Fiction: Good Housekeeping, British Edition, and the Camel

Sara first encounters the Good Housekeeping British Edition magazine in the Israeli army, when she switches from her English grammar School in London with its grey knickers and socks and skirt and Latin “Amo Amas Amant”—to the baggy olive-green army trousers of Israel, where her young eyes search for infiltrating terrorists on the radar screen, while her new Israeli soldier girlfriends wax her legs.

Ouch!

Sorry!

Your skin is so sensitive, with your English freckles—and you don’t have any hairs anyway!

But Sara insists on the pain of the hair removal wax, because she so wants to be an Israeli, taking on the simultaneous responsibility of smooth skin and safe borders.

The Good Housekeeping British Edition magazines sits in a pile on top of the samples of Yardley Lavender hand cream in a brown paper wrapped box, sent by the UK/British Hadassah Women’s Association. The box was sent to Sara’s desert caravan—all the way from the British women’s perfectly housekept semi-detached, rose-bush-fronted houses in the English Jewish suburbs. They sent them to the Israeli girl-soldiers like a Morse code, reminding them of the ultimate job of a woman.

When her army shift is over, Sara lies on her bunkbed in her pajamas, smelling of lavender with the raging desert with its camels and whistling sandstorms outside the window, reading how to grow English roses, how to make custard from scratch, the color of raincoats this season, how to de-clutter your kitchen. She lies there, with her smooth legs, flipping the glossy pages that turn England into such a perfect motherland. This is so different from her real mother’s house in London, where you could get lost under the sagging sofa with the African bright cotton print thrown over it, and on it the piles of political Free Palestine pamphlets, and a much-leafed copy of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and by them stray poor people, rocking the new crying baby, and some folk records, and on the low table, wine and coffee cups and babies bottles, and under all of these piles of potential, was the complicated breakdown of her mother’s second marriage.

So after school in London, Sara rushes away from the popular blonde English girls (not her) chanting in Latin, pulling her blue Zionist movement shirt with the red socialist lace over her newly growing breasts, rollicking onto the red London bus that heaves past the swaying drunks in the pubs, up to the Zionist youth movement, the Bayit the “home” where they dance and sing about Israel, their red laces flying, turning Israel into a perfect far away fatherland (her own father had disappeared behind a rose bush with one of the Haddasah women in London, years ago)—Just like under her scratchy green army blanket in Israel, the magazine turns England into a perfect motherland. “How to fit the perfect bra” “Make your bath a Spa experience” (hard to imagine in the army).

After the army, Sara goes to study Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in the holiest of languages, to provide herself not only with an Israeli future, but also with a Hebrew past. But university is much harder than the army. She wanders round the curving corridors of Mount Scopus which after living on the tiny army base with four caravans, are so confusing, and she can’t find her classes, and when she does find them, she struggles to read the ancient Hebrew letters with their dots, the nikkud punctuation that are more slippery than Latin in high school, more slippery than the dots of the terrorist ships on her army radar, more elusive than the invisible hairs on her legs.

But also in Jerusalem, the British Edition of Good Housekeeping magazine comforts her once again, this time in the British Council library in Paris Square, in the Terra Sancta College building from the British Mandate that itself is a comfort, with its statue of Mary on the roof, hands held out to welcome her personally back to her mother tongue. The pine trees whisper a hushed welcome through the elegant oblong windows and along the walls of the marble stairs with their cool, timesmoothed oak banisters, hang the framed orientalist pictures of Jerusalem at the turn of the century, with its romantic hills and
Arabs leading camels, and a framed Balfour Declaration:

His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

Sara likes reading that text, but most of all she loves the picture of the camel, with its elegant curves, led by the turbaned Bedouin Arab, and next to him, a British gentleman looking at his pocket watch.

First, she gathers her pile of books, Sense and Sensibility, Lord of the Rings, self-help books from the popular psychology section such as, What Colour is Your Parachute? Healing the Inner Child, How to Live with ADHD, and a red Norton’s Introduction to Poetry that her grandma had once bought her
(a Holocaust, survivor, with eyes such pools of sadness, that is captured in those poetic words).

She saves the best part for last. Before she leaves the library she sits on the stuffed leather armchair by the magazines, that have special plastic covers and wooden magazine clamps, and she reads the Good Housekeeping magazine (British Edition, current issue) that is tucked behind The Times and The Guardian, that are full of news about middle east wars. Sara sits there, gulping down the features about women who had made a difference, head nurses, teachers’ social workers, a scientist or two, recipes for plum crumble, how to choose the right shaped trousers for your figure, using bicarbonate of soda to clean the grout between tiles, how to declutter kitchens, and how to find the right husband.

The bicarbonate of soda works in the dirty dorm bathroom, and the “women in the helping professions” feature helps her shift from the quiet disdain of humanities with its closed doors and complicated corridors, to study developmental psychology—where her body feels at ease with the boisterous people energy that she meets there, and she also meets her inner child. She learns about Bowlby’s experiment in an orphanage with monkeys (and thinks of her Holocaust orphaned grandmother); she learns about generational transference (and thinks of her mother); she learns about Erikson’s developmental stages with their built in hope for fixing, at each stage (and she thinks of herself ); this is similar to the concept of tikkun (reparation) that she studied in the Kabbala lesson in her former Jewish history department, because the doctoral student who taught it listens to her comments and is so interesting and kind. And
then, one rainy night at Mount Scopus, she bumps into him at the bus stop, and they talk so much, back and forth, that they don’t notice the bus go past—so they wait for the next one and talk some more.

Never run after the bus in front, there’s always a bus behind, says Good Housekeeping, and so she waits, because she can’t read the Medieval Hebrew texts he teaches, but she can read his face, and he, hers, and because he smells right (Maybe it was the rain steaming on his woolen sweater, that smelt of England?)

It’s much harder to find Good Housekeeping British Edition magazines when they move from Jerusalem to the desert town of Be’er Sheva with their three small children, where her husband gets a job teaching Kabbala in the Jewish studies department at Ben Gurion University, but anyway, there is no time to read them because the south with its failure to bloom, was a perfect place for developmental psychologists and Sara has so much work, and three small kids and a desert to make bloom for Ben Gurion.

Each morning, Sara drives along the desert’s cracked roads with the heat hitting in waves the concrete development towns that rise before her in the shimmering sands, next to the signs warning against camels crossing the road, that always make her smile. On the municipal building’s steps, brandishing their welfare pages for her to sign, wait Russian immigrants wiping sweat from broad foreheads and pushing grandchildren’s prams, and by them the ultra-Orthodox men darting from foot to foot as if treading on the hot coals, and by them, the Ethiopian mothers, in their long white cottons like a chorus in a silent Greek tragedy, and by them, the Bedouin in black.

There are very few Housekeeping magazines in the desert, but in the summers, they go back to England, to her mother’s house, and there, while her husband takes the kids to the National Gallery to soak up the masterpieces and the pigeons, Sara sneaks off to Marks & Spencer’s and comes back with new bras, with egg salad sandwiches and scones and Ribena juice—all the comforts not found in her mother’s house, and also, piles of Good Housekeeping back-issues, that she stores in her suitcase like the squirrels in the park that store their acorns under the waving old oak.

But still, with all of Israel’s troubles, Sara is so happy after these summers to get back to their village, to their good house-kept by her, their home-land-with their friends sitting in their garden on the old swing, talking about the same things again and again, if there will be war, or a good cleaning lady, the school—a little politics—but not too much, the conversation going around and around the way it should in families. And on the Day of Independence, Sara always makes a coconut cake with blue and white flag of Israel icing for the small children, as if the country is another child in their shared family (the Good Housekeeping has cake-icing tips). When everyone goes home, they sit on the torn upholstery of the old garden swing, where they rock their children, clasping them tight under the anxious desert moon, telling them stories of overcoming.

And when Sara finishes the clearing up and finally crawls into bed, she has her back-copies of Good Housekeeping British Edition to leaf through. But years pass, and the children become teenagers, and they don’t want to sit with them on swings anymore and suppertime becomes a teenage battlefield, and the country becomes a constant battlefield, after Rabin is assassinated and the word peace leaves the country.

“History is so boring!” her youngest son grumbles, studying for his matriculation exam.

“No, it isn’t! it’s important, everything we do today is based on history! The past helps us manage decisions in the present.”

“Well in that case it looks like we’ve learnt nothing! Because there is another war!

Wars are usually in summer, when everyone is so hot and bored; A Jewish or an Arab politician will step on an Arab or a Jewish temple, and then the retaliation gets out of hand and the politicians rant and rave like third-rate actors, like abusive husbands, filling viewers with fear, and then claiming only they can save them. But now their own children are soldiers, and they are folded inside these wars, like the soft raisins in Sara’s blue and white Israeli flag cake.

The kids and their friends come home for a weekend from the army, and their eyes look blurred, unfocused, trying to forget what they have seen. And then their close friend’s son, who was on their lawn just last week with his smiling nursery school face inside his new soldier face, dies in the war. The wars in the children’s history matriculation exams, with their raging prophesies, and caves and battles and blood, they all come storming out of the textbooks into their day-to-day lives, turning the fantasy of
rebuilding a symbolic temple, into a real physical one, turning the Bible from a book into a land.

At the funeral, the women circulate with trays of food, as if hunger is the problem, and the men line up with their prayers and the youth hug the dead soldier’s mother, telling them stories of their now dead son, to keep him alive a little longer. Remember when he led us the wrong way in the desert, but made
us all the best chocolate mousse? They the alive ones, utilize their good, free childhood, their unknowing youth, to comfort the parents, their guns flowing like long hair from their ballet trained, young shoulders. The broken parents gulp down their words, hug them in a daze and thank them with blind desperate
eyes that cannot see anything. Sara, standing there, understands that the army is not like her memories about waxing legs and good housekeeping, or listening to Abbie Nathan sing “give peace a chance” (no one gave it a chance). This is not a song or a story or a dance or a cake with a Star of David on it. This is
the sacrificing of their children on the slabs of politics like burnt offerings, in the way of pagans.

What have they done?

She desperately needs to escape these thoughts, she needs her Good Housekeeping magazine, where she can return to the world of mothers who protect their children with healthy banana muffins for school lunches, with getting stains out of school clothes, she needs her magazine the way a junkie needs
drugs. So, she drives between the sirens over to the book shop in Be’er Sheva/their desert town and finds a rare copy of her magazine on the one small and disapproving English section
in the shop. The young Israeli booksellers purse their lips at Sara, an old woman rushing out in war time to buy a frivolous magazine, and in English, after all these years. She herself is an unsightly lump in the Israeli melting pot.

She rushes home before there is a siren, throwing the magazine into the seat by her, and the car, like a camel, knows its way home. She drives past the pockmarked grey cement blocks of Be’er Sheva/the development town, past the tin shanties of the unrecognized Bedouin villages, she drives under the dessert sky’s blue shards of flecked gold, flecked God, but God is not gentle and the Negev sun blasts down its last rays, and the songs on the radio become rapidly more nationalistic and also religious, as always in times of war, and then the dishevelled stray grasses by the road shiver as a siren screeches out of the huge blue sky. Sara stops the car and grabs her magazine and flings herself face down, like in lamentation, onto the acrid desert earth, her hands covering her soft skull, her eyes inside the growth of
sparse patches of grasses, that close-up, look like the forgotten hairs on an a woman’s face. (She remembers those tips for hair removal in her magazine that are a helpful distraction from the
bombs). She clutches her magazine closer, and eventually, the video game hiss of the missiles above quiets, and she raises her head and gasps to see the long curving neck and small head of a real camel, standing there, looking at her without interest. The camel moves forward, and her four spindly legs emerge and she wobbles on, as if in high heels, as if she is a woman from a fashion magazine with her ridiculously long false looking lashes, her arrogant head, huge eyes, delicate legs, swaying buttocks, all
receding nonchalantly, dignified, taking her time—disappearing into the desert that she, the camel, knows is hers.

When she gets back home, Sara quickly prepares to host her Bedouin—Jewish women’s group, that was supposed to unite the Negev southern community, but it has gradually turned into just a Jewish one because the Bedouin women stopped coming in the end. Maybe they couldn’t afford the huge meals of rice and meat and pastries that they insisted on preparing as hosts, while the Jewish women just laid out a few biscuits, or maybe their husbands didn’t allow them, or maybe they got bored with the Jewish women’s fascination with polygamy, so it shifted to just Jewish women, and then the Hebrew speaking ones also left, they didn’t have time to read books, being serious housekeepers, with no time for magazines, and so now it’s just the few English speaking women, sitting by the whirring fans in Sara’s garden like colonial ladies, discussing novels about how history, usually wars, interacted with woman’s lives, and then quickly moving on to gossip about husbands and children and illnesses and wrinkles and if there will be another siren.

And finally, after the final washing up and housekeeping choirs, Sara crawls into bed, and unwraps her new Good Housekeeping British Edition magazine that she had rushed to buy in the middle of the rocket attack, because she so needed a rest from this Levant. She flips the pages, that show how to make your own window curtains and tell of the importance of maintaining a sex life even with teenagers at home (her husband is still downstairs, in front of the news). Sara’s eyes start to close, soothed by the glossy pages. Outside her bedroom window (that does need new curtains) the light of the anxious desert moon
rises behind the palm tree and the moon and the tree peer together into the window, as if they also want to read the magazine, and all three stare yearningly at the Good Housekeeping’s page of suggested summer breaks, at a pale tall English woman in a swimsuit, with a palm tree and the slabs of stone pyramids, and an orange sunset behind her, leading a camel across the desert with a golden thread.

Professor Ephrat Huss runs an MA program on arts in social
work at Ben Gurion University. At the age of 64 she completed
an MA in creative writing.