Dust, Heat, Wind

My father is lost in Israel. Home of millions of slim, tan women; of hairy men with enormous hands; of falafel stands every three inches; of pushy, hot-tempered, bargain-hungry everyone; of soldiers who frisk you at the supermarket, mall, and movie theater. My father moves again and again. He tells me everything is temporary.

I find him in Jaffa. City of gleaming white. Restaurants and jewelry stores carved into stone. Succulent breads. A man with freckled lips wants to marry me, and asks my father how much. We enter a canopied marketplace. I wrap a beach towel around my legs and enter a historic synagogue with blood-red windows. The women are missing. I chew my bread.

I am stranded on the beach in Tel Aviv. I’ve fallen asleep and waited too long and now the busses have stopped. A man from England who lives on the beach wants to know my name. He’s been watching. Would I like to smoke a joint behind the rocks? It is Shabbat and the streets are empty. Seven miles to my father’s apartment. I pray my flip-flops hold up.

The next day, I take a bus downtown. My blistered feet tell me I need shoes I can walk miles in. A soldier on the bus shouts in Hebrew, then English. Who left the blue backpack under the seat? The bus is evacuated. I watch from a distance as the sun goes down. Men arrive in military trucks and block off the street. The bus stands and waits like a lost child. This time, I am only two miles from home.

My father and I move to a hotel in Elat. Red pebbles that look like glass beads float in milk-white sand. Across the water, the Egyptian mountain range is hazy, purple fringed with red. On the beach, a woman rises from the water, an Uzi strapped around her neck. A hotel clerk wants to marry me. I’m beautiful and he loves me. I tell him the mountains are beautiful, the woman with the gun, the sea. He agrees: ken, ken, ken . . . .

My father is passed out in the hotel room. He is sick from all the pills. Lyme Disease is so American, the doctors are perplexed. I pay fifteen shekels to go snorkeling. Lime, fuchsia, cobalt, gold. Colors so bright I laugh until I choke. I do not know the name of the porcupine fish—pale yellowish circles with eyes, spikes, and lips. One touch can paralyze. I float above their prickly tips, wishing my shadow invisible.

In Rehovot, I sit in a stranger’s apartment and watch British MTV. My father is in the hospital again. Doctors have put a port in his arm for daily antibiotics. When he returns, he will vomit and drink tea in this city of grapefruits and lemons, colors that hurt to see. I never go out before 2 PM; the sun is like a hammer. I slide open the wall of windows. Black dust and heavy air. I sweep and listen to the hollow room filled by Madonna, sirens, horns, dogs, and screaming children at play. Clichés that sound like home.

For two years, my mother has kept her mother’s ashes in a Johnson & Johnson baby powder container. I take a two-hour bus ride to Jerusalem with my grandmother in my backpack. At the bus depot, I enter a Mercedes cab. How much to the closest cemetery? Comma Ze Ole? If the driver doesn’t tell me, I’ll get out. Suddenly, he speaks English. At the cemetery, I find a short, hooked tree on a hill. Dusty white Jerusalem below where irrigation hoses have failed. When I pour my grandmother out, she rises and expands. Dust, heat, and wind.

A dusty, suited man places his hand on my head and begins to mumble in Hebrew. A weak song in a dry voice. I am nervous and continue shaking my grandmother out. The man is old. His hands shake. Bone clacks against plastic. When I stand, the man shows me the cardboard sign around his neck: Blessings for Cheap $$. I give him five shekels and walk away, turning back
to make sure no one follows.

Black tents snap in the wind. The archeologists are unearthing a city beneath a city. In one of my lives, it’s 2,003. In another, 5,764. At the Wailing Wall, we are separated—man from woman, Jew from Jew. A wall of humming. I pray for my father’s lungs and heart, the right side of his face that has frozen from palsy. I write it down. My prayers turn wet in my hands. I tuck them into the stone, wondering when the foundation will break. Millions of prayers. One wall. I can already see the cracks.

On the one-year anniversary of his mother’s death, my father and I visit the cemetery where she is buried in Givataim. The last time I saw her, she was a sliver of a woman with white hair and a broken leg. A tiny ghost who refused to speak. My cousin Yonkel stands near her grave. As children, we traded bullet shells, stuck them on the ends of our fingers and growled, waving our golden claws. Now he will not look at me. Unholy. My Aunt Aviva also turns away. I stand alone in a group of turned faces while the men collect men. They must form a circle of ten to pray for the dead.

My brother and I drive to the Golan Heights to swim in the ancient Roman pools. Seven pools cut into stone. We try their different sizes, temperatures. Suddenly, a naked little girl—round belly and brown curls. Tulips. The flat sound of her running feet. Her squeal of joy as she splashes. We are on the edge of the sea.

My father and I eat shrimp crusted with sesame seeds on the docks of Haifa. He tells me about living here, the fisherman who gave him chicken, salt, and bread. He tells me our last name belongs to the fisherman. My father has seen the fliers, the ones glued to the pylons that announce the fisherman is dead. It is good to see my father eat. The bones in his hands have begun to show.