I Am Ariel Sharon Read online

  I Am Ariel Sharon

  I AM

  ARIEL

  SHARON

  A Novel

  Yara El-Ghadban

  Translated by Wayne Grady

  Copyright © 2018 Mémoire d’encrier

  English translation copyright © 2020 by Wayne Grady

  First published as Je suis Ariel Sharon in 2018 by Mémoire d’encrier

  First published in English in 2020 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: I Am Ariel Sharon / Yara El-Ghadban ; translated by Wayne Grady.

  Other titles: Je suis Ariel Sharon. English

  Names: El-Ghadban, Yara, 1976– author.

  Description: Translation of: Je suis Ariel Sharon.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020020842X | Canadiana (ebook) 20200208438 | ISBN 9781487007973 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487007980 (EPUB) |

  ISBN 9781487007997 (Kindle)

  Subjects: LCSH: Sharon, Ariel—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS8609.E334 J413 2020 | DDC C843/.6—dc23

  Cover design: Etienne Bienvenu

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Action Plan for Official Languages — 2018–2023: Investing in Our Future, for our translation activities.

  To those whom History

  has prevented from being ordinary.

  This is not a biography, but fiction. Only fiction can work within History’s flaws. And only the novel makes our meeting possible.

  Y.E.

  January 2, 2018

  Ah Rita

  Between us a million birds and images

  Of innumerable trysts

  Riddled with bullets.

  Mahmoud Darwish

  I Am Ariel Sharon

  Tel Aviv, January 4, 2006

  Political upheaval in Israel

  Prime Minister Ariel Sharon floored by a stroke

  Arik …

  Arik, the lion, plunged into a coma

  a few months prior to the elections

  Arik …

  The former strongman of Israel is being

  kept alive in the Tel Hashomer Sheba Hospital outside of Tel Aviv

  Arik …

  The powers of the man known as the

  grandfather of the nation transferred to

  his DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER, Ehud Olmert

  Arik …

  Kadima, the centrist party founded by

  Ariel Sharon shortly before his collapse,

  wins a slim majority

  Arik …

  Arik …

  Arik! Follow my voice. Don’t look for the light. Don’t look for your body. Arik! Yes, it’s you I’m talking to. Are you cold? You’re shivering. Patience, have patience. You’ll feel better soon. I’m here. I’ll explain everything. Don’t try to speak. I’ll be your mouth, your eyes, your body.

  You’re floating. In liquid. It’s the caress of the void. Immerse yourself in it. Let yourself be swallowed up in its warmth. You’ll not suffocate. On the contrary, you’ll breathe more easily and hear better, too. Who knows? You might gradually recover your sight, even your speech. So, don’t seek yourself out. You no longer exist. You are dying, Arik. Slowly.

  Be calm, be calm. Here is truth. The truth doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t judge. You are losing your faculties, your sense of things. Who you are, your age, your face. None of it matters. I am everything you no longer are. Your loves, your hatreds, your dreams, your fears, your regrets. I hear the words, the doubts, the terrors. I see the child, the man, his rise, his fall.

  I know the precise moment of your demise. For days and days, clichés pour in from all sides:

  Ariel Sharon, the charismatic commander, surrounded by swirling eddies of sand in the middle of the desert. You giving orders. You plotting the positions of Egyptian troops on a map.

  Ariel Sharon, sitting around the table of a community centre, sharing a meal with settlers. Lily, your beloved, at your side. You laugh heartily between bites.

  Ariel Sharon, your head barely visible among the bodyguards protecting you from the faithful at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City.

  Ariel Sharon in the Knesset, an accusatory finger pointing at a member of the Opposition.

  The more the years pass, the more weight you gain. Your obesity takes on the grotesque dimensions of a glutton whose entire body has become a mouth. Your stomach swings on its own whenever you stand up or take a step. Suddenly this is all you are, sagging pounds of flesh drooping over your buried belt. And what it has devoured, this flesh! Faces, voices, stories, places, time, territory, houses, futures, hopes, shrieks, dreams, nightmares, legs crawling on the ground and hands reaching up to the sky. They stir beneath your skin, these desires, hungers, furies wolfed down quickly, so quickly, before there’s even time to chew on them. Their churning creates hollows and lumps, deforming your stomach. And suddenly, here you are: Ariel Sharon, in the abyss of your body.

  An entire life unravels behind the dispassionate voice of the journalist delivering the news:

  Tel Aviv, January 4, 2006. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has lapsed into a deep coma. The stroke has occurred two months before the general election that, according to polls, will return him to power at the head of Kadima, the centrist party he recently founded.

  I smile.

  Don’t give me a hard time for smiling, I can’t help it. I carry my story and those of so many other women, Arik. And though, like you, their bodies may elude them, they’ve not lost their memories.

  I hear their voices as I do your own. The one you hide in the soundproofed room that is your soul.

  I am the fire that burns within.

  I am love, I am melancholy.

  I am silence.

  Silence …

  Truths, hushed.

  Confessions, stifled.

  Agonies, dragging themselves across the floor.

  I am the cry!

  The disgust. The bitterness.

  The satisfaction at the news of your stroke.

  There you go. He got what he deserved!

  A fate more awful than death: a half-death, or worse.

  A half-life.

  Arik, are you listening? Do my words give you the chills? Don’t run away. Wrap yourself in my voice. The roughest cloth is also the warmest, as you well know, you who sat up all night long in your father’s fields in a coarse woollen coat.

  Let me come near, caress your eyelids, put my own eyes behind them. Now do you see, Arik? The necks, chins, chests, arms of the doctors, paramedics, and nurses bending over you? They’re pushing your bed into the operating room.

  Float, Arik. Savour the lightness of death.

  You’re not a believer, but still you say a little prayer before the plane takes off. Out of superstition, maybe habit. You believe in the Last Judgement no more than you do in morality. Neither do I. Does that surprise you, coming from an angel? You’re an atheist, and yet you think me an angel. No, Arik. Angels don’t consider the question of whether or not they’re on the side of good or evil. They’re not born, they don’t die. They just are. There’s no more to it than that.
<
br />   As for me, I was young once, beautiful, and in love with a boy who had the gift of words. He used to tell me the divine lived in my eyes. He was a poet and I was his poem. He wrote me so that I wouldn’t grow up, so I’d remain the little Jewish girl with golden tresses, whose cheeks he liked to pinch. But he was the one who didn’t grow up. And despite his poems, my hair lost its glow.

  Say my name, Arik. All the wretched of this land sing my poem.

  No, I’m not an angel. Injustice roars in me, has its hands around my neck, plants my feet firmly on the ground. My wings flap uselessly in the air. They beat the wind beneath my arms. The wind blows and blows against my arms until it breaks my bones and rips away my feathers. In these moments, injustice is transparent, omnipresent, invisible as a breeze on hot days. And, as does the breeze on hot days, injustice travels from mouth to mouth. Slides down the throat. Travels the blue and purple highways of our veins, the length of our arms, across our thighs, and up to the corners of our temples. Heaps tiny rages into the heart, cleaving it from what remains of our innocence. Shreds that innocence into a thousand pieces. And from its destruction rises an enormous black mushroom. Injustice spreading in all its magnificence!

  Palpable.

  Fragrant.

  Delirious.

  Unbridled.

  Monstrous.

  Injustice hovers over death, extends everywhere. I want to grab it by its heels. Crumple it up. Crush it in my hand like an old newspaper. Stuff it into the immense mouth that is your body, shut it inside with the ghosts of all the other lives you’ve swallowed.

  I say your body. But the truth is there are no boundaries between us. You, me, the other women. Your ghosts are my ghosts, their ghosts are yours. They no longer know where your body begins and theirs end. And in my body I carry you all.

  I am. Mother. Lover. Friend. Executioner. Victim. Martyr. Warrior. Revolutionary! I rock back and forth. I whisper fairy tales. Spit out truths. You bury me beneath a mountain of secrets and then seize the locks of my hair to pull yourself from the wells.

  Say my name, you know who I am!

  I am the woman who lives in you. The woman you love and who loves you in turn. She who would tear out your eyes and your tongue, chop off the hands that strangled her child. She who rubs your hands to warm them and puts your bear-paw to her breast.

  I am these women. They are all me. Their nightmares haunt my dreams. Their dreams invade your nightmares. I gather up dreams, I gather up nightmares, caress them, cajole them, feed them.

  I am the woman who waits on your suffering. She who replays your death to savour the violence of it. Who awaits your death as she does the return of her vanished child, even though she knows doing so is a lie. Grief, anger, rebirth. Lies that keep her alive.

  Hush, my love, my Arik. No. Don’t gouge out my eyes. Don’t deprive yourself of their light, even if it burns. Here, take my heart instead. Feel me. Wander in my shadows. Light is wicked when it exists without night. It cannot be just for itself.

  The light is that abundant part of me I must tone down. Dull the glare with splatters of grey and brown. The half-light that makes it possible to love the half-man half-monster. The machine crushing souls to pieces for the sake of a wall. The grieving father, the brawling son, the man who knows how to tell a joke. Go, go to where you bury your pain, your laughter, your amazements. Welcome, without remorse, your joys when they come knocking at my door. Unfetter your dreams inside me without betraying these other women.

  Will they blame me if I remove the shadow from each letter of your name, the violence from each date in your biography? If I take death from you and lend you life? Will they resent me if I am able to slip in and see you, as they do, naked? If I stripped you of your many layers, your warrior’s skin, your politician’s mask? Until nothing is left before me but you? Until you are nobody? Until I am nobody?

  Let us be no one. Let us, together, be without a face. Let us lose ourselves in this deep sleep. Lift the veils from all our faces.

  Go on, ask me: what is your name? I’ll name all the women.

  And ask yourself: who am I? All the women will answer you. Their voices are my voice. Do you really not know who you are?

  Don’t cry, Arik. Get to your feet on my legs.

  Let’s go back. I’ll come with you.

  Let’s go back to the very beginning.

  Before me.

  Before you.

  VERA

  Is that you, Arik? I hear your footsteps in the snow. Don’t hide. The forest is bare. Come to the fire. Sit close to me. My eyesight’s not what it used to be. Oh! How you’ve aged since I died! Has it been eighteen years already? I’ve lost all sense of time …

  You’re shivering. Come here, let me hold you. Lay your head on my chest. Don’t be shy. Who knows when we’ll be able to touch one another again? We’ve wasted enough time as it is. A whole life without hugs. Don’t fight my tenderness, Arik, now that I can finally loosen the bowstring. Here. Take my coat. I don’t need it. The cold and I are old friends.

  Why this distance? Touch this face. These mollified angles, these folded eyelids, these cheeks still high despite my years. My forehead, my brows, my nose straight as the letter I. You love this nose. You would so like to have inherited it. Not these lips, though. Too thin for your taste, you who melts before Lily’s full mouth. Go on. Caress this brown skin, its patches, its wrinkles. Is it not familiar, this face? No doubt I’ve changed. Look at these hands. All crumpled. Worn down by farm work. These hands weren’t made for milking cows. I’d always imagined them holding a stethoscope over a baby’s heart. Funny, no? Does my smile surprise you? A smile of wisdom, I suppose.

  You don’t recognize me, do you? Neither my voice, nor even my Russian accent that makes you laugh so when I swear in Hebrew? Don’t worry about it, Arik. Call me Vera. I survived the beginning and the end. And that’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it? The beginning of all this and an end, a way out of the coma? You can die, Arik. Right now, if you want to. All you have to do is ask. I’m your mamushka. I gave you life. I could take it back.

  What, then? You miss the sun and blue sky? You want to see them again before you die? My son, synulya, bni hayakar! I say that to you in all languages. Dead or alive, you belong to me. I know you, Arik. You won’t be leaving here without knowing the path you left behind.

  Get up now and put out the fire. Are you brave enough to face the cold? Let’s walk, walk until we can’t feel our toes anymore. Ah, when I was just a little thing, I used to love fluttering my eyelashes against my fingertips and seeing how stiff the snow had made them. Let’s go. Give me your arm, synulya, let’s walk to the beginning of history.

  Watch out for the roots of the trees! Your ancestor planted them. What a tall, strong man he was. So tall and strong he intimidates friends and foes alike. He serves in Russia, in the Tsar’s army. As a reward for his bravery, the Tsar gives him a forest at the edge of the empire, along the Dnieper River. Do you know where that is? It’s my home. In Belarus. Yes, yes, I know, at the time there was no such place as Belarus. Just the Russian Empire and the forest. That’s the sum of it.

  You’d have thought him suffering in exile. But no. To this man, one who never expected to own land, the forest is a gift from heaven. He moves with his family to Galevencici, at the edge of the woods. There, where lights twinkle in the distance. For generations, they are the only Jews in the region. The man’s name is Schneeroff and he bequeaths the forest, his woodsman’s vocation, his imposing height to my father Mordecai. Then I inherit my father’s stout body, his iron-like carapace, in turn. And now I, your mother, what shall I leave to you, poor Arik, eh?

  No, don’t answer that.

  In Galevencici there’s no electricity, no running water. The wooden walls of the house whistle whenever the wind is up. On winter nights my brothers and sisters and I sleep so close to the fireplace that sparks bur
n holes in our blankets. At dawn, the echo of my father’s axe inveigles its way into my sleep.

  Do you hear that pounding on the tree trunk? That’s the beat of my childhood.

  Just as it will be in Palestine for you and your sister Dita, lost in your grammar books while outside, Shmuel, your father, rakes straw in that dump of a moshav, Kfar Malal.

  A generation, a migration, and so many farewells between you and me, my darlings. And to what end? Za chem, Arik, for what? We abandon our Russian lives to live under siege in Palestine! Your father gathers straw without ever taking his eyes off the barn, for fear it will be set on fire, as I survey the horizon from the window, the Mauser close at hand.

  A German rifle! German!

  Jews are being killed with the same firearm in Europe and here I am, ready to shoot Arabs with my Mauser. Life can be perverse, can it not? Oh yes, it can! And you, my little zaychik, you run around like a little rabbit with a Caucasian dagger in your hand. A bunny barely out of the hutch, proudly brandishing the weapon your father gave you for your fifth birthday. What benefit is there in leaving war behind to build a new nation somewhere else, if you have to fight another war in order to live in it? To have to sleep with a bloodstained club underneath the bed. Leave your son on his own all night to keep watch over the fields and the hostile neighbours at their edge. If it means not lifting a finger when he turns into an assassin, and even going so far as to rejoice in his transformation. Aged fifteen, you’re already training with the youth militia. From the fields to the Haganah camps, and from the camps to the battlefields. What was the point of saving you from Russia’s gangs and pogroms?

  Have we really made any progress since my youth? Not an iota! What does it matter, I’m in my forest now, and you’re here with me. Far away from that such’ya life. Oh, please! Don’t look so shocked, it’s not as if you’ve never heard me swear before. Forget I’m your mother and look at me, Arik. No, don’t look away! I’m Vera. I’m a woman. I curse. And I wail!