Fields of Exile Page 3

  “We, the faculty,” Weick is saying — rather grandly, like an American saying “We, the People” — “have just told you something about ourselves. So now we would like to hear from you: who you are, what you’ve been doing, and what you’re interested in.” He stops abruptly and turns sideways to listen to Phoebe, who is hissing something at him. He turns back to the group with a short laugh. “Unfortunately, however, Phoebe reminds me that in only twenty minutes Labour Studies gets this room. So please tell us something about yourself, but try to keep your comments brief. Just a few sentences, starting with your name, of course.”

  Judith’s stomach starts convulsing. This type of public speaking always makes her very nervous. But at least, she sees, she won’t have to go first or even anywhere near the beginning: she’s sitting smack in the middle of the room, and Weick has started the go-around on his immediate left, with a startled older woman. As this woman speaks, and is followed by other students, Judith listens for clues about what to say when her turn comes. Anxiously she plans a presentation of herself that will make her look interesting and will also fit in with the “mission” of this school and what others are saying. Among the first seven to speak, there are those who proudly declare themselves gay, poor, “of colour,” physically challenged, learning disabled, and “culturally diverse” (Native, Caribbean, Pakistani, Portuguese). Some are just one of these things; others are two or even three, like Macario, the gay, dyslexic, Portuguese guy. Judith struggles over what to say about herself. There’s nothing particularly oppressed about her — nothing she can think of, anyway. She’s white, middle-class, heterosexual, not disabled intellectually or physically, and neither old nor young. She knows that being female and Jewish, she has been in various ways oppressed by both sexism and antisemitism. But the truth is, she doesn’t feel particularly oppressed, and doesn’t see any reason to put herself across that way. The go-around continues, and as it moves closer and closer to her, she gradually figures out what to say. The person talking is three seats away from her. Then two. Now it’s Cindy’s turn.

  “I’m Cindy Hanson. Since getting my B.S.W. five years ago, I’ve been working at Mindy’s Place, a group home for teenage girls with physical and developmental disabilities. Quite a few of them have been sexually abused. So I guess what interests me is why that is, and if it happens to these kinds of girls more often than others because of being disabled. I’d also like to know how they think about these abusive experiences, and also about their bodies in general.” There are nods and murmurs of support. “So this is what I’d like to do my thesis on. Maybe approaching it from a feminist perspective, even though I don’t know very much about that. But I hope to learn.” Cindy looks at Terry Montana, and Terry nods back.

  Now everyone looks expectantly at Judith.

  “I’m Judith Gallanter,” she begins.

  “Louder,” shouts someone from the other side of the room. “We can’t hear you.”

  Judith raises her voice. “I’m Judith Gallanter. Is that better?” But somehow the volume has increased with each word, so that by the end she’s shouting. Heads turn sharply toward her and a few people laugh, as if she’s made a joke. Blushing, she continues, somewhere between her normal voice and a shout.

  “My area of interest, like Cindy’s, is teens. But what I’ve been involved with were discussion groups between Jewish and Arab adolescents in Israel. I was part of a group called Friends-of-Peace. They have a branch in Toronto. We ran meetings twice a month — with discussions and activities — to foster mutual understanding and tolerance between the two groups. To try to build bridges for the future between these two communities, instead of just conflict and hatred.” She pauses. Everybody’s looking at her and listening attentively.

  “So while I’m here, I’d like to focus on cross-cultural dialogue, especially with adolescents, and examine what makes it work when it works — or not work when it doesn’t. In more general terms, I’m interested in how people talk to each other. I’m interested in hate speech, and also” — she smiles, scanning the room — “in love speech. In coexistence speech. In the language we use to communicate with each other.” She pauses for a moment. Then she shrugs. “I guess that’s it.”

  Lots of people are smiling back at her or nodding approvingly. With relief and happiness she realizes she’s done well. She’s managed to translate herself, and her life in Israel, into Canadian terms: into something these people can relate to. Several of the professors are regarding her with interest. Cindy touches her arm and whispers, “That sounds very interesting.” “Thanks,” says Judith. Soon the go-around is complete, and Weick stands. But before he can say a word, there is loud, raucous noise coming from the hallway — yelling, laughing, and banging on the door, like an approaching mob.

  “That must be the Labour Studies people,” says Weick. “An unru-u-uly bunch.” Someone laughs. “It’s their turn for the room now, so we’re going to have to adjourn. Please make sure you’ve got all the handouts, and we’ll see you in class. Welcome.”

  Judith is glad this orientation is over. It felt considerably longer than one-and-a-half hours, and she’s tired. But she feels much better now — less alone — than when she walked in here this morning. She gathers her papers.

  “Thanks again,” she says to Cindy.

  “No problem. You know, we should talk sometime about working with teens. That’s not an age group many people like.”

  Judith laughs. “I know.” She watches Cindy, who is trying to straighten out all her different-coloured handouts, and then, giving up, just stuffs them impatiently into her brown leather satchel. There is something endearing about this, and while Cindy bends over, buckling the straps, Judith says to her back, “How about now? I’m not doing anything.”

  Cindy looks sideways at her with china blue eyes, reminding Judith of Loretta, her favourite doll when she was growing up: the one with the real open-and-shut eyes. “Sounds good,” Cindy says, standing and slinging the satchel over her shoulder. “But I have a few errands to do first: I have to drop by the administration office to pay my fees, and I need a library card.”

  “I have the same list. So we could do them together.”

  “Great!” says Cindy. They move toward the door. “That’ll be more fun than doing it alone.”

  “Yes. I hate doing stuff like this. It’s so boring.”

  “I know. Plus even though I did my B.S.W. here, they’ve changed the campus since then, and I can’t find my way anywhere.”

  “Really?!” Judith is surprised. “You seem so … at home here.”

  “Me?” Cindy laughs. “Not at all. I haven’t been in a classroom in five years, and I find all this quite overwhelming. I’m not sure I’m ready for this grad school thing. Plus the faculty for the B.S.W. and M.S.W. are completely different. I don’t know a single person here.”

  “Yes, you do,” says Judith. “You know me.”

  Now it’s Cindy’s turn to look surprised. They look at each other for a moment, then smile. “You’re right,” says Cindy. Together they leave the room. And on the way out, Judith, feeling triumphant, snatches one last cookie.

  — 3 —

  Five hours later, driving back to Toronto, she hits bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic. She probably should’ve left Dunhill earlier, right after finishing lunch with Cindy at the Lion’s Den. But she was too excited and happy. She had a great time talking with Cindy about social work and life in general. Cindy knew nothing about Israel except what she read in the papers, but seemed genuinely interested in Judith’s life there. Then she showed Judith some pictures of her baby and husband. And the weather was glorious: it felt like the perfect day to walk around the campus under those magnificent oaks, and find out where the gym, library, administration office, and cafeterias were. To physically orient themselves, it being Orientation Day. A strange word though, orient, it seems to Judith now in her unmoving car, since at this point she is not in the Orient. Dunhill shouldn’t have had an Orientation Day
; it should have had an Occidentation Day, since, being in Canada, it is located in the Occident. Which sounds like Accident. Yes, she thinks, it’s an accident I’m here in the Occident. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Daddy getting sick. I didn’t choose to leave Israel — I’m not one of those chickenshits who fled because of the intifada, betraying Israel in her time of need.

  She glances at the clock. It says 6:12, like the insect repellent she grew up with, and she frowns at the clock like at some horrible bug, as if it is personally to blame for the time. It’s late. And Bobby hates to be kept waiting. So there’s no time to stop off and change her sweaty, smelly T-shirt before going to his place for supper. The stalled traffic irritates her. She looks around: off the highway there are barns, crops, and some grazing cows, everything in a mix of sun and shade. She breathes deeply, inhaling the pungent smells of animal dung and the sweet hay and clover from the fields. Her father loved the country — he loved barns, of all crazy things — but she pushes this away, she doesn’t want to start thinking about him now. Or about his house, where she is now living all alone — so empty and desolate without him there, the house grimy and filthy, and her dirty dishes piling up precariously high in the sink.

  Instead she reflects on the coming year. Tomorrow night is Rosh Hashana, and she hopes it will be the beginning of a good, sweet, and happy year. It can’t be worse than the last one: the year she watched her father die. She’d like the year ahead to be easy, light, and pleasant — even slightly boring, so she can recover from what she’s been through. Bruria, her friend in Jerusalem, thinks a year in Toronto may be the perfect thing. Last week Judith wailed on the phone, “What am I doing here, Bruria? Why am I stuck here for a year? I want to come home!”

  Bruria answered calmly, “Try and enjoy it, Judith. It’s not like things here are so great right now. Some people would kill to be in your position — to have a year away from Israel forced on them by circumstances, no guilt attached. So enjoy yourself. Make the most of it. Think of the coming year as an anthropological experiment: a chance to study life in Canada. It could be interesting.”

  “Okay,” Judith said, “I’ll try.” Grateful to be “given permission” — as Bruria, a therapist, would say — to enjoy herself. Now she reaches into the glove compartment and pulls out a tape labelled Israel at Forty, and in seconds her car is filled with bright, tinny music, unsophisticated and hopeful. No such hopeful music, though, emerged from Israel’s fiftieth birthday. By 1998 the country was traumatized by Rabin’s assassination, the first intifada, and a series of crises one after another, political, economic, and social. The songs on that tape are sombre and anguished. So she prefers to listen to Israel at Forty instead. She listens to a line or two of “The Honey and the Bee Sting,” and then starts singing along, loudly, whole-heartedly, in Hebrew, in the privacy of her car. She knows every word of this song and of every song on this tape — she has sung them year after year with her friends at Yechiel and Miri’s annual Independence Day sing-song — and when it comes to the chorus of this one,

  Please, good Lord,

  Preserve all these.

  The honey and the bee sting,

  The bitter and the sweet,

  she feels like she’s singing it together with them, no longer alone in her car in Canada, in galut.

  But then the song ends, the car is silent while she flips the tape, and maybe because she is alone, and in galut, the words of this song now strike her as odd. She wonders who would want to preserve the bitter parts of life along with the sweet? Who would pray to God asking for that? And why, if you want a bit of honey in your tea, should you first have to suffer the pain of a bee sting? Is this what we in Israel have come to believe now? That we only deserve to be happy, or to live, if first we count out x number of pain tokens per year, like poker chips, to pay to God? That’s sick. It’s like domestic violence — like letting someone beat you so you can have his “love.”

  She does understand, though, all those battered women who stay with their men. Because her love for Israel is something like that. Unconditional. The way many people love their family members. You know all their faults, but still you love them. There are things about Israel she can’t stand. At the top of the list, the occupation, and this government’s treatment of Palestinians. (Another definition of domestic violence: domestic policies that are violent.) But it doesn’t matter: Israel is her love. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.

  One of her boyfriends in Israel, Micah, once joked that Israel was the only real love in her life. Recalling this now, she knows it is basically true. She has loved various men, just as she currently loves Bobby. But nothing has ever come close to her passion for Israel. Israel was her first love, and it’s the love of her life. Only there has she ever felt fully alive or at home. She never felt at home in her parents’ house. It wasn’t a “bad” home, or anything like that. There was nothing particularly wrong with her family. Her parents loved her. But they were both busy running their little dry goods store, and for as long as she could remember she’d let herself into a silent, empty house after school. When her parents finally did come home at seven-thirty, they were tired after being on their feet for twelve hours, serving customers. There was a quick supper, and she did homework while her mother did housework and her father paid bills. Her parents always had more to do than there was time for. And her mother was short-tempered and given to moods.

  But then Judith found Israel. The summer she was twelve she went to a Zionist summer camp, and after that she never felt that loneliness again. She was part of something larger than herself. Her life had meaning and purpose. But not in just a dutiful way. Rather in the way that life has meaning and purpose when you’re in love. She fell in love with Israel. With its soul, but also — a few years later, on her first visit — with its body. She loved this country’s red earth, its mountain-deserts, streams, forests, birds, fish, and flowers. She loved the star-studded night sky, with its sliver of moon lying horizontally on the bottom like a cradle, instead of standing vertically, like in Canada. She even loved the air in Israel and the water — including the salt-heavy water of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth. In Canada she’d always found geography and history boring, scoring low on her high-school leaving exams in both these subjects. But in Israel she was fascinated by every mountain range, by every excavated tell or Biblical battlefield. Because it was hers. It was about her people, and it told the story of what had happened to them, and therefore to her.

  One morning, on one of the many nature-and-archaeology trips she took with the Israeli Nature Protection Society, she awakened in her sleeping bag on the cold desert sand near Timna, the location of King Solomon’s mines, and also a modern reconstruction of the Israelites’ tabernacle during their forty-year desert journey. Everyone else in the group was still asleep, their sleeping bags dotting the desert floor like multicoloured rocks, and she watched the mountains gradually turn visible in the early morning light, until the whole valley was bathed in a strange grey-yellow haze. Nothing else seemed awake, or even alive, except her and an ibex, its horn arced backwards, staring at her. She followed it. After ten minutes, she abruptly stopped walking. The sun, a brilliant orange, illuminated the mountain before her, making it radiate in the sun, and the whole world was perfectly silent and still. Suspended, as if waiting for something. Feeling rather foolish, she said, “I promise.” She didn’t know exactly what she was promising, she couldn’t have articulated it if you’d asked her. But she had promised herself to this land.

  Of course, she’s never told anyone about this. It would have sounded too corny — ridiculous even. Who wouldn’t laugh at a too-earnest pretty young woman swearing herself to a desert at dawn? No one, she thinks now as she drives. But from that point on, her life — as if with a will of its own — bent in a new direction. That glowing throbbing orange of a vow sat in the centre of her like a hot coal she had swallowed, burning and transforming her all the way down. Nothing mattered to her
anymore except taking her place in Jewish history and on Jewish geography. Coincidentally, her cousin wrote her around then that history and geography were now being taught together in Canadian high schools under the heading Social Sciences, which felt exactly right to Judith. All she wanted to do at this point was to help realize the Zionist dream. To come home again after two thousand years of exile — of galut, which she noticed laughingly back then, rhymed with dissolute and pollute. To rebuild the land, and on it to reunite all the Jews scattered and in exile from every corner of the globe. As soon as she knew this was what she wanted, she found herself in a circle of young people like herself — Zionist dreamers, new immigrants from everywhere: the United States, England, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Russia, France, Switzerland, Italy, Finland, Holland, Algeria, Morocco, India, Ethiopia, even China. She learned scraps of a dozen new languages, heard music and tasted foods she’d never encountered in Canada. It’s ironic, she wrote then to her father, newly a widower. I was afraid living in a Jewish state would seem culturally narrow and parochial after Canada. But here I’m for the first time living a truly multicultural life.