Holy Cow

39 A PIG IN THE PROMISED LAND

Tom made a quick, rough landing and yelled for us to hurry out of the plane. Since we had flown in unscheduled and low on a private craft, it would be only a matter of minutes before we were discovered. We hustled out and just sneaked through a hole in a fence around the perimeter of the runway. We could see the outskirts of Tel Aviv in the distance, and Tom dialed up Google Maps to figure out which way to Jerusalem.

It was going to be quite a pilgrimage from Ben Gurion Airport to Jerusalem, but in a matter of hours, plodding through some dicey neighborhoods and then into the hot, shrubby desert, we had come to an area that had been partitioned by a nasty-looking wall of ugly, gray, graffiti-strewn cement and razor wire. There were spray-painted pleas for change and mercy in Arabic and Hebrew, even English; there was a portrait of Che Guevara in black spray paint and nearby a yellow portrait of Bugs Bunny. Every so often there was a forbidding-looking tower manned by faceless men in full riot gear. It seems this part of this country was split in two-on one side those who believed the name of their god was YHWH (can I buy a vowel?), and on the other those who believed God’s name was Allah. Jews and Muslims. And also Christians. Jews, Muslims, and Christians all with Jerusalem in their hearts. It would be beautiful if it weren’t so contentious. They all claimed to worship the same god, they all claimed this was the Holy Land, but other than that could find very little lasting peaceful common ground.

“It seems this part of this country was split in two.”

In Israel, the Jews had the upper hand, but they were the minority in the Middle East, surrounded by sea, desert, and a people historically hostile to them. Tom, in his therapeutic German accent, suggested they always “felt like David in ze David und Goliath story, a boy against a giant, their slingshot now a nuclear veapon.” The entire region, he said, has a “siege complex” and “Cain und Abel issues.” Shalom flipped Tom the bird. “Don’t get me started, Sigmund Fraud.”

The Israelis built this giant wall to keep Palestinian Arabs out of disputed lands they were claiming for themselves. It reminded me of the fences back on the farm that were meant to keep us animals in our place. There is something in man that loves a wall, but what wall menders and fence builders do not get is that when they fence something out, they are also fencing themselves in. Not one but two prisons are made by one wall. Maybe the prison on the fence builders’ side is a little larger, a little nicer, but it’s only a matter of scale. China had a Great Wall that kept their enemies out, but also isolated the Chinese within. And that isolation weakened and doomed the empire. There was a wall in Berlin. That did not end well. For the wall, that is. There is a fence on the U.S.-Mexican border, and that’s not making anybody happy either.

Personally, I didn’t understand. To me, they all looked like people, all part of one desert herd, and to cows, all people look alike anyway. We bovines have a saying you folks might adopt-“Some black, some white, some black and white, some roan, all cows.” At some point, we came upon a break in the wall of just a few feet and we absentmindedly, unknowingly slipped through into Palestinian territory.

A few hours after this-or was it days, I can’t remember-we found ourselves wandering in a desert. The terrain wasn’t fully barren, there was some green-shrub and wildflower. It looked like someone had taken a desert and decided to build a garden, but then got distracted shortly after beginning and walked away, the original Eden maybe. It felt oddly forsaken, this part of the earth that was so hotly contested, and it was difficult for me to believe this is where the Ur-cow stood so many generations ago. I breathed in the dry, difficult air and imagined these were the smells inhaled by our First Father and First Mother. It must have been a hard life with so little to eat and drink. It was a powerful private moment for me. It was also f-ing hot and I was quite thirsty. I asked Tom where we were and what did the map on the phone say.

“Last I checked, we were near the Sharafat mountains. Uh-oh. Seems I got some good news and I got some bad news,” Tom said. “The bad news is: the battery is dead. No map. Hey, don’t blame me, it’s a design flaw as far as I’m concerned. They say the 6G is gonna address that shit.”

“What’s the good news?” I asked.

“There is no good news. It’s just I’ve always wanted to say ‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news.’”

“Mission accomplished, dumbbell. It’s ’cause you wasted half the damn battery playing Angry Birds, you idiot.”

“Birds against pigs, broham. Best. Game. Ever,” Tom said.

Shalom was hot, tired, thirsty, and as pissed as a wild boar. “We’re gonna schlep around in the desert forever, you birdbrain,” he moaned. “I would kill for a seltzer. You’re like a damn tsuris trap. And don’t call me broham.”

Wander we did, in what could have been circles for all we knew, keeping shy of the armed border guards, and looking for another crack in the wall where maybe we could squeeze through and get to Jerusalem. It sure was a helluva lot easier to go from Israel to Palestine than Palestine to Israel. Shalom was still stewing, lost in his own bubbly water thoughts and egg cream dreams, when a stone landed a few feet away from him. We looked up and saw what I took to be some Arab children about thirty yards away from us, yelling taunts in our general direction, but specifically at the pig.

“It’s ’cause I’m Jewish,” Shalom explained.

“No,” Tom said, “it’s ’cause you’re a pig. Muslims revile pigs too.”

Shalom raised up and yelled back at the kids, “Have a BLT, suckers!”

“Do you really think it helps to fight hatred with hatred?” I asked him.

“I’m not fighting hatred with hatred, I’m fighting hatred with ignorance-it’s a fine distinction. This is how it’s done in this part of the world, each side plays their part like actors,” he pontificated, and he went back to cursing the kids out in his porcine Yiddish.

Now the initial group of two or three boys was joined by about ten others, and what had been the occasional pebble tossed our way became a full-on fusillade of all sorts of desert projectiles. As Shalom again turned to make his religious stand, a rock bounced off his shoulder. “If I back down here,” he argued, “it’s like dominoes, they’ll just keep coming, and where will it end? Not until they’ve murdered every last one of us.”

I said, “That’s totally illogical. And you’re gonna get us all killed!” Tom deftly blocked a rock speeding for his head, unfortunately using the limb that was holding the phone. The glass shattered. No more upgrade, no more battery, and no more phone.

Shalom held his beloved Torah above his head and waved it like a flag at the boys, trying to get their goat. A big stone crashed into the nail bed of the hoof holding his Torah, and Shalom dropped it on the sand, cradling his bleeding hoof. Fresh blood dripped on the old book. I snuck behind Shalom and gave him a swift kick with my hind legs to get him moving.

“My Torah!” he yelled.

“It’s only a book,” I snorted in reply.

Just then a big gob of viscous spit shimmied through the air and landed on my head with an audible plop. I looked up to see a camel staring at me. I’d only seen one in the encyclopedia, but I knew it was a camel, and I was relieved when he spoke to me in a standard animal Esperanto I could understand.

“What kind of whacky dromedary are you?” he asked. “Where is your hump, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I’m a cow from America,” I said.

“I’m kidding. I know you’re a cow. Cows originated here along with the first civilizations. I’ve been all around the world myself. I used to model in the States, had a big cigarette campaign, my own brand named after me, even had a day, Wednesday, named for me-perhaps you’ve heard of hump day? But they let me go when I got too old.” He looked like he might cry, and spat again. “Sorry, nasty habit, I’m gonna quit.”

A rock landed at his feet. “Name’s Joseph, but you can call me Joe, Joe Camel. But you probably knew that on account of my fame and such, the modeling.” He whipped on a pair of sunglasses. “Recognize me now?” He struck a pose, lit up a cigarette, and acted as if he were looking at a watch. “I call this: ‘Oh Yes, I Have the Time.’ Not bad, right? Where you wanna get to?” he asked in between a seemingly endless array of modeling freeze frames that he struck with the precision of an Olympic gymnast. He froze with one leg bent in the air. “This one’s called ‘Hoofin’ It, ’97.’”

“Jerusalem.”

“Ah,” he sighed. “Well, you’re on the wrong side of the fence; first you gotta get to and through Ramallah.” And he struck a pose where he seemed to be laughing at some joke no one else heard. “I call this one ‘The World Is My Oyster’ or ‘The Clooney.’”

“Joe, I think that’s a killer pose, and I’d like to see some more, but do you think you could first help us get to a safer place where you can vogue, where rocks maybe aren’t raining down on our heads?”

“Follow me!” he spat, and trotted off nearly as fast as a horse.