Sport, African Cultures, Value For Money: A Return to South Africa Jenefer Share 5 the plane begins its descent into Johannes- A burg, I struggle with the arrival form, finding its blank squares?just so many letters per an? swer?v-as good a place as any to pose the problem. Coun- try of Birth: South Africa. Country of Citizenship: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Country of Residence: the United States of America. That about sums it up: citizen (through paternity) of a place I have never lived, nonresident in my native land, and resident where I'm neither native nor citizen. But the question I can?t answer comes next. Main Purpose of Visit? I hesitate?Holiday? well, I hope to enjoy the landscape this time; Business/Professional? I carry my lapt0p like a shield??but then I check Visit- ing Friends/Relatives. It is only half-true. Relatives, yes (my entire immediate family awaits me) but there aren?t any friends left, after thirteen years away. What motivated you most to visit South Africa? the form then wants to know. None of Your Business isn?t on the list; neither are Political Change, Guilt, Nostalgia (more precisely, the nostalgia for nostalgia), or Intima- tions of Mortality. I waver between Friends/Family and Previous Visits, then check the latter, though that twenty- two-year previous visit was what drove me to leave. (The other options, by the way, are Climate, Scenic Beauty, Sport, African Cultures, Value for Money.) At 7:45 July 16, 1991, the jet touches down on the African earth. All I can see from the window is the lion-colored winter grass. I thought I would cry but I don't. I try to feel something apprOpriate to the occasion, but what do you feel when you are about to step back into a reviled and imaginary land? You don?t feel any- thing; you're afraid your ghosr-foot will slip through the dream-earth into the past. Two weeks later, on the waterfront in Cape Town, I?m taking a short cut through a parking lot when a man sticks his head out of a van and, in the thick jazzy local accent, shouts ?Hallo sweetie, long time no see!? For a moment, I wonder how he knows. Jenefer Shiite, author of Life-Size ougbtorr-M Win), is a writ- er who lives in Boston, asset/3:456:25 My two-year?old nephew, whom I have never seen, toddles out, smiling and trusting, from under the guardrail that cordons off the arrival area, so, crouching instinctively, he is the one I kiss first. Then, so he won?t feel neglected, I kiss his shyer four-year-old brorher, fa- miliar from photographs that somehow failed to capture the little-old-man quality I sense now. Then my sister, whom I have seen once in these thirteen years, before her incurable illness was diagnosed. Then my mother, then my father, both of whom I saw in London in 1983 and 1987. I suffered the shock of their aging then; are they suffering the shock of mine now? Nobody cries. That is the way we are. As we walk out to the car, Durban?s damp subtr0pi- cal air fingers my face with a remembered feel. It is an hour?s drive from the Durban airport to my parents? house in Pietermaritzburg, a sleepy mid-sized Victorian town in the province of Natal. I have never lived there: they moved there after I left home, left Johannesburg for the University of Cape Town (stormed away, more accurately, in seventeen?year?old self-righteousness). Hyperalert, I strain my eyes staring out of the car win- dow. Nothing looks familiar, but nothing looks strange either; I don?t recognize anything, but it all seems nor- mal, unremarkable, the way the light and colors of a for- eign country never do at first. On the roadside, near a sign for the Lions River Polo Club, Black women are cutting the long dry grass to thatch their huts. one's: small, neat, anonymous, not in the best of taste. I don?t recognize a single thing, which fright- ens me. Gradually, over the next week or so, I begin to recover odd objects: a battered tea tray, a blue-and-white creamer, a china figurine of two lovers. But they?re just objects, old, recognizable, long-lost; they carry no charge of association. What will? I wonder, having hoped for instant epiphany. Weeks later, in Johannesburg, the taxi turns a corner and there before me is a curve of road where, I realize, accidents still happen in my dreams. I ave never seen my parents? house. It could be any- 57 Ii uh T- Dora, my mother?s Zulu maid, is washing dishes in the kitchen when my mother introduces me, the leg- endary daughter from America. I confuse and embar- rass her by trying to shake her hand (it is wet, she can't think what to dry it on). The tone my mother uses to speak to her?slow, de- liberate, over?enunciating, as if to a child?is painfully familiar, and, when I hear it again, I begin to recall where my politics come from. Dora is raising six children alone on $125 a month. Her grown son, laid off from the mines, works one day a week in the garden. She calls me ?Nkosikaan?: princess. I ask her not to and merely add to her humiliation as she stumbles, tongue-tied, over my first name, which she cannot quite bring herself to say. There is cake and champagne, flowers, gifts, talk, a daylong effort to impersonate a family rather than the collective hallucination we feel ourselves to be. That night, when I go to bed in the guest room, I hug against me the hot-water bottle that my mother, not knowing how else to offer comfort, has insisted upon. I have never felt lonelier in my life. parents, the privileged ones, live in a cage. The entire house is barred, with metal grilles on the doors and windows that have to be locked and unlocked every time anyone passes through, even a child going into the garden to play. When we leave for the day or the evening, it takes at least fifteen minutes to close up the house, with an elaborate ritual of shutting windows, securing the metal gates, turning on lights and radios. My mother also locks the drawers against Dora's (alleged) depredations. What she dreads is not, as one might expect, ANC or Inkatha guerrillas rising from her nightmares to claim what is theirs: it is common-or?garden burglary, assault. Her every thought twists back to some threat, some news report of neigh- bors whose houses have been broken into, who have been bound, raped, shot. The image of her own victim- ization thrills and obsesses her. There is, in fact, a high rate of violent crime against white suburban householders in Pietermaritzburg, as in South Africa as a whole. The surrounding Black town- ships have, in fact, been the site of some of the most gruesome clashes between Inkatha and the ANC. But what my mother suffers from, I realize, is paranoia. An empty paper bag on the street is enough to scare her. After a while it begins to infect me too. - I have lived alone all over the world, had close call in strange cities, bolted my own door in Boston. Like other women, I manage most of the time to keep my fear at a subliminal, background-radiation level. But after a 58 TIKKUN VOL. 7, No. 6 week in Pietermaritzburg, returning from dinner one night, I unlock the metal gate and am suddenly too frightened to go in. In the bookstore, Time and Newsweek sit next to May- z'bzzye, journal of the ANC, which in turn sits next to Shooting Times. In the suburbs, houses cower behind high walls adorned with barbed wire, icons of attack dogs, and signs warning that the household is protected by an alarm system (usually named something macho?~ Predator; Power Force?though there is also the humble and reassuring Mike?s). At The Workshop, a Durban shopping complex, families can enjoy one?stOp shopping: a modest storefront, between Joe?s Radioland and The Bead Factory, houses The Arsenal?which is exactly that. few months after my visit, my parents come out of the house one morning to find both cars propped on bricks, all eight wheels?stolen dur- ing the night. They?re moving. During an afternoon visit to the Durban city centre, my mother is very uncomfortable and, as she puts it, ?claustrophobic.? She keeps complaining about the crowds, can?t wait to leave. At ?rst I assume it is be- cause, as she approaches her sixties and strays less and less often from the suburbs, she finds the urban bustle overwhelming. But later my sister tells me that she com- plains about the number of Blacks downtown, now that most forms of segregation have been abolished. Al- though I didn?t recognize it at the time, she was experi- encing culture shock-?disorientation, panic, a sense of her own unreality. (I know the She tells me that since the beaches have been integrated, they?re so crowded that ?nobody goes there any more.? Hamish, age four, on noting the rust-stained bathtub in the maid?s bathroom: ?Mum, why do Zulu peOple have brown baths?? At an official function in Pietermaritzburg, where my father is awarded civic honors, the city councilors file in their royal-blue robes and tricorned hats, and I?m as- tounded to see that about half the faces are of darker pigmentation (Indian and soscalled ?colored,? no Blacks). Later I?m told that they aren?t full voting mem- bers of the council?just as, in South Africa as a whole, there are separate, powerless ?parliaments? for Indians and ?coloreds. The person who tells me this is Yvonne Spain, the newest and youngest council member, a small, dark, intense woman of about my age. We recognize each other as similar types: she is a long-time activist now committed to working within the system. She Spends most of our short talk trying to convince me that it is time for peOple like me to come back. I want to leave it all behind me. I want to shed it like a skin. At the end of a week in Pietermaritzburg, spending all my time with my mother and sister in their self-en- closed suburban bubble, the only people of color I have Spoken to are: 1. My mother?s Zulu maid, Dora. 2. My sister?s Zulu maid, Mavis. (These aren't, of course, their real names. They are the English names, smacking of the mission school, that Black workers use around white pe0ple so they won?t have to exert them- selves by wrapping their tongues around anything foreign?Le. African.) 3. Mrs. Naidoo, an In- dian labor organizer I meet briefly at the civic function. 4. An Indian woman with a small child, with whOm I strike up a conversation in the airport departure lounge. At the South African Air- ways check-in counter, a large red poster implores me, in En- glish and Afrikaans, to ?Look and Save A Life. Beneath the heading ?Terrorist Weapons? are arrayed 3-D plastic mod- els of a limpet mine, a mini- limpet mine, a TM 57 Land Mine, an anti-personnel mine, and four types of hand grenades. At the Cape Town post of- fice, a similar display shrieks ?The Look of Death!" The first time I hear Afrikaans again is on the plane from London, where the South African Airways stew- ardesses are chatting in the galley. I can't understand a word they say. But within a week, I?m listening to the news without even noticing whether it is in Afrikaans or English (they alternate). I am, after all, bilingual; I am, after all, a South African. I thought I would be traumatized by how much things had changed. Instead, I?m traumatized by how little they have. The only real difference I notice at first is how drasti- cally my family?s standard of living has dropped. In?ation and economic sanctions (which I fought for, a world away) have done their work. My folks are hardly poor, but they?re feeling the pinch, and the luxurious way of life I took for granted as a child is gone forever. My sister longs for Lego, lingerie, butterscotch, and bath gel; my parents dread re- tirement because their savings are worth so little now. I fought for years to achieve this effect, because I believed economic pressure was the only way to force change; I be? lieve it still, but it pains me to see them like this, old and worried before their time?even thOugh I know it is just. On the plane to Cape Town, a middle-aged Black man in a pinstriped suit sits down next to me. Progress, I think?? this could never have happened before. His other neigh- bor, an English-Speaking businessman type, strikes up a conversation with him over the white wine and gin-and- tonics. The engine is making too much noise for me to hear what they?re saying, but?definitely progress, I think. Af? ter a while, my Black seatmate turns to me and we make small talk (I?m from America, I tell him: not exactly a lie). I?m having a little trouble un- derstanding him because of his accent, but we?re communicat- ing expansiver all the same. Progress, I think, elated. Then I need to go to the bathroom. ?Excuse me, please,? I say, rising from my seat, indicating that I need to squeeze past him. ?Sorry madam!? he stammers, flus- tered, springing to his feet. At the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, a political bal- ladeer sings of ?the year of false hopes and eUphoria/T he year we thought the struggle had been won.? At these words, a profound sadness overcomes me. I used to think that what I felt was guilt. Now I know it is sorrow. Graffiti on a power station wall: The Human Came. Cape Town is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, as moody and intoxicating as a lover. I was afraid that when I went back there I would feel something I have never felt before, a pull on my soul from a piece of the earth. I long for, and dread, a voice that says ?you should stay here? when I arrive somewhere; I have drifted around the world listening for it, relieved and bereft because I have never found it. Instead, I Spend the first two days shivering and fever- ish in a darkened hotel room. Then I rent a car and drive down the incomparable coastal route to Cape Point. I stand on the tip of Africa, where the oceans meet?or as close to it as they let you get, anyway?and say to myself, theatrically, without much conviction, am an African.? My sister buys her gardener a new set of work clothes, a two-piece outfit in heavy blue drill. For some reason this combo is Called a ?Continental Suit.? I wonder which continent the manufacturers have in mind. I revisit the University of Cape Town, nestled on the mountain sloPes, and see the first really startling change SOUTH AFRICA 59 of my trip. Most of the students strolling from building to building are Black now; in my undergraduate days, you would have had to sit on the steps all day long to glimpse even one. I had precisely one Black classmate, who was later unmasked as a government informer. Wandering around the Rosebank and Rondebosch ar- eas that flank the university, I have the most clich?d ex- perience of all: everything looks smaller, shrunken, a few shabby blocks instead of a whole world. This happens to everyone revisiting the past, I know, but I thought it had something to do with childhood (everything looks smaller because you have grown bigger). But now I see that it has nothing to do with size. It has to do with inhabiting a place fully, living in a saturated world: never seeing it from the outside, never seeing where it ends, that it ends. I keep waiting for an epiphany that doesn?t happen. Maybe it is not going to?and that is the epiphany. oedean hasn?t shrunk, it has grown. Roedean is the exclusive British-style private school in Jo? hannesburg where I was schooled in Latin and field hockey and advanced mathematics. We called the teachers ?Madame,? we wore navy blue pinafores with knee socks and panama hats; I remember it as a prison, site of some of my most spectacular adolescent acting? out. But when I pass through the gates, scarcely able to breathe, I see that it is lush and florescent and green. It looks like a country estate, not a jail. Then I notice the six feet of barbed wire on top of the walls. I find a staircase that still serves (don?t ask me why) as a stage set for my anxiety dreams, epics of en- trapment. For the first time since setting foot in South Africa, I cry?but not from nostalgia. Graffiti: Did you vote Nat (Afrikaaner Nationalist)? Don?t worry, be sorry. I discover that I still hate white South Africans. I hate the way they think, the way they talk, the way they live. I hate them, and I?m one myself. This causes problems with pronouns, among other things. What hasn?t changed, as far as I can see, is the mean spiritedness of their culture. I find that an Afrikaans word keeps recurring to me: verkrampte. Nowadays it is used mainly to mean conservative?as opposed to verlz'gz?e, enlightened?but, in its literal sense of cramped, narrow, pinched, it is the best description of the world white South Africans have created for them- selves and of their minds, deformed to fit it. I know this is unfair, a gross generalization, mean- Spirited in its own way. I know that, but it doesn't make any difference; my attitudes toward South Africa? Mother country, Fatherland?are frozen in late adoles- cence. A five-week visit scarcely penetrates the personal mythology I have cultivated, in a vacuum, my whole 60 TIKKUN VOL. 7, No. 6 adult life. Victor Ntoni, a Johannesburg jazz musician, on the subject of revenge: don?t have time for that, man? there is such a lot of living to do out there.? Over cocktails, my mother tells the story, a pprovingly, of a Pietermaritzburg woman who owned an expensive dress sh0p but refused to allow Black or Indian women to try on the clothes. They could buy but not try. When the local newspaper made an issue of this, rather than change her policy, she emigrated to Australia. There used to be red buses and green buses (red for whites, and green, jam~packed, for Blacks). Now there are only red buses, jam-packed, for everyone. Jusr when I think this is the only kind of change I?m going to see, I Spend ten days in Johannesburg with my brother, who manages the Market Theatre. The Market is an island in the worst part of the city, a small, mirac- ulous world where the future, somehow, has already hap- pened. It is a bubble with enough air for me to breathe: three performance spaces plus an art gallery, a shopping precinct, a restaurant, a jazz club (where Mandela cele- brated his seventy-third birthday), and a pub, the Yard of Ale, where, if you hang out long enough, you?ll meet everybody in politics and the arts. After two days, I spend most of my time there: the rest of Johannesburg is bleak and violent, and revisiting the suburban wastes of my childhood fills me only with emptiness. My brother has a Black boss, Black staff, Black friends. He treats them all with genuine color blindness (which I would have thought impossible in a white South African raised as we were: at the very least, I?d expect a hint of self-congratulation). He works long hours and smokes a lot; he knows everything that is going down, and is quietly cynical about the current politics of con- venience. No one on the Left, he says, knows what is go- ing to happen next. Graffiti: Mandela Unites, Bad Organizing Divides. He has been in exile, too: in London for five years, returning to the Market after Mandela?s release (the post-February period, people call it, shorthand for a whole cycle of euphoria and letdown). I try to explain to him my confusion, my lack of revelation, my sense of everything being familiar but not meaningful. He understands. ?As if you have seen it all before in a movie, right?? He shrugs. Either this is what happens to people who have been away too long, or, being sib- lings, we have developed the same mechanisms of denial. But now there is something else: cognitive dissonance. The more time I Spend talking and listening in the warm, crowded Yard of Ale, the less I can recapture the sour, sealed world my parents inhabit. I can scarcely be- lieve it exists in the same time and place. Yet it does: it is real, too. Which is more real? Which is ?South Africa?? (As in, ?So, how was South question I?m supposed to be able to an- swer when I get back to the States.) I deveIOp a pat answer: Political discourse has changed, I say?you can see Mandela?s face on but daily life hasn?t. Also, I add, you can read books and see movies that would have been censored before. For instance? Henry and June. I go back to Pietermaritzburg, where my mother, a ner- vous driver, is involved in a near-miss with the car. Shaken, she crawls home at twenty miles an hour and tells us the story again and again over cups of strong tea. She keeps emphasizing that everything happened so quickly she didn?t even catch a glimpse of the other driver?s face. At first I assume this detail is for dramatic effect, but on the fourth or fifth telling, she rephrases it: ?It happened so quickly I couldn?t even see if he was Black or white.? Then I realize that, without this piece of information, my mother is unable to interpret what happened to her. Without it, she cannot make sense of her experience. John Kani, actor and co-director of the Market The- atre: ?SOme people are unteachable. That is why we have to pin our hopes on the next generation. My nephews, Hamish and Andrew, watch the English, Afrikaans, and Zulu programs on TV. When I was grow- ing up, there was no television in South Africa. They speak a few sentences of Zulu to Mavis, the maid. I can't say a word in any African language. My sister has taught them to call Blacks ?Zulu people.? I squeeze hope from that word, people. They call any Black male ?the man?? in my childhood, he would have been ?the boy, ?the kaffir,? or ?the coon??but Mavis is still ?the girl.? Charlotte Bauer, Arts Editor of the Weeka Mail: ?But tell me, why did we ever think it wouldn?t be complicated?? My brother invites me to attend the South African Breweries Mini Arts Festival at the Market Theatre one Sunday afternoon, a celebration of what he calls ?cor- porate guilt-money. In honor of a senior executive?s re- tirement, all the arts groups funded by South African Breweries are showcasing their wares, and, as the pro- gram unfolds, I see that the corporation has adopted the American model, spreading its funding neatly across the Spectrum, picking out one group per color as if select- ing a fistful of or Ms. There is a Soweto jazz company, a group performing Indian dance, the Transvaal Chinese Association?s Harmony Dancers, an all-Black orchestra (with no conductor), and so on, through the rainbow. The audience, consisting of local arts figures, proud parents, and c0rporate white-hairs, sits politely through a sharp dressing down by a ?colored? professor, who at- tacks private-sector funding as a cosmetic, conscience- easing measure. Then the Black poet Don Mattera, banned for nine years, leaps up to read a passionate in- dictment of white South Africans. After he has cata- logued our collective crimes, we applaud politely. He reads one more poem, dedicating it to his young son beaming in the third row. We applaud again. Next, the arts groups present a gift to the retiring ex- ecutive. It is a carved wooden figure in traditional African style, about two feet high, outfitted for war and bran- dishing a large club. As the figure is handed over, its club (called a Jerzobkem'e) appears to be aimed right at the re? cipient?s head. A coincidence, I wonder, or a subtle joke? The program ends with a huge massed choir from Soweto, whose motto, they tell us, is ?We will sing un- til justice reigns in our country.? They begin with tra- ditional African songs that bring people to their feet, dancing and ululating, and then, without skipping a beat, modulate into western choral music. More c0gni- tive dissonance: the conductor in his African robes drawing forth Mozart from these African throats. Colo- nialism, carps the cyniCal part of my brain, but for once I tell it to shut up. In my heart at that moment, I un- derstand something about transcendence: that such sounds should come from It takes more courage and generosity of spirit to live in South Africa now?really live there?than I will ever be capable of. my last day at my parents? house (we?re all 0 relieved and exhausted and achineg sad), I say goodbye to Dora and leave her a fairly large tip. When she gets around to counting it, she thinks that I, being unfamiliar with the currency, have miscalcu- lated, and that she will somehow get into trouble for ac- cepting so much cash. So she shows it to my mother and asks her what she should do. My mother is outraged, taking my gesture not only as vulgar ostentation but also as a reproach to her (which it is, in a way); Dora is hu? miliated (again); and I am unmasked in the act of trying (Continued on p. 77) SOUTH AFRICA 61 a more expansive notion of who and what we are, be? ginning in the Bible, amplified in the Talmud, and preva- lent in the wOrks of modern Jewish thinkers. The great mystic Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) ex- pressed it well: One cannot reach the exalted position of being able to recite the verse from the morning prayer (I Chronicles 16:8), ?Praise the Lord, invoke His name, declare His works among the nations,? without experiencing the deep, inner love stirring one to solicitousness for all nations, to improve their material state, to promote their happiness. This disposition qualifies theJewish people to experience the spirit of the Messiah. El AUSCHWITZ Continued from p. 33) terror here? Or do we restore them to their historically accurate, original forms to convey the full horror of the enterprise? While mom of the group voiced warm appreciation and admiration for the job done by the museum?s ever- worked, undercompensated staff, all agreed that it was time to address the training of the young Polish guides. In her command of the facts, our Polish guide, Wanda, had been exemplary. But hers was non?could not have been?a Jewish narrative of Auschwitz. We thus pro- posed that teachers from Holocaust education centers such as Facing History and Ourselves in Boston or Is- rael?s Yad Vashem be recruited to conduct training sem- inars precisely to teach the Jewish narrative of events, which is still not being adequately told. We then looked to the preparation of the Jewish guides who often accompany groups from Israel and America and found that, in fact, they rarely told the Po[- z'sb narrative to their Jewish charges. In open sessions with the Auschwitz Museum staff, we were alerted to this problem when Wanda, polite and extremely reluc- tant to offend her guests, painfully related stories of be- ing verbally abused by angry Jewish youth groups. In their frustration and memory-ignited rage, Jewish visitors to the camp had begun to confuse their Polish tour guides for SS guards. We tried to explain to Wanda that for many of the Jewish visitors, the nearest objects of rage and frustration were too often their guides, the surround? ing Polish population, and the country itself. We also re? solved to improve the preparation of Jewish groups to make sure that they knew enough of the Polish narrative to distinguish between Nazi killers and Polish victims. Indeed, given the overwhelming proportion of Pol- ish and Christian visitors to Auschwitz, we had to rec- ognize that Auschwitz-Birkenau would necessarily func- tion as a shared memorial space, where Polish Catholics will remember as Polish Catholics, even when they re- member Jewish victims. As Jews, we do not locate the victims in a Polish Catholic martyrological tradition. But neither can we expect Polish Catholics to recite the mourners? Kaddish. As Jews recall events in the metaphors of their tradition, so will Poles remember in the forms of their faith. The problem may not be that Poles deliberately displace Jewish memory of Auschwitz with their own, but that in a country bereft of its Jews, these memorials can do little but cultivate Polish mem- Ory. In this light, we realized that Auschwitz is part of a national landscape of suffering, one coordinate among others by which both Jews and Poles continue to graSp their present lives in light of a remembered past. With all this in mind, it is clear to me that any pre- scription for institutional memory at Auschwitz would be, like memorials themselves, provisional. Mosr of our proposals will be adopted, others debated further, refined, augmented, and perhaps elided altogether. In- deed, the process itself reminds us that as much as we desire it, no memorial is really everlasting: Each is shaped and understood in the context of its time and place, its meanings contingent on evolving political re- alities. Perhaps the wisest course, therefore, will be to build into the memorial at Auschwitz a capacity for change in new times and circumstances, to make explicit the kinds of meanings this site holds for us now, even as we make room for the new meanings this site will surely engender in the next generation. For once we make clear how many people died there, for what reasons, and at whose hands, it will be up to future commemorators to find their own significance in this past. Cl SOUTH AFRICA . Continued from p. 61) to stanch a yawning, irreparable guilt??a lifetime?s worth?with a wad of paper money. My sister tells me that she and her husband have given Mavis R1000 (about $400, a substantial sum in that econ- omy) to build a new mud-brick house, because her fam- ily was left homeless in the township violence. But, she adds, ?Don?t tell Mom. What did I learn from my return to South Africa? I learned that I don't have a well-developed sense of place: that is not how I remember things. I learned that I will never understand South Africa because I don?t want to: I just want to reject it. I learned that there are some things in life, in fami- FICTION 77 lies, that can never be repaired. On the very last night of my visit, my brother, in an ironic gesture, takes me to the Doll House, a classic fifties-style drive-in restaurant where we used to go as children?but rarely, because the whole experience of- fended my father?s sensibilities. He would sit in the driver?s seat like a condemned man, radiating finicky dis- taste, while the car filled with the odor of fried grease, and some accident always befell the upholstery. The garish neon lighting in the parking lot hasn?t changed, and neither have the fake doll-house dormers on the restaurant facade. My brother orders a burger and chocolate milkshake, as before; as befOre, I order a toasted cheese and ginger beer. For realism, we should be squab- bling and spilling food in the back seat, but he is a suave thirty-one-year~old now, and time has begun to trace the Same fine lines on his English skin as it has on mine. We sit side by side in the pink and cobalt glare, play- ing at nostalgia, when something that looks like a huge armadillo crawls into the parking lot behind us. A ?ap Opens in the side, disgorging a stream of humanoid crea- tures in camou?age gear. That, my brother tells me, is a CaSSpir, an armored vehicle full of police, probably on its way to Alexandria township to quell ?disturbances? there. After a while, the armed men wander back, and vast quantities of coffee and burgers begin to appear, served on those little red trays that are supposed to hook on to car windows. But this menacing pachyderm has no windows, and so the flap opens again, and the trays dis- appear inside, as if the machine itself were ingesting them. I?m leaving in the morning, but there isn?t much to say, so we sit side by side in silence: my brother and I at an American-style drive-in somewhere in Africa, pre- tending to relive a childhood neither of us can recall, sharing the neon intimacy of the parking lot with real families and real children and this obscene machine. The moment is surreal?and that is why, for the first time, it seems to make some kind of sense. TIKKUN Salons Coordinator We need volunteer coordinators Peoplecontact'us wanting to be involved, but at the moment we don't have funding for a coordinator. Armed with :1 computer and fax, that person could live anywhere in the US. Or they could come into our New York or Oakland office twice a week. That person would follow up-on requests, contact existing salons or TIKKUN study groups to sec-if there are any openings for new members, and would help publicize and recruit participation in Tucson salons around the country. Minimum time commitment: 16 hours per week No pay, but eventually we hope to find a foundation that would fund this position, and those who work With-us nowiould be prime candidates for the job. TIKKUN Sales Representative Sell TIKKUNsubscr-iptions, or sell ad space in the magazine. Commission:.20 patent. No Other pay or benefits. To apply to be a-Salon Coordinator or a Sales Rep.: Senda self-revealing personal letter'to 'l?iltkun, Box 1778. Cathedral Station, New York, NY. 10025. Hiking to Sky Meadows We leave the children, take a bus down a mountain road into the national park, hOping to condense into two hours what we gave up so willingly: privacy, solitude, that part of us we now ignore. The Hassids believe each soul is pleaded with to come down from heaven. The other souls sing to ease its burden. First a gentle hum, then more demanding. Always a melody you think you've heard before. Here among the wild?owers, a jarring quiet isolates us. I strain to remember the names: elephant head with its perfect pink trunk, the purple flowers of monkshood, so appealing and so poisonous. The smell of swamp onion lingers over the meadow. If I could stay here forever, the melodies would come back to me, flooding and tripping each other, finally stacking into a ladder, where the souls would tumble down. Now we start up a different route, enticed by rumors of great beauty. There is a choice of two paths, as in fairytales. One follows the twisting waters of Cold Creek and is fairly steep, the other wanders through the lodgepole forest along a horsepath. We hike up towards Blue Crag past Emerald Lake, where a fisherman dozes, his pole bobbing in the water. Up the drier slopes swamp whiteheads and striped tiger lilies part for us. Then the path climbs a low hemlock-covered ridge. We are ascending now and the air thins. I want to stop but my legs refuse. The sky cleats and flattens, but thunder, louder and fiercer, presses against me, the higher we go. I recognize the sound of water rushing. Maybe it ?5 just the singing and the whir of black coats. The bride is toasted now and then her future children. She is lifted in a chair and passed in a circle above the heads, a tapping of feet and a bum swathc her. I am sure it?s a melody I know. Carol Davis 73 TIKKUN VOL. 7, No. 6