The Haj - Leon Uris [161]
Paradise eroded a few months before my thirteenth birthday.
First it was the windstorms. The sky would blacken. At the start, we could not tell if it were locusts or sand. A reverse wind from the desert to the sea—called the hamsin, a wind with furnacelike heat—whipped over us. All you could do was find a place close to the ground and turn your back to the wind and lay there gasping, sometimes for hours. Billions of grains of sand bite at you with hurting velocity. You cannot move in it. You cannot open your eyes, for fear the sand will blind you. The sand rips into your clothing and sours your skin and strains your efforts to breathe.
No matter how we tried to seal off the cave, sand found its way into everything—our grain, our weapons, our fuel. Sand burrowed its way into our hair. We would spit it out for a week afterward, but sand was always in our teeth and noses and, no matter how we tried to clean the cave, there was always sand mixed in our food and pitted under our fingernails and embedded in our skin.
On the heels of the sandstorms came the little lice. They dug their way into our eyebrows and the hair of our bodies. We would douse each other with petrol, then go to the springs, but our soap was running low and, in order to destroy the lice, we had to live with petrol burns on our skin.
It always took days to strip our weapons and clean them after a storm and we were forced to use supplies faster than we wanted. Tallow, petrol, oil, soap, and some foods began to dwindle and it was impossible to replace them in Jericho. There was a shortage of everything there, a hundredfold increase in the population, and the inevitable, murderous black market. The hordes who had flocked to Jericho were soon out of money and jewelry. At the cave, we had reached a point of diminishing returns. We simply could not replace what we were using. In two months or less, we would be dry ... depleted.
The worst part of the windstorms and our dwindling supplies was what it did to our minds. Ramiza and Fatima became miserable in their pregnancies, vomiting continuously and weeping hysterically. The rest of us became testy, quarreling over nothing. At times we flared so quickly we were tempted to blurt out our various secrets to stab home an argument and to inflict pain on the person we did not like at the moment. Of course, we did not give out our secrets but buried them deeper inside ourselves.
Then came the water. The first winter rain and flash flood wiped out our water-collecting dams and split the cistern, ruining a whole spring and summer’s work. What little water we collected was dirty and silty, undrinkable and barely usable.
Fissures in the cliff allowed streamlets of water to sop into the cave. In a bad storm, we were ankle-deep in water. It was impossible to contain the leaks and the wet became permanent and mildew began to rot our grain.
The wet also brought vermin, which attacked our food and kept us awake with their sounds and by darting over our bodies.
Our shoes were worn through the soles. Our feet hardened in our climbs around the rocks, but they also tore and bled after jagged knifelike stabs. There was no medicine nor even village herbs to combat the continuous rounds of coughing, dysentery, and fevers. Our clothing was so dilapidated it offered us little protection from sun and heat.
We looked to Haj Ibrahim constantly for the word that we should quit and leave, for leaving became the lesser of the evils. Even with Father as our leader, our willpower had run extremely low. The confidence and family pride we had retained collapsed to universal fear, hopelessness, and suspicion.
What really broke Haj Ibrahim’s back was the continuous bad news brought from Jericho. The second truce had ended. In rapid succession, the flagship of the Egyptian Navy was sunk, then the Jews captured Beersheba and were running the Egyptians out of the Negev and even crossing into the Sinai. What was left of Kaukji and the Army of Liberation was driven over the borders. Syria was a dead issue