Dangerous, even. Things happen there.
And there have already been group members there who’d asked more questions than allowed, persisted, and vanished.
Orr is currently at a nice-looking children’s boarding home there, with facilities and nannies, but tightly shut. She can’t go out, and she can’t be visited. A kind of educational experiment, they say. A home for children in nature. Without parents.
Hila had met the investigator before he left for the village.
Jacob, he’s called.
They sat together for hours. To listen, to explain. To understand. To set means of communications between them.
Hila trusts him implicitly. He updates her with everything that’s happening.
There, she’s gotten me up to speed too now. And Dad’s updated as well, she says. Ra’anan is updating us.
“Who’s Ra’anan?”
Hila seems to blush a little bit.
“Ra’anan is the backpacker who’d lived there with them, and then published that article about the village. He’s with us too. Right now he’s outside the Existential College, at a nearby village, and he’s our contact there. Passes us Jacob’s reports.”
The moment is nearing. “We’ll beat them, Mom,” Hila says, “and they won’t get away with it.”
Cayrona Beach 2017
27
Jacob is tense.
He’s an active member in everything happening in the village. Now he’s working in the management building. With Dori, Eyal, and even with David. Not every day. But they do meet.
David always smiles at him. Sometimes he also invites him for a drink at his huge room, with the windows facing the ocean.
Jacob gladly volunteers for every task. Gracefully, lightly, without making a big deal out of it.
Want a hand in the fields? No problem. Help with grocery shopping at Cayrona market? Done.
Bring the Caesar crates of meat, fruit, cigarettes, and booze for the cops from Puerto Viejo? Sure thing.
They love him. Tall, dark, dimpled Jacob, who is everywhere. As though he’d already been with them for ages. From the very beginning.
Jacob makes a note of everything in his mind.
The village map is etched within him. Exits, both visible and hidden from sight. Vehicle entrance gates. Work schedules of undercover security guards, who walk around the fence as though it’s nothing, just a stroll. Working hours of the nannies at the children’s boarding home. Precise start and finish times of each one. What times the children go out to the tightly-fenced playground.
He listens patiently to anyone who starts a conversation with him.
Fishes out facts from the stories, methodically separating the trivial from the important and relevant.
From the unavoidable gossip, he gathers shards of information to aid them when the time comes.
And he feels that with every day that goes by, he’s conquering more and more fields of knowledge.
He’s no longer walking around here the way he did during his first few days, wandering and hesitant, in a strange foreign village, where there’s no way of understanding the principle at the base of the cog-wheels driving it.
Because he hasn’t yet understood it, actually.
Even now, when he’s already familiar with the village’s sites and activities, he still hasn’t managed to crack the secret.
What is the source of energy operating them, driving them all together into one herd-like gallop in an unbelievable direction, strange, blurred of shape, shrouded in vagueness.
What is it that erases all of the creativity that individualizes them, and directs all of their heads towards an odd mentor, like the yellow heads of sunflowers in a field. All directed in unison towards the sun.
When was it that His Royal Highness had created this fake, glowing, clearly fraudulent aura, Jacob wonders, and how can they not see that there’s nothing actually there, at the top of the obviously deceitful path, which he offers up to them with disguises of spiritual affluence drenched in beauty.
Jacob sees with dumbfounded eyes what’s really happening to them. The complete opposite of the promised wealth, because everyone’s being emptied of their assets. Gradually shrinking in size. How can they not notice it?
The Land of the Blind.
Jacob carefully observes His Royal Highness, their sun.
Sees the hypnotized gaze of his followers, and doesn’t get it. Could it be that he’s the only one to see this empty drivel, and everyone else really is bewitched?
Time and time again, Jacob scans over the captivated faces. The eyes hanging onto every word, the lips that sometimes stir and mumble along with Him, whispering the chant, the repetitive words.
And he finds a kind of desperation in their eyes. Like a great thirst. The yearning to be included.
To belong.
To be loved.
To be validated as important. As unique.
As existing.
By now he already knows many of them. He hears their stories. Where they came from. What they searched for.
What they’re still searching for.
They don’t all come from the same places.
There are scholars with multiple degrees, members of wealthy families, warriors from battlefields who had been dispersed and forgotten in faraway tumultuous corners of the earth, scattered refugees of families, ones orphaned during childhood, during adolescence, but also ones from still-existing whole families.
Academically-educated ones and life-educated ones.
Jacob doesn’t really know what it is that binds them all together.
But it’s already clear to him that this desperation is heavily weighing within each and every one of them.
They’re all attached to one another, with what he imagines as a transparent steel wire, invisible to the naked eye, but strong, joining them together, coming out of the vast space within them and pulling, yearning and longing to search for meaning, and immediately magnetizing onto David and his vacuous utterances.
He notices that Dana has no wire. Visible or concealed.
She is to herself. Alone. Shut. Bundled up like a delicate silkworm that shrunk itself after someone had unintentionally touched it.
Sits on a mat, almost glued to the hall’s carpeted side wall, its windows facing the sea, her black hair, seemingly-floating, now softly falls onto her skinny shoulders, covering them.
The white robe, a good few sizes larger than the emaciated body it envelopes.
Dana doesn’t look at the big, empty chair of the King, who will soon enter. Her eyes focus on some spot within the open space of the hall, which Jacob tries to decipher, to no avail. She’s sitting here with everyone, but isn’t truly present in the Gathering.
Jacob knows, and his heart goes out to her, she feels lost here.
Eyal, however, is very present.
Jacob looks at him.
Eyal is haughty, handsome, full of himself, scattering smiles all around. Lightly skips between the rows of those seated on the rugs and pillows, patting on shoulders, hugging, laughing with one person, chatting with another.
He ignores Dana. She’s simply absent from here. Non-existent, as far as he’s concerned, and not missed by any of the others, apparently.
She’s invisible, and probably isn’t able to see anything herself.
A tense rustle of murmurs now goes silent.
Through a small opening on the side, Dori enters the hall with an air of dignity, collects his bright white robe, decorated by a kind of rose on its collar, and sits on the padded chair, a tad lower than the embellished one next to it, His Majesty’s one.
Total, motionless silence, filling the room. Tense anticipation.
The grand hall’s vast wooden door now opens wide, and His Royal Highness stands at the threshold.
Eve
ryone rises.
Jacob too. Just like at a court of law.
The King walks regally to his high seat, calmly indicating to his reverence-filled subjects to sit back down, but no one dares implement his generosity until the moment that the King himself transports his royal pelvis over and above the luxurious armchair, and sits on it with his full body’s weight.
A sigh of relief, and the entire group stoops down once again to the mats and pillows on the floor, their eyes lifted up high. To him.
Now his stare strolls over the rows. Surveying in a chilling silence all of the eyes focusing onto him. His gaze is serious. His lips are tightly closed. He pauses over here, moves onto there, looks far across to the back row, and returns to the front row.
He suddenly sends the piercing ray of his intense gaze to the side of a distant row, slicing directly through Dana.
At once, everyone follows the cue, turning their heads backwards in unison. Dozens of pairs of eyes are now solely fixed onto Dana.
Jacob suddenly shudders.
Something’s happening.
He clearly realizes that.
Tension is something that one can sense. And Jacob senses it explicitly. Solid and tangible. He can smell it. Touch it.
A shadow of fear.
Gilli.
Jacob is now thinking to himself. We haven’t found Gilli yet. And he recalls what Ra’anan had told him about this army friend of his. The one who’d joined the Existential College Village many months ago, with breezy carefree joy, lacking any fear, like a butterfly fluttering around a colorful flower. She’s the one who’d invited Ra’anan to visit her here, at the perfect paradise she’d found in the rainforest by the ocean’s shore.
And she’s the one who had gradually, apparently, began digging deeper all of a sudden, and asking questions.
Just like that, with a kind of naïve courage, she rose up at Gatherings and protested. In front of everyone. As was told to Ra’anan later on by someone in the group, almost whispering, and with eyes scampering in fear.
The subject of money, for instance. She wanted to know why did it actually cost that much to prepare a landing site, and what was so special about it that required adding more and more money all of the time.
And then she vanished.
When Ra’anan arrived at the village, she was no longer there.
And no one even knew who he was referring to. Gilli? Gilli? Is he certain? With us? At the village?
Everyone just shrugged their shoulders. Nope. There was never anyone like that here. We don’t know her.
Even Ra’anan began doubting it. Maybe it had been a different village.
And he pulled out the invitation postcards he’d received from Gilli. A photo of the village gates. The Existential College Village.
Descriptions of the perfect paradise she’d found. And David. And Professor Doron Sadeh, and the fields, and the flowers, and the fascinating Gatherings, and the sense of purpose.
It’s all there, he showed them.
And then, when faced with the photos he presented to them, they recalled, the group members. Slowly. Gradually, like that, in short segments.
Ohhh, Gilli, yes. Yes. Wait. Maybe there really was a Gilli here once. Kind of curly, maybe?
Left.
Spent a bit of time here, and left. Don’t know where to.
And Ra’anan believed, got sucked into the village’s life, took photos, wrote. Told. Transferred the writing to be reviewed. Began publishing.
In the newspaper. In websites.
Until he suddenly felt within him an unexpected sprouting of seedlings. Wild weeds of doubts.
One person had hinted to him with a look when he’d mentioned Gilli. Another one had accidently blurted out her name, and quickly halted himself, frantically covering his mouth with his hand. One of the girls whispered to him quietly, longingly:
“She was great, Gilli. Right?”
And went silent, looking to the sides in fright.
Ra’anan began realizing that something was wrong. Incredibly wrong.
And then Dana approached him.
He had hardly noticed her before. She was like a little bird plucked of its feathers.
“They took Gilli away.”
Dana told him discreetly one day, when they were peeling vegetables in the kitchen.
“Where to?”
Ra’anan asked quickly, as quietly as her.
“I don’t know. But I saw them taking her stuff out of her room. She’s not the first. They get rid of anyone who gives them trouble.”
And Ra’anan heard Dana’s tales. How Gilli had loved living there. Worked, rejoiced, partook in all of the Gatherings. Remained active throughout.
“Don’t believe the ones who claim not to remember her. They remember her just fine. And they loved her, I’m telling you. I did too. She was amazing, Gilli. But that’s what they’re like. There’s no room for troublemakers here. It’s dangerous for them, what with all of their dirty business.”
And Ra’anan travelled back to Tel Aviv, and asked him, Jacob, to look into it. Check out what’s happening. With Gilli, and with Dana, and with Orr.
And with a few others who had vanished from the village all of a sudden.
Now, at the Gathering, the Caesar has been sitting for three full minutes, his eyes nailed into Dana.
Old things become damaged, and new things come into being.
David hasn’t yet said a single word. People are starting to stir uneasily in their seats. A kind of agitation drifts through the hall.
The day is very near!
David suddenly tears through the air with a loud shout.
An odd terror sends shivers along Jacob’s back, and he notices everyone else sensing it too.
Even Dana lifts her head in fright, coming out of the shrunken ball shape she had maintained up until then.
Very very near!
David rises from his seat.
The group is hypnotized. He never gets up mid-speech, just like that, His Royal Highness.
And he’s now pacing in measured steps, nearing them. Those sitting on rugs and mats on the hall’s floor. Jacob swiftly realizes that the King is headed in his direction, and through the thick lenses of his glasses, he notices an odd sparkle in his eyes. Aimed straight at him.
And Jacob is flooded by absolute certainty.
That’s it. He’s been caught.
His Royal Highness knows. Everything. About his being a foreign element planted within his ranks, about the espionage. Perhaps about the mission too.
Throughout his whole time here, Jacob has never once underestimated King David’s abilities. With each day that goes by, Jacob’s recognition of the King’s cunningness increases, which in turn forces him to further fortify and strengthen walls of caution around himself.
The hidden opening, unnoticed, within the thick thorny vegetation at the edge of the fence surrounding the village, the one he uses as a means of communications with Ra’anan, his means of contact with the outside world, used for the placing and collecting of encoded messages, photographs, recordings and maps, is visited by him only during times when he’s made absolutely sure that there are no other eyes there but his own. He sneaks over there with the silent crawling of a skilled commando. He knows that the place has remained unbreeched. Communications have been maintained, and he has clear indications that it hasn’t been compromised.
Yet.
But he cannot, of course, be a hundred percent certain.
David pauses his walk for a moment. Stands in the center of the hall. His eyes are shut. Total silence sets over the room and the people present.
We must prepare! Must prepare! All of us!
His cry slices through the silence. Everyone is tense. The excitement is blowing strongly into them, like wind through a cornfi
eld.
This is the day they’ve all been training for. At Gatherings, with mind and body exercises, with memorization. With mortification of the flesh, with harsh labor, with self-restraint. With giving up on possessions, on the intimacy of the body by having it shared around with everyone, on the inner sense of purpose which has become blurred within them all, on the anguished self, cut short of stature.
Everything. Everything boils down to now.
Days, weeks, months. They’ve practiced for it, to be prepared. In body. In spirit, for when it comes. This is the cry they’ve been awaiting.
Here, now the King is openly announcing it.
And they, the worthy ones, are anointed.
Very soon, in just a little while, they’ll be lifted away to other universes.
It’s been worth it all.
They’re choking with tension. With pent-up joy. We’ve arrived. We’re all ready. Whatever else you ask of us, we will do.
We shall ready ourselves. Tomorrow is the great day of preparation.
And His Majesty now stands, like a gigantic statue, near his vacant chair, and tells the group about the preparations.
Jacob listens carefully, like everyone else, and cannot believe it.
Here is a large group of absolutely ordinary people, twenty-first century people, passionately drinking up, each and every one of them, without a hint of doubting, the gushing swell of delusions, about spaceships that are soon to carry them out and beyond our atmosphere. To another place. A better one. Far away from here.
And Jacob surveys their attentive, tense faces. Shifts his gaze from one person to the next, and onwards, rows upon rows of faces, all focused on him, their chosen leader, blurting out his nonsensical utterances.
And Jacob just doesn’t get it.
Doesn’t get it.
“As is clear to you all, your human body is limp. Weak.
A Savage Flower Page 14