Alef: The NEXT Conversation

The Earth is Not Quiet

By Laura Jo Hess

No place but a sidewalk crack, a bridge across water, the oily death of a crooked coast. Here, you sip tea on a balcony made of wood, spit tears from a hotel roof, jut eyes across a dimmed room. Hammocks are slung between bedposts, blankets pile high on the floor, shadows take the shape of a sailboat. If you try hard, you can recall the angles of the woman in the marketplace and the hue of her orange skin. You can locate love in the zee of two bodies clasped together at a bedside or a coffee shop. All you need to know is this smeared window and the existence of plastic tables and telephone poles. Take your feet and place them down—learn the loose alleyways and etch your face on the tavern wall as you turn to leave.

What life there is, is remembered on the balcony of a soon-to-be vacant room. Shirtless boys with tanned skin bend at the hips and knees; girls in shoes walk like birds to the local bar, kiss gloss to the side of glass and make you remember their scents. I, in canvas shoes, just learned how to breathe. I, an animal, forgot you when the air came through. How must the cracks in the desert hide jewels, a scroll of history, bedposts of old lovers. How must soldiers hold metal in clasped hands and recall, broken, the face of their best friends, their brothers, shema over the arch of a bomb. A man wipes the skin beneath his eyes and his teeth shine as he speaks—I can’t hear the words but his lip movements are inevitable. I can’t see his hands but later they place stones on a grave flat and secure. Later, his chest heaves and his gun sags with the weight of his tears.

But how could this be in a place that just began? Let us recall a boy in shirtsleeves and a tie clip, ten years old, studying letters in black ink, shapes that start with lines and end in squares: moments you mustn’t trust until spoken. Climb aboard, his father says, yelp these words from rooftops havens and hammock beds. Place sounds in wood petrified to stone, in the stratified parallels of doorways, the limestone fibers of a place you claim to love. If you want language, he boasts, learn to love a foreigner. If you want history, memorize these words, tattoo them on the inner side of your wrists; remember them once I’m gone. When addressed in Yiddish, respond in Hebrew. When wide-eyed boys throw stones in your direction, throw back in Hebrew. If you want food, shiny shoes, or a slice of bread, use only Hebrew words.

A hundred and fifty years later, a street moans in language: lamps sway and sound emits from the crown of the head, light from the back of the throat. What you know is limited to distance and boiling points, minutes of mediocrity. Amid a circle, find swans dancing limbs across the radii, blonde arms flailing and torsos aghast, static becoming motion momentarily. Let me explain you the drummers with tanned skin and definition, a shofar in hands callused, lips pursed red. But at a beach in the afternoon, a light splits the air in thirds and a white horse prepares for a ceremony, human legs sturdy on either side of its tough and furless hide. I heave my body upon sand, haul breaths from my open center, pause for heat to gather on my chin, my toes. I suppose it took such a contrast of color to make me weep.

At synagogue, a woman with thick stockings and a wig leads my finger along Hebrew words. She picks the lint from my skirt and covers my calves with fabric. You come to my house, she whispers, you eat Shabbat. If Israel is a moment, then put me in a café with a wooden deck and chairs with straight backs, a cue. Give me a real hand on a real thigh, an instant of smoke billowing from the lungs. If Israel is a day, then sit me on a bench at Jaffa with jagged coastlines and flags folded over in wind. For now, Israel must be larger—sand surrendered in the fiber of a pant leg, a graveyard set at dawn.

Photo by acroll, licensed under Creative Commons.

Laura Jo Hess is a midwesterner living in Brooklyn. She is attending The New School in the fall.

Read more posts from Issue #19: Israel.

Tags: coast, Hebrew, Israel, Shabbat, Yiddish

Posted by Emily.Comisar@birthrightisraelnext.org, Tuesday, August 17th, 2010, 11:17 am, Israel.