Pale of Settlement

Borderland

Susan could spot an Israeli anywhere. Among the tourists in the Thamel Backpacker’s Café—the familiar crowd of Germans and Australians, rangy kids and rugged types who looked ready to head up Everest at a sprint—he stood out right away: the ropy muscles, the jiggling knee, the ashtray full of cigarettes smoked down to the filter or stubbed out half-done. He had broad sideburns, an Adam’sappleassharpasastone.HewaswearingaNirvanaT-shirt and baggy Bedouin pants. He was writing in a notebook. Not left to right. Two tables over, he looked up. His left eye twitched, then widened —a tic, not a wink. She could walk over and say Shalom, but then she’d be stuck explaining that she didn’t really speak Hebrew after all. She could ask him for a cigarette, but she didn’t smoke. She could say, My parents are Israeli, too. Fromhereinthecenteroftown,youcouldn’tseethemountains, Borderland 58 b o r d e r l a n d ~ 59 just the white disk of the sun burning through the morning haze. There was a musky scent of incense and donkey dung, a chaos of passingmotorbikesandrickshaws,bicyclesandbeat-upcars,bells and horns and shouts. Across the road, a little girl peeked around the doorway of a child-sized shrine. A dog lay panting in the shade ofastandstackedwithbinsofmangoes,persimmons,apples,packages of crackers, chocolate bars, wooden flutes, garlands of orange marigolds,brightpinksweets.Anoldwomansquattedbytheshop, spat on the dusty ground. Susan touched the face of her grandmother’s watch and counted back.Itwasninehoursandforty-fiveminutesearlierbackhome— stillthedaybefore:October19,1998.Theextrafifteenminutesoff New Delhi time were Nepal’s little hat-tip of independence from its big neighbors to the north and south—an interval intended, Susan supposed, solely to annoy, or to make you stop and think. Shefingeredthewatch’sgoldbracelet,itsdelicatesafetychain.She should have left it at home. In Gaza, the Arabs lined up at dawn. They waited at the checkpoint in taxis, crammed four across the back, in cars and trucks. The heat swirled in a yellow haze. Everywhere, there was sand. The soldiers—Dubi, Ofer, Sergei, Assaf, and the rest of the unit—stood by the concrete barriers and sandbags and razor wire and checked identity cards and waved a metal detector wand. The Arabs were laborers,fieldhands,merchants,factoryworkers,students,fishermen . They were on their way to Khan Yunis or Gaza City or across thebordertoIsrael.Theycarriedtheirbelongingsinplasticsacks. The women wore loose dresses, scarves wrapped around their heads. They smelled of sweat and cigarettes; their speech tumbled 60 ~ b o r d e r l a n d from their throats—glottal ayins, rolling rs. The sea was less than half a mile away. At night, you could hear it breathe. Go take a hike, Susan’s brothers used to say. After a while, her motherstartedsayingit,too,althoughcomingfromher,likemany English idioms, it never sounded right. She had a way of making everything seem literal. Go take a hike, she’d say, as if she really expected you to jump up, grab your rucksack and alpenstock and march down eight flights of stairs, out into Van Cortlandt Park and across the Bronx. Susan’s grandparents had been the hikers, the lovers of Alpine forests, wildflower glades. Her own parents preferred the beach. What Susan remembered, though, about their summers in Haifa or at the Jersey shore, was that the beach was the place her parents fought. They fought at night, after Susan and her brothers were in bed.TheyarguedinHebrew,anescalationofharshwhispersbreaking through to shouts. Then the screen door would rasp and slam, and Susan would lie awake, anxiety fluttering in her chest, waiting for whoever had gone out to return, but all she ever heard, before she fell asleep, was the hissing of the waves along the shore. In the morning, of course, she’d find her mother in the kitchen makingbreakfastasusual,akibbutznik’sbucketcapatopherhead, herfatherdrinkinghiscoffee,rustlingthenewspaper,ashealways did, as if nothing at all had happened between them the night before . It’sgoodtohaveashortmemory,hermotheralwayssaid,flicking her hands. But Susan didn’t have a short memory. She had a fickle, sticky memory, an inability to let go. She accumulated arguments, misunderstandings , fallings-out and fights, storing them away like b o r d e r l a n d ~ 61 the stacks of old letters and photographs she kept in shoe boxes underneath her bed, like her closets full of poorly fitting clothes. Her mother couldn’t understand why Susan wouldn’t throw things out. Leah was always...