Chains of Sand Read online

  “What?”

  “I’ll never leave Israel. You don’t even talk to me about it and you think I’ll come? You are crazy if you think that, if you think I would leave my home, my studies, my life.”

  “Ella-”

  “You are crazy. My whole family is here.”

  “We could start our own family,” he tempts her.

  Ella doesn’t mean to, but a giggle escapes her mouth.

  ***

  Now

  2

  Udi cannot delay any longer. The uncertainty is killing him. He kicks through the dusty streets, glaring at tourists who with their cameras collect the ruins and the sleek Bauhaus architecture, and the dust. Late one afternoon on his way to his shift at the bar he finds himself caught up in a teenage tour group. Many summers ago, he kissed an American teenager from just such a group. She was two years older than he was then. He liked her accent, her breasts, her enthusiasm for him. They ate bubble-gum ice-cream on the beach-front and held hands looking out over the port, and ignored the sewage floating just feet away. Now the chatter of these teens charges him with an acute claustrophobia. They jostle. Their hair braided with coloured thread, a couple of the boys sporting fresh tattoos in a Hebrew script they don’t understand, one of the girls clearly watching him, her eyes wide and welcoming. He is, he imagines, part of her envisioned escapade. Tensing his arms he attempts to plough through, but the rest of the group are oblivious to all but their adventure together, their false snapshot, and do not disperse. He moves left and then right but they hem him in. A surge of rage rushes up his spine. He will have to speak, to tell them, to do something. But he says nothing.

  Udi has not felt this way, this paralysed, since he was six years old smelling falafel. Not amidst the fire of bullets, or the melting of flesh, or the madness of an angry people: familiar terrors, routinely overcome. At the back of his throat, shame mingles with anger and incomprehension. But there is no real surprise to it. What lies before him is simply far more immobilising: he must decide whether or not to wait for Ella.

  She has said that she wants to come to London. By giggling, she has tempted him. And in so doing she has both handed him his freedom and tied him tightly, jealously to herself. Because emigrating together has unveiled a whole new set of obstacles. It is not only double the cost, double the time spent deciphering double the application forms, and double the headache, it is the navigation of circumstances entirely different from his own. She is a student, her studies important to her.

  “And I can’t transfer in the middle of a semester.”

  “But if we get you a student visa-”

  “We should wait until January.”

  “Wait?”

  “What if I don’t get a university place in London?”

  “You will.”

  “Would you want me to drop out if I don’t? Udi, should I?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A sigh. “Then I should wait for the transfer.”

  “But I cannot wait. Ella, I cannot wait.”

  “My professors will help.”

  “When will you talk to them?”

  “Tomorrow.” “After this paper.” “After this presentation.”

  Her application is stagnant. And he is waiting. But each day he wakes with a pounding headache and knows it is this, this, this constant, unbearable unknowing.

  Why is he waiting?

  He had been prepared to mourn her. He had been going, he was almost gone.

  Even if she manages the transfer, she will only be a student, it will only be temporary.

  But temporary is better than nothing.

  Screw temporary – with or without her he will not be able to move at all if he can’t find proof of a job waiting for him. It is the only section still empty on his own application form.

  ‘Y’allah,’ he shouts with a flick of his open palm at the still-milling teens. Surprised by his aggression, the girl who had been eyeing him steps aside.

  Before his shift begins, from inside the bar’s office, Udi decides to call Ben, his British cousin. The two of them have grown up in parallel. Different countries, different cultures, different climates, languages, expectations. But they are the same age and share the same last name so they feel no distinction. Or at least they didn’t used to. When they were small they spent whole summers together, Ben’s family making their annual trip to Israel and Ben slotting fluidly each time into Udi’s life. Mornings were spent in darkened rooms in front of computer games followed by afternoons at the beach, or as they got older, in cafés, by schwarma stalls, at parties talking to girls. Ben used to tell him repeatedly that Israeli girls were the most beautiful girls on Earth and back then this fit easily into Udi’s philosophy: Israel was the greatest country on Earth so why shouldn’t it be home to the most beautiful girls? He and Ben flirted with them equally, with equal luck.

  Since the end of high school however, things have been less equal. The divergence is not enough to stop him calling, but there is a moment of hesitation.

  It is 2005. Ben is in his first year of university and has invited Udi to visit. Udi is on leave from the army, a welcome break from a month in Gaza during the long awaited disengagement. For months, blue and orange flags have been flying from car antennas. Half the people he knows are hopeful that it is a step towards peace, the other half think it is a betrayal, and his sister, Avigail, thinks the unilateral mode of the disengagement is a conscious manipulation by the Israeli government, outwardly giving back land while in real terms fating the Palestinians to failure. All Udi knows is that it is shit, it feels shit, he feels shit. It is his first real assignment since his training finished a few months earlier and not what he imagined, not what he has been imagining. Making it into one of the army’s elite combat units has been his dream since he was 13 years old. Time had passed since he was six and lost in a market; by 13 he had watched Die Hard and Mad Max and Mission Impossible, and decided that hell yeah, he wanted to shoot guns and jump out of planes. And so on his 13th birthday he’d set his alarm for 4am and every day since then he has run hills and done press-ups and readied himself for this. For defending his country, the country that saved his parents. Somebody once told him that if you don’t have what to live for then you don’t have what to die for, but he did, he had both, he’d thought. And so he’d shined his boots and packed his bag, and carried his heavy gun to Gaza.

  He hadn’t been naïve. He’d known this was what the training was for – real stuff, real war, real danger. But still…

  Ben picks him up from the airport and takes him straight out to a club where they drink vodka and Red Bulls that are two-for-one for students and three-for-one for a mad 20 minutes at midnight. Around them, barely-clothed girls do body-shots, Udi steps in something sticky, and sometime after three they tumble agreeably comatose into Ben’s student flat. The following day they consume a fry-up breakfast at two in the afternoon and smoke weed with Ben’s four flatmates well into the night. It is a Wednesday, but Ben explains that he has only one lecture that day and it can be missed – they spend most of the next 24 hours high.

  The blur of this is a pleasing rest for Udi, he is glad of the film, the hazy edges, the sharp, flashing images softening just a fraction in his mind. He lights another spliff and enjoys the usual sense of edification when talk is laced with weed. He sleeps. He sleeps.

  Yet it is a jolt.

  The nothingness.

  The length and extent of the apathy.

  Nobody seems to care. Not about studying. Not about their future, their life plan or lack of it. Nobody talks politics or worries about British defence policy.

  One evening, during a brief lull in the partying during which they are consuming seven pizzas between five people, Ben asks, “So how are things over in Y’Is-ra-el?”

  But he says it while selecting a computer game from his stash of them, and while his flatmates are ranking girls on a ‘Hot or Not’ website. And it doesn’t feel right to drag them down. To tell them h
ow it felt to prise sobbing, screaming settlers from their homes, or about the marks left on paint by clinging fingernails. It doesn’t feel right to describe the surprising sadness of dismantling synagogues, of cracking stained glass. Or how sick he was, how physically sick when he had to dig bodies from graves, bodies too Jewish to remain in Palestinian land. It doesn’t feel right, and so he says nothing.

  And on his return to the army he says nothing too, not telling Shimon or Tomer how his British cousin wastes his time at university, time they would kill for. Time they do kill for. He talks about the clubs and the girls, but not his cousin by whom, for the first time, he is embarrassed. They are both 18, only 18, but Ben seems so woefully immature.

  Udi glances at the phone in his hand and shakes his head. It took years before he had appreciated the beauty of Ben’s naivety then: British families send their sons and daughters to university to learn, but also to grant them a few extra years in which to figure out what will come next – a gentle transition to adulthood. Israeli parents send their children straight to the front line. This, he sees now, is the idiosyncrasy. What he did back then, not what Ben did. This is the oddity. The injustice. He didn’t ask for the heaviness that has been foisted upon him. He didn’t agree to the intensity he still cannot shake. When he was 18 he had not yet even voted. Yet he learned his country’s lessons, the too-direct education about the shortness of life and the quickness of death.

  In any case, last time he saw Ben, two years ago now, everything had flipped again.

  Ben is staying at The Hilton, not on Udi’s bedroom floor. His girlfriend is with him. She wears Prada sunglasses and wants to spend most of her day by the pool or shopping at the Kikar, a place mobbed by the French and Russians and where Udi can afford exactly nothing. Ben has been out of university and working now for over three years. Last year he and his older brother, Jonny, opened a restaurant in London and it is doing well. There is talk of expanding into a franchise. Ben speaks of this with the confidence of success. He has a bank manager. And a title. And staff under him. Udi is working for tips in a café.

  They go for lunch at a fancy restaurant on a cliff-top. Their conversation is as fluid and joking and probing as ever; but Ben pays – it is, he says, his invitation. Udi allows it only because there is no way he can afford the meal. He feels young next to Ben. Too young and simultaneously too old.

  Udi picks up the phone. Things may have changed, but still they stay in touch and think of each other as close cousins.

  Ben answers after a single ring. He is with Jonny who shouts myriad swear words down the phone in light-hearted, broken Hebrew. Udi throws some more imaginative ones back and hears Ben and Jonny laughing. The two of them are tight, always have been. They work together with their father and after work spend more time in each other’s willing company. Ben has told Jonny about Udi’s plans, although Udi has yet to inform his own family.

  “So?” Udi asks after they briefly catch up on each other’s news. He is attempting to sound not too pushy, or too needy. “Is there anything?”

  He will take anything: builder, waiter, gardener, anything. The only requirement is that he can write it down in the accusatory blank space of his immigration form, and that it offers him some kind of wage, some kind of beginning.

  “Are you ready to come?” Ben asks plainly.

  “You’ve found something?” Udi does not want to allow too much hope, but finds himself standing up from the desk he has been leaning on.

  “How soon can you be here?”

  “Ben, have you found me a job?” From outside the office, Udi can hear the swell of a large group entering and his manager shouting for Udi to hurry up.

  “How long do you think the application takes?”

  “Stop fucking with me you cooney. Did you find something? What is it?”

  Ben laughs. “We need a new manager,” he says. “At the restaurant. Jonny and I are starting some new projects so we can’t be there all the time, and we need someone we can trust. The only thing is,” he continues, “we like the manager to be close by in case anything needs attention, so you’ll have to stay in the flat above the restaurant. No rent obviously, but that’s the deal. And you’ll have to drive the company car cos it has our logo on it. What do you think? You okay to drive here?”

  As though to provide illustration, the first honks of evening traffic pierce the walls of the bar. In the next room, the volume on the sound system is turned up to its usual deafening level. But inside Udi’s head there is an unfamiliar quiet.

  “Udi?” probes Ben after Udi is not sure how long.

  Still he cannot answer.

  “Udi?”

  “Get a move on and get your Israeli arse over here!” Jonny shouts abruptly, and Ben laughs, and now finally Udi manages to say okay, okay, yes, and soon the three of them are exchanging insults again and Udi is teaching them how to say ‘go screw a goat’ in Hebrew.

  ***

  Ella breathes in as she pulls at the top button of her favourite pair of jeans. They are a size smaller than the rest of the trousers she owns and they pinch when she sits down, but she likes the way they hug her body like a second skin, painting her curves with a thin brush of denim. Udi likes them too and this is why she has rooted them out of the closet. He has phoned to say he is coming over even though she is due at his house in less than an hour for Shabbat dinner. He says he has something to tell her.

  Ella’s mother is almost more excited than she is and is the one who instructed her to make sure she looks good for this seminal moment. To make sure her nails are painted, her fingers unadorned, ready. Now her mother is pottering around downstairs, pretending to put the finishing touches to the Shabbat meal she is creating but making more trips to the sink underneath the front window than is necessary, conspicuously peering out. Finally Ella hears a door open and her mother’s voice rise followed by another at a lower cadence, then Udi’s unmistakable lilting footsteps on the stairs. She shakes her dark curls about her shoulders and waits.

  He is smiling as he enters. She gets up from the bed and he immerses her in an oversized hug. It has been many months since she’s seen such an untainted expression on his face, and she doesn’t think he has ever been so voluntarily affectionate. She giggles freely and they kiss. It is as if they both know without speaking the joy that the next few moments will unfold. She wants to savour the anticipation. But he begins.

  “Ella, I need to talk to you about something important. Something great.” He digs his hand deep inside his jeans pocket, reaching.

  “What is it?” She pretends not to know. He grins broadly and she feels her stomach leap in expectation.

  “Something we’ve both been wanting. I’ve been wanting it for a very long time.”

  “I have too, Udi. For so long.” His brow furrows but she knows he finds it hard to express the true depth of his love. She sits on the bed and waits for him to say it his way. Hesitating, he is nervous, and she feels another giggle pushing its way through her chest. Finally he begins again.

  “I’m going.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going, Ella, to London. Ben’s found me a job, I’ve even got somewhere to stay, it’s…look.” He pulls the immigration form from his pocket and unfolds it carefully before presenting it to her, like a gem. “Look,” he urges again. “It’s finished. No gaps!”

  Ella’s mouth feels painfully dry. She can hardly concentrate on what he’s saying; she can’t grasp it. “But- I don’t understand. I thought we were going together.”

  “We are going together. Not at first maybe. Maybe you’ll stay here and finish the semester and then join me. But I can finally send off my form.” His face is alight. He wants to be congratulated. She wants to be sick. Her jeans are suddenly suffocatingly tight.

  “How- When- How can you go without me?”

  “Only for a while, Ella. I still want you to come. As soon as your application’s ready, you’ll come too.”

  “Bullshit, Udi.”


  His smile has waned slightly. “Only at first, baby.”

  For a moment she stares at him in silence. Clutching the bed where she is still perched, she sees the fragility of his enthusiasm, and there is a part of her, even now, that wants to make it solid, wants to shore him up. But, “I don’t want to go,” she whispers.

  “What?” He steps away from her.

  “I don’t want to go to London, Udi. I don’t want to leave Israel. I thought you were going to ask me to marry you.”

  “But you said-”

  “I said that because you promised me a family!” She is no longer whispering. “For fuck’s sake Udi. How can you just move to another country without me?! I thought you were about to propose.”

  “So you’ve been lying to me all this time? You never wanted to go?”

  “Of course I didn’t want to! Are you stupid? Why would I want to? Only for you, Udi. I was going to try it for you. But now, again, you don’t even think about me. Do you even hear what I’m saying to you: I-thought-you-were-going-to-propose! Don’t you care? You never think about me.”

  “Have you been thinking about me?” he shouts back at her. “Do you care that I want to leave? That I’m going mad here? That my life here is shit?”

  “Thanks.”

  “You know I don’t mean-”

  “You’re so selfish, Udi. You only think of yourself. You think you’re the only one whose opinion counts. You are just like your father.”

  “Qus!” He bangs his fist against the wall and a picture of them that he once framed for her smashes to the ground. They both stare at the shattered pieces.

  “Udi.” She moves towards him. “Udi-”

  “Okay,” he says, putting his hand up to stop her. “Enough.” And slams the door as he leaves.

  ***

  In the car, Udi stuffs the large, brown envelope he has already addressed, with the form, and drives rebelliously to the post office. It is closed. He had forgotten that it is Shabbat. Udi swears at nobody and slams the car door. Checking his watch and driving furiously back towards his home, he anticipates the inevitable complaints of lateness that will come from his mother, and he pushes the accelerator harder against the floor. Tonight it will matter more than usual. Ari is home. At least it will please her that Ella is no longer joining them.