Sulha

Malka Marom

Description

Sulha tells the story of Leora, who, twenty years after her husband was killed in the Sinai War, is empowered by law to decide whether or not to allow her only son to serve high-risk duty as his father did. As Abraham was so severely tested, so is Leora with her son's fate in her hands. Charged with this burden, Leora leaves her uneasy exile in Toronto and ventures to Sinai and encounters a Bedouin clan, which offers her a glimpse of the other: the mysterious Arab world that so fascinated her as a child, the enemy that her son might face. But are these people really the enemy?

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770903425
• Langue: English

Extrait

“ Sulha is one of the most poignant and inspired novels to have emerged from modern Israel’s harrowing yet exultant experience.”
—ELIE WIESEL
“This is not just a book for Jews and women, it is a multi-cultural adventure. Strong and provocative and illuminating, it is told in a unique new voice.”
—JONI MITCHELL
“. . . Crucial human questions, passionately addressed, and answered in a spirit of humility . . . I rejoice in [Malka Marom’s] achievement.
—LEONARD COHEN
“ Sulha attempts to reconcile ancient conflicts, the living and the dead, forgetting and forgiving, within the compassion and frailties of its characters. It is a large-hearted book, full of questions.”
—ANNE MICHAELS
“. . . I read it above all as a Poem or THE Poem of the desert . . . If history and politics are present, it is through an individual woman’s obsessive consciousness to come to grips with them, primarily to give meaning to her own life . . . This is where I see the beauty of [ Sulha ].”
—ROBERT ELBAZ



SULHA
A NOVEL
MALKA MAROM
ECW PRESS



Rarely, in the regions inhabited by Arabic- and
Hebrew-speaking people, will the two agree on any one thing.
The word sulha is the exception. In both
languages it has the same meaning: a forgiveness;
a reconciliation; a joining, repairing, making whole that
which has been torn asunder—peace.



In memory of my sister Yehudit
For Alexandra Hillah, Marva and Ellai



“The desert is a place where good and bad are wedded like sun and shade, where a stranger is always received and always shut out, a place where the common language is often silence or guns, where the horizon is wide and the boundaries narrow . . .”
(Sulha)



PROLOGUE
Today the great riverbeds of the Sinai are paved. Troops can move in the desert faster than ever—it was for them, the peacekeeping forces, that the great wadis were blacktopped. Yet, fast or slow, sooner or later, the flash floods will surely tear up the asphalt and sweep it downstream, just as they did the mines from the minefields.
Fast or slow, huge signs spin by every few kilometres on these highways, signs that say: “It is forbidden for stranger-foreigners to get off the main roads.” Thus, paved or not, the great riverbeds, the great, ancient passageways of the Sinai desert, are now borders within borders.
But ever since time remembered, the Sinai has held restrictions within restrictions. The ones written on bejewelled veils have been as binding as the ones carved in granite.
To this day, no place in the Sinai is more restricted to stranger-foreigners than the home ground of the mountain Badu. Even stranger-nomads are reluctant to venture there, not only because the wadis and the tributaries are difficult to traverse for even the best of camels or four-wheel drive, but also out of fear of the mountain clansmen and the strict nomadic law that dictates: Honour and blood will be avenged, if it takes five generations to track down the offender’s descendants. Even in words, very few people dare enter.
Only in whispers of whispers do people rumour that the most beautiful women in the peninsula have lived in solitude, for the past fifteen hundred years, in those mountains where no one except a person directly related to them by blood or marriage is ever allowed to see them, veiled though they may be. That is why their tents are called “the forbidden tents.”
To this day, only one stranger-foreigner has entered the forbidden tents. Her name is Leora—Nura, the Badu named her.
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It was in spring 1978 that Leora first entered the forbidden tents.
For once, since she was war-widowed in the Sinai War, Leora elected to forgo the memorial ceremonies held on Mount Herzl. She chose instead to touch the ground that had claimed her husband, the scorched wilderness over which his fighter plane had last been sighted. She embarked on her journey in time—ample time, she thought—to reach that site on Memorial Day.
But the desert laughs at what we mortals predetermine. You head to one place but end up at another. That’s the desert—the unexpected, the detours that change your life.
Leora didn’t know it. She didn’t know the desert. It was the first time she had ventured to the Sinai.
There was only one paved highway in the whole peninsula on that spring day in ’78. Every few kilometres, this highway climbed a hill or a mountain, rising so close to the Gulf of Aqaba–Eilat, Leora didn’t have to step out of the Land-Rover to see the desert mountains and the Red Sea forming an almost perfect circle of blue in the Valley of the Sun; and grains of sand glittered like gold dust on the beach, where stranger-girls wearing topless bikinis attracted Badu youths and nearly bewitched them—or so the Badu elders said—with their unveiled faces, uncovered bodies, and upbraided hair that swayed in tandem with the motion of their hips.
And when the sun disappeared behind the mountain range west of the highway, the sister range swelled east across the gulf, in Jordan, and farther south, in Saudi Arabia. The faint image of the gulf looked like the creation of an artist who had no desire or time to finish his picture, choosing instead to paint half the gulf on half of the canvas and to fold it precisely while the paint was still wet, in order to press an exact copy.
Now, soon after the Land-Rover turned from the gulf to the interior, Sinai became a chain of circles, no two links alike, and every highway—every road, every path, every track—was a wadi, a river caked dry. At forty or fifty kilometres an hour, and sometimes over sixty, the Land-Rover rolled on a river of dust banked by mountains—a towering massif locked tight, with no opening, no way out, in sight, and just when it seemed you were going to smack into it head-on, the mountains would part, the river would bend, a new circle would open up. You would exhale in relief—only to gasp when you notice that this circle, too, is locked tight. Solid stone ahead. Looking back, you see no sign of the spot where the mountains had parted, as if by miracle, only a minute ago. An opening must be there—you know in your head, but not in your blood.
A drought had been ravaging the Sinai for the past seven years, like in Egypt during Joseph’s days. And still the Sinai won’t let you forget that, in this desert, more people die in water—floodwater—than in thirst.
Upon the stone-hard banks of the dry riverbed, floodwaters had painted a white line. Whenever you see it, you cock your ears for the clap of a thundering flood and you itch to climb above the white line, no matter how innocent the sky. Rainfall, even a drizzle kilometres away, could flood here in a flash, tearing boulders off the cliffs and sweeping them downriver.
Deep in the interior, Sinai dwarfs the living—and the dead.
Here Leora felt she was in the right place at the right time. And though she wished she knew the desert well enough to traverse it by herself, in her own vehicle, her respect grew all the more for Russell, a distant relative who had offered her a ride in his Land-Rover.
Professor Russell—El Bofessa, the Badu called him in recognition of his knowledge of the desert and its inhabitants—was consulted by Badu elders on the event that had shaken the whole region as none other in the past thirty years. For, never before in thirty years—thirty years of war—had any Arab nation agreed to negotiate a peace treaty with Israel. Yet the previous autumn, the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, had flown to Jerusalem, and there, for the whole world to hear, he had declared: No more war! . . . No sooner did he say that than the prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, offered to return the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for peace.
At that very moment the Israeli occupation of Sinai changed from permanent to temporary—just as, in 1967, it had started to change from temporary to permanent when the Arab leader decided in Khartoum to reject the Israeli peace offering. But now, almost as soon as the peace talks started, they began to collapse. From day to day, no one knew if they would lead to no more war or to no more peace talks, let alone peace. And so, a period of waiting began—not unlike the one in 1967.
“The mirror image of time is staring you in the face at this very moment. For once you can see the full measure of the moment we are living in,” Russell told Leora. “Nothing stays the same here for very long, yet everything stays the same here forever,” he added, by force of habit, forgetting she was not his student. “Words change meaning from day to day now. ‘Peace,’ for instance, is invested with Messianic dimensions today, but if Egypt signs a peace treaty with Israel, the word ‘peace’ would shrink to mean ‘no war.’ This, in turn, is bound to shrink the soul . . .” Russell applied the brakes, skipped out of the Land-Rover, and picked up a couple of rocks, “work tools from the Stone Age . . .” He rested them on a ledge above the white flash-flood line so as to better conserve them.
It was not until they reached the Gates of the Wadi that the detour—the unexpected—materialized in the form of a nomad who hailed their Land Rover to a stop. The nomad and Russell exchanged salutations. Still short of breath, the nomad said, “A child-boy possessed of demons must be rushed quick-fast to the darwisha —the healing woman—of the mountain Badu . . .”
Russell told Leora he’d take the detour; drive the Badu child-boy to the maq’ad —the men’s guest-receiving-place—of the mountain Badu, and then drive her to her destination.
But when they arrived, the mountain maq’ad was deserted.
“Stay here and don’t wander off,” Russell said to Leora and to the Badu child-boy. And then he went to look for Abu Salim, the elder of the mountain Badu, or one of his clansmen.