A Wall of Light - Edeet Ravel [39]
He asks if I want him to carry me and I climb on his back. If only the Children’s House was a thousand kilometres away.
Before you know it we’re here. Daddy lets me down and tells Shoshana I promised Dori we’d take her temperature. Shoshana brings the thermometer to the entrance. Daddy never comes in more than the entrance unless it’s for my goodnight kiss. Shoshana hands me the thermometer but somehow it slips and falls on the floor and breaks into tiny pieces. Shoshana and Daddy burst out laughing.
Everyone has to stay away while Shoshana picks up the pieces with a dustpan because if mercury gets into your body you die.
Daddy and Shoshana laugh some more and then he leaves. I don’t understand this at all. How come if the thermometer broke it means I’m not sick? And how come if a thermometer breaks it’s funny?
I begin to cry. I sit on my chair and cry right through supper. There’s tongue for supper. A cow’s tongue. Disgusting if you ask me but I’m hungry so I eat it. I eat it and cry and Shoshana laughs at me because I have to stop crying every time I take a bite.
Baby Diary
November 22
I handed over the 2:00 feeding to the Minder, Edna. How strange it was not to come to her again at that hour! I felt something was missing. But it seems I didn’t regret it as much as I did when I handed over the feeding with David. My work keeps me so busy and so utterly depleted of energy, that the extra rest is quite simply healing. But that’s not to say that I don’t feel a sense of longing. I hurry to her earlier than the other mothers, to kiss her delicious soft cheeks, to hug her close to me.
She turns in a circle on her belly. Today she did a full circle. She also raises her legs forward, a hint of the crawling that will soon come. She’s patient, kind-hearted, and always happy.
She won’t receive a full bottle but rather pudding in a cup. She doesn’t suck much at that hour anyhow.
Dori
Usually Shoshana wakes us in the morning but today we woke up by ourselves. There’s no one here—only us.
We go wild. Lulu and Gilead come into our room and we all get wild together. We scream and yell and jump on the beds. We spill the peepee from the potty on Elan’s bed.
Elan gets very scared. He stands on his bed with his back against the wall and his hands against the wall and he shivers and smiles in that worried way. I feel bad for him but I try not to think about it. He makes tiny scared sounds while he shivers. We push him down on the bed. He tries to get up and we push him down again.
Only Skye doesn’t join us. She stays in her bed and watches.
Our First Year
18 May 1949. Worked in our vineyards today, elevating the vines on crossed stakes. Long, black, gnarled vines, twisting along the ground, with the green new growths being stuck up into the air like giant fans.
Beautiful day; every morning the long walk down the slope, a gothic descent from our castle-like home along stony paths strung with thorns, slabs and tables of rocks, with ants, chameleons, and busy insects covering the earth with a lacework of agitated life and movement.
The view from the south hill towards the village is toy-like, magical. Fig trees like flat candy dishes on a white stem of glass, the olive trees like balls of rich, deep silver-green, the terraces like pebble fences, the fields of poppies and the blue stuff like a wash of water colour, the aluminum roofs on the wood huts gleam with an intensity that makes them more fierce-looking than the sun, the brown ploughed patches, the fields of grass, the parched boulders and out-croppings—can anything in the country compare with our Eldar?
Dori
Everything is taking me a long time today. The other children already left to visit their parents but I’m still eating my bread and jam.
It’s quiet in the Children’s House with no one here. I get that feeling again—the feeling that I have Doreet’s big loose face. I’m very ugly with that face.
My hands are full of sticky jam so I go to the sink