by Maxim Matusevich

Perched against a fluffy pile of IKEA pillows Nora watched the camels cross into her field of vision, framed by the glass panel of the balcony door. The room was bathed in an early evening quiet, the pale rays refracted off the ceramic floor tiles and played havoc with the otherwise stately outlines of her beloved possession – a bulky mahogany armoire. The armoire, acquired at the Elite Wholesales Furniture Emporium in Newton, Mass.—an acquisition intended as a testimony to her exquisite Leningrad taste and American success—loomed large in Nora’s life story. It was mostly a story of great suffering and resilience and Nora wouldn’t have it any other way. In Boston, an American co-worker Amy once told her, “Nora, your life reminds me of a Hollywood movie – so many struggles, so many missed chances, but you always triumph.” She meant well but Nora was not pleased, she bristled at the very idea of a happy end. “What Hollywood,” she said, “In your Hollywood, they make you believe as if everything will eventually work out, but it never does. Life is a war that cannot be won.” She liked making such pronouncements – for their dramatic flair, to be sure, but also because they made her American interlocutors uncomfortable.

Americans have had it too easy, she believed. Their infantile optimism shielded them from the stark realities of the wildness and savagery of the “real world.” SHE knew because she had come in from that world – in from the wild, and she could still sense the heat of the scorching fires licking at her feet, the stench of burning flesh still filled her nostrils. She couldn’t abide not being dramatic – THAT would’ve been a betrayal of her own story, her “life story” as the well-intentioned but hopelessly naïve Amy would put it. Amy had no clue, none of them did. No wonder most of her Boston coworkers voted for Democrats – all desirous of happy ends, all believers in hope and change and other such nonsense that only existed in their popcorn-inflamed imagination. It pained her that Alex had bought into these rosy visions. Of course, he had – he was weak and malleable, which sort of worked… so long as she was the one bending his will.

The armoire was a statement of faith and an award for her hard crossing. Its hulking and unequivocal presence served as a constant reminder of her successful escape from the netherworld. In the meantime, the first of the camels had reached the outer edges of the frame and the animals now formed an unsteady procession that from her perch reminded Nora of a clothesline stretched out between the two panels of the balcony door. How far are they? Half a kilometer at least… She could see that far after the cataract surgery in Ashdod. The measly five hundred meters is nothing, she could see further – thousands of kilometers into the distance. She could see Alex. She could see right through him… She caught herself humming a long-forgotten tune of her youth: a song by a bandana-sporting bard, Novella Matveeva, who crooned of heartaches reimagined, of old raincoats left hanging on rusty nails as souvenirs of the loves that never were. Matveeva was as anti-Hollywood as one could be, as one should be. And, surprisingly, one of her songs was about a camel caravan crossing the desert. Nothing in the desert, half-whispered Matveeva to the strumming of her guitar, is what it seems. The desert comes alive with colorful fantastical visions of Fata Morgana, the dreamy images that promise and distort, that beckon only to disappoint. But the camels… they remain indifferent and trod on their set path with no regrets harbored, no complaints uttered:

My caravan was traversing the desert
My caravan was traversing the desert
The leading camel deep in melancholy thought
And the rest of them following him
And their heads were moving slowly
As if they knew something but kept silent
As if they knew something but didn’t know
How to share what they knew: with whom, when, for what purpose

The lines so simple and lulling, the words of those who prefer not to explain. Such words are impossible to translate into English. A Bedouin boy on a battered motorcycle accompanied the camels: at first, he idled at the edges of the frame, then revved up the engine and sped up along the length of the caravan – a quick flash across the screen. The camels kept on moving – graceful, stately, and utterly indifferent to the speeding motorcycle. “Like in a movie theater,” Nora thought. Lately, she had developed a habit of comparing her lived experiences to movie scenes. Both the star and the director of the film, she recognized the dramatic but also, importantly, the therapeutic potential of this innovation. Her approach to live filmmaking differed radically from the despised Hollywood concoctions. Her movie will seethe with passion and dramatic tension but there will be no resolution, no ridiculous happy endings. Alex won’t be able to exhale a sigh of relief. Her friends back in Boston, and especially Gala, will have no satisfaction of picking her up at Logan and hosting a welcome back party, complete with stupid balloons and Gala’s ever gallant hubby Misha flipping hamburgers in the backyard. Gala, despite their shared Soviet past, always struck her as a well-meaning fool, who would like nothing better than a tear-stained reunion. In their last Skype conversation Gala pleaded with her to reconcile with Alex and “respect his life choices.” She begged her to return to Boston. What an idiot! What a blithering, blabbering, kind-hearted dupe! Probably voted for Obama too. And to think that she has known them for close to half-a-century. Wasn’t she paying attention? Didn’t she realize that Nora never, NEVER betrayed her principles. It’s a slippery slope, she barked at Gala. You Gala are always ready to slide down the slippery slope and you want to drag me along? To squeeze in next to you on the sled and hurtle merrily downhill, leaving everything that’s sacred and right behind? Leaving Alex behind? In the clutches of that horrid, twice-divorced Moldovan whore? No, Gala, you definitely have not been paying attention and if you so much as breathe another word there will be no more Skype calls. I can do wonderfully without the Skype calls, thank you very much. My friendship (and you should know that) is not unconditional – loyalty is the condition. And I have everything that I need right here – my little country that fills my heart with pride and thrilling tenderness, a view of the Judean desert in bloom through my bedroom window, a bottle of Armenian cognac (the select five-star brand), a pack of Davidoff Golds, a brightly colored pill case: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… all the days of the week through Yom Rishon. And most importantly, I have my honor intact, my principles uncompromised.

Nora was done explaining herself to Boston friends. What was that saying she liked quoting so much? If there is a need to explain then it’s futile to explain. Something like that – as always it sounded perfect in its original Russian. And there was another one that she never tired of hurling at her adversaries, even before her relocation to a real, bone fide desert: I’m not gonna bother proving to you that I am not a camel. She spent enough time in the States to know that the phrase sounded borderline insane in English, but that knowledge never stopped her from deploying it in both languages. You think we owe each other an explanation? Forget about it, not wasting my time. And really, how do you explain betrayal? How do you make the kindly and unprincipled Gala recoil in horror at the idea of Alex betraying his mother? How do you make Alex, her sweet little Alex (not so little anymore at forty-five – what with all that weight he has put on now that the Moldovan bitch is busy plying him with mamaliga and that revolting stuffed cabbage dish)… yes, her formerly sweet little Alex or better yet her “sweet little Alex” in quotation marks… that Alex, her faithless and weak son Alex – how do you make him shudder at his own disloyalty? “Respect his life choices”… Well, here she is – on the edge of the desert, breathing in the arid medicinal air of Arad, smoking her Davidoffs, sipping her cognac, respecting his fucking life choices. And it’s not that she didn’t warn him, she did – more than once, more than a hundred times; she warned him about those provincial sluts, brazen and irrepressible like weeds: you kick them out of the door and they’ll climb right back in through the window. It’s impossible to get rid of them… short of radical measures. Moving to Israel was a radical measure – an act of inspired nationalism that doubled as a devastating rebuke to her son. It felt so right and appropriate: having been let down by the most important, the only important human in her life – to seek solace in the bosom of her people.

Those people though… they defied her idea of them and tested the limits of her tribalism. The Bukhara Jews, the Moroccans, the Ethiopians, the Black Hebrews, the shtreimel-wearing Haredim… And those ramshackle Bedouin encampments on the edges of the city… the proverbial big tent, the Jewish family that she had yearned for seeking protection against the indignities inflicted on her by the only person who really mattered. She desperately desired to become one with this place. Back in Boston, when haranguing her baffled friends, she tapped into the deepest well of emotional theatricality to declare her attachment to the land of Israel. The pushback from shell-shocked friends was feeble, they knew better than place themselves in the way of Nora’s passions. Like most of her other life decisions this one was articulated in such extreme and intemperate terms that the doubters didn’t dare to protest.

*

Extravagant articulations of emotions came naturally to Nora, who had close to eight decades to hone the skill. She learned early on in life that very few were capable to withstand a torrent of over-the-top superlatives without giving their ground. She first discovered the potency of the trick at that horrid deathtrap of a boarding school in Western Siberia, where she was moved from the besieged Leningrad in the autumn of 1941. Her father stayed behind to defend the city and, as she would find out after the war, lasted until December. Her mother… the Germans began strafing the train as soon as they reached Luga. The attacks seemed like an afterthought, the Luftwaffe had more important targets to play with – the weapons depots, the grain collectors, the troops concentrations. The bombers were sweeping in at an obnoxiously low altitude, breezing leisurely over the train – a cool-down after the main mission. Sometimes they didn’t even shoot, their ammunition spent elsewhere. When they did strafe the train they tended to target it without precision. Mother should’ve not poked her head outside, she should’ve known that even when satiated predators can be deadly. So… an orphan. The Siberian school contained multitudes, which is to say, dozens of children from Leningrad and smaller cities overrun by the Germans, most of them parentless. At the time she couldn’t understand why some of them blamed kids “like her” for the loss of their parents. Seventy-five years later, Nora remembered a few of the children, mostly those who attempted to torment her but were eventually tamed by her primal scream, by the power of her emotions. She remembered Pavlik, a boy her age evacuated from Pskov. “Comrade Stalin is defending the Jews,” he explained to Nora during a recess. “He is very kind but because of his kindness the Germans shot my parents.”—“But the Germans shot my mother too,” objected Nora. Pavlik would have none of it. “It’s a lie,” he smirked. “Jews are never harmed, others die for them.” And that’s when Nora discovered the power of her scream. Poor Pavlik would never know that he served as a test target for a weapon that Nora would yield with such deadly efficiency for the rest of her life.

She swapped Boston for Arad in the same dramatic fashion that some thirty years earlier she had exchanged Leningrad for Boston. But in some ways, this latest passage proved to be infinitely more performative. Her Soviet exodus followed a well-trodden path that bore the footprints of almost a million of her fellow Soviet emigres, including a number of close Leningrad friends (Gala and Misha, for example). “I feel like a guppy fished out of the aquarium,” she shared with Gala soon after they had reunited in Brookline, Mass. “You see, it’s like being stretched out in someone’s palm, all rainbow colored and tremulous, exposed and therefore unique.” She took a sip of her favorite cognac; Gala nodded obligingly as she often did when forced to endure one of Nora’s soliloquys. “It’s all an illusion, of course. For them,” her index finger stabbed the air in the direction of the bay window – the vastness of America unfolded outside of it, “for them, we’re indistinguishable from one another – just a school of fish, an enormous school of fish crossing the Atlantic.” – “And whose palm is it?” asked Gala – haltingly as Nora rarely responded well to interruptions. “How the fuck do I know? God? Uncle Sam? Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts?” Gala winced – she was squeamish when it came to cursing. And so, generally, was Nora – squeamish, yes, but not above transgressing, especially for dramatic effect, or just to make Gala squirm.

From Leningrad to Boston she had traveled in a metaphorical herd, holding Alex’s hand—figuratively and literally, not letting it go—being one with her son but the two of them also forming a constituent part of the great migration. Crossing the Atlantic with a flock of migrating birds, many thousands of them, all ferrying the suitcases and shipping containers full of Czech crystal and hard covers of Russian classics. No husband though. Nora could and did well without a husband, especially without the one who had gifted her with Alex. Job well done, now get lost. That was the official version of her separation from a man, who at their alimony hearing, conducted in a featureless, malodorous courtroom, called her an “evil gargoyle” and boasted of his many infidelities – an ill-advised behavior during a divorce trial, but one that apparently gave him enormous satisfaction. She could care less, the loser was a certified nobody, not deserving of their company – hers and Alex’s. Getting rid of the cheating bastard was “the best thing that ever happened to me”… Again, the official version of the events that would be presented to the world having passed her personal censorship.

Her escape to the Judean desert thirty years later (“my Exodus” she predictably referred to it) would proceed in accordance with a different script, a non-existing one. Misha, aghast at her decision, said that much: “No sane person, no one in her right mind and no one, forgive me my bluntness, of your age has ever done this!” Nora couldn’t care less what Misha thought. She would travel alone, disconnected from any larger historical patterns, at least from the most obvious ones, not holding anyone’s hand, certainly not the hand of Alex. Alex’s hand, just like all the other parts of his body (which, she had never learned to see as separate from her own), was now occupied otherwise.

What did she expect? Did she have a plan beyond the practical steps required for the relocation? Where did she see herself in five years? What a stupefyingly idiotic question to ask someone like Nora. The funny thing she was asked exactly that when interviewing for her first job in the States. A stout, kindly HR person, his pinkish bald spot glistening with sweat, popped the question and even prodded her ever so lightly towards the correct response: “Do you see yourself succeeding at our company? In five years?” In five years?! What hubris! Americans, even the mild-mannered bureaucrats, believe they can control their destiny. They plan their weddings several years out, they make hotel reservations months in advance. Ridiculous. Life is not a river to be dammed, its course adjusted or reversed to your specifications. The Soviets tried that trick in Central Asia and look what happened: remember the Aral Sea? Exactly. No, you don’t make plans, you make moves – dramatic ones, fueled by extreme emotions. Nora had no idea whether or not she would succeed at her new place of employment. Five years?! “I cannot promise you that,” she hissed. “Five years is a long period of time. For all I know, I may be dead in five years.” Then she fixed the visibly uncomfortable interviewer with an intense stare: “Listen, you can die too. It’s quite possible that five years from now both of us will be dead.” Somehow she still got the job, and drew all the wrong conclusions from that one-off accident.

She didn’t expect Alex to drop his pathetic Boston life—complete with a six-figure salary, a four-bedroom house in Newton, and a shiksa whore in the kitchen—and follow her, Nora, to Eretz. A vision of the last scene: the two of them lighting Shabbat candles by the balcony window; the camel train in the distance gradually dissolving into a quickly gathering Levantine darkness; she pours out two tumblers of cognac for them to share; her recently purchased Hyundai Elantra is parked outside the building in a designated parking spot that came with the apartment; the day after tomorrow, after Shabbat, Alex will drive her to a doctor’s appointment in Ashdod; he’ll sit still in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, while she is undergoing all the necessary tests and renews her prescriptions: her pill box is never empty, not these days, not at her age; afterwards they’ll have a lunch of khachapuri and khinkali at that friendly Georgian beachside café. What a lovely last scene, with camera panning across the breadth of the Mediterranean horizon, then zooming out… Will never happen, of course. Her life is a movie, no doubt, but it’s a different sort of film. No happy ends, remember?

*

Farida will take care of things. What do they call her? Another strange Hebrew word – a metapelet, Nora’s caretaker. “Oh, you now have a nurse?” the feeble-minded Gala innocently blurted out during a Skype call. Nora bristled indignantly: “I don’t need a nurse! I’m not one of those Brookline old hags! I still drive, which by the way you never learned to do. No, she is my assistant, helping me out with the chores and such.” But Gala, whose many virtues did not include circumspection, pressed on: “Farida… She is Muslim, isn’t she? It’s a Muslim name. Isn’t it funny that now that you have moved to Israel you have a Muslim… assistant?” Momentarily, Nora was taken aback: such ignorance. Muslim! What does she know! Listen, you fool, you hardly know what you’re blabbering about, you’d better keep quiet about serious matters that you’re too limited to understand. She doesn’t say it exactly like that, despite her perennial disdain for Gala she is eager to preserve the connection, these Skype chats sustain her in her profound loneliness. Instead, she snorts contemptuously at the screen: “No, she is my metapelet, a beautiful Hebrew word.” Nora claims to “absolutely love” her “native” language, which she neither speaks nor understands. But she derives such pleasure from knowing that it’s all around her, its guttural sounds, those throaty “khs” filling her with delight and a sense of belonging. Farida speaks it fluently even though she is not Jewish. An Uzbek? A Tatar? Nora always forgets to ask, too busy oversharing with Farida the minute details of her own odyssey. In her sorrow over the loss of Alex to a Moldovan carpetbagger, in her fierce commitment to an illusion of independence, in her stubborn refusal to accept reality as it presents itself to her, stripped of fiction and allegory, Nora is not about to admit to her growing affection for Farida. She is contemptuous of sentimental human attachments, especially to strangers, to those who cannot possibly share your values or your grief. Only the tribe can do this for you, the tribe will protect you from the species of the wind-swept outside that are keen, hell-bent in fact, on tunneling their way inside your warmly lit world. The multitudes of hate-filled and antisemitic lies-spouting Pavliks, and the cheating, good-for-nothing husbands, and the dour-faced Soviet apparatchiks, and all those grabbing provincial tarts, whose whole purpose in life is to ensnare, and to disrupt, and to claim your own flesh and blood as their own – the strangers, the trespassers, the meddlers, the appropriators. But the tribe… where IS it? In search of its protective shield, a metaphorical Iron Dome designed to her own specifications, she had secured a refuge in this god-forsaken, yet god-blessed desert. The town is drab and feels alien, she rarely leaves her apartment. The irony of it, the irony of her tribe appearing like a still from a National Geographic documentary about a remote community of exotically attired locals, whose ways she cannot begin to comprehend. She never cared much for documentaries. “It’s like a miracle, I instantly felt at home here!” she announced to Gala and Misha within days of her arrival in Arad. “It’s like returning home after decades of wondering in the desert.” Gala thought the analogy strange and inverted: “What are you talking about? You are in the desert now, you have literally moved to the desert… from Boston.” That bloody fool, what does she know? What does she understand? Hidden from elements behind Misha’s broad frame: fifty years of no problems, fifty years of being led by her hand, fifty years and counting. She understands nothing! Those free of hurt are incapable of understanding.

But Farida understands. Farida, a stout, fast-moving and fast-talking woman, shows her kindness. More importantly, she shows respect for Nora’s misfortunes and doesn’t dismiss Nora’s grievances glibly, absorbing the torrent of lamentations with unaffected ease. Grateful, Nora is willing to forgive even Farida’s lulling, singsong accented Russian. So what if she is a Muslim? After all, the two of them hail from the same one-sixth of the earth’s landmass, now rearranged in a new geopolitical constellation, where such distinctions didn’t matter. Well, the hell they didn’t, just ask any Pavlik, and yet, and yet… Farida is hardly a stranger even though her claim on this patch of the Judean desert is rooted not in a 3,000-year old prophesy, but in the vagaries of post-Soviet disintegration.

Muslim or not Farida is not above sharing a snifter of cognac when they assemble in front of Nora’s flat-screen Samsung tv set to watch the evening news on a Russian-language Israeli channel. A breakdown of the day’s events is delivered in urgent Russian by a bevy of boisterous presenters. The rightwing and unapologetically nationalist tone of the news analysis satisfies Nora’s deeper political cravings, while having no visible effect on Farida. “Damn right!” reacts Nora to another swipe by a paunchy talking head against the evil machinations of the appeasers. Farida glances briefly at the screen and takes the measure of the expert. “God, isn’t he fat?” she pronounces to Nora’s great indignation. “Fat?! What do you mean “fat”? He is smart, he sees right through these leftist hoodlums. If we had more like him back in the States maybe the country wouldn’t be going down the drain right now!” Farida, ever nonchalant, waves her freshly refilled tumbler: “Ah, politics, just politics, all the same everywhere: people barking at each other like dogs. Whoof! Whoof!” She imitates the barking sounds, then laughs and the sound of her laughter envelopes Nora and drains the pent-up tension out of a tired body: “Norochka, my lovely, don’t you sweat over such silly things. Here, let me top off your glass. Here! L’chaim, my dearest!”

Such are their rituals of sisterly bonding, set against the backdrop of a two-bedroom apartment of whitewashed walls and ceramic flooring, purchased for cash with the proceeds from the sale of her Brookline condo. True to form, Alex denounced the transaction as a fiscally irresponsible madness, failing to realize that he had forfeited his right to express an opinion about her affairs. No person, living or dead, could pass judgment on her “last chapter.” For that’s how Nora with her penchant for grandiose formulations, assessed her present predicament – her last chapter or maybe even, she thought to herself slyly, an epilogue. Or… an afterword to summarize the progression of dramatic twists, insults, and unearned misfortunes that have landed her—wronged, exhausted but unbent and unbroken—in Arad. Good-bye, Alex, my dear chubby boy, sail on or rather spin your wheels in that mamaliga-reeking kitchen. Free at last, free of your mama’s concerns and fears (all justified, of course), free to choose as you please, even if what pleases you makes your poor mama shudder: her lonely misery the price of your liberation. But at least one of us knows (feels it in her gut) that the promise of freedom is but an illusion, just another pipe dream, pushed by the loveless ones. The land of the free is the land of the unloved, the land of the damned, the land of exile.

Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu, thank you for Farida, thank you for a stranger, who knows how to love and be loyal. Farida will take care of things, nothing can faze her. Gala and Misha—immersed in their comforts, shielded from the angry winds by their self-serving naivete and lack of imagination—have no appreciation for the bonds of unlikely friendships. When everything else fails as they say. And everything else has failed – everything! Which, of course, is what has brought her to this comfy setup inside the movie theater of her life. With little effort she had secured the best seats in town – propped up on the cushions, tucked in neatly by the thoughtful Farida. Farida will be back in the morning, she’ll take care of things. In the meantime, Nora can sit back, recline and enjoy the view of a moving caravan. She can sip her cognac and maybe, ah, what the hell, one last Davidoff before bedtime (bedtime? she is already in bed), one for the road, one for the flinty caravan trail. “Don’t forget the pills, sweetie,” Farida reminded her before leaving the apartment. And she promised not to. And as everyone who has ever crossed Nora’s path knows only too well she’s good at keeping promises. Alex knows. And Misha knows. And the dim-witted Gala would’ve known had she ever paused to think. The pills are right here, on the nightstand, next to the cognac, next to a half-empty pack of Davidoffs: a merrily colored plastic box, whose seven square compartments represent the days of the week and are loaded up with every conceivable pharmaceutical wonder. Today is… what? Monday? Yes, Yom Sheni. One of the very first things they teach you at the Ulpan are the days of the week. And that’s about the only thing she has retained from a two-week language course for the new arrivals. She quit, the class gave her headaches and the very thought of having to turn in home assignments was both humiliating and inducive of hypertension. But not before she had learned the days of the week. Yom Sheni is followed by Yom Shlishi, which is still a long way from Shabbat. One can cover the distance by living it out or else by cheating: by jumping the hurdle of the plastic partitions separating the tiny squares. There was a book… There is always a book… A strange phantasmagorical tale by two science-fiction author-brothers, wildly popular among her Leningrad friends. And what a peculiar title too – Monday Begins on Saturday. She was never big on anything outlandish and didn’t care much for the book. But its title, so openly disdainful of the linear conception of time… that title intrigued her, mostly because it appealed to her rebellious spirit. Rebels know how to cheat time and bend it to their will. If only she could focus well enough and stop worrying about tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, if she cleared her vision of the haunting images of that man-child Alex, then she would skip a week, and another one, and yet another one… Her Yom Shlishi will arrive on Shabbat. And how liberating would THAT be? She will soar high above the roofs of Arad and swish through the night air – down to the Dead Sea, up to the domes of Jerusalem, on towards the glistening spires of her forgotten Leningrad. She will take in the earth below, BREATHE it in, become one with it, because it’s a movie, HER movie, its very last scene. The camel caravan down in the distance, now a slender, barely visible thread of tiny dots, weaving its way through the desert. It’s getting darker but she can still see them: a bird’s eye view of the last speck of an animal crossing the balcony window frame, lingering on for a brief second, then… gone.