An Angry Wind

Deep in the deserts, a wind rose up and with it, a thousand djinn stirred from their sandy sleep. Cyclones of fine sand lifted into the air and dressed themselves in Egyptian cotton and the coarse wool of goats and sheep raised on the edges of the wilderness. Their bodies were wrapped in robes, their heads covered in turbans, their faces obscured by scarves held across nose and mouth so that only dark black eyes looked out. The wind whipped around them, and then blew northward taking the djinn with it.
 
 
 
It was about midnight in Petach Tikvah when the sound of the laundry room door banging open and shut woke me from my sleep. I'd been having a strange sort of nightmare, and was glad to realize that it had only been a dream. I lay in bed for a few minutes, hoping that the wind would die down a little and the laundry door would go quiet. I knew better, though. If I didn't get up and close the door solidly it would keep slamming, and I'd have to listen to my downstairs neighbor complaining again about how rude I am when they are trying to sleep.

I got up, pulled the door tight, listening for the sound of the latch clicking, and then headed back to bed. I threw the blankets to the floor and kept only the top sheet to cover myself. It was too hot for more than that.

I lay there awake for a few minutes, listening to the sound of the wind banging the windows in the living room. It wasn't loud enough to bother anyone else, but I had images in my head of finding the window broken to shards in the morning. I climbed out of bed again.

In the living room I opened the glass windows wide so that I could reach the metal shutters beyond them. I slid the shutters shut and made sure that all of them were locked down. Then I closed the windows again. .

Just a few moments of wind had left the living room completely disheveled. Papers that had been on my desk were strewn across the floor. The clothes that I had folded before bedtime and had left sitting on the couch were rumpled and disorderly. A chair at the breakfast table had fallen over. For sure my downstairs neighbor would accuse me of moving furniture in the middle of the night again. I groaned, then trudged back to my room.

I lay back on my bed, turned over and then over again, closed my eyes and fell asleep.

My dreams were strange and violent. No one could be trusted. My closest friends got angry at me. One of them threw a shoe at me, and then a glass bottle, and then garbage bags full of trash. I screamed out in shock and woke myself up.

The wind still banged against the building. The shutters slammed back and forth in their tracks on the other side of the windows. And even though the house was closed as tightly as it could be, there was a hot breeze that blew across my room, and brushed my face. I stared at the dark ceiling, and wondered what those dreams had been about.

It's just the wind, I told myself. It's making you nervous.

I closed my eyes again, rolled to my other side and fell back to sleep instantly.

My dreams returned with the same strange sense of anger and unpredictability. A young girl walked up to me in the middle of the street and kicked my shins. She walked off, without a word, and no one around us even seemed to notice my yelp of pain. I walked a bit further, to a bus stop filled with people who were complaining that no buses seemed to be running. I stood there with them, waiting for my bus, but just as they had said, none arrived. Not mine. Not anyone's. As time wore on, the people at the bus stop got more and more anxious.

An old lady who'd been standing quietly, not complaining at all, straightened her back and seemed to get taller. Her flowered frock morphed as she grew, but I couldn't tell what it was, precisely, as if the robe itself became confusing. And then her face turned to me, with black eyes and an ancient, wrinkled skin like a desert tree, right before she lashed out and smacked the first of her victims. She stood in one spot and reached out with what seemed like more arms than a little old lady should have, smacking each of us down to the ground. If anyone stood up, she smacked us back down again.

My face hurt. My neck hurt. My spine felt like two of the vertebrae had been yanked apart from each other. I tried to move, but I couldn't. I tried to get up, but I was stuck. I struggled and struggled, and suddenly I was awake.

I was still on my bed. I'd been laying on my stomach, but I'd pushed myself up onto my hands as I tried to get up in the dream. By the time I was fully awake I was almost sitting on my knees, with my hands still pushing against the mattress. My heart raced. My eyes focused on the patterns in the headboard of my bed. I tried to slow my breathing, calm myself down.

A noise startled me.

A scrape of a chair. The chair by my bed. I looked to my right. The chair was not there. I sat up abruptly, turning to the right as I went. My heart stopped in my throat.

The chair had been moved. It was about two feet from my bed, now, about half way between the head and foot of the bed. And someone was in it.

I could hear the sound of breath like the wind blowing across my ears only quieter, more like a whisper in my room. The figure in front of me nearly glowed in the darkness of the room, his white clothes reflecting what little light came into the room like snow reflects even the slightest light from the moon. He was completely covered, from head to foot in robes like a stereotype of a nomadic Arab, a thobe and kafiyeh. His face was covered, too, as if to protect himself from a sand storm. Only his eyes were open to the air, and they were darkness itself.

My fear abated only slightly as I realized that this must be another dream. The wind had played a number on my psyche, for sure. But, I've read books. I know that you can change a dream. You only need to think about it and you can change the course the story takes. Just think about it.

“There are no butterflies here and your dream will not change from your will alone.”

Was the voice in my head? Or was it in the room? It seemed to vibrate through my bones, and yet it wasn't loud at all. Was it English he'd spoken? Hebrew? Or something else entirely? I couldn't tell. How did I understand it?

“You understand because I want you to.”

The eyes in front of me seemed to pulse for a moment, pulling less of the light from the air around them, as if to twinkle. Was that like a smile?

I shifted, and sat on the edge of the bed. I felt strangely naked in front of the figure despite the sweatpants and tank top t-shirt I had worn to sleep. I pulled the sheet around my shoulders and held it closed in front of me.

“You understand my words, but you haven't really understood anything at all.”

The voice sounded sad, frustrated even. We sat there for a while, looking at each other. I wondered what was going on, what this was all about.

“Do you want to understand? Would you do anything if you did?”

I'm not sure if he was asking me, or asking himself about me.

“I don't know what you mean about doing anything. But I do try to understand.” I said. My words seemed so weak in comparison to the reverberations of the other voice. I felt like a silly child.

“A silly child? If only you knew the power that you wield unthinkingly.” Of course a dream can read my thoughts. Of course a dream knows how I feel. The dream is me. I am the dream. My subconscious is just trying to get a message through to me. I must understand.

The figure in front of me let out a laugh. Loud and hearty. Deep and rich. My own ribs shook from the power of the sound. The floor beneath my feet shook as well. The laughter went on and on. I couldn't help but smile, too, though I wasn't sure what was so funny.

There were three bangs at the floor, as the downstairs neighbor registered their displeasure with the midnight noise from my apartment with a broomstick to their ceiling.

The laughter stopped abruptly.

“They don't like you very much, do they?” and then he laughed again, but this time quietly.

Now I laughed as well. “No. I'm not sure what their problem is. You'd think I play loud music all night with the way they complain about me.”

“I'm sure it's not your fault you are a klutz and knock chairs over in the middle of the night.” The voice said with a hint of mischief.

“Hey! That was the wind.”

“Or your dream.” He laughed again and I realized that it had been him. And it had been the wind. He was the wind, and he was my dream.

“Ah, you can understand. You see the pieces of the puzzle as they come together, don't you?”

We sat in silence for a little while longer. Staring at each other. Thinking.

“I will show you,” he said at last. But, he didn't say what it was he was going to show me or why. He just reached across with a long arm, stretched out a hand and touched me on the forehead.

I had just a moment to notice that his skin was hot and rough like sandpaper, and then I was gone.

Suddenly it was day time, the early morning just after sunrise. I was dressed in black clothing, covered head to toe in an abaya and hijab like one of the Bedouin women that I'd seen tending sheep near the highway on road trips near Be'er Sheva. Only, I was not in Be'er Sheva, nor, I think, near it. I was standing in the midst of the rocky, hilly desert with its shades of yellow and white and brown stretching out all around me. I stood in one place and turned slowly around to take in the view.

There were no buildings in sight in any direction, but evidence of people was easy to find. Across the landscape there were spots of color fluttering in the wind – pink, blue, orange. I would have wondered what they were, but a small bush two feet in front of me had one of these splashes of orange waving from a branch. The small plastic bag had surely once held tomatoes or bread rolls from the shuk or a corner grocery store. It could have been used just yesterday, or perhaps years ago. There was no writing or any other sign to suggest where it had come from. But here it was, it and dozens of its cousins, rolling about the desert like tumbleweeds, flowing like flags from the branches of stout desert bushes, half buried in sand.

I didn't want to stand in one spot forever, though I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing here. I needed to walk. I wasn't even completely sure by this time if this was a dream or some other kind of magic. It's well known that strange things happen to people who live in Petach Tikvah.

I thought for a moment, and decided that the best way to head would be East. If I were still in Israel, then I'd eventually either hit a highway or else the Jordanian border. Either way, I'd be able to get help to make my way back home if need be. So, I put the sun to my back and started to walk.

There were no paths here, no marked stones or posts to tell me where I was, just hills made of stone and sand and dried river beds lined with green plants. I know nothing of desert survival. I wondered about flash flooding. I wondered about scorpions. I wondered how long I could walk without water before I would die of dehydration. I tried not to be afraid. I just needed to walk.

I shifted my gaze back and forth between the horizon and the ground beneath my feet. I didn't want to lose sight of where I was headed, nor did I wish to trip on a rock or kill the delicate plants in the desert.

There were little white snails that looked as if they'd been bleached. At first I thought that they were ancient sea shells brought up to the surface of the earth by erosion, but then I realized that these were living snails. The white color of their shells must protect them from the heat and the blazing sun. Some moved slowly across the ground. Others were in large colonies in the branches of the tiny bushes that dotted the landscape. They were amazing little things.

A little later I saw a line of ants crossing my path. I couldn't see where they were coming from nor where they were headed. For all I knew this could be the middle of a many-miled trek for them. Their line was double file, with ants on one side heading north and on the other side heading south, like rush hour on the Ayalon highway. My mind conjured up horror stories of amazonian ants that would take down a full grown man and eat him whole, leaving polished bones behind, and I wondered if I was safe. The ants didn't think about me at all. They continued about their commute, carrying their goods on their backs, heading to work or heading home, as if I didn't matter at all.

I stepped over the line of ants and continued my own journey.

A few feet later, I saw a shoe. It was an old shoe from some other time. It looked like something a 19th century European adventurer might wear in the desert. Just one shoe, half buried. There must be a story there, but I couldn't imagine it.

I continued onward, and found a glass bottle sitting at the bottom of one hill. I picked it up, and wondered if I could use it to gather some water. Where could I find water out there? I didn't know, but I figured that it wouldn't hurt to have the bottle with me if I found some. I tried to figure out if there was some place that I could put the bottle rather than just holding it in my hands. In the process, I discovered that the robe I was wearing had nice large pockets sewn into the inside. I slid the bottle into the pocket on my left side and continued on my way.

Over the next few hours, I realized that that first decaying shoe was not alone. It was one of many singletons that had found their graves in the desert. An army boot. A tiny tennis shoe. A 1930's women's pump. A leather sandal. A high heel and half the sole of a shoe, with no sign of the rest. An expensive Adidas shoe. A cheap no-brand shoe. They were not all in one pile. They were not spaced in any way that would make you think that they were placed intentionally. As I walked straight, I saw a shoe to my right, or to my left, or right on my path. They were not marking anything. They were simple residents of the desert, but how they got there, I do not know.

As the sun rose, I was grateful for the robes I was wearing. The heat was like a solid wall on the desert floor, and the air rose up in wavy apparitions like water in front of me, and yet I was comfortable and well protected. It's not that I didn't feel the heat, just that it wasn't melting me. And that was good enough, considering the circumstances.

In the third hour of hiking through the desert I came upon a track that lead diagonally across the path that I was walking, and just off the track, in the space between two hills, was an unofficial garbage dump. There were all sorts of strange things there. Huge bags of cement mix, solidified. A pile of floor tiles, some broken, others good as new aside from the dust. Piles of black garbage bags full of unknown things. The rusted out front of a car body with no engine and no tires.

There was still no one in sight. There were still no buildings near by. There was just this path, this sort of dirt road with no recent visitors as far as I could tell, and a pile of garbage in the middle of no where.

I stood there for a while contemplating the situation. The issue of getting myself to safety was in one corner of my mind, but fighting it for ownership rights of my mind was the bizarreness of this view.

Why? Why would people come all this way just to dump their garbage? More to the point, why would people come all this way to dump things that were perfectly good and usable? That was the real mystery. Is an unofficial garbage dump worse than an official one? Is this place more sacred because it's so far away from a city? (Is it so far away? Or had I almost reached civilization again?)

A blue plastic bag flew on the wind from the North, bouncing occasionally on the ground. It turned East and kept going. Perhaps it would find it's way to the Jordan river, I thought.

The mental image of the bag reaching water shook me from my revelry. I was thirsty, and most certainly needed to drink something soon if I didn't want to get sick or worse.

I looked up and down the track, trying to decide which direction I was most likely to find the closest settlement of any sort. I decided that it was more likely that I'd find people faster if I headed North, so I turned left and walked that way.

After another hour, I finally saw some buildings. There was a grouping of prefab homes and corrugated tin shacks along with a couple of very large tents at the top of one of the hills. Outside there were a handful of children playing, some goats gnawing at plants along the edge of a dried river bed that went down the side of the hill, and a few adults tending to various chores.

I wanted to go up to them and ask for some water, but I was afraid. I don't speak Arabic, and I wasn't sure how they would react to me. I thought of speaking to them in English, pretending to be a very stupid American tourist lost on what should have been a desert adventure, but I didn't think that I could pull off that lie very convincingly. So, I stayed to the main part of the track, and did not turn up the path that lead to the little settlement on the hill.

There was a little boy of about three or four playing near the place where the dirt road met up with the path to the settlement. He had a stick in his hand and was beating a bush, knocking the little white snails out of their places and then stomping on the snails. As I came closer to him, a woman dressed much like I was came running down the hill with her eyes on me and on the boy. She swept the boy up in her arms and, still looking at me with suspicion in her eyes, recited, “bism-allah ar-rahman ar-rahim”. At the same time, a man came down the hill and threw something at me that looked like a handful of white sand.

Some of it landed on my clothes and some hit my eyes. It stung like death itself and I felt myself suddenly flung through space at an enormous speed. The world flashed by me, blurring into a cartoon version of speed.

When I stopped, I was alone in the desert again. There was no path, no settlements, no people, friendly or otherwise. I sat down to cry, but I had no tears. I must have been more dehydrated than I'd thought.

I picked myself up and kept walking. I wanted to return to my Eastward walk, but now the sun was high overhead, and I wasn't completely sure that I was going the right way. From here, I judged, the sun should be slightly to the South. So, if that's on my right, just a little, then I should be going more or less the right way. I hoped.

I walked for another hour before I saw people again. Along the way there were many more signs of human activity. I found food wrapping in one place and a soda can in another. At last I saw a positive sign that I was getting close to civilization again, or at least would be able to find it. There was a stone with three stripes painted on: white, blue, white. This was the sign of a designated hiking trail. It was hard to tell where the trail was exactly, since it wasn't like a well paved road or heavily walked trail. Every so often I would find another marker, though, sometimes to the right or left of where I walked, and I'd adjust my path. I knew I'd find people again soon. And I was right.

As I reached the top of one of the hills, I saw a couple of two man tents on the top of the next hill over. Outside the tents were a couple of guys and one girl, each wearing jeans, t-shirts and hiking boots. I couldn't hear them speak, but there was no doubt that they were a trio of twenty-something Jewish Israelis. I was so happy. I wanted to jump up and down and wave my hands at them, but I realized that my appearance might alarm them out here. Especially if I acted strangely like that. I decided to just keep walking toward them as I was, and when I got closer, I'd take off the head covering that obscured my auburn hair and pale skin. Then I'd have the chance to ask for water and explain myself.

But how could I explain myself? How could I tell them how I got here, lost in the middle of the desert? They would never understand. That's when I started to get really nervous. What would these three campers think? And what would they do? Would they be nice, hippy lefties? Would they be angry anti-Arab right-wingers? Would they believe any story I told them at all? Even without being dressed like a Bedouin, my story of suddenly appearing in the desert was more than a little bit crazy sounding.

Wait. Am I crazy? Have I just forgotten where I am because I've been walking through the desert so long? How did I get here?

And then I saw it. One of the young men got up from where he was sitting, took the white plastic grocery bag that had been hanging from the side of one of the tents, tied the handles together, and threw it down one side of the hill.

I got so mad, I ran up the hill towards the campers and let out a blood curdling yell, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! THIS IS OUR DESERT! THIS IS OUR LAND! OUR LAND! ALL OF OUR LAND, NOT JUST YOURS! YOU CAN'T DO THAT!!”

As I reached the top of the hill, I ripped off my hijab so that they could see my angry face, with every intention of scolding them even more, but instead the world stopped.

For a brief moment I saw the look of utter shock and terror on the faces of the three young people, and then the world fell apart. Or rather, I fell apart. The grains of sand that made up my desert body came out of the robes I was wearing, were lifted by the winds and scattered. What was left, dropped in a pile to the ground.

And then I was back in my room. The wind was still banging against my apartment building, and I was certain that I was awake now, but the figure in my room was still there. He took his hand from my head and sat back into the chair.

“You understood,” he said.

And then he stood up, put his hand up to his scarf and pulled it off to reveal his face. For a brief instant I was able to see him, a sand sculpture of a handsome man, and then there was nothing but a pile of cloth and sand and the sound of the wind outside.