Sting: An Excerpt from “Preliminaries”

Did he cry out? Did he hear a cry? – he can’t remember but he’s already at the boy’s side, already he’s in his arms, everything, dropped, everything, and runs, runs stumbling, runs to him, and the mule continues with the plough on its side leaping and cutting with the handle on its side, the child, what is it, my boy, what is it, but he knows already, too shocked to believe, a scorpion? a snake? no, bees? A seething mass of golden things buzzing angrily raspingly all round and waving at them with his big hat, which you mustn’t do, and with his foot kicking at them at the air, to shoo them away and to kick at them, bees, damn them, wasps, looking at the child in his arms with terror, what is it, my boy, what is it, my boy, gurgling now for lack of air and the shock of the burning pain, trying to catch some air, not to choke, with his tiny hands, and his neck, his neck, God, not screaming because he can’t, now he’s fainting, my boy, my boy, what is it, his hands seem to be chasing something away or explaining something, demanding something, quick quick, something that is beyond him, clenching and opening as if trying to push something away or the opposite, trying to catch something, what is it, my boy, what is it, my boy, impossible pain, deadly pain, oh no, oh no, God, run run, fear, crazed with fear, a helpless urge, and the impossible pain, and Daddy and with his hands and his kicks in the air trying to shoo them away, both of them one now, all fastened to his breast, what is it, my boy, what is it, my boy, driving them away, flying furiously, flying all around, running to run home to run, and the big hat dropped, running with heavy shoes, with no feet, and already, and calling for help too, or not calling and running, or running and calling, and Mummy now, oh God, what is it, my boy, breathing, look what I’ve brought you, he can breathe, how many bites here, and on the neck, and here look, red and all poisoned with venom, what is it, my boy, God what, and sometimes just one is enough, God, don’t let, breathing, choking fainting so small so small, why? why?

What did he do to them that they suddenly, all against him? How can a father have sat a baby down on a wasps’ nest? Aren’t there always wasps near a carob tree, isn’t it dangerous, isn’t it, God, their nest in a hole in the ground, and when one of them stings they all attack, and who, curse them, who, what has he done to you, what, who on earth sits a baby down on a wasps’ nest, you criminal, they beset me, yea they surrounded me, they beset me like bees, why, why, my boy, in the name of the Lord I cut them off, they beset me and surrounded me, what’s happening now, run, to Mummy, what now, hurry to the doctor quick, quick as we can, get the cart ready, quick it’s three hours to the doctor, what is it my boy, so red so swollen fainting so sobbing so, he’s suffocating, oh no, God, I cut them off, they encompassed me, yea they encompassed me, and on those tiny hands too and on the legs, luckily not on the face, but yes, the eyes, oh the eyes, so much so much, what will happen, run, Mummy, get the cart ready, wrap him in a warm towel, or a cold one, how a cold one, how, quick, quick, all in a torrent, all together, in an instant, as though bursting, both together, pressed to his heart, the child, the running, the terror, to shout, to cry out, to call for help, look look, quick quick, and tell us how dangerous it is, someone who knows, say, how far, think straight, don’t lose the direction, what is straight, what does he know, to Mummy, she’ll know, she always does, always, in the name of the Lord, they beset me, yea they surrounded me, like a fire of thorns, what a panic she’ll be in, why why, what have you done to him, I did it, little child, breathe my precious breathe, run, faster, breathe my precious, no air to breathe, on the neck a sting there, so red everywhere, the whole face the whole neck, he mustn’t choke, quick, child hugged by Daddy, quick quick.

Then he knows not how Mummy is there, he is in her arms, and people, all around, how did it happen, what is it, run and harness get moving, just get moving, quick quick, an ambulance, quick, and catch that mule and from the plough to the cart, only be quick, people, be quick, and where’s the other mule, here’s Mummy, in her arms already, Mein Kind, Mummy, mein Kind, wrap him in something, and she kisses him and counts where, and breathes kisses near the edge of his breaths, he is sobbing with pain, fainting, give him something to drink, everything’s swollen, the face, how can it be so, choking and swollen and here all around, and Mummy more to her heart, oy, Gott Gottenyu, wrapping him all up and to her heart, mein Kind, wrapping and squeezing, and quick to the doctor, the male nurse from Ekron always comes here, or take a horse and Daddy gallop with the child in arms he and the child to the doctor, on the cart, they’re all here now, and suggestions, and somebody, the main thing is the face, it may not be dangerous, only it hurts so terribly, and all kinds of experts but he is so small, lost in a faint but his tiny breathing moaning inside him, make sure the tongue is out, not to block his jaw, and some water, how all of a sudden, and why, why, and quick quick

The other mule, the female, with the second cart that went to fetch the water up from the railway station, they may be back, and the horse, who knows where the horse is, they may have taken it to the Governor’s in Ramallah, they went off this morning and they’ll be back soon, now there’s only the mules quick and the cart, and wrap the child, cold water? warm water? only be quick, and quick it’s the two mules and the cart and Mummy and Daddy, and who will look after the older boy, and run along, why haven’t they harnessed yet, Daddy runs, other comrades run, that stupid mule is here but refuses the shafts, the idiot, and they push it, but it won’t go, and they push it, and it just resists and complains that it’s tired from the ploughing and hasn’t got the strength for running, and they should let it just breathe a little and just drink some water and just maybe roll in the dust, why not, throwing its head up and from side to side so they can’t get the bridle on, it backs, determined not to put up with any yoke, all whinnies of protest, in plain basic mule language, but now they’ve harnessed it, and now someone comes running up the hill with its partner, the she-mule from the water cart, that they’ve left on the track in the middle of everything and unharnessed that mule, and hurried it along too against its will, and whipped it despite its whinnies, and now they’re harnessing her and she doesn’t want to either, all unwilling, full of protests, and the first mule that’s already harnessed doesn’t want to either, and they throw in a sack of straw to sit on and the board for the driver and help Mummy up, and she wraps the child in a scarf, with the water jug next to her, and a cloth on the child’s forehead, to shade his face, God how swollen it is, unrecognisable, she doesn’t know where to start, swollen hurting sobbing and his eyes like a red mountain of swelling too red too terrible to look at, and Daddy is already standing up in the cart shouting Get a move on, and raising the whip, Daddy, raising and whipping, Daddy who has never whipped, and he shouts in a voice that is not his own Get along there get along with you, and now they are turning scraping, almost stumbling, swerving, and going down to the road, and only Faster you scum, faster, hurry faster, Daddy who has never whipped, and now he is gathering up the slack of the reins to whip, and whips with the whip and whips, where did he learn all this, where is it inside him all this time, and he shrieks in an unknown voice Faster you beasts, faster you scum faster, damn you, faster, and he whips, faster, he beats, faster, and he looks down at Mummy who is holding the child in her arms, to her heart, unconscious, breathing, still alive, mein Kind, she says to him, sobbing and stopping and sobbing and stopping and clutching him to her heart, mein Kind, she says, mein teyere Kind, she says, and quick quick

First of all they must go straight down and the shortest way to the beaten track, and then they will have to avoid Mansoura, and hurry round its edge, today there is no Mansoura and you won’t find it, it has been wiped out, it no longer exists, and in its place there is just a road, eucalyptus trees, and some stone ruins, but once you had to go round the edge of it, and its dogs, and sometimes stones too, and then already in the brown dusty plain and dust-weary grasses, to gallop and gallop towards the big village, in the red-brown dust, and along the sides of the plough beyond the field of sorghum, spilling slowly down to where a hill humps gently, and from there to the empty horizon, beyond which is a shimmering haze and a totally clean sky without anything. And they bounce over the embankment of the railway line to Jerusalem and then over the tracks themselves, gleaming as though they have just been polished, scraping over the heaped coarse gravel in which the sleepers are embedded one after the other as far as the eye can see, coming from some distant part and disappearing in a great arc to another distant part, and all of them, embankment, beams and rails, seem completely artificial and forced onto these fields, but that is not important now, here’s the wadi now, and they skirt it and go down onto the track through the fields and speed along it, and then they drop down into the great wadi, without avoiding it, and look out for a shallower gulley, to go down from the edge slowly, without upsetting everything, hurrying with difficulty through its marl full of pure sand looking for another gentle slope that will take them out on the other side without overturning, and the wretched mules have no desire to run all the time and hurry all the time and even when they do run they are only pretending to and have to be whipped and shouted at, and you only want to weep, and Mummy weeps, and enfolds in the scarf and to her heart the still breathing but not conscious child, whose pain is hers now, and how did it happen, to Daddy, and how could you let him, and even this not much, because everything is a rush now and confused and helpless, as though they are people abandoned in a wilderness with a child, and only to whip and hurry along there, faster, you beasts, faster, and how they don’t seem to have made any progress and how the journey does not seem to have been shortened at all and they alone with the fine dust thrown up against the sun, and quick quick

Then they are approaching the village, and damn it they always get lost in the narrow alleys and among the hovels and yards and the dogs and the children and even a few stones, until some grown-up silences the motley crowd and even kindly indicates how to get out of all this, and sometimes you even have to threaten with the whip those who hang on to the back of the cart or frighten the mules with malicious laughter, and all sorts of troublemakers, until they finally escape from the hedges of prickly pear and the smoke of tabbun and the stench of sheep-dung, and are ready to climb up the sand at the foot of that hill, beyond which they will be able to see the roofs, and they will sink in the sand and the mules will not be able to run even if you kill them, and meanwhile they are still here on this plain, in this dust in this sunlight, and he suddenly moans, God, and Mummy turns to him, what is it mein Kind, and wets his lips with water, and runs her hand over his face, he is swollen and his eyes are buried in a terrible swelling, and only little breaths, with almost no pulse, and she, it hurts, it hurts terribly, and he only groans, and she, Mummy’s here mein Kind, and he clenches, and she, not long now not long now, and he tries to swallow, perhaps, and she, it hurts, it hurts terribly, and he suddenly seems to sink, and she, not long now my child not long now, and so, and suchlike things, and quick quick

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And suddenly and in spasms, as if something inside him is trying to escape, or he cannot cope any more, as if some refusal is working inside him, some resistance from all his tiny being, and Mummy turns to him, and Daddy turns to him, the reins in his hands, his face wrinkled, his hair dusty, unshaven, his shirt sweaty, his arms big and gnarled, with straw on the backs of his big hands holding the reins, turning towards the child and all poured out and leaning, are they three people together here now, or each one alone not knowing what to do, with nothing to hold onto, and shudders go through the child, his blood is poisoned, his veins are nettle-rashed with poison, maybe right to the heart, and can he withstand it, how far has the poison got, and the terrible pain that the fainting absorbs for the time being, and prevents him shrieking, sobbing and flailing with his legs and arms, and writhing with this unbearable pain, what is pain, what makes pain pain, Daddy doesn’t know, Daddy who always knows more than others and always knows because he has always read something once and he never forgets anything he has read, but Daddy does not know what pain is or what happens in someone who has a pain, and this suddenly takes him away from the presence that is fixed on the child and he slinks away for a moment towards the extra knowledge of those who know how to know. What do they know about wasp stings, about the poison, about what it does to a person, let alone a little two-year-old child, so weak and frail, and what did he do to them to drive them mad, why did they suddenly swarm on him and inject venom into him, did he touch them with his little finger in their hole, or push a stick into the hole where their nest was and their babies, where they stood guard against any invader, what is this wasp anyway, what do we know about it, it is written in the Torah ‘And I shall send my hornet before me,’ and it says ‘none of your sting, none of your honey,’ in Midrash Rabbah, apparently, who knows any more about the wasp, this gold-colored bee, the big bee that eats bees, in the underground nest live the queen the workers and the soldiers, and these are the ones that were alarmed and came out in full force to repel the invader, what did he do to them, this invader, what was he capable of doing to them, he put in his hand by the hole, and suddenly Daddy recalls the tale of the maiden of Sodom who gave bread to a poor man and when the act became known they spread honey upon her and exposed her on the wall, and the wasps came and ate her – is it in Tractate Sanhedrin? – that is it, apparently, Daddy has not forgotten, good God, the wasps came and ate her, as simple as that, what more does a man know about the wasp, the hornet, a tale of two wasps that the Holy One, blessed be He, coupled and they both planted their venom in a man’s eye and the eye burst and he fell from a height and died, where is it, Daddy doesn’t recall, maybe in Tanhuma, with the torn mottled cover, never mind, what does it matter now, nothing matters, except Quick quick, faster, you beasts, get along there, faster, quick quick

And there’s more there, that it is permitted to kill a wasp even on the Sabbath, there are five things you can kill on the Sabbath, the fly in Egypt and the wasp in Nineveh, the mad dog anywhere, and the scorpion is there too, lucky it wasn’t a scorpion, lucky it wasn’t a snake, that it wasn’t a viper, a place swarming with desolation, and the scorpion in Adiabene, apparently, and the serpent in the Land of Israel, that may be killed anywhere, a place of snakes, always, and scorpions, a place in the world, a place lacking, a place lacking place, and a child that grows up in a place lacking place, and to raise a toddler in a place lacking place, Mummy will never forgive him, Mummy would be incapable of sitting a child down on a wasps’ nest, is it in Tractate Shabbat? Perhaps. It looks as though we can’t stay here. There was only one more strip left to finish and then we could go home, and he was sitting so quietly there, and all the time, how red he is, and so burning hot, let’s hope his windpipe isn’t blocked, he’s so tiny, and so many of them attacked him, why not me, they could sting me as much as they liked, and the wasp in Nineveh, and there are all kinds of other afflictions there, the grasshopper and the fly apparently, and the wasp and the mosquito, that one does not need to warn against but cries out against, if he is not mistaken, yes, behold a man before You, my God, crying out, to You, prepared to give all, would that I might take your place, my son, crying out, to You, and a child, so small, look, in this sunlight, in this heat, with this rushing, with this distance, and not an hour has passed, and everything now is just endless plain all totally empty, until the entrance to the village, with those children and dogs and all the confusion, such a remote faraway place, the male nurse comes once a week and what does he know, quinine, aspirin and dressings, and how to get a splinter out, or an ingrown toenail, what hurts a man when he has a pain, what is there in his body when he is attacked by the venom with which wasps stun their prey, and then they lay their eggs inside him so that when they hatch the larvae have rotten meat ready to hand, and the wasp in Nineveh, this bee, this wasp, the oriental one, there’s the German one too, if he remembers correctly from Berahm, and from Schmeil, with the illustrations, vespa orientalis, the golden one, and the German wasp, such a beautiful queen, with golden bands, and its narrow waist, that begins with a hole in the ground that it finds and it builds up with a material that resembles paper, with its saliva mixed with all sorts of leftovers, and when the nest is built it simply lays its eggs and the workers take care of it and gather food, while the males are only there for the moment of insemination, a nuptial flight, or is that only bees, a nuptial flight where only one of them possesses her and falls dead out of the sky. But not wasps, they tear the bees apart. With their golden bands. To feed their young. Faster, you beasts, faster, quick quick

Bareheaded, his short hair verging on blond and in fact already greying, and covered in dust, screwing up his eyes, moustache and mouth pressed tight, he pushes the mules that cannot and will not hurry faster or otherwise than their panting walk, their quivering skin flinching from the blows of the whip, unmoved by his cries, this is how they hurry and they know no other way, and this is how they will run all day and all evening and all night if that is their lot, hurrying neither more nor less, that is all that their mulish ability can manage, there is nothing to be done. What can be done my child, Mummy says to her chick who is huddled close to her, enwrapped in her, shaded from the sun, soundlessly sobbing, and Mummy, water? some water? but he doesn’t seem to be here, and she, rest a while like that, is that better for you? But he only writhes. And she, where does it hurt, mein Kind, where does it hurt, but he doesn’t seem to be there, and she, does my little boy hurt terribly? And she goes on, Mummy’s here, Mummy’s here, lay your head, and to Daddy, almost screaming, why aren’t we moving, why is it so slow, the child is burning the child is… are the three of them together, or each consumed with their own care, and one of them is almost here almost not, Daddy whipping now and shouting now and the mules hurrying now, as they hurried before he shouted and before he whipped, and this bare plain all around, that only stirs up these dust clouds, above which the sun is moving now and seems to be starting to decline a little, and the horizon is full of sort of watery ripples, as though who knows what, or hints, or as though there it’s different, and only hurry along there, quick quick

Like a nettle rash, and terrifyingly swollen, as though there’s no pulse in the pulse, only the sobbing of the pain that is beyond fainting, because he has not uttered a single cry beyond that first, terrible one that rent the world and the air and the sunlight, and at once his voice is silenced, from the pain and the swelling, and Daddy is already at his side, already he’s lifting him up, what is it, my boy, what is it, already waving them away with his hand and kicking them away with his foot, and flapping his hat, without being afraid of them, already running, where does it hurt, ruling out a snake or a scorpion and knowing already that it’s them, the wasps, the damned wasps, from the hole in the ground, on which he had put his baby to sit and amuse himself while he finished this strip, the last one, oh the strip of the field of this place that doesn’t exist yet, of this Co-operative Workers’ Association of the Herzl Forest Project, of Hapo‘el Hatza‘ir. Are they three people together now (or four, with the older boy, seven years old, who had been left behind), or three one of whom is guilty and needs to explain and apologise and even promise? So long as, so long as, God, so long as, I lift up my eyes, whence my help, out of the depths I cry to You, O Lord hear my voice, let Your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication, and in a suddenly murderous voice, Get along there, faster, you beasts, faster, quick quick