A Wall of Light - Edeet Ravel [3]
Finally Mummy promised to come back later to kiss me goodnight. I stopped crying right away. I was so happy that she was coming back. So happy! Now I get a kiss every night.
The other children wish their parents could kiss them goodnight too. I don’t really know why Mummy is allowed but somehow she got permission. I’m not complaining. It’s not fair but I need it.
The Parent Clutch
Dori
Not too long ago I gave everyone in my Group8 a colour.
Lulu is red. She has a red rash around her mouth and a very good heart. She shares the candies her parents give her on Friday with me—including the red ones that change the colour of your tongue. Actually I don’t really like the red ones. They’re too sharp.
Simon is green. He’s chubby and he hardly ever says anything and also Daddy told me a story about a boy called Simon who wanted green hair.
Gilead is brown of course. He’s tall and has brown skin. He doesn’t have a father and he wasn’t born on Eldar. There’s a lot I don’t know about Gilead.
Skye is very very dark blue. Her hair looks dark blue in the sun and the sky is dark blue at night and she’s the most serious in our Group. Also the smartest.
Elan is white. His skin is white and his hair is almost white and he’s skinny and scared. He’s so scared he sometimes shakes like a ghost. I don’t know if he has a mother but his father is a round jokey man who’s crazy about my sister Sara. He calls her Suraleh.
Jonathan is yellow because he has yellow hair. He likes me.
Shoshana makes fun of the way Simon walks because he doesn’t lift his feet. Every day she says look how he walks! look how he walks! and she wants everyone to laugh with her. But no one laughs. I don’t know what’s wrong with walking any way you want.
Our First Year
13 January 1949. Last night was our farewell party at Ein Hashofet. The Dining Hall was packed: long white tables loaded down with cakes, candies and later, coffee; a sea of familiar faces; speeches; readings, including a satirical but friendly study of the idiosyncrasies of the gang; on all the walls beautiful photos of our life here; two original dances prepared by our modern dance group; folk-dancing and singing with a rip-roaring spirit until two a.m.; culminating in a wild hora that had the walls quivering. After that we finished loading trucks, by starlight, and left in a convoy for Eldar at five in the morning.
The ride was extremely cold, and when we reached the Galilee, the roads became tortuous and the wind cutting and icy. We rode through a landscape of majestic mountains, red earth in some sections practically turgid with fertility, and monstrous rocks, bulbaceous and knotty.
Eldar itself squats on a hill, white, silent, about 900 meters above sea-level, with its mosque and surrounding dwellings stuck right into the contours of the elevation, as if pushed tightly and economically into place by the finger of a giant. A Shell gasoline pump stands at the foot of the road leading to the village, a grotesquely modern totem in the midst of the red-grey mountains. To the north, quite a distance away in Lebanon, and as white and awesome as something out of Tibet or Alaska, looms the snow-covered Mount Hermon, a magnificent view.
By the time most of the vehicles had arrived, there were nearly 200 people present, and we immediately began laying the foundation for the Dining Hall. Prefab sections, tools, pots, sacks, trunks, beds, picks, shovels, and touriyas9 and boards were moving and swinging in all directions. Reporters and cameramen seemed to be as thick as flies.
At noon the work was interrupted and the official ceremonies were conducted. Flags and coloured banners beat violently in the wind. There were cakes, oranges and wine. The army men who had been stationed there up to our arrival walked around with rifles slung casually from the shoulder over greatcoats and sheepskins. It could have been opening night at the Met, only in the opposite, non-bourgeois direction of course.
When the celebration