Zeeva Bukai – ‘Requiem for the Lost’

 

I

It’s August 1977, your year abroad in Israel. You survive a khamsin, a hot desert wind that lasts three days. Lying on the cool tiled floor, you breathe through a wet cloth like a fish beached and gasping for air. Your roommate, Natalie is visiting her family in Jerusalem, so you’re alone with the lights off, and in that comforting darkness you remember resting your head on your mother’s lap, her plush belly an ocean of sound. The scent of her invades you and lifts you. She tells you to go, though you bury the reasons why. You don’t remember your father’s tread on the stairs or the musk rising off his skin as he lay beside you weeping. What you remember is the lesson — your body is the sacred house that holds the family honor. 

You want to stay with your mother, whose lungs are scarred, the lesions shaped like the continents she was forced to cross. The two of you speak without speaking in whistling breaths. She wants to protect you, but all she can muster is brushing your hair and the declarative – Go. The word comes to you in Hebrew as if out of an ancient well, lechi, go forth. 

                                                                        II

The air in a khamsin is thick with sand and dust. Your eyes burn; your lungs burn. 

Best to stay indoors, Pnina, the housemother says. Every time she sees you, she calls you by another name. She can’t get a fix on your face. You think this is a metaphor for some deep flaw in you rather than her inability to recall who you are. 

When the dust settles and the sky is no longer smeared in yellow haze, you walk through the dormitory gates. A soldier guards the entrance, a boy your age, his face besieged by acne. He smiles with all his teeth. Listen, he says. Bernstein’s “Kaddish” sweeps out of the music building, over palm trees and rhododendron bushes, the sloping lawn and the feathered yellow pompoms on the mimosa trees. It weaves through the pride of vespas parked outside, and down the boulevard towards the sea that cups your heart. The air smells of citrus and turned earth. The choir sings, Here, in this sacred house, I want to pray, and the snapdragons in the median bow their heads.

                                                                        III

A woman charges at you. She is the same age as your mother. You’ve seen her wandering the streets, chanting the names of her dead, eyes alight, hair scorched. The faded numbers above her wrist catch the sun as she pulls her dress up over her head. Facista, she cries, facista. Her naked belly shudders and she hits the ground. The soldier who moments ago asked if you’d like to get a drink, calls the police. Two officers arrive. The tall one cradles her. Come on, Auntie, he says and wraps her in a blanket then tucks her into the back of the squad car. She leans her head against the window. Run, she says, smiling through the glass. Where? I ask. But she’s gone and Bernstein’s Kaddish continues and the narrator intones, There is nothing to dream. Nowhere to go. And the words echo through the boulevard like a siren.

                                                                        IV

You’ve been out all night. You and your roommate, Natalie, with your long hair and longer dresses that sail the pavements as you walk. It’s nearly dawn. You’re hungry and drunk on screwdrivers and jazz. Near the loading dock of the Supersol across from where Golda Meir lives, you wait for the Tnuva truck to make its delivery. Crates of breads and cheeses left unattended at 5:00am, the sun just beginning its ascent. Grass soaked in dew. These are innocent days when no one locks their doors, when the country listens to Arik Einstein and Naomi Shemer, and the world has witnessed the nightmare, but the songs are still hopeful because Am Yisrael has been resurrected. The lone soldier guarding Meir’s house calls her Ima. She feeds him tea and apple cake. A cigarette clamped between her lips. Your roommate throws an arm across your shoulder. Bathed in the gentle light of a new day, she whispers, I love this, and you hope she loves you. Me too, you say feeling so alive your skin is murmuring. Soon the ravens shatter the silence and hoot their morning hellos. 

                                                                        V

There is a story your father tells about his Uncle Zaki in Damascus whose right arm was amputated for stealing a chicken to feed his children. This was Syrian justice, your father says, an arm for a chicken. You are 133 miles from Damascus where your father was cursed and pelted with rocks, where his mother was arrested and beaten, where his father was arrested and beaten, where his five-year old brother lost an eye to a grenade tossed through the synagogue window on a Friday night in August 1949. Forget how hungry and poor we were, he says. But you can’t forget, nor can you forget your teenage aunts and their sacred bodies given to their cousins in marriage like parcels of land.

For Zaki, you steal a sack of choco. For Zaki you and Natalie slurp the chocolate milk straight from the plastic bag until the bag deflates in your hands. Hands you will not lose. For your father’s brother, you keep a brown marble in your pocket to remind you that in an eyeblink the world can go dark. And for your aunts, you purify your sacred body in the mikveh of forgetfulness.  

                                                                        VI

This is the story you tell. You return to the land of your birth where your soul lives. You escape the father who owns your body. You leave the mother whose body betrays her. You leave them in their American dream house. Your mother saves her poker nickels and dimes for you. Before the High Holy Days, she sends you a five-dollar bill and asks you to stop calling collect. 

You’ll get me in trouble, she says. You know how he is about money. He lived on pita and olives. Watched his family starve, all ten children in that one room, can you imagine? 

You tell her you understand and that you love her. You tell her you hear her voice in your dreams. She calls your name, but you awaken in your dorm to the sound of Natalie’s liquored rasp. You try to hold onto your mother’s voice, to the way she says your name like it’s a benediction. And you miss her. You miss not being her sweet baby girl. 

                                                                        VII

Natalie is with her family in Jerusalem. So, you spend Yom Kippur, the loneliest of days, on the beach with a boy in the air force. There is nowhere to hide from the iron-fisted sun. You are hungry. You are thirsty. You leave him at an intersection where the traffic lights flash with uncertainty. When the holiday ends, you sit in the dark serenaded by a quorum of cats under your window. 

                                                                        VIII

Months go by. It’s a new year. You plant a cypress tree on Tu B’Shevat. The rains have ended, spring has begun. Carpets of red poppy cover the hills. You remember running through them as a toddler, running and laughing and your father laughing with you, lifting you in the air, planting you on his shoulder. And you were happy. 

                                                                        IX

The University is on lockdown. No one comes in or out of the dormitory. There’s been a massacre on the Coastal Road. A bus hijacked. The passengers held hostage. You hear they killed, Gail Rubin, an American nature photographer. She was near the beach where the killers landed. They smiled and asked her for directions. She answered; the sun was in her eyes. On campus the musicians rehearse the Kaddish. Here is the flute, here the violin. Your windows are open to the whisper and thunder. 

She never saw the gun. 

You want to believe the music reached her, that it was carried on the wind in the yellow dust lifting off the backs of bees. The prayer for the dead blooming as the gunmen surrounded the bus. One throws a grenade, another opens fire. You imagine her hand snapping the final shot. You imagine it is of the sea, deep in its eternal blueness. And she is not afraid.  

                                                                        X

You’re broke so you get a job in a gas station that sells cheese toasties that taste of benzine and nickels won in a ladies all night poker game. On weekends you sing for loose change at a piano bar on Yirmiyahu Street where you meet a drummer who’s lost his fingerprints in a fire in the war in a tank in the Golan Heights. He says he loves the way you smell. He says you smell like sweet milk.

The two of you hitchhike to Nueba. 

The air is salt; it is heat and the sun melts on your tongue. You swim naked in the Red Sea. Your bodies glow like fool’s gold in the moonlight. You frolic in the surf like Burt Lancaster and Debra Kerr in, From Here to Eternity. You think he says, I love you, but you’re not sure. You’re too anxious to listen. There is only sea, and sky, and sand. A landscape that devours you. A place to get lost in. Nothing to grip onto in case of a fall and you’re afraid of falling, afraid of the lost-self roaming aimlessly. But really, you’re afraid of losing what has already been lost.

At night a thousand stars burn in the eternal blackness. At night you are the eternal blackness.

                                                                        XI

The drummer buys you a breakfast pita, handmade on a hot stone by a Bedouin whose round eyes are like brown marbles dressed in kohl. He wants to make you his second wife but doesn’t have the bride price. You watch him cross the dunes, kicking up clouds, carrying the stone and discs of dough on his back like the Israelites before God sent them manna. 

The drummer says, you and me, we’re free spirits, and then like a magician in a traveling circus he disappears. You can feel the grit between your teeth as you chew the last of the pita on a stretch of desert where shepherds graze their sheep. Ribbons of green copper deposits and red cadmium striate the mountains. The sky, saturated in celluloid blue, is so wide it meets the curved earth in a seamless line. 

Strains of Bernstein’s Kaddish shuttle across the Red Sea. You face the Kingdom of Jordan, ankle-deep in sea foam. There is no requiem for the lost only the dead. You miss your roommate Natalie who has fallen in love again. You miss home. And then you catch a glimpse of your reflection in a car window and wonder, who is that wild girl.                                                                       

                                                            XII

You hitch a ride back to Tel-Aviv with a trucker named Eli. He recites Genesis, chapter and verse. You’re impressed despite his rough appearance – the beard, the sweaty shirt, the greasy pants, dirt under his nails. He shares his lunch with you. He offers you a soda and you take it. He offers you a cigarette and you take it. You drive past Sodom and he points to the pillar of salt that is Lot’s wife. He calls you Eve. He calls you Eden. At a stop outside of Modiin, he slips an ardent hand between your legs and asks if he can see you again. You tell him you’ll call, but you don’t have a telephone token. Weeks later he shows up at a Purim party on campus with his young wife. The two of them wear matching white tunics like the ancient Hebrew priests in the temple on days the ewes were sacrificed. The strong smell of lamb shank sifts out of the folds of their costumes.

Natalie tells you to forget him. You pretend to agree, but what shakes you is he doesn’t recognize you, not even when you remove the plain Volto mask, frozen somewhere between pleasure and regret.           

                                                                        XIII

In the spring you and your roommate discover Jobim from a kibbutznik who comes to Israel by way of Brazil. His craggy face reminds you of your father when he was a young soldier. There’s a picture of your daddy on top of a mountain in Eilat overlooking Aqaba. He was dreamy then, full of the promise he left on the mountain. His hope strewn like burnt paper in the desert near the bodies of soldiers whose names were erased in the sand. Sometimes you want to erase him, but he clings to you like a stinging fly. When he is gone, you’re crushed by his absence. 

The Brazilian teaches you and Natalie to samba. You drink Courvoisier because drinking cognac is classier than drinking gin. He says you’ve got to try Cachaca, but you can’t find it at the Supersol. Instead, you, Natalie, and the Brazilian kibbutznik smoke a bowl of hash and watch carp bump up against the glass tanks in the supermarket. He stays a week. You dance for him on a table like a GoGo dancer in a cage. He watches in disapproval. You recognize your father in the plains of his face, the slope of his cheeks, the ramparts of his forehead and nose. He leaves to join a batucada band in the north and takes the Jobim cassette with him, but he leaves you with Vinicius DeMorias whose melancholic yearning cuts you like a blade. Vai, vai, vai.  

You and Natalie smoke another bowl and dance on the beach at dusk. Lightness infuses your body, and you think, this is freedom.

                                                                        XIV

After Passover, you visit Natalie in Jerusalem. Her family embraces you. They try out their English on you. You watch how her father kisses her forehead, how her mother blesses her at the start of the sabbath, how her mother blesses you and you wonder why no one’s blessed you before. 

You pray for your soul at the Wailing Wall. You pray for your mother and you say a prayer for your father, you say these prayers hoping they still love you even though you have profaned the sacred house. You feel the hand of God grip the back of your neck. You look up at soldier patrolling the parapet and fall in love. He buys you irises whose velvet tongues are the deep purple of a deep vein. His Uzi is like his right arm. He lays it on the bed beside you, the cold muzzle snug against your back. He says his father never carried a gun, only a belt to fend off sorrow. His apartment smells of cedar and rain. He washes your hair in the kitchen sink. You feel adored and give him all your flesh. You want him to teach you the prayers that ascend to heaven. He sings a psalm in your ear. He sings you to sleep and you remember your mother’s lullabies. Each morning you want him to open your mouth and funnel love in. You want him to open your mouth and funnel God in. You want. You want. 

At night, with the Uzi at your back, you hear the muezzin cry Allah u Akbar. From high in the mountains of Jerusalem the jackals howl and on the wind that rustles the Aleppo pines, the Kaddish plays. And you are at peace. 

                                                            XV

He is restless and leaves you on Lag B’omer when the bonfires scorch the sky. You keen like the women in David’s city. Your breasts covered in ashes. Your head shaved in grief. You sleep. You eat. Natalie tries to feed you halvah to sweeten your life. You ditch your classes and get a job slicing deli meat. You clean houses. You waitress in a shawarma palace on Dizengoff Street and bartend in a dive where the local cops hustle free beer. You laugh when customers grab your ass. Everyone thinks you’re a good sport. No one can tell that you’ve vacated your body; you’re no longer there.  

                                                            XVI

It’s summer and the nights are short and boozy. You pass out in a stranger’s bed. He has hands like hammers. Your body aches like you’ve been milled into flour. You sneak out before he wakes. The dorms are deserted. You crawl into Natalie’s bed. You wait for redemption. You wait for a sign. 

                                                                        XVII

The next morning you’re walking on a dusty street in Tel-Aviv and see a prophet holding a placard that reads, “Go Home.” You cannot resist and you think it’s time. You’ve been gone so long. When you get there, your mother kisses your cheek and tells you daddy’s at work.

You look different, she says, less like me, more like you. 

You don’t tell her she looks different too, that her skin is waxy, that her full lips have thinned; they barely cover her teeth. She coughs and feeds you figs. She pours milk into your glass and you read the exhaustion in her shaking hands. Then she smooths your hair and calls you her sweet baby girl and you know you should be relieved but all you feel is your own strangeness. 

Go to sleep, she says. 

You lock your door when you hear your father’s tread on the stairs. Rain smacks the ground. You listen to the earth absorb the shock of it; your body absorbs the shock of it. And you know this is no longer home; you have lost the thread of it. 

On the coastal road near the sea, high up in the trees, the Kaddish lingers. 

__________

Zeeva Bukai was born in Israel and raised in New York City. Her honors include fellowships at the Center for Fiction, and residencies at Hedgebrook and Byrdcliff AIR. Her stories have appeared in Carve, Pithead Chapel, Lilith, McSweeney’s Quartely Concern, Image Journal, December Magazine and elsewhere. “The Anatomy of Exile,” her debut novel, will be published by Delphinium Books in January 2025. You can reach her at zeevabukai.com.