Maiden Voyages (64 page)

“Ah, but I have, you know. I have been to two holy lands—Israel and Egypt. I have also been to Greece, which is not really a holy land. But to get back to that streetcar—”

“Tell me about Israel,” Ibrahim said. “I want to comprehend the enemy.”

“On my first day there I took a walk alone along the beach at Jaffa, which means
The Beautiful
. Some boy about eleven or twelve came up and asked me the time—everybody there asks you the time, don’t ask me why—and when I told him he attacked me and threw me to the ground and starting punching me all over. We punched and kicked for a while until he finally got bored and walked away. I never knew what it was all about, except that because I was wearing shorts I probably offended him.”

“Bloody aggressive Israelis,” Ibrahim said. “That’s all they know, how to punch and kick their way through the world.”

“The boy was a Palestinian Arab,” Kali said. “He thought
I
was an Israeli.”

“Then the story is entirely different,” said Ibrahim. “It needs reexamining.”

The mythological food arrived at their table and they dug in. Ibrahim showed her how to eat a dish of dark brown powder with an indescribable smell.

“This is
zaatar
,” he said. “We’ve been eating it for centuries in the East. You dip the bread first in the olive oil to moisten it, then into the
zaatar
—so.” He popped a piece into her mouth. “Jesus Christ ate this all the time,” he said. “Him and his disciples. This is the bitter herbs they wrote about. Anyway, tell me more about Israel.”

“It’s really the streetcar I want to talk about,” Kali said.

“Never mind the streetcar.”

“Well I was walking through this village called Lifta, outside Jerusalem, and I was wearing shorts again, so I looked like a
sabra
again, and a whole tribe of little Arab boys came screaming up the mountain path toward me and started pelting me with stones. Stoned outside of Jerusalem, can you imagine, in the twentieth century, and me a Kanadian. In the clinic they put something called a spider clamp into my head where the worst wound was, and covered it with bandages that looked like a turban. They said now I looked like an Arab, and told me not to do anything exciting for a few days. I tried not to do anything exciting, but the Israelis are hooked on speed—I mean anything that
goes fast, the faster the better. So I had this wild motorcycle ride with a guy who thought he was doing me a favour by giving me a ride up to Tiberias, and every moment I thought I was going to die, which was of course the whole point, the thrill. Then I walked around Tiberias with the spider clamp rusting in my skull, holding my thoughts together as it were, keeping my head from flying apart in a hundred directions; then I brooded and felt biblical in a small hotel, and the next day another guy offered me a ride in his motor-boat in Lake Tiberias. I should have known better. He rode at top speed to the middle of the lake and informed me that now, two minutes either way, meant the difference between Israel and Jordan, life or death. Then he laughed and laughed like a madman and started going around in crazy wild circles. Can you imagine—this maniac in the middle of the Sea of Galilee and us going round and round and the laughter so loud they could probably hear it on both shores.…”

“Bloody insane Israelis,” said Ibrahim, and passed her a plate of ripe green figs.

“Well all the guys are on the make over there,” Kali said, “and I was a female tourist traveling alone, so what could I expect? Come on, it would be the same in your country.”

Ibrahim addressed his full attention to the figs.

“Oh wait,” Kali remembered, “I knew I forgot something, I forgot to tell you about the Holyland Buffet.…”

“What?”

“The Holyland Buffet. It was this crazy little place at the foot of the Mount of Loaves and Fishes. Nothing more than a little shack, really, with a counter in the front and a few shelves behind full of orange drinks and cigarettes and halvah bars. I must have been the first person the owner had seen for days, because—”

“Wait!” Ibrahim cried. “Wait wait wait! I have a cousin in Jordan who has a place called the Holyland Buffet, just outside of Bethlehem!”

“Well this one was in Israel.”

“It’s impossible that there are two!” Ibrahim cried, his face getting very red. “It’s just impossible!”

“Well, I didn’t know if the guy who ran this one was Arab or Israeli. Anyway, as I was saying, I must have been the first person or maybe
just the first woman he’d seen for days because he leaned over the counter after he served me my drink and clutched my wrists and pleaded
Come with me to Haifa! The lights, the cabarets, the people!
I said that I couldn’t, and I didn’t even know him. He said that didn’t matter, we’d have a wonderful time anyway.
To Haifa, to Haifa together!
I wonder where he is today; what a beautiful man.…”

“There can’t be two Holyland Buffets,” Ibrahim said, and proceeded not to listen to her as she went on.

“And then there was old Ephraim, the painter who lived in the old village of Safed in the mountains. He wanted to seduce me too, although he went on for hours about Eisenstein and Isadora Duncan and Stanislavsky and all the others he had known who were black-listed in the States. Now in Israel the tourist bureau warned tourists against having their portraits done by the infamous communist Ephraim, so he ended up with more business than anyone.…”

“Let’s change the subject,” said Ibrahim, dejectedly sipping a Turkish coffee. “What about Egypt?”

“At last we’re getting to what I wanted to tell you in the first place. The streetcar—”

“Who cares about a streetcar? What happened in Egypt?”

“Well of course, it’s even worse there for a woman to walk around alone. When I went every day to the museum in Cairo because there was so much to see, the guards thought I must have been playing some really sexy game with them; it was inconceivable that I would go alone to a museum every day—why? What was my
real
reason? I could not possibly have travelled half-way around the world to stare at statues and mummies of the dead lords of Egypt, the gold of Tutankhamen, the most exquisite sculpture imaginable. No, I was indeed a tart, a slut, a whore. So they kept plying me with sugary tea and cigarettes, and they smiled and joked among themselves, and when I didn’t want more sugary tea they offered me
Misra-Cola
and more cigarettes and endless offers of escorted tours around Cairo. Within a few days I had acquired a reputation of being one of the loosest women in the city, a tramp, an easy lay; and of course each one of them boasted to the others of his conquest of this piece of garbage, this foreigner. I don’t know how
I got to actually see what I wanted to see in the museum, but somehow I did.”

“Would you like some
halvah?
” Ibrahim asked. “It’s the lovely kind with chocolate marbled all through it. Here, have some.” And he popped a piece into her mouth. “Now, what else?”

“The pyramids,” Kali said. “Not the pyramids themselves—what can one say? But the washrooms, the horrible little washrooms that had no doors on the cubicles and no doors closed to the outside, and you had to pay the guard—a man—to go and pee, and you sat there in the shameless light of day staring at the Great Pyramid of Giza from the vantage point of a toilet seat, for Christ’s sake. I remember it well; I have tried to forget.”

The waiter at Mythological Foods produced the bill for the meal, and Ibrahim frowned darkly as he checked it over.

“It’s amazing and disgusting what they think they can charge for food that has been eaten since before Jesus Christ walked the earth, before Ulysses set sail from Ithaca, before there even was a Holy Land,” he said.

He paid, and they left. Outside the sky was a frail blue, the colour of Roman glass.

“But you come back from these travels, and it’s wonderful,” Kali mused. “You come back to Kanada, and the jet going from East to West interferes with the world’s turning. You realize there are other times, arrested sunsets, moments that go on forever, cities whose walls trap time.…”

“That bill was too high,” Ibrahim muttered. “We’d have gotten a better meal at the Holyland Buffet. The one my cousin owns. In Jordan.”

They waited for a streetcar; they were both going in the same direction.

“
Now
will you listen to my story, the one I was going to tell you in the first place?” Kali asked.

“All right, but make it fast.”

“Well there I was, standing in the middle of Cairo one afternoon, hot, mad, and completely disoriented, with people screaming all around
me and donkeys braying and a chaos that exists nowhere else in the world—when what should I see?”

“I don’t know. What did you see?”

“What should I see, coming toward me with the slowness and grace of a dream, its colours an unmistakable dark-red and yellow, the sign on its metal forehead a magic name recalling a distant, mythic land.…”

“What did you
see
?” Ibrahim’s mood was black.

“A King Street streetcar.”

“A what?”

“A King Street streetcar. From Toronto, Kanada. The city gives old ones away to Egypt and I guess other places, when they’re too worn out to use here. There it was, coming toward me, this great, fabulous beast. Try to imagine it, Ibrahim, try to imagine what I felt.”

But Ibrahim was too angry about the meal, about the bill, about the second Holyland Buffet which was in the country of the enemy, and about the coldness of the day in this country of his exile, to pay much attention to what she said.

(1945–)

from
TEACHING A STONE TO TALK

THE DEER AT PROVIDENCIA

There were four of us North Americans in the jungle, in the Ecuadorian jungle on the banks of the Napo River in the Amazon watershed. The other three North Americans were metropolitan men. We stayed in tents in one riverside village, and visited others. At the village called Providencia we saw a sight which moved us, and which shocked the men.

* * *

The first thing we saw when we climbed the riverbank to the village of Providencia was the deer. It was roped to a tree on the grass clearing near the thatch shelter where we would eat lunch.

The deer was small, about the size of a whitetail fawn, but apparently full-grown. It had a rope around its neck and three feet caught in the rope. Someone said that the dogs had caught it that morning and the villagers were going to cook and eat it that night.

This clearing lay at the edge of the little thatched-hut village. We could see the villagers going about their business, scattering feed corn for hens about their houses, and wandering down paths to the river to bathe. The village headman was our host; he stood beside us as we watched the deer struggle. Several village boys were interested in the deer; they formed part of the circle we made around it in the clearing. So also did four businessmen from Quito who were attempting to guide us around the jungle. Few of the very different people standing in this circle had a common language. We watched the deer, and no one said much.

The deer lay on its side at the rope’s very end, so the rope lacked slack to let it rest its head in the dust. It was “pretty,” delicate of bone like all deer, and thin-skinned for the tropics. Its skin looked virtually hairless, in fact, and almost translucent, like a membrane. Its neck was no thicker than my wrist; it was rubbed open on the rope, and gashed. Trying to paw itself free of the rope, the deer had scratched its own neck with its hooves. The raw underside of its neck showed red stripes and some bruises bleeding inside the muscles. Now three of its feet were hooked in the rope under its jaw. It could not stand, of course, on one leg, so it could not move to slacken the rope and ease the pull on its throat and enable it to rest its head.

Repeatedly the deer paused, motionless, its eyes veiled, with only its rib cage in motion, and its breaths the only sound. Then, after I would think, “It has given up; now it will die,” it would heave. The rope twanged; the tree leaves clattered; the deer’s free foot beat the ground. We stepped back and held our breaths. It thrashed, kicking, but only one leg moved; the other three legs tightened inside the rope’s loops.
Its hip jerked; its spine shook. Its eyes rolled; its tongue, thick with spittle, pushed in and out. Then it would rest again. We watched this for fifteen minutes.