But Dorit has a lot of work. She apologizes. Got to get back to it.
“Yeah. Fine.”
Hila knows that she’s been pestering everyone here, in this big office. And she’s starting to be that person from whom, the moment she appears in the long corridor, everyone runs off to other rooms.
She’s really trying not to be. Forcefully locking up the words within her, telling herself, shut up already. And doesn’t manage it.
And she’s actually trying with all her might to work properly. Knows that this time she has to. Last chance.
Because Mom had arranged it, this position, after accumulated despair, with great effort and significant grovelling.
Last chance. Dita had sighed then. Knowing that it’s most likely not.
Now Hila is the Department Chief’s office manager. And she’s decided that this time she won’t drop out. Won’t skip work. Won’t act coquettish or pampered or give up. She’ll stay here. Show everyone that when she really wants something, she gets it done.
There will be a clean slate here.
She dresses right. Juggles schedules for Alex, the Department Head, sets up meetings, erases, shifts, politely declines, warmly welcoming the appropriate people, graciously assertive towards others. She’s quiet, efficient, knows how to be unnoticed, when required. Available and quick under pressure.
Alex had even called her Mom to thank her.
She’s determined, this time she’s galloping forward. She’ll show them. All of them.
But what can she do, what with Dana and Orr burning her from within. And she constantly tries to put it out. Understand how. Why.
Strange. In the beginning she was actually glad.
Alright, well, just a little bit.
There you have it, see? And what do you have to say about that? Look, look at your successful Dana! For years you’ve been worshipping her. And-Dana-and-Dana-and-Dana. The most beautiful. The most scholarly. The most everything.
You built a pedestal up high and placed her statue on top of it. You bowed before her. Santa-Dana.
I was just someone running around your home. Dust. Not that smart. Not very pretty. Not Dana. Who had even noticed me being there?
But then Mom broke down.
Hila had never seen her like that. Her mother, the authoritative, the proud, the opinionated. As though someone had just turned off her light from the inside. During the first few weeks she had still attempted to get dressed, Dita.
Go out. Friends. Gym. Volunteering at the hospital.
But her eyes were extinguished. Sort of faded. Dead, even.
Then Dad disappeared on her, and Dita almost didn’t notice.
“Do you happen to know where Dad is?”
She asked Hila in a monotone voice, indifferent.
Hila knew, because Dad had called.
Dad has moved - temporarily, he told her - to an apartment in one of the buildings in the new project that he was just finishing. Needs to see the finishing touches from up-close.
She can’t recall whether or not she had answered her mom then. And her mom didn’t really seem to care anyway.
Ilan no longer lives there. At the safe house fortified by his three women, Dita, Dana and she, Hila, their shadow.
Now, thinking about it from the distance of time passed, she suddenly feels that their familial deployment is a little different from what it had seemed back then.
Shreds of memories flutter around her.
She’s twelve years old, and wakes up with Dad early on Saturday morning.
They prepare, only for the two of them, a few sandwiches, fruit, place them in a little cooler, fill a container with ice and water, go out for a tour of the lot. That’s what Ilan calls it. The lot.
His company has recently been building a new neighborhood at the edge of some southern town. And Dad takes her to see what his job really looks like. No Dana, no Mom, just her, only Hila.
They drive through long empty highways of some very early Saturday morning hour, tossed around by dirt roads, cut a path through wild green fields, and reach a huge construction site.
A kind of ghost town of yet uninhabited vacant homes.
Hila gets out of the big car with Dad. Two security guards are standing at one of the entrances, welcoming them in Arabic, offering coffee and chocolate.
They drink with them, Hila’s delighted by the chocolate, impressed by one of the guards’ mighty moustache.
Then she and Ilan nimbly climb over wooden boards nailed onto concrete slopes between levels, no stairs yet built.
You see, Hila, soon there will be families living here. We’ve already laid the groundwork for electricity, sewage pipes. Look at this big kitchen. What do you think about this balcony? Do you think it’s big enough for a table and chairs?
And she, Hila, thinks for a moment, measuring the width and length with her steps, calculating the size of a table. Dad seems pleased when she approves of the size. This balcony will have a table, she says with certainty.
Then they go downstairs, find a corner at the far end of the neighborhood-in-progress, within soft grass, in the shade of a single Eucalyptus tree, the sole survivor of the enthused momentum of construction, which is spreading wider through the development-towns that her dad so industriously extends.
She and Ilan lay out a mat, devour their omelet sandwiches, talk about minor and major things which Hila can no longer recall.
But the happiness of those moments, of the sheltering fatherhood, devoted solely to her, is treasured by Hila to this very day. Her and Dad. Just her and him. And nothing coming between them.
And there were more.
Days like those. Long conversations between her and him. And he always gives her the feeling that she has someone to go to. That he’ll envelop her with protective shields, if she requires them.
Even during Dana’s absolute reign, when Hila had placed barricades and battlefronts against the entire world, shooting indiscriminately at anything moving around her. Even then.
Yes. She knows for certain by now.
Perhaps he has his own secrets, Dad. Hila doesn’t exactly know. He probably does. Who doesn’t?
Her sociable father. Friends surround him. Women too. He’s popular, sought-after.
Mom has friends too. But differently. With Mom everything is precise. Calculated in accordance with rules and regulations. Not spontaneous. Not gushing and trickling, not flowing as naturally as Ilan.
And suddenly Hila’s heart goes out to her mother.
Mom is dragging herself indifferently from place to place. White roots peering through the shiny bronze hues of her thick hair. She looks pale and skinny. She occasionally sits at her desk, writing something with pen and paper.
For years she has only used a keyboard.
When Hila enters the room, Mom quickly covers up the paper. Then walks out, absentmindedly leaving the paper out in the open on the desk. A letter of pleading to Dana is spread out there in messy handwriting.
Hila is startled. Dita is getting lost.
“Come back, Dana. We can fix everything. We’ll all work at it. It’s not too late. It can always happen. Come, Dana. Our Dana-Dear…”
Hila tosses the paper towards the desk in horror, and it falls to the floor. The woman with the messy hair, scribbling these words on a piece of paper, is a different woman. A stranger. Her Mom would never write like that.
She had never been one of those all-encompassing moms whose motherhood is an artform.
Whose motherhood defines their entire being, and without it they have no existence. After all, she had been a woman of work, obligations, responsibilities, and such, her entire life.
A career, come on.
On another occasion, she heard her quietly saying, as though to herself:
“I’m a bereaved mother.”
A bereaved mother to a living daughter, Hila completes the sentence in her head, unable to banish that mosquito pecking at her, and if it were me, and not Dana.
And perhaps exactly then, at that very moment, she decides. She’ll bring Dana back home.
She’ll show everyone that it’s possible.
Because Dana cannot be left alone with those bizarre people. Aliens. Spaceships. Existential College. Come on, really.
Some reporter had visited them there, at the village on the beach, lived as though he were one of them, joined the group, sat in the Gatherings, came back to Israel and published an article a few pages long in a popular newspaper, photographs included, about the village and its residents. He was impressed by King David’s expressive manner and his insights, so he wrote, but still he phrased his words with a kind of witty irony, a concealed mocking tone, just in case he himself would be suspected, perhaps, of partaking in some sort of mystical following, God forbid.
Just to be on the safe side.
Hila had recognized Dana in one of the photos, and shuddered. It was Dana, clearly. But also not.
The colorful photo had presented a totally different Dana. A stranger.
Very skinny, even while wearing a wide white robe, the bones beneath her exposed throat sharp and protruding, her beautiful face as though filed and narrowed, leaving only a pair of doe eyes, large and incredibly scared.
The fear in Dana’s eyes is unmistakeable.
And where’s Orr?
Why isn’t she there? Hila searches for Orr in all of the photos. Sees Eyal smiling in a different photo, Eyal talking to David, to Dori, to all sorts of figures dressed in white robes, none of them Dana, none of them familiar to Hila.
But Orr isn’t in any of them.
In fact, she notices, there are no children in any of the photos.
Strange.
But Dana troubles her most of all. Now it’s clear. Something bad is happening to her there.
And she, Hila, yes, she, is going to rescue her.
21
Hila sends an email to the reporter who had published the photographed newspaper article about life in the Existential College at Cayrona Beach. Asking to meet with him.
Ra’anan Paz will be happy to.
“Ra’anan, pleased to meet you.”
“Hila. Thank you for coming.”
They meet for a drink at Aroma Café, Weizmann Center, sit near a tree with colorful glass leaves dripping off it, they try to talk, but they find it hard to concentrate with the quiet mumbling noise, ceaseless, of the open space, and Hila suggests that they go up to her apartment.
“It’s just here, not too far.”
Ra’anan eyes her again, this time with a more thorough look (and appreciates what he sees, Hila notes to herself satisfactorily), says, “I’m up for that,” and they both leave their little empty espresso mugs near the glass tree, and walk out through the revolving doors back out to Weizmann Street.
On the way, he tells her about how he had managed to reach the village.
He has a friend from back in the army, Gilli, who lives there. At Cayrona Beach. Yes, in the village. She was a backpacker doing her post-army-service trip, ploughing her way through South America on her own.
A year and a half ago, some older man, a lecturer from the Hebrew University, met her at an Israelis’ hostel there, they got to talking, hung out a little bit, started to become friendly, and he offered her to try it. The Existential College. Cayrona Beach. She had never heard of it before, and got psyched up about it. She’s a kind of searcher, you know.
Hila knew.
“It’s here. Let’s go up.”
Ra’anan looked admiringly at the new building on Be’eri Street.
“Here?”
“Yes.”
Hila knows that look.
She visits enough friends in a variety of rented apartments in Tel Aviv, in order to understand him without him saying anything. Old urban rooms, ancient coats of peeling paint above veteran thresholds, exposed pipework in bathrooms, their walls hosting mouldy stains of dampness a few generations old.
Hila thanks her lucky stars for having bestowed her with a building entrepreneur for a father. A lovely brand-new apartment.
“Do you want a cup of coffee? Something cold to drink?”
“Just a Turkish coffee, no sugar.”
They sit in the brightly-lit kitchen.
His eyes wander across the coffee machine, the light kitchen cupboards, the large window granting them the green foliage of an old Tel Avivian Ficus tree.
Ra’anan tells her about himself. He’s originally from a kibbutz. In the north of Israel. You probably don’t know it.
Hila actually does. Even visited it. With a friend from the army. Yarden.
“You know Yarden?”
He laughs. What a tiny country. Everyone knows everyone.
“So you really know Yarden? A real sweetie, that one. She’s probably also in some God-forsaken place. In Peru.”
“We were friends at the army base. At the Kirya headquarters. It was cool. Inseparable all day every day. It ended, we went our separate ways. You know what it’s like.”
“Just as long as she doesn’t join that damn village, Yarden. She’s a great girl. Just as long as she doesn’t fall for those loonies’ tricks.”
And then his gaze suddenly turns serious, and he starts telling her about the village. About how he had gone there to visit Gilli, his friend from the army, and what he had discovered there.
Hila quietly drinks her Turkish coffee, listening. Ra’anan talks in a faint voice. Almost inaudible. At certain points she has to make a real effort in order to hear him.
She feels that with every word he utters, her heart is squeezed harder and harder within a gigantic hand, shrinking with terror.
“It’s not good, what’s happening there. Not good.”
Ra’anan says.
“Just tell me first, Hila, who do you have over there? Because I get that you have someone in the village.”
“My sister, Dana.”
“Dana?”
His brown eyes become cloudy, turning darker.
Yes. He clearly remembers Dana. Beautiful and sad. No, not quite, actually. Scared, to be precise.
“Of what?”
Hila asks.
“What exactly is she scared of?”
“Well, you surely understand that it’s probably difficult for her without her child.”
“Why? Where’s the child?”
“You don’t know, do you? Right. I left out that part. After I had already spent a while there, I told David about the article that I wanted to publish. I didn’t want any trouble. He agreed, but he prescribed some terms up front. You don’t write about the children. Confidentiality. The right to privacy. I agreed. I wanted that article real badly.”
“But where are they, the children? Has he sent them away from the village?”
Hila is very frightened.
“No. Calm down. They’re there.”
Ra’anan tries to soften the blow, and she can sense that it’s hard for him.
“Maybe they even like it. They have this big yard there, with lots of playground facilities. I heard them playing and laughing. Really. And there’s a big and beautiful brick structure, like some sort of a boarding home. I didn’t see the inside. They study there, they definitely play, eat, sleep, everything.”
“And they go to their parents every day? Like at a kibbutz?”
Ra’anan becomes cloudy again.
“That’s the thing, that they don’t exactly… umm… umm… I think that for now they’re being kept separated from their parents. They have nannies and teachers, that sort of thing. Maybe it’s a kind of educational experiment. I didn’t totally understand it.”
He’s tripping on his own words, avoiding Hila’s eyes.
Hila feels herself becoming teary. The tears land on her knitted white top, and she too doesn’t look at Ra’anan.
Now he’s talking and talking.
About the group’s daily work. In the fields where they had cut down the trees.
It’s so beautiful around there. Green. Lots of corn fields. Yams. Potatoes. Green beans. The work in the shared kitchen. Mainly the women work there. The men work more in construction. Renovations. Infrastructures.
New members arrive all the time and they need more huts. And there’s electricity. Can you believe it. Generators. And running water. The village used to belong to some religious Christian group, a kind of industrious one. They also make wooden beds. And grass mats. Not bad at all. And some wooden furniture. And there’s a laundrette. In that respect they did remind him of his childhood at the kibbutz.
But there’s more.
Not good. He repeats. Not good.
Towards evening-time, everyone is showered and clean, neatly combed, donning white robes.
They all convene.
“Why?”
“Gatherings.”
“What do they do there?”
“All sorts of things. Play music. Listen to music on some pretty advanced sound systems. Sing. There’s a choir.
And King David talks.”
Ra’anan stops speaking. Pensive. It seems to Hila that he’s somewhere far away. Different. She remains silent.
“What’s not good?”
She waits for him to elaborate.
“What does he tell them?”
Hila breaks the silence.
“Who? David? All sorts of things. He wants a lot of things from them.”
“But what? What does he want?”
She almost forcibly shakes him. Say it. Speak clearly. What is it exactly. What does this king want from the group? Which way is he directing them there? Her sister. Eyal. What?
A Savage Flower Page 10