First Essay- Dust

Dust

When I was nine I would look at the light coming through my Israeli grandparents’ dining room window. The cheap white painted wooden frame would let in the rays of the noon sun. Under the frame was a black wooden table, which at the time seemed large to me. Every day dust played in the light; clouds, waves, streams of dust. It told me that the table was there, the window was there, the house was there. The sun was there. I was there.

Dust in the United States is cuter; it makes dust bunnies. Two particles of dust glide on polished American wooden floors as if to say: “Hey! We’re both dust particles! Let’s be friends.” They embrace each other and continue gliding on polished American wooden floors. They meet other dust particles and they too, embrace. Soon, the whole lot of them seem so overcome with the joy of being in each other’s presence that they no longer glide; they hop. Transformation complete. A nation of dust bunnies.

In Israel the dust does not embrace. I have never seen a dust bunny there. The only thing that brings dust particles together is the violent swing of a broom, or the harsh wipe of a rag soaked with hard water, and even then they only coalesce to die.

When I was sixteen, I found a box. A sealed, black, cardboard box in the back room of my parents’ house in Israel where I lived almost my entire life. I bent down on my knees to open it. It was an ordinary box. I stopped. It didn’t feel right to open this box.

We fight dust with brushes and rags; with soap, water, and chemicals. We tell it that it is unwanted.

There is a way particles settle on a plane. They pile on top of each other and arrange into layers. In photography, little dots on a blank piece of photographic paper thrown in a watery bath chemically appear, blemishes that form the texture of a man not selling melons in the market. This is how it was in my father’s photography, and later in my own. Light bounced on dust, that was this man not selling melons in the market, that bounced onto film, covered in dusty grains of silver halide that turned darker when developed, and when projected with light from an enlarger onto paper, blocked some rays and let some through, which turned more silver halide into light-darkness imbued flecks, which in a chemical watery bath turned light into the texture of a man not selling melons in the market.

Later I found out that the ordinary black box in my parents’ back room contained my American grandfather’s dust. My mother put her father’s dust in a grave, in the cemetery next to the pool next to the shed next to the turkey cages next to the cow pens next to our house.

We are dust. Dust in the act of becoming. When we die we will, again, become dust.

Where should we go when the dust settles? God said to Abraham “And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered.” And we seed have been avoiding being numbered since. A number, finite and permanent, is death. On the body in ink, on a piece of official paper in ink, on just one passport, in ink; death, death, death. We can never settle, like that. Dust bunnies, even those creeping along corners, hiding under beds and kitchen cupboards, are easy to number. I can pick them up between thumb and forefinger. “A skip and a hop, and in the trashcan you go.” We, seed that is dust, could never have that done to us. Try to pick up a single particle of dust by the thumb and forefinger. Can you number us?

My American grandfather’s body, which was dust and my mother put in a grave, was not turned to dust in Israel, but somewhere in Michigan. There was a place in Israel next to the pool next to the shed next to the turkey cages next to the cow pens next to my house where they burnt bodies to dust. The place was called Aley Shalechet (Effoliation of Autumn Leaves), and it was clandestinely built and operated in the village of Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion), just five minutes away from where I was sweeping dust off of my parents’ back porch. The sweet, sweet, sick smell was not just cow dust and turkey dust after all. In August 2007 word got out where the crematorium was located, and because turning one’s body into dust with fire is against Jewish religious law, Effoliation of Autumn Leaves was also turned to dust with fire.

When I was five, my mother picked up the phone and talked to someone I didn’t know. My sister and I were sitting by the table next to her in our house in Israel. She hung up the phone and told us that our father’s father had passed away. His body was only a two minute walk away from us. I thought passing away was a good thing, like passing a ball or passing a test, and so wasn’t saddened by the news.

What is the difference between a fruit fly and dust? A fruit fly has wings, and follows the putrid air currents of rotting organic matter. Dust has no wings, and follows any air current that comes along. Sometimes, when out of the corner of my eye I see dust playing in a ray of sunlight I think it is a fruit fly. What makes me so sure that one is dead and the other alive? They both move. They are both organic matter. Or is it that one can reproduce and the other cannot?

What I remember the most about my father’s father are the issues of Der Stern on the coffee table in his small one bedroom apartment, and the cigarettes he smoked: Nelsons with a picture of the admiral on the soft packs. And I imagine there were ashtrays too, full of cigarette dust, dust that he inhaled with fire, perhaps dust that killed him, although my father tells me that it was old age that killed him.

When I was seven, I would walk from school to my father’s wooden shed, under the pines with their dripping yellow pollen dust. Inside it was dark. I would ask him if I could push aside the heavy black curtain, and he would tell me to wait one moment, until he finished exposing the paper to bright rays. I would slide into the dim red light, and look at the trays with their almost clear waters, where dust came to be. Were they washing away the dust from the paper, or were they washing it in?

My eyes are my most fertile dust-producing organs. When I try to number the world my eyes become a vertical collection plate for dust. Because I’m allergic to dust, my eye over-lids and under-brows become swollen, red, and itchy. I scratch and they become swollen, red, itchy, and dry. I scratch some more. Dry rivers appear then, both over and under; the delicate skin cracks, and turns to dust. I try to number the dust my eyes have made and it collects again inside.

We are constantly exuding dust. A prelude to our own death. Wherever we go we leave behind a trail of our own dying selves.

When my father’s father was sixteen, his German family was worried that the first world war would turn him into a soldier and carry him away. His family paid a forger to add a curvy line in ink to the last digit of the year on his birth certificate, 1900, and in one stroke he became six years younger, a ten year old child born into the year 1906.

When I was nineteen, I became older in more than number, and no longer pretended to be a soldier by the black table in my grandparents’ house. I became a soldier. In boot camp we lived in tents, ten men to a tent on foldable cots. Gunpowder, shoe polish, and rough fabric all made my hands dry, made my skin crack. Blood would flow. I didn’t apply moisturizer. Instead I let the blood dry. I went to the camp doctor with the mangled bloody mess and shoved it in his face. “Here, see what’s happening to me?” He sent me to a dermatologist in the central base of the Medical Corps in Tzrifin. She looked at my hands and said “Yes? What’s the problem?” “Can’t you see I’m bleeding? It’s sleeping in the tent that’s doing this to me. It’s the dust.” “That can’t be.” She said, “There is no dust in tents.”

My father’s father never revealed his true age to anyone. And since his entire family died in the second world war, no one could doubt his story. Only when he died did my father figure out his own father’s number game.

In between making Ishmael and Isaac, the first and second carriers of his dust, Abraham was informed by God that: “the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous; I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know.” Abraham knew that God did not intend to make a courtesy house call. He tried to make a quantifiable appeal to God’s sense of logic: “Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein?” Abraham’s words struck a chord, and God said: “If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.” Abraham knew, of course, that there weren’t fifty righteous within the city, but his foot was in the door, and now it was just a matter of settling the numbers.

Men in Israel serve in the military for three years. Or one thousand and ninety five days. Or twenty six thousand two hundred and eighty hours. Or one million five hundred and seventy six thousand eight hundred minutes. Or ninety four million six hundred and eight thousand seconds. In my base we had a computer program that would count down the seconds to our discharge date. With all the other uncertainties of military service, those changing numbers were a constant.

And now Abraham was about to begin the real negotiations for Sodom and Gomorrah, but before he started, he had to remind God of their special dust contract: “I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes.” And now he was ready to begin in earnest: “ Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous. Wilt thou destroy all the city for lack of five?” Was Abraham simply humbling himself before God or was he setting up an equation because he knew how much his dust was worth? Was it his future dust’s unquantifiable quality that made forty-five, then forty, then thirty, then twenty, then ten righteous pale in comparison? Abraham convinced God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for ten righteous; Abraham had a head for numbers. Was he the world’s first dust accountant? If he was, then he failed his first audit. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed: “And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.” The folks in S&G, it seems, had their dust numbered.

I wonder if my American maternal grandfather was cremated in a furnace like the US Cremation Equipment model “The Classic” which according to their brochure “is capable of completing a cremation every 60 to 90 minutes and performing up to six (6) cremations in a ten (10) hour work day.” I wonder if “The Classic” is similar to the furnace used to cremate my German paternal great-grandparents, whose numbers joined the product of a different multiple of six (6) and ten (10).

In Hebrew the etymological root of the word avak, dust, means “that which fire produced.” In Latin, pulvis, dust, is related to pulso, “to beat,” “pulsate.” Dust in German, staub, is similar in origin to the English “step” or “stab.”

I wish I could stop thinking in numbers. I wish that the key to understanding dust could be found in languages instead. One is death, one is life, and one is the act which bridges the two. I could tell myself a story that would finally solve the mystery of why dust bunnies are so in love, why dust particles in Israel refuse to join. It would explain to me what we are made of and what we will become. In the triangle of languages it becomes clear who will step on whom; and who will be stabbed. I know who was produced by fire, and who will remain pulsating.

But dust isn’t that simple.

When I was zero, one or more of my paternal great-grandparents must have given me the genetic gift of chameleon skin. Whatever pattern of dust on a random piece of furniture my hands touch is immediately inscribed in red, fiery, splotchy allergic ink onto my epidermis, like an angry tattoo. Later I found out that the only way to end the itch is by pouring boiling water on my hands, simultaneously quenching and setting fire to them. At its height, this pain is the most orgasmic pleasure I know.

Dust is a private matter.

When my father tells me that he loves the rain because it washes away the dust and leaves the air clean, does he know that rain clouds form around a single particle of dust?

My father also inherited chameleon skin.

My mother’s mother was also turned to dust in a furnace in Michigan. I don’t know what happened to her dust, but I imagine it being slowly washed away by a river. One day it will leave the continent and reach the ocean.

My mother arrived in the United States in her mother’s womb, and left it when she was nineteen. Her only sister has no children. Why did my mother bring her father’s dust to Israel? Why did she bury it in the ground by our house? Her family’s dust in America was numbered easily. Her family in America was a small and light footprint that was washed away.

Before he was turned to dust in Michigan, my mother’s father did not visit Israel often, but my father’s mother remembers one particular visit many years ago. He sat in her living room, by the black wooden table, and she looked down upon his American existence, and told him of how proud she is to be a Jew building a Jewish homeland. My mother’s father told my father’s mother he didn’t understand how she can conceive of ever living in peace with her country surrounded by unnumbered enemies. Now that my grandmother is turning ninety, she thinks he may have been right.

When I was eleven my family moved to Michigan because the dust in Israel was killing me and my father. Our chameleon skin was tightening around our bodies and suffocating us. The air in Michigan was clean; it rained often. We no longer had chameleon skin. Two years later we moved back to Israel. We too, left a footprint that was easily washed away.

By the time we came back they took away my father’s wooden shed with the dim red light. I had to find other ways to understand what washes the dust in and away.

When I was twenty five I decided to come back to the United States. Here I can run my finger over my rented black table and roll out a dust bunny between thumb and forefinger. Here I can retire my chameleon skin. Here I’m temporarily free of Abraham’s dust accounting. But in the space between thought and action, when my mind is blank, there is a momentary endless gulf that tells me that the numbers are still running.

When I go back to Israel there are no easy answers. I go to the cemetery by my house and place a pebble over the gravestone at the head of my maternal grandfather’s dust. I go and place a pebble over my paternal grandfather’s gravestone, which says “Born 1900”, the year he didn’t live by, but the one which his body died by. I go to the gray concrete memorial at the entrance to the cemetery, search for the etched names of my paternal great grandparents, and wish that I could put a pebble over their gravestones, but I know their dust is lost forever. I wish that the river will take my maternal grandmother where she wants to go. I wish I could understand how my dust is connected to their dust; how I can join their number; how I can break away from their number. The future of my dust is blurry.

When I go back to Israel and regain my chameleon skin the red splotches on my hands do not come together to form a tattooed treasure map to guide me.

But when I go back I see the dust out of the corner of my eye; I feel the fiery ink on my skin; dust still tells me I am here.