By now, I already understand what part was played by the well-known professor, who was married, of course (though since then he’s managed to shed off his spouse), in Dana’s unreceptiveness towards her suitors.
Dana’s PhD tutor.
Professor Doron Sadeh.
Dori.
I was one of the last to find out.
How many years did he rob of her, that bastard? Four? Five? Who knows. After all, I, her mother, don’t even know when the whole thing started. As though I were blind. Even when I repeatedly saw our old friends sitting closely together and whispering, lips to ears, then suddenly raising their lowered heads, stopping the whispers the minute I entered the room. A real top-secret gang. How stupid can you be. So naïve. Idiot.
Until Nitza, such a good and devoted friend, finally spilled the entire story, I hadn’t understood. Anything.
“I was sure that you knew.”
Dana just tranquilly tossed those casual words towards my erupting heap of sobs, after having rushed to her straight from my conversation with Nitza, upset, almost maddened with rage.
To this day I still blush when recalling that embarrassing moment. How I stood in front of a cool and calm Dana, like a street cat in the rain. Wet with tears, tattered.
Couldn’t understand it.
Professor Doron Sadeh, head of the department, and his esteemed spouse were our frequent guests.
Well, perhaps not part of our closest circle, true, but I had invested so much in hosting them.
I set tables, laid out oriental tablecloths from India, unique dishes from Ussefiya, vigorously dug out adventurous recipes from rare cookbooks. To impress them.
All for our genius Dana.
For her PhD. For her to finish it already, complete it, for the professor to stop making her run back and forth and correct over and over again.
For her to get married already, come on.
And our monumental pride when Dana travelled with him to Italy, with that libertine professor. Just the two of them. An important law conference, and of all people, he chose to take our Dana along! Of course. The Dean’s top student.
Trying hard not to give in to the play on words which is so called-for right now.
Dana didn’t even think to end the affair with the professor.
“Why?”
She asked me with genuine bewilderment.
And besides, she announced, it’s her private business, and she unequivocally asks that no one intervene.
Ilan didn’t intervene, despite my pleads.
Perhaps that’s where it was first seeded within him, within Ilan. That new estrangement towards me which is growing in him.
“This strange woman laying in my bed,” I recall a line from a poem I once read (or wrote myself?), could it be that I am her?
I don’t know.
“It really is her private business, Ditty,” he insisted back then.
The Ilan that I knew so well suddenly presented me with a new face, which managed to surprise me in its growing viscosity.
Of course, we never dared to remind her of our continuous cash-flow, throughout all the years, directly into Dana’s pool of private affairs: the studies, the rent in Jerusalem (the professor must have been so comfortable in Dana’s cushy apartment, which we funded), the regular allowance, because she simply couldn’t take on any sort of job with such a hefty study-load.
Oh yes, her private affairs were to clean us out of a lot of money.
But with this private affair, of hers and the professor’s, we are in no way allowed to intervene.
Eventually it ended. Thank God. After he had sucked away Dana’s best years, significantly thinned out the available men from her vicinity, and left her void of happiness.
But a Doctor.
Of Law.
Now a gloomy and sought-after university lecturer.
That disturbing episode ended when the good news arrived.
Dana is pregnant. And getting married.
Ilan and I have long ignored the reversed world-order of our youth, which prefaced pregnancy with marriage, because who wants to deal with semantics when such great joy is presented.
Eyal Levi and our Dana were wed, if that’s what you want to call the ceremony held by a female Rabbi - yes, female - at a festive hall in Ness Ziona, which included highlighted excerpts of Leah Goldberg, a reciting from the Song of Songs, lines by Yehuda Amichai (I swear that I had heard those same lines a week before at the floral Rightful Rest cemetery in Kfar Saba), and the festive breaking of the glass to honor the bond created there, beneath the canopy supported by four pillars of snow-white lilies.
Whatever. Who cares.
As long as the kid is married. With a baby, soon to come. The belly was hardly noticeable, though Dana and Eyal were very proud of it, allowing their dancing friends to pat it with blatant affection, as though they were equal partners in its creation.
I, on my part, almost spilled a glass of wine on my glamorous dress because I suddenly noticed Professor Sadeh and his foppish spouse, with a face full of gladness, right there, at Dana’s joyous wedding, waving to me from afar with the comradery of celebration, underneath a Eucalyptus donned with colorful lanterns.
How dare he.
And now, this invitation to drop by and see Dana. And Eyal.
Because Dana called yesterday, and asked.
The fear is now a small flame burning within me.
When Ilan and I were still young parents, exhausted by sleepless nights, surrounded by paediatricians and throat and ear infections, my mother used to laugh.
“Just you wait,” in a kind of melodic Yiddish. “Little children - little problems, big children - big problems!”
Back then, big children seemed to me like a surreal vision, one which I didn’t entirely believe would come true, when facing my pure-eyed baby, ceaselessly screaming in her diapers.
Not even in my wildest dreams.
This week, while sitting with my trusted childhood friend, Galia, I was presented with all of the tribulations which her thirty-something year old children provide her, and then she paused her gush of words for a moment and looked at me.
“Can you believe it, Ditty?”
No.
“When we used to run wild back in high school, and after our military service, you remember, would you have believed that we’d be sitting like this, at our current age, aching our children’s pain?”
Children, right. Thirty years old already.
But yes. Now I do. Believe it.
And today I’ll drop by Dana’s.
What’s happened? Is she getting divorced? Has Eyal found someone else? Has she? Is the professor back? Is the child ill? Do they need money?
What.
You don’t just drop by Dana’s for no reason.
And Eyal’s.
They’re organized. Calculated. Well-planned. With them, everything is accurate and filed away weeks in advance. Listed in a chart of squares, hourly. There is nothing vivacious about the way they run their lives. No one ever just gets up and drops by to see Dana and Eyal. They’re actually very suited to each other in that respect.
Then why should they get divorced, actually?
Now I’m reprimanding myself. What. You eternal pessimist. Stop it. Always thinking up the worst-case scenario down to the tiniest detail. Enough of that.
And still, I can already sense it. Here it comes.
Trouble.
A thought momentarily passes through me, then is immediately expelled.
I wish. That they’ll get divorced.
What’s the worst that can happen?
That Eyal has never… OK. True. So what. You don’t like him. You don’t need to. Always looks like he’s anguished by haemorrhoids. Tight-lipped. As though he were to implode with rage in a mo
ment’s time. At any given moment. Every day.
But divorce? Dana? And the child? Complicated.
And we’re actually surrounded by friends whose children have undergone this popular current process, and divorced.
Their young families which had only just begun to grow immediately slip away from them, flowing and gushing in frolicking and liberated streams, in all directions, streams upon streams, rivers absorbing new fathers, unfamiliar mothers, children of all ages, leftovers of previous families, wandering through houses in a ceaseless voyage, a heavy school bag on their back (containing today’s class schedule, and tomorrow’s, and yesterday’s gym clothes), from Mom-house to Dad-house, stuck onto strange children in new families, then half-siblings are added to the great flood, further babies appearing from the new coupling, and everyone is carried together over the tumultuous swells towards a disappearing future.
Complicated.
I get up and go to the kitchen, wash my coffee mug, not waking up Ilan, whose serene sleep is interrupted by nothing, get dressed, glance at the mirror, sigh, grab my bag and keys, and walk out.
3
Alright, so they’re not getting divorced.
Eyal hasn’t found anyone else. For now. The professor has yet to re-enter Dana and Eyal’s crispy family life, though he has recently managed to separate from his spouse, at least to the best of my knowledge.
It is also not a request for further budgets. Not this time.
And I feel shattered.
Can’t even remember how I managed to make my way back home. Shards of myself.
Head is pounding.
“Do you understand this?”
Can’t even manage to blurt out a cohesive sentence between one sob and another.
Ilan really doesn’t understand it.
It takes him quite a while to form my fragmented tale into one consecutive unit, as I spout words upon words, and he tries to fish them out and organize them into some sort of fabric which makes sense.
Makes sense? Not quite.
What sense can be made when a first-born daughter, as successful as any mother and father could ask for, well-married, with a child almost four years of age - Orr, a single granddaughter to her grandparents, for now - decisively announces to her mother such a conclusive and final verdict.
“And don’t try to change it, because we’ve thought of everything already, and it’s final.”
That’s what Dana says, holding hands with Eyal in a gesture of determination, gazing at him adoringly. Trustingly. Tranquilly.
“No buts.”
She coolly protests to my frightened mumblings.
“No maybe, and no perhaps, and no please-just-talk-to-Dad.”
She rules with conviction as she notices the tears that begin welling up in my eyes.
Damn it, why can I never gain control of my weeping.
“I told you, it’s final.”
And stands up to indicate that the visit is over.
Dana and Eyal, holding hands and pleased with themselves, escort me to the entrance, and here I am, outside, behind a shut door. Dana is kind enough to stand for a moment longer on the porch facing my sobs, stationed beyond the front door that Eyal had slammed shut only a moment ago, as he marched back into the house with blazing confidence.
Groping the front gate. Sidewalk. Car. Steering wheel. Road blurred out by tears.
My shards are now driving home.
“Do you understand it, Ilan?”
He remains silent. Mute. Quiet and staring.
Ilan, the wise optimist, who always knows how to extract a drop of quenching water from even the most barren desert, is silent.
Only his eyes silently ask, are you sure?
Yes. Sure.
I was the one who had oozed of forlornness there, on their porch, who was abandoned behind a locked door.
Me, who stood there confused and speechless after having walked in through that same door only half an hour earlier, frozen and stunned inside an apartment entirely emptied of the furniture we had funded for that pair of lovers only four years ago.
Staring at Orr as she joyously skipped around huge filled suitcases and vacant rooms.
Me, who collapsed down to sit on an exceptionally large suitcase. Eyal and Dana sitting together, holding hands, on a stone bench carved out of the wall by an interior architect during a burst of creativity.
Me, who listened to Dana and Eyal’s explicit, sharply-cut words as they rolled my way, colliding into me like a shower of rocks.
That’s what it must feel like to be executed by stoning.
Eyal-and-Dana-request-to-cut-all-contact-with-us.
Yes. Yes, Ilan. With me and with you. And with Hila. With the whole family.
With this country.
Please respect their wishes, and don’t try to contact them in any way in the future. Ever.
No emails and no phone calls. No letters too. They expect just a tiny show of respect from us, Ilan, that’s what they’re saying, if they can at all expect anything like that from us.
They have everything organized and ready. They’re leaving this place forever.
With the entire group.
Tonight.
“Where is Cayrona Beach anyway?”
Wonders Ilan, who knows the entire globe’s trails as he does the streets of Tel Aviv.
“Cayrona Beach…?”
He rolls the name over his tongue again. With an exclamation mark, with a question mark. “Cayrona Beach?”
It’s that King David. From Jerusalem.
He almost whispers.
That’s right. I too realize that now. When it’s already too late.
I’ve known that king and his work for quite some time now. I’ve also heard of his chosen group.
But as always, the events preceded. Caught us off-guard. Horrifyingly surprised.
Can anyone ever foresee these things?
Severing.
We had been told that His Royal Highness severs children from their parents. Someone had even sued him and taken him to court, how long ago? A year, two.
A cult, they said.
His Royal Highness, the King David, the head of the cult. That’s also what was written in the lawsuit against him. For financial extortion.
We had actually followed that lawsuit’s tiring development, which began with front page headlines in newspapers and on TV, and slowly dissipated into little individualized segments about legal quibbles, court arrangements and distorted laws, famous first-rate lawyers, further deferrals, and interim orders. In a space filled with thousands of both visible and hidden particles of countless lengthy and stretched-out cases which crawl along the hallways and corridors of various justice-halls ruled by exhausted judges.
“The Jerusalem King,” they nicknamed him, embellishing their articles with his photo, one that was taken secretly, since His Majesty never gives interviews, and never has his photo taken.
The photo by the hidden camera shows His Royal Highness in the garden of his private home, capturing an image of someone whom you simply cannot ignore.
Because the Jerusalem King is amazingly ugly.
Big, fat, his huge thighs stretching out the fabric of his nearly-bursting pants, sporting messy white hair, eccentric looking, his eyes hidden behind exceptionally thick spectacles.
What is it about him that conducts such fascination over handsome and educated young people such as Dana and Eyal?
Just like that gifted musician who had delighted in His Majesty’s shadow for a few years, with blind admiration, spilling his soul’s yearnings before His Royal Highness into wonderful music, investing all of his earnings in him, until suddenly, the king’s grace towards him ceased, who knows why. The musician wallowed within chasms of anguish, attempted to reconcile and appease the king, despaired,
and finally sued him.
For extortion.
Hoped for redemption, and is yet to be saved.
The trial is meanwhile dissolving into countless deliberations which seem to have no visible end in sight.
Because this King David has enrolled a well-known, smarmy and elusive lawyer, the kind who can manage to acquit even a mass-murderer standing above dead bodies with a smoking gun in his hand, as long as the appropriate fee is paid.
A cult? What cult? His loyal subjects gaze out with innocent eyes. Bewildered.
The Existential College. That’s what it is.
That’s what it’s called.
Applied philosophy studies.
No cult.
At the time, Dana and Eyal answered all of our worried questions slowly and clearly, like a pair of patient teachers sitting before the least comprehending student in class.
King David, a veteran university lecturer, an organizer of special contemplation courses for elite researchers. Only for the deep thinkers. For the worthy ones. For the chosen group which Dana and Eyal were privileged to join. Only for the most excellent.
For those refusing to tread the repugnantly occupied path, which had been carved out for them in a visionless dreariness by parents and mediocre teachers, little bourgeois people, tired, ever so predictable, who belong to a pathetic and inferior materialistic system.
Such as myself and Ilan, for example. With our feeble rejoicing in the little pathetic bourgeois family that we made for ourselves.
Thought that we made.
All of those tiring pagan festivities and holy days, our petty and murky Israeliness.
Oh, the provinciality. The provinciality. All that banality.
His Royal Highness - indeed named David - set in front of them a ladder with its base on the ground, and its top a wondrous gate to the heavens. To the pure, the cosmic, the sublime.
Presenting them with a different thought. Original. Daring. Arrogant. Colorful, making them special and separated from the dreary gloom. Because they are the others. Different. Enlightened. Their gaze soars up to the distance, above the dusty day-to-day of streets packed with little people, running around aimlessly, like their family members, for example.
A Savage Flower Page 2