Ariga: Poetry: May 2003: Arrival -- excerpt from 'Law of Return,' a novel by Joe Bardin

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Arrival
By Joe Bardin

For security reasons, arrivals could only be met as they exited the terminal at Ben Gurion airport. Danny waited outside in the pre-dawn dark. With cigarettes glowing, drivers clustered at the head of a line of taxis. A few passengers entered the airport for early flights. Inside, Danny glimpsed the customs girls in tight sweaters walking circles beneath fluorescent lights. Plain-clothes men with soldiers' haircuts and loose safari jackets passed by regularly.
After a while the steel gate covering the food kiosk was hauled up. Darkness dissolved steadily around Danny, light filling in by default. More people gathered to greet people coming in.
A flight had landed. The terminal doors released a flow of passengers. A woman screamed and jumped in the air, then dipped under the retaining rail and slalomed through on-coming passengers and luggage carts to reach a man and plant him with kisses.
Danny spotted his parents. His father was a large man, poorly dressed if you looked closely, in a green wool sweater and dark blue slacks that could only look good with the suit they had originally belonged to. He walked heavily and with a forward stoop as if he'd been taught the worst things about himself first and most soundly, so that all his attributes were credited against some essential deficit.
His mother wore a white blouse, a beige sweater, elastic-waist pants and sneakers. She had been an attractive bride--Danny had seen the pictures--who discarded her beauty systematically through the years, he'd watched her do it, as if it was an exercise in independence like the right to vote.
Danny loved them with a love that ached like a radio signal humming through his bones.
His grandmother Sylvia had died, his father's mother. They were here for the funeral.
Danny saw them searching for him and not seeing him though he was plainly in front of them and approaching, as if finding their son couldn't possibly be as easy as looking straight ahead. He was just a couple steps from them when his father finally spotted him and waved.
"We heard you had rain," his father said.
"Tons. Who told you?"
"Your Aunt Shula. We're staying with her in Jerusalem." It was a point of pride that they were not such strangers in Israel as to stay in a hotel.
Shula was the first wife of Sylvia's little brother Sam who'd died of heart failure in California.
"You wouldn't believe the rain," Danny said.
Danny wheeled their baggage cart through the stream of people exiting the terminal toward the taxi stand. He hadn't intended to ride with them to Jerusalem-there were several buses back to Tel Aviv-but they were so gray and quiet he thought he'd better. They were wrecked, and morning was the worst time to arrive. It meant you had to stay up an entire day in order to sleep the night, or you'd never adjust to the time-difference.
The taxi driver loaded their luggage.
"Where you go?" he said in English.
Danny's father answered in his impeccable Hebrew.
"Your Hebrew is excellent," the driver was cheered to hear such fluency out of a tourist.
"How's it feel to be back in Israel Mom?" Danny said.
"I should be adjusted by the time we leave," she said. They were staying for just five days. She would likely suffer migraines for most of that time; she was allergic to Israel.
"You'll be ok after you rest," Danny said.
"If I rest," she said.
On the ascent to Jerusalem, snow patched the ground. Danny had heard about the snowfall on the news. The weather all over the country was being reported with the enthusiasm of a corruption scandal. In Tel Aviv, a front-page photo showed a kayaker paddling the rapids roiling down the concrete drainage canal that ran alongside the Ayalon freeway. Here in the Jerusalem Hills they were driving through, the rain had frozen to snow. Its weight had snapped the tops off nearly every pine tree in sight. Still attached, upper limbs dangled like rigging from broken masts.
"Dad, look at the trees."
"Well, I'll be darned. Honey, look at the trees."
"What happened?" his mothers asked suspiciously, as if this might be just the first of many unpleasant surprises.
"Snow," Danny said.
"Snow did that?" his mother said.
"They showed it on the news," Danny said.
In Jerusalem, Aunt Shula's one-way street was best reached from the direction they were coming by making a U-turn at a certain point. His father described this to the driver, using the formal term for U-turn, which thrilled the driver, who wrote out his phone number on a slip of paper and insisted that his father call him any time he needed a taxi, day or night.
Modern Hebrew was a conscious updating of the biblical version, rather than the product of popular natural selection. This left numerous useless words still wandering around that were effectively extinct, but hadn't yet disappeared entirely. In his passion for Hebrew and all things Israeli, Danny's father had learned these words also, and enjoyed finding opportunities to use them in conversation.
His father wasn't showing off-it wasn't in his nature to do so overtly--he was just happy to be in Israel. Danny felt suddenly sad for him, for the five meager days he would spend there before going back. He put a hand on his father's shoulder, but his father wasn't sad; he was ecstatic to be back on any terms, like a man long separated from his lover, even for only five days, for an afternoon, for an hour.

Joe Bardin is a freelance journalist and author living outside Phoenix, Arizona. He is currently completing his first novel, Law of Return. Set in Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War, Law of Return is about a young man who moves to Israel to escape his parents, his girlfriend, his entire life to that point. When he becomes involved with a woman twice his age, he makes a bigger break from his past than he ever expected, and has to confront the consequences of such radical personal change.