afraid to find a lot of things that aren't mine, that aren't myself. I perceive myself as terribly easily influenced. By other people. By

16

FIRST VISIT

books I read." When I ask she agrees that at least 'alone in nature; as she has termed it in the native Hebrew I'm translating, whatever you are is most probably not an imitation of anything. She remembers her want, her need to be alone. Especially outside. Outside of houses, outside of towns, outside the range of people's looks and speech. As a child on weekend picnics with her parents, which were very frequent, she used to go off in her own direction and find a quiet spot to sit alone. A spot which she says often had nothing special about it except for being unremarkable enough to stay unvisited by others. I know the spot. I looked for it for years. The place where I thought I would stop my acting, where I would escape my sense of furtively squinting over my shoulder to find out how I looked to other people. The place, construed as a geographical one, on the other side of self-consciousness where I believed I would be me and real. Unstudied. Miriam says, "Being somewhere where you're not attached you're free. Travelling is the most free activity because you don't have to conform to anything." Judith says, "I was a child who didn't want to go away. Quite a dependent child, very sensitive to people's moods. I was quite needy. But my need to be together was not met and I decided, early on, to look after myself. Out of my fear of dependency, I learned to be counter-dependent, rather than independent. When I was eighteen I ran away. For good." On one trip with her family and parents' friends to the Sinai, a few days down the coast and into the desert, Orna, then in her late teens, announced her decision to leave the group. She had to promise her protesting, indignant parents to go straight home and in fact she intended to. But then, outside the tourspace defined by bus, group members, hotel rooms, itinerary, she decided to take any direction she could hitch first. Her ride took her to a row of caves along the bay called Na'ama in the Hebrew that briefly remapped the Sinai in the years of its occupation by Israel. Not far from Sharm ElSheikh, it was a place where people came and stayed in order to feel away and different and unfettered and often as not to smoke hashish. The tour group was staying at a hotel just across the bay and above the cavemarked cliff, and for the next few days she dodged them repeatedly, carefully preserving her invisibility to the group as a tangible form of self. Executing literally the metaphor of finding one's. As far back as she can remember Orna wanted to take every path to its end and see what was there. And she did, often, take the paths running

THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

17

through the now diminished expanse of citrus groves in which she grew up, on the Israeli coastal plain. As a child on foot with a group of children from her neighborhood, who were not even exceptionally adventurous in the village-like security of the tight-knit, provincial Israeli sixties. As a sixteen year old on motor scooter, alone and sometimes taking real risks. What she found at the ends of the earth at the ends of her paths were on some occasions discoveries, such as overgrown, secret, empty, isolated houses. Talking houses, eloquent in the silent speech of their desertion, their half-roofed, cracking walls, hung with the brittle remains of the summer's fast-growing loofa vines. Houses loaded with the fascination of past, hurriedly abandoned lives. No less exciting to her, though, were the times when she found a crossing, opening onto a whole other network of paths, of possibilities inviting her on, this or some next time. Offered. Compelling. It says, in the interpreted Book of Balkacz, on page sixty-eight, "Balkacz comes to think it entire complete moments after it has been voiced and done. It at first impersonates part of the constant present background much as heartbeat or breathing. And only after it's subsided does he recall, always with a start-1 know, I watch him-that it has in fact presented itself. Only after a definite interval. Unfailingly in the afterlull, his attention called by its ending rather than beginning. Much like realizing that a locust drone has stopped only to find that it had been heard all along. It is this, his delayed meeting with it on the watershed of sense and memory, which renders Balkacz accepting of it even before he becomes aware of its arrival. And so it is that when he comes to feel, he is unafraid to meet, it, the call. The beckon to leave." One of my first and most compelling memories is a long nighttrain whistle from Johannesburg to Capetown still echoing along the expanse of tracks and years. Baying the restless promise of distant rhythmically approaching destinations. Orna says she feels stuck. While we're meeting and talking she's a veterinary surgeon, thirty-four, mother to a toddler and married to her daughter's father. Her past travel includes two months as a seasick yacht-hand going from Israel to Italy, via Cyprus, Rhodes and a few other Greek islands, four on-her-own months washing dishes and travelling in Italy, eight months of volunteer work at a desert-trek and diving center at Eilat on the Red Sea, a trip to India with a woman friend and two trips to Japan, one with her then boyfriend, when she worked in an animal clinic for five of the eight months they were there. For the past few years, she says, she has felt enclosed, frus-

18

FIRST VISIT

trated and ashamed that she's unsuccessfull at making the next stretch of going away. A flower, a zinnia, was growing in a garden with a very high wall around it. Once upon a time, that is. It could have been in Capetown, behind Miriam's huge wall. It could have been on the border of June's expansive lawn or her California vegetable garden. This one was in Jaffa though. I couldn't have been more than three when my mother used to tell me its story. We had a ritual of walking along sidewalks pushing my baby sister's baby carriage outside the military base where we lived, whose old apartment buildings had, I now understand, only recently belonged to Palestinian Arabs. Before we and the new Israeli state moved in. As I remember it the story began with the zinnia growing in the garden with the very high wall around it. I remember a real wall, grainy, gray, possibly patched with dry moss, passed and stopped at regularly on our walks. And peering in. And a frustrated blank. As if I couldn't manage to see what was there because I was too little, or because it was nothing to see. And the zinnia longed, so much (I can hear my mother's intonation, her phrases-either inscribed or superimposed by me on my inner recording-I have no way of telling), to get outside the wall and go into the world far, far beyond. '"In Xanadu did Kublai Khan','' my father used to recite and repeat one of the only poetry fragments I know by heart. '"Through caverns measureless to man Down."' Embedded in the canon of his colonial, British South African, Jewish schooling, imported to Palestine and then Israel and passed on to me as a deeply important item of cultural knowledge, this Coleridge stanza, visceral yawning want-expressed or aroused-hypnotic rhythm of promise, fragment vision of slant-eyed rich subversive-because-unattainable beauty, sorcery, olive-skinned wonder. '"Down to a sunless sea:" I used to try to envision measureless. In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree where Alf the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. And the zinnia longed so much to get outside the wall and see the world far, far beyond. And there was a little girl etcetera. This part of the story is standard blond hair, blue-green eyes, of no real importance in my memory because by the age of 'I couldn't have been more than three,' I already understood the conventional imperative of telling children stories about themselves.

THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

19

So soon and sure enough the cute little me-girl was reported to be rescuing the zinnia, recognized and picked above all others, freeing her from the highwalled garden. And taking her home into the world far, far beyond. I remember, I think from then and not embedded later, the anti-climax. So this second set of even less attractive less exotic walls was supposed to be made rewarding by my blond-haired attentions. But I was the zinnia behind the wall much more than the standard little story girl. I wasn't interested in possessing the flower. I wanted the world. And my mother's story was a parable of disappointment, where protean dreams of beckoning expanses led straight to an ordinary, familiar apartment. That was as far as they, as I, could take me. As much as my mother could imagine for me. Even though I asked for the story over and over, hoping I think each time that maybe now it would meet the aching anticipation built up wall high by her dramatic opening inflections. She says, though, that I got angry at even the slightest change in the wording. It apparently wasn't lost on me at that age of socialization, that as this version of the world would have it, dreams of far beyond had to end not only in disappointment but also in death. The zinnia obviously wasn't going to last very long in the stupid little girl's vase. I asked my mother, "But it'll wilt and die?" willing her to prove me wrong. She explained that it would have had to die anyway. So, besides getting you nowhere much, getting out far, far beyond meant severing life from its roots. Scale the wall and you die, and in an ordinary apartment. Dare to try and live little girl etcetera and you'll fail and you'll die. "An insatiable search, his wander seems meant more to lose than find. Lose the searcher, lose limited repetitive self, lose face in the sense of losing one's image of how one looks, how one is expected to conduct oneself. Lose the linkage of body weight to a known series of sites;' it says in the Book of Balkacz on page forty-two. And, on page

10

of Travellers' Tales, Trinh T.

Minh-ha has translated and quoted Tahar Ben Jelloun, as saying, "The writer writes so that [s] he no longer has a face:' I have added the's' and adopted her view that he means the traveller too, in his piece Les Pierred du temps, in the journal Traverses number 40, published in 1987, on page 158. The writer traveller travels writes so that she no longer has a face. So that she can lose it, her insular sense of separate identity. Exit her self and feel that which is beyond her skin. Beyond her brain. That which exceeds her perimeters, her world. At the rim of self, tickled pink, beside self, she tries on death. Itself a traveller, this house is not back home to any of us. We only dwell

20

FIRST VISIT

here in a manner of speaking, discursively, here and gone. Brought by our stories. But it is, to the extent that talking houses can ever be, a site of self, of truth, of no pretensions or affectation. It does try to have that meaning of home. As in make yourself at home or as in make yourself (into) a home. This meaning is often found first away from home, alone in nature, as Orna calls it, and can sometimes then be kept intact and installed at home, whether back at the old one or at the new place that it now turns into home. So whatever else it may be, however richly exotic to senses and emotions, the house you make us still has to stay ordinary, unobtrusive, unintrusive, natural to its temporary tenants to the point of a regular apartment in Jaffa. Imagine it ingeniously balancing the comfort of anti-climax against the disappointment. It could never, for instance, be like Hannah's fairytale real-life round Turkish tower hidden in a green garden on the grounds of a walled-in monastery in the middle of down-town, modern Jerusalem. A perfect, terra cotta floor, totally appropriate to the structure, totally foreign to the land. A deep, old fireplace. A long, spacious room leading off the kitchen, with a wide, low windowshelf holding large thriving potted plants. The first broad, later narrowing and steepening, stairs spiraling between the thick, caressingly coarse, whitewashed walls, past an oriental-carpeted library-desked landing, to end precisely beneath the domed-skylighted white ceiling on a pure white bedspread cascading onto the other white of the circular, wall-to-wall carpet. Old stories, surviving war and destruction behind respected walls, rented for life from the monastery and slowly, lovingly renovated by Hannah to meet the sensibilities of her professional photographer's eye. "I do live here," she says in a part of the notes where the tape was off. "A lot of people relate to me as a transient. Not as really having a life here. I don't feel Israeli. Not Australian either any more. I don't belong anywhere, no roots or nationalistic feeling. I try to go beyond it:' Our pattering in passing simply wouldn't have the time it needed to become un-selfconscious and comfortable in her tower. It couldn't help staying wary of the gorgeous, tasteful, detailed design, and unaccustomed, childlike, uneasy about ruining something, tipping, spilling, dropping, breaking. Imagine, then, a first of all reassuring space, accepting, not systematically stylized although in some ways pleasing, sticky and hot sometimes, in some ways disappointing, nice not beautiful. Distracted from beauty by chores and fun and coping. Probably to some degree cluttered, clumsy and tolerant of clumsiness, intermittently inconsistent, unrestraining.

THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

21

Unrestraining because part of the drive concerning which some of us are here, is, as Judith puts it, to "push myself to the limits, to find out I can be totally self-sufficient, to make myself an island and survive:' Part of it comes too of "a belief that it's possible and worthwhile, that it is a mission:' As it were, my avocation. She says, "I always wanted to go there." Since when is always? While we're talking Judith is a thirty-eight year old psychologist and anthropologist, living on her own in London. She is speaking English with a mostly East Coast American accent. "To Latin America:' she goes on, "My father used to play the music, I liked the music. My best friend married a Colombian. To me it was a remote and colorful area of the world." Since before consciousness maybe. Always might be since before reflective consciousness. "I always wanted ... It was it was the challenge, the challe-" Miriam is saying, "I always wanted to be in a place where I didn't speak the language, I didn't have money and to see if I'd be able to survive. The point was to see if I'd be able to survive." And at some other time she says, "It was just something which pushed me and drove me, I had to go. I had to go. I never thought the rest of life I don't want to get married. But now, now. I don't want to get married and I don't want to get married and live next door to the family and be;' she mimics strangulation. "No, no. Couldn't travel like this. I wouldn't be free you see." "You're walking eighteen kilometers a day... everything aches ... afterwards I lost all my toenails because of the boots, you know, banging on the toe ... ;' Hannah says. "This was a... I'd done many pilgrimages. And you know this implies walking up mountains up to ... at high altitude and sleeping out in tents and uh all of that. And uh I've done that in the past, in India and Sri Lanka:' She pronounces it shri. She is speaking English fairly slowly. Herdiction is exceptionally clear, native Australian accent notwithstanding, and her intonation rises and falls with dramatic stresses and loaded pauses. "And none of them have been easy. You get stuck in the torrential rain ... " She had explained before, "I had a very specific pilgrimage that I wanted to do and I went through uh ... pure hell to do it and I knew: a pilgrimage implies a certain test, you know. Are you really sincere in your desire to do this and if you are then there will be obstacles put up in front of you and these obstacles were definitely put up in front of me and it was to me: okay, am I going to turn back? And where do we turn back to anyway in the middle of Tibet? You know, going back is as bad as going forward. So uh I pushed through with it and it was you know the hardest thing I have ever done. Absol-

22

FIRST VISIT

without a shadow of doubt and I cried and wailed every day because... Literally wailed and cried every day because really I thought I don't know if I'm going to get out of this alive. "So now if I say I have no fears it's because I've pushed through them all. But anyway I didn't have that. Mean even to take on this trip implied, you know, a certain ... either really naive or really... I mean I knew it would be difficult, I didn't know to what degree." She explains later, "There's a great feeling of satisfaction in that and I don't... 1... something about it that I like. And so this one in Tibet was like the last pilgrimage and the greatest of all pilgrimages. It's the most symbolic, the most significant, doing it, you don't climb the mountain, you circumambulate the mountain-clockwise-and the mountain is called Mount Kailash, it's the holiest mountain in all of Asia. It's holy to Hindus, Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhists ... and circumambulating it means that all the sins of this lifetime are erased. Somehow I do uh really believe that. I believe that I carry that now that I have done the pilgrimage. I'm very careful not to incur any bad karma, not to tell little white lies or big white lies, not to take an ashtray from a restaurant, all these little things that uh ... It just is a different awareness that I'm I've done the pilgrimage which implies I'm on a dean slate and I must be careful not to take on or pick up now more bad karma." "So that it's not only photographing pilgrimages;' I ask her, "it's also... " "Yuh, I do it. I do it and I choose the pilgrimages that are things that I'm particularly interested in and I want to do. I don't just go off ad hoc to any pilgrimage that uh... I haven't been in Lourdes or all this ... the Catholic thing, it's not... very hard for me to relate to it. But the Sufi or the Hindu or the Buddhist attract me very strongly. Jewish things I'm really not ... Someone said, 'Have you been to Har Meiron?' and, 'you must you must'... I just the thought of all those religious people on the top of the mountain is like my idea of a nightmare. But I suppose I should, it's true, I should. I think, I mean after all I am Jewish. It's not like I have any illusions that I'm not Jewish." Later she says, "I really adopted that kind of concentration camp uh mentality where every meal was my last. I really ate with that awareness. Better eat it now because really you know you don't know where the next meal's gonna come from. Uh, you know those packets of instant noodles that you put in water for three minutes? Those noodles, they come in cellophane and sometimes they've got a little powdered uh sauce with them. So you can buy them there and so I'm telling you sometimes I ate the noodles uncooked:'

THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

23

At such heights, from such a vantage point, I can see where it could have happened. Exactly twenty-five years from here. I knew it then too-that it could happen at this point. But I was assuming other, future points. I didn't know then what I do now-that I wasn't going to make it happen. Or in other words, that I wasn't going. Not for at least the last twenty-five years. Maybe not ever, although I can still claim the inscrutability of the future. I don't really think so. I guess not ever. I guess "decisions made early in life shape the range of possible decisions that can be made later. Efforts to override earlier decisions entail significant psychological transformations in how a woman thinks of herself as an agent;' as Kathleen Christensen says in her article, Eliminating the Journey to Work: Home-based work across the life course of women in the United States, on page 59 of the book Full Circles, that you've already read some quotes from. Going wandering, that is. Full scale not knowing where exactly or till when. But knowing for sure that it will be far and foreign. Out of knowhere into the radically unknown. As I said, I wasn't. I was twenty and had just finished one year and eight months of compulsory duty as quasi-becausefemale-soldier in the Israeli army. I was coming back from being home on leave every other weekend and sometimes much less. When my current boyfriend at home heard my barely forming plans, an apprenticeship as a nature and trekking guide in the Judean Desert, he said it would be the end of our relationship. It wasn't phrased as an ultimatum though I recognized it as one as well as a realistic observation. I stayed with the relationship. I am a writer, forty-six as I'm starting this, mother of three, married to the current boyfriend for twenty-four years. What I had wanted although apparently not desperately enough was to become able (which I didn't feel) to navigate places. I wanted to learn how to do it; decide which way, map out how to (preferably) walk there, what to take along, and go. I wanted to make myself at home in the wilderness, anywhere. I wanted to learn the lore of the scouts, familiarize myself with the clues of the trail, hone my senses, get in the habit of treading on the whole underface of the feet that I wanted to learn to trust. Mine. I wanted to stop feeling wobbly, top heavy with blurred extremities. I wanted to be able to go almost anywhere and go. No less away from than to. Make live the unfocused fantasy mysteries of faraway, felt mainly as an ache between my lower ribs. At the time I wasn't even aware of assuming all along that I wouldn't be doing it alone but beside a man, simply because no alternative assumption

24

FIRST VISIT

existed in my vocabulary. This was one of the ways my mind both expressed and kept in place the circumscription of a woman's freedom to move. We travel glass corridors, navigate a constrained world. Notwithstanding, roamings around the rugged Israeli Judean desert might really have given me some practice at making decisions which were less restricted by fears, timidity, a difficult-to-lose sense of smallness, of confusion. But they might just as easily have left me, like the army did, with a set of skills that was applicable to nothing at all outside of the idiosyncratic structure where I acquired it. They may have left my inconfidence and maybe self-imposed but real helplessness completely intact, despite some adventurous memories of trekking over tannish-yellow rock, functionally, if not physically, behind young, admirably independent and fearlessly matter-of-fact male colleagues or lovers. In fact only now, from this observation point, do I realize that I did indeed trek alone quite a number of half-days, through the low wooded mountains, bare wadis and shrinking marshland of the Upper Galilee where I served my army duty. Usually taking along one of the base's mongrel German Shepherds. All of which confidence evaporated and was forgotten back in the structures of family and lifecareer grooves at home. So there I stayed and the unnamable stirrings stayed with me, presenting themselves some of the time as the apparition of a different (kind of) love and at other times as that of a different life. And gradually less rarely but never altogether, not at all.

THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

25

SECOND VISIT: JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

"sy A MIRACLE A FRIEND OF MINE GAVE, not a lover l WOUld point OUt,

gave me his appointment, his apartment, and moved into his sort of underground, physically underground, atelier where he was a carpenter and let me take over his apartment. Then when I lost that, a friend of mi- I commuted way out in the country to a friend's kitchen floor with my old army sleeping bag. And a little woman who sold flowers on the street saw me and she said, 'Well what are you doing here shivering at this time of night, come to my place.' And I I have her place to this day." June says. You've already been introduced. You met her on the first visit. In Switzerland with the count, after leaving California. Making her way to India, to start out on her lifetime of opposing human violence. We might try to place our talking house in her Geneva apartment. There wouldn't be space there for too many of us though. It's a little apartment, except the ceilings are high and the walls are covered all the way up with shelves of books and papers and publications. In every single room including the bathroom. The bath is a filing cabinet. Going into the apartment I had to move sideways along the entrance corridor. June's daughter Janie says, "We never really you know had any bought furniture or anything. It;' that is the apartment, "was never really established in a permanent manner. You know often we'd uh move furniture around or... also my mother has this great admiration for cardboard. She thinks that, you know, cardboard is this wonderful piece of furniture. And so lots of uhm

26

closets and stuff which are made up of cardboards piled up on each other. That could be also turned into... playhouses or doll beds or uhm boxes to put papers in and books and stuff." When I was there, June showed me a long cardboard box that she was setting up as a bed for her visiting grandson. I imagined him rather enjoying sleeping arrangements that reinstalled thesecret, friendly dark of a child's private box house. "So ... nothing," Janie is saying, "was really... there wasn't really a sense of of permanence really in in the way it was set up. There weren't an- there were no... family heirlooms or... grandfather clocks standing around, you know." I suppose the houses in Geneva that are serving her in comparison, have quite a few grandfather docks standing around. June says, "Because she didn't want it any more after a while." She's referring to the concierge. "She, her husband had died and her children one of them's in mental hospital one thing and another. So I took over her apartment and I was a concierge. Charge of painting five flights of stairs and putting the light bulbs in the garbage cans. I mean the light bulbs in and the garbage cans out. Which I paid students and so on to help me with. But I have that place to this day which is rue de," I'm not putting in the address, "which is internationally known even to the CIA apparently for being a a marvelous place where anybody in the old days used to be able to sleep or take a shower or make a phone call." Small but still, by this description, clearly one configuration of our moving talking house. At least in past. "Now," June says, "our list has boiled down to the family. The blood family and their spouses and stuff. Otherwise I was I just couldn't do it any more." Janie says, "But then actually things have not changed in that apartment for the last thirty years that ... If you go in there it's ... it's never been repainted. And everything that has gone up on the walls has never come down. Like little postcards that people have sent and posters and uhm it's just an accumulation of... things. History. Family, sort of our own family history. So... in a in a sense it's funny because things haven't moved, but there was never a sense of establishment there." Earlier June has said of Geneva, "I just started working there, just started working there. Quietly. And living;' she laughs, "the darndest places. A friend's attic. Another friend's basement and just really no fixed abode at all but somehow able to dress decently and go to my offices all. The first was atoms for peace exhibition and oh I don't know I worked uh seven years in one place and three in another." I'm pretty sure June knows by now that "Atoms

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

27

for Peace" was a con. That she was working for a deadly con. I'm sure she didn't know it then. "This crusade;' Spencer R. Weart says on page 156 of his book Nuclear Fear: A History of Images, published by Harvard University Press in 1988, "began in the White House. The ground was prepared by the Eisenhower administration's conviction that in holding off Communism, public relations and 'psychological warfare' were as important as bombers." It was 1952. Hydrogen fusion bombs were becoming a reality. The first tests

had convinced almost anyone involved that fusion "went farther even than fission bombs into the realm of apocalypse," Spencer says on page 155. With the result that demands for nuclear information were raised-by the press and others. On page 157 Spenser says, "Eisenhower himself had been disturbed about hydrogen weapons ever since he learned the results of the first test." And, "Worse news arrived in August: the enemy too had tested a fusion device." And, "Americans would have to be told something about all this:' But "Eisenhower reportedly complained, 'We don't want to scare the country to death."' Or as Margot A. Henriksen says on page 44 of her book, Dr. Strangelove's America: society and culture in the atomic age, published by University of California Press in 1997, he didn't "want the full and despairing truth known." He wanted to offer some hope. Sterling Cole, the new chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, "wanted to speed up the building of bombs, but at the same time he wanted to 'assure the world we stand ready to share the benefits of peacetime atomic energy;" Spenser says on page 157. Eisenhower conceived a proposal to "'turn over to the United Nations, for peaceful use, X kilograms of fissionable material."' This "at a time;' Spenser says on the next page, "when fissionable materials were more rare and magical than gold." Such a step "should kindle sympathy for the entire American nuclear program;' embarrassing the Soviets if they held back, and seriously depleting their small stockpile of bombs if they joined. So "on December 8, 1953, Eisenhower delivered the much-revised speech on hydrogen bombs before the General Assembly of the United Nations." Spenser says he described "with awe but little new information the power of modern bombs." But the main point was when "the President, his eyes shining with emotion, offered to support an International Atomic Energy Agency to develop the new power for life rather than death." "The speech;' Spenser says, "had an unexpectedly great impact on the world public. The final result would be something the President scarcely intended: to promote a nuclear power industry far more rapidly than ordi-

28

SECOND VISIT

nary business practices would have advised!' On page 163 he says a secret report dated November 1955, "boasted that the campaign 'detracted popular attention away from the image of a United States bent on nuclear holocaust,' diverting the public eye to 'technological progress and international cooperation.' "The Atoms for Peace crusade broke through to a new level of credibility at an international conference proposed by the United States and convened in Geneva in 1955,'' where June was doing typing work for the project. The event hosted a "working nuclear reactor that was the centerpiece of the American exhibit at Geneva. Magazines around the world ran photographs of this deep cylinder of crystal-dear water with its rods of uranium, where visitors could see the water glow with a ravishing blue light." "Many came home eager to buy or build reactors,'' Spenser says on the next page. And many national leaders, "abandoned their caution and began to reach for nuclear energy as a panacea." And, "by the end of 1957 the United States had signed bilateral agreements with forty-nine countries from Cuba to Thailand." By that time June had moved on. Later on in our talking she's saying, "I had enormous numbers of severe ... relatively severely mentally ill people, boring people and all kinds of people, pouring in and out and I was supporting all these people of course in a way. First I had a house out in the country too for a little while. Where I tried to uh bring home the bacon for a whole bunch of misfits to keep them from not... going into mental hospitals. But that became too dangerous. Really physically dangerous." And she says, "I was very much alone but with this hoard of people around all the time:' And later she says, "So I had this apartment and I stayed there." And Kennedy was shot so Janie was born. "Along came Janie's father." June explains. "That was a strange thing because he appeared in Qua- I didn't go to Quaker meeting much. Now I don't go at all I just give up. They're very sweet people but I -n't go to meeting!' Some words get smothered here by an apologetic laugh. "And they know why it's, I'm not travelling or something I'm just not worshipping anything any more." Anyway she says, "So Janie's father appeared on the scene because Kennedy was shot. And I went to Quaker meeting and suddenly I thought, 'Oh how awful, what am I doing here, I'm going home. There's gonna be trouble now... 'I... not that I worship Kennedy I can guarantee you with this Bay of Pigs and all that. That was just oooh that was ... that's an-

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

29

other time when I got terribly sick and had to drop out of work lost my job even because I I I was so terrified." And she says, "So I met hi- he came down from Lausanne. He was this big business man in charge of uhm he was sales manager for all of Europe and Africa and Asia and what an enormous area of the world for... Alcoa international which is one of the big bad guys you know, doing horrible things to the;' there's interference on the tape here, "systems and he'd been put into that job at nineteen by his father who owned;' and noise again, "silver millionaires. He was a doctor." More words are blurred here, "his father and mother. Supposedly." She means his supposedly-father-and-mother. "Then he discovered when he was nine years of age in a drawer the papers. When he was nine. And that screwed him up the rest of his life. He doesn't trust anybody anymore. He lies the way he breathes. You know I mean he it's impossible to live with him. He was ... we lived together three years. He asked me that very day. See, he came down because Kennedy had died and there he was sitting in the meeting. This business man in his gray suit with his short hair. Just the kind of person who's the least enticing to me I can tell you:' Janie says, "My father and mother lived together," till she was about two and a half, "and then ... in a house in in the Swiss mountains." With her father's older children, and her mother's oldest daughter, who had come to live with her mother, ten years after she'd left America and her two children for a year. That is, when her son was three and her daughter was ten. Janie's father, "lived in Switzerland and then in Germany and then in Madrid and then in London. He only recently retired and moved back to America." After he and June separated, Janie didn't visit his home very often. She pronounces the word with an audible 't'. "I didn't really... I didn't like to be away from my mother for you know a whole s - month in the summer or to be with his ... wife. I didn't feel comfortable with that:' Later she says, "It was really only three or four times in my childhood that I went to visit him for... short periods. Three or four times were longer like a holiday, like a month in Germany and maybe two weeks in the south of France ... that's what I call long. Otherwise it was over the weekend. But that was only until about the age of... eight and then after that I didn't visit. "Uhm ... I don't know I think it was my mother who was ... making trouble. She didn't really... I mean she couldn't... it wasn't a very nice atmosphere in his house I mean ... and I'd complained about that ... so ... she preferred to

30

SECOND VISIT

have him come and visit. Because there were ... I preferred being alone with my dad it was more fun. But when I was in his house there were ... just too many other kids and always guests and he was never available and he was working and ... you know his wife was ... bossing all the kids around because she was trying to organize the household and stuff. And... that was it. And that that was not the type of family life I was used to. See I was for instance you know eating separately from the adults and this type of thing and going to bed early. I didn't I didn't like that. I was used to being treated on an equal footing with uh ... my mother and her friends you know. And and uh I I I felt that sort of to be a bit humiliating. To be treated as just any other child in the family:' She laughs softly, shyly as she says this. So he would come to spend time with her in Geneva every month or so, whenever he made or needed a few days there to take care of business at the company headquarters. At the time she's telling this, Janie is twenty-eight. She has two children, eight and two and a half, the oldest born when she was nineteen. She has been travelling on and off-along with him (and later her second son)since he was nine months old. Since marrying in 1990, she has lived with her partner and children in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem (in the Palestinian part, that is), in Saudi Arabia, in Tel-Aviv, and in a small village in the Israelioccupied West Bank, each for about a year. Moving for the International Committee of the Red Cross, while her husband works there. The last is actually a strange permutation of'there.' It means an abstract, intangible set of relationships, definitions, rules and agreements, and a resulting set of recurrent financial and other transactions. Rather than a geographical site, that is. Because he worked 'there' for the whole time that they were consequently travelling from place to place. "All the same area." Janie says. "In a way, I think culturally there there's certainly similarity;' the tape is indecipherable here, "of the Arab culture. Things that we're accustomed to." She has a bad cold and a lot her consonants are hard to make out. The feeling that she's projecting is one of moving to another neighborhood. Of viewing each of these places-separate but adjacent relative to 'the world'-as part of yet another single, although compound, 'there'. She's talking about Israel, Saudi Arabia, Palestine. Whose sealed borders and hatreds prove surprisingly and simply crossable to her and her family, un-belongers to any one of these singular 'there's'. Earlier she's said, "I've been to New York City, for a year. From Switzerland. That was just me and Michael;' her oldest son. '"cause Jean Paul;' her

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

31

husband, "came over here and we weren't married and he wasn't- we'd been living together three years but for the first mission he wasn't able to have the family with him. So uh ... "She had been at law school in Geneva. "Originally," she says, "I I was gonna uhm pass the bar in Switzerland and become a Swiss lawyer you know. Public interest Swiss lawyer. But I mean even before finishing my after my first year oflaw school I went I traveled in the States for four months. On my own with Michael. And there, actually there I had decided to stay in the States and study there." In fact she later graduated from law school in Geneva, but in New York she worked at Middle East Watch, an organization that monitors human rights abuses in the Middle East. "And my mother came with us." "And she was with you for the whole year?" "Yaah. Well actually it wasn't quite a year it was eight months. And that was fun. We lived in a little, a studio the three of us. She took care of Michael you know half the day, and half the day he went to school. He was four years old:' Janie gets disoriented in new surroundings. Not physically. "I feel actually 1... don't I don't really like rearranging a house. I like to have things there and

they stay there. And it really does aggravate me to dismantle a house every year, pack it all up." She's had to do that a short time before we start our talking. Moving from East Jerusalem to the Tel-Aviv area. We met at a human rights organization where I'm working and she's volunteering. If I've got it right, Red Cross wives aren't encouraged to get involved with local human rights organizations. "I don't find that exciting," Janie says about moving, "And uh... it tires me to build up a new house. Psychologically maybe rather tha-I mean it's not physically tired, but it takes me a longtime, it takes me maybe three months to fit in shh ... putting things up on the walls and just... "I do get sad when I leave a place. And it takes me a little while to get accustomed to a new place. But I haven't noticed that with with my children;' not even she says with, "my eight year old who's able to express it verbally. Uh ... I haven't noticed any change in his comportment or in his enthusiasm or in his appetite or anything like that. People you know sometimes say, 'oh, uh children need their," what people say they need is drowned out here by background noise. "I think children also need to be ... I think it's very good for children to be exposed to different environments, different cultures and ... different mentalities, rules ... as long as there's a very strong uh emotional security I think with stability let's say with their immediate family. Keeping certain little rit-

32

SECOND VISIT

uals like story-telling at night, eating meals together you know playing in the bath ... Spending, spending time with the children that not being too ... trying not to be too frantic or preoccupied by other things. Uh ... Activities. Keeping somehow a I don't know a continuous set of activities I think which you ... repeat." Sara Ruddick says, "Central tasks of fostering growth are administrative. Mothers organize places and times in which infants and toddlers can socialize." And she says, "Mothers arrange for or provide safe occasions for learning and friendship." That is, in her book, Maternal Thinking, published by Ballantine in 1989, on page 87. "Another thing I I focus a lot on is memories:' Janie says, "And uh ... I try not to let the memories of places and friends just uh disappear. We talk a lot about the different places we've lived and the things we liked to do there and uh ... the people we liked to be with, the games we liked to play. The food we ate. Even things like doing _shopping. Where we used to do our shopping. Every day all this we talk about these things and we have ... we have lots of pictures also and we have little photo albums that are just lined up. Easy at hand and the the children look at them a lot." I'm struck by the tense that's dominant in this part of her talking. While we're meeting her boys are young. One of them two and a half, one of them eight. And she's talking about focusing their attention on a past tense, a past simple but also a past perfectthe done and gone processes, the habits left behind, the daily routines. Involving them in knitting a continuity of past where there isn't a continuity of place. "And we talk about them and family members and we see since we see ... on my father's side there are also lots of brothers and sisters and we have a lot of contact with them but we see them maybe once or twice a year so we ... look at their pictures and talk about them and ... I think this is important to to keep up memory." Chava says, "Songs. Songs and rocking. I guess mainly one. Uhm the same one the same song I've been singing to her, I guess ever since she was born. I mean literally and. I used to hold her like hold her against me in the rocking chair or just sit on the bed and rock my my back back and forth like a swing. Like you do in a swing. When she was nursing. And hum. Sort of passing this repetition, the sound the movement-low, soft, like out of my lower chest and my ribcage to her skull and back and. Feeling this this amazing echo but also really ordinary nothing much to think about. Through ... through all our internal cavities. Our organs. Resounding." She is saying it in Hebrew and I'm translating. The parts I'm including, that is.

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

33

You'll know without my telling you that some parts are left out. You'll know that you're reading only parts of our talkings. That I couldn't possibly offer you all the hours of all our talkings and that you wouldn't read them anyway. That I'm choosing and arranging from them, for your visit. That a representation of reality is always just that, not reality. No matter how faithfully the details are preserved, and even when every single stutter is recorded and transcribed. And it is. You're reading a record of all the stutters, all the tangled sentences sidetracked along the way and left unending, all the uhms, the I means, the you knows. It's a record deeply caring for every woman's precise words and word fragments and silences, for the actual beat and rhythms and inflections of her speech. For the unique vocal cadences of her solo as it threads in and out of our jamming. Choosing and arranging I don't voiceover any of the talkings this house is made of. Choosing to read, you're choosing to adjust the way you read. Because the painstaking preservation of every syllable is as uncomfortable and foreign to you in print as it is comfortable and natural in speech. And so, faithful as it is, the record has to seem-and admittedly is-tangibly crafted, contrived. A visible veil through which you're aware, on and off, that you're peering, as you piece together a recounted reality, palpably non-real. Which in turn keeps you aware that you too are choosing and arranging-organizing, connecting, understanding. Such is the paradox of the faithful record that its committed and meticulous faithfulness can only result in increasing its unfaithfulness. "I only realized how I guess powerful, enormously powerful it is," Chava is saying, "when we got past the uh passport, I guess passport control it's called. And she was cranky and I did it to calm her down after I hadn't done it for oh about two years. Even more maybe. Just naturally started doing it. Like I used to every day or four times a day or mostly night. And suddenly I in a a kind of flash realized it was this sort of bubble we were making together of familiar... sense data. As if we were going inside to get away from all the strangeness around us where we knew we ... you know we knew what was there. Outside it was all so... " Chava is thirty-seven as she says this. Her daughter, Atar, who was with her on the trip, both hers and Chava's first over seas, is almost five. Her father and Chava have never lived together or married but they both take care of her. His apartment in Tel-Aviv is two streets away from Chava's, where their daughter lives. Chava has been working on a doctoral thesis in literature for almost eight years and teaches at a university as a junior faculty

34

SECOND VISIT

member. She is translator of, and commentator on, the medieval Venetian journal written by Caterina de Viglionis, which she calls The Book of Balkacz. This book, she has said, is the reason she has finally come to leave Israel and travel for the first time. First overland to the Sinai and then on the trip she's just been describing. She says, "It was all so strange. I felt so totally uhm removed from myself while I was doing it. As if it wasn't me activating myself because I knew I didn't know how to do this stuff so how could I be. Like uh looking up travel agents in the phone book and making a list of numbers and a list... questions so I wouldn't forget when I got... confused on the phone and. I knew I would. And then dialing and and talking saying what I needed, where, what I how long, how much, that stuff. Writing it down. Remembering to buy what's it call- notepad to write it down in one place so it wouldn't get like little notes all over the place. And then every place I had to go for the uh p - papers and money and banks and gover-like I mean offices and. To register Atar all that. The doors really phased me. "Do you push them or pull them or maybe they're sliding or automatic I mean and do I look stupid freezing in front of it! It's glass. I mean they can see me from the other side for god's sake. Why don't they write instructions on them? They did of course. I just wasn't seeing. How do you open the door to the other side of the Mediterranean? How do you how do you turn on your voice? I would get I mean does this woman at the PC receive public or not? Does should I interrupt her typing or wait uh till she looks up and ask about a trip to France to stay for two or three months with a small daughter and budget or uhm just who to talk to? ... How do people know? How come I don't? How come everybody knows and I don't?" In the talking house, each of us in her own way, is examining her ability to move. You've already read this on the first visit. Her capacity to move, physically, geographically. Her chin or ann through air. Her hand in the right direction to slide open a door. Her steps across a floor or a continent. Or up the stairway to an airplane. "And then the uch that airport;' Chava says and groans quietly. Examining her ability to propel her self on her own of her own volition. Like the others coming and going here. So simple, so basic, so evasive. Most of the time Chava's speech is even slower than Janie's, as if she's constantly translating from this difficult, obscure language. "How do you know where to go? How does everybody else? I mean people just seem to know

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

35

and. I uhm can't even decide who to ask." She says this last mainly to herself, almost inaudibly. "It was a it it was a revelation to me that I could ask. I kept discovering that I thought that because I was finally doing an independent, adult thing, I had to just know how to do it all by myself. It didn't occur to me I could ask along the way, when I didn't. Know I mean. Like I should just turn totally self-sufficient all at once without," her near-mumble here is indecipherable. "So at first I was like walking around in this insular invisible ... vow of silence that I forgot I could just. So finding my voice and realizing I could simply use it to ask directions was progress. Like I didn't have to rely strictly and exclusively on my ability to decipher maps and street signs. Suddenly I could change the rules. But but even when I started asking I couldn't decide. I took I don't know ten minutes to decide who every- and when you get off and out the door, let's say it's automatic, what how... "A good friend of mine actually sat me down and gave me a pretty close to a step by step plan. But even she didn't think of the sudden sinking panic when uh Atar had to pee after we landed and before we'd found the baggage what's it called, that moving track. But so once we were upstairs in I now I can nonchalantly call it after I've had this experience the 'departures lounge,' right? Before I realized it I found myself constructing this bubble of familiar song singing and rocking to take us to get us there ... safe." And 'there' here are both the bubble and France. Janie keeps, "contact with with pia- sort of home bases, what are what we call really home bases, like my mother's apartment and my husband's family's house in Quebec. And these are places we go back to every year. We find the same objects there, the same fa- the same people." She herself lived in the concierge's apartment until she was twenty-one. It was only when Michael was born that she and June stopped sharing a room, though they still went on sharing the tiny apartment. Janie was very fond of how cozy it felt to share a room with her mother, how secure. They shared a single bed till she was eight or nine. And now, as she's telling this, they regularly share one along with her two sons for a night or two when June is visiting and Jean Paul has to stay away overnight, at work. They all bundle up together in the double bed. Seventy-three, twenty-eight, eight, two and a half. She makes it sound like one of those delicious things that kids celebrate doing that much more because they're not usually supposed to. She says she sees a couple as a factor of distancing between children and parents. June says, Janie told her, "'I don't see how two people can raise a child together!"'

36

SECOND VISIT

When Michael was nine months old and Janie took him to the States, they "traveled around different uhm ... New York, California, West Virginia. It was very nice. He's a great great travelling companion:' Later she says, "The first the first three weeks I stayed in the same place and I went then I went two weeks to southern California, two weeks to northern California but in different people's homes, back to southern California, then to uh New York City for about two weeks. Then to West Virginia for a month. And then back to New York and Switzerland. "We took so many airplanes too. I remember we counted I think about nine airplanes or something." And on the flights, he was "very good! Very very good. He was delightful really, a delightful travel companion. I found it much more fun to travel with a child, I mean alone with a child than ... alone, actually. I've traveled alone ... because you're, you always have company. And yet you're in control pretty much of what's going on, you don't you know... also it facilitates contacts with people, 'cause you give a certain image, a young mother. .. You meet other families, you meet people who think you look friendly or something. I never had any... uhm ... unpleasant contact that I may have had as a as a young woman travelling alone you know:' Trinh T. Minh-ha says on page 15 of Travellers' Tales that, "streets and public places belong to men. Women are not supposed to circulate freely in these male domains, especially after dark (the time propitious to desire, 'the drive, the unnamable' and the unknown), for should anything happen to them to violate their physical well-being, they are immediately said to have 'asked for it' as they have singularly 'exposed' themselves by turning away from the Father's refuge." Which was a type of refuge Janie hadn't really had. "But he was he was an easy child;' she says, "I mean he didn't cry very much ... "I had to I have to go to the States to make him American 'cause he wasn't anything. He was stateless. Yaah, yaah." "How's that, you're a Swiss citizen, aren't you?" "No, I wasn't then and I was a... I'm a second generation American." As I am. "Abroad:' Which I am too, relative to America, in this country that has always been my home. "I had to prove that I'd lived uhm five years in America, before his birth or whatever. So that was not possible. And then according to Swiss law, even if the father is Swiss, the parents have to be married for him to transmit citizenship. It's discrimination against uhm children born out of wedlock really, because it means that a child of a Swiss man if the parents are born in wedlock, he receives the citizenship, if they're not born in

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

37

wedlock he doesn't receive the citizenship. So they're supposed to be so proud of the fact that they've eliminated the word 'illegitimate' and everything from their legislation. They say there's no dis- no distinction but obviously in this area there is. They're afraid of African women coming and having babies with Swiss men or something. A Swi- no, a Swiss mono, a Swiss mother unmarried automatically gives the citizenship. However, until recently a Swiss mother married to a foreigner could not give citizenship, whether. .. where the Swiss man married to a foreigner could." Earlier on Janie has said, "When they started to try their trouble with me, uh she she got a very strong lawyer which she had to pay for with her very modest salary and my father had to pay for and ... and uh ... you know of course that's, my mother and father were living together and you know, so that probably... they probably thought that was at least ... although my father was married to somebody else and ... but uh anyway... so they they weren't able t - well." She pauses here for longer than the time she has a habit of taking to search for an accurate, careful next word. "They they did they did place me for a short period with this family actually.'' "With the same family?" Her older brother, June's third child, was already living with them. "Yaah. Yaah. At the age of three." "Do you remember it at all?" "Yaah, I do. It was very traumatic. Yaah. 'Cause I was very attached to my mother of course and ... I remember uh ... I remember whispering every night I remember whispering to myself, 'Where's my mother? Where's my mother?' in English." Her next sentence is hard to decipher. It's either "They couldn't understand English." Or, "I could understand English." "I remember being slapped in the face by them because I I couldn't eat. They... you know they had this ... policy of finishing your meal:' She laughs here. "And then this vomiting and of the father saying, 'You're a you're a pig. You're a pig.' and uh ... " she is crying here, having a hard time getting the words out, "I remember my my brother making fun of me because I was crying.'' "I'm sorry Janie. I didn't mean to take you travelling this far." "It's old stuff.'' Our cracking taped voices make it hard to decide which one of us is saying the next two sentences. "Stuff that's pretty awful.'' "It doesn't go away." Janie says, talking and crying, "The thing is, we really lost my brother.''

38

SECOND VISIT

"Oh god. We never got him back." A lot of the broken sounds here don't materialize into words, "... if I had a child ... He has ... three boys uh:' This part is blurred again. "I try to make reparation." We may well be touching here, depending on how close we have already come to feel and how much closer these last pieces of information have taken us. Hugging or stroking a cheek or hand or clutching it or laying a head on a shoulder. "He's a lawyer, right?" ''A banker. A very square Swiss banker. Uh but uh you know he ... " Before this she's explained the background. ''Actually, until the late fifties a woman who had children without being married, automatically had the child taken away from her and had no parental authority. The state, yaah, in in Switzerland. The state had the ... parental authority over that child. It was presumed that the woman was incapable of... looking after her child because she wasn't married. And then the laws ... changed I guess in the early sixties but the presumption was still there," she smiled audibly here, "that there's no such thing as a woman who chose to have children on her own. And I mean that she was, if she did, she was mentally ill or something... anyway she because because you know you didn't have a man, you you had no status at all. Because it in fact you know women didn't have a right to vote even until1972 and uh ... the marriage laws were very... discriminatory;' there's a deep, quiet sigh here, "against women; women had to ask their husbands' permission to in order to ... work for instance. Or in order to leave the country... like Saudi Arabia or something." Her laugh, here and all along, is very soft. Silent. Somehow shy and careful not to stick out. "Uh so... thi- this was very very firmly not only in the minds of the people but in the laws and in ... so you know, did she mention that I have an older brother who's in Switzerland? Yes. She has four children. Two of them are-" "So you grew up with him?" "No! Well that well that's just it you see. He was taken away from her." "What's his name?" She says it. ''And uh it's really a horrible thing. He was taken away:' "At what age?" "Well uh three. But it's- you see he was formally taken away from her at three I mean he was ... The thing is she was working full time. And of course while she was working she had him from seven in the morning to seven at night or whatever with a Swiss family. You know. And uh;' she sighs to her-

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

39

self here again, "and uh ... fff... you know slowly but surely the Swiss family started to well I guess get very attached to him and also they were two very conservative Swiss people who didn't understand my mother at all. Her lifestyle or anything. "And what happened you see is that, when my brother was born, normally an illi- illegitimate child w - is declared you know illegitimate right away at the hospital. Well my brother was ... there was ... they made a mistake. Because my mother had put her husband's you know her husband's name and her name, they assumed that she was married but her husband was in America or something. And so for three years in fact she had the ... she she wasn't trying to fool them or anything. I mean mother didn't think about these;' this word is blurred, "or anything but then ... then by the age of uh ... when he was three years old, suddenly it was discovered, they somehow discovered that this mistake had been made. "I think it... I don't know for some formality that was occurring or something. Change of domicile or something. And they said, 'Oh wait a minute, uh, you're not supposed to have parental authority over this child.' So then they went and they also got the support of this Swiss family who started saying, 'Well June, she has all these friends and these different men and she goes to cafes and this and this ... 'and when she was working full time supporting him and everything. But so they said, 'Okay well now the child has to stay here. And you're not allowed to... you know you can come to see him. Once every two weeks or something. Yaah. And very strict visiting hours. And I mean it was it was horrible so ... and they completely brainwashed him about how bad she was. How crazy she was. That she was a... Terrible things. Terrible things they said actually about her. Totally untrue. And so he of course by the age of seven or so he started he was ... even afraid to be with her." Janie laughs. June has said, "So I had this apartment and I stayed there and I had this one boy:' She's referring to the same concierge's apartment, so maybe it wasn't change of domicile but some other occasion that invited the authorities in. He was already six and taken away by the time Janie was born and they moved, temporarily, to the mountains with her father. "With a very young and very beautiful chap of Russian descent. And that boy was I raised him all by myself really. And then along came ... " "The father just... ?" "Well he, I didn't even try to develop anything with him. Not at all. I re-

40

SECOND VISIT

ally wanted to have that child to raise it by myself properly," she says stressing the words evenly, slowly. "He was born in fifty-nine I guess. Janie was born in sixty-three. Sixty-six? No, she was born in sixty-six what am I talking about. She was born in ... he was born in fifty-nine. She was born in February fifth sixty-six:' Janie says, "I was born when he was six years old. And so there's a very strange contrast there. Parallel. Because by some miracle, well miracle;' her intonation of the last two words is ironic, "no... she of course by the time I was born she started to know how the how they were functioning." Later she says, "She was fighting for my brother the whole time and then there was a very strange discrepancy, really of the legal... uh system, because how could, you know if my mother was such a dangerous parent, well how did they leave one child with her and another not." And, "That was sort of an element that uhm got my mother and myself, very close. We were always sort of... together. Uh, the period I was separated from her? Well that period was only three weeks. Only three weeks but then of course uh ... then legally she had no uh authority over me for about four years. So there was always that threat that they were gonna come to get me:' That is, until she was seven. "On a daily basis and over the long term, women must move to secure their economic support, integrate their productive and reproductive activities and take advantage of the opportunities for personal development and autonomy;' say Cindi Katz and Janice Monk in Making Connections, their joint chapter in Full Circles, on page 266. "Her autonomy and mobility are interconnected;' they have said two pages earlier. And on 266 they go on to say that her "capacity to do so;' that is to move, "is often severely constrained by ideologies about sexuality and appropriate behavior for women, by the responsibilities of their gender roles:' Moved-by her own decision, for her development and her autonomy-to a place in the context of which she became both acutely inappropriate and badly powerless (almost completely lacking connections, family, money, information, knowledge of the ropes), June was made to pay with a son. And Janie with a horrible fear that they would come and get her. Again. And maybe for good. Because for her 'They'll come and getcha' was an actual, real-world memory. Neither she nor they could know all those years what is now the self-evident fact that they never did. But they did come and get Avigail. Unexpected. In a surprise raid. Bashan

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

41

pronounces her older daughter's name like Hebrew speakers do, with a "v" rather than a "b." Actually, most of the time she uses ''Avi;' mostly a boy's nickname in Hebrew. Her Hebrew accent is outlandish despite close to thirty years in the land. But fragments of the local Israeli usage have become very much her own. You've barely been introduced to Bashanyet. She says, "If I had really been uh conscious. But I wasn't you know I was I wasn't aware of the danger that she was in." And later she says, "I mean as as the mother and everything hey you felt that somehow another that everything maybe just happened because of like I say I wasn't in tune with what was really going on. Like you said the you know dangers and everything but its ... as long as we were inside of the community okay everybody was like ... " The night before her deportation-to America, where she'd never set foot in her life-Avigail phoned from prison. They'd been holding her there for over six months. She was caught outside the confines of the neighborhood in the desert town of Dimona designated by Israeli authorities for the Black Hebrew community. Leaving either this group of small-scale apartment buildings or the country, for any reason, meant no legal way back for community members. The state had let them in near the end of the sixties, American born, descended from slaves-maybe under the misapprehension that they were, or wanted to become, Jews. They weren't and didn't. They had a religion of their own, strongly opposed to the Christianity they saw as a major source and tool of their oppression, and borrowing heavily from what they considered an original form ofJudaism. Developed and taught by their leaders, their religion structured their community and led them from America, through Liberia, to Israel, where they revoked their US citizenship and passports. By the time I met Bashan in eighty-six, Israel wanted them out. But without passports, it was left without a legal apparatus for deportation. Still, it could refuse to grant them resident status, work permits, travel papers. So just shy of starving them out, the Ministry of Interior allowed only a small number of men to move in and out of the designated boundaries. The police had picked Avi up in Tel-Aviv while she was staying there with her mother, who was working in the city and commuting to the community on weekends. Avi was a second-generation American. Like Janie. Like me. With her American passport unrevoked. Which made her legally suitable for deportation to the US. Upon apprehension beyond community boundaries. Her passport was still valid because the embassy and the community had yet to-Bashan calls it process-it. The Americans, though, still contested the

42

SECOND VISIT

deportation. And while the two bureaucracies decided where she was to go, Avigail waited in prison. The first child born to the Black Hebrew community after their exodus from America, she was the youngest of the community women being held. Bashan says, "I was what like it'd be like three months pregnant when I when I left America I was pregnant with her you know. And then in my in my saying was so strong a belief hey that this is one this is a chi- hey I'm gonna have, my child is not gonna be born here in America you know. My child is gonna be gonna be born in Africa or Israel or wherever we's we were going. But this one in particular she's gonna have a very different type of life from what I've had you know. And then the fact that she was the first one born when we got to Africa when we got to L - uh to Liberia;' where the community spent about two years in preparation for their move to the holy land, "she was the first child born there you know:' When Avi was born, "We all commer- commemorated celebrated. Ah this is our first child born out of cus- born out of captivity you know. Born into the land of you know freedom. You know free mind, free thoughts, a free life you know and everything:' Referring to the time of the arrest, Bashan says, "She was on the verge she was close to turning eighteen at this time, right it was ... 'cause it just was a couple of weeks or so before her birthday. And uhm she hadn't had time to you know it hadn't came up her time to go down to begin processing her dep- her uhm what do you... her citizenship you know her renunciation papers right." A little later on Bashan's voice gets even deeper in its resonating bell tone and very quiet. She is speaking on the edge of silence. She clears her throat a lot. There are long pauses in the middles of sentences and in some places she's audibly fighting to get the words out unbroken. ''And uh then when she did uh she spent her... was it her eighteenth birthday in uh prison you know she was in they locked her up in Abu Kabir. Then they sent her on to uh uhm Neveh what is it Neveh uh... "The management at Neveh Tirzah, the central women's prison, more or less ignored the group's strictly vegetarian beliefs. Once, when I drove Bashan there for one of her visits, she brought along a basket of food. She only knew the station where she usually got on the bus and we got a little lost looking for the prison. When we got there we had to wait in the sun for quite a while before they let us in. I don't remember how, or even if, the dried fruit and vegetarian staples were transferred to Avigail. Not directly anyway, because that was prohibited, even though there was no

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

43

screen on the room-length window we were talking and touching through. I remember I was surprised that Bashan was laughing her booming laugh a lot. "On the night that on her last night here in Israel;' Bashan says, "it was raining and uh she had she had called me uh fro- from the prison and when and the connection was so baaayudd," she says in a voice which has almost faded to silence. "I could just hardly hear. But I knew it was her on the other end 'cause all I could hear was this you know, 'imaaa; you know, 'ima;" she says, quoting the word children use to call to their mothers in Hebrew, "and and the phone was it was, oh that connection was so terrible. And I'm just trying to, 'Avi, Avi; you know. And we couldn't you know we couldn't talk and then she only had, what, about three minutes on the then the phone cut off and I'm ... but then you know she managed to tell me let me know that she was leaving that morning you know." "Didn't you feel as if as if," I'm embarrassed to ask this, looking for the words to soften but still say it, "it was kind of like uh an echo of of mothers' experience in slavery? Of of mothers having their children taken away? In slavery?" "It's a race that you been running you been running running running you know," she says, ''And finally you know you pah-pah-pah you look up where you, you look like it seems to me you win it and boom boy, all of a sudden you fall down. And everything that you done you worked you done tried to achieve, everything that you believe in ... and everything, you can just see it just you know just flying you know just flying off." She says, "I thought I had excaped. I had gotten out. I thought I'd really had excaped. But then what happened. I look up, oh wow. Here it is I turn around and I lost my first you know Avigail my firstborn." And a little later she says, "An- and it was like hey I was saying hey so uh they didn't get me you know but then they went they came and got the they got they got the uh they got the closest thing to me." As punishment for leaving the confines. Of the community. Of America. Of her designated, appropriate place. Is this the bedrock of what Cindi calls, "strategies by which women's movements are restricted," on page 89 of Full Circles? (In her piece Growing Girls/Closing Circles: Limits on the spaces of knowing in rural Sudan and US cities.) Is it the threat of losing not necessarily or only myself, but the closest thing to me. Inextricably tied up with what Cindi and Janice call the "extensive webs of care which absorb women's time, as well as emotional and physical energy;' on page 275, and which-absorbing time, emotions

44

SECOND VISIT

and energy-pin women down. Read "care" as in "care for" but also as in "care about." The closest thing to me is arguably, sometimes, more precious to me than me. A being that I deeply want to (not only have to) be with and possibly raise and watch and support. Is this, then, the or at least a primary threat keeping so many of us, the vast majority of us-much more so than men-in place? Place as both specified physical location and prescribed social role. To which we are committed. Like patients to an institution, and at the same time, not one bit less, of our own free wills, our autonomously made commitments. Is this a major mechanism keeping us geographically stationary, even when we want, and can make the means, to move. Is it the petrifying threat of losing the power to keep a child? Or, in another configuration, of losing the right to choose to have a child? The threatened taking away of my child in punishment for my not staying put? Sara Ruddick says, on page 28 of Maternal Thinking, "In many societies, the ideology of motherhood is oppressive to women. It defines maternal work as a consuming identity requiring sacrifices of health, pleasure, and ambitions." So Doreen says, ''I've got lots of regrets by now. You know I'm very sad tha- that I don't have children. Yah sure:' She has said, "Uh I left it too late. I uh ... So travelling in in a way became I don't know not a bimkom,'' a long, soft sigh goes along with this Hebrew word that means poor replacement, "but something that I could do ... easily 'cause I didn't have a... the ... shop was my baby:' She means the one she owns with her sister Miriam. You've met them both on the first visit, in Capetown. And then at their house in Tzfat, in the Upper Galilee, where they first opened their ethnic shop. "You know that was the big responsibility that I couldn't leave,'' Doreen says. "Couldn't leave for too long." Later she'll say, "It's more of an involvement with life. A a real involvement. A real what's it? Commitment. Not involvement, commitment is more the uh commitment to responsibility. I would sort of wish that I would get stuck but on the other hand I was enj- enjoying the freedom and if I wasn't going to be ... sort of tied down by marriage or anything then why not take this ... trip." But having children, "It was something that wasn't ev- that wasn't that important, that was

other people. It was always the other people had the children. Oh, all my friends they just sort of got married at the age of twenty and just got stuck in their home. I wasn't going to do that." And on page 147 of her book, Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman's Life, published by Harper & Row in 1986, Nancy Mairs says, as she re-examines written records of her depression, '"It seems

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

45

unspeakable that I should not want and love my child,' I wrote. 'But she seems to represent to me everything I rebel against-being tied to the house, following dull routine, and above all accepting responsibility: Getting well to me meant ending my rebellion." "At the heart of a mother's arrangements," Sara Ruddick is saying on page 87, "is a 'home'," which she says is, "the headquarters for a mother's organiz-

ing and a child's growing. Home is where children are supposed to return when their world turns heartless." So it seems apt or natural to me to propose taking this talking house to my mother's. Formerly mine. A semi-detached, comfortable and tasteful but inelegant house in a Tel-Aviv suburb which is upper-class by current Israeli standards. I've brought along my six year old daughter this time, and the miniature tape recorder I use for interviews, because I've asked her to tell me the story. She is seventy-one, and it is a year before her death almost to the day. Which we didn't actually know, in spite of knowing she was in the advanced stages of terminal lymphatic leukemia. That is, in that distanced mode of knowing that oneday I will die. After majoring in psychology for her bachelor's degree, she married, left America for Israel (which was Palestine at the time), was widowed by a car crash and gave birth to me, at age twenty-six, in that order. She spent most of her adulthood as a mother to my two sisters, one brother and me and a wife to the father I grew up with. In her late forties she went back to school to become a clinical psychologist. Trying to fathom my combination of restlessness and relative immobility, and to share parts of our mother and daughter past with my own daughter, I asked her to tell me the story. She is talking to my daughter rather than me, who I guess is also there as a less embarrassing, indirect channel for exploring a somehow emotionally charged story about our past. Which means she is speaking Hebrew, still sheepishly because uncertainly, forty-seven years after immigrating, while trying to make things clear and consistent for my six year old. Her English is rich and highly articulate but she says in a stilted Hebrew, "When your mother was a little girl, littler than you, we lived for two years about in Jaffa, in an apartment with no veranda. And in order to get out of the house I and my friend Rachel would take our children in carriages because she had a son Danny who was just about your mommy's age and we used to take them for walks. We couldn't go to the beach because then it was at the time of polio." "Oh, really?"

46

SECOND VISIT

"Offp010. 1" ?" "A disease that... " "And the doctors just told the public not to be together. Especially at the beach." The doctors, the authorities, the judges, the Fathers. Stay home, stay indoors, keep to yourselves, if you want to keep your children safe. If you want to keep your children. Danny was killed in a car crash when we were both twenty-two. "So we used to take walks with them in the streets of Jaffa which was a place that there were a lot of little shops and and little factories, a shoe factory like there is today but smaller and without a lot of equipment. In between all these places there was ... a little house with I think a tiled roof, I don't remember exactly but I think and a fence uh ... " ''A wall." "Yes, around." "It was a little house?"

"Yeah, I think it was little, not more than one and a half-two stories." "No, but-" "Little in size, yes. It wasn't big. But the garden around it was big. And in the garden were so many flowers that it was utterly wonderful and it was a place that we loved to see on our walks. Both me and your mommy and also Danny and Rachel:' "Did we used to look through the gate?" "Through the gate and I think there was another opening at the side. It, it... I can see it but there are parts that are vague. But the flowers I remember. And you really really loved it. And every Friday we used to go there 'cause I wanted to buy flowers. For our house." "Oh, they used to sell flowers?" "They used to sell flowers." "Ahhh:' ''And then there grew up this kind of ritual that I had to tell your mommy this story and it always had to begin once upon a time there was a little girl with blond hair and green-blue eyes who really really loved to go on walks and especially loved to walk with her mother to the garden" At this point my father turns on some machine in the kitchen which drowns out all of our voices until we shout to him to shut it off. "to the garden to see the flowers. And then the story went on that there was one flower in the garden that really really wanted us mother to buy her. And her name was Zinnia, because it was a zinnia."

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

47

"Zinnia." "Zinnia is the name of a flower." ''And she wanted to go to the little girl with the blond hair and the bluegreen eyes:' "Dad, it'll get into the recording." "Oh."

"And she shouted, 'I want to go home to your house!' And the little girl's mother didn't hear anything much. But the little girl was still a little girl and she could still hear the voices of the flowers. And she said," "I can also hear them ticking." ''And she said, 'This flower I want!' So the little girl's mother bought the flower and they took it home. And Zinnia was so happy on Friday evening with the Sabbath candles and the nice food and the little blond girl with her big blue-green eyes." ''And that's the ending you remember? So what was it you said you didn't remember yet that was still vague?" "Because I'm not sure it was exactly like that. The beginning I remember. Very clearly. But the end roughly I recalled. Actually it took me time at first I, it was all vague and then ... " "What's so funny about it?" "Not funny, it's a story I heard ... " "Not funny:' "a lot of times when I was little and I remembered it and 1 wanted Grandma to tell it to me and and I wanted you to hear too. To hear a story from your Grandma that she used to tell me when I was littler than you." My daughter announces her exit to the yard to hunt for snails. My mother and I try to reconstruct when we've talked about this story over the years, how it's stayed intact. We keep on talking Hebrew even though my daughter has gone outside. Keeping, between us, the distance marked out by this language-foreign to her and renaturalized by me after forgetting it during seven child years in America. Keeping at bay what I take to be the sentimentality that wells up in her English. Me in my element, she out of hers. She says, in the halting words now transcribed into an English very much shabbier than hers was when she used it, "We used to talk about going for walks in Jaffa and that there was a garden. I don't know if she sold, the womanwho was a pleasant woman-sold to people in general but to us she sold." ''Ah sort of as a side income. You mean she didn't grow flowers for sale?"

48

SECOND VISIT

"No no no no no but I couldn't go every week then and get ... and there wasn't any other place where there was I mean in Jaffa in that area ... " "Yeah, for buying flowers." We are talking in fact about home-making; the utensils thereof. Flowers and candles for weekends, segregating the festive, rarer, supposed-to-be leisure times, from routine work and week times. The rituals of making a home periodically desirable. The rites of making a refuge. What Janie, as you already know, has called, "A continuous set of activities I think which you ... repeat." What Chava has referred to as a bubble of songs and rocking. The trappings of this place that Sara Ruddick has said children are supposed to return to when the outside world is heartless. But equally sometimes, the very means of marking that world-outside-as heartless. Necessary markers, even when it really is. Like District Six, maybe, in Capetown, where you've already read that Miriam first discovered the world outside the wall. In that district, Rosemary Ridd says that English was a utensil insisted upon at home by 'Coloured' mothers, as a mark of respectability. Depicting the district in the 1970's, twenty years after Miriam lost her job there, Rosemary says English "is used for polite conversation by women in the home" while Afrikaans is, "spoken colloquially and considered to be uncouth." She's saying this on page 188 of Women and Space, a book edited by Shirley Ardener and published by Berg in 1993, in her article, Where Women Must Dominate: Response to Oppression in a South African Urban Community. Under apartheid, she says two pages earlier, the 'Coloured' home, "has been elevated as a place of refuge and women thrust into the vital endeavour of preserving the dignity of the family," while "the street;' on page 193-4, "is essentially a male domain" which women associate with disorder. In their space, their respectable homes, she says back on page 191, they "assert dominance through the control of the household budget, household organisation and decision-making, socialisation of children, attitudes towards men and through hospitality," all the while teaching their daughters to do the same. And to speak the language and use the relics that mark their separate circumscribed space, their desperate stubborn bid for safety. Not totally unlike what my mother was going about in the newly re-settled Jaffa when I was not yet three. I tell my mother my story of the zinnia. You've read it on your first visit. "Yes, I think you're right." she says. "That story was a story about a woman, about a little girl, that wants to get out:' I say, "The one I remember. Not so much the ... "

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

49

"The woman that wants to get out as well." "What?" "If I was telling a story like that ... " "Yes. That was why I wanted to hear it from you." "But it rings a bell." "It does?"

"So it could be that either it started that way or that that was the second episode." Much later after interruptions and digressions, using English by now, we talk about my question about Zinnia's death and she says, "I'm sure you asked me. So I told you that a flower dies anyway in the end. Something like that. So it was better for her to be at the house and see the world:' So for Zinnia my home was adventure in the face of death, while for me she was Icon of this safe, repeated house. Which for both of us was supposed to consequently be both desirable and enough. The world in an ordinary apartment. Of a kind that seems to have been almost totally absent from Aura's world. Aura is Hannah's daughter. Hannah travelled with her a lot. You've met Hannah near the end of the first visit, in her exquisite round Turkish tower, in Jerusalem, telling about her pilgrimage to Mt. Kailash. Hannah regularly took Aura along on her travel since she was about eighteen months old. She took her all over. And didn't lose her. Although once, she says, she was terrified she had. "I was in Sri Lanka. So uh we were in the hotel and she was there in the hotel, we were having dinner, and she I was finishing up my meal and she'd somehow wandered off and started up a conversation with someone. So they came over to me and said, 'Look we think your daughter's delightful. Would you mind, would you object if we bought her an ice cream?' And I said, 'No I don't mind.' I said, 'Look, I'm going to my room now. I've finished dinner, so when she's had the ice cream why don't you just bring her to room fifteen.' They said okay. And they brought her to the room and they said, 'Oh she's just lovely and we don't have any children of our own and my husband really liked her, would you mind if tomorrow morning we took her with us, you know for the morning?' And I said, 'No that's all right.' I said, 'I mean we are leaving Sri Lanka in the afternoon so if you could have her back by twelve, I'd appreciate it 'cause we've got a plane to catch but uh uh you know. So we arranged and then they came in the morning and I remember I was in an airline office and they said, Singapore Airlines, and they came and they said, 'Okay, see you,' and the second they left

50

SECOND VISIT

the penny dropped. I said, 'God I don't know their names. I don't know where they live. I don't know anything.' And suddenly my heart sank and I thought uh, 'God they told me they don't have any children. What if they've kidnapped my baby?!' And I thought anyway, 'Look Hannah, don't even entertain those thoughts. Stay with positive thoughts.' But I was uneasy the whole morning and I got back to the hotel at twelve and I said, 'Anyone come in with my daughter?' 'No.' 'Uhhhhh.' You know, my heart was just, I was just trying to stop it from beating so hard. ''And uhm anyway, two minutes later, in she comes, you know wearing a brand new embroidered little dress and with a brand new soft cuddly toy. And everyone's ecstatic. You know and she's got ice cream all over her mouth and she's had a beautiful time. And they've had a beautiful time. And the wife says, 'You know my we don't have children and my husband feels he knows her in another life, from another life.' I said, 'Very good, very nice, thank you; and we exchanged addresses and we always sent each other Christmas cards and uh it was very nice." Years later, when she and Aura were in Sri Lanka again, the couple, now with a child of their own, hosted them like royalty. Other than that, though, she says she wasn't afraid for Aura, "Not that I can recall, no, I don't remember anything uh threatening or dangerous. I can't recall you know I'm not very good my memory's not great.'' And Aura says, "I think the basic sensation was of being quite safe and just carefree and never really thinking about... just kind of going along with whatever... being stimulated by whatever it was I saw:' Their travel, she says, "Gave me a lot of richness. And I was very... one of the things that I kind of feel is that I don't ever really remember being a child in the sense of... and from photos and just from the way I feel in general I kind of see myself as being really... uhm introspective and really in my own world. I don't remember myself communicating as much as I remember myself... kind of dreaming and thinking things to myself or painting or... I was always into that. I always painted. And I'd write little poems and stories. I used to write:' ''And show them to your mother?" "Yeah. She's always been very supportive, very... admiring of what I do." She is wearing black when she comes to the talking house. This one is in London. We've borrowed it from a friend. It has five floors including the basement, with a room or two on each floor, a small back garden and piles and shelves and rows of books in all the rooms on all the floors, many a little dusty but almost all of them read, most marked with notes and com-

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

51

ments in the margins. And a sweet-shop of bath oils and bath salts and body lotions and wonderful soaps in the bath room, one or two of them with dead ants stuck to the bottom when you pick them up. When we meet, Aura is graceful and poised and twenty and impressively naturally so. She is uncontriving, frank, as she talks. "l was just very rich inside. That's how I felt that I was as a child. And I had a lot of stimulus to to create that. There are a lot of things that I saw that... stimulated my imagination and just whatever. And and also I remember myself as being very... easy. I mean I wasn't a kind of difficult child and ... I remember myself as being very easy and enjoying ... and I still it still is that way. I mean I feel that my mother is very dominant and very overpowering. And then if I just let go and kind of... enjoy it, move how she... I always have a good time with her, do you know what I mean? Sometimes it gets a bit too much." She apologizes here by laughing. "It's like a bit too ... I don't have my own space. But in general, following her, as ... most of my life was you know, going doing things that she led me on to doing, was in a way very rewarding and it was very rich." Hannah says, "She was never in any way a hindrance or a problem. In fact she was uh ... you know a point where people ... responded to a little girl, and would do things as a photographer even, professionally, because of her that I couldn't do just if I was on my own. I found that out." Later she'll say, "She was an asset a lot of the time. You know it gives you like a point of contact with people. You're a mother, she's a mother. People feel uhm less inhibited and you know that they can relate to you easier. They definitely feel that. She's definitely an asset. Doors open that other-wouldn't otherwise open. On many levels. I mean getting a better seat in the bus or. I remember that on one trip when I was specifically working, I gave her her own automatic camera, and the way the people would just... respond to this little girl with a little automatic camera and she's got now her own book of her own photos. And I think even today, like she's twenty now, she's aware that she had a unique uh childhood and that she was travelling with me in many parts of the world. In Ladakh, in India, in Sri Lanka, in Bali, for long periods of time. She sees it as an enriching experience. She's never ever seen it as in any way detrimental that she missed out on stability or formibonding or anything of that nature. Only just recently I've unearthed old super-eight movies that we made at different periods of her life. Here and in Bali. I've put them all on video. And I see in them that she's uh a happy child. There may be shyness but none of these things in any way affect af-

52

SECOND VISIT

fected her negatively. On the contrary they broadened her horizons and gave her a lot." Aura is studying art and philosophy in Italy, but we're meeting during a year when she has chosen to take some courses in London. She's an artist but when I ask her about it she just says vaguely that she makes things. She is speaking very quietly. The recording is extremely hard to follow because her voice keeps dropping almost out of sound, as if she'd prefer saying it to herself to speaking it aloud. She also syncopates her sentences with long intervals at intonationally incongruous points, as a consistent way of avoiding emphases and so understating. She says, "A few years ago there was just suddenly... I just discovered loads and loads of photos of me when I was younger. And I was very surprised to see that I just had... I looked so peaceful. And I was peaceful." Hannah says, "We were moving. We were moving. I mean look not every time. I mean it depended if I was working or if I was uh ... living. Like the five months we lived in Bali, we lived. But you know we had transport, we had a motorbike, but we had one house basically the whole time. And in India I was working and I saw I was in nice hotels and it all worked out very well. To the best of my memory. Maybe I've diluted it. Well I can recall in Ladakh we had uh a jeep and you know every night we were in a different hotel or different location. Not any extended period. I mean it definitely wasn't more than a month. Later, when Hannah and I go out into the sun that's warming the garden around her tower, she'll say, "I think she I get the impression that she feels very uhm fortunate. I think she I don't think she feels she missed out on anything, I think quite the contrary. I mean I could ask her but I do think that she feels that she had a special time of it, you know." And a little later she says, "I felt that the stability that she had in her formative years was always having me around almost always. You know. I was her anchor. And uh ... look, you know it's a single-parent family almost all the time. And even though during that period I did live with a man or uh different men and had the you know... Hardly any of them ever really assumed any kind of father figure. And she always had an ongoing relationship with her father;' who lives in Spain, "and visits, annual visits. So... " But Hannah did leave her behind sometimes, "Actually I do recall one thing now that you mention it. I wanted to go on a pilgrimage and it wasn't uh advisable to take her. I didn't know how hard it would be so I arranged that she and the little puppy dog that we had picked up in Ladakh would go

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

53

and stay with the general manager of the hotel for a week. And unlike a lot of other children that I know, she accepted this. There was none of this, 'Oh mummy don't leave me, oh mummy, ohhhhh,' you know. I mean none of this clingy I mean of course I saw to it that she would be very comfortably and uh and happily and well looked after. I have to pay her. Otherwise she's going to take more from me. I have to let her go," Hannah says here and loses me. She's fast and clear and decisive. I feel clumsy asking a lot of simple questions in order to keep up with what she's saying, embarrassed by my disorientation. Then I understand she's talking about the Filipina woman who's been cleaning the house while we're out in the garden. She gets up and goes inside. A little later she goes on, "So I left her with the manager of the Oberoy in Kashmir and you know they had a little child, little Indian child, so she stayed in their quarters and she stayed there a week while I did my_ pilgrimage and she had a little Indian playmate and 1... guess she they spoke English but I think the little child. I don't recall. And there she was in this luxury hotel and I mean she was well cared for. She had nothing to complain about and they told me that she was an absolute delight and you know I could have stayed away another week. There were no problems with her, she was easy to be with and I'd say she must have been seven or eight. I guess. "So yeah, I would leave her. I would leave her on certain trips. I remember another time when I went in uh eighty-one to carnival in Rio I left her with friends who had a little boy and the same thing. That was a six week tour. Trip. And there were never any problems with that. She they never complained that she was difficult or problematic. I would leave her on lots of trips when it wasn't s - suitable for me to take her. With the manager, I mean we had stayed in the hotel and since I was a guest we had been introduced to the manager and everyone 'Oh, isn't she lovely? Da da da da da.' And uhm then came the question of well I'm going to go off on this difficult pilgrimage, now what'll I do with her. So I phoned and said, 'Now look; you know, 'how does this idea sound to you? Of course I'd uh pay you.' 'No, no, no, it's a marvelous idea. We'd love it.' And they would you know. But she didn't know them prior.'' Aura tells me about an incident when, "I refused to go up with her on this kind of mountain or something which had stairs which went all around. It was some kind of pilgrimage. And I just couldn't go up it. There was no ... and I just I refused. I think one of our hats ... blew off with the wind and I

54

SECOND VISIT

just saw it go really... just down and it was really scary and there was no way I was going to go up that staircase. I was ten. Nine. Nine. I think it was India. Or Sri Lanka. India, India. "And when you stayed on your own you weren't scared?" Her answer is almost inaudible on the tape. "I guess not, no:' "You don't remember? You were more scared of going up. And she, it was obvious to her that okay if you're not going up then ... " "She'd go. Yeah." "And you didn't feel angry?" "Not at the time. I might now, if it were to happen again." "What do you think you would do?" "I don't know because you see I don't know whether... where her limit is, whether it's ... giving the child enough independence ... to just say look this isn't I'm going to do what I'm going to do, and you do what you want to do, and it's okay, we can do it separately. Or kind of... perhaps taking ... what they're saying more seriously and understanding that perhaps the child wants me to be with him." She says, generalizing, using language and gender to distinguish her answer from her history. She says, "But I don't think with my mother I really felt ... that. I don't think it was a case of me saying, me not wanting to go up so as to get her attention to be with me." "No, you were really scared." "Yeah I didn't want to go up. And so I don't think it was it wasn't a problem, her going up and my staying down." "You can be really scared of going up and you can still be really scared of staying down alone too." "No I wasn't that. I I don't think I was very happy about it but I... amused myself." Later Aura says, "I had this really strange memory just the other day about me ... being in someone's house and ... getting very angry at one of their... 'cause you know you have 'boys' in Bali, you have it in Indonesia. Westerners have have them. Specially in the seventies perhaps and ... me getting really angry at one of them and really really aggressive. Which I don't... I mean this is just a really... strange memory that really shocked me about myself when I remembered it. Me like taking out a knife or something, getting really angry and ... I don't know what happened. Perhaps it was just... kind of fantasy or dreams. I mean 'cause some of these memories that I have ... I'm not really sure until now, really now that I think about them I know that they were,

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

55

they can't have been, like me driving a car or something... "she says laughing, "they're really strange memories that they're like visions ... I think they were kind of jeering at us and just I mean I remember that kind of... awkward laughter in it too. I don't... I kind of have this vague image of being some ... you know lots of vegetation and all and this kind of big bungalows and stuff and me upstairs at the window with some other girl and them down there and they were running after us and something and then I just, I have this image of me holding a knife and kind of... shaking and not believing what I'm doing," she laughs again. "Something like that and then being really angry and then... they just left us alone. "I was probably... six." "It all came to a halt once she moved into secondary school." Hannah

says. "Because up until that point I felt I could easily whisk her out of school and take her with me. That it wasn't detrimental. But after secondary school, once she got into secondary school, I made a a commitment to myself that I would give her stability. And that I wouldn't take her out of school. And that she'd also go to the same secondary school throughout until she matriculated, which is exactly what happened. We c - made a commitment to staying here in Israel. I made the commitment." So they stayed in Jerusalem. Aura's room in the Turkish tower is on the ground floor. It runs off at a tangent to the round base, starting to one side of the fire place end of the long living room. It stands in the garden, on the lawn, more than in the tower. White curtained and airy and light. There were a lot of fights. Aura says, "When you're travelling so much ... together you kind of... don't really have to confront the relationship. 'Cause you're getting you know everything's coming from the out- there's not a lot of time for... one-to-one. I think part of it was ... first of all for her, I think it was quite difficult. I mean she ... still now I feel as though she sees it as a sacrifice that she took. That she uhm ... gave up five years of travelling to give me some stability and as soon as I left she immediately ran off, saying you know, 'now that I'm free;" Aura giggles here, "which is what she said literally. 'Now that I'm free I'll... this is what I've been wanting to do for ages' so I always felt as though it was a bit of a s - it was a sacrifice on her behalf and ... that ... the problem was on her... from her side it being a sacrifice and her finding a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble we had. And ... my side suddenly having to confront more responsible relationships with other people. Don't know if'responsible' is the word but suddenly it had to be a long-term rela-

56

SECOND VISIT

tionship and you know, just creating a whole base for myself which was something that I'd never really had to do ... in that sense. Giving myself security. I mean my security, my self-esteem has boosted up. And I'd I didn't realize how much I didn't have any until... suddenly we had to be here. I mean I did but not... a different kind, you know, not the kind that I felt secure with people my age or just people in general. But older people I did. I just never had the chance to have people give me any feedback:' "Except being a cute little girl along with her mother?" "Which I got a lot of I mean. I got a lot of... a lot of her friends still now they... admire me a lot for some reason. They see me as a very... I don't know, something in me that they really like, I don't know what it is. Or maybe it's just her translating their wor- no, some of them ... I mean some of them like ... actually just yesterday an ex-boyfriend of hers called me and said, 'you know you were' and I was eleven when I met him, and we struck up a friendship, and he said, 'you know you're a very... important part of my life: He said that now which I suppose I understand. But ... it was still in a way secondhand." She says, "I remember until the age of ten getting along with her wonderfully. You know just... being her and I and her on the road kind of. It was really... I don't know I just I still like travelling with her. It's ... really nice. Just the fact that she's always active you know, she's full of energy and it's like you can always meet people and always go to different places and always unique and special. But I mean it's different it's really nice if I just can want to... put myself aside. In a way. I mean kind of say, 'Well, it's Hannah now: You know what I mean? It's very cliff- I think the prob- the difficulty arises when... it suddenly has to be me with my own life. It's wonderful. But it's like I have to kind of put myself aside for a moment and sometimes when I'm not feeling myself enough, it's a very it's a difficult thing to do." "You have to have a lot of self-confidence:' "Exactly, which you ... don't." Hannah says, "Now that she has left home, about the last year, she asked me to take her to Mykonos for her twentieth birthday. Which you know I was extremely flattered that a twenty year old would like to spend it sitting around with her mother instead of off with her friends. And uh ... it was great to travel with her now as an adult. Did I mention it to you? She was a marvelous uh travelling companion she know- her timing fits in well with mine and she knows when to keep quiet you know. There isn't this constant

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

57

chitter-chatter going on. Her rhythm fits in with mine and she's easy to be with. Or our rhythms suit let's put it that... " Much earlier on, I asked Aura to construct a rough life-itinerary. She said, "I have a kind of blank till second grade:' And she said, "This this is the blank is until I'm about... seven. I only it's like I can kind of guess. But I don't really know the whole. Uhm ... Australia, uhm ... Indonesia, uhm ... India. I don't know this this is not really the order. I'm not really sure. We lived for a half year in Indonesia and also in Kashmir. Uhm ... in Israel I guess and a bit of kindergarten. I started school in ... Australia. I changed the thing is it's kind of a blur 'cause ... " Her low, recorded voice keeps fading out of hearing range and back a lot during this part, as blurred and unsure as the memories. I am threading identifiable pieces together. "Yah I think I started school in Sydney, but I changed schools quite often. And was there uhm from first grade, second grade and I think in the middle of third grade I left and missed that year to travel uhm on our way to immigration to Israel to do aliya." She uses the Hebrew term designating immigration to the Jewish homeland. She says, "I don't know, I didn't really ever think about it," meaning their travel, "until perhaps the past few years and it wasn't something that... I felt was present. I mean it just seemed for granted. I don't know how to explain it but it just wasn't an issue in my life that I'd think about. And it was something that people would always ... say you know you've been everywhere and it was kind of... an asset. In a way, you know. Something ... that most people don't have. People saw it... as one. Something that I was very lucky to have and that is very valuable and not many people my age have such an experience." But in the last few years, she says, she has realized that, "I didn't really have a stable ... me. I uhm ... I uh ... 'cause I didn't really put my roots anywhere until I was quite old until I could study in Israel at school. So I was very much in my own world and very uh ... well! wasn't I was very shy and very and ... uhm ... "her words disappear here. "and then ... a lot of my... I got along very well with my mother's frie- I mean I didn't have many friends my own age. And I still do get along very well with older people and with my mother's friends and so until I was about... twelve I don't think I actually had any really good friends that were my own age. It's not... frequently that I make good friends anyway. And I had some but... "And so what I feel now is that... there's a part of me which just isn't really there that I have to kind of give to myself. There's a part... of me that's very... that la- that lacks substance. That I kind of feel very insecure all of

58

SECOND VISIT

a sudden. Well not insecure just kind of that I'm not really there. I'm notreally me yet. And I have to give myself something stable to do and yet on the other hand for some reason ... I've decided to continue this kind of lifestyle and uproot myself from Italy where I've started something and ... come here, so I don't really know I'm kind of... confused about what what;' she is laughing here, "all of this means. "It's strange because on the one hand I did give myself a lot of stability in Italy. I lived in a two-year relationship with a man. I needed it now:' She says, referring to the year away from him. "But I mean that was ... very stable, I mean almost ... as stable as any relationship my mother's had. If not more." Her laugh as she says this is shy and apologizing." 'Cause I mean I've known him for three years and I lived with him in a house, in a one-roomed apartment for two. I mean now looking back I find it an accomplishment also because many older people that I know haven't... I mean it just seems like something that I've achieved which may be nowadays is a bit difficult or something, I don't know. And also I think he gave me a lot of stability that I was needing. And then I feel that on the one hand, that kind of me lacking and on the other hand I feel a bit ... that it's accelerated a lot of... or it's given me something which is quite ... don't know if it ... don't know how to call it. I mean it's given me certain values and certain ways of thinking and perhaps people, especially being in Italy over the last while, people are very they're very rooted, they have a lot of history. And for them I'm just a complete ... I'm something completely different I'm a kind of... nomad you know. Without a patria. So it makes me kind of in the end I feel like I belong everywhere and nowhere at all. "Like I speak-this is what I felt before-I I speak a lot oflanguages and yet I don't speak any of them ... well enough to say that they're mine. Which is probably one of the reasons I'm here now in England, recuperating my English." Aura is fluent in English (which is what we're speaking at the moment) and Hebrew and Spanish and Italian. "I think perhaps the main ... reason I'm here this year is just to kind of be a bit alone with myself and listen to myself because I ended up feeling after 1... 'd m - moved so quickly to Italy and established something so stable and so quickly, I suddenly felt as though I really wasn't... from anywhere. I just had this very strong feeling of not ... belonging anywhere and ... not knowing who I am at all. And kind of feeling on the one hand very lucky and on the other extremely... confused and like everywhere I go I'm foreign.

JANIE'S ROOM WITH ZINNIA

59

Everywhere. There's absolutely no place I can say that I can ... that I'm from there or that's my nationa... I don't feel any nationality at all. And every place I go I re-I recognize something that's me. Like if I go to Australia I recognize part of me that was there or I go to a place in Asia or I go to Israel or... or to any middle eastern country. It's almost as if I don't... I love travelling I really want to travel even more but I kind of fear it because it's like I'm gonna... segment-that the right word?-myself even more."

60

SECOND VISIT

THIRD VISIT: STORYTAILS

want to know what happened. I mean what happened next and then what happened and then what happened next. And then you'll want to know what happened in the end. Which though? End, I mean. Nobody in the house is over yet. Not in the YES, OKAY, I KNOW. You'll

sense of dead. At least, not at this point. That is, nobody except my mother. I sat there for more than half an hour with her body and it wasn't. Her, that is. There was a wet stain growing through the sheet at about where a thigh met the underside of the body's stomach. A considerate male nurse put a towel over it but it still kept on growing. When I looked out a window I realized that at the edge of my field of vision I was seeing the body breathe. A barely perceptible rise and fall of sheet surfaces that I was apparently superimposing even though I was seeing it. Seeing habits. But while I was seeing her body breathe when it wasn't I still understood she was dead. They'd told me that and I believed them. They had unhooked the intricate network of transparent tubes and toy-colored plastic joins that had led in and out of her. The machinery beep-clack parody of her bodily function noises, substituting for her volitive selfmade sounds, was turned off. The intensive care cubicle was intensely silent. The bare very round and padded shoulder, where I touched it near the neck, was warm. But the lower lip that I tried closing over the bottom teeth it had bared, wouldn't stay there.

61

It bounced back out of what had been, for the second I held it up, one of her

tight -lipped pained looks, very much alive and disapproving. That jarred me, her disapproval still alive. But I did grasp that the future of our stagnated but habitually hopeful two-way exchange was done. That anything more from there on would be my one-way. No new input from her. The monitor screen bleeping and plotting every single heart-beat of every one of the past few days, said Patient Discharge/Press CLEAR KEY to resume monitoring, she was over. Past last minute extension. Much reduced. Will contained and sealed, not to move a finger even a single sometime even not to want to. The future possible a milli-second ago breathed out. Clear. Still. Still, even she isn't over in some of the other senses. You can see that in some of them she's very much here in the house, for example. In the talking. So the thing is that you want to know what happened in the end, but the capital T, capital E are elusive. There are lots of them. Each of us is lots of them. Of starts and stops, some ends, some false ones; you can only tell later which, usually much later, and sometimes you can't. Each of us is lots of different layers intersecting the starts and stops. Different life-issues, life-tissues, developing in different directions over the same stretches of time between them. Which are the ones to know then? Which ones do you think you'd want? Want to hear about, but also want for yourself, at least as fantasies. Which are the important ones? The ones that count, the expected ones? As I've already mentioned, you obviously wouldn't want the entire transcriptions of all the tapes. Or all the notes and doodles and jotted phone numbers on the big yellow spiral-head note pads. Or all the tentative and alternative versions typed up over the years on screen and saved on diskettes and hard disk. That would be too much, a swamp to get bogged down in or to skirt around altogether. That would become a related life that you'd have

62

THIRD VISIT

to sort out for yourself. You already have one. I'm pretty sure you don't want another. So when you want to know what happened next you mean you want to know what I've decided is worth telling next. Chosen by me, that is, from what each woman told me. Their telling and my next, you could say more or less. Here are some of June's storytails: "My father and mother went up onto this seven-hundred-twenty acre ranch that my other grandfather had bought for my father because he came back-it was known as shell-shock in those days. And ... from the first world war. My father came back from the first world war with shell-shock. And he used to we- drive my mother wild because he would his bed-time stories consisted of telling me terrible stories of the trenches which really sank in and uh made me think that war was ... from the first I can remember is Daddy quietly telling me these stories. I don't think he was trying to scare me or turn me into a pacifist as he certainly wasn't or anything else. But I just grasped the fact rather early in the game that war was something we could do without. Nothing glamorous about it at all. Which seems to be a rather weird attitude to it. Just it seems to be an attitude that you know for some reason people seem to think it's such a grand and glorious affair. Until suddenly they find out their bodies;' her strong voice fades into some kind of interference on this part of the tape. "I was the first. Mother and Daddy had two children after me. And mother uh got special permission to teach me at home. And I picked out the books that I wanted to study from, which consisted of uh Russian fairy-tales and the inquisition and all kinds of miscellaneous things. Mother taught me to read:' Later she explains, "Mother sent for the Calvert system 'cause we had plenty of money and it was an expensive school by correspondence. Very very good. It comes from Baltimore Maryland and it's used by missionaries and god knows who else all around the world. It's in English and they sent you, I believe it was once a week she sent back you know the paper the material came and went. All the textbooks, even the notebooks, pencil, paper, everything was there for the jungles or wherever you have to be. And there they had two marvelous books, a child's history of the world and a child's geography of the world. And it started right out there with the concept of the world as a round ball with everybody on it absolutely on equal footing and so on. And those two books are simply wonderful." It's only a few years

STORYTAILS

63

later that I think to ask about this footing. About the detailed mechanics of establishing equal standing in a comprehensive account of the world out of Baltimore Maryland. Tailored to the needs of distant missionaries. How did it work? But while we're talking the question doesn't even occur to me. And she probably couldn't tell me anyway-it was all so long ago. "The others," she means her sister and brother, "didn't get that marvelous education. No because everything was wiped out suddenly by the depression. Mother couldn't even afford to take this anymore and we had to go up and try to save the ranch which was being foreclosed on after just we had just a tiny bit of the mortgage left on it and they would not uh they closed the banks, and the federal land banks, and they were gonna take all these big ranches. And Daddy called all the farmers together and tried to fight it but it didn't work. And we lost the ranch and we lost the house. We sold it for thirteen thousand dollars, this marvelous, beautiful home. Dripping with wisteria and so on, this beautiful ball room, wide steps leading down to where we gave concerts and everything it was just, tower and everything thirteen thousand dollars. And the ranch." What she says here sounds on the tape like, "Didn't matter.'' At some other point she says, "You see I I went into university at age sixteen because of Mother's training. But in order to get in I had to go to to pass an exam. So I went to a very nice very small girls' school, in Berkeley, to pass these ... exam on you know getting into university. And I went into university much too young supposedly because I wasn't able to socialize properly or something. And uh did very very well academically. Highest grade in science they've ever given a girl. Science of all things. In paleontology." Later June says, "I was married when I was twenty to Molten who was very handsome and very attractive and everything and likely to be killed in the war. So some friends said, 'June you just must marry him.'

Th~s

man,"

what she says here is drowned out by interference, "for two years and been doing Shakespeare together, raising money for British war relief and everything. Just acting to raise money and for Finnish war relief. Then Finland went down. Then for British war relief. And then came Pearl Harbor and then uh I decided okay," she sighs heavily here, "''d marry him. But I really wasn't," she starts to laugh, "in any rush to marry anybody. And I never seemed to have any boyfriends. And from the pictures of the time I was not bad to look at. But I loved my Shakespeare and I loved to be just out on a hill just sitting quietly, thinking under preferably under an oak tree or some-

64

THIRD VISIT

thing like that. But uhm so I married him. And three years later then we deliberately made my oldest daughter and that was when the war... well Hiroshima hadn't hit yet," she says counting her personal time by major manmade catastrophes. "And when Hiroshima did come I thought, 'My god, I would play it backwards right now, I would never have created this child.' But I was five months pregnant. Anyway I'm totally against abortion. For myself. And I was so horrified by that 'cause I could see plainly then what we were in for and I felt to bring a child into the world was going to be a terrible responsibility to put it mildly. So then of course I had to," she is laughing again here, "really plunge in to try to prevent nuclear war nuclear accidents and all the rest of it." And she says, "I was very busy writing during the war before I had my first daughter. And I wrote a lot I was ... och just a journal of an American army wife pretty funny mostly funny. And people said ... it wasn't funny but it wa- they said it reminded them of Mark Twain because the way I talk you can see there are no commas or periods half the time." It's me guessing at where they should be and putting them in. But June's saying, "And I write more or less the same ... " "Did you ever publish?" "No, not that, no.l... published a few children's stories, that's about it. No. I don't know whatever happened to that thing. But wherever I was I would gravitate towards the uhm university women's club because there was always;' her words are blurred here, "and I'd have them laughing with the tears running down their face from the funny things that happened to us here and there and ... And actually we had our mon- honeymoon on a troop-train going along with all these soldiers. And he had a little compartment 'cause he was an officer and I was sailing along... it was it it wasn't it was bittersweet you know that whole war. And fortunately he survived and I survived and both in excellent health and going strong. But for how long you know we don't know we ... I'm very preoccupied now with uh how long I have," she says laughing, "left to ... do everything I want to do and how quickly I'm gonna depart the uh ... " "What do you want to do?" Now her laugh is really strong and comes before the words and goes on long after they're said. "I want to save the world from war:' "No, no it's always the same old thing," she says. After the war she, "just could not stay in this lovely house with its lawns

STORYTAILS

65

and everything and we met a very marvelous man named Randolf Dole, whose uh uncle resurrected Shakespeare. He was a man in his sixties when I met him. And he was a fantastic Shakespearean actor director and he took The Idiot of Dostoyevsky and made it into a fantastic play in which he played the idiot. In New York when I was about two years old I guess. And he discovered and trained uhm Lawrence Olivier and his wife there, what's her name? And he was Charlie Chaplin's best friend. And I had met him through an English writer whom we met I don't know how. And we started reading Shakespeare in our home in the evenings just for pleasure. With Chaplin's son, Sidney. Actually Sidney was eventually paying him to train him to put on Othello. And then McCarthyism closed in on uh Charlie Chaplin and I met... knew and Oona was also about thirty years younger than uh Charlie. And I I remember one night I sat bolt upright in bed next to my husband. I said, 'Why, I'm in love with mister Dole.' And he didn't say anything. Mr. Dole. Randolf Dole. He's an Englishman. An Englishman who came over, he was a best friend of Rupert Brooke, and uh he went to he was from Cambridge. And he and Rupert Brooke started the drama society in Cambridge and then I don't know he was just a fantastic person. With the most terrible asthma that you can imagine. Which would come over him just like uh you know really. Choke him so that he could barely function sometimes. So he was very tall, thin, a Welshman, of Welsh descent. And very much interested in uh oh phhh all kinds of philosophy and theater and art and he'd been living alone for a very long time. And hi- he had a son. Charming fellow. Uh whose mother later married Frank Lloyd Wright. Uh this is a whole crew. He later married Anais Nin so that that's a whole ... Anais Nin, yah, the his son married Anais Nin. And not that that's any... I don't particularly... no. I don't like Anais Nin very much. I think she was a great a very good writer but I think her journal is ... preposterous. Sorry," she says laughing, "I don't like that woman. She's so artificial! And she didn't like me I can tell you. Anyway. I never met her face to face but she wrote letters to her son 'cause she was very worried about him. Anyway, 'cause she thought I was just... she said, 'don't let June get you down, she's completely crazy."' There is something unaccountably unreal about this matter-of-fact inlay of famous names, famous people, referred to in passing, nonchalantly, as equals, friends, acquaintances, adversaries. And you've read from the outset, from the very first page, that in fact some of us, some of our stories, aren't real. For June, demonstratedly uncaring about major social conventions,

66

THIRD VISIT

name dropping would seem sort of incongruous, maybe one of the markings of fiction. Unless it wasn't strictly name dropping but instead an account of facts in which known names serve as strong markers of when, where, in what kind of social context and climate the events were taking place. So, you might say to yourself, if you're assuming that June is real and if your sense of her has come to include a basic trust, don't famous people have unknown friends? Don't they live in the real, regular world and interact with real, regular, unfamous people? Couldn't it all be true? Still, June's enjoyment of the names is tangible. She is having great fun as she speaks them. She knows very well how precarious they make the whole story sound. Take it or leave it. "But anyway I just uh didn't leave my husband altogether but I went off with Randolf into the desert, trying to see that he would survive, look after him, and he gave readings. Oh we lov- we loved the desert. Out there we were ... He was living ... you see this was when my husband was finishing his studies and then teaching in the Hollywood and Los Angeles area:' June pronounces it with a hard g, instead of the more familiar j. "And we love the desert. I'd like any desert very much and the wind in the desert and no plants and oh it's marvelous. And so I took my daughter with me sometimes. But I really became extremely interested in the possibility of trying to have two husbands which I discovered was quite normal in large areas of India;' she laughs, "and uh ... west of India and also in Tibet, where you could be married to nine brothers and this and that and the other thing. And I thought well why not? If everything is up and up and they know each other and they know the situation and it's all open. Well I tried it. I must say in our civilization it doesn't work. Well I wonder how well it works anywhere to have several wives or several husbands. Somebody is bound to suffer. And I think my husband was suffering pretty much from this although he ... adored Rollie too. I mean really with great... he was our kind of guru. I hate the word but something like that. And eventually I found everybody was suffering from this. And I decided to just leave them both. "But by that time I'd deliberately had a little boy with Randolf. Deliberately. Asked him, 'Please, let me have a son. Or a child anyway: And he said he didn't think this was possible because he'd had an operation years ago and he'd been married twice and he'd only had," what he'd had is blocked out by interference. The batteries in my tape were getting low. ''And I said, 'Well do you mind if I pray?' so in those days I was still rather addicted to ... god." She laughs here again. ''And I prayed and so I have a marvelous son."

STORYTAILS

67

The poly-marriage lasted, "Couple years. Couple of years. Meantime along came this fool McCarthy business you see. And I was very active with the Quakers and the Quakers were in very hot water because we were saying the all same things a lot of communists were saying. Ergo, we must be communists. And Rollie and all his intellectual or spiritual minded or whatever friends, pacifists and uh nudists and god knows what else that you have all over California were all called communists to say nothing of homosexuals and whatnot. And it was just getting worse and worse. So there's no doubt however that I simply departed not only because of McCarthy I can't put the full blame on that monster and uh you know Richard Nixon was right in his committee. Nixon I finally got him smiling and laughing when I talked to him and friendly and he was very thoughtful but he did just the opposite of what I wanted him to do. Terrible gall;' she says and laughs. "So that's the second child;' she says. "That's only the second. I have two more with two more fathers. I would simply go off with Randolf for a certain period of time in the desert taking;' what or who was taken is blotted out, "because living together didn't work. I remember sitting by the fire we would suddenly find ... Well, he lived in hotel nearby but he was around and ask... and we were putting on programs of Shakespeare and Ibsen and everything together in San Francisco. As readings. The three of us. And they were, I must say I sound like I'm really... bragging but we gave a reading of uhm, oh well of The Idiot. We also did a reading of his play on Abraham Lincoln which was just simply marvelous. Which he produced and Gregory Peck wanted to play and I was supposed to come back from Europe and pla- and be in that." She doesn't pause even slightly here before she says, "I didn't go back for twenty-one years:' But she slows down as she enunciates the number. "I was shook the dust of that country off my feet. That's all I can say:' Another thing that might jeopardize readers' trust even more than the famous names she cites, is June's account of peculiar experiences, many of them of a mystical nature, "that could almost be said to be ... oh I won't say schizophrenic but uh hearing things, visions and the usual thing." June says this is something that, "Janie, of course, doesn't like to hear about. I notice she's more secure now perhaps with Jean Paul and all. She doesn't like to ... I don't talk about it. But fortunately, nobody ever got wind of that or they would have had a wonderful excuse to put me in mental hospital. Throughout my whole life. Not recently thank god. I mean I think it's impossible to have this in Geneva which is so darn dry and also I avoid this. Ghandi, whom

68

THIRD VISIT

I became very interested in clearly stated, 'Avoid,' you know, 'just do not get into anything esoteric or any... just steer clear of it altogether,' and I in my case it was essential." I muse over what it was exactly that Ghandi said because those are definitely June's words and Americanized phrases substituting for his. But it was in a vision that he himself had come to her for the first time, complete with his unique voice, which she had never heard before and only later heard in a documentary film. "The real man,'' she says. ''And he was standing there like that and he said what is the matter with you and he had this lovely little smile and this nice gentle voice and uh I wasn't I just wasn't in my right mind, that's all there is to it." The war in Korea had just been started. June came down right away with severe double pneumonia and her doctor recommended hospitalization. She was steadily vomiting everything she swallowed including antibiotics. Her husband had also brought in a woman, a Christian Scientist, who was stroking her arm and reading from Genesis. Enter Mahatma Ghandi. ''And I looked and I said well I think I don't want to live any more, I think my body is uh I mean I my body being one, wants to bow out because I said I simply cannot stand watching the world die any more than I could watch a- an old mother dying of cancer and I I'm terrified for my children and everything and I I can't face what's ... I said seems to me there are two choices. It's communism or war and I couldn't possibly fit into either one. And he said, 'No. There's a third way,' he said to me. In a funny Indian accent. 'Follow me.' And he disappeared! So you could imagine who could I relate that remarkable happening to. And I was stunned you know I thought of... for goodness sakes, you know. And the only thought I had ever given to Ghandi was when I was pushing my little girl around when she was a little tyke in a supermarket and I remember the the advertising the paper it said Mahatma Ghandi assassinated and I, 'Oh poor man, such a good man, how terrible.' That's all. I didn't think about it at all." Her doctor, she says, was very uncomfortable, sweating profusely, when her double pneumonia disappeared altogether in a matter of hours. June's third child was the boy she had in Geneva with the beautiful young Russian and lost to the Swiss government. Her fourth was Janie. After she started living with Janie's father she began taking care of his children and, she says, "persuaded him to bring his wife over." From America, that is. "To a mental hospital which I thought was good at that time. Turned out to be perfectly awful. And then when we both discovered that he was lying about

STORYTAILS

69

everything to each of us," she laughs in explanation, "we just decided that we'd both had quite enough. And I left him after three years. And meantime I had Janie and that was very funny. 'Cause I got it all with him of course and living in a house and you know real thing and he wanting me to marry him. And of course that would mean having to travel wherever Alcoa would send him. Brazil was coming. Well I didn't want to marry." And then she says emphasizing every word separately, "''d promised myself never to marry again. And that was it. But living with him and having a child with him that was something else again." And here are some of Janie's versions: "I mean it has to do with with a norm, what is a norm and uhm ... you know sensitivity. I - the term illness has uh has something negative about it you see. It means suffering. Uh and uh ... "there is a long sigh here, "I I don't think that somebody who is who has maybe higher uh ... how would you say spiritual uh sensitivities maybe or uhm ... yeah! Higher spiritual sensitivities!" she laughs apologetically, "I think that's what you would call a person who has certain mystical experiences and uh ... visions or whatever. Premonitions or this type of thing. I think uhm I I think that's a fairly natural and sane uh ... uhm ... what do you say, happening or incident. I mean I think that most people have a lifestyle or uh preoccupations that sort of prevent anything like that from happening. Either willingly or uh ... or unwillingly. Just because of circumstances and survival. Things like that. But other people strive for this type of experience and uh ... awareness. Uh hermits or... peo- you know, gurus or whatever and I think that's every person's individual uh choice. I think she did put herself into circumstances where she would be more sensitive to this. You know sometimes by fasting or by uhm spending time alone or... things like this. But... I think uh ill- that the term mental illness, the limit let's say is is when there starts to be suffering and uh harm to oneself and to other people." She says of her three year old, older brother that June was leaving with friends, and who she-Janie-met many years later, "Well sh- she uh ... just I don't think she wanted to uh ... she didn't see herself raising an- another child at that moment. I mean she was busy with other things, with uh ... theater and travel and love affairs and I don't know what and she wasn't uhm ... I don't think she was interested in coping with the responsibilities of changing diapers and having a fixed schedule and you know financially also, she was not independent and she somehow didn't uh find a way to become so or chose not to have some uninteresting job just to be able to offer... well,

70

THIRD VISIT

refused I mean from her husband ... well, she always said to me that he was, poor guy, he was uhm ... broke and had no special ambitions or whatever and was sort of in a hippie phase himself and so she didn't see why all the ... all the responsibility should go on the man and it's true, I think in their divorce agreement there's no alimony or anything. And she accepted that. Maybe in that sense she was a true feminist or something like that I mean she didn't have anything more to do with this guy and she didn't see why he should have an obligation towards her either. But uhm ... of course it was not his child and he knew that. He knew that. Yeah, she she knew I mean she knew that. I don't think there was any ever blood test or. .. but I think I think her preoccupations were elsewhere. And I I don't think they were uhm ... I mean plenty of men have done this and they're they're certainly not mentally ill, you know considered to be mentally ill, for doing it. They just have other preoccupations and other desires for liberty and this type of thing and that that's just what she ... she had I think. I mean because I'm more of a family type person uh I I I don't think it's very fair for a parent to do that, whether it's a man or a woman. For their kids. But on the other hand I don't I know that he ... was not unhappy. I've talked with him a lot about it. He had a great childhood, he was living with great people and they were very close friends of my mother's. She ... you know she chose them specifically because she knew that they had the same philosophy of life or simple living and they... well in his case. "Uhm ... now my sister was older and she was connected with her father more ah ... and he ... obviously did not take his responsibility either. And uh ... my mother did not find another solution because she didn't look for another solution. She just... she went away and she assumed that he would be you know taking his responsibility. I don't know why she assumed that. That was a mistake. I think it was it was all a pretty selfish decision really but uhm ... ego- egocentric or something. But I think it was like it was almost like a p - a professional or a career decision on her part. When it came to lifestyle I mean she wasn't going, leaving the States for a job in Procter and Gamble but she was leaving the States for... you know... " "But she ... still, she ... " "She left her children! Exactly! I uh actually," Janie laughs a small laugh here, "we have big discussions about this every time with my mother because ah ... you know I I'm a very personally I'm a very motherly person uh ... it's you know. I I can't imagine even uh ... "she's quiet here for a long time, visi-

STORYTAILS

71

bly hurting to get out the next words, "ah, I just can't imagine leaving this uh my children ... uh in the care of somebody else for a long period of time. But uh ... you know... " "Do you blame her for it?" "Well uh I I uh ... yeah in a way I I I blame her for it. I tell her you know I... she blames herself for it too. But she says that it was really beyond her power. She was she was in a desperate state. She was completely crushed by her family and by uh society and American society at the time. And she said if she if she didn't leave, at that moment that she had left, she wouldn't have survived." Writing of Met State, a mental institution she was in, Nancy Mairs says on page 148 of Plaintext, "There were those seven hundred women in CTG;' that is, Continuing Therapy and Guidance, "many of whom had lived longer at Met State than anywhere else, with their faded hair and eyes, shuffling through the dim corridors in soft house slippers, fingers plucking at the pale flowers on their limp cotton shifts. Their families, if they had any, must long since have grown disheartened, perhaps even moved away, for no one ever came for them. In any case, the incarceration of these women became a structural component-whether as presence or as absence-in the lives connected with theirs." Janie says, "She'd done three years of university. Berkeley. And then uh suddenly she got married before finishing the fourth year. Under the pressure of the second world war and all of that. But then the war ended, she wanted to go back to study and get her degree. And she could have done all sorts of things with that degree afterwards but uh ... neither her husband nor her family were willing to help her with that. And then she got a divorce with her you know there again the issue came up again. 'Well if I... at least then we should get my last credits but... you know I mean at least I'll be more intelligently... you know selling at the dime store and ... ' But there again, the family, who were quite wealthy, were not willing to ... to uh help her out with that at all. And uh ... so ... " she's audibly sighing here, talking slowly, "she you know she she's also very involved with all sorts of committees against racism and all this stuff. Volunteer of course. But she's too busy with those things and I I don't know. I don't know what it was all about. But I think at some point there was there was real tension, real pressure uh ... living in an environment of people who didn't understand her values at all. I think in a situation where she could herself uh ... be financially independent, 'cause that's

72

THIRD VISIT

really what it came down to is financial independence. As long as as you're dependent on somebody they can control what you're doing." And some time before she's said, ''Anyway so but uh the strange thing was that, what I found it;' her laugh here sounds embarrassed, "the lack of contact with her children for ten years thereafter. Because you can leave in a desperate situation. Ah ... and uh ... but you you don't need to have total lack of contact like that. "Now, her her spiritual experiences and everything, that I think that you know that was ... pretty independent from that decision she took. It was all... I mean uh ... well I d - I don't really know I think that she could have taken those ... made that decision to leave without having her more mystical experiences as well... But how she happened to have that from her background I don't know. 'Cause she had the model of a very uh ... traditional mother really in the home. But you know, she w - she had this upbringing of being home-schooled and being very free uhm space- spacewise and all that. So maybe that affected her also. Not feeling this you know tie or responsibility towards her family." Earlier she's said, "I think it was four months that she stayed alone in a in a small village in the south of France. Has she told you about that at all? Four months that he was back in Switzerland doing his watch-repairing business." She's talking about the count here. ''And ... you know there she was very free but also putting herself into all sorts of... very vulnerable situations. 'Specially I think with with men really. Uh ... She felt safe. She felt totally... she felt totally protected. That's it. Because this is what she felt, that she was totally... in the hands of uh ... " she continues the last sound for a long time until it gets clearly thoughtful, dreamy, "whatever the powers;' she laughs, "of above or whatever. And she had no fear. And she felt the same for her for her family and ... I think that she probably didn't have at the time what one would call a maternal instinct. I don't know if you believe in that or not I know you're not supposed to talk about that anymore. Maternal or paternal. But the sense that uh you somehow you owe protection to your to your progeny. You she uh there is a connection there, physical spiritual connection with you know your progeny and she obviously didn't really have that I guess. But uh ... Many men certainly haven't had that and they've gone off alone mind you." Have you gone off alone? Ever? On your own? You have now. You have to. In a way, I mean. You have to go off alone to read. Which is exactly why most mothers can barely do it. When their children are little, that is. It's a mental

STORYTAILS

73

and temporary going off, of course. Not a total, physical one, like disappearing from your children's lives for ten years. But reading, you have briefly been off alone. I want to take you back. To your surroundings. Is there a table somewhere near, maybe with a started chocolate bar-J'm addicted to them-with the wrapper torn open. And to potato chips. Dipped in mayonnaise? Yuck. Or a plastic container of dried figs and unroasted almonds? And something to drink, maybe hot-I'd love some coffee if it's not past 6 p.m. Is it bitter cold out? Are you hunched over, almost on top of the radiator? Or maybe out in the shade, on a cotton blanket on the ground, because it's so hot in the house, sitting cross-legged, back against the trunk, the branches and leaves a little too ragged to really block the sun. Maybe you're not within but without concrete walls. You may be roofless. Homeless. Maybe you've decided or been forced to make your home in your head, wherever you move. Where are you moving? Where is it that you're taking us? Because whatever it is that you'd like to know-about what happened next, and what happened then, and then what happened in the end-it depends on the context. The context you're bringing into the house and the talking. The context you're bringing the house and us into. What are the assumptions you're making? About where we stand (each of us separately, because in fact we've never all met)? About where the course of her life might go. Your assumptions define your questions. What assumptions are you making about lives? About stories? About what's possible, what matters, what's readable, what's tell-able? Your assumptions frame your responses. They'll get you frustrated if these visits go off track or go into excessive detail or go weird on you. They're assumptions about The track (that a life or a story should follow), or about the amount of detail that's interesting, or about weirdness and weirdoes. And those are just three. There are more. This visit may accommodate some of them. It's a brief, temporary stretch off the tangled trail, where maybe you can see ahead more clearly, where maybe it's easier to tell apart the life-lines you're following at the moment. For now, there's an intelligibly separate section for each. They don't weave in and out of each other so densely. And each section progresses in chronological order, not in the order I first heard the events in. So at least for the duration of this visit you can stick with each woman for a while and keep on asking, and reading, what happened then, and what happened after that, and then what happened next. As we examine abilities to move. A chin or arm. Across a floor. A self, plus or minus bike, cross country. Examine the ability

74

THIRD VISIT

to propel her self of her own will. Or in other words, to decide where she's going, and to go. Which means, at least partly, to tell what happens next. That is, to decide (as in 'don't tell me what to do'), and to understand (as in 'I can't tell what she means'), and to relate (as in 'please don't tell on me'). We-including you-are here examining our ability to tell what happens next. Among other things. Here are some of Chava's storytails: "I didn't start out really travelling as such," she says. "I'd always I'd always dreamed of it and never been able to bring myself to do it and. I was too scared and uhm totally, completely incompetent. And I it nev- I didn't ever think I had enough money even though I knew other people who traveled somehow got by and stretched it and didn't have any more than me and. But this was an emergency. I guess. I think I only understood only later I mean I realized that later. When I started doing it I I hardly actually even realized it was travel. I was I'm looking for Mickie. I just had I have to. I was oh phhh I'm convinced he was signaling me to look for him. And I'm I was really worried. I seriously believed he uhm needed needed my help and he's letting me know that in this codified way. I guess I still do. Except that it has been quite a few years now, three about. And 1... ;' she sighs here and stops before she can go on talking. "I haven't... found a trace of him. Not really. I mean I've found parts of his trail but I can't even be sure when they're from and. But nothing about where he's gone where where he is. Following what I thought were the clues he left, I haven't ... "Mickie is uhm one of those friends that defy classification." she has said earlier on. ''A one-of-a-kind friend that I think not too many people are lucky enough sometimes to make and. We've known fo- each other for years. Lots of them with him gone somewhere. Overseas. A few a lot of the time into the Sinai. That's why I can still uh talk about us in you know present tense. Our present has always sort of... subsumed these long intervals out of touch. We met each other as kids. We were in high school. Not... we didn't go to school together. He nev- spent much time at school even though he did go to some high school." At some other point she's said, "It wasn't so much that he disappeared. It's he'd done that before. And I hadn't even really kept track of it mostly. It wasn't we were never lived together or anything. Uhm we were very close in some ... ways but it wasn't like we'd see each other you know really often. So wha- what counts as disappearing? When you're I mean used to not seeing someone for uh a couple of months or or even more? When do you real-

STORYTAILS

75

ize they're gone? What makes it kind of turn into a disappearance instead of a regular just... absence?" Her voice has gotten slightly louder here and her careful diction sounds a little like a lecture. She might be borrowing the tune she's used to using for the questions she puts to her students when she prepares to present an argument. ''And absence was his element. It wasn't the first time and. He'd already he'd done it before. Like uh after his father died. He was gone for oh for I guess close to two years. And he was living alone in in he had this shack of his on the beach before that and he had uhm a few friends I guess from school and mostly and a few divers and but they all, all of them were used to him coming and going and. Sort of periodically materializing at his own these cryptic times. None of them had realized he was seriously gone. Me neither I didn't at the time. He told me later." They never actually had it but you might picture this conversation: "Did you know I disappeared?" "What?" you can imagine the answer. And maybe again, "What?" "I disappeared. Till just a couple of months ago actually." "What do you mean?'' "I wasn't around for a really long time and nobody knew where I was." "Who didn't?" "Nobody. Nobody knew." "Yeah, but who was supposed to know? Usually nobody knows where you are." "I dunno. I... " "It doesn't count then." "What do you mean?'' "Nobody knew they didn't know where you were. They just assumed you were gone as usual. That's not disappearing." "But the fact is nobody knew. And it was almost two years." "Yeh, but nobody knew they didn't know. I mean any more than they usually don't know." "But I knew they didn't know:' "But disappearing goes the other way. Them knowing they don't know, not just you knowing. They have to be looking for you. Or at least worried or at least wondering about you. Was anybody looking for you? Your mother?" "City Hall:' "City Hall?" "They tore down my shack."

76

THIRD VISIT

"So they were glad you weren't around to make trouble. They definitely weren't looking for you." "They sent me some prior notices by registered mail." "That's standard procedure. They have to. But really they were glad not to be able to locate you. Doesn't count." "They wanted me to pay a fine for not taking my stuff away after they left it outside after they tore it down and they kept on sending me notices." "To the torn-down shack?" "They left the mailbox." "So even they didn't really consider you disappeared." "They started sending threats to my father's place if I didn't pay the fine:' "After he died? See, they didn't even know he died." "But they knew I wasn't answering their notices or paying their fine." "Okay, so let's say that at City Hall you'd disappeared. I wouldn't say that really counts. Would you?" "But what if I did it again." "Let me know next time, okay? So it can count." "I didn't plan it. It happened. It kind of just happened. I just didn't come back. No, but seriously, what if I did it again?" "You mean now this minute, before my very eyes? Sounds fascinating, let's do it:' "Witch." Chava says, "But it wasn't so much that it looked like he'd disappeared, it was more that ... this was the first time he he ever he had never given me a book. Any kind of book. Actually any kind of anything. We'd just hadn't given each other things it wasn't part of... let alone something like this and. It was it was so incredible. This ... manuscript. I couldn't I can't begin to imagine where he got it. I've tried. Really. I I started thinking back and trying to uhm retrace what I knew about, not much but what about some of his travels but it's hopeless it's like it's ... Well I actually I might have a clue now a uh lead. I'm working on it. It looks pretty significant. I've found someone well not actually found him yet but I uh know where to find him. I I I'll find him. I think. And he might be a clue to where Mickie got it. Maybe even from him. And maybe a clue to where Mickie is. And but it could have been anywhere, he could have got it anywhere, because these kinds of things are l i - they're so valuable, they're like investments or collectors' obsessions, so they uhm change hands all over the globe and. But also it's in exquisite condition.

STORYTAILS

77

Which usually means it's either been like luckily buried away somewhere up until you got it or it's it's been carefully treated and guarded by some official, government or Vatican or something, like library or archive. It's got it's worth a fortune. The university library old books department is still in the process of uh getting an estimate. There was no way no way he could have bought it. I don't thi- believe he stole it. I can't no that's just... no I and. But I'm sure he knew like the kind of league he was playing in. A thirteenth-century manuscript. And not only but as unique as this one. Women couldn't write in the thirteenth century. Even aristocracy. I mean and. Well most of them. Most people you know most people couldn't for that matter. And he would have known all the questions I wanted to ask him about it and how uh completely fascinated I would be by it... and he just. .. was away." We're having this conversation at Chava's mid-town apartment in TelAviv. Her daughter, Atar, is asleep. She wanted to stay up and Chava let her and she's fallen asleep on a striped oversized pouf. The apartment looks like its residents are getting ready to move. Half the veranda is a solid expanse of crates. In the room we're using there are a lot of cardboard boxes with books and toys and a whole wall of long shelves are partly emptied. In fact, Chava and Atar have just come back from almost six months abroad. Chava will be teaching at the university in Tel-Aviv for the next few months and working on the translation. At the end of the school year she plans to leave again. She's saying, "And he was always al- I mean you know when we spent time together, always cross examining me about understanding books, about interpreting, you know my work and what I was studying ... stuff like that and. He was ob- well couldn't leave it alone. Always trying to construct I guess sort of non-standard interpretations, his own alternatives, and to uh show how they worked just as well, how they fit the text just as ... It really... So giving it to me, actually he uh didn't even do that, he he just left it. He told his mother somebody would call and to tell her to come and pick it up. She didn't remember him leaving her a name. Can you imagine? Just that uhm somebody would call. But maybe that was just her being vague. She is uh generally. So when I called her oh probably less than a couple of months after he'd gone, she said, 'He left something. He said someone would call and to give it to her.' And I went over I about a week later and got it. Absolutely casually. You know I had no I hadn't the slightest idea what it was. Neither did she and. It was uh just just wrapped up in this black... And no idea of where it would be ... taking me. My god, was 1... I was so scared to

78

THIRD VISIT

take it home. I was terrified something would happen on the way or somebody would ... just the ride home was like a nightmare and then uh walking up the steps. Unlocking the door took like forever. It was it was like he was uhm enormously... amplifying all those fears I've got anyway. Of going places and getting places and. Like even my home neighborhood was turned into a a threat." Chava doesn't actually have the manuscript any more. It's in safe keeping in one of the humidity, light and temperature control units of the university library old books collection. She knew she couldn't keep working on the original without it being seriously damaged. It took pretty dose to two years to get the collection curators to do tests on the manuscript and authenticate its dating and then, finally, to provide her with a computerized facsimile that she could work on. Before that she hardly dared touch it. She says that right from the first she only let herself read it in dim lighting and very slowly so it wouldn't be out open in the air too long every day. It was hard because she was totally electrified by it. But in fact before she started reading and trying to understand it, she made herself invent and complete a crash course in old book preservation. She read about it and went to look at a collection or two and spent about a week hanging around at a place where religious texts are still hand written to understand some of the mechanics. And she got in touch with a publisher who uses facsimiles of old books and maps in calendars and greeting cards and visited the printing plant. And asked the university restorer a lot of questions. The restorer was a lot more receptive and interested than the curators of the old book collection and she ended up doing most of the lobbying that eventually got the manuscript authenticated and placed in the collection. Chava says, "It's about well it looks like it was written by the only European woman known to have been in China in the thirteenth century. I mean who there's a record of her presence there. In China." As she's saying this she picks up a book that's been waiting in her lap. And she turns its pages to look up a sentence. "Here, uh Leonardo Olschki says this about her. This is his book Marco Polo's Asia;' she raises it and turns it around for a second to show the cover, with the university library catalogue numbering on it, "translated from the uh Italian by John A. Scott and published by the the University of California Press and Cambridge University Press in 1960. Uhm he says, 'As is well known, the first mention of the Italian mercantile colony at Tabriz is found in the will of Pietro Viglioni, a Venetian, which dates from 1264. We

STORYTAILS

79

find traces of his descendants;" here her voice starts stressing the words to explain why she's reading this passage, "'in the funerary inscription for the tomb of his granddaughter Caterina, who died at Yangchow in China, in 1340.' This is on uh page 15, in note number 7." Chava is speaking Hebrew but

she reads Olschki in the English of the translated edition she's been using. "And then somewhere later, about two hundred pages into the book he says, in uh another footnote, 'This would be the only European woman recorded in China in that century.' Here, I wrote it down in the margin but the uh exact reference is in my files and he says, 'A sculptured funerary inscription discovered at Yangchow, in Kiangsu, pertaining to the tomb of a certain Caterina de Viglionis, who died in 1340, is briefly discussed by M. Roncaglia,' in other words in another book, but Olschki, I mean based on that other book, says she, 'was probably the wife of an Italian merchant in that city of which Marco is supposed to have laid claim to being governor for three years.' He was pretty far off. '"The only European woman recorded in China in that century.' By recorded he uh meant just only a a tombstone. Her name you know, date of death, birth, whatever and. When he wrote his book, Olschki had no idea that a whole journal existed. That she'd recorded-or at least it was apparently her-stufflike this, it's hard to know for sure. She'd recorded her amazing life and this record had uhm been preserved." "So it's by her? This medieval book he left you." "Yes." "And about her?" "Most of it. You know it's a journal. It uh wasn't written as a like a book or anything. It's her basically talking to herself in writing." "So why's it The Book of Balkacz then?" "It's not. I mean that's my uh title for it. It doesn't have there's no title in the original you know. Journals aren't usually titled. A lot of medieval books weren't titled. I called it that bee- because he, Balkacz, he well he sort of... was her role model. She wrote about him actually quite a bit but mainly uh she learned to travel from him. In a sense kind of uhm learned to live. Well partly. I guess really mostly from the woman who raised her. You know a a nurse uh nursemaid. Her name was Li Fu-tze. But she ... stayed behind. The nursemaid. So in that sense he uh Balkacz is he's obviously to me he's the one in the book who's I think more the due to Mickie. There's no I have almost no doubt he was the one he meant me to kind of concentrate on, to

80

THIRD VISIT

like follow when he left the book. So for me just just for me it was in that sense it was is the Book of Balkacz." Chava says, later on, "I know it seems pretty unreal. I know you're probably asking yourself if it's all a uh big fairy tale or maybe if I'm a little you know a little nuts. So am I. I uh I I of course I can't really answer that. I mean the first part. I don't think I'm nuts:' Her laugh here sounds embarrassed. "The book's real. That's as definite as it can get with contemporary methods. I mean sure it's real, it's a thing that you can hold except that now it's locked away in the library. But I mean you know it was really written at that time and. At I mean about the first quarter of the thirteenth century. And in some ways it's really the kind of writing that was done then except nev- as far as we've known till now never by women. Women travelers were strictly pilgrims if there if they did travel at all. And if they wrote at all, their more modern uh 'secular' kind of writing it... kind of erupted after fifteen centuries of silence. Or even more." Chava stresses the last two phrases and takes a breath that is audible on the tape before she goes on. "But Caterina de Viglionis is not writing about a pilgrimage. I mean she was there is something like uhm ascetic almost uh monastic in a way about her. But also mainly she was simply travelling. Well partly. Because she needed to but also because she just wanted to. Because she was that kind of person. And essentially well finally on her own. It's pretty incredible what she's telling is-is it real, did it really happen? You know how it is, you always uh want to know what happened, uh what actually happened. That's to me... I mean I want to know too and. I would love to know actually. I'm dying to know. I dream about it and. Somebody showing up somehow with the conclusive piece of proof of whatever that could be. Either way-real or unreal-as long as I could know for sure. But even if it it happened in her mind. Even if she just if she could imagine all of it:' When we meet many months later, Chava is feeling and saying something different about this. But at this point in her talking, she's saying, ''I'm not sure exactly what kind of difference that makes to me one way or the other when we're talking about this thirteenth-century woman. How would the reality versus fictionality of what she's described to me atiect my life differently? Or the reality versus fictionality of her even. If she existed or not or wrote a diary or not. There's this sense of critical importance about it. Half the fascination comes from the uh fact that it claims to be real. Makes it more ... potent somehow. But then, when you think about what difference

STORYTAILS

81

would it make ... to me, here, at this time. I... mean, information like her, almost all of it, real or unreal, is ... by now is pure text." She says, "No. It does. It does make a difference. I think because one of the most basic most... crucial decision processes I feel I have to master I mean not only me, in general, in order to to navigate ... life, not to get lost or go off at a pointless tangent, is the one of of... determining what's true, what's real versus what isn't. For leading a life reasonably successfully you have to know how to do that reliably. More or less. To decide what's an untruth. What you'll discount for uhm purposes of your practical decisions. You know. And the most testing but also I guess most interesting times are when all your suspicions are aroused. What are they uh based on? Ho-- how are they t triggered? How far do you trust them? What wha- would disprove them? There's this uhm compulsion to practice answering those questions. "That's part of why I've I mean I miss him too but that's partly why I've felt I've got to find him. That is, that is, assuming he knows."

82

THIRD VISIT

FOURTH VISIT: THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

Chava is saying at some point. "Do you have any idea of any sense of what that means? I don't know if you realize;' she says, "that there is no manuscript really... intact, I mean existing to this day, of the

"r'vE GOT AN ORIGINAL;'

book that Marco Polo wrote. You know the book of his travels. Marco Polo. Actually, he didn't write it. A professional writer did. His name was Rustichello. He it uh based it on conversations he had with Polo about his memories and also Polo had his notes sent to him, apparently while both of them did uh did time. Supposedly in a jail in Genoa. They were prisoners of war kind of and. At least Polo was. I'm not sure what Rustichello was doing there. I don't know the details of that series of trade battles I guess between Venice and Genoa. Sea battles. "Anyway the Milione was you know written just a few years before the one I got from Mickie. The Polo that's the Marco Polo book. Whoever uhm actually composed it. I mean you uh there was no printing press and books got recorded by by scribes. Mostly their authors didn't write them, did-didn't actually pen them. Scribes did. And then they got copied again and again by hand. So as far as researchers know today, at least the ones I know about, the uh the original of the Milione didn't survive. Just derivatives. And those aren't ever usually completely faithful to the original. It says in this English translation of it from 1958, it it was translated by Ronald Latham and it's Penguin Books and I mean Latham says in his introduction, here it's on page 24, he

83

says, 'It is now generally agreed that his words are best preserved in a Paris manuscript (F) written in the early fourteenth century in the same curious Italianate French that is found in his other writings."' Chava looks up for a minute and says, '"His' is he means Rustichello's writings here, not Polo's. This professional uhm like ghost writer of the Polo book. So there's this this manuscript in Paris that's probably the closest to the original Rustichello wrote. So it's agreed, it's kind of common knowledge;' she goes on reading, '"that an original closely resembling this underlies most of the other versions.' But this original is gone. At least unless somebody suddenly unearths it like my uh well not mine really. "There are a couple of degenerate you know fragmented and revised versions of of what they think is the original. One in Latin, they call it a compendium-doesn't matter, scholarly technicalities-and and a really messed up version in Venetian dialect. Actually this is probably pretty close to the dialect in Caterina's journal. I uhm I I had to really try and get a feel of it, of kind of more than just proficiency. I mean before I started working on on interpreting the manuscript and. My uh I've studied Petrarca you know the poet... a lot in the original and I know some Latin but it's still a pretty localized an actually a different language," Chava says. "So here's this research is trying to piece together-from all these copies and fragments-some relatively complete uh like proto-version. To ext-extrapolate the original and. What it might have had in it. And in fact there are more uh," Chava starts reading from Latham's introduction again, on the same page. '"A far fuller text than any of these, however, is provided by Ramusio's Italian edition; in other words in another copy made by somebody called Ramusio, which Latham says, 'includes lengthy passages not found in any known manuscript.' A lot of critics thought these were complete fabrications. But-" For a few sentences Chava's speech rhythm verges on talking to herself. "Professor Benedetto, I I tried to find him. Wrote to Italy and to uh his transla-his uh publisher. Thought there might be a slim chance. But he'd already died. He was a major major authority but one of those real scholars. Kind of esoteric. Makes some little curlicue everybody's seen but nobody's ever thought was important into a a life work. Places it in an enormous bed of knowledge, this huge encyclopedic-encyclopedia of details and connections and uhm writings of another place and time, like some like an entire world, a complete ... All in his head and shelves and. He was the interna-

84

FOURTH VISIT

tiona! authority on the history of Marco Polo's book. Anyway but the introduction says that the professor found many of these passages in another Latin compendium and he thinks that the Latin text that this ... scribe I guess, Ramusio, might have used, came uh was transla-from a fuller version of Rusticello's original. "So uh s-so you see;' she says, "here's this famous book by by a man who I mean for us he has become this archetypal symbol or I don't know uhm cultural concept. Marco Polo. Of daring out into the unknown and succeeding. Of of moving of travel to faraway exotic lands uh unattainable to others. And it's all, all our knowledge of it, is it's all based on derivatives of translations of... you you see what I mean. Second-, third-, fourth-hand telling. "Even the original, the uh that one that was ghost-written by Rustichello, is kind of a derivative. Here, on page 17 Latham says that, 'Rustichello's share in the joint venture has probably been underrated. Professor L.F. Bendetto, who produced the first critical edition of the Polo manuscripts in 1928, has clearly demonstrated,' uhm I'll skip this, ta ta ta, here: he's demonstrated 'that Rustichello was responsible for the leisurely, conversational style of the oldest French manuscript.' And he uh he also found a knights-of-the-roundtable type of romance by Rustichello, that he used big portions of when he wrote the Milione. 'With the minimum of adaptation; Benedetto says. And apparently other things in the Polo book were uh by Rustichello, not Polo. "And I've got an original. Just... Plain and simple. Can you do you start to get a sense of what that means? Well I mean of course I don't I haven't literally got it any more. And of course I it's not really plain and simple. It's it looks like it's an original. As far as we-as far as scholarship and scholars can tell at this point. The university restorator has uh she's really put a lot of work into that. She was as fascinated by it as I was and she sort of made it into a career breakthrough to put into motion all these ... methods I uh chemistry, physics, optics and a big collection of international contacts and comparisons, and to finally authenticate it and. Which still of course which still doesn't mean authenticate her. "When Caterina de Viglionis was eleven," Chava says in a slightly storytelling rhythm, which is strikingly similar in her Hebrew and the translated English, "she was still living in her parents' and grandparents' home. It was in Tabriz, which is in what-today-is known as Azerbaijan. In whatroughly-came to be known as Persia by the cultures that later came to be

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

85

known as Europe. Up in the northwestern part of Persia. On the travel route out into what we're used to calling the far east. I mean if if all the borders were open from from Europe and through Turkey to cross the Caspian Sea let's say. Just for a general sense of orientation where you are at... Tabriz. I'm uh talking about a major trade route, at least potentially, I mean if the borders were were open. And then-at that time-it was such a route or it it was at least starting to be. Much more than today. Caterina's grandfather, Pietro, was originally from Venice. And he had was a trader, and sta-settled there about 1250, about thirty years before his granddaughter was born. "But when she was eleven in 1294, Arghun Khan died, Lord of the Tartars of the Levant, and his new nineteen year old bride, Princess Cocachin, was late for the wedding." Chava starts reading from her commentated translation of the Book of Balkacz, which, while she is reading from it, is still unpublished, a work in progress. She's translating the original into Hebrew, because that's the language she writes confidently. But the Hebrew is already being translated into English as she progresses, by Irit, a professional translator, employed by the university, to whom Chava regularly transfers drafts of the parts she's just completed. In some cases she's transferred two or three drafts of a single passage or chapter, when some of the main sentences can be read in conflicting ways, or when there are alternative options for understanding some event. Irit translates one of them provisionally, usually the first that arrives, and when Chava's translation is finished they intend to make a joint project of piecing together a coherent single version. But Chava says she really wants to publish a few optional versions of specific parts of the manuscript. "Sometimes," she says, "the illusion of getting it right, arriving at a unified, you know a one-track, a uhm single definite chain of clear causes and effects, isn't isn't worth the price you pay of understanding the different possible segments, the uh multiple possible causes and developments:' But she says she's pretty sure the publisher won't want to go along with this. Won't publish a poly-version. Not even a scholarly, academic publisher. So she's glad to have parts of the translation quoted at length in another text. That is, in this one. A lot of the sections she's read at the talking house are passages that she and Irit have tentatively discarded, in favor of other versions. She says sometimes her decisions to reject a given version have to do with the fact that its world-view comes across as, after all, too modern, too much hers, too little Caterina's. That it implies beliefs which Caterina couldn't seriously have

86

FOURTH VISIT

held, concepts which didn't exist in her time. But Chava says she's uneasy about such decisions. She says, "If you-as it were-uh transcribe such a version into our terms, if you could do that, if you could try to understand it in modern terms as if you were living then and then was modern, then ... oh, I don't know.'' She's not convinced, she says, that these aren't really "the bingo version" as she calls it, "as if there's any such thing." And rather than trash them, she says she's interested in their survival, in public view, as alternatives. So besides the readings she's also provided sections of her Hebrew translation and, when they exist, drafts of their English translations. It was a real hassle to get the university to permit their publication in this text but she finally convinced them it would be good PR. They stipulated specifically that no more than IS% of the pre-published material could be identical to the final version, and that this had to be noted clearly and explicitly in the pre-publication. So this is notification of the fact that the present text (or house) contains passages from the Book of Balkacz, no more than IS% of which are strictly identical to those of the forthcoming final version. Chava is reading from page twelve of a section that Irit has already translated. Chava is reading the Hebrew. This is the English translation. '"We were told that they had entered the city at night. Six hundred on departure not counting the seamen, eighteen on arrival. Six hundred on departure not counting the seamen, eighteen on arrival. Fourteen ships, it was said, each with four masts and twelve sails. Sailed from Zaiton, three months to Java, eighteen crossing the Indian Ocean to the port of Hormuz. So we heard. And then an overland caravan. A full two years on the way. She had been seventeen when the Khan, her lord, had first dispatched her. My sister's age. By the time they reached Isfahan they had heard the news. They came already knowing that Arghun Khan was dead, knowing that the wedding was not to be held. They came exhausted and ill, eighteen only out of six hundred, into the fruit orchards and orange groves, into Tabriz, sending away to Arghun's brother, to Kaikhatu, then ruling the Levant, to ask what to do with the princess. I cried bitterly that morning. Disappointed. No wedding and I would never see the princess.'" Chava stops and it's quiet for a while and then she says, "The Tartar name Cocachin uhm apparently meant a blue the color of the sky, 'sky-blue' and also 'celestial; you know, 'heavenly.' But her description in in Polo's Travels, on page 42, as a lady 'of great beauty and charm' is probably, is pretty likely to have been a standard formula-maybe Rustic hello put it there. At least at

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

87

least if we take Caterina's word for it. About the beauty I mean. The charm was apparently very much there. I again I mean for for Caterina." Caterina says in the translated manuscript, on pages thirty-one and thirty-two, "It was said she was to be beautiful, exceptional in her beauty beyond known women. When I saw her finally she was not. I did not see beauty. I loved her face for its strangeness. A face apart. Indeed exceptional. Not beautiful. Broad. Flattened. Dark. Of irregularly distant eyes. Deceptive in its heavy, passive looking expanse. In the wide slow curve of its contours. I was fortunate to learn the secret force of her mind and spirit, kept and guarded behind this slowly moving set of features. The hair was beautiful. I could feel it for looking at it. Cool fall of black. To below her waist. Parted and plaited and twisted round and pinned up in strictly set ceremonial manner to be tucked up under her cap or headdress which could always only barely control its abundance and shining weight. It encumbered her, with its heaviness, with its tightness, with its hours of ritual dressings, and when mine was shaved I dedicated to her my lovely light-headedness. "As many women of her tribe she was trained from childhood to grace the sovereign's administrations. When he sat in state, they were arranged on nearby elevated seats to look on and be looked upon, adorned with required tranquil and solemn yet benevolent look. Her attention to the sovereign visible and visibly, constantly held. She had been taught the art over years. And when alone or in court company it was to her to discern when to match his wit or defer in demonstrated appreciation. When to venture an observation or purely praise. Sometimes staking and risking almost all on her decision. This she described to us. And I believe it was her inner bowstring strength, vibrating in each dangerous decision, speaking through her body's deportment, which was looked upon as beauty." "Princess Cocachin;' Chava says, "was sent to Persia by Kublai Khan, after Arghun's wife, Queen Bulagan, died. The queen had stipulated in her will that a uh successor be brought fro-from her people, from her own extended family. Cocachin was chosen from that family. Chosen and and dispatched by Kublai Khan who was ruling in Mongolia and China. First, three three envoys tried to escort her from China, or uh Cathay the English translations of Polo call it, t-to Per-to Persia on horseback. But they were forced to turn back because of a war that was barring the roads. This attempt took them the Polo book says it took them eight months. Then the Khan sent her out again. This time by sea, and with the same escort and he added

88

FOURTH VISIT

an uh even larger retinue, a huge one, including the Polo's-I mean Marco and his father and uncle. The Khan in the upshot he had finally allowed them to uh leave his empire for home, for Venice, to to go on with their journey I mean after they'd delivered the princess and." It says in the Book of Balkacz, pages thirteen and fourteen, "They came to my father's house. We had no idea who they were. We were told they were with the retinue. They had sent and asked permission to be received and they came. They said they were Venetians. They did not look so. I had seen Venetians at my father's house. Venetian traders coming and going, with families at times. They came to stay at my father's house before they set out on their trade roads or back to Venice. It was not an inn but there were many rooms and they presented my grandmother with goods in thanks for the rooms and food and information. Sometimes the women and children would stay on for many months while the men did travel and trade. "These three were anxious for news of Venice, of loyalties, properties, anecdotes, any news my father or uncles or oldest cousins or Venetian guests could tell about one or another of the great families, some of it many years old by then. They had been in the interior they said for twenty years. And they asked which goods were selling well on the markets and at what prices and which was the latest sea-battle heard of against the Genoese. And the state of canals and sea-routes and roads, and the current locations of the brigand bands and pirates en route to Venice, and the prospects in Tabriz for commandeering horses on the authority of Kublai Khan. They appreciated the food enormously, especially the two older men, and swelled my grandmother's pride in keeping up Venetian tradition with these impossibly inferior Tabrizi ingredients. And they asked as well the estimated time for the messengers' travel to Kaikhatu and back. They were sitting, the three, at one end of the long table and my brothers and sister and amah tried their best to stop me but I was an uncontainable child and burst out and asked in what sounded inside my head like the loudest of voices, 'Please tell about the princess, please. Please tell about her.' There was a terrible silence and I was whooshed from the room. I thought the laughter that broke behind me was at me and my misconduct. "To this day I know the route by heart. Whispered over to myself and over, every day, every waking hour, like a spell, for more than a year after I first heard it spoken at my father's table. And then gradually less over the coming years, till today I use it only on troubled nights to lull myself to sleep.

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

89

'Through the straits of Singapore and Malacca to the islands of Nicobar and Ceylon, cross the south China Sea to Sumatra, cross the breadth of the Indian Ocean, down the Indian coast till Hormuz. Only eighteen survived of six-hundred set off in fourteen ships. And on overland through the desert, into the orchards, on to Tabriz, all the way carrying the gold tablets so inscribed by Kublai Khan, the golden piasters boding both curse and awful penalty to any who harm them.' From that night on I was a Po los' apprentice. Travelling with them till I could learn to travel without. Humbly. To the rear. Please, I promise to be very quiet and no bother at all, please. Please, I promise to be good. Please, please, I promise I'll make do and need nothing and you won't even notice me. Please. Please tell about the princess, please." Chava says, "A translation, usually, or even a commentary, doesn't emphasize the translator's or commentator's first person. Usually, she uhm usually she behaves herself. I mean according to the convention of polite selfeffacement. Even if in the meantime she's really still trying really hard-but you know in an indirect not an outspoken way-to to show just exactly how learned, how original and how brilliant that first person is. You know you're not supposed to ask for compliments. You have to be given them without asking. Otherwise they... don't count. And I mean you you have to learn how to do it gracefully without actually seeming to. To fish wi-without seeming to fish. "Anyway what I mean is that a commentator or a translator usually complies with the custom of... of locating and reporting what I'd call elements and and effects of the text, as if they didn't depend on the singular look of an individual reader, you know-hers. She finds them and reports them either in another language or in commentary. But she does it as if they were ... selfevident-there for everybody to see. Her the translator or commentator's voice is supposed to to dis-to strive to disappear as much as it possibly can behind the uh supposedly factual reporting." To become a "voice generally taken to be not a voice but the truth;' as it is described by Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan in their book, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, published by Ballantine Books in 1992, on page 21. "I," Chava says very slowly, "don't believe there is such a thing as a truly objective fac-factual report and. I uh the way I see it is that for example translated renderings are they're just suggestions for. .. looking at selected sections of the story, of the text. And of course these sections are uh singled

90

FOURTH VISIT

out by the commentator-translator. By me in this case. They point out what can, only possibly, can be seen from the place I'm at right now. What it seems to me that I see and and how. So I really I feel obliged to use my personal voice clearly and to be modest, instead of of being you know coyly selfeffacing. That's I think that's manipulative. It's a defensive mannerism and you know a control mechanism. It establishes authority by means of absence. There's no one there who's flesh and blood to differ with or to uh criticize. It's not anybody's thoughts or views. It's the I mean it's the free- floating truth there in the air sky in the sky pie in the sky in front of our eye. But I don't... I I feel that I need to openly to explicitly... acknowledge the limitations of my statements. And that means sometimes even to explicitly put myself in, so it'll be clear that I'm saying, 'I see it this way; and not, 'This is how it looks: Supposedly to everybody with eyes. You know." On page 22 Lyn and Carol describe "interpreting, and writing about the words and silences, the stories and the narratives of other people," when they, "ask not only who is speaking but who is listening:' Who else is participating in the exchange, who is present in the talking house. Chava's saying, "Putting myself in is uh it's misleading though. Because it looks like I think I'm in the center, I mean central, right in the middle and like I'm being the exact exactly the opposite of modest. But what it's meant to do is to keep in sight that whatever this is, it's being seen and said by just a single, singular, uh singularly fallible, person. Also, I I do re-trials over time, I look at what's supposed to be the same part or the same aspect of the text (but might turn out not to be) from different points, from different nows, kind of from different me's. So this uhm commentated translation that I've titled the Book of Balkacz doesn't even ... it doesn't set itself up as a 'faithful rendering: It's a log book of successive readings. And successive understandings. And their cumulative shifts. And I can't claim not to be inside it along with Caterina de Viglionis. I am. Reading her it uh ... changes me and then it's a different me is reading her and I'm I'm being created re-written by her no less than she's being translated by me. And the modern language and modern concepts in my translation are my equivalents for what I understand her... Caterina's thirteenth-century ones to be. Because I relate to her I respect her as a very p--present, very relevant, contemporary being, not an historical curiosity:' She sounds gradually more passionate as she's saying all this, as if she's stating a case, and by the end of the passage her speech has lost some of the breaks and hesitations of her usual intonation patterns.

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

91

"Balkacz;' she says after a silence, "Do you know what it looks like? The word?" She spells it out loud. "Or if you read it-how does it sound to you? The name? It's a sound with a specific uh sequence of tones and pitches and relative durations in the language it belongs or used to belong to. That's really the same goes for every name, so this actually looks like a kind of trivial example but I I find it powerful because of that. Because it's so pervasive. You know uh it holds for for the ... even the most basic trivial level of reading. Ev-every name can be pronounced in a lot of ways, and different families sometimes they have their own versions of regular names. But when the spelling is familiar that's that's forgotten. But how do you pronounce 'cz'?" She says it. 'See zed.' "You read it. I read it. Do you know or I know how to hear it? How to say it? How to map it onto tangible sense-sound? It's a vacant marker of absent sound. When you first uhm read it, do you make a clear voice-image of it-your your own interpretative creation-or do you just smooth over the uncertainty and leave it vague, not clearly uttered in your mind's ear. If you're not reading aloud you can do that. You can you can do either. Or both, you can do both. You can uhm imaginatively fill in the void at the center or leave it an empty place-keeper, or just vague and halfempty. Either way though, you're transforming it. Acting on it." After another silence she says in a quiet voice, "Knowingly or unknowingly you're being drawn, you're being pulled you're being made to act by what evades you. So. So am I being drawn by this man who ... this evasive man, this evasive text." Imagine Chava's oral readings in Hebrew. Not all of us here at the house speak the language. But think of speech rhythms and sounds that can pull and compel from outside of understanding. Picture us choosing to come into the room, gathering, sitting very still and listening intently without necessarily wanting translations. Chava's reading a passage you've already read on the first visit. This time you can trace the Hebrew harmonies echoing through the translation. '"An enquiring merchant might be told, "Balkacz, he can act as guide-man if you don't mind a bit finger-taps-temple. Cain we call him. He knows how to go where he wants. A lot he goes."'" Chava says, "This is this is Caterina well uh improvising. This is not strictly fact and. Because look no one in the village he came from had ever heard of Cain. Or probably of the Old uh Testament. He wouldn't have been a Christian. And he wasn't a a Jew. His culture would have had some other uhm uh idiom for driven wanderers or maybe not because maybe it was a a culture of wanderers. Pro-

92

FOURTH VISIT

foundly foreign to hers, unknown. Still, she's writing him, making this him that simultaneously deeply eludes her. Drawn by it, drawn out by it. Moved." "Our Christian year of 1294 was the same year that our amah, Li Fu-tze, originally come to Tabriz many years before with the retinue of Queen Bulagan, had begun to teach me ways of healing known to the women of her people," says the translated Book of Balkacz on page twelve. "From my infanthood, she said, she had seen that I would want to know these ways, would ask about them, would follow and imitate her hands kneading muscles, her fingers pressing healing points, travelling pain routes, dressing wounds, gathering and crushing and preparing and administering herbs. And I had. Loving the movements and the chants and the smells and the power~to soothe and ease and sometimes make well. And possibly more than anything loving the promise of shared complicity in practices kept from others. I would ply her over and over again with questions. I would shadow her through all her daily chores just to catch a glimpse of fleeting bits of these doings, practiced in darkened back rooms on the sick child of a neighbor's cook or on one of my infant cousins or my great aunts. She always knew I was there and only sent me away if some higher family authority was likely to intrude, but all my questions were sidestepped, shushed away with a hug, which only made me more determined to join in her exclusive, evasive knowledge. "But that year when I was eleven was when she said she knew that I would keep the secret of these ways and the secret of knowing them. I was ready and I was able to keep them safe and as well myself, she said. That year we planted together all the different seeds she saved every year, each kind in a separate pot, on the drying roof of the house. And she had first taught me the forms and the faces of the seeds and their names in her language. Then we had tended them and watched them grow and I had learned to find the tiny new plants by name and to match them to the single seed she had let me keep for each and how to care for each infant plant. "In the last days before Queen Bulagan died she had sent away the court physicians and in great secrecy had summoned two women healers of her own people, originally from her retinue. Li Fu-tze was one. I was terrified, when she left to attend the queen, that she would not come back. I sat at her feet the morning before she left, while she was preparing her herbs and salves, and quietly tied one of her ankles to my right wrist with one end of my sash. She laughed when she tried to rise and take a step, but I could see the fear present in her eyes too. I knew that she had not entered the palace

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

93

since her mother died when she was hardly beyond girlhood and was taken into service in the city. I knew that she didn't know what the summons meant. I knew that she feared disclosure of her clandestine doings. And today I know as well that along with a deep trust of skills, plants, touching, observing, she also knew fully, as I have learned to know, the limits of her healing powers:' This is page fourteen, quoted as is from Irit's draft. "The queen, however, knew she was dying and sought not cures but comfort and companions in the old women she had called to her, 'as a child in pain calls its mother: This I heard from Li Fu-tze after she was back. I wouldn't leave her side for several weeks. They had sat up with her all the nights and days, she said, in turns and sometimes paired, and rubbed the queen's limbs and feet and hands, her belly and her back with warmed herb oils and burned incenses of soothing smells when the pain was worst. "And in her long hours of waiting she had told them of the princess, to be brought from among her lineage, from among their people, and she designated that the princess be prepared for the wedding by these same two attendants, healing-mothers of her people. That was how I was to see the princess. Li Fu-tze had asked permission to bring along, as a trusted and credible helper, a young lady, daughter of a distinguished merchant line well known in the city for a generation. I was to be a more explainable presence in the rooms of a princess, my own presence there placing my amah in the role of escort, less dangerous a one than healing-mother." "The text doesn't ever state explicitly," Chava is saying at some point between readings, "that Princess Cocachin was footbound. But the custom, which uhm which was one that endured for about a thousand years, can you imagine, started long long before her birth. Prob-probably it began even before the Sung dynasty, that's the one that Kublai Khan finally finished off completely in 1279. Also there's also no exact indication of which Tartar tribe or people she came from or Queen Bulagan before her, or of how uh you know just how Sinicized her people actually were. Latham says though on page 12 of his introduction to The Travels of Marco Polo that the Tartar, Kublai, or 'Kubilai, as the Chinese historians describe him, was a very different character from his half-savage predecessors. He had absorbed many of the best elements of Chinese culture."' On page 139 of her book, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, published by Beacon Press, in Boston in 1978, Mary Daly says about footbinding that, "by the twelfth century it was widely accepted as correct

94

FOURTH VISIT

fashion among the upper classes. The mothers who belonged to families claiming aristocratic lineage felt forced to bind the feet of their daughters as a sign of upper class distinction." And two pages earlier she says that women "performed this ritual mutilation out of fear that otherwise the girl would not be marriageable." And, "This was a realistic fear, since for a thousandyear period Chinese males-millions of them-required this maiming of female feet." Footbinding. "The means by which the Chinese patriarchs saw to it that their girls and women would never 'run around';' Mary calls it on page 136. Never run around, never take their bikes cross country or their cars cross continent. It would be enough just taking steps cross a floor. Just deciding to move physically, not to speak of geographically on her own, of her own volition. To propel her self. On pages 136-7 Mary is saying that it-footbinding-"ensured that women would be brainwashed as well, since their immobility made them entirely dependent upon males for knowledge of the world outside their houses."

The italics are mine. "Moreover;' Mary says, "since the torture and mutilation of a small girl was carried out by her mother and other close female relatives, the lesson of 'never trust a woman' was branded upon her soul, and emotional dependency upon the seemingly less involved males was guaranteed." "Feet are our contact with the ground," she says in a note on page 146. Women on a journey or a life-course, she goes on a few lines below, "need to be balanced and sure-footed and capable of receiving impressions accurately." But, "perfectly footbound women;' she explains (on page 148), "could only fall from stump to stump and often had to be carried." In perfect bound feet, she says, "the bones were hopelessly broken and deformed" (page 142) and the ankles "monstrously misshapen" (page 141). Chava has said she has no way of knowing for sure but she thinks that part of Caterina's fascination with the princess, besides common attraction to royalty and lots of girls' more specific interest in princesses, might have stemmed from the knowledge that she was footbound. The fact that it isn't mentioned anywhere in the text doesn't necessarily contradict this. It may have been so obvious to Caterina and to everyone around her that Tartar princesses from Cathay came footbound, that saying so would have seemed as redundant as saying she had feet. "At eleven this daughter and granddaughter of travelling salesmen, was dreaming of travelling faraway lands like her grandfather and father and uncles and, in a more limited sense, her

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

95

grandmother too;' Chava says of Caterina, "so the idea of footbound immobility may have held for her you know that kind of horrified fascination of... you know of not being able to look at it while not being able to look away. And in Tabriz it wasn't common and definitely not even thought of for her, in her family, a foreign one, with with uh altogether other customs that it took a lot of care to keep:' "Anyway, eventually, regardless of the canceled wedding, for one reason or another, and probably also I guess someone was secretly executing Bulagan's will, anyway, Li Fu-tze, finally was summoned-on the pretext of a palace summons to Caterina-to attend the princess. While she she was waiting to be sent off once more, with her retinue and the Polos, to marry uh instead of Arghun, his son, Ghazan, who The Travels says on page 44, 'was in the region of the Dry Tree on the borders of Persia with 6o,ooo troops.' As it turned out the other old healer had become very ill and only the two of them were attending Cocachin." From page twenty-one of The Book of Balkacz: "By this time I had come into the room itself, out of the antechamber where I had been invisibly doing chores, crushing herbs with a wooden pestle and mortar, rinsing the lengths of cloth in clear warm water:' Chava says, "Strips of cloth might have been used for all kinds of healing treatments. But the cloths that Caterina was washing in the antechamber might also have been the bandages used for binding the princess's feet." Mary, on page 141 of Gyn/Ecology says the binding process was highly ritualized. She's writing about the original process of deforming the feet and also about their maintenance later on. She says, "There were rules for tile size of the bandages, the intervals between applications of tighter and tighter bandages, the roles of various members of the family in this act of dis-memberment, the length of the correct 'foot,' the manner in which the foot-bound women should sit and stand, the washing of tile re-formed feet (to be done privately because of smell and ugliness hidden by ointments and fancy shoes)." Caterina says on the same page, "Now I was kneeling right behind my amah, cupping and pouring the oils into her hands as she kneaded the princess's legs. She had stopped her chant after a long stretch and the room was quiet and softly I had started mine. Without hesitating one moment, slipping into it smoothly, without thinking of the words, my chant of far places, magical and misty, calling, 'Through the straits of Singapore and Malacca to the islands of Nicobar and Ceylon, cross the south China Sea to Su-

96

FOURTH VISIT

matra, cross the breadth of the Indian Ocean, down the Indian coast till Hormuz. Only eighteen survived of six-hundred set off in fourteen ships. And on overland through the desert, into the orchards, on to Tabriz, all the way carrying the gold tablets so inscribed by Kublai Khan, the golden piasters boding both curse and awful penalty to any who harm them.' "The princess had opened her eyes as I was chanting and fixed me with a stare. My amah, sensing the change, had slowed the movement of her hands, as if moving aside to make place for something she was expecting. Princess Cocachin did not speak my language but the names of the places were the same or nearly so. She was listening intently, her earlier meditative relaxation turned to what felt like an alert near-panic. When I finished she waited, almost frozen. Then she said one word, hoarsely, to my amah. 'Say it again, she asks that you say it again,' Li Fu-tze told me. I said it again from the beginning, my back straight now at a sort of attention, but swaying slightly with the chant, and with her looking, staring, straight at me. And when it was said a second time, a different hoarse word to Li Fu-tze was translated to me as, 'And now backwards, say it backwards.' '"Carrying the golden tablets so inscribed by Kublai Khan, the gold piasters boding both curse and awful penalty to any who'd done them harm, come to Tabriz, through the orchards the desert and overland, come to Hormuz all the way from up the Indian coast, from across the full breadth of the Indian Ocean, by Sumatra come across the south China Sea, come by way of Ceylon and from Nicobar, by way of Malacca, through the straits of Singapore, of all of six-hundred in fourteen ships eighteen alone to survive.' I stopped. '"Zaiton,' she said, 'the six-hundred sailed from Zaiton. We sailed from Zaiton.' And she began laughing. Not wildly or madly. Her panic had disintegrated into a deep, rolling laugh that now animated her broad, dark, cumbersome, cow face. My amah had resumed her massaging with long, light hand-movements, working into the laughter, spreading its release further down, further up, drawing it out. Laughing along, taking the laughter into herself. Amplifying its health through the cavities of her body and the movements of her limbs. '"So,' the princess said to my amah in their language, 'So. My healer's helper is taking me home.' And she went on laughing in tears. Then she said to us, 'I am one taken. You know that. I know you know that. Especially you, my healer-mother. You as well are taken, forced and taken. From home where I am not to return. Where you are not to return. Where only your magic your

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

97

helper's magic can ever take me. You at least are come as a child, perhaps somewhat finding a new home here with your mother. Mine I will never again meet. I will tell you some of the words I had with the youngest Polo, the Venetian. "'Before we reached the sea I was afraid. I was afraid that I would be ill the whole trip and vomiting and dirty and ridiculous as a princess may not be. I was afraid too of the depths of the water, of their dark, afraid of sinking to depths, afraid even from the depths of my aching aloneness. When on the ship I refused to leave the deck and stayed there, protected in my sedan chair for long hours, to watch every moment what transpired. I watched waves and wind directions and followed from a distance the details of steering and of shifting sails. I have studied much of seas and winds so watching. And breathing deep breaths of the spray. Moving my back and arms with the sway. Rocking my pain as your hands and arms do. '"And constantly four strides from me, as decreed by my lord the Khan, watching my person, watching over my person, the youngest of the Polos. Marco Polo. The Venetian. You go, I told him one afternoon, and I am taken. And he said yes that is true. I asked him, how is that true? Not one of us navigates, neither steers, commands the ship, the fleet of fourteen, commands the sails or the slaves in the galley. It is the sailors do all this, not one of us does all or any of this. He almost turned his face to look at me directly although it was forbidden and said yes. I said, but you move while I am moved, I said, you are travelling, I, borne."' Chava explains that the Polos were led, both on land and sea, by guides, men who knew the routes and the necessary stops and the safe ones. She says, "Olschki for example Olschki says, in in note number 61 to page 32, 'In Marco's times, navigation in that part of the world by Chinese ships was worked out with the help of the stars, the sun, and the magnetic needle, which Marco never mentioned.' And above, on the same page he refers to 'the charts, which he; meaning Marco, 'calls "mapemondi;' that were used by sailors in the course of their difficult navigation among so many lands and islands washed by the Indian Ocean.' And then on page 36 he says, 'It is obvious that although he was able to make use of navigational charts he was unacquainted with the celestial spheres of Arabian design which were then well known in Italy and Asia... Certainly the Persian or Chinese sailors who piloted the imperial ships through those waters were far more expert than he.' So actually, it wasn't, I mean his travels they weren't exactly his. Not re-

98

FOURTH VISIT

ally this independent discovery or navigating himself or making you know the decisions about directions and distances or anything like that. And he totally couldn't go anywhere at all in the empire unless the Khan or some other authority that was high enough said he could and. He and his father and his uncle had to wait twenty years, twenty years till Kubilai gave them the the the permission and the uh means and the protection to finally go home. If that hadn't happened and if they'd never come home, they would never have been given the title of travelers. They would have stayed uhm just missing I guess, you know lost, gone. I I think uh I guess maybe travelling presupposes a degree of success at least to a point, in getting back or at least being able to get information back. About the travel and the traveler and. "And but these on the other hand these guides, they weren't exactly their own men either. They knew the ways and knew how to do it but they were were hired or actually commanded maybe to get somebody from here to there often on pain of death if they didn't deliver. And they didn't usually own the ships or the means of transportation. They weren't it it wasn't freedom. It was this kind of large-scale spatial license. And knowledge. It was that. But not strictly freedom. It mi-only looked like it. Or only from here, from today maybe. The only one really free in that sense, in this cast of characters, was was Balkacz. Like on this page of my translation, here;' she's reading it in Hebrew, '"There were those who had need of Balkacz for following clandestine routes. The placement of military outposts fast set up over recent years, the regular but intricately alternated routes of the Khan's reconnaissance units, the set paths of post-riders, were known even to very few locals. Balkacz knew them. Some of them. Enough of them. And as well the sites of deserted shelters and springs and wells. Making him, in effect, a secret map without which he and his ward were likely to lose either free movement, or life.' Marco Polo and Rustichello and the anonymous scribes and Latham, on page

227

of The Travels in English, tell in their multiple voice

jus-how really crucial this could be. It says there that, 'All those who keep inns or provide lodgings for travelers write down the names of all those who lodge with them and the dates of their stay. So throughout the year the Great Khan can know who is coming and going through all his dominions. And this is a useful piece of knowledge to prudent statesmen.' "Princess Cocachin;' Caterina and Chava say on page twenty-three of the translated Book of Balkacz, "was speaking quietly of this exchange with Marco Polo, about her transfer so unlike his travel, telling it in a dry voice

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

99

perhaps even slightly amused. But I was eleven. And unconditionally devoted to her. ''And I felt the fast, great anger wave rise. Such anger. So much anger. Great tide din of anger enormous overturning. Bringing to feet roaring anger. Soaring anger. Rearing. Pick up, fling in the air anger, whirl around, throw, feed him seeds of castor plant leaves of oleander pods of jimsonweed poisons witch's apprentice woman's apprentice. Willing. and ready bowed. Borne. Veiled. Humbled. Hoping. Wishing. Watching. Witching time. Now surprises, now uprises. Uproars. Up-pays. Out, rage. Pure castor plant seed leaves feed him evil which without knowing I was speaking. And with me also Li Fu-tze and Her Highness Cocachin with me the ending words and lines of the chant, in unison though in my language and of my making. The hate I dared to speak was theirs. The unspeakable hate. The pain. ''And then Her Highness told us as well, ashamed, of the attraction. "It wasn't him she wished but hadn't dared to hate. At least not exactly.

Not the youngest Polo. He wasn't implicated. He was an outsider. Foreign. A common subject merely entrusted with a deposit. A Tartar princess. Awesome deposit. She could imagine his fear. What if something befalls her? What if something is done to her? What if by his hand? He did not touch her. He did not leave her side and did not touch her for two whole years. Everyday. "She told us, one day I said to him, Polo your eye. He never spoke to me

100

FOURTH VISIT

unaddressed. Never looked at me directly. He asked what Your Highness, what. I said, so exotic, so round, so open. Is such the eye of all Venetians Marco Polo? The four strides decreed between them always, had long before become dense, touchable air, space replete. I knew this as she described their talk. Meetings of eyes were dangerous. Piercing the loaded combustible air. He said your eye Your Highness. I asked: what? she told us. And he said so sad. No, I said, she told me and my amah that day, no, I told him, so sealed. He answered me that such was the way of my sadness. I answered him that such is the way of my strength. He said nothing. Then he said he did not know which would be the foreign now, now that he was returning to Venice, the Venetian eye distanced two decades or the slanted now acquired as habit. I asked him, which do you mean, the one seen or the one seeing?" "Doesn't it, isn't it," Chava says very slowly, thoughtful, "when you think of Marco Polo, don't you think of dark olive skin and slanted eyes? I do. I know I've got it wrong but still. I do. Doesn't he his exotic trip his his story his faraway uhm doesn't it transform his image, doesn't he actually turn in your mind into a mirror image of a Tartar, a Tartar Khan, dressed in silks and jewels. Isn't it mentally transitive-exoticism? As if it were contagious?" I agree. It hadn't occurred to me before. But yes, I discover Marco Polo is oriental in my mind. "In fact," Chava says, "their homecoming actually the Polos' I mean, Ramusio describes it in that in his Italian version of The Travels that he based on an apparently reliable and very uhm detailed Latin manuscript that that like I've said it didn't survive. It's clear from what he says that by by the time they got back they uh they looked they didn't look Venetian, they looked foreign. What's his name, Latham, says on page 16 of his introduction, that according to Ramusio, 'at first the wanderers' families, who had long believed them dead, failed to recognize these strange beings: See? And then he quotes Ramusio as saying that that these strange beings that is 'with a je ne sais quoi of the Tartar about them; in other words 'a something, I can't put my finger on it, a something' of the Tartar about them. My bet is my bet is it's the eyes. How they look. "Anyway;' Chava says here, "there's this erotica of eyes. Exotica of eyes. The erotica of the space of choice held between. You know uhm between Polo and Princess. Of the the uh continuing choice of abstinence, of the protracted attraction, the strength, the power contained, unleashable but but stemmed. The erotica of not.

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

101

"Mickie and I knew it quite well." she says. "We we liked it I think." Later on she says, "Sometimes, probably very rarely, the princess would let down her hair. In in the wind on the deck. Then later on she uh had it combed. By her own old uh amah nurse bee-become handmaid mostly I guess and tied up again. The traditional embroidered headdress, it was called a bochta, that usually covered her hair actually traveled on to Venice with Marco, after she was safely and finally delivered to Ghazan. There was a custom of uhm giving a gift of a royal garment to someone especially close or as a token of uh special thanks. The bochta was kept at the family home in Venice and it was they considered it precious enough that it was even listed in the inventory drawn up of Marco Polo's belongings on July 13 1366, after his death. It was in Venetian dialect and. The uh list of the inventory." Page thirty-four of The Book of Balkacz: "When she was gone off to Ghazan, after the messengers had gone and come to Kaikhatu, after months of our attending her, gone from another mother and home, from a new healing-mother and her helper, again escorted by retinue and Polos, and my days and the days of Li Fu-tze passed again at my father's house, she sat me down one afternoon, while everyone was about their work and business and told me I would have to leave. Not immediately, she said. Not as the child I still was, but not too long from now. After she had taught me all she could teach me and after she had tried to help me learn to rein the power she had seen in the princess's rooms. This was not from her, she told me, not of her teaching. But she could try to help me learn to care for it, to contain it. To use well my gift. Otherwise, she said, it would endanger my life, which it would even so, if I did not leave in time. For there was no way I could or I would hide it, she said. Then she said it would be best to travel into tlle interior. As deep and as far as I could go:' In their book, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, published by The Feminist Press, in the USA, in 1973, Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English say on page 6, "Witches lived and were burned long before the development of modern medical technology. The great majority of them were lay healers serving the peasant population." And on the next page, "The age of witch-hunting spanned more than four centuries (from the 14th to the 17th century)." And later, "Many writers have estimated the total number killed to have been in the millions. Women made up some 85 percent of those executed." On page 13 they say, "Witch-healers were often the only general medical

102

FOURTH VISIT

practitioners for a people who had no doctors and no hospitals and who were bitterly afflicted with poverty and disease." And on pages 15 and 16, "For eight long centuries, from the fifth to the thirteenth, the other-worldly, antimedical stance of the Church had stood in the way of the development of medicine as a respectable profession. Then, in the 13th century, there was a revival of learning, touched off by contact with the Arab world. Medical schools appeared in the universities and more and more young men of means sought medical training." Which "made it easy to bar women legally from practice." (On pages 17 and 18.) "With few exceptions, the universities were closed to women (even to upper class women who could afford them), and licensing laws were established to prohibit all but university-trained doctors from practice. It was impossible to enforce the licensing laws consistently since there was only a handful of university-trained doctors compared to the great mass of lay healers. But the laws could be used selectively. Their first target was not the peasant healer, but the better off, literate woman healer who competed for the same urban clientele as that of the universitytrained doctors. And so, Jacoba Felicie, was tried in 1322 by the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris, on charges of illegal practice. She was literate and had some unspecified medical training. "Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up," Barbara and Deirdre say, while, "the primary accusations brought against her were that '... she would cure her patient of internal illness and wounds or of external abscesses."' Chava says, "There was all this you know Veneti-western I guess really commerce and ideas and culture coming through the Viglioni house and through Tabriz altogether, prob-more or less steadily. There were uhm a lot of Genoese there too. Merchants like the Venetians. And clerics. And and Li Fu-tze had, it looks like she'd uh acquired a sense of western conduct and power-play. She was ... it's clear she was really astute. And she had realized the uh dangerous, the precarious status of her healing knowledge:' Anna Comnena, physician and medical writer in the kingdom of Byzantium, was an Emperor's daughter nevertheless put away by her brother, relegated to silence in a convent, one hundred years before Caterina's birth. Francesca of Salerno, Italy, Caterina's contemporary, succeeded in graduating medical school. But in order to practice she petitioned the duke for exceptional permission. Both women are described by Judy Chicago in her

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

103

book, The Dinner Party, published by Anchor Press/Doubleday, in 1979, on page 132 and page 139. Chava says, "It it wasn't only in the wes-in Europe either. It was in China too. This exclus-this forceful, systematic exclusion of women from healing. The well like the founder of Taoism in in the second century in China collected the spells and talismans and charms of the witch doctors who were the lay healers, usually rural people, a lot of women. And he wrote them up as a kind of religious system. So even at the very beginnings medicine was collected from lay healers. But then much later I uh in 1219, Ch'angch'un, a major Taoist holy man was summoned by Chingiz Khan and and went to meet him. Not too far from Samarkand. Just over a generation before Caterina was born. Probably not too long before her amah Li Fu-tze was born somewhere on the steppes. "His the Taoist's trip and and his uh meeting with the Khan are they're the sto-material for a book called The Travels of an Alchemist, the Hsi Yu Chi in Chinese. It it was recorded by his disciple Li Chih-ch'ang a-and. I in 1931 it was translated into English by Arthur Waley. And published by by Headley Brothers. I love this copy I've it's a reprint from the Republic of China." Chava turns the book over to show me the Chinese on the page with the publishing information. "Printed by by SMC Publishing Taipei, in uhm nineteen ... 1991. So the text he created, this founder-kind of-of Taoism, the let's say coherent or at least collected body of knowledge he put together, that was privileged information. It was the basis for making a clergy. On page 9 there's uh there's an introduction and Waley says that the strength of Taoism resulted because, 'it had a definite ecclesiastical organization, controlled by an hereditary potentate: And a definitive institutional text, which he calls a 'mystery: That he says 'still remains in the possession of the Chang family: This uhm secret mystery text is supposed to be still intact. "On on page 11 of the uh his introduction h-he Waley says, 'The Chinese had inherited from the remote past the belief that certain substances such as jade, pearl, mother-of-pearl, cinnabar, were life-giving, and that if absorbed into the body they would prevent the gradual deteriorations of old age: And then on pages 13 uhm here, yah this is the point, he says that by the end of the nth century, 'alchemy comes to mean in China not an experimentation with chemicals, blow-pipes, furnace and the like (though these survive in the popular alchemy of itinerant quacks), but a system of mental and physical re-education.' And of course, the main point is in parentheses.

104

FOURTH VISIT

The uh the old practitioners were re-defined as quacks to create a a new an exclusive kind of medicine and. According to Waley it was in this new, confidential sense that Ch'ang-ch'un was an alchemist. "So when the uh this alchemist is summoned by the emper-the KhanChingiz Chingiz Khan-on page 101 of the translat-the travelogue, The Travels of an Alchemist, the Khan asks Ch'ang-ch'un the Taoist, 'what medicine of long life have you brought me?' And uhm Ch'ang-ch'un answers, 'I have means of protecting life, but no elixir that will prolong it.' And they set a date when Ch'ang-ch'un will tell Chingiz the means, the uhm 'the Way.' The Taoist doctrine. But the point is the the point is that before he uh you know expounded upon the means of protecting life, it says, here on page 112 that, 'an imposing pavilion was erected,' for this audience with the emperor and and, 'the women of the Khan's retinue were sent away.'" Chava is quiet for several seconds here. "The women." "Yeah the women. Who else." When Chava goes on her voice sounds tangibly tired, even slower than usual. "So there you there it is. The women were sent away. A few days before the audience. Plain and simple. Women don't can't know a thing about the means for protecting life. And uh when he he's finished giving his discourse, this Taoist, here-page 113, the Khan told everybody there 'You have heard the holy Immortal discourse three times upon the art of nurturing the vital spirit. His words have sunk deeply into my heart. I rely upon you not to repeat what you have heard.' Top secret. Classified information. And the first the main ones to keep it from were the women. They couldn't even stay in the vicinity.'' There's another relatively long silence here after the book snaps shut on tape. "So this Tartar servant wise-woman understood very well that healing knowledge would be all the more perilous to the person of a much more uhm visible young, you know well-descended Venetian than to herself. And Caterina's ability to use her growing knowledge was it's pretty obvious it was both uh exceptional and and like irrepressibly irreverent and. On page thirtyfive, Caterina says she told Li Fu-tze, 'Never will I be taken. I will not. I must learn to go. Her Highness has taught me to ride but I must learn to go.' Chava remarks that page 197 of the English Travels of Marco Polo says the Tartars' "daughters and wives often go riding with them." "Although I don't suppose it means ever riding alone," she adds. But Caterina had never been allowed near horses, and she was afraid but also ambitious. And it was no

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

105

less than her revered princess who had resolved to teach her. Caterina, says of the princess, on page twenty-eight, "For her, she said, the ride was free flow, to move as she otherwise could not. For several weeks I only watched. Her, galloping the inside circumference of the sports grounds. Her, prancing the meadow lightly. I watched seated the negotiated grace of woman-animal. Walking after watching I became a cricket ungainly, jerking, miniature, beside their flow. And I learned the words, as my amah translated. Leg, back, arm, left, right, slow, stop, press, heel. Then, after several weeks of words and watching I mounted. And met the gap between the image and the real riding. The sticky sweat and flies and strain of muscles. The clumsy fumbling and falling. I met the constant tension of refusing to relinquish the image though the real riding did not meet it. And then I met isolated seconds of something beyond both-neither image nor uncomfortable riding. A surprising and unexpected sensation of blending with horse to become skyborne. Once only when leaping a hedge and a large puddle one after the other. I was frightened to death before and immediately after. So short the sensation that it was past before recognized and only remembering was left. Other than that, always, bodily apprehension, tension incessant. And without having any way of knowing that it will finally, gradually arrive in the end and provide satisfaction. It is very deeply tiring. Exhausting. Even though there is some small enjoyment of overcoming fear. And of persisting at that which persistently evades what is expected. "It stretched over all of the months till Her Highness's departure, this triangle of student and horse and trainer. As if perched rather than seated in saddle, I felt top-heavy, precarious, mistrustful of the animal's will. And watching, commanding my fearful imploring of the animal, she would direct attention down my back and legs, through my hunched shoulders, spreading them out with her voice to soften and sway at ease, flow attention down my arms, through my fingers, unclenching but holding, loose but firm and alert, directing. We performed the ritual again and again and still again. Unlearning my body's rigid precautions and cautions. Again and again I mounted wooden and slowly relaxed at the meeting place between her speech and the animal's movement under my parted legs. Walking around the grounds. New at it every time. Again and again heavy and immobile with the fear and the strangeness of it, with her eyes and enunciations and choices steering me to where I could steer. Much later, when I rode with Balkacz, and his were other choices and another temperament, and the riding was overland and long and

106

FOURTH VISIT

clandestine, his remarks touched totally different parts of my body and different segments of my riding. Transforming it into a thing again utterly foreign. A riding of other faculties and limbs. Making a triangle again strange and unaccustomed. Making the former seem comfortable and familiar. But in fact Her Highness took care to develop my pliability by commanding different horses for almost every one of our lessons, and having me deal with shifting size and form and temper and style of moving. Each change reframing the three-way contract and directing differently her attention and mine. "And after the lessons during the first frightened weeks, Li Fu-tze, my beloved amah, would rub my aches, meanwhile teaching me the places and ways of her touching. By that time she had not bathed me or rubbed me unclothed for several years. When she began there was even an embarrassment present between us, come of this redrawing of the boundaries of privacy. I rem~mber the first day. I lay on my back and she was seated on her knees above my head, lifting my head and neck and massaging the base of the neck all around, bent over my face. I could smell the smell of her mouth which was distinctive, not sweet but not unpleasant, and the smell of her right armpit which was stronger than that of the left. I could see very closely the wrinkling skin underneath her chin. The rules were such: She touched my upper chest and the sides of my chest and the hard join in the middle of it but never my still flat breasts or nipples. Her touch was sometimes strong, sometimes soft but never stroking. That was kept for when she was mothering, not healing, and for when a barrier of cloth was between our skins or when the one of age had been much clearer. She never touched what she called my flower up between my legs or the tender inner edge just before the meeting of my buttocks but she sometimes pressed and manipulated the bone immediately above and between them or the bones above my thighs and below my belly. The borders, very carefully drawn, defined the body parts that were acceptable for touch. Continuously surprising me, her inclusions and exclusions, mapping out on my body her sensitivities and prohibitions. I knew as she kneaded that I would have not been uncomfortable at her touching some of the places she did not. But the borders were also between kinds of touch. Allowing a hand pressure that was healing and unprovoking but not a purely pleasure-taking stroke. Allowed as well were quick light successive scratches, waking but not arousing an area of dulled skin. I knew I might feel discomfort at an infringement on such manners of touch, even at permitted places on my body. "While learning the borders themselves, which I would later use to guide

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

107

me to my own, as a healing woman, I learned the great importance placed by Li Fu-tze upon indicating them fast and clear when administering. 'For the healing to be able to work; she taught me, 'it is the condition, that the person asking it know first of all that she can trust you with her body. And with her pain. She must know first of all that although she gives them into your hands you nevertheless respect her ownership of them. In every way. She must feel that strongly.' I believed her. I still do but I also believe today that this is her and my embarrassment as well, her and my need, given a distressed consenting body, to establish quickly, clearly, our terms. This I do, we indicate, this I do not. We institute and protect our own privacy, our own personal will, while offering our faithful service. All of this without words." Touch and hand pressure and moving and manipulating skin, muscle, bone, are natural, caring ways of relieving tension and affliction that you could probably assume we'd be using, extensively, among us. A touching, as well as talking, house. Especially after somebody has come a long way. Crossed countries or continents. Or internal expanses or boundaries. But then there's always the delicate issue of who is prepared to touch whom or not. Some of the maps for some of us exclude not only parts of bodies but entire people. Sometimes even when the people concerned like or love each other. And the reasons for exclusion or inclusion aren't necessarily always knowable. Just the borders, even though they're also usually drawn without words. So it would be hard to tell which two of us, from among those coming and going at the house, some real, some imagined, might or might not be saying, "Here? Is this where it hurts?" "I don't know, not really. I I'm not sure." "Sometimes there's a kind of memory of pain that your body discovers through the touch. Even if the part that hurts has kind of shifted away from there and changed." "I can't always decide if what I'm feeling is just your fingers pressing hard, uncomfortably or some kind of sensitivity that was there before:' "For now, just try to give up being good and patient with pain. Drop the precise nuances. If it's uncomfortable, it's uncomfortable. Say so. That's what we're looking for." "Besides, sometimes it feels good when you touch some place that hurts and sort of release a current of pain, let it out kind of. I can't always tell which is pain and which is relief." "But if it's a place that feels relief, that means something was bothering it."

108

FOURTH VISIT

"You know that's a place where I think I've never been touched. That that place you just pressed into, underneath my shoulder bone. And along the sides of those vertebrae where you were pressing before. In my upper middle back. You know you were sort of pressing gradually harder and then releasing a little at a time, was it I guess two or three times on one side of each vertebra. And then one of the times, after the height of the pressure, when you were already letting go, there was this streak of pain this very sudden channel of pain straight from where you were pressing right up to my left temple. It still hurts. My whole head does. I feel kind of fuzzy and dizzy. "But it was an amazing feeling because it gave me clear sense-connection with this unknown path in the depths of my own body that I hadn't known about and can't decide to feel of my own will." "Just lie quietly for awhile. Let's let your head rest awhile. Here, I'm going to apply some very gentle pressure to your temples and then ... massage your scalp a little and your... smooth your forehead. That's right, relax the muscles around your eyes. Let them be just lie in their sockets like cradles, softly. Suspended there. Floating." And then it would be hard to say which two or maybe three of us, sitting around the table and talking about this kind of discovery of deep underskin paths, might say, "Like the first time I actually felt my cervix, when a doctor touched touched it with a with a you know a a... sugar tongs. I don't know what it's called. Before it had ever even occurred to me that I could touch it myself with my own fingers. And when I felt the inside of it that I can't ever touch, when he put in an IUD. Or maybe it was when he took it out. No, when he put it in.lt hurt a lot to the point of making me weak but it was still an amazing feeling." "My labor was like that. A window into what was going on inside me so I could cooperate and help." And she might not say-because it would sound too weird to put it this way to anyone but herself, or because it was so far removed from many women's bad experience that it would sound like a romantic idealization, "I felt it like a wave starting outside of me, in some kind of great all-encompassing element that I don't know what to call except 'nature.' As if I was in ... was part of an ocean. And it started far away from me and reached me and crested through me and went on through the sea to subside and make place for another one. And it was up to me to let myself be part of this ocean and let this ocean be part of me, to ride its waves and not fight them. To contract

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

109

and dilute with their rhythms. To keep on deciding second by second to agree to them and tune my body so they wouldn't waste their strength its strength my strength. And the pain was the tool for doing it. The signal system that let me keep in touch and responsive. Keep the wet womb muscles synchronized to the waves, tapping into their life-force. A dialogue via pain with deep inner parts and underskin streams:' "I was pliable;' Caterina says on page thirty-seven of the translated manuscript, "and I learned. Well:' She's talking about both riding and healing. "And my mother, much earlier, had installed me in the kitchen for quite some time, where I had learned much about turning produce into food. I felt I could sustain myself. And about at that time, a growing precocious girl, venturing more and more into my father's storerooms I watched him prepare my brothers for their merchant's travel. Inscribing in his ledgers the amounts of what they were taking, inscribing the prices of their buying of each spice and cloth and article, each consignment. Inscribing too the contents and bags and the seals and the cloth strips sewn around the necks of the jugs. Like his favorite dog I crept into my father's lap as he sat at the end of the long packing table plotting the route with the oldest of my brothers. I began to realize letters and charts and figures:' One version of Irit's translation says "realize letters." A second says "recite letters:' Chava has said she's undecided. It could be either. The words in mercantile Venetian share the same root. The script is hard to read. She kept both versions in the Hebrew and then she tentatively opted for "recite letters" because the next sentence is: "And my father came to listen:' But she hated omitting "realized letters" even though it's an irregular structure. She thinks Caterina is describing a process in which the use of writing and calculation dawned on her, where she happened to be exposed to them and came to understand what they were used for, why she might need them. On page thirty-nine it says, "To calculate quantities of seed and predict the yields of my healing plants and record and follow the times of their sowing and harvest. I would need to carefully choose and record the sites of planted plots, perhaps-of necessity-secret ones, to be returned to at harvest time, myself or by messenger. To plan routes and sojourns which would allow for this. The necessary quantities were small and portable, but I would need ensured means of securing and using them. And this, I told my amah, meant knowing the use of signs. That could preserve, pass on and reconstruct locations. I wished and wanted to learn letters.

110

FOURTH VISIT

"I had not been instructed as my brothers, in preparation for the merchant's trade. Nor had I trained my memory, as youths of the monastery, to classify and keep ready at hand such a quantity of intricate detail. Neither did my mother, not a noblewoman, have the skills of script by which I now became fascinated. I began visiting the storerooms, playing counting games with my brothers, nagging them about letters and words, watching my father inscribe sacks and record sellings and buyings, asking for leaves of precious paper from the great ledgers. It was truly play and perhaps it was due to this that only rarely did my father or uncle scold and banish my invented learning games from their merchants' cellars. My father barred me from the use of paper but smilingly suffered my amusement with stylus upon a scribe's wax tablet." On page 150 of The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago says, "Women's situation from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries also has to be understood in the context of their difficulty in gaining education." And on page 194 of Gyn/Ecology, Mary calls the witch craze a "primal battle of principalities and powers," which she says, "was at heart concerned with die process of knowing, which the professionals wanted to possess and control as their 'body of knowledge:" But Armando Petrucci, suspects or discloses nothing of such battles or difficulties, when he says, "with the conquest of the 'right to write' by Italian vernacular (or Itali an vernaculars) in the twelfth and still more die thirteenth centuries, there was reborn in Italy after an eclipse of nearly eight hundred years a relatively new figure in the panorama of Western medieval written culture: the literate person free to write apart from any precise social function or constricting juridical obligations." This is on page 178 of his book, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, edited and translated by: Charles M. Radding, and published by Yale University Press in 1995. And there's no trace on this page of the fact that the literate person was almost always a literate man. Judy however says, a little earlier on page 150, the "contraction of women's position, the gradual loss of educational rights and the advent of witch hunts combined to create a situation in which most women were intimidated into submission." At some point in her talking Chava has said, "For all practical purposes Caterina was well you could say she was made into, she learned to be this timid person. First Li Fu-tze was uh did, and and she knew that Caterina had to as well, to survive. So she ... Caterina knew she had to get out and she was, well in those days eleven wasn't really always a child any more. I mean just

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

111

about three or four years at most before menstruation. In some places and in in some families, pre-pubescent adolescent girls were married off. By those standards she was a near adult. She would have had to face a betrothal and and a wedding soon. She may have even been betrothed like uh spoken for already and. That happened a lot. A kind of understood contract between families from when a girl wa-was very young. And whoever her husband, virtually, legally her owner was going to be, there's uh really no question that she wouldn't have been able to go on healing. Not that kind of stuff. Not any of it. Not the growing. Not the seeing people in private. No question of the travelling. She could actually do more and and learn much more as a girl even move around more because she wasn't so important. Wasn't so visible. The controls she would have been subjected to as a wife would have been much more uh ... So she was only eleven and she knew she'd have to leave and hide. But it she wasn-not timid to the point of submission. She I guess you could say she was intimidated into subterfuge." From the translated Book of Balkacz, page forty-nine, ''At this time my father and my uncle traveled for several months and it was then day by day that I nagged and wheedled my oldest brother into giving me a sewn sheaf of paper leaves of my father's zibaldone. It was a sheaf not yet incorporated into the volume, awaiting the bookbinder's hand. Not yet used:' The zibaldone, or hodepodge book, Armando says on page 183, is a volume "whose most characteristic examples retain the book-form only in its outward appearance as a container of folded leaves." On page 189 he writes of"artisan merchants of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy who not by chance (as it might seem) wrote gate tolls and currency exchange rates in their zibaldoni alongside medical recipes, devotional tracts, lauds, and love lyrics, thus summing up on a brief, paper horizon of humble appearance the fundamental benchmarks of their culture and of their own presence in the society of the time." And on page 178, "These literates who were 'free to write' did so in vernacular, outside the bounds of the language institution of official culture, and they produced evidence written not as books but explicitly inspired by documentary models (letters, receipts, account books, books of memoirs in the form of a register)." "I did not use it for my letter practice," Caterina says a little further down the page. I hid and saved it for my flight." Page fifty-three of the manuscript says, "He had asked for Li Fu-tze. At the servants' entrance. He had asked for her by name and she was alerted to pos-

112

FOURTH VISIT

sible danger. She sent to say she could see no one without leave from her masters. A few days after this she was walking towards the produce market alone in a small alleyway and a man fell into step with her half a pace behind her. In rhythm with the strides, almost imperceptibly, he said in a low voice, 'I have Mori bark. Do you need some?' She was more startled, she told me, by the sound of her language, even though it was rudimentary and heavily accented, than she was by his address. And the sound of it lowered her guard. And, as well, this offer of one of the main medicinals which were ungrowable in Tabriz. She made a quarter turn but went on walking fast. 'I can't buy,' she said choosing the words that would make this public exchange as brief and clear as possible, omitting to ask how he knew her craft or identity, how he knew of this specific need. 'I'll trade; he returned a similar format, 'Imperate seed.' She said, 'Much care, root can get dangerous.' He said, 'With care. Sparing.' By now she was no longer looking towards him but straight ahead again. And they set a time and place and she said she would send a child. 'Your name; she said, 'for the child.' 'Balkacz.' "She had described it for me repeatedly. Its height, its leaves, its smell, the color and texture of the bark. The taste before and after its preparation. I had tried to envision and imagine and translate as best I could and record it all in my still halting script. I was using a length of soft white cotton to write on in small numbered columns, a wrap to be worn among my several layers. She had told me, rather than taught me as she usually did, how to prepare the Mori bark extract. Now, she could show me and supervise my practice. It was nothing like I had imagined.

"She let me practice without limiting times or quantities despite the small, precious store. It was all for me. She had done without for years, she said. I would need the knowledge to be able to use the Mori when I reached the interior. The hem of the herb-chart wrap was meanwhile becoming my storeroom. Li Fu-tze and I were gradually sewing tiny packets of seeds into its breadth, which I would then inscribe with the identifying sign we had chosen for each. The cotton would allow them air enough to prevent rot, but I would need to keep them constantly dry. "Five months later he was back. This time he sent her a sliver of bark wrapped in a piece of cloth and told the servant an hour and place beyond a turn in the alleyway that the servants' gate opened onto. She went to meet him herself and took a packet of seeds. He nodded when she approached. It was still dark near dawn. She nodded back and stretched out her hand with

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

113

the seeds and said, 'Imperate and Alisma and Perilla.' He exchanged them for the bark and she asked, 'How far?' He answered, 'I am fast. Very far.' She asked, 'Tangut?' And he said, 'Yes and even from near Manzi.' She said, 'You know the ways and move alone?' He said, 'Often alone.' 'And you use these yourself?' 'A little I use when I recognize someone's symptoms. Most I trade with master healers.' 'How do you know them?' 'I hear. People you have treated.' 'You know the danger.' 'Less for me. But yes. I don't speak of you or your likes. But I hear.' 'Do you need food?' 'I can always use some.' 'Are you long in Tabriz?' 'I never know.' 'I can send a child here at dusk today with food.' Til be here."' "So there he is," Chava says. "Trading to travel. An inversion of the Viglionis' travelling to trade. Getting by. You know, making it. On minimum means and and sidestepping, uh getting by, prohibitions. He was trading in the margins, with uh with the exiles and the slaves and the un-stripped emigrants who were you know denied access to the substances of home, with the keepers of transplanted, illegalized bodies of knowledge and knowledge of bodies. As part of what it meant to him to move freely. Not only through land but through laws. And as a service to the kind of people he understood. The people who who navigated the cracks in official, respectable society and had to stay essentially invisible to do so. And Li Fu-tze with her witch's sight knew him for who he was." "This time;' Caterina says on page fifty-one, "she gave me only a small amount of bark to take extract from. She didn't need to supervise the process. I did it alone. She divided the extract into two vials, one to use and the other to add to my travel store. And she kept the rest of the precious bark in her own store. '"Will you be able to bring me Mori every few months? Or even once a year?' she asked him on their next pre-dawn meeting. 'I will be able to try. Usually I can get to where I want. But at times I have to change what I want:

114

FOURTH VISIT

'Do you know I have a student, a young apprentice?' 'None have spoken that.' 'A daughter of my master.' 'Venetian.' 'Yes.' 'She is in growing danger. She should leave. Could you take her?' ·'Into the interior? A Venetian?' 'Our knowledge is better recognized there. She is gifted.' 'Does she ride?' 'She has learned from Her Highness Cocachin.' 'But not distances?' 'No distances. Where could she go.' 'Does she want to leave?' 'She wants to travel.' "I can tell their conversations word for word because I made her tell them to me every time she came back, over and over and over again. Like a new chant of vastness their words pulsed through me, making me breathless with longing to go. From the first bit of Mori bark bringing us scents of faraway forests I had memorized every word of his, every small thing my amah could tell me, every attitude of hand or eyebrow. And his name became to me, itself, a vista of distant places, a mountaintop view of endless lands. A pull.'' Not so different from how it was, for June when she didn't know what to do next, when this man came and, as it happened, was a way out as well as a count. She hadn't known what to do, she says, and she had fasted to find some guidance. And then she had broken her fast and gone up the California mountain with a friend, Nijinsky's daughter, who apparently danced herself, to dance together and commune and ask advice. And she had danced on the mountain and then at some point she had simply known that she had to go straight to the house where a man was lecturing on India and Greece, this man who she'd almost forgotten that someone had said she should meet. She says, "I thought, 'Now this is it. Who is this?'"

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN

115

FIFTH VISIT: THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

HE WASN'T HANGED.

The prosecution prescribed hanging. But he wasn't

hanged. He was barred from teaching. She says he was acquitted, so this must have been an unofficial measure of some kind, taken by the university on its own initiative. To be on the safe side no doubt. But then, about a year later, there was an appeal. By the prosecution. Unprecedented. Unheard of. And a second trial. She's trying to recollect the details. Or actually maybe to collect them for the first time. She doesn't really know too much about that period, she says. She was barely an adolescent while her father was on trial, and she apparently spent part of the time sent away from home. The memories are jumbled and vague. After she apologizes for her poor English, Ellen says, "Now I am reget that I haven't asked more about the time after thirty-third uh after thirty till forty-five. Now I'm regret that. I don't know why hav- I haven't asked. Uhm but I think it is also a little the education and the time Nazi time that we picked up, there were some taboos and we must learn to overcome these taboos." Her voice is audibly incredulous as she says, "Never I have known how much my father has earned. Never! Only after his death! We have never asked how how much you you you receive." This is the question she picks to illustrate the taboos deeply internalized in Nazi times. "He has

had money, mostly. Only one time was very critical but this we have known uh uh by chance. Because we must pay our house in Munchen a second

116

time. Because I have told you this house was Jewish house and he has paid it and after war after all the money was uhm the new in in forty-eight there's was new money;' in Germany after World War Two, "and no one has sssspared money and then the son of this family came from England and then said, 'Where's the money of this house?' And my father could show all the accounts from the bank that he has paid all but the money was gone to the Nazi government but we must pay once more and that was a hard time for our family. I have heard by chance because my mother was in hospital uh and she there was a can- cancer operation and he she said, crying, that they have no money to pay this operation. Because of and then the professor had said, 'You are the wife of my colleague mustn't pay.' So only in this context I have heard about our financial problem of the family. And I was in these," she shifts to German to calculate to herself, "I was twenty twentythree yes? The parents hasn't spoken with us about financial problems!" She's consciously, self-consciously, searching for words all through our talking, so her speech is very slow. She's visibly unsure and persistently apologetic. Her accent has the softened v's and shortened e's of Germanized English. 'Sefn' for seven; very dissolving into 'wery'; interesting with the emphasis on the next-to-the-last 'es'. Her intonation keeps rising near the ends of sentences, making it sound as if she's questioning everything she says. And her answers are often fragmentary, half sentences, leaning heavily on the cues of the other half of the conversation. Over the years when we're meeting and talking, Ellen lives on her own in a small village in Germany. She grows most of her own food, fruits, vegetables, nuts. She writes-both poetry and political essays-and puts a good deal of her time into political activism. Later, hours later, we're talking about loving. Did she love him. Did she love this man? "Not so much;' she says simply. "He he was my father, he was the authoritete," that's how she pronounces it. "He we haven't never had so uhm uh connections per- uh very personal connections. He was a man a scientist and uh famous and so he was not so much a father to us when we were children. So I cannot say that there was so much love between us." Before that she has said, "We have many many years we have had nearly no contact. He was far away and I was far away and I was with my family.'' Her husband and two children. "Never he has visited o - our house he has given to us, never. He said, 'I... I'm happy that you are happy there so."' And at some point later on she says, "We were only once together in the house of

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

117

my parents in Tubingen and only once in Spain in the summer house of my parents. During the eigh- ninetieth birthday of my father." Part of the time we're talking under the big distinctively scented fig tree growing right up against the wall around the little patio in back of my house. The figs are disappointing-inedible-and drop off one by one and attract hovering gnats. Still, it's full of birds and long loud phrases of their chirpings and shrilling accompany the whole length of our taped conversation. When we start she says, 'Tm sixty-seven. Uh I was born in twenty... seven. The eighth of October. In Tubingen, a university town in the southern part of Germany. When I wa- we moved in forty-eight. I was mmm not yet not ... yet eleven. Because my father has received uhm mmm" "A position? An appointment?" "Yes an appointment to the university in Munich. As Romanist. He was a linguist ... ic." She must have meant thirty-eight. She was eleven in thirty-eight. Maybe she really would have liked the decade she accidentally skipped to drop out of existence. In any case, at some point before or after thirty-eight her father, a German professor, said he was against the war. He thought and said publicly that it shouldn't be fought. That is, in Germany, around 1938. He was charged for treason. Re-hearing the story now, while I transcribe it from tape and retell parts of it, I realize not only what I already realized then, while Ellen was talking-that on some accounts, her father could have been called a minor hero-but also that such accounts are overridden by what she has called "the education and the time-Nazi Nazi time-that we picked up, some taboos." For one, the taboo against asking or knowing, "What did your father do in the war?" just in case, no matter what. So that seeing or telling him as a minor hero couldn't have even occurred to her. And neither could trying to reconstruct a clear, orderly history of what he said and did during this time, this Nazi time. On the highway from Hamburg to Berlin, while Ellen and I take turns driving, I actually overstep a form of this taboo. I ask her whether he opposed and spoke against the racism, the racist laws, the racist violence, or just against the war. I ask her whether he knew about the systematic murdering. She doesn't know. Whether he ever talked about any of this. She can't remember. Over those years, she says, there were extended periods when she was sent away. At other times he was the one who was gone-in hiding. My

118

FIFTH VISIT

questions and her halting answers start her out on a new research program about which she still writes me from time to time. Her father was acquitted by the appeals court too. But he couldn't teach. Towards the end of the war, there seemed to be some chance that he might get conscripted. He fled and went into hiding. Somewhere outside of Munich, Ellen says. So he never served in the army. But he was an explorer. Crossing land to capture knowledge rather than people, places or palaces. Not necessarily less of an adventurer than a soldier. Not conclusively less of a conquerer. He was a discoverer. Ellen says, "He was often by feet or uhm riding on an ass or a by bus-when he was a young man. So he know every place every village there up in the mountain:' In Italy. More specifically southern Italy and Sicily. And as Ellen puts it, "There was uhm language i - islands. That ... " "When he was young he went by... " "By foot or by ass. By a donkey, riding on a den- donkey. Or going by the bus of the uh uh indigenous people of the ... " "And these language islands ... " "He he has found that it was really ancient Greek. And he has proved it." Proved that ancient Greek was spoken in the early twentieth century, in the mountain villages of Sicily and southern Italy. "Uhm in the you know Italy it was just uh Secile, Secile," that's how she pronounces it, "Sicilian, the Sicile and just on this part and on the other. That was uh Italy looks like a shoe. So at the end of this shoe the one side," she's using her finger to draw an invisible map on the table. "Yes, toe and the heel. Just in these parts there were were still some of Greek islands from the antique. Above in the mountains. Not o - on the coast. And he found it as a uh when he was a student." "And he worked on the same thing all his life?" "Uh uhm yes also in Greek," she means Greece, "and also in Creta and on some islands, Greek islands:' He worked on Greek islands and on islands of Greek. Islands of the speech of the ancients-kept intact, kept insular by the barriers of mountains and difficult passes and the poverty or rootednessof the mountain people of southern Italy and Sicily. Language preserved by the geographically pre-plotted lives of rural generations. Through tiny landlocked and snail-changing locations he travelled time a thousand years back in an instant. To a form of ancient Greek no longer existent in Greece itself. I wonder whether conquerors can come on buses. "Within this type of knowledge specimens are named by Europeans and extracted from their en-

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

119

vironment;" says Sara Mills, in her piece, Knowledge, Gender, and Empire, on page 34 of the book Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, edited by Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, and published by The Guilford Press, in 1994. "In the process of naming them and setting them within a classificatory system, they are transformed from chaos into an order that is European. Thus those writers who produce scientific knowledge are fundamentally connected to European imperial expansion and the promotion of a view of the world that sees European activities as fundamentally civilizing. Knowledge here is given the appearance of a simple neutral endeavor at an individual level, but in fact it is very much part of the imperialism; in this way, scientific knowledge can present itself as free from the taint surrounding the commercial and political expansion that it underwrote." She adds, "The naturalist figure may have had some appeal to women travelers." Ellen says, "Mostly he he knows where he nearly in each village he knows a person. Or he's going to a uhm coffee;' she shifts to German, talking to herself in the next phrase, looking for the word, "to a bar where where always old men sitting round. So and he sit down and then he asked and that wethey were interested more often they were interested, sometimes not because they wanted to play. Cards. Uh always going to the mayor and asked or to a pharmacy and asked, 'To whom I can go? Who knows? Who can answer these questions?' And so:' Looking for those who knew the words. Chava says, "There there are a couple of characters she's actually made up on her own. Ca- Caterina's made up." As there are a couple of characters that I too have made up among us, the women at the talking house. Chava says, "She didn't have very much time to learn the standard letter forms and there uh I guess there wasn't much of of other peoples' writing for her to learn from, just her father's ledgers and how do you call it s t - stock-taking? And business letters. And maybe some personal writing of his or maybe he was copying passages, poetry, whatever. That's possible. It would have been one of the ways for the family to have things to read. And she could probably copy a few of the the uh paper bills that the II-Khan Kaikhatu introduced into Persia in 1294. Just after he came into power. Not too long before Caterina left the uh her home. While she was preparing or and Li Fu-tze was preparing her. Those banknotes the uh paper notes they actually went out of circulation about it it was about two or a couple of months later, after the new papermoney system had h - almost destroyed the economy there completely and. The bills had inscriptions on them. In this kind of merchant Italian that

120

FIFTH VISIT

Venetian and Genoese traders used, underneath the major ones that were i - in Turkic ones not no, they weren't in Chinese. Those were in China. In China the paper money system worked. But here it just it totally collapsed. It was just Kaikhatu's title and the sums. "She probably didn't have access to any books in in the language she was learning to read and write. If her father if he had books he probably locked them away somewhere and. Books were uhm really expensive and precious. And usually they were heavy an- and like big. You didn't take them with you to sit and read you more often you came to read them near the place the cupboard or something they were kept in. So and she prac- learned and drilled the uh basics pretty fast and then she had t - to leave. So she had this minimal basis I guess but no ... means of checking, of correcting mistakes. So I uh I imagine;' the sound is slurred here near the end of this tape and there's probably a gap of a few sentences before the start of the next one. "mis-remembered the alphabet or maybe she thought she had missed some letters. And she made up characters for two common phonemes, these recurring sound units that are ... that you're supposed to use two letters to inscribe them. The right the standard way I mean." "It does seem natural to assume that whoever writes a text of any substantial length must know how to write, and write well," Armando says on page 77. "But it is not a fact of nature ... at least, not always and not in its entirety. In practice, the connection between writers and writing is never so absolutely and clearly definable as is usually thought, with clear boundaries between literates and illiterates." On page 79 he describes informal writing, which "is not easily reduced to any particular type because it is executed awkwardly and roughly so that it falls outside the norms. One can plausibly attribute these scripts to writers with a fairly low level of graphic education." In fifteenth-century Italy, he says on page 198, the new literates, "were 'restricted by knowing only the vernacular; and "wrote mercantesca;' or mercantile Franco-Venetian. These men and very few women, who had recently and sparingly achieved some writing according to their culture and customs, were without any formal training and sometimes invented parts of notations, in effect creating private scripts. "In 1453;' Armando says, "Enea Silvio Piccolomini reproached one of his correspondents who was guilty of having written him in an incomprehensible script." Chava's saying, "She Caterina also-maybe I'm all wrong. Maybe she did it on purpose. Like kind of a code. I don't think she wanted to hide stuff

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

121

from Balkacz but it it's clear from the uh journal that she was ... like keeping her privacy and. Writing to herself. It wasn't this kind of open letter or anything this writing of hers. They didn't discuss what she was writing. At least there's no mention of that. Actually in in fact I guess the opposite is pretty clear at some points. That she uh sh- she describes how it she did it in private even though they were living travelling at such close quarters. He had to know she was writing the journal. There was no way he could have been unaware of this not small sheaf of uh paper and she'd have needed to get inks or uh dyes. But she didn't share it. She could have wanted to keep that freedom of writing stuff he wouldn't be able to read. That is a possibility. "Uh another one maybe it's more likely is that she was uhm afraid of authorities. Mainly of her records of where she planted seeds and stuff, of that maybe being captured and read by some authorities. So she trained herself to write everything in in private script:' I'm translating from the Hebrew that Chava and I are using, except when she's quoting from some source in English. Her accent when she does is heavily Israeli, with guttural 'r's and 'z' instead of'th'. She seems sheepish about it and swallows a lot of the words. "Anyway;' she's saying in her Hebrew and my English, "it was pure hell to figure out these extra letters. They threw me off whole words and whole sentences and in fact at some point I actually s started doubting whether I was reading the language I I thought I was. It was like listening to a conversation fade into gibberish and back into, you think, words, but staying just slightly beyond what's understood, as if maybe there's something wrong with you. With your hearing or your brain or or something. And part of the time you're even sure you are understanding something, but what?" The questions to be asked, Ellen explains, in the coffee houses where her father asked old men to lay down cards and answer, "were about the dialect. Sometimes he has ha- prepared uhm not anecdotes but... proverbs. In Italian. And then he wanted that they translate this proverbs in their dialect. So I think that once we have had uhm six dialects but he has thirty proverbs and then in five six conflations. That was once. He has begun in the Alps in Switzerland and then in Toscana and then also" "Sound or vocabulary?" "Both, both. And he has his own uh writing." His own notation for recording the spoken relics of Greek civilization, in the mountain villages of southern Italy.

122

FIFTH VISIT

"Did yo- did he record?" "No. He he doesn't like he writes all the time. He wasn't accustomed to-" "Machines?" "No no no. We tried to tell him that's better. 'Oh no I'm accustomed to write it at once.' And so." He preferred this script of his own making at the disappearing point where territory and language met and merged, where lost phonemes and meanings lived on by location. His private invented script for capturing an insular, almost private, speech. Preserving in a novel, written form the discovered preservation of ancient speech forms. Chava says about the script of the manuscript, "But th- there were some one or two really basic, simple words that had these characters in them the uh these signs that Caterina invented so so after a while I caught on and. "But all this time I couldn't stop thinking that... whether Mickie could answer some, any, of my questions. I mean here he was so absent. So uhm like noticeably, extremely absent given that that I was left holding all all this wonder. All these in- credulous questions. And he was ... off somewhere. Faraway. I wanted to ... go." There was no way she could report him missing she says. His mother didn't seem to feel he was, and Chava didn't want to alarm her. She was unsure of her footing. There wouldn't be any way to explain to the police why this time, of all the other ones, Mickie's absence qualified as missing. Because she thought so? Or, more precisely,felt so? She wasn't even sure she did. She knew she had this powerful urge to go and maybe find him. She felt the need to look. To go and look for herself. She was dying to "grab and cross-examine him by the collar," she keeps calling it. "Besides," she says, "who uh wh- could I possibly be to the police? Not wife. Not relative. Not even uhm unmarried you know mother of his kid." Her voice is getting progressively louder here, "What kind of pos- status could I claim? Curious and worried soul-mate? I hadn't even known he'd left before I phoned his mother and. And I didn't want to report the manuscript. Not till it got authenticated. That could could really get me committed to some ... institution." While she waited to see if she'd suddenly hear from Mickie, Chava got caught up in cramming the basics of ancient manuscript scholarship and preservation and restoration. And slowly, gingerly she started trying to read the journal. She began a correspondence with two of the authors whose books she was reading. She asked them a lot of details about scripts and characters. She was trying to figure out the code. But she didn't want to say

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

123

anything about the manuscript yet. "It felt too dangerous and too too uh whacky. Both:' Over a year after she'd picked it up that day, nonchalantly, at Mickie's mother's place, she finally figured out the notation system. She started making sense of the journal. It wasn't very long after that, she says, that she started thinking of it as a map. It had to be. "He didn't write it," Chava says, "Mickie didn't write the book but I'm clear he he's using it to say something. To signal. He's definitely got something to tell me. I mean it's not just me asking him questions. It's more than that it and. Leaving me with such an uh enormous event and just leaving, just like that, are-;' she uses the Hebrew expression for "incompatible" which literally means "don't sit down together." There was no sitting down, she says. He had to mean something and she had to get up and go and find out what. Or at least where. By way of explaining, she reads a piece of her written annotations to the Book of Balkacz. Unedited. Fully intact on the tape. Translated by me, not Irit, into English, with Chava's permission. I interrupt her specifically. "Is it all right do you can I use it? Quote it? I mean it's part of your work. The thinking you're doing about the manuscript, like the theory of your work process. After all you are an academic. You need t - you publish stuff. It's not even the t r - journal. Your uh hypotheses about what you're doing. I don't know... academic credit uh rights. Integrity. Unfinished work. Out of context. Stuff like that. Is is it okay?" "I I don't uh I mean you're quoting it as me you're quoting me. So ... ? And the fact that it's not uhm sealed and and final yet that's just part of what I'm saying. Yeah l publish. Not yet I will I uh have to. Want to too I guess. Anyway I will. Don't worry. But it won't the piece won't be the same by then anyway and. It's thinking. It moves it uh changes. Any-" ''I'm worried about you know I'm also worried about copyright. You know legal p - permission to uhm quote this. So there won't be any problems with a publisher when this book uh ... " "Well here it is on tape. It's not part of the actual the uh translation so the university doesn't have any rights. It's mine. And believe me nobody will print it. Not this way. Not the way it is. Here so here they are. The rights. I'm giving you authorizing you to quote it. Verbatim." She pronounces the term in Latin in her Hebrew accent. This is a translated excerpt from Chava's comments about the manuscript: "The book is changing shape in front of my eyes, moving from the

124

FIFTH VISIT

traditional literary space of works as free-standing, separate entities, to a different species of space. A harem maybe. Maybe a witches' cave. Bubble, toil and trouble. "Witchart re-discovers the umbilical bond between a work and its maker. Reads in a text a direct and intentional statement of a creator, a living speaker, with a singular and unconcealed face. Trouble making art. Law breaking art. Resisting the commandment of irony that the culture of western patriarchy has imposed on products of personal expression. "Under the law of irony, what is good in art is written (and therefore obviously read) for its underlying meaning. In other words for its other words. Not to be taken literally, the written words. In what is good art they are merely circumstantial evidence for what is hidden and hinted with intricate sophistication beyond and against what is visible. What is good doesn't state directly, it conveys. What is good cons. "Under the arch, urbane irony law, real, innocent, direct sentences about life are not done. Not in literature. They are in philosophy. A little. Sometimes. With care. They are in physics but mean very little to most people. They are in pop music. Not in literature. Not done. Immature. Unsophisticated. Ridiculous, embarrassing. Know this: conning is always to be preferred to embarrassing. "I consider irony a tool of violence. It keeps the truths to itself and now let's see you find them out. Cunt. It manipulates whoever is trying to understand. It doesn't deal out information freely and equally to all. It's an entrance exam, a prize-winning quiz, an executive game. And it sets up a partition between the writer and the words she is writing. The curse of irony blunts the edge of personal expression, which becomes more guarded and less risky. And irony in this broad sense, as a requirement excluding candidates for the title of'good' art, was born of the masculine need to sheath personal parts in an insulating layer. So that even intimate and rectum-tearing acts like (some of) poetry can be carried out in relative personal safety. It's the poem speaking from a page. The contrived voice. Not me. "I adhere, instead, to the principle of bewitching words, which are acting words, impacting words, reality-changing words, practical words. To the direct action of a giver, a speaker, upon a hearer, a receiver. And vice versa. To making words as making worlds. And the book changes before my eyes into the speech of a singular, specific, actual I directed to me. Singular, specific, actual. I. And my reading in a mirror image of the direct address tries to pro-

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

125

duce a practical, tangible action stepping out into physical space, of doing, beyond understanding." She decided to try the Sinai. Chava says the Sinai had been her first impulse anyway. Mickie had usually spent a lot of time down there. And if she was viewing the manuscript as, in some way, a map, and if she was assuming that Mickie somehow intended her to follow it, and supposedly, hopefully to follow him, it was dear that Sinai would be the easiest place for her to begin. "Going overland. Due south. Basically I mean. You know no uh airports or or escalators or sliding doors;' she laughs. "I uh well I had to wait to see what would happen with the manuscript too. By this time the restorator had it in a special case and she'd provided me with a few sheets of facsimiles. Of the first part and. She was using them to you know with the letters she was circulating to get the university to invest in authenticating the thing. I couldn't have gone anywhere before I got its-safe. Right at the beginning for a few months I was actually having trouble just leaving home. Even to to go to work or something. I g - got kind of paranoid. "But when I just simply knew at some point that I would be going to the Sinai but I had to wait and and deal with stuff. But I knew I'd go eventually. Partly it had to do with the uhm desert parts of the manuscript. So much desert in it. It ... it's so clear that it's the desert is the base. It's funny, it's not really easy to hide in the desert be- because you're so completely dependent on water holes. No matter how big it is you need to uh visit them and. They're definitely not big and people, a lot of times people have to meet each other there. Or at least leave traces and uhm memories. Although of course if you keep your visits at uh to them short you can you're sort of hiding in time, in pockets of time away from water holes and from meeting ... places. People;' there's a slur on the tape at this point, "still leave traces. "But Balkacz he still knows how to uh avoid ... and the desert is where he keeps going back to:' Most of the time she refers to him in present tense. "To not to hide exactly. More drop out of sight. Not uhm ... account. Have to answer to anybody. And his medicinals make him I guess necessary enough to some people to be able to skip questions too. N - not to kind of expect to get his story and." "And you didn't, Ellen, I mean didn't you talk to people just about themselves, about their life story or... " "A little too. So. Not so much:' Ellen answers. "He was interested in just

126

FIFTH VISIT

this." I wonder what she was interested in but I don't interrupt her. "And in some places he has friends and then we were invited and then that was more familiar and so:' "But usually you'd like spend an hour or two with a person or two or three people and then you'd go on to the next village:' "Yes. Yes. Most most with some peoples because one was cor- able to correct the other. So he has also three four peoples." Male people. Those with free access to public gathering places like coffee houses. Those who knew the words. Those who made the worlds. "Had I been a Greek woman;' says Nancy Mairs on page 102 of her book Plaintext, which you've already read from, on the second visit, "I would never have entered the agora:' She means an ancient Greek woman, in the Greece where the obsolete forms of speech traced to Italy by Ellen's father, still held currency. Where the agora, the marketplace, was-Nancy has said just before-"the spot where citizens assemble to discuss and vote on matters of the city-state:' Had she been a Greek woman, she says next, "I would not, in fact, have left my house. I would not have been a citizen except in name." Ellen's father, she says, "was known since fifty years in these uhm villages, villages far away in the mountains in south Italy. And he was the German man there." Laughing as she says this, she may be recalling these unimaginably unchanging places where, in the early twentieth century, a single returning visitor could evolve into generic German. Perhaps even, in a way, into generic citizen. Free to leave and return. Authorized to discuss and determine matters public. To define and classify the very medium of public disussion, the language. "The authoritete;' as you've read Ellen put it. "And sometimes when we were coming to this of one of these villages, said, 'Ahhh you are Professor Rohlfs! Yes, we know you since a lot of time."' "The Authentic Habita," Eric J, Leed says, "granted by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I to all scholars within the dominions of the empire, at the request of the doctors of law at the schools of Bologna in 1158, was the first charter of academic freedom, a freedom rooted in the right of free departure and unrestricted travel:' This is on page 153 of his book, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, published by BasicBooks, in 1991. The Habita, he goes on below, "granted scholars a supraterritorial status, and this status became the property of scholars as a group and of the universitasan institution identical with their collective person." And on page 154, "Because the scholars were the universities, these were mobile institutions."

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

127

Mobile and tortoise-shared, going wherever we go. Our talking house is also our learning house. Made of and for our learning. Of and for our talking, our word-made world. Life accommodating, it doesn't confine us. Its walls are moving, shifted like a pregnancy from secret inner places, imperceptibly growing. Mapping us moving. "Imagine a plurilocated, fluid space that tries to acknowledge difference," Alison and Gillian are asking us in Women's Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, their joint introduction to Writing Women and Space, on page 7· They're asking us to imagine it because, they say, "No feminist today can innocently represent all women, and so the position from which any feminist speaks must be continually interrogated and relocated as circumstances change." As I cannot innocently represent even the women who make up this house. As I can only represent small scintillating fragments of them, only those parts which I'm able or which I choose to elicit from the living, fluid, process of change that is each of them. Knowing all the while that while I presume to transmit their voices, I use them as an amplifier of my own. Use an imaginary "we" where the real we has never met, never ever convened all at once at any one house. Would probably never choose to. And actually couldn't-not physically-because some of us are fictions. "We;' then, are here, wherever you place this moving "here" for the moment, studying our ability to move. To purposely relocate. Here examining, comparing, telling, our distinct, distinctive, different selfpropelled movements. Physical, geographical. Chin or arm. Steps or bike. The Book of Balkacz page seventy-four: "Balkacz had told me, 'This winter we will ride the desert. Study its safety: We followed its fringes. Riding in and out of the bare land, taking a dry gully two nights in, hiding from the height of the sun, taking direction by sky marks on the icy cold clear nights and riding by the moon, taking direction by the land marks in daylight, of the gully walls before they flattened into scattered rock formations. Then following the pointings of the rock formations. Sleep in the shadow of a slight wave of ground. And riding back again along the same route now following my lead, my learning. We were gauging the depth of desert outskirts-how far to human stores of food and water, how far from noticed, registered sojourn. How able for how long to stay unknown, unneeding, and where. Under ledges of rock, in short pieces of gully appearing suddenly and leveling off fast into flat heights, their drop invisible from either flank. If nothing else, in the shadow of a dune. And back out to where the herds began to graze the thin gray-green. Perforating the desert shell, we went chanting its songs.

128

FIFTH VISIT

Forwards going in, inverted going out, ever to a steady, repeated piece of tune, memorizing sky mark and land mark to the rhythm of hoofs. He had brought me back a fresh stallion. I was terrified." From the translated Book of Balkacz, page seventy-three: "I was riding well. It was the second winter of our riding. I had stayed the summer on the high ground, with the clan that traded me summer tent, food, protection, water and grazing for my horse, in return for my healing. Their young leader suffered constant running pains along his two left limbs and left lower back and had had no relief for several years. I knew from the first that he was not in danger of death and that neither would I so be, if my healing were to fail. But I eased his pain. Staying the season, I tended the seed beds I planted in the spring till they bloomed and seeded and I could renew my store and prepare my powders and salves. My amah had taught me by heart the names of each place of the interior where every seed grew wild. But that was yet unthinkably far. Not all the plants I used could grow in the high ground, and along our route there, I had sown hidden beds." Secret enclaves of ancient stuffs and meanings. Of tangential grasses to those who did not know, of a complete medicine to those few who did. Loci of purposeful preservation. "We agreed that on his return journey north Balkacz would find these and harvest them. I listed each on my cotton hem ledger and he later memorized sites and plant-types. I sowed more than one of the most important, in case some were ruined or he couldn't get to them. The harvesting times of one bed after another would draw him steadily north east to reach the high grounds just before winter. And I stretched my body through the summer from the long ride, in warmth and light clothing. And I practiced writing:' And the Book of Balkacz, page seventy-eight: "After the harvests, we seemed to have no particular destination. That was our greatest strength." Ellen says, "He in uhm he has written me, 'I want to go to these places.' And then every day he says, 'So so tomorrow we will go there and so: He has had always a very exact plan plan. To go around." "And you knew the plan?'' "Yes. I have known the plan sometimes changed some a little, it depends so. But mostly I I have known the plan. Yes:' And Caterina goes on saying, on page thirty-five of the translation, "We carried some food, dates, jerky, flour to bake flat-breads, needed little, and knew edible leaves and stems and roots and snared small rodents and sometimes lizards. Among humans, my preparations were bartered for more food

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

129

or fuel or ink when required. Our blankets were light and warm but heavily stained and rolled always with torn edges outward, to ensure bandits of our meager means. Though we rode the winter, we did not carry tents." As Eric says on page 154, "Poverty was the primary source of the scholar's power;' or in this case of the healer's. "Of their ability to force communities, kings, and popes to secure their material existence and the conditions necessary for study. Their wealth consisted in a few books and the fees they were able to command for their exegesis of the texts." Or for their healing, as the case may be, of clients most often poorer than popes and kings, more dependent on unauthorized healing. The Book of Balkacz, on the same page, "We had and carried with us no safe conduct emblems but each of us wore seed pod necklaces as a curers' sign and a signal of no arms. Although not everywhere was it known." This is one of the passages Chava has read out loud during our talking, pretty early on. Here she suddenly broke off and said, "It could be the uh the last sentence could be translated to mean that Caterina's saying it was a uhm secret, sort of u - an underground sign. A secret sign to get them safe passage by identifying with uhm like secret dissenting groups. The phrase well there are different ways to understand it and. I've been thinking of Caterina in terms of of uh openly and uh simply broadcasting her non-violent, beneficial skill. Her healing knowledge. On page 56 of The Travels of an Alchemist, Waley's translation says, 'At night towards the far end of the Pass they met with a band of robbers. But learning who it was the fellows bowed and withdrew, saying they had no wish to disturb the Master.' The uh lay society Caterina moves in;' the tape ends here and the next one seems to pick up just a sentence or two later, "her skill and mostly uhm su- supportive and sympathetic and. But in Marco Polo's Asia, Leonardo Olschki says on page 419, that, 'Marco confirms and observes the distinction, current since ancient times, which both in regulatory legislation and in the exercise of professional practice clearly separated the popular and superstitious medicine from the legitimate and officially recognized science."' She's reading very fast, impatiently, in the semi-mechanical tone of quickly listing tedious or obvious facts. In her almost comic Hebrew accent. "'Thus only approved physicians were permitted to gather and make use of herbs for therapeutic purposes, and to practice their art as a professional service. As we have seen, a special branch of the imperial administration was at that time charged with the control of public health.' Et cetera et cetera.

130

FIFTH VISIT

And the uh literal words of this passage in Caterina's journal ca- can actually maybe mean something like, 'Although not open to all places' or 'not revealed to all.' Which would have meant that maybe their freedom of travel, Caterina's, Balkacz's, their freedom from from harassment like from some robbers-actually maybe outlaws of a different kind, not not to exaggerate, but more of uhm Robin Hoodish kind of wa- was maybe much more dependent than I've made it on like outlaw rebels like these loose forms of organizing uh outside of and against the rulers." "I don't understand. At least I'm not sure I... " ''I'm sorry. I'm rushing around I guess. I I'll slow down and explain." "Wait a minute. What you you're saying is that one way of understanding it is that everyone recognized and respected the uh this emblem of healers. What were they-seed pods, right?" "Yah. Exactly. And" "Virtually everyone including for instance robbers, right?" "Uh-huh. Well mostly and" "And the other way of that you might read it would be that it was like a secret insignia of a kind of what? Un- underground?" "Yes. That's it.'' "That's quite a difference.'' "Yes. Yes, it is." "You mean they were either she was either like this uh individual wanderer of choice, more or less, or I guess like part of a social movement?" "Yah." In 'the interior,' inside China, for instance, Luc Kwanten says on page 218 of his book Imperial Nomads: A History of Central Asia soo-1500, published by Leicester University Press in 1979, "secret societies, many of which had a Buddhist foundation, presented a serious risk of rebellion." And, on page 219, "The religious institutions, especially those in China proper, became centers for antidynastic agitation." The passage from the Book of Balkacz goes on, "Sometimes we preferred to walk for days leading the horses, lightly spreading the often bare soles of our feet over crusts of ground or rock spines or dipping them in sand. If we were not riding through the night, we would begin our search for a cave-mouth, an overhanging rock, a gully, a sheltering dune, soon after midday and sometimes before. We rode where we were attracted or thought convenient. Fast or slow as we chose at the moment, and never against the weather. With three horses, at least one resting

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

131

through every stretch. For the third, the stallion, Balkacz had bartered a quantity of Mori extract, that I specially prepared at his request and gave him to trade back in the south, nearer Tabriz. The stallion's back right leg was malformed and some amount shorter than the rest, and the uneven gait caused a chronic sore over his front left leg, which I treated every morning. Although this had made him affordable and kept him as unattractive to robbers as our two very old mares of dwindled milk, Balkacz said he was a strong and excellent horse, tended right. I refused to ride him. 'You have ridden through the winter and you have acquired distance. You have stealth also, and direction. What do you fear?' Balkacz asked. I told him, 'My fear.' He waited. 'My faltering confusion. My weakness to break away from, and run away with.' The stallion was not yet full-grown. Balkacz said, 'He is young so as to learn your hand and seat and voice.' 'But I am the young child, small to his spirit and speed,' I said. 'You will learn them as he will learn yours; Balkacz answered. I did not." Ellen says, "I was the driver." "And you were not choosing you were not making the choices?" "No, no. That's only on returning when he has finished his work then he said, 'So now we have time, do you want to see something on our way home?'" She's laughing here as she seems to at times when either her story or her father have assigned her little-girl status. She wasn't laughing earlier, though, when she said, "Uh this uh the trips with my father we have began together after his eight- when he was eighty. More than eighty years old. And then I was ... forty-three I think so it was seventy-two ... ah so seventy-three guess I was yes forty-five." Before that he had travelled with her mother until she died, and then with his second wife and then, once or twice, with her brother. "My father didn't know to drive a car," she has said. She was almost grave about my question, later, "Did you meet people?" She said, "Yes ... " hesitantly. "You alone?" "No. No, not. Uh always always with my father." "Never even had any conversations of your own when you went shopping or just walking?" . "No because my Italian was so so little I I couldn't. Sometimes I have spoken English or French but I was often oder mostly with my father." And before that she was matter-of-fact. "So you didn't know Italian?"

132

FIFTH VISIT

"No. And I haven't prepared I wanted to learn but I haven't had the time. Uhm but because I have known I have learned in school French and Latin so I was very astonished that very quickly I have understood nearly all. I under-

stood. But because I have such a good;' she starts laughing her little-girl laugh here, "uh uh uhm na my father knows Italian like German-interpreter-so I have never learned to speak Italian. Only very very little. But the language was no problem for me then after some weeks. So yes, because I was with him so but sometimes I I was buying for the picnic. Then I was alone:' And she laughs again. "But in hotels and all sorts of there was for me no no lang- no language problem." My question, "No language problem or no language?" stays unasked. But she seems to have had a language when she was travelling on her own. At some point she's describing her first trip alone. A trip she made before she started being her father's driver. "The my first voy- uh trip I've made that was in uh sixty-seven, the children must have a cure because they had;' there's some interference here, "bronchitis. Bronchitis," she pronounces the 'ch' as in 'chance.' "They said they must uhm a a cure you know on a northland north sea island for six weeks, and just in this moment I have had time. For six weeks." "Which island?" She answers with an unfamiliar German name. "It was the biggest one. I never was there. They were with other children. Only with other children." "You and your husband didn't go?" "No, my husband was working and I was going to Palestine. They went alone to this cure, yes uh with only children. That was only children cure. Without mothers and parents. There were children homes for such these children who are often ill about the bronchitis. Six weeks yes. And because I have had just in this time connection to a society who is helping the schools, the Lutheran schools in Bethlehem, Beth ]allah, Beth Sahur, and because I was interested in this problems of these uh uh of this country and ... albecause I was in this time I was a very persuaded Christian I wanted to know this Bib- Biblical uh country;' her laugh here sounds apologetic, embarrassed, but also ironic, "and I have had also lectures about this country;' she means she was giving lectures, "but I was never there. So they have said, 'You must go then. Ahh ... '" Here the recording is bad again, "the first time that I've travelled far away from at home and alone. By ship. And it was very interesting for me. I was

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

133

happy after ten years only to do with little children;' she is laughing here, "to see new things and to meet other persons and another culture and I was very happy to do this." "This was before you went with your father?" "Yes. That was in uh sixty-seven. And only in seventy-two I was going with my father. It was Jordanian in this time:' "Ah, it was before the war." The war between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Syria in 1967. "It was just before some some weeks before. I have returned on the sev-

enth of April that was the first clash between Syrian and Israel uh that aero" planes. I didn't know, I haven't heard. In this morning I was flying from Jerusalem," she pronounces it yerusalem, "to Beirut. But my family has heard about this and they were very anxious. But I uh nothing feeled, nothing heard, only afterwards. "I came to Jordan, Beirut to Beirut by ship, Alexandria again via Alexandria, Beirut by ship, and then with a very little uh aeroplane from Beirut to Kalandia in Jerusalem. So I have learned the situation of this land as Jordan and. And I was also in Tel-A- in Amman and Madaba because this family in to which I was invited they have relatives in Madaba and in Amman." "You weren't afraid? You were confident?" "Yes. Yes. Truly my language my English language was worse than now. But because I have had German friends there who they have learned German and the Palestinians who had spoken German so I have no problems and. Just it was a very new world, new culture, The Orient. Uh never seen until now. But I was with Christians in this first times and so I felt very well. It was very spontaneous. Because I have written to this society to which I was a little connected, I said, 'Now I have some weeks time, I can go but I have no

money: So they have given me this money because they have said, 'You are speaking about this work of the Lutheran churches and and and and ... for uh but... you arc speaking like a blind about the color. So you must learn it. So I was there and I was first interested in this work of this missionary work as the schools and the churches and also hmmm because of a Chri- I was Christian I was looking for the uh now I say so-called holy places for the Christians in Jerusalem and but I was going alone. In Jerusalem. In some places they were accompanied me but Jerusalem I have conquered from myself." Her laughing here sounds shy but proud, a different punctuation mark dian the little-girl one. "Conquered."

134

FIFTH VISIT

"From Beirut to Jerusalem;' she explains a little later, "I must do all myself I must fetch my uh my ticket in the midst of the town of Beirut and then I must go to the airport it was very difficult but uh it was huh. lt was the last ticket before Easter because I was later than ... so I received the last ticket to fly to jerusalem and in Jerusalem they waited for me since some days." "You were not worried about how you would manage?" "No, no, I thought always as I, 'Oh I I think it it will go it it will uh uh das geht gut uh.' Yes." She was to visit with the family of a teacher she had met in Germany. "His parents parents had large plantati- uh citrus plantation between Ramallah and and Lydda." The latter, now renamed Lod in the Hebrew that has overwritten the Palestinian Arabic, is the town nearest Israel's main international airport. The former is one of the towns in the Israeli occupied West Bank which Israel handed over to a Palestinian Authority in 1995. "And he has told me the history the story of his family. And so I have learned first the problems from the Palestinian side." For instance how his family, "after forty-eight they have lost all and they are Christians and they are going to Bethlehem," in Jordan when she was first there, in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel at the time we are speaking, in one more of the Israeli evacuated enclaves at the time I am writing. But as she was saying before, '"It will uh uh das geht gut uh.' Yes. Then there was uh the war and because I have told about this I have said, 'Now I must learn the other side.' And I've asked my father, 'Can you give me; the next year, 'Can you give me the money for another travel, now with a group? I must learn the other side, the Israelienne side, the Jewish side.' So I was once uh one nee noch ein mal uh once more in in the Jan- country but now in Israel. But I was not so content with this group. It costs not so much money and it was just in a time where my children must make an oilier cure. They said he they must do another cure for three weeks. Three or four weeks. So I haven't had the time so much but I have had just the time to go with one of tllese groups at this time." "These cures-they sound like maybe uhm more of a cure for the mother than a cure for the children. Do you think maybe the doctor knew this?" "No, uh no." "For me it's a very strange conception for to send away a... a nine year old?" "Then they were eh yes Erna was in school... and Dieter was coming just to school yes. They were no in fact seventy sixty-seven they were not in

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

135

school. But in sixty-eight they were and just we were just coming into Ler and after this cure you know it was better with them. It was not;' she sighs here, "my wish to make another journey but because the children have had the cure I've said, 'Now I have the time to to learn the other side. It's necessary. When I'm speaking about this country I must learn both sides.' And my father is giving me the money and so;' and she laughs here, "was uhm possible for me." But, "After this, two years after it, I have had a nervenzusammenbruch I have had a break down yes. Uhm because all was too too much for me." "What what all?" Her son, she explains, came down with meningitis. He was sick for a few weeks. When it was over, he was diagnosed as dyslexic. "He was intelligent in mathematics but he has much problems to write. Not so much in reading but to write." A little later, she says," I think he had it before but after this it was really recognized. And I was working with the boy and I," she's laughing here, "I need much patience with him and he doesn't like to work and to make his school:' And they moved to a new house, "and the changing from a flat to the house, and the garden and I have had four changes before." She's already described parts of these. "Because both children were born in one year and I was not;' here she searches to herself in German and then raises her voice back to conversation level, "ein embole uh during the birth uh during the second birth I have had embole;' she pronounces it with an 'ie' sound at the end, "so I was paralysed with my leg. Embole no no no it was a blood-" "Clot?" "Uh yes ... during the birth uh process there was something. And after it I had problems with my feet my left feet. So it was very difficult to have two little children, babies, two babies and nearly paralysed on one leg and very primitive flat. Uh no bathroom or a little bathroom, uh toilet only, for four families. It was very primitive in this village. Yes, Dieter's birth. It was very very difficult:' And a little later she's said, "And we lived upstairs and the stair was very steep and it was very difficult to go these stairs to my flat and then with two little babies it this was ve- very difficult time for me. So I have stopped to work it's uh ... ,"she laughs here as she's talking. "And you said there was one bathroom for?" "For uh one unmarried man and an old lady living alone and for a family

136

FIFTH VISIT

with two children. So we have had only one toilet. One man a teacher an old teacher, then was an old women also living alone in this house and then a family with two children and me with babies. So that was all in an old house in a village:' You might place the toilet at our talking house down the hall from the apartment, maybe shared with one or two other living units. It could be the standard in the area or time where the house is for the moment. It's one of those old ones with a chain and a handle at the end of it to pull on for flushing. There's a dull clunking noise when you pull the chain. Ellen is saying, "My husband more uh was living in the boarding school. But there was no place for for his family." She laughs again. "So he lived away and only when he has had free free time he was coming home:' "How often did he come home?" "Once in the evening for some hours or in the afternoon no in the morning because the uh the pupils were in school. During the pupils were in school he must he was the house-father in one of this houses of the boarding school. So when the children the boys were in school he was coming in the morning for some hours." "Every day?" "Yes. Genau." "So you were actually bringing up the children alone?" "Oh yes. But we were not so long. This was only one year in this bebecause it was so difficult, we have changed to another boarding school. But that was not a school it was a home for ... young men who are working and learning in the;' the next phrase is completely blurred on tape. "Then we have had a flat in the cellar looking looking to the garbage and to the rats." And a little later she says, "We have changed;' meaning moved, "once more because the uhm responsible uh director of this boarding house was an old Nazi and this his uh pedagogic ... "she's laughing here, "we couldn't! And there were crash- crashes, gashes so we have said, 'No, no more here."' So, as you've already heard her saying, although in our conversation she got to it about here, "That all was too much and so I have had a breakdown and I couldn- I it it was I could do nothing. Uh that was in seventy. So I uh not the children must have a cure but me:' "How long did it go on?" "Uh first for three four weeks and I have a a friend who was with my children in in during this time." "What actually happened when you had the breakdown?"

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

137

"I stopped functioning. Just just... " '~nd

this cure you you went to regular like therapy or... ?"

"No, I was at home. I was in a cure home for mothers." Sent away for a cure. Gone away for the children's cure. Else where as cure. Cure-borne travel. Much later she has said, "I was cleaning and working the house but in my in my head I was always on trip." And after both cures and both trips, hers and the children's, two years after her break down (she pronounces it with a pause, two words, like what happens to a car), when her father asked her hand in motion, she consulted the administrator of cures. "I was going to my doctor and I said, 'My father wants to come with him to drive seven thousand kilometers.'" About a year and a half before she died, my mother took a trip. The malignant lymphatic disease she had had for over fifteen years had already inchingly destroyed her immune system. None of us could really know that at the time. It's the kind of present that needs the future to make it a knowable past. My own enduring habit of expecting her to get better if not well, was broken only by her death. As Ellen is putting it at some point, "And in this uh in this moment I didn't know that it's not the only travels or trip that we have had eight trips in the next ten years. Because when father is eighty we don't know he's living he was then ninety-four when he has died. So the next fourteen years I was often with my father." Often with the travelling master. His driver, follower, caretaker. The deep breath she drew in when she said-as you've read above-"to come with him to drive seven thousand kilometers;' had to be an exclamation. "And I can't uh I was uh ... "' "You went to the doctor?" "Yes, I go to him because he he known how how uh not ill but how worse I was how how bad I was in the last in the years uh before. And I have told him a little of my father. And then he has said, 'You you must go, surely you must go there.' First I was frightened if I'm able to do this. To make such long mmm drive, only resp- uh responsible with the car because my father didn't know to drive a car. And to responsible for this old man. He was eighty.'' My mother had consulted her doctor too. Whatever it was he said, she got sick on the trip and then better and then came home and pretty soon after that came down with a very aggressive pneumonia-like syndrome. Of a kind

138

FIFTH VISIT

called Legionnaires' disease that often kills. Her voice sounded proud when she said the name. The gravity of it made her feel important. They cured the syndrome at the hospital but she stayed incurable and a good deal weaker than before. About a year and a half later she died. I know my father has wondered about that last trip. Whether it was worth it. Whether it shortened her life. Whether it was still worth it. Whether maybe, I've wondered, it was a cure in a way that exited the confinement of a dying body. It was an old dream of hers-to see the pre-historic paintings in the caves of the Dordogne valley. She read and knew a lot about pre-history and prehistoric artifacts. She loved the way they looked and the thrill of confronting their ages and authors, telescoping time. She was a psychologist, not a prehistorian. But she was deeply and romantically moved by humanness and by the fossils of its origins. She dreamed of China too. But that looked badly unreasonable in her condition. And probably like too much to cope with even in health. So they went, the two of them, to France. To the Dordogne river basin and its caves and distilled medieval towns. In a way, maybe Zinnia-theflower's ordinary apartment, compared to the wild great world far far out there in China. But she had already told me when I wasn't yet three, "that a flower dies anyway in the end. Something like that. So it was better for her to be at the house and see the world." Scale the wall and you die and in an ordinary apartment. Dare to try and live little girl et cetera and you'll fail and you'll die. The farthest you'll get is an apartment. A cave in France is as much world as you'll ever see. Never China. Unless maybe neither death nor an apartment are necessarily failures. Unless maybe the whole point, or the cure, or a piece of it, or a version of it, is simply scaling the wall. "'There is no possible reason for climbing except the climbing itself;" says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, quoting a mountain climber, in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, published in San Francisco, by Jossey-Bass, in 1975, on page 36. "'The purpose of flow is to keep on flowing;" the climber's quote begins, "'not looking for a peak or utopia, but staying in the flow. It is not a moving up but a continuous flowing; you move only to keep the flow going."' It's a state in which, Mihaly says, "action follows action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor," it's a "unified flowing from one moment to the next;' in which, "there is little distinction between self and environment." Eric, who's quoting these portraits of the flow state from Mihaly, on pages

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

139

76 and 77 of The Mind of the Traveler, says, "The activity of passage connects self and the world in a seamless sequence of predictably evolving transformation. It unifies those elements-actor, world, action, past, present, and future-that might otherwise be knit through words and narration." Is it that this seamlessness is a form of cure? Of health? Of being, living, become pure? In Caterina's translated words, on page sixty-eight of the Book of Balkacz, "The pull, the incessant painful lack. The longed-for state of tranquillity is movement. The direction irrelevant if only away from what is routinely known and repeats itself. Such as family. So Balkacz's wander is devoid of family. In family he is merely in hiding. From other people, from difference from other people to the point of disability, to the point of their cruelty towards him, hinted in a nickname such as Cain. Such cruelty can become a system of harsh restrictions upon his person. He escapes in a semblance of family, allowing him to be nomad without being outcast." "His was an inverted home;' you've read her say (down the same page) on the first visit, ' A_ place mainly left and returned to only to releave, whose content was located not in but outside of and stretching from it. An interval." On page forty, in a draft oflrit's English translation, Caterina says, "Coming in to a bath town on the desert's edge I went to the bath to whisper my trade. To barter it for dates, or flour and freshly curdled milk, or ink." Leonardo says, on page 427, "In eastern Persia he," meaning Marco, "noted the numerous thermae characteristic of those arid regions, and mentioned their curative powers, which helped to ameliorate a variety of ailments, especially diseases of the skin." And the Book of Balkacz goes on, "An old woman addressing me in third person, asked could she kindly oil my back. This other color of the skin. Its foreign texture. The upper cheeks of the buttocks and the old thighs. But still carrying the spine and torso far and strong. I'll show her how to do it she said. If she wants, if her grace would like, I'll show her the craft. I can show her this cure. She is fair skinned and light eyed. I could show her how to make herself into a body like this, and a skin like this, see? Quite something. I oiled the back of her neck. The deep lines at the base of the neck. If she should wish I could tell her this witchcraft. She tickles me my old skin along the spine. She wakes it. This is good. Tickle me, she tells me, her hands are good, gifted. If she likes I shall tell her the secrets of such a body. She could bring a little one too her little one too if she so wishes. Children always find something to poke into at an old hag's. I smiled. Her head turned and the eyes opposite twinkled light. My own mother taught me even

140

FIFTH VISIT

as a little child. I handed back the flask. No little one I said. Not yet she said. Perhaps, I said. Then she said, her eye her grace. I asked what. She said, so sad. No, I said, so sealed. She said that was the way of her sadness. I said, that is the way of my strength. She said nothing. Then she asked which now, along her way as traveller, which eye now is the foreign-the one seen or the one seeing? Heed your eyes held by ciphers, by this pen, my pen well cut by my father's pen-maker, your eyes held by my fingers, my thoughts. Heed your eyeballs growing heavy, a softness overcome them, a laxity. Eyelids drooping. Sense your eyes closing yet seeing, entwined in script, held in story, reading still my voice. My stilled voice. Beyond sight, and light, and ink, and life, they know, they understand. They are one, I said, the same." "Help me;' my mother said, in awful pain, still conscious, a week before she died. I couldn't. I was massaging and lifting and moving her heavy, morethan-half-paralyzed, excruciating legs. "The same, she said, yes. As this body of witches is one and the same with hers and she went on to oil her lower arms herself;' The Book of Balkacz goes on, "and she took my hand and lifted my arm and began oiling upwards deep and slow, up from the back of the hand and the palm and the wrist. Swiveling the hand and arm. And she said she should come, truly, I could show her everything-all she could want for shedding the looks-of men, of prying home-keepers, of suspicious officials and officers, all the tricks and ways of losing the vulnerability of the young and fair-how to wrinkle and how make spots on the skin of the hands. Which craft is a gift to be ever refined and developed. Witch she clearly possesses, a gift to use well. These skin skills I'd be glad I'd be honored to teach her-my small bits of cures." "Help me;' she said. I couldn't. The pain was hers. Only a shadow of it become mine. The movement was mine. Only a shadow of it become hers. Her excruciating legs. My lifting, moving, massaging. Leaving. Her departing. "When it was the time to go home;' Ellen says, after four weeks of the cure, "I was so anxious that the responsible woman of this home said, 'You must stay another four weeks.' And that was very for my family;' her laugh sounds sheepish here, "uhm they doesn't like. They they didn't like.'' "You said it was a special cure home for mothers?" "For mothers, yes.'' Ah, so mothers need to be cured. "What goes on at this cure home?." "Uh to rest, to have baths, to swim, to speak-together.''

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

141

"Like group therapy?" "A little yes yes a little. And ... to walk. To walk alone or with others. Uhm medical t r - uh treatment for some things I don't know:' She doesn't mention any hands-on treatment. I startled myself massaging her legs. For very many years I'd felt a deep aversion to her body. For most of my life as her daughter. Curling in on myself whenever she initiated a kiss or a hug, shutting myself away as best I could just short of actively repelling. Going through the motions of physical proximity. Of frozen physical contact. This-the massage a week before she died-wasn't caressing, fondling, fond. It was dutiful, merciful. But still a surprise I hadn't imagined I would bring myself to do. The Book of Balkacz, page forty-two, "They were always the old woman's, always her handseyes, never my own-in my healing. The drywise, veined organs of transparent speckled warted skin, nimble, lightfeeling hands of the blind. Moving across surface texture, through muscle, intensely delicately listening, smelling, feeling. They were not my own but acquired. Silently-from the models I studied. My amah's hands. Other women's hands. Hands in the town baths. Secretively followed and imitated palms down, palms turn, fingers lift, rest, nostrils flare, strokes practiced, rhythms memorized. Letting them down at the ends of my arms change my arms, my shoulders, my neck, my face, my eyes, with the upward swell of their alien senses. Strange stolen hands transforming my posture and soul." Ellen says, "After eight weeks of cure I was coming home new born. Like a new born child. I felt well. I I was singing, I was working, I had begun to write, I was uh drawing flowers. I was so happy. After these eight weeks of rest and cure and uh to do no housework;' her voice joyous here, "and not feel responsible for the children and so, I was really I have begun a new a new life. I have written poems and oh yes and in this time I was playing p i pia- piano and flute with others. It was I was a new a new," and incredulous here, "human being. Then I have had the power to begin anew." "To begin the same routine?" "Yes it was no problem for me to do all this because also now I have taken time for me sometimes." "Did you keep taking time for yourself?" "Yes, yes I've taken. So I sit in the garden and and I haven't work and I sat I sit and drawing my flowers in my garden or to take photos or. .. to live. Only to live. And that I have learned during this cure."

142

FIFTH VISIT

Much later I'm asking her, "Did you rest ever, did you-you know-take a few a days off?" We're talking about the trips she took with her father. She says, "Uh my father has said, 'In one hotel we stay three days so we will rest.' But then we were there it was a very very nice place and I like it and I think so, 'We rest.' On the other morning he has said, 'So we will go today in the next village.' And I was ... 'uh;" she mimics an amazed gasp. "'Didn't you say that we will rest these days?' 'No, no, we will we stay here in this hotel but we will I must go to some of these villages.' So there was no rest for me. Only that we stay three nights at the same hotel." Quite a bit earlier we were saying, "You you've talked about three men. Your father said, 'Come I want you to drive me.' In one way for him too but also very much for you. You were afraid and you uh you didn't know if you cou- could do it. And you didn't know if your family could uhm cope with it. So you went to your doctor. And you went to your husband. So here are these three authority figures in a way and and you received permission and you you go? You were afraid of the responsibility of driving and the responsibility for your father and your doctor said you should go. Was that enough for you?" "Uhm ... yes ... he encouraged me to do it. He say, 'Go! It's it's a very important for you. You must learn the mmm you as the daughter of such a man you must learn the work. If you have the possibility, do it.' I have asked my doctor because uh some years ago I was sss- so, so.'' And then, catching on excitedly, taking up the theme, enlarging on it, Ellen says almost breathlessly, "And ... And also there was a a fourth. The the young boy! Legastenier." She's laughing here as she refers to his dyslexia. "For whom I was responsible till somebody has said to me, 'Go to a doctor with him, to a psychiater and uh uh und her suchen uhm to make a test with him.' And then sh- doctor she has said, 'Not you must do the kinderwerk. A teacher, that's not good for you, child and father.' So. And then so it I was very happy to to be free uh of of this." The second spring she served as her father's driver, "The second time;' she says, "I have known how how it is such a travel with my father, that it's not always uh easy but I understood that I cannot change an old man. So that I try to do my best with him. "And he was also very happy with me and my-" "Why did you want to do your best?"

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

143

"Uh I think that's the best for both of us. I wanted to with this old man to be in harmony uhm. And I have had the feeling of faithfulness. He has helped us our family for for house and so and during all the days he has had ... and that was the only way to to say thank you to him:' A little earlier I've asked her, "You said you asked your family. What do you mean?" And she's said, "If I can let them alone for some weeks, for fivesix weeks uh, uh because the children they're only eleven and twelve. Then they said yes because ... uh they were very thankful to my father. He has given us the possibility mmm to have a house, he has paid the house in which we are I am living now and we lived since seventy. And we were very happy with this. My husband never has had so much money to to buy a house," her soft laugh here sounds embarrassed, "so they have said, 'Your father has wanted my help; oder he wanted that I accompany him and first I was very anxious." "But in fact you mean you asked your husband? You didn't ask the children:' "Uh mm ... my husband truly. Because during this time he must be responsible for the children." Later I ask her, "Did you want to go?" And I'm pretty sure she hesitates. "I was I was ... just I was scared. I uh I it's hard maybe it's hard to believe;' Chava says, "but I'd never left I'd never been beyond the borders of this country and. Most Israelis barely count Sinai as bey- the borders. Altogether, going overland doesn't exactly fall int- under the usual Israeli conception of abroad and. But for me it definitely I I was really scared. I was scared of the drive down. I would take a wrong turn. I wou- I'd drive around in circles or or get lost in the desert and run into nighttime and and drive across the border by mistake. I I interviewed three different friends about every... junction. I brought them maps. Every single slip of paper and form for the border crossing. I wrote them down. I kept thinking my legs wou- had to go weak on me and not function. Literally my legs buckling and. And the engine would have to stall. So I specifically took the car to be uhm tuned and. "But and there was also this magnetic pull together with a feeling of I don't know urgency. Commitment. No maybe more a responsibility. A... it's almost embarrassing-a duty." She puckers her smile as she says this. Selfdeprecating. Audibly, on tape. "To the book? I don't know partly. To it it's sign i f - and. Mayb- no really primarily to Mickie. I don't know, this unease-it it was such a major act, a really definitive milestone to to leave me the this manuscript and. It had to mean something significant. That he

144

FIFTH VISIT

wa- he wasn't just roaming as usual. I was I felt clearly really strong;' her voice drops very low here as if she's reluctant to say this, "that he was he's really missing." There's a long silence here. "He's signalled that. "So uh so there was also this kind of irrational uhm like faith-he's there, he's waiting for you, he knows you're coming, he he knows his way around he you'll be okay and. And I decided to take Atar. I didn't really even decide it was a kind of gut feeling, I would feel the most secure about her if she if uh she was simply with me. At first her father objected. He wanted me to leave her with him. His schedule is kind of complicated even though he usually makes a lot of time for her and it he would have worked it out. A friend of mine offered to help. She has a little girl Atar's age. It would have been fine and. But I could- did- didn't want any uhm a rigid time frame. To need to be back fast. My assumption was it needed time. A lot of flexibility. I couldn't do that if I left Atar behind. I'd only could give myself a couple of weeks or three at most. I knew that. So I promised Atar's father we'd stay in touch and he could come down and visit if it got if it went on for long. Going there's not a big deal for him. She was so excited of course she Atar. I was almost too scared to be to feel excited and too you know too busy dealing with details but she was my like my excito-meter. I could feel it through her." After visibly hesitating about whether or not she wanted to go, Ellen finally says, "Ye- ees, yes, I want because so I have had the possibility to come out from the family, to to see new things, to learn Italy. That was a dream always but I haven't had the money to do it and uh ... yes I'll I like it much. But truly I have asked myself is I uh i - nee am I responsible enough for my children when I left them alone only to travel with my father. I wonder still today that they were so uh understandable you can say that they have understood me and said, 'Yes, go: They were content. Surely I think that they have the feeling, 'Oh in the next weeks we are more free. Mother is not behind us.' Uh yes. Uh ... my husband didn't make much with the children so surely more when I'm not at home. He feel more responsibility. Surely. But not so much, sometimes he said, 'Oh today we have a f - we have uhm a fasting day. Today who wants something to eat who must make it himself. Course my husband doesn't cook:' She's laughing here. "He doesn't like t-.uh to cook. So the children must do it theirselvcs." "So you really think they were happy that you were going away?" "Uhm half and half. And I thought that they learned just in these times to be more self... ;'she says it in German.

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

145

"Independent?" "To make ... independent and to learn to to make things which I have made usually. But then they must think about the things they must wash their uh things to to to cook and to clean the house a little and to ... " "This you say now. But what you felt then ... you felt guilty about going away, you felt that you were doing something wrong to them?" She's quiet for a long time. And then her voice sounds almost protesting. "No. No. I haven't. No because I have uh prepared so much as I can do. And I have spoken with them and they were very reasonable. Also in this time they were eleven and twelve. They were very reasonable and they have understood that I will do it also to be thankful to their grandfather, to my father. Uh because he has paid and uh given us this house and to live in this wonderful area near the wood and they were very happy in it. So they have understood that I can thankful only in this manner. It was both-the duty to my father and also to to learn something for myself. "But did you tell them both things? "No. No." "But you knew?" "For me yes." "And your husband?" "Uh uh I have said him both, yes. He accepted it yes." Her husband accepted it yes, Ellen says, but left and divorced her seventeen years later, when she was sixty-two, saying-as she puts it somewhere near the end of our talk, "he said he said, 'Family; uh and he has finished his work. 'Family I have I am free. Now I can make trips.' So. So it's not only th- uh another woman. 'Now I can make trips.' So. 'I am free.' So." But the first time her father asked her and she and asked him and and he accepted, "I think it was also that he has had the feeling that I was ... stronger, the stronger person in the family-also in the connection to the childrenso he mmm he liked it to be sometimes with the children alone." And then, some time later, she's saying, "Each travel I have seen many things. But most of the time I was the driver." Caterina says, "He knew trails." On page seventy-two. "In peopled places he knew trails. Some of them. Many of them. And some of the branches of some of them. Side trails unused by post-riders. And some of the shelters and springs and wells concealed off of branches of trails. In these he had traded over many trips, many years, a salve for a little barley and the site of

146

FIFTH VISIT

an abandoned hut, a powder for a cloth of dates and the secret of a fickle well. And he knew some plants and mosses and grasses and rocks signalling heights and weathers and waters. And he knew some stars and skies and winds pointing ways. And he knew the place of the many days of crowded fields of fragrant wild onions, and the slopes of scattered, seldom, wild garlic, and the mountain streams with giant leeks three feet in height to cut and cook. And the salt springs in the high land where we broke off crystal cakes. And I knew none and followed. And he knew some parts of three languages besides his father's Yakut tongue. And at the edges of knowing the paths and places he knew names, collected carefully on the way, of followers of trails. To find in their village hamlets and to ask. In return for his own tellings. "And although I rode unveiled I rode unseeing. Ahead or beyond unknown, unable to picture what we were about to reach, even though he told me. Or what we were circumventing, which often he didn't. Mounted and riding forth, I was yet bound-to his direction and his descriptions. Having as my own ever those which were now behind us. And the possibly impossible ones chanted from the tale of my princess. I rode unasking. At that time I feared to know or enquire if we would ever come to follow my chant. "For our routes he had no writing. He used memory and his chants alone as he had before my coming. No store of charted learning. Stumbling I was charting mine. The routes of our travel, the sites of my planting. Higher and higher above the hem of my underdress, in ink and when there was none in boiled berry juices-red mulberry, black rasberry-and in henna. And on my right palm writing with my left, setting well the sticky strings of henna with lemon and grape juice or tamarind, before they dried and flaked off to leave their months of stain, and in long strips adorning my right arm from elbow to wrist like a tribal bride. Land- become hand-marks. And later across my feet and around my ankles and up along my calves, and then in half-rings round the fronts of my thighs. And as cloth and skin became crowded and faded, the best remembered, the most useful marks, I copied onto these paper leaves, carried with me from my father's house a sheaf of twenty-six rolled round a cloth and covered with cloth, and then acquired another six. "Balkacz was memorizing many passages in my tongue, was copying practicing my characters on sand or earth. This was the barter we had agreed, asked and negotiated and set through my amah. Taught tongue and script for taught directions and providing. There had been no gold to give him, nor had he asked it. Li Fu-tze said he would not have use for much and would

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

147

think it more dangerous a custody than myself. In any case, we had none to give him, my amah and I, for my planned departure was known only to us and to Balkacz." On the next page Caterina says, "For many days before I left I was restless, excited, waiting. Li Fu-tze supplied a continuous stream of distracting tasks and errands. I was yet bored. Impatient. Burdened by secrecy, I had grown distant from my younger sister, my dear playmate and laughing-companion. She pleaded gently confused. I made no response. The day of my leaving was not set. Balkacz had proposed a means of obscuring the complicity of Li Fu-tze, of sparing her awful punishment. We were to wait for one of the outbreaks in our quarter rushing through streets and many homes. I studied the ways to go out unnoticed to meet him in the uproar, as if swept away by abducters." ''Arghun died on 10 March 1291;' Luc says on page 163. "In May the latent resentment against government officials broke out, and Sa'ud al-Daula was arrested and executed. His execution marked the beginning of the looting of the houses of all those even remotely associated with him." Then, a little further down the page, quoting the Syriac historian, Bar Hebraeus, he describes Kaikhatu, Arghun's successor, "'He had no thought for anything except the things that were necessary for Kings and which they were bound to have and how he could get possession of the sons and daughters of the nobles and have intercourse with them ... And very many chaste women among the wives of the nobles fled from him, and others removed their sons and daughters and sent them away to remote districts."' In August 1294, he says on page 164, when paper money was introduced, "economic activity throughout the empire ground to a halt, and the markets ofTabriz suddenly were empty:' As he's said one page earlier, "It is indisputable that during his," that is Kaikhatu's, "reign ofless than four years the Il-khanid empire came close to collapse." Four years overlapping with those of Caterina's apprenticeship, the years of her preparation and finally of her departure. She's said on the previous page, "I had accepted my only choice to be escape, which meant secrecy, which in turn meant poverty." At first, right after he left her, Ellen says she was in a state of shock. She went through a severe crisis. She hadn't seen it coming, although looking back she says that her recurring absences, prolonged and seemingly privileging her within the family, had put distance between herself and her husband. As did, maybe, her seeming alignment with the distinguished professor op-

148

FIFTH VISIT

posite the ordinary social worker. In the process of his desertion and his alliance with another woman, she says she lost her formerly deep faith in the church establishment, though not necessarily in Christianity. Over time though, his leaving actually freed her in a very deep sense. Gave her, she says, more liberty than she'd ever enjoyed or experienced before. "I was res- responsible for him;' Ellen says, about her duties as a driver. ''And during the lunch time we are we were looking for a nice place. In autumn we had a Mediterranean to take a bath and then we make picnic and I have bought vegetables and salad and I've had water and oil and lemons and wine for him and water for me:' "You don't drink wine?" "When I'm driving not." "We looked for a nice place to have rest and I I've made the salad and we have bread and and cheese and it was very uh mmm to rest. To have a rest. And he wondered that I'm not sitting down to eat. I said, 'All the day I was sitting in the car so I must go round;' she's on her feet here, pacing, demonstrating, "and to eat. "With me in my car I have had a a chair for him and a little for me and a table. And that he like much. And to swim before our lunch we ... not in springtime but when we were in autumn. So I know nearly each place to where you can swim round south Italy. And sometimes he remembered, 'Here in this place I was with your mother.' Or, 'In this place with your mother we have had this or so.' Because mother, my mother, real mother was uh in the thirties here sometimes with him. But not driving. They haven't uh a car.'' "The car was your car?" "Mostly it was my car, yes. But sometimes paid by him. Uh paid by him but that was my car. Sometimes he had paid to buy the car, yes. Uh uhm I have had a little car, and when I was with him he wanted a little so so he has given the money so I've got a bigger one. And he paid also all of this drive of the trip and the hotels and all he he paid." She laughs her little girl laugh. "How, from the university?" "He has his rent from the university. He has finished with sixty-five and then he said, 'So, now I have time to work. It's for myself, for research yah.' Yes it's uh was his pension and it was good pension so ... he never made holidays. Only to ... holidays only to swim and to as that. He was always working. Surely so two hours to rest and to take a bath and then but to work. If it was holiday or Sunday or a feast-every day he was working.''

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

149

"And your trips were ... how long?" "Mostly it's for four five weeks we were driving every day at another place and another hotel. And every day some villages in which he wa- has worked. More than one. Oh yes. Two in the morning, two in the afternoon. Perhaps. Sometimes uhm uh less, sometimes more. And often he had lectures in universities during this time at several places or cities. And he has to stop with with editors in Ravenna." It's only later that I ask her, "Did you enjoy yourself?" "Uh during this uh ... yes, yes ... " She may sound a little doubtful. I'm not sure. I might be misinterpreting her foreign intonation. "I enjoyed because I like to uh I like to to travel and to learn other countries. But without the help of my father or wi- without these possibilities, it wasn't possible for me." "Diving spots was what I I was concentrating on reef... diving spots;' Chava is saying at some point in our talk. "Even though I uhm I know Mickie used to also do uh hiking climbing in the mountains and. You know backpacking. In Sinai I understand you usua- do it with camels carrying the packs. With Bedouin guides or later on I think he did some of it some areas that on his own with maybe just one other companion. He knew some of the parts some of the Si- well enough to," there's a siren here, police or ambulance, drowning out part of the sentence on the tape. "transitional. Not where he would stay for for any length of time. He did that as far as I knew he did that at the places where he could uh scuba dive. So those were the places I decided I went. There's this book. Of of uh diving places in the Sinai. I got it. I don't think he ever had it it's kind of like a coffee table albuprobably didn't need it but it I think it definitely could have taken me some of the places where he used to and. "I kind of narrowed down I tried possibilities. Thinking about what kind of of place he would uh tend to stay. Not the main attractions, something like off the main. But he would need some kind of facilities and transportation. He never took a car down. Used the local taxis all along the coast road up and down the uh I mean they're not exactly taxis. They go set routes they they're really cheap. But there are also there are buses. He owned some of the uhm equipment himself but he would need a diving center for uhf- oxygen how do you say balloons or or tanks and. I decided to take my car. With Atar I it looked like it would be easier and I don't know safer if she got sick or anything like got a really bad case of diarrhea and I needed to get back fast to the border and.

150

FIFTH VISIT

"He did like to uh do diving where there was something to really see. I knew that for sure. He used to laugh well gently but at my snorkelling in Eilat and tell me I had to come with him just one time to Ras Muhammad and discover the real really and. That was where I'd I uh decided to start but it they told me it wasn't it was a military zone. They told me you can't get in any more. It's off limits. "The uh actually two or no three days before we left;' Chava says, "I took a long walk on the beach near where his Mickie's shack used to be before they tore it down and we used to hang out a lot. I I was trying to psyche myself up into well kind of convince mys- myself I could do it. But also I was reconstructing conversations. I was like trying to make a map. Place names I mean. Where he uh used to go in in the Sinai an- and in what order. I kind of I sat down at somewhere where there was nobody was around and it was mid-winter it was a pretty windy day and cold and not a beach day except for the year-round swimmers and I'd walked to like between t two public beaches a middle point. I sat down and kind of shut out uh looked at the sea listened I love listening to surf and watching it but more listening and I let it mesmerise me almost hypnotised myself and tried to remember to to I mean like literally re-call our conversations. About his time h - there were quite a few stretches of time he spent I guess you could say lived in Sinai. "I could literally hear his voice saying the names. The one that really clear over and over was Ras Muhammad." And Ellen says, "So I've learned the Mediterranean, the northern part of the Mediterranean countries and I was very interested in the old Greek art. So I was very happy to learn it during these uh trips with father. And I was nearly at all famous places in Greek." "And the fact that you uh weren't in control, not... didn't weren't free to make your your own choices really. Did this bother you?" She laughs. "That was sometimes a problem. I wanted to go in Athene to the mmm uh museum but father knows it, he was sometimes there, and he waited for me outside in the car:' She laughs again. "So I I must go very quickly so in this moment I was not very content:' "And?" "In general it was it was all right. And I was happy to have this possibility to know countries and just Greek. I know that my mother liked it much." The most amazing of all the painted caves of the Dordogne, my mother

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

151

said, was the network of caves at Lascaux. The rich colors of prehistory were layed out in intricately placed, enormous, gorgeous, figures and lines on their ceilings and walls. By the time my parents went there, the original network had been sealed to visitors. Tourists who weren't doing specialized research were admitted to a tasteful and painstaking fascimile, created in the rock right beside the real ancient caves. In the darkness and damp of the fascimile chambers, which I visited too a few years later, the excitement of an ageless imagination and craft cut through and marginalized the awareness that this was a carefully contrived copy. The picture Chava found at Bardawil wasn't clear and it was pretty tattered. But she knew it was Mickie. She was really positive she said. The guy had a collection. Nine pictures he had taken with his foreign friends. Men except one woman who had come from or through Israel, not all Israelis though, light skinned and bronze tanned, short sleeves, light clothes, sand colored sun-bleached hair, and lived in one of two hushas on the beach for weeks running into months. Each on his or her own. And each eventually started joining him in his fishing boat at night, with the big gas-lamp lit to draw up the fish. Helping him and his cousin spread nets that they all hauled up by morning. Helping them pick out and sort the fish into wood and plastic packing crates and throw back the junk. The lagoon was full of more and more junk and less and less fish. It wasn't a diving area. The miles and miles of lagoon were shallow, sandy bottomed. But it was a place where hardly any tourists ever came and where not even very many locals-Egyptians? Bedouins?-fishermen and sons of fishermen, lived any more. Not much of a living to be had. But over the years since the Sinai was handed back to the Egyptians after the peace treaty in 1979, there had been these friends. Mostly one at a time. Each for a few months. Each with a different, personal style. Yes, he had had some diving equipment with him, he told her. But there wasn't any diving to be done there. No, he hadn't done any. He had a beard in the picture. And he was wearing sunglasses. She had never seen him with either. She says she never used to meet him right after he got home. It had always taken them at least a couple of days and sometimes a week or so. Maybe he'd arrived home with a beard and had time to shave it off by the time they met. She says she thinks she remembers herself at some point asking about his pale jaw and his bronze cheekbones. And he never used to use sunglasses at home. But the Sinai sun might have made him. Or he might have been using them as a disguise, not wanting to leave clear tracks."

152

FIFTH VISIT

"You think he was actually uh like uh I don't know like dropping out? Trying to shed his identity or?" "I don't it's hard to say. It seemed to be working both ways both leaving a big uhm huge trail this manuscript and at the same time trying maybe not to. Al- almost like a game:' Chava's speech here is very slow and soft. Almost still. Then it picks up all at once. "Anyway, we'd been uh hopping beaches, Atar and I. I couldn't believe the border was behind me and I we uh and. Abroad! Another country. We started south. Slow. It was this leisurely kind of there was no hurry. It had been well over a year since he'd left and. Couldn't make much of a difference how uh how fast I was moving. And after we crossed the border in a way I it's hard to explain I lost this sense of urgency I'd had. I was just there. Being there. En- enjoying it kind of. It's part this how the Sinai affects people. A lot of uh. The heat. So blinding your main point becomes to stay protected from fr- it. I had heard about you know lot's of people go there from Israel. I'd heard about it but you can't till you experience it you can't... the mountains. These bare and oblivious, unaffected by human dimensions and and hu- human life, eons of it, human history." "Yeah I know just what you mean. I fee- every time I'm down there it affects me. It's so powerful:' "I felt t i - insignificant but in a way it's comforting. Sad and also comforting. Nothing can nothing really makes a difference. Human life and pain and joys they it just rolls off those mountians like little fluffs. It's this kind of floating sensation. Floating soaking in white heat haze. "I needed to take it slowly. To be able to take it in and deal with it. It was all so new so. Even though it it didn't feel new. The same time as it felt like uh completely new it all felt as as familiar as my body odors. Something inborn. Lived with intimately since for ever. We uh did we'd stay in each of the resorts they're called they're really not uhm they're very simple kind of stone huts with awfully noisy air-conditioners and saline water running from the taps for showering and. And a few are just palm leaf huts-hushas-and a Bedouin-style dining space on the ground with carpets covering it and kind of carpet-roll pillows to lean back against and. Right uh right south of of the border they start now. There didn't used to be anything there till so we we'd stay at every one a few days. Lie on the beach in the shade-there they've put up like dry palm leaf beach umbrellas at every and nap in the afternoon when it got too hot. Where there was a reef right up to the edge of the water we'd take walks on it at the low tide. Atar couldn't she was hypnotized so was

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

153

I actually no less than she was by the the tide pools. You know they're full of sea cucumbers is is that what I think they're called and those little hermit crabs in uh in all kinds of shells they've, you know they find an empty shell and use it as for their shell, and s - sea anemones and we'd just squat by a pool for half an hour straight and without budging. We'd bought a couple of soft white cotton galabias at the first place we stayed and that was what we uh wore all the time. "After a while we I think it took about ten or eleven days or no maymaybe it was more I actually I did make notes of the days at first. Anyway we stopped using the resorts most of the time. We started staying at at with the Bedouin ... they're not really what you'd call villages. I mean they're for tourists too but it's they put up a few hushas and a kind of toilet and shower in another husha and and rent them out right near their own in their little ... well okay I guess village right near their own uh living space. "But at some point, we never went all the way down the coast and reached the the southern tip and or Ras Muhamad, we uh w - crossed to the eastern coast for some reason. I guess one of the names that kept occuring to me more and more often had been Bardawil. It's this big lagoon on the northeast coast of the Sinai where there used to be a lot of fish and and fishing villages and I can't even remember if I heard the name from Mickie. I know someone who lived there for a few years when it was uh occupied by Israel. But it it it uh isn't a place where people go. It's totally off the track. In fact it isn't even included in the visa. The uh Egyptian visa you get to go to Sinai and. But I got talking with one of the tourist policemen and and he told me where to go to the headquarters and that they'd probably give me a permit. They did. It took a few days. Maybe it was a week. Closer to two actually. Maybe. They told me to come back and come back and they'd uh enquire and possibly and. It was irregular and may- I don't know suspicious. The last day they said yes it took about five hours just waiting around but they uh they did. "And anyway Atar and I drove there. We didn't not straight there. I don't drive too long at a stretch. She uh it's too boring for her to be cooped up for so long. So we spent a few nights on the way. Two or three nights every place we stopped so it wouldn't uh get to be days on end in the uh the car. Just we were just knocking around at the inland spots where we were, far away from the beach. Playing something, hunting for little stones with different colors, drawing, reading stories to her, pottering in the sand, making shadow pic-

154

FIFTH VISIT

tures, whatever. There were cats and dogs everywhere we stopped and she she made friends with them and. And sometimes with one or two of the kids too. A little later she's saying, "He asked me, Eyad asked me, 'Mickie, the one with the beard?' and I said, 'No beard.' By that time I was already getting by more or less in the Sinai Bedouins' Arabic. We'd been down there for I guess it was uh about two months already. I guess I partly lost track of time. Then I it seemed totally logical that he'd stopped shaving and grew one. Maybe he did every time he travelled. Or maybe not. I I can't remember looking at pictures with him ever of his trips even though he did use to mention pictures sometimes and. "Then he said, 'Mickie Mickie he has good carving hands he carves beautiful little things from sticks and bones. And he hears very well. A sharp sharp ear. The swoop of night birds he hears like a Bedouin scout, jackals, foxes in the desert. Leaping fish off the side of the boat.' I I uh looked at him sort of I uh stared I I di- I didn't really know what to say. I ha- hadn't the slightest idea about all this stuff. Like a different perso- like different habits when he was uh in motio- uhm a traveller. And also I'm not sure I got every word right. Eyad's. I was getting by but still doing a lot of guesswork. But but i - it is him in the picture. It's a polaroid. The camera taken w - uh with a polaroid camera. He he must have got uh or maybe Eyad I guess got some somebody a travelling photographer or a a tourist to take a shot of them. Together in front of the boat. I think it's the same one Atar and I went in with him with uh with Eyad. Mickie looks really thin. Probably he got thin travelling. "He did bring one time he did bring Atar some little carved kitten and she loves it and. I it it never occured to me that he'd made it. I assumed it's something he picked up somewhere. Some market or village. I can't remember where it was he'd been when he brought it back. He always used to bring stuff for her little like brace- a bracelet or some beads or a little kite or like a bean ball or. I didn't pay any special attention. I mean the kitten is really cute but I it just. There's a date on the snapshot. Eyad gave it to me when we left. He it was hard for him. He really likes his collection. It's not only photos it's like improvised calling uh business cards. He actually uhm he calls them 'calling cards' in English. I guess somebody taught him the expression. He uh cuts pieces, oblongs of cardboard and some of his friends write him something or uh doodle something. He can't read but he asks his friends to tell him what they put on their calling cards and he uh memorizes it. He re-

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

155

cited all of them for me. He showed me the little carved boat that Mickie gave him. It even has a gas-lamp. That was that was his calling card he says. "Bu- but he gave me the photo. I I uh actually I had a hard time taking it. I almost didn't but I thought it might really be able to use it to uh help people remember him. To ask about him. Trace him. Places we were staying and he'd passed through. When he'd been there, how long, you know. The date is it wasn't it was sometime in 1993. Long before when Mickie had uhm apparently left me the uh or seemed to have left it to me, the manuscript. In fact about at least a year before. But Eyad says it's not the date he was there. He says the camera date was wrong and he remembers the right date. It was about at the same time I was just uhm starting to read it. Try trying to I before I knew how to to decipher and. I mean Caterina's journal. ''And there was also there was one of the calling cards Eyad had that I copied out. It didn't have a name on it. He uh showed me a picture with one of his friends. This one looked a little maybe older tha- than the than most of the others. He looked vaguely French. Eyad says his name is Jacques I mean I I guess it's Jacques and not Jack. Eyad's pronunciation could make it either. Anyway Jacques Perez it sounds like and. Eyad pronounces it Berez. It... isn't written anywhere. His uh calling card I mean the card Eyad says he

wrote for him, that that he keeps right behind his uh picutre in the box, says 'Les Livres Anciens, St. Pons, Ardeche, the good life, good river rafting and trout fishing, maybe one day you can come and try my friend.' I had uh looked through that box of cards maybe uh may- a dozen times before I I realized what I was reading on that card. It just hadn't sunk in. My French isn't very it was kind of rusty then I I hadn't used it you know. I just got by at high school and I hadn't ever used it and I was concentrated on the English. And I don't know maybe it was the capital letters-I I wasn't registering exactly. I thought it it was the name of a place a a town or an estate. It took me a while to realize that he apparently dealt in in deals in ha- has something to do with ancient books." Over two years before she came to talk with me under the fig tree in back of my house, Ellen and I were both at a conference in Hamburg. I hadn't seen very much of her during the conference. I'd only met her briefly before, and there were two good friends of mine around who I wanted some time with, and some others who looked attractive and exciting that I wanted to make, and a woman whose help I was supposed to ask, raising money for an organization I worked with, delicately which meant it needed time. It was only in

156

FIFTH VISIT

the middle of the third, last day of the conference, when Ellen and I got around to getting something to eat together, that I realized she'd been having her meals and coffees in her car. Underground in the conference building garage. Picnicking she said. It was quiet when she wanted to lie down. She got out some oatmeal-and-honey bars and juice that we sat in front eating and drinking and staring at, mirrored in the windshield backed by the concrete wall.

THE PRINCESS IN THE CARAVAN TOO

157

SIXTH VISIT: THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

WHEN COUNT BERNARD DU PLESSIS VAN MAESDYCK

told June that, "it

was impossible to drive to India, as he had already done, without a gun in the car, going through Iraq and Iran and all that stuff;' she answered, '"Well, I can't have a gun anywhere around me. That's all there is to it."' She wanted to go to India to study non-violence with Ghandians. She couldn't use a gun to do it. It was that simple. Not even after leaving a daughter and a son and two partners in the States to get to Ghandians and India. Earlier, absent from both the tapes and the notes but definite and clear in my memory, she talked about her ex-husband's gun collection. A large, carefully acquired and kept-obsessive, she said-collection of guns and swords, living in her California house beside her already forceful rejection of violence. She mentioned the irony of his obsession in a marriage with hers. She wasn't here on the last visit, but now she's back at the talking house. From the way she sits and the way she gestures, from her strong booming clearly pronounced words, from the work she explains she is still busy with, the meetings, the people she approaches, June seems deeply determined at seventy-three to make good the equal determination of the thirty-some year old that she's re-calling. But she is also shy. She knows very well how some of her expressions sound to the uninvolved. She laughs a lot by way of laughing at herself, letting her listeners know she knows it's hard to take her seriously, that she doesn't take herself totally seriously, even though she's dead

158

serious about what she's doing. She uses laughter to distance herself from the words, making them more acceptable after she herself has put them in proportion. "So we wrang- wrestled with this problem for three years;' she goes on, "and finally he went to India with a gun and with a young lady whom I found for him because I, I finally deduced that he didn't really need me he just needed someone to be with him. He was threatening to commit suicide and all the rest if I didn't stay with him." Probably she also deduced that she didn't really need him, and apparently that she didn't even need someone to be with her. But at first she had needed him. To get going. She calls her meeting with him a miracle. As if to say she knew very well how to be on her own. "It seems that I just function best and feel best, feel most myself, when I'm

by myself," she says. But not how to move on her own. And she desperately needed to move. At first they hadn't been lovers. "It didn't start right away:' she says. "But we got finally involved in it. Which was very successful and happy and this and that but he absolutely didn't want any children. Because he said the world was overpopulated which is certainly an understatement. He already had, oh no, he didn't have a son yet, he had a son with this friend I found for him. By jove. No, no;' she says fast, talking more to herself than to any listener, a little surprised at what she has just said and then realized. "But healways said I could bring my children over with me. We could have the children over;' she says, putting the last sentence in her emphatic, one word at a time evenly accentuated style. She occasionally alternates this one with a continuous runaway speed that almost trips over the thoughts as they rush out. "Okay, so I was very thrilled with that. "His parents were perfectly charming. They lived on this sort of a strip above Montreux;' in Switzerland, near Lausanne, "where there were all, there were Russian princes and princesses, there was a German princess. Everybody was counts and countesses and barons and everything living there and they were all I discovered ... really... right wing to put it mildly. And I opened up a closet under the roof of this marvelous old house that I was helping him rebuild and I stumbled on a huge pile of German magazines of handsome big blond fellows and the virgin Mary everywhere you know distorted and. Everything was you know they were really The Crusaders and Mary was horribly mixed up in it l)omehow" the next words on the tape are indecipherable "the statues, you know, from and I thought, 'Wait a minute! This is this is ter-

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

159

rible!' and then little by little I began to realize that he was very much into Nietzsche of course he just loves Nietzsche. Well Nietzsche is marvelous but and not totally... but the great superman is totally different from my individual," she spaces the words one by one again, "which is just a person in his natural form as I would say. So poor Bernard uhm I realized had been brainwashed by his parents who indeed were not in Holland because they they they didn't want to be there for all kinds of reasons but it would have been all right with them if the Nazis had won ... So how the Samuel could I bring the children over to that see!? So I left him. "He went off to India." It wasn't just the gun that she couldn't take to India. It was also this man she'd left America with so she could study nonviolence and help end wars, as she'd now come to see him. "I in the meantime though we did go to Tunisia. For one winter. We lived in little villages all over... you see he had during the war taken a degree in watch repairing and so on in Geneva he had his little" what she says here sounds like "breveh, as they call it." She says, "And the front of his car, he had a marvelous camping car, a little tiny Be- Ve, he had rubies and everything to work with and the back he had his bed a little camping thing I remember the smell of it the smell was ... I didn't know all this background thing of course." She means what she found in the closet later, and then surmised about his parents' reaction "if the Nazis had won." She and Bernard, she says, had "lived all over in very small towns in Italy, where he'd been before, and very small villages in Tunisia, where he'd been before, where people lined up for their watches and clocks to be repaired. And I did all the washing and all the cooking and we ate camel liver and carrots. "And uhm I helped him build a new bigger car which we went to Tunisia, to live lived with the Bedouins and stuff, took all these marvelous pictures again and there too I helped him carrying his equipment and so on and I even I must confess helped him, he'd pretend to be taking a picture of me looking at some palm tree or something and he'd really-now there I was cheating I guess," and was arguably cheated too-"be taking a picture of some woman washing. Nothing unusual but ... " Cheating, because even at the time June apparently realized that "some woman washing" often didn't want or like her picture taken, believed it could do her harm or sensed her privacy and modesty invaded, her right to refuse abused. Cheated, as almost every woman 'carrying his equipment' is cheated, but all the more so when this makes her complicit in a project that is against her principles. "He took

160

SIXTH VISIT

marvelous prizes for the pictures, they are really superb. And he has a deep love for people:' About a year before Janie first turns up at the talking house and later brings along her mother, June, that is in 1992, I am going into Gaza. Regularly. I have been for some time. Gaza is occupied by Israel, and Jewish Israelis go into Gaza in 1992 either because they are soldiers or because they are radicals. I choose to leave out merchandisers because they are essentially soldiers too-conquerors-in Gaza, and journalists because they are essentially either one or the other. While I go in, a Jewish Israeli woman, in 1992 I am a radical, a political dissenter. And Gaza is in my head. It's a dark dream place, not a concrete and corrugated-tin town spread over ground. In my body at the flick of the name it's a reflex of dilated pupils and gland dread, an irretrievable shard of nightmare. Maybe faces closing in, foreign silent language, sweating, lostness, palpitations, sweating, imminent danger for my life. It's the place "where the white children live," and it's drawn by Dave, "as the largest, completely blank area on his map. From his taped conversation it is clear that he is physically afraid of the area and has never ventured near it. On his map the white residential area is literally terra incognita, while all the detail on the map is immediately around his home and school on the other side of Parker Street." That's the Gaza on page 32 of the book by Peter Gould and Rodney White, Mental Maps, published by Pelican Books in 1974. In the head of a darkskinned American schoolboy named Dave, it is undifferentiated alleyways and threats, the gray-dark fearmass of unvisited, unvisitable living places. With another name. The military checkpoint just north of Gaza has already come to be known as "Erez" in Palestinian as well as Hebrew. For other places, many inside Israel, Palestinians make a point of using the Arabic. But this site, set by Israelis, is pinpointed in their Hebrew name for it as the end limit of that language's domain. It is the mental point at which my simple personal senseknowledge is checked and my fear erupts. And my elation. "You see Jerusalem when you die." Bashan says. "And you be buried in the ground. And you ... Gonna raise up, gonna get your wings and you could fly on to Jerusalem. It was it was the mythical part about the religion that was indoctrinated into our heads." She says. "It was this this religious song, 'I want to be ready, I want to be ready;" she is singing fast just to outline the

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

161

tune, in a rough draft of the rich deep voice she lends regularly to the spirituals choir in her community-the Black Hebrew congregation you've heard of on the second visit, living in an enclosed neighborhood in an Israeli desert town. Many of them originally from Chicago. '"Watkin in Jerusalem just like John' you know. Used to sing this song all the time, right. But they thought they had to die in order for them to walk in

J~rusalem

you know.

This is what the preachers used to set up every Sunday morning. If you want to walk in Jerusalem just like John, hey, you got to live a righteous life, then when you die then you gonna walk there, right. "To me Jerusalem it was ahhh the valley, the drea-;' she's telling me of a magazine article she read in the fifties, "When I seen this picture in the background of this pope I mean all I could see was the trees ... the hills ... the mountains ... you know the beauty of Jerusalem. This is what I seen. I seen the land. Like ... Oh, sure, I mean Georgia is uh Georgia I mean that was beautiful. But it didn't have the spiritual connection, okay. It also had to do with the, with with the spiritual part of you and all... "A Jerusalem no less in her head than the Gaza in mine. Bashan hasn't been at the talking house for a while. Since the first and second visits, in fact. Now she's back. She was born in Georgia under a familiarly American name in August 1944 and lived on her parents' farm till she was about seven, when they moved to Gary Indiana and later broke up. She has gone by the sonorous first name I met her with, exclusively a last name in common Hebrew usage, for almost thirty years now. Her speaking voice is rich sound in me. Its layers of overtones and undertones touch chords that I can't usually feel resonating inside. Touch them and play them. I don't know what they're echoing. I try to, but can't really, trace the source back to Aida-Ruth, who used to take care of my sister and me as very young girl children, while our mother worked and our father studied in a Kansas university town. I can hardly remember her. I think she was young and heavy and not pretty. I know she was black. Maybe I was attracted by the strength of her sullen defiance, if that's what it was. I remember we didn't like her. She probably didn't like us either. And I can't really trace the source back to Tarlese either, who probably cleaned the Kansas City apartment we lived in a few years later. I can only remember her ironing and I think singing. I used to sit and watch. Fascinated without knowing it. Even now, when I know, I don't know why. I can only wonder if, like Griselda Pollock, I could be "trapped in the psychic time and space in which a mythical Africa

162

SIXTH VISIT

and its landscape, colours, textiles and music become an imagined but forbidden native space, the metonymic image of the woman whom she the once-child imagines was one of her lost mothers." This is what she says on page 82 of Travellers' Tales, in her piece: Territories of desire: reconsiderations of an African childhood, writing about her African nanny. I don't think I ever imagined that these two black women were my substitute-mothers whose daughter I can no longer be now that they're no longer her caretakers. And neither of them is likely to have ever lived in Africa. But colors, textiles and music of their persons, their voices, their rhythms, their place or lack of it among the people I knew, their black, still seemed to touch something strong and longed for in me, of the depth and pull of m/other-magic. And in the child I also distinctly remember repulsion. Further back, when I was four, I landed by plane in Nairobi with my parents and sister, on the way to visit my father's South African Jewish family, and then to go on by boat to live seven years in America. No one in Israel was black then. I had never seen skin like that. The image of an amazingly tall very black man in a white coverall stretched up to work on the plane wing from underneath, has since stayed intact. I remember him as extending my world, branding impression, exciting, accelerating breath with his beauty, which may have been made that, at least partly, by my mother's romantic, admiring voice. Then, with the family in South Africa, I watched the very young woman they called the girl get my bath ready, get my clothes ready, things I expected my mother to do or to help me do for myself, comb my cousin's hair (I asked to comb my own). What I understood, with the cultural knowledge of a four year old, was that she was a slave. I remember her name as being Ruby. I can still feel the past child's outrage and shock and fear and incredulity at the fact of this slavery. How can they do that to them? How can they let them do that to them? By the age of four, a Jew, I had already celebrated the Pesach feast of the freeing of the slaves once upon a time, and was appalled at the limits of its validity. At the actual cubic mileage in which it apparently didn't hold and bondage did. "But they already freed the slaves." I asked my mother. "What the 'white' child (or rather the one who will become 'white' by this lesson) learns;' Griselda explains on page So, "is a structure of difference and authority relative to which she must take up" (I'm skipping here) a position "of class and race." Besides feeling a terrible uncomfortable pity I was also squeamish that the black might rub off on me. I could tell it rubbed off when they touched things, from the look of their palms.

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

163

A little later in our conversation Bashan says, "I mean I used to sing about Jerusalem. All the time. Like to me it's, Jerusalem is like a dream, a vision, a place so faraway unseen that you got to go, you got to, you know, you got to die first." Bas han's speech is rhythmic singing and at the emphasized parts of

it she claps, snaps fingers, slaps thighs. "You know, only the righteous, the worthy, will ever see this place like ... So uh so when I learned of the truth about Jerusalem, why all you got to do is just buy your airplane ticket and get on the airplane and you can walk the streets on Jerusalem ... you know I was like oh, wow, man you know, hey, this is uh this is ... There always was, there always was a, a longing you know to see and to be and to walk in the land that was always so spiritual." she says. Which Griselda, on page 83, depicts as her powerful desire, formed "in childhood and in specific social relations whose only links with actual people I once loved was, typically, displaced on to a land, a landscape, a territorial signifier: Africa." Then she says, "The word 'Africa' became a signifier not of property but of loss and permanent exclusion:' In Africa, in the mandatory term of wilderness, mapped onto Liberian jungle, which the community leaders allotted to the first Black Hebrews who made their way to the promised land, Bashan bought a house. With her brothers-in-law and sisters. Not as property, to endure, to pay off. As a place to live a while, working in the capital, Monrovia, to support the community living in the jungle. "We got a big old house," she says, "and then uh yeah I think we brought all of the children down. My sisters' children and everybody. Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah because Meshulam," her oldest son, "that's when he used to tell tell my sisters' girls he was going to take them to see James Brown and Aretha Franklin when they came to Africa. Right. He would tell them to go and get, tell their moth- ima;' she unthinkingly says in Hebrew, "to get them dressed up 'cause he was going to take them out to the show. Mean oh god this guy yeah, 'cause they were all in Monrobia at this at this time. You know so it was like basically I was work ... but then I think by the time Ketura was born;' her second daughter, "we were all together. Yeah. Me Avi," her oldest daughter, "and Meshulam was together 'cause then we had got the house yah." A talking house probably much of the time in strong loud musical voices, a spacious one and most likely often fun and funny, and deeply homey. Its talking, that of American-born Black Hebrew women. And its serving but maybe talking too of other African women and possibly men come to think

164

SIXTH VISIT

of it. More stratified maybe than this talking, this house, but sharing the same pulsating aliveness and the same dogged coping practices. "And I it was livi- I was living very very well at the house, oh my goodness jeeze o'peace. It really was a good life. I had about what two maybe about two or three sitters, I had a servant somebody to wa- do the washing, somebody to do the cooking, somebody to do the uh to do the cleaning, right. I mean it was, lord it was that so cheap. Oh my god. You didn't have to do nothing. Not nothing. It was the good life." When she isn't cleaning one of the houses she works at in the Tel-Aviv area or playing basketball on the court in the desert, Bash an wraps her lithe long body in striking mono-toned color and matching turban, sometimes in white. She looks regal. She has grown terribly thin in the past two or three years. She rarely feels like eating and she forgets to. When she comes to the house she sometimes has a bowl of soup and some bread. Sometimes just a cup of herb tea with honey. She hasn't had the time or money or either to fiX the teeth she has begun to lose at fifty. For many years she had no legal status under Israeli law. Nine years before this talking, when she came to clean my apartment in Tel-Aviv she had already renounced her American citizenship. In Israel she wasn't a citizen or a resident or a tourist. Living in the blanks in between legal rubrics, she was not allowed to work, to hold a driver's license, to have a bank account. She couldn't leave the country because she wouldn't be allowed back, home to her four children, to the place where one of them still lives now. An, I believe unwritten, semi-official, agreement reached around that time between the Black Hebrew community and the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, allowed the community to go on living within the confines of three neighborhoods in three desert towns-Dimona, Arad and Mitzpeh Ramon-with only a limited number of persons allowed to move and work beyond community borders. My guess is that it was the community rather than the Israelis which limited these rights to men. As we talk, nine years later, after almost thirty years in Israel, Bashan, like the rest of her community, is an American citizen again, a temporary resident in Israel. She can own a bank account. She can work. She can travel. She can return. She still hasn't been able to get Israeli medical insurance. She says, "If you had a vision, a thought, then you were able to make, to manifest this thought, to make fhis thought become real you know instead of just imagining or dreaming. But you know you were able to make it exist.

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

165

And then too you have to understand how brainwashed the black man was concerning Jerusalem, concerning Israel and everything. To us well Israel it was just always like stories. Things you read in the bible and things that uh, you know, you hear tales passed on and on and on, but you never could connect yourself with it. Until you found out that hey you can be a part of it too:' When I go into Gaza I do it along with one or two other people, radicals, to meet some of the people who live there, with whom we collect and record the details of abuses of their rights. These we then cross back to take to court or to the press or to some officer of the abusing party, that is of my government. In 1992 we are still at liberty, as the people who live there are not, to come and go, to cross in and out. And although we do it a lot, I can still sense in the people doing it with me and in myself a feeling that verges on exhilarated freedom at crossing into the fearzone and emerging unscathed. Even though it gets increasingly mapped. Onto just dusty streets in the sun and stale unfull grocery store fronts and the bare concrete steps without banisters that we climb up to cramped lawyers' offices. It is meted out in compressed but different living-cubicles in Jeballiah refugee camp and in our acquaintance with the red dirt lot in between the open sewage pool and the Israeli army post, where both the armed gangs can get pretty rough sometimes. But also with the fringes of the central business area that are usually calm. Or the intersection across from the military government headquarters and the central prison, that is often volatile and our escorts know when to skirt. the scented gardens of fruit but mostly citrus trees in the rich residential neighborhood where we're sometimes graciously received and fed arealways protected and quiet. The garbage piled gorgeous beach is consistently empty. Still we feel the power of entering and leaving the locus of fear in our minds. We too covert conquerors, our self-concepts built on the images and illusions that are fed by Gaza's subjection. And still, in spite of mappings that have filled a lot of detail into our blank white mind-spaces, we come clearly excited at crossing in to meet "a density that marks the ruin of the known or the beginning of the unknowable:' And, as Adrian Rifkin adds on page 218 of Travelers' Tales: Narratives of home and displacement, in his piece called Travel for men: from Claude Levi-Strauss to the sailor Hans, "The desire for this point," that I'm reading as 'meeting point; "is the motive behind that all-pervasive journeying of modern class societies called slumming." Which besides the high adventure of the mind's unknown also offers a compelling ritual atonement for richer people's eco-

166

SIXTH VISIT

nomic guilt. While the added political oppression of Gaza makes it just that much more magnetic to the slummers. "In the modern metropolis;' Adrian says on page 220, "travel and slumming have collapsed into one another." Passing south through Erez changes breathing patterns to deep, free, lungfilling breaths. It straightens spines. "And I suddenly, huuuhhhh," Miriam describes the feeling, using her long inward breath as a word. You've met her on the first few visits. Referring to Capetown, where she originally comes from, she's saying, "I suddenly felt out of the stuffy, genteel, suburbia where everything is sort of, you know, the parties and this and everything seems pink plastic to me. It seemed suddenly real." As you've already read her say, "At the age of nineteen;' this was 1951, "I was a social worker from a protected environment, protected home with a big wall around it. And I was suddenly faced with things like prostitution, drug addiction, unmarried mothers ... and I became fascinated with this area. It was not very far from us. And also, you know, the smell of slums." It is addictive. I can see it in the way the radicals greet each other when they happen to or intentionally meet somewhere on their various itineraries. Hugs and strong handshakes and warm words and voices stylized in their openness and bluntness along the lines of Israeli pioneer images. Acceptable gestures of emotion. Often between people who know very little of each other, tokens of a quasimilitary camaraderie of arms against the subjectors. Travel by slumming, selfhood by dissent, both assign individuals a group. The use of first person plural becomes unavoidable. And it is subtly a male plural, even though the majority of those doing the work are women. I can see it in the real but overacted warmth of their meetings with each one of our hosts. From the gasstation worker who keeps an eye on the Israeli car, too dangerous to drive into the fearzone with its compulsory yellow license plates among the blue ones in Gaza, and parked just a few meters south of the checkpoint, through the visibly overstressed lawyer who tells us the usable details of the latest court hearing, to the known but undeclared party leader whose wife serves us lunch in his garden. I follow our body language. It's serious, important, timewatchful, implying a scale of doings much bigger than the one reflected in their minuscule media-presence. Or even in the warm thanks we get on paper or faces-for trying to repair broken human rights. Then there is the omission of surprise when meetings between us in Gaza are unexpected. Only casual questions about today's project are customary. Not being privy to inside information might mean you don't fully belong.

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

167

Not being aware might mean you aren't completely committed. After all, what we deal in is information. Omitting surprise signifies having it. Signifies power. Which we too trade in, in our minute, deviant community. I find our self-images often bloated and our self-moral-satisfaction repulsive, even though I agree it's probably vital to the work, which I agree is often good. We are merchandisers too in our subtle way. Our personal liberation through uncommon conduct existing by courtesy of, even if not causing, even if trying to end, their subjection. We are ingeniously netted in the web of complicity by the mental and emotional benefits of our dissent. Sometimes it even has material ones. Some of us, more often the men, get paid trips and podiums overseas to tell about the work we're doing or the facts we're finding or to meet people who can get us money for both. Which is, I again agree, necessary for the work. In fact going into Gaza isn't my going. I move in the fearzone by leave of Palestinians who live there and consent to have us. They pick us up just inside the checkpoint and escort us wherever we're going, pre-arranging cars and drivers to take us from one meeting to another. We know we won't be assaulted by any of the rival factions barely avoiding open warfare in 1992, out of deference to the power of our escorts, who are, we have been able to find out, recognized seats of power implicit inside the collective powerlessness. South of Erez we are by courtesy of our hosts. We're safe because they're vouching for us. The freedom we feel ourselves exercising consists entirely of deciding to trust and listen to them. This is the key to how we position ourselves beyond the dictates of our community. By which we will nevertheless not be too seriously harassed in the person of Israeli soldiers because we are Jewish Israelis, answerable only to the laws that hold only for the rulers here. These we don't break. We stretch them a little when we try to offer a couple of their protective measures to people for whom they were never meant, and probably won't serve. But the freedom we feel ourselves exercising in fact consists of deciding to obey and apply these laws and rules. Which is the key to how we position ourselves beyond the dictates to their community. So my liberty or strength come of crossing. Back and forth. As if I were subject to neither community while I am actually subject to both. Like sailor Hans, who Adrian says, "can show the whole Marseilles scene to tourists," meaning the Marseilles underworld scene. "Going in and out of its images with increasing fluency, he can make the tourists pay for a glimpse of those worlds whose mastery holds the key to his own in-

168

SIXTH VISIT

dependence from them." Simultaneously of, and outside of, each of them, sailor Hans needs both. He makes his living independence off of helping these worlds meet. In the sealed port of Gaza I may not be a tourist but I can't claim to be a sailor either. Not even that. My going and coming is totally by the mastery of others. My independence no more and also no less than crossing a mental fearplace. Than deciding to rely on the representatives and rules of a foreign public, known to be dangerous by my own, on whose rules and representatives I still, in spite of this, continue to rely. And imprinting this compound decision onto the physical, geographical place, the territorial signifier. Gaza. Which makes my going there a paradigm of all my travel. One of the workplaces we use a lot is Auwni's office furniture and human rights store. It's convenient because it's a fairly large off-the-street space with assorted desks for a few Israeli volunteers to sit at beside Palestinian interpreters and take testimonies from the individuals who come to the store that day. In a triangle of talking, gesturing, listening, interpreting, listening, asking, listening, telling, interpreting, looking over documents. None of us speaks a useful Arabic. Writing. First name, father's name, grandfather's name, last name, age, address, precise grievance and request and/or nature of incident, date of incident, location of incident, exact time of incident, description, copies of all relevant documents. The shadow-bureaucracy of human rights work aptly in motion in a clumsy take-off on the offices of the ruling bureaucracy. Which dictates the contents and form of the shadow anyway. Or of our talking house. A space that people keep entering and leaving, by standing invitation to sit and talk, and have coffee and relate. A listening place, where story pieces are offered. Melody fragments are voiced and resound, suspended in the room. First accepted, absorbed, left to stay as they are, for a while. And then, very patiently, questions are asked, comments made, clarifications added. Relief sought. Around oversized, fake-wood male executive's desks that are crowded at right-angles all the way across the space. Squeezed in between them are black high-backed vinyl-covered executive swivel chairs. There's no place to swivel. Almost nobody in Gaza has been able to buy this stuff for some years now, and the comings and goings of furnishings through this show room have slowed to a trickle. The lighting is dim and we write with faces close to the writing pads and are served good, bitter coffee in tiny china cups by the woman Mouna who is dark, large, beautiful, Nubian-looking, never says anything.

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

169

In the flow of hurtful testimonies I remember the contingent shock of discovering that the ancient woman opposite me in half a veil, I think it passed across her chin, and a dark headdress, wrinkled and missing some bottom teeth, is exactly my age, November 48, same month, same year. I have no memory of what her request was but from across a chasm she thanked me with dry determined hands which were much more wrinkled than my own no less bony ones, pressed on my chest and cheeks, and a lot of repeated words in her language for taking down the details of her pain. To feed into the shredder of the real bureaucracy while we try again to figure out new ways to jam it. Like true bureaucrats we always make a point of explaining very clearly that we can't promise anything. Judith, far from promising anything, is seriously afraid that her anthropological documentation of a process she sees as genocidal, might actually endanger some of the individual Quiche women whose experience she recorded in the mountains in Guatemala for almost two years. As she has good reason to be, even though she felt that, in a way, she was on a mission. You've met her briefly on the first visit. You can spend some more time with her on the next if you want. "For me," she says, "I had the option to leave, which makes it all entirely different. At one level I've had a privileged existence. I have a survivor guilt." Or a slummer's. And she knew she might suddenly have to flee. June did. She says, "What I really left the US for was the threat over everybody. Particularly people like us being put in mental hospitals and called mentally ill when we weren't, and made mentally ill with the very primitive drugs they had at that time which were quite effective, some lobotomies, electro-shock of course, the whole bit." With her visions and her obsession with teaching the world non-violence, with her openly multiple partners, the two fathers of her first two children, with her motherhood out of wedlock, with her beliefs, she knew how easily she could be subjected to diagnosis. She knew she could be committed. She knew her biography and personality fell outside of standard normalcy, seriously and very gravely endangering her personal liberty. She realized she had to flee. When she started making arrangements to leave she says, "My little boy was already out in the valley behind San Francisco because he could not breathe in the Bay area with his asthma. And so a very dear friend of mine had him with her children in a dry area where he was doing just fine. And I was, I tell you, I was just... a psychiatrist actually, child psychiatrist, not a

170

SIXTH VISIT

psychiatrist a just an ordinary doctor, he was not even a psychiatrist, said, 'I must tell you Mrs. Molten, he is allergic to you:" June stays quiet here for the duration of a phrase. Then she starts up her reconstruction again, "And I said that guy I think was off the track completely but in those ... at that I tell you he said, 'Leave him alone. Just don't even go to see him for... ' uh we got on marvelously well like I do with my grandsons actually but he said, he was then about three and he said, 'Just don't see him for at least three months and if you could go away for a whole year, give him a chance: "And then I thought of my grandmother losing her son who finally died of all this asthma and bronchitis at age nineteen and I knew how close I'd been to death... numerous times: nine years old, thirteen years old and then several times as a grown up. I decided, you know, one can always say that this was a lot of it was very handy for me just to go away for a year just because this one doctor said to or something. I can very easily see how all this was rather handy-for Ghandi to say one should experiment with sex because you know these are all handy ways to become a nymphomaniac or to be this or to be ... to abandon your children. All those words can be very well applied to me you see and I was fully aware that those could be. Yes. At the time." She is emphatic. In Geneva, where she finally came to live, she "typed for twentythree years and nine months." And Bashan fled too. She fled America in 1967. She says, "We all everybody knew it America is called Babylon. And you know that Babylon is up for what destruction or whatever not. And we know that this when you read the scripture it says that that my people must come up out of Babylon. You know. It was always the Bible when you read it, it always shows you of a exodus. Out. Get out. Get out of Babylon right. So this was what you know we uh so this is what this our teachers began to go on. And then since they started talking about leaving Babylon so this is when the Black Hebrew group it became uh formally it it became ... " this bit is blurred on the recording, "because then we started talking about exodus and no other group was talking about exodus:' They decided to leave, she says, because they had come to understand that, "you cannot live the American life, you can't live the American dream, it is this is not what you want, this is not what you want for your children. Because look what it's, look what America is offering! Look what is

America to offer. "Hey in America it's more it's it's it's more vicious. It's more brutal. You know. It has no it has it shows no kind of kindness. No kind of considera-

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

171

tion. It has no limits. There is no end. All at the beginning, the starting of everything. Troubles, problems, sorrows." She's chanting an incantation. I'm believing her. I'm taking up the beat. Joining in. Feeling the fear she's telling. But why I ask her why's it different from my own, from my fear of Israel and its army, from my fear for my children grown to soldiers, from my fear as a woman, from my sense of the insaneness I'm facing all around me. "You don't un- you don't understand it;' she explains softly, almost whispering, "because you've never lived there." In fact I have and she knows it. Maybe her 'there' means black. She wasn't fleeing America with a count in 1967. But she did have her uncle. "My uncle;' she says, "would be coming and telling us, 'Okay, hey get your bags packed.' We hadn't started settling nothing. We was, 'Okay, we got time, be cool.' Chill. And, 'We we we comin; you know. So what we would do, we would just go and buy a little bit of something just to put in our bags just to make it look like okay hey, just to get him off our backs. This was with my uncle right. 'Cause he ha- became like a overseer or you know guardian. He was you know somebody else:' Guardian, overseer, father. Teacher. Mission. For her leaving and moving, singular and independent though it is, every woman in this house takes her place, participates, in a structure of power. Herself trapped, Trinh T. Minhha says, on page 15 of Travellers' Tales, within the frontiers of her body and her species (she says it in the plural so quotation marks would be inaccurate), herself subject to oppression and spatial confinement, which she either dares to defy or ignores-strong and unafraid, she is implicated, whether knowingly or not, in oppression-based practices that she deploys for her own personal liberation. One way or another. For better and for worse that is what is empowerment. Getting a piece of it. And, necessarily, getting it from someone or someplace or something in which, of which, she then holds (some) power. In which, of which, she is then (all the more) a part. Using a portion of its power. Even if she uses it to leave. "The Minister of Interior;' Miriam is saying, "had very bad ulcers. And he wouldn't see he wouldn't see a Jewish doctor but my father was a gastroenterologist. So obviously he had a lot of pain so he decided he'd come and see him and my father said, 'On one condition'." She says this last in Hebrew. "That that he that he got that I got a passport. "I was about two years or something without a passport, three years, fifty-six fifty... Because I was involved with publi- the the passive resis-

172

SIXTH VISIT

tance campaigns and politically involved and they'd thrown me out of my job and you know this all... It was general political involvement and it was involvement with the passive resistance campaign at that time. It was specifically the passive resistance campaign. And I was working there in this District Six and being involved in the political movement. Uh the ANC or anything wasn't strong at the time." As we are talking the metal wind chimes on the roof verandah of Miriam's Tel-Aviv apartment have started a clear, pure singing in the sea breeze. "If I had stayed a little bit longer in South Africa then, I would have joined the communist party. Whatever it meant. Because it was an anti-apartheid party you know at the time. And then I suddenly thought to myself... I was working for this organization which was supposed to be it was called Society for the Protection of Child ... Life. Felt like wildlife but it was child... and it was one of these uh church do-good organizations which was s - sort of had an overlay of professionalism and they got money from the government. And the government said to them if they continued to employ me they'll stop their subsidy. So they took me aside in a room one day and they said, 'Very sorry we can't do have you employed here anymore as much as we would like to because the ... to cut away our money.' So I said to myself, 'Well, what can I do? I can stay. Be more politically involved. Go to jail.' 'Cause that was inevitable:' She pauses for a long time to think at the end of this sentence. She has been talking softly for a few sentences as a representation of talking to herself and as an expression of sad difficult deciding. '"Become a a martyr or not-and who's going to remember, spend the rest of my life in jail. Or else;... it was tremendous conflict... , 'leave.' And all my political friends said to me at the time, 'Ahhhhh, are you deserting us, 'ey?'" She gives them slightly Afrikaner accents here. '"So you're leaving us?'" She switches to Hebrew for the next sentence. '"You're betraying us: And of course your guilt. Guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt. And I decided to leave." Before losing her passport, she explains, she had spent some time away and, "I came back with a British and a South African passport. Which was illegal. Came to Durban. I don't know why, somehow or other, I can't remember, the guy knew, the that I also had the British passport, he said, 'You can't have British and South African.' Took the British away from me. I arrived in South Afri- in Capetown, I remember it was Rosh Hashana, the boat because there was so much wind, South-easter, uh the boat was parked out in the docks and I was sitting getting drunk all day in the thing. Got off the

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

173

boat. My parents were waiting for me. It was erev Rosh Hashana," that is, the eve of the Jewish new year, "and the first thing I said to them was, 'I'm not staying in this country! I'm not staying here! I'm going back again!' My parents said, 'uh huh huh huh' you know. And the next thing that happened, I think the passpor-, I can't remember, passport was finished and I applied for a new passport and I was refused." Doreen is the first one to get up. She's been stringing an almost waist length necklace of stone and ceramic and metal beads in faded aquamarine and blunt gold and light gold-browns and darker browns and some bronze and black. The different sizes and thicknesses and textures and colors are making a rich rhythm along the string and she's playing a tape of a Zairian mass sung by a choir. She and Miriam almost always have something special in the fridge at the back of their shop and we've been drinking a mixture of juices with slices of fresh ginger and mint leaves in it and a little bit of alcohol. She's been beating the rhythm as she chooses one bead after another out of her twenty years of collection, sorted by shade and size and type in the compartments of a large number of transparent plastic trays. She lays the necklace on the counter and comes around it and starts moving her legs and arms and shoulders and pelvis to the music. She is small. Her long dress is a soft cotton handprinted in browns and blacks. The room smells of wood oil and patchouli. She's doing more than a few steps that take advantage of an excuse to be the music on the way to do something else. She's keeping on. It's dancing without any need for excuses. Just like that in the middle of everything. And she sustains it long enough that we stop smiling in indulgent understanding and envy but slight embarrassment. It's become independent of the reactions around it. It doesn't need them or care about them. At that point we join. Closing eyes, then opening them again, no need to block out awareness of what we're doing. Swaying hips, rolling heads, snapping our fingers, smiling very broadly to each other and ourselves, humming low voiced bits of the unfamiliar to me, but somehow known, repetitive, magic music. The last hours of the business week are already over and there are no customers in the shop, though someone has phoned and said he was on his way and would they still be there in forty minutes. We may not dance all of them. Miriam has left her two walking sticks leaning on a wall. She doesn't need them for dancing. Our movement, our mobility-the competence we're here to examine in the talking house-has these kinds of undercurrents and overtones. A feat

174

SIXTH VISIT

of individuality, it is still, also, formed by the architectures in which it takes place. Its own place, true, but not necessarily in its own space. These are the kinds of contexts that direct our free choices, our freedom to choose. The conditions of our enablement, the malemodels of our independent selves. Hannah says, "I went back to Australia. There was a new government in power, there was a new Australian nationalism, a pride and I realized I knew very little of Australia. I'd grown up in Melbourne, I'd never really traveled and you know it is this enormous continent." You've spent some time with Hannah on the first and second visits, at her Turkish tower in Jerusalem. Now she's saying, "And I decided with my daughter to get this little Volkswagen combi van and fit it out with a bed and a gas cooker and travel and discover Australia and the wild birds and ... anyway... No, I wasn't a photographer. I suppose I was really recuperating from my divorce in a sense and from the trauma of being you know not having this ideal marriage. On the way I met in Sydney a photographer, that's the point of this, because he was definitely my mentor and made me a photographer. I became a photographer through through what I'm about to tell you about how I got to the pilgrimages. So we lived together for six years including a period here, he came and joined me here and we lived here for a year. And in that six years he was a photographer and we traveled together somewhat. And we were living together with my daughter in Bali for five mon- Bali Indonesia. And uh he said, 'We have to go back to Australia and work and make money and be serious,' and and I didn't really want to go back to the West, to Australia. I really liked our life in Bali. And we both had work there. It just occurred. I designed jewelry and certain clothes and had them manufactured there and sold them there and my daughter was happy there, there was a little gan;' she says kindergarten in Hebrew, "with other kids. We had a very nice time there. We would photograph. He had photographic jobs and we made our living there very easily including going to the beach every day and parties and whatever we did. And uh I'd met a Brazilian who told me about a festival which is a it's kind of a pilgrimage in India. What he told me really struck a chord and really appealed to me about this Pushkar Camel Fair, at the only temple in India that's dedicated to Lord Brahma and. So I don't know how it happened but when my boyfriend said we have to go back to Australia, I don't know how it happened but I said to him, 'I don't want to go back to Australia. I want to go to India and I want to go to Pushkar and I want to photograph this Pushkar festival and I want to come back and sell the photos:

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

175

Somehow I made the shift from just doing happy snaps to wanting to do it professionally. Just, I don't know where it came from in my mind. But I said that that's what I wanted to do. And uh and I did. "I didn't want him to come with me because he was such a good photographer and I was so unsure and I. He said, 'I can't be without you.' I said, 'If you come with me whatever you'll be pointing your camera at I'll be wondering why I'm pointing mine there that way and uh and I don't want you around as a photographer.' So he said, 'Okay I'll make a movie film and you do your stills.' So he did come with me. We left my daughter with my parents or with a friend or something. For both of us it was a definite jumping off point and we both uh acknowledge it in each other that we both that was a turning point in both our lives. I became a professional photographer after that. I came back, the photos were published in the magazine that I wanted them to be published in, they were the cover, they made a poster, after that I showed it to the government of India tourist office, they said, 'Well we'll invite you to India as a hospitali- as our guest to the government to do a photographic project. I went. Red carpet treatment. Made all my contacts in India which I still have. And it became the beginning of a whole new life and a whole new direction in life. And for him too. He made his film and then he decided he was going to make films about religious festivals around the world and he's been doing that ever since also." Bashan says that in order to leave America, "You had to do it as a individual. I mean you had to make that final decision. Okay, am I gonna go or am I gonna stay you know. And you couldn't make it because based on like you say your relatives, your family, your friends or anything." And she says, "It became a individual decision." And she also says, "I mean you prefer you just go from one indoctrination to another, you know. But the one what you ... how you look at it is, which one is to your advantage. Which one give you a broader ah a broader outlook. And the first, okay, the first turning point where I had to come through and I felt the the first the turning road, right, you get to and that was to leave America. To give up America. I didn't want it but this is what I had to do from indoctrination. The indoctrination is telling you, hey give up America." Earlier she's said, "It was just uhm it was that uh how did they say it was that wind that was blowing at that time in the sixties. You know it w - that was that wind, it was a wind blowing. Right:' She's said, "Like when they said tell me I'm going to Africa you know. Ev- everyplace we'd crack, 'Africa.'

176

SIXTH VISIT

But it didn't take that much you know it didn't take a lot of cha-cha-cha, you know, sweating and ... to convince us. I mean we thought it was great. Everybody shit." She could hardly talk here, she was laughing so hard, her big strong self-jabbing laugh. She caught her breath, "Till we got there. We was ... 'Africa; you know, 'what the hell are we doing here.' You know and everything. But uh yeah it was just hey that we, you know, that we became motivated. We ... we were young. What twenty-two, t - twenty-three years old. Young. And we just and a at that time that the foo- everything that, everybody was just going like hey, this was in the sixties. Anything you choose or desire." What I choose or desire. Just going. Like hey. Still. Today, in the nineties. What I desire. Knowledge of nature and eloquent, communicating quiet. Wild untamedness and carved warm dark beauty. Strength and secret silence. The key word is mastery which freedom is made of. Footknowledge of every rock and nook, every forest desert clue. At home in the deep dark. Movement a home. Open spaces. Confident quiet moccasin step through the wild. Nowhere daunted at a loss. Nowhere to be lost. Self sufficient. Self fully sufficient. To be that kind of person. Nothing else needed but self, to take oneself anywhere, to get one's bearings everywhere, to find the way and the place. To come or go. To decide. (The majestic background-almost-audible-music is unsilenceable in my head.) I sat beside one in first grade. The two of us shared a double desk at school in a Kansas university town. His name was Barry. I don't think he ever spoke to me. Probably I never asked him anything. Maybe I did in one of my clumsy because rare, unpracticed attempts to start a dialogue and he answered in one word and I was left at an embarrassing loss. He was slight and beautiful through his skewed, off-center look which I un-saw in my determination that he should be. With dark velvet eyes. I have no idea how I knew he was Indian. That was what it was called then and what I still call it now, meaning the mythical image rather than the living people. "quosdam Indos violenter arripui" Christopher Columbus wrote on his journey home in 1493, "I had several Indians taken prisoner," inflicting his pre-set image on the living people. Un-seeing the people for the idea from the first second. From a stationary habitude continuous shifting looks like freedom. From our heavy houses, theirs' look to me like living outside, unenclosed. I can't feel the tyrannical confinement of their seasonal roads-born-of-needs. I can

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

177

guess it. I know it from reading about it. Just like I know I'm talking about a past. But I can't feel it for the sky, expansive above them in the very least of westerns. The majestic background-almost-audible-music is unsilenceable in my head. Indians. Wild untamedness and carved warm dark beauty. Strength and secret silence. Knowledge of nature and eloquent, communicating quiet. The key word mastery, which freedom is made of. Footknowledge of every rock and nook, every forest desert clue. At home in the deep dark. Movement their home. Open spaces. "The sun of Africa, the skies of Africa, the the the

size of Africa around you," as Miriam says it. Confident quiet moccasin step through the wild. Nowhere daunted at a loss. Nowhere lost. Self sufficient. Nothing needed but self, to take oneself anywhere, to get one's bearings everywhere, to find the way and the place. To come or go. To decide. I can hardly remember anyone else in my first grade class. Not even the little girls who were the friends that I occasionally used to visit or play with after school. But I remember Barry and my excitement at the thought of his lineage. I only remember the first realization of sitting beside him. I have no idea if the nice first grade teacher moved one of us somewhere else the next day or if we sat next to each other all year. What I remember is the encounter with the thought. "The archetype of the American Indian: the feather-streaming, buffalochasing, wild-riding, recklessly fighting Indian of the plains;' and, "the boundless land in which he lived, confined only by the wide and starry sky, gave obvious emphasis to the pervasive notion of Indian freedom." This is on page 335 of The American Heritage Book of Indians, whose editor in charge was Alvin M. Josephy Jr., and whose narrative was written by William Brandon. It was published by the American Heritage Publishing Company in 1961. On page 337 William says, "Anyone alone in the plains turns into a mystic:' And he says, "Something happens to a man when he gets on a horse, in a country where he can ride at a run forever; it is quite easy to ascend to an impression of living in a myth:' Why is it that he's implicitly assumed to be riding alone in the plains? Isn't that a figment of the myth? And who is it that ascends "to an impression ofliving in a myth"-the Indian or his writer (who, I gather, wasn't Indian)? Me for one. I believed it. I still do in spite of myself. It's an inherited myth. Maybe most are. Maybe that's part of the definition of myth. Received readymade from my mother. Through her wistful voice when she pronounced the word, through our rare and distinctly remembered visits at the shop on the poor river edge of town, where a man who

178

SIXTH VISIT

looked like he could be Barry's father used to show her around. He was very patient and very quiet and tangibly shy and so was she back, even though she wasn't in a lot of other places. And she could never afford to buy the rug she always really wanted, and I took what I think were hours to choose my first ring when I turned five, which I still have more than forty years later and will soon give to my daughter. Passed on-the myth-through our car-cramped drive of back-seat sister fights cross-country one summer, that detoured on purpose to a night in Taos because she said so, the only one I remember in weeks of trip, where we went to see them dancing for the tourists, feathered bare legged and torsoed, bronze skinned silhouettes around a fire-one of my first I think. Passed on by my mother through the huge prairie expanse of unmanageable intimidating text in the heavy expensive coffee-table American Heritage book, in whose company I grew up after a close friend of hers made her a gift of it and later died. With the gorgeous black and white pictures of the handsome, exotically set-faced slant-eyed chiefs, which I studied and learnt by heart. And the color plates of sand paintings and painted portraits and painted faces and the names. The music of the names. Dakota, Iroquois, Hopi, Zuni, tipi, Navaho, Apache, Commanche. For the first time in bits over the past year I've actually been reading the book. A book never intended for reading. Reading it I am reading an archeology of my mind. In the mid-nineteenth century, it says, on page 247, "Town-dwelling Indians, rich in culture and cornfields, were transfigured in the popular mind into nomadic hunters, rather dirtier and less desirable than gypsies, which of course made it easier to drive them away, or shoot them if they became dangerous." And it says, "But at the same time sizable sections of public opinion magnified the Creeks and their neighbours into romantic heros." And it says, "While Illinois militiamen were shooting Sauk and Foxes to persuade them to stay west of the Mississippi;' the "Sauk and Fox leader Black Hawk was becoming a national celebrity." It says the mid-nineteenth century-like mefound parts of its Indian heroes in Fenimore Cooper fiction, which I absorbed unread in the nineteen-fifties through its television and kids' games progeny. And in 1750, it says on page 241, images of the people of the New World were "distilled by Jean Jacques Rousseau into his vision of the blessed state of the natural man, the noble savage, pure, simple, and above all free. 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains'." I felt everywhere in chains at school. I feared it and hated it. At home,

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

179

powerless and totally dependent and bored. And restless. Projecting the rules I answered to onto the world, it looked as if Indians answered to none. I didn't even register the fact that Barry was sitting at the same hated school. I had no idea that there were such things as histories or minorities, despite the absence in our Kansas town of enough Jewish males besides my father to make up the minion for a circumcision ceremony. And despite the fact that I was already using pieces of just those things to understand and dream. So uncomprehendingly superimposed by me on an equally untalkative darkskinned six-year old called Barry was the romanticism and eroticism of what is dreamt by the white to be Indian. Though I'm sure I did know, without letting it interfere in the least, that he didn't live in a tipi. What I didn't know, then that is, even though I think it's clear now, was that the real crosser-of-lines, free agent who I was imagining was probably a white man. True, probably exotically suntanned. "The American trapper;' William says on page 339, "the 'free' trapper, the mountain man. The mountain men became a byword for knowledge of the wild Far West and how to survive therein; a few who survived gained fame in specialized circles as guides for later western explorers." Down the page he says they, "lived and worked with the Indians and constituted, in effect, a small, scattered tribe of their own, in some respects more Indian than the Indians themselves;' I think in all respects, given the white-myth meaning of'Indian; "so far from the civilization of 'the States' they were scarcely recognizable as Americans." The story I believed so deeply was one of the different, magic-making other, moving through the whole of nature at home, loving and reverent of earth and animal and plant, knowing death-his own included? I'm not sure-for a natural phase, a venerable passing into another element, not to be obstructed when its time comes. And when I wish for the confidence to travel the wilderness alone, to be at home in the world at large, this is the idol role model. A figure whose TV and movie proven deftness and grace in performing a procession of killings and beatings recasts them as beauty, as acts majestically momentous. A gorgeous, sexy, pure-minded killer with a right to do what he does, because I take the genre's word for it that he only does it when he has no other choice. He doesn't mean to dominate, just to protect justice, his rights, his life, his wife, usually prospective, a deserving-because-beautiful woman. And it's not his fault that everyone who challenges his supremacy ends up dead and he ends up carrying her off. I was never really clear about who I wanted to be, the hawkeye or the woman, the tracker or carried off.

180

SIXTH VISIT

"The 'others' of the master subject are marginalized and ignored in its gaze at space, but are also given their own places: the slum, the ghetto, the harem, the colony, the closet, the inner city, the Third World, the private." The wild, the jungle, the deep forest, the desert, I might add. "These places haunt the imagination of the master subject, and are both desired and feared for their difference;' say Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose who edited the book Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, in their introduction, on page 16. As a white middle-class Israeli-American Jewish girl-child, my claim to master subjecthood could only be partial. But my otherhood was marginalized by me no less than him. My imagination handed over in full, completely given over to his desires, his fears, his haunted haunting places. As I envy him I realize that it is him that I envy. His mastery of the skills of a coverer of ground. I would be a coverer of ground. As a child and even a young woman I actually wasn't aware of the distinction. I didn't realize I was making an assumption not to mention a mistake when I projected myself onto both the hawkeye and his requisitioned bride as if they were interchangeable equals. Judith says, in one of the fragments decipherable on the damaged tape of our conversation, that in the kind of journeying she has done, "You become a token male." In both Guatemala and India she was unafraid of being violated by men, despite some threatening encounters. She habitually acts, she says, "like: don't mess with me; with a haughty air of confidence quite exceeding the reality:' Miriam says, in the notes, somewhere in between tapes, that she was a third sex on her trips through Afghanistan. "Men don't know how to relate to you," she says, "and it protects you." She says she, "went from Afghanistan into Persia and I was in the desert taking stuff through. I'd bought a lot of stuff up in the Turkmen villages in the in this sort of you know, right in the north of Afghanistan and I went absolutely hnnnnnhh I was this whole day in this village, mainly of nomads, I was in this village. Only at the end of the day did I realize that I was the only woman in their midst I was so exhilarated." "The first half of the year;' Hannah says, referring to a recent year of travel, "in Russia and Soviet Central Asia and Tibet, the first six months, I took with me my worst clothes, my least provocative clothes, nothing provocative, only practical clothes and clothes that really I wanted to wear out and dump. And uh you know nothing no tight pants ... only functional practical work clothes:' Hannah has a strain of extravagance in her dress, an

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

181

open enjoyment of her long lanky form. As she's saying this she's wearing a cream white knee length poplin dress that gently follows the contours of her body, with a very wide black belt around the waist, making the least of her slimness. She looks striking and dramatic and seems happy and comfortable and playful with it. "And I was so aware;' she goes on, "the first half of the trip ... no luxury, a lot of discomfort, no gratification on any level as a woman, no ... you know, none. No appreciation of me as a woman and no sexual flirtations or interests at all. And they're all Muslim countries too Soviet Central Asia." Griselda says, on page 78, that the freedom the "white mother achieves is a version of what we typically associate with the bourgeois man." She says, "He is the privileged traveller through and occupant of public spaces of money, exchange, leisure and power." The hawkeye was, is, the inner core of the longing. My vision of selfdetermination, none other than the tale of my erasure. Wander a man's dream, the nomad moving image a man. By longing to be, not to speak of becoming, one, I'm disclaiming me. Maybe more than I will survive. Scale the wall and you die, little zinnia. There's no way out with (your) self intact. Even your dreams, not your own, are minted by the wall. My son is a soldier. Requisitioned and exquisitely trained to defend the wall. He has to be by Israeli law. He might also have been by choice. I can't see any way of knowing. Brown skinned, blue eyed, light brown hair cropped, high cheekboned, graceful and thin and strong and sensitive. He visits often, my older son, coming through, very happy and appreciating of the normal food and the clean smell of the sheets and towels. Eats and showers and sleeps. His body taken careful care of and given the space to relax. To revert to protectedness. His hands are heavily callused from the metal he cleans and assembles and carries. His skin has been desensitized to rain and cold and arid heat and darkness and he has learned to walk the dark. Alone. With a map in his head. I deeply envy him this. And as I envy him this I realize that it is this that I envy. This mastery of the skills of a coverer of ground. I would be a coverer of ground. But the maps I carry in my head are unwalkable. Charles Trowbridge understood. "The pioneer of mental maps" he is called by Peter and Rodney on page 180 of their book by that name. He proposed in 1913, they write, "'that children be seated at school in a special manner when studying geography, the cardinal points of the compass marked in the room, and the maps in the books properly oriented and the imaginary maps systematically corrected in childhood."' This was important, he ex-

182

SIXTH VISIT

plained, because '"the matter has a pertinent relation to the training of children to become soldiers."' "Historical travel has been closely associated with conquests-sexual and territorial;' Barry Curtis and Claire Pajaczkowska say on page 201 of Travellers' Tales in their article: 'Getting There': travel, time and narrative. The individual power exercised in travelling a space, rests on whatever it is or was that causes the people there, in that space, to grant access to and from it. Often as not, whatever it is, or was, is military and colonizing. And the power exercised in travelling rests, as well, on the traveler's claim to have a right of access; to enter the space, to use portions of its resources, its products, its views. To look and freely leave. Which often as not is a right denied the people there. Barry Curtis and Claire Pajaczkowska, on the same page, call this "the power relations that underpin the historically constituted privilege of visiting." In India, Hannah says in a section of the notes that has somehow escaped the tapes but retains her words, she is the great white goddess. That's how she's treated. That's how she acts. Even when she's out in the field. She uses public transport, buses and public shuttle services and eats street food. But she's learned, she says, how to make it work very easily for her. She sends everything out to be done, laundry and such not. After she had spent six ascetic months in Soviet Central Asia, "Once I hit India, first of all I had to buy a whole new wardrobe 'cause I hit summer. Everything else had been basically cold and I needed warm clothes and ... and the second half of my trip, which was India, Bali, Australia was die exact opposite. I was bathed in luxury. What luxury. As luxury as only in India you know maharajas and all that. I get that in India and uhm lovely clothes. Lovely feminine soft clothes, light clothes, flowing clothes. And again makeup and and wha- looking how my nails looked and uh and being appreciated as a woman again." Soviet Central Asia is foreign turf to her. But even tliere she says she never has to take no for an answer. She can simply push through by persistence or charm. "They'd say'no, you can't; the notes read. "I'd just not agree:' When Miriam "first came to India I felt I was in Capetown. Bombay was just so colonial. I mean, the museum looked the same the ... everything the lines outside I don't know. So India I never felt ... of course I mean Hinduism is foreign, I was never exposed to Hinduism as such in Capetown. Of course it's completely kind of foreign. But somehow or other there's the overlay of still of the British colonial tliing there and of course the language. Of course

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

183

the language." And talking of Pakistan, she says. "Of course English again. It's also English and the English colonial uh, uh which say to Americans is foreign exotic, for me it's very familiar, grown up in Capetown. It's very familiar. More so in a way probably than if I'd grown up in England itself because it was the colonies." Where she was daughter to a well known family. Everyone in Capetown knew her father and she felt protected. From the protected house. Which she took with her everywhere. Tortoise-like. To Tzfat, in one case. When she bought the house there. She says she was seeing it in the terms and placements of Capetown. She didn't have any knowledge of where it was situated in Israeli social-geography. Where it stood regarding centers or periphery, what kind of people chose or had to live in its vicinity. How any of that had come about. What she incidentally happened to be stating and participating in when she acquired this wonderful house. She perceived it, unknowingly, as a transplant, by mapping the visible features of Galilee terrain onto South African meanings. Her neighbors were from Jerba. Their daughter, she has remarked thoughtfully, is now grown and a policewoman. Drives a police car. Carries a gun. Moves through the country-Israel-freely, securely, powerfully. "This last trip when I was in Jerba;' she says, "you know Jerba's also got a very was one of my pilgrimage places. Like Bukhara, like Cochin. Where the Jews had come from because we have so much contact here you know we were buyi-," she's referring to the shop. Buying ethnic artifacts for the shop. "Our neighbors were from Jerba in Tzfat. They used to bring us Jerba couscous every Friday." She's already said this. It's an important tie she keeps returning to. "You know there was a sort of family that we were sort of our family their family. And I always used to think, 'Wowwww if Orli hadn't come to Israel, and is a shoteret," that is, a Hebrew policewoman, "walking around with a gun, she'd been sitting here in this khatzer;' this courtyard, "and never been allowed out, until she got married."' Miriam drives. She could carry a gun if she wanted. (She wouldn't think of it.) She moves through more than one, through many, many countries. This is her birthright, granted-maybe grudgingly, maybe almost taken by force but nonetheless for granted-by the place and people where she grew up. But it is Jerba and Jerba-like places where she goes to feel her freedom. To breathe. "Modernity," Griselda says on page 72, "appears to uproot, deracinate, detraditionalize societies. It thus makes difficult, if not impossible, the sense of belonging which could only be found by a migration in time

184

SIXTH VISIT

and space backwards to the pre-modern pasts where other peoples's memories, or the fictions of them, could be 'colonized' to do service for what the Westerns felt they were experiencing, a living death." It's the cross-mapping that makes it into living breathing freedom. It's the using this freedom where she and it are strange. And yet at the same time at home. Griselda goes on, "Travel thus becomes a fetishizing activity, journeying as disavowal of both the present and of death:' Miriam says, "The shop gave me a purpose for travel, it gave me a reason for travelling, it gave me a reason for contact with people, it gave me an excuse or a reason to get," there's noise here on the tape, "about other cultures. And because of that it gave me a kind of entree to enter completely different societies all the time rather than just going to see museums and temples," and more noise, "got involved in how you make, how you make batik and how you make traditional die. You get terribly involved. As soon as you get buying you get terribly involved in the culture. I think I would have got bored long time ago if I didn't have a purpose:' She always takes cash in local currency, so there's no bureaucracy involved in buying and no identity either, the Israeli aspect of which can cause problems in some places. She explains a little apologetically that she uses samsonite luggage, her only luxury travel accessory, so the things she'-s buying and carrying home won't get ruined or broken. A lot of the stuff gets mailed, though, sometimes to family in England, when there are no postal relations with Israel. She packs it herself except in Bombay, where you get packages sewn up and sealed with wax on the street outside the post office. Somehow, miraculously, she says, the packages always arrive. Some many months later. And she traces their complicated routes over her mindmaps, amazed that they've made their way. Hannah's acquisitions are the photographs she sells to make her living and the pilgrimages she makes to improve it. "Now over the years," she says, "I've built up all these professional contacts. And for example this time when I was in India-ppphhhh I can count on one hand the number of nights I paid for hotels. But I in the three months I was there I stayed ppphhh probably two months out of three months either in the top luxury hotels or with friends in very luxurious uh homes. And all of that I work out in advance on a complementary basis, the accommodation. I have these deals going. Professional deals. And I have an excellent reput- professional reputation in India. Excellent. You know, having been invited by the government for the Indian Tourist Office, all of my connections then were all those top level hotels that

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

185

all wanted promotional work." That is, brochures or, "in-house magazines. And that's one of the reasons I like it there. I mean it's not that I'm stuck on luxury by any means. Even this three months I traveled to very remote places and there you stay in you know hotels that are in whatever they have and it's okay, it doesn't bother me, it doesn't have to be luxury. But it somehow is. "Up until this pilgrimage, this one I did now in Tibet, other pilgrimages I've done have, I've organized it. You know I did one that's you you originate out of Kashmir and you the pilgrimage is up in the Himalayas, remote but I organized out of Kashmir that my house bo- boat boy would accompany me and he would bring the tent, the sleeping bag, the pots the pans, the food and he would arrange the pony who would carry everything. And he would also be in a sense my protector and uh you pay for this and that's the way that it was done." "For cultures whose expansion and dominance were intimately dependent upon the colonial enterprise;' Trinh T. Minh-ha says on page 22 of Travellers' Tales, "travelling as part of a system of foreign investment by metropolitan powers has largely been a form of culture-collecting aimed at world hegemony." "The people there was like ... they didn't have clothes;' Bashan is saying, there being Liberia here, "and they would gladly give you a proper banana for a shirt or a pair of shoes. God, a pair of shoes? Jeeze o'peace you can uh almost buy a truck." Just before this she's said, "We had shipped a lot of trunks of our goods there, right. We had shipped you know. And so when we did get the shipment of these trunks and a lot of people that was supposed to come they had shipped things too but they didn't come, right;' she goes on. "And so like I say we was so down and we ... got all these trunks up in the interior with nothing to do with them right. 'Cause we live in the interior mind you. So finally I don't know who it was somebody hit upon the idea of taking a couple of garments or shirts to the market right. And this guy did. And when he came back he had this big old stock of bananas like this. A big old bag of rice. Everybody went like man, hey! So from that point on we started on the trunks. I mean but of course this was getting close to around the time when we was we had to be leaving because like I say as we became, as our knowledge increased you know." And a little later she's saying, "Oh and the fruit! Oh my god. So it was at this point this was that we really began to live the good life." A long time before this, when we just started our talking she said, "I had one dream I was always always wanting to be was a cowgirl. To go west. You

186

SIXTH VISIT

know, to be like the cowboys and the Indians. You know. But not uh ... well this is what I had wanted to do you know. To be a... for me to what, to say to be a cowboy, oh I thought it would be fun. Living outside and you know riding horses and shootin guns and you know yippie-yo'in and everything. You know Americans they kind of like live back in those days. It was ... you were still caught up in the mythical things and this was one of them, was what I thought about-going west-this is what I want to be. This is in my teen years. And then... because after I uh gradua ... you know I went from school into marriage so that blew that blew all of that. And then I thought about joining the army and whatnot. Before I'd gotten married. I felt that it would have had been a opportunity to get out, you know, go around and see the other side of life and to also ... you was lookin at yourself, 'Hey but you got to do something of a career, you've got to have a career: so you know, and this would have been the main I think the main one that I would have chosen. But like I said, I went from high school into marriage:' And soon enough into a tent. Before they bought the house in Monrovia. "The camp was already set up right when I got there right and they just went on and just made, just put my tent up, said uh welcome uh ... " She says, laughing, "You know, and it's when you first get there about the first the thing like he said, Michael Jackson and everything, it's the smell, oh my god. I mean it smells just just like that. You know like they say when Michael Jackson was wrinkling up his nose at the smell. Well when Michael Jackson went to what is it he went to Ghana somewhere he was uh I I know what he was because I;' her next words drown in some interference, "like that-the smell. Animals. Smell like animals and then if you go in the summertime there's the red earth." Now her voice drops very low, gets deep, quiet, almost reverent, awed. At the mystery. At the power. "You know, oh my goodness it's like wow. You have to cover yourself up very very good else you get all red and dusty. And the water ugghh. It's like uuugh. But you got used to it. "I stayed in the tent which I lived in a tent for maybe uhm maybe a year or so, right. And then after we stayed up in in the interior for about a year and uhm, now how long was that, no it wasn't even a year. But we was in between from the city to the interior right. You know you s - how we live here. You've still got the house up in the interior but then you come down here right. So this was all basically how it how we would live:' In the tent, she says, "I remember what, I had uh twelve diapers and this was with Avigail yah I had twelve diapers right. And then I got pregnant with

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

187

Ketura. So I had trained Avi 'cause I was she was she was very swift. Very swift. And I had trained her because I knew that I was getting ready to have another child. So I trained her. Got to train. So so then about a week or two before I delivered Ketura, Avi got malaria and you know she had to they had to put in put her in the hospital. Was it malaria or measles? She got measles. Right. So they had to put her in the hospital. And they had to put her back on diapers. And I went like, 'Oh no!' You know. When I went to see her. 'What are you doing with these diapers on?!' 'Oh ma'am were sorry but she must be; 'cause they they told me you know she's a little baby she, you know. I says, 'You've got to be kidding.' And then it was the rainy season and I'm getting ready to deliver and I ain't got but twelve diapers;' meaning cloth ones, like diapers were then, before they turned into paper. "So I got Avi home and I shhh fire," she snaps her fingers as a word here, "'Come on Avi,"' and laughs, '"you've got to use the seer now use the seer."' That's the Hebrew word for potty. "So I managed to get her uh trained right a couple of days before Ketura was born. So the twelve diapers went to Ketura you know. Sure. Oh yeah, you washed by hand:' So here we are talking diapers and toilet training and stinking laundry in a tent in the Nigerian bush deep into the night. Bashan's story. Together piecing it together. Stringing its words and pictures along loose perpendicular threads of chronology and meaningful similarity. Of a piece with our other stories, making muslin sense, growing clothwise. Leaving some of the most traumatic events aside, holes for as long as our talking doesn't need them. Like the murders, for instance. Or prison and the deportation. The first of which aren't connected to the last even though that's probably a natural assumption to make. It's not that some of these events haven't been weaved into the fabric of our talkings-you've already read through Avi's deportation on the second visit. It's not that some of the others won't do so later. They were major events of lives. They still are. But they aren't kept dangling in front of you to bait your curiosity and hold onto your reading, to keep you following a trail of information crumbs. Not doing that is one way our talking house can resist what Rajeswari Sunder Rajan says is the desire "built upon the prolongation of suspense and the postponement of climax." We stay at least partly free of what she says is "the force of masculine desire that invests all narrative:' On page 73 of her book Real and Imagined Woman: Gender, culture and postcolonialism, published by Routledge in 1993. As a result, it might seem like not a lot is going on in this housebook.

188

SIXTH VISIT

We're here, as you've read, examining our separate abilities to move physically-chins, arms, steps over continents, bikes, cars cross country-evasive capacities of self-propulsion. And all the while it may seem as if not much is going down. Not very much going on here at the house that is this book. As · if it's a static condition, not a line of narrated action. A standing conversation with its own stationary mass, inert to lots of entries and exits of the women making it and leaving it with assorted incidental threads sticking out at the edges which may or may not be taken up again. A sustained eventless present. But it can also be read as a type of subversive action, a narrative underground. A different kind of telling talking burrowing along and back and forth under the wall. A kind of story that doesn't supply that kind of action, doesn't comply with that directed, targeted, gun kind of listening that's out to get something, thatthing. For one thing, at least some of us are here to kick heroism. Among other habits, that is. Which has even infected my own story of my own wander longing. Given it movie-screen measurements, claimed for it the constantly heightened risk of life on the edge. 'Climb the wall and you die.' Come on. Give us a break. That formulation makes matter-of-lifeor-death stuff out of matter of fact, rumpled, regular-sometimes sad or funny or boring or poignant or pointless or stale-wanting that's all. Disappointment, period. Lack. Unmet wish. Which just occasionally is sweet or deeply significant or very repulsive or seriously frightening or brilliantly relentlessly illuminating or beautiful mundane, and by the way (or on it), at some point, ends incomplete. In death. Like everything alive. The hawkeye turns everything he does into a matter of life or death. That single ploy gets him center stage and makes measles and nursing and mashing the bananas look stupid. Kids can die of measles even though most white kids don't any more. And nothing is more of a matter of life or death than eating. But usually it's not a matter of instant life or death. And usually it's not decided by clearly identifiable, countable and accountable human beings. Hawkeye's life-or-deaths are humanly decided at an exact, expected, ejaculated minute. That we're told is coming and we wait for, suspended. Suspense is our wait for others' decisions. And mashing bananas doesn't fit soaring background music. We won't use a gun to do it. It's that simple. "The great superman is totally different from my individual;' June has said, "which is just a person in his natural form as I would say." And hers, as I would. And I don't think we'll say it the other way.

THE INDIAN IN THE LONGING

189

SEVENTH VISIT: THE MOUNTAINS AND THE HILLS AND THE TOILET

"IT IS A POLITICAL DECISION

from the groups not to apply for work per-

mits," Maria explains. Her's' in the word decision is soft, an s rather than a z sound. Her 'on' is slightly extended, pronounced on as in on the table, despite her excellent Americanized English. I love listening to the light lilt of her Swedish-born inflections and the syncopation of her irregularly placed prepositions. They are badly impaired on the tapes, though, between frequent smears of sound that have left only spattered half sentences and phrases intact. My routine one two three testing plus date wasn't long enough to detect the malfunction before our meeting. So her speech here is mainly in my wording, lifted from the notes I took as I taped the conversation, sifted through my language habits and interpretation. They want as little interaction as possible with the military government. Preferably perhaps to stay unknown to it altogether, existing and operating in a blind spot or smear, cultivating invisibility instead of the transparent accountability so habitual to them in the democracy of their home land. In keeping with their ideology and practices, these human rights groups refuse to recognize the jurisdiction of the military regime and choose to avoid, as far as possible, both its prohibitions and its permits, minimizing entanglement in the nets of its bureaucracy and intelligence. So their people don't apply for work permits. And as a tourist, on a tourist visa, Maria was not

190

supposed to work. She was not supposed to stay overnight in the village. And she was under an obligation not to name her senders. You haven't met Maria yet. This is the first time she's been at the house since you started coming here. You've met Judith, though. She was back at the house very briefly on the last visit. Her permit was for psychological research on village children affected by La Violencia and its aftermath. It was, in a sense, an official work permit but it too was obtained and, later, renewed through an overlay making inscrutable her real work in the village. The notes she took in the journal that was subsequently stolen were all in a self-styled code. Maria says the fear wasn't constant. Not constant fear but points of fear, she says. Points in time and points in terrain. Checkpoints for instance, on the roads. Around and between which life continued. As well as her work. Every three months she had to leave the country for a few days while renewing her tourist visa. The air fare and accommodation were paid by the organization and if she added on an extra day or two to let herself relax into a sense of security, she would pay for them herself. Being a foreigner and lawless, living outside of the law-or at least alongside it-was, says Maria who was committing physical therapy, "a totally personal development for me I think;' the tape blurs briefly here, "that it was possible to do it for me and and that this situation here I mean yah it opened my eyes and I felt that" it was good (it says in the notes), "that I saw what I saw." It looks different from when you're sticking to the rules. Looking in from the edges it's easier to see a patterned net of policies and intentions behind the shapeless interactions that are buried for granted by longterm, everyday compliance. Breaking or skirting them, you are kept very much aware that there are rules. That there are the rules you're outside of. Keeping them, you often don't realize you could be doing anything else, taking them simply for the way things are, always, everywhere. Maybe more than that though, living

beside and not by the rules feels different for a woman accustomed to obey and pretty much respect the law. The definite article had become inapplicable. There was still a law that she respected. One which she continued to view as largely humane, democratic, necessary, reasonably just. This law she continued to obey, at times in direct contradiction to the law of the military government, which she disrespected and would generally not be party to. And overlaid on both were the

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE HILLS AND THE TOILET

191

religious intertwined with social law of the village and the people. These last she obeyed when in the village. Not out of respect for their contents but in deference to both the right to cultural difference and the fact of her intrusion. Her position had to be manned by a woman. It involved home visits. The codes of conduct mapped out for her before she left her own home, both by the human rights organization and by other western women who had lived in the area, stipulated no shorts, no sleeveless blouses, no receiving men at her house alone because of the talk it would start in the village. "You'll be a foreigner in a village and everyone will be looking at you. It's so important to be respectable." By the rules. Some days, if no home visits were scheduled, she could allow herself jeans. Not, we agree as we talk about it, that we don't-in the west-dress to avoid making bad impressions. Or sometimes expressly to make them. At this point on the tape we're laughing together hard. There's only a fragment of it left. But we're using the codes into which we were born and raised. They appear to us to be natural. We're less aware of how arbitrary they are. Of how they actually constitute a "male connoisseur;' who "resides within the consciousness of most women;' as Sandra Bartky is saying on page 247 of Free Spirits: Feminist Philosophers on Culture, published in 1995 by Prentice Hall and edited by Kate Mehuron and Gary Percesepe, in her article, Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power. Then she says that women, modern western women, "stand perpetually before his gaze and under his judgment. Woman lives her body as seen by another, by an anonymous patriarchal Other:' "A generalized male witness;' she says on page 251, "comes to structure woman's consciousness of herself as a bodily being:' In the villages, Maria was accepting, and complying with, a gaze no less dominated by men. But the details of its prescribed daily practices were foreign to her, and localized. They only applied to her so long as she was there. They didn't converge with what she perceived as her self. She could clearly identify their severe constrictions and restrictions as something imposed and imposing. So in the villages she was freed, at least partly, of those ingrained, incessant, habits of surveillance which almost all of us take for part of our selves. I decided, Maria explains (this part is fully intact in the notes and fully absent from the tapes), never to discuss boyfriends, never to discuss sex, never to discuss politics. As a woman, you walk without looking around. You don't go out just for no reason. Always with a goal that's the reason why you are out in public space. I accepted it and dressed appropriately. "To work (she

192

SEVENTH VISIT

says on tape) I wear a skirt and aT-shirt or a (blur)." I know her T-shirts, they're largish, loose, never exposing. "I have to think about that it's clean, that it's not too short:' And back in the notes: When I treated men clients some of the other workers always came into the clinic with me. There were always other people in the clinic. I never worked alone. Later, when living in the city, she preferred not to go to the market alone as a woman, and her neighbors used to help with the shopping. Just after having arrived at the village she remembers, "you know putting the hands forward and one would say, 'No, I don't say hello: So I stopped doing that." No handshaking. One of the rules. In the village and the neighboring villages. In this cluster of villages, "I felt that everybody knew about this foreigner. I felt people staring a lot. They can do things with me that you would never do with someone else:' Such as reaching up and touching her hair, for instance. It is very fair, cut short and slightly, attractively ragged. Maria is tall and striking with a flowing, confident ease and strength of movement. At the time of our talkings she is thirty-one. Born herself in a small village in the south of Sweden, she spent years caring for an invalid, cooking in hospital kitchen;; and working as a practical nurse before she became a physical therapist. The village women, her constant companions, walking to clients' homes, hitching rides to neighboring villages on tractor fenders, in trucks, in whatever happened to be passing through, some times by public taxi service, were very much "women." She explains, between tape smears, "they make up their eyes every day, they dress up when they go to anywhere, whenever they go out. I get up I take a shower I wet my hair and shake it and towel it and comb it out with my fingers and I go. But they put a lot of energy into their appearance and they work on it with small details, you know not... shoes with small heels, in that sense... very neat:' "And now:' she says, "this has been has become a part of my life. I know I have changed my tastes a little bit because at home very rarely I would wear skirt for you know like a day like this. Rarely, but today I like it. So it's somehow I think that I have ... There's been change in my taste a little bit. I like skirts I like dresses... It seems because you have so-as I feel as a Westerner-you have so little chance to express your femininity. Earrings. I never did that. Now I like to wear these long earrings and jewelry, rings, which I never used to. To dress much more than I ever did in ... to travel West and show my shoulders:' We laugh together. "There is a lot I have begun to understand about my own country and about myself about my own culture:'

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE HILLS AND THE TOILET

193

When she was eighteen she moved to Stockholm on her own. She was crying when she left the village. So were her parents. Listening to her, it's clear she's examining a specific mental image, a singular fragment of time in tears. She says, in the notes, that her parents told her, "You will never come back." That was the whole point. She says, in my memory and in a surviving fragment on the tape that she "was afraid of staying and just you know staying staying nothing." But also terribly afraid of what was outside the village. Which was probably pouring into her tears no less than the knowledge that her leaving was indeed irreversible. The notes say: very afraid of Stockholm; thought: everywhere you walked you would be raped. The tape says, "you grew up in a village or in a small town, people talk about the big city:' In the place where she grew up everyone's life course was clearly plotted, known ahead in detail. I knew very early, the notes say (without the usual hesitations and 'uhms' of the real conversation) that it wasn't that kind of life I wanted. The drive to leave resulted from what she sees as basically a lack of self-confidence. I want to prove myself for myself. And also from curiosity. Wanting some excitement. And maybe one girl between two brothers, I was different and I had to fight with them. I wanted to separate from my parents and maybe it was easier for me to do that with putting distance between us. I was more afraid of staying than afraid of going. For the first month in Stockholm she stayed with a distant relative. Later she cared for an invalid, "it was also very lonely because it was just him and me;' cooked in hospital kitchens, worked as a practical nurse in hospitals and old age homes. For six years. By that time she was established in the city, had a flat, knew I could stay. I felt my future was there in the sense of people I knew and friends. I had lived with a man for a few years, discussed moving to the country. When I was ten my mother had an unmarried friend who went to Ethiopia. She came home and brought us presents. That started something in me. While I was studying I thought it was a good profession to travel with. And I met a woman who became a close friend of mine who had been to Lebanon as a nurse from 1987 to '88. This section of the notes is written in my Hebrew. Maria was speaking her excellent Swedish English and I was taking it in and recording it in Hebrew, which I write quicker than English. Now, in the absence of her exact words on tape, I'm translating back into English. So she's saying in this hybrid formulation: that (or she) provided a model. That's what I want, maybe I too can do that. Immediately at the end

194

SEVENTH VISIT

of my studies I wrote to all kinds of organizations and offered to work for them. At first I didn't care where I was sent. Later, I decided that I wanted to go to Lebanon. The area interested me. I started reading about it. My friend came back from there and told about her experiences. And at the time, to Lebanon, you would travel in teams and that seemed a good way to do it. I'm guessing at the words-at the exact vocabulary she uses, at the way they're arranged in the sentences-sometimes preserving the Swedish syntax and departing from the English. But inside my head I can hear the tune of her talk, of her lovely lilting intonation. No words or sentences. Just the music. Along with some of her gestures and her body language. Her face is less clearly inscribed in my memory. The way she was sitting, the energy and vitality of her presence. The kinds of movements she made when she got up to make some more tea or go to the bathroom. Once, many months into our talking, we went to the beach with my daughter. We were almost alone there, after the end of summer, holding onto it, still in the water at sunset and splashing and laughing and ignoring the creeping chill. The sea was calm and it looked like liquid bronze all around us. On the sand a large group of youths were jogging and chanting, getting gradually closer. My daughter asked about them. "What is it?" she asked. "What's going on?" "They're doing fitness training." I answered and translated the exchange for Maria. "What's fitness training, why? What are they shouting?" "I think they're one of those high school groups getting ready for the army." They were all boys. "You know like your brother did last year." "But what are they shouting." "I can't hear the words. They're shouting like ... to encourage themselves. And to keep the rhythm. It's hard running for a long time. Really hard in the sand." "I want to hear what they're saying." "Maybe they're one of those groups or they might even be an army unit. Like at basic training. They come down here too sometimes to do fitness drills-some army platoons." There were always soldiers on the roofs in the village. Watching her when she walked from her home to the clinic. The ones in the alleys used to stop her, ask her for her papers. She was constantly afraid of them. They used to bother her a lot when they saw her. Seriously harass her. What are you doing? Who do you know here? The notes say: try to keep very low key and be

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE HILLS AND THE TOILET

195

seen as little as possible. Her strategies of limiting visibility, suited to both her fear of the military and the dictates of village customs. When she was visible, the soldiers were in shock to see her there. The tape, fragmented by smears says, "were shocked also because they thought, 'My god this woman is totally wrong, we have to protect her:" blond, tall, light eyed, light skinned, lovely, obviously Scandinavian, "many came ... 'you can speak to me,"' assuming she had to be in some way captive, otherwise what could she be doing there. "In the street and wanted your passport. I got followed by jeeps many times ... I was afraid. I mean it was lot it was lot of violence." Many times, many mornings as she was going to the clinic, there would be a demonstration going on. She would escape into some nearby house for fear of the shooting and the teargas. When the shooting was bad she would hide under the table. There was always a table. When the offer to go had arrived, she says, it wasn't to Lebanon, "and I said well I do I have to go by myself? Yes." In the first months, they told her, you should simply listen and learn. It will take time. Only later will you be able to try to achieve anything. She knew she would be on her own, without any training or anyone on the spot to guide her. Now I can look back, the notes say, and say that I was so alone, so much without support. But then I didn't feel that way. And then a little later they say (retranslated from my Hebrew), I never felt alone there. It was actually a problem. I was never alone. The family that owned her flat were living above her. They spoke a little English. They had eight kids. She was up there a lot. To watch television. For a cup of coffee. At first I never said 'no'-I wanted to be accepted. In time I learned to close the door or to say I was busy. Now I'm not afraid to say what I accept and what I don't. I've returned to my self, my own culture. But then it was important to me to understand and accept that culture. Most of the time there was running water in the flat. There was a sink in the kitchen, a shower, a European-style toilet. Electricity reached the village for a few hours a day between 5 and 7 in the morning and 5 and 9 in the evening. Most days, not all of them. It wasn't enough to get the water hot in the electric water heater. In summer it was okay. The weather was hot and if there was water coming out of the pipes, it was warmish. In winter it was freezing and Maria used to heat up water on the gas burner and pour it over herself by hand. Or she skipped showers till her next weekend in the city. There was a big bed, a wooden cupboard for clothes, a bare concrete floor, a

196

SEVENTH VISIT

plastic table and four or five plastic chairs. She didn't say but they were probably white. She used to boil the local goats' cheese to kill the brucella bacteria. The medical organization she was affiliated with had cautioned her about brucellosis and told her which measures to take. There was no mineral water for sale in the village and she drank water from the pipes. At first she was sick. She got diarrhea and got over it and then from time to time she would get it again. Not too severely. Judith says toilets are non-existent in the village and the region where she was staying. It was a real problem for her. "It was a real problem going to the toilet at night. You couldn't see a thing. For a few months of the year it was pouring rain, you'd get totally soaked, you were walking in mud, stepping in things you didn't want to." When the corn plants were high it was easier. The houses weren't close and she would go somewhere in the fields. "I had my own toilet paper. I used to take it with me and then bring it back to throw on a fire where they would burn the garbage. They had no toilet paper. I think they used bits of leaves." She washed her clothes by hand in a concrete trough in the yard or in a water hole or the lake. "I didn't dress like them;' you've already heard her say a chapter ago. She "found their clothes very uncomfortable. Talking about restraining women;' she comments, "they used to tie them very tight around the waist and do all this strenuous physical work. And they were very small, much smaller than me. And their heads were smaller. I couldn't get my head through the neck-holes in the blouses." Judith is extremely small by Western standards. "But the skirts made going to the toilet easier," she says. "They were very discrete and private about it. Suddenly you used to realize that somebody had left the room:' When they menstruated they used cloths and washed them in water. One of the women asked her once what she used and was terribly shocked to discover tampons. Judith had a stock for the whole time. Of both toilet paper and tampons. Somewhere in the notes it also says: took enough pads for whole time. She might be talking about writing pads here, because she'd said she used tampons for her periods. But maybe just in case she took sanitary pads too. She's very lucky, she says, she has light menses. That's the word she uses. I'm more used to 'periods' or 'flow' and it sounds kind of academic to me and at the same time very direct, the name-even if it's clinical-rather than the euphemism. One of the lessons learned, the notes say: that I could never become equivalent. That I was a product of my culture and that I wanted to go on

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE HILLS AND THE TOILET

197

being that. They also say she wanted to: push myself to the limits, be totally self-sufficient, end of the earth. In Guatemala discovered I could be. Can make myself an island and survive. Also discovered that I didn't like it very much. Much like Maria, who says-as you've read a little earlier: Now I'm not uncomfortable about saying which things l accept and which I don't. I've gone back to my own culture. And on a tape fragment she's saying, "okay you couldn't go out after five because it was so much ... and so much about that culture because l I lived it and and I learned also that my god I need privacy I... " It was only after I saw the strong, clear connections and parallels between

Maria's and Judith's stories, that I realized the talkings with both of them had produced badly damaged recordings. For the most part I've mastered the skill of recording well-of placing the apparatus so it picks up the whole conversation, of switching tapes or turning them over in time, of keeping them labeled and sorted. And meanwhile of both asking questions and taking detailed, faithful notes that follow the talk fairly closely, as closely as notes can, given the gap between talking and hearing and understanding and writing speeds. Judith's first visit at the talking house was six months before Maria's. She came here from England on a visit and then went back to London and later on she went to back Guatemala. On one occasion we met for lunch at a London pub along with the friend who had introduced us, but that was before we started our talking. Maria arrived at the house after Judith but she spent more time at its different, moving locations. But of all the tapes of the talking house, those of their conversations are somehow the ones that are seriously, consistently unusable. So their voices, as you've already read, are here in quoted fragments, some of them from the tapes and some of them from my notes in the spiral yellow notepads. And their stories, as you read them on your visits here, are my reconstructions; my sifting, wording, retelling, reshuffling. True, that goes for all the stories. No question. My sifting, my selecting, my reshuffling. I keep wondering whether it's pure coincidence that these of all the tapes were virtually silenced. A too neat metaphor, that I can't take seriously, but which tempts me in spite of myself, would connect the inscrutable tapes to the camouflage that both Maria and Judith had to practice, in order to stay where each of them was, and in order to go on doing what each was clandestinely really doing. Maria offering physical therapy to villagers, particu-

198

SEVENTH VISIT

larly to victims of the military, while trying to absent herself or at least appear as just a visitor. Judith documenting crimes committed in the course of the violence through her study of the lives of women, while ostensibly doing psychological research on childhood and children. Doing their work needed secrecy. Needed the careful absence of any incriminating evidence. Judith kept a journal for the first year. Then it was stolen. But she'd been aware all along that it might be stolen or confiscated. She had used code for everything-for people, for the army, for the secret graves down the mountain. As a foreigner she felt somewhat protected, the notes say. At one point, with the filming equipment she used for documentation, she filmed a press gang forcibly conscripting people into the army. She stood right outside the military base and filmed them. Unwavering. And apparently unmolested. The violence itself was foreign to her. Can't really believe that it's real, the notes say. As if it somehow didn't apply to her. They also say: had an advantage being a woman. Army would have seen me as a greater threat as a man. Macho, didn't think I could endanger them. Also charmed by me, ask me out, answer charmingly that not possible. Being a foreigner and living outside the law, say the notes of Maria's talking. Totally personal development for me. Opened my eyes and felt it was good I saw what I saw, felt it was important because people didn't really know. We were lawless but I felt that this wasn't... What's missing here is the name of the country whose jurisdiction she refused to acknowledge. The country felt she was living outside of, though the government in power would have disagreed. The fragments of this on the tape say, "a totally personal development for me I think. .. that it was possible to do it for me and and that this situation here I mean yah it opened my eyes and I felt that... that I saw what I saw because ... " In an article called The Psychological Impact of Impunity, published in the journal Anthropology Today, Volume 10 Number 3, in June 1994, Judith is writing about the people who aren't foreigners, those who live inside and under the repressive jurisdiction. On page 15 she says, "Knowing what not to know is a major coping response to terror." And she says, "One of the purposes of political oppression is to make citizens psychologically repress-that is, not see (I'm adding the italics)-the less than democratic aspects of the government they may observe. Denial, although a coping mechanism because the secrecy is internalized, becomes a pervasive way of relating to the world." And people in such conditions, she says, can experience "processes that interfere with the assessment of reality. Such psy-

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE HILLS AND THE TOILET

199

chological processes affect perception in the service of internal needs for security resulting in a 'failure to recognize' certain aspects of the environment and the self. This can become almost a cognitive style: the inhibition of thought process phenomena (given that one cannot put into words what one sees) and the transition to the area where orders of not-knowing are learnt can become pervasive mechanisms of thinking. The abuse thus interferes with victims' thinking and relationships with themselves, their bodies, with others and with authority:' And maybe conversely, for a traveller into the regime, who risks its measures but is also privileged by outside citizenship, maybe for such a traveller holding onto a solid sense of reality, of seeing and knowing and naming, can center on a steady relationship with body, an enduring set of body practices that form a crucial core of identity. Of course, these are practices that have to conform to the current conditions-no toilets, or no hot water. But they can hang onto a persisting discomfort about these conditions and onto scraps of toilet paper, as a tangible link to foreign citizenship. Badly or vaguely missing a hot shower and a sit -down toilet that flushes, every single morning. So that daily, habitual, basic body maintenance becomes a maintenance of her sense of self and reality. "Discipline can provide the individual upon whom it is imposed with a sense of mastery as well as a secure sense of identity;' Sandra says on page 251. And the most intimate, unthinking techniques of caring for and using her body are the distinguishing, protective agents of her outside culture, of her choice to be a critical witness. At first, Judith says, her unconscious agenda had actually been to shed her culture. Guatemalans, the notes say, don't have so many trappings for judging people. I understand her to mean as many as her Western culture does. The next line just says: Togetherness. Earlier they say that as a child she was: quite needy. Need to be together was not met and decided to look after myself. 'Counter-dependent; not in-dependent. Fear of dependency. She was: a child who didn't want to go away. Quite a dependent child. You've already read her say this, six visits ago. Her father left home when she was fourteen. Biggest blow of my life mother cracked up and changed entirely into a bit of a tart. Judith was born in the US and spent some of her childhood there. At the time of the breakup, the family was living in Israel, in Haifa, above the harbor. They had no furniture and lived in a virtually empty flat in which her mother read regular installments of Portnoy's Complaint, out loud, to Judith and her sister. The

200

SEVENTH VISIT

windows overlooked the port, and every leaving boat was accompanied by histrionics in the apartment, as their mother worked the two adolescent girls into a frenzy because she invariably promised they were leaving on next boat and the boat left and they didn't. She told Judith's older sister that they were certainly going back but that she, the teenage girl, would have to go to work. Their mother didn't work, she got some kind of social welfare. Judith didn't really believe all that was necessary. From a very young age, the notes say, I always saw the alternatives. When she was eighteen, she ran away to live with her older sister and two years later she contacted her mother. The very first notes of our talking say: Never strongly aligned/located. Marginality gave freedom, sense of equality in terms of how I see myself moving around the world. Don't feel that any people are my own people. Background of dislocation gave me freedom to go wherever I like. But then a few pages later, as you've already seen, when she's talking about the Guatemalans, they say togetherness. When she traveled around India on my own, couple of months, 1987, they say at another point, she got very sick. The tape fragment says, "In India partly to do with this illness I think actually I wanted to die in poverty and ... be left on the street." In the notes, my wording of her unconscious agenda seems to imply more of an active choice: to lay down with the dying on the streets and just die. But both are striking in their equation of shedding culture and leaving life. Sandra says that to have a body which is "socially constructed through the appropriate practices-is in most cases crucial to a woman's sense of herself as female and, since persons currently can be only as male or female, to her sense of herself as an existing individual:' This is on page 252. And on page n of the Mind of the Traveler Eric says, "The stripping away by the frictions of passage of all that is not of the essence of the passenger, the removal of defining associations, of bonds to the world of place-all effect changes in the character of the traveler that are strictly analogous to a cleansing, the reduction of the purified entity to its smallest, truest dimensions. Pilgrimage is the institutionalization of this transformation." It was a mission, you've read Judith say from the notes. "I felt that that okay, now, I will get killed. "It was once when we in a home you see ... "Maria says on a section of the tapes that's a little better preserved than most of the rest. Which I'll still be interspersing with background information-some of it from the notes, to keep the story more coherent. She was on a home visit, treating one of her

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE HILLS AND THE TOILET

201

immobile patients. Soldiers burst in, in pursuit of the granddaughter who had a banned national flag in her schoolbag. They were older soldiers, probably reservists I surmise, and they looked so evil. They were pointing their guns. Searching the house. Ransacking it, breaking things. "And taking their dubs and breaking the windows. Breaking vases, breaking ... anything, I don't know. Just out of tension, nerves. When people are that tense they let out such violence you can't ... They're simply scared. You can see it in their eyes. They try to look like heroes but can't, you see the fear. So they let out violence;' says one of the soldiers interviewed in Testimonies, a film I initiated and helped make between 1990 and 1993, about Israeli soldiers suppressing the Palestinian uprising known as the Intifada. I also did the English subtitles which are quoted here. Maria goes on in the notes: I sat on the bed. And she was with a woman, the tape says, "who helped me to translate, she" regularly interpreted pain, symptoms, and body sites for Maria, and questions and treatment strategies for Maria's clients. She went to the soldiers. Walked up to them. Stood in front of them. And shouted at them. "What are you doing!? Why!? Nnhh nnhh nnhh nnhh nnhh! And I couldn't. I was just frozen, I... I was terrified. But it would have been more appropriate if I would have done it because she with her life ... if I would have done it maybe also maybe they would have listened. A little ... left after a while and I was totally shocked and I began to cry." In the notes: they didn't listen and after a while they left and I cried really hard. "And all the girls they were laughing and said Maria that's not a problem .... Every night this translator she was through it because she lived in a camp ... used to arguing and and not being afraid.... Later I heard they had asked her;' the soldiers, "they come back to the family and asked who was that;' meaning Maria,"... that time because then I felt that I didn't feel any different. Most of the time yes but... " that time she felt just like any other woman living in the village. Imperiled. Judith really really missed showers. I remember the emphasis and the longing in our talk. The notes say: Miss: shower. Went to tap in mid night; They bathe once a week in sweat baths; private at homes. She also missed coffee terribly. Those were the two items that she retorted with instantly when I asked her what she'd missed. Coffee was very expensive to buy there, I think she said it could only be bought in the city, and I think she didn't even like the kinds they did sell. She couldn't take any good coffee along because she wouldn't be drinking it alone and there was no way to take enough stock to be able to share it daily with her hostesses. She also had a problem

202

SEVENTH VISIT

with shoes. She doesn't wear leather. Sneakers and cloth shoes were apparently nonexistent. She finally started using plastic sandals. She washed her clothes by hand in a concrete trough in the yard or sometimes, it says in the notes, at water hole or lake. I imagine her watching the Quiche women's techniques, maybe borrowing some of their movements. Maybe learning some of their songs. To prepare herself before leaving England, Judith went running for a year. She was told about the dangers, the violence. But didn't believe it, say the notes. Have survivor guilt; at one level-I've had a privileged existence. And much later they repeat: Can't really believe that it's real (the trouble). Somewhere else they say: while in Guatemala, felt dead father protecting me, watching over me, though not religious or into mysticism in any way. Also, people used to take care of you. She looks very small and delicate by western standards. A tape fragment says, "People would spoil me because they thought ... people 'would adopt me, gave me a job, gave me an ID card." And believing in the violence or not, there was a particularly troubled spot at which they were throwing more grenades where she decided not to do field work. Because more trouble there, the notes say, didn't want to get myself killed. Before she went, she studied Spanish a little and says she had the grammar in place. Later, in the course of her work, she learned both Spanish and Quiche. A grant she applied for and got from the British government financed twenty months of research in Guatemala and four years in all of graduate work. In the village, she stayed with a family. This was negotiated through an organization that she worked for part-time without contradicting the terms of the grant. She paid for her lodging. A pittance; wouldn't take any more, say the notes. They also say: One space with whole family. Two people. Only women. The tapes say nothing. But I have a clear memory of her saying there were two rooms and that the women she was living with gave her the bedroom. There was a regular western bed. She used to get up very early every day, about four or five a.m. She would live, in the notes: much more with natural cycle of the day. Much more than in London, that is. She used to talk with people. Help with chores. Only women's chores. Except for the driving. She had a jeep. She used to visit with one of the seven war widows whose lives she was documenting. "Two years' work with war widows in the province of El Quiche' in the northwest highlands;' it says in the article in Anthropology Today on page 13. She went with them to mar-

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE HILLS AND THE TOILET

203

ket, or she'd take one of them to see her mother. She'd spend a lot of time waiting for people who didn't come. Maria says on tape, "At that time everything you decided to do something next week maybe it happened after four months and that was ... it was a lot of organizing at the same time it was very difficult to... "She's talking about her first months there, when she "just ... organized things, we tried." After three months she was terribly afraid and frustrated. She considered leaving. But, "Should I leave before my contract? ... It's a failure for me." She attaches importance to contract, to commitment, to formal and binding agreement. She sees this as sometimes a weakness and sometimes a strength. She stayed. Every day, every morning women are busy cleaning their house in the village. With lots of water. "In fact when you came into a house that this is not the ... it was too early because then they were all busy cleaning. Every day. If they had ... Now in that village most of the people was on couches on the floor." The notes say they spread mattresses on the floor for the night and had couches during the day. I've seen them. About twenty minutes' drive from my house, maybe half an hour or a little more. But it always takes a lot longer to get there because I don't go all the way in my car. I leave it somewhere that's still Israel and take a local taxi service from there or ask someone to meet us or pick us up. 'Us' because I don't go alone. I've seen the light, doth-covered foam rubber mattresses getting picked up off the floor and piled to one side of a room. And a bucket or two of water getting sloshed over the floor and moved across it and out the front door and down the stoop with a rubber squeegee on a broomstick. And I know the often heavy, sometimes velvet-upholstered couches where guests are seated and served black coffee. It was a traditional farmers' village, Maria says in the notes, in my Hebrew. And the tape says, "Most of the people actually had some kind of a shower." ''And a toilet?" "Yah. I mean there were areas that were poorer but... would just think at the time it was not so common to have the European toilet." On weekends, from Thursday afternoons through Saturday mornings, she would take time off and go to Jerusalem. To the Palestinian part. East Jerusalem. Which was one place I did go alone, pretty often, to meet her and other people I worked with. "It was very very important to me;' she says about these weekends. She would spend time with friends and often she would visit a hotel. ''A very social place ... that time for the foreigners who were working it was a little bit of a gathering place."

204

SEVENTH VISIT

She had to leave the country every three months for an interval between her limited tourist visas. This was a rule she chose to comply with in order to lessen the danger of blowing her cover. Unlike many illegal aliens she could. She had the means. As you've already read, the human rights group paid for the trips. She got a volunteer's wage of roughly soo dollars a month to cover basic living expenses. The group also paid her rent and covered the weekends in East Jerusalem. "It was not very much but it was fine;' the tape says. She was renting out her Stockholm apartment to a friend. After nine months in the West Bank village, she decided to leave. The notes say: I couldn't see how the project could be continued. The tape says, "I was really fed up. Really.... the program couldn't continue. And I also felt very isolated professionally being up there north. I got very little input from Jerus ... was tired of living in the village .... I felt that I had I couldn't continue, 'cause the first was six month contract and... they'd asked for three months I said no, I should go ... I didn't have more energy... what could you do ... "The Hebrew notes say her feeling wasn't one of failure. She didn't feel that it was really a project in a context. The problems were structural, not rooted in personal weakness or inability to tope. She had kept her side of the contract. She felt, in the notes: In a certain sense hopelessness in another sense ... don't want to get used to the violence.

La Violencia, Judith explains on the first page of her article, page 13 of the journal, was the, "persistent terrorization of a mainly Indian, rural population in the aftermath of what the state maintains was a discrete episode (the counter-insurgency campaigns of the late 1970s and early '8os)." Above that she has said, "At the time of my fieldwork, the war in Guatemala was officially deemed to have ended five years previously; however, a hidden, psychological war, involving considerable death and disruption, continues to the present." Meaning the time the article was written. "Massacres committed in the villages where I worked;' she says on page 14, "were carried out by the civil patrol commanders who were local men.

The dead were buried, by the commanders, in shallow graves within the village boundaries. Neither the massacres nor the dead men have ever been mentioned in public since; the commanders threatened the witnesses with the same fate should they talk about it. Initially, the commanders' motivation in committing these atrocities was to save their own lives, for the military had given them the choice of kill or be killed. However, the massacres had a hypnotic effect on the survivors, who were also victims of this atrocious

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE HILLS AND THE TOILET

205

piece of theatre, as well as the local perpetrators. The massacres conducted by the commanders under the coercion of the army began a process which the commanders continued themselves in an apparently auto-suggestive fashion: they convinced themselves that they had the right and the strength to make further displays of their violent power and they soon found out that they could do so with impunity." And on page 17 she says, "The sense of exposure and vulnerability was heightened after the village massacres by the fact that the killers continued to live in close proximity (the fear was so great that when a clandestine grave was exhumed in Chijtinimit, Chichicastenango, El Quiche', in 1988, not one relative came forward to identify the remains). It was not an anonymous person or crown who had carried out the killing:' Down the page she says, "Witnessing of the killing of innocent kin by a known person meant that the murder became an 'intimate truth':' "If my son asks how you did it, what can I answer?" says one of the soldiers talking in the film Testimonies. "Look, there are still things I haven't told you;' he says a little earlier. Or anyone else, I remember he said off the film. "There were many moments in the Intifada when I... felt like a hunter. I was 'Licensed for Plastic,"' he means plastic-covered bullets, "and you stand there with the telescopic lens, and you're allowed to shoot at masked figures when you're-see them about to throw a firebomb or something, the orders are dear. And I shot Plastic, I felt like ... these are things I'll never be able to explain. If you tell me, go get a rifle now and hunt a... shoot a doe, I won't do it. And I did do it to a human being. Not to say I killed, I didn't kill. But it's a very difficult situation. To kneel, slowly, calmly and look through the sights and wait for the lower limbs to enter the lens. And pull the trigger. Like they taught us, wring it. Licensed for Plastic. Like a hunter. If my son asks how you did it, what can I answer? And if you ask me now-I don't know. And it's being done every moment, every second, every village this minute it's being done." "I don't ask him because I don't really want to know," says Raya, in the research material for Testimonies. She's talking about her husband, a reserve soldier. She wasn't interviewed on film. No women were. When I talked to her, her husband had served about five one-month terms in the Occupied Territories, in the course of the Intifada. I know him. He's warm, funny, shortish and a little plump, very gentle, with a beautiful face framed in striking silver hair. "I want to avoid criticizing him for complying," she says. "If I interrogated him I would inevitably criticize, judge, feel contempt for himmaybe a harsh wording. It would place him in a very bad light in my sight.

206

SEVENTH VISIT

'How can you? How can you face your children with it?"' Later I asked her, "Do the children ask him about it?" Her oldest is very interested in politics and knows a great deal. But never asks him. The younger one, "asked me not him." But just about "the rifle and all that:' There's "something really sad about the whole experience;' the interviewer asks one of the soldiers at the end of Testimonies. "I guess there is;' comes the answer. "I can't define what. Maybe it's the ... helplessness, or the sense of aloneness and the backs being turned on you by everyone who ... by everyone concerned, all around you." Even without a terrified secrecy, the truth can be intimate in the sense of being unsharable. Powerful and powerfully resistant of transmission. "I went into a severe depression when I went home," Maria says. She stayed in Sweden almost nine months. Here, you're part of something, people are involved, it says in the notes. For her part, Judith says in the notes: Difference in intensity in relationships one has. Also church-unity, very powerful experience. And Maria goes on: Excitement. At home-'great, you're back; everything normal. But normalcy, once exited and no longer taken on trust, can be elusive to recapture. Because part of it is the socially established archive of what need not be questioned. And once I start subjecting significant social rules to a conscious process of deciding which to follow and which not to, a stratum of routine actions that underpins my usual-normal-degree of individuality seems to disintegrate and leave me reeling. When my younger son chose to stop being a soldier, and I spent three hours lying to the army psychologist so that he would approve a discharge, I distinctly remember feeling I wouldn't recognize the way home. When Maria got back home she says: I felt I had changed a lot. That people weren't really interested. I was very involved politically, very much in turmoil. In Sweden they told me I'd been brainwashed, that I'd become too emotional. Patients' problems looked trivial to me. I was in depression and in therapy almost the whole time. I came back and saw everything from the outside. While living in the Quiche village, Judith was dangerously sick for some time. You've read about it a little it was six visits ago. The notes say: Had hepatitis thought I was going to die. Ended up in bed. Only diagnosed once eyes were yellow. Recovered a couple of months. Day of Dead, Nov. 1st got out of sick bed. That was the day a group of villagers walked down the mountain to hold a secret memorial service for their murdered husbands. That is, mostly they

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE HILLS AND THE TOILET

207

were husbands and sons and brothers and fathers and uncles. Some of the dead were also daughters and wives and mothers, but for the most part those were left living to keep the secret. Which Judith was documenting. She says she wasn't good at keeping a diary. Also, the notes say, she had no time to be alone. Which probably means no space. She had no computer. She recorded a lot. I think with both an audio tape and a video camera. She had professional or semi-professional video equipment, which she used a lot to record dozens of hours on tape. She had a camera with a tele-lens too and took slides and stills. She wasn't intimidated or daunted by the technical equipment. She actually enjoyed learning to use it competently. But she wrote her dissertation without using much of it. She didn't use diaries at all, she worked more from memory and also some from transcriptions and slides. Remember a lot, the notes say. Somewhere else they say: Since back developed several phobias which I think are related. Nowhere in the tapes or the notes but clearly in my memory, she said one of them was her inability to drive faster than about 20 kilometers an hour. After a while Maria found a course that knit together her living intense experience of another world and a coherent, sense-making body of theoretical knowledge. She began studying 'Rehabilitation in Developing Countries'. Physiotherapy-such a new field, say the notes, and especially outside of the West. Such a long tradition of doctors and nurses travelling to the third world. But not of physiotherapists, they imply. The course contextualized her lonely, isolated perceptions and assigned them significance. She says it was excellent, gave her new energy and a huge push. Gradually she realized she missed Palestine. She wanted to go back. I didn't want to live in the village, the notes say. I didn't want the control. I want a private life. A way to go out sometimes in the evening. She was interviewed by a Quakers' organization in London that decided to hire her. They sent her to Philadelphia to meet some people, to learn about the organization and its work. That was big for me-to go to America, the notes say. Like Stockholm years before. She was afraid of the United States, reluctant to go. The image she describes was one of hugeness, getting lost, lurking violence. Some of the tape fragments say, "They contacted me, ... yes, yes yes, yes you see because there aren't so many physiotherapists as nurses, in Sweden at least... they wanted me to go to Philadelphia and I did I couldn't... went there and I had the best time of my life. I mean the couple I stayed with

208

SEVENTH VISIT

she's working and... I mean we had such a great ... I felt so home, the very first beginning, really. And they really took so good care of me and we spent very very nice time. After that I was thinking of... Of course I was in this American Friends context. Very active people, very politically aware, very and every from everything ...... feel informed before .... And I knew that they are pacifists and I okay I could write that because I want the work. But I decided no. I can't ... I decided okay I will be very very honest with this ... and break the law. I think it's an excellent way of hiring people. Excellent .... talk with many people. I was very impressed by their way of dealing with volunteers. Very very nice." She was enormously surprised and relieved. She'd been far more frightened of La Guardia or maybe it was Kennedy-"! was so nervous I mean I went to New York's airport by myself having to phone the number to a limousine service coming and pick me up"-than she had been of arriving in the occupied West Bank in the middle of the uprising. Knowing no Arabic. I worked in villages, the notes say. People who didn't speak English. At first I just wrote down words in a book. (I assume she means a hardcovered notebook.) Everything was in Arabic. I had to. The interpreters weren't terribly fluent. I took a course in spoken Arabic. Then without courses. I wrote, I noted, I tried to talk. You get a huge amount of support from your surroundings. It's an enormous change in your ability to access, to understand. Also an understanding of the culture. A lot more respect towards me. Makes me closer to them. Write and read as well but it's a struggle. Literary. (Meaning literary Arabic-quite different from the spoken language.) This fragment of the notes is in English: You understand so much more all of a sudden. For the work-excellent. Raising quality. Her car also improved the scope and quality of her work. For the first three months she walked wherever she was going inside the village and took public transportation or passing tractors to get to other villages. She was always together with other women when she hitched a ride to a nearby village. Sometimes the organization provided a private driver plus car. Before she'd arrived the organization had said she would need a car. Fairly soon she wrote them to speed up the process. At first she was afraid of driving it. The license plates were Israeli, which meant she might get stoned or firebombed by militant Palestinians. When she first brought it to the village people assured her that the girls would get word out that this was her car, that it shouldn't be touched. By the end of her term she worked in ten villages and felt totally safe driving through them and between them. In the nearby town and its

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE HILLS AND THE TOILET

209

vicinity, things were different. There was always stone-throwing and constant fear. Usually, she avoided driving there. The car made her feel much much more independent. It also changed her status in the villages. "Wow, she has a car," she emulates the villagers in the notes. It indicated a solid financial backing, a respect for her and her work on the part of the organization. That played a role in choosing the car she would drive. Shiny new, white, the notes say. I remember a red one, but that was later-after a different year in the southern West Bank and a year in Gaza and then a stretch of commuting between both. The tape fragments say, "I mean at that time it was like wow... so many people would ... at the same time very much like a settler car," meaning the Jewish settlers taking over land in the West Bank. She would pass their houses as she drove between villages. ''And also by that time we had been seen walking around so much and used the private driver so much that people say, 'Hamdillah, you have a car! That's better for you, you are now you don't have to walk and ... "'She says there's no doubt it turned out much better that she'd only gotten a car after a few months' work, after the villages had got to know her on a more equal footing. And people still thought it was strange. The tape says,'"... woman is driving a car?!' And a little ... six years he told me, 'You're a man?' 'No, I'm not a man, I'm a woman.'

a

'Yes you are man! You're driving a car!' Six years old. So yah, you know.'' The checkpoints were hard. She knew she'd get through in the end. And she knew that blue license plates, meaning the car was registered in the territories, would have made the scrutiny much harsher and the process a lot longer. She felt safer driving alone, without her Palestinian colleagues, because they were so much more vulnerable than her to harassment by the soldiers. She was so obviously a foreigner. They couldn't risk much. And probably they tended to view her as more of a person, though a strange one, and less of an adversary or subject. There were soldiers who wanted a ride. "Sure," she would smile, "but just-please-without your rifle." Judith had a jeep. I bought it; got some money before I left, it says in the notes. Gave back with the jeep. I was an ambulance. Measles epidemic. Stopped doing work then. She's referring to her research. Doing it, she persistently felt she was taking, being generously given, major parts of the lives she was recording. And possibly endangering those lives, the women she was studying. They would be subject to any consequences that might be caused by her fact- finding and fact -disclosing. She was subject of another crown. So when measles broke out in the village in a deadly epidemic, she was glad to

210

SEVENTH VISIT

override research for emergency driving. Driving the jeep-got it there. Terror on those roads. I remember she described the hairpin turns on unpaved roads climbing up over the mountains, chunks of which were washed away, not to speak of safety fencing along the sheer-dropping edge, and how the jeep had slid and slipped inching along the day, wet for months on end in the rains, and how she drove those roads at night, in the dark, driving and singing to herself, using her voice for company, and how sometimes, more than once, she'd had busted tires to change and had to find and carry heavy rocks in the sticky mud to make rockpiles under the wheels so they would stabilize the jeep on the steep incline. The notes say: Edged along the mountain. Old second hand jeep, four-wheel drive, big, on mud, steep, mountain paths, all through rains and in dark, stuck a few times, piled up stones under wheels, once someone put the jeep in back of his truck, once she towed someone down mountain. And: Jeep; drove indigenous inside the base. She says she drove carefully but she did have several accidents. Apparently not too serious. She had no problems with vertigo. There was one time when she was driving in the middle of the mountains-my memory is of a muddy sticky path-serpentine-and a steep, slithering descent. Of her singing out loud but not loud, some sixties' song for some reason, happy. And of alert but confidently relaxed driving, with her eyes on the mountain side cut by the path, and away from the sheer drop just beyond the edge of the jeep. And of coming around one of the sidewinding turns and of "great long line of soldiers" suddenly, hundreds. Maybe more. Probably more. Heavy backpacks. Guns. Tramping the mud. Moving relentlessly slowly, animating the path's giant serpent. She couldn't tell how many. She could hardly bring herself to look. On and on. A memory of inching past. Of dreamlike molasses motion. Arrested time. She told herself, "Just keep going." "In the morning about three hundred men show up and the army has to make sure they form a line," Raya tells me. This last time she has purposely and closely questioned her partner about his term of reserve duty. The soldiers have to see, "that everything's done quietly and quickly and efficiently." She's talking about a line of Palestinian men from Gaza. They come to checkpoint Erez two hours before dawn, hoping to get through for a day's work inside Israel. "He's standing there alone with three hundred Arabs. It's a frightening moment. Enormous control and on the other hand fear. He tries to do it as well as possible. A mass, a bloc of people. Not people you know anything about."

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE HILLS AND THE TOILET

211

I couldn't decide to live here, Maria says in the notes. As far as I know, Judith has. Gone back and decided to stay. Not in the mountain village, though. At the time of our talking Maria is getting ready to leave Palestine. She'll spend half of the next year here and half of it in Sweden. Feels good to end slowly, gradually. She's ambivalent. She deeply enjoys her role here. Everything is changing, moving. She's learning so much on a lot of levels through multiple tasks. It will be hard to find such work at home. But she has decided to go back because she's afraid she'll lose Sweden. That I'll be rootless. Maybe I am already. By now she enjoys Sweden much more than she was able to two years before. She thinks there are parts of the culture and the society here that she mustn't by any means get used to. At the moment, it's in some sense harder for her to go back than stay. In Sweden people think it's very exciting, how strong you must be, very exotic. Re-reading the notes I re-hear her Swedish 'x,' broken down into a firm 'k' and a long, soft's' and then the inflected, extended 'o.' The tape says, "It's very exotic that you can go to the Mediterranean, it's very exotic in Sweden. In fact all this area is exotic. I often hear, 'I wish I could do that but'... always take up something that has prevented them. And they say, 'Well oh you are lucky, you could do it.' And I feel why? I mean I always say, 'I'm not lucky."' I always say, ''I'm not lucky," the notes say in English, "J struggled, I worked for it." And the fragmented tape goes on, "That they can take down and see that okay this is not so exotic .... and it's like, it's eating these kinds ... yes, 'aren't you going to get married?' and yah ...... 'yes, the little looney.'"

212

SEVENTH VISIT

EIGHTH VISIT: FEARLEDGE

both my parents used to say in similar intonations. My father still does. I hated it. They were particularly proud that it was captured. A treasured feat of photography. I was about five. I'm pretty sure "r

LOVE THAT PICTURE,"

of that. Definitely no less than four and a half, very probably no more than six. It was summer and I was dressed up for some occasion. Some family departure from routine to make a weekend tangible and appreciated. In a light white dress that I think was waffled cotton, or possibly a very light pastel blue. The color occurs to me when I look at the photo, unembodied, floating alongside of it. It's in black and white. Probably snapped before color cameras were common. I was on my knees in grass that came roughly up to my waist. I'm reaching a swinging hand into the grass and looking towards it, very deeply engrossed. My very blond hair is ear length and slightly wavy and sweet. To them it was a picture of a lovely innocent natural child in nature. It was a picture of a lie. I was hyper-aware of the camera scanning the scene, following me and probably my sister too, skipping back and forth, searching, in wait for a photogenic instant. I made one. I followed the camera following me and I made one. I knew how. I knew which ingredients to supply. I knew they couldn't include a direct acknowledgment of the lens, that they had to pretend an ignorance of it. I wasn't supposed to be posing, I was supposed to be caught unawares, an image of a child's guileless preoccupation. Natural. Uncontrived. I

213

don't remember who was using it. The camera, not the photographer, was the focal point, its presence compelling. I remember it wasn't my father. I think it was a friend of the family whose name was later pronounced with special warmth in my parents' voices for having contributed such a family classic. I was deeply guilty about the sham. Even more so because it went on to become an enlarged and much duplicated treasure, mailed and hand delivered to grandmothers and aunts and friends. I was afraid of being found out. And meanwhile I was contemptuous of the stupidity, which scared me even more, made me feel even guiltier. So easily, an about five year old, I'd long ago mastered their transparent rules and duped them. So effortlessly I was conning my mother and my father. But worst of all and on top of it all was ahatred of my hyper-awareness of audience, my non-stop state of performance. As a child, long before five, I have a clear memory of constantly feeling myself looking over my own shoulder, trying to make an impression and gauging how to. And then gauging how it had gone. Collecting a sense of myself through-and badly depending on-others' reactions. "Approval, the flattering mirror upon which her identity depends;' says Mary Daly in Gyn/ Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, on pages 335-6. The camera was only a material embodiment of this constant state of consciousness. Almost never pure doing, being, acting, engrossed and immersed and forgetful of self. Always looking at and staging my own actions. And as a result radically split from my body, which was left with a distinct feeling of clumsiness, lumpish ness, unattractive wooden movement. Unless I could get the better of it. Later on, when I was not much older, I would formulate this as a sense of artificiality, of never being unthinking me, of being an onion of conscious faces and gestures with no confident grasp of a firm identity core. I sensed it as the root of what my mother used to call my Weltschmerz. Belittling and domesticating the pain with the smiling, Yiddish, folk name, she was deeply troubled and mystified by it, guilty about it, groping to placate it, so she could feel all was well. I was a vaguely but consistently depressed child. I felt my sadness and restlessness coming out of this split consciousness, this lack of an instinctive, · straightforward, enduring self-core, integrating me as body. You've read as much on the first visit. From Orna, for instance, in her terms, "I'm afraid to look in my journals;' she said there. ''I'm afraid to find a lot of things that aren't mine, that aren't myself. I perceive myself as terribly easily influenced. By other people." She remembers her want, her need to be alone especially

214

EIGHTH VISIT

outside. Outside of houses, outside of towns, outside the range of people's looks and speech. On family picnics she'd go off on her own. Most likely to an unremarkable spot that would stay unvisited by others. A spot I looked for too. The place where I thought I'd stop my acting, escape my sense of furtively squinting from beside myself, to find out how I looked to other people. The place, construed as a geographical one, on the other side of selfconsciousness. Where I believed I would be me and real. It's only recendy though that I've been able to make out why all this was the stuff of depression. "Modern society," Sandra says, in her piece in Free Spirits, on page 253, "has seen the emergence of increasingly invasive apparatuses of power: These exercise a far more restrictive social and psychological control than was heretofore possible. In modern societies, effects of power 'circulate through progressively finer channels, gaining access to individuals themselves, to their bodies, their gestures and all their daily actions: Power now seeks to transform the minds of those bodies." She is quoting Michel Foucault here, from page 151 of a book called Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, which was edited by Colin Gordon and published in 1980, she doesn't say by whom. She is also quoting Foucault on page 241 when she describes, "'a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power:" This is from page 201 of his book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. lated by Alan Sheridan, and published in 1979 by Vintage Books. Sandra goes on, "Each becomes to himself his own jailer. This 'state of conscious and permanent visibility' is a sign that the tight, disciplinary control of the body has gotten a hold on the mind as well. In the perpetual self-surveillance of the inmate lies the genesis of the celebrated 'individualism' and heightened selfconsciousness which are hallmarks of modern times." At roughly five I hadn't read Foucault. But I had got a grasp of what I was up against. That is, what Sandra calls, on page 253, "Modern technologies of behavior." These are "oriented toward the production of isolated and selfpolicing subjects." I was turning, had already turned, into (this is on the next page) "a self committed to a relendess self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy." I was crushed. In what I view as a form of resisting I worked at dodging the surveillance. At stricdy screening my responses and actions for signs that they were contrived. At trying to let through only the real and reject the contrived. But this was itself a form of self-surveillance. It could only be hopelessly self-defeating.

FEARLEDGE

215

Besides, it was based on my five year old's firm adherence to a possible untruth. That is, to the belief that there is a natural, real, given me to be found somewhere. The belief instilled precisely in the interest of creating me as a compliant subject of social forces and laws. As a docile body. Judith Butler says, "there may not be a subject who stands 'before' the law, awaiting representation in or by the law. Perhaps the subject, as well as the invocation of a temporal 'before: is constituted by the law as the fictive foundation of its own claim to legitimacy. The prevailing assumption of the ontological integrity of the subject before the law might be understood as the contemporary trace of the state of nature hypothesis, that foundationalist fable constitutive of the juridical structures of classical liberalism." In her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, published by Routledge in 1990, on pages 2

and 3· Trapped in an impossible search for a pre-existing me to be in the

world, I couldn't see, at five, as I can only barely glimpse at fifty, that it's nowhere to be found, that it isn't ready-made, that it has to be slowly, interactively, and never conclusively, created. That it is created and re-created by the power structures and social structures that elicit and form it. That it is necessarily if partly, perhaps, the child of those, fashioned for their purposes. "What the person 'is,"' Judith says later, on page 10, "and, indeed, what gender 'is; is always relative to the constructed relations in which it is determined:' Which explains why-while I was looking so hard for myself-! tended to stay silent most of the time, whenever the question of my authentic response stayed unresolved. Rather than perform I would smother suspect reactions. If I wasn't sure what I really felt, or in other words was, I could at least choose to display no false feeling. I rarely smiled. I didn't stand much of a chance though. During roughly the same period I distinctly remember being forcefully struck by my accidental discovery that when I smiled at someone they would smile back. I remember noting it as a relief-a means of eliciting badly wanted warmth. A surprising, comforting fact that made smiling seem less vulnerable, made it look like a form of self expression I could trust and a tool I could use with confidence. "In the economy of smiles as well as elsewhere, there is evidence that women are exploited, for they give more than they receive," Sandra says on page 244. And about forty years later, I recognized "fear as a central agent in the process of socialization:' This is from an essay I wrote called Parenting Troops: The Summons to Acquiescence, in The Women and War Reader, edited by Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin, and published in 1998 by the New

216

EIGHTH VISIT

York University Press. On page 273. I recognized the iron power of the fear carefully fostered in me, of bungling the rules and standing-shamefullyout. Outside. This, I explain on the same page, is a fear of "the possibility of visibly standing apart. Step outside and there is literally no knowing what will happen to you:' In some ways this "outside" is probably the kind of place that Roger Hart is talking about when he says, on page 338, about places children fear, "A most interesting feature of children's relationship to these places is that while they express fear of them they also commonly express an attraction to them." His book, Children's Experience of Place, was published by Irvington Publishers in New York in 1979. He says, "This may be related to the more general suggestion that knowledge has not only a growing-forward function but also an anxiety-reducing function, a protective, homeostatic function. This conforms with the more general notion suggested above that children have an urge to know the physical world in order to feel comfortable in it:' A sense of comfort and ease that goes on eluding those of us who haven't sufficiently played out our anxiety-reducing impulse, because, as Roger puts it on page 486, "my own fears of the unknown worked against my urges to explore and curtailed the expansion of my environment:' My own? Are they? Some of them must be. Tnborn as opposed to inbred. Which? This specimen gently held and nudged around by my tweezers, this key tool of my socializing-my fear-has also begun unraveling another puzzle for me-of why I so deeply and hatefully feared my mother. Or more precisely, of what it was, exactly, that I was afraid of. Because she was a normally loving and warm mother, not clearly or obviously a fearful figure, though in some ways a strong, ruling one. And yet, equipped with her own "pervasive feeling of bodily deficiency," in Sandra's words on pages 254-5, she had to be the powerful, judgmental proxy who taught me the terms and craft of my self-surveillance, modeled on hers, and guided by her gaze at herself and only then at me. "A few children, largely girls," Roger says on page 44, "said" (I'm skipping a little here) "that they always tell their mother when they go somewhere." Hidden and elusive because of my great child's love for her, and her great mother's love for me, was her role as what Mary calls "token torturer." "As if women were truly the controlling agents;' she says in Gyn/Ecology, on page 140 where she's talking about footbinding and mindbinding, "as if women were its originators, controllers, legitimators," male responsibility was erased. "There was no question of his blame or moral accountability. After all,

FEARLEDGE

217

women 'did it to themselves;" she says on page 137, when all the while, "they performed this ritual mutilation out of fear that otherwise the girl would not be marriageable." These mothers before us learned well that, "a woman who is unable or unwilling to submit herself to the appropriate body discipline;' I'm selecting from Sandra's sentences on page 251, "faces a very severe sanction indeed in a world dominated by men: the refusal of male patronage. For the heterosexual woman, this may mean the loss of badly needed intimacy; for both heterosexual women and lesbians, it may well mean the refusal of a decent livelihood." Our mothers, charged with enforcing their culture's particular form of girl-maiming on their trusting, wholly dependent, loving daughters, have long served to make plausible the "deceptive misinterpretations and to perpetuate hate and distrust among women," Mary says on page 141. "It is commonly revealed that the rules, usually made by both parents, are

in fact administered by the mother only;' Roger says on page 65. And she "often turns a 'blind eye' when her boy breaks the boundary: 'Well, she knows that I go, but I'm not supposed to.' Comments such as this are most frequently made by the older boys in town. Again from casual observations, I noted;' Roger is saying, "that if the boy should get into trouble outside of the formally agreed upon range such as falling into the river, he must be ready to be punished. Implicit in this special treatment given to boys by their mothers seems to be the attitude that 'boys will be boys; meaning that we must expect them to explore more, engage in more rough play, be more physically active, and even get into trouble more, but that they must expect punishment when caught. Such are the attitudes toward the making of a man.'' Then, down the page he says, "Mothers are usually not aware of their differential treatment of their sons' and daughters' ranges." As they're often not aware of imposing other forms of their culture's customary hobbles on their young, pliant daughters. So, now please, you tell me, you describe, "Tell me all the places you are allowed to go to from your

home; and I shall color them in on this photograph for you: 1.

Without having to ask permission or tell someone each time. (Red)

2.

Alone, but with permission or having to tell someone each time you go.

(Blue) Is cycling any different? (Dotted blue). 3· With permission and with other school children; (Black) Is cycling any different? (Dotted black).'' These are Roger's questions to the children he studied, on page 44.

218

EIGHTH VISIT

Then he says, "4. Show me any places you would really like to go to alone but which your mother or father does not allow you to go to now. (Green)" (Green.) Grass. High grass. Into the grass. Into the tall, tall grass. Away from the group on the ground composed around tablecloth, picnic. Venturing out of bounds of the tame short-cropped turf. Into the wild where I'm almost invisible, a five year old almost hidden by strong, thick, abrasive blades, semi-dry, prickly in the summer heat. Going deeper, walking out of sight, out of theirs, out of mine, cracking and crushing the stems, pushing against and into the mass, smelling breathing the plantstuff, braving the thick, at my feet stopped short, almost stepped on, snake, enormous, dark, coiled in wait. No figment. Fully flesh and scales and blood oozing out of head chopped off body with hoe in the hand of one of the picnic fathers a millennium later. No dream the snake but pure nightmare the legs and larynx actually literally paralyzed with fear, turned useless, wood, turned motionless, voiceless, helpless, no shout, no scream, no uttered guttural croak. Stone silence. No rushing run, escape, flight in fright through brushing cutting tripping growth. Just finally painful painstaking inching lifting ton of leg. After leg. After leg. Turning around going back in slowed motion and somehow, inconceivably, one thousand years later, arriving quietly struck dumb at the square of picnic cloth. And pointing. Letting loose the father and the hullabaloo and the hoe and the blood. And the hot discussion whether it was just a black after all and not poisonous and actually no need to kill it. And my sadness at getting it killed by my nightmare and my nagging frightening new knowledge that I could I did physically freeze in fear in life outside of dreams. That it wasn't just a figment. That I couldn't trust my legs to run. My voice to shout. I have no idea and can never ever hope to get one, of how long the millennium took on the way back to the picnic. And Miriam can never hope to get a sound estimate of how long it actually took her to get out of the pool. She couldn't climb the ladder. She was making huge efforts, she says, to climb it, to get herself out. But her legs weren't lifting. Weren't listening, weren't responding. It's a salt-water pool. Outdoor. She used to swim there right through winter, through the rain. She relished being on her own there when it was raining, when the sea just beyond the slatted concrete fence was the same heavy slate gray as the sky. It was an old pool. One of the first built in Tel-Aviv. Within walking distance of her walk-up fourth floor apartment. The pool area was bare con-

FEARLEDGE

219

crete and the pool was a stark rectangle sunk into it. Outside the concrete fence there was a lot of rusting barbed wire running and spiraling in no clear pattern, to keep out unpaying or untimely swimmers, probably mainly kids. It was the ladder, it was slippery in the water and perpendicular. She could do

all right with steps, going up the broad, airy stairwell to the top floor where she lived. Holding onto the old, well polished, curved wooden banister with its curled-over rim. But the ladder-going straight up-was too hard. Miriam has been at the house quite a bit. On the first few visits and then again on the sixth one. In the weeks and months before she couldn't get out of the pool she'd been falling. She had found herself repeatedly falling while she walked through Tel Aviv with her two dogs, mother and daughter, Razala, Arabic for gazelle, black and graceful with huge doe's eyes, and her auburn coated daughter. It wasn't her legs buckling under, she says. She would just go stiff and topple, unable to readjust her balance. At first each fall was a separate incident. Accident. She didn't see the connection. Until that morning at the pool. It was deeply unnerving. Struggling alone in silence, she made a huge painstakingly slow effort to use her feet to climb the ladder. She realized something was seriously wrong. She wasn't lifting her feet high enough. This part of our talking is untaped. I asked her and she expressly agreed to talk about struggling with her legs, her illness. But the tape was bothering her, "I wish I knew what we were doing," she repeated. I had told her early on that I wouldn't be writing her biography. I had picked her up at the shop that evening and we were making supper together and talking. Steaming fresh spinach in bamboo steamers that I'd only ever seen used as decorative pieces. Among other things having fun I said. She agreed. By the end of the evening she'd pronounced me a good drinking partner. I told her I would give her copies of all the tapes if she wanted, to use as she wished. I said I was sure our projects wouldn't clash, that we'd each be doing different things. Then she agreed to tape the conversation but I didn't. A day or so later I wrote notes of it from memory. She was tripping over small stones or uneven places in the sidewalk. Visiting a friend who was also one of her suppliers, she couldn't lift her leg to get up a steep step. And falling stiffly, at going-on sixty, she started breaking bones. She broke her shoulder, she broke an arm, and then the other arm, before the first was fully healed. For a while she had to have someone with her to walk or go anywhere. Around the time we were having this conversation. Earlier, though, after falling for some time and a number of doctors,

220

EIGHTH VISIT

her problem had been diagnosed by a senior professor as a type of degeneration which he told her was incurable, fairly fast-developing and terminal. I can't dilute what to me is the compelling fact that the heart of her illness is a severe impairment of her basic mobility. The simple ability to move herself from place to place. The taken-for-granted use of her legs to walk her body. While mobility is so obviously also the heart of her singular life and personality, a major component of her needs, her identity, her special strength. On one of the taped parts of our talkings she's said, "There were times there was something inside me:' there's bad interference here, "doubts or is it;' and some more, "but there was something inside me that used to at times used to push me ... you know if you you're in a in a Moslem country and you like in Afghanistan or Yemen or Sudan or somewhere where I was and I wanted to I wanted to go to a place a restaurant or something where only men sitting there. I used to say to myself, 'Just go, just go, just go: And and and I used to go. "They nearly arrested me in Yemen. I was arrested once in Dahomey. They took me out to shoot me." The account of her near-execution in Dahomey is pockmarked with white noise and sea breeze interference. I was just learning to use the tape and hadn't realized its batteries were running low. "The story in in in in Dahomey is;' noise, "is the capital, is an old French colonial very sleepy sort of town but it was very left at the time. Every day it was 'bonjour camarade' 'ca va camarade' and sirens went off in the morning before they had to go to work and everything like that. And communism doesn't suit Africa. I had been in Nairobi and Nigeria. And Africans don't:' noise, "I came to Dahomey and I wandered round this Dahomey street, the one street where:' noise, "and it looks like the beginning of sort of old colonial houses, high walls, so I took out my movie camera:' noise, "second two guys jumped out of the bush and said;' noise. "For some obscure reason I don't know why I quickly changed the camera cause they'd already smashed that camera I thought at least keep this I don't know why. They said come with us." They took her to the Palais de Revolution. "And I come inside and there are these nice guys. They came and say to me, 'What do you think of the Dahomi men?' I said, 'I dunno, you're the first I'm meeting. You're quite nice: What could I say. I said, 'What did I do?' They said," noise, "revolution." Noise. "They said, 'Come back tomorrow morning at eight o'clock. You know if;" noise, '"tourist: So I went back. I stayed at this tiny little African hotel, there was me and a Japanese. A room with a bed and that was it. Shower. So

FEARLEDGE

221

the next morning at eight o'clock. .. And I had just come from South Africa. I started tearing up the papers ... I dunno why I went. I thought I'd better go, to show I'd been in South Africa. I had three passports-Israeli, South African, British. I started tearing up everything South African. I left my Israeli passport under the mattress, big deal. So I left it under the mattress. I come there and I come in and the place is bristling with army, bristling with army, 'Ah, ah, toi, oui, oui, oui, bien, ici bien, come this way, yahyahyah, they put me in this room ... I can remember this roo- the room had tiles, white tiles, black tiles round and I was certain that there was a hole in one tile that somebody was watching. I sat there. "'Uh-oh Miriam this is it. This is it; I was frightened then. Then they said, 'Come on, come out; they put me in this truck and there was a guy with uh with guns on either side, so I thought at what point do you say may I see my ambassador? And what ambassador do you ask to see? I figured well okay, it's the British, all right. Just throat just dry. You know, you can't talk. By the way, I don't think it's Collin ... I must look for it. One of the sort of very well known travel writers was there at the time and the same thing happened to him. But worse. And I was going to write to him and I heard he's since died of AIDS." "Uh ... Chatwin." "Exactly! Bruce Chatwin. How did you know?" "I remembered the story." "And I was going to write to him and say, 'Wow, my god, I was there too! I was there!' But he, he;' noise, "much worse. Because, what happened to me, see, I'm in this truck and I see we're not going to the bush, the truck turns, we come to the police station and the police, 'Ah, bonjour madame, ca va madame, cava bien madame, bien ici.' There was this young policemen a bit shy, the only thing that he'd forgotten was take the number of the;' noise, '"Where are you staying,"' noise, "he said to me, 'Can I, can I?' I said, 'Yes, of course, come this afternoon, four o'clock, okay?' "This is the country you know where all the black magic, the juju, the tom-tom, all that, and in the nighttime outside the;' noise, "not paved it's just... and there's a night market where all the women sit with food they've made and tiny little little lamps and it's hot, tropical and these tiny little lamps, I think it's just kind of kerosene or something like that or candles and it's just beautiful, it's absolutely beautiful. So this guy came around for tea without his uniform, terribly shy and I spoke to this Japanese guy, so he came, he had tea. 'Miriam, better get out.' Took a bush taxi. Got to Togo.

222

EIGHTH VISIT

Stopped. Everybody's drunk. Everybody was drunk! Not because of the young man, because of the situation. Because of the atmosphere. I just felt that the atmosphere was not good. There was a coup d'etat the next day and they told me that every foreigner who was there, they came, they stripped their mattresses, they took them in ... well this was what he wrote about, they took them into jail, they questioned them, they beat them ... " Miriam says, "I have been fri- it's not that I've never been frightened. But on the whole. And that's where I always say, 'What is it?' I'm not a person who has a lot of kind of self-confidence you know. But there was something inside me which made me able to do these:' What is it? is what we're here asking. What we're talking about at the talking house, what we're trying to understand. What is or isn't it? Our ability or disability to "do these ... " as Miriam's said it, and move. Ourselves. Move ourselves by ourselves, of our accord. How far, how well, how freely. Among other things, we're talking about the perceived opposition of house and road. The implication being that you're either so afraid of the road that you stay, or so afraid of the house that you go. Either way you see them as mutually exclusive, yourself as forced to choose. And early on in our talkings I've asked about the toilet. Miriam says, "I'm very lucky. I sort of can can my body is such a way that I can go to toilet in the morning and not go till I come back at night unless I have diarrhea or something." She calls it by its Hebrew name, 'shilshul: "And then huggghhh But you must ask Doreen," her sister, "about this cause Doreen needs to go to the toilet five or six times a day and then it's a then it's a problem. You know and all the boys stand around to see your white bum you know because they've never seen one." I do. We're at her apartment, a few streets east of Miriam's. In a similar building, probably around 50 to 6o years old, with high ceilings and old, uneven floors made of time-smoothed Arab floor tiles, and capricious plumbing. She always gets stomach problems when she's travelling, she says, and a cold. Every time. She's started being more careful of water, now-putting pills into the water or drinking mineral water. She's telling about a long bus ride in Nepal. She was with her husband, on the way to do some trekking. They do that. They're usually thirty to forty years older than any of the travellers around, she says. Generally, they take a porter. Someone from the Sherpa tribe living on the Himalayas. The porter takes a few dollars a day and he knows the way, knows where the night and eating stations are. So

FEARLEDGE

223

once, on a long bus ride before starting a trek, her husband forced the driver to stop. She had had to go for four hours and she was in agony. The conductors laughed at her but finally stopped the bus. She had to go on the road, behind the bus. In Nepal, she says, everyone just squats wherever. And once in Ladakh everyone got off the bus. You can't do anything, she says, you try maybe, with a skirt or a shawl, you try hiding your white bottom. But in India no one knows me at any rate, she says. She's not the doctor's daughter. Still, she does get embarrassed by her white bottom. Miriam goes on, "For me actually when I travel I'm lucky I can sort of go in the morning and not go again till the nighttime. That's the way I it's probably not healthy but that's the way I." Carrying the baggage of what may be my mother's American preoccupation with clean modern toilets, into an only partly Americanized landscape, I took a walk I particularly remember through a colorful market in Crete with the pressure mounting. At first I hadn't realized it and then I heard myself getting sharp and impatient with my partner. I got disoriented, fuzzy about directions, confusion creeping up and growing, along with apprehension. A constant sub-sensed shiver running down my spine. I hesitated at every tiny junction. I couldn't decide which alleyway to take, as if it made any difference, or whether or not to buy another wonderfully cheap disc of local bouzuki music. I was agonizing over tiny unimportant decisions, whether to walk around the back or the front of the stall, slowed to a standstill. And I realized I was blocking out more than I wanted, a whole broad range of sensations in order to disregard the one pressing one I had no available way to respond to. Deadened senses. Or maybe it was the energy drain of holding it in. Taking up surprisingly big parts of my functionality, my consciousness, my routine abilities to decide and to move. Pushing or pulling me to stay put, to sit, if I couldn't go. So I wouldn't lose control. This happens to me fairly often. But somehow at the market in Chanya I was following the process. Simultaneously experiencing it and watching it from the sidelines. Recognizing the source and the creeping toll-my seriously reduced clarity, my woodenness. A main English language euphemism for peeing or defecating is go to the toilet, I need to go. Needing to go-to the toilet-for western women and maybe for other women too, is probably one of the most central and persistent hindrances to mobility. Needing to go combined with the imperative need to control the exposure of our vulvas and buttocks and dissociate them from pee and defecation. Worrying about

224

EIGHTH VISIT

it, about going, about needing to go, is one of the strongest, most permanent manifestations of the "generalized male witness" that you've already heard Sandra say, "comes to structure woman's consciousness of herself as a bodily being." Just like worrying about traces of blood seeping through pants and skirts is so concentrated a form of female self-surveillance, that tampon and sanitary napkin ads can capitalize hugely on our fear of the awful humiliation incurred by "showing." I wonder about blocking off sense signals. An ability to ignore building body pressure and simply ward off a western woman's difficulty in locating a place acceptable to her and others, in finding either the physical privacy or the mental and emotional indifference that she needs to defecate or pee. I've often noted my own inability to block out my bladder. It's not that the bodily sensations of having to go are the same for every woman. But I can't help wondering about their apparent absence for hours and hours. Is it acquired? Could it block out and deaden other nerve channels? Could it interfere with use of her legs? Is it simultaneously also part of an ingenious escape from the ever-present witness, the self-surveillance? Forgetting oneself. Blocking selfawareness. Getting out of it, getting away from it. Going. Just go. When she's travelling, it always takes her time to get her defenses, her barriers, up. At first she has a tendency to be very trusting and accepting, to go along with everything, Miriam says. It takes her time each trip, on the way, to get more cautious and careful. Orna had a motorbike at age sixteen. Roger pleas children's need, "to explore and experiment in ways that cannot occur under the constant surveillance of adults: how to assess and risk danger." (On page 488.) Orna says, "So then it was easier to attain the end of the paths and it was quicker to ride and to to decide where to nnnhhh and there was some amount of risk but uh ... I like ... ignored it." "And were there incidents that were actually frightening? Was there something that was really risky or was it just you know, theoretical-you knowing it?" "Ehm ... there were there were two incidents. There was one time but it's also more connected... not really related to trips, maybe more connected to the tendency to get to know strange people or to take things like all the way a little or... So there there was one time I remember when somebody eh eh shut me up in some apartment:' "It is her transgressive wandering (her 'error' in both senses of the word)

FEARLEDGE

225

that led in the first place to her confinement/imprisonment, the necessary condition of rape;' Rajeswari says, on page 76 of Real and Imagined Woman. "Where?" "Tel-Aviv I think something ... Nothing happened to me. I mean in the end it somehow he let me go but ehm ... it was an episode that was a little like scary." "Do you remember any more details?" "No, I don't actually." "You were about sixteen-seventeen?" "Yes something like that. Yes. He had had intentions apparently something but somehow it... " "So you met him somewhere?" "Apparently I met him somewhere. I really it's very vague to me the whole incident but eh ... " "And another incident?" "And another incident too when someone tried like ... he invited me to meet him and tried too, and I didn't want to and all kinds of stuff like that." "Away from home somewhere?" "Yes, yes, yes:' "And what happened? You said you didn't want it and it ended or?" "Somehow there was a little eh ... an attempted use of fore- but not serious. I mean there was also... I succeeded in evading it." "And you don't remember it either?" "This one I do remember more." "So try to tell me how it went." Rajeswari is saying, on the same page, "The fact that the enactment of rape takes place in private and secret places requires the author to conduct his readers into the innermost recesses of physical space!' "Or;' she says later, "as readers we may be located in the space of the 'truth' -seeking spectators in a courtroom:' "He invited me somewhere." "Where did you meet him?" "He was... he was ... there was a boarding school near our house. For boys. And somehow I met him." "He was from the boarding school?" "He was from the boarding school, yes." Orna is quiet for a long time. "And he told me that I that I should come to some place and he would show

226

EIGHTH VISIT

me something. He has something interesting to show me. Kind of something like that. Roughly, older than me by about three years. Something like that. And that's it, and then I came and he kind of mmm ... " "And where was this place?" "It was an abandoned house in some ... not far from my house." "Did you know that it ... were you afraid?" She has said a little earlier, "Always when there were abandoned houses and such, it would fire my imagination." Now she says, "Eh ... I think I was terribly naive. I didn't think of about uh such a situation. I mean I think I really eh believed that he wanted to show me something or... " ''And you came and then he tried... " "Yes. He tried to hug me, to kiss me ehm ... it uhm it really like disgusted me that he was trying to kiss me." She says this with an apologetic soft laugh, embarrassed, and her voice gets very low, near a whisper. "I started telling him, 'no, no,' and all that and he ... and then he kind of started like ... I remember he like pinned me to the wall and then eh I ran away." "And what did you feel after that?" She's quiet for a long time. "I felt both degraded and also eh ... that I had been like stupid. That how... how had I even thought to go meet with a person like that. Because I felt the ... suddenly I realized the ... what had happened there. Like that he hadn't ever meant to show me anything at all and... " ''And did it change your attitude afterwards?" "No. No. Maybe. There's no way to tell... Look I don't know, uh ... it's hard for me to see the real processes ... what happened to me as a result but ... in general I don't think it affected me a whole lot. Look maybe if it had really developed into rape and that, then maybe it might have been different 1... I thought that I had been like stupid!' "Do you remember yourself later getting into similar circumstances? Going with someone ... " "Not that far. No, not that far. But not uh not drastically afraid of people either or afraid of getting to know strange people or... Not ... Maybe it m gave me a strong aversion to a certain kind of men. Or to understand like some certain facet of of of masculinity I don't know." Miriam was in Cairo, starting out on a trip, waiting for a visa or something. In the market at Khan El-Khalili someone approached her and suggested they get something to eat. She'd said she was a vegetarian and he'd said so was he. She was interested. She'd never met an Egyptian vegetarian. He

FEARLEDGE

227

lived nearby he said with his mother and sisters, let's go for a vegetarian meal. She followed him into a very old building with concave stairs carved down by footsteps, into an apartment with old Victorian furniture that didn't look lived in. Another man there was introduced as his cousin. They shut the door and started whispering. She thinks she had all her money on her. Her fears happen mid-way, she says, not at the outset, not before. They attack when she clutches her head in her hands and says, 'What have I done? Where have I put myself? What's going to happen now?' Fears after the facts. They didn't actually try to exert any force. They tried persuading her to stay. She didn't. We're talking about her legs. Recalling the first stages of her illness. "I used to get completely spastic. I'd get stiff, I couldn't move. Just couldn't move:' And, "I s - sometimes you know I sit and I watch people walk and I just think, 'Wow, just look at them. People walk. I used to walk just like that."' The first diagnosis was traumatic. A point blank prediction that she'd get less and less mobile and pretty soon she'd die. It gave her, "a bad scare." But her own neurologist disbelieved it from the start. He said, "He said that, so what?" She was given "lots and lots and lots of tests." As we're talking, five years later, there is still no clear diagnosis. And Miriam is still falling. Besides which, some months ago, she underwent some cardiovascular procedure. She walks with two sticks. Beautiful carved black wood. More for security than for actually carrying her weight. She gets tense and uncomfortable and afraid of falling in crowded places with a lot of hubbub. At one point she felt it was a kind of agoraphobia, a difficulty with public places. She's often very conscious of the problem of crossing a room. She regularly, persistently, patiently does hydrotherapy, physiotherapy, uses a kind of apparatus or technique called Pilatus that strengthens the lower back and thigh muscles. She still swims. She's tried several different kinds of alternative medicine and diets, one of which seemed to be helping her feel better over the months of our talking. She lives on her own on the top floor of the old, high-ceilinged apartment building, cooks for herself, does her own shopping much of the time. She works in the shop several days a week, alternating with Doreen. She drives all over the country to traditional craftsmen and craftswomen who sell their work to the shop. "To me driving is freedom. Freedom. Absolute freedom." On many weekends she drives to the house in Tzfat. And she has also started travelling again during our talkings. For the first time ever along with Doreen. "When I you know when I went in January with Doreen;' a military helicopter squalling over-

228

EIGHTH VISIT

head makes it hard to hear each other and she's almost shouting, "to Egypt, to Siwa, first of all it was the first time we traveled together. Which we're both uh a little bit trepidatious of it:' And she says, "it was travelling with me, it was ... it was it was okay. It was the most wonderful feeling to me to feel I was back on the road. Just take the bus here, find out which bus it is in Cairo, take the bus, go up to Marsa Matrukh, just go down, take the nextake the donkey cart across and take the bus going down another four hours in the desert ... and arrive in the oasis in the evening going to look for a hotel. You know just... kacha. Starn." Hebrew for 'just like that.' "On the road. Hahhhhh just tha- first of all it's a wonderful thing to feel I'm doing it

again! I'm back you know on the maslul." The route. "Uh there the hagbalot;' the limitations. "I felt once 'cause it was cold so I got stiff in the nighttime you know but because I was with Doreen ... one night. And then suddenly, hu- here I was in the middle of Khan El-Khalili before ... before Ramadan there must have been fifty in the whole of Cairo, fifteen million people must have been in Khan El-Khalili. All the crowds and everything else like that. And everybody very good humored. And uh there was no problem, I mean I managed. "I may have there was one moment where I thought I wouldn't be able to manage and that was standing in the middle of Kasr El-Nil, Sharia Kasr El-Nil, and the cars come at you;' she's spacing the words, saying each one slowly, describing the building fear. "And if you're in the middle of the road. They don't they don't swerve. They just they don't honk. They just go straight at you. Or they're honking anyway. And and as the car came I suddenly froze. I couldn't move! I sai- and then Doreen just grabbed in time because this car didn't uh didn't didn't move, he just went straight on. And about you know if she hadn't pulled me away... but otherwise ... it was just such a wonderful feeling. That's why I want to try now I mean the idea uh the aim is in January to get to ... Mali. And to go to Timbuktu on a boat. That's my aim.'' A little later she's saying, "I was very pleased with myself because ... you know for the party at the shop;' they'd had a party the week before, "we take all sorts of dishes from here and everything else and ... it's difficult for me because I've got two sticks to carry everything up but I brought everything up which means I lean something here and I brought up all the dishes and aaannnd ... luckily the car was parked over here. The stairs are nothing. The stairs are nothing but just you know all this and that I managed to do every-

FEARLEDGE

229

thing not having to wait till Doreen or till this one or that one or somebody else brings it up for me. I decided... 'tov... at yechola la'asot et zeh levad.' Vezehu." Okay... you can do it on you own. And that's that. "And Doreen doesn't fuss about all of this?" "No, thank goodness she doesn't. Doreen doesn't. You know. Uh ... you know, if she doesn't hear from me half a day she doesn't think, 'Oh my god, she's fallen.' You know. Ah, so, just uh;' her voice here is nonchalant, making light of it all. "But uh, it's just depressing when I do fall." "How do you deal with depression?" "The only thing that the only thing that deals with it is time. The only thing is time. Listen, in the last few weeks I fell four times. I was just thinking of the way I fell. Uh ...... only once did I hurt myself. Not badly. I'm beginning to think, 'Oh my god! Fallen again.' It's something which is ... I went to a new doctor. He said to me, 'How often have you fallen?' I said, 'Hhhhh, hundreds of times! I can't tell you how many times. Hundreds of times!' Since this all started. Nineteen ... it's now nineteen-ninety... five years. Now my my doctor in Capetown who's the homeopathic doctor I spoke to on the phone now and she said, and I went to her for a year. And she said to me, 'You know, that your condition,' 'cause she's convinced this is a virus, she said to me, 'the time for getting better-it can go on for ten years."' And she says, "The other day on Friday there was a woman who comes to the shop and she was sitting in the shop and I was walking around the shop and suddenly she looks at me, she says, 'Miriam! You are walking legamri normali!"' Completely normally. "Can't walk fast. True because it's like in a protected area, I can. But it means that the physical thing of walking, actually walking, is possible." Out of Guatemala, Judith literally slowed down. She couldn't make herself drive over 20 kilometers per hour. Or was it 40? Either way her physical mobility was inhibited. She mentioned other debilitating phobias she developed back in England. And she was the one who used the word phobia, "a fear or anxiety that exceeds normal proportions," says the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged Edition, 1981. But we didn't get around to the details of what they were. In Guatemala, the notes say: Driving the jeep-got it there. Terror on those roads. Had a couple of crashes. Once breaks failed in city. Edged along the mountain. Was fearless then. She had no phobias. Those came later: Since back developed several phobias which I think are related. Related that is to the subject of our talking at this point, related to fear.

230

EIGHTH VISIT

As you've read on the last visit, she was told, but couldn't convince herself to believe, that the trouble, La Violencia, was real. She persistently relegated it to the realm of the unreal. Although she did decide, at the outset, not to do her study in a particularly troubled area where more people were getting hurt. She was mentally fixing the borders of fear, where and where-not to feel afraid. Defining a space, a realm of the real in which she chose to feel safe. Aura's uncle's camper was the place-marker which helped them find his body, in the desert. The man whose body it was, Aura's uncle, was the same man who was one of Hannah's brothers. But Hannah didn't bring him up or in. To the talk or the house. Aura did. Talking about the family that she periodically spent time with, between periods of travel as a child, she says, "My other uncle was murdered:' "Murdered? Seriously? How?" "I don't really know because;' her low voice on the tape is hard to understand, "he lived with the Black Hebrews in uh Sinai. He lived there for a while." "In Sinai? They the Black Hebrews had a community in Sinai? I'd never heard that. I know quite a bit about them. Are you sure? In Sinai?" "I don't know if that was just like well that's where I think he was then he was living with them a while wherever it is that they are. And then he went

to Sinai and lived there for a while." "Oh so in Sinai he was on his own. It wasn't with the Black Hebrews there." "Uhm and then nobody heard from him for a long time and my aunt;' who lives in Jerusalem, "went with her husband to look for him in Sinai. She realized that he had been taken out, taken and ... she just realized it was just.. . How long hadn't they heard from him? About ... for a few months. And .. . and then they found his body and uhm and it was hardly recognizable. And it was just too much of a... emotional strain to ... like you know it's not as if it's the right place to go back looking for ... people ... " "And they were sure he didn't just die somehow or-?" "No no his skull was bashed and his body was not ... whole." "And your aunt actually found him? Where?" "I think h - near Tarabin. I don't I mean I hope I'm not changing the facts this is all my kind of distorted memory. I think nobody in my family really has nobody's really talked about it. Except for my aunt who told me, more or less, this I mean how she was the one who went back looking for

FEARLEDGE

231

him and ... I mean nobody else really... thought... I mean it it just didn't occur to anyone to actually go about looking for him. My grandparents I think my grandmother wasn't even ... in Israel. "I think it was about ten years ago. Eighty... eighty something. I must have been about ... nine ... ten ... probably eighty-four or eighty-five." "And with your mother, have you talked about it?" "She never talked. No, every once in a while she says that she's ... found photos of him and she shows these to my... grandfather and how he's very much into that but never in direct relation to how she feels about it. She's never talked about it. We've talked... I've asked her, I mean I think also that one ... of the obvious things that happened was that she wasn't on good terms with him in the last patch and ... " "She feels guilty?" "She doesn't really... I think she's kind of... she's very uhm ... like she doesn't... go through all kinds of... guilt trips you know she kind of... like she takes life in a different way which is more compatible, it's more one of her very good qualities. Maybe I've ... mixed up the facts:' This, then, is one of the murders that populate our house. Stumbled onto in one of its tal kings. Set down to one side of where we're sitting, present, briefly startling, continually painful, enigmatic, but unimposing. We haven't made it a centerpiece, dominating our talkings and lives, permeating our entire consciousness. Just as June de-centered thoughts of the extended government surveillance she discovered she had been under. "There was there was suddenly a big campaign about it, a political campaign," Janie says. She's been to the house more often than June so she's the one I've asked to explain June's remark, on the second visit, that her home address was "internationally known even to the CIA apparently." Janie says, "Because somebody found out about it, some politician found out about it uh ... it started off with a scandal of... Unfortunately the first and now probably the the only for a long time woman head of... well, you ... there are seven heads of state in Switzerland and each one represented a department, and she's the head of the police and justice department and it turned out that she was or her husband was involved in the drug trafficking business and she knew about it. That scandal came out and with that, it came out that uhm that there was this political police who were tapping ... I don't know how many thousand people's thousands of people's phones in uhm in Switzerland. This was in about eighty-seven. And had been doing so for a long time. I don't

232

EIGHTH VISIT

know. I don't know how many thousand people. I should I should get the exact number because it was it's ... thousands of people. Thousands of people. "And uh ... anybody connected with some you know cultural or leftist organization or... even some right wing politicians found out that they were being tapped and kept records on and everything. So then within this campaign my mother also wrote in for information. Well because she had been interrogated twice by the police. In the sixties. About... precisely about her political connections and why was she learning Chinese and this type of thing. And she saw that they had these big dossiers on her." "She actually saw them?" "Yeah she saw. It was called the police for foreigners." "What!? Can you repeat that?" I can hear my incredulous tone on the tape. "The police for foreigners." She says it slowly. "And they were trying to expel her but they couldn't find a ... any good reason because she was not ... she was perfectly in order, legally you know. And uhm ... but it was life style that bothered them more than anything else. Every time she had an illegitimate child they called her. .. it's it was already a political, dissident act." "She wrote in, she got-?" "Yeah confirmation that they had it and a very small extract of it. And then it took about another four years ... a file on her that they had a f i they had a you know, the political police had kept a file. 'Cause they closed this ... uh police, secret, it was a secret political police, nobody knew about it and they dismantled it and then ... I couldn't, I don't know exactly, eightyseven, eighty-eight, I mean it all took quite a while for the whole thing to... decisions to be made and everything. And apologies and all this." "How long was all this going on-this ah ... surveillance?" "Well about twenty years. From about from ... well information was started to be gathered in six- around sixty-six or so. I think it wasn't just tapping. I'm not sure they tapped the phone during that whole period uh but there were you know also informers. Friends, so called friends who had actually been working for the police. And because she had a very open household there were lots of people in and out that we didn't even know what their backgrounds were and who they were working for so ... and then ... you know they went to her employers, they went to all the local cafes and asked them questions. And she knew that because the cafe owners were her friends and told her. But then there were people who were not her friends

FEARLEDGE

233

like certain old... ladies neighbors and stuff who were also questioned and ... you know didn't tell her. So uhm" "And they finally they gave her the file?'' "Yeah well she has the whole file now. It took about four years. It was a very slow process because they had so many demands. I mean so many people requesting to have their full files. I mean these these thousands of people everybody was requesting to have it so ... it took about four or five years for them to even send it to them. They sent it to her through the mail and uh ... she only got it about last year so we were able to look at it. And it's not a very big file, I mean maybe about you know thirty pages or something or some ... fifty pages. Have comments in French and in German and ... you know a lot of information that is objectively true but was uninterpreted like ... she did take three Chinese lessons but it said she took Chinese lessons for two years or something and then ... that must have been because of her connections with the Chinese embassy or something. And then her only connection with the Chinese embassy was that she'd she went there once a year to their national holiday reception and ate spring rolls and enjoyed herself and and because she knew the Chinese teacher who was ... but you know so ... how that information got out who knows ... Well now there's I mean there's the question of rectification ... uh what what is gonna be done with these files ... " "You mean they didn't they kept the files?" "That's right, she has a copy. And it's been decided that these files are going to be put in the archives. Some people are saying they should be destroyed, others were saying no, they should not be destroyed because uh because it's important for you know for Swiss history that we know that this type of thing happened and stuff and uh ... so it's been decided that they're in the archives and they're inaccessible for fifty years. Something like that. "So the whole ... One of the questions was the sources, 'cause 'cause a lot of the actual file is blacked out. In other words uh-you know all the informers' names and circumstances in which you know she could guess at the information being uh got- gotten whatever, have been blacked out and she's uhm appealing that decision to black it out. As are many many other people. I mean it's a just part of a political movement to say well but, you know they're saying, 'Well we have to protect the security of the state by protecting the informers and everything.' Well what security of the state are you protecting if the information you're getting is wrong anyway? Uhm ... you know we'd better know who and why so that this type of thing can't happen

234

EIGHTH VISIT

again. But they it's clear in in that file 'cause they do say again and again they say uhm ... no serious political activity, which is true she was not member of any party or anything. But there are other reasons to keep an eye on ... so ... and then they go on and on about her lifestyle, the fact that she had children without being marrie- ,"for which no man would ever be put under surveillance, "in a police report you know:' Much later she's saying, "My mother was on some sort of a mystical trip, did she tell you about that? That through this whole period she not only believed that they were in the good hands of-her immediate family;' she means June's children, her older sister and brother, "but also that;' her sigh here sounds sad, "god was looking after everything and uh... the virgin Mary also and... okay. Sort of she you know a very very high trip and this is why she she has to live dangerously. She did some things you know dangerous things." "Like what for instance? Can you do you know any examples?" "Well you know travelling in ... alone in places where women never traveled and where men were out to get these ... free women like you know south ofltaly and and places that. At times her Dutch friend would uh... there were a couple of months I think it was four months that she stayed alone in a in a small village in the south of France. Has she told you about that at all?" "Not in any detail, no." "And four months that he was back in Switzerland uh ... doing his watch repairing business and everything and uh ... there she was very free but also putting herself into all sorts of... very vulnerable situations. Specially I think with with men really. Uh ... "She felt safe. She felt totally... she felt totally protected. That's it. Because this is what she felt, that she was totally... in the hands of uh ... whatever the powers ... of above or whatever. And she had no fear:' I was told it wasn't dangerous. He had categorically stated that. I didn't need to be afraid of a thing, he said, except for crossing the street (the traffic was wild). I had no way of sensing this when I got off the bus at Meidan alTahrir alone, Woman, at ten p.m., in the middle of Cairo. Several meters of men were leaning on the iron railings that ran along the sidewalk at the vast, half-dark square which was being dug up in big patches for the new subwayin-construction, and they told me, "Dollars? Dollars? You speak English? Hallo. Hallo." I couldn't see there was nothing to be afraid of in the street, just like I couldn't see there was bilharziasis in the motheriver where I badly wanted to dangle my bare feet, over the side of the broad, low rim of the

FEARLEDGE

235

faluka, gliding noiseless through the dark with a full blown sail. But I knew. My western-urban alertness would long ago have translated the persistent, soft steps behind me into a possible threat. Would have stiffened the muscles at my jaw. But he had told me that they're not the least bit violent, even though they don't let foreigners alone for a second in the streets. I had a note the size of half a page of a school notebook with the Arabic numerals in a row opposite the western ones, and a drawing in pen, at the bottom, of how to get to the building, and an address and a cousin. He had lived in the building for almost a year by the time I arrived in Cairo, and a few months before, I had said I might visit and we'd even talked tentative dates. We hadn't been in contact since and the fluent English voices at the Egyptian telephone exchange, had kept telling me for the past two weeks that ·there was no answer at the number written at the bottom of the note. I had come down by bus from Tel-Aviv. I had no idea whether or not I'd find him at the apartment and I didn't know anyone else in Cairo. My plan, if he wasn't there, was to live at the Hilton, if worst came to worst and I couldn't find my way to a pleasant but cheaper hotel, because I'd heard from him that chances were that asking directions would take me on a two-hour detour to a perfume shop owned by a relative of the person I'd asked. That people are genuinely nice and warm and don't tell you they don't know and will always show you the way somewhere. Now I understand he meant men. If I'd asked a woman I might have got a straight answer, provided I could find one on the street at that hour and she knew where it was and she spoke enough English. I'd stay for as many days as my money would hold out, I told myself, and at least I'd always be able to go to the National Museum which is almost directly opposite the Hilton, on the other side of Meidan al-Tahrir, and which, I had heard, was so full of stuff you could spend days there, and live it up in oriental luxury at the Hilton. I told myself I could always get on a return bus whenever and leave behind the women who were peering out through the wooden lattices at Suheimi house, way back beyond the market at Khan El-Khalili two hundred years ago. The harem and bathing area on the third floor were storybook rooms with crafted marble tiling, and broad reclining-niches behind the lattices whose wood carving and intricate transparencies, into the inner garden, mesmerized me to stay a long time in the house's huge silence. The truth is I thought I would find him and more than planning a fallback, I was mumbling a magic incantation to convince myself I wasn't scared. I convinced the American student sitting in front of me on the bus. We

236

EIGHTH VISIT

didn't talk much but at some point on the way down he said you could feel an inner tranquilness about me. I couldn't resist feeling proud while I knew very well that the compliment was pompous and superficial though it still didn't occur to me that he might be coming onto me. I don't think anyone else on the bus was alone. The rued-student was with someone using their eye contact and body language to make the point that they were only travel partners. My travel alone, a woman, registered in his senses as quiet confidence. The bus was pretty empty, I guess. I remember I was sitting alone. I wanted to and the other passengers respected the bag on the seat beside me and my gaze turned to the window. Through which-if it had been turned that way ten years later at Ataba Square in Cairo-it might have met a young woman forced off of a public bus, as my cousin explained in a lecture he gave that year, and serially raped in broad daylight, among hundreds of passersby, not one of whom interfered. There's a fear of doing the forbidden thing, overstepping the prohibition and bringing wrath down upon you. And there's a distinctly different fear of the thing being done to you, just because you happen to be at that time and place. The first has to do with your agency and your own guilt. In the second you're the innocent victim of another's guilt. But the two are habitually merged by socialization, particularly women's, making you guilty of being exposed to hurt, because you took yourself to that place at that time. In Parenting Troops, on page 273 of The Women and War Reader, I'm saying, "I was struggling with the difficulty of separating myself from an inherited and formerly (largely) unquestioned social affiliation, a separation which I experienced as an unfocused sense of guilt and defection." But, "Being a separation and moreover an ideologically motivated one, it also gave me a new sense of self and autonomy." This is just after I've written, "Uncomfortable and strangely apprehensive of things I couldn't actually name, I simultaneously felt free and exhilarated." "Fears concerning the social dangers to which children are exposed;' Cindi Katz says in Full Circles on pages 103 and 104, "seem to impel parents to limit children's and particularly girls' autonomy outdoors." She's looking at "studies of children's outdoor experience in Western industrialized settings:' All of which, "reveal that boys are allowed greater spatial freedom and range from an earlier age than girls." Her next sentence is, "Yet boys are injured with greater frequency." And she says, "The data suggests that, at least in the US, boys are the more common victims of social dangers as well. Even

FEARLEDGE

237

as boys suffer more frequent sexual and physical abuse than girls, and comprise the majority of adolescent prostitutes, parents continue to act as if their sons were immune to these social dangers." Down the page she says, "Parents make choices and rules for their children within a risk calculus that is as much a function of fear as of fact, of statistical reality (whatever that is) as of social custom." And, "The result is that girls in urban industrialized areas are restricted from exploring and manipulating the outdoor environment." He was a man though, and he was confined to a room. It's measurements were such that he couldn't straighten his legs. He had to keep them slightly bent or put his feet up on the wall or stand up. Standing, he could straighten his legs if he bent his back. He had to sleep with his knees bent or on his side with his legs perpendicular to his trunk. We got together about two weeks after his release. We had done political work together before he was detained for interrogation by the Israeli secret service, known as the General Security Service or 'Shabak.' Suheil was a doctor. A neurologist. A Palestinian from the occupied West Bank. And in the months before his detainment we had assembled groups of Israelis to talk with him and his colleagues, to hear some of the small print of daily life under occupation being narrated in person, by personable people, to listen to their views and political analyses, to comment and question and understand. It took him what seemed like a long time to let himself pee in his clothes. Hours he thought after he'd realized that no one was going to take him to a toilet. After he had asked again and again. Defying his toilet training was a painstakingly slow task. And when he asked for soap the day he was taken to out to shower, the guard laughed, "You think this is the Hilton?" He explained the danger of a scabies epidemic. He thought he might already have contracted a case of scabies. It was badly infectious. The shower was on top of a latrine with standing stinking water. A few days later the guard, still gruff, actually brought him a piece of soap. He kept it over a depression on the floor near the far corner of the room, so it could drain. So it wouldn't fall apart. Just left of where the daylight streaked in for what he thought was about 35 minutes in the late afternoons. Which meant the slat in the wall was facing west, towards the Mediterranean, where you see the sun setting in Israel and the territories. He used to align himself along the streak, facing towards the slat, and close his eyes and feel the light through his eyelids, bathing his face, and open his eyes and look at it along the length of his bent knee and thigh and up the torso. It didn't actually recede it simply dimmed, pretty quickly and disappeared. There were other regular rituals,

238

EIGHTH VISIT

like the order of his repositionings, the exercises he did every morning and after supper. The anatomy lectures he gave after lunch, visualizing a dissection and a circle of students around the table, reconstructing the textbook order and trying to recite a chapter a day. The mind letters he wrote to his wife and to each of his sons, the older of which would soon be a dentist and the younger who was studying accountancy. One letter every night. Unless they were interrogating. That warped time and lurched him off routine and he had no way of estimating how long he was sitting there with a stifling sack on his head on a child's size bench, much too low for comfort, with his hands tightly handcuffed behind his back, in constantly bright light and long stretches of deafening music, in between the interrogation sessions, where there in fact wasn't any beating. It could be days on end. It could be unending minutes. He couldn't know. And back in his room he would slowly recuperate, reconstruct routine. Till the guard, a new one, no less gruff, opened the door and said get up he was being moved. He was terrified. He forgot the soap. There may be, Oliver Sacks says, "with all cognitive tasks, two ways of approach, two cerebral 'strategies; and a shift (with the acquisition of skill) from one to the other. The right hemisphere's role;' the right hemisphere of the brain, that is, "as thus conceived, is critical for dealing with novel situations, for which there does not yet exist any established descriptive system or code-and it is also seen as playing a part in assembling such codes. Once such a code has been assembled, or emerged, there is a transfer of function from right to left hemisphere, for the latter controls all processes that are organized in terms of such grammars or codes." This is from pages 104 and 105 of Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, published by Picador, Pan Books in 1991. "Right hemisphere functioning;' he goes on on page 109, "is restricted to perceptual organization;' which can't embrace the paradigmatic. In India, I stopped assuming I could get places. During the ludicrously short two weeks that I spent there I felt physically disconnected from myself, strange to my body and habits. My assumptions. Mainly to my assumptions. In Bombay and in Delhi I stopped taking my moving through space for granted. I met the power of crowds to stop me, divert me, prevent me from ongoing routine orientation. The collision between masses and time, heightened conscious of my moving body and the limits on its ability to progress, to reach destinations. I was experiencing a new kind of bodily being in place

FEARLEDGE

239

and time. Trying to learn it, what it was, how to act on it while living the irrelevance of my accustomed bodily being. My feeling was distinctly of groping. Of trying to contain, to perceive. Of being re-set a task I hadn't even retained a memory of performing. I was looking for the dimensions of my body, its velocity, its force, its potential for movement, its realistically estimated ability to cover distances in India's big cities. In his book An Anthropologist on Mars, published in Britain by Picador in 1995, on pages 120 and 121, Oliver describes "an infant moving his hand to and fro before his eyes, waggling his head, turning it this way and that, in his primal construction of the world. Most of us have no sense of the immensity of this construction, for we perform it seamlessly, unconsciously, thousands of times every day, at a glance." Down the page he says, "We achieve perceptual constancy-the correlation of all the different appearances, the transforms of objects-very early, in the first months oflife." So in a way I was time travelling. Back to the first months of life in another version. It was time travel with friends. Women. Three of us together. We loved the

women's-only cars on the city trains, even though they could get panicstrikingly tricky to get off of. Walking down the platforms, scanning the crowd fast in the rush, straining to spot the cluster of women waiting to board, regulars who knew roughly where the car would usually be stopping. If there was time we asked. Women were always warm and helpful, often took charge of us and marched us to the right place whether or not they were going that way. And, when she was, then making an effort to seat us on the packed train, to show us where to get off or relay us to someone else going as far as we needed. My hands, as if not totally under my jurisdiction, had to be held consciously in check and scolded repeatedly for almost reaching out to spread fingers across the rippling saris. The textures and strong kaleidoscope colors were hand magnets. I needed to know how each one met my palm and the lengths of my fingers and my fingertips. The dense weave, the softness, the sheen, the light pliability, the smoothness, the transparent scratchiness. I needed to connect sight and touch in a store of unfamiliar treasure. Nowhere I knew did women live in this kind of fabricolor. I needed to touch. "One does not see, or sense, or perceive, in isolation;' Oliver says in note 3 to page m of An Anthropologist on Mars, and I've added some italics,"... perception

is always linked to behavior and movement, to reaching out and exploring the world:'

"Have you been down to ... Jericho since it's Palestine?" Miriam asks me at

240

EIGHTH VISIT

some point in our talking. She means since it was handed over to the Palestinian Authority. On the tape there are running water sounds and dishwashing clinks-her heavy pottery plates. "No. You have, I remember." "No, I went just before. Went before. When I came out of hospital." "Yah, I remember when you went down." "Like a week after the Intifada." "See how this works. I'm curious about how this is with ginger." She's making a spiced juice. Cutting, pouring, squeezing, stirring, clinking. "Ginger always adds:' "Mmm ... " "Good?" "Really good." "The ginger and the the mint is very good:' "And also because it isn't sweet. I like that." "Mmm ... it's very good. Mmm ... I'd like to go to Jericho. I love Jericho." "I don't know it very well. I used to... " "I love it. 'Cause it's a bit like Africa. It's a different sense of time there, different relationship to the earth. I don't know. It's just... and then the the desert and the oasis. And then I get high on this kind of dry desert kind of heat. "We used to go and sit in these gardens there. You must have been." "Yah." "And last time we were there the one that we used to go to they said, 'No, no they're building ten-story house with apartments: Something for Yasser Arafat you know." Doreen says, "Went down to Jericho. Yeah yeah. And she walked ... she was amazing! She walked up you know there's the Monastery of the Temptation and, and she'd been four days out of the hospital. Four days before, she has a had the operation. She walked up and down," part of the sentence is blurred here, "stick. The only time she's had to walk like that. But she was never s t - much of a walker... " Suheil's walk, his whole body, struggled visibly with panic as he was marched to the new cell. The long march he called it when we met after his release. An infinity of minutes. Unforeseen terror at his surgical removal from what he had mentally constructed as his space. A response of physically losing balance, shouting guard, prodding him up from where he had half stumbled against the corridor wall, with a boot or a club, he couldn't tell. A

FEARLEDGE

241

deathly dread, disorientation, near collapse. A powerful instantaneous grasp of what the first cell had come to be-the place where he was left alone, the space he knew intimately, his confinement, his haven. The confiscation of his perceived personal space felt like a disintegration of self, a near annihilation of coherent consciousness. He didn't think he would make it. Our house has gone to prison. There it is. Our talking, our meetings, our shared shelter. Our multicolor hair, eyes, fingers, voices, neighborhood news, our quiltwork riches. Taken right into the heart of surveillance, the center of confinement. We have taken it there. Together. Because we can, because we're free to, when others aren't free, because we care about them, because it's the little we can do. It's only a visit. We know we won't be staying. The day I drove Bashan to Neveh Tirzah, the central women's prison in Israel, to visit Avigail, her daughter, it was just a few months before the stormy night that interfered with Avi's phone call from prison to say she'd be deported to America in the morning. And it was one or two months more before my daughter was born, that morning Bashan found my two sons on their own when she got to our house to clean up. And it was about eighteen months before Tahani's daughter, ten months old in May 1988, was brought to the prison, at her mother's request, to stay with her while she was held in administrative detention, without charges or trial, for two and a half months. Tahani calls the prison by the Arabic name of the city that was already there before Israel, Ramla. I had met her before she was placed in detention, in a meeting hall in East Jerusalem. It was peopled with Israeli women and mothers and Palestinians whose fathers, mothers, brothers, wives, children, husbands weren't allowed to live here. 'Here' being Israel and the territories that it was holding under military occupation. A relatively small stretch of land to which no single agreed name. Hence "here." Each Israeli participant would follow and plea the case-to the authorities-of one of the Palestinian families present. I was there with a friend with a video camera, to attend and to record, and I followed Tahani, her very bright and very alive and very black eyes and clear power of presence. Then, in 1992 she came to the human rights center in Gaza, at Auwni's office furniture store. She came in late in the day. Everyone else had already left and we were putting notepads and photocopied documents back into bags and standing around and talking a little before we called it a day. We wanted to leave in time to make checkpoint Erez before sundown. Her walk into the big, cluttered space was commanding and graceful and confident. Very different from the ones that most

242

EIGHTH VISIT

of the people we talked to used when they came into the store. She knew we would receive her even though we had already wrapped up the workday. She had lots of public responsibilities and this was a personal problem, she hadn't been able to make it any earlier. She had very little hope that we would be able to do anything, but she had to try. Watching her in the store, I knew I had seen her before at close range and for a long time. I couldn't place it. She was wearing a yellow and black and soft kerchief tucked around her hair. She is slight and small. At the time I'm writing she is one of the leaders of a Palestinian Muslim women's organization. In that position, if I'm not mistaken, she has managed a bakery, drives a pickup truck, manages a nursery school or several of them. I talked with her at Auwni's interpreted through her sister in law, who speaks a near-perfect Hebrew, and then I remembered. The hall. Her request was still the same. In 1987 in Jerusalem. In 1992 in Gaza. She had no way of seeing her father who was living abroad. Aging and sick. He wasn't allowed in, she wasn't allowed out. Of here. We'll try. Again. It won't help that she's been in prison in the meantime. Charges or no charges. Tagged by the Shabak regardless. The official security service euphemism was, 'Delayed Departees.' We knew it well from our routine applications. For gravely sick people to get expert treatment. For parents to accompany their kids to the hospital. For medical students to get to school. For many others for whom departure was chronically delayed. In Making Women Talk, a book published in 1992 by Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, the author, Teresa Thornhill, quotes an affidavit given by Tahani. It describes a miscarriage which she has no doubt was induced against her wishes when she was forced to take some unidentified pills in prison. "It is important," she says on page 98, "to mention that I was not provided with sanitary towels" during the entire first night. "I either used paper napkins or borrowed towels which other prisoners had brought from the canteen."

FEARLEDGE

243

NINTH VISIT: BOOKMAPS AND HOUSEBOOKS

HE couLDN'T GET IN.

Her father. She couldn't get out. His daughter. In out

of here in 1992. Israel, Palestine, Gaza, West Bank, occupied territories. Tahani's sister-in-law has been translating. Transferring Tahani's sentences into a shared terminology. We have been listening. Asking. Taking notes. Taking care. Not to promise. She already knows. She understands the terms just as well as we do. Most Palestinian prisoners become very fluent in Hebrew during their time in prison. Maybe Tahani refused, just as she refused the Hebrew name of the prison. Maybe she understands every word we're saying but chooses not to speak the language. Maybe she wants to take care that every word is precise and clear. There are three of us at Auwni's this time. Five of us speaking, four of us talking the language we've imposed. Which for the three from Israel could-not incorrectly-be referred to as "ours." Except that the term is predicated on a "mine" that I am uneasily unsure of. My mother's tongue was English, spoken at home, in Hebrew surroundings. And my tongue was probably first hers and then, pretty fast I guess multiplied-into hers and the surroundings'. But when I was four, the surroundings got changed and turned English. And myother tongue got lost. And then when I was eleven, the surroundings got changed back and turned Hebrew, and my mother's tongue was no use any more and myother tongue was gone. So I was left without one, except the one for talking with my mother. And everybody else around knew something I didn't.

244

I learned. Back in Israel at age eleven I learned myother tongue. Again. Fairly fast in terms of calendar time, painstakingly humiliatingly slowly in terms of mine. But I never backtracked to read the books my playmates had long been reading, in the florid syntax and vocabulary that mark literature as literature in Hebrew. Or to follow the radio serials they loved. Reading was too slow and too far from enjoyment in this re-acquired language. And the conjunctions and terms that made it literature, made it aloof, intimidating and sharply alienating to me. Like the school principal who wore stiff dark suits and instructed students to address him in the formal third person. And radio in a foreign tongue is particularly foreign. I could never unhave the organization of reality that was already put in place in years of American English surroundings. I would never act or think, unquestioning, on their presuppositions. I could revise my own and consciously suppose, but never presuppose, theirs. So when I came back from the American fifties, still a child, and communist Russia was the terrifying conspirator of global evil and hideous oppression, it was mind-jarring that in the Hebrew of my suburban Israeli playmates, Russia was just one of two potential big brothers; not particularly fearful or hated, though perhaps by then slightly less likable than the other. And America wasn't the baseline standard of liberty and good, but just another country, grantedly more big and powerful than most. And justice, liberty and good were embodied in Zionism and the proud young Jewish state. A reality reorganized isn't as real as the original. Just, you know, just the way things are, gets permanently dubious. Taking for granted isn't granted. Isn't effortless. I could never turn back into a genuine, simple child of my, which?, culture. Or socialization. I couldn't completely lose the third dimension. I tried really hard. I didn't even realize I couldn't. I believed I could unlearn, as well as learn. I desperately wanted back in-to belong. I wanted to be as Israeli as humanly possible. A total, unsuspect and fully acknowledged member. I acted out my construct of Israeli-ness with all my teenage might. Now, almost four decades later, I find it curious and unperturbing, maybe enriching, that I don't have a simple, secure, automatic "mine" attached to a single language, a single culture. But then, me then, wanted to be a natural, organic part of the place where I was born, the place I was from. Mistakenly equating place with people. Unnoticing that the place had more, many more, than one body of community and custom to be from, to be part of. Overlooking that I didn't actually issue from place, I wanted to know the

BOOKMAPS AND HOUSEBOOKS

245

land. The actual land, in detail. To know ahead every tricky turn-off on remote footpaths. To know the names of the brambles and the changing, seasonal flowers and the different kinds of trees, and the separate names of each of the low-altitude mountains in the Galilee and the Negev desert. My American born mother, immigrated to this place about a year before I was born, used to use Arabic place names, disdaining the newer Hebrew versions. (Her Hebrew wasn't very good anyway.) Nebi Yusha, Jermak, Jebellia she called them, where my school and schoolmates taught me Meiron, Givat Aliya. My mother shrugged them off, disdainful, "Jermak, Jebellia," proud to be party to old-timers' intimacy, from before the overlay of invented Hebrew names or of re-imposed and covertly relocated biblical ones. Converging, inadvertently, almost forty years later with Tahani Abu Dakka's refusal of the Hebrew name of Ramleh.

My mother was struggling to get in too, to belong. To her ideologically chosen, unnatural community. Our common struggle pitting us against each other. I needed to be unlike her and disown her American accent and habits and tastes. She needed to show herself and me that she was more in the know than I was, so she and I would have reason to keep her. I appropriated but aimed at more than her linguistic exhibit of old-timers' savvy. I wanted to walk away, to literally walk the land, to feel it all over and feel all over it. My best girlhood friend had a big map hanging on the wall of her room. Taller than I was. Shades of greens browns light blues, shadowed so the mountains would stand out in relief. A map of the land. I used to spend long stretches of time standing in front of it all through our teenage years. I puzzle about what I was doing. I wasn't studying or systematically memorizing it in any way. I wasn't plotting routes. I wasn't using its grid to visualize a 3-D view from the air. I never did acquire the skill of fluidly re-transposing two dimensions into three. They stay in separate compartments in my mind. To use them as a common pool of spatial information, I need to thread them together with words. My ground level perception of space isn't broad, integrated, inclusive. No over view. Routes and roads are isolated tunnels. Disconnected scenes with no clear image of interconnections, though sometimes I know which tunnel will lead from one scene to another. But each scene imperceptibly merges into blankness, at some point, not into other puzzle pieces. There's no all. And so, no simple translation of world to and from encompassing, mapping views. That feels incurably over my head, with everybody else around knowing something I don't. Seeing something I don't.

246

NINTH VISIT

Superimposed on, and at the same time generating, my absent ability of effortless mapping and orientation, is my entrenched, feminizing, littleness. My little-girl self-image. A sense of endemic confusion. "My wallpaper was that route map. I dreamed of going all those places," Philip Condit is saying sometime in 1998, while he is interviewed by Tim Sebastian on the Hardtalk series of the BBC World Service. Philip Condit is director of Boeing when he says this. In charge of 250,000 employees and a vastly greater number of units of whichever currency you choose to count in. He commands the design and manufacture of a huge proportion of the world's airplanes. The machines that cross a world flattened and mapped from above. He's talking about a route map he saw as a boy in a PanAmerican airlines office. He was fascinated and wrote in and asked for some. When they arrived he papered his walls with them. He looked at the walls and dreamed of going places. His route map was wallpaper. The one on my best friend's wall I remember as beautiful. Deeply exciting, significant. It was of a tiny country, relative to the world, but for me like for Philip the map was a beckoning dreamspace. Hanging taller than me, it wasn't above a bed or a desk or anywhere where I could sit or lie. I had to face it standing, really close to it to read the names, for what I remember as really long stretches of time. Not hours but long pieces of time. I was looking at it. Recognizing some of the sites and names, but mainly just looking. I think trying to have it, to take it in as part of me. To devour it. It was longed for, exotic, magnetic-this foreign From. Where I was from. Where I was foreign. Its mountains and wadis in particular. Underneath people, pre-dating people-made sites. Enduring, supporting, outliving human flux and fluff. I couldn't see they were man-named, man-defined, man-embordered. Manmapped. I couldn't see that each mountain or wadi name was a line, drawn around an it. "It's territory mapped out," Luce Irigary says on page 17 of her book Elemental Passions, translated from French by J. Collie and J. Still, and published by Athlone Press in 1992. "And the line creates an inside and an outside," Gillian Rose adds to this quote from Luce, on page 68 of BodySpace, in her piece: As if the mirrors had bled: Masculine dwelling, masculinist theory and feminist masquerade. I felt very much outside and badly wanted in. I couldn't appreciate at the time that I was. Deep inside. Walking half and hour to school through the orange groves every morning. Back every afternoon. Trees taller than we were, branches spread wide from just above knee level, crowded growth of

BOOKMAPS AND HOUSEBOOKS

247

leaves, barring even chance glimpses of destination. Groves homogenous and disordered enough to make me lose the path when I got four or five ragged rows of trees away from it, and to mix up directions. "It has been reported that if people who have lived their entire lives in a dense rain forest, with a far point no more than a few feet away, are brought into a wide, empty landscape, they may reach out and try to touch the mountaintops, with their hand; they have no concept of how far the mountains are." Oliver says in note number six on page 113 of his book An Anthropologist on Mars. No concept of how far inside I was. Over vacations, when school was out, four or five of us, boys and girls together, used to dive into the groves. This practice of roaming ground unsupervised was unknown in my American city childhood. The rush it gave me was gorgeous and addictive. We'd take paths we knew just the beginnings of. Unsure where they would lead us, we would trust them, hand over control to the repeated travel that had worn them down before us. Our excitement and curiosity and slight fear were free of suspicion. We were joyful to coast the currents wherever they took us through the leafWalled, dappled corridors. Sometimes we'd walk for long hours, breaking off to lie down under the growth and chew on sweetish grass ends and lace fingers through the sandy red dirt and bother a bug. In winter we'd pick fresh oranges and eat parts of their tangy peel as we skinned them, and then keep on smelling our sticky hands when they were done. In winter too we'd accumulate inches of mud on our shoe soles, getting thicker and thicker till the sheer weight peeled globs of it off, and our pants hems-rubbed against the opposite shoe swinging forward with its load-would grow a rising smear of dark brown. In late winter, before the last oranges were gone, we waded through the achingly exquisite smell of the blossoms, white, breakable, snowing around us as we brushed past, heavy with orange promise. If we walked long enough and far enough north and east we would turn up somewhere at the edge of the Yarkon headwaters. Sometimes near an old deserted building that may have been a house many years before, we had no idea whose or how it related to any community. Or a storehouse, or a small orange packing plant. We didn't know how to tell. Sometimes separate hikes would happen onto the same disintegrating building. But we didn't know how to reconstruct our way there intentionally. We just haphazardly gambled on one prong of one fork and went. Between us we had a fairly good sense of compass directions. Sometimes, from relative clearings in the or-

248

NINTH VISIT

chards, we could see fragments of the hills we knew were east of us, accumulating height to the south and further east, till they reached Jerusalem. And opposite the hills, at the other extremity, were the west and the sea. On the coastal plain, the Israeli sun sets orange into the sea. My two year old daughter would watch it years later and comment, agitated, "Oy, it melted!" But none of us ever acquired a detailed mental mapping of the network of paths. The orange groves were no more charted in my classmates' minds than they were in mine. For them, though, this never figured as an unpassed test of the belonging they felt for granted. They never equated possession of a full mental map with being from and part of. While I, conflating community with place, felt a need to become so much at one with the space that it would become an extension of my self, totally comfortable. With native comfort irretrievable, to me total comfort had come to mean mastery through total mapping. Of a terrain which constantly and subtly shifted and changed by winter flooding and streamlets, seasons, plowings, erosion, uprootings, prunings and replantings. Our mid-ambling pauses were often occasions for long debates about the forking paths and where a particular one would lead. I usually felt too foreign and out-of-the-know to have a voice or a claim. Kathleen M. Kirby says I was 'lost.' Her piece in BodySpace, is titled Re: Mapping Subjectivity: Cartographic vision and the limits of politics. It describes two journals written by men who traveled and mapped North America. She says about one of them, on pages 48 and 49, that his "vision and his consciousness are increasingly compressed; the land's attributes are magnified until where he is seems the whole world. Since he does not know where he is, the environment, rather than being a stable field he moves across, appears to be reorganizing around him. The landscape penetrates the subject-he can no longer maintain his position of cool distance." The other, she says on page 40, feels 'lost' "because his concept of orientation relies on separating himself from a place, rather than becoming integrally involved with it. Being 'lost' not only describes the subject in space; it describes the subject as space. The elevation of the subject over its surrounding space collapses; the minute vacuum assuring their separation disintegrates, likewise decomposing the pure compartmentalization of the subject.'' Being lost-being totally in terrain, being influenced and guided by the attributes, forms, directives that it continually springs on me, that are always new because I couldn't know what was coming, because that is the meaning of lost. Immersion, no stable separation between subject and site. Being part of the terrain. Being one of its many unfolding processes.

BOOKMAPS AND HOUSEBOOKS

249

If this is being in, being fully part of, a place, in what sense is a site-

dwelling people part of its site? Is it a paradox of belonging to a home site, that members acquire a mastery over, rather than being in and fully part of it? That belonging entails a mental distance from a land flattened by long repetitive acquaintance? Or a mental distance of the kind I believe lay between most of my classmates' parents and the orange groves. None of them had mind maps of the grove paths either. But they had mastered the grove area not through intimate, long acquaintance but through habitual, long erasure. Either way, then, belonging seems to include the kind of mental distance needed for viewing location as finitely known, a permanent underpinning, which I can travel unstartled and confidently manipulate. An explorer in my old-new community, which I mistakenly read as land, a position of homeland mastery was, for me, a noble objective. I wanted to feel never lost. I wanted to feel at home. And trying to be part of a people I was in fact struggling to distance myself slightly but crucially from the land. "Part of the function of mapping, it would seem, is to ensure that the relationship between knower and known remains unidirectional. The mapper should be able to 'master' his environment, occupy a secure and superior position in relation to it, without it affecting him in return," Kathleen says on page 48. Of the explorers of the new world she says, on the same page, "They could not assume the position of mastery they possessed in their homelands, where their travels carried them (one would suppose) to destinations known in advance across already-ordered spaces." Distanced, now, from my need for distance, for mapping, I can see in it clearly my need for over view. For oversight. That belittles or disappears a lot of things from sight. Particularly people. Not only but particularly people. In a need for mapping I can see a need for overlooking. And for overseeing. Managing. Both people and other details. Mapping as a tool of command. Of foresight. Of farsight. A means to predict and plan. To control. Positing a purity of nature, I longed for belonging above the peopled maze. I dreamed a bird's eye view-the knowledge, in advance, of paths' directions and destinations. The paths are gone. Our paths are gone now. The whole network dissolved. Melted like the sun in the Mediterranean. I sometimes go back and walk the fields emerged from under the orange groves of my teens~all cut down now and carted off. Stripped of the dense three dimensionality of tree growth, the paths are ironed silly. From the top of one of the moderate hills

250

NINTH VISIT

where the teenage I couldn't see beyond or through the thick, the now I can see the whole vista. Laid bare. Mapped out. No jungle shadow unknown destination to be happened onto and discovered. The entirety out in the light, transposed onto two dimensions. No overgrowth sustaining suspense. No losing oneself. All Clear. All visible from a slight rise. Accessible. Simple. Straight forward. The fields cut out from under the orange groves of my teens are contained by roads now and construction on every side. Enclosed. They're no longer openings into unsure exciting paths going we don't know where. Diminished and diminishing. Jailed and dying. The possibilities of my teenhood closing in. Beckoning adventures being eaten away, sealed off, shut down, built up, stripped bare, brought to parching light. Coming back after several years away I was physically shocked to find no groves. Dizzy. Just a few years ago parts of them were still there and I walked their depths with my children, both my sons-now travelling the world-and their younger sister. Now the total absence of the groves changes the whole spatial structure of the land. They had given it height, depth, presence. Now it seems trivialized and ludicrous. Belittled. I'm standing on a relative rise off center of the sheepish island of remaining fields. They're planted with strawberries. I think. I'm not sure. The part near the rise lies fallow. And from here, some distance away, I can't see the small, unripe, green buttons I expect to be showing at the start of spring. The strawberries they grow here now are gorgeous and almost tasteless. Good for export and store shelves. Sad shadows of the taste we hit into as kids. Although they rarely got a chance to ripen out in our back yard because my sister and I always picked and bit into them to check if they were ripe the minute they started turning slightly red. From the rise, I watch a car move through the fields. lt looks huge on the field. I can't tell from here whether it's driving along a dirt path or straight over the rows. It's at the top of another moderate hill and it makes the stretch of fields around it look like a small game board, a puny, funny, pitiful pond of land. It makes the land seem not-land. It's white, the giant toy car someone's giant hand is moving over the strawberry rows. I can't hear the engine from here through the background growl of the highway, so it moves in silence. It's at almost the same height that I'm at here on my rise. Now it's reached a path I can see it's turning into, and coming in this direction. Still noiseless. But it's behind a row of about four or five cypress trees

BOOKMAPS AND HOUSEBOOKS

251

for a moment and the whole system of spatial relations is suddenly and radically shifted. From behind the trees it looks car-size again. Reduced to human scale with the trees big beside it and the fields now fleetingly expansive. Arounding the car instead of it dwarfing them. It's coming down a path in this direction and in a minute it's going to reach a fork that'll bring it up to this rise and this clump of eucalyptuses. But the path coming up here is undrivable for a car or at least for most normal cars and this one looks normal. Not a jeep or anything. A shiny, clean unreal white plunked down onto the fields. Maybe they're lost in the maze of paths, trying to find a way out. Maybe they're taking an impulsive, gambling turn in high spirits and betting they won't get stuck. By this time I can see there's no they, just a driver. A person. Before it was all car. I'm suddenly very curious about the person. I'd like to see the face. I'd like to see whether it's a man or a woman. Most probably a man. Still. Maybe. I'd really like to see the face of this adventurer who is now turning up this way into the undrivable path. But then she I still can't see if it's a she sees the piles of earth blocking the path and backs up into the path she came from and turns around. New ground isn't easy for me to learn. I don't have any automatically activated ability to unintentionally note landmarks in sequence, for future reference-to unroll in reverse on my way back. My way back often looks as if I've never been there. I get quickly confused and hesitant about whether it's the right one. Driving through a landscape, or cityscape, or walking a street, I don't effortlessly acquire a rough sketch or inventory of buildings or fields or hills passed, turns made-a grid for general orientation, so I can later experiment with other sub-routes, or collect and insert more details. I've taught myself to pay attention and consciously choose and register markers, which I verbalize and repeat to myself, almost memorize. Sometimes it works. Even then, though, the result is a mental tunnel, not some kind of integrated spreading weave. An isolated linear series of verbal directions. The persistent feeling is of having lost sight even though I never had it. So I've never fully accomplished there-naturalization of my homeland. The ordering, mastering, mapping of its spaces in my consciousness stays incomplete. Some patches are stored in my memory mainly as words and sequences of place-names along roads or compass coordinates. Not as visual grids. Some patches are there as fleeting video-clips of objects walked and climbed and seen and smelled and touched and rubbed against. Occasionally there's some overlap. More often the two strains of memories won't con-

252

NINTH VISIT

verge. And some zones on the paper maps, or zones of the physical terrain, are blank or gray mist in my mind. There is a store of places in this country where I still live, which is still only partly my homeland (although I don't have any other any more), which does-nevertheless-exist (though in flux) in my mind's library. A lot of it was put there courtesy of the youth movement. From age thirteen to eighteen, a tightknit bickering intense group, we hiked the land for days and weeks on school vacations, carrying backpacks with all our food and water and sleeping bags and towels and extra socks and underpants and shirts and pants. A lot of the time I felt top-heavy and wobbly on my feet, which were supposed to firmly tread the land. But I loved being cut off from family and neighborhood and town, isolated on this moving island peopled with the best of my friends and the worst of my enemies. And I loved the expanse and the unartificial space, the rocks and sheer bluffs and trees and brush and scrub and stars. And for all my persistent, slightly shameful clumsiness, I loved my intense physicality and my activated senses. Arriving back at my mother's house was always painful, a severance. Out of all proportion with practical constraints, we moved through the landscape as a self-sufficient unit. We could have been met by pick-up trucks with food and equipment, or detoured into villages to buy fresh bread and cheese and chumous (chick pea spread). But we carried even cartons of eggs and little kerosene stoves and big tin containers of kerosene that banged against my shins as I hauled it up a steep path in front of me. Only halfrealizing it, we were a quasi-military bivouac, marking out proprietary. The choice to hike through them self-sufficient, implied the zones around our routes to be unspoilt nature. And we actively unsaw, or saw as quaintly picturesque and part-of-nature, the stone houses of Arab communities we never thought of then as Palestinian. And we actively overlooked, or saw as out-ofplace and marring nature, the bare, uniform concrete houses of communities of Arab Jews come from the towns or grazing lands of the Levant, and positioned by the state at isolated sites. Our youth movement marched out a practical concretization of the Zionist delusion of virgin land to be possessed and gorgeously fertilized. Ideally, by beautiful, caucasian featured, male youths. We styled ourselves accordingly and suppressed conventional femininity. Our paces measured and mapped onto the ground our unfolding, forming beliefs. Our parents' firm convictions. And in a cyclic, self-perpetuating process, the sensual experience then powerfully reaffirmed our unseeing perceptions.

BOOKMAPS AND HOUSEBOOKS

253

"Maps were graphic tools of colonization, themselves colonizing spaces perceived as empty and uninscribed," Alison and Gillian say on page 9 of the book they edited Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. And, true to the maps, I didn't know I was a colonizer. Embedded in me by my old-new community, was a mindset I could pre-suppose-that is suppose without knowing I was doing so-because it lay outside the interrupted presuppositions of my half an American childhood. It wasn't my unbelonging that made me unsee the suppressed Palestinian presence in Palestine. Or the suppressed heritage of Arab-Jews. On the contrary. It was a symptom of my developing belonging. To the Zionist ethos and maps that drew an empty unsettled land to be lovingly settled by the likes of the us I wanted for mine. And by coincidence, or none, this was a mindset well tuned to my tv training, in the American settlers' state, to love the land and its objectified, picturesqued, lore. So practicing a settlers' religion, I felt deep love for the land. "Attachment to nation states in fact may be one of the clearest expressions of mythical-magical consciousness of place in the twentieth century," Robert David Sack says on page 193 of Conceptions of Space in Social Thought: A Geographical Perspective. Sacred space he says "tends to be a locus of power; it is clearly demarcated and set apart; it is supposed to be complete; and it demands the ultimate sacrifice for its defence. All of these characteristics apply to the modern nation state." So the new nation state, born the same year I was, with its slightly older myths of heroes scouting out the land, figured large in my teenage needs for belonging and self. And our youth movement, like others, also simulated the paramilitary operations of the years before we were born, before ilie Israeli state. Which operations needed, and also acted out, detailed knowledge of terrain. "Geography grew up in the shadow of the military;' say the editors of the journal Herodote, quoted by Michel Foucault, on page 69 of the book, Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon and published by Panilieon in 1980. We were reveling in the titillating tradition of adorable fighters whose names or stories we pronounced in special, reverent voices. And I, all that much more than the others, for being unsure of my rightful, justified claim to them. I deeply identified with the rough repossessivencss, with the trail-blazing, claim-staking romance. Meanwhile running into these in rivulets and undercurrents of different, mixing colors, were other, maybe more individual needs and drives. Like

254

NINTH VISIT

the powerful pull of country lanes. Especially if it's almost completely hidden in an overgrowth of woman-high vegetation. And only if you can't see the end of it and you don't know in advance where it might lead (which is why there can't be very many of these, by now, in the country I'm from). And especially if it goes on long enough to start arousing apprehensions that you might not make it, or you might not make it back, or you might run into serious snags the same pull of the same lane since I was very small. And in the relatively few times I've found and taken one of its beginnings, it's always flooded me with a powerful excitement and sense of discovery, of buried treasure waiting at its end. Without fixing in my imagination exactly what it is that would fit that term. Something along the lines of a magical secret garden waiting there just for me, or a hidden house. But mainly something I wasn't looking for and hadn't known about. A surprise. a thing unexpected, filling me with happiness when I arrive a stubborn association of happiness with place. a deep emotional and irrational conviction that there is a physical place, or there are physical places, in the world, where I'll be happy if I can only just find it and stay. if I can find, not build, it. Riding due west of Hollywood, straight into the sunset. or climbing over the rainbow and where bluebirds fly. an unshakable belief that where the sides of the road meet, happiness pours into the world best on foot. bicycle second best. even a car can do it, but it does dull the senses and excitement. the important thing though is not to pass it by and stick to the main road without turning in looking up, on youth movement hikes, from the bottom of a tangled, lush, overgrown wadi, from my hidden observation point, looking at the light filtering down through the long ferns and the cane apples and the oaks and the smell of velvety moist moss and earth. out loud, at times, in devout belief, i'd say, "i could stay here all my life." my girlhood friend asked me once, "seriously? Would you really?" and i thought i would. part of me insisted that you need no more than the right place to guarantee happiness. even though, to tell the truth, i think there was always also the hidden assumption of a partner there. who in fact provided the escape hatch, playing the role of the one who didn't, who doesn't, want to stay. Not there and a belief, for many years, that my house would in fact be me. Be, that is, constitute the identity, the place, i was trying to find. i wanted one of my own, a personal house. different from the ones i knew in tel-aviv housing

BOOKMAPS AND HOUSEBOOKS

255

projects. or different construed as distant. and isolated. i felt my home was out there somewhere, that what i had to do was discover it. a hidden, a protected, place. a place where i wouldn't be seen, where i'd be totally free because no one could see what i was doing and i could do whatever i wanted. in an overgrowth of vegetation, woman-high. a place of total even if local liberation. even if there was actually no way, and in fact maybe no need, to stay Truth is, there are places of happiness like that the place I love best in the whole world at the side of a stream in the galilee, at the eastern edge of the apple orchards around the kibbutz where I was born but didn't grow up. lots of times the treasure is water. which, among other things, makes it clear that the country lane has arrived. even if the stream is easy to cross and the lane picks up on the opposite bank, water is confirmation of its having arrived. the other side a separate beginning. in this particular galilee stream, flowing out of the springs and snows of lebanon and feeding, further south, into the jordan, there's a strong and mainly shallow but slightly ominous current over a bed of rocks. on every picnic there we need to relearn how to navigate it and when we do there's a great feeling of achievement and bodily ease. one of the best treasures i've succeeded in giving the gift of to my children. when you put your head on the smoothness of one of the rocks and lie in the stream, sometimes with your ears submerged, and retreat into the din, your whole body agrees to a deep, cold massage. when you swim against it through the stains of sunlight lacing through the willow and plane tree branches, you make friends with some of the boulders you can hug and hold, to rest on your way. then the way back is bubbly with laughing, excited, a little scared of getting caught up and swept off. it's a childhood place that i've kept and shown through the years just to people i love which still doesn't let me down. it's sadly littered by now and almost never secluded. most often there are loud families on group hikes coming through and shouting to each other as they slip and splash. and when we go there we take along outsize plastic bags and pick up used diapers and empty cans and old bread and toilet paper and rinds before we start spreading out our stuff. but still, surprisingly, if i give it enough time and patience i unfailingly find what i was looking for. the secret of the country lane is that there aren't many places like that but there are places like that the tree in front of my parents' house, where i spent dozens of hours, alone or with a friend, at horne and absent. the big jacaranda, still there, used to branch into a fourth dimension. in it, in my teens, i was invisible by con-

256

NINTH VISIT

tract. family custom stipulated: never approach me while i'm up it, respect the agreed partition making its crown an insular, isolated space. while all the time, it continued to rely on the protection of the bigger, sheltering space of family home yard. and i reserved the prerogative of asking up whoever i chose, though my parents never did climb it a second tree. the branches of the jujube in the fields, near the middle of where there's now an apartment building, almost touching the ground on every side of its trunk. in the moldy and partly littered shelter, crawled into on hands and knees, i used to spend night hours hugging my first boyfriend. there were still lots of jackals in the fields around tel-aviv and their howling thickened the dark and the shelter of that private treespace. "probably the primary fear of woods is that they are dark," roger says on page 181 of children's experience of place, "-the fear of the unknown which lends itself to the boundless exercise of the imagination." a little later he's saying, "eighteen children described the woods as their favorite places. many of these are the same children who described their fear of the woods." and then he says, "people do not have clearly defined selective images of the world; they have multiple worlds: perceived and imagined sets of places which change both in structure and meaning according to the purposes and feelings of the moment. "sometimes one place may carry absolutely contrary qualities for a person, resulting in both approach to, and avoidance of, that place:' this dream, my dream of detours, is rooted, I think, in a deep, optimistic conviction that you, that I, can find a happiness that endures. places are one of the few things around that can't go anyplace. so happiness in place should be of the kind that endures the term 'happiness' readable, too, as 'self' could root my dream in a conviction about a self that endures, a self that's out there somewhere, that you, that I, can look for, can find but i got lost in a room. True, it was a rather large one. i was six. i was being tested. some psychologist. in a distinctly large room i was told to do whatever i wanted. it was full of a lot of Toys. i can't remember which. the only one i remember was an oversized, child-high clown that Rolled back to standing position when you knocked it down. i didn't. Ugly predictable and boring. i wandered around the room, barely touching anything, looking. nothing caught my interest. nothing Surprised me. just a big bunch of toys. inert. nothing real. nothing exciting. "belief in solids, in solid objects, in the material as simply there, is thus a guarantee of the subject's own subject-

BOOKMAPS AND HOUSEBOOKS

257

hood," gillian rose is saying on page 69 of bodyspace, in her article there. i couldn't find a me that wanted whatever i wanted. i couldn't produce a want, a wish about the big jumble. i was ashamed of not being able to do what i was supposed to, and sad and ashamed again because among so much stuff there wasn't a single whatever that i found appealing enough to get me as absorbed and busy as my little sister was. she was with me in the room but not in the least lost i had no inkling of my aversion as a version of wanting. of a wanting me, wanting real rather than make-believe things to do. i kept walking around the room slowly and feeling lost. feeling vacant, Part of the jumble. i remember the room as very gray. gray linoleum floor. gray pop-up clown. big glass wall. self and space, the mapper and the mapped, are constructed, created reciprocally. they're similar, kathleen says on page 47, in "the way the boundary between them is patterned as a constant barricade enforcing the difference between the two sites, preventing admixture and the diffusion of either identity." and mapping, she says a little earlier, represents space as immutable, "organized by invariable boundaries, an a-temporal, objective, transparent space" "the idea of a Great Wall of China, familiar to me since childhood, and with which I began my work, is a historical myth," says Arthur Waldron on page 7 of his book The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth, published in 1990 by the Cambridge University Press. And on page 9 he says, "Chinese and Western elements were combined to produce the mythical account of the Wall." And, "on some level territorial definition through wallbuilding, and national definition through the creation of cultural symbols, are both aspects of a single, ongoing process. That process is of course the definition of China itself." And, "Basic to the process is the definition of the civilized, Chinese hua and its negative counterpart, the i, or barbarian. Although the actual size of Chinese states has varied greatly from one dynasty to another, the question of what was 'Chinese' territory, and what constituted 'China proper' is still often thought of as having been answered long ago by the Great Wall." But, "without any such line to rely on, the full magnitude of the problem of defining China becomes clear." "the line creates an inside and an outside;' you've already read gillian rose say at the start of this visit. boundaries. boundaries between the beach of a Greek fishing village and the street adjacent to it, allowing foreign women to uncover their breasts on the stretch of sand, whether lying down, standing

258

NINTH VISIT

up, walking, playing, running, or swimming, but not on the sand-swept sidewalk at its edge, or in the alley and shops behind it. or boundaries that allow foreign women and men to lie and walk and swim undressed on a second beach, across the small bay, visible from the village pier, ten minutes away by fishing boat, twenty minutes around the bay on foot. lines that are mapped out clearly, known to both tourists and villagers. wall-like, with very little margin for error. crossing them naked would be inscrutable. undressing in a room right off the beach you still have the decency to draw the curtain or shut the door. or type in a period. there has to be a map-reading activity going on in identifying and conforming to these lines of propriety how were they put there to be read? how long ago? who laid them out? they don't apply to the local women accountable to village eyes. they clearly weren't there before the foreigners. but they were negotiated with the village and the villagers that were there before the foreigners. real-estate developers of sorts, the foreigners have had to secure some form of consent, obtained partly by indicating clear spatial limits to their novel, problematic land-use. "the developer," Mark Monmonier says on page 87 of his book, How to Lie with Maps, published by the University of Chicago Press, in 1991, "usually confronts groups of neighboring property owners, environmentalists, or historic preservationists," and in doing so, needs and uses maps. or maybe they, the tourists, are a species of political activists-in mark's terms propagandists-who, he says a little later, display maps when they confront and try to persuade, "a vocal ethnic minority, another country, an alliance of countries, an opposing ideology, or a widely accepted standard of right and wrong." and these boundary lines. did tlley materialize all at once, with the tourists totally taking the villagers aback, incomprehensibly scattering on botll beaches one day in different degrees of undress? did they evolve gradually, maybe less obtrusive at first-across the bay, later allowed to intrude on village premises in restricted form, once the foreigners' economic utility had been established. what could have constituted their rejection by the village? what countermovements would the villagers have taken to draw out counter-maps, if they considered this foreign land-use unthinkable, unnegotiable? boundaries set by namings. geographical boundaries. which hill is named, which isn't, making it perhaps the extension of an adjacent one, non-discrete, unmapped, appropriated by the given name. proprietary boundaries. which language names, which doesn't, its erasure overriding its speakers' claim to continuous presence and property. boundaries set by letters. Capitalized. or

BOOKMAPS AND HOUSEBOOKS

259

by punctuation marks. or by paragraphing. conceptual boundaries. which phrase, which thought fragment, is coded as complete-a sentence, which isn't, making it the extension of an adjacent one, non-discrete, appropriated by the assigned punctuation on page 342 roger says, "the landscape is differentiated by each of us into a multitude of places. many of these carry names which have been handed to us by others and, in fact, these places and objects carry meaning for each of us because we were given a name for them which we could then use to differentiate the place or object from the totally perceived environment. through this process we each come to live in an intersubjective landscape where there is a consensuality over what parts of the total environment are places and objects." and, "hunting stories were not merely after-dinner entertainment," leslie marmon silko is saying on page 32 of her book, yellow woman and a beauty of the spirit: essays on native american life today, published by simon and schuster in 1997. "these accounts contained information of critical importance about the behavior and migration patterns of mule deer. hunting stories carefully described key landmarks and location of fresh water. thus, a deer-hunt story might also serve as a map. lost travelers and pinion-nut gatherers have been saved by sighting a rock formation they recognize only because they once heard a hunting story describing this rock formation." a little earlier she's said, "communal story telling was a self-correcting process in which listeners were encouraged to speak up if they noted an important fact or detail omitted. the people were happy to listen to two or three different versions of the same event." and a little later on the same page, "the ancient Pueblo people sought a communal truth, not an absolute truth. for them this truth lived somewhere within the web of differing versions, disputes over minor points, and outright contradictions tangling with old feuds and village rivalries." communal, geographical truth Dry peaks jutting out of the sea which are named which aren't which are accordingly classified as island as rock when is a rock an island only when big enough what is Enough when is a phrase a sentence only when predicated only when Punctuated only with first letter capitalizeD? are they unavoidable? orderly, punctuated boundaries and Capitals? common recognizable cues of meaning? "scribes of limited talent," armando says on pages 134 and 135 of writers and Readers in Medieval italy, introduced "separations into groups of letters in a fashion that was irregular and arbitrary." before this took place in the eighth century a.d. in the british isles,

260

NINTH VISIT

there was just continuous writing. nO gaps between letters no bouNdaries between sentences. continuous strings ofletters for each reader to parse into sounds and Sense and what of the unsounds? and what of the nonsense? what of the underside of communal truth, of common cues? beyond between the boundaries? the "landscape of common language is not the total 'subjective landscape."' this is what roger is saying on the same page as above. there is more landscape. Other landscape. escaping mapped Order. not unimportant. not ordered but not unimportant. among other things, because mapping by name, by communal term, relates to size, to human size, to how big the peak is relative to human bodies. places named in a relatively broadly shared langwige often mean a much-more-than-human scale or water. they can also mean water, a large or small body, a heavy or precious flow, moving through or onto the dry ground-crust, often even if it's a trickle, often even out of a very small hole. Water is taken to be the notable Substance, the appearance, on the dry, taken-for-Granted foundation which is largely unremarkable, that is: not to be remarked on-marked, or named, down to the small holes and details of its endlessly varied morphology. water is remarked. more often it is the one which is singled out by name from "the great system by which the surface of this globe has been broken up, and land and water interchanged." these are the words of charles darwin, quoted without their precise source, by oliver sacks, on page 36 of the island of the colorblind, published by Knopf in 1997· why? why is water remarked? is it in reverence of the vital, life-giving substance, seemingly more so than soil? is it in deference to the obstructive medium, disabling human breathing and slowing human movement? is it in recognition of the moving matter, perceptibly, relentlessly running of its own volition? is it an attempt to control and keep at bay fluids, fluidity? luce irigary says, "the 'subject' identifies himself with/in an almost material consistency that finds everything flowing abhorrent." this is just after she's said, "blood, but also milk, sperm, lymph, saliva, spit, tears ... all threaten to deform, propagate, evaporate, consume ... " she's being quoted by gillian on page 71 of BodySpace, from page 237 of her own book, speculum of the other woman, translated from french by g. c. gill and published by cornell university press In 1985. "the dark carries no familiar forms, nothing to reassure me of the permanence and security of a known environment;' roger says on page 492 the dry, taken-for-granted foundation. unRemarkable. not to be named

BOOKMAPS AND HOUSEBOOKS

261

down to the small holes and details of its endlessly varied morphology. expert footsoldiers use special maps for plotting out bivouacs, scaled closer than most to human body-size, adapted to walking. and combine these with aerial photographs and learn by heart the landmarks, and the land markings and the distinctive morphologies of their route. but even these really need supplements in the form of verbal details-stories passed on by people who have been there, who are reliable. people who remember. "there is little information or material about trails that is passed around with writing;' leslie says on page 57· with writing, that is, with maps. or, for that matter, with naming. mostly trails are too minute, too undifferentiated from the landscape, seemingly too impermanent to merit names. except, in the tongue of a handful of neighbors or the internal language of a single person's thoughts. most often, maybe, children. their landscape, roger says on page 342, "is commonly personal, that is, with very few place names that are shared with other children or adults. these place names are often directly descriptive or functional;' and, "invariably they are tied to that child's own uses of and experiences with the landscape" "girls;' he says earlier, talking about these experiences, on page 211, "modify their places in their imagination" he's describing their make-believe houses. he has watched them, "communicate these imagined elements to each other" and he explains, "modification by the imagination, i.e., places named as beds, seats and shelves, etc., without physically changing them. i never saw this type of detailed physical or imaginative modification of place among boys, and no imaginative modification whatsoever by boys older than third-grade." boys, he's said above, "concentrate on building structures with walls, and roofs, with little detail in the interior of the places." their main activity is physically manipulating space. but the girls he studied (and the very little boys) made talking houses. houses made of talking, houses made for talking. girls mapping their ideas and images onto place, in an extended process of naming and re-naming. women conducting an intricate communal process of conversation debate argument manipulation compromise, till an agreed scene is constructed. and remodeled. and de- and re-constructed. constantly. women and girls unrolling and stretching between them a swath, a context, on which, in which, to try out play out selves. tentative and temporary, accepting and expecting additions amendments. intact, moving, reshaping. to include and realign. tortoise-shared, wherever we go it goes. our talking house.

262

NINTH VISIT

it won't confine. it's walls move. shifted like a pregnancy, secret inner, growing tissue, imperceptibly accommodating, it integrates lostness. "home once interrogated is a place we have never before been," says kamala visweswaran, in the book, fictions of feminist ethnography, published by the university of minnesota press in 1994, on page 113, and quoted by matthew sparke, on page 229 of bodySpace, in his piece: displacing the field in fieldwork: masculinity, metaphor and space we are as in a house in a warm climate. an inviting house, used for inviting no less than for staying. you too. invited in, you've stayed a while. maybe you'll stay a while longer. and share change it-the house. now embedded in your universe, understood on your terms, made into your knowledge, situated in your experience and habits and views and ways of making sense; anchored where you stand, read through what you know think feel. all these perhaps slightly changing now, as you stay in it study it. this house. you're providing it with one of"the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible;' as matthew says on page 223, quoting donna haraway, from her piece, situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective, in her book, simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature, published in 1989 by routledge. this is on page 196 surprise Paths can only open out from a particular person's standpoint, not on a generalized, abstracted map. they're only surprises when there's someone to be surprised. someone whose specific body of knowledge, finite and limited as all bodies are, all knowledge is, didn't previously cover these specific paths. and that's why the house you were invited to imagine once upon many visits ago, was to be furnished with textures and smells that you only begin to guess at, that evaporate when you reach for the details. just beyond the edge of the familiar, things unexperienced recollected, anciently retained, ancestral. strangely known and sensuous. like the wondrous delicious smell of a bakery shop that no single taste of any single pastry can ever capture. with a fruit full, semi-tended garden. coming as if into the house, each at her chosen times, we could be sitting down for a while somewhere in the cushion color combination, sipping something cool and subtly spiced or gulping a cold diet coke. or arriving from a long absence to hugs and happy calls of her name or to hurt cold shoulders, spiked under the smiles, turned at her long neglect to stay in touch. or newcoming making her place, learning to step over the floorboard just inside the doorway with the irritating creak or to skirt the most touchy questions.

BOOKMAPS AND HOUSEBOOKS

263

"i wish I knew what we were doing," miriam says but i don't. wish, or know for sure either, but I'm content and excited to wait and see and listen. still content, after all this time together, to learn, to find. out. struggling all the while against a single, inclusive overview, a privileged, olympian vision. trying to follow paths rather than maps, trying to truly allow them the lead, not at all sure of a definite return. as one of us, rising at some point, collects her loose, light garment, going out for an hour or good the one thing definite being that our shifting walls are not a place where people "can go secure in the knowledge that they will always be able to leave." not the kind of place, like the field in fieldwork, that matthew describes on page 219, as "a durable, everyday and taken-for-granted embodiment of absolute space:' not the kind of place that geographers go forth to map, academics to learn, anthropologists to record, tourists to view, without it changing them, without their changing it this spacehouse continuously changing via visitors and viewers. in the distances between us we make out unknown singular curious forms. "a strange reversal or illusion occurred;' oliver's saying on page 88 of the Island of the colorblind, "so that instead of seeing the stars in the sky, i saw the sky, the night sky, hanging on the stars." inverting relationality, we arrive elsewhere through our meeting, taking the holes between us for spacesocks, turning them inside out, crawling through to other dimensions. we play a serious, vital game: one of us improvises body sculptures with her arms, legs, torso, head, mind. her game partner follows closely, concentrating, to anticipate her choices, find the gaps left behind the improviser and put her hands in, tracing the vacated sites with open palms. with bare hands we map each other's leanings, imaginings. myriad multiple-skeined movings. not regulated by destination, direction. fanning out. backtracking. Sidewinding moving between cooking and sleeping spots. going to nap or swim or bike to town. coming back with potato chips and mayonnaise and chick peas and tampons and a new job. possibly to make enough money for the next stretch of her trip. one or two of us bringing her child for a stay. piles and shelves and rows of books in all the rooms on all the floors, a lot of them a little dusty but a lot of them read and marked with comments in the margins. a sweet -shop of bath oils and bath salts and body lotions and wonderful soaps in the bath room, one or two of them with dead ants stuck to the bottom when you pick them up. gathering and scattering in the pulse of our running, extended exchange, we can stretch out legs, sometimes massaging

264

NINTH VISIT

each others' cracked soles with a light possibly scented local oil, sometimes staying carefully polite and apart. there's always the delicate issue of who is prepared to touch whom or not. cross legged on the floor or sitting on the rather unique kind of seats used in this faraway part of the world, picture us slicing and thinking around the kitchen table. or raking and clipping and discussing in the yard. cutting each other's hair with onionsmell singing from the pan with the improvised handle. each sweeping up her own. trying our best but not always able not to judge each other. not that i can avoid imposing my ideas, my mental images, my personalities, my mind-sets. not that i even try. not that i do no overviewing, general making-sense-of, abstracting. i do. i do all of that. i believe there's no way not to. but i do admit to them, i hereby admit to authorship, i hereby confess to their being mine and fallible. "maps, like speeches and paintings, are authored collections of information;' mark is saying on page 2. they create an illusion of being true to life because they look like what you can see from the sky. faithful, as it were, to what is real. but what you can see from the sky isn't life or real. it's an erasure of what's humanly real. and we wouldn't know how to see it as real if human life hadn't first, some time ago, imagined and created and learned to read maps. we can decipher what you see from space and see it as real because we've already developed the code. both the view and the maps have to be read. you have to learn how. "words are creatures of the alphabet;' ivan is saying on page 39 of his book, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1993. "the greek language originally had no word for 'a word; singly identified." and down the page he says that "our kind of 'words; like the other syntactic parts of speech, acquired meaning only after they had been hatched under the alphabet during the first centuries of its use:' so that speech and thought are structured by script as sight is structured by maps "a single map," mark is saying a little further up on page 2, "is but one of an indefinitely large number of maps that might be produced for the same situation or from the same data:' he's warning you. "map users must be aware that cartographic license is enormously broad" what is it? what carto-poetic license should you beware of? i've already warned you about some of it. like you already stand warned that i've grouped and placed us at a non-geographical site, yourself included, invited. and i've warned you there's no way i can innocently represent the different women who make up this house. i've said i can only represent small fragments,

BOOKMAPS AND HOUSEBOOKS

265

elicited from the fluid process of change that is each. so that all the present, presented, personalities and speech and stories are refracted through my mind, reconstructed. sometimes imagined, madeup. making them amplifiers of my own voice while i presume to transmit theirs. i've pointed out that what gives this away is the artificial "we;' where the real we has never met and would probably never choose to. but i should also warn you about the maps. i'm providing maps. my offer at the end of this visit is of separate maps of each visit. i won't be offering route maps of the book's whole itinerary, moving back and forth among different women. i won't be mapping the route taken to get to the different locations of our meeting house. the gain you might stand to get from such graphically plotted book-routes, looked tiny to me compared to the concentration you'd need for following the knot of arrows and lines. that was my assessment, my decision, my license. deciding what to map, what to not map, what species of map to offer so the visit maps chart each separate visit at the talking house. if successful, they might be a tool for roughly orienting your reading, for maybe feeling less lost. maybe just a little less. they might be an aid in deciphering the maze of each visit. or they might be just abstract ink drawings. but if successful as maps, they undeniably give an overview. they omit some of the deeply meaningful detail. on page 1 of how to lie with maps, mark says "there's no escape from the cartographic paradox: to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies:' and then he says, "because most map users willingly tolerate white lies on maps, it's not difficult for maps also to tell more serious lies" the visit maps indicate presence-who is present during each visit. who is present and talking, who is present through another's talking. who is there in her words, who is there in others' words. who it is that's visiting the house each time, who it is that's being visited each time. because it's not just the women at the house who are visiting. we-you, i, book, moving house-are visiting too. visiting the women written and read. so the maps are also questions: who are visiting, who are visited? who, in the manner of visits, is coming and going, secure in the knowledge that she will always be able to leave, and who, if anyone, is stationary? is the house being visited or paying visits? are the stars in the sky or are the stars hung with sky? a "'heaven tree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit;" oliver says on page 88 quoting from something by james joyce, he doesn't say what

266

NINTH VISIT

the map of each visit, then, shows the women who's own words, who's owned words, make up the house for the duration of that visit. it also shows, but marks differently, the women visiting through others' talk. revealing that another part of carto-poetic license is deciding how to classify endlessly classifiable things, choosing a particular aspect that presents them-on the map-as either similar or dissimilar. the visiting women are all women. all talking. all travelling. i could have divided them otherwise. I chose the distinguishing principle besides the women i met and talked to in person along the writing/route of the book, i met a lot of other women and a few men in texts along the same w/route, and bwrought them into the house. but i didn't put the text people on the maps. i did add a set of housekeys, though. you'll find it after the maps. it's a list of the texts that i bwrought into each separate visit i met Caterina in text too but i put her in the maps. a powerful presence i met alive in Person seven hundred years Ago. my carto-poetic license, then, besides deciding the rule about what to show anD unshow on my maps, and how, is deciding to break that rule in a specific significant case, made significant by way of my deciSion and carto-poetic license is also deciding, in the first place (that is my place), which women each visit will span. you're the exception. your license is deciding whether or not to make these visits in the first place (that is your place), and whether to make all of them or some of them or bits of them. while I map out who it is you're meeting in given, discrete, stretches of your reading, your reading is licensed to define different stretches and segment the book in a different way, or not to read it. (by this point though that might not be a serious option.) it was also in the terms of my license to make the maps offer bits of information that i haven't necessarily put in words in the house book. so the carto-poetic license i'm exercising is also to comment on the text in wordless, visual terms. and, finally, it's to reach an uncharted end, two visits at the brink of an unmapped vastness you may navigate as you will, and possibly get lost in, and possibly by now feel totally at home in

BOOKMAPS AND HOUSEBOOKS

267

first visit

~

translated text

~

presently visiting

absent but mentioned

second visit

aura

J

~aircase up a mountain

mymother waUed garden

tel-aviv

third visit

fourth visit

fifth visit

mymother france china

sixth visit

vwcamper the closet

mymother american heritage book

myolderson the dark the ground

seventh visit

~rmy

~

eighth visit

tahani d;enapkins suheil the soap

hannah

tenth visit

D

m"'•

dangerous fields

HOUSEKEYS

The keys to each visit are offered in the order of each key's first use on that particular visit.

Housekeys for the First Visit Nawal el Sa'adawi's book Memoirs from the Women's Prison, translated from Egyptian by Marilyn Booth and published by the Women's Press Limited in 1986. Lydia M. Pulsipher's article 'He Won't Let She Stretch She Foot': Gender relations in traditional West Indian houseyards, from the book Full Circles: geographies of women over the life course, edited by Cindi Katz and Janice Monk and published by Routledge in 1993. Trinh T. Minh-ha's piece Other than myself/my other self, in the book Travellers' Tales: Narratives of home and displacement, edited by George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam, and published by Routledge in 1994. Tahar Ben Jelloun's piece Les Pierred du temps, in the journal Traverses number 40, published in 1987, translated and quoted from by Trinh T. Minhha in her piece in Travellers' Tales, above.

277

Kathleen Christensen's article Eliminating the Journey to Work: Homebased work across the life course of women in the United States, in the book Full Circles: geographies of women over the life course, above.

Housekeys for the Second Visit Spencer R. Weart's book Nuclear Fear: A History of Images, published by Harvard University Press in 1988. Margot A. Henriksen's book Dr. Strangelove's America: society and culture in the atomic age, published by University of California Press in 1997. Sara Ruddick's book Maternal Thinking, published by Ballantine in 1989. Trinh T. Minh-ha's piece Other than myself/my other self, in the book Travellers' Tales: Narratives of home and displacement, edited by George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam, and published by Routledge in 1994. Cindi Katz's and Janice Monk's joint chapter, Making Connections, in the book they edited, Full Circles: geographies of women over the life course, published by Routledge in 1993. Cindi Katz's piece Growing Girls/Closing Circles: Limits on the spaces of knowing in rural Sudan and US cities, in the book Full Circles: geographies of women over the life course. Nancy Mairs' essay On Living Behind Bars, in her book Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman's Life, published by Harper & Row in 1986. Rosemary Ridd's article Where Women Must Dominate: Response to Oppression in a South African Urban Community, in the book Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps, edited by Shirley Ardener and published by Berg in 1993.

Housekeys for the Third Visit Nancy Mairs' essay On Living Behind Bars, in her book Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman's Life, published by Harper & Row in 1986.

278

HOUSEKEYS

Leonardo Olschki's book Marco Polo's Asia, translated from Italian by John A. Scott and published by the the University of California Press and Cambridge University Press in 1960.

Housekeys for the Fourth Visit Marco Polo's book The Travels of Marco Polo, translated into English by Ronald Latham and published by Penguin Books in 1958. The book by Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, published by Ballantine Books in 1992. Mary Daly's book Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, published by Beacon Press, in 1978. Leonardo Olschki's book Marco Polo's Asia, translated from Italian by John A. Scott and published by the the University of California Press and Cambridge University Press in 1960. The book by Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, published by The Feminist Press in 1973. Judy Chicago's book The Dinner Party, published by Anchor Press/Doubleday, in 1979. The Travels of an Alchemist, told by Ch'ang-ch'un and recorded by Li Chihch'ang, translated into English by Arthur Waley and published by Headley Brothers in 1931, reprinted in the Republic of China by SMC Publishing Taipei in 1991. Armando Petrucci's book Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, edited and translated from Italian by Charles M. Radding, published by Yale University Press in 1995.

Housekeys for the Fifth Visit Sara Mills' article Knowledge, Gender, and Empire, in the book Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, edited by Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, and published by The Guilford Press in 1994.

HOUSEKEYS

279

· Armando Petrucci's book Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, edited and translated from Italian by Charles M. Radding, published by Yale University Press in 1995. Nancy Mairs' essay On Keeping Women In/Out, in her book Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman's Life, published by Harper & Row in 1986. Eric J. Leed's book The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, published by BasicBooks in 1991. Alison Blunt's and Gillian Rose's article Women's Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, the introduction to their jointly edited book Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, published by The Guilford Press in 1994. The Travels of an Alchemist, told by Ch'ang-ch'un and recorded by Li Chihch'ang, translated into English by Arthur Waley and published by Headley Brothers in 1931, reprinted in the Republic of China by SMC Publishing Taipei in 1991. Leonardo Olschki's book Marco Polo's Asia, translated from Italian by John A. Scott and published by the the University of California Press and Cambridge University Press in 1960. Luc Kwanten's book Imperial Nomads: A History of Central Asia 500-1500, published by Leicester University Press in 1979. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, published by Jossey-Bass in 1975, and quoted from by Eric J. Leed in his book The Mind of the Traveler, above.

Housekeys for the Sixth Visit The book by Peter Gould and Rodney White, Mental Maps, published by Pelican Books in 1974. Griselda Pollock's piece Territories of desire: reconsiderations of an African childhood, in the book Travellers' Tales: Narratives of home and displacement, edited by George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam, and published by Routledge in 1994.

280

HOUSEKEYS

Adrian Rifkin's piece Travel for men: from Claude Levi-Strauss to the sailor Hans, in the book Travellers' Tales: Narratives of home and displacement, above. Trinh T. Minh-ha's piece Other than myself/my other self, in the book: Travellers' Tales: Narratives of home and displacement, above. The American Heritage Book of Indians, whose editor in charge was Alvin M. Josephy Jr., and whose narrative was written by William Brandon, published by the American Heritage Publishing Company in 1961. Alison Blunt's and Gillian Rose's article Women's Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, the introduction to their jointly edited book Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, published by The Guilford Press in 1994. The piece by Barry Curtis and Claire Pajaczkowska, 'Getting There': travel, time and narrative, in the book Travellers' Tales: Narratives of home and displacement, above. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's book Real and Imagined Woman: Gender, culture and postcolonialism, published by Routledge in 1993.

Housekeys for the Seventh Visit Sandra Bartky's article Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power, in the book Free Spirits: Feminist Philosophers on Culture, edited by Kate Mehuron and Gary Percesepe, and published by Prentice Hall in 1995. Judith Zur's article, The Psychological Impact of Impunity, published in the journal Anthropology Today, Volume 10 Number 3, in June 1994. Eric

J. Leed's book The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global

Tourism, published by BasicBooks in 1991. The film Testimonies, 1993, initiated by Rela Mazali and Ido Sela, directed by Ido Sela, assistant director-Rela Mazali, co-produced by the "Testimonies" Group (Tel-Aviv), Les Films d'Ici (Paris), Channel Four (London).

HOUSEKEYS

281

Housekeys for the Eighth Visit Mary Daly's book Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, published by Beacon Press, in 1978. Sandra Bartky's article Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power, in the book Free Spirits: Feminist Philosophers on Culture, edited by Kate Mehuron and Gary Percesepe, and published by Prentice Hall ill

1995·

Michel Foucault's book Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon and published in 1980, quoted in Sandra Bartky's article, above, no publisher specified. Michel Foucault's book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated from French by Alan Sheridan, and published by Vintage Books in 1979, quoted in Sandra Bartky's article, above. Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, published by Routledge in 1990. Rela Mazali's article Parenting Troops: The Summons to Acquiescence, in the book The Women and War Reader, edited by Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin, published by New York University Press in 1998. Roger Hart's book Children's Experience of Place, published by Irvington Publishers in 1979. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's book Real and Imagined Woman: Gender, culture and postcolonialism, published by Routledge in 1993. Cindi Katz's piece Growing Girls/Closing Circles: Limits on the spaces of knowing in rural Sudan and US cities, in the book Full Circles: geographies of women over the life course. Oliver Sacks' book Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, published by Picador, Pan Books in 1991. Oliver Sacks' book An Anthropologist on Mars, published by Picador in 1995·

282

HOUSEKEYS

Excerpts from Affidavit number 1528, taken by the al-Haq human rights organization, from Tahani Suliman Abu Daqqa, quoted by Teresa Thornhill in her book Making Women Talk, published by Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights in 1992.

Housekeys for this visit Luce Irigary's book Elemental Passions, translated from French by J. Collie and J. Still, and published by Athlone Press in 1992, quoted in the article below. Gillian Rose's article As if the mirrors had bled: Masculine dwelling, masculinist theory and feminist masquerade, in the collection BodySpace: destablizing geographies of gender and sexuality, edited by Nancy Duncan, published by Routledge in 1996. Oliver Sacks' book An Anthropologist on Mars, published by Picador in 1995·

Kathleen M. Kirby's article Re: Mapping Subjectivity: Cartographic vision and the limits of politics, in the book BodySpace, above. Alison Blunt's and Gillian Rose's article Women's Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, the introduction to their jointly edited book Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, published by The Guilford Press in 1994. Robert David Sack's book Conceptions of Space in Social Thought: A Geographical Perspective, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1980.

The journal Herodote, quoted by Michel Foucault, in the book, Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon and published by Pantheon in 1980. Roger Hart's book, Children's Experience of Place, published by Irvington Publishers in 1979. Arthur Waldron's book The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth, published by the Cambridge University Press in 1990.

HOUSEKEYS

283

Mark Monmonier's book, How to Lie with Maps, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1991. Leslie Marmon Silko's book Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today, published by Simon and Schuster in 1997. Armando Petrucci's book Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, edited and translated from Italian by Charles M. Radding, published by Yale University Press in 1995. Oliver Sacks' book, The Island of the Colorblind, published by Knopf in 1997. Luce Irigary's book, Speculum of the Other Woman, translated from French by G.C. Gill and published by Cornell University Press in 1985, quoted by Gillian Rose in the book BodySpace, above. Kamala Visweswaran's book, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1994, and quoted in Matthew Sparke's article below. Matthew Sparke's article Displacing the Field in Fieldwork: Masculinity, Metaphor and Space, in the book BodySpace, above. Donna Haraway's article Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, in her book Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, published by Routledge in 1989, and quoted in Matthew Sparke's article, above.

Ivan Illich's book In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1993.

Housekeys for the Tenth Visit Ivan Illich's book In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1993. Roger Hart's book Children's Experience of Place, published by Irvington Publishers in 1979. Susan Bordo's book, Unbearable Weight, published by University of California Press in 1993.

284

HOUSEKEYS

Iris Young's article Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality, published in Human Studies 3, in 1980, quoted by Sandra Bartky, in her article, below. Sandra Bartky's article Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power, in the book Free Spirits: Feminist Philosophers on Culture, edited by Kate Mehuron and Gary Percesepe, and published by Prentice Hall in 1995. Sandra Rosenbloom's article Women's Travel Patterns at Various Stages of their Lives, in the book Full Circles: geographies of women over the life course, edited by Cindi Katz and Janice Monk and published by Routledge in 1993. Dale Spender's book Invisible Women: The Schooling Scandal, published by Writers and Readers Publishing in 1982. Cindi Katz's piece Growing Girls/Closing Circles: Limits on the spaces of knowing in rural Sudan and US cities, in the book Full Circles: geographies of women over the life course, published by Routledge in 1993. Gill Valentine's article The geography of women's fear (she doesn't use capitals), in the journal, Area, on page 388.

Housekeys for the Eleventh Visit

Eric J. Leed's book The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, published by BasicBooks in 1991. Bertold Spuler's book The Mongol Period: History of the Muslim World, first published in 1969 and re-published by Markus Wiener Publishers in 1994·

Sandra Harding's book The Science Question in Feminism, published by Cornell University Press in 1986. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's book Real and Imagined Woman: Gender, culture and postcolonialism, published by Routledge in 1993. Oliver Sacks' book, The Island of the Colorblind, published by Knopf in 1997·

HOUSEKEYS

285

Leslie Marmon Silko's book Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today, published by Simon and Schuster in 1997. Luc Kwanten's book Imperial Nomads: A History of Central Asia 500-1500, published by Leicester University Press in 1979.

Housekeys for the Twelfth Visit Luc Kwanten's book Imperial Nomads: A History of Central Asia 500-1500, published by Leicester University Press in 1979. Oliver Sacks' book, The Island of the Colorblind, published by Knopf in 1997·

Alison Blunt's and Gillian Rose's article Women's Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, the introduction to their jointly edited book Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, published by The Guilford Press in 1994. Chandra Talpade Mohanty's article "Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism," in the book Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, published by Indiana University Press in 1991, and quoted in the article above. Ivan Illich's book In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1993.

286

HOUSEKEYS

TENTH VISIT: BALLS, BATS AND CARS

IS IT

FEELING FAMILIAR

BY

NOW-the house? Relatively comfortable at

least in the minimal sense of familiar? Which one is it that you're picturing or maybe just vaguely sensing in the background? Around us. Around you. Its walls talking. To you. Is it your own? Or at least the one you're in for the moment? That is, if you are in one for the moment. Maybe you're not. Not within. Maybe you're without concrete walls. You may be roofless. Homeless. Maybe you've decided or been forced to make your home in your head, wherever you move. Where are you moving? Where are you taking us? In Europe, in the early Middle Ages, children were carefully taught to build mental houses. Boys, really. While they were training to become monks or clerics. They were taught to imagine and remember elaborate mental palaces. Distinct rooms, detailed colors, precise furnishings. They would practice running-mentally-to one of the rooms, navigating their way through complicated corridors, opening the requested door, finding one of the objects located in the mental room, bringing it back and reciting it for approval, from the teacher who was supervising the drill. In building these memory mazes, the child's mind was trained "to establish the habit to dart and retrieve" inside the mazes as Ivan Illich describes it on page 37. Set firmly in place and intricately memorized, mind-houses then became the receptacles of knowledge. As students acquired new truths and information, each item was stored in a

287

particular room of the memory palace for future use. This was before the invention of indices as tools of reference. "Remembrance;' Ivan says a little further down the page, "was not conceived as an act of mapping but of psychomotor, morally charged activity." Then around

1128,

Hugh of the Saint

Victor monastery in Paris, went one step deeper into the memory maze. The structure he taught his students-over several years-to retain, was modeled on an image of Noah's Ark. Hugh began with a two-dimensional floor plan on which he trained his students to arrange all the events of biblical history. This he saw as the basis and substance of reality, as all of History. The comprehensive context, vital for making sense of any given event or datum. When the foundation was laid, he could then guide his students in building the Ark. This Ark was more than a memorizing device. The Ark, Ivan says on page 46, "stands for a social entity," which the students were a living part of. They made practical personal decisions and chose courses of action according to the solidly embedded perceptions entailed by this view of society and history. The Ark structured the way they linked and organized events and beliefs, past and present. "What anthropologists distinguish as 'cultures'," Ivan says on page 39, "the historian of mental spaces might distinguish as different 'memories':' Once the Ark had "shaped a child's mental topology" (on page 24), such boys' reading, their understanding, their absorption of newly deciphered knowledge, connected the all-encompassing Ark of reality with (on page 47) "the microcosmos of the reader's personal intimacy." So that "Hugh's originality," Ivan explains in note 51 on page 48, "lies in his request that the reader mentally construct this ark in his mind, and then live in it, as his mental home." Are you inviting us in to your house, then? Your head? If you are, I want to thank you. Not as a figure of speech. Really. As you'll know from your previous visits, speech is a serious substance here. So seriously, thanks. For volunteering your house for this talking. That's not at all taken for granted. It's truly appreciated. You know what I mean. Moving furniture around. Redefining spaces, partitions. Shifting walls to accommodate the ones our stories are building. All that. And the broom. Look. Look at the broom. Did you realize before how it barely comes up to your knee? And did you see how the front window is just about the size of your palm, how you can cover it completely with the palm of your hand? Getting so small. And the little dish rack with all those dishes on it, little dishes, tiny little dishes and miniature forks and spoons and even

288

TENTH VISIT

a soup-ladle and a potato masher and a tiny garlic press. They're so cute! And the kettle! And the teapot! They're just so perfect and really real! Minute and perfect. Every single detail in place. Everything diminishing impeccably, telescoping in around your calves and ankles. Exquisitely preserved. Captivating. Wonderful wonderful wonderland. Charming and magical. These dolls' house

toy car

play pots

model plane electric train

toy stroller

The body that's playing with them is playing giants. In reality they're much much bigger than his body (it's he more often than she who's playing with them). He's playing a giant who's operating tiny machines. The toys radically invert the size-relations between his child's body and the real machines, the real car or plane or train. But there's more to it than that. The real machines are hugely powerful. They're movingmachines. They compress distance. They move the body and they move it much faster than it could ever move itself. They take it big distances. It commands them and they give it speed and scope. So the giant body is playing command of wide open spaces, playing huge mastery and power and freedom. The body that's playing with them is playing giants too. Household giants. The real machines her toy ones fake (these toys are hers more often than his) are mostly littler than the real machines which his toys fake. What's more, these

BALLS, BATS AND CARS

289

machines-the real ones, the soupladle, the garlic press, the vacuum cleaner-offer command of limited, walled-in, unmoving spaces. If they're going anywhere-like the stroller-it's not very far. The imaginary distances her toys conjure up are walking distances, portioned by the dimensions and capacities of human limbs. The mastery that her child's body plays at is measured, circumscribed. Not open-ended, not soaring. Touchably finite. "The boys;' Roger says, on page 211, "usually build large-scale places such as highway systems, towns, airports or race-tracks. Girls, unless playing with boys, most commonly build houses and decorate the interiors." So playing his games, he experiences his body very differently than she experiences her body, playing her games. He practices sweeping birds-eye looks, she practices interiors. He internalizes jet-engine speed and swift sudden swerves, she internalizes strolls. He gut-feels expanse, distances covered and done, she gut-feels placed, distanced, wall-protected from the beyond. She habituates the glass corridors through which she must learn to move. They're acquiring different habits of sensing body in space. Different ways of being their body. Of projecting self onto, or into, horizons. Oflooking, assessing, deciding. In 1979 that is, when Roger was observing them. But at least as far as I can see around me in 1999 too, in the Israeli culture where my daughter is still a young girl. On page 63 Roger says, "Marked differences are found between the spatial range of boys and girls. Boys' parentally defined ranges are larger." In fact, much larger. Often twice as large for the same age group. Looking at children of up to about n, in a small US town in the seventies, he says on page 65 that the gap he found between the spatial ranges allowed to, and commanded by, boys and girls, was "greater for the older grouping of children than for the younger grouping." I've added the italics. The inequality grew as the boys and girls did. Merav is 23 when she comes into the house. You haven't met her yet. She lives in a very small communal village on the Mediterranean coast at the foot of the Carmel mountains. She is home now, after spending four-and-a-

290

TENTH VISIT

half months in South Africa, a year in Jerusalem, two months back home, two-and-a-half months on different Greek islands, two-and-some months in Europe, the last stretch of them by herself in London. She says, "I don't know what would have happened if we had roamed around free in the fields here. All in all it's not ... it's not safe not only in terms of people and things like that. I mean it's simply d - dangerous, there's it's it's a totally wild nature here. You know like wells, caves ... uh all kinds of uh very ancient groves where there have already been fires and that which utterly without any prior notiThere's nowhere to roam around here. I mean we didn't go to the fields and all that alone because it's so... we were in the fields here but not... like-it's dangerous. I mean you don't go alone. It's simply a matter of education. Like: a girl alone doesn't go to the field." "I had a sense of freedom;' Janie is saying, "of of freedom of movement and then also I had all my friends in the street that I'd play with every afternoon. Outside of... when it was dayti- I mean when it was summer." She's talking about growing up in Geneva. Somewhere in the 1970's. By the time the threat they might come and get her was already past. They being the Swiss authorities that had already taken away her older brother. At seven she was told that they definitely wouldn't, maybe that they couldn't anymore. "We'd play out on the sidewalk. Which nowadays couldn't be done anymore in that neighborhood. They've, they've actually," she laughs here, "made the sidewalk smaller, they've enlarged the street and ... there are too many cars and too many strange people and stuff. But we could. We used to have a good time on the sidewalk. Well, I mean ... I c - no I certainly wasn't supposed to open the door to anybody when I was alone in the house. It wasn't a village. I mean it wasn't a village atmosphere.lt was the city. But uh ... playing outside, that was probably when my mother... no, no I remember going out and coming in by myself. But uhm ... actually when I started going to private schools I I didn't play that much with the kids in my street because ... we didn't know each other that much, people moved away, new kids came in, and I wasn't going to their school and stuff. But uhm ... that gave me a sense of mobility I mean it wasn't... I guess it was always the same route that I took." During the twelve to two break in the middle of the Swiss school day, she says, "Most of the time I ate at the canteen, the school canteen, so I didn't ... " "So you were different there from some of the other kids, you were sort of on your own whereas they would maybe have their parents pick them u-"

BALLS, BATS AND CARS

291

"Yah and then maybe they would go back, yah. So uhm and then at this other more alternative type school I went to, that's where I had to take the bus to, you know there we'd all bring our little picnic. But it ended earlier. Ended at three. And so then I would come home and then spend another two or three hours alone at home. This is uh nine. Nine to fifteen. And uhm and and also I would do all the shopping, the food shopping:' "When you were nine?" My voiced italics, the inflection so audible on the tape, is evidence of the stubborn persistence of my own habits of thinking about girls, the dangers they face, the strategies for confronting these, and how mothers' rules should embody such strategies. "Yeah. Around age nine. And so you know she would give me lists and money and stuff and uh ... but they were little neighborhood stores that I would go out to. I knew the people. Yah. It wasn't the s - the big supermarket. It was still a time where there were little neighborhood stores ... " Janie makes a point of explaining her mother's practices, as sensitive as I am to their deviance in urban middle class, western surroundings. Even though they equipped her with exceptional confidence and freedom. "I enjoyed doing that. And uhm ... but that that meant at least going out and ... My mother was working full time and so I was you know always going and coming back from school by myself. And most of the time I went to private schools which were not in my neighborhood. So that entailed taking the bus ... the first private school was walking quite a distance. It was a like a... forty minute walk or something from the house. That was uh age eight. And then ... then the second one was going to take a bus and that was another almost well fortyfive minutes going forty-five minutes coming back." "How far did you walk at eight?" "Well about it was I d - I can't tell in kilometers but it it took me about forty minutes." "A long walk for an eight year old alone." "Yah but I mean it was in the city and it was in uhm it was well let's see, no, thirty minutes let's say. It's a cou- it's probably... " "Do you remember yourself learning to do it? Did your mom take you the first time?" "Yeah, yeah, she probably took me the first couple times. Yah, I do, I remember going and coming back and then uhm ... then her office was halfway between the house and the school, so occasionally I would stop off on the way back I would stop off in her office and I had like a little ... house under a

292

TENTH VISIT

desk and stuff and uh sh- I was able to stay there and... until six o'clock when she ended." Children making houses and forts, Roger says on page 219, "are building maps of environments, experienced or imagined." Playing with child-built places, as he calls them, "offers the opportunity to reduce in scale, environments too large to be experienced by children directly. It offers superb opportunities to assimilate new knowledge and to re-work existing notions of the macro-environment:' An "extremely important point," that he makes on page 348, "is the very small size of many of the children's important landscape qualities." Scale matters. We miniaturize to perceive. And our models and representations and maps, which we literally use to see, to interpret our realities, are-of necessity-relative to our body sizes. Because it's relative to an actual body and to living senses that something is too big or too complex to be taken in as a whole, or that something else is miniature enough, but not too tiny, to feed into a usable mental image. But the body-size that's brought into play (and out of it) isn't simply the measuring rod one. No less than that, it is felt size, the space you sense yourself taking up. So different habits of sensing your size and your command of space, would seriously seem to project different worlds. "Foucault constantly reminds us of the primacy of practice over belief." Susan Bordo says on page 165 of her book, Unbearable Weight, published in 1993 by University of California Press. "Not chiefly through ideology, but through the organization and regulation of the time, space, and movements of our daily lives, our bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, femininity." My mother was fat for most of her adult life. For about as long as I can remember I could palpably sense her deep wish-but-inability to make tlle heavy body thin, to lighten it, to make it do what she wanted it to, be what she wanted it to. It was a wish-but-inability perceived both by her and her surroundings as a lack of control or will, as reason for shame. I felt intensely tllat she didn't like her body, her smells, her sweats, her stickiness. Maybe it was me. Maybe I didn't like them. Besides that, she didn't drive. She had alicense. Her own mother, the co-manager of the family's neighborhood store in Kansas City, had driven extensively at a time when relatively few women drove cars. But my mother didn't drive. It was a parallel if fainter version of the wish-but-inability to make her big body do what she wanted, to make it

BALLS, BATS AND CARS

293

go where she wanted. Taken as another sign of her lack of will or control, her childish, insurmountable, clumsy timidity or timid clumsiness. To be sheepishly apologized for. "Mind/body dualism," Susan says on page 13, " is no mere philosophical position, to be defended or dispensed with by clever argument. Rather, it is a practical metaphysics that has been deployed and socially embodied in medicine, law, literary and artistic representations, the psychological construction of self." So the "she" in 'she should be ashamed of herself' or in 'she could have done it if she'd really wanted to' has to be the abstracted, mind-she. The ostensibly real identity-she, that's supposed to be controlling and leading the dumb, fat body-she. Which is an unthinking she, not to be held responsible while the strip of road is there ahead to be traveled, like a strip of story, she can't take command. Of the wheel that would navigate it. Can't propel her self far fast. Not car-fast. The walls of white fear close in. On all of us. "A space seems to surround women in imagination which they are hesitant to move beyond: This manifests itself both in a reluctance to reach, stretch, and extend the body to meet resistances of matter in motion-as in sport or in the performance of physical tasks -and in a typically constricted posture and general style of movement. Woman's space is not a field in which her bodily intentionality can be freely realized but an enclosure in which she feels herself positioned and by which she is confined." This from a paper by Iris Young called Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment,

294

TENTH VISIT

Motility and Spatiality, published in Human Studies 3, in 1980, on pages 137-56, and quoted by Sandra Bartky on pages 243-4 of Free Spirits. It's at the wheel that many of us face the nightmare-white walls. Feel dangerously incompetent at self-directed overland motorspeed. At driving. 'Dangerously' because cars can kill. Or seriously injure. Or stall and then where are you at. Alone, at the mercy. And in the middle of elsewhere. And what if you have to pee? What then? "All women, across the existing generations, drive significantly less than men;' Sandra Rosenbloom says in Full Circles, on page 232, in her article: Women's Travel Patterns at Various Stages of their Lives. "At no age do women drive more than 40 per cent of the miles driven by comparable male drivers." She studied American women. Modern women. In 1993. Drive at least 6o percent less miles than males. "I decided that I should drive, and uh my brain and my insides did what it wants. And didn't didn't let me drive:' Merav says. "I mean made me fail the theory exam which is really crap and failing the theory three times is really... uh people who're much less intelligent than me passed so that isn't ... and drive and uh not see road signs and my eyesight is one hundred percent, there's no reason at all for me not to see road signs. And all kinds of things like that I uh I decided I'd drive and my body said, 'You won't drive:" When she was 12 Merav flew to Switzerland to visit adult friends. On her own. "I don't remember me having any sort of problem, I don't remember

BALLS, BATS AND CARS

295

being afraid sort of not knowing what I... was supposed to do;' she's saying. The people she stayed with were working and she was often left to her own devices. "I stayed in a village and I used to go to town back and forth alone on my own but uh 1 used to do the things 1 did in the village, I used to roam around the village on my own, roam around the house, go to the town. I roamed around the town, sat in a cafe, I don't... I remember a few times I sat with myself at a cafe, went into shops, came out, roamed around. I passed the time. And this is in spite of the fact that it's a language I don't know:' The town was about ten or fifteen minutes from where she was staying. She says, "It's getting on a bus, saying where you're going, knowing where to get off, because it's a bus that goes further, it's not... knowing how much to pay. I mean it's a procedure ... "She's pretty sure she would have had more fun with a grown-up there to take her places but it was still fun and she felt proud of herself and proud of her parents for trusting her to do this at twelve. Merav has a really good sense of direction. ''I'm not scared of getting lost. Uh walking. Or on buses either. It doesn't scare me I always know like that I'll get there in the end. It's not an issue. At all." Tatni doesn't drive. Not really. She has a license but she doesn't drive. "I feel horribly little in a car and not big. I feel horribly little and scared;' she says, and she means when she's driving, which is very rarely. And later she says, "In a car I sense myself physically as very small and very exposed and vulnerable. Even though I sit like this;' she leans back slightly, pulls her shoulders away from the imaginary steering wheel till her back is long and rigid. "'Yeah, okay, I'm tense, but I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna show you: That's my language." She says. And she says, "But what'll happen if I don't see in the rearview mirror. Obviously I can look in the mirror, right? And what if all these cars hit me?" And later she says, "And what'll happen if I can't climb the ascent to Jerusalem and I get stuck again at Beit Zayit. What'll happen if I get stuck? And what'll happen if I can't park." Tami isn't small in any way. Let me introduce you. She's at least average height by Israeli standards. She has been to England more times than she's counted, almost all of them on her own, one of them for four months to do research and interviewing before she actually knew how to speak English (though she could read and write it), travelling all over Wales and Ireland and Scotland. Asking questions, obtaining research grants, finding people, some of them famous and important. Calling them on the phone with nearly no English. Finding places, getting there with very little money. Find-

296

TENTH VISIT

ing the bus, the train, the street, interviewing poets and editors and cultural functionaries, fathoming libraries. She's been to Washington, for ten months and then again for a month and a half and then for another four. Navigating the Library of Congress, learning it intimately. But she still keeps going back to her main, major accomplishment of, "lugging my suitcases on my own at the airport. And they were really heavy those suitcases." She was married at the time, her second marriage. But her partner was home in Israel during these travels, on which she was completely self-supporting. When we start our talking she's thirty-six, she has just finished renovating an apartment she bought in mid-Tel-Aviv and a Ph.D. on the literature of nuclear war. She has been unmarried again for some time. She is assistant editor of a big travel magazine and teaches part-time at university. She hardly ever drives. She has a license which she finally painstakingly got the year before, and has let e~pire temporarily and hasn't yet renewed. She doesn't own a car and rarely uses the one that her mother would easily lend her. Tami has a really good sense of direction. In sharp contrast to my own chronic spatial vagueness, orientation is inborn and easy for her. She's tried to describe how it works. A sort of directedness of the body. Knowing in the limbs which way to turn, which way she's headed. Not an integrating grid laid across a mental image of the surrounding geography but something that, she says apologetically, is like a sixth sense, her body feeling which way to turn at the next corner. But she also describes it as a store of visual maps in her head, "I walk around with maps in my head. If I reach a new city I map it. Let's say uh ... one of one the things I like I take the main road and then I don't go back taking the main road I start taking short cuts. Right away. If you ask me now how to get from here to to Sokolov. I've got a map in my head." She clinches the sentence with a slap on the table top. Her speech is very fast. Piling up words and thoughts at runaway speed. "It's not... On the other hand, left and right-I'm absolutely bad. I mean it's all

visual like it's in the ... so I always excelled I used to direct my father, my mother, everyone, I mean the family, as a little girl. Because I remembered let's say, how to get to my parents' friends, I remembered." But as an adult driver she says, "Great god and what if I don't see things and what if she I don't hear and what if I don't know the way and what if I don't like ... stuff that doesn't scare me at all when I take a bus:' She says, "It doesn't bother me if I get on the wrong bus. So I'll get on the wrong bus so I'll change buses, what's the big deal. And here I get in a car and what'll hap-

BALLS, BATS AND CARS

297

pen if I don't know the way." And later she says, "That's a huge step. Moving to the front seat and loosing the helplessness of the back seat. I won't be little and I won't be protected any more." Because as she's put it earlier, "In the image in my head I'm a little girl in back and I'm being driven." Playing our games as girls in the fifties and sixties and seventies, we practiced our bodies very differently than they practiced theirs, playing their games. We learned interiors while they did sweeping birds-eye looks. We felt strolls where they felt jet -engine speed and sudden swerves. Developing different habits of sensing our bodies in space. Different deciding habits. Different ways of being bodies. On page 16 of Unbearable Weight, Susan says it's the grip, "that culture has on our bodies, through the practices and bodily habits of everyday life. Through routine, habitual activity, our bodies learn what is 'inner' and what is 'outer,' which gestures are forbidden and which required, how violable or inviolable are the boundaries of our bodies, how much space around the body may be claimed, and so on. These are often far more powerful lessons than those we learn consciously:' Look at the schoolyards. You can see them outside when you open the shutters. Maybe they open out onto die past. Maybe today's schoolyards are changing. At least in America. But in my daughter's schoolyards, today in Israel, still-his are soccer fields and basketball courts and big. Much bigger than his body. Hers are leftovers-either of the square footage or the time. Girls can use the ball fields in between the boy times, or they can put up a fight for more, or they can stay and play in the margins. Skip rope, hopscotch, jacks? What do young girls play these days? Who knows? They're in the margins. The same margins their teams get on the screen and the sports page, when they've grown into women and still insist-a tiny minority by then-on playing ball. Talking about schools, Dale Spender says in 1982, on page 62 of her book, Invisible Women: The Schooling Scandal, published by Writers and Readers Publishing, "In general, boys take up more space, even when they are a minority. They take up more space on their chairs (legs frequently extended as obstacles to unwary travellers), their chairs and desks take up more space, they move around the room more. (They also frequently have more space outside the classroom in corridors and, of course, in terms of sporting facilities ... )" And in the big spaces the boys practice quick coordination, fast body orientation and re-orientation, at a run, self-locomotion, rotation, assessing quickchanging 360 degree physical facts-where's the ball right this second,

298

TENTH VISIT

who's it coming from, who can I send it to, how hard, how fast, where directed, where I to it, can I, how I, move, intercept, catch, kick, bat, hit, which angle, I foot, I arm, I vector, split-second split-senses I decide. Or the ball is past. Watch it go. Missed. Shit. Damn fucker. It'll come again over and over and over again. And again. "A large proportion of our everyday movements arise out of habit and the directedness of the body." Roger, at the top of page 12. Again and again and again. Hours. Days. Years. Of drilling bignesspeed responses. Feeling at home with them. Feeling at one with them. "Women are far more restricted than men in their manner of movement and in their lived spatiality;' Sandra says on pages 243-4 of Free Spirits. Definitely more restricted in their driving, even when they do drive. How many of us won't drive into the congested center of town? Some of us, come in from the suburbs, park at the bus station and take a bus "into town." How many of us won't drive to places we've never been before trusting maps and signs and our senses to get us there? How many of us avoid major highways? Won't drive out of town? Won't parallel park when there's a car behind us? Don't drive on trips overseas? Never rented a car on our own? Drive sixty percent less miles than males? Drive a . hundred percent less miles? Boys and balls, practicing high-speed sense-use and high-velocity deciding, meanwhile form the habit of taking the ground for granted. They count on it underfoot. Tread at ease with its details. Comfortable with its size. And with theirs crossing it. Kicking balls across it, running over it in short spurts, turning, taking a few steps backwards, gauging team-mates' placements. Changing direction, running again. Certainly, for some it never gets comfortable or easy. But for almost every one of them it at least gets repeatedly practiced. It has to. They have to. They're boys. "Children have been found to perform better and prefer to spend more time on tasks and in play labeled as appropriate for their own sex;' Roger says on page 345, at the end of the 1970's in the USA. But around me in the 1990's, in Israel, the big space is still theirs, earmarked for their use, there for them, theirs to cover with their strides and shouts and trajectories. Their right, declared and institutionalized in this visible rectangle. Their challenge. Their obligation. Their habit. Significantly, they fight often to keep others off, to keep the big space available for their movement. Habitually holding ground. Shahira used to play

BALLS, BATS AND CARS

299

with them. "Who else was I supposed to play with?" she says in a fluent Hebrew which I hear as fresh and musical through her Palestinian Arabic inflections. "I played with my brothers. I had to play with them. I had no one to play with." And, being brothers, they let her do so-on sufferance. She used to play soccer. And marbles. And fix home appliances. "Also, when something was out of order in our house always with some heater, I used to fix it. The telephone-I used to open it up and take it apart and fix it and put it back. And ... I remember that one of the ... a friend of mine, a good friend of my... at school once told me she had to hammer a nail I think in the broom because it came off its stick. She had to hammer in a nail so she asked her brother to put a nail in. I would never have asked anyone to do it. It's just a nail, what's that. I used to fix our TV cable and my mother used to bring me some cables with all those the ... plug like yes the wall socket too and ... broken and had to be switched from one to another, lengthened, all kinds of stuff, for electric stoves. I would do it. Why not?" As natural to her as it was to her brothers. They had let her. She had run with them for hours and days. She had learned and loved to sprint and kick and flex the strength and speed of her body. Why not? Shahira used to park a different car outside the house every week or so. "I've driven any number of cars. From the very best to the very worst. I learned to drive before I went to learn ah officially. I mean my father taught me before that. Long before. I remember I was in sixth-seventh grade and I would drive, he would... I would like drive in the fields.'' The Palestinian village she grew up in is in the area claimed in 1948 and declared the state of Israel. It's not far from Nazareth. She says, "I would drive the car. So that when I reached the ... the first driving lesson and ... Abba came to pick me up after the lesson," speaking Hebrew, because I don't speak Arabic, she calls him by the Hebrew name that children use for father, "and he asked the teacher, 'How is she?' and he told him, 'Well, her first teacher did a good job."' Later she says, "I knew how to use the clutch, how to let go ... I was waiting for the moment I'd get a license. I remember I went to take the... theoretical test, the theory... and they sent me home because I still hadn't turned seventeen at the time, they said, 'Come back when you're seventeen.' And I wanted it so much to get it." While we're talking Shahira is very near graduating a driving instructors' course. She is one of two women taking the course with a lot of men. She's a coordinator at a rape crisis center. One of the first started in Israel for Palestinian women and operated in Arabic. She has a degree in social work. She's

300

TENTH VISIT

been an active feminist for years. She's married and has a six-month old. "The air-conditioner maintenance at my parents';' she was saying before, "It was all up to me. It needed to be taken apart, cleaned, the knobs ... " But mostly the prohibitions are kept in place. Edna says, "I didn't try to learn technical things because I thought it was men's things. Really if I reconstruct that's what I myself thought. Driving is a matter for men:' She's a sociologist, an educator, an activist. For over 30 years, mostly in poor neighborhoods, she has founded and facilitated groups that work for social and personal change. She travels all over Israel doing political, feminist work, and puts in hundreds of reading hours on buses and trains. She is a member of some of the more cutting-edge groups in the peace and feminist movements in Israel. About ten years before we start talking, she got her driving license. "Which was a very advanced age. What was ... it was we said eighty... nine years ago. Yes? So I was uh uh fif- uh forty uh forty-four. Or fortyfive I really don't remember exactly." She says, "I felt that one of the areas that I'm not contending with in the field of where the uh my socialization as a woman told me that women shouldn't drive. They shouldn't do technical things. Even though it's very strange I grew up in a time when a lo-a lot of women already had driving uh uh licenses. But okay we'll take it apart later. That I'm not making that change in my life while I'm constantly working with people and with groups of people on making a change in theitheir lives. And on on getting out of the boxes of that they got... and I myself aren't doing it. That I have to confront that question." And she says, "one of the things that maybe blocked my driving was that all my life I watched Ronnie, my life partner, who's really a born a born driver. Who's a man who travels uh tens of thousands of kilometers. He really travels a lot he travels relatively an enormous amount for a man who hasn't had uh an accident in his life, hasn't been involved in any anything. And I've witnessed I've even been with him in the car when he succeeded in avoiding accidents I mean in a pile-up when people crashed in front and in back he got out because he his senses were so quick. So maybe that was also one of the things that made me think-I'll never be like that. Okay, Ronnie is also a pilot and he and he also air glides and really he has all the stuff." Who can compete with a pilot, she means. How can she possibly compare? At the time we're talking, Edna still isn't driving, despite the license. She says, "Ronnie was usually very supportive of my my feminist directions," she says, "Except for the fact that that if he has prejudices or had prejudices

BALLS, BATS AND CARS

301

about women as driv- then it was as drivers and that. He was truly one of the people who for years till he finally changed it but he didn't support uh. I mean he didn't tell me, 'Don't go,' but he let's say didn't encourage me and I really needed a serious push. On this matter. He was a man who never on all the other aspects of life ... I worked with youth. So I used to come home at midnight and sometimes and jobs weekends, holidays. He was a partner raising the children. He made worked at home a lot. He never whether I went to a party or or or work he never interrogated me or. I mean everything was about independence and equality and respect and esteem and... but uhm that's part of the things where I really didn't get too much support. But I uh I'm not dumping it on him." Later she says, "''m not saddling him with the responsibility. I'm saying he wasn't supportive. But I can't say, 'He did this to me.' I did this to me. Yes. I did this. I chose to accept this. I chose to get scared of the ... I choose to get scared when they when I get honked at. I choose to accept that I'm no good, that's my choice." Listening to Edna's thoughtful, careful formulations, I puzzle about usages of the term 'technical.' Our talking tries to dismantle it. What qualifies as technical? Okay, somehow having to do with machines. But not operating an electric food processor. Or a gas oven. Or a sewing machine or a washing machine. Operating a car does, supposedly. Why? Because it's done in motion? Not standing still on the kitchen floor or moving at a walk between countertop and burner and fridge door and maybe the phone outlet? Because you're in the machine and moving with it as you work it? Engulfed by it as you direct it? It does seem to have something to do with machines' insides, because lifting the hood and taking out a part of what's inside and being able to put it back right, not to mention fixing it, would definitely qualify as technical. Something to do with inside information that women are mostly excluded from. 'Technical' would also apply to opening up and fixing a hair-dryer or a wall socket, even though all of those are performed standing or sitting or lying. But how many drivers, men or women, are actually technical in this insides sense? Maybe 'technical' in the contexts we're talking about pretty much boils down to: 'machine-related things that women don't do well and aren't expected to.' Because they're not taught to. Because they're taught not to. And taught to think they were born like that. Shahira says, "Changing a flat, for instance, I knew how. My father used to ask me to go and do it on my own.

302

TENTH VISIT

And I would do it I mean. Sixth grade maybe. Yes, I would do it. But at a later age I stopped doing it. When I was in high school and a little while later, I never changed a flat." "Why?" "I don't know. I felt as if I didn't know how. I felt as if I didn't want to get my hands dirty. I though"You felt like you didn't know how!?" "Yes, I felt as if I didn't know how, as if I couldn't cope with it. There was a while when I felt as if they were trying to make a man out of me, but I'm a woman. And that they're not accepting my femininity and that I want to develop it. I mean there was a time when uhm I dressed like boys both the shoes and the clothes and ... I felt for some time that I didn't want to. Didn't suit me. I could also be ... I could be a strong woman. With all the ... to include both my femininity and my strong character. And then I started to resist all these things. During that phase, changing a flat seemed to me to be masculine. Apparently my resistance also created this feeling of mine, unconsciously: I don't know how to do it. Because I don't want to get my hands dirty, I take care of my fingernails, I don't want to sit on the road and get my clothes dirty. So I... I'll stand in the street and someone will come and help me with the ... " Merav has "the deep wish to be a little girl I mean to go back to age three. It looks to me like a wonderful place." She says, "When you're kids you're potted plants. We don't choose. We do the things we have to do. And the things you do at age three are really fun like going to the park to play is really wonderful. Because then all the choices are made for you, the responsibility isn't yours, you can enjoy life, sort of the littlest things, the fact that you succeeded like doing a puzzle or something. So like everywhere else, of course you get decided on, but you don't know how much it's I mean at age three they want terribly to decide for themselves and they don't know that at age thirty when they have to decide on their own they totally, 'Let somebody decide for me

please; like totally... At age thirty it looks like really if to change a career or buy an apartment or not I mean ... The burden of like the heavy responsibilities, money, home, these are the things that uh cloud our lives. Like the very big dilemmas come now. At school it wasn't a dilemma whether or not to stay here;' in the village. She says, "It's a very big dilemma. Ev- every choice that I could have made sort of it always leads back here.~' I have a stubborn sense of a learning process stunted. The relatively rigid

BALLS, BATS AND CARS

303

circumscription of my space, as a growing girl, seems to me to have left me with impaired ability to decide. To exercise a judgment that I haven't had enough opportunity to practice. I seem to need rules to-literally-go by. Guide lines. "The most striking feature of the interviews with the children about parental range restrictions," Roger says on page 63, "and the one which led me first to notice the many sex differences in this data, was the ambiguity of responses received from the boys as opposed to the girls. Boys describe one boundary and then give the name of another place beyond the boundary. On further questioning, it is commonly revealed that the rules, usually made by both parents, are in fact administered by the mother only and that she often turns a 'blind eye' when her boy breaks the boundary: 'Well, she knows that I go, but I'm not supposed to."' And on page 331 and 330, "Boys reveal considerably more ambiguity over their descriptions of parental range limits than the girls because their mothers more readily 'turn a blind eye' to the breaking of range restrictions. This is related to what they consider to be the natural inclination of 'boys to be boys."' So, "By fifth grade (10 years of age) the boys had gained freedom to travel almost wherever they please and so their own powers of locomotion had already set a limit:' You can see them outside. They're pegged to the ground by place names and stretched between them. The cordons. The limits. Parents' words superimposed on geography. Liquid, elastic, ambiguous. Yours to defy and precisely define. Yours to respect and examine and redefine. Telescoping in around your calves and ankles. Captivating. Wonderful wonderful wonderland-decision. Your decision. Charming. And magical. Cindi Katz says on page 102 of Full Circles, "Boys are expected to break rules, and the fact that they are not punished when they do," here I'm skipping a little, "must encourage them in this behaviour." She's writing in the 1990's. About the USA. She's writing about practicing judgment. Testing and realizing power. Challenging or evading authority. Breaking or bending, overstepping, taking consequences. Coming through okay. Pushing the limits and coming through okay. No metaphor. Physically. With your body. Moving the lines. The world transforming as you negotiate its scope, your scope. Your size. Your strength. "It has been noted how important the physical environment is to chil-

dren's developing conceptions of their effectiveness," Roger says on 343. A conception damaged for me by a deeply imprinted habit of littleness. In the schoolyard at recess-the American term-I was probably standing around, maybe alone, at a loss as to how to have fun during the period supposedly af-

304

TENTH VISIT

fording the most of it. I suddenly noticed there was a knot of kids gathered around the two or three steps leading out of our classroom. I realized something was going on that I wasn't part of. I had a sense it was important. You pick up these things. From participants' body postures maybe, from intonation patterns even when you can't hear the words. I got closer. Curious. Careful not to infringe, not to butt in, not to incur rebuttal. Maybe just to be able to look on. A girl was standing on the highest step. The knot was tied around her. She was just turning to go back in. But some of the kids were calling her, asking her. 'Me too, show me, I wanna see, let's see.' Brenda. Iremember the name. 'Brenda me too.' I'd never noticed her before. She was in my class. She turned back and held up a rectangle of white paper. The kind we spent a lot of our time drawing on in class. The drawing was a landscape. A path and a house and a field. In perspective. I didn't know the word. I definitely didn't know the concept. I'd been exposed to paintings. But those were just there. Not tangibly made. And in any case grown up. This was a child-made drawing. In perspective. The house wasn't wobbling above a strip of brown or green across the bottom of the page. It was placed in a surrounding field of color. The sky was around the images, not a ludicrous blue bar at the top. The house's flat facade branched into diagonal lines. And into depth. I'd never seen a child draw like that. But that wasn't what caused the shock that has kept this scene intact in my memory. I was shocked at my not having seen-literally seen-the obvious: that pages were flat and houses weren't. And then at seeing this in a flash when two dimensions impostered three. I'd known all along that my houses looked stupid and wobbly. But I'd also known that sky was above and ground was below. And that that's where I was putting them on the page. I could see I wasn't getting it right, but what Brenda's drawing brought home to me with cruel clarity was that the real-life "right" became irrelevant in mapping three onto two dimensions. That there was a whole other kind of right to be learned there. That I hadn't even suspected this was the "it" I wasn't getting: a known, learn-able store of knowledge to make my houses look realer. I not only hadn't known it, I hadn't even known

of it. She was standing higher than me, Brenda. Showing the other kids her drawing from slightly above. I was one of the youngest and also short for my age. A lo.t of the kids were taller, calling back to her above my head. Two or

BALLS, BATS AND CARS

305

three infinite inches over my head-a language whose existence I hadn't even suspected. I was in first grade, at the first American school I went to, in a small university town in Kansas, when I found out with the other kids talking over my head, that everybody else around knew something I didn't. Whether or not I'm actually less able to form an over view-to map, to two-dimensionalize, generalise, summarise, assess-my mental littleness keeps me deeply unsure of those abilities. I'm quick to assume the existence of a store of relevant knowledge which I not only lack but don't know of I easily believe that other people are privvy it to over my head. For many years I was very hesitant to conjecture or profess in public. "There are a lot of places and and groups where I speak out easily;' Edna says. She remembers herself talking politics in high school, always standing with a group of boys and talking politics. With a lot of confidence. "But I uh don't do that in new places or. Look I didn't speak at at at today at the seminar. I have an opinion, yes. And I didn't speak. And it's even a place that's relatively familiar to me. I've got a lot of friends there. But I don't know if it was characteristic but seeing as it's already happened to me in past, I say, 'Just a minute this is probably no coincidence.' Or maybe I didn't have anything particularly unique to say. Yes I no at the end I really wanted to speak up about the matter of the study. But it actually turned out good that Arabiyeh spoke before I tried. But no matter. But this is really a relatively friendly place. But sometimes I speak and n - not always. I have to have a great deal of confidence-scientific and I mean I won't I won't say anything that I'm not certain whether I remember right or or... "My guess is that 'scientific' here is functioning much like 'technical' does. As a mechanism of exclusion. A heavily gendered one. "It's also this thing of being stupid," Edna says. "That I don't know how to figure it out.'' Gill Valentine lists some of the roots of this feeling and I'm italicizing: "male use of physical size and comportment to intimidate women, for example when trying to be served at a bar; male mockery of the ability of women engaged in sporting or leisure activities such as running or playing pool." Insert driving too. ''And male verbal harassment." Read: 'Women driver!' This is in Gill's 1989 article, The geography of women's fear (she doesn't use capitals), in the journal, Area, on page 388. She says, "Domination is achieved not only through numerical appropriation of space, but through assertive and aggressive behavior which intimidates and embarrasses women.'' Later, we're talking about Edna's work. Trying to gauge effectiveness. Edna says, "I try to help peo- people to look at their condition. At the moment

306

TENTH VISIT

it's particularly women. To improve their self-image. To acquire tools, really, in order to contend better. My my whole attitude ... is it's no accident that I chos- I mean so I worked in the poverty neighborhoods for some two years with all kinds of groups and I saw the sense of worthlessness of so many women that 'I'm no good and I'm doing wrong and I'm not working. And I'm no no ... nothing.' "And also the hunger for advancement and learning and uh that often comes of frustrations of'I can't help my children because I don't know how to help with schoolwork.' All kinds of uh a lack of basic skills that makes very many women helpless in all their negotiations not not uh ... an inability to make the most of even what the system can offer them. And the system isn't exactly structured so as to offer them. I see myself acting with a lot of anger at the system." I listen to Edna's empathy for the women she works with. The system, not the women, is the site of worthlessness and failure. But she, educated, trained, conscious, relatively privileged by the system, assumes private ownership of her own failures. In non-driving, it is she who's "no good;' who's personally responsible, whether or not she received support from her surroundings, her partner, whether or not she felt she could ask it. Much later she says, "The truth is that I get a deep satisfaction from from my work." And then, "But, but I'm I'm a sociologist by train- by training damn it. I know it doesn't change the reality, yes. Uhm." In a Soviet film she saw many years ago a woman at a train station was watching soldiers return from war. She already knew her soldier wouldn't be coming back. And she walked around the station handing out flowers. "That's what's possible;' Edna says, "to give people flowers. It's impossible to change the the the world. I do the things needed to soften, needed to make people's da- day sweeter. I mean I hand them the symbolic flower. Uh so I hand people flowers, yes. Give them all kinds of uh I haven't haven't really developed beyond that childish view:' Compare a single stem offered at arm's length with a swung baseball bat. It could be a rose or a zinnia. Compare a flower and a baseball bat. Or for that matter a kicked soccer ball. Each of them is relayed by the limb's direction and velocity and force, and the mind's intention. Each of them is an extension of body/mind, of life, used to somehow affect surroundings. But bats and balls, unlike flowers, acquaint their operators with the feel of wielding their physical strength, using leverage to amplify their body. And more important maybe, they closely acquaint these users with the limitations of

BALLS, BATS AND CARS

307

their strength and bodies. Familiarizing physical force and its finity. They teach their wielder not to fear his own force. Not to cringe in wait for inevitable retribution on the heels of its exertion, not to expect destruction brought on by hard fast extension of body. They teach him by rote that extending his force and speed will not inescapably kill. Edna says, "This thing of a feeling that I wouldn't succeed in mastering uh technically that blocked me from learning to drive, blocked this whole process, is connected to the issue of responsibility, of a sense that it's not some appliance that uh I don't know that the data in it will get burnt. It's a matter of uh of life. And it's not theoretical. I mean people die on the roads every day. I internalize the statistics on dead and the wounded very thoroughly." And she says, "I if I die and get killed that's not so bad but if I can't take the chance of causing someone damage because I'll know that I probably even if I'm not completely to blame it won't sa- satisfy me. I'll know that someone with with quicker responses could have prevented it. I can't take it on my conscience, it's not right, not responsible." And, "I have a side that that runs away from from responsibility. I see responsibility as so so big and that connects in all directions, that I don't want to take it. Uh if I take it then I have a huge responsibility for for for the life of things:' There it is, isn't it? "The life of things." There's the flip-side of our, of my, being so accustomade to nurture and take care and bear. Of being so used to the use of my body, for life-giving. Which, on the underside, strongly implies its power to life-take. By even just inaction-not feeding a baby, tending an invalid, mashing the bananas. Not to speak of hard-fast action, loco motion. Does my sense of my self as a lever in others' living magnify my sense of leverage in their dying? Heighten wariness of my power to kill,

308

TENTH VISIT

an untested fear of my force. Especially since I haven't ever gone in there kicking and batting and hitting and spitting and checked out, felt out the limits. Haven't ever learned by rote that extending my force and speed will not inescapably kill.

If she finally starts driving, really driving, as a matter of course, Tami pictures it as feeling like, "I can, I can, I have the strength for it. Great god it's awfully scary. It's a kind of uh ... I'll kill the world see ... I'll blow it up." And, "If I can make it on my own I won't need anyone and then I can destroy everything and I'll blow them up because I don't need them. If I can make it on my own, what do I need them for." And she says, "There was something in me that undercut parts of uh really of standing on my own two of certain parts of really standing on my own two feet and saying, 'I can!' Like, I take the responsibility. I... can cook for myself, I can manage a home with kids, I can manage a more or less good marriage relationship, I can I can. I'm not... I've grown up. That's that. And ah and I've grown up and it's not so bad and it won't make the little girl inside me die." Her laugh here sounds like an apology. But she says, "I think there's place here for let's say for the history." She's referring to the family history. As it affects her driving. "For the fact that Abba drove so badly. And for the fact that he was afraid to drive. And for the fact that we always used to go to Jerusalem and, because they really loved to go to Jerusalem my parents, and we used to get stuck on the way at Beit Zayit every time. Every time. The car used to heat up. For the life of me all the other cars drove by and we heated up. And it was a Fiat 124, not especially old it wasn't like ... we always got stuck. We knew it already. We used to see the Beit Zayit moment coming. Well well... That's the real truth though. And I developed the talents of sleeping and singing in cars in a... big way. And I think this whole experience of driving uh of of like riding with someone was not pleasant. "He was very nervous. It was very much an enterprise. And he was ... uh he was Ima was th- Ima used to hold on, it went like this, it like you know the vibrations that kids receive? He used to drive and he didn't talk. And Ima used to hold on onto this handle here, yes? Like this. You know, you could see her hand you could see the muscles in her hand. I mean she was afraid all the time. And ... he would get stuck at Beit Zayit and then he would get mad.

BALLS, BATS AND CARS

309

And then we would wait for the car to like cool off. And we uh there wasn't a bit of humor here and my father was a man full of humor. There wasn't a bit of humor. We used to get to Jerusalem-everyone used to sigh in relief. "Maybe because of these pilgrimages too that for me they connect with all kinds of... and we would get there and there was a feeling of relief but we always knew that we would have to make our way back. So all these trips with the family turned into a nightmare, as you can imagine:' "Were there arguments?" "Of course there were. There were arguments all the time in any case. But like ... about the car... when he used to get stuck so there was an argument right away. And the argument was on stage I mean staged it wasn't... he used to get mad so he used to find something to shout about. And ... altogether they were really two pretty tense parents. So the car was just a kind of signifier of other... harsh phenomena:' "This;' Tami is saying now, "is my uh my me uh: my mother's credo, this is how I believe she acted with her father too and with her brother and... always. Men are uh are are not strong people and they very much need their woman beside them. Now, women are women are something strong. And therefore need to play a double game, always. I mean this is the uh this is what their role is. Their role is on the one hand uh in fact to manage life, I mean to manage the life of the man and the family and of all kinds and at work and all kinds of things like that." And then she is saying, "On a second level she had to play a game according to which there are some things the man's important things that he should feel he can do them on his own. "Now, sh- my father was the director of the alumni association of TelAviv university. And as someone like that he used to organize lots of these kind of public events you know that they invite all kinds of... director. Uh he it was I mean he was like you know it's an administrative position. I mean he got it because he was working before he was the deputy director of the zoo, he worked at the ministry of agriculture. My father changed jobs like socks, more or less. And this was the job he succeeded in staying in for the longest time. About ten years I think he worked as the director... and he was very successful because he was very charming. And it was all about uh this kind of bits I mean he knew how to charm both women and men and he was this kind of handsome man, like tall and with a leather jacket. When men still didn't so much wear leather jackets and that. And well dressed and always. And he would organize all kinds of events you know let's say a concert at the

310

TENTH VISIT

Mann Auditorium uh meetings at the home of Ayala Zacks, everything to do with the Board of Trustees it was him. And in short it's lots of work with uh like public appearances you know you have to attend to go to all kinds of places. And there Ima expressly played the little wife and she explained to me that it was;' there's a break here between tapes, "and she says, 'It's' and she says, 'And it's really strange Tami because because I had a lot to say a lot of times and I didn't:" Tami's suddenly quiet for a long time. Then she says, "'And I didn't."'

BALLS, BATS AND CARS

311

ELEVENTH VISIT: THE SEA AND THE DESERT

ARE UNMAPPABLE,

down to the small holes and details of their endlessly

varied morphology. endlessly changing morphology. bodies of shifting particles, They hold relatively consistent shapes only at their extremities. mapped only by their dissipation into other, differently particled, bodies. Sea mapped by the empty fossil prints of burst foam bubbles Winding across weT sand. sea mapped by non-sea-debris, cradled inert by water, deposited where sea plays out its motion. desert Mapped by the fingers of sand windblown into gradually thickened vegetation converging on a water sourcE and rooting the sands intO earth. sea and desert-chartable only as masses, blocks, with oases and islands as grid-points. expanses inscribed with skeletons of past passages, past journeys. Their discernible structure born of differences meeting, of pauses in homogeneity. "'Stay unaccustomed; Balkacz tells me many times over;' Caterina says on the seventy-eighth page of the Book of Balkacz, in a passage already translated into English. '"Stay alien. Never forget to flee. Do not even briefly forget to be a fugitive.' Leaving no traces in merchant or aristocratic circles to possibly reach my seeking father, brothers, uncles, family. For as long as they may continue to seek. For as long as they live. Avoiding official registration, recordable lodgings or domicile, countable property, taxable tradings. Avoiding longterm or legalized status with any partner or husband or master. Living by selling what cannot be got elsewhere, what is not weighed or inscribed in

312

ledgers, what is taken on trust. What is hence contraband-simply for travelling unaccountable through transactions. Evading channels of governing I become outlaw. Over and over re-creating the need to flee. The necessity of movement. Movement has become my staple, my stable mode of being. My dream of distances, my magical chant of moving become my element. "We are two winters into our journey nearing second spring. I have learned much nomads' lore, signs and signals of the way, numerous edible plants and water marks, fire sources, shelter places, which kinds of people to engage, by which to stay unseen. Knowing no one beyond the walls of my father's house, when I departed, save my dear princess Cocachin, I can now easily identify the traffickers in goods, or in people, or in beliefs, all of whom have intercourse with the rulers. I know the owners of much or oflittle who trust the rulers as their own, as fathers, deeply believed and feared and respected, to be faithfully informed the doings of others. I know the owners of nothing who yet have their trust to lose and would report irregular dealings as the one gift which they have full power to grant their masters. I can tell those, those possessed of loyalty. Those possessed by loyalty. "Balkacz has taught me as my amah taught me before, deftly, softly. In patient practical detail. Simple and clear. To squat in the shadow of one of our horses, at the side of an alley or the edge of a market, not too far apart, blending in. To hide within my headdress. To watch, quietly, patiently. Before long to see. I watch eyes, hands, dealings, I follow speech and silences. I can see sometimes instantly the opaque resignation of faces painfully trained in the patience of powerlessness. I can see the rhythm of smothered, suspended attentiveness in the eye and lip movements of those made to wait. As I watch I can tell also those who disbelieve the Khans, who purposely evade or mislead their royal emissaries, who lead their lives, whenever they can, into ungoverned passages. Many of them are women. "I too have been teacher. I have kept to the terms of the barter with Balkacz-taught tongue and script for taught directions and providing. I have spoken my tongue to him till he speaks it better. I have taught him what I know of writing. Most often practicing on earth but at times on cloth or bark or wood with one of my three pens. I have taught him what I know of reading. Not of the ceremonial books of my father's house for I never read those and we have none to read. He uses his own scripts mostly. We rarely have others, and I do not share mine. Sometimes we obtain or find and read coins or paper moneys or debt notes. In some places we can read the victory

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

313

inscriptions of past rulers and we read inscribed tombs, though these are rare. When we can, we use also the scripts of merchants in the markets. We position ourselves to silently watch while the greatest merchants dictate in numerals and characters the names and weights and values of daily buyings and sales. At one market destroyed by fire five days before we arrived, we found and took some pieces of a ledger for our practice. "Never has he had a travelling companion for the duration of his way;' the Book of Balkacz says on the next page. "Always alone he has traveled, or guided travellers for only a commissioned stretch and left them, secure in his prerogative of leaving. I didn't know, as we set out, how huge his concession of apprenticed travel. On our way slowly I understood. I first understood when we set out steadily eastwards, after long months of riding in directions chosen by us by chance. I understood when we met a crossroads, and his choice was steadily east though he was drawn to the south and the west, towards a route he had words of. He would point his horse to the south and west and hold it strong, while it shifted weight impatiently, lifted high hooves only to set them down again on the same piece of earth. And was then turned about, abrupt, to the east, and spurred off strong, and I had to catch up. I understood at those times, not many but not few, when he did not speak our near destination or doings, when he chose to go alone about the business of preparing camp or food or bartering for goods or leading the way, showing his wish to be without companion. I understood during the weeks and sometimes the months when he lodged me with a tribe or a widow and asked that I stay till he should come back, often seeming at the same time to ask the reverse. Only lately though, has he told me the express wish of my dearest Li Fu-tze that I reach her people, deep in the interior, far to the north and to the east." "Between the upper Irtysh and Orkhon rivers north of the Altai mountains, dwelt the Naiman." Bertold Spuler says on page

2

of his book, The

Mongol Period: History of the Muslim World, first published in 1969 and republished by Markus Wiener Publishers in 1994. "On account of the proximity of the Turkish Uigurs to the south, the Naiman had at an early stage absorbed numerous elements of Central Asian culture, such as the Uigur alphabet and Christianity of the Nestorian rite. In civilization they were the most advanced of the Mongol tribes. Not far behind were the Kerait, who adjoined them on the east, along and to the south of the Orkhon; at the middle of the first millennium AD. the majority of the Kerait, had also adopted

314

ELEVENTH VISIT

Nestorian Christianity. North of the Kerait, on the middle and lower Selenga, lived the Mer kit; and west of the Merkit and north of the Naiman lived the very backward Oirats. The Chinese classified the Mongol tribes according to their grade of civilization into 'White Tartars' of the southern zone immediately north of the Chinese frontier, 'Black Tartars' further to the north, and lastly 'Savage Tartars' or forest dwellers who, in contrast with the other nomadic tribes, lived by hunting and were particularly devoted to the Shaman-

ist religion. For long to come, Shamans (priests) originating from these areas were considered to be more reliable and efficacious than others." "Neither did I know at first, \lS I still do not, how long we shall keep me with him," the Book of Balkacz says on its ninety-first page, in my own translation of Chava's Hebrew. "Leaving my home I thought of leaving. Not of destination. Now Balkacz has said a destination set by my amah. Her will, become my chant. And yet in the dream form of chant, her wish becomes unreal, not to be lived. And I ask myself since, repeatedly ask myself what difference, why the deep interior, why her people. Why a fugitive there rather than anywhere. I ask myself and also Balkacz. 'I am a messenger: he has answered, 'entrusted.' "I say, 'To what difference? What purpose? Who's to know? To care? No less foreign and threatening and threatened there than anywhere. Why? Let the chant remain chant. I deeply love my dear Li Fu-tze. She has sent me to live and heal by my wits. By her teaching yes and also by my own understanding. Not to return ever. She has said that to me. Not ever. Never return. She has sent me to make my own way at my own discretion. My debt to her is using that. Using well my learning. My judgment. Not silencing it for hers.' '"She wished your skill be returned to her people. They are losing the knowledge she has said. She has heard, as I have seen in other places, how the rulers, the people of the Khans, are taking many daughters of mothers, healing mothers, she has said, as they took her mother from her mother's mother, taking women as wives, taking them as concubines, taking them as servants, as they later took your amah herself. Taking many daughters, breaking their lines of transmitted knowing and teaching. She wished your gift to them and their respect of it to you. She wished a home for you in her past.' '"It is a home in her future, unrecognizable, her past changed. Taking the

women they take not only the healing, they take the home. Their kneaded bread, their tunes, their weaving. Their respect? For me? Perhaps their suspicion? Like anywhere else. She left them as a child. Their lines of teaching

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

315

broken will have changed them. Are they still her people? What did she truly know of them? She said they were not lovers of strangers.' "But she knew all this as well as I. Still she has said she wishes me there. Told to Balkacz, to tell me now, beyond two winters into our journey. Not to me at its start. Though she was acquainted with the rhythms that moved me. I suspect for no more reason than giving me direction. A compass to make sense of wander. To keep me moving after the magical rhythm of the beginning subsides. "'Has she said their exact place?' "'She has said their main camping grounds. They are travelling tribes. Some of their words have found me along my travel and I am able to use small parts of their tongue. But their camping and river and mountain forest and desert names are farther than I know. Names without place. I do not know the places. I do not know what leads to them.' "'Do you know of any who does? Any of the travellers who can tell you trails?' "'I don't know. I cannot know whether I know of anyone. For these names are far beyond the living places of the farthest of the travellers whose names I keep. And yet they may be known to them perhaps in a different language, different names than the ones your amah has said. The places of her tribe are desert to my words, my knowing, my travel. Land bare of the trail-telling which might lead me there: '"Why would I need you then?' '"You would not. You ride well, you trade well, you hide well. You learn well. You have learnt fast to find paths and directions and shelter. You are young. You are learning yet. You have learnt to shave your head as a young holy man of these peoples. You have learnt the placement of water, the provision of food. Your healing hands and substances are greater protection than I offer. Your seed pods do you well. You know how to find trail-tellers.' '"Why would you keep on then? Why would you need me?' '"I would need you for being entrusted. Your amah entrusted you to me. And I would keep on for the desert, for going beyond my knowing; Balkacz told me, 'for finding tellers of places I cannot even ask of-not knowing their present names and tongue, and then following their tales.' '"And your home?' "'It waits. They wait. And they do not wait. They travel their lives. Con-

stantly they expect me not to return."'

316

ELEVENTH VISIT

Chava says this is a particularly tricky passage. The original has no quotation marks or anything like that. There's no punctuation at all in Caterina's script. So Chava has segmented the text, here and altogether, based on a degree of guesswork. Her segmentation naturally depends on her hypotheses about who is doing the talking at any given point and, in the case of this passage for example, about what is being said out loud and what is put only in writing. There are places in the passage where assigning the other speaker would change the entire meaning of a sentence or several sentences. The second paragraph, for instance, "I say, 'To what difference?, etcetera" was assigned to Caterina, supposedly speaking aloud to Balkacz. But ifBalkacz was the one doing the speaking here, this would make him much more skeptical, much more critical of the destination he was saddled with, than he is in the present translation. Chava says this kind of criticism on his part might actually be more believable than such independent, deep skepticism on the part of a young teenage girl, about seven hundred years ago. She might be expected to be more accepting than Balkacz of the authority of her mentor and beloved nurse. But other parts of the text seem to bear out this attitude of hers and for other reasons, linguistic cues and a general intuition of Caterina's personality, Chava intends to keep the present solution. "We rarely sleep in homes. When we do, we stay with widows," The Book of Balkacz says on the one hundred-and-first page. "Almost always at the edge of a village. Along the walls in walled desert towns. Often where a wall is breaking up, cracking, untended. Sometimes outside, in clay huts of forbidden or destitute women. They are wary of Balkacz. I try to reassure them. They become wary of me. I offer them massaging or a healing powder. I propose their presence with me as I am healing others, a chaperone making less suspect my kneading and touching. I offer them payment in seeds or salve. Not all agree to have us." Chava says, "It I you know it turned out to uh to be no coincidence. Unbelievable as it seemed. I mean where we stayed ... it was really it played a major role and. It was so significant. I uh I I was already back home from the Sinai and I was translating the manuscript and you know how sometimes ... it just it hit me." Her voice is almost breathless here. It's clear she's reliving a lot of excitement. "I realized what I was read- translating. And it suddenly linked so clearly to what Eyad had been showing me. And about about going beyond what I know, what I've got words for. And I simply decided to do it. The minute it dawned on me.

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

317

"I decided I could do it along with Atar. I was basically I was jus- uh lashing out blindly. No clear, no good reason. Instinct? Maybe just pure curiosity. But my hunch was that that was the whole point. Pure follow pure curiosity. Go beyond where you know where you're going. It was all so so slim. Such insubstantial evidence for ... but I just decided. I'd try I'd find this uh this Ardeche and St. Pons a village I guessed and look for this Jacques Perez and his ancient books. His Livres Anciens. I wasn't even sure whether that was his name. I uh I'd only heard Eyad say it. When he showed me his photo and the calling card from his box. It might not even be French for all I knew. It wasn't on the card. None of them had names on them. Eyad just remembered all the names by heart. And the dates. And I had no idea whether there was really any uh any kind of connection between him and Mickie, or whether I I'd find Mickie's tra- tracks. Or any explanation for the manuscript. Maybe it could be just a coincidence and have nothing to do with the manuscript. I mean where Mickie got it from or and. "But it was, this ... this was how I had become how I was coming to read, uh a new reading of what... Balkacz talking about beyond what you know, physically beyond what you know. The desert. Of both of them moving there. Caterina and Balkacz." Chava and I are talking at her apartment in Tel-Aviv. You've already read parts of this talking on the second visit. And then the third and the fourth and the fifth. Chava and Atar have just recently come back-from first Sinai and then France and then Gibraltar. And she's planning to leave again at the end of the school year. While we're talking Atar has fallen asleep on a black and white pouf in the living room. At some point Chava has picked her up and put her to bed. "It's she's amazing how she falls asleep anywhere and it doesn't bother her when I move her to bed. A lot of kids are really sensiti- you know have a hard time sleeping places that aren't their own beds. I'm like that. I where were we? I was yah deciding to leave. By this time I was getting paid for the translation. This is already uh late 1996. About almost two years after J first got found the manuscript. And uhm about a year after Atar and I went spent those months in Sinai. It was three four months. This rare books librarian had really worked on it and found a pretty decent grant and. I mean we wrote the requests together. Looked for for foundations that... but it was basically that she'd managed to convince this foundation actually a couple of them that this is a real an enormous find. She's like a recognized authority. A

318

ELEVENTH VISIT

little. So she persuaded them tha- that it should be revealed along with the translation all at once so it would get a lot of publicity. The university is really counting on getting a lot of I don't know to set up a viewing of it I guess for an entrance fee. You know. And I was working from copies so I could do it travelling. "When I when we went to Sinai I actually simply stopped working on it for a while. It was before it got authenticated and you know recognized. I actually thought at the time that I might find Mickie down there and that uhm maybe that would help authenticate it. And I uh down there I couldn't really work on it. I didn't take a laptop and it wouldn't I wouldn't have had the electricity and facilities to work on one most of the time anyway. Just the sand would have killed it in a week I think. And I didn't have a facsimile yet then. Except the first few pages the restorator was using to uh lobby for it. And it's cheap the

Sinai~

I mean then it was even cheaper and. So I knew I

could stay there for quite a while I wasn't teaching already so we just went. Left. Left everything on hold and went. But to France I even they uh the univ- the fund I uhm explained this might be the source and maybe help with tracing you know some kind of pedigree for the manuscript and stuff. So part of my travel expenses and accommodations were covered. I was kind of dazed. From zero mobility to this continent hopping. It was so sweeping, so strong, so so for me so quick. But I uh I was doing it! ''And at the same time all along I was getting it was strange I was getting less clear about what or who I guess I was looking for. I whether it was still Mickie or the source of the manuscript or or my uh and. "I didn't feel like reading about the place or finding out what what. I decided I'd just go. I kind of took along a little semi-winter clothes and a little a few summer clothes for both for me and Atar, and just didn't pack much so it wouldn't be hell with Atar and schlepping a huge suitcase. I took her cassettes and a walkman because she loves listening and the books she likes uh uh best. She some of the time she'll look at a book that isn't that's not the story she's listening to but she uh sort of fits the story cassette she likes to hear to the pictures she likes anyway. And some of the time she fits the pictures to music. And I took you know some of the stuff she likes best so she'd have a few familiar anchors and. But I basically didn't take a lot of anything. "But I still had a a lot of mental baggage. Images. You know a lot of preconceptions. I mean-France. The French countryside. Uhm vineyards and prehistoric caves and old stone and wood farmhouses and old stone castles

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

319

and. My mental images and expectations they... the reality would bear them out. I mean I knew that. I knew I'd be at least a little disappointed that I wasn't more surprised. More uh ... so I was also looking for those places, those loopholes where I would be. Surprised. Where the little concrete details would go beyond my preconceptions. Would feel real because I hadn't got them out of of movies and tv and magazine ads and I couldn't have guessed they'd be there." At another, later point in our conversation, Chava is saying, "actually, it's barely even a village. St. Pons. Well I mean it's a village but. It it's on the map but depending which map of course but you know on the Michelin road map. Of the area. It's a tiny dot more or less between Montelimar and Aubenas which aren't very big towns either. It's on the uh edge I guess it's still the edge of the Ardeche river basin. I'd never heard of the Ardeche. At first I didn't even know what it was that it was a uh river. I thought it was like a county or a region I don't know I didn't even actually have any specific idea. It could have been a pia- a town you know and. It was just a name that

had nothing stuck on the other end for for me. I asked a couple of friends of mine who are like uhm kind of pretty well traveled in especially in Europe but they'd hadn't heard of it either. Name didn't mean anything to them. It's not that well known it it's a gorgeous area but mostly the tourists there are French or at least European. No Israelis to speak of. Mostly neighbors kind of like from oh Holland or. So right at first I didn't even know what I was looking for on the maps. Whether it would be in the index of towns or like whether to look at the names of mountain ranges or. A little later she says, "Just for I don't know a few hours, or a day I'm not sure how long it was. It was so powerful. It was a little like going into a blank. I hadn't got around to getting a book yet. I it was scary but it it was also like jumping off a bluff I mean with a hang-glider or something. Not knowing where you'll. Really a kind of thrill. I knew a name and knew that was where I was going. Without knowing where what kind of... thing!! I was going to. Just "Then someone told me it was a river area, someone who'd lived in France for as a child and a good part of her life. She hadn't ever been there but she knew there were these bi- spectacular rock formations and high cliffs. That the river was very like a gorge very deep wi- with steep rock walls, really winding. And that it's an area where they grow uhm lavender. Commercially. She said she thought the uh fields would be blooming at about the time I was going to get there.

320

ELEVENTH VISIT

"They were. It was it was so beautiful. Just so beautiful. Atar and I found a spot off one of the side roads under a tree and we'd just sit there for I don't know it maybe for hours. It was above a patch of fields and their color, this purple lavender it was it was like luminescent. Like almost ultraviolet. It looked like the ground was. Like the ground was this deep ultraviolet. Glowing. And the scent of it all over. We'd just sit in the shade and eat great grapes and cheese Atar actually developed a liking for the chevre, the uh goats' cheese they they make there. It's not it's not one of the really heavy ones, it's kind of subtle and gentle. And we'd get a baguette at the bakery in the morning and a round of cheese and take some grapes we kept in the fridge and cold water and just keep on tearing pieces of the bread and breaking off pieces of the cheese. At first she had one of these disposable cameras. You know the cardboard and. She'd look through the lens and choose her picture and she'd lie in the shade and listen to music and. Or she'd putter around in the dirt and collect little bits of colored stone and shells and snails and stuff. "Sometimes she was restless and I couldn't do a thing because she she wanted me to putter with her. Or she'd get itchy and hot and cry and want to go swimming in the uh in the stream or go back to our room. I'd try to find us a place near one of the streams so she could putter in the water too and cool off when she got. Usually there were more people and kids around there but I found one place that was usually quiet enough. And I was working. A lot of the time I was working. On different parts of the translation. And I was trying to get a to kind of put together a base of acquaintances who might be able to help find this guy. Jacques. "And then it turned out that there had there actually had been an ancient book dealer at St. Pons. And in fact it was my landlady who told me. That's I mean that's the point. She uh sh~ she didn't know hardly any English. At first we did a lot of you know gesturing, sign language. But I started remembering some of my French you know my high school and basic stuff. My accent is really really awful. A lot of people i~ in the street or shopkeepers or can't understand me at all. But we Monique and I after a while actually pretty fast we could usually communicate okay in context and. Sometimes I I'd shift to Italian without by mistake and she'd get it fairly often. There th- there's a lot well enough of a similarity. "She liked Atar and she was very kind about... well at first she was actually kind of reserved I guess and proper and worried about messes and damages. But she needed the money and it didn't take too long and she warmed

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

321

up. The first few days were tense. I was trying to control Atar too much I think to uh get her to be quiet. Well quieter. And not to run around too much in the room and the yard and. But at some point, I think we yah we were sitting on this old wooden bench in the sun along one of the outer walls and Monique was doing some hoeing or weeding in the vegetable garden and Atar got up and started getting closer kind of slowly you know. And finally Monique looked up and handed her a fresh little carrot and Atar was so excited and they uh she Monique showed her what she was doing and Atar caught on and started helping. I can't remember she was probably picking up weeds and taking them over to the compost pile or something. It that was a total ice-breaker. She actually started spending a lot of time with Monique. In the garden and the house. Doing whatever she's doing along with her. She can't translate along with me. This is was much more interesting. And I was kind of careful and hesitant I I was afraid it was it would be a nuisance but Monique enjoyed it and told me so. So ... "She's shrugging here and her smile looks a little ashamed or uncomfortable. "Was there something that worried you about it?" "Well it it's this strange feeling. Being in a uh very foreign I mean to me it's very foreign any kind of devout religion with the uh the cross on the uh crucifix on the wall in the living room and pictures of saints you know gilded in the kitchen-and religion worked so intricately into the daily scheme of things and the basic routines. Her rosary, telling her beads and and Atar was fascinated by all this and she uh adored the gilded saints and asked a lot of questions and started crossing herself after Monique did. Maybe that's the most the uh the strongest example but but that's easy relatively I mean to explain to a kid. She believes differently, that kind of stuff. But the uh more subtle things like the importance of of sticking strictly to customs and timetables, this sense of rules of how things are done that are utterly beyond question. Teaching them to Atar I mean she was she's really nice and gentle and all that but there's this authority to the way she uh shows you things. That's how they're to be done. Period. The correct manner. And. No, no and. "And it's all it's really convenient for me because I can just sit at the beautiful old table in my room with the window open and work. And it's gorgeous. And I'm totally taking advantage of this whole thing but I also feel strange about it. Unnerved. Vaguely uh guilty maybe? As if I'm I it's hard to ... as if I don't at all share her views and how she what she believes but I take advantage of her generosity and play along and take care not to offend her.

322

ELEVENTH VISIT

And she, I may be reading things into it but she uh seems sort of so devout and ... kind of... naive? That she doesn't have any sense of my very different views, my different diff- world. It's as if she simply assumes that if I'm nice and honest I can't not see things they way she does. I mean totally accept her uh ... way of see- you know her beliefs va- values. Like even her well not customs but the boundaries like what you simply don't wear or. And I'm not worried about Atar. It's not that. She'll learn she'll it'll be an experience of variety. But for me it feels as if there's something a little a little cynical about it. "I guess these were are the sort of the loopholes. I mean like the patches of reality of of of my personal involvement, my meeting and negotiating with the intricacies of real life in between the preconceptions. "Atar's learned a lot of French. She's she was interested and she kept asking words and and practicing the uh enuncia- pronouncing. She and Monique and I laughed a lot at our I was trying too and Atar was making me maybe more than I would have on my own. It was a game. But she's really good. Sometimes there's this even this kind of reversed roles and she can interpret for me. And Monique was Atar taught her some Hebrew. I mean just words. Just isolated-greetings and stuff. "Anyway, I was asking around-book shops and at the local gendarmerie and. The book shops were all tourist ones. Almost all in French because most of the tourists there are domestic. With just uh a spattering in English and some Dutch and I guess some German. You know light novels and generally guide maps and presents. It got complicated to keep going into them with Atar because she kept wanting some little toy every time. At St. Pons there actually weren't any. I was making the rounds of neighboring larlarger villages. "I had been asking about it about him by name most of the time I I guessed people would know that more than I don't know it just seemed so farfetched. Ancient book dealer. I mean when I saw this village. What on earth would he how could he be doing that there? Who would be ... I don't know. I felt silly asking. Conspicuous. I asked Monique about him too. By name. Pretty early on but she sh- she didn't remember anyone by that name from the village. And I uh didn't say what anything about the ancient books. I think I also had this sense ... I was afrai- it I had had it all along but it got stronger in this actual real little village that maybe the manuscript, maybe there was something you know illegal or dishonest or uhm wrong

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

323

about the way it had had changed hands. Maybe it belonged to someone. Maybe here, from here, from this village or nearby. I it's obvious that it's enormously valuable. How come how could I... it just turned up! And by this time there was I mean the university was already involved and paying and I I couldn't just like give it back or. It wasn't my... I didn't actually have any ownership rights to it. And I was in- involved I was implicated. I'd mostly suppressed this till... I mean after the first little while I forgot to think about it. I'd sort of I got used to the manuscript. I worked with it. The amazement wore off and it just felt kind of natural. But at St. Pons it all came back Amazement and I guess fear. Real fear. Like I suddenly felt I was in over my head. So I I had to sort of feel my way around. Be careful. ''And also of of course yes it haunts me. Of course I'm never totally satisfied uh uhm convinced;' Chava's saying a little later. "One reason I was so preoccupied with finding a source, you know there really there have been cases of very good hoaxes. Archeological or like prehistorical hoaxes. They sound-the word hoax is really misleading here-it sounds like kind of a prank. Fun. But it's it's it's such a manipulation of our minds. Of human knowledge. Of how it's accumulated and constructed." "Is it? Does it have to be a manipulation? Does it have to be of knowledge? Or maybe you really mean only just of science? Like scientific knowledge?" "I don't... you mean uh ... " "I mean, don't you think there's place, a a real need to expose how much knowledge science actually excludes? How many possible ways of theorizing it rules out? Don't you think the uh the sharp, clear distinction between fact and fiction is a fiction itself? That things really aren't that clear cut, and it's-the distinction is-a kind of uhm gate-keeper we'd be better off suspecting? And undermining? At least partly." Chava's quiet here for a relatively long stretch. And on the tape there's a puttering noise from a passing motorbike and some muffled shouts and something being dragged along a pavement. Maybe garbage containers. Then she says, slowly, "And you mean like like what-simply admit let's say that Caterina and her journal are fictions but that we can still build or or gain knowledge out of them? And leave it at that? And then, like what;' she's smiling now, "admit that not only she and the book but that !-because I'm the one who's kind of bringing it into the world, who who's doing the translating-that I'm made up too? And Atar?" "Would it make a whole lot of difference?"

324

ELEVENTH VISIT

"It would to me:' "How? Here you are. Talking ... At the house ... " "But not in the world." "Which one? Who's world? I believe Caterina de Viglionis was actually alive about seven hundred years ago. But maybe the uh funerary inscription is a a forgery. Or maybe it's been misread and it isn't a funerary inscription at all. Or maybe the books that mention it her are uh let's say all of them are based on a single mistaken source. It could happen, couldn't it? So what's left? I mean what is there that's directly factual about her life? And about the text she supposedly wrote? But if it is a fiction, does that make her uh it less alive in your world? In your thinking? Aren't they worth keeping in a in a kind of gray area where they might be fact and they might be fiction and we'll probably never have any way of knowing, but the substance is worth holding onto anyway? "What am I saying? I I'm not saying there's like no physical, real reality. No difference at all between a person who went particular places and lived a particular life and a person who didn't and just imagined it all. Or no difference at all let's say if there if a murder was committed or if it never occurred. But I'm saying that for the most part, much more than we tend to realize, we have no way of knowing real reality, and we we inescapably need fictions to know anything at all. The whole concept of reality as a steady kind of 'outthere' with human-related dimensions is a kind of fiction we've constructed and live with and need. And I think using fictions is really-no I won't say 'really' even though I'm tempted-I think using fictions is part of our way of finding our way around and surviving. And I think we're better off aware of that. Mindful of it. "So so let's just assume Caterina was alive but maybe the text wasn't isn't true or real. And maybe it is but you're not. Or Atar. Not real living bodies in the world. You'd still be real parts of this house, real text, real images, real enough to warp and test the mental mechanics of telling real and unreal apart. That is, for whoever's visiting here, reading. "What I I mean is that the uh set of rules and the methods we use for making what we think of as legitimate knowledge are are so restrictive. They're designed you know to get at particular kinds of knowledge and to legitimize them and to shut out other kinds. And what's more, to place the knowledge they get at the service of uh particular groups of people. To to serve dominant parts of society. The parts that have the means to invest in

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

325

learning and applying these rules for collecting knowledge. And these rules they don't necessarily get at facts. Just at what we've we're used to thinking of as facts. They get at what our knowledge-building customs say are facts. "So don't you I mean think we need to take a a seriously critical look at those customs, uh rules and restrictions? At at even the most basic. .. one like the fact-fiction distinction? I'm thinking of a kind of learning that locates these sort of windsocks in what we think of as reality, and moves through to another... plane. That's a lot more careful about what we throw out. And seriously bothered about the automatic assumptions we make about ... reality. I mean let's open up some big cracks in it, so we can get a look at these assumptions, at what they are." In her book, The Science Question in Feminism, published by Cornell University Press in 1986, on page 245, Sandra Harding is saying, "There is another world hidden from the consciousness of science-the world of emotions, feelings, political values; of the individual and collective unconscious; of social and historical particularity explored by novels, drama, poetry, music and art-within which we all live most of our waking and dreaming hours under constant threat of its increasing infusion by scientific rationality." She believes we need "to reveal the relationship between these two worlds-how each shapes and forms the other." I believe many facts are fictions. Identified and given form by stories we take on trust, on authority. Or naturalized by habits we copy and learn before we know. I don't think we can eliminate them-we need them before we know. I don't think we should try. But we can carefully, constantly re-tune our ways of asking, of looking, of fact- finding. And carefully, constantly reexamine what we use the border for, why we hold it all-important. Which means attentive sensitizing, which requires taking risks. Walking fine lines through factfiction. Staying suspended in insecurity zones, semi-detached from the hard-and-fast. Studying how to de-automatize reactions, how to respect and retain fictional facts, factual fictions. Chava seems too deeply absorbed in her own line of thought to follow mine. Possibly too troubled. Uncharacteristically, she has gone on talking almost all this time, as if I wasn't doing any talking, wasn't actually uttering any sounds or voicing any ideas. Our two voices run together on the tape, a single voice, a compound, complicated tangle. Among other things, she's been saying, "I well ... anyway I'm so totally uhm invested in in the manuscript. It would I can't really imagine what... if it turned out ugh!" At this point her

326

ELEVENTH VISIT

voice is muffled and even harder to decipher through our double speech. She's covering her eyes with her hands and talking through her fingers as if she can't bear to look at something. "But about the other uh if it has a rightful owner, how it was gotten I mean all that is based on the assumption that it's real. Otherwise terms like 'rightful' and 'owner' they just become void:' "See that's what I part of what I'm saying about science. Facts are about property rights. I mean that's not all they are, but but seriously." "I mean I know it's real actually. There's no seems to be no doubt about its age. Chemistry, ink, the types of marks left by particular kinds of pen nubs used during particular periods, the characters. All of them are thirteenth century. But what I mean uh that I can I can never be sure that it's totally legitimate. So on the one hand discovering problems with its you know its procurement-! saw that as uh as exciting, as as evidence of the value I knew I know it has. Even sort of half-hoped for it. But on the other it I uh was petrified. "It's all so mixed up with Mickie too. Where he is. Whether he he wants to be 'found' at all. Whether I guess it's his right to disappear. Whether wheth- maybe I might be kind of butting into... none of my business. Just because he left me a curious present. And because he's a a friend. I mean was. He at least he was. An important one. And because I'm curious. But also whether I want to find him. Why. Do I need to? What do I want from it? Uhm uh what do I exp- want from the uh the whole I don't know the journey:' "I just don't feel that I'm a person, I'm the type of person that will ever be confined;' Bashan is saying near the end of our conversation, "to one one destiny or one destination or whatnot. I see myself moving and expanding. All around. It still seems to me that there's a lot of the world that I still haven't seen yet." She laughs her beautiful big laugh here. She hasn't been at the house for a while. Since a few visits ago. "You know. You had a filling of. And okay and if you're going to be a person that is thinking of even being in this manner, first thing you gotta know is, you got to know about people. You've got to know what is how to relate and how to survive among people. No matter where you go, who you are, where you are, you still have to learn how to relate with people. And with me being out here I have learned this." She means being beyond the boundaries and rules of the community, her Black Hebrew community. "I mean I have had very great you know teachings and learnings on how to deal and relate with people. So therefore I can

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

327

always uh move along. And had I continued just being confined in the community I don't think I would have gotten this. "Look how long it took me. I had to go step by step you know. First I had to start off sleeping on the floor you know at the corner of some of somebody else's bed. Then I went from there to sharing a room and then from sharing a room to sharing an apartment then from sharing an apartment I finally got to where I could have my own apartment. You know later on. But it takes time. Sure. And then hey like I say it is a sacrifice. You have to start off making ... " And after a while she's saying, "You want to you want to change up the system so you so somebody got to go and take the ... be it:' She's using 'it' like it's used by kids in America to play hide and seek-designating the child singled out as the seeker. 'It' as in, 'Who's it? Not me not me.' 'Me! I wannabe it: And Bashan is saying, "I was the first one to get a outside job. Yeah. Definitely. I was the first one in in Dimona. Sure. Went on and got the job. Matter of fact I was sneaking going to work. Women weren't supposed to be working." Her voice shifts into a mimic of a hoarse, elderly, nasty one. '"What do you want to work for? Women don't need to be working. You need to just stay home and just take care of the family.' Says, 'Are you serious?' Yep. So I was so definitely you know. Right. And then oh I mean this is like in everything, everything. Even when I started working... And all of the old jobs that I had back then back in Dimona now other women now other sisters are working them now. Oh yes, I say, 'I'm really glad to see you guys is really coming on; you know. So and then it is just like hey... And I thought about driving and I says I think I'm gonna have to do it. I'm gonna have to go on in uh break the break the break the barrier. I'm gonna have to go on and drive. Just pulling up one day with my car screeeeech. "You have like what you call the officials. Right. And so it was the officials that you didn't inform, you didn't let know that you were working. And so for a couple hours of the day you'd just make yourself scarce. Right round it was in the shikun," the low-income housing project, "where I was staying, right around I would just have to step out of my villa and shouuup zip up somebody else's. I did this for a while. By this time they knew that I was working. Somebody else went to one of the officials and asked they wanted to work you know and they says, 'Oh no, you know women don't work. We don't allow the sis- the sisters don't even ... ''Well Bash an is working.' 'Oh yeh she is? Now what do you mean she's working?' 'Oh yes, she works for them lady over there.' 'Oh yeah? Uh-huh. Okay.' They might have came to

328

ELEVENTH VISIT

me and you know yah I think they did, say, 'Hey well you know you're not supposed to be working da-da-da,' and then I might have gave them some lip back you know. 'Well hey, I don't see you dropping no dimes or nothing if you don't want me to work okay then hey I've got to have this blessing.' At this point I was known to be outspoken whatnot. So this was how I was branded." She's whispering here. "It was at this point that they knew that I was an outspoken person and did whatever... And then I'm gonna think well did this happen during the time that my husband was in prison so it wasn't nobody to take their complaint to. 'Cause if my husband had been home they could have went and told him that he could say, 'Hey stop it.' I would have been backed up against the wall. But this was at a point where uh ... or was I married then? I don't know but they couldn't uh ... A husband would have demanded that I stop working and I would have had to. Sure." I guess maybe it's time to talk about the other murder. You've already read there were more than one. Quite a while ago near the end of the sixth visit. And then again on the eighth visit. Are more than one, that is. They don't go away. There are two murders in our house, two murders in our talking. Two that we know of so far. You've already read the first one. On the eighth visit. It was Aura's uncle, Hannah's brother. In the Sinai. Near Tarabin. Found in the vicinity of his camper, in the sand. It's probably time to tell the second. For one thing, it was another desert murder. Maybe all murders are. In that sense of desert. Of belonging to a place beyond the spoken and the known. But mainly, it simply needs to be acknowledged and accounted for. We can't pretend it isn't there, even if it's off to one side, off at the edge of our field of vision, set down somewhere on the cement tile floor, moved further into a corner by an unintending foot. We can't pretend we didn't stumble onto murder in our talking. In our living. We did. There it is. Ignoring it probably gives it more stature than telling it. Raises this unmentionable, unmappable mass, dark and ominous. Prohibited secret. Dangerous depth. Implies that it could erupt and devour and destroy. Otherwise why hide it? No question, murder is ominous. And it's hard fact. Probably one of the hardest. But none of us committed this one, that should be stated outright. Neither this one nor the other one. They did affect and involve us, though. Some of us more, some less. You know-matter of life and death tales affect us. Almost all of us. Even at their outer perimeter. Even at the reading edge. At the edge where facts or fiction are getting told and read in a trail of text spreading across page.

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

329

Murder affects the quality of reading. How it feels. It can attach unexpected resonance to words or phrases which are now linked with death, with a death, with the completion of a life. It can make you anticipate a certain level of drama in the coming events. It can focus your fascination on the crucial and basic who-done-it question. And the why, and how, and when questions. All related, of course. It can change your pace, quicken reading, make it more of an info-search. Murder can heighten desire-your pressing drive to have, to get, to know. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan calls it, "the intrusive, voyeuristic aspect of novel-reading; the pleasure of mastery and possession over the 'passive' text in reading:' On page 76 of her book, Real and Imagined Women, which you've already read pieces of, on the sixth visit. She's talking about rape, not murder. She's also talking about stories about rape. About the "narrative's very trajectory, its movement towards closure which traverses the feminine as object, obstacle, or space." She says, "it is these inscriptions of desire/ guilt in narrativity itself which are negotiated in a feminist reconstruction of the female subject of rape." She's talking about texts that reconstitute an active female subject, an agent who isn't limited to victimhood. She's describing tales that work against what she calls the "narrative determinism" of stories about rape. They do this in quite a few ways, she says on the next page. For instance, by "structuring a post-rape narrative that traces her strategies of survival instead of a rape-centered narrative." Or instead of a murder-centered one. These talkings, our narratives, don't privilege the ominous suspense, the murderous violence around us that threatens our moving round the world. They're talkings of women who move around it a lot, regardless, though not careless. Murder, rape, while acknowledged, are not deferred to in a structure of suspense. We don't go to the trouble of hiding them way back on some top shelf, or under one of the dozen or so mattresses, in this talking house, to then be sniffed out and discovered, treasure-like. They're kept aired and visible and part of the regular furniture, gradually fading in the strong sunlight we let in through the windows. We can't afford to lose sight of them. But they're not centerpieces either. Or the only important players in long scary tales told into the night while we huddle together with all the doors locked. They're matters-of-fact, matters-of-anger and fight, matters of figuring out what now, more than figuring out who and how, matters of everyday living more than matters of life-and-death. That is, if and when they're relevant.

330

ELEVENTH VISIT

"It was uh it was a murder. That happened down in the com- in the

community, right." Bas han is saying. She means the community of Black Hebrews in the desert town of Dimona. ''And uh he took the uh he he took the rap for it." She means her ex-husband, whose name is Hagadol, which means 'the great.' "It wasn't him?" "Well of course not. We come to find out later that it wasn't he just took he just took the rap. You know he took the he he he did time for it but he didn't do it." "Someone from the community died?" "Yah, yah, yah, yah." "It was a murder inside the community?" "Not murder, it was a killing. It's a difference between murder and killing. Could even say it was a accident. You know, uh whatnot. But it was a fight that took place right and the guy got hit. So somebody had to say, 'Hey I did it. I that... "' "Why did he take the rap?" "Well it was 'cause somebody had to go and they felt that you know whoever went had to be somebody strong. Somebody that would be able to stand if maybe if they he might have to do five or ten years." "Your leaders decided who was going to take the rap?" "No they just a - no they asked for a volunteer. And he volunteered." "Did they know who had done the killing?" "I think so, yeah. But they knew I mean so instead of uh it was about three or four or five peo- people in- involved in it right. So they just asked for one man to take the re- to take the responsibility. Of it you know just to uh say, 'Okay I did it and I'll serve.' They had already did time and everything tor it. The four or five people that were involved. It was about what it was five people in- involved in it right and they'd all been in prison what almost a year something or other, pending the trial and everything. So one one person would take the rap for it, you know, take responsibility for the killing. So he did and uh so he wound up doing you know the time for it. He only got about two years for the whole thing because it came out it was uh manslaughter one two or three wha- however they the terms, so he only had to do about two years of jail.'' She says, "He went in and came out a total type of different person. I don't know if it was prison that did it." Her laugh here sounds ironic. "But

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

331

when he came out he didn't seem to be you know he wasn't uh he didn't seem the same. It went on life as usual. I was the only one that seen the difference. I was the only one. A few others seen it too. You know but of course you didn't... you didn't say nothing. You talked about it pa-ta-ta-ta under the table small small small talk but uh no. Didn't nobody else. He was like uh he was given Kavod." She's using the Hebrew term for respect, great honor. "You know he was a man of Kavod. Right. 'Cause he had did taaaaiiime. And so hey and then I'm going to-? Oh heavens no! So you had to just zip zip lip." It was a secret. Who the killer was, who he wasn't but could take it-take

prison, take the rap, how he came out changed, how he couldn't really take it, how he didn't, how it damaged and changed him. Deeply. Irreversible. Unmentionable. "It was a Kavod because he had took on the he had took on the sacrifice,

he had took on the responsibility. You know, he took the rap." "Is that does that happen in the US too? Is it like a kind of community code of conduct?" "Well, it's some type of honor for uh if you are like Black Hebrew and if then because usually what they're getting you on, the charge that they're getting you on is a system charge. 'Cause I don't think they usually do too much, they don't do hard crimes. Like robbery and killing. They do like what isbasically the white collar type crime. And if they get oh hey, yah they are given that type whatnot... "OfKavod? Because it's anti-system crimes? "Like fraud, embezzlement. You know. Forgery. Oh forgery's very very popular. Sure. Getting back what you felt is owed to you." He was changed and she was his wife. Bashan and I have talked a lot about marriage. Long before she came to give me her stories to put on tape and her words to make a talking house. It would happen while she was cleaning the kitchen sink and I was making both of us some herbal tea, taking a break from writing a school curriculum, or some prose. Stopped in mid-chore, with the sponge suspended, wrung over and over into the sink, with a spoonful of honey plunged into a mug, getting stirred exhaustively. We'd be meaning to get straight back to what we were supposed to be doing, knowing at the same time that our really important work was talking, letting it snare us for long stretching minutes, standing there all the while as if about to interrupt it, signaling mainly to ourselves that we weren't shirking our duties, that we knew them, that we were going to faithfully perform them, any minute now.

332

ELEVENTH VISIT

In Bashan's community it's called the divine marriage and it allows several wives. She's said the wives can sometimes support each other, watching over each other's children, splitting housework, putting up an opposition to a husband's unreasonable rulings, gradually phasing one of them out of sex she doesn't want. But that isn't how it works all the time or probably even most of it. A lot of the time there are tensions, competition. In Liberia she'd had a partner. The father of her two youngest children. A musician from outside the community. Then, in Israel, she missed him but didn't answer when he wrote her from Europe, trying to make his way here. She was instructed not to. "I think when he when he was in Europe he was having a visa problem or something, right. And he needed ... oh I think during that that period back in the seventies before you could enter to another country you got to have uh uh the address or the stability as to where you're going or whatnot. You couldn't just move in like that. 'Specially all coming to Israel during that time. Yeah cause this is just right after this is in seventy. There was that uh six day uh you know that war sort of thing. Anyway they wouldn't let him in. So this is when I think he had written or telegraphed sent me a telegraph or something say, 'Hey but I need clarifications from this side; you know. And this is when I went to inquire and they;' meaning the community officials, "told me, 'Huh are you serious? Huh? You think we're gonna let him in? No! No way!' Their doctr- their teachings it was they was very stupid then, they wasn't uh uh prepared they you know a outsider was considered if somebody wasn't born in wasn't born in America." We're both laughing here. Hard. "Sure. And when I look up now and I see all of the outsiders that are insiders now, and I said, 'Boy oh boy. Who would have you know who would believe the record: So I did I cut him loose and then at first I went on this defiant thing hey I wouldn't marry I wasn't planning I didn't want to marry nobody didn't want nobody to talk to me. Hey, I just rather just stay all my life uh just with me and my kids. So that's what I thought I would be able to do but then you know till I met Hagadol right. And I think by him being in prison with my brother in laws you know he was able to get an inside scoop on me so this was how the relationship got started. And like I say I don't think the marriage is based on love or anything like that because I still had emotional feelings for Ketura's and Kimuel's abba and I was I only married him out of you know duty. To the children. And the uh community. I was his second wife:' The community didn't allow divorce. For many years. Then Bashan was

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

333

one of a group who led a campaign to legalize it. "And this is what happened like in the marriage. We had to struggle through it god we had to find things out. It was it's like it's based on our mistakes. And then like out of the group out of my group that I had that I got you know that did finally manage that went on and gave the release the di- divorce to, it was what about fif- I wasn't the only woman it was about fifteen." And June says, describing her three-way marriage, "I just uh I didn't leave my husband altogether but I went off with Randolf into the desert, trying to see that he would survive, look after him, and he gave readings. Oh we lov- we loved the desert. He was living ... you see this was when my husband was finishing his studies and then teaching in the Hollywood and Los Angeles area. And we love the desert. I'd like any desert very much and the wind in the desert and the plants and oh it's marvelous. And so I took my daughter with me sometimes. But I really became extremely interested in the possibility of trying to have two husbands." Of trying to be a living arrangement for which she, they, had no map, no precedent model to follow. Where else but the desert, out beyond what was mappable. "The Vast thrills, as well as terrifies," Oliver is saying on page 16 of The Island of the Colorblind. Just after he's described, "the trackless vastness of the Pacific. No ships, no planes, no land, no boundaries, nothing-only the limitless blue of sky and ocean, fusing at times into a single blue bowl. This featureless, cloudless vastness is a great relief, and reverie-inducing-but, like sensory deprivation, somewhat terrifying, too." A place of total even if local liberation. Even if there's actually no way, and in fact maybe no need, to stay. Truth is, there are places of happiness like that. "I was never afraid to go anywhere around Laguna when I was growing up," Leslie Marmon Silko says on page 16 of Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit. A little later she says, "Up in the hills with the birds and animals and my horse, I felt absolutely safe; I knew outsiders and kidnappers stayed out of the hills. I spent hours and hours alone in the hills southeast of Laguna:' On page 17 she says, "Grandma Lily took me and my sisters on walks to the river, and as we got older, she took us to hike in the mesas and sandhills as she had done with my father and his brothers when they were young. She wasn't afraid of anything in the hills; she was the horsewoman who would ride any bronco, and she wore a woman's dress and women's shoes only three times a year." I don't even know the meaning of 'mesa.' I fill the word with a reddish tan. Elevate it above surroundings, make it high and

334

ELEVENTH VISIT

level, a plateau. Read it as all of these yet persistently vague. Imagined only roughly from the context of sentences and stories. Never sought in a dictionary or encyclopedia because sufficiently deciphered to understand the surrounding text. Therefore left partly vacant, unvisualized, unspecified. Never visited by my feet. Or my eyes. On the next page Leslie says, "I still trust the land-the rocks, the shrubs, the cactus, the rattlesnakes, and mountain lions-far more than I trust human beings. I never feel lonely when I walk alone in the hills: I am surrounded with living beings, with these sandstone ridges and lava rock hills full of life." So there are places of happiness like that. For example there's the sea. I'm not willing to live really far from it for very long. And every time I go down to it (and it's always down), it makes me happy. That is, ifi give it time. I ascribe it, my happiness, mainly, to rhythm. To the water's beat superimposed on the background of stable, muffled infra-voiced thunder. Something in my physiology that needs that beat for its fine-tuning. Maybe needs that particular kind of light too, and changing sights of the water and the cut of its smell. And sometimes the sand, though I can often do without sand. I can't do without sea. Once a week or month or whenever I need it to, it undoes a knot that nothing else does in me. Something about the it that makes me different in it. The distinct pressures and temperatures against various locations on my skin. Fitting me into the body of water, making me part, contiguous with it. Not the usual discrete unit moving through, and around, and between, other discrete units. No fear in the water of bumping or grazing. No need to account for my extremities. Afloat. Partly, I'm describing homogeneity. I don't have to navigate my way. Don't have to constantly swiftly readjust my mental map and mental plan of what turn I'm going to take, what I need to circumvent, which angle I'm going to proceed at, what just moved into my field of vision from the left and how to deal. Partly, I'm describing expanse. An option of continuous unbroken liquid movement. The distances I cover through it, through this element, the sea, have no way of being significant. Relative to its body, that is. Not, that is, significant enough to need the navigation that's needed for actually getting somewhere across it. Across the sea. And this is why, in my only diffusely limited space, I can acquire a sense of almost pure freedom. Swimming.

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

335

Straight ahead. The only constraint-the elemental opposition of shore line and the fluid body I'm crossing. Swimming to the limits of my fear. Won't matter which wake I make, which angle to the shore line, where I land again (I can always walk back along the beach). Incompatible combination of unlimited expanse at my disposal and limited capacity to dispose of it. Making my movement feel totally light and suspended. Sense-rich but sense-free. "Hah! The sea! I mean, you, huh! It was such an emotional thing. And we're going down now to see this ... empty docks. The empty part, this empty part. And I suddenly thought, 'Wow! Gosh! So many times.' You know. 'On this boat.' I once went on a Dutch boat. I can't remember, four, five, six times," Miriam is saying. I was on the same line. Leaving from the same dock. The Kenya Castle. I've still got the passenger list and a dining room card with the pre-arranged seating. On quality paper. It's barely even yellow. We had flown from Israel to Johannesburg via Nairobi. Where I caught my first sight of black people. And my first child's understanding of modern slavery. As you've read on the sixth visit. Took the long-whistling night-train to the Cape. And boarded the boat to England. At the same docks, in the same years when Miriam was coming and going. Chanting a magic rhythm, speaking a magnetic spell, she has been saying, "I went to see when I was in Capetown now where the Union Castle boat used to come. It was such an emotional experience for me because those boats ... Either you were going or you were going to see somebody off and if you didn't go and see somebody off you still went down. It was an event. Friday afternoon four o'clock. Union Castle line boat. And the boats used to be, just before four, it was packed with people. Everybody used to be sending presents. It was the ... whatcha call it... crystallized fruit. Crystallized fruit was one of the things, in these cellophane packets from Marx? Brothers in Capetown. You know. And suddenly it was just before four and the gongs used to start going off. And the excitement! The excitement! And then the people had to get all the pea- the the the visitors had to get off and you stood overlooking slowly, you know, and you started throwing down these paper streamers to your friends. And suddenly they played 'God Save the Queen' or the King and the band was playing and the boat was slowwwly you know slowly slowly eventually the streamers would break. .. and there used to be a man who used to, who was a mimic of Charlie Chaplin who used to perform at the boat. He used to perform and these streamers would break and there was a pilot ship

336

ELEVENTH VISIT

that used to take the boat out. Take the boat out the boat turned rouuunnnd and;' some of her words are blurred here, "see the last of Table Mountain, Capetown. And then the dolphins came, you know:' She's using a wave rhythm, undulating her voice, stretching out some of the words like 'dolphins' to ride the waves. "Hah! The sea! I mean, you, huh! It was such an emotional thing. And we're going down now to see this empty docks. The empty part, this empty part. And I suddenly thought, 'Wow! Gosh! So many times:" As very small girl-children in Tel-Aviv, my sister and I, grave, excited, riding in a rare, awesome car, sang out in unison at the top of every hill, "I see the sea, I see the sea." Then we went away for years and kept on singing out the top of every hill, in the new, landlocked homeplace. "I see the sea, I see the sea." Singing in the Hebrew we'd already lost save this chant of love. Believing, almost believing, fighting hard to believe, a split second before the crest, that maybe this time we would. When we got back to Tel-Aviv trees and buildings had grown tall. And it wasn't waiting anymore at the tops of the hills. Still, to this day, for almost every hill, I play that chant in my chest, in my brain. Staring out of the harbor creepsmooth sheets of shallow water kaleidoscoping colors sunset-rejects leftover liquid light-blugraylilac running expanse of sand deepening distance into dark. through the straights of Singapore and Malacca to the islands of Nicobar and Ceylon, cross the south China Sea to Sumatra, cross the breadth of the Indian Ocean, down the Indian coast till Hormuz. Only eighteen survived of six-hundred set off in fourteen ships. And on overland through the desert, into the orchards,

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

337

on to Tabriz, all the way carrying the gold tablets so inscribed by Kublai Khan, the golden piasters boding both curse and awful penalty "It is a widow we have stayed with who has told us a map," it says on the

ninety-fifth page of the Book of Balkacz. "She has given the names of a necklace of places ending in the forests of my amah's people. They are not those of the dynasty, she has said. She does not know the names of the dynasty. The new names decreed and used by the new rulers. The ones she possesses are old. Unknown to the new hordes who have come to live along the route by decree of the dynasty. Forgotten and lost by most all of the grandchildren of those who long ago lived and traveled the route to the forests of my amah's people. Finding those who recognize the names, we will be finding safe informants and safe places to eat and sleep. She has said this. "She does not know the places. She has traveled to none. Hers is a service household, assigned the production of ropes, to be made of fibers from the gathered desert leaf. Twice a year collected by the dynasty. She and her husband before his death and her mother and father before theirs, rope-makers. Gatherers of fiber leaves, travellers in the nearby desert. Never beyond. "Yet before the command to service in this desert town, which she will not name for its too many names too frequently given anew by new rulers, her father's household was of the wall-builders of the Chin. Her father's grandfather a wall-builder for the dynasty of Chin. Living and building along the north wall, in a province before the high grasslands and beyond them the mountain forests. Pouring and packing earth in pressed layers, hard and high. Facing it with timber or stone. And later the decree came and her father's grandmother traveled south, with husband and family, from the north wall of Chin to this desert town. To craft rope and inhabit. This was the dynasty decree to inhabit empty cities, vanquished, massacred and exiled by the founders of the Yuan dynasty, the first of the warrior Khans. "They traveled slowly the necklace of names, she has said, the widow, leaving three of her father's grandmother's children at three of the named places in the necklace, buried along their way. They would later recite the place names, she and her husband and her two living children, to remember the dead ones. This is the necklace recited and remembered by her father and family, which now she has told to us.

338

ELEVENTH VISIT

"As recited by her father it was a four year travel. At the first place name the family requested residence. There was a town wall in construction and her father's grandfather petitioned the governor's master builder. But he could not recant the decree of the Khan. And so it was that they moved from this place name to the next. At the second name they settled outside the town. They contrived a movable shelter, an abode of skins stretched between posts and stones. They gathered and sold wild garlic and chamomile, hoping to avoid both the census and the decree. Often moving their shelter, they were missed by one census and they stayed on. After a year, she has said, as recited in her father's family, the administrator of the funeral rites of the first dead child, sought to enter her death in the regional ledgers. Seeking the family entry, he discovered its absence. The governor was notified. Soldiers were sent. To enforce the decree of the dynasty. Her father's grandfather and grandmother and children were digging garlic almost half a day's distance from their shelter. The soldiers missed them and destroyed and burned the shelter and all that was around it. The family fled. "From then on, she has repeated from the family chant, her father's grandfather became resigned to fulfilling the decree, and moved steadily on, taking his family. In rhythm with the seasons, with obtainable food, with the illnesses of children. Slowly. Unbearably abandoning burial sites. "The widow has told us all of this in a tongue related to that of my amah, sufficiently close for me to understand it and for Balkacz to partly follow it, the tongue of a people who once lived immediately south of the northern grasslands. Spoken in her family though she knows too the speech of the desert town. Spoken as well by other households of the town, descendants all, of the wall-builders decreed to service in this town. She has told us, the widow, to follow backwards her necklace of names till we come to the ancient wall of the dynasty of Chin built to ward off the Tartar riders of horses. It is beyond the Kerulen River and the Lake of Hu-Lun-Ch'ih. In the lifetime

of her father's grandfather, to the north and beyond those walls, she has said, was the place of the people of my amah. Beyond the high grasslands, in the forests of the high ranges, north of the great desert. "I am tired. And I am uninterested. In my tiredness I have grown to ache for my young sister's voice and the sound of her running strides along the corridor. I have lately been conjuring up the smells of the kitchen in Tabriz, as I kneaded my mother's loaves there by morning. I have enough now of leaving. I repeat almost incessantly my chant, the chant of my princess. No

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

339

longer directing my longing to the faraway places it names, places I have not yet seen or traveled, but rather itself, its sound, its beat, become sites familiar beloved accustomed. Sounds of home. J have no wish now of leaving. I have said this to Balkacz and he has listened. He has not yet answered. I have told him that I believe the people of my amah to be destroyed and decreed by the dynasty:' Writing about the Mongols, Luc says-on page 189 of Imperial Nomads: A History of Central Asia soo-Isoo, "Warfare between unrelated clans was a common occurrence, but so was warfare between related clans, that is those claiming a common bone or yosun. If it belonged to the same yosun, it became a vassal of the victor; if it was outside the yosun, it was reduced to slave status." The Book of Balkacz, page ninety-seven, "I have told Balkacz that I believe I have too little to bring that could heal this despair. Or perhaps I believe that meeting it-this despair of the people of my dearly loved one-I might meet the devastation of my health and my healing. Some of both, for they are one, I have passed on to him. "I can be as safe here as any place where I arrest my motion. The safety I seek in movement is diminished by my exhaustion and my disinterest. I had wished the preservation of my healing and my seed beds. The latter I recorded on hem and hand and legs. But we have left far behind us the travel of seasonal cycles. Many seed beds lie unharvested behind us. Their records tearing at the edges of my shift, fading along my calves and arms. And upon them, for need of space to write, new ones are now recorded. The new ones now fading themselves, indistinguishable, in parts, from the old. The preservation of my handiwork is lessened by weariness. That of my seedbeds annulled by distance and fading. "There is healing work here as elsewhere. I have said I will remain with this widow in her house. Helping her gather the desert leaves and manufacture rope. Cultivating my seeds in desert pockets, with the collected dew to sprout and grow them. At sites found and memorized in the near desert where she gathers leaves. Offering my handiwork to her neighbors. Asking her accompaniment in treatments so I shall not be alone and suspect in my touching. Perhaps in time I will wish again to wander. This I have said to Balkacz. Perhaps in time to follow backwards her map of names to its end in the high forests. To the past people of my amah. Not now. Perhaps never. My belief now is that not at all. That not ever will I wish or choose to travel to

340

ELEVENTH VISIT

the high forests north of the wall of the Chin, beyond the mountain grasslands. I do not believe I have anything to seek or offer there." On page ninety-nine, Caterina says, "He has said that he will go. I have asked him, 'So your home will again be surprised by your return. Disproven-its constant expecting that you will not.' But he has said that indeed he will not, proving right his home's expecting. He will not travel home. Not now. Not westwards. He has said that he himself, alone, will follow backwards the necklace of names if it is my wish to stop leaving. I asked him to what end. He said, 'I have been given a map. A gift. An offer to cross the borders of my knowing. An aid for moving through the desert of that which I could not know or find how to learn. This is the offer that has been given me. I will travel it: "'And your home?' I ask him again. "'It is with me; he has said. 'And also it waits. They wait. And they do not wait; he answers again. 'They travel their lives: '"Mine I will travel in the desert town. Beyond it if I wish it in my future. But not to the northern high forests. I believe my amah mistaken in asking me that. Or perhaps pretending. I believe she may have not meant it truly. I believe it was asked as a crossroads-for me to arrive at and decide. My own desert to enter, crossing myself the borders of what I have been told and taught. Going the direction in which I have not been told to go: "'You wear the seed pods of healers. For as far as these are recognized they will help protect your hands. You are as tall and broad as myself. Taller and broader than many men of these places, though their sinewy smallness is strong. Your short-shaven hair-you know well-is strange, unknown. To many-awesome. To some-an affront, of which ones you should beware. You have learned to collect and travel maps. I believe you will be safe. But be cautious.' "'You have learnt the signs of my language. You have practiced their use for remembering. You now know how to read them, how to take for your own that which was stored in them by others, or that which you have stored by your own writing. You have shared my sowing and recording and harvesting and preparing oils and salves. You have seen my healing. As I first saw it at the hands of my amah. You can use yours. You will learn the healing of your own hands through such use. If you find the people of those who once carried whole the healing, you may bring them these fragments of broken lines of knowledge. If you can find the way to fit together these fragments and the

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

341

ones preserved by the broken people, you may mend parts of the healing knowledge, parts of the people. You can meet their pain undevastated for you come not of their bone." Imperial Nomads, page 189, "In one sense, the bone constituted a blood lineage, but in time it lost its precise meaning, so that several clans could claim to belong to the same bone without being directly related to each other." The Book of Balkacz, one-hundred, near the bottom, '"I believe you will be safe though you cross a desert. I will miss our companionship. That which you wish perhaps to escape. We too have been a home for these seasons of travel, become to one another steady, staying sites. To each learn and adjust to. Gradually familiar in our habits and ways-of seeking shelter for a night, of finding food, of cooking, of eating, of speaking or silence, of bodily needs and reliefs. Missing this as I miss my beloved amah and kitchen and sister, I will for the first time be travelling a desert. Vast wonderful fearful.' "We did not embrace," Caterina says at the end of this section. On the next page she says, "I have agreed and so it is the other two he has taken, leaving me only the stallion. The stallion which he wrongly said I would come to know and ride and I have not." "So he left a couple of years ago, he hadn't been around for uh let's see;' Chava says, "and she wasn't sure about his name. I can't remember how we started in on the subject. I it I don't remember. Somehow suddenly in our conversation one day she said something about ancient books. Monique. She loved looking at them or something. It's possible we were talking about the gilded saints on the walls and. Atar used to ask about them a lot. Who they were, 'Tell me the story of St. Etienne, of St. Francis, of St. Pons. Tell me again, tell me the story.' Monique used to tell her bedtime stories about saints." Chava pauses here for awhile. Then she giggles almost to herself and it gets uncontrollable, pretty fast. Till it turns into a really strong laugh, an infectious one, and I'm laughing too and we both have to wipe our eyes before we go on. "Anyway maybe Monique was talking about how they looked in the illustrations of ancient manuscripts. I think that might have been it and I asked wheth- she had seen any or she'd just heard what they were like or seen uh pictures. And what I do remember is she said she loved old ancient manuscripts, they fascinated her their colors and inks and writing and the quill strokes and the tiny blots their imperfections. Some of them you could only see through a magnifying glass, she said. But still, how that could affect read-

342

ELEVENTH VISIT

ing uh understanding them and she talked about their smell. And about restoring them and how that had to b - be careful well it always changed them she said but to try to get at the original form, to understand what that was and change back to it. A process of cleaning away time, she said. If it was successful. And I uh I asked where she'd seen any. I mean she was talking about details. Not you know sh- she was describing material physical details like you have to have been around real manuscripts to have an acquaintance with that kind of and. "She said she had done his cooking. Some of it at his house and some she would bring in from hers. It wasn't uh she said it wasn't steady. He was away a lot of the time and he'd usually drop in on Saturdays and ask for the next week or the uh the next two or three weeks. Or sometimes just a couple of days. Just for himself. And uhm sometimes he'd alternate her cooking with other a couple of other women from the village. It wasn't a fixed contract or anything. But she said he seemed to like hers best. Mostly it was her. And also kitchen gardening. That was steadier that was actually steady I guess. He didn't need to be there. She had free access to the kitchen garden and the tool shed. And their uhni understanding wa- was that when he wasn't there she would take home anything that was ripe and preserve it for him if it was preservable and and use some of it for herself. She's a wonderful food gardener. I learned uh an enormous amount from her. Even though the climate there is different and some of the stuff just doesn't and. But just the way she looks at plants and knows how what they need to keep on developing. "She said there were never guests except one time a lot of about twentyfive people for a luncheon and then she got extra help from her neighbor's daughter and son. And very occasionally she said another person for dinner. She called him Monsieur Pelliot. That's what she knew that was the name she knew him by. She wasn't sure about the first name because she'd never had occasion she said you know. But she remembered vaguely Jean Jacques she thought. Maybe from an envelop or something like that. I asked about Perez and it didn't it didn't ring a bell or anything. She'd never heard it. She was sure. She uh sh- there wasn't any she couldn't offer any explanation for the discrepancy. "Sometimes she served him. That was he used to ask her to bring in the plate. He left the menu up to her and. He was he was working and he didn't want to be bothered with planning it or serving himself. And she said she'd usually be finishing up at his house or she'd uhm just come over with the

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

343

pots and greens. She said then she'd uh bring a plate into the study and sometimes there were manus- well she just generally referred to them as ancient manuscripts or ancient books. They were open on one of the desks or in one of the glass cases. "She said there were four desks and a medium size kitchen table. The room was kept she said the uh windows were always closed and the curtains. They were a special kind curtains that filtered through part of the daylight. And there was a uh skylight in up in the ceiling. He'd had it installed specially. Brought in somebody from town. It was it was a pleasant room, she said, not you know stuffy or dark. But she called it 'insulated.' And an airconditioner. That's that's really rare. Not in the village I mean. In the whole area. Houses just don't hardly ever have them and. She said she thought it was a special kind. It had I guess what readings for humidity? She said it was like some museum something she'd seen at a museum. And there was no cleaning Ia- he did his own cleaning. That was also pretty irregular she thou- she considered it strange. He uh she suggested it a couple of times she didn't do usually do cleaning herself but she suggested one of the village women who does. But he said he was fine. Handling it fine himself. That it was delicate. "The study was most of the house she said. There was just another little room with his bed and the kitchen. She said she used to he didn't mind if she looked and took her time in the study to look at them a little. He'd stop working when she came in with the food and go over to the plate. The kitchen table was he uh kept it bare it was strictly for eating. But he could sit at it and look straight at one of the cases where he sometimes had books open on stands at a certain place. It the table was right in front of the case. And sometimes he'd say something about an illustration or something else in one of the manuscripts. Something he was looking at or she guessed he was working on. And she'd ask him a couple of questions maybe. He used to tell her something about what the origins might be or where it was copiedby which order or at you know at which monastery. "At at first it felt so eerie;' Chava says here. She's talking slowly with very little stammering and her Hebrew words on the tape are completely clear. "It felt like, 'Why how of all places of all people my landlady?' Like this unnerving suspicious coincidence. But really that's the whole point-there simply aren't I mean St. Pons isn't it isn't all places and of course there aren't really that many 'all people' there, not all that many people. And she's on her own and uh she needs extra cash. Monique would would naturally be one of the

344

ELEVENTH VISIT

first that he would be referred to in the village. Which of course which really narrows down the possibilities. Just like I was referred to her. I got there and stayed at in the Auberge for a couple of nights and Atar and I had our breakfast at the you know the boulangerie and they were nice and we asked them if they knew of anybody who would let rent a room on a more long term basis which was cheaper and. So and they sent us to Monique. It's not really such a coincidence. And she's really competent and nice. So I uh I guess I got through that phase pretty fast. "All of this was about at least eight years ago she says. Him staying in the village I mean and she wa- cooked for him. She said when I asked her eight or nine at first and then she said well actually even ten. Maybe even ten years but about two since he left. Maybe three. She said it she it was hard to remember. There weren't you know any clear milestones to keep track of time. She says time is is s - so kind of uniform for her in the village. Not in a bad way or anything. Just how it is. At some point in his goings and comings she says he just didn't come back any more. The house she'd never known who it belonged to in the first place. Someone from uh Dijon or Lyon she thought or maybe even Paris. It used to be the to belong to the daughters one of the daughters of of cheese farmers but she'd sold it long ago and moved to Paris. She said she was a designer or something. It was it had become this ... real estate. Maybe someone had meant it for a summer home and never I don't anyway it was empty except for the time he was there. "She got a check in the mail she said for the balance of her gardening work and a note it was from a lawyers' firm that she could harvest the garden at the end of the season and keep on harvesting the fruit trees every year pending further notice. But that there would be no more seeds or irrigation or fertilizer provided and that she was requested not to grow seasonal vegetables and greens and to harvest the trees in the full understanding that this in no way established any claims of hers blah blah. She she actually found the note. She still had it. It took a while but she did. She kept everything but this wa- she thought this was important because it was you know her official permit to harvest the fruits. Even though nobody ever bothered her about it she said. And an- she showed it to me. "The address was in Montpellier. The phone number was an old one. They changed the system I guess about last year or uh the year before that and the number wasn't was the old one of course. And Monique tried information and you won't I couldn't believe there were twelve lawyers' firms

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

345

there by the same name or that had that name in them and none of them were at the address on the note. But you know that's just they could have moved. I mean in a couple of years it's usually rented space and. So there I was next morning on the train to Montpellier. And Atar. And Monique. All three of us. "Monique was like she uh she totally lost her reserve. And her like her comportment her serious, respectable uh and. She was so excited sh- she didn't stop talking for a minute. She hardly ever traveled anywhere and it was this huge ... and uh Atar wa- was explaining to her about the airplane on our way to France and how there was a tunnel to get straight off from the plane door and they were uhm playing with the train seats you know reclining them and popping them up. And I here I was suddenly this old hand at travel. But we were giggling all together all all three of us. It was we we were so happy." I see the sea! I see the sea! I see the sea! I see the sea! Excited impatient happiness at crests of hills, catching sight of the awesome, playful, promising, beckoning body. Breathlessly hoping. To rush down out into its broad openness, to splash, roll, shout, shriek, lick salted lips, squeeze stinging eyes shut, flow through fluid, lie face down in water, stretch arms out to their full length, lie face down in sand, squiggle toes. Water, sand, sea desert. Magnet pull of the elemental, of seemingly shedding seeming. Of seemingly shedding social, that which is intricately required, authoritatively ordained. Pull, hope, dream of moves and movements freed. "We couldn't go to the beach because then it was at the time of polio." You've already read my mother tell my daughter, on our second visit, almost a whole book ago, almost half a century after that time of polio. "Oh, really?" That was my voice on the tape. "Offpolio?" That was my daughter's. She didn't recognize the word half a century after that time. If it were AIDS she wouldn't have needed to ask, young as she was. "A disease that ... " I started to explain to her. "And the doctors just told the public not to be together," my mother went on, unaware of the unfamiliar word. "Especially at the beach," she said. So back at that time, in Jaffa, the beach was promised land, promised sand looked upon from the tops of hills. I see the sea. Sea, sand, desert, the imagined elemental freedom of the expanses we projected beyond our peopled places. The heat, reveled in, allowing thin airy

346

ELEVENTH VISIT

clothes, seeming to allow unfettered mobility. The commanding power of desert mountains, silent solid redbrownyellow rock, darkening into sunset, opaque, occupying, becoming, the horizon. Looking over. Looking after? Looking on impassive to my insect doings. In the sensual imagery that constituted my internal map of my self, my deepest being longing belonging to a Place, the base matter was sea and desert. These-the authentic original particles, pivotal in the mental construct which was my Israeli-ness. Mind-sites that I ached to, but knew well I could never, intimately know as a place grown up in. Roamed offhand. Bashan lived in the desert. Her first years oflsraeli-ness were Dimona, labeled 'development town' in the ideological dialect of the fifties, when it was built. A planned town in the Negev desert to which immigrants were transported by the Zionist administration, with the stated ain1 of settling and holding as much territory as possible. To which a few work-intensive, governmentsubsidized factories were transferred to make jobs for the captive work force of mainly north African Jews. Twenty years later, when the Black Hebrews came there, the town had long been an entrenched Israeli emblem of poverty, unemployment, anger, despair. The black African-Americans, many from US inner-cities, could move into the abandoned government housing that the luckier immigrants had succeeded in leaving behind. And develop their congregation and culture, in the relative insularity provided by desert and a marginalized surrounding population. As you've read just now, and before, on our second visit, some years after they got there Bashan began coming out of the desert to work. Living weekends in Dimona and weekdays in the city. "I feel that I am you know I am still part of the community," she says, "even though I'm working out outside the confines of the community and have been you know for the past what eight years or something another. I am still part. But my ideas my imagination has expanded. It's moved on to a more of a higher how do you say a greater elevation. Evolution:' Miriam is talking about Jericho. About the excitement of a trip there, after its liberation from Israeli occupation, under the new Palestinian Authority agreed on in 1993 by Israel and the PLO. "The the desert... ;' Miriam is saying lovingly, "and the oasis. And then I get high on this kind of dry desert kind of heat." It was there-the desert-very tangibly present inside the house she grew up in. Where the womenfolk, her mother and cousins were

all brought up and the men used arrive twice a year by oxcart, after a week of travel from the Kalahari to Capetown. Her desert was the men's' place. The

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

347

expanse they disappeared in and emerged from periodically, rhythmically, in time with seasons and religious, cultural rituals. The grazing grounds beyond the encompassing huge wall of the homestead. A protected environment, she's called this childhood house, a protected home. With a huge wall around it built by the slaves and a huge big gate. At once secure and suffocating, providing her the confidence to leave and the urgent need to get beyond its confines. To breathe. "I once went from Afghanistan into Persia;' she says at some point much later in our talking. "And I was in the desert taking stuff through. I'd bought a lot of stuff up in the Turkmen villages in the in this sort of you know right in the north of Afghanistan and I went absolutely hnnnnnhh;' she inhales long and deeply. Later she says, "I was so exhilarated. You know when I travel I can't sleep, I just so I get high, just kind of high." "From the fact that you're travelling?" "The people, the colors, the things, the contact with the people sitting on the floor in the market, the things, just just everything that happens around." Can you tell me where you've been? Please tell me where you've been. Please take me where you've been? No chronological order. Haphazard. A partial list. Magical names. Some known, others I've never heard. Jotted down from memory from one of the talks when she didn't feel like recording, didn't quite know what for, just what we were doing, why. Jotted down-it's possible-from my imagination. In any case all imagined, by me, all fantasized, pictured-distant vague exotic calling permanently beyond my reach. Whether real or unreal. Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Timbuktu, Mauritania, the Sahara, the Tarakeruma highway into China, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, the steppes of Asia to Kashkal (very like Bokhara Miriam said), Sudan, Morocco, Tunis, Mali, Niger, Yemen twice, Oman. Please tell about the princess, please. Please tell about her. ''A terrible silence," it says on page thirteen of the Book of Balkacz, as you've already read on the fourth visit. "whooshed from the room;' it says there in the next sentence. I feel always whooshed from the room when I ask to hear the story of the princess. The story of her distant, gorgeous, tortuous trip. Even when told by each and all of us, even when lovingly shared in our patient, talking house, it stays nevertheless unmappable, beyond knowing or naming. And I stay pinned at its edge, staring. into a desert. Into a sea staring into a sea

348

ELEVENTH VISIT

two days before my mother died. How could I know? I didn't. There was no way I could. No way to know even two days into the future. But I did. I know now I did. She was drugged unconscious because she had fought with the respirator. And because the people around her couldn't bear her pain. I don't know whether she could. There was no way I couldknow-whether she'd rather be bearing it or drugging her last two days. Before she was drugged she was paralyzed. Though still able to rotate her neck a little and move her face muscles. Worse than her pain, for me, maybe not for her, was the forced removal of her contact. Of her ways to say or sign what she needed, wished, was. I kept talking to her when I came to stand or sit by her bed and body in intensive care. I felt sheepish dutiful determined-in case maybe her body could hear but couldn't say so. There wasn't much else to do there anyway. I asked one of the nurses or doctors if they knew whether she could hear me. She or he I don't remember said they really couldn't answer but encouraged me to follow my own instincts and talk to her if it felt right. It didn't. I kept on talking though. Mildly aggravated at her or his patronizing choice to ignore the real question I'd asked. A simple I don't know would have been okay. Couldn't they see the issue wasn't me. At some hour two days before she died, when I wasn't standing beside her bed, because there really wasn't much to do there, or any way of knowing whether it was needed, I vacant mindedly drove to the sea. I was on automatic pilot. Taking myself to the contemplating place. Home-base of my self. If it didn't sound so suspect to me, I'd say 'of my soul: The place where I know how to make myself feel reknit and somewhat mended. It was midwinter gray and wind wild. I climbed across the rocks above the last undomesticated beach in the vicinity of my house and stood in the wind. Loving its impersonal pushing force and the crazy water below. When I finally sat down on one of the rocks it was uncomfortable spiky rough through my raincoat and pants. Sobbing staccato stretches out loud at her pain, at my loss of what I hadn't felt I had but still longed for. Clumsy noises falling out of some of me. I talked to it, resuming my conversation with her coma. Asking it to rock her, to hold her, to float her, sea to soothe her pain to sleep, pray the lord my soul to keep. Commending her

THE SEA AND THE DESERT

349

TWELFTH VISIT: GIBRALTAR

CATERINA DE vrGLIONIS did not stay in the desert town. On page onehundred and twenty-two, Irit's English translation of Chava's Hebrew one says, "This will be my last harvest of the desert pockets where the dew is heavy enough to sprout and grow my seeds. I have rested and finally, perhaps of necessity, perhaps of growing strength, J have mounted the stallion. I fear him. He senses it but possibly respects me for taking my fear astride him. And as well for his feeding, his grooming, for tending the sores of his uneven leg. I sit on the saddle, placed on his back. I hold strong the rein. J do not ride. I ask a direction of him with my hands and back and a leg. He complies to take me. I expect every moment that he may refuse. Taken by his consent I am less than rider. Attending my requests he is less than leader. We combine curbed wills to make a single wake. "I again feel a wish to leave. This I have studied with Balkacz-to heed and to follow a wish to leave. To hear and answer the call. I will give some seeds and salves to my housemistress as parts of payment, though she has not turned her attention to their use or their preservation. She attends better to fiber leaves and ropes. But she can ease her own pain with the preparations either by applying them to her skin and muscle or by trading them for some amounts of food and warmth. Whichever she may choose. She is not inclined to healing. I have not hung on her neck the seed-pods of healers. She was a pleasant and loyal companion. She was a priceless trail-teller to Balkacz. Her

350

loneliness is untouchable and weighs heavy. My presence changes it little. I believe that she is attached to it as to an accustomed beloved. "My trade has brought some food and some fuel into her house. To me a kind house, suspicious to some from the town. Suspicions both subdued and confirmed by my trade. For my offer of healing can be hesitantly, thankfully invited or fearfully discounted. A kind house so far from, so unlike, the house, the plentiful warmth and food of my father's providing. A town so far from the great Tabriz of Balkacz's telling. This one this desert town went undestroyed by the campaign of the first of the dynasty. It is not important or large. I have heard that it is another town of this desert which straddles the great northern route. Bypassed by great routes and great campaigns, this desert town, only part-destroyed and part-slaughtered, lives on much as before, weak. "I have lightened somewhat the widow's rope making, offered her my youth and easy movement to provide respite from walking and bending long hours in the desert. I have taken the stallion in search of leaves, then carried back on the saddle. I have happily helped her beat and pull and dry the leaves on her rooftop, torn them, spread them, much as we spread fruits and nuts and herbs on my mother's roof in the sun of Tabriz. I have loved the work and loved and learned the words and melody she sings to lead our bending backs and knees and fingers through their rope-making motions. Facing each other with legs firm apart we have twisted fibers into long strong skeins. We have coiled them-silvery bleached and scented-and piled them high in heavy circles, the ordained manner of storing manufactured rope, ever prepared to be weighed and provided to the collectors of the dynasty. "They will come soon to the town. The time of collecting is near and they will visit all of the service households. There is no advance notice, so that the households will not have time to conceal any surplus exceeding the quotas. It is not taken-the surplus-but it is recorded in the ledgers for future calculation of quotas. The new quotas have been something lessened. To make a livelier marketplace, say the messengers of the Khan, and for rebuilding the part-destroyed town. The households fear a rise again as under the last Khan, when the quotas could not be met and many were taken for slaves, and all were hungry. They would wish the surplus low in the ledgers." "The tarh tax involved the compulsory sale of products to the ruling classes at prices well below market value," Luc Kwanten says on page 213 of Imperial Nomads. "These taxes were accompanied by physical forms of tax-

GIBRALTAR

351

ation, such as corvee labor, billeting of troops, carriage duty, and an obligation to provide animals, without reimbursement, to the postal service." The Book of Balkacz, page one-hundred and twenty-three, "It is the young men, the sons of the households, who bring already registered surplus to sell at markets in the city far from here, and who gather words of coming collections from horse keepers and from saddle-makers and from ledger-binders. Such is the way that the households know collection times even when there is no official notice. Such is the way that some manage to conceal surplus in the desert, although those of the Khan's collectors appointed from among the people, know many of the desert hiding places and visit them and loot them. "In a few days, I will go into the desert. I will not stay in the town together with the Khan's collectors. After the collection I will return for a time. I will briefly fill the painful space left in the widow's house by the requisitioned piles of living, sweet -smelling rope. And then I will go. I have told her I will leave half a season after the seed harvest. When my new hem is sewn with seed and my new oils and salves prepared. "Upon leaving I will end this writing. I have used it to practice, to make a habit of the characters-for my fingers, for my eyes. I have recorded routes. But I will not return. I will not revisit the inscribed seed-beds. The sites and paths are memorized to give to others. I will not travel them myself. I have used the writing also to collect travel wisdom. It is that wisdom which now instructs me to subtract what I choose to transport. Rolled in its felt and leather wrapping, the sheaf of writing papers is neither small nor light. Travelling with an extra horse, Balkacz and I carried yet an added bundle. On my own with the stallion it will be cumbersome. I will leave it to the widow my housemistress. There is much writing and reading where I wish to go, though not in my language. Once arrived I may learn another script. This time perhaps with a teacher-scribe to supervise my characters. "I will take the stallion and I will keep moving as I learned riding the desert with Balkacz.lt has been a full summer and a winter since his leaving. Possibly he has reached the people of my amah. I will not know that. I will not know either whether he is turned back west or if he again comes to this town. If he returns to this house the widow may give him the rolled sheaf of pages. If he passes here, if she gives it to him, if he so wishes, he can use his learned skill of deciphering to read this record of my traveller's apprenticeship, which he has never read, which I no longer feel I need to keep for myself. As I will use my learned skill of leave and travel to read the way I wish to take.

352

TWELFTH VISIT

"I will not take the child. He is still too young. He may come after me later, several seasons from now, when he can make his way independent. I have left part of the means for his travel. I have left half my store of Mori bark. Crushed and powdered only in pinches as needed along the way. Then prepared for administering as extract. My original store with me still, as bits of bark. I have yet to procure an additional store. The substance ofBalkacz's first approach those seasons ago, offered to catch the interest and trust of my Li Fu-tze. Nearly unattainable, but yet known in these desert surroundings, its value known by many. And the most common of its uses. The half-store I am taking will buy my passage, my needs along the way. The half-store I have now powdered and prepared and left behind could be exchanged for an escort, the son of a service household who would take the boy the length of the journey to find me. Or-divided into rations-it could buy food for along the way for almost the whole of his trip. I have also left preserved with the widow my housemistress, two rope baskets and a blanket-for her to offer him when he has grown several seasons. This is what I have saved. It is little for I earn little. But what is saved and not paid to her, is left to him. "I have left also the names given me to form the route I wish to follow. This travel has a destination. I have a destination. I no longer adhere to an ever changing direction. I will try, with this travel, to arrive. I have left the names of the route memorized by the widow and by the boy himself, in chant. As once I memorized the chant of the princess and the Palos. The chant which has long now been my home. The chant of my future route I have also taught to the singer man to chant to the boy. And as well the route names are inscribed on the child's blanket. I have called it a good luck charm I leave to protect him. If anyone passes here who can read in my language, they might read him the way. "Grown into a youth, however, he may wish none of this. He may prefer to remain in the desert town. Or to take another route. Stopping here again on his way west, if he comes again to this town, Balkacz could catch his eye, could recognize him, could offer him a westward route. Or someone else passing through-perhaps the singer man-could do the same. Such a man, passing through, offering a route, could be either teacher or cheat. Offering to enrich or exploit the clear quick grasp. The boy is sweet and unprepared for cheating. I can do no more than trust and hope for an honest teacher who will know him as I did, who will recognize what he is:' The Book of Balkacz, page one-hundred-and-three, "I was trading salve

GIBRALTAR

353

for fodder to feed the stallion. Waiting near the stables of the post horses, for a stable man to tell me where he would bring the traded fodder. I saw a boy there, watching me, and I knew him instantaneously for his interested and agile mind. Knew him more than he knew:' Down the page it says, "Magnetized, he is following me. For four days now quietly. He waits just around the corner of the old wall, on the way to the widow's house at the edge of the town. He says nothing, asks nothing, he knows that I see him. "He is slight. His coloring is unhealthy. He lacks for food, more than his brothers I believe and possibly more even than his sister. I have seen other children push him aside. He seems not to mind. When I went to groom the stallion beyond the wall I left him two balls of cooked grain on a stone near his corner. He ate them. I have a few dates to bring him." The next page says, "He has approached and spoken. He speaks the tongue of the wall-builders. The widow's tongue I understand. He is fascinated by my substances. He held out his hand, asked to hold, see, smell. Carefully touch, feel thicknesses, slicknesses, stickiness, between his fingers. His fingers are eloquent. He closed his eyes as he circled thumb against index tip feeling each oil and each salve. He studied each. In between he wiped well his fingers in the hot dry sand." Down the page it says, "He calls me 'Substance-Woman."' Page one-hundred and six says, "He has learnt all the seeds. Tomorrow we will go to the first of the desert pockets and I will show him the plants. He is uninterested in people or he is extremely shy. He will apparently never touch people, skin. He will not chant in front of them or act out a ritual of healing. This he leaves to the substance-woman, a part of the healing which he will not learn. He will learn wonderfully the plants and the seeds and the substances. He is a grower. And a distiller. Deeply knowing about the native plants and their traditional uses. He seems to know every inch of the nearby desert, where every plant is to be found. To him each of them significant, holy. He has taken me to his garden. In the courtyard of his father's home. Along the inner wall. Inviting his sister and brothers to tease and trample. Protected by his father's anger only because no water is needed and some of the fruits and leaves are ground and powdered and to add to the family grain. "A small line of tiny clay pots or even broken shards filled with desert dust. In careful order against the wall to stay mostly in shade. Tiny plants with hard miniature fruits and leaves, surviving by their stunted size in the heat. Surviving by his ingenious irrigation. Sliced desert leaves, of the kind that make the widow's ropes. He lays them in the pots. Coats them with sand on

354

TWELFTH VISIT

the side exposed to the heat and sun. And they ooze their moisture downwards, feeding the dust in the pot. The garden is a game he plays alone. Some of the pots he covers with gnarled tumbleweed and wakes up before dawn to slightly shift the tangle. As I have learned too in the desert pockets, it gathers a quantity of night dew, and this is dripped to the earth if the tumbleweed is gently, repeatedly moved before sunrise:' "We set off for the rain forest with a botanist friend of Greg's, Bill Raynor," Oliver Sacks is saying in The Island of the Colorblind on page 81, "and he brought along two Pohnpeian colleagues: Joakim, a medicine man, deeply knowledgeable about the native plants and their traditional uses, and Valentine, an expert on location, who seemed to know every inch of the island, where every plant was to be found, its favorite conditions, its relationship to

all the other inhabitants of the ecosystem. Both men seemed to be born naturalists; in the West, they might have become doctors or botanists. But here their powers had been molded by a different tradition-more concrete, less theoretical than ours, so that their knowledge was intimately bound up with the bodily and mental and spiritual balance of their people, with magic and myth, the sense tllat man and his environment were not separable, were one:' When he first came to the island, Oliver says on the next page, Bill "had arrived with a sort of arrogance, he told me, flushed with the hubris of Western science, and then had been astonished, humbled, by finding in the local medicine men a vastly detailed and systematic knowledge of plants on the island." And then down the page, "Every plant on the island, Bill said, was considered significant and sacred. The vast majority were seen as therapeutic." The Book of Balkacz, page one hundred and twenty-four, "The child's play is with substances. I could stay and teach him more of medicinals and of making diem into salves and oils. I could stay and study more of his ways of watering or his ways oflearning plants. There is much good we could exchange. Master-Grower and Substance-Woman. But I will leave. I feel a wish a need to leave again. And the boy will go on teaching himself as he did before untroubled devising his own games. Perhaps stronger from the small servings of food I have given him, from the interest I have shown. Perhaps, though, become more vulnerable. More needful of a recognizing eye. I will not know. Grown to a youth he may come looking for me and teach me what he has found." Three pages before, the Book of Balkacz says, "I have words of a place of many healers. The words are of some women at this place besides men. And

GIBRALTAR

355

of seeds and barks and greens and bulbs gathered and grown, come from many parts. Collected to grow at this place of healers. The name of this place and of places between were given me by a singer man who walks from village to village. He heard of me in the market of this desert town and came looking. I feel I trust him. He asked where I had come from and where I had · learned my handiwork. I told him. He had not heard the name ofTabriz. But he had heard the name of the tribe of my amah and the ancient names of its forest lands beyond the old, disintegrating wall. He speaks the other tongue of the desert town but knows some of the ancient wall-builders' language. He walks in villages and never cities and does not set out to go far. His trade needs listeners to his language, who will offer some handfuls of grains or dates for singing about the clans of their mothers, their fathers, about disputes, deaths and marriages, about departures, decrees, about fields canals villages shrines-all destroyed and burnt and some rebuilt. He carries with him a string instrument of his own making played with a bow. In his tongue he chants the hardship of the dynasty salt laws, the sicknesses of those in need of the Khans' protected substance who cannot pay fully the decreed salt-tax. He sings also the old names of the secret salt marshes where the poor and sick may harvest their fill of the oiled and shining crystals. "I have told him of the boy and wished him-if he comes back through the town-to ask after him. If the boy is still here he may want a route from the singer or even a trade, too add to his growing." The next page of the Book of Balkacz says, "The place the singer man has told me is far in the southern interior. It is a city. Large. Greater it seems than Tabriz. "I know Tabriz as my father's house and as latticed views of a single alleyway through the northern windows. I know it as hooded, escorted walks to a small gateway in the wall of the palace, and as a single apartment inside the palace. I know it as one of the palace stables and as a nearby riding space, the last alone known from above, from the height of a horse. The greatness of the city of my childhood I do not know. The greatness of the city of my childhood I have heard. From my brothers, my father, somewhat from my mother, from my amah. Most of its greatness I have heard from Balkacz. He passed through all alleys and parts of Tabriz city, going with intent to see. This passage, he has said, he repeated on the different times he came there, each time in a different order. Effaced and protected by his rarely broken silence, broken only sparingly even in our many seasons of riding, he studied the city.

356

TWELFTH VISIT

"Practicing his script over the seasons of our travel, he has recorded its streets. He has written the black soot dust in the charcoal makers' quarter which covers every thing near the smoldering dirt -covered piles, where I had never been before I left. The scent of cedarwood incense in the square of the fruit vendors, where I had once, steadily burnt to keep off flies, beside each separate fruit stall. He has written the words of a soot-blacked charcoal maker. 'Rascal! You! Move. Sleep the night somewhere else dog. This is no fire place for hire.' And the words of a vendor. 'Are you buying sir? Or are you giving the evil eye then?' Before quickly turning to serve the next. Perhaps my dear Li Fu-tze come to market. And the words of a beggar. 'Have mercy, can you spare a morsel, sir?' And the crawling soft touch of a hand at the side of his leg. He has written beggars' locations along his walks through the alleyways, leaving his horse tied outside of the city walls. He has written their begging postures-standing in front of the candle-maker's, lying on his side along the north outer wall, squatting opposite the southern water spout in a short indigo-blue shift, blind, nursing under her cloak, the infant murmuring. He has listed transactions, his tradings for food. And his trading partners. A scrub from the kitchens of one of the great houses. A date-picker come from the north. An itinerant camel driver. An incense stick and candle maker who told him a sleeping place behind the staircase of a public bath, for free. He has written the places he slept. Under the old sundial, no longer in use. On the roof of the west inner-gate. In q minor mausoleum. Depicting and populating a remembered city. "He writes in silence, speaking only to ask me directions for a character or a word. Meanwhile I do my own writing on the current leaf, spread out on a thickly folded blanket. His lists are slowly executed. When they are fully done we recite them aloud together and I point out errors in his script. My records I keep unread. The ink dries on the leaf as we read out his list and when we're done I return the leaf to its roll. Many nights our blankets are laid over the same, flat stretch of earth which has served for recording his city. It is loosened and softened by the furrows of his writing. "He has written the colored cloths and told me the tinkle of the listed ornaments-silver, shell, brass, gold-on the short crowded arcade of theTabriz wedding market, where families from the whole of the province prepare their brides and grooms, where my family would have come soon had I stayed on. He has listed along with these the shopowners' names, heard and memorized. And the prices, quoted and paid, by the family matriarch or pa-

GIBRALTAR

357

triarch who led the bargaining. He wrote the sacks and the immense clay pots in the shops of grains and spices where he told me he filled his palms with the smoothness of seeds and shiny hard sun-dried beans. He wrote the brittle feather light dried herb leaves and roots and barks in the usuallydarkened recesses of spice shops. A cat in the sun on an unopened sack. Another shouted out of the shop next door. And ass dung and horse dung lining the streets, daily swept into piles save Fridays, and set out and dried for fuel, along the tops of stone walls. His inventory of a place where I am strange, the city of my home. "Less and less I guided him as he practiced writing his script. At each of our rest stops, as we rode, he recorded in sand or mud, a list of objects or people or words or transactions made, recalled from a single square or alley, in his city of Tabriz. Street after street, rest stop after rest stop. Some evenings before dark he would write two streets. "For the city to travel to I have no map but I will use his writing of my unknown Tabriz. It has explained to me a city that is great. I will use it to explain this great city to which I ride. Its sites, its people's transactions and their words in foreign tongues, its days. I will recognize these by Balkacz's lists. The bathhouse, the seat of government, the seat of faith, the bargaining, the proclaiming crier, the funeral, the feast. For the city to travel to, I have been told two names. The old dynasty name Qinsai and the new dynasty name Hangchow. The first Qinsai is the great capital of the ancient dynasty of the Sung. In the present dynasty of the Yuan, Hang chow is a city in Chekiang province." Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose are saying, "The claim that 'a place on the map ... is ... also a locatable place in history' should involve deconstructions of and resistance to not only'the map' and 'history; but also to 'place' itself." This is in the introduction to the book they edited, Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, on page 14. They've taken the phr,ase in quotation marks from Chandra Talpade Mohanty, page 34 of her article, "Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism," in a book she edited with Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, called: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, published in 1991 by Indiana University Press. Literally deconstructed, dismantled by conquests, or moving out of their old, former walls, old city centers shift. And original city sites stand partly abandoned. Moving, these entities called cities take with them the attribute of place-habitually assumed to be permanent-which they are thought to be.

358

TWELFTH VISIT

The translation of the Book of Balkacz says, a little further down the same page, "The telling I have heard of the city I will travel to is a telling of many healers, many among them of the place called Qinsai, preserving and using the teachings of healers of ancient times. It is also a telling of learning, of many healing apprenticeships in the place called Hangchow, many presentday healer teachers, many many thousand baths. These are the destination of my new travel:' In the centuries before the Mongol conquest, the Sung dynasty gradually retreated from northern China, concentrating the growth of their definitive Chinese culture in the deep south, and progressively abandoning those areas edged by the scattered lengths of wall erected by previous generations. The Sung capital was established at the city of Qinsai. Roughly the same location, under the later Yuan dynasty, was a city named Hangchow. A few hundred miles to the south of Peking, presently emerged as Beijing, and less-possibly 150 miles-to the south of Yangchow. The last is a name you've already read near the end of the third visit, quoted from a book by Leonardo Olschki, in reference to a particular city in China. It was in this city that Marco Polo claimed to have been appointed and acted as governor for three years, in the service ofKubilai Khan. It was in this capacity that he professed, in The Travels of Marco Polo, to have administered the government monopolized production and sales of salt from the regional salt marshes. No mention of this appointment is made anywhere in the annals of the Yuan dynasty or in works by Chinese historians, none of which in fact make any mention whatsoever of the existence or service of a Marco Polo. As for Yangchow, whether it-the name or the city-remains locatable in current-day China, would need verification by contemporary Chinese informants, maps or phone books. But in 1960, Olschki's book, Marco Polo's Asia, cited it as the location of the sculptured funerary inscription, pertaining to the burial in 1340, of one Caterina de Viglionis. "The station at Montpellier was awful;' Chava says. "It was like this it's hard to describe this dump. I don't know this pit. You get out below ground level and all around you there's this incline, steps, no escalators or anything, and people pressing in and you're trying to get out and it's claustrophobic and stuffy and and it stinks. Bare concrete I think at least that was my impression. Maybe it was stone I'm not sure but I what I felt like was bare concrete. It's supposed to be Montpellier is th-.- this beautiful old city, this really ancient university town with lovely gardens and avenues with big old

GIBRALTAR

359

trees and. I mean it is I guess. And we were supposed to be coming there to finally find a real lead, to find this uh Jacques Perez or Jean Jacques Pelliot or whatever we didn't know what his name was, a uh dealer in ancient books who was maybe the source of the manuscript and might maybe the key to finding Mickie. All that piled all those expectations on onto this note from a lawyers' office and an incorrect address in Montpellier. But the station was uch! And probably it it wasn't just the station. All three of us felt sort of I guess depressed basically. Lost. We'd really really laughed all the way there. Monique had taught us children's songs some beautiful tunes French children's songs but then we uh we got there and b - by the time we got out of the station there was no more it was like like we totally weren't laughing at all. "Looking back

r guess maybe the uh the decision had been so fast the

switch. From leisurely routine we really already had a routine. At St. Pons I mean. Me translating and Atar in the garden all morning with Monique or doing errands with her or playing with the neighbors' cats or watching tv. And then some most afternoons me and Atar going on long walks and. Usually out of the village to a some farm near there or most of the time along the stream. Sometimes we took a bus to another town like half-an-hour's drive and uh usually looked around ... And then in the evenings the days were long and Atar went to sleep she was really tired and she was usually in bed by about eight-thirty. And I would go back to translating. We got there in May. Right at the end of May. I'd taken Atar out of out of her preschool before the end of the year. The minute I was done with teaching. It I didn't I mean what's the difference-preschool-and I uhm wanted to get in as much time as we could in St. Pons. I arranged to have students' exams sent to me there. S - so we'd really developed a routine. And boom crash in a flash here we were off on a ... well a maybe a wild goose chase. But mainly the switch was so fast and I guess unp- you know unprocessed. I'd never decided anything that fast in my life! And and the excitement and. I guess that was what was registering. "And it was cold. Midsummer but actually really cold. Quite a bit further south than St. Pons but somehow at least that day a lot colder. We'd counted on finding a place to stay when we got there. But then by the time we got out of the station you know how sometimes you're so exhausted it uh kind of turns into depression. Or maybe the other way around. I don't know but you can't get it together, uh mainly can't make decisions and everything looks huge and. That was about where we were at. It was like it was contagious. I

360

TWELFTH VISIT

mean both Monique and me. The a - adults who were supposed to be the responsible ... And we walked from one old main street hotel to the next and lugging our these bags and we sort of gazed at rooms they were showing us and everything looked tacky and moldy. And we lost track of streets and just sort of went from hotel sign to hotel sign and I guess kind of half half-consciously let ourselves get lost because we that was we felt lost." "And Atar?" I ask 'her, "I know how kids are when you're schlepping around." "Atar was uh I guess she was surprisingly quiet. She really didn't complain unless I'm remembering wrong. Maybe I was in such a daze I just don't remember. I mean maybe she could have been complaining and I wasn't registering it. But finally she we passed a cafe I mean just one more cafe. I guess we'd passed about a dozen. We'd been in at least five hotels. And she uh just just suddenly turned around and walked in and sat down at a table." "By herself?" "By herself. It uh took me a split second I guess it wasn't really more than a second to realize that she'd walked off. I did and I I just nudged Monique and pointed. There we were on the sidewalk with our all our stuff and there she was at the little round table sitting there very calmly sort of you know uhm sedately, just about ready to order. And the two of us were kind of jerked into a giggle and then a laugh we were laughing hard. And she was looking at us looked at us through the glass and didn't even smile just uh waited like she was waiting for us to cut the bullshit. "And we went in and dumped our bags down beside her and we all had hot chocolate and croissant. It was left over from the morning batch because Iremember it wasn't crisp, it was kind of too sticky and my cheek got smeared and then that was funny and we laughed and everything was funny and we couldn't stop." The inviting kind of place recognized instantaneously by a tired, selfconfident girl-child, definitely fits some of the specifications of 'talking house: The living quarters, might be located over the coffee shop (also serving light meals) which we could run together. Both floors would offer the appropriate type of engulfing, boldly present, distinctive, smells and warmth, but also-mainly-the plain reliable sustenance. And the businesslike unprying refuge. If you want to tell what from, you're welcome. It could well be in the south of France in an old farming or fishing town, where I imagine the land or the Mediterranean are still the kind of solid sustaining presences

GIBRALTAR

361

which can put Paris London New York into perspective. It could be in a town like Montpellier or Agde, where some of the coffee shops have a suffocating, dust-smell of dried flower arrangements and camouflaged disuse, but others, not necessarily the good-looking ones but not necessarily the bad-looking ones either, are de-facto community centers, that people half-choose halfhappen to belong to. The one of us who's waitressing on some particular day wouldn't always be cordial. She might be curt or cool. Or preoccupied. If she notices, the one who's cooking at the time might offer to switch, so her friend could take a break from people and serving. But she might happen to be distracted too and wrapped up in melting the butter and frying croutons for the soup and mentally re-running yesterday's phone call to her mother. It was another hard one maybe and she could be trying to soothe the scraped skin, or a happy one that she could be trying to preserve. Or she might happen to feel unwilling to help, fuming at her friend for her unspoken but tangible disapproval of how yesterday she had slipped into cute coquetry while courting a customer. We could barter work hours, sometimes intensely close and loving, sometimes politely collegial-doing the cooking, clearing the tables, doing accounts, waitressing, working the cash register or going out to buy the baguettes and butter and vegetables-for a place to stay on the floor above, in one of six rooms, each opening onto the next, with the kitchen at one end and the bathroom and toilet at the other. The rooms could all have windows on either side, with windowboxes where geraniums were doing okay, facing the street in front of the shop and the inner courtyard in back-cobblestoned and oily black under parked cars and plastic garbage pails. They'd probably have high ceilings and possibly unattractive wallpaper which we'd long ago have covered with our cloth wall hangings and our friends' paintings, and our framed reproductions from the shop at the bibliotheque, and some snapshots of kids and men. They might be underheated, making us wear big shawls a lot of the time and feel stiff and slightly wooden every morning and evening. And the floors could be beautiful old shiny planks, and the kitchen could be too small but usable in shifts, just off the dining room with its broad, gracious table. One of us might be a little obsessive about always replacing the fresh flowers from the market in the heavy cut glass vase or bowl set in the middle of the table, which would serve as our gathering place, because of using all the other rooms for beds. The floorplan might pose a sticky problem because what about privacy? None of us could

362

TWELFTH VISIT

have much privacy and what would we do with lovers, either current or prospective. And how would we do our writing or thinking or sulking. It could be a drag-running a coffee shop in a little French town where we'd forever be the foreign eccentric women, 'are they all lesbians? the tall one looks so housewifely,' keeping it open over holidays, weekends, emotional crises, bitter arguments. Keeping it functional throughout manipulative moves made by one or some of us, through more open struggles over who decides, appoints, buys. Still, it could be a feasible way to keep our precious talking ongoing, at least for a few years. At least for those of us who could weather the debates and tensions, which might prove unbearable for others. It could be a not perfect not too unpleasant means to provide for our inviting, for our meetings, for our loving, for our loving conversations. While sharing the effort. At the cafe in Montpellier, Chava says, "We just went on sitting. We didn't uh we didn't have the energy to start the hotel hunt again and it was really cold outside. It was almost getting dark. We were kind of pleasantly paralyzed. Un- undecisive? And totally not dealing with it. Monique for a while I guess she'd been staring absent-mindedly at the street-name you know on the plaque on the building across the street and she announced, 'It's the street.' "I didn't have a clue. I stared at her. I felt drunk. Between us we'd had only a half-carafe of the house wine so I thought it had to be my French. It was you know like she was in the middle of a conversation we were already having only I wasn't. I probably looked totally dumbfounded bee- because she started laughing again and she was laughing so hard she couldn't explain. And all through it Atar was falling asleep over her hot chocolate and she was laughing her head off and I felt as if I was going a little crazy. Nowhere to stay and cold and and totally irresponsible an an over-exhausted kid and a hysterical friend that I didn't really know all that well going totally, freaking out sort of and me just just sitting there like a lump. She finally caught her breath enough to say, 'the lawyers, the street with the law firms.' 'Oh that's a godsend! A law firm to sleep at. Breakfast included, do you think?"' Chava stays quiet for a while before she says, "But it turned out it was. Uhm kind of. A kind of godsend. It was really sort of and. I was feeling so overwhelmed and exhausted and when I said that, I remember I could feel two thin trickles of tears going down my cheeks at two different speeds. But Monique just prodded me a little less than gently she suddenly all I could see

GIBRALTAR

363

was this practical Catholic French stranger with proper you know proper clothes and dressy pumps. And she said firmly she'd stay with Atar and she told me to go ahead. T - to try one or two of these law firms before it was closing time. She right away she found it was in her bag the list we'd printed up from my laptop before we left. I had a copy too in my bag but I was still rummaging around in it and she handed me the list and I said but why not do it the other way around because of my unpresentable French. But she just she was firm she just said, 'You go, go on.' "And probably she was right because it snapped me out of the lumpstate. At least well half-way. Partly because it was so cold outside and I wasn't really dressed for it. Even though I was wearing jeans and sneakers. Anyway, I uh I ended up going to three places and. I knew for sure that attorneys don't usually disclose information you know their clients' addresses. I did- didn't really expect much I don't know I felt like I was she'd told me to try so I was going through the motions. I guess it was because of that I mean I didn't expect the people to be very nice they at two places were really nice and helpful and and even patient with my French. I don't know maybe it's there are a lot of foreign students at Montpellier. It's not like most places in uh ... And then atthe third one they were closing and they said come back tomorrow and they didn't even want me to ask they didn't want to hear what I had to ask. And I was like, 'enough, I need someplace to crawl under a blanket; but there was another place across the hall and they said it closes a little later and why don't you try and it would have been stupid not to but if it had been the fifth I don't think I'd have had the energy, and they told me there they told me yes, they knew of they worked with an ancient book dealer who had resided at St. Pons. Just like that. "I couldn't believe it just like that. My heart was was like literally it was pounding hard and I was completely breathless. The guy it was amazing he was speaking excellent English he was the only one and it was at this specific place he told me please sit down, it was rather irregular, my request, as a rule they were not at liberty to disclose clients' addresses, and he would need to consult his boss." If it was our coffee house across the street he'd be one of the regulars. Both of them could be. The guy and his boss. They wouldn't have to sit at the same table and maybe they'd come in at different times. Chava and Atar and Monique would almost certainly be staying upstairs for a few days or months. Atar might be playing with Janie's boys or Orna's boy and her baby

364

TWELFTH VISIT

girl. Monique would be great at market and in the kitchen and Chava would be waitressing, 'another illiterate? it isn't an American accent, right? do you recognize it? where do you suppose she's from?,' or helping Monique with our shopping at the street-market early Mondays and Saturdays, or working the cash register. Their arrival could be so different from the one they had. So invited, cushioned, so well fitted to the talking and the house. They could go upstairs right after the hot chocolate. They're steep, someone would help with Atar because she'd be virtually asleep by then, and someone else or two of us would help with the bags. There might not be a room for all three of them alone, depending on when they arrived and who was around. But there would definitely be place enough to put them up and warm light eiderdowns and decent beds and towels and hot hot water in the shower. One morning about three weeks later one of us would be serving his boss. Or better yet the guy. He'd be having brioche instead of croissant for a change, 'it's really light, would you like homemade marmalade with it?' and she could mention she thought he'd met our newly come Chava, that she was upstairs, up so early, already working on the translation. She could almost verge on gushing when she remarked that it was really exciting-it actually had a fair chance of becoming an international event once the English translation was done and published, that she thought that a few university presses were actually already interested. She could slip in how Chava was going about it without any visible fuss really... quietly and steadily. This one of us who was waitress would probably be having fun and.at the same time feeling repelled. Sharply aware of her calculated, conscious use of the stereotype-the deft hostess making gracious, intelligent, tactful, motiveless small talk. Most likely she'd be sensing the power of playing a role well, in unison with her deep objection to that role. Coming back to offer more coffee she could wait for his cue, knowing he would certainly give it. In answer she could add how the manuscript had already been authenticated by top professionals but how it's really still immensely important to find out as much as possible about its source. Atar might come jumping down the steps at this point and the one of us who was in the kitchen might say something about slowing down because they're so steep and she might come out of the kitchen to give her a hug and ask how she'd slept and remark to the guy, who was sitting to the back, fairly near the bottom of the stairs, 'isn't she adorable? Chava's taking her along on this search she's conducting for the source of the manuscript. she copes with it all so amazingly. Translating and travel-

GIBRALTAR

365

ling and this one, she's irresistible, isn't she?' And Atar with the sharpened senses of a girl-child would be deeply convincing in her appointed role of bright captivating innocent sweetness. Possibly he wouldn't like his boss very much. And he might fully appreciate a chance to disobey. To contradict the professional ethics he'd come to see as designed for the protection of privileges and the privileged. He wasn't necessarily an activist but as opinions go he could well be a radical. An anarchist really at heart. Who believed he had to put up with a restrictive apprenticeship, and even do things he thought were wrong, before he could start practicing corporate law independently, and stick to his principles. He might relish this opportunity for private subversion. He could, let's say, deeply detest Jean Jacques who he experienced as oblivious to his critical scrutiny, in fact to his very existence at the office-treating him, he felt, like an invisible, insignificant piece of the oiled apparatus facilitating transfers of property and dealings with the tax authorities. There wouldn't be any way to trace the information to him-they wouldn't tell who had given them the address. So he could sit at the corner table and stroke the rim of his coffee cup with his third finger and think about it. Uneasy. Attracted. "The 'self' or the 'individual; is one of the great discoveries of the twelfth century;' Ivan Illich says on page 22 of his book In the Vineyard of the Text, that you've already read from on your ninth and tenth visits. In the Vineyard of the Text is a book about a book. Its subject, a book called Didascalicon, was written in the twelfth century. By Hugh of the Saint Victor monastery in Paris. On the next page of the vineyard Ivan says that Hugh "wants the reader to face the page so that by the light of wisdom he shall discover his self in the mirror of the parchment. In the page the reader will acknowledge himself not in the way others see him or by the titles or nicknames they call him, but by knowing himself by sight:' Then he says, "With the spirit of self-definition, estrangement acquires a new positive meaning. Hugh's call away from the 'sweetness of one's native soil' and to a journey of self-discovery is but one instance of the new ethos, Bernard of Clairvaux preaches the Crusades, which are another way of expressing the same invitation: They address people at all levels of the feudal hierarchy to leave the common mind-set of the neighborhood, within which identity comes from the way others have named me and treat me, and to discover their selves in the loneliness of the long road. At Bernard's beckoning, tens of thousands leave their village communities and discover that they can survive on their own without the bonds which had sus-

366

TWELFTH VISIT

tained them and constrained them within the predetermined feudal ordo." Which I understand to mean ordained order. "Pilgrims and crusaders, travelling masons and mill mechanics, beggars and relic thieves, minstrels and wandering scholars-all these take to the road by the end of the twelfth century." Perhaps prefiguring the ability of a single teenage woman to travel the road in unique estrangement about a century later. On the next page Ivan says, "We think today of each other as people with frontiers. Our personalities are as detached from each other as are our bodies. Existence in an inner distance from the community, which the pilgrim who set out to Santiago or the pupil who studied the Didascalicon had to discover on their own, is for us a social reality, something so obvious that we would not think of wishing it away. We are born into a world of exiles:' And, "What I want to stress here is a special correspondence between the emergence of selfhood understood as a person and the emergence of 'the' text from the page." (On page 25.) He's talking about a turning point. A point in time, in the twelfth century, when he believes that both self and text became, came into being. Both-new kinds of abstractions from the material corpus. He's pinpointing the beginnings of a matter-of-fact, modern willingness to address an intangible but real 'self' or 'text' somehow floating separate from, but generated by, the physical inscribed body or page. This wasn't, isn't, a 'soul' possessed by, and born with, a body. It is rather a created, constructed 'self: An understood, interpreted 'text: A construct of concepts, of words. A mentally manufactured integrity. Abstract, intangible, real. Not unlike a talking house. Built of the lace of light and dark lines on the printed page, its imagined image-and-word walls are much like the latticed palm-leaf wind breakers on the beaches of Sinai. Providing a minimal but sufficient screen for the world. The house, the text constituted vis-a-vis the world. Letting through half-arrested air and softened light, letting through manageable parts of world from the other side. Doing so with thin means, almost non-existing. There verging on not-there, placed verging on displaced, on blowing away, disintegrating. And yet haven enough. The best of protections in fact, in the desert winds along the Red Sea coast. "The page had to give birth to the visible text;' Ivan says on page 72. "The 'faithful' had to give birth to the moral self and the legal person." To the "subject who stands 'before' the law;' as you've read Judith Butler calling him in other words, on the eighth visit. A subject-self in fact constituted, she has explained, by his placement vis-a-vis the law.

GIBRALTAR

367

While of course, built into that, I'll add, is the option of transgressing. The law of the land, the law of the Fathers, the law of the employers. The rule: do not disclose the address of a client. Transgressing as an act of constituting a self. Of conceiving and making a move beyond homogenized obedience. So when the guy came into the coffee house on the next afternoon his walk might have had a slightly altered rhythm. Maybe rebellious. Maybe worried-and-hurried. He might or might not sit down at his usual table and order. Either way he might smile at Atar, 'bonsoir petite mademoiselle,' and possibly pat her hair, and quietly hand a note to the one of us who was waitressing. "The upshot of it was that they gave me his address,'' Chava says. "Jean Jacques' address. They said they couldn't contact him at the moment because the boss he actually what happened was that he invited me into his office. It was warm and I was so cold from coming in from outside. And I guess my kind of half-depression still, kind of lump-feeling and. I almost fell asleep on the spot because of getting warm all at once and my just my total exhaustion. Literally I was on the verge of nodding. Right in front of him. It was so weird, like at this uh point of climax, here I was maybe actually going to find the source of the manuscript or or or Mickie, or both, and I was falling asleep. But this lawyer was nice and just kind of pretty straightforward and brisk. And asked me a lot of questions. He he ki- he rolled them out one after another fast. And it woke me up. 'What is your interest in Jean Jacques? Who referred you to him?' Uhm, 'How are you connected to the manuscript that you want information about?' Uhm, 'A Hebrew translation? For what particular purpose?' And uh, 'University backing? Which university? Prospective English publication? By which publishers?' You know, like that. Uh, 'Why do you believe this manuscript was handled by Jean Jacques?' H - he I mean he it wasn't aggressive in any way. He was interested, actually he seemed fascinated. And the questions were like casual and comfortable, friendly. As if he was just... curious. But also very fast. I could hardly think and uh decide whether how much I wanted to say. Very deft and. Besides he spoke really decent English. I didn't have to struggle, it was such a relief. But also he I guess he needed to know who he was giving information to and why. And he went through the through some formalities. I suppose it would have looked maybe felt too unprofessional to him if he'd skipped his explanation that of course it was not standard practice, that lawyers weren't supposed to give out their clients' addresses. But then he said Jean Jacques

368

TWELFTH VISIT

was a close friend and that he managed all his business and and that he was sure it would be okay. He couldn't call him he said to uh to get permission because he was travelling. Jean Jacques was. Travelling. He wasn't sure where. He does have email but usually on his travels he doesn't bother with it but usually he doesn't travel for longer than two or three months at a time, he said. He lives in Gibraltar. He has his business based there. 'Here's the address and the phone number.' Just like that." "Qualifying Individual Status:' said the Form-A-Co (that is, Form a Company) website, at http://www.formaco.gi/qualify.htm, on February 7, 1999, "is available to all non-Gibraltarian individuals who establish a resi-

dential address in Gibraltar, have not been ordinarily resident in Gibraltar during the preceding 5 years, and do not derive any income from Gibraltar sources other than from Gibraltar Tax Exempt Status companies. "The Government of Gibraltar will normally insist that the address to be established in Gibraltar is purchased by the individual for his exclusive use during a minimum period of 7 months in a year, and that he resided in Gibraltar for a minimum of 30 days in each calendar year (which period need not be consecutive)." Then, down the screen it said that Qualifying Individual Status, "can be particularly useful for those persons who may wish to show a tax authority in another jurisdiction that they are subject to taxation in Gibraltar with a view to persuading them that they should only be expected to pay a nominal amount of tax in their home jurisdiction, at the same time as they keep their taxation level in Gibraltar to an absolute minimum." The website explained how. In other words, living or-more precisely-owning an address, in Gibraltar can keep taxation levels to an absolute minimum. Both in Gibraltar and in "the home jurisdiction:' meaning the country the individual lives in or comes from. That, as the website said, "can be particularly useful." "When I got back to the cafe," Chava says, "I uh there was a note there. 'Hotel des Pommes, rue Charles Cing # 8.' The waiter said across the street and first left turn. I didn't even get a look at the room. Atar and Monique were already asleep and I threw off my clothes and crashed in about two seconds. "Next morning we were really confused. It seemed unreal. As if I we had a hard time convincing ourselves it happened. It was beautiful out. Gorgeous, sunny, slightly cloudy breezy. You know. That helped a little. It was

GIBRALTAR

369

comforting. It if uh if it had been like gray mist we'd have probably felt even more unsure of reality and. We found a park pretty near the hotel and Atar rolled in the grass for a while but then she came over. She could tell we were having an important you know a grown ups' discussion. We weren't sure what to make of it. It was this ... uhm uneasiness. Something vague. Get getting the address so like effortlessly. Too uh too easy, too simple. I mean to be believable. It made it all seem you know suspicious. Sort of sinister. As if we might be I don't know walking into a trap. Getting used. I - not understanding kind of playing into someone's hands. Into someone's oh ulterior motives. Especially with the well vaguely knowing mainly Monique said that Gibraltar was this kind of tax haven which it isn't usually not for like respectable regular people and." Chava's laugh here sounds embarrassed, signaling a sense of her fears as childish, naive as she explains their roots. "I mean as far as I could see as both of us could I I didn't have anything that was uhm stealable. I didn't have the manuscript. That was safe. And I was sending files of my translation to Irit to my uh to the woman who's doing the English version every day by email. Almost every day. Sometimes I had trouble with the phone lines and there had been some places on the way to St. Pons where I couldn't hook up. And a week? No it was two I think when my computer wasn't working and I was climbing the walls to get it fixed and then when it got back they'd messed up some of the software and it took another three or four days. But also there were diskettes with copies of all the earlier files at home and then some more at Monique's at St. Pons, and more copies either already at Irit's or on their way there by airmail. "So I don't know it might be really good the translation might be a windfall for an ancient books business to ... getting possibly some international publicity. But so what? Monique and I couldn't see the danger. Couldn't figure it out besides the gut feeling. So what if he or his lawyer ha- had hidden motives or interests? How dangerous could they be? But then of course there's just there's always our women's fears of getting somehow trapped. Of uh moving unsuspecting into someone's co- control, into like a zone some

man actually controls. You don't need a specific reason. It's you we I I just live with it. In the background. The fear's there. It's real enough the danger is it's there. And a new kind of unpremeditated like uh uncontrolled move, physical move to a physical place, for me that that makes ... the lurking fear pops up then. And I essentially I feel more decidedly more vulnerable when Atar's with me. But there were two of us me and Monique and."

370

TWELFTH VISIT

"Well we did find Jean Jacques," Chava says a little later. Her intonation, pronouncing his name, sounds very French to me. I know very little French and I ask her and she says yes, that in French she apparently has much less of a foreign accent than she does in English, even though she understands and speaks a lot more English. Maybe because the rolling French 'r' is closer to the guttural Hebrew one she says. "Finally. Finally we found him. He wasn't he wasn't there when we got there. But we stayed. Which you already know. And it took a while before he got back. About three months actually. More than we'd been led to expect at first. But I'll uhm try to tell it in chronological order. "We arrived in in Gibraltar and his house was empty. But after a while we went into neighborhood stores a few times and after they knew my our faces a little we asked if where ... anyway we were referred to a housekeeper and she referred us to a part-time secretary he employs here who told us he'd definitely be back and he thought he would uh definitely see us. There was no way to tell exactly when. Usually he apparently just arrives unannounced. We had already decided to stay here. So we kept on waiting. So we just pottered around Gibraltar and I was working uh pretty steadily on the translation and then we got a call that he'd arrived. He was you know busy for about a week and we weren't top priority of course. But then he invited the three of us over for an evening meal. "He was we hadn't said anything about Monique. We thought he probably might not even remember her last name anyway. It would have been I mean it how would we have explained? You know over the phone with a secretary. And it was clear the firm the law firm hadn't given him any details. Because they'd asked me originally how I found them. Which was actually kind of reassuring that they didn't apparently didn't see a need to fill him in on all the uh ... So he just knew I had a travelling companion and he told his secretary to say 'bring along your companion and your daughter.' Monique was more than a little apprehensive really. She'd been his like his cook and here she'd be showing up for dinner uh. At first she didn't want to come. She was sure it would be terribly awkward. And she said I think it was mainly an excuse but she said it might spoil things for me he might you know not treat me as seriously uh respect my status enough to give me information. But I said if he was interested in old manuscripts that shouldn't make a difference I I was sure he was like dealing with all kinds of people. And I said I didn't want this ... any hiding. That she was my travelling companion and he said

GIBRALTAR

371

she was invited. That also she was the whole reason I'd found him and. Of course she was also curious about his house and everything. And Atar kept at her and wouldn't let her wouldn't give up, 'Yes, yes, you're coming, I want you to, please come: So uhm she did. "He actually he was happy and really amused to see her. He laughed enormously at the surprise of and at how I'd I'd found him through her. He's a very I mean he seems like an open, warm person. He's enormously intrigued by the manuscript. He wasn't the one who gave it to Mickie. He's never seen it or heard of it before. And he doesn't think it's real. "He actually he did meet someone called Mickie on the coast of the Bardawillagoon in northern Sinai. He was there part of the time that this Mickie was staying with Eyad. They had had a good time together, he said, fishing on Eyad's boat, swimming, uh lying in the sand and. But he said that most of the time they actually left each other alone. Each of them knew the limits of how social he felt. They were there together for somewhere around two months he thinks. At some point Mickie had left and and Jean Jacques had stayed on for two or three weeks more. He ca- can't remember exactly. It was 1994 or five, the year they were together there. Maybe a few months before Atar and I got there. But by the time I got to St. Pons and then to Gibraltar it was late 1997, autumn, almost 1998.

"Jean Jacques says this person's uh Mickie's plans hadn't been very definite when he left but he had talked about extended stays in different parts of the Sinai. He had needed to do some work Jean Jacques says, because he was running out of cash, and he thought-he wasn't sure he remembered right-he said he thought he might work at one of the diving centers along the Red Sea coast or do some construction there. You know building one of the new tourist villages and. Jean Jacques says he might have said something about T - Tunis and Morocco and maybe Algeria, he remembers Algeria, it stuck in his mind with all the vio- you know the civil war going on there, when he when Mickie decided to move on. He thinks maybe he was saying uhm later when he had some money he would cross the canal to Egypt and gradually moving along the northern coast of Africa. Jean Jacques invited him to St. Pons if he himself happened to be there between travelling. But he told him he might he was already planning to move. He says he told Mickie about his place in Gibraltar too where he sometimes stayed-that was before he bought his house-and Mickie could look him up there. He thinks this might have been the context why they uh discussed north Africa. He says Mickie

372

TWELFTH VISIT

didn't give him an address. There was nowhere he said there was nowhere uh definite he knew he'd be staying. "Apparently Mickie interviewed Jean Jacques about old manuscripts in a lot of detail. He asked exactly how they got authenticated and dated. H how they were usually preserved, what might happen to them under different kinds of of conditions. He'd thought at the time it was just I mean curiosity about something that Mickie had never been exposed to before. Another kind of journey into new territory. The same way Mickie asked Eyad, he said, about net mending and the different fish they caught at Bardawil and what spots and hours of the day were good for uhm which fish. Mickie had had asked Jean Jacques about what different kinds of ancient books existed, and the known structures and types usually found, what each kind each of them looked like, what they were made of and. Lots of questions like that." "I uh it's not a map anymore;' Chava is saying many months later. We're sitting in Gibraltar, on the veranda of the apartment she's rented. It's a little way up the hill above the harbor. I was going to Marseilles for a meeting and she'd given me her Gibraltar phone number and before I left I called and asked if I could come talk with her again. The conversation before this had been in Tel-Aviv as you've already read. Chava was back there at the time, doing a semester's worth of teaching, after having spent several months in Gibraltar and deciding she would go back there. This time our talking is on Citymill Lane, "Right above the Israeli consulate just in case;' Chava says and laughs, "a short way above Main Street." The Mediterranean below the verandah is blue gray and I can hear the surf. It's October and pretty windy but we've decided that sitting in the sharp chilly wind is worth having the sea smell and the roll of waves and the open, broad, exciting view. Taping is hopeless in this wind, so these parts of Chava's talking are preserved in notes only. The uhms and other grainy cements and glues of real women's talkings are disappeared. The skeleton record is of ordered sentences, mostly in Chava's own words when I could catch them fast enough in writing, but definitely sometimes in mine. "I was telling you about it last time we were talking," she says. "My reading of the book is different now. I don't think of it anymore, like I did three, two years even a year ago, as a literal map or a series of geographical or factual clues that I'm supposed to follow like a game of hide-and-seek, to find Mickie or find answers to questions about the book. Back then I was kind of captive in a whodunnit mindset. I still think it's definitely direct talking to

GIBRALTAR

373

me, but in a different way. Look at where I am. Look where I've gone, where it's taken me. I'm reading it now more as a manual, a guidebook to a kind of independence. Not telling me where to look for Mickie, or for Caterina, or the origins of the manuscript. Telling me where or how to look for me. For my own abilities. I know that sounds kind of bombastic. I don't know how to put it so it won't though, because it's really what I'm reading now in the book. And it looks like it's going to cause some significant changes in parts of the translation. But I knew from the outset that that was a possibility. ''I'm planning to stay here. I didn't realize it when T came back but I do now. At least for the time being. I'm not looking for Mickie anymore. I don't know whether he wanted me to in the first place. I don't know and it's not important to me to know any more what he may have wanted or intended. I mean he was a special friend. But that's was. He left. So did I. I've gone a long way of my own. And I'm not following him or trying to any more. He has become irrelevant. A warm nice memory. A trigger if you wish. If we somehow run into each other at some point it will be a very different, very new meeting. It won't be between the same people who were special friends back then. We won't be able to presuppose that kind of friendship. So, in some ways that are important to me, I'm a deeply different person. And the book-this travel, my journeys, my change-have changed it. It's not the same one that it was when I first started work on it. It won't even have the same name. It has changed before my eyes." Chava and Atar and Monique have been back in Gibraltar for about three months by the time we're sitting on the verandah and talking. They say there's something that each of them has become deeply attached to here. My French is near non-existent and Monique feels really incompetent in English so Chava has been interpreting for us a lot of the time. Monique says she's excited by the process more than the place-her unexpected ability to simrly pick up and relocate herself, Chava says. Which she says of course creates a strong bond between the two of them. She does like the place too though. The fact that it's actually a small town with shopkeepers and cafe owners who tend get into conversations with her. A lot of them speak some French and she finds she understands some Spanish. She's also making an effort with English but she's really shy about it. She says it's a little easier with some of the shopkeepers because their own English isn't perfect. And with Atar. She can't get over the sea. Being able to watch it and hear it all the time. St. Pons is way inland and before their first stretch in Gibraltar she had

374

TWELFTH VISIT

never spent any length of time by the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. She walks on the beach every day in any weather for at least an hour. Pretty often she takes Atar. The apartment opens onto a small back patio that's less exposed to salt air and wind than the verandah. Monique has been setting up a pot garden there. Potted tomato plants and cucumber and zucchini and herbs and lettuce and cress. She brought some of her own seeds even though Chava wasn't sure it was legal to cross the borders with them. And they got some seedlings from a local nursery. Atar helps her plant and she's the one in charge of watering. The growing conditions and climate are fairly similar to the ones at St. Pons except for more wind and the proximity of the sea and the salt air. Monique is basically doing the same kind of work she was in St. Ponscooking for people. And waitressing. She's also let a few shopkeepers and cafe owners know that there's a room to let at the apartment. More or less like she did at her house in St. Pons. I'm invited to stay the night. I've agreed on condition they take their regular rate. They set up the extra room they use for lodgers by using a cupboard to partition off part of Atar's room, the biggest one in the apartment, and they only take in women. If there are two women who need a place to stay for just a couple of nights they have an extra fold-out bed in the living room. Monique goes to church at St. Mary the Crowned, they have no idea why that name, and she's gotten to know two of the women who are regular worshipers there. They were the ones who helped her find homes to cook in. One of them has a vegetable garden. At first she hadn't planned on coming back. To Gibraltar. And then when she did she hadn't planned on staying. When each of them left for home they'd thought that was more or less that. "Ce tout;' Monique had said when they gave each other parting hugs. They had met Jean Jacques, they had reached a dead end as it were with the sleuthing project. Monique says she'd assumed her adventure was over. And she was glad to get home. Pretty soon though, she says, she was missing Chava and Atar. In their about three months at St. Pons and about three more in Gibraltar together she'd gotten used to having them around. "I don't have grandchildren," she told me shyly as if it was an embarrassing faux pas, as she lightly stepped over the supposedly worse embarrassment of having no children. Chava had phoned her almost every week from Tel-Aviv. Phoning from Israel is much cheaper than it is from France Chava says. Monique says she realized she felt kind of adopted

GIBRALTAR

375

by Chava. They started talking about Monique maybe coming to visit the holy land. As a young girl she had dreamt of seeing Jerusalem and Nazareth and the Jordan but she said she'd sort of totally put even the dreams aside as an adult. But having a place to live might make it affordable without a package deal which she couldn't bear the thought of. "These herds of dumb sheep following the tour guides around," she says. And the main attraction was in fact Atar and the fun and confidence of having someone to tell her which bus lines to use. During more than one of their phone conversations Chava said why not come. But finally they worked out that maybe the next time Chava was in Gibraltar and had to go back and teach a semester or so in Israel, Monique would come to Gibraltar to meet them and they could sail to Haifa together, which is much cheaper than flying, and would be a good change for Chava and Atar. But then Chava suggested on several occasions that Monique might want to come stay with them in Gibraltar. She said she could vouch for the rent, at least for as long as she still had funding for her translation. As it turns out, someone's now renting Monique's house and they're actually splitting the rent and expenses between them. But on the phone from Israel Chava said 'please come at least for a week or two just to see us and then we'll see.' Monique says Chava was very open about saying it would be a big help to her, that she wanted her along for selfish reasons, that it wasn't a favor or anything to Monique. And especially that Atar would be much happier with Monique around as well as Chava. Atar isn't having an easy time. She's told me she misses her abba, though he's visited twice since they came back, and her street at home and playing with her friends. And Monique's garden at St. Pons. Chava says they go to the playground a lot to get to know the children around. There aren't many. But Atar makes friends fast so Chava hopes she'll start feeling a little better soon. The children she's met here speak various languages so in order to get beyond just physical play, Atar is having to pick up both English (along with Monique) and Spanish, besides her basic French. One child has already been over to the apartment two or three times. And Atar's been over to her house further up the hill. But it's still a beginning kind of friendship. And the little girl and her family are often abroad. Atar is fascinated with the monkeys. Chava says, "The Barbary apes of Gibraltar. She's totally, completely magnetized. We go and watch their feedings as often as she can get me to make the steep climb up to the feeding

376

TWELFTH VISIT

place. Sometimes we take a taxi. A while ago I rented a car for a week to get back and forth up the coast to Malaga in Spain to get some stuff arranged there. While we had it we drove up to the feeding place every day. Either for the morning feeding or in the afternoon. She'd go twice a day to both feedings if I took her. They used to be fed by the British army but now it's the Gibraltar municipality. Some of them are semi-tame and come really close. Atar sits there quietly and watches. It's amazing the kind of patience she has for it. And she talks about them a lot and continuously asks questions, so we've been collecting books and information. It's getting to be a little library. Jean Jacques gave her an illustrated Gibraltar legend about them, published in Spanish. There are no wild apes anywhere else in Europe. The coast of Africa is just 24 kilometers away and there are wild apes like these in Africa. So this old Gibraltar legend is that they originally got here through an undersea tunnel between here and Africa. It's supposed to have an unknown opening somewhere deep in the St. Michael's cave system. She tells me, "In the last century, somewhere around 1850, there were two British colonels who are supposed to have gone into the St. Michael's caves and who never came back. The story is that one of iliem had a dog who came back howling. Actually their disappearance is on record. So then this undersea tunnel legend really caught on for a while." At the time we're talking, Chava is still working on her translation. She says it will be finished soon. And so will ilie living it provides. Jean Jacques is helping her try to set up some kind of similar project through his contacts with libraries and universities and museums that handle old manuscripts. He says the experience she's accumulated seems employable. Probably not for translating, because that usually means into English. The double step translation-into Hebrew and then into English-is too expensive. Most manuscripts won't be thought to justify that kind of investment. But she has accumulated a considerable expertise in research and deciphering texts in old Italian languages, particularly mercantesca, and especially in personalized versions of it. She may go back to Tel-Aviv for a semester or two if she gets an offer to teach there and if they can't work out a way for Atar to spend enough time with her father. But Chava doesn't see Tel-Aviv or the university or even teaching as her only, automatic option any more. For now she wants to stay in Gibraltar. "Looking at Africa," she says. "Out across the water. Spanning my horizon. The whole length and breadth and depth of it waiting behind the disappearing line. Accessible maybe. I don't

GIBRALTAR

377

know. Sometime. I never thought I'd be here either. I love this jumpoff point. Its chances. Even though physically you usually go somewhere else, to a more major airport, to get anywhere. Even if I don't ... " She doesn't finish this sentence. For now she says she wants to stay. She's mainly working on the end of the translation but she's also begun to make her own inquiries. At places where Jean Jacques has no personal contacts. And she says if that doesn't work out she'll be fine joining Monique at least for a while maybe adding house work to the cooking jobs and their room to let. "He doesn't believe it's real;' Chava tells me again after she's introduced me to Jean Jacques. We're meeting him at a cafe higher up the Gibraltar slope than her apartment. Each of the windows is carefully turned towards the spectacular view. He has invited all of us to dinner at his house the following evening. But I have to leave before that, early morning, to catch my flight back from Marseilles. So Chava and I have come to meet him here. Atar is at her friend's house and Monique is cooking at one of the houses on the panoramic drive even further up the hill. I'm actually glad of the less formal, lighter arrangements. I'm curious to see Jean Jacques' Gibraltar house but I've also begun to get exhausted by continuously interpreted multi-language conversations and the careful etiquette of appreciating hospitality. As warm and sincere as it's been. I'll be glad to just get to the point over an extended, single espresso. "Not that it's not real in the sense that it isn't ah isn't really from the thirteenth or fourteenth century. I have no doubts about that. That's that has been established. But the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ah ... did you know they are notorious for the ah forgeries they produced?" Jean Jacques is stroking his beard as he talks. It's sandy colored streaked with gray or in fact the opposite. Gray with parenthesized streaks of light blondish brown. "Forgeries?" "Forgeries, exactement. This it was exactly over this period that writing, in the form of documents, began to spread as a means of guaranteeing agreements. And other kinds of social actions. And when you ah use writing more and more as proof, as a means of establishing truth, it seems unavoidable that it will simultaneously be getting used more and more, to forge. To ah try to establish false claims to the truth:' "But what's the point? What's like what's to be gained from forging a personal journal or uh at least this one? I mean some personal journals might be worth uh of of important like kings or but this?"

378

TWELFTH VISIT

"No no yes of course, I do not mean that but well it is also a period when writing began to be ah practiced by many many more people across more social classes. People more and more took for themselves the prerogative, the privilege to write. And did it for itself seulement. So I think it might be forged in the sense that it isn't actually a journal or a travelogue. I mean perhaps the fantasies of this woman, perhaps called Caterina, or the ah fantasies about her of someone else. In any case I mean ah not what it seems." "I don't think so:' Chava says. She's been visibly restraining herself. The tape has caught her chair scraping the tiled terra-cotta floor and squeaking almost constantly as she moves in it. "But first I I'll let you hear Jean Jacques through and:' Jean Jacques went on. "I think it's just too too ah far removed farfetched you say yes? from what is known about the women in the ah thirteenth or fourteenth century. Basically that's it along with the context as I've told you. A hunch you might put it." There's a pause here and Chava is just about to start saying something but before she does Jean Jacques goes on, "In general, dealing with manuscripts I've ah I've developed this ... a sense of multi-layered reading-of texts and documents being not what we read them to be. Today. What we read them to be today I mean." "I actually don't know much about I uh it's not my" "First:' he's saying, "many medieval manuscripts most of them were not ah physically written but only dictated by their authors. They are not the lit- the literal words of these famous authors whose names we ah presently know. They are the words recorded, sometimes in shorthand, and remembered by the ah unknown scribes to whom they were dictated. So even what we think of as the simple the link between author auteur and text, that is that is ah so so basic to us-it was precarious then, yes? It was not definite. Not direct. Not also not perceived as crucial." "But how is that relevant here? This one you certainly aren't saying this one was dictated I don't think. It doesn't seem logical that this personal kind ... it's not the kind of book that would be" "No no. It undoubtedly it was not but that is one of the layers through which I am aware that I read when I ah deal with old books. And it is ah also an example of a second, problem. Words they are changing constantly their meaning. And the words of medieval manuscripts they are deeply-deeply! -anchored in ah gone cultural contexts of which we have no ah how you

GIBRALTAR

379

say inkling of. We only can p-- painstakingly reconstruct perhaps parts of them. Perhaps. Our reality, as we physically sense it, is in its most simple details ... changed. So to the example I was just before giving, we make such ah drastically different assumptions about what is a book, what is expected to be in it, how is it to be used, where is it kept, how read, what kind of ah activity the reading of it is." Jean Jacques takes a sip of his coffee here. It's the first he's taken since we started. There's the sound of china clinking on the tape when he puts down his cup and also of Chava's chair squeaking. "The type of silent, personal reading that we ah automatically assume does not hold. Not for a great deal of medieval reading. The the type of uniform, standardized use of written characters and of words and of shared language that is to us fundamental to written communication-it is not a character of old manuscripts:' I'm surprised that his voice gets softer as he gets more and more animated. He seems to be self-conscious about his near-lecturing. Expounding his views. Aware and uncomfortable about dominating the conversation. But excited and passionate enough to go on. ''Ah ah concepts-concepts such as 'object' or ah even 'language' par example, as a generic term, were not part of people's world before the twelfth or thirteenth centuries." The tape records another pause and sip of coffee. Then he says, "Handling manuscripts it's I ah live with a feeling of receding reality. I can feel this a world untouchable but only just so, beyond the ah edge of the written words. It is embedded deeply in the density, in the ah thickness, in the pliability of the language as it it it designates the shifting meanings." Chava waits about a full half-minute before she starts to talk. As if she's waiting to be sure he's finished. She has stopped moving in her chair. Her speech is very slow. She seems to be considering what she's saying throughout the entire process of saying it, right till she's done. Piecing the thoughts or words together, weighing them, intentionally resisting their familiarity with it's offer of a quick, comfortable recital. She sounds as if she's almost dictating, so I can record her views in writing even though she knows I'm running the tape as well as taking notes. First, briefly, she has turned to Jean Jacques. "Jean Jacques, you will excuse me for talking in Hebrew." She's saying this in French. "You will understand. It's terribly artificial for us to speak to each other in English. And I need to be precise. I need I really need to try to make myself clear here. And you know my views. We've argued this over and over. So I don't agree with him," she turns to me and says in Hebrew.

380

TWELFTH VISIT

"Not at the fundamental level. It's not that I've got it all right. The translation I mean and. It's not that all of the words and uh uhm concepts are translatable. They're not. Or that that uh her sense of world is fully clear to me. It isn't. Or that I've accurately remapped it onto a contemporary sense of world. You know I don't believe in translation. That what gets translated actually captures the meaning, the feeling, the feel, the world, the the time, the rhythm of the original. It I don't think ... it really doesn't. Translation can ever be exhaustive, definitive. You know I think understanding is quicksand. That's why we agreed in the first place that you could use all those parts of what I'd translated. Because I was I'm so convinced that it was is uh temporary, provisional, that it will be almost unrecognizable by the time the book gets printed. And because I I believe that for all I know the published version may well be getting further away from the source than the first tries. So why not keep both? As a record of the process too. And for readers to choose between if they want. "But I uh disagree with Jean Jacques about the story's authenticity. I feel I've dived so deep into the intricacies of this person who wrote it and the details of her experiences that I'm sure there's no way they could have been falsified. Or or even just imagined. I have no doubt not a doubt. They're for real. Even if she did adopt Caterina's name as an alias, in order to hide something, or even if she did alter her own origins to match Caterina's. That's irrelevant and. Whoever she was and maybe she was Caterina her- herself whoever she I I can feel her personal presence. Her real concrete experience in the writing. It's this document is no less action than words. It is her standing and proclaiming. It is her this woman reporting a reality, operating on a reality by uttering and naming what she has lived, what she has experienced physically-I am convinced of that-by her organizing it, her telling it." Jean Jacques has moved back into his chair. They're old, deep chairs. Upholstered. In a smooth soft cotton paisley with a dark aquamarine background. I've been seeing it off to the side and back of the notepad I'm holding propped up on my lap. They have beautifully carved armrests. I don't know much about wood. Mahogany I think. Really warm friendly classic chairs but a little too big for me to sit all the way back in and still keep my feet comfortably on the floor. I'm hardly looking up from the notes I'm trying to take of every word, but he's there at the edge of my field of vision watching us intently and patiently. He can't understand the language. But he's looking straight at us, concentrated, following our exchange.

GIBRALTAR

381

"Besides;' Chava is saying, "what do we know about women in the thirteenth century? That's just the point. Nada. Or close to that. They were written out of history which means that we don't really know can't really know about what they commonly did or didn't do. And let's say okay, yes, so uh what she was knowing and and telling around her isn't what I can know, what I can see around me through my knowing, and what I can tell. My yes my reading of her is arrested. Reaches the dead end of opaque words. Of course my translation cannot ever converge with her act. Her action. But they do touch, intersect at the point of this this call of hers, this fact of writing-urgently dispatched, where she is uhm commanding her readers' gaze. 'Look at me, look directly, look at the living fact of me, at my proclaiming. Me rather than text. Through the text."' "You know I will have to go there." This is in French. To Jean Jacques. Then she explains to me in Hebrew. Then she goes back to French. "To Yangchow. I will I will have to I've decided to go to go there. Not now. It's too soon with Atar and Gibraltar just new and everything. But I will. Try to find the place. Try to find the funerary inscription. To look at it. To look back at it. At her in a way. I know, yes, it won't be in a language I can read. I will need an interpreter. Someone to help me locate it and read it to me. To read the stone. Someone to tell me what I am seeing. Still, I will see."

382

TWELFTH VISIT

CONTRAVERSIONS

JEWS AND OTHER DIFFERENCES

Rela Mazali, Maps of Women's Goings and Stayings Shelly Matthews, First Converts: Rich Pagan Women and the Rhetoric of Mission in Early Judaism and Christianity

Menachem Lorberbaum, Politics and the Limits of Law: Secularizing the Political in Medieval Jewish Thought

Gabriella Safran, Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire

Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore in Rabbinic Literature Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender

James A. Matisoff, Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish, second edition Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution Amir Sumaka'i Fink and Jacob Press, Independence Park: The Lives of Gay Men in Israel

Alon Goshen-Gottstein, The Sinner and the Amnesiac: The Rabbinic Invention of Elisha ben Abuya and Eleazar ben Arach

Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, eds., Modernity, Culture, and 'the Jew' Benjamin D. Sommer, A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40-66 Marilyn Reizbaum, fames Joyce's Judaic Other