The heel of my boot broke off in the parking lot at Ben Gurion airport. Not completely off, but almost; it flapped back and forth, hanging by a thin piece of rubber. I tried to prevent it from coming off entirely as I maneuvered my two enormous suitcases into the van. I sat down in the back seat and carefully planted my foot on the floor. We drove south, out of the city and into the desert.

In Hebrew desert is midbar, wilderness. Very little of the desert in Israel is composed of those photogenic soft sand dunes people tend to demand of a desert. Yes, there are a few dunes, and you can roll down them screaming as clouds of dust rise up and envelop you. But mostly the desert in Israel is bleached, scrubby, red-brown earth, or rock formations that look like Neapolitan ice cream, or pale expanses of hills like chalk. The desert is silent until a fly buzzes past your ear, or a tiny lizard scrambles up the side of a boulder, or a flash flood sweeps through a wadi. It is a tough beauty, an ancient beauty, a beauty that does not exist for your pleasure and does not care if you die in its harshness. It is a landscape that does not reveal all of itself at once, but makes you work to know it.

We stopped at a gas station, or a rest stop, and I stepped out and hobbled about on my loose heel. I remember stretching with my arms straight up, and that dull dazed feeling you get after a sleepless night on an airplane. And that one of those little military trucks with a soft top pulled up beside us, and a bunch of young soldiers tumbled out like clowns. And that the sky was brilliantly azure.

I lived in a merkaz klitah, an absorption center, a dormitory where immigrants stay while they learn the language and skills they will need before going out into their new world. During the fall and winter that I and the other students in my intensive language program lived there, the building also housed groups of Russian and Ethiopian teenagers. The Russians blasted German rock music at all hours and carried identical flimsy plaid suitcases, which we joked must have been provided to them by the government. The Ethiopians were shy and clung together in small groups and smiled. We were mostly American, and mostly tourists, but they were olim chadashim, which meant new immigrants and which was pronounced with a certain envy and respect. Our group had Ulpan, Hebrew class, four times a week for half the day. On our breaks we would buy coffee in tiny ridged cups from a vending machine in the hall. Sometimes a fighter jet would fly over in the middle of a lesson, and everyone would stop talking as its deafening roar filled the sky.

I wrote letters home to describe my surroundings and they all contained the words “dichotomy” and “surreal.” Illegal Romanian workers dressed as Hasidim to elude the authorities and suicide bombers dressed as Hasidim to sneak onto buses.  Real Hasidim rode around Jerusalem on bicycles, curly pais flapping in the wind. In our rooms, the shower was separated from the rest of the bathroom only by a plastic curtain; there was no bathtub or barrier to contain the water. Hi-tech companies turned out revolutionary new computer chips seemingly by the minute, but no one had invented a way to prevent the shower from dripping everywhere. We would clean our bathroom floor every morning with a giant squeegee. Our student lounge was a bomb shelter. The bomb shelter had a musty couch which made me sneeze and sneeze and sneeze. Once we had a dance in the bomb shelter. I wore my boots, having Krazy-Glued the flapping heel back into place.

We lived in a town of about 20,000 residents, which contained a shopping mall with a movie theater in it, an artists’ colony, and two bars. There was a store that sold beads, and one that sold candy. Sometimes when we went out at night, I would buy gummy worms there and eat them one by one out of my pocket as we stood on the sidewalk debating which of the two bars to go to. There was a big supermarket in the mall, and another at the edge of town where you were checked for explosives at the door, and a little grocery store where the Russian woman at the checkout counter wore a winter coat and fingerless gloves as she worked the register. In any kind of store, it was considered odd if not obnoxious to put your money in a cashier’s hand instead of on the counter. It was considered perfectly acceptable to shove your way into the checkout line.

You could walk from one end of town to the other in half an hour, and then the town stopped, and you were in the desert. You could look out and see nothing but hills and dust, interrupted only occasionally by a small Bedouin village or a few mangy camels. The sunlight in Israel was like nowhere else, gold and pink and soft. It hit the white stone walls of the buildings and reflected against the sand, and everything glowed softly. There were palm trees planted in rows along the streets. The wind blew and the desert rearranged itself and a fine yellow dust collected in the gutters. It seeped into everything; it invaded your room by means of the windows; it had to be wiped from your belongings with a damp cloth.

Once a week a shuk, an outdoor market of tables and white tents, would pop up in a parking lot. The fruits and vegetables sold there were the Platonic ideals of fruits and vegetables; they didn't always look as big and shiny as the ones I was used to, but when I ate them I would think, This is a cucumber. This is an orange. All these years, without being aware of it, I had been eating mere shadows of foods. In the shuk there were barrels and barrels of olives, mounds of avocados, and piles of platform shoes and knives.

One day, walking home from the shuk, I passed a school playground. It was empty except for two little boys, maybe five years old, each holding a leafy tree branch about as big as himself. The first time I looked over, one was whacking the other over the head with his branch, in typical little boy style. I stopped to rearrange the tomatoes in my backpack, and when I looked back, the whack-ee was sitting on the ground, looking dejected, and the whack-er was bending over him, murmuring and consoling.

A girl I knew told me a story. She had been wandering around one night, looking for somewhere to eat, but everything was closed. She saw a restaurant where the wait staff were sitting around inside, and she knocked on the door and asked if they had any cheese. They invited her in and made her a plate of cheese and served her wine and talked to her for a while, and then they offered her a ride home. She asked how much the bill was, and they said, there is no bill, life is like that.

One night I went to a ceremony at Masada, which UNESCO was dedicating as Israel’s second World Heritage Site. There were speeches by officials, out of which I understood the words "government", "national park", and "thank you". There was interpretative dance. Then children came marching down the Roman Ramp waving flags from different countries, Israel and all the others, all equal. It was a fiction, but it was a beautiful fiction; for a moment the audience sat in silence, complicit in this happy hopeful lie. Then there were fireworks. I imagined, as I sat in the middle of the desert with gunpowder exploding over my head, that somewhere those bursts of light were flashing on the radar screens of an enemy country. I pictured angry functionaries in a room somewhere, watching on little screens as streaks and wheels of color illuminated the Middle Eastern sky.

We learned new words, and new concepts. A freier is a sucker, the worst possible thing to be. There was a man in line in front of me in the grocery store, buying a whole load of food, including one bag full of sliced bread. The cashier started to open it, as if to count the slices, and he told her how many there were, but she opened it anyway, and reached in, pulling out a large block of cheese. She raised her eyebrows at him and shook her head. He shrugged. She would have been a freier if she had simply taken his word. He would have been a freier if he hadn't at least attempted it.

A balagan is a mess. The world was a balagan, the government was a balagan, my Hebrew class, where everyone behaved like 10-year-olds who had missed their last three doses of Ritalin, was really a balagan. You could look at something, such as the traffic jam of a road that divides Jerusalem between the Jewish houses (peaked red roofs) and the Arab houses (flat roofs with satellite dishes), and simply throw up your hands and mutter, "Balagan.”

One night a week there was Israeli Folk Dancing. A bouncy Israeli guy with curly hair and a round belly would come to lead us, and we would stand outside and do a kind of glorified Electric Slide to the likes of Ace of Base, the "Grease" sound-track, and the Macarena. Israeli Dancing Night was mainly attended by the Russian girls, who were all very skinny and dressed for a disco. They had, for reasons we could not discern, a particular fondness for the Chicken Dance. When the Chicken Dance music came on, the Americans would flee, overcome by bad memories of Bar Mitzvas and Sweet Sixteens. Sometimes one of the guards would come and dance with us for a little while, a single, armed man in a square of women. The instructor would yell commands (Kadima ve ahora ve kadima ve ahora, forward and back and forward and back) and the square would switch direction so the front became the rear, like a little dancing army drilling to a disco beat from a boom box.

We went on a Tiyul, or a trip, into the Negev. I told my friends back home that a Tiyul is when you take a group of Jews, load them onto a bus, and deposit them in the middle of the desert in an attempt to replicate the suffering of our ancestors during their forty years of wandering. I remarked that Biblical historians always question why it took the Jews forty years to cross such a small piece of land, but that must be because Biblical historians have never been on a Tiyul. Looking at us with our sleeping bags and our water bottles and our boxes of food, standing bleary eyed in the parking lot at 5:00 in the morning, I imagined that it could conceivably take forty years to get a group of Jews onto the bus in the first place. I imagined the Exodus from Egypt as a kind of improv sketch, with the Israelites squabbling over how to work the GPS, and Moses yelling into his cell phone, "Hello? Can you hear me NOW?!"

We spent days walking through the Negev, learning about the Negev, looking at the Negev, and sleeping in the Negev. Before we went to sleep we placed our socks in our shoes so that scorpions would not nestle inside them during the night. We had armed guards, who stayed up all night, and we stayed up with them, rotating each hour to keep the guards awake. I pulled my sleeping bag up over my head, leaving exposed only one eye and half of one hand. When I woke up the hand and eye were swollen with huge pink mosquito bites. For breakfast we ate slices of little chocolate pound cakes that came in plastic bags. We had instant coffee and hot water ladled from a kettle, which spilled over and burned my thumb. My roommate, who camped out often as part of her job, said I was adapting very well. I said it was just that surviving in the wild is a lot like surviving in New York City. Grabbing the least rocky patch of dirt to sleep on is like getting a parking space on the Upper East Side. Aggressive mosquitoes are only slightly more annoying than wayward bike messengers on the sidewalks. The IDF jets flying overhead in the pre-dawn hours are not much louder than garbage trucks.

I had not wanted to go camping. I had hoped, secretly, for the breakout of a small regional conflict, not bad enough to actually kill anyone, but bad enough to restrict the movement of civilians in open areas. But in the end, to my amazement, I loved the hiking and the sleeping out and the trudging up mountains. I had thought I was a city person, but I realized it was not the city itself but the extremity of it that I loved. I became a city-and-wilderness person, disdaining all that fell in between.

Just before Hanukkah, we had a seminar about the war between the Maccabees and the Seleucids. The lecture was conducted in a forest, and we sat on rocks and listened, or mostly didn't listen, as the sun filtered through the trees. There was a group of small children there, too, learning the same lesson, except that they also got to reenact the battles. They were running around the forest screaming, “Greeks!” “Jews!” “Aaaahhhh!” On our seminars we frequently shared spaces with kids on field trips. They were always accompanied by many chaperones, as well as guards with M16s. When we passed them we would smile and wave, and they would look up at us and call out in child-like sing-song unison: “Shaaaa-lom.”

My friend received a message from another friend, a message that simply said, “Fine.” She thought that was a bit rude and wondered how she had offended him, what had prompted him to write her this one-word missive of defiance. She found out it was merely short hand, meaning that he had not been on the bus he was supposed to board that morning, the one that had exploded. Meaning that she shouldn't worry, because he was fine.

One morning I went to class and found that all hell had broken loose. Terrorists had attacked an Israeli hotel in Kenya, and almost simultaneously fired missiles at a civilian Israeli plane. I called a friend at home in America, because I knew that an Israeli friend of hers was on vacation in Africa, though I didn't know where. Because it was still night in America I called my friend’s voice mail at work, which said, “We are not in the office now…If this is an emergency…”

I had a rented cell phone that had a feature where you could press a key and hear the latest headlines. I understood maybe every tenth word, but it was comforting to be able to summon a description of the latest disaster whenever I wanted, to know that I was not the only person addicted to the news. Sometimes, when boarding a flight to Israel, there would be a table stacked full of newspapers before you got to the plane. Everyone would lunge for them like starving people grabbing for food. 

On Election Day, gunmen attacked a polling station in the North of the country. Israelis continued to vote all day. We read a poem in class, from the 12^Th or 13^Th century, a time when liturgical poems became less about praising God and more about pogroms the poets had witnessed. The one we read was very vivid, gory, about Jewish blood running in the streets. I scrawled a line from it across my notebook, “These are the people that survived the sword.”

Israeli Election day coincided with Thanksgiving in the U.S. A number of Americans organized and collected for a Thanksgiving dinner, taking advantage of the culinary school kitchen that happened to be located in our building. Three turkeys were ordered; they arrived with necks on, innards in, and steamed. The turkey people thought they had done us a favor by preparing them for us. That culture clash was somehow remedied, and the turkey was fine. The American boys played football in the dark on the paved lot outside, and then we ate our Thanksgiving dinner in the dining hall, which was next to the lounge, and also part of the bomb shelter.

One Saturday there was a rain storm. Israel received a significant percentage of its annual rainfall in the course of two days and a few people died in the flooding. It got very cold and the wind was blowing, rattling the windows. The power went out, and a bunch of us retreated to the room of the people who owned the most candles. We were sitting around in the candlelight, having secured all the bottles of wine and vodka left over from Shabbat dinner, when someone came in and announced there was going to be a war. 

Our town was supposedly the safest place in Israel to be; that is, it was considered by Israelis to be too boring to bomb. But one day Patriot missile launchers appeared outside, large rectangles mounted on vehicles, pointing at the sky. They were there for a day or two and then they were gone, moved we knew not where. We stood on the back staircase and looked out into the desert, not knowing exactly what we expected to see.

The Israeli Government sent a soldier, a small teenage girl in tight green pants, to teach us about the preparations for bio-chemical warfare. We took notes: You do not take your gas mask out of the box until you are directed to do so. At that point, in your bomb shelter or sealed room, you may take out your gas mask and put it on. To put it on, you slip two fingers through the straps on each side, and slide it over your face. You can drink water through a straw connected to your gas mask, via a little valve that you control with your tongue. If you happen to be hit with nerve gas, there is a syringe of atropine in your gas mask kit. You pull off the top and jam the needle into your thigh. You then bend the needle into a hook and attach the syringe to your shirt with it, so that when you are paralyzed and unable to speak, the doctors will know you have already had a dose. Chemical burns can be treated with cake flour.

We practiced getting everyone into the bomb shelter, but we didn't practice very well. Many people ignored the scheduled drill altogether. I went, but I did not run down the six or seven flights of stairs as quickly as I could; I was holding a cup of coffee. We discussed what we would do if someone came late to the bomb shelter, after we had bolted the door. We discussed the fact that the bomb shelter seemed to have a draft.

In the end I didn't stay for the start of the war; mundane things like work and my life at home intervened, and I was in New York a few weeks later. I would say that my memories of that time in the desert have faded, but they haven’t; the smallest things can bring them back.  Occasionally on steamy days when drops of water fall on the bathroom floor and fail to dry, I smell their heat and think of the giant squeegee and a way of life that was more difficult yet far simpler. I listen to Israeli radio now and then, and I still get only every tenth word, but I concentrate, as if the calm urgency in the announcer’s voice will make me understand. Sometimes I see a palm-lined city street on the evening news, and I look past the carnage in the foreground to the glow of the sky against the pale stones, and I am back there, where the light is a color I have seen nowhere else.

© Johnna Kaplan

About the Author Johnna Kaplan is a freelance writer and compulsive traveler. Originally from New York, she currently lives in St. Louis, MO, and is concentrating on discovering the many strange cultures of her own country before venturing abroad again. She fully intends to return to Israel and eventually learn enough Hebrew to understand the news.  Visit her website for more information.

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