The Negev desert is like the landscape of the moon. The mountain ranges are gray, almost without color. A million years ago it was covered by the sea, and even today you can sometimes find a shell encrusted with salt. There are camels, frogs, scorpions, and snakes.
The desert can hypnotize you. That is how I felt when I first saw Aisha, the Bedouin girl who suddenly appeared on her donkey. She must have come from one of the black goat-hair tents that we had passed earlier. I had seen women patiently weaving rugs stretched out on the ground there, while goats nibbled on sparse vegetation.
Aisha appeared out of nowhere. She was dark-skinned, with black lustrous eyes, and she rode her donkey side-saddle. She hummed a melody while the gold coins sewn into her kaftan jingled in time with the tune and the rhythm of donkey’s hooves. She was following an almost invisible trail of goat and sheep droppings, left by generations of animals. The trail led shepherds to water and grass.
We studied each other silently. For a moment our eyes locked until she shyly lowered hers. But as she passed me, although I couldn’t be sure, I thought I heard her giggling.
Who is Aisha?
My tour guide said, “She belongs to the el-Azazme tribe, the only one of 13 tribes that did not flee the Negev in 1948. She is 12 years old. Soon she will be married to her cousin, her father’s brother’s son. That is the custom.”
“Married? That child!”
“Twelve is not a child in Bedouin tradition. They always try to marry their daughters to close kinsmen.”
My curiosity led me later to a journey of discovery about her life as a Bedouin girl. She would drink coffee ground with a djoron – a brass coffee grinder – boiled in a brass pot over a fire lit from a flint made from a piece of steel and a weed. Or maybe she would drink hot tea with nana – fragrant mint. The tune she was humming was probably a desert chant sung by the campfire and played on a one-stringed rubab. Her meal might have been pickled onions and cucumbers, eggs with camel butter, tomatoes, and small pieces of sheep’s liver.
Her tribe is nomadic, travellng in caravans across the Negev. Sometimes they travel to Beersheba for the Bedouin shuk, where they sell their baby camels and goods, buy camel meat for stew, and meet friends from other tribes. The Bedouin of the Negev own 100,000 acres, but because there is so little rain, they usually only have a harvest three out of five years.
My chance meeting with Aisha was several years ago. If we met again now, she would be married, wearing a black veil. Perhaps she is already a mother, that child Aisha riding the small donkey.
But I think in the instant our eyes met, we had a fleeting woman-to-woman relationship. She is descended from Ishmael and I am from Isaac, but the father of both was Abraham, so perhaps it was kinship that we felt and recognized.■
The writer is the author of 14 books. She can be contacted at dwaysman@gmail.com.