A Wall of Light - Edeet Ravel [4]
Dori
Everyone is already sitting at the two round tables. I’m the last one. Lulu waves at me. I sit down next to her and she gives me a hug. She has curly hair that matches her name. Lulululululu sounds like a lot of curls. It goes back to where it started like a circle and curls are circles too.
For supper there’s bread and margarine and green beans and beet soup and cheese triangles. No soup bits10 unfortunately. We don’t get soup bits that often. My three favourite foods in the world are figs from a tree—not the dried kind—and pomegranates and soup bits. You can’t get any of those foods in Canada. It’s too cold to grow figs and pomegranates there and they don’t know how to make soup bits.
My favourite dessert is chocolate leben but today there’s carrots and raisins.
The carrots and raisins are never the same. Sometimes the carrots are sweet and thin and there’s just the right amount of water and the raisins are big and delicious and the water gets sweet from the raisins. Other times the carrots are in big pieces and they taste bitter and the raisins are small and yellow and sour and there’s so much water you can’t taste anything. I wish the Kitchen would get it right all the time.
Thane of Eldar
Here stands Jeremiah ben Jacob, sometime of London, risen to Thane, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water. The rats however I am killing. Peace, Smulkin!
Dori
Shoshana doesn’t notice that I’m not drinking my milk. That’s one good thing about Shoshana—she never notices what anyone eats or drinks. She’s too busy at the sink. I pour my milk into Gilead’s cup. He likes everything.
I only like milk when there’s cocoa in it. The cocoa in Canada is different from the cocoa in Eldar. In Canada it’s sweeter and you can make it yourself. You have to squish the pieces that float up and you can add a little more if it isn’t sweet enough though it’s harder to squish when the milk is already in the cup. The cocoa in Canada is called Quik. Here they make the cocoa in the Kitchen. It’s not as good as Quik but it’s better than no cocoa.
Hot cocoa sometimes has skin that you have to take off with your spoon. I would die if I had to eat the skin. Or lumps in semolina. Or soft-boiled eggs. Semolina is very hard to make without lumps. Every time Shoshana brings semolina from the Kitchen I get worried. Sometimes you bite on a lump by mistake because you can’t see it. I try not to eat semolina at all. It’s not worth it.
Hard to believe but Simon likes the skin on hot milk. That’s because his parents like it.
Shoshana says whoever is good can help her wash the dishes. She thinks we’re dummies. Pioneers have to work hard but we’re only children. Why would we want to help her wash dishes?
But Simon does. He stands on a chair and dries the dishes. He looks funny with an apron on because he’s round. I whisper to Lulu aprons look funny on round people and we laugh until our stomachs hurt.11
Archaeology
House of the Second Mukhtar of the village of El-Daar (1872–1948); now an archaeological museum containing artefacts found in the vicinity.
“The Hyksos built a village here a little less than six thousand years ago; I ran into their village when I dug the foundation for the high school. We found one of their graves with some lovely Middle Bronze Age pottery. After the Hyksos came the Canaanites; they turned Eldar into a walled village. We found very good pottery with glazed decorations, and one of the altars on which they sacrificed children twice a year. The Israelites came next; they built a fort here. They were technologically primitive but monotheistic. The Assyrians wiped Eldar out in 722 BCE; we found a layer of ashes; it was burnt. The Babylonian and