Oaks

Roots run deep

Editor’s Note: Elana Gomel’s second piece for Judith is a hallucinatory vision of how war twists our family trees. —David Michael Slater

Detail of Dali's illustrations of the Forest of Suicides in the Divine Comedy

The heat was as implacable as a drill sergeant. At least, there was none of Tel Aviv’s oppressive humidity. The air was golden and crackling; the dry grass on the hillside was the color of a lion’s mane, spotted by scattered black stones. The ancient bones of the land sticking through its depleted flesh.

Oren sat down in the shade of a Tabor oak – a short, gnarled, heavily muscled tree with scant leathery leaves. “Shade” was an exaggeration; the tree could barely cast a lacy spectral web on the ground.

It was all familiar: the heat, the stones, the stunted trees. His father, David, took him hiking on the Golan Heights when he was a child just as Oren had taken his son, Leehu… The memories of both pierced him like a bullet—he grasped a thorny twig, preferring physical pain to emotional anguish.

“Oak” is Alon in Hebrew, a man’s name, and Oren had always sulked at his parents for not naming him that. His name meant “pine”: a timid, trembly, weak tree, its white flesh easily broken. He did not like pines. He liked oaks: the ancient, burly survivors stubbornly drilling with their long roots into the basalt of the Golan Heights. At eighteen, he had even thought of changing his name, but then the army intervened, and his marriage to Ruthie, and he forgot all about it. And when his son was born, he could not connect the delicate bundle of soft flesh with the inexorable strength of oak trees. He gave him a gentle, vulnerable name: Leehu, “he is for me.” Had he been wrong? Would a stronger name have been a shield?

Nonsense. No name can stop an RPG.

Oren rearranged his backpack, took out a plastic bottle of water, and drank half of it. His father had long ago drummed into him how dangerous dehydration was for hikers, so he knew better than to stint on water. Yet he hadn’t taken quite enough water for this hike. And he’d done it deliberately. He wanted the familiar hardships of his military training to deliver the drug of mindless exhaustion. Blistered feet; chafed shoulders; the metallic taste of dehydration—he craved all of them. It was why he’d gone on the hike alone, leaving the rest of the family to find their own consolation in the buzz of visits from friends and relatives that had not subsided since the shiva.

But he was tired in a bone-weary way. No matter how hard Oren pushed himself, his middle-aged body refused to be browbeaten into believing it belonged to an eighteen-year-old soldier. To catch a breath, he pretended he was interested in the powdery grey soil under the oak, digging at it desultorily with a dry branch.

The branch pushed against something hard and snapped. Another rock? The soil was seeded with them: hard black nuggets of the ancient obdurate land. The land that devours its children.

But no, there was a gleam of metal in the small hole. Oren dug out a dark coin, polished it against the sleeve of his t-shirt, and peered at the delicate Arabic script. He didn’t read Arabic, so he couldn’t tell how old the coin was. It might have lain here since the Six-Day War of 1967 when the Golan Heights had passed from Syria to Israel. Or maybe since the war of the Day of Atonement, 1973, when his father had fought here. Or the Lebanon war… There had been so many. And even the days of so-called peace were filled with brittle waiting, broken by an unexpected knock on the door and two somber-faced officers from your son’s unit…

He would not think about it. Oren decided, for no good reason, that the coin was lost in 1973, the year of his birth. He would mount it in silver and give it to Ruthie as a necklace. Life must go on. He poked at the ground some more, hoping to find a hoard, but was rewarded with nothing more spectacular than some empty gun shells. They confirmed his supposition that the coin was from the Day of Atonement War. Pocketing it, he drank some more water and started climbing again.

The trail was overgrown with brambles so dry that they snapped when he touched them with the sound of shots. There were no more trees, and the sun beat mercilessly on his exposed neck, burning it scarlet. He would have gotten sunstroke by now without his hat. Leehu had refused to wear a hat when he was six, and Oren yelled at him, threatening he would never take him on a hike again. The threat worked. Leehu loved hiking; he loved the land. And the land loved him back, so much so that it took him.

He is for me. No, he was for me until they put him deep into the ground.

Oren felt the prickling of incipient tears and roughly admonished himself. Grief was of no use. Nothing was of use anymore.

He reached the ridge and looked down at the sweep of the golden slope dotted with rocks and bushes, all the way down to the blue shimmer of the Sea of Galilee. He remembered his father telling him about the fighting here. How they had stormed the Syrian outpost. An eighteen-year-old, crawling through the razor wire, a pregnant girlfriend at home. Oren’s mother Daphne. But for Oren, the familiar beauty of the landscape was gone. It looked garish and unreal.

After a while, he turned away and resumed walking. He suddenly realized he didn’t know where he was. But that was good. He wanted to be lost. No matter that the cellphone signal was strong even here: the army made sure of that. He could check his location at any time. Still, he could pretend to be alone.

Something loomed ahead, dissolving in the white glare of the afternoon sun. Oren squinted. It looked like a thin spire surrounded by prickly hedgehog shapes. Squat trees grew in an uneven circle around the structure.

Oren hurried on, glad for the distraction of curiosity. The structure must be an abandoned Syrian outpost. There were many of those scattered around the borderland. Some had been transformed into tourist attractions or vista points. He couldn’t remember any here, though.

He was right; it was an outpost. On the barren hillside, there were remnants of a concrete bunker, its locked door scribbled over with faded graffiti in Arabic and Hebrew. The hedgehog shapes were anti-tank defenses, rusty and bent. The spire was mysterious—an ugly bare concrete thing stabbing into the boiling sky. It looked like somebody had started building a memorial and abandoned it halfway—another white elephant of the tourist bureaucracy. The outpost was perched above a sheer drop, and there was a bent barbed-wire fence with signs warning of landmines.

Oren came closer to the bunker. The door was secured with rusty spars. There were more shells scattered around it. They clanged under his footsteps like coins dropped into a beggar’s bowl.

He circled the bunker that was roughly triangular, sunken into the powdery soil. There was a tiny, barred window. Oren peered through.

A face looked back at him.

He jumped back with a curse. Cupping his hands around the window, he looked again and saw—nothing. Oren took out his cellphone, turned on the flashlight, and tried to shine it through. The bare concrete floor was littered with some unidentifiable rubbish. More graffiti. Not enough room for a mouse to hide.

It was then that Oren realized that he was in real danger of a heatstroke. The trees that ringed the outpost offered some shade. Leaning against a crouching bole, he drank as much of his tepid water as he could reasonably spare. He still had to get back to his car.

He closed his eyes, trying to reconstruct what he’d seen—or rather, what he thought he’d seen. Oren believed neither in ghosts nor in God, but he was curious about the hidden pathways of his mind. This would be the first time in his life he had a hallucination. Even under fire in Lebanon, he’d seen the world exactly the way it was: pitiless, indifferent, and bright.

The ghostly face had not been ghostly pale. In fact, it had a strange texture; not like human skin at all, but fissured, knotted, and bumpy. It had tiny eyes like holes in the wood and a crack-like mouth. That was it! Oren almost smiled, having solved the mystery. An afterimage. He’d looked at oaks for too long and somehow an imprint of their knobby trunks superimposed itself on the window of the bunker. He was staring at another oak right now.

No, that wasn’t right. Oren looked around, frowning. But he couldn’t deny his own eyes. The trees that ringed the outpost were, without an exception, Tabor oaks.

That was peculiar. Almost all abandoned Syrian outposts were surrounded by trees, but they were eucalypti. There was a story attached to that: In the 1960s, the Israeli spy in Syria, Eli Cohen, had somehow convinced the Syrian military to plant them around the outposts on the Golan Heights, thus enabling the Israeli army to pinpoint their locations. But Oren had never heard of oaks being used in such a way.

He knocked on the hard trunk to make sure it was really there, but even if he were sunstruck and hallucinating, he would not confuse a delicate eucalyptus and a burly oak.

As if in response to his knock, from inside the bunker came a series of sharp blows.

Oren jumped up and rushed back to the tiny window. Again, there was nothing to be seen except… The rubbish-strewn floor was shaking and buckling, the old concrete cracking in long fissures.

An earthquake! Oren backed away from the building. Tremors were not unusual here, as the tectonic plates clashed and ground against each other like the tribes who crawled on top of them.

But no, the ground was steady. The whispering noise was the tree branches tossing in the wind, not the rumble of the Syrian-African rift waking up from its ancient slumber.

Only, there was no wind.

The bunker exploded.

Oren automatically fell onto the ground and rolled up, protecting his head with his arms. A rain of concrete fragments and clods of earth fell around him, but he knew from the sound and the stray piece of debris that hit him that it was not a proper blow up. It was not old ammunition suddenly remembering that its purpose was to kill people. If it were, he would be already dead.

So, what the hell was it?

When the patter subsided, he cautiously lifted his head.

The bunker had cracked open like a broken egg, and rising from its remnants was a leathery grey stump, lumpy and misshapen. When it reached the height of a man, its top split into branches, and those grabbed the air with the knobby fingers of twigs. It grew impossibly fast like a tree in a dream. But it had the uncompromising solidity of the real. There was a smell too: a stench of burning, hot metal and blood mixed with the familiar tart aroma of Mediterranean vegetation.

The tree in the bunker shuddered. The bare twigs sprouted leaves. But these were not green. Thin, sharp-edged strips of pale flesh, they dripped heavy scarlet drops into the dust. The branches strained, reaching toward Oren. A swelling formed under the canopy in the middle of the trunk. It looked like a burl, like a tree cancer, but it kept growing, ballooning, and finally, it separated itself from the trunk, lunging forward on the corded neck of wooden filaments.

Two holes opened in the bark and filled with blood that ran down the corrugated cheeks. Below them, the bark twitched and quavered and finally tore. A gaping slit resulted, but no sound issued from the wooden lips. The trunk struggled to break free but was anchored to the soil by the distended veins of the roots.

The ground shook again. Roots were pushing the soil up, running from the surrounding oaks to the tree in the bunker, covering the whole area of the outpost in the network of bulging cords. The trees convulsed, their leathery leaves raining upon the ground. Faces grew on the trunks like clusters of cancerous grapes.

Oren staggered away from the oaks, but there was nowhere to go. He was surrounded. Just like his son when a military exercise turned into a deadly trap.

The sky burned with the fire of sunset, and their contorted black silhouettes lashed impotently against the scarlet and the gold. Oren addressed the oak nearest to him. It had the face of a young man pockmarked with shrapnel holes and was missing one eye. Blood sap was seeping from the hole, and the face’s wooden mouth was gaping in a perpetual mute scream.

“You are caught here,” said the oak man. “Perhaps they forgot to tell you the war is over.”

Except it was not and never would be.

“You must pay the passage,” the oak man said. “But soldiers are not paid, are they? We fight for our land. For our honor. For our families. And then we fight because there is nothing else that we can do.”

Oren put the coin down where the oak man’s roots gripped the broken concrete. The light was bad, but he saw dark stains wetting the powdery dust as a viscous liquid bubbled up from the cracks. “I know it’s an enemy coin,” he said, “but do they care in the underworld?”

The trees looked on; their faces did not disappear; the twig fingers clawed the air. But when he shouldered his way between two oaks, they let him go.

Oren walked down the trail, wiping sweat from his forehead. It occurred to him that the oak soldiers may have been Syrians, but what difference did it make?

He looked back only once and saw the outpost disappearing behind the brow of the hill, dissolving in the rapidly falling Mediterranean dusk. The trees were indistinct masses against the mauve sky like a crowd of weary marchers slumping down to rest.

When he saw his car parked in the empty lot below the trail, Oren’s cellphone rang. He squinted at the display. It was his father. Sighing, he took the call.

“What’s up, Dad?”

“Where are you?” his father asked, sounding agitated. “Ruthie called, and she said…”

“I just needed to be alone,” Oren told him. “Your grandson is buried. The shiva is over. Don’t I have the right to be on my own?”

“Your family needs you!”

“I know. And my country needs me. And the army needs me. Even oaks need me. Alon ha-Tavor. The oaks of Tabor—they also need something from me.”

“Oaks?”

“Never mind.” Oren unlocked his car. “Tell Ruthie I’m on my way back.”

“You are on the Golan Heights.” It was not a question.

“I am.”

“Listen,” his father said, then hesitated. But there was something in his voice that gave Oren pause, something portentous. His father was unsentimental and tough, but the death of his firstborn grandson had been a hard blow.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he finally said. “I should have told you long ago, but I did not want Leehu to feel… different. To feel that I treated him differently from your sisters’ kids.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know you were born three months after I married your mother.”

Oren snorted.

“Who cares? Seriously, Dad, why do you think it matters?”

Oren heard a voice in the background. His mother’s: “Tell him!”

“But Daphne…”

“Tell him!”

“This is not the right time…”

“It is.”

Oren leaned against the car, looking up at the jagged edge of the heights studded with low trees. “Okay, out with it,” he said. “But forget this nonsense about the date of the wedding. I knew Mum was pregnant when you guys got married. Nobody gives a shit about this, even in your generation, let alone in… in Leehu’s.”

“Yes,” his father said. “She was pregnant. But not by me.”

Oren’s heart skipped a beat. “What?”

“We fought on the Golan. I had a best friend. You know how it is. My buddy.”

“Yes, I know.”

Leehu’s buddy, sitting with the family during the shiva, his face swollen with tears.

“He had a pregnant girlfriend. He was wounded. I was with him when… Shrapnel. They couldn’t even evacuate.”

Oren could imagine it very vividly. The intestines, falling out of the opened-up stomach, trailing on the ground like the roots of a tree…

“He asked me to take care of her.”

Oren swallowed and closed his eyes. “I understand,” he said. “I understand, Daddy.”

Going back home after war; lying in bed with your buddy’s girlfriend; your hand on her belly; lying with her in your friend’s place.

“It’s Okay,” Oren promised. He took in a deep breath. “Tell Mum I’ll be home soon.” He was about to end the call when, on impulse, he asked, “What was his name? My…” He didn’t want to say father. David was his father. But maybe soldiers who shared life and death could also share fatherhood.

“Alon,” his father told him. “His name was Alon.”

Born in Ukraine and currently residing in California, Elana Gomel is an academic, an award-winning writer, and a professional nomad. She is well-known in the academy for her work on speculative fiction and narrative theory. Twelve years ago, she published her first fantasy novel and has never looked back. She is the author of more than a hundred short stories, two collections, several novellas, and eight novels. She writes dark fantasy, dark SF, fairy tales, and hard-to-classify dreamlike stories. Her latest novel Nine Levels is out now.

✡︎

What are five tiny delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?

1. A cup of very strong black coffee in the morning.

2. Remembering my dream from last night and writing it down while having the said cup of coffee (all my stories and novels have their origin in dreams)

3. Looking at my bookshelves (real or virtual) and realizing I will never run out of books to read.

4. A former student showing up on social media and telling me that they still remember a class I taught.

5. Packing for an upcoming trip.

What are five tiny JEWISH delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?

1. The smell of orange groves in the hot dusk of Tel Aviv.

2. Real pita and hummus (preferably in Jaffa)

3. Hearing Hebrew in the streets of London

4. Ladino and Mizrahi music

5. Rereading Jean Amery's essay "On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew"