Allowed Eyal to elaborate further and further, praise and glorify the group and its abilities, amused himself a little by pretending to be a pensive doubter, not entirely sure about it all. Asked, are you certain?
And the drained Eyal continued sailing away with his praises, until Jacob had almost felt a tinge of compassion towards him. And consented.
After two days, they left for the village on a flight from Bogota, which then continued onto a ride in an off-road vehicle from the derelict airport where they had landed.
They arrived at the village exhausted.
“Everyone, this is Jacob.”
Eyal says to the donners of white robes, sitting on the mats and rugs at the feet of His Royal Highness during the Gathering. David looks him up and down with an appreciative gaze, and adds with a smile, “The beautiful Jacob.”
And that’s how everyone in the village has called him since.
The beautiful Jacob.
He spots Dana immediately. At his first Gathering. Though she’s sitting on the side, recoiled and reducing herself against the wall, at the edge of the row before last.
Jacob notices her, perhaps specifically because of her having reduced herself. A kind of foetal position of an emaciated body, dressed in a white robe much bigger than its dimensions, flowing black hair covering the shoulders. He focuses his eyes on her, and when he’s introduced to the group, she slightly lifts her head in order to see, and he finds himself staring at the pair of frightened doe eyes, same as in the photo.
That gaze pounds into him strongly.
He now feels a new determination sizzling within him.
“Can I go rest for a bit?”
He asks Eyal after the music, and the reception, and the group’s welcoming of the new member.
“Yes. Come, I’ll walk with you.”
Eyal places a hand over his shoulder in a kind of blatant ownership, and Jacob smiles at him.
“No need. It’s fine, Eyal. Let me make use of my navigation skills.”
And hurries out. If he wanders alone a bit in the area, he’ll just be seen as a new member who had somewhat gotten lost among the village’s paths.
It’s pleasant outside. He can smell the sea, hear the waves crashing onto the shore at a steady pace, see the stars glimmering over the velvet dome of dark sky.
And starts calmly walking around. Circling the village. He very quickly realizes that the village is tightly sealed by a thick and tall prickly fence.
OK. So long, freedom. For now, he grumbles to himself. And continues walking.
But it’s beautiful here, he thinks as he walks, noticing the big, huge flowers, intoxicatingly scented, even through the dark. Then the ocean is revealed before him. Black, the white foam of the waves sketching lines that dissemble onto the shore. Truly beautiful.
He notes to himself that not a single one of the village residents is wandering around the paths of this beautiful place.
And then he spots, on the tiled path between the huts, the regal David.
The giant figure is unmistakeable. Though he can’t see in detail, he clearly recognizes him, and quickly hides behind a thick bush. He knows that The King lives in his own place, at the Gathering hall’s brick structure.
Wonders where he’s off to. His steps seem vigorous and confident. Definitely not a serene night-time stroll.
He stops at the next hut. Quickly glances to the sides, and opens the door without knocking.
The village map is clearly etched within Jacob’s mind, he knows. That’s Eyal’s hut.
And Dana’s.
But Eyal isn’t there. Jacob’s certain that Eyal remained in the hall after being let down by Jacob’s refusal of accompaniment. He had managed to see Eyal pouring himself another glass of wine at the half-empty Gathering hall, and sitting down on an armchair to drink it.
Jacob doesn’t know if Dana is in the hut. And he waits to see what’ll happen.
The Caesar isn’t coming back out.
Not yet.
No.
No.
Not yet.
The faint light at the entrance shines on the door suddenly bursting open. David stands at the threshold for a moment, smooths his robe, his face illuminated by an expression of great satisfaction and contentment. He quickly glances again at the vacant darkness, and leaves smiling, with quick steps, towards the Gathering hall. To his living quarters, most likely.
Someone had bestowed him with a satisfactory offering. Very satisfactory. An arrow of a thought pierces through Jacob.
And he feels a sudden pang.
Tel Aviv 2017
24
Strange that Hila’s inviting me over to her apartment.
To talk, she says.
I can’t recall the last time we’d sat at her place together for a Mother-Daughter chat, the way mothers and daughters must do all over the world.
No us. Not Hila and me.
Not with Dana either. Even before this disaster had crushed us.
And perhaps mothers no longer sit with their daughters the way that they used to. What do I know.
I’m trying to recall what it was like in my family. Back when I was, say, a girl, a teenager, with my mother.
I rummage deep beneath the layers of my memory. Removing one layer after another. Not really uncovering any conclusive findings. Did it even happen.
We had all lived together, the entire family, until I married Ilan. Mom, Dad, my older brother Eitan, and I, if we don’t take into account the student dorms in Jerusalem, from which I ran away every weekend, mainly in order to meet with Ilan, who would also escape his Technion dorms, straight to our wild Saturday meetings in Tel Aviv. There we found refuge at friends’ rented apartments, or even in a makeshift tent on the beach.
Did I even see the possibility of my mother existing as a separate entity? Outside the solid mold of motherhood cast firmly around her since the dawn of my existence? Unbreakable?
She’s Mom, and that’s it.
But a woman with whom I could talk? Ask for advice? A kind of ripe and level-headed authority figure?
If so, then I had clearly missed out on her.
With my mother you could half-listen, as she peeled carrots in the kitchen, made chicken soup, fried eggplants or something, absentmindedly hearing, for the thousandth time, used-up insights, hand-me-downs from Warsaw.
Groom (Scholarly. From a good home.)
Studies (But a woman too smart - also not good.)
Profession (Something easy. A teacher, maybe, half workday, lots of holidays.)
Girl-friends (They’re all jealous. Don’t believe any of them!)
Guy-Friends (No such thing.)
Boys (Caution, men!)
Respecting your parents (Most important of all.)
And oh, how I had respected. I had ticked all of the boxes, such a good obedient girl. I did everything right. Just like she’d told me.
I never gave my mom any reason to complain about me. Or about my good brother, who flew away years ago to live in Los Angeles, but made sure to visit her every year.
Even when it became clear to us all, and to her too, that her voyage to the other side was almost final, nearly complete, and that she’d soon cease to be, when we nursed her devotedly, the way she had always taught us that good kids from Tel Aviv should do, she still whispered, her energy weakening, to all who surrounded her, see what amazing children I have. That is, see what an amazing mother I’ve been. I deserve it!
We respected our parents that much.
But a chat? Sit with her in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, and talk?
About what.
She had arrived here, once upon a time, years ago, when she was nineteen, with a twenty-two year old husband, my father, a couple of young pioneers, to a hot, new and harsh country.
&nbs
p; They had both been pulled out of a different world, different families. Different lives, which had long ceased, turning instead into the ashes of Europe.
No, we never really chatted. Mom and I.
To me, she was Mom, and nothing else beyond that. Not a woman. Not a friend. Not a spouse.
Strange, when I think about it now, she did chat with my father. I heard it myself.
They had chats. I’d listened to them speaking in the kitchen quietly, not to wake us up, while sipping tea, in the small two-bedroom apartment of yesteryear’s Tel Aviv.
They’d even laughed occasionally. And I’d drift off with their whispered words seeping into my bonds of sleep.
With whom did she speak after my father had surprised us all, one weekday noon, totally ordinary, when his heart quivered and ceased, and he collapsed at his office where, for years, he had run the accounts of small businesses, hardware stores, textile and sewing shops?
I didn’t really give it too much thought back then, and now I can no longer find out. She lived without him for years, alone in an apartment emptied of us all. We visited her, obviously. As did Dana and Hila, who loved their Grandma and her patties. She feasted with us on Holy Days and Friday nights.
But her chats with Dad, her partner of many years, the end-of-workday chats, with a cup of tea in the kitchen, the whispers which had cushioned my night-time sleep, must have died along with him.
Now, out of nowhere, a sudden strong inner urge arises within me, to speak to her. To ask. To know a little more about her. Who she really was, my mother.
She’s constructed dimly within my imagination. Only according to what she had blurted out, here and there, during our meager years together.
Dvora Bloom, she had told me, a nineteen-year-old girl who had arrived from Warsaw with her young husband Itzhak, whom she had just married at her father’s synagogue, two years before the Great War.
I don’t know much more than that. And there’s no one to ask anymore.
Now Hila’s inviting me over to chat to her for a bit, and I still remember clearly, with great horror, Dana’s casual invitation, when she had said back then, on that terrible day, in a by-the-way manner of a supposed daily routine, will you drop by?
And my world was demolished to ashes by the mere words of an invite to hop by, as though casual.
I reprimand myself a little bit for using big words which never used to be part of my spoken lexicon.
‘Demolished to ashes.’ Oh, come on. Calm down. Your house is sturdy, the garden is blossoming, you’re healthy, Ilan’s healthy, Hila’s fine. She’s even changed.
For the better, I must admit.
After the disaster, when Hila realized that she was basically the only one remaining to defend our disintegrating family’s exposed outpost (those big words again), she began, slowly, unnoticeably at first, to shed off layer after layer of herself.
She asked Ilan to help her find a normal apartment, instead of the mouldy hellhole she had rented for herself in Florentin.
Then she asked that I help her find a suitable job. And I asked myself, what could possibly suit her, except for bartending, in light of her proven expertise in the field of alcohol.
She promised me that this time would be different, because she was no longer drinking, and she’d enrolled and was studying at all sorts of training programs for career changes that I didn’t have the energy to look into.
And here, look, Mom, look at how I’m dressing.
True. I really did notice something different about her appearance recently, and couldn’t put my finger on it, and say precisely what it is.
Her tanned shoulders, along with her breasts peering out through the tight sleeveless tops she’d always worn, are now tucked away, with a modesty I can’t recall her ever possessing, underneath a demure white cotton blouse, short-sleeved.
And she’s also working properly.
Office Manager.
Alex Byrne, the Head of the Department for Informal Education, is even pleased with her.
He told me so himself.
A welcomed change from the days of the nine-to-five jobs she had skipped through, and I don’t want to recall that.
He didn’t really want to hire her, Alex Byrne. He’s from here, he too hears the rumors.
It’s a good thing that we’d once worked together. Good thing that I insisted. Don’t understand how I possessed the strength. I had to really pull myself together for it. Asking a favor of Alex Byrne. How low can one stoop.
But I’ve always been a lioness-mother when need be.
I’m sure that even Dana remembers that.
Or not.
I clearly remember having gone to her school, when she was at ninth grade, for a serious conversation with her English teacher, who hadn’t included Dana’s perfect essay, her English Lit bonus project about the poems of Edgar Allen Poe, into her final grade.
I was polite and proper, but I crucified her with my eloquent efficiency, and the A minus grade was immediately rectified. A perfect A plus.
Dana surely remembers. She must.
Where have all of our good days together gone. After all, we did have our good days. It’s undeniable.
True, there were years where I had felt, sometimes, like a commuter sitting inside a fast train. The windows tossing houses at me, streets, trees, cars, the views blurring within the ceaseless crazed acceleration.
True, sometimes my train went full-speed ahead, perhaps not always halting at the right stops. Here and there, I imagined spotting Dana and Hila, standing with Ilan in the rain, donning coats and woollen scarves. Waving to me at the station, indicating for me to stop, but they too became blurred by my train’s jet-speed, and remained waving from a distance.
What was it that had caused me to gallop ahead like that during those years?
Where did I even aspire to reach that badly.
Funny, perhaps, but I can’t seem to recall right now. I had clearly wanted to work my way up to the top. That I did. And I succeeded too. Here and there.
I applied for job tenders. I also received promotions. I was ahead of Bruriah, and Dalia, and what’s-her-name, but was that really my aim? Was that the place which I had so yearned for in my galloping?
Where, damn it.
Could it be that this scorched field, which I’m trampling through today, bare earth, thorns and thistles, was indeed my final destination?
Because that’s all you have left in the end, after your overwhelming endless voyage through the fields - the career - towards what looks to be green pastures, rewarding, laden with fruit, just pick a few and enjoy yourself.
Just look at you now.
An aging woman with gray roots in her hair, standing alone in a charred lot, beneath a decimated sky. Welcome.
You’ve reached your destination.
All alone.
25
It’s pleasant at Hila’s apartment.
Why does that surprise me. After all, when she had lived with us, before all of the strange apartments in which she resided with roommates in central Tel Aviv, she was a neat and tidy girl. Her notebooks wrapped, her books placed on the shelves, clothes folded in the closet. Even during my long days of absence, she still maintained an appropriate upkeep.
When did she actually change, Hila. And how is it that even now I can’t put my finger on it and say, yes, that’s it right there. On June 1st of the year so and so, Hila A disappeared - the diligent student, the obedient, the immaculately dressed, the neatly combed - and in her place, Hila B appeared. The wild, the defying, the opposer of all authority and frameworks, pierced everywhere both visible and covered.
I’ll admit that I didn’t notice at first. Ilan and I had been utterly occupied back then by the experience of Dana moving to Jerusalem.
Dana had served in the army at the Kirya headquarte
rs in Tel Aviv, and would come back home almost every night.
“I’m doing a home-based army service,” she used to tell us. True. It had almost been like at high school, only with uniform.
But then she was released, and she moved to Jerusalem to study at the Hebrew University. Honors track. Straight to her Master’s degree.
Our talented Dana. The smart. The beautiful.
We all twirled around her. Worshipped her.
Ilan and I then climbed up dozens of stairwells, checking apartments in Jerusalem, and rented out the one she had chosen, on a beautiful street, a little far from the university, true.
Later on it became clear that she needed a car, since she wanted to come back home on weekends, semester breaks.
And we bought her a brand new Subaru.
And a cell phone.
She renewed her wardrobe, and I delighted in seeing the fascinating woman who had grown from my special little girl.
And then she settled down in Jerusalem.
And her brand new silver Subaru, and her cell phone, and her new wardrobe, didn’t really get to know the route leading back to us, to Tel Aviv.
She loves Jerusalem, she said, and that was that.
So perhaps I really didn’t see Hila much back then. She was still in high school, 11th grade, I think, maybe 12th.
I knew of course that she was taking her preparatory exams, and finals, I also took care of constant food and beverage supplies for her and her friends when they’d study together in her room, and I was definitely knowledgeable of her grades, which were totally fine.
But it wasn’t as thrilling as the exams we had experienced with Dana, at her time.
First, because Hila wasn’t that sort of bright student whose teachers’ eyes lit up when recognizing her mother.
“Dana Neveh? You’re Dana Neveh’s mother?”
Shivers of delight. Pride at being Dana Neveh’s mother. I was Dana Neveh’s mother.
It’s not that Hila was a terrible student. She had tried really hard. Studied during the days, the nights. Brought home kind of okay report cards.
A Savage Flower Page 12