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Port of Aqaba, Transjordan, September 1942
I awoke with a deep feeling of foreboding. My neck ached as if it had borne some terrible burden throughout my fitful dream. The morning sun angled through the porous reed roof and walls of my rented hut, turning flesh into striped zebra hide, and creating myriad spotlights wherein dust mites floated with abandon.
The flies had begun their daily pestering dance on lip and limb, which would last until the midday heat became too intense even for them. I roused myself from the thin mattress that lay on the straw floor mat, and threw the hut’s door open, almost blinding myself as the sun leapt in at me. The brown strip of bare sand at my feet dragged my teary, blinking eyes across its featureless expanse, then plunged them abruptly into the coolest, deepest blue water I had ever seen. I started, for when I debarked last night and arrived at the “hotel,” I had seen only blackness.
The Red Sea, it seemed, was not really red.
I stepped out of the hut, which had cost me the last coins in my pocket, to better survey the majestic scene: red-brown mountain crags locked in distant struggle with lighter brown sand and rockslides, which tugged their foes inexorably towards the sea’s azure maw.
I frowned, recalling snippets of the night’s dream. I cradled the aching stump of my hand and thought about loss, but then heard Viktor’s voice accusing me of wallowing, and shook off the dread with which I’d woken. I forced myself to grin.
What if there really is a light at the end of this tunnel? What if I’ve paid my fare in full? What if I’ve been crawling so long that I’ve forgotten how to stand?
I straightened up and smiled, this time for real. I’m almost there, my love, I told Danuta silently. I’m waiting for you, she answered in my head.
I washed myself clumsily in brackish water from the pitcher by the chipped ceramic basin, for which I’d paid extra, struggling to accomplish yet another two-handed task with only a single appendage. Then I gathered my few things and walked across the already-hot sand to the restaurant, with the aim of finding a creative yet quick way to get to Tel Aviv with no money.
The “restaurant” was a squat structure supported by stout palm trunks and roofed with dry palm fronds. British stevedores crowded its low-slung wooden tables, sitting on dusty cushions scattered across the woven rag carpet floor. I gathered that, owing to the heat, they worked at night like their compatriots in Bandar Shahpur. They’d just finished their shift, and were tiredly raucous. The hotel owner nodded that I could join them, as lodging included breakfast at no additional cost. I hesitated, chose a less crowded table, and plopped down on a cushion.
Over breakfast that consisted of sandy, flat, blackened pita dipped in tangy tehina, chopped salad, and some kind of salty cheese, I gathered from the stevedores at my table that bus fare to Tel Aviv was high, and service was spotty. One could also, for a hefty bribe, hitch a ride with a British army convoy for the two-day trip. Yet the prices the stevedores mentioned would take me weeks to earn, if I could even find work suitable to one hand.
A stevedore from the next table, who’d been listening to our pidgin-English parley, leaned over and spoke up. “Oi, you should talk to Bashir. He’s the ticket. Runs the camel caravans to Jaffa. You’ll find the little pisser down the beach a bit. Just follow the trail of camel shit.” He winked and turned back to his meal.
The others at the table nodded in agreement.
I thanked them, rose from the table and headed down the beach, bidding the owner farewell.
There really was a trail of camel shit. At its end, I found a group of ten or so of the beasts, sitting with legs folded underneath them at incongruous angles, near the water’s edge. Each chewed a cud thoughtfully and turned to catch the last memory of cool morning breeze that rose from the water.
A boy of perhaps fifteen leaned against the largest of the camels. Short and skinny, he had dark curly hair that framed a round dust-streaked face. Dark, dull eyes sat behind a flat nose whose nostrils flared into cheeks still graced by baby fat. Two dark-skinned, stick-like legs, capped by white-dusted bare feet, protruded from his ragged grey cotton thawb.
I’d read and heard much about the Bedouins, but never encountered one. Savvy herdsman and adept desert survivors, they were considered rather slow-witted—especially the younger ones, since none were formally educated. Thus, as I approached this boy, I donned the large smile I’d learned to use when facing particularly ignorant Russian peasants. I greeted him in the few words of his own language that I’d learned from the stevedores—hoping fervently that I wasn’t actually cursing his mother. Then, I spent the following minutes pantomiming my urgent need to get to Tel Aviv, and my willingness to work at any job to do so.
He stared at me blankly, one eyebrow raised in vague interest—as if, despite the novelty of my appearance in his line of sight, I yielded little other entertainment value. A fly crawled across his lips, and he did not wave it away.
His dim eyes remained directed at me, though, so I tried again. This time, I accompanied my grandiose arm gestures with an elaborate pidgin English soliloquy. “You Bashir? Me Samuel! Me need go Tel Aviv. Bashir take me. Yes? We go Tel Aviv? Bashir and Samuel. Yes?”
Still Bashir stared.
Obviously, the stevedores were pulling my leg. This boy is clearly stupid, mentally deficient, or a bit of both.
Moreover, everything I’d read and heard about Bedouins was apparently true. Resignedly, I turned to go back to the hotel, intending to ask the owner for his travel recommendation. As I left, I muttered to myself in Polish about ignorant natives and wasted time.
A clear voice stopped me in my tracks.
“Kto nie ma w glowie, musi miec w nogach,” it said in perfect and nearly unaccented Polish—he who falls short in the head, had better be long in the heels. My father had loved to throw out that phrase at Aron and me whenever we did something particularly stupid.
I spun around. “Mowisz po polsku?”—you speak Polish?
“Nie chwal dnia przed zachodem slonca,” Bashir answered—don’t praise the day before sunset. He continued in clearly fluent Polish, “I’ll take you to Tel Aviv, but it will cost you.”
***
Cost was something my father had understood. A man of science, of finance, and of education, he was a student of enlightenment, a universalist who truly believed in humanity’s power to deliver itself from ignorance and superstition into a state of reason. When he returned from the Great War—Aron was just five years old and I was yet to be conceived—his break with the inborn spirituality of his shetl past was complete. He never spoke specifically of his wartime experiences, yet he imbued us with their lessons constantly. The battlefield, he liked to repeat often, stripped existence to its barest elements. In the trenches, you could rely on two things: your own hands, and the man next to you. God, he’d learned and shared repeatedly, had nothing to do with either. We must therefore take responsibility, he would tell us, for each of our actions, no matter how seemingly insignificant. And we must always accept that each has a cost.
After the war, Father returned to Warsaw to resume his financial career and his family life. He examined, researched, and cautiously executed every step. Life, he told us, was a minefield. If you didn’t feel like losing a foot to it, you had to judge each step. When he purchased the new apartment on Wybrzeze Szczecinskie Street, he’d visited the land registry himself to ensure the soundness of the property ownership. When he brought Mother a dog for her birthday, he spent hours in the library, researching the relative merits of each breed before selecting the little Kundel we called Max, yet who lived with us for only a week until we discovered that Mother was allergic. He measured, checked, considered, and rechecked every step through the minefield of his life. The successful life, he claimed, was simply a science.
Thus, Father’s decision to take Aron for “treatment” in the fall of 1928, just months after he nearly drowned me by the Vistula, did not surprise in and of itself. Following extensive research and consultation with Warsaw’s leading Freudian scholars and endocrinological experts, Father had found a way to help Aron overcome his “delicate issue.” He would take Aron, he announced one evening somewhat officiously to Mother, to Vienna to see the eminent Dr. Eugen Steinach himself.
I stood behind, stiff against the wall, hidden between the end of the kitchen counter and the frame of the door leading into the dining room—my frequent parental listening post. Father’s excited voice carried quite clearly through the thin swinging door. The Steinach Procedure, he explained to Mother in what Aron and I called his “Eureka!” tone of voice, was widely accepted and exceedingly in-demand in Europe and America.
“Even Karl Kraus came out in favor of the procedure, my dear. You fancy his work, do you not? He joked—with no small measure of truth, mind you—that Steinach could make suffragettes into Madonnas and journalists into real men, just by doing this simple testicular transplant. The key is the testosterone in the donor testes, you see. Aron needs more, and this transplant can provide it. He can overcome his unnatural proclivities, using nature itself. There’s really no danger, and Steinach’s results have been quite positive.”
My mother remained unconvinced.
Father’s voice grew lower and more urgent, and I strained to hear. “This can make our son whole, dear. This can make him a whole man. Why would we not take this opportunity to offer him a life of true fulfillment, instead of one of depravity? How could we look ourselves in the eyes, knowing that we did not do everything in our power to change him into what he should be?”
He persisted, and Mother acceded to a compromise in the end. Father would take Aron to Vienna for an examination only, then consult her via telegram before agreeing to any procedure.
I momentarily considered sharing this information with Aron. My parents were, I understood even at the age of ten, essentially planning to mutilate my brother—even if it was for his own good. Yet the incident by the Vistula remained too fresh in my mind, and I contented myself with a smug look at Aron as he and Father left the flat late Monday afternoon.
He caught this look, and returned a cursory, puzzled look of his own—raising eyebrows as if to say “What?” Then they were gone.
On Wednesday morning, two days later, as I prepared for school, the door slammed open. Aron burst through, my father close behind. He rushed over to me and tried to grab my shoulders. I instinctively shrunk from him, still leery from the attack just months previously, and moved across the room.
Across the dining table now sitting safely between us, he said in a voice dripping with accusation and vehemence sadly familiar to me, “You knew. You knew, and you didn’t tell me. Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Did you think I’d let them do that to me?”
My father looked pleadingly at my mother, who turned away.
Aron’s stare burned into me, and I looked down at my toes at first, unable to meet it. Then I straightened my back and neck, and looked directly into my brother’s eyes defiantly, silently. Without saying a word, I asked him with my eyes: who crossed the line between mischief and hostility first? Who raised their hand against whom? And given this, why should I have been obligated to inform you of anything?
Over a lifetime, we both acquire and inflict deep wounds. Most of these wounds never fully heal. They scab over, only to be reopened constantly by one emotional concussion or another. In some rare instances, we acquire or inflict wounds so deep that they won’t even scab.
I acquired one such wound with Aron’s hands around my throat on the muddy banks of the Vistula. I inflicted one such wound when I neglected to tell him that my father was taking him to Vienna for a doctor to cut his scrotum open.
There is a cost to everything, brother, my eyes silently told him across the dining table.
My parents looked on, utterly unaware of the silent Clash of the Titans underway right in front of them.
I have paid, and now so have you.
***
“What will it cost me?” I asked Bashir in Polish.
One of the camels lowed loudly, and Bashir swatted at it, eager to make himself heard.
Flies buzzed at my eyes, and I waved them away.
“You are educated, are you not?” he responded.
I nodded, and shaded my eyes against the sun now reflecting off the water’s glass.
His husky voice resonated in the range between boy and man, yet remained purposeful and unwavering. “Outstanding. So, I’ll take you to Tel Aviv, and you teach me along the way.”
