Sadness Is a White Bird: A Novel - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Moriel Rothman-Zecher is an Israeli-American novelist and poet. He is a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and received a 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellowship for Literature. His writing has been published in The New York Times, The Paris Review’s “The Daily,” Haaretz, and elsewhere. He lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with his wife, Kayla, and daughter, Nahar. Read more at TheLefternWall.com and follow him on Twitter @Moriel_RZ. 

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Sadness Is a White Bird

ONE

EVERYTHING WAS SALT AND SWEAT, summertime and sharpened swords. It was Friday, July 25th. The date of our catastrophe, Laith.

Or mine, at least.

Two days after my 19th birthday. Two days before I was sent here. One lifetime ago. Now, in the fluorescent glow of this jail cell, I can still feel echoes of the South Hebron heat on my skin. Mostly, the desert painted in shades of red on the canvas of my face, but when I looked in the mirror that morning, on July 25th, I thought I saw a faint hum of brown glimmering beneath the sunburnt crust, threading between the black and ochre tapestry of my almost-full beard. A twinge of Saba Yehuda’s complexion, maybe. A twinge of my grandfather’s Salonican toughness. You might not have recognized me. My scalp was a hedgehog. My eyes glinted strangely in the glass of the base’s bathroom, yellow-green and nearly fearless.

We’d been in the Territories for almost a month by this point. One night, on guard duty outside the settlement of Kerem El, I pulled hair after hair out of my beard, just to stay awake. Afterward, back in my bunk, I wondered blearily if the Commander would notice patches and revoke my beard permit, make me shave it all off. He didn’t. I kept the tiny, coiled hairs in my pocket for three days, until I came to my senses and realized how weird that was.

Patrolling the Palestinian villages in the area was more interesting. No one else called them “Palestinian,” of course: everyone said “Arab villages” or “enemy villages” or “Arab outposts.” They were wobbly shanty-clusters that seemed like something you’d expect to find on the outskirts of Mumbai or Sao Paulo, only here there was no major metropolis in sight, just desert and the sprawling town of Yatta, whose economy was reportedly based on stolen cars and whose yellowish houses huddled together along the horizon’s hills.

None of the South Hebron villages had running water or electricity. Eviad claimed that was how they chose to live—“It’s their Bedouin culture, and shit”—but I was skeptical. I was usually skeptical when other Israelis spoke about Arabs. I was a discerning soldier, a different kind of soldier: ears always perked, eyebrows always raised. Almost always, at least. I remembered Kufr Qanut. I’d promised myself to sever my right hand, Laith, to suture my tongue to the roof of my mouth before I let myself forget: I was here to protect the Seven Other Villages, just like I told your sister I would be.

Some of the dusty children scampering between the tin-sided structures would ask us for candy during our patrols, and I’d give it to them when I had it. American candy too, that my dad brought back from a visit to our old home in Everbrook, Pennsylvania. I could feel through the wrappers how the heat turned the sweets gooey and soft, just like I liked them, but I didn’t allow myself to open even a single package. They weren’t for me. They were for the saucer eyes and twinkle laughs I’d get as I told the kids, in Arabic, not to eat all the candies at once, making a silly face to go along with my silly suggestion.

And then there were the dogs: chained to various desert shrubs, their rib cages bulging like broken accordions, raspy gurgles in their throats as they barked halfheartedly. They didn’t seem threatening, the dogs or the villages, but still, in the back of all our minds (yes, even mine) were the stories: the shepherd Yaron Ben Yisrael, stabbed in the throat. The ambulance filled with explosives. The old farmer in the suicide vest. The ambush at the Sheep Junction in ’03, where three guys from the Lavi unit were taken out in less than a minute. One moment: three boys laughing, pulling jackets tight, thinking about warm blowjobs and hot chocolate. Next moment: three corpses draped in torn olive green, blood coagulating in their chests alongside foreign lead and misplaced bone shards and half-baked hopes for the coming weekend and the one after that.

On a shelf inside my head, alongside the piles of my good intentions, I’d placed a little sign that read “No Illusions.” These were the Territories, after all. This wasn’t Beit al-Asal.

There was one village, Suswan, which seemed to have more going on than the other villages. Structurally, it was the same: dilapidated houses, tragic mutts, graffiti sprayed on the rocks reading “Freedom Falestine” in English and “No to the Zionist Colonization” in Arabic. The difference in Suswan was the number of people who seemed to be constantly coming and going. On the day of my birthday, July 23rd, our patrol passed by Suswan and I noticed a big group seated in a semicircle by the village’s olive grove. We were packed into the belly of an armored vehicle called a Ze’ev—a Wolf—whose shell was built around the skeleton of a Ford F-550, and was designed to protect against light weapons’ fire, as well as Molotov cocktails and rocks. The driver was a sullen, chain-smoking professional soldier named Evgeny. He was at least five years older than us, and Russian, and it wasn’t clear how well he actually spoke Hebrew, so he sort of faded into the background of the Wolf: dashboard, windshield, Evgeny. I’d been appointed patrol commander for the afternoon, and I told Evgeny to stop at the outskirts of the village. At first, it didn’t seem like he’d heard me or, if he had, like he gave a shit about what I was telling him to do.

“Evgeny, man,” I repeated, in louder, slower Hebrew, “Atzor kan. Stop here.”

The Wolf veered left and rolled to an off-road stop, earth clods and small plants crushed under its tires, and from the way Evgeny looked over at me, I wondered whether he might murder me in my sleep. This was a running joke I had with Gadi and Tal and Eviad: “Good night, dudes,” we’d say. “See you in the morning, unless Evgeny gets you first.” I looked at him now, at the bluish bags under his gray eyes, and felt a little bad that we’d decided he might be a serial killer, just because he was pale and brooding. Maybe he wasn’t even brooding. Maybe he was just shy.

“You don’t have to come,” I said. “You can wait here and smoke or something.”

Evgeny blinked.

I looked back at Gadi, Eviad, and Tal, at their lopsided smiles as they stretched their arms and cracked their knuckles and tumbled out of the Wolf into the sweltering sunlight.

“I’m going over there, guys,” I said, closing my door gently. “Any of you want to join?”

“Is this Arabian booty call, America?” Gadi said, in English, and Tal and Eviad laughed.

“Go fuck yourself,” I said, in Hebrew, running a hand over the side of my beard to obscure some of the blood vessels glowing below the skin of my cheeks.

“The Commander said we should make sure they notice us, right? And anyway, aren’t you curious to see who all those people are?”

I gestured toward the semicircle: eight or ten fleshy pink faces sheltering from the sun in the sparse shade supplied by Suswan’s silver-leaved olive trees. They were wearing beige vests, and some had crucifixes dangling from their necks. In the silence that followed my question, I could hear that they were speaking what sounded like German. There was one Palestinian guy sitting there with them.
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