—For Mark Marcus—

HITCH-HIKING IN ISRAEL’S Negev Desert, the August wind desiccated him like a hair-dryer. A few minutes in the sun and his skin began to fry. His limbs became lead weights and his head throbbed. He paused at a bus-stop high on a mountain road and put down his rucksack on the edge of a steep, red sandstone cliff. His army-surplus shirt was ringed with sweat, his features broken by a floppy-brimmed white hat.

An Arab and a Jew waited like antagonists in a half-finished racist joke, sternly willing the bus towards themselves. No words were exchanged; they shared none and had no reason to speak. Silence hung on the air, scorching. The Jew’s seven-year-old daughter, in leotard, pink-net tutu and ballet slippers, pirouetted alone at the cliff-top.

Heat haze rippled the sand like a curtain all the way to the horizon. A sky with the close weave and high sheen of a silk headscarf, shimmered. Laden olive trees skirted the winding valley road; a black-clad Bedouin tradesman passed with a camel, jerking down towards the Red Sea.

The hiker crouched against the short dry-stone wall at the cliff-edge and rolled himself a cigarette. Parched tobacco scorched his lungs as he watched the pretty Jewish girl lost in the maze of her imagination, spinning her smile, arms raised, fingers like buds.

Slowly, without knowing, the circles of the girl’s dance spread; circumferences drawing nearer to the hiker. Her bobbing toes scuffed the foot of the wall. The Arab and the Jew watched the roof of their bus levitate from the crest of a far-off gradient and disappear at once in a liquid shimmer.

The back of the girl’s knees caught the top of the wall and, in a reflex action, her legs buckled. Slow motion; the hitcher’s metabolic rate jackknifed as his brain’s forced acceleration assessed the geometry of imminent crisis.

Frozen time.

The girl slipped head-first over the wall, her calm expression modified, her backwards movement uncoordinated.

This is no falling dream.

The hitcher reached out, heart sinking; in the corner of his eye the ragged cliff-face and strewn rocks below.

He snatched her out of the air before she plummeted to her death; she was light, the rescue effortless. He didn’t even sweat.

Time caught up with itself. The girl was too shocked to speak, the hitcher said nothing, thought: her father probably wouldn’t understand anyway.

The girl, back on her feet, joined her father, whose eyes followed the Arab’s eyes, following the bus, which stopped in front of them. The Arab, the Jew and the girl boarded the bus without looking back.

The bus drove off leaving the hitcher at the cliff-top smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and waiting for a free ride.

-0O0-

(Desert Ballet first appeared in print in Finland’s Sivullinen magazine.)

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