I live in a wet place. My old stone house, a smallholder’s bwthyn, once thatched, now slated, once whitewashed, now bare stone, is at the bottom of a valley, between a stream and a river, which used to be a ford across the road. I’ve lived here twelve years, but the house stands as it has stood for at least two and a half centuries, the wall built in places into the rock. It used to have Fferm attached to the name; a woman called Jane Williams lived and died here and was the last to farm its land; then it changed hands, the land was sold, and the house became a home only to people, not to animals whose warmth used to rise from the barn at the lower end and heat the living quarters. The barn is gone, knocked down to accommodate a wider road; there are ruins of a pig and chicken house; the stream has been rerouted and piped under the field, and the course it used to take is dry in the summer, like a wadi. But it doesn’t want to flow that way. When it rains hard, the stream breaks its bounds and bursts up out of its pipes to rush down the hillside by the house, spreading out and making a wide shallow river of the garden, flooding towards my doorway, swirling around the porous stone walls, washing away mortar, seeping in and swelling the plaster.
At its worst, after days on end of falling rain, when the river is in flood, when the culverts can’t take the run-off, and the stream is tearing around the house, when the ground is pulpy and swollen, I feel I might go mad with the surfeit of water, and I think of desert and burnished sky, the smell of eucalyptus, the call of a palm dove, and I am ready to move, to go back to Israel, to engage, even though, whenever I’m there, I can’t wait to leave.
Sometimes I think Israel is gone from me. After I came back from a long summer there, in 2009, I went out onto the peat bog near the autumn equinox. It was empty of dogs and people, of men pointing with authoritative knowledge at birds. The days were turning cold, and the midges and mayflies were gone. The blackberries were waterlogged and maggot-ridden after a summer of torrential rain. The bog is a place of waterways, once treacherous, then drained so that the peat could be cut and stacked and dried for fuel, and now reflooded to preserve what’s left of a wilderness that was almost lost.
In the soft mud of an open space beside the walkway were otter prints so fresh it seemed they had just been made, and the softening blurred prints of a bird. I went there once in the company of a man with whom I believed myself to be madly in love. It was before the signposts, before the boardwalk and bird-hides and woven willow screens. There was only the overgrown path of the disused railway line, and perhaps we went through a gate, ignoring a no trespassing sign, or a warning, and ventured out onto the bog along a narrow raised plank path encroached by reed and bog-cotton and dark water. The planks were surfaced with the remains of a rusty netting to add a little grip when the wood was wet and slippery. We walked to the river and stopped on a low rail bridge to watch the swell of the water towards us. We both saw and pointed at the same time to a line of bubbles across its surface – knowing and yet not daring to know what it was, because the bubbles cut across the current. They were not a result of the water flow against something submerged, but the sign of an otter, which broke the surface of the water and looked at us looking at him. Lazily, not finding what he saw to be of interest or something to fear, he turned and swam away around the bend and out of sight, and the man I was with said, ‘Right, let’s go home,’ and I said ‘That’s it?’ and he said, ‘I think we’ve seen what we came for.’
When I came back alone at the equinox, it was cold but clear, and I sat down on the wet boards to be out of the wind and to wait for whatever I had frightened to feel safe again and emerge. Off in the distance a marsh harrier was quartering the sullen remnants of a field where the farmer had given up cutting or ploughing the reeds; it put up a flight of startled mallard, which it ignored. Then they dropped back down and settled. Everything went still but the slight wind sibilant in the purple grass and reed.
I lay down on my back and looked at the sky. On the horizon dark cumulus was building, ponderous with rain that would be shaken loose when the clouds reached the high slopes of Mynydd Bach, near my house. I felt my keys slide towards the opening of my pocket. There were gaps in the boardwalk. I thought that if the keys slipped through I might never retrieve them. I would be adrift, alone. For a moment I thought this was how I wanted to die – by walking untrammelled and unremarked into a wild place and lying down and letting the world slip away. I remembered years ago feeling that in the Negev Desert, feeling its immensity and impersonality. I was driving north through the desert with my younger daughter towards Be’er Sheva, the city of seven wells. The first indications of habitation were the camel crossing signs. They’re valuable animals, and some owners mark them with fluorescent paint so that they will show up in your headlights when you’re travelling the unlit desert road. After the camel signs, the outermost straggle of the city was the Bedouin villages and camps, their black tents and corrugated tin roofs, and then on the horizon the familiar urban forms appeared – industrial towers trailing plumes of smoke or steam, highrises: Be’er Sheva, ancient and modern.
We stopped in the city to see a friend, Eitan. The heat was extraordinary, but Eitan said, ‘I have something to show you,’ and he took us out of the air-conditioned cool of his house and along a few blocks of dusty streets and pale stone walls to the British military cemetery. The grass was wrong – thick-bladed, sharp, hard – and thin feral cats and sandy stray dogs were slinking away in its shaded borders, but otherwise this cemetery was like all British military cemeteries: row upon row of pale headstones, and in this one, row upon row of Welsh names. These were the young men left behind in the desert during General Allenby’s push from Gaza to Jerusalem nearly a century ago, when Lloyd George asked him to capture Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the nation in 1917.
I don’t know why it moved me so much, those Welsh boys, many of them from the villages around where I now live, lying forever in that land which their own country mapped onto itself as an image of holiness and lineage. At home in Wales I drive everywhere through a landscape marked by Hebrew names.
In the cemetery in Be’er Sheva, the Welsh boys lie surrounded by streets onto which modern Israel projected its own ancient and recent military history: HaMacabi and Bar Kochba, HaPalmach, HaHaganah and Ha’Aliya, ‘Street of the Return’, every inhabited place an invocation of the past as a legitimisation of the present. And as in every Israeli city, there are streets named after its great literary and cultural heroes, too – Bialik, Bezalel, Yehuda HaLevi... I thought of the graves of those Welsh boys killed in 1916 and 1917, lying in quiet, pale, stone ranks in the British war cemetery in Be’er Sheva, as I lay in the silence of the peat-bog, making a fantasy of death – a death without pain, or lights, or anyone’s care; a life and an ending to it adrift in the world, untied.
But we aren’t usually given deaths like that. They are messy, and involve other people. When my sister died seven years ago I could not stop weeping. It was as though she unleashed all the grief I’d felt for years; I became a child, abandoned, desolate, sobbing and inconsolable. I still cannot think of her dead and not weep. I had not known she was ill until three days before her death, and then came my father’s call to say she’d died; then I was travelling to London, weeping on the train, weeping at Heathrow airport, breathless, light-headed, wandering in shock for four hollow hours in the airport in Hong Kong on the way to Australia for the funeral. A week before her death I had walked across the peat-bog with that man, seen the trail of bubbles that heralded the otter, but now that too was gone; he’d passed through for the last time.
You can’t repeat moments of splendour; you can’t return to them. Even my sister’s death had about it a kind of splendour – there was a hard purity in her determination not to let the fears of others ignite her fear, and in her belief and will that she could be cured intact, without the butchering machinery and crude poison of modern medicine. There was, in its way, a kind of splendour in grief, too – our terrible emotion in the garish light and noise of subtropical Queensland; my parents raw and open for the first time, and the aftermath, when, back at home and alone in Wales, I felt everything wrung with misery. But you can’t live in that kind of intensity for long; it calms, or you calm down, or retreat. You remember it, and each return to the memory entails a small loss of feeling, a blunting and a forgetting. Grief quietens, as does splendour, and you become a voyeur, looking in on your own memory.
This is what happens every time I leave Israel: there is an unreality, as though I cannot quite adjust from full colour to partial colour. The continual jostling of the present and the past, of omissions and concealments, of alternate names and stories with their injustices and outrages, is simultaneously enlivening and exhausting. It is always a relief to leave, but always, as soon as I have left, the homesickness starts up, a longing to go back. It’s a homesickness for a state of mind as much as a place – this intense, contorted, alert consciousness, a kind of hyperreality.
You can’t live like that though; it is only intense for me because I am there for short periods. Living there, outrag-eous conditions become normalised. A girl paints her mother’s nails as the two of them wait to go through a checkpoint. A woman with morning sickness retches into a pink plastic bag waiting while a soldier compares her with the photograph in her ID. In Hebron, if you’re Palestinian, you need a strong wire-mesh screen in order to sit on your balcony. All the time you know what’s happening in Gaza, but you acclimatise and become immune to it because you have to get on with a drab daily life of work and family, paying the next bill and worrying about the new noise in the car engine; but also, perhaps, you become immune because you can, because it’s easier, because you choose not to question the accepted narrative of security and threat, because you choose not to see – because you feel helpless to change what you see, because you are tired, so tired, you can no longer care. Yehuda Amichai wrote about Jerusalem that it is
... full of tired Jews,
always goaded on again for holidays, for memorial days,
like circus bears dancing on aching legs.1
But it’s not just Jerusalem. Most of Israel is tired. Goaded, most Israeli Jews perform, but they are tired of the performance – the secular ones, anyway. And I got tired, too; I chose not to put on that costume and dance. Instead I left. I always leave. And now, perhaps, at last Israel is leaving me.