Making Waves
We crossed our first checkpoint before dawn. In the heart of the Holy Land, the checkpoint was a valve: as we pumped through at 120 kilometres per hour, I saw cars with green and white plates queueing in the other direction. We had spent less than an hour travelling the width of the country. I’d read that for some Palestinians, a ten-kilometre commute takes four hours.
My chest tightened. I shouldn’t be here. ‘Reconsider your need to travel to the West Bank,’ the Australian government had advised us. It was too late for that now. From the backseat of Adva’s Peugeot, I gazed into the desert and read the roadsigns that flashed up like Old Testament verses: Jerusalem, Judea, Jericho. We pulled into a gas station at Kalya. Kim and I sat under a date palm and ate boiled eggs while Adva bought coffee and cigarettes. Kim and Adva had trained together in Melbourne. The three of us had become good friends. When Adva had told us she was leaving her leafy seaside apartment in Elwood to move back to Israel, I couldn’t understand why.
We drove on. The sun was still tucked behind the Abarim mountains. To our west, I half-expected to see Tusken Raiders peering out from behind the bare, rocky outcrops. We passed a second checkpoint. A few minutes later, Adva stopped in the dry dirt. I stepped out of the car and saw white horses dancing on the Dead Sea’s shimmering surface.
‘Are they waves?’ I asked.
‘Nooo!’ Adva said. She stared at the water. ‘In all the times I’ve been here, I’ve never seen that.’
The Facebook universe had warned us about the salt: ‘Don’t swallow the water, don’t pee, and above all don’t get it in your eyes!’ But no one had told us to pack surfboards.
We followed a sandy track to the shore. The rising sun brought gusts of wind that shook the apple of Sodom trees and blew hot air in my face like I’d just opened an oven door. We laid out our towels next to a freshwater pool, stripped down to our undies, and waded in to the sloshing sea. The stinging salt found its way into every cut and scratch. I tried to float on my back but the waves were too big, and I strained my neck to keep my head out of the water.
We got out, lathered ourselves in thick, grey mud, and sat down between the driftwood and the junk. We weren’t alone. I saw a makeshift tent in the distance beyond the bulrushes. Behind us, a man with cropped hair lay on a mattress in the shade of a tamarisk tree. He was naked, drinking beer and smoking a joint. To our right, an old man wandered back and forth as though he was looking for where he’d left his clothes. Or his God.
Kim was back in the water.
‘This is a magical place,’ I said to Adva. ‘I feel like I’m at the edge of the world. Or the bottom of it. The edge of time, even. To think that human civilisation began on the other side of those mountains…’
‘But you wouldn’t want to live here, right?’ Adva said. I smiled. She laughed. ‘Who would? It’s dry, dirty, and dusty. And it’s expensive—I have to work three jobs to pay my rent.’
‘And the Dead Sea has waves!’ I said.
We both laughed. She broke off a piece of knafeh and gave it to me.
‘Toda.’ The sugar stuck to my fingers. I crunched quietly.
‘We’re not even meant to be here, right?’ Adva said.
Kim’s head bobbed up and down in the water. I paused. ‘I’m not sure. I think both sides have valid claims to this land.’
‘Many Jews and Arabs agree. More than you might think.’
‘Don’t believe the media, right?’ I said. ‘And you?’
‘I might not like everything about it,’ Adva said. ‘But this is my home.’ She wrapped a red scarf around her head. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock but the heat was oppressive. ‘We should go soon.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Ten minutes? I’m going to try and catch a wave.’
