Why I? On the Road

ON THE ROAD TO RISHON LE ZION

A car was stuck up ahead, so I eased over to the side of the road the better to look at the Bedouin woman standing there.
I stared at the heavily embroidered shawl, the long , black dress, worn on the hot day. I tried to decipher the blue tattoo on her face and count the gold coins strung along her forehead.
She looked at me. She saw hair cut short tousled in the
wind, a face painted on cheek and lip, eyes covered with glasses framed in red, arms an hair bared to the Sun.
She stood behind her baby camel.
I sat deep in my open roadster.
What did she think, as she looked at me - naked, I suppose, to her eyes - indecent, a provocation, a Jewish Jezebel?
Our eyes held for a moment. If she read mine aright,
she saw the questions in them.
What is your life?
Outwardly so different, are we really?
What do you think of my sixty miles an hour? Do you envy
it?
Will you be sighing as you trudge back to your tent with a heavy pail of water, "I'd like a home of brick and steel like she must have with running water in the kitchen?"
How many houses have you been in?
So rootless seeming, are you really rootless?
What is your name? Are you Fatima, the daughter of Fatima, the granddaughter of Fatima? How do you name your babies and after whom?
Did you ever imagine yourself a fairy princess when you were small? Play hopscotch with a broken piece of glass. Did you help your mother like I helped mine? When I was decorating our Succah, were you decorating your tent? Do you have special foods with special tastes on special days? What are your holidays like? Do you love them?
What did you do in all these days that I spent sitting straight in school?
And when I climbed trees and ate green cherries, what were you doing?
Did you have a very best friend? Who told you "The facts of life?"
Are you called "Fatima?"
Did you see in your virginity a precious thing, a promise of fidelity, or a merchandise to be exchanged as for some of our young ladies, for a night at the theater?
What do you mean when you say, "I love you?" -- surely not an echo from an eighteenth century novel, sixteenth century poem, or a twentieth century movie?
Did you cry when you were married?
Are you looked at lovingly when your time is near?
Was that first baby's cry a kind of shout of exultant triumph in your heart, echoing possession, pride maternity, a covenant between your life and its father's life and its father's fathers' lives.
Do you say a night prayer with your children? Do you kiss them gently? do you scold, rant, rave or do you guide, persuade, urge?
Who are the great men you want them to be like? Their father, Maybe? Do you like him? And his other wives -- do you like them? Do you sit together gossiping about his frailties, laughing together over the exaggerated way he sits on his donkey in the morning? You'd think it was a white Cadillac! - giggling over the silly jokes he thinks are funny, frightened over his absence in the darkening night?
Are you vain? Are you modest? Are you loved?
Do you go into town and press your nose against the store windows, wanting a washing machine, a cake mixer?
Do you hate me because I am a Jew?
Do you despise me because I am a Westerner?
If you knew me better, could you be my friend?
Do you wonder about me the way I wondered about you in those 30 seconds that our eyes met on the road to Rishon le Zion?

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Learn more about the author Grace Hollander

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