But I want to tell you about Musa. He came to the building site and I was pleased, expecting a donation, but he brought marvelous Arab sweets. A few days later he came again and helped the workers to drive piles into the ground. The students had left by then. For a month there was no sign of him but then he arrived with a small digger. By evening they had finished digging out the foundations for the staff premises and he paid for the work. I hardly spoke to him. We exchanged only a few words at supper before he left. I thought he was very handsome and admired his hands. Europeans don’t have hands like his. All Arabs, both women and men, have perfectly shaped hands and they are extraordinarily refined. It’s probably because their bodies are so enveloped in clothing and this is the only part of a woman she doesn’t have to keep under a covering, so her hands try to stand in for everything else. Men’s faces are not particularly visible either. There is all that vegetation, the keffiyeh covering their heads, so that only their nose sticks out, like Arafat’s. Arabs do not show their bodies. I was working there in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, and Musa did not look my way because it “hurt his eyes,” as he told me later. He was consumed by passion and I was completely unaware of it. He was in despair because he thought I did not consider him a man. He was almost right, except that it was myself I did not consider a woman.
One time he said he had planned an orchard which he would plant when the building work was complete, and told me what kind of trees would grow there. He had a sheet of paper in front of him and drew on it with a blue felt tip pen. He left the paper when he went away, and I put it in a folder.
We met for almost a year and I liked him very much, the way you delight in something beautifuclass="underline" an antique bronze, a picture, or the binding of an old book. He was all gold and brown like the shell of a nut in the forest, but his body was not hard, it was soft and firm, and he could weep for love. These things I learned later. I’m sure I would never have known anything if I had not been bitten by a snake in the springtime. We were sitting under the awning next to our almost completed building and drinking tea he had made. It was the place where we always spent the hottest hours of the day, when it was impossible to work. The ground was flat and well trodden there, so why nobody noticed that a snake had glided in is puzzling. I took a cup of tea from Musa and settled down comfortably, leaning on my left hand. I felt a slight prick in my forearm and fleetingly glimpsed a length of dark cord out of the corner of my eye. Before I knew what had happened, Musa had already wound a towel into a tourniquet and bound my arm tightly above the bite.
“A viper. It was a viper,” he said. I knew that in the spring Israeli vipers are very active. Musa fell upon my arm and seemed to bite me hard. He spat out. The snake bite was so small I couldn’t even see it. He took me in his arms and carried me down to the car.
“I can walk! I’m fine!” I shouted, but he said I needed to move as little as possible until they injected the serum. He laid me down on the back seat and drove me to hospital. My arm was very sore where he had bitten it.
At the hospital I was immediately given an injection and told to lie down for an hour. There was reddening around the wound and bruising caused by Musa’s teeth. The doctor said that if there was no reaction after an hour, Musa must have succeeded in sucking all the poison out. It was very rare to manage that so speedily.
I was laid on a couch and Musa waited for me out in the corridor. Then he came in and said he had almost died of worry. He started crying but I didn’t, because I realized he loved me, and that was even more of a surprise than the snakebite.
After that everything happened very quickly. We had after all been getting ready for this for a whole year. Well, perhaps not exactly, but all year I had been bathing in his lovelorn gaze, and I even got rid of my pimples. In the past I sometimes got small pimples on my chin and forehead, but now my skin looked as if I had been grooming and pampering it in a beauty salon. I rented a little flat in the Middle Town from Arabs. There was one room the size of a large divan and a small kitchen. Musa lived in the Upper Town, in a large house with an orchard. The day came when he did not return home.
No, it is not at all what you are thinking. He knew nothing about me, but intuited everything. He was an emotional genius. He approached me so cautiously, as if I were a spirit or a mirage. I was a wild animal with its femininity completely suppressed. I suspect I am one of those women who find it easy to live out their lives as a virgin. Very gradually I learned to respond to him. It took almost a year before my body could do that, but during that year it was as if a different, quite separate creature was growing inside me.
Then there came the Six-Day War. Everybody was euphoric. East Jerusalem was occupied, part of the Judaean Desert, Sinai, Samaria, the Golan Heights. It seemed as if the only two people with misgivings were Daniel and Musa. Daniel said this was a hostage to fortune and that seizing territory did not resolve the issue but complicated it. Musa, who as an Arab was not taken into the army, said the consequences were unforeseeable.
I remember them talking one morning and Daniel said the Six-Day War was like a chapter in the Bible. Victory had come at the wave of a hand. “And defeat with a wave of the other hand?” Musa asked quickly. I was suddenly afraid.
Outwardly, little changed. I worked from morning till night. We were organizing a kind of crèche at the church. Most of our women were unable to take jobs. There were few crèches, and it was difficult and expensive to transport children. We did have a group for working mothers, and one or two of them would take turns to look after the children. Usually there was a lactating mother. I remember one, Veronica, fed half the children in the community with her breasts. This was the time when we finished building the Church of Elijah by the Spring. The Druze had found the spring for us, but it was such a trickle that it could have provided only enough water for the birds to drink.
We became a real community, even slightly communistic. There were always people with nowhere to go living in the church shelter. Sometimes they were completely random people who were homeless, and a number of drug addicts attached themselves to us. One managed to cure himself of drug taking, pulled himself up, and even finished his studies. Daniel and I bought food and there were charitable aid packages. We boiled, fed, washed dishes, and prayed. He conducted the liturgy, a large part of which was in Hebrew. Musa often came to help. Sometimes he invited me to go on an outing, showing me beautiful places. Whenever he did, I would ask Daniel whether I could take the time off. He would be cross and say, “Why are you asking me? You are a responsible adult. You know Musa is married. If you cannot go, it’s better for you not to.”
Of course I knew that Musa was married, but I also knew he had been married when he was still just a boy of seventeen. His wife was older. She was related to him on his mother’s side and there were some family considerations which obliged him to marry her. Of course, nobody asked his opinion. By now he had three children.
Twenty-one years passed from the day he slipped that note into my bag until the day he died. Twenty-one years of suffering, happiness, breaking up, reconciliation, ceaseless pangs of conscience, shame, and a union as heavenly as anyone could imagine.
At the very beginning I went, confused, to talk to Daniel and for a long time couldn’t say anything. Then I said just one word, “Sin.” He was silent, then took the clasp from my hair. It fell about me. He stroked my head and said, “What beautiful hair you have, and your forehead, your eyes and nose … You were created to be loved. The sin is with the other person. It is he who took the vow, but I can understand him, too, Hilda. In love, women are almost always the victims. Women suffer more from love, but perhaps, too, they gain more. There is no escaping life. It takes what is its due. Do not be hard on yourself. Endure. Try to protect yourself.” I hardly understood what he was saying. It was astonishing the way people would come to him with banal problems, but he never gave them banal answers.