A Savage Flower

by Judith Weinstock

  He anoints them with the distilled oil of contemplation, casting existential meaning into their mouldy vessels, a new life, conjuring up a blossoming within them which they had never imagined possible.

  And he also envelops them with love. They’re encased by support and warmth, over there at his college. Because it’s meant to contain only the most outstanding chosen few, who then suckle from his wisdom.

  They have been awarded a great privilege.

  They have been taken into the group. Found to be worthy.

  They have been anointed.

  They belong.

  And they’re the ones to join him for the greatest of all voyages. Once they’re ready. On the destined day. When the time comes.

  I saw everything developing, step by step, but I didn’t understand.

  I didn’t get any of it.

  The silent, built-in contempt of Dana towards us, her parents, has been accompanying us for many years.

  Since her adolescence, actually.

  I always accepted it with my head submissively lowered, as though an admittance to my incredible daughter’s superior intellect.

  The cash flow too, which gradually grew after Dana and Eyal’s joyous wedding, reaching unbelievable volumes, instead of the decline we had expected upon the completion of her studies and the beginning of her new job which came with a sizeable wage, still didn’t ignite my warning signs.

  It was only with the publication of the unrequited musician’s lawsuit against the King David, with claims of endless financial extortion, only when the newspaper articles detailed the activities of the Existential College group that the king had gathered around him, only then did everything start becoming clearer.

  And still not fully.

  The way Eyal came to us with requests for growing sums of money, the way he once blurted out that David, the great spiritual teacher, purchased an estate and a castle (castle!) in Toscana, available for the entire group to make use of, though legally registered solely to the king’s name, naturally.

  The way they invest with him in shares, stocks, property - he’s swimming like a fish in water through this successful financial thicket, their Divine king of kings, closing wonderful deals for himself, by himself - and we just gave and kept on giving.

  Until we stopped.

  One long night, after a family meal during which Eyal and Dana had hoped to secure yet another hefty sum of money, Ilan made up his mind.

  No.

  Enough.

  That’s it. No more. We’re shutting the faucet to any further funding.

  Eyal tried to argue. Dana did too.

  King David’s wisdom, his supreme ethics, his cosmic intelligence, everything was drafted for the sake of the battle.

  And Ilan stayed put in his refusal.

  “Whose name is registered on the castle that you’ve funded?”

  Ilan asked.

  “It’s on David’s name. But it belongs to us all. Don’t you get it? As is all of the area surrounding the castle. A huge area. Ours. Of course. We go there and stay there whenever we want, we tend the gardens together. Lots of vegetables patches, flowers, trees we planted at the estate, because we share everything, we’re together, don’t you understand?”

  “You see, he’s manipulating you, and you don’t even feel it.”

  “Of course you’ll never understand,” Eyal was awash with glaring righteousness, “all you ever think about is money!”

  Ilan smiled, but he wasn’t appeased. His wallet remained sealed shut.

  Over the years, Ilan had gotten the reputation of a fair, cool and calculated entrepreneur. Some might say even a tough one. But the kind whom you could trust with financial affairs.

  He knows how to recognize financial opportunities early and in places where others wouldn’t, you can always be relaxed with him. He’ll never enter into an unnecessary adventure, one which might dwindle his investors’ accounts.

  His name, accentuated by an asterisk, familiar and likeable, is listed with donors of organizations for at-risk youth and women, food distribution for the elderly, autistic children, and all others helpless and needy in Israel.

  And for the first time ever, he didn’t say yes to Dana.

  After that, Eyal and Dana tried over and over again. Came over for Friday dinners, birthdays.

  And the money. The money. The money.

  Because now, His Royal Highness King David has discovered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. An absolutely rare deal.

  An entire village, built over the ruins of another village, which was once formed by a group of devout Christians of a certain cult, at Cayrona Beach, abandoned a few years ago by its residents, who left behind around 150 renovated wooden huts, wind and rain proof, with running water, a main brick house for management, hundreds of acres of fields cultivated from a nearby rainforest, on a gorgeous seafront, a perfect village for the Existential College group.

  And David is always right when it comes to these types of matters. He knows how to recognize a good deal. You won’t regret this investment.

  A loan, of course. Not a grant. Obviously, Eyal emphasizes.

  Of course.

  I had already started sensing it nearing. Approaching. But I had never imagined such a quick and comprehensive severing, a motion of beheading.

  Cayrona Beach?

  Yes.

  The Jerusalem King has somehow managed to bypass his ban from leaving the country, ordered due to the lengthy legal proceedings against him, and is already there awaiting them.

  The entire Existential College group.

  Which is in no way, shape or form, a cult. Simply a course for applied philosophy studies, the meaning of existence and its purpose.

  In Cayrona Beach. At the north part of South America.

  4

  Hila packs her things in New York, where she’s been studying for the past four years, taking courses which change seasonally, Film currently, and flies over to us for a mourners’ visit.

  “You know, that’s what Dana’s like,” she starts.

  I tense up.

  “And when she was here, in Jerusalem, was she close to you then? As if. And when she and Eyal lived four streets away from you, did the two of you meet for coffee? Remind me when that last happened.”

  I just stare at her. Silent.

  “Enough. Make peace with it. That’s Dana. What else is new. No big deal. Let them live for a while in South America with their Royal Highness. Those idiots. They’re probably working for him there, and he won’t leave them even a single cent. Let them run around naked on the beach like monkeys among the trees, come on. You have nothing to cry about. They’ll come back home sooner than you think.”

  Why do I get the feeling that underneath those words, Hila is hiding a vibrating gaiety?

  They have always been jealous of each other.

  And we tried so hard to instill a comradery of sisters in them.

  There is not one hill in this country, one mountain, anemone flower, saffron plant, observatory, ancient ruins, grove or forest which those two didn’t frolic over together during their childhood. Hotel rooms and guesthouses in the Galilee and in the Negev. And abroad. European amusement parks with rollercoasters that reach unfathomable heights.

  Certain that these experiences will be etched within them forever. Leaving the two of them welded into each other in an enveloping familial seal, for eternity.

  “This is the happy home of sisters Dana and Hila Neveh.”

  Nothing. Zilch. Nada. An unbelievable void.

  Those petty little brawls, which I viewed as a normal part of standard Israeli childhoods, bickering about a shoe and a dress and the phone, pooled drop by drop into murky puddles, accumulating into a thick and marshy silt lake.

  And now, only Hila is left here. A sole queen to her entire
kingdom.

  I distance my gaze, as though through a reversed binocular. Seeing everything small and far away.

  Observing Hila in this manner, now sizzling within herself. Her eyes can’t conceal the revelry, and it bursts out of her in a flowing shower of merriment, uncontrolled.

  There is no love in this house.

  I recoil into myself.

  5

  And there’s no Dana.

  She’s alive and breathing and happy and probably also filled with insights about the meaning of life in a way that regular everyday Israelis simply aren’t able to fully explore.

  But she’s gone.

  And not because of the oceans separating us. What’s a trip to South America nowadays? A hop over to Miami. Perhaps New York. One connecting flight, or a direct one, and you’re there. With a granddaughter. With a daughter. With a son-in-law. With family.

  But there’s no daughter. No granddaughter. And this family is crumbling. Just like that. Simply gone.

  Without mourners. Without crying and declared grief. No ripping of clothes, no funeral, no seven days of mourning.

  And I shudder. The loss is gnawing at me.

  I can feel a vast hole gaping within me, and everything happening around me falls deep down into it, lost.

  No one is noticing the growing and expanding crater within me.

  I have coffee with friends. Run on a treadmill at the gym. Color and streak my hair. And no sensation penetrates the skin, nothing touches the soul. Everything plummets down into the depths of the hole.

  Ilan too.

  Don’t know if it’s me who has tossed Ilan into the depths of the great black void within me, along with everything else, or if it’s him distancing himself from my sorrow, careful not to near the edge of the chasm, after I have lost all interest in anything that isn’t Dana and Eyal. And Orr.

  Repeatedly digging and picking at the pain and at the severing, the questions, the what happened, and the why, and the how. Wilting further within the desolation of utter inexplicability.

  But of course Ilan is gone too.

  It’s been years already that Ilan and I have been running our daily lives in separate ways, yet also jointly.

  Because they always cross eventually, the paths. We are revealed to each other’s eyes at the end of crammed working hours, in quiet evenings of hectic days, together, at the kitchen table, on the porch, in bed too, and the paths which had split into two, re-meet and re-merge with a touch of a hand, with glances, with laughter, with words, events, people, meetings, with the currents we both know so well.

  Within all of those, the years blend us into one whole body, stronger than the sum of its parts.

  And now I’m suddenly noticing the lack.

  Ilan is absent.

  Not trying to console, calm down, sooth. Muted.

  I awake to the realization that his side of the bed is as tidy in the morning as it was last night.

  Since when, actually.

  Don’t remember. How did I not notice. I occasionally bump into him in the work room. The kitchen. Nod to him on the porch. There he is sitting on the couch. Staring at the old Ficus tree through the window. And the silence between us.

  A black crow is hoarsely cawing something there. Ilan doesn’t see. I walk out without saying anything.

  This is what bereaved parents must look like.

  I think.

  A border separating two life periods which aren’t connected by anything anymore. As though we had moved home from a color TV to a black and white one.

  Ilan no longer belongs. He’s elsewhere, and surprisingly, I don’t care. Doesn’t touch.

  And Hila.

  The girl who was attached to me at the hip wherever I went, telling me with sparkling eyes about each and every detail from girl-scout activities, she too is no longer with us. For years. Not just now. Not just because of the severing.

  And that too doesn’t present me with a huge wave of loss. Perhaps a dull touch of limp sorrow.

  Nothing but the great void.

  Dana. Orr. Eyal. Ilan. Hila. Family. Gone. Gone. Gone.

  I’m inside a horrible dream. Want to wake up. But also not. Because waking up immediately slams me into an even scarier reality.

  Hila.

  True, so we’ve still got Hila. And she’s even trying to help. Rented an apartment not too far from us.

  Feeble consolation. No one can hear me here. I’m talking into myself silently. Fools’ consolation.

  Hila, meaning aura, we called her when she was born.

  The young and innocent couple we once were.

  A name that foretold of something spiritual, enlightened, illuminating hidden glows over this heavenly baby who glided into our lap at the maternity ward as though from a distant world, almost thirty years ago, a bright and pure fairy, encased in beauty from another universe. We could almost touch the invisible-visible aura surrounding her. Back then.

  “Ditty,” Ilan once told me, years later, when we were still very much together, “Hila isn’t what we thought.”

  That was when the knowledge seeped into us.

  She’s no aura.

  When we began understanding what the rest of the family, friends, acquaintances, as well as quite a few law enforcers, had understood ages ago.

  That Hila has been spreading her graces cheaply and haphazardly ever since her high school days. That her naked body has been shuffled around the worldwide web for a long while now. That’s she’s very well-known. Already having been tossed out of numerous clubs in the city for drunkenly acting wild. Shattering, breaking, injuring.

  That the minor accidents in our family car weren’t caused by that idiot guy who doesn’t know how to drive, but because the alcohol in her body had crushed any possibility of reasonable driving. And those nights that she had spent at her friends’ sleepovers were sometimes nights of arrests for repeated drunken driving. That the men in her life come and go, and aren’t chosen all that carefully.

  We didn’t even know when it all started. When did our pristine beauty become a used-up threshold all around town.

  And how did it happen.

  A child who was happy to go to girl-scout activities. Who was always surrounded by friends. With impeccable grades. The kind that teachers report as, “Nothing to say. Everything’s fine.”

  Perhaps it started back then, with that scout counsellor, Dror, whom she had admired and who must have collected some handsome dividends. Who knows at this point.

  During the last few years she’s been living in New York, she didn’t even show up to Dana’s wedding, had to hand in an urgent project at the New York Film Academy.

  Almost thirty, and I know for certain that her backpacker’s rucksack contains much more than fifty shades of something.

  Now she’s here, consoling at our mourners’ home.

  “Mom, enough. Forget about it. Don’t you understand that Dana never belonged? Not to you, not to Dad, not to our family. Not to this country, and not to anything here. Can you recall even one time that she voted in the elections? Elections! Yes. Here. In this country. Get it into your head. She’s out of our league. We’re of no interest to her. And you two know that perfectly well. Dana’s a global kind of person. A woman of the world. His Royal Highness simply uncorked her bottle. Released her and Eyal’s spiritualized fantasies of roaming around the cosmos.”

  “Eyal?”

  “Yes, of course, Eyal too. What did you think?”

  I look at her.

  Now she’s sweeping me away in a gushing shower of words. Unstoppable.

  “Okay, it’s not Eyal who had put those ideas in her head, clearly, it wasn’t her either.

  It was that professor of hers, Doron Sadeh, do you remember? He planted that into her back then already, in Jerusalem. What’s not clear here?
/>   Eyal was simply his show dog at the department.

  Everyone knows that.

  Who do you think it was that attached Eyal so fittingly onto Dana? Who was it that pushed him into her bed? Who was it that inserted our dear Sleeping-Dana into this package deal of pregnancy-marriage-king-Cayrona-Beach? The Jerusalem professor! Yes! Precisely! Doron Sadeh. Dori. What don’t you get here?

  Okay, then let me explain it to you slowly.

  This king, this Caesar, and the professor, they’ve been together for years. Yes. Yes. Everyone knows that. Two peas in a pod. Laurel and Hardy. David and Dori Sadeh. A duo, get it? Shall I explain it in basic Hebrew? Them two. Together. Together. I’m telling you. A duo. Yes, come on.

  Tell me, is Dad like this too? Or are you the only dense person here, never seeing anything of what’s happening around you?”

  I wonder what sort of mother I am, and how come these slaps land on my face time and time again, without any warning ever.

  How can some professor from Jerusalem suddenly just drop out of my totally-clear-blue sky, impregnating us with a seed of calamity. How has this seed grown, twisting, grabbing and branching around the body and internal organs of our virginal, wise Dana?

  And how has it turned out, without any preliminary indications, that Eyal, a worthy and all-around promising son-in-law, is no more than a trained show dog belonging to this professor.

  And the Master Jester, King David of Jerusalem, His spiritual Royal Highness whose ideas reach well beyond world orders, though few can explain their exact meaning, he too is tightly sewn within this straightjacket.

  And I too am growing more entangled within it.

  More and more bound.

  What is happening to us. How. How, Ilan. How, us.