Adamit, Sunday, August 6, 2006

Hello friends

As the week begins we appear to be passing into a new phase of confusion. Personal information about the whereabouts of loved ones or public information regarding people's ages or other pertinent news rapidly reaches us, but there is a perplexing margin of error.

We were told that a friend's son had been mobilized but was finally located on a Tel Aviv beach. We were given a bewildering difference in ages for some of the victims killed in yesterday's rocket attack at Mazra'a, the central Bedouin village of Arab al-Aramshe. There is a difference of five hours between the announced time of the funeral at four PM, the time people understood to congregate at the hillside cemetery at Khirbet Idmith at eleven, and the real time in which this burial will actually get underway, sometime between one and two this afternoon. Avner has been waiting patiently in the heat for an hour, finding shade under the chance Indian lilac tree by the ruins of the ancient village, when a rocket barrage has succeeded in shearing a power line near Shlomi causing another power outage. Initial reports spoke of a direct hit on the home of Qureish and Fadhiya, as she huddled with her daughters in an inner room.

One friend dialed us inquiring about the power outage yesterday, which may be linked with the attack at Arab al-Aramshe, or the timing may be coincidental. All I know is that I was notified that there was a problem with the pumps at the waste water facility and scooted out to the fields to investigate, in anticipation of pressing a great big green button that says "reset". When I got there I saw that everything was operating perfectly, because the emergency generator had kicked in.

David G. phoned me, because the attack on Qureish's family, as they sat in their front yard, was quite unsettling for all of us. Everyone here has a need to talk, and thus we reinforce each other.  From the eagle's nest, he can see the crash landings of rockets beneath the plateau. There was a question regarding how the power outage affected the Adamit poultry houses. Who was doing the irrigation in the apple, pear and peach orchard? The fellow who was usually there had been called up to his reserve unit. The fellow who had been dedicating himself to irrigating Adamit's avocado orchard witnessed too many explosions in the field to comfortably continue with his job. So when our friend dialed today with his inquiry, he mentioned hearing that the entire flock had suffocated, because the enclosed buildings' air conditioning system had shut down during the outage. Does the generator operate automatically, or does some very special person need to turn it on? I attempted to unravel the mysteries behind these questions, but by this time our home phone began its nebulous hissing and cackling like an inquisitive chicken in Qureish's courtyard. I have no idea if those pullets have made it, but I hope so.

There are two funerals today adding up to four people. I plan to attend the funeral at Sa'ar for Dave. There is still an outside chance that I will make a condolence call at Qureish's home sometime this afternoon, although it is more likely to be deferred to some time later in the week. Qureish is a mason who worked on various construction projects in Adamit and Eilon.  His late wife Fadhiya could often be seen like many women of her generation scouring the meadows and fields in late winter and early spring, harvesting the seasonal wild herbs and edible greens, such as houbeza . During the early spring months she would show up with an apron and  hatchet by the mounds of pruned brushwood  that  were swept from the orchard floor after the winter pruning, sometimes haggling with the other women for "prime" kindling wood. At Irbin there might be as many as a dozen women toiling to extricate strands of apple or pear wood compacted by the tractor into huge mounds. Sometimes she would appeal to me to saw a choice "chunk", amputating thickly sliced lateral branches off a main limb.  The women labored quietly, chopping away with their hatchets, often with their infant children with their runny noses and purple plastic sandals clinging to the hems of their mothers' brightly florid dresses. Longer expeditions always included a thermos of quintessential Turkish coffee, a plastic bag with demitasse cups. When they saw my tractor approach, they entreated me with a winsome smile or lured me with an offer of their coffee, competing against each other for some ill-understood herbaceous advantage.

Fadhiya was always charming and cunning enough to attract my attention.   Until its uprooting, I pruned the twelve acre Eilon pear orchard at Umm al-Jarein or Amud al-Slabanei by myself. One day Fadhiya arrived, replete with her tools, possibly at the behest of Qureish, and proceeded to pull those branches from the huge piles that accumulated in an open field inside the orchard. Sometimes she might enter a row. No sooner had I discarded a branch, than I would feel someone tugging at it from the other side. There was Fadhiya with a big grin on her oval face, oh Fadhiya!

I feel our greater community chastened by this nearly inscrutable madness that has cruelly disported itself upon us all. Zed and I ramble up the shadowy western lane by Gedalia's house. He is quietly suppering on the veranda alone, savoring the silence. It is quite peaceful. To the north, the muezzin's plaintive call invoking the peasants and the powerless wavers above the broad hillside, wending and waning along our pathway into the depths of the mourners' darkness.

Barry.