A Wall of Light - Edeet Ravel [53]
Till Eulenspiegel does things for a reason. The reason is that people are bad.
David sometimes does things for no reason. One time in Canada David was looking after me and he saw that when I made a poo I checked the toilet paper to see when it was clean. He began to laugh and make fun of me. I didn’t know it was a stupid thing to do.
Then Daddy called on the phone. And David said do you know what Dori does—when she wipes herself she looks at the paper and he began to laugh. I began to yell no no and I ran to the phone and grabbed it from David and said it isn’t true it isn’t true but I knew it was too late and that Daddy would know it was true.
Why did David have to tell him? He just did it to be mean. Just like that.
Complicated Procedures
Dori
Shoshana takes us on a short Hike to see bees. Usually Shoshana’s Hikes are boring but the bees are interesting. Coco looks after the hives. She wears a special hat with a net and special clothes that bees can’t sting through.
Even with the hat and the clothes I’d be scared. But Coco is brave. She smiles at us and tries to explain what she’s doing but no one listens. We like the bees and the hives and Coco’s special hat but we’re a bit worried about getting stung.
Shoshana’s scared too. She laughs a little but she’s scared.
Another thing about Coco apart from her shaggy dog and the bees is that she planted a whole bed of Amnonand-Tamar flowers.54 I think I have to add Amnon-and-Tamar to my favourite flowers. Each flower has two colours—yellow and purple or light purple and dark purple. And they all look like velvet. Every time I see them I’m surprised that you can plant something so beautiful.
Coco is a good person to have on Eldar.
Diary of a Young Man
29 March 1922. A full moon—spring is here—yesterday we sat on the boulders and sang. The whole commune gathered together without the ringing of the bell, and everyone sang and sang— suddenly without knowing how or why, a circle came into being and the commune began to dance. We danced for hours without pause. Our legs rose on their own, shoulder adjoining shoulder, the entire commune poured into one great soul and danced.
2 April 1922. We do not cease to speak of the dance of that night. Will such a dance ever come again?
20 April 1922. Unbelievable, what those moshav [community of cooperative farms] people are capable of! Simply boggles the mind!
In the middle of today’s dance, at the height of our fervour and sense of closeness, a few moshav people who happened to be in the Dining Hall burst into the circle.
Instantly our singing ceased and we all left the circle, leaving the moshav people alone in the middle of the tent. And thus our celebration was cut short. What’s really interesting is that they don’t understand what ails us.
How can they not comprehend—the commune’s dance is an internal event, like the commune’s Meeting, and a stranger cannot have any part of it.
Dori
Daddy can touch the tip of his nose with his tongue. That’s very hard to do. He also has a gold tooth.
I can stand on my head up to 100 if I have a pillow and it’s near a wall.
My brother David can move his ears. He’s the only person on Eldar who can do that. He also knows Everybody Loves Saturday Night in six languages. There was a talent show on the ship from Canada and he got up on stage and sang that song in all six languages.
I don’t know what Mummy can do.
Our First Year
2 October 1949. I think back now to the earlier months of the year, when we looked with such wonderment and anticipation at the clean fig trees with their hard, green knobs popping out like buttons at the ends of the branches, when we kept trying to conjure forth the taste and shape of the ripe fruit.
Now those little green knobs attack our eyes as heaps of yellow, split, spoiling fruit, and behind each yellow conidial blotch leers the image of an ideologically compromised Arab. The stuff was ripening, splitting, falling, and terrifying us by the