Fields of Exile Read online

  “Thank you, Phoebe,” he says. “Now let’s have a go-round of the faculty, who will each tell you what they’re teaching this year, and also speak a bit about their research.” Judith notices now for the first time the long lineup of professors at the front of the room, sitting in a row on plastic orange chairs to the left of Phoebe. Oh God – a dozen speeches!

  “Don’t forget,” says Weick, “some of you will need to find someone next term to act as your thesis advisor. So, as your profs are speaking, listen carefully for common interests you might have.”

  A short, friendly-looking woman with close-cropped black hair stands. Judith’s pen is poised, waiting, above the pink page. “My name is Terry Montana, and this term I’ll be teaching the course on women and social work, which focuses on the relationship between the social policies affecting women in this society and the everyday problems faced by our women clients.” This interests Judith. “I’m also co-chairing the GLBT committee this year, and for those of you who don’t know, this stands for gay, lesbian, bi, and trans.”

  Judith, smiling, lowers her eyes to the page.

  Terry continues, “My research is a study I’m doing with five women colleagues from universities across the province, documenting the kinds of barriers lesbian graduate students face, and the ways heterosexism and homophobia are manifested in the academic environment. If you’re interested in this topic, or anything to do with GLBT, feel free to come chat. My office hours are Thursdays from two to four.”

  Terry Montana, writes Judith on the pink invitation to the Lion’s Den. Feminist. Lesbian. GLBT. She means to write down what Terry said, but she’s tired, and with the next guy already starting his spiel, she writes without realizing it, Gay Lesbian Bacon and Tomato. The next guy is named Greg Smolan, then it’s Corinne Marajian, and by the time the following guy stands up, Judith is spacing out. A short round bald man resembling Humpty Dumpty introduces himself as Tom Reggel. Reggel eggel, thinks Judith. In the prophet Ezekiel’s “vision of the chariot,” the reggel eggel was an ambiguous part of the four-headed creature’s body, which has traditionally been translated as a foot, a third and extra foot. But she knows from a night course in Jewish mysticism she took one winter at the Beit Ha’am Institute in Jerusalem, that reggel eggel actually means a penis. Automatically she glances at Tom Reggel’s crotch — no bulge there at all (maybe he doesn’t have one?). Then she catches herself and, blushing, looks away. Professor Reggel is speaking now, but she isn’t listening to him at all. She’s thinking about the penis of Moshe, the married man she was with seven years ago in Israel for about six months. Until her father’s death, she hardly ever thought about Moshe. But he’s been on her mind a lot since the funeral. As she sat there that day in the front row, surrounded by people but feeling all alone, Moshe’s image appeared before her like an apparition, like Hamlet’s father, and ever since then he has come to visit her once, twice, three times a day, even more if she’s bored or lonely. She isn’t so much thinking now about Moshe as feeling him. Feeling his taut, strong body, his thighs, chest, and penis pressing hard against her. Every Monday and Thursday morning he’d wait for her at the train station, at Hartuv Junction near the town where she worked. She’d get off the train from Jerusalem drained by the ecstasy of the ride: forty minutes of meandering through magnificent sun-slashed forests, up and down the backroads of the Jerusalem hills. Unsteadily she’d step off the train onto the almost-deserted outdoor platform, and at the bottom of the hill, Moshe’s white van was always waiting quietly under a tree, with the back door open, like an invitation. She would go running toward it: half-running, half-tripping down the hill, stumbling over the protruding tangled roots from the olive trees and their Y-shaped broken-off branches, nature-made slingshots.

  At the bottom she’d hurl herself against Moshe’s body, and he would catch and embrace her, one hand on her buttocks, and pull her tight against him. His body was hard and muscular, the body of a man who worked his own fields. No softness. No slack. But there was softness in his mouth, in his lips and tongue, when he kissed her, and in his eyes when he smiled at her tenderly. Then his kiss would turn hard, and he’d pull her down, and right there on the floor of the forest — on top of pine needles, and pine cones, and dead and living grass — they’d make love. Quickly, and urgently, always quickly and urgently, because there was never much time.

  “Never enough time,” Moshe often said, feeling old at forty-two, and having, as she thought then, “intimations of mortality.” But also, objectively speaking, there wasn’t much time. The train from Jerusalem arrived at seven-thirty in the morning, and they both had to be at work for eight. So as soon as they’d finished, they stood and brushed themselves off, with him sometimes picking debris out of her hair (reminding her of Rabbi Akiva, who did the same thing with his bride almost two thousand years earlier). Then he’d drive her up the hill to the lone office building in the town centre, where she was working for eight months on a community development project to help the poor and infirm.

  While in the middle of this thing with Moshe, she didn’t think much about it, because she couldn’t understand it. And she couldn’t understand it because she couldn’t find a word for it. I still can’t, she thinks, sitting here at Dunhill, while at the front of the room a cheerful but tough-looking blonde woman named Harloffery does her spiel. Moshe wasn’t a “boyfriend.” Boyfriends were the Jerusalem boys around her own age, innocent and eager, who took her out on Saturday night dates to movies. Moshe never took her anywhere; he just waited for her by the train. He wasn’t a boy either; he was a man, and an older man at that: forty-two to her twenty-four. Forty-two, twenty-four: opposite numbers, but matching opposites.

  The other word that didn’t fit her relationship with Moshe was love. They never used this word between them, not once. Though this thing between them was deep, maybe even as deep as love. Because Moshe was a man of the land. He had five dunams of land on a moshav that he farmed himself with his own tractor, growing artichokes, melons, and orange and lemon trees. To her, he smelled of the earth, the fields, the orchards, and the sun. Sometimes, after they’d made love, she would lie face down on top of him — the same way she liked on nature trips to lie face down flat on the Israeli earth and inhale its deep scent — and she would smell him. As if Moshe were the Land, Israel itself. Once, lying on top of him like this, she wished she could just for a while be male, so she could scatter her seed on Israel’s earth, and in this way help to — as Ben-Gurion put it — “make the desert bloom.”

  Now at the front of the room a tall, skinny man is making his presentation. The blonde woman is gone: Judith didn’t even notice when they switched. In fact, she’s not even sure there hasn’t been someone else, or even two other people, in between Blondie and this guy. Now she feels anxious: maybe she’s missed something important. So she tries to focus and listen to this man. He is talking about the elusiveness of language, and how, from a postmodern perspective, the meaning of a word is not static, but something that constantly shifts, depending on its context. What he’s saying sounds very interesting and seems to resonate with depth. Yet she keeps feeling that she almost understands what he’s talking about, but never 100 percent. As if he were an ad for his own product: Elusive Language. After ten minutes of increasing frustration, she asks herself what Moshe, if he were here, would say.­­

  “Bullshit,” comes his immediate answer. Judith suppresses her laughter and looks down at the arm of her chair. Of course he’d say that: to Moshe, language was a simple matter. He spoke without thinking about the words he used. But she found them fascinating because they were Hebrew. Moshe was a man of Hebrew words. A “real Israeli,” a sabra. This was his language, his and Bialik’s and the Bible’s — this language she had just borrowed, acquired through painful study, “breaking her teeth” on it, as the Hebrew expression goes. And which even now she knew — though unusually well for an immigrant — in only a fractured way. It was still for her a second, “other,” language, lik
e being the “other” woman, someone’s second love. Yet this language, this holy tongue, belonged in Moshe’s mouth. Sometimes when he kissed her, she imagined thousands of Hebrew words, tiny as sperm, being transferred from him to her, along with his saliva and desire. Planting themselves within her, taking root, and then blossoming inside her into a tree, with hundreds of Hebrew words hanging off the branches, instead of pink flowers. Making her a “real Israeli,” too.

  She looks at the postmodern guy. No — words for Moshe didn’t shape-shift. They each had a meaning that was constant and clear. She used to ask him for words, and his answer was always unhesitating.

  “How do you say this in Hebrew?” she’d ask him, scooping a palmful of soil from the ground.

  “Karka.”

  She held up a pine cone.

  “Itztrueball.”

  She pointed to a pink wildflower.

  “Hotmeet.” A hot meeting, she thought. Hot meat.

  She was like Helen Keller asking Anne Sullivan to tell her the names of things. Moshe always told her. But he couldn’t understand her hunger for words. He’d say to her, tenderly joking, “What do you need all these words for, Judith? What will you do with them once you have them? When are you ever going to have a conversation about pine cones?”

  But she kept asking. Earlobe. Spider web. Cum. (T’nuch. Kurei akavish. Shpeech.) Which, written, looked to her almost like Speech. Slurred speech — shpeech — like when you come. When Moshe asked her halfway into their relationship what she wanted for her birthday, she told him “a word.”

  “A word! What word?”

  “Any word. As long as it’s one I don’t already know.”

  “But how am I supposed to know what words you don’t know?”

  She just shrugged.

  “Crazy girl,” said Moshe.

  But the following week, when she turned twenty-five, he gave her two presents. First a plastic, imitation-alligator-skin purse — the kind of thing she’d never be caught dead with. Then he gave her the word ta’ava. Craving, or longing. Because, he said, she seemed so much to want, and to want so much. “Greedy girl,” he chided her gently. “You must learn to be satisfied with less. L’histapek b’m’at.” Which she realizes now was probably his way of reminding her he was married, and she shouldn’t hope for too much from him. He concluded his little birthday speech by quoting from Ethics of the Fathers, disconcerting her since he was so staunchly secular: “Who is rich? He who is content with his portion.”

  He … his, she thought. That male language doesn’t include me, so I don’t have to be content. She said this out loud to Moshe, half-knowing he wouldn’t understand. And he didn’t. But that’s okay, she thought. L’histapek b’m’at.

  Now at the front of the room, there has been another changing of the guard: a skinny woman with wild hair like a cavewoman is talking. From postmodern to premodern, or even prehistoric, thinks Judith, and listens for a few moments. Blah blah blah. She returns to Moshe. Yes, he was married. He had two young daughters who adored him, and a wife who didn’t like sex. And who he in turn didn’t seem to much like, his lip curling involuntarily whenever he mentioned her. What Zahava did like, though, was lampshades. Apparently she had over a hundred of them, and bought a new one at least once a month. Judith pictured a small house crammed full of lampshades, all tawdry and vulgar, and Zahava as tawdry and vulgar too. But actually it was thanks to Zahava that she met Moshe. It was only because he had to keep up with the cost of Zahava’s wild shopping sprees that he started moonlighting and took the six-month part-time contract in the town where Judith worked. He was hired as a contractor to renovate this small, run-down development town. In the thirty-ninth year after the town’s founding, and in anticipation of the fortieth-year festivities, a group of leading citizens had convinced the municipal council the place needed some sprucing up. So, twice a week, Moshe wandered in and out of decrepit abandoned shacks, houses missing half their roofs, and never-used “community centres” with all their windows broken — donated by well-meaning but naive Jewish communities abroad — as he chewed thoughtfully on a piece of straw, considering what to do. She watched him and thought, This is a man who fixes things. Takes that which is broken, and makes it whole again. Perhaps he could do this for people, too.

  She soon discovered, though, that he didn’t work alone. He had a Moroccan guy helping him, a skinny younger man named Koby, who measured everything in sight, listened to Moshe weigh the pros and cons of various repair plans, acted as his sounding-board, and helped him come up with price estimates that were neither too high nor too low. Once Judith came with Moshe to visit one of his sites. Koby looked with surprise at her, then questioningly at Moshe; Moshe just smiled and shrugged. For the next fifteen minutes, she watched the two men work together and saw how heavily Moshe depended on Koby: he couldn’t have managed this project without him. But that didn’t stop Moshe from saying when they were alone again back in the van: “Never trust a Moroccan, Judith. You’re not from here, you don’t know what they’re like. They’re lazy, and primitive, and they’ll rob you blind the second you turn your back.”

  She looked sharply at him to see if he was joking, but he wasn’t. She felt nauseated, and couldn’t think of anything to say. Other than, “But Koby —”

  “Koby’s okay — he’s a good worker,” Moshe said. “But he’s the exception. Most Moroccans aren’t like him. And even he sometimes says very primitive things.”

  Not like you, she thought, but didn’t say it. She stared straight ahead at the road as they drove through the town, and her nausea steadily increased. She couldn’t believe she’d been intimate with this man — she’d let him inside her body — and he was a racist. She was disgusted by his comment, and by him and his body, calmly arrogant in the driver’s seat next to her. Yet she also half-admired, or anyway envied, him. She wished she had his male self-confidence, his unquestioned assumption that it’s his God-given right to say whatever he feels like. She was always worrying about sounding nice or not-nice, saying the right or the wrong thing. But Moshe just talked. He didn’t know about political correctness, and even if he had he wouldn’t have cared. He’d have felt it was his right to express, to expel, whatever words had collected in his mouth. Not just the “nice” ones, but all of them. She can see his mouth now: his sensual mouth, full of words. Full of words like the mouths in the Shabbat morning prayer:

  Even if our mouths were as full of poetry as the sea is full of water, and our tongues sang your praises like the roaring waves … we could never thank you, God, for even one thousandth of your countless gifts and miracles.

  Moshe’s mouth was like a sea. And his red lips like the banks of the Red Sea. She remembers the first time he kissed her. His kiss was careful, exploratory, tentative, like dipping a toe into the sea. She’d just gotten off the train from Jerusalem, he was at the station picking up a small shipment of building materials that had been delivered there, and even though they didn’t know each other, he offered her a lift up the hill to the centre of town. It was a long, hot, dusty walk, and that day there was a hamsin, a burning, dry desert wind. She looked up the hill doubtfully, and nodded yes. In the car, they drove in silence. But at the top of the hill, Moshe leaned over and his mouth softly covered hers. Then his lips parted like the parting of the sea, and his tongue, just the tip of it, reached down hopefully into her mouth. She waited a moment, wondering what would happen next, but it just stayed there — hanging there like a bat hanging upside down on its perch — waiting. Slowly she reached up the tip of her tongue to meet his. Carefully, though. She’d been told by previous men she was too intense, too passionate. She didn’t want to frighten Moshe. But then she couldn’t help it: she trembled — a huge tremor ran through her body, and made Moshe tremble, too. His face flushed and filled with desire.

  “On Thursday I’ll pick you up again,” he said hoarsely, somewhere between a statement and a question. She hesitated, then nodded before getting out of the van. She was sitti
ng high up and she had to be careful stepping down. As she did so, she felt swollen in between her legs, and reaching the pavement, it was hard for her to walk.

  Remembering this now, she keeps her eyes lowered to the arm of her chair. She’s not sure how much of her feelings show on her face, and she doesn’t want everyone here at the Dunhill School of Social Work to see written across it all her naked longing and desire. Once on a Jerusalem bus, she was daydreaming and forgot to watch herself — and not only did she miss her stop, she actually moaned out loud at one point, recalling the night before with her lover, and a man sitting two seats away shot her a sharp glance. Now too, she senses someone watching her. She looks up: it’s Weick. Peering at her intently. She blushes and looks down. Oh God. He knows. He can tell. She keeps looking at the orange armrest. When she glances up again, he’s still gazing at her, frowning slightly, as if trying to puzzle her out. Then he looks away and stands. Now alone at the front of the room, he instructs everyone to look at the rose-coloured page, which lists all the teachers and their areas of specialization. Judith studies the list. It looks like they have one of everything here, like a smorgasbord. One lesbian, one gay guy (the interest in HIV/AIDS is always a dead giveaway), one black prof, one Native one, etc. Given these identity politics, she can’t help speculating whether the prof who will be teaching poverty grew up poor, if the guy teaching about housing was ever homeless, and whether Tom Reggel, specializing in child abuse and neglect, was, as a child, neglected and abused.

  Someone’s handing out canary-coloured sheets. It’s the schedule for first term: every Monday she will have Weick in the morning, Greg Smolan over the lunch hour, and then in the afternoon someone named Malone for “Social Work Practice with Individuals, Families, and Groups.” Weick loudly clears his throat, looks around the room to get silence, and explains there are four profs on the list who couldn’t be here today: Hetty Caplar, Marie Green, Bruce McIvor, and Suzy Malone. Suzy Malone — that name, spoken aloud, sounds familiar to Judith. But she can’t place it. “Malone, Malone,” she whispers under her breath, as if speaking the name aloud will help. It doesn’t. But hearing it repeated like that makes the name seem different, like an abbreviation for “I’m alone”: ’mAlone. And she does feel alone. Terribly alone. There’s no one here — in this school, town, or even country — who really understands her. Who she could talk to about Israel, who shares her feelings about that place. Bobby loves her, but he doesn’t understand her. She achingly misses her friends in Jerusalem. I’m alone here, she thinks. ’mAlone. Gantz aleyn. In galut. In exile.