Fields of Exile. Nora Gold
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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