To Stay: Part III

To Stay: Part I
To Stay: Part II

We leave Jerusalem to head down to the desert and already I can count on one hand the number of days before I’m back on a plane. I guess at how many e-mails will flood into my Blackberry when I have to turn it back on. When I think about what I have learned or come to understand, I realize, with regret, that Israel has only become more confusing than it was when I first got there. I can’t shake the feeling that nothing has been gained.

It’s in the middle of nowhere that we find Yeruham, a development community in which we are scheduled to do volunteer work for the day, help some kids paint a couple of murals on the local community center walls. Yeruham was supposed to become a prime example of how Israelis transform dry, hot nothingness into thriving oasis. When the road to Eilat passes through town you expect big things. Then somebody builds another road, a better road, and they forget to tell anybody that you exist. But somehow, even the forgotten manage.

I’m not into crafts and I’ve never been that good with kids, so I’m just wondering how effective of a staffing selection I’ll be and how many brain cells the paint fumes are going to kill before we’re out of there.

When I ask which colors go where, what the plan for the mural is, Emmanuel tells me to chill the hell out. He’s from Chile, and he talks like a surfer dude. “Just paint man. Just do whatever you feel like. Don’t worry, you’ll see, it’ll turn out great. It’ll be beautiful man.”

A little kid saunters up to me and I figure out I can actually communicate with him because we both speak Russian. We mix some paint, I show him where to add color. Because I don’t get the whole kiddie talk thing we just chat about where he’s from, about his sister who happens to be that little quiet girl with the blonde hair painting at another part of the wall. When I walk away to go check on the other mural, he follows, and asks me to come back to the one he’s at. As we’re leaving this six year-old takes my contact info, my phone number and e-mail address, even though he doesn’t have a computer and asks whether it’s expensive to call New York.

Emmanuel wipes the sweat out of his eyes and scratches his nose with the back of his arm. He puts that same arm around me. “It’s so great you came here man. Maybe it’s no big deal to you, but these kids, they got shit lives some of them, and they’re gonna remember this. Maybe one day you’ll come back with your wife and kids, and you’ll come to see this mural and tell them how you helped paint it. It’s beautiful man.”   

That night I sleep for three hours, shacked up in a little bungalow near the back of a tourist-trap Bedouin encampment. I drift off thinking about the community center and the kids we met there. All of it, it makes me angry. This can’t be right. Israel is not supposed to have a southern Tel Aviv with Sudanese refugees who will never become citizens, no matter how hard they work or how much they love the only country that has ever let them be human beings. It’s not supposed to have beggars standing by the Western Wall, or communities with trash piling up in the streets and abandoned Pintos rusting on sidewalks, or concrete walls slashing gray chasms between towns to alleviate the fear of sniper fire and tossed grenades. It’s not supposed to have a Yeruham with a sad little community center that caters to children who beg for a dozen Americans to notice them for an afternoon. I can’t help but feel that it’s all so ridiculous, so painfully insignificant, the idea that we made any sort of difference by spending a couple of hours with them.

It’s still dark when the alarm on my rented phone goes off and I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen the sun rise. I’m up within minutes, liberated from the need to shower or put on deodorant or comb my hair, still slightly stained from the mural paint. As I stroll away from where the rest of my group is still asleep, I find myself staring off towards the dull glow that’s growing behind the distant mountains and I hold my breath.

I can’t stand this place of contradiction, where a historically-imbued, genetic Godliness lives in an arranged marriage with the inevitability of human imperfection. And yet in some strange way, in a way I can’t really explain, that contradiction is also what makes everything here feel so alive. In that moment, I’m perhaps the biggest hypocrite of them all, and I don’t want to be anywhere else in the world. It’s like the lover you spurn, but then come rushing back to because you just can’t keep yourself away. You chide yourself for the reckless abandon with which you behave, but you simultaneously understand that without that spinning head of emotion, you wouldn’t be as invested, you wouldn’t care as much as you do.

I exhale when the beams hit my face, reminding me of the stubborn realities of what I’ve seen, of how much is wrong and of all the work that needs to be done. And still I smile. Maybe Emmanuel was just some guy who didn’t know what he was talking about. Or maybe he was right, and the best we can hope for is believing in what we do, and believing that in the end, it could just end up being beautiful.

As the rest of the people from my group wake up, I’m pulled into conversations that displace everything I’m thinking about. The day is spent trekking under the sun as it indiscriminately throbs heat, asserting itself a little more with every minute, draining out of us every ounce of water we put in. I glance over at our Israeli guide squinting beneath the brim of her fisherman’s hat. Our eyes meet and I realize that we haven’t really spoken since that night in Jerusalem. It’s something that just happened, this weirdness that has grown between us over the last few days. I brush it aside and approach anyway.

“What’s it like? Growing up here I mean.” I toss out my question awkwardly, too quickly given the fact that we’ve been silent with each other for some time now. There’s a sadness in my voice, a sense that this is a place of lost childhoods, evenings filled with hushed tensions that cartoon nightlights cannot ease.

“Like anywhere else I guess.” She answers quickly, automatically. She looks at me in a way that reads “oh you Americans” even though her English attests to the fact she was raised by parents more American than my own, even though she’s never lived anywhere else.

When she was 17 she heard the explosion on the way to her medic volunteer job in her hometown of Efrat. Seconds later, arriving on the scene, she found the body parts of the teenager who had blown himself up and the mangled body of the friend she worked with.

I imagine what it must have been like. I imagine her wondering about it afterwards, about the little things that kept her from making it on time, which delayed everything just a little bit. After years of recovery, the friend is alive but has a permanent limp. Other friends have died, either at war or from shrapnel closer to home.

She smiles but it comes out forced, adding a shrug that’s meant to brush something off, maybe the discomfort of the memory or the discomfort of having to speak with me. For the first time I realize that she’s a woman already, a woman still trapped in a girl’s body. I see that when she laughs with abandon, when her eyes shrink into little lines with deep crow’s feet at their ends. I see that when she blushes crimson, shy at the lighthearted flirting that has managed to sneak into our conversation yet again, even while we’re discussing something serious, even while in the back of my mind I still remember the make and model of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. I notice the lime green socks peeking out from the tops of her hiking boots, the sliver of color slashing across the khaki that consumes her. So close that I can smell her lotion, and yet it has become obvious just how far apart we are.

This time there’s no return. After we leave the desert she barely says a word to me for the rest of the trip, as if we’ve crossed a line. Perhaps it’s just that she knows I will never really understand, because I am not from this world, this Israel with its own set of rules that makes girls into women before their time, that takes away the first born with a sigh and stalks the line between honor and disgrace. I think about it all on the bus ride back to Tel Aviv. I’m barely lucid, slipping in and out of sleep as the heat beats a melody in my head. Outside the country glides past and I can’t seem to remember whether I’ve just arrived or if it’s almost time to go home.