Lucena (17 page)

The trip was short. In Madrid we got on an airplane which took us to Tel-Aviv. It seemed long to me. Where are we going? I don’t have any Friends there. I don’t know the language. Well, yes, a bit of Hebrew that I studied for my
Bar-Mitzva
and from the Sunday classes from
monsieur
Zohar. But I didn’t know it well enough to live there. It was apparent to me that my place was not there. I don’t know where I got that feeling in my chest, that ache in the chest which lasted the two years we were there. An ache which no doctor could explain. A tenuous, but permanent ache, waking or sleeping. An ache which disappeared the day we returned to Málaga. But I ask myself again and again; what made him emigrate to Israel? I asked him, and he responded, as is customary among the Tetuanis, that we must not talk about the past. He didn’t care about psychology, Freud, Jung. He was always busy with his business. Business was to earn money, and support the family. Though in reality the purpose of his business was to escape from the family, avoid encounters with her, and problems with the children. That, he left to the wife, while he took charge of the business which kept him occupied from dawn to midnight, even on Saturdays. I think that what he wanted was to quiet his conscience. He simply wanted to be able to say: I tried. And that those above not come down from heaven to complicate his life with Zionism, the gathering of the dispersed, the Temple and the Jewish people. When I get to heaven he would say, “I tried it for two years. And look what your Jews did to me. They laughed at me every day I spent there. If you give awards for suffering, you must give me more than you gave Job who lost his children and his gods. And they pulled out one of my hairs every fifteen minutes. Then they pulled out my nails. And when they grew back, they pulled them out again. And then they plucked out my eyes. They made me want to be deaf so I wouldn’t hear what I heard. They made me want to die every day, to hate the Jewish people. They made me want to kill, and when I decided to leave, they asserted that the only thing I had wanted was to take advantage of the benefits from the resettlement office. That is what they said, without trying to assist or to listen.”

I’m sure he did it to have his speech prepared for arrival in heaven because he had already been in Israel four times.

There is where I did it for the first time. It was during a trip to Elat. They said she was easy. I remember what she was called. I remember her name but it’s hard for me to pronounce it. She had drunk a little cheap wine that we were offered on Friday then I took her to the beach. I don’t know if she wanted it or not. There was nobody around. It would have been about three in the morning. I did penetrate her. I don’t know who she supposedly had given herself to but there was a little blood. She was a virgin like me. Why did they say she was easy? Go figure. However it was, since that day we never spoke again. I don’t even remember our glances ever crossing once during the rest of the classes which we both attended. As though from that moment we had ceased to exist for each other.

But also my father, perhaps, in those two years found his true love. I don’t believe he had ever loved my mother. It was a secret we kept that he had a lover. Everyone knew it and kept quiet. I have the impression that this was the only reason my mother agreed to emigrate, or return, to Málaga. She had always said she loved Israel and even today would have wanted to live in Jerusalem. But my father loved a Russian named Ludmila, a large, robust woman with blond hair, a woman like those of the forties. Not like the anorexics of today. Once I saw him entering a movie house in Tel-Aviv. I had never seen him look so happy. It seems that part of the business he had in Tel-Aviv, he had likely gone to get merchandise while my mother stayed in the store but besides the work, he also had a bit of pleasure. But that day I saw his face shining. He was happy as a kid. Happy as though he didn’t have a family. For him a family was like a growth on his back which he had to live with; a kind of life-long deformity without any way to avoid facing up to it.

Lately I ask him regularly why he wanted to go to Israel. Every time he answers something different.

Here are some of the answers I remember:

“I wanted to look the Arabs up and down. I wanted to see them depending on me and not me on them.”

“So your mother would leave me in peace so she couldn’t say that I hadn’t tried. It cost me a lot of money, but at least she keeps quiet.”

“To live together with a lot of Jews. It is an unforgettable experience.”

“So that you can be Jews. So you would not forget that you are Jews and so you wouldn’t marry a non-Jew.”

There are other responses, but when I ask why he returned he does not answer. As if he himself said: Isn’t it obvious? It is very obvious that there was nothing for him to find there. It is absolutely certain that those two years were the strangest of my life. Everyone is always nosing around about your origin. My mother would say she is Spanish. My father would say he is from Spanish Morocco. And I say that I am from Morocco. And then, when we are at the table, my mother tells me that we are not Moroccan, that we are not like THOSE Moroccans. Nobody is like THOSE Moroccans. They don’t exist. She stubbornly insists that we have a European culture and she is proud not to have ever heard any Moorish music
as though that were shameful
. She only listened to Tchaikovsky and Mozart. I, whenever I could, listened to Bob Dylan and Neil Young. And at school I was told I didn’t look like a Moroccan but I quickly understood that what they said about the Arabs, they really said about us. And when I tell my father that what he shouts at the television against the Arabs –that they should load them on a truck and take them to the other side of the border—is what they want to do with us. When they say you can’t trust an Arab, they mean you can’t trust a Moroccan. When they are afraid if you give an Arab something he will just want more, they are really referring to the Moroccans. When they say the Arabs are passive, they mean it is a lot better that they are, and that they don’t get involved in their affairs, in their country. Well, now my father understands that this is his country. He doesn’t understand very well the difference between Moroccans, Arabs and Asians, but it doesn’t matter anymore, only that it was insanity. Those were years of insanity. Years of cognitive dissonance. Yes, that is what it is called. The inner reality of the Moroccan is exactly the opposite of what he sees in every corner of the street. The only thing he can do is go crazy over it, become a delinquent, a crazy person, or leave the country. When I talk about this with my friends who dream of going to Israel, they say I am taking the side of the Arabs, and that I am an anti-Zionist. But one of them who studied a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem sometimes tells me: “It’s a country of crazies.” but then he keeps quiet. I think it is not exactly a country of crazies, not at all. It is a country of Ashkenazi’s. To us, their behavior seems crazy to the degree that ours seems so to them. The only problem is that they are the ones with the money. So from now on I tell them: They are not crazies, they are Ashkenazi’s.

––––––––

W
E ARE ALL POLACKS

C
harlie Bukovza woke in his destroyed apartment in South Tel-Aviv at noon.

It was called a pleasant morning.

But it was not to be.

In the mailbox he found a letter from ‘Tzirím’ magazine asking for an article for a special issue: “Couscous in Moroccan Poetry.”

Nobody hated more than he those loathsome texts that he was obligated to write so he could pay the rent without having to work at his profession of financial advisor. Two years before, he had received a small inheritance from his grandmother in France but it was only just enough to eat, for female escorts, and for paper.

He immediately grabbed the telephone and called the editor.

“We’re not back doing the same thing again, are we?”

“Who is speaking please?”

“Who? It’s Bukovza. I’m Bukovza.”

“Oh! I hope you will write the article. I think you are the right person for this righteous assignment.”

“Mister Brosh, aren’t you guys tired of all this foolishness?” complained Charlie. “Tell me, what the hell do I know about Moroccan poetry? I don’t speak Moroccan. I came to Israel at age three. How can you expect me to know Moroccan, much less Moroccan poetry? At great effort I did read the poems of Tahar Ben Jelloun, who, by the way, writes in French. My father is from Algeria and my mother is from Benchauen, from the Benzimra family. Do you know them? Why didn’t you ask for an article for the previous issue about love, or the previous one, about wine? What’s the matter? Do only Ashkenazi’s know about love?”

“Now, now, are we back to that again? I thought you got over that.” replied Brosh.

“Believe me,” said Charlie. “I’ll write an article for you. But why don’t you ask me to write articles about other topics as well? Besides, I want to be paid in advance. Eight hundred shekels in advance, tax free.”

“You know we don’t pay in advance.”

“Pay in advance or nothing,” demanded Charlie. “I know that those who don’t pay in advance don’t pay. It is what it is. See, I’ve turned into a Polack. We all turn into Polacks from arguing so much with you guys.”

“You must know,” injected Brosh, “that I am, in fact, a Moroccan according to
halajá
, Mosaic tradition, because my grandmother was born in Morocco, my sister-in-law is Moroccan and my daughter is going to marry a Moroccan who previously lived in France - now they call them Franco-Moroccans.”

“Surely your grandmother was born on the border between Morocco and Poland,” said Charlie.

“How do you know that?”

“Because,” said Charlie, “I have heard the Poles have even taken the Mediterranean away from us. ... In the Van Leer Foundation, King Leer was born in Morocco. Didn’t you know that? The world is Polish. I have a friend who says Judaism is Sephardic.”

“Right.” sighed Brosh, “Are you going to write the article or not?”

“When your check is deposited I will write it and in two days the article will be on your desk.”

“Good bye...”Charlie hung up.

The check arrived in two weeks. He deposited it and went to eat at the ‘Forel’ restaurant with his life- long girlfriend, Haya Barchilón, self-taught sketch artist and lesbian by choice.

“You’re the one who is always on the subject,” said Haya. “That’s why they always ask you to write about Moroccans, couscous and the rest.”

“I hate couscous. I never liked it. What a name! It sounds worse than sauerkraut. I always thought sauerkraut was a Tunisian food until ten years ago when I met a French girl Franco-Moroccan. She laughed at me for over an hour when I said that because it is an Alsatian food.”

“Who doesn’t know that?”

“Me. I also thought that besamel sauce was a honey sauce that was cooked with honey.”

“Why don’t you change the subject?” complained Haya.

“Tell me,” said Charlie, “You tell me. What do I know about Moroccan poetry? What am I going to talk about? About Tahar Ben Jelloun and the Palestinians? Know something? Jelloun justifies the assassination of Jews. I would like to write a poem called “Injustice justifies Injustice” because in this case we Jews can make the world spin a hundred times without a word.”

“Now you’re on the Palestinians? Eat your langostinos,”mumbled Haya.

“That‘s it,” said Charlie, “langostinos-Palestinos, it rhymes, gabacho-Morocco, I will write about the Sufi poetry of the Moroccans. You know something? It always goes well. You start out talking about the Sufis, then you say what you want and everybody drools. Then something about the whirling dervishes, a little of this, a little of that, a few names from the encyclopedia and you have an
ajla
article, fantastic.”

“Do you know where
ajla
comes from?” he went on. “Once I gave my book of poems ‘Occidente en mi Corazón’ to a presenter on Channel 3 or 33, and one day she called me and I asked what was going on, and whether they were thinking of doing a program about it. And she said “I’d like to, Wow what an
ajila
of a book.”

Haya laughed.

Charlie was nervous. He ate the fish quickly not even enjoying it, as usual. After the divorce his father had returned to France. There he had bought a pricy, famous restaurant ‘Le chaperon bleu’, where he used to go eat whenever he was in París. His father also didn’t know anything about Moroccan poetry and very little about couscous.

Charlie sat by the old typewriter and, as per his custom, he wrote the article in twenty minutes. He put it in an envelope and sent it to the editor. If all those homos who voted for the
Meretz
party and wrote one poem every four months knew how quickly he wrote they would tear out their hair. At any rate they already hate me enough it’s not necessary to irritate them further. In every interview I tell them how much of an effort it is for me to write so they don’t feel alone.

The next day there was a call from Mr. Brush.

“What is this? Here you don’t say anything about Moroccan poetry
Langostino-palestino
. What’s gotten in to you?”

“That’s not true. There is an allusion to the poet Barkat Abu Sansana, at the beginning of the article.”

“An allusion is not an article.”

“There was no contract. I wrote what I wrote. Besides, I am a Moroccan poet. Everything I write is Moroccan poetry, right? That is what you all always say.”

“You’re going too far! Write another article. I’m not publishing this”

“Another article, another eight hundred shekels. This time taxes included.”

“I won’t pay you again.”

“Tell me, is your grandmother still in Morocco or ...?”

“Don’t you raise your voice to me!”

“You know something?” said Charlie, “I have discovered that my family comes from Germany. My grandmother comes from Germany. Incredible isn’t it? I found out yesterday. I’m a
yeque
!”

“Imagine that!”

After two days another check arrived. Charlie had promised he would not write anything again about Morocco. It was enough. He had done it thousands of times. He didn’t even remember anything about there, nor had he experienced any nostalgia for visiting the parental home. In fact, neither had his parents.