A Wall of Light - Edeet Ravel [21]
I run to the Room and show Daddy attention at ease salute. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like the whole army business. I ask him did you fight in the army? and he says not exactly. He doesn’t want to tell me. There was something else I had to ask him but I forget.
Our First Year
23 January 1949. We are now living in dispersed areas in the few good buildings that were left standing in the village. Living quarters assigned of course in conformity with needs of security. A spooky and unpleasant process to stumble home in the dark and rainy night, with a glaring battery light and all sorts of looming and unfamiliar ruins seeming to crowd forward on every side.
Some of us still get lost from time to time on the unfamiliar paths, complicated terraces and treacherous rubble. I often feel like something from one of those Kafkaesque novels when I step out of my damp room filled with smoke (can’t get the fireplace to burn properly) and walk over the huge white stones, past the half-destroyed wall, and watch a wild cat come running out of the small building with the caved-in roof.
Dori
There’s a song my brother David likes to sing with his friends. It’s about the legend of the Red Rock. The legend says that there’s a place beyond the mountains called the Red Rock and no one who goes there returns alive. Three lads decide to go anyhow. All they take with them is an old dream and a map and a canteen. What I like best about the song is that after each part you get to say oh the Red Rock, the Red Rock.33
I don’t know the whole song but in the end the lads die. I asked Daddy why everyone who goes to the Red Rock dies but he didn’t want to tell me. The question made him angry. Not at me though. At something else.
I kept asking and asking and finally he said because it’s dangerous. I asked what can happen? but he only said it’s not safe because he didn’t want to tell me but he didn’t want to lie. I asked if people know they’re going to die, why do they go? and he said because it’s so beautiful.
That doesn’t make sense in my opinion. What’s the point of seeing something beautiful if you die the minute you see it?
David says Ben Gurion won’t let the radio play the song about the Red Rock because it might give people the idea to go there. But the lad in the song dies so how would that make someone want to go? Also if Ben Gurion is afraid people will go to the Red Rock, is it a legend or is it real?
I don’t understand this whole Red Rock business.
Petra
Archaeological city in Jordan;
capital of the Nabataeans in the sixth century BCE;
chosen by the BBC as one of forty places to see before you die;
unknown in the West before 1812;
in May 1953 two young Israeli hikers challenged themselves to reach Petra and succeeded, travelling mostly by night, hiding from armed Bedouins, scaling walls of rock, crossing streams, bypassing waterfalls, climbing and descending cliffs and ravines, avoiding goat herds;
their success encouraged Eitan Mintz, Yaakov Kleifeld, Gila Ben-Akiva, Arik Magar and nursing graduate Miriam Monderer (pictured resting above) who attempted the journey in August but, possibly following a snakebite, approached the police station for help, were presumably taken for aggressors and shot;
their bodies were returned to Israel the next day;
three years later, in April 1956, paratroopers Dror Levi and Dimitri Berman made the attempt and were shot, though Berman managed to haul himself home;34
a year later Menahem Ben-David, Ram Pragai, Kalman Shlafsky and Dan Gilad were killed on the way to Petra;
song about Petra fatalities banned 30 July 1958;
trips to Petra safe for Israelis since the 1994 peace agreement with Jordan;
one-day group tours from Eilat available for $200 per adult.
Dori
My brother David found a jug somewhere. Exactly like the fairy’s jugs in Pinocchio.
I get very excited. David lets me hold the jug and I try to put it on my head but the handle is too high.
I look inside and suddenly a horrible smell comes out of the jug. The worst smell I ever smelled in my whole