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Excerpt

XIII

Rather, let my left hand take my right hand captive than witness one nation enslave and demolish another. Rather, let my heart drag my feet away in chains than witness one ruler flex at the expense of another. Let the flags of the nations be white and blank, and lifted, in the great surrender of humanity… – The Scroll of Anatiya 26:34-36

All of us, Ibrahim and Naima, Walid and the girls, Mortichai and I, are sitting in the living room around the entrance to the pit planning out the assignments for the day and having coffee when a brick comes crashing through the window. A cloud of glass hangs over the pit for a fraction of time like a giant crystal chandelier, and then drops.

Mortichai instantly throws himself over me to shield me. Everyone else throws themselves onto the floor as well. A slew of stones follow the brick.

I feel my breath which was shallow and fast from fear shift underneath him to desire. His body feels large, warm and strong around me, and I am a sugar cube dissolving into him. It is the first time he’s touched me. He lifts off of me, and before I can feel ashamed of touching him, despoiling his religious purity, or ecstatic for myself, I catch sight of Dalia and scream.

“Dalia! Are you alright?” Dalia is rising to her feet. Bright red blood runs in rivulets through her purple hair. Her eyes roll back and her legs begin to crumple, her body falling toward the pit.

I lunge toward her and grab her forearm, twisting her toward me. Mortichai grabs me around my waist before I tumbled in with her. We all fall back. Dalia is unconscious.

Mortichai lays her body out and kneels over her. Naima rushes to call the paramedics. I massage Dalia’s hand while Mortichai assures us she is breathing. Walid is pressing his tee shirt to Dalia’s head to slow the bleeding. After five minutes Dalia suddenly gasps deeply, although she remains unconscious. Five minutes after that we hear the siren of the ambulance. Mortichai and I carefully remove all of her earrings. Meirav says, “The sound of one ambulance is good. It means someone is going to get help. The sound of two means there was a bombing and people are probably dead. They sound of three or more ambulances and you can be sure a lot of people are dead.”

Mortichai and I get into the ambulance with Dalia, each of us holding one of her hands. The paramedics put an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose and we race to the hospital. I think about what would have happened had she fallen into the pit and I instinctively cross myself.

I regret it when I realize Mortichai has seen me. But he doesn’t seem to mind. He just nods to me as if he understands.

The rest of the team is following us in two cars. At the hospital Walid is particularly upset. He is visibly shaken by what has happened in the house, his pallor frightened and pale.

Dalia has a concussion and will be monitored in the hospital for a couple of days. When she is made comfortable in her room, we all come in and smile, petting her hand. She speaks weakly and her eyelids seem heavy. Walid sits on the chair beside her and says softly, “Ahlan,” hi in Arabic. She smiles warmly at him and takes his hand in hers and says, “Ahlan.” Walid bursts into tears and lays his head upon her belly and she smoothes his hair in tired strokes. A nurse comes in and asks us to leave so that Dalia can rest and when we all begin exiting we find that Walid has fallen asleep. We leave the two alone to slumber and to heal, each from the hurt in their heads.

Ibrahim has been quite pale in the hospital room and bows out before the rest of us. Naima tells Mortichai and I in the lobby that Ibrahim’s grandfather had been a coward and a cheat. He had been an extraordinarily abusive man toward his wife, and the abuse escalated until one night he threw a brick at her head and she died. The fatal marriage of Wissam and Sura Barakat had haunted Ibrahim and he always made every effort to ensure that his house was one of love, where no violence ever occurred. In the car to the hospital, Naima said he fell apart with fear for Dalia and an old anger toward his grandfather.

I linger with Mortichai in the waiting room while the others went to the cafeteria. Mortichai sits beside me on the scratchy sofa picking at the frays on his left sleeve. I feel slumped and defeated, the fluorescent lights sapping my spirit.

After we sit for a long while I ask him, “Is this the hospital where you volunteer?”

He says quietly, “I don’t volunteer at a hospital.”

“But when your pager went off you said…”

“I am a volunteer for the orthodox community. There is a small group of us who are specially trained in forensics and mortuary practice who are among the first to arrive when there is a terrorist attack or suicide bombing. We comb the crime scene for flesh and bones to be sure that it all gets a proper burial. So that a child’s fingertip or a grandmother’s cheek won’t rot in a gutter or get ground by tires into the street like it was trash.”

He sits with his head in his hands. He looks extremely tired.

“What do you do with what you collect…?” I ask softly.

“I bring it to an orthodox mortuary, to Eternity Mortuary, outside of the city. I’ve been working with Eternity for a long time now.”

We sit for a long time in silence. Other people come into the waiting area, sit for a while and then leave.

Mortichai lifts his hat for a moment to run his hands over his hair. Then he straightens and speaks while looking straight ahead, “I have seen the most terrible things, Page.”

“Tell me,” I urge.

He puts his head back into his hands and speaks, “I have seen bodies torn in half. I have scraped pounds of human remains from floors, walls, tables and chairs. Digits blown fifty yards from their hands. I have picked up eyes, ears. I have found shreds of flesh in the sidewalk, a thimbleful of flesh, cold and soft and bloody, and I’ve scooped it up as gently as I could and lay it in my collection box. We each carry a collection box. And then we go to a morgue, and we try to sort out the pieces. It is better to bury an arm with the body that lost the arm, if the clothing or skin tone can help us match, but most of the parts we find are buried in collection boxes. We clean it. We say a prayer. We bury it in a special section of the cemetery outside of Jerusalem with no marker.”

He turns to look at me. I don’t say anything. He continues, “It is morbid, I know.”

Mortichai gets up and walks away from me, out of the waiting room. I have the feeling that he may be crying and doesn’t want me to see. I hold myself very still while I wait, and a few minutes later he returns, stuffing a napkin into his pocket. He sits back down and continues talking. “Once I found a little foot. I picked it up delicately. It had a little bruise on the ankle. The bruise was not from the bombing, it was an older bruise, from at least a week before. It had scabbed over. This was a perfect little boy’s foot with a perfect little boy scrape on it from running, sliding and playing tag. I can’t even comprehend the pain that his family went through. All I know is that I mourned for his little foot,” Mortichai pulls the napkin out of his pocket and presses it to his eyes. “They lost a whole child that morning. I only knew his foot.”

After a few moments Mortichai says more, “I think of that as my job. To mourn the little parts. I mourn this little patch of skin that no one is thinking about because they are busy grieving the whole person. A person is not finite, Page,” Mortichai turned and his eyes met mine. “He is a galaxy. I could study a fragment of a person for a hundred years and it would still only know a tiny speck in the whole of a person. I could study a fragment for a hundred years, or I could love a whole person, and never take the hundred years I would need to study that person’s little finger, so how could we ever say we know anything?”

“I don’t know,” I manage to say in a whisper. I think about my conversation with Norris years ago. Hadn’t he said something similar? And yet then it made me uncomfortable. Listening to Mortichai I feel lulled by the steady cadence of his voice.

“If you ever found bloodied flesh as I have, you would never be disappointed excavating bones again. Bones are always at peace, even if they are broken. A patch of flesh is an unfathomable physical and emotional hurt.”

That night we take a cab back to the house. Mortichai leans forward in the backseat trying to listen to the news on the driver’s radio. I sit back trying not to hear it.

***

While the others are in the dining room having lunch, Mortichai and I take a walk. We walk to Ezra’s stand and have falafel sandwiches and then continue up to Jeremiah’s tomb. We walk down and detour into a sunflower field, sitting between the giant stalks. We unwrap our sandwiches. I stare at him. He looks sad. His head is down, his sandwich on its wax paper at his side. He is picking at a fallen sunflower head, absorbed in its spiral of seeds. He is holding in his two hands the golden spiral, Fibonacci’s sequence that repeats itself in conch shells and unfurling roses and hurricanes. All the eloquent answers in our world of complex equations right there. I am wondering if I have to marry him in order for him to touch me. I am wondering if I have to convert to Judaism for him to marry me. Looking at the galaxy in his hands, rimmed in joyful yellow petals, like a playful floppy crown, anything seems possible. He glances up at me.

He says, “I have misled you.”

My mouth is full of falafel. “How?” I manage to say, cheeks puffed out.

“I didn’t tell you everything about the rabbi’s daughter,” he says heavily.

“Mor, what did you do!” I say playfully, throwing a little pebble at him. “Did you take her chastity?”

Mortichai smiles faintly. He looks at me long and hard. I try to hold his gaze, but become nervous and lower my eyes, digging into my sandwich. He says no more about the rabbi’s daughter, and instead we talk about the cistern, and our plan to invite in the Antiquities Authority Tuesday. The site needs to be protected.

When we rise to leave, I lift myself on my fingers and groan, “Shoot, my nail.” Examining my finger, with a chip of nail hanging off, I say, “When I was young, I had this little calcium deposit in my fingernail, in this fingernail. I never covered it with nail polish. I liked it. It was a little cloud. And every week it would move up as my nail grew, a cloud moving across the sky. My tiny firmament. And I let my nails grow long because I didn’t want to lose it. It branded my hands unique. So stupid, right?” I look at him. “To feel that way about a calcium deposit? And then my mom made me cut my nails. And when I saw that clipped nail, upon the table, severed from my finger, with its distinctive mark, I completely panicked. My chest seized up and I could not breathe. It was a dead piece of me, laying there, a piece of garbage. And as I stared at it, it became my whole hand, and then my whole body, it was just this stupid nail but it had been me, and I started sobbing wildly. My mother couldn’t understand what had happened to me, she thought I cut myself.” Mortichai is standing quite still. It makes me uncomfortable all of a sudden. This is the sort of thing I never talk about with people.

“It’s just that passage of time thing, I guess,” I say. “Like Saint Vincent Millay I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.”

“Give it to me,” he says with deep seriousness.

I laugh. I put the nail in his palm. It looks so small, a tiny silver-gray fish arching in his large palm. He shuts his fist, and starts walking through the sunflowers. Soon he is practically jogging. I dash after him. When I reach him, I start skipping in tight circles all around him like an excited child, saying, “What are you planning to do with that little piece of me? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to put it in a locket,” he says and laughs.

“No! Ick, ick! C’mon, it is me! What are you going to do with me, what? What?”

Then he stops and says, “We are going to bury it and make peace with it. We are going to eulogize it, and then move on from this little death.”

He kneels down and scrapes the soil, laying the little piece of me into it, my tiniest arch, into it. I kneel next to him, still laughing and giddy.

“Oh little piece of Page Brookstone,” he says, “You were good at whatever you did. Thanks.”

“How you twirled my hair so well,” I chime in.

“Alright, you want more. We say thank you. We know, little nail, that death is a part of life. Every time we blink we sloth away millions of cells. We lose pieces smaller than you every moment, hair and skin, blood and tears, gone to feed the roses, and we don’t even pause to say a prayer or blessing. And so you, little nail, represent all the pieces of us that we shed. We appreciate you all. You will always be a part of us. Amen.”

“Amen! Amen!” I leap up and skip through the stalks.

“You see?” he says. “Part of us dies every day, but part of us skips away,”

I stand still. “But one day, all of me will stop,” I say, eyes wide with the truth of that.

“No,” he corrects me. “The best of you will always skip away.” We begin walking toward the road.

“I thought you loved bones,” I say, tentatively.

“I do,” he says, “But I love your bones the least of you.” Then he quickly wipes his mouth, as if what he just said was distasteful. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes.

“For what?” I ask, but we walk on saying nothing more. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

Talking Points and Reading Guide for Drawing in the Dust

• Israel
Imagine Israel is a character in the book. How would you describe her character? The author intended to create a very positive picture of Israel, while making sure the reader didn’t feel there was an ‘agenda’ to the book. What are the devices the author used to try to achieve this? Did the author succeed at this? Is the Israel portrayed in the book anything like your own experience of Israel?

• Fanaticism
Who are the bad guys in this book? Who are the good guys? What is the book trying to say about fanaticism and fundamentalism in every religion?

• Modern Prophets
The author creates an ancient prophetess named Anatiya. How authentic is her voice to you? Do you think that there are prophets in our midst today? If Anatiya had been a real prophet, do you think our world would be any different? If you could ‘invent’ a prophet, what would he/she be like?

• Interfaith
A short blog on the Jewish Outreach Institute about Drawing in the Dust asks the question: why there are so many books being written and released with character plots featuring interfaith couples? Why did the author, a rabbi, choose to make the protagonist Catholic?

Reading Guide

1. The Barakats believe the ground beneath their house is haunted and claim to have seen spirits in their home. How does their faith contribute to this belief? Do you think that Page begins believing in ghosts and the paranormal as the book progresses? Who are the skeptics and who are the cynics of the novel?
2. Discuss the various aspects of faith as they relate to the novel. Do not limit yourself to strictly religious faith, but also discuss everyday matters of faith, i.e. the hope and belief that things will always work out for the best, etc.
3. What parts of the book made you reflect upon your own feelings and beliefs about religion? How do you feel about the religious restrictions placed on Page and Mortichai's relationship? What was your reaction to the destruction of the archaeological finds in the name of religion?
4. Water makes several appearances in the novel, from the cistern below the Barakats' home, to baths, to ritual cleansing. What is the symbolism of water throughout the book as it relates to worship and faith?
5. The author is a congregational rabbi, a position that has been traditionally held by men. How are traditional gender roles subverted in this story? What is Klein saying by giving Anatiya as much agency as she does? How would the story have been different if Jeremiah had written the scrolls instead?
6. The passages from the scrolls which appear at the beginning of each chapter tell of the love story between Jeremiah and Anatiya. How do those passages mirror what happens to the characters in each of those chapters?
7. Early in the book Page's friend points out the difference between a broken heart and a depressed heart. How would you describe the status of Page's heart at the beginning of the novel? Where is it at the end? How does her relationship with Mortichai change it?
8. Page is accused of being able to string together complex concepts, but of being unable to understand simple things such as love. How true do you think this is and why? How does her emotional growth progress throughout the novel?
9. The conventional definition of archaeology is the scientific study of historic or prehistoric people and their cultures. Beyond Page's search into the history of Jeremiah, what else is she searching for in her past as it relates to her family and relationships? What does she discover that she wasn't searching for?
10. Page has chosen a career that isolates her and places her within a small contained group of people. What is she avoiding? Do you see symbolism in her choice of a career in archaeology? Part of the process of archaeology is the constant search for things long hidden, things in the past that will help us better understand the present. What are the various characters searching for? Norris? Page? Itai? The Barakats? Who is more successful in finding what they seek, and why?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author Zoe Klein's web site
»	Author Q&A
»	Author Zoe Klein's blog
»	Zoe Klein's bio
»	Zoe Klein interview with Jewish Journal
»	Author Interview
»	Author Interview in San Diego's Jewish World
»	Book Review

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