“Give her a bottle already!”
Her mother is upset.
“The child will die of starvation.”
Dana, tired and aching, gives up, bottle-feeds, changes diapers and tries to put the baby to sleep.
Again. And again.
And the milk accumulated inside her, having no way out. When the area became swollen, her body temperature swiftly rose, the pain was unbearable, Dad rushed her to the emergency room.
A surgeon then picked up a kidney-shaped metal canister, a nurse placed it underneath the agonizing swelling, the doctor performed, without any anaesthetics, a swift incision to the breast, and a burst of puss gushed out ceaselessly into the metal receptacle, almost flooding it. The doctor sutured the wound, wanted her to stay there overnight, and she wanted to go back to her baby.
“You hated breastfeeding!”
Eyal hurled her guilt onto her.
“Motherhood doesn’t come naturally to you. Not like it does to other mothers.”
She remains silent.
Maybe she’d already realized back then that she was on the verge of post-natal depression. Mom had also seemed to realize it. She offered help. Took Orr out for walks. Changed diapers. Fed. Let Dana rest in bed.
It went away by itself after a few weeks. She doesn’t remember precisely anymore. Some days are erased from her mind.
But Eyal remembers.
And reminds.
When they arrive at the village, they both blossom, Orr, and Dana along with her. They both run barefoot on the water.
“Mommy, look at those flowers!”
Within the green of the nearby forest, colors blossom the likes of which Dana had never before seen. Big. Open. Reds and yellows. And blue and white butterflies flutter there. And Dana tells Orr about three butterflies, red, yellow and white, who fluttered in the forest seeking shelter from the sudden rain. And how the white flower agreed to shelter only the white butterfly, the yellow only invited the yellow butterfly to hide within it, and the red flower only invited the red butterfly to sit on it, but the three butterflies refused to part from one another. Because you don’t abandon friends in the rain. And all colors are beautiful and good.
They feel so good, she and Orr. Dana had never felt so complete.
This is what paradise looks like, Dana thinks to herself. No but, no maybe, and why, and what. Just like that.
Somebody couldn’t handle seeing this happiness of theirs.
Accepting the existence of innocent, primal, existential joy, lacking questions and doubts, like Orr’s and hers.
It was Eyal who had felt a little bit secluded, and complained. To Doron? Maybe Doron. Could he have been jealous? Of Orr? And perhaps it was David, watching the two one morning, splashing water and laughing on the beach, outsourced pure joy, not included within the village regulations.
And then she hears the mocking.
Aimed at her.
For the first time.
With giggles.
Someone says something. She doesn’t even hear precisely what. Only her name. Dana. And glances. A wink.
It begins kind of quietly. Almost unfelt. But she picks up on it very clearly.
Then they address her.
“What do you say about that, Dana?”
She’s busy with the view through the window. Dozens of birds in an array of colors chirping among the treetops, preparing for their night sleep. Dana is fascinated. Tomorrow she’ll bring Orr there. They’ll watch the colorful flock filling the air with their tweets, and perhaps she’ll sing to her about the merry choir.
She’s filled by delightful softness.
“So what do you think, Dana?”
She’s abruptly extracted from her wondrous delight. Feels a malicious hand forcefully rattling her, and she’s thrust into a foreign space, exposed.
Dozens of pairs of foreign eyes fix on her.
She sees Eyal next to Dori, reddening with embarrassment. Perhaps with anger.
“Hello, Dana!”
Now it’s David.
She hears a hesitant giggle.
“Are you with us, Dana?”
David asks with exaggerated softness, with a wide hand gesture of a romantic stage actor.
Dana attempts a limp smile.
“No, it’s totally fine, Dana, we’ll all just wait here for you.”
He now shifts to a theatrical role of a merciful father.
Her smile wilts.
Gray silence banishes the delightful softness that had filled her earlier, solidifying inside like hardened concrete, and filling the entire body. The throat. The mouth.
She can’t manage to say a word. Only her eyes flutter over the people sitting around her, over Eyal, Dori, David. She feels everyone closing in on her.
From now on there are them, and her.
Doesn’t belong. Doesn’t belong.
“Dana? Doctor Dana?”
Who was that? She looks at them, confused. Can’t tell apart.
This time it’s already a rolling wave of laughter that sweeps away everyone around her, their faces are erased, just bodies moving towards her in waves of surging laughter.
This is how it will be fixed around her from this moment on. A wall. Her and them.
This moment is clearly marked. From here on in, she’ll live among them within her own world. Only within herself.
She’ll be like a dress now. Inside out.
It too will have a front and a back.
The delicate seams, the choice fabric, the fine finish, it will all wrap around her body like silky soft lining, inwards.
The necessary abrasive connections of fabric will manage her from the outside.
The silence will settle within her, firm, permanent.
Dana gradually feels herself becoming their comic relief.
The group’s private joke. And she remains silent.
17
The regular group members don’t have computers in the village. No phones either.
Though there is internet here. Obviously. For the elevated ones. For David. For Doron.
Dana’s not sure if for Eyal too. His status isn’t as established as that of those above him. He’s merely a lieutenant. So it seems to her.
One can, however, receive standard mail.
Once every few weeks, a mailman arrives in sweaty uniform, riding some type of off-road motorcycle.
The two guards securing the village’s locked gate open up for him, he turns to the big house, hands over a bundle of envelopes bearing foreign stamps to the supervisor there, and leaves through the iron gate which then locks shut behind him, then rides back to the outside world.
After a day or two, the envelopes reach their addressees in the village. All have been opened.
Dana doesn’t know exactly who it is that reads them, and she herself had long ceased to await them. During the first few weeks she had still received letters from back home. From Mom. From Dad.
She would read them silently, then hide them beneath a wooden floorboard in the hut.
Those were the days when she still ran with Orr across the beach’s wet sand.
Orr laughing, tanned, slippery from the waves’ wetness, her long hair sticking to her back, drenched in salt and seawater. Her eyes gaped open at the tales of butterflies and bees which Dana had illustrated to her with dancing movements of gliding hands, fluttering, drawing amounts of love out of herself which she had never imagined could possibly exist within her depths.
She had never thought that anyone could possess the ability to contain that much emotion.
That anyone could love like that.
Before she had been banished from their paradise.
When she’d read her mother’s written words back then, she had fumed.
She had asked h
er not to get in touch. Her mother’s handwriting had lost its organized, pearly form, morphed into a display of messy, gushing, lamented scribbling.
Why? How? Those whiny lines asked her over and over again. They just want to know, please, please, for her just to tell them where they had let her down so badly, her parents, that she had to distance herself in this manner. Where did they go wrong. Perhaps it’s still reparable.
Her father was much more concise. Dana, remember. You will always remain our daughter. We’re here. Waiting for you. Whenever you want to return.
They both aggravated her.
Back then.
Whenever she wants to return. Come on, really. How do they not get it.
Even Hila wrote her back then: Having a ball, Sis. You always did know how to live your life. Say, do you have any hot guys over there? Joking. No need.
Dana knew that Hila was jealous.
She was always like that. Her letter too was buried beneath the floor. She didn’t write back to any of them.
What would she say? During the first few weeks in the village she had still lived in a dream, not wanting to wake up from it. Bright glowing sun, nothing coming even close to it anywhere else, had utterly blinded her.
The stream of letters dwindled, until they ceased to arrive.
Now, after so many days spent in this place, she occasionally picks one of them, quietly, hastily, looks for a momentary hideaway, and reads it. Can’t believe that those things really were written for her.
That it was indeed she who had once read them, ignoring and fuming.
That she’s now thousands of miles away from them. From everyone.
That this really is what happened.
She’ll get out of here. With Orr. Find her way back.
How.
Just think.
Dana hears Eyal calling her, dons her frozen expression, straightens out her work dress, her hair, and rises towards him.
“Oh, there you are.”
“Yes. We’ve just finished in the kitchen.”
“Well actually, you didn’t. They’re looking for you there.”
“I’m going.”
And Dana returns to the kitchen. She finds Yuli and Vered there, agitated in front of a huge pot on the big stove, red sauce bubbling inside it.
Guests are arriving at the village. They’re cooking stuffed vegetables. Because they’ve now suddenly requested it. The management. Something different. Special.
Dana joins in silently. By now she already knows the ways of the kitchen. Her expertise within the field has wondrously grown.
Boil the leaves to soften, separate. Fill a big leaf with spiced rice, fold its sides, like an envelope, roll. Seal, place in the pot. Complete one layer, pour sauce. Fill, fold, roll, place.
Vered and Yuli calm down.
She knows this because she sees the two women’s eyes meeting.
Which of them will be willing to join her? Be her confidant? Not interfere? Not turn her in?
Dana thinks.
No one. That’s clear to her.
She doesn’t have a single ally in this entire bustling village.
A red sun is about to set. They won’t manage to take those sunsets away from her.
Dana washes herself with plain soap, removing the smell of the pots that had stuck to her, launders her gray kitchen dress with the remainder, hangs it out to dry in the yard, dons the white robe of the village and turns to the beach.
The forest’s dense green ends with a wide strip of white sand, and the ocean’s water appears before her. Glistening. As beautiful as ever.
Her mound, on the border between the sand and the forest, awaits her there. Hidden among the last row of trees, behind thick branches of a bush where big red flowers, inexplicable, occasionally appear, exuberantly blossoming for a day or two, then wilt in that same suddenness, which she still hasn’t managed to decipher. But she knows that they’ll return. Like her.
She’s loyal to her mound. Hers alone. The beach extends and spreads further on, until it abruptly ends in prickly barbed wire ringlets that invade the sea.
The refuge is secluded and well-hidden, and she’s certain that they won’t find her there. No one but her there. Her blossoming bush, the sea, and the setting sun, with her.
And with Orr who is within her.
She can’t be without Orr. Dana feels that something has been uprooted from her body. Sometimes it’s her heart, sometimes she genuinely aches from her entrails having been torn out. Sometimes it murmurs inside her head, a kind of ceaseless humming. Orr.
But she also feels like she’s recharging, there on the beach. Like a battery. Arriving empty, returning charged. Consoled. Hopeful.
Because she knows that it will happen.
Everything is still blurry. Unclear. They’re strong. They have good ties with the police. And yet she’ll still make it.
The district police officer in luxurious uniform, a collection of colorful decorations covering its front, arrives for a visit at the village once every few weeks.
Nimbly hops out of a large off-road jeep, a group of cops with rifles following him, everyone is warmly welcomed by David and Doron, sometimes Eyal joins too, they sit down together to drink, eat, laugh.
Pat one another on the back with the drunken laughter of affectionate friends.
Everybody knows that the officer gets money from them.
David said so himself. At the Gathering.
“We have to,” he said.
“That’s how it works with these locals. They give permits, we give money.
A lot of money.
Need a lot of permits.
More and more lands are being added to the village. Because we’re taking in new group members, as you can see. And we need more brick structures. For the Gatherings. For offices. For the management’s living quarters. This country doesn’t really like to build permanent homes on its beaches. Forests. Uprooting trees. Need a lot of permits.”
He ends with a wink.
A lot of permits. And he is granted permission for everything, of course. King David.
That’s what we all have to work so hard for. Earn. Recruit. Bring new members to the village.
The new members, as well as the veteran ones, already know. They serve up their life savings, their inheritance, to the Caesar, with ceremonial joy. Selling remote lots, homes, which David had suddenly discovered after having thoroughly rummaged through their past and their countries of origin.
Recently he’s been organizing the writing of wills.
Theirs.
Each of them, in turn, is summoned before him, declares visible and hidden assets, fills out forms. And since no man ever knows in advance the exact day of his passing, when, how, and only if, and God forbid, then the group member instructs that everything he leaves behind when his day comes, if it comes, will go to the village fund.
Not to King David, obviously.
To the Existential College Village. Of course. The bestower signs. Two independent witnesses sign too, as is required, and the will is buried within a large safe, until the fateful day. God forbid, of course. God forbid.
Money.
Their kingdom constantly consumes it. And a lot of it.
During their most recent Gathering, David, from his armchair on the stage, opened with a quiet talk, gradually growing louder.
“Let’s begin with our needing four hundred thousand dollars today,” he says.
“I personally bring a lot of money into our fund. A lot of money.”
He pauses his soft flow of words, and his eyes scan over everyone, momentarily hovering over each face, which then immediately lowers the eyes towards the rug, shivering. His Majesty seems pleased, shifts his gaze towards another subject, and another one after that.
“I too am tak
ing out bank loans, you know. But we must commit to more. Can anyone commit to a hundred thousand dollars, say, by tomorrow?”
Silence.
Dana holds her breath, and it seems to her that even the birds’ chirps have gone muted.
“You people don’t get it.”
David, king of paupers, continues with a soft placating tone.
“Listen. It’s not about land. Not about expanding. This time it’s actual life or death. We’ve received an urgent message. We must prepare and tightly guard our landing site. The day is nearing when we’ll have to leave here swiftly. We’ll have no more than twenty-four hours. The landing site has to be in precise accordance with the specs that we received, in order for our spaceship to land safely.
There is no room for deviations. Even one single (single!) inaccurate detail, and our entire mission will be wiped out on the spot.
We won’t make it.
The landing site’s preparation is almost complete. A few more details need to be checked. But most important of all right now is guarding it.
Because it’s one of a kind. It has confidential, sensitive, rare and expensive equipment. We’ve recruited a special security unit, of course, professional, armed with advanced weaponry.
Securing the site twenty-four hours a day. Eyes wide open seven days a week. We have to remain on top of it every single moment. And that costs us.”
He takes a deep breath.
“Five thousand dollars a month.”
Silence.
A finger hesitantly lifts in the air.
“Yes?”
David asks with renewed hope.
From the edge of the seating row a quiet voice rises, timid. Dana recognizes the voice.
It’s Yuli. She happens to be one of the group’s veterans, arrived before Dana, but doesn’t belong to those group members who stand out.
A Savage Flower Page 8