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Far from Sidon
translated from the Hebrew by Alan Sacks

At the "Cedars Hotel" in Metula, watching the color television in the evening. Behind me, near the reception desk, army spokesmen are shouting to their superiors and children. They have to shout because it's a long distance to army headquarters back in Tel Aviv. I hear bits of conversation, personal matters. The names of children suddenly breaking into a technical report.

A Maronite girl from the neighboring village scurries about the lobby. She speaks flawless Hebrew and knows to laugh demurely at the officer's dirty jokes. "It hasn't been easy these eight years, pal," the proprietor tells an astonished officer. "But she didn't know a word of Hebrew when I brought her here. She hadn't seen soap and didn't recognize a toothbrush. Now she says "Metulan" perfectly, not like you fly-by-night guests who wrongly say "Metulist." "One time," says the congenial proprietor, "we were Metulan shopkeepers. That was a long time ago. Now Metula is growing."

I have some free time until the evening news comes on so I go for a walk around the Moshava. A soldier stuck at the "nipple" gate can now find military lodging in Metula. Plain and rough but comfortable. The golden days in hotels and kibbutz guest-houses are gone. Now it's clean, spartan quarters lovingly provided by Soldiers' Welfare. If the roads are blocked or snow has piled up or sabotage has made the route impassible, you can pass the night at this pleasant Moshava. The drooping cedars in the residential gardens haven't grown in the past 10 years. But there are more roads. Streets light shine, the sidewalks have been widened and the business center, down near the police station, is expanding.

I remember a wonderful radio show I heard some years ago. "Far from Sidon" it was called, by the author Yehoshua Kenaz, as I recall. Or perhaps I'm mistaken. I'm just a confused reserve soldier and it's been a long time since then. In this small hotel one night in the Metula that used to be, at the tip of the "finger," something unseen is happening to the people sitting there. Could the writer have sat in the Cedars Hotel's lobby just as I am? Did he see the curtains open and a meal served to the UN officers, those envoys from distance worlds? Did he see, as I do, announcers from "The Voice of Hope" in foreign blue jeans and blond hair? And who dreamed then of a protracted war, a border terminal and a thriving drug trade? There might have been a few smugglers, but everything was strictly secret. Ten years separating one world from another.

On the bypass road around the Moshava, groaning vehicles ascend into southern Lebanon. Traffic is heavy even at night. Troops go in and come out, and there is a feeling that their place, on the route to the "nipple" gate near Metula, is the center of the universe. The men sit stony-faced in their open "safari" buses. Each strains under a flak jacket and heavy helmet. Some of them will continue to Tel Aviv, still wearing their ski masks and Canadian ski boots.

My ears hear shouts, curses, curt orders. The convoy bound for Nabbatiya is forming up below. It's time to hurry. Those entering the gate now are troops from Sidon. Has it really been only 10 years? Is Sidon really so close? Why, the very name "Far From Sidon" had expressed the illusion of unsurpassable distance, of an impossible achievement and dreams never to be realized. But it wasn't only Sidon, taken from large colored maps and school books, mentioned on the ethereal radio show. No, Metula itself was the final, unreachable, forgotten point of the fringe of our land of Israel books. A place so far that it existed beyond the bounds of "from Dan to Be'er Sheva."

The news has come on in the Cedars Hotel television room. The army spokesmen, who for some reason strike me as bank directors on reserve duty, exchange short comments as though they know more than appears on the news. I close my eyes and hear the magnificent lyrical lines spouted by Kenaz's characters. That fantastic program lives and breathes around me, as true now as then. Only one thing must be corrected. Ten years have passed, and we no longer are far from Sidon.


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