next car came and we repeated the same movement like some amateur bedraggled dance troupe; Pete with his shorts and t-shirt sleeves rolled up, his moustache and balding head, Helen with her long legs and long blonde hair, Anna with her flowing skirt and skimpy vest top, me with my painted Doctor Marten boots and football top and Rob with his skinny freckled Scottish legs. And so, perhaps understandably, the second car went past too. We’d decided to hitch-hike after being told it was normal practice, and Shabbat was our only day off each week. Out through the gates we’d gone, into the flat dusty vastness of the Heights, a few green bushes sprouting here and there amid a 360 degree horizon of sun scorched grass and earth. We’d followed the track from Afiq until we reached the one road that came out there, headed for the shade of the bus-stop, an isolated sanctuary from heat riddled with bullet holes. And then someone else came along; a soldier from Afiq. He smiled but carried on straight past, stood about twenty metres further down. A car came along just a few minutes later. Again we performed what was fast becoming a natural manoeuvre. Our spirits lifted as the car slowed down, then sank as it went right past us and picked the soldier up, who got in without looking back. After another failed attempt and the realisation that a bus hadn’t been past in the last hour and a half either, we decided on an astute tactical move. We sat back in the shade, supped from water bottles, then when we heard the next car only Anna and Helen stepped out. This time the car slowed down, right to a stop, and one of the girls held the door open for Rob, Pete and I to climb in. Along the top we went, then down in slow curls, riding camel coloured earth waves frozen in motion, rising and peaking, ebbing away before rising and peaking once more. And then we were right down, almost seven hundred feet below sea level, at the lowest freshwater lake on earth, following palm trees along the shore of the Galilee where Jesus recruited disciples from local fishermen. We were dropped off at En Gev, a rich kibbutz hidden behind trees, then walked down its side to the water’s edge where the son of God told numerous parables and performed many miracles. Over volcanic and limestone rock, to millions upon millions of tiny shells embedded in thick dry mud to form a beach. The water was bottle green, warm as a welcome bath, breathing slowly. We waded out, dipped our bodies in, looked at hills and valleys that surrounded us, white painted Tiberius on the far side. Anna, Helen and I fell asleep near where the tide softly broke, woke up with water lapping around our bodies. Then, feeling blessed, we hitched a lift within minutes with a middle aged bearded man. He took a different route, pulled his car into the side about three quarters of the way up. We followed him to a viewing site, sat on a low wall and looked out at the whole of the Sea of Galilee, hazy in the heat like our sun stroked minds, fed on the right by the Jordan River that ran down between Syria and Lebanon.
Our driver waited patiently for us to take it all in, then held his arm out, swept it along.
“Do you know where you are?” he asked rhetorically. “The Sea of Galilee with the miracles of Jesus. And the city of Tiberius, named after the Roman Emperor. Destroyed by two earthquakes”
He reminded us we were standing on Syrian earth, where they bombed Israel from before it was captured in 1967.
“You can see why this is so necessary for Israel,” he said, sweeping his hand backwards, motioning to the whole of the Golan. “If you are down there, you have no chance”
We walked back to the car in silence, wondering if he was Israeli or Arabic. Then he drove us back to the top, along the road to Afiq and dropped us off right outside the gates.
•
Anna lies on the bed whilst the nurse changes her dressing and comments how nature does indeed take its course. The breast looks almost as it did originally, bar a small concave area and an obvious incision mark where they cut into it. I smile, remember the teenage lad on the metro opposite, all intrigued when she pulled her top out and peered downwards to see if the dressing was doing its job. The nurse disappears. Anna unfolds her newspaper, reads the two front page headlines; a genetic master switch which would allow cancer to be turned off. And how Jade Goody’s children will live with their father when she dies.
Then the doctor comes in.
He brings another nurse with him, a medical student too. Opens the file with eyes cast down. Looks up and tells us her results. The invasive cancerous lump was small and has been removed successfully. But when they opened her up there were pre-cancerous cells around it that hadn’t been detected. Also, two of the four lymph nodes they took out of her armpit were infected with cancer. They have no option but to remove the whole breast, to start a course of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, to prescribe Tamoxifen and probably Herceptin too. They’ll also have to take more lymph nodes out, probably all of them, because it’s through these that cancer spreads, if it hasn’t already. I look at Anna, mouth on hand. Stunned. The doctor looks at us both in sympathy. But we can’t speak so he says a little more. The medical student fidgets, doesn’t know where to put herself. And still we can’t speak. And so the doctor asks if we understand everything. Anna nods, clamps her knuckles with her teeth at the same time, understands perfectly. It’s everything we didn’t want to hear. She’s going back for surgery. The cancer may have spread through her body. She’s going to have her breast cut off, have chemotherapy every three weeks for six months. Her hair is going to fall out. And there’s a chance that the cancer will kill her, will kill Joe and Isla’s Mammy. As usual, she thinks little of herself and more of how they would cope. The doctor leaves and her head goes down. And the tears flow out. The student squirms and slips away. The nurse gives us a few minutes alone. I try my best to fight back tears but eventually break and join her.
•
Days of work followed. I partnered an Israeli called Rufel, climbed ladders, cleared ivy from gutters and roofing. Anna cleared grass with Helen and a few others. On the afternoon we sat outside our houses in the sunshine, wrote letters and diaries, walked to Piq or the Syrian House on the other side of kibbutz, watched kaleidoscope sunsets down valleys and over the Galilee; always Anna, Helen, Rob and myself. I watched Anna and Helen move whenever I could, like I watched them move in the waters of the Galilee. I watched them come back from work together, chat and laugh, become great friends.
Out walking in the Golan, we came across an old Howitzer, its long barrel pointing down at dusty earth; then nothing, no landmark at all except the odd withered tree. Until half a mile later, a half destroyed bus. Further on, an old desert coloured army truck. We took pictures of ourselves in them like excited children, idiot tourists brought up in a peace taken for granted. We found pillboxes and trenches along the top edge of the Golan that spied down on Tiberius and the Galilee. Crawling through them we discovered rusty beds burrowed inside rock, tried to imagine what this alternative reality must have been like. The next evening Rob and I ventured out the kibbutz in the dark, to a phone box by the side of the road, using light from thousands of stars as our guides. The haunting cries of wolves echoed around us like wailing ghosts of Syrians destroyed in the fight for their homeland. We hurried to the safety of the phone box, stood inside during each other’s calls. On the way back two of them walked alongside us, just far enough back on the edge of our sight for us to make out the faint silhouettes of their bodies. Howls came from the other side of the road, out in the darkness, thirty, forty feet away. But these two walked silently alongside, as if leading us back to where humans belonged, back inside the tall wire fences of Afiq.
•
Joe’s a tall five year old, slim built with hair in between wavy and curly, in between finally turning from blond to brown. People look at Anna and I, both brunettes, then ask where Joe gets his blond locks from. I tell them he looks like the fruit and veg man who used to come round every Thursday in his shiny new van; that Anna was always quick to climb his little steps, caress his cauliflowers. And he certainly took a shine to Anna as well; of that there’s no doubt. Those who know us well laugh my suggestion off easier. They see not only my height and sometimes languid style in Joe, but other characteristics too. The way he completely ignores everything you say if his mind is somewhere else, even if your face is right in front of his. The way he can’t see any point in putting effort into something he isn’t interested in. And in his otherworldliness and his love of books.
Isla is a different kettle of fish, blessed with beauty like her brother but with lips that can turn from smile to pout and back again within seconds, all framed by long straight brown hair.