Look, I sort of knew and didn’t know what was happening to me.
Of course we went to the Wailing Wall when me and Abigail were kids. I thought those Orthodox guys in their long grimy coats looked like black unicorns with those boxes on their heads.
‘More like bogeymen,’ Abigail said.
‘That’s the Torah in there.’ My father acted offended. ‘Tefillin is our sign to remember that God led us out of Egypt. It’s like the airplane’s black box; it’s the signal of a Jew’s devotion.’
We all watched the herd of black unicorns pitching back and forth on the spot.
My mother scoffed. ‘Those ultra-religious always cheat on their wives.’
‘Don’t let them hear you say that.’
‘Oooooh, shaking in my booties, look at me,’ my mother said.
My mother made Abigail laugh.
I did not pack any pills. I forgot to pack my pills on purpose. I knew my breathing was laboured – extrinsic, mechanic. I pulsed Barbra’s hand on repeat, on repeat.
Abigail wrote back: WTF? Call Dad. Are u not ok?
I manhandled my phone and shoved it away.
The road down here was stained with clouds of exhaust. Filipino families with strollers crossed the streets. It didn’t seem like the beach was anywhere near. Smears of bird shit fell on open-toed feet. Crooked blood between toes, sandals twisted up legs.
Abbi, I thought, I’m surrendering.
‘Home,’ Barbra said. She took her hand away from me.
The schmuck was too silent. Cuckoo meant insane.
Then our cab stopped at the lights in front of a circular park. It was full of Black people standing around. Barbra roughly crawled over my lap.
‘Yo!’ she screamed out the window. ‘This is where my Darfuri bruhs at!’
People waved at our taxi. Barbra yelled out their names. Her breasts over my head, her skirt in my face. At the far end of the park, I saw sun-drenched orange tents. Sheets flapping and hanging over a slide. Open boxes of fruit in the sun in a dry wading pool. An oversized cast-iron pot smoked on a grate.
The schmuck tapped my shoulder behind her. ‘The rest of them are in Holot,’ he said quietly. ‘A concentration camp.’
Our taxi kept driving around the park. Barbra, exhilarated, returned to her place on the back seat.
In Israel, she’d said, they treat us like dogs.
Darfur was a place of genocide.
I remembered my Grade 7 teacher showing us slides of starving Ethiopian kids.
Operation Solomon was a miracle, my dad chanted.
Ka-Tzetnik was a diagnosed schizophrenic, Sugarman recounted.
For I have also been a stranger in a strange land, a voice landed.
‘Are you okay?’ Barbra said to me, dripping sweat.
I needed her hand. I found it again and I squeezed. She kept looking behind her through the rear window at all the people back there encamped. I thumbed Holot on my phone. Open-air detention centre in the Negev, it said. Thousands of African asylum seekers have been sent to the prison. They have no life there. They are languishing.
Suddenly I knew it was KZ, the Auschwitz survivor, who whispered in my ear: See from where she was flung. See from whence she came.