9. Helmsman
He loved this big fish, and the wind, and the sea.
He said to
himself that he loved the sea more than any woman in his life.
Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea
The lights of Eilat and Akaba had long disappeared. The narrow gulf, squeezed by mountains on both sides, was smooth like a pond. Once in a while we would see headlights of a car driving along the shore, or a tiny village. But mostly there were only stars overhead. I was sitting in a chair, with the tip of my shoe between the spikes of the steering wheel, staring into the darkness to make sure we didn't collide with something. In those waters, Israeli ships usually sailed with their lights off. As Vlad said when I told him about the trip: "Watch out. You see the gulf every day, and think it's ours. But it's not mare nostrum".
All six passengers were already in their cabins. Anka was sitting beside me, looking at navigational equipment. We tried not to think what was going to happen next hour, when my shift would be over. It all was too fast. I tried to guess what stage was her relationship with Levi at. She probably wondered what the hell she was doing there - in hostile waters with a guy she wouldn't even notice a few days earlier. We opened a bottle of Samarian muscat, but it didn't help much.
Suddenly I noticed a dim whitish line on the sea surface. I jumped to my feet, took the wheel with both hands, sent Tommy, the sailor on duty, to furl some of the sails, then opened the front window and turned off the music, listening for the sound of surf breaking over a reef. I didn't expect any shallow places in the middle of the gulf (it is also a rift, very deep along its entire length). But the night was so dark, it would be easy to get off course.
I still couldn't understand what it was. The water ahead just looked white, like skim milk. I tried to turn the boat, and told Tom to furl as many sails as possible. The brig slowed down, but didn't stop, and we moved a few feet inside the white area. Teri, our captain, showed up and looked around, as puzzled as I was.
And then, without any warning, the sea exploded. A blinding white flash shot out from under our bow, and spread out in a wave of light, as if the entire gulf was made of burning magnesium. By that hour, a thin layer of fog was forming above the water. Now it became illuminated, so the yacht was in the center of a rolling cloud of light, as bright as a lightning.
Tom and Teri furled all sails except the royals, so we stopped right in the middle of the lake of fire. I looked overboard and saw thousands of floating pyrosomas - little-known, condom-like colonial animals also known as fire salps. Each splash of a wave against our hull caused some of them to produce a flash of unnaturally bright light. Thousands of others instantly flashed back, and a glowing circle spread out over the pyrosoma-filled area, a mile or two wide.
It was one of the most impressive things I've ever seen at sea. Soon we left the salps behind, but now we were feeling much better. Anka didn't look sad and lonely anymore. The lights of Nuveiba, a small Egyptian city, showed up on the right. My shift was over. Teri took the wheel, and we went to our cabin.
The night was cool and quiet. We could barely hear the music from the bridge. We turned off the light, leaving only the green exit sign above the door, and started kissing. Suddenly Anka stepped back and said:
"No, wait. Don't think it's gonna be so easy."
I didn't expect it to be easy. I knew she would play hard to get, just to feel better. But we had plenty of time. I pretended to be happy with just kissing. For at least half an hour I kept kissing her lips, ears, and neck, as if it was all I could think about. At first I only touched her nape and shoulders, but eventually my hands made their way to her waist and belly.
My tactics worked. She liked what I was doing, and soon got tired of pretending not to. She got bored and wanted to move on. So she only giggled when, kissing her belly button for the hundredth time, I occasionally untied her shirt.
Now all her chest was inside the conquered territory. Each one of her small soft nipples got more attention than some women get in their entire life. But the main battle was still to be won. You can't take jeans off a person unless that person wants you to take them off. Besides, Anka certainly knew that after letting me undress her completely, playing hard to get wouldn't make sense anymore.
I took her in my arms, kissed a few more times while holding her in the air, then sat her on a bunk and stepped between her knees. Still licking and kissing her nipples, I began to softly massage the inside of her thighs. A tiny wet spot appeared in her groin. I touched it with my fingertips and looked her in the eyes. She blushed and tried to move her legs together, but I was between them. Before she could do anything, I quickly undid the zipper of her jeans.
She fell right into my trap. She tried to stand up, but I used that chance to pull her jeans down, than put her back on the bunk, and stepped forward. Now I was inside the circle formed by her legs and jeans. For a second she seemed scared - I probably had crossed the line beyond which Levi had never been able to get. But nothing bad happened, only some pleasant things, and soon she was relaxed again.
She still tried to control the situation, but every time I touched her underpants (they were totally soaked already), she closed her eyes, arched her back, and her breasts seemed to look up a bit and then nod approvingly. She knew I could see her condition, and it turned her on even more. As soon as she came for the first time, I took off her jeans completely. Now I could slide my hand all the way along the best legs in Eilat, from toes to silky skin on the edges of her pubic mound. She probably expected her panties to slow me down, but it tore them off.
"I'm unkissed," she whispered, using Russian folk term for a virgin, and came for the second time.
"It's OK," I said in a voice sweet as chocolate concentrate. I wasn't very happy to hear it. I was ready to enter the gates of the conquered castle, but suddenly there was one last obstacle: I had to undress myself without getting the poor girl scared.
I waited another minute, took off my T-shirt and shoes, then carefully, as if stacking window glass panels, put Anka on her back and started kissing the smooth skin of her thighs. Now she was facing the ceiling, and, thinking that I could no longer see her face, relaxed even more.
My jeans got stuck for at least half a second, but finally they and the swimsuit were on the floor. For a few torturous minutes I used my fingertips to play with her clitoris (I prefer the now-forgotten Ancient Russian term, vishenka - "little cherry"). She was lying still, quietly singing "o-o-o", her hands clutching at the bunk edge. The louder got her moaning, the further reached my fingers. She hardly noticed when they were joined by Chief of the Redskins himself. And then, finally, her last reason for fear was gone. She flinched, but I just hugged her and moved further inside. A second later she forgot about the instant pain, surfing happily from one wave of pleasure to another. I managed to find a right moment, pulled out for a second and put on a condom.
What a great fun it was, to watch another person discover the world of love for herself! To guide her through the streets and palaces of the enchanted kingdom, to show her every star in that universe for two, as if I myself was creating all its planets and galaxies... When I was with Anka, it felt as if I, too, was exploring the wonders of that endless world for the first time. She wasn't the first girl I helped open the magic door, but others were all brief encounters - I never had time to lead them deep into the new land. Now my beloved and I were walking together, and there was no end to discoveries.
...Teri quietly knocked the door before lunch. My shift was to start in half an hour. Using only the foresail, we were carefully moving between the reefs, looking for a place protected but deep. The creatures we were after didn't like shallows.
To the left was a large flat island called Tiran, to the right were yellow hills of Sinai. I swam around the boat checking for sharks, than took an Uzi and kept watching for danger while others played in the water. There seemed to be no sharks around, and standing there with the submachine gun felt very stupid. We kept slowly drifting south, out of the Gulf of Akaba, into the Red Sea.
Eventually we spotted a flock of brown boobies circling above the waves, moved there and caught a few flying fishes for bait. Soon we got a bunch of mackerels and a small yellowfin tuna. They, in turn, were used as bait. Everybody on board (except Anka, who didn't wake up until dinner) lined up on the desk with fishing rods. But we didn't catch anything big on our first day. Just before sunset we had to pull the lines, because the boat got visited by a herd of bottlenose dolphins. We were moving too slow to have a bow wave they could ride, so they soon left. At dusk, countless flocks of terns, gulls, and reef egrets crossed the sky on their way to nesting colonies on Tiran. Except for the birds, the island's only inhabitants were a few Bedouins and their goats. I could hardly wait for the end of my shift. When it was finally over, I jumped in the sea for another circle around the boat, and dragged Anka to our cabin.
That night she tried the new sport for real. There were many things she had to learn. To tell me what she wanted without embarrassment, to mention any body parts she'd like to mention, getting a bit more excited just from talking about it. To enjoy not only her own sensations, but also the pleasure I was getting from seeing and touching her (at first she was a bit selfish, and being selfish makes you miss a lot). To caress her vishenka if I wasn't able to reach it, to yell, shout, laugh and cry as loudly as she wanted to. To let me touch any part of her body at any time, to play freely with any part of my body... and so on.
On the second day we caught a few bluefin tuna, and Jolly Roger was really good at tuna-based cooking. The third and the fourth day brought us only a few small yellowfins, beautiful sunsets, and one night encounter with a family of finback whales. They suddenly surfaced around the boat, and we had a chance to swim with them in luminescent sea.
Anka spent most of the time lying topless on the bridge roof, bathing in sunshine and male stares. Soon she got so tanned that she looked like a Polynesian goddess. At some point everybody switched to sunning and swimming naked. We were now close to the Tropic of Cancer, the sea was so warm that at night we could have sex in the water, where each our movement caused the waves to explode with tiny green sparks. One night, just at the end of the foreplay, we were joined by a group of small spotted dolphins, but they didn't stay to watch, just passed by like a bunch of meteors, leaving green glowing trails.
We tried to avoid the median line of the Red Sea because of the endless succession of freighters and tankers on their way to or from Suez. Closer to shores there were almost no ships, only occasional fishing boats, most of them Egyptian or Sudanese.
On the fifth day we turned back, following the Arabian coast. The sea there looked deserted, except for floating jellyfish and some shearwaters. But there was a lot of underwater activity. Two of our passengers caught small swordfishes, and Jolly Roger got a large black marlin, but lost it after three hours of fighting.
A day later, as we were passing by Tiran Island again, I hooked a huge sailfish. It took me five hours of pulling to get it close to the boat. Now I was supposed to kill it and drag onboard. But it was so beautiful that I released it instead, and didn't fish anymore.
In the evening we met a giant blue marlin. It cruised past our brig, paying no attention to the bait. We stopped near a tiny islet and spent another day there, but didn't see anything for many hours.
One of the tourists was Julie, a tiny redhead girl from Iowa. All she could talk about was fishing. She was dying to catch something. But for some reason all fish kept ignoring her line. That afternoon she finally got a large swordfish. We expected to have to watch many hours of struggle, painful for both the girl and the fish. But the swordfish didn't fight. As soon as it felt the hook, it headed directly for the boat, as if intending to ram her, passed under the keel and jumped out of the water on the other side. It turned in the air and cut the line with its sword. Julie almost jumped overboard, but it was too late. We didn't see any fish at all for the rest of the trip. The crew and most tourists gave it up, preferring to sunbathe, swim around and snorkel at small reefs. One morning, when we were all lined up on the desk naked, Teri called out from the bridge:
"Thar she blows!"
I jumped to my feet, and saw a diagonal streak of white steam ahead. Soon we found ourselves in the middle of a sperm whale herd. I put on my mask and dropped in the water. The whales were floating just below the surface - a fleet of dark gray airships. Then they went down, falling into the abyss like giant drops of mercury. The sea at that place was half a mile deep.
We returned to Eilat at sunrise. After a week of watching desert coastlines it seemed to be a large city, very beautiful. I thought that Hemingway would've liked it there. Eilat, he would say, was like a moveable feast.
"I hope everybody enjoyed the cruise," said Teri.
"We didn't catch much," complained Julie.
"Nobody catches much the first time. Come back for the next trip."
"Will there be the next trip?" I asked quickly.
"Could be in May. You can stay on the boat for now, just keep her clean. And try to get rid of that mouse."
We had a desert spiny mouse living in the galley. Teri pretended to be trying to get rid of it, but secretly fed it.
Anka had to go to school that day. I preferred not to visit her place too often. Rocky the bull terrier didn't like me since the day Beni and I had trimmed his claws. I walked her home and called Beni from a payphone.
"Come here for a day," he said. "You can look for a job later."
I took Ruben's bicycle and went north. Mountain bike was much easier to drive into the wind. The weather was unusual - I'd never seen so many clouds in Eilat before. When I approached a roadside dump, at least a hundred eagles - golden, imperial, tawny, and spotted - took off from it. They circled above like a living tornado, rapidly drifting south with the wind.
I was only an hour's ride from Hai Bar when a black wall of clouds appeared in the north, all crisscrossed with nonstop lightning. I turned on a road to Timna and hurried to the National Park entrance kiosk.
Timna Valley is one of the most interesting places in Negev. Its copper deposits were first worked by the Egyptians of the Ancient Kingdom, who left a lot of graffiti all over the place. Thanks to the copper, Timna's weird rock formations and cliff faces are unusually colorful - not just red, white, and black, as in other canyons, but also bright blue, turquoise, and green. In the far end of the valley there is a tiny lake with a few species of small African fishes, their eggs probably imported on the feet of migratory birds. The valley floor has almost no wildlife, only busloads of tourists and a weird species of flattened praying mantis, mimicking a wolf spider.
But that time the valley didn't look very inviting. I hardly got under the roof of the kiosk when the rain started. It lasted for almost an hour, and I got to see a real flash flood, an extremely rare event in southern Negev. Most wadis get running water only once in many years. Before I got to Hai Bar, I had to cross two more muddy streams.
Beni met me with a bottle of champagne.
"Congratulations! You finally got what you wanted. But there's more than one reason for celebration. We finally got a real rainy season this year, and the Rueppells got cubs."
He was talking about sand foxes, Vulpes rueppelli.
"Last year they had cubs in March, and migrating kites got them all before we could have a good look at them. But now it's only January. Eagles are migrating now, but the enclosure is too small for them to fly in from a side, and they can't drop vertically like kites do."
"Can we have a look?"
"They only come out at night now, and not much. They'll get more active in about a week."
The phone rang. It was Nathan, Beni's friend from Ein Gedi reserve. He was on his way to Eilat, but ran into the rain. Israeli drivers are not used to bad weather. Any puddle of water on the pavement can create a mile-long traffic jam.
"He is asking," said Beni, "if he can stay here if he can't make it to Eilat. He's driving a jeep."
"I just got through on a bike."
"It's OK, I'll tell him to come, he's a nice guy."
But Nathan didn't even make it to Hai Bar, and turned back.
"You know," said Beni, opening another bottle, "I've been here for three years, and I still can't believe it. How could this nation win all those wars? They are supposed to be Jewish, but they don't even have Jewish brains. You know, our vultures won't breed because there are too many people around. Well, Ivi and Toni tried to help the female build a nest!
"How can someone be so incompetent?"
"What would you expect? Before Toni was appointed our director, he worked in a pet clinic. The only job they trusted him with was putting animals to sleep. And he couldn't even do that right. Half of the dogs didn't die. You know, back in Georgia my relatives and I always preferred to consult vets rather than human doctors. A good vet has broader knowledge and better intuition. Here, I wouldn't trust local vets with trimming a dog's claws. Well, local doctors aren't much better. And they call themselves a Jewish state!"
I thought he was exaggerating. But later, when I got to know Israel and Israelis better, I had to agree with him. It is not a Jewish nation.
That night we crawled to the foxes' enclosure with a small flashlight, and caught a glimpse of six tiny shining eyes. We had to take the jeep and go to Yotvata kibbutz for yet another bottle.
It kept raining for most of the next day. I helped Beni and David feed the animals, wrote letters to my friends and relatives and a postcard to Irina - I was missing her more and more. After lunch Beni drove me to Eilat, where I almost immediately ran into Gin-Tonic.
"Where have you been?" he asked. "I've been looking for you everywhere! Let's go!"
"Where?"
"I found a great job for you! With free housing!"
I dropped the letters and the postcard in a mailbox, and followed him to the downtown.
Postcard
Soon the days
will start to grow,
And I'll hurry
home again
Through the
melting dirty snow,
Flooded rivers,
mud and rain.
Friends can
keep my jeep and house,
Sunny days,
and nights so hot.
And my neighbor,
desert mouse,
Will be missing
me a lot.
It was very
nice up here,
But my heart
already sings
That it's time
to kiss you, dear,
And do other
pleasant things.