The Sodomites

Zvika is not as well accustomed to change as he used to be. He imagines life in a Parisian apartment, washing dishes while an old CD of the Trio Jubran puts a baby to sleep, and she enters the kitchen and pinches his butt, reminding him that she really is there, that it’s not a dream, that they will be together for many more f***s and unemployment lines, that as long as algae nibbles at the foundations of the Golden Gate Bridge, they will keep on emptying bottles of wine and falling in love, keep on melting into each other on a couch in front of televised opiates and staying in place long after the electricity blacks out. But it is a dream, and he is alone, alone, alone with her ghost.The air is cool in the mornings and in the late afternoons. Sometimes there are heat waves and sometimes it rains. The woodpecker is long gone from the olive tree beneath the flat. The Jerusalem winter is not what it used to be, nor is the summer, for that matter. There is a great loneliness and a great despair, there are few friends and many enemies, but still there is a strong desire to flow. Like a powerful river, to flow, to flow. This will be another sleepless night, he sighs, and packs his equipment. The wine remains in his imaginary cellar, waiting for her. There’s only one thing he can do right now.   ***   Al Badawi, the world’s oldest olive tree, is not as well accustomed to change as it used to be. Yet it registers Zvika’s presence, who has been coming to pour water at its roots recently, and whose head is covered with an elusively colored material, something between bark and mud and late-winter leaves. In the evening all light is sucked from the sky into a hole of red fire, like flood water washing off a rock, and in the morning the light spreads well before the wheel of fire rises, white-hot and fresh for another nourishing turn over the canopy. At least this phenomenon remains more or less unchanged. The hills and valleys, however, have been altered beyond recognition. The two-legged animals would always come and go like the seasons, trimming Al Badawi’s leaves and collecting its fruit, laughing beneath its friendly shade, taking shelter from the water falling from the sky. Yet at some point they started removing boulders and shrubbery at an ever-increasing pace, flattening the grounds on the hills and in the valley below. Al Badawi meditated on this for several hundreds of years in its practice of contemplative effervescence, when it finally realized they were transforming the earth in order to plant specific species and then move round-like objects on top of the ground, enabling them, for some inexplicable reason, to take from plants ever larger quantities of fruit. It was all escalating pretty quickly according to Al Badawi’s conception of time, and the tree sensed grim implications in the changing taste of water, in the increasing dust in the air, and in a growing feeling of loneliness, as its friends of diverse species, and not only trees, were being uprooted and dismembered. It issued a warning to its genetic information, hoping to get the message across to its future descendants. Perhaps with some more pondering through the collective ancestral memory, a way could be found to deal with this ever-expanding menace. As it was issuing the notice, the agricultural terraces were becoming less relevant, the roads were turning from mere dirt to asphalt, buildings were sprouting, the air was changing, carrying with it ominous scents, the water was becoming ever more scarce, and from one moment to the next, a massive concrete serpentine structure, eight meters tall and so long it had no beginning nor end, was slithering in Al Badawi’s direction, swallowing everything in its path. Al Badawi sensed a certain foreboding element in the air, of things that move despite being dead, but had no time to give it any attention, as it was still deeply concerned about the terraces and roads that had already transformed the hills and valleys so dramatically. Al Badawi didn’t really know that it stood directly in the path of the Wall, next to this village of humanoids which they call Al Walaje, where one of the final stretches of the Separation Barrier will be constructed, entirely surrounding the village, and uprooting a bunch of trees on the way. “At the aunt’s and uncle’s…” Zvika hums, his voice cracked from bygone years of chain-smoking in the desert. “Yalla, boys, hand me that bucket of water.” The Palestinian kids follow the old Jew, who looks much like a shepherd with his traditional clothing, dark skin and thick gray eyebrows. He speaks colorful Arabic in a funny Iraqi accent and gives them balloons every time he comes over. Zvika pours the bucket at the old tree’s roots and pats the trunk. An older child on a donkey leads a herd of sheep down the valley below, to graze on the long barley billowing gently in the breeze, before the Wall separates it from the villagers forever. “Ahsan haywanat.” Zvika looks at the donkey’s calm eyes. “The best animal.” Back in the previous decade, when they just started building the Wall, Zvika went at night to the construction route and used a one-handed sledge hammer to drive in large nails into each marked tree on the way, hammering nails almost all the way in at the base of the trees, and then cutting the ends off with a pair of bolt cutters so the workers would not be able to identify spiked trees. He imagined with satisfaction the saws cutting through the trees to hit metal and break the chain with a sharp thud. The next day they came with a big Caterpillar excavator, lifted the olive trees whole out of the ground, and loaded them onto a truck to sell and transplant in the gardens of rich Israelis. Zvika remembers the wail of the old Palestinian haj: “Why the trees? Haram ‘al a-zaytun! What have the olive trees ever done to them?” I was there in Al Walaje once or twice as well. I joined a group of solidarity activists to repair a demolished house on the route of the forthcoming Wall. The owner, a man with a multicolored black-gray-white mustache, painted an image of the house before demolition. “Here was the children’s bedroom, there was the kitchen.” With a blank face and a shaking hand, he pointed at the other side of the valley. “And there was Al Walajeh, on that mountain, before we were displaced in 1948.” And so we went to work with an activist fervor, carrying dirt and manning shovels. Since I spend most of my time seated and staring at pixels on the screen, whenever I do manual labor I get this megalomaniac sensation. After an hour of work, when my muscles started aching with the satisfying feeling of accomplishment, I already visualized myself immortalized with a post-revolutionary statue—me with a bucket in each hand, on my face a stoic gaze to the future, and at the bottom, a steel plate on a marble base with my name. “Adi carried a s**t-ton of dirt,” people would say. And then Zvika arrived with four young men from Beit Jalla in his pickup truck and told us we had been carrying the dirt to the wrong place, shattering my fantasy. The young men went to work, and in ten minutes the mound of dirt was moved elsewhere. “They’re students at Bethlehem University but they still work pretty well,” Zvika said, and looking at my sweaty forehead, added, “Yalla, let’s get to work unless you want me to propose to you.” It is early in the morning. Zvika’s joints are not what they had been. His nighttime mission is done, and so is he. He walks away, leaning on a thick branch as he goes, barely visible with his attire of green brown and gray, and the camouflage kuffiyeh wrapped tightly around his head. Beneath Al Badawi’s hill, while one small child clumsily tries to blow air into his deflated orange balloon, the construction crew assembles to start a day of work. Four reserve soldiers pour out of their loud jeep lethargically, looking like they have something better to do, barely glancing at the kids by the tree. A contractor, wearing a white buttoned shirt and hauling white papers, spits orders in several directions. The workers, Palestinians hired in a city, perhaps Yatta, from another part of the West Bank, avoid the kids’ eyes. Their reflective vests get swallowed in the big yellow machines on the site. The Cat excavator fills the morning air with the roar of its engine. The hydraulic arm is raised with the gigantic bucket pointing its fangs towards the inside, and the machine moves ahead, ninety tons crunching the ground, straight towards the marked olive trees. But something’s wrong. The excavator stops and the worker steps out to examine the engine. The sound of the engine changes from a deep menacing grunge, to an increasingly higher pitch, and to a screeching scream, like a wall of noise. The contractor runs towards the excavator, yelling, “Shut down the engine, shut down the engine!” but the workers cover their ears as the screeching continues, increasing in volume until a loud c****x—like a high-speed train going off track—mutes the machine. Black smoke emerges from the engine cover. In the silence that ensues, one can hear the jeep of the bewildered soldiers, and a hesitant toll of a bellwether from a flock of sheep in the valley below, and soon, a cheerful chant, “Allahu akbar, Allahu ak-bar!” Children wave their colorful balloons. A couple of kilometers and several groans of pain down Wadi Ahmad, Zvika finds his old pickup truck. He throws a cut plastic jug, a crescent wrench and a funnel into the trunk, replaces the kuffiyeh with a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, and hauls his beaten old legs into the driver’s seat. He drives up a dirt path evading the checkpoint to meet the road to Malha. Stops by the highway to buy a dozen red roses from a dark-skinned boy adorned with a thin mustache stubble. Another dollar, another day. The kid counts his coins.