Читать книгу Sarah/Sara - Jacob Marperger Paul - Страница 8

July 20

Shabbat came and went. I observed (no cooking, rowing, writing, burning) but I did not da’aven. I went for a short jog along the shore, figured I might as well give my legs a bit of exercise. And besides, this prolonged a stretch of sand beach is pretty rare. I don’t know when I’ll get to go on a real run again. But that all digresses from the point that I’m shocked and scared that even yesterday, when there was pretty much nothing else to do, and nothing more important, I didn’t pray. But I don’t want to think about it too much, either. And I have other things to be worried about.

I forgot to bring the camera bag on the plane. In the long run, doing without binoculars, a guide to North American birds and my Canon won’t kill me. But ill-preparedness will, and two things already happened today to make me feel even that inconsequential bag’s absence. First, about 10:30 in the morning, right after I’d started off for the day (more about missing half the morning later) I went by a tiny island and all of these round orange birds rose up out of tundra. It would’ve thrilled you, Abba. You probably would’ve identified them off the top of your head as some rare species, a once in a lifetime sighting. They weren’t large but they were exceedingly round, visibly so even a good hundred feet off. They didn’t rise up to fly away but instead created this squawking chaotic mass, the way seagulls do, blanketing the little island. I hadn’t intended to stop there anyway, but after that, it was simply out of the question. I don’t want to die in some Hitchcockian rerun. But, and this was a welcome change from the anxiety that plagues me, my curiosity about the birds occupied at least as much mental territory as my unease about their angry, unprecedented eruption.

But, no bird book, no binoculars; I worry because I don’t think you’d forget something like that, what with your elaborate and redundant checklists. I worry that if I can make little mistakes, I can make big mistakes, that if I’m noticing some things I’ve forgotten to do in preparation, then there are other, worse things I’m also forgetting, neglecting, overlooking.

Perhaps I’d do better to be concerned about my gradual drift in time. Each day, I’ve set out slightly later. I mean, I’m still getting my same eight to ten hours in each day; I’m getting to where I’m supposed to be on the topo map before stopping each night, and it’s always light out. So what does it matter? I don’t know. It strikes me as a gradual erosion of discipline, an acceleration of the time lost traveling west to east, not that time zones are relevant or practical here. I don’t know if or when I’ll need that time back.

You can jump at your own shadows out here.

I meant to da’aven today. I didn’t. I don’t know what that means either.

I wished for my binoculars most after lunch. I had the sail up. There was a good wind and the freedom of not paddling, not tacking, made me strangely giddy. I found myself craning in different directions, stir-crazy, half out of the cockpit, looking behind me, shading my eyes. I think I may have shouted out once or twice. That’s one of the strangest things about moving swiftly under sail: no sense of wind. You’re moving in the wind at the speed of the wind; the water slips past you and you feel like you should feel speed; there is no feeling of speed. I wanted to feel in a way that matched my energy. Dazzling white, breakaway chunks of pack-ice drifted past to the north on my left, occasionally escorting the odd blue iceberg, a lost traveler from the great glacial snouts of western Alaska, or errant wanderers long strayed from Greenland. One stood out, oddly crescent, like the moon of Islam, like a sickle, like the shadow of a hood, pirouetting. I was frantic beneath my spray skirt, feet twitching, knees banging against the wooden hull; I shrieked a series of panting rhythmic whoops and shook my head violently. I was under sail; I grew chilly. I pulled the skirt up after all and felt underneath me for my trusty, fuzzy orange fleece. No dice. It was in the rear bulkhead. You can access the rear bulkhead while under sail as long as the pontoons are out. It’s risky though. I decided to lower the sail somewhat, slow pace, and then go for it. I lay my body across the smooth rear deck, its convex crease pressing into my breast bone and carefully, like a precariously perched lookout edging from the forecastle out onto a twisting spar high above the deck, I slid out to the bulkhead. I keep everything tied on one way or another, so I didn’t have to worry about balancing the bulkhead cap, just the boat. The fleece was there sure enough, right on top. I grabbed it, and then looked up. And I could see it, sort of, behind me, a swift white floe, about four feet of it above water, moving toward me. It was far away and at first I thought I was seeing a mirage of dry miraculously splayed across the water. It disappeared in a twist of sun and wave. My giddiness departed as if it never had been. My legs no longer dreamed of speed in staccato hull drumming. I gingerly retreated to the cockpit as fast as I could. That’s not a paradox; I did it. I got back to the cockpit; and gripping the fleece in my knees, I hoisted the sail and picked up some speed. I looked back and a little closer a crest of white topped a roll in the water and was gone but maybe only to reappear again. I pulled the fleece on and grabbed my paddle, started rowing. But that didn’t really add much. The sail’s efficient; all I was doing was adding nervous energy to the mix. I decided to head directly with the wind, take it for all it was worth; it took me north. I looked back: nothing. I pulled the spray skirt around the cockpit lip and looked back: something, yes, something but what? The boat lurched uneasily and I realized I’d hit a small wave funny, not a problem, per se, but I was headed towards a chunk of ice. I tacked and then looked back again: yes, something, almost certainly, but something indeterminate, something at roughly my speed, something I could’ve identified with binoculars.

Uncertain hours last a long, long time. When the waters are with you, when the boat’s running as it should, you can simply hang on and watch the ever-changing shore, sloping ridges like long dirt fingers suddenly broken by rifts of rock. The ever-present Brooks Range, defining the southern border of sight, changes as well. For much of this morning its reaches were covered in fog and then the fog dissipated and grey erupted into sun-blessed white peaks. But hours of peeking back, seeing and then not seeing, defining, imagining, dissuading, dwelling, those hours are static, long and damning. But I will not let the lack of a set of binoculars kill me. Even if it was a bear, a polar bear, I doubt if it wanted much with me. I am danger.

But then we are all fear and danger. Once, Eema told me that the terrorists acted out of fear. Abba, you weren’t home yet, and so I got her on the phone. “Yeah, they’re cowards, Eema.”

“Mother or Mom, Sarah, no Eema for me.”

“Well then it’s Sara, please.”

“I bore you, I named you, I’ll call you Sarah; you can have your friends call you what they like.” I wasn’t going to keep arguing with her. “Sarah, the issue isn’t cowardice; it’s fear.”

I let her go on, not understanding, not really caring, waiting for you to get home and take the phone. “The issue is that these men and women, these people, are so terrorized by fear, by anxiety, by uncertainty that they have to share it any way they can. Those men who almost killed your father; they were so crazed with fear that the only thing they could think to do was share it somehow, perpetrate this horrible terror with planes and fire.” Right, Mom. “That’s why your Sharon’s policies in the occupied territories will never stop terrorism. The more fear he creates; the more fear will seek outlet. People who do not fear, who are not oppressed, hunted, haunted by occupiers, they strive to avoid a situation of fear, strive to preserve a status-quo; those kind of people would never blow up buses or fly planes into buildings.” I asked her if she wanted me to start with her insistence on calling the land Hashem promised us in the Torah occupied, or would she rather I addressed the massive success of Jewish passivity during the Shoah, or would she simply rather I dropped the subject?

“F—king hell, Sarah,” she whispered—since I became orthodox and stopped cursing, she’s taken a special joy in profanity, a joy I once shared. “The security guard who used to let your father go in without ID when he had his cast didn’t make it out. Your father’s been to his house twice now to visit his wife. He used to see the man every day, but he only just learned his name, Samba. Yes, he was North African, Muslim. He was a twelve-dollar-an-hour employee with a green card who everyone resented because he wouldn’t let them in without their IDs and he stayed until the whole shithouse caved in and all you can think about is reprisals, and right and wrong, and bombing people.” Eema wasn’t whispering anymore. “And I have to think about what the hell I would do if I lost your father and there you are, self-righteously advocating a genocide of what was a pastoral shepherd folk until we, yes us, the never-can-do-wrong, always-the-victim Jews radicalized them. And you use the Holocaust to justify it. My grandparents died in the Holocaust; don’t you ever bring that up to me as a basis for your twisted manifest destiny. They would not have wanted others to die because they died; and while I’m at it, I might as well say that I can’t stand the pathetic way you call it the Shoah. Or call me, Eema! God it makes me angry. Call it what it is, the Holocaust. Not everything needs a name assigned by some smarmy, bearded self-righteous wisp of a man in a black coat, in a shtetl.”

I had to refrain from nervously giggling at her last comment about yeshivah boys naming the Shoah. Nothing I could say would turn the tide at that point, so I delicately set the receiver back down in its cradle on my desk while she continued talking, gaining volume. There just wasn’t any point staying on the phone. I was the first one in the office by a matter of hours, gray streaks of cold December light barely beginning to part the buildings ringing Ben Yehudah Square, all so that I’d be early enough that it would be late enough but early enough back there. I couldn’t listen; I didn’t have to. I would give an awful lot to hear you launch into a righteous tirade, right or wrong, at this moment, Eema. I’d really give an awful lot. I miss you. Despite everything, your misgivings about Eretz Yisroel, about flying, about me, you came to Yerushalaim. Despite all of my belief, despite knowing that everything fits into Hashem’s plan, I wish that you hadn’t.

But what choice is there but to go on? They seem cliché, the sayings: Changing your life lets them win; the best defense is your daily routine; never bow to terrorism; never again; an eye for an eye; to fear is to lose. But the world rotates on a combination of obstinacy and faith. If you don’t believe that you’ll die the moment Hashem decides, no sooner, no later, you go insane. You can’t survive. There are teenage women in bulky coats dressed up like orthodox women, like me, walking into university cafeterias and devolving into a ground level Fourth-of-July display. Legs and hands and feet and bone and bolts and nails. I shouldn’t have told my father what the Rosh Yeshivah where I learned with the women’s group in the evening in Kiriat Yoel said about the Jews that died in the Shoah. Of course my father told my mother. Of course she called me outraged. “They deserved it, Sarah? Is that what he told you? That they deserved it? That motherf—r said that my grandparents deserved to be yanked out of their tiny Czech ghetto, out of their shtetl shul, and taken out into the woods where they dug their own graves? Or did the f—t b—d mean that my father deserved to go to the children’s labor camp where the commandant used him to teach his son how to strike body blows? Or did he not realize that my father’s family was practicing, was orthodox, was devout?” What could I say back to her, to my mother? I answered the way the rabbi answered when the question of the many Orthodox Jews who died was raised, probably not the right answer.

“Eema, it’s very hard to accept that we might have deserved it, and it in no way negates any of the Nazis’ guilt. They are Amalek, who we were supposed to have killed off in the time of the first temple. But the fact is that all Jews are interconnected and responsible for each other, and if the Jew in Russia (I didn’t want to say Czechoslovakia, I didn’t want to indict my own great-grandparents, my own grandfather) if the Jew in Russia says Tehillim without kovanah, then there’s that much less righteousness in the world, and then the Jew in Germany will break Shabbos, the Jew in France eat pork, the Jew in America intermarry.”

That time, she hung up on me, but only after first repeatedly banging the receiver against something hard, the kitchen countertop maybe. I thought I might have heard silverware jangling as it hit. I hung on, listened until she hung up. I thought about my grandfather, how he was lucky that he got to stand all day while a little Nazi solar-plexed him. I was thinking about how it felt putting body weight behind a blow during training with punching bags when I did my tour with the Israeli Defense Forces, the way your shoulder wants to blow out the back of your moving body, and imagining my fourteen-year-old grandfather bearing that impact again and again, glad that his special role as a punching bag made him unique, kept him alive while all other children persished. The least I could do was listen while she slammed the phone and cursed, though the call wasn’t cheap. I was in my apartment that time, upstairs from the cafe.

Well the sun isn’t going to go down. That’s just part of the deal. But there’s a lot that I need to do, will do tomorrow. I’ll wake up early, and if not totally reverse the lost time, at least begin the reversal. For each of the next four days, I, Sara bat Shmeenah, Sarah Frankel, will wake up half an hour earlier. And that means that I have to go to bed soon, with or without the help of dark.

I don’t know if I can go back to that apartment. It’s right over the cafe; my windows blew out too. Perhaps I can make this compromise: I’ll return to Yerushalaim, but to a new apartment. Ok. That makes me feel better. I can go to bed now. Good-night, Sun, sweet dreams.