Fields of Exile. Nora Gold
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about the oppressions, injustices, and structural inequalities in Canadian society today, as well as around the globe. Secondly, it means preparing our students to engage in the struggle against inequity and oppression, whether you’re working with individuals, groups, or communities.”
Judith is starting to feel at home here. This mission statement sounds almost verbatim like the one at the university where she completed her B.S.W. ten years ago. The same language, the same concepts. Apparently nothing has changed.
Now Weick introduces Phoebe Browne, the school’s Administrative Coordinator and student advisor. Phoebe is a dumpy-looking woman of about forty, wearing an apricot-coloured polyester pantsuit, and she speaks for about ten minutes, describing in mind-deadening detail all the course requirements for Dunhill’s one-year M.S.W. Judith, being in the Practice, rather than the Policy, stream, will need to take eight half-courses — six required and two electives — over the course of the year; alternatively, she can take only six courses and write a one-hundred-page thesis. Thesis, she writes. She’s forgotten to bring paper with her today, so she is writing in the margins of a fuchsia handout that invites all the first-year students to the Lion’s Den, the student pub on campus, for the first meeting of the school’s GLBT committee. GLBT looks strange to her — she’s used to seeing the term LGBT instead. So for a moment GLBT strikes her as some variation on a BLT — maybe a Greek Lettuce-Bacon-and-Tomato, something for the Greek students? Then she understands. Phoebe, finished now, sits, and Weick pops up again like a jack-in-the-box.
“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