6. Construction Worker
So we captured Akaba, a tiny Turk outpost amidst
hundreds of miles of
empty desert. It was probably the most useless and desperate town on Earth.
Thomas E. Lawrence
Nights were getting so cold that I had to dig my rain jacket out of the backpack. At dawn, a thin layer of snow was sometimes visible at the summit of Jebel Mohammed, the highest of Jordanian volcanoes, but it would always melt at sunrise. Small clouds occasionally wandered into our area from the North, only to evaporate quickly in hot desert air. Male ostriches now considered all two-legged objects to be female ostriches: they followed me along the other side of the fence as I walked home from work. Sometimes they started dancing, spreading their wings and waving heads. All female foxes in the zoo were pregnant, while the female wolf got false pregnancy. Every time I entered their cage, she growled and tried to stalk me if I wasn't looking at her.
Shlomi never made a director. He committed a serious violation: forgot to check on the snakes next day after feeding them live mice. Some of the mice didn't get eaten, and they bit off the last two centimeters of a horned viper's tail.
Toni Ring's son turned 13. Jewish tradition is to have a large celebration on this occasion, but Toni refused to have even a small party, as a form of protest against the rule of religious obscurantism in Israel. He was somewhat correct about the rule, but I thought he overreacted a bit. Well, it was none of my business.
We were all required to carry guns now: border guards had found someone's tracks crossing the border from Jordan. Terrorists and people of other shadowy occupations often walked across narrow southern Israel to get to Egypt and back. I realized that the border was much more porous than it seemed.
I held a few night watches and discovered that every morning, at about four o'clock, a pair of caracals visited my yard to pick up the frozen chicken I'd left for them. I started putting out the food a few minutes later each day, and finally got the cats to come at dawn. I borrowed David's camera and got some nice photos of these beautiful predators.
One morning, walking to the office with the camera in my pocket, I suddenly saw a leopard. It was hiding behind a trailside rock, waiting for me to pass. I pretended not to notice the cat, but quietly took one picture without stopping.
That same day Beni got a visit, too. Mini and Soli, two girls from northern Israel, came to see him. They were Ethiopian Jews, very dark-skinned and pretty. We were just about to move on to the less formal part of the evening program, when suddenly the tranquil night was interrupted by deafening roar of two leopards: our female and the male I'd seen that morning. We grabbed a flashlight and ran to her enclosure. Imagine our surprise when we saw two black shadows with shining eyes inside the cage! The concrete wall which formed the backside of the fence was slightly tilted inward - the guest probably ran up it and jumped in.
We turned off the light, and the leopards, completely ignoring our presence, resumed their play. After a few hours of watching them, we got back to the house. While we were gone, the girls finished all food and most of the wine, made love (they were bisexual), and now were sleeping like a pair of doves, hugging each other. It took us a while to wake them up and carry to separate rooms.
My girl, Mini, was slim as a West African ebony statue. Her breasts were so firm that they wouldn't slide to the sides when she was lying on her back. I even suspected she'd had implants, but no, they were natural, and very sensitive. Every time I put my hands on them and massage a little, she'd start trembling, kissing me, and then pull me closer by my butt, whispering "get in me, get in me" in Amharic. I even was late to work next morning.
Then we discovered that the male leopard was trapped in the enclosure. The cats didn't pay attention to meat, so we couldn't lure any one of them to the adjacent cage. We also couldn't just leave the door open, because the female probably wouldn't survive in the savanna after five years in captivity. I suggested that if someone entered the pen, the wild male would probably get more scared and run to the second cage.
"And who would go in?" asked Ivi quickly.
"I can..."
"You'll get killed, and I'll go to jail," said Toni.
"I probably won't have to go all the way in, just pretend to be entering."
Soon all the crew was lined up along the fence with shovels, pitchforks, and buckets of water. Shlomi brought a rifle, but I insisted that he unloaded it.
The leopards were nervously circling the enclosure. The instance I opened the door, the male rushed to the other cage, while the female leaped toward me. I think I locked the door from the outside before she landed. Ivi closed the trapdoor between the enclosures. We released the male, and watched the female for the next few weeks, but she was apparently too old to have kittens.
The next major event in our desert life was the Great Birdwatching Conference. Eilat is located on one of the major flyways (bird migration routes); it also happens to be the only place with certain African birds to be included in some European bird guidebooks. So birdwatchers make up a significant part of tourists there. The city even had an international birdwatching center, which was represented at the Conference by its director Ruben and a few volunteers. Most volunteers were British and resembled a bunch of juvenile delinquents on the run from a minimum-security prison. Only one, Shari, was a Punjabi and looked very white-collar.
The Center owned a little hostel in downtown Eilat, and Ruben was careless enough to invite me to stay there for a few days. The hostel (Beni called it "shelter") was mostly vacant until mid-January, when birdwatchers and ornithologists from all over Europe would come to Israel to count birds of prey during the spring migration. They'd form a chain of observers across the entire country (it's less than a hundred kilometers wide), and also establish counting stations in Arava. Most raptors of Eastern Europe and Western Siberia follow the rift valley on their way home from Africa and Arabia, so thousands of them pass over Eilat every day in early spring.
I was planning to move to Eilat after the New Year, to look for a job. I enjoyed every minute in Hai Bar, but I had to make some money before going back to Russia in spring. First I decided to go to the city for a day for reconnaissance. I had no money for bus, but I had a bicycle.
The bottom of Arava is slightly sloping towards the Red Sea, and the wind is usually from the North. I almost didn't have to work, and covered all forty kilometers before the air got really hot.
Israel owns less than ten kilometers of the Red Sea coast, and the city of Eilat occupies five of them. It is a nice town, rising up the mountains like a white amphitheater. Only a mile away is its mirror image, Akaba - the only Jordanian port. The shores further south belong to Egypt (south from Eilat) and to Saudi Arabia (south from Akaba). All four countries can be seen from the city beaches.
The "shelter" was actually a two-room apartment, packed with bunks, its walls covered with photos of naked girls and rare birds. But free place to live was difficult to find in Israel, so I really appreciated Ruben's offer.
The road back was difficult. I had to ride the bike uphill and into the wind, so strong that I had to tack. I was moving very slowly and soon realized that I won't get home until dark. So I decided to wait the wind out in Ein Netafim, a tiny oasis just thirty meters from the Jordanian border.
The oasis was nothing more than a dry puddle with a spot of liquid mud in the center, surrounded by a few tall dum palms with slender Y-shaped trunks. It was inhabited by dorcas gazelles, tiny green bee-eaters, and large dabb lizards. I expected the wind to weaken before sunset, but instead it kept getting worse, and thunderclouds appeared in the north.
I had to leave Ein Netafim and walk the bike. Soon the wind was so strong that even walking became difficult. It was getting dark, and the distance between kilometer posts seemed to increase. It was Friday, so there were no buses. A few cars passed by; but hitchhiking in Israel was very difficult unless you had military-style clothes and could be mistaken for a soldier. That time I had no clothes except for shorts, so I didn't look military at all.
By the time I finally got to Hai Bar, the thunderstorm was overhead. Lightning danced above the mountains, thunder rolled back and forth across Arava, and yellow clouds of dust filled the air. But not a single drop of rain made it to the ground. The rainy season was still a week away. I was too tired to make the last two kilometers to my cabin, and spent the night at Beni's place.
Next day we went to Yotwata Kibbutz, and I met with Kathy - for the last time. I hope she and Alex are OK, and still USA Citizens.
Sunday is a weekday in Israel. When I got to the office in the morning, Toni and others were discussing a complicated scientific problem.
Until recently, most of the Middle East was inhabited by the African wild cat. It is the ancestor of the domestic cat, so they interbreed freely. As human population of the region skyrocketed during the last few decades, so did the number of feral cats. It is now very difficult to find a pureblood wild cat. Unexpectedly, this once common animal became an endangered species.
We had four of those beautiful creatures in our zoo, and a few more in surrounding canyons. Now we got visited by a delegation from kibbutz Tsofar in northern Arava. They brought us a tomcat which had been caught in their hencoop. It was a very nice specimen: almost twice the size of an average house cat, with smoky-gray fur, slightly greenish on the back, and small black spots.
"What a wonderful animal!" Beni and I said. "Let's release him in Wadi Samar, there's a lone female there!"
"Wait," said Toni Ring. "We don't know if it is pureblood or not."
"Are you kidding? Hybrids never have such perfect spots. And look at his tail: thick, rounded, with short fur - have you ever seen a hybrid with such tail? And ears, ears!"
The cat's ears were decorated with small black tufts.
"You guys are so unscientific!" said Toni. "Ears don't matter. Let's put it in a cage, and identify later."
At that time DNA tests were still thought of as something exotic.
"How are you planning to "identify" it?" asked Beni.
"It's very simple. We'll take all measurements, download the numbers into the computer, and compare them with typical measurements of a wild cat. If the mean difference is less than 10.5%, the cat is pureblood."
"10.5? Why not 10 or 11?"
"That's what the book says," Toni pointed to a huge volume titled Exterior Morphology of Wild and Domesticated Mammals. "Shouldn't you two be at work?"
The cat was put in a cage and instantly forgotten. Three days later Beni and I came to check on it.
"He shouldn't be kept here any longer," said Beni. "He will get too used to people."
"Let's remind Toni."
"You can try, but I don't think it would work. Israeli mentality: if a problem can't be solved instantly, it's better to forget it."
"Well, what if we..."
"Quiet, Graduate," said Beni. "We'll figure it out."
And he figured it out. While visiting someone in Eilat, he stopped at an animal shelter, and got a recently euthanized cat of a similar color. Next Friday night he put it in the cage, took the wild tomcat, and we released him in Wadi Samar. During the weekend ravens ate most of the carcass, leaving only a pile of fur and bones. Since that day, every time Toni Ring tried to argue with us, we reminded him about The Tragic Loss of the Endangered Wild Cat to shut him up.
"Well, if you are such smart scientists," said Toni finally, "I have scientific jobs for you. Beni will do wild ass observations, and Vovi will count gazelles X. Just don't drive on the highway - you don't have a license."
"Gazelles X" was our name for small gray gazelles that inhabited a narrow strip of savanna between the highway and the cliffs to the west. There are a few dozen gazelle experts in the world, and each one of them has his own views on their systematics: which forms are separate species, which ones are local races, and which ones don't exist at all (some are only known from a single specimen). Our gazelles X were among the most mysterious ones. David shared the official theory, according to which that small population was a relictual subspecies of the common gazelle, widespread in northern Israel. Beni suspected that it could be an undescribed species. I thought it could be a race of the sand gazelle of Northern Africa.
I soon realized that counting them from a jeep was impossible: they were too scared of it. So I crisscrossed their tiny range on a bicycle, and found that there were 22 of them. (The number had increased a little during the next ten years). Then I spent three more days crawling around in the thick layer of acacia thorns, trying to study their behavior a little. Poor David still couldn't get a chance to do it. It was a wonderful time: I saw dueling males, playing kids, and elegant courtship rituals. I learned to recognize all individual gazelles, and more or less figured out their social status. But I failed to get any good photos: even at close range the animals perfectly blended with the background.
During one of the biking trips I flushed a small yellowish animal. When it saw that the bicycle was faster, it flattened itself against the sand, hiding its boldly striped face between its paws. As I got closer, it moved under a boulder, hissing and making faces at me. That time I didn't miss the opportunity, and got a great picture of a sand cat.
The day of my move to Eilat was getting close, and I still had an unsolved problem in Hai Bar. I had to find a mate for little Moshe the Gecko. There were lots of geckos of all sizes and colors around. A few even lived in my cabin, feeding on insects attracted by light. But Moshe was a rare sand gecko, and the only large area of sandy desert in Israel was in a remote corner of Negev along the Gaza border. It would be too difficult to get there without a car, so I had to delay the trip. But I promised myself to do it before spring.
My own private life wasn't much better than Moshe's. During the New Year party at Beni's place, Anka still completely ignored me. Naturally, it only made me more determined.
"Forget it," said Beni after chatting with her parents. "No chance. She has a suitor, a good one."
"An Israeli?"
"No, worse. A second-generation Russian immigrant. His father is one of the richest people in Eilat. Don't make such face, or you'd get arrested. And don't even think of fighting with him. Levi himself isn't a problem, but his father would either put you in jail or hire someone to break your legs."
"Did it already happen to somebody?"
"Yes, although for some other reason. And don't try to meet with her in Eilat. You'd either make her even more irritated, or get into trouble."
I am not a brave person. I can comfortably travel in places considered unsafe by some other people, but only because I am qualified to do so. Facing hit men and attorneys is not a part of my professional skills. I had no choice but to wait and hope for a better chance. But I decided to remind Anka about myself from time to time with little tokens of appreciation. I knew I couldn't give up, even if I wanted to.
The day I left Hai Bar was a sad one. The crew organized a small farewell party, and Beni quietly gave me five kilos of gazelle meat. He was happy at the time, because he could spend countless hours on a watchtower, surrounded by grazing wild asses (any normal person would go crazy there in two days from heat and boredom). The Department paid me only half of what it was supposed to, but in Israel it's better to ignore such minor misfortunes, especially if you are ole khadash - a new immigrant.
I moved into the shelter and got a job at a construction site. Actually, at that stage it was still a demolition site - we were taking apart an old amusement park. My new boss was Irish, and most workers were from his village. It was very difficult for me to understand their English, but the pay was good, and, although the work was hard, the hours were only six to three. After work I could go to the beach, swim in the sea, and then go back to the shelter, passing by Anka's place along the way. But I never met her, because she was already back from school by that time.
A few days later I got my chance. Beni called me from Eilat bus station.
"I'm going to Boris'," he said. "Their dog needs claw trimming. Could you go with me? I need you to hold him."
When we entered the apartment, Anka blushed a little, but didn't say anything and went to the kitchen. While we were playing with Rocky, a fat white bull terrier, I caught a few glimpses of her in a mirror, which happened to reflect the kitchen door. We trimmed the dog's claws, and then had a few glasses of water with syrup (traditional drink of new immigrants) with Boris. He was making good money working at an auto shop, but still couldn't shake off the habit of saving every shekel.
I quickly wrote a short poem, wrapped it over a box with a silver necklace I'd brought for Anka, and left it on her desk under a book. No, I didn't rob anyone, I had another source of free jewelry. I'll tell about it later.
It was Friday, so Beni and I had some shaurma in an Arab cafe and took the last bus to Hai Bar. My beautiful black Mini and her equally pretty friend Soli were waiting for us at Beni's porch, caressing each other. That time I got Soli - I don't remember why, but I wasn't disappointed.
to Ann
Sometimes it
gets so lonely here -
This tunnel
doesn't have its light.
But I repeat
your name, my dear,
And know that
there's hope in sight.
Most people
stay at home off duty -
I'm in a shelter,
like a dog,
But when I'm
thinking of your beauty
I could feel
cozy in a bog.
And I am happy
- yes, completely!
And all my problems
go away
If I can only
hope to meet you
Once in a while
along the way.