11. Camel Driver

Girls with black eyes, lush hair, slim waists, sweet and pleasant - a prize to the
righteous for their deeds. So take two, and three, and four - as many as you can lay
your hands on... For Allah's blessing is with a man who takes good care of women.

Koran

There are no true Jewish villages in Israel, only Arab ones. Jews live in agrarian communes called kibbutzim, or in farmer co-ops called moshavim. All of them look more like small towns. The only exception is Kfar Harash with its adobe buildings, donkeys in the streets, and packs of pariah dogs.

It is perched on the edge of a very high cliff. To the west are the endless low hills of Negev Plateau. To the east, a thousand meters below, is the green savanna of Hai Bar, five kilometers away as raven flies, but twenty by switchback-intensive road. Across the broad flat Arava valley, ephemeral winter clouds float above Jordanian volcanoes.

Anka and I happened to come there at the best time of the year, in early February. In Arava the days were getting too hot, but it was still cool at the plateau. The first spots of red poppy, brown iris, and golden feathergrass were appearing in some wadis. Endless flocks of migratory birds were moving north along the rift valley. When we were sitting on the edge of the cliff, we could see eagles, hawks, and seagulls soar just a few feet away. But the nights were still cold, so we had to keep each other warm until morning.

Kfar Harash consisted of twenty houses, seven of them inhabited by Arabs, ten - by British Jews, and three - by visiting tourists. The largest house belonged to Dan and Gina, who owned a tiny camel farm. Most visitors there were big fans of camel races, or simply the desert atmosphere.

I worked there as a camel driver for free housing, food, and symbolic pay. Every morning at nine, a tour bus arrived from Eilat. After a brief talk, I seated the tourists on camels and lead them on a four-hour ride across the gravel-covered desert. A camel is much easier for a novice to ride than a horse, but by the end of the ride some clients were almost falling off.

After lunch Anka and I spent a few hours in bed, waiting for the heat to subside, and walked to our favorite place - a narrow ledge just below the edge of the cliff, accessible by an almost invisible trail. From there we could see all southern Arava, Eilat and Akaba, but nobody could see us, except for eagles flying by. We would make love until sunset, when it got cold and we had to go back to have dinner and chat with long-term visitors. The bus-riding tourists were all gone by that time.

The constant presence of cosmopolitan crowd in the village formed the tradition of total sexual freedom. It was customary for a visitor to have sex with all guests of the opposite gender during the length of his/her stay. Fortunately, I was considered an employee, not a visitor. I probably wouldn't be able to deal with Anka and someone else at the same time. I was right when I liked her at first sight. She could use all sexual attention I was capable of.

We both pretended to ignore the sad fact that our happy time together couldn't last long. I didn't make a secret of my plans to go back to Russia. Anka openly discussed with me her ideas about marrying rich. Even If I decided to stay, it wouldn't change anything. She was funny and charming, but we had almost nothing to talk about, probably because of age difference. I couldn't keep a straight face when she was talking about psychics or UFOs, and Anka got mad at me for my skepticism. She didn't speak much English, so I was the only person in Harash she could talk to - not a good thing for a relationship. Only sex kept us together, and we were bound to part our ways as soon as the physical attraction would weaken. But it wasn't showing any sign of weakening yet, and we tried to enjoy every second when we could keep our bodies in contact - each kiss, each touch, each thrust.

Five days had passed as one quickie, and it was time for Anka to go back. Dan allowed us to take his horses, we rode down the switchbacks to the highway, I put her on a bus, and decided to check on Beni.

By that time the sand fox cubs had grown a lot, and were happily running around the enclosure. Small, shy, dark-masked Blanford's foxes also got cubs. Moshe the Gecko and his new roommate were getting used to each other, but it was still only friendship. As for Beni, he got a new idea: to make money by breeding Caucasian Shepherds. It would be difficult to find good breeding stock in Israel, but some of his friends had already promised him to deliver a pair of cubs from Georgia.

"Did you put your girlfriend on a bus?" asked Dan and Gina when I got back.

"Yes."

"What are you gonna do now?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you don't have a woman, and you have to stay here for another week."

"I'll survive."

"Are you crazy? In your age? Listen, tomorrow a nice girl will come. Her name is Cary. She visits us every spring. If you manage to become friends with her, consider yourself lucky."

"Yeah, right," I thought. "I've seen your nice girls. She's probably a drug addict and an amateur prostitute. I'd have to wrap myself in condoms from head to toe before getting anywhere near her."

But I didn't say anything. My hosts were nice folks, and I didn't want to disappoint or offend them.

Caroline arrived next day, just in time for the evening dances.

"Cary, this is Vovi, a biologist from Russia," said Gina. "You'll live in his room."

The girl gave me a standard American "cheese" smile, nodded and went to dance. Five minutes later she was already sharing some ecstasy with other girls.

"Just as I thought," I said to myself. "And what a dork - to use this teenagers' stuff! She's probably twenty-something. All self-respecting girls her age have long switched to acid."

I probably shouldn't call anybody a dork. I have to admit that I'm not much into drugs. I never use them unless they are really good quality and offered for free. Which is a rare set of conditions. The reason is that they don't usually affect me the way they are supposed to. Besides, I'm almost always in a very good mood, may be even a little bit high, without any stimulants.

Still, I had to admit to myself that I liked Cary's looks. Blue eyes, hair the color of desert feathergrass, complete set of male-attracting body features. By the time the party was over and we were walking in the moonlight towards our cabin, I decided that it was worth trying. But the moment we entered the room she said:

"Could you go to the kitchen, please? I have to change."

We were about to bunk together for almost a week, so I thought that helping each other undress would be the best way to jump-start our relationship. But Cary surprised me: she put on a nightgown, pushed apart the beds that Anka and I had moved together, and was already under her blanket by the time I came back from the kitchen.

"I'm not looking," she said. "You can go to bed now. What are you waiting for? You didn't expect us to sleep together, did you?"

"Of course I didn't! Why would I? I can see you are not like all other girls!"

"All other? Stop boasting! Why are all men such stupid male chauvinists?"

"Cary, you got it all wrong. I'm not a male chauvinist and don't think anybody should sleep with me simply because I'd like it. You see, where I am from, it is considered inappropriate for a man to even start a conversation with a woman. A girl is expected to make the choice and the first step, and also to let the man she likes know that she is about to award him by allowing him to please her."

A good thing about being Russian is that you can say virtually anything about your native country, and people will believe you.

"Really?" She was interested. "And men never harass women?"

"Never! It is punished by fifty years of uranium mining labor in Siberian prison camps. Isn't it considered a crime in your country?"

"Well... it is... in a way. I'd really like to visit Russia! It sounds like a nice place. Listen, I... how was that? I will award you by allowing you to please me."

Only my tremendous willpower prevented me from displaying an abominable smirk of a selfish male chauvinist.

Caroline seemed totally inexperienced sexually, but she tried to boss me all the time: "I'll only do it if I'm on top", "forget that foolishness and do your job", and so on. Finally I couldn't stand it anymore. I dragged her off the bed, spread-eagled on a fluffy Persian carpet, and worked like a short-circuited vibrator until she started to make sweet-sounding high-pitched screams like a steppe marmot. It was apparently the only way to become friends with her. I kept tormenting her all night, sometimes making her stand on her elbows and knees, sometimes throwing her across a bed, sometimes holding her in the air by her thighs, face down, her hands on a bed headboard. At dawn I took her in a shower for partial revival, and then continued the harassment.

"Where's Cary?" asked Dan at breakfast.

"Sleeping."

"Missing her meal? You didn't have sex with her, did you?"

"Well... there was nothing else to do after dinner..."

"But she's a lesbian!"

"She is? Than why did you tell me I'd be lucky if I became friends with her?"

"Because Cary would have her girlfriends come to your place. Watching them make love is better than any sex! No, listen, did you really? How was it?"

"It was OK."

"Oi-vai, I have to tell Gina. Gina-a!!!" he shouted across the dining room, "he screwed our Cary!"

"True?" Gina even switched to Hebrew. "May be she'll go bisex now?"

I didn't care much about Cary's official sexual orientation. After all, virtually every woman is at least to some extent bisexual, even though many of them never have a chance to find out. I didn't see why lesbians should be any different. For me, Cary's homosexuality worked out just fine. When she brought over Reit, her Arab girlfriend, I watched them for half an hour, then joined them and had one of the best threesomes in my life. I don't like watching, although I have to admit they did it very beautifully.

A few days later, Yosef the Policeman called to say it was OK for me to return from exile. I gave some lettuce to my camel Abd-ar-Rahman, put on my backpack, and was about to start the long trek down to Hai Bar, when Cary suddenly began to cry.

"If not for you," she said, "I'd never know why some women sleep with men."

"Beats me, too," I said honestly. "Most men are just pigs. But it's not our fault. It's because of the Natural selection. It turned us into walking gene dispensers. You just have to take us for what we are. You are so beautiful when you are smiling. Thank you, and good-bye."

I tried not to look sad. Yet another nice person I'll never see again...

I'm sorry to say that my affair with Cary made me a bit male-chauvinistic. But something tells me that you have to have some tiny speck of male chauvinism in you in order to be a real man. May be I'm not using the right term. Or may be it's all because I come from a particularly backward country.

As soon as I got to Eilat, I went to the local office of Interior Ministry. It had been almost a year since my first visit to Israel, and supposedly I could apply for a passport. I expected it to make traveling easier. Getting visa to almost every country is a very long, expensive, and humiliating process if you are a citizen of CIS, the Commonwealth of Inferior States.

"No problem," smiled Ruti, the secretary of local Permits Office. "You only need to get a permission from the Army, and a letter from the Ministry of Absorption confirming that you don't owe anything."

When you enter Israel as an immigrant, you are given a small amount of money known as "absorption basket". If you want to travel abroad less than three years after receiving it, you have to pay it back. But I never took the "basket", because I was planning to leave soon.

"Where can I get those papers?" I asked.

"The one from the Army - in Beer Sheva, the one from the Ministry - in Tel Aviv."

A bus ride to Tel Aviv cost 15 dollars, to Beer Sheva - 10. It was a lot of money for me. I decided to start with the Army.

Beer Sheva is the only large city in Negev. It's located in the northern, irrigated part of the desert. Or the former desert, because now it is surrounded by many miles of fields and canals. Countless flocks of sandgrouses, doves, and starlings circle those fields, looking for wheat shoots emerging from the sand. Even in winter, the temperature here reaches 40 Centigrade, so housing is cheap and the city is mostly inhabited by Israeli Arabs, Ethiopian Jews, and "Russians".

Many residential areas seem to have been transported from some small town near Moscow. Babushkas sit knitting on wooden benches, old men play domino, drunk bums sleep under crooked poplar trees, and the only language spoken is Russian. You cross a street, and all around you are women wearing burkas, men in burnouses, and calls for prayer from minarets.

"We-e-ell, let's see," said the Army Official, a young girl dressed in strict accordance with Israeli fashion: khaki shirt with a bra strap visible on one shoulder. "You, my friend, should be drafted."

"Right now?"

"No, on April 20th. You can get your passport and go to Russia, but you should be back by April. But you have to register first."

"Where?"

"In the Defense Ministry."

The Ministry was located in a small town near Tel Aviv. I got there late at night, and had to sleep under a bush. By morning I didn't look very fresh.

It took me only six or seven hours to get the required paper. The only part of the procedure I can vaguely remember was an interview with a Mossad agent. She was much cuter than the Army Official, but she also had one bra strap visible. I began to wonder if it was required by some military regulation. I thought any secret service would be interested in my experience in illegal border crossings, but for some reason that topic never came up. The young Mata Hari declined my request for a dinner together, probably because of my dirty jeans and unshaved facial features.

It was too late to go to the Absorption Ministry, so I had to pay a surprise visit to my aunt Polina. I used her phone to call Jafar. Something was telling me I could need an emergency exit from the country.

"Sam isn't coming this year," said Jafar. "He is planning to be sailing around Triest, transporting various... transportables to Croatia. Yugoslavian coast is now a great place for people in his line of work. He had to get a new engine for the yacht, so he needs a lot of money."

Then I called Nadin.

"Vladimir, is that you?" I could almost see her jumping with joy. "Where have you been? Can you come here?"

"You mean, to your place?"

"Yes! My parents are in Haifa!"

She lived in a small cozy house in a remote suburb. The Byelorussian taxi driver was already cursing me quietly when we finally found her street on a steep hill. She was as fresh and pretty as the day I'd first seen her, and we were stupid enough to rub off sore again. Besides, next morning I was almost late for the Ministry of Absorption (they were only open to public for two hours a week).

The employees there were all women in their forties or fifties, and they all looked as if they'd just found a dead cockroach in their tea. They never smiled, and talked in short barking phrases, like prison guards or school principals.

"Return the basket," told me one of them, "and go back to your Russia."

"I never took the basket."

She burst with laughter. All people in the large office hall stopped talking and stared at us. They'd never seen a Ministry pkida (female clerk) laughing.

"Oh, my," she kept convulsing, "I've heard everything from those Russians, but this... You think we are stupid, don't you? You think someone can be stupid enough to believe you!"

A few years later it would all be different. But at that time the term nouveau Russians didn't even exist, and the tattooed hordes of cash-loaded "businessmen" were yet to spill out of the former Soviet Union. Even the wealthiest of the immigrants were happy to have the "basket".

"What's you last name, clown," she asked, "I should remember you."

"Dinets."

She instantly fell silent, as if choked on a fly.

That name was well known in Israel. There was a guy named Sima Dinnits, the head of Sokhnut - a colossal organization responsible for talking Jews abroad into immigrating to Israel. In Russia, they were known for telling people that immediately after alia everybody would be given free housing and guaranteed lifetime employment. A huge chunk of donations from rich Western Jews goes to Sokhnut. I'm sure most of those millions end up in the pockets of Sokhnut officials. Nobody knows how large its annual budget is, but some people say that it's larger than Israel's GDP, and that the entire country is just a residential outlet of Sokhnut.

Sima was the national corruption champion: he got caught more than ten times. Usually it happens to Israeli officials only five-six times in their decades of service. A few years later he went too far, and even had to resign when it was discovered that he pocketed a sum sufficient for maintaining an armored division for a year. Or may be he just thought it was time to retire - he was in his eighties.

When I first came to Israel, the branch of Sokhnut that was processing my papers sent him a request, asking if I could be his relative. He replied that he couldn't possibly have relatives in the Soviet Union. But I knew from my grandmother that his ancestors had come to Israel from the same town in Ukraine that was the birthplace of my clan.

The pkida studied my ID card bearing the glorious name, then smiled like an Egyptian mummy, and warbled:

"No problem, we'll give you the letter, we just need you to bring us the forms from Sokhnut, the bank..."

Altogether, six forms were required, and they all had to be obtained in different places in different days. Nadin's parents were already back, the next day was Saturday, so I had to return to Eilat. Before leaving, I went to the dolphinarium to see how my friends the dolphins were doing.

My former boss was glad to see me. He proudly showed me the new snake cages - glass tanks with lilac-colored gable lids.

I knew him as a person with good taste, and was a bit surprised to see that abomination, but he explained:

"I know it's awful, but the visitors just love it. We Israelis like bright colors."

"But you can't see the snakes!" I said. "They all hide under the lids, close to the lamps. Couldn't you make them flat?"

"You don't get it. Flat lids are Arab style, Arab mentality. Our Israeli mentality suggests gable lids."

"May be they are right when they don't hire "Russians"," I thought. "It is so difficult to understand people from another culture. At least I often can't understand them."

The new Tel Aviv bus terminal was apparently modeled on Knossos Palace - even locals often got lost there. Finally I found my bus, ate some ice cream, climbed to the upper deck, and went to sleep, feeling totally exhausted.

When I woke up, I saw the huge concrete cube of a roadside prison, and knew we had long passed Beer Sheva. The spring hadn't reached that part of Negev yet, so the hills and plains were barren. Only in one place I saw a patch of grass. It was just downhill from the ruins of Avdat, a Nabatean city. Their ancient system of ditches for collecting rainwater still worked, despite being almost totally obliterated.

As soon as I got to Eilat, I called Gin-Tonic.

"Hey, chief!" He sounded very excited. "You're back! I found a great job for you!"

"Do they pay?"

"Twelve hundred dollars a month."

"It can't be," I said. It was more than the national average - way above anything an immigrant could count on.

"It can. You'll have to work fourteen hours a day, but food and housing are free. They don't hire "Russians", but I pretended to be an American and recommended my friend from England. Their hiring manager is from London, so he agreed to hire you. Your interview is tomorrow."

"But my ID card says I was born in Moscow."

"You can say you were born in Russia, but lived in the UK."

"Wait a minute. I can't fool an Englishman like that."

"You can if you keep thinking about the twelve hundred dollars."

"No way. What about my accent?"

"Your ID says you've been here for a year. Russian and Hebrew accents are similar. Stop whining, better think what you gonna tell him. I'll be waiting for you tomorrow at ten near Queen Hotel."

And he hung up.

I went to the beach, fell on the hot sand, and started thinking. With such a job, I could make enough money for my trip to India in one month. I still had a chance to get there before the monsoon. If only I could get the passport...

A warm wave licked my toes. Small yachts were coming back to their piers, the sun was setting, the mountains to the east seemed to be on fire, the city to the west was being slowly engulfed by dark blue shadow. A flock of geese passed overhead, moving North.

I tried to imagine what it was like in Moscow at that time. A warm winter in Israel usually means a cold one in Russia. Ice-coated streets, hills of dirty snow, pale faces... Russia would be a nice place if not for mean people, screwed environment, and horrible climate.

I sent Irina another postcard, then went to the banding station and helped Ruben process that evening's catch. It was interesting to observe how with each passing week, new species of migrant birds appeared. When we finished, he went home, and I spent the night on a bench in the cabin. I decided not to worry about the interview until the last moment. I always think better with my back to the wall.

                           To Irina

                      That is it - no more crazy adventures,
                      No sweet fun on this white coral sand.
                      I am leaving the tropics to venture
                      Towards midnight, my deep-frozen land.

                      I can probably still call it mine, as
                      There still are some doorbells to ring.
                      I am missing the soft tender shyness
                      In the foreplay of Boreal spring.

                      May be not all my life is just travel,
                      May be I'll be invited to come,
                      Get some rest from asphalt, dirt, and gravel,
                      And - who knows? - even talk with mon famme.

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