4. Volunteer
Another day falls like a maple leaf.
Nowhere to hurry.
Each day gets me closer
To the winter.
Li MeiFan. Tour of Shanxi Province waterfalls
I opened my eyes, and felt so happy that I had to close them again for a moment. Tropical sunlight was coming through the broken window, birds were singing their larynxes out in the trees, the wonderful world of Hai Bar was around me, and, best of all, it was almost time to go to work. I jumped off the mattress and opened the door, flushing a flock of doves and sparrows from a leaking water hose - the only permanent water source within two kilometers. The porch was littered with a thick layer of tiny spirals, acacia seeds from a huge tree sheltering the entire cabin like a giant umbrella. In its thorny branches, shiny greenish-black Palestinian sunbirds were jumping back and forth, looking for scarlet flowers of parasitic Loranthus plants. A narrow path to the highway was covered with tracks of caracals and a small sand fox - it lived in a nearby canyon and would pay me a visit almost every night.
Then I remembered that it was the morning of the Mouse Day, and got even happier. I quickly made myself some fried eggs with tomatoes, then ate an orange for dessert, collected some moths under the porch light for lizards in our terrariums, and walked along the highway towards the office a few kilometers south. I had a bicycle, but preferred to hike.
To my right was a long, grim row of cliffs a thousand meters high, cut all the way to its base by narrow, mysterious-looking canyons. It was the eastern rim of Negev Plateau. To the left was Arava - a flat valley with evenly spaced acacia trees. On the far side of the valley, the Jordanian slope of the rift was visible - a blue ridge topped by extinct volcanoes. Flocks of finches flying overhead greeted me with their clear, musical calls. A few gazelles, hiding in shadows, watched me pass by.
Just as I was approaching the office, the rocks to the right suddenly turned red, and then the sun popped out from behind the Jordanian mountains. The sky immediately changed color from conch-pink to Morpho-blue. A jeep with my neighbors Ivi and Gili passed me, while a car with Toni, Aila, Shlomi and David rolled in the office parking lot from the south. All four lived in Eilat, forty kilometers from Hai Bar.
We started work early to do most of the chores before it got too hot and the tourists arrived. The first thing to do was to clean the restrooms. Usually they were spotless anyway. But Toni, our boss, insisted on doing it himself every morning to show his democratism. Shlomi and I fed the mice and the cockroaches (they were bred as food for other animals), and hurried to the Night Animals House, because the lights there were about to go off.
The House was built for various nocturnal creatures. To make them visible for tourists, the light there was supposed to be on during the night, and almost off during the day. In reality it was totally off during the day because of some miscalculations: you had to stay there for half an hour before your eyes got used to the darkness and you could see the exit sign. Nobody knew how to fix the rheostat, but the tourists were happy anyway: at least they could see the scorpions. There were small UV lamps installed in scorpions' cages, and they made those shy creatures glow weird blue.
Today was a holiday for all our carnivores: the Mouse Day. Usually they were fed meat, eggs, and frozen chickens, but once a week we'd give them live mice. Shlomi first went to feed a pair of sand foxes - he'd raised them from cubs. I put four mice in an enclosure shared by a pair of black Ethiopian hedgehogs and two little owls. You'd expect the owls to be faster predators, but it wasn't the case. The arrival of mice turned the cute little balls of needles into swift, merciless killers: they chased down one mice each, and offed them before the owls could snatch theirs.
Then I gave a mouse to our barn owl, who thanked me with a blood-chilling hiss; dropped some into cages of fat horned vipers; brought cockroaches for scorpions and tarantulas; fed some vegetables to cute, squirrel-like bushy-tailed gerbils; and went to the largest cage in the House. It was inhabited by four dozen cave fruit bats. As soon as I hanged some mesh bags with apples and persimmons to the ceiling, a hundred skinny wings filled the air, making the cage look like the Pterodactyl Swamp from The Lost World. We watched the bats for a while, checking for newborn babies in their armpits, and then got out of the House. Shlomi went to the Large Predators row, and I had work to do in Small Animals area.
Hai Bar was originally created as a center for reintroducing the fauna mentioned in the Bible to the deserts of Israel. It had a few fenced natural areas of various sizes, mostly used as enclosures for breeding programs, and a small zoo with desert and savanna animals. Sometimes it was unclear what species the Bible was talking about, as Ancient Hebrew animal names were no longer in use. So a few mistakes were made: for example, they first brought in scimitar-horned oryxes from Africa instead of Arabian oryxes, because nobody knew for sure which one the Bible mentioned. Eventually a few ungulates plus ostriches made their way to Hai Bar. I told Moni many times that it would be a great idea to reintroduce one more species, probably the most frequently mentioned animal in the Bible. He thought my suggestion to let some lions loose in Israel was nothing but humour noire. But for me, savanna without lions was like taiga without bears.
In the Small Animals area I worked with David, the "Russian" I'd talked with the day I got the job. A shy intellectual, he emigrated from Kazakhstan, where he used to study Persian gazelles. Although Hai Bar had two species of gazelles that urgently needed to be studied, David mostly worked as a janitor. As with most "Russian" scientists, the only reason he got hired was that the Ministry of Absorption, which was responsible for supporting new immigrants, was paying half of his salary. Usually, such people are fired as soon as their three years of support by the Ministry are over, and then their employers hire fresher immigrants to save more money. David had only half a year left, so he looked very sad most of time.
We started with snakes, because it would be dangerous to open their cages with tourists around. Sand vipers already buried themselves for the day. Only their eyes under little horns were visible above the sand. They didn't pay the mice any attention. Huge, scary-looking black desert cobra started hissing and hitting the glass as soon as we got within a few steps from its cage. It instantly grabbed the mouse, thrashed it like a terrier, and swallowed. The next cage contained a tiny black snake called mole viper. It looked like a worm, but its fangs were so long they couldn't fit into its mouth and were sticking out like a sabertooth tiger's canines.
"Last year," said David, "we had to put a small mole viper in a cage with another desert cobra. We were afraid the cobra would eat it, so we came back to check on them five minutes later."
"And?"
"The viper had killed the cobra."
The most difficult snake to work with was a Sinai racer - long, thin creature resembling a piece of striped electric cable. Usually it was coiled in a corner, but could get scared of something at any moment. Than it could move so fast that it almost turned invisible. It was difficult to believe a living thing could be so agile. Before you realized what was happening, it would use your arm to climb out of the cage, jump on the ground and disappear in a cloud of dust. Even on a paved surface you had to run to catch up with it.
Then we gave some cockroaches to our agama lizards. It was necessary to place the insects upside down right under the agamas' noses, so that their kicking legs would attract the lizards' attention. Only than would they be kind enough to consume that lowly meal with a fastidious look on their face. David went on to play with our tame family of fat sand gerbils ("fat" was part of their scientific name), feed the black-tailed dormouse and the monitor. I had to take care of Moshe the Gecko.
Moshe, the smallest animal in the zoo, was about the size of a rifle bullet. When I first saw him, he was dying of stomatitis, a common disease of lizards. Miserable, forgotten, with swollen lower jaw, he was hiding in a dark corner, his big eyes hopelessly sad. I began feeding him with abdomens of the smallest cockroach larvae just after their first moult, when their armor was still soft. Using the thinnest needle available, I pre-injected each abdomen with penicillin-tetracycline mix. Now Moshe looked much better. As soon as he saw me coming, he darted out to meet me. I threw in a cockroach, and the gecko began stalking it, whipping his sides with his tail like an angry lion. Then he pounced. Heart-stopping crunch of insect wings, horrible squeeze of merciless jaws, and it was over. Moshe was back in his corner, yawning and wiping his golden eyes with his large pink tongue.
The tourist buses hadn't arrived yet, so we let our jerboa out to jump around its pen, then lured it back into its nestbox with a cabbage leaf, and went to feed the hyraxes.
Rock hyraxes are distant relatives of ungulates, but they look like large reddish-brown Guinea pigs. They can jump between rocks and climb trees, and always seem to be smiling. We gave them two plates of vegetables, and they began running all over the cage, never stopping but still managing to consume red pepper, apples, and dates. It was impossible to watch them without laughing.
"David," I said, finally, "stop walking around looking so sad! Don't tell me it is worse here than in Kazakhstan!"
"In Kazakhstan," he said solemnly, "I could hike in the steppe and study my gazelles as long as I wanted to. And here I have to..."
I interrupted him. "All your gazelles have been shot and eaten..." I was going to say that things were not the same there since he'd left in 1990, that no one could get paid for studying gazelles anymore. But at that moment a crowd of tourists burst into the Small Animals area, flooding us with happy cries, camera flashes, perfume smells, and idiotic questions. Pushing a baby carriage that we used to deliver food to animals, we ran away, trying to leave the visitors behind and get to the last cage before they did.
This was not just a cage, but a huge aviary, home to four vultures. They had a strict procedure for food distribution. The old female lappet-faced vulture would come down to the ground first. Heavy, melancholic lappet-faces were particularly respected in Hai Bar, because there were only six of them left in Israel. The lady didn't like mice, so Toni had to go to Jerusalem once a month to steal a few rats from some medical facility. Then her husband came, pressed a mouse to the floor, swallowed it, and proceeded to complement it with a huge chunk of veal. The griffon vulture was always the third one to eat - she simply squeezed a mouse a bit with her talons and swallowed alive. Finally, the small white Egyptian vulture came. That guy was a professional: he broke a mouse's neck with one blow of his sharp beak.
All of them also had their own ways of eating eggs, and again the Egyptian was the most interesting to watch. He either kicked eggs up into the air, or dropped a small pebble on them to break the shell.
Then I left David, and hurried to help Shlomi. He was just driving the jeep out of the garage, towing a trailer full of hay.
The territory of Hai Bar was too small for all herbivores living there, so they had to be given hay and food pellets daily. As we were driving deeper into the savanna, animals emerged one by one from acacia groves and followed the jeep. Ostriches were striding ahead of all others. They didn't eat hay, but enjoyed the socializing. They were followed by oryxes, running head to head so that their facial masks formed one long black line across the white background of the herd. Addaxes were the last to show up. They looked like oryxes, but were a bit yellowish, and had corkscrew-shaped horns, with only foot-long tips straight as daggers. They are better adapted to desert life than oryxes, and never form large herds.
Shlomy was driving slowly, while I was throwing hay in all directions with a pitchfork. Eventually the animals dropped off one by one: antelopes chewing, ostriches walking around looking lost. Only one male addax was still following us, trying to stab me, until I kicked his horns away with the pitchfork.
"Why are you beating him?" asked Shlomi. "He's not dangerous!"
"What about the horns?"
"He's not an oryx! He can only drive them into you as far as the first spire!"
Shlomi's parents had come to Israel from Cadiz, and he could still speak some Ladino, the almost-extinct language of Spanish Jews. I was teaching him English a bit, and he was helping me with Hebrew.
Hebrew is an interesting language. Its grammar is so simple and logical that it resembles programming languages. Although its word-forming ways and root base are very different from Indo-European languages, you can easily learn to put together simple sentences. Ein li - I don't have. Iesh li - I have. Iesh li pipi - I have to go to the bathroom. What I like the most is that it doesn't have plural form of addressing an individual (like "you" in English), only singular (like "thou"). It gives the entire Israeli lifestyle a certain democratic feeling. Although it is mostly an artificially created language, it has only a few foreign words, such as Russian nu (well). Nobody pays much attention to grammar or pronunciation, because for the majority of the population it is not a mother tongue. Only a few people -the descendants of the first immigrants, the Zionist intellectuals - can speak the so-called "High Hebrew".
Unfortunately, when I started learning Spanish a few years later, it totally replaced whatever Hebrew I had left in my head. These two languages are a bit similar, so probably the brain stores them in the same memory cells.
I think adopting Hebrew as the official language of Israel was a mistake. At the time the country was a British colony, so most people could speak at least some English. Learning English takes much less time and effort - imagine how much easier life would have been for millions of new immigrants! And Israel of today would probably be a much more open country.
We drove all the way to the far northern corner of the reserve, with date palm groves of the nearby Yotvata kibbutz just across the fence. Small yellow dorcas gazelles were watching us from acacia shadows. Nobody had ever brought them to Hai Bar, they just lived there and found themselves inside the fence when it was built.
Here we stopped near a pen with yellow scimitar-horned oryxes from Sahara Desert. They were larger than Arabian oryxes, but their hook-shaped horns were less effective as weapons, so they had to be kept separate: otherwise the Arabians would kill all the males.
Scimitar-horns had a surprise for us. Lying in the center of the pen was a tiny brown calf, born during the night. It was fun, big time. Shlomi called our boss over the radio, he arrived with shields, scales, syringes and other equipment, we formed a "turtle" with the shields, caught the baby and performed all the necessary rituals.
It was lunchtime, the working hours were almost over. I had just enough time to visit the wild asses. As I was approaching their large enclosure near the office, I could hear puffing, grunting, and loud noise of cracking bones. Ivi, our zoologist, was chopping meat for carnivores.
Ivi was a huge strong guy, very loud, upbeat, and kind. He liked animals a lot. Unfortunately, animals didn't like him. They got either nervous or scared to death in his presence. Every time he entered a cage, the inhabitants started running in circles or trying to ram the mesh with their heads. Poor Ivi was desperate, but there was nothing he could do. As if to make things worse, Toni put him in charge of large predators. There were only seven of them in the zoo, but it was a tough gang. To me, Toni's choice looked like a murder. I tried to teach Ivi to talk quietly and move smoothly, but it didn't work until I got a better idea - told him to sign up for aikido classes. The sansei, an old Chinese Jew, refused to work with Ivi unless he'd pay double rate. By the next spring, however, Ivi had lost twenty kilos and was moving in a much softer manner. As far as I know, he is still alive.
I took our pitchforks and drove Beni to the southern enclosure. I didn't have a license (a private car was still a luxury in Russia at the time), but Beni had car idiosyncrasy. He arrived in Israel with a license he'd bought in his home town of Tbilisi, Georgia, and even managed to confirm it in Jerusalem, but he couldn't be trusted with a wheel. It took Hai Bar administration one week to realize. During that week, Beni broke the jeep four times: twice took off without releasing the parking brake, and twice switched gears without pressing the clutch. He was banned from driving for six months. The day the sentence was over, he happened to drive by a male ostrich guarding his brood. The stupid bird attacked the jeep, and, trying to avoid him, Beni ploughed down six meters of the fence. Well, at least he didn't hit the ostrich. Now he was giving me advice from the passenger seat.
Beni and I became friends instantly. He came to the country at the same time as David, but got "absorbed" much better. There was no town or kibbutz in all of Israel where he didn't have a friend or a girlfriend. Some of them used his lone house near the office as some kind of a vacation home, and dropped by periodically for parties, often in dozens. Other employees got really scared when he was visited by very strange people: Persian Jewish truck drivers, long-mustached Druz men from Carmel Mountains, suspicious-looking Arabs from "the territories" (Israeli name for West Bank and Gaza). Beni looked a bit scary, too: with clear-shaven head and gorgeous black beard, he resembled a mojaheddin or a Curcassian warrior from Shamil's guerilla army. His love life was a favorite topic of conversations in Hai Bar: reportedly, a new girl would visit him almost every night.
Despite successful "absorption", Israel was getting to his nerves, too - particularly the local approach to science.
"They think," he once said, "that you only have to feed all the data into a computer, and whatever it prints out is the absolute truth. They can't see that if you don't understand the animal you study, you'll never get any good data, and your computer will never produce good results. Just one example: our Toni is studying onagers. He clocked the time each of them was spending drinking from a waterhole, put it into a computer, the computer arranged the numbers, and now Toni claims that these numbers reflect the structure of the herd, with alpha male drinking longer than others, and so on."
I'd never worked with onagers before, but even to me Toni's mistake was obvious. The leader of the herd doesn't have much time to drink or eat: he must always be on a lookout for enemies, rival males, and other dangers. In horse herds, the pressure on alpha stallions is so intense that they usually get rotated every few months, worn down by constant stress.
"That's OK," said Beni, while we were giving hay to the onagers. "Soon Shlomi will be our boss."
"How do you know?"
"Just watch his behavior. Since yesterday, he'd been performing dominant matings with everybody."
Dominant mating is an imitation of real mating, performed by alpha males in many species of ungulates and other mammals to demonstrate their high social status. Beni was true: Shlomi had been kind of bossy recently. I knew that personal connections could get you everywhere in Israel, but that was too much.
"He's not even a biologist!" I said.
"No, he's a former taxi driver. So what? Only Ivi is a biologist here. Plus David and I, but we don't count, obviously."
We finished feeding onagers, and moved to the enclosure where Hai Bar's four most precious animals lived. Before I saw them, I couldn't imagine that a donkey could be so beautiful. But these were true African wild asses, almost as tall as a horse, gray-blue with zebra-like leg stripes and Iroquois-style manes. There were only a few dozen left in the world, in Ethiopia and probably Somalia. Beni desperately tried to breed them, but it didn't work.
"The problem is," he explained, "they are all descendants of one pair. This one (he pointed to a young male) will probably be sterile. It's time for his testicles to descend, but I can't see if they did."
We tried to check it, but the vary animal didn't like to turn his back on us. We outmaneuvered him by walking around him in opposite directions, and I was happy to see one precious ball already in place.
"That's great, Student," Beni said, "let's get drunk today."
"Why do you call me Student?" I asked.
"Why not? It's a good nickname. People like you always learn."
It was getting hot. Our working day was over.
"Go home," said Beni, "and come back at four. You'll help me cook the dinner."
I remembered that he had a farewell party planned for the evening. Later at night he had to get on the last bus to Tel Aviv. He was about to spend his vacation in Tbilisi, where at that time people endured fuel and food shortages. I felt really sorry for him. I walked home, watered the microlawn, washed my T-shirt, and put it on the bicycle seat to dry. Then I spent a few hours in my hammock, reading books from Hai Bar library. At four o'clock, I got on the bike and rode to Beni's house.
The reserve had a huge freezer, always full of dead gazelles. We got common gazelles delivered from Golan Heights in the far North of Israel, where they'd become too numerous and had to be culled. While Beni was making his famous meat-in-ceramic-pots, I cut some meat and vegetables for the barbecue and the salads.
"Cut it smaller," Beni said, "we make smaller pieces for the hyraxes. I don't mind, but we'll have guests with children, their mouths don't open that wide."
We barely had time to finish cooking before a dozen cars showed up on the horizon - almost all "Russian" intelligentsia of Eilat. While Beni was serving the dinner, I took the guests on a tour of the zoo. There were some pretty girls among them, so I opened one of the cages and got out the most harmless snake. It was a small ribbon snake, usually very tame. This time, however, it was not in a good mood, and bit my finger. I tried to put it back in its cage with one hand, while sucking the blood from the finger. A small boy helped me handle it. His name was Sergei, his father Vlad was a former linguistics professor. Grateful, I let Sergei pet a fat sand gerbil and promised to show him moon craters in Beni's binoculars.
We got back to the table, and Beni rolled out a trolley full of large wooden boxes. Each box contained eight cardboard cases of wine - wonderful Galilean wine, clear as birch sap in spring. We started on the meat when the bonfire suddenly shot a bright cloud of sparks into the night sky. Everybody fell silent for a second, and at that moment the most beautiful sound of the desert came from a nearby canyon: a long, solemn evening call of a wolf. Two wolves in our zoo replied, and soon all broad Arava Valley was filled with songs of numerous wolves.
Beni knew all local wolves by their voices. He pointed to the East and told me:
"One more pair came from Jordan. You'll probably have some adventures here while I'm gone".
He didn't have time to explain. Everybody started talking again. Beni appointed me a tamada - a Georgian term for a person responsible for keeping the party interesting and well-organized. So I was quite busy, deciding who was to make the next speech, settling the arguments, and so on. I tried to find some time to talk to a beautiful girl sitting across the table. Others called her Anka. She had long legs, shiny black hair and always-laughing eyes the color of black onyx. I said another foreword to another speech, asked David to make it (he almost choked on his vine), and turned to Anka, but suddenly Sergei pulled at my sleeve. Beni's binoculars were hanging from his neck.
"Let's go look at the craters," he said. The moon, a huge red dish, was just rising above the row of Jordanian volcanoes.
"Later," I turned back to Anka. "How long have you..."
"Speech!" demanded everybody, so I had to take a glass of vine and make another toast.
Finally everybody was full and drunk, and started telling jokes. I could consider my duties as tamada fulfilled. Anka's father Boris, an auto mechanic, began to tell the first one:
"Why did Moses spend forty years walking with the Hebrews all around the desert?"
"Let's talk," I whispered to Anka and dragged her away from the fire, but not too fast - so that we could hear the answer.
"He was looking for a place with no oil!"
We walked around for a while, talking. Golden moonlight was spilling on the trails, reflecting in the eyes of animals watching us from their cages. It was getting cold. Anka shuddered, I hugged her and then kissed. A minute later I was about to undo her shirt, tied in a knot over her belly, when suddenly I was pulled by a sleeve again.
"Show me the craters," said Sergei.
"First walk me back," said Anka, got up, and we had to take her back to the fire.
I was sure that in ten minutes I'd be able to get her back in the shadow of an acacia tree. So I showed Sergei the craters. The air was so clean that Tycho Crater was actually visible to an unaided eye. But when we returned to the table, the guests were already getting in their cars.
If I knew how much time and effort it would take me to untie that knot eventually, one little boy's ears would certainly get pulled.
"Do you know how old she is?" Beni asked when we were alone. "Sixteen."
"So what?" I didn't understand. "She's very much..."
"Of course she is! The best legs in all of Southern Israel! She's cover girl material! If I was younger, I'd give anything for such a nymphet! But legally speaking, she's a minor. Three to five with possibility of parole, but not until half of the term is served."
I was really scared. "Are you saying I might be forced to marry her?"
Anka was charming, but marrying a schoolgirl would be too much.
"You are not in Russia! Here, marriage doesn't make it legal. You'd still go to jail for statutory rape."
I couldn't remain calm when faced with such stupidity. The idea that people over 18 should be prevented from having sex with people under 18 had always seemed ridiculous to me. Who are teenagers supposed to learn from? How can skills and knowledge be passed from generation to generation? Besides, the underlying motive of such laws is to prevent "minors" from having sex whenever possible. Which is a crime against humanity, if you ask me. It's not a big deal if you go without for a year when you are forty. But when you are a teen, your body changes constantly, so the way you enjoy making love changes with each passing year. Sex at 15 is a different experience from sex at 16. If you miss a year, you miss something unique and precious. And you'll never even know what you've missed.
"We'll do what we want to do," I said. "As for the legal matters..."
I kept talking for about five minutes. I'd picked up a very diverse slang vocabulary while traveling all over the former USSR. Beni was watching me with growing respect.
"Enough, Student," he said finally. "Your nickname is to be Graduate from now on."
But instead he started calling me Humbert, after a character from Lolita.
I helped him carry his bags to the bus stop. When he left I got on the bike to go home. Suddenly I realized that I didn't have phone numbers or addresses of any of his friends, so I'd not see Anka until he returns. I had to be alone for a week.
But I didn't get a chance to sink into depression. Deep, velvety, low-pitched roar rolled over Arava. The only leopard in our zoo, an old female, was informing anybody who would listen that spring wasn't that far away. For a few minutes, her solemn calls "rrroom...rrroom... rrroom..." kept coming in waves, resonating from cliffs, trembling in narrow canyons. Then we both waited in silence. A distant reply came - weak call of another female who lived in Timna Valley, seven kilometers to the south. As far as I knew, the nearest male lived five times as far, to the north, and couldn't possibly hear the call.
"You are alone here, too..." I sighed and went home. The sky was so packed with stars, it looked like a jewelry exhibition. Things weren't so bad after all. I was surrounded by magic savanna full of interesting things. I could look forward to many warm nights and guaranteed sunny days. When I wake up tomorrow, I'll see mountains in my window.
Palestine
They say this
land is old and sacred,
They fight for
ruined holy sites,
For weird beliefs
and ancient hatred,
Traditions and
ancestral rights.
But shrines
and tombs are dead and useless,
Old dust is
not worth spilling blood.
Wars of the
past, today's abuses
Will be forgotten,
mud to mud.
This land has
value, that's for sure,
And, free of
charge, it all is mine:
Its desert flowers,
young and pure,
Its pretty girls
and tasty wine.