A Savage Flower Read online

  To Mom and Dad,

  Hanna and Haim Zisovich,

  with longing

  Producer & International Distributor

  eBookPro Publishing

  www.ebook-pro.com

  A Savage Flower

  Judith Weinstock

  Copyright © 2020 Judith Weinstock

  All rights reserved; No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, of the author.

  Translation from the Hebrew by Maya Thomas

  Contact: [email protected]

  Contents

  Dita and Ilan’s Zombie Farm

  Tel Aviv 2016

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Cayrona Beach 2017

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Jerusalem 2010

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Cayrona Beach 2017

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Tel Aviv 2017

  20

  21

  22

  Cayrona Beach 2017

  23

  Tel Aviv 2017

  24

  25

  26

  Cayrona Beach 2017

  27

  28

  Tel Aviv 2017

  29

  Cayrona Beach 2017

  30

  Tel Aviv 2017

  31

  Cayrona Beach 2017

  32

  33

  34

  Tel Aviv 2017

  35

  36

  37

  Acknowledgments

  Dita and Ilan’s Zombie Farm

  A place full of green, visually stunning, something like a holiday resort, with an entrance gate that isn’t overly wide. Ilan and I stand outside it, curiously scanning over the place.

  Someone cordially invites us to come inside. We walk in. Why not. The place is breath-taking. Green, blooming.

  The gate locks shut behind us and then immediately vanishes within an impenetrable thicket of bougainvillea flowers. Turns out that you can go in, but you can’t come back out.

  We glimpse into the rooms. They’re clean, fully equipped, even pleasant.

  Well-dressed people are walking across the lawn area, young, old, and older. They seem fine. From afar. Once you get closer, you realize what isn’t right.

  Their eyes.

  Extinguished. Hollow. Entirely.

  And their faces, as though erased, like when news channels blur-out flight cadets’ faces during their graduation ceremonies.

  And you can’t get out.

  We’ve tried.

  We’re looking for the gate we had used half an hour ago. Maybe an hour. It’s disappeared. The lawn area is surrounded by tall and thick thorny vegetation. We’ll try to cross through it. Ilan holds onto my hand, pulling me after him into the thicket. Sharp aggressive thorns gnaw at us. We retreat.

  An open door in the structure opposite us reveals a pleasant-looking room with an orange curtain fluttering in the light breeze, a double bed, a table, chairs. Maybe we should rest for a little while?

  We walk in.

  And the door locks shut behind us.

  Ilan tries to open it from inside the room. No door handle. Wait. There’s a window. The fluttering curtain.

  No. The orange curtain is now still. The window is shut. I don’t even try it. There’s no handle.

  You can go inside, but you can’t come back out.

  We lay down on the double bed. Hold each other’s hands. Remain silent. Now what. Our eyes close.

  How long have we been here.

  We discover a pot of hot coffee next to the bed. Sandwiches too. One with cheese, one with a hardboiled egg. Ilan pours us coffee into glass mugs. We both drink.

  Someone enters the room. He looks at us.

  I recoil. His eyes are extinguished. Like in vampire movies.

  He’s not a vampire, I somehow know that.

  But I have to get out of here. What does he want. He’s muttering something. I don’t catch the words, and yet I understand. He’s asking us to stay.

  No. How do we get back home.

  We’ve let him down. You can tell. His lips droop down. Like a kid who’s going to start crying any minute now. Is that a tear streaming down his cheek?

  Home. Now. What is this place? A zombie farm. He’s murmuring. I don’t understand the words, but I know. That’s what he said.

  This someone really wants us to stay. But we don’t belong here. I can sense that. We’re not from here. We’re from there.

  We’re not zombies.

  I don’t quite know what it is, but slivers of memories begin resurfacing within me. Characters from movies. Books. Horror.

  They’re crawling through the depths of my memories, walking inside me with heavy steps, with dead eyes, not running, not nimbly skipping, just thump-thump-thump. Like robots, only they’re not.

  We can’t stay here for a minute longer, I shake Ilan. Quick. We still want to laugh and sing, and to dance. And to love. Don’t we?

  This is a treacherous double bed. It won’t allow us to love. Can’t you see?

  I look into Ilan’s eyes. Thank God, they’re just like they always are. Alive. So long as they don’t transform into those vacant zombie eyes.

  Ilan, come on!

  I now realize that this nightmare will be over in a moment’s time.

  Just like all of the nights during the last few weeks. This is how it always goes.

  Ilan.

  Me.

  Zombies.

  And no way out. No way out.

  We still want to run outside towards everything that exists beyond that thick thorny fence. To a place that has children.

  Our children. Our family. Our two daughters. Dana and Hila. We’re a couple. Home. Family.

  And our home has real double beds. Ones where we can love.

  We’re a family. Everybody knows that.

  I forcefully try to open my eyes. In a moment they’ll open, and Ilan will be lying next to me, either asleep or awake, we’ll see, and he’ll reach out a casual hand, moving in the automated fashion of a thirty-five year relationship, an incidental movement. No thought behind it. And all of this will vanish.

  Yes. There. Just like that.

  And there’s no farm, and no zombies, and the bougainvillea by the window is entirely ours, blazing with the multitude of purple flowers planted by Ilan and me many years ago.

  What is it with you and all of these zombies, I reprimand myself. You’re just a woman who’s grown older.

  With two daughters who already have homes of their own. So what.

  In bed, with a husband of many years. And a predictable one. Like morning coffee and toast. Totally fine, though no longer containing the fervor of sophisticated culinary arts.

  Inside a very quiet house of sleepy, dull and barren spaces. That has already sent offshoots to other sites. True.

  No more ‘no way out.’

  There is a way out.

  Everything’s fine.

  You’re just another woman who’s grown older. This is what it’s
like with all of your friends, you’ve all grown older.

  You’ve completed all of the right and proper things; marriage, children, career.

  Now you all live within yourselves, just like in the song.

  Within houses that are too big, between walls that close in on you, staring out through windows of abandoned rooms.

  While everything surrounding you is fresh and in bloom.

  Tel Aviv 2016

  1

  The problem with growing older is that it’s so very unpretty.

  In infancy everything is beautiful. Laughter within a toothless mouth, diapers, little round baby bottoms.

  Youth erupts with beauty, spraying crazy life-scents all around. The feminine realms too are filled with ripe magic.

  But not growing older.

  This isn’t growing older, I decisively pronounce in my mind, with no compassion.

  Aging.

  That’s what this is. And you, Dita, are ascending towards it.

  Yes.

  There are stairs on the way up to it. Lots of softened words climbing silently up, year after year, step by step, purified, crystalized, clarified and sharpened, until the final threshold, the one before the last door opens.

  But I don’t want to continue ascending now, alongside the words. Especially not in the morning, when I stand here in front of the mirror.

  Because growing older is a stage with no beauty in it.

  Every day, something in you breaks down. During that constant climb upwards. Body parts which had a quiet and efficient daily ticking that you had never noticed. Knees, eyes, vertebrae. Joints. Skin.

  They are. Existing within you. And they’re assertively declaring their presence.

  Once, when I was very young, still cruising with the determination of a battleship along a path that I had considered to be a fool proof way to a carefully-planned career, I was assigned to some important-committee-of-whatever, which has long been forgotten.

  Somebody, very high-up in the chain of our governmental office, some Miriam, who had also vanished into thin air ages ago, was the chairwoman of that committee.

  We probably drafted, as was customary for this type of committee, a few decisions for immediate implementation, after summarizing our long drawn-out and in-depth discussions.

  Obviously, our insightful instructions were also gathered and printed, as was done in those pre-computerized days, creating an obligatory guideline booklet demanding urgent action.

  That booklet we had produced back then is probably resting somewhere to this very day, gathering dust, on some forgotten shelf in the silence of one of the archives in our ancient office, which has already witnessed everyone come and go.

  And who can remember.

  All I can recall about that important committee and the leisurely discussions that lasted for months on end, is the fine aromatic coffee that Miriam used to make us at her little apartment on Arnon Street in Tel Aviv, and the answer she gave my polite and hesitant question regarding her age, which at the time seemed ancient to me.

  “The good thing about older age,” Miriam retorted, “is that it doesn’t arrive just like that, by surprise. It crawls, and you collect it unto you crumb by crumb, without even noticing.”

  Slowly but surely, you get used to it.

  In the beginning there are only hints, and you’re not sure. Could it be that you’ve become a little bit slower?

  Here, a word is tossed your way. There, a forgiving smile. One day, it seems to you that someone thinks of you as too old for this role, or for that subject. Suppressing a little smile when you speak at an important meeting.

  Or worse, glancing at the clock.

  You can’t believe this is happening to you.

  You?

  With all of your knowledge and experience? And status? Maybe you’re just imagining it? Then you realize that yes. You’re no longer where you had been. You’ve moved on a phase. And another one. Eventually, you make peace with it. And the weirdest thing is, it seems alright to you, and not that bad. And there are even advantages.

  “Yes, you make peace with it,” Miriam illuminated.

  I looked at her, and listened with a slight tone of compassion. Just a slight one. After all, back then I was still living within a different age realm, at a different pace, a galloping one, with two young girls ceaselessly draining my full attention.

  A young husband, Ilan, a researcher at the Technion, with curiosity and an ambition for an academic career, whose exhausting and unrewarding days force him to abandon the theories and transfer, just for now, of course, to the harsh and competitive world of construction entrepreneurship.

  Though some day, in the future, he’ll succeed within that field, right now his sleeves are rolled up and his body is constantly prepped for a ruthless race.

  I now see with sudden clarity that young woman I once was, fidgety and restless, already in charge of employees, but also a subordinate to the managers and their whims, manoeuvring between both with a mixture of common sense and trickery.

  Older age was but a rumor to me back then. A very dim shadow, beyond the distant horizon, which only occasionally occupied my mind, on a purely theoretical level, as a passing thought. Mainly in regard to the growing contact with our parents, whose seams were slowly unravelling before our very eyes.

  But still very much beyond distant darkened mountains, whose peeks had yet to peer into my world, which was buzzing like a clamouring beehive.

  Intangible.

  Now I suddenly recall that Miriam-what’s-her-name again. I wonder how she’s doing. Many years have passed. Has death too, like old age, snuck underneath her in that way, silently, softly, peacefully, into her prim little apartment on Arnon Street in Tel Aviv?

  She was right, Miriam.

  But also not.

  Because, still, this is an enemy.

  And it’s so conniving. Age.

  True, it crawls through the years, quietly, unfelt, like the adder we once saw in the desert sands, its color matching the wilderness surrounding it, watching yet undetected until it leaps, gives a sudden bite, and vanishes into the sand again.

  It’s not the silent crawl that’s scary.

  It’s the leap.

  I too would be willing to make peace with the crawl. You could even say that I’ve already made peace with it. Almost. Sometimes.

  But that sudden bite, you can’t get used to that. You were wrong, Miriam. I’m not getting used to it.

  I’m bitten each time a mirror happens to cross my path.

  Not true. I whisper to the mirror.

  That’s not me.

  But I know it is.

  On the shelf in our bedroom, a photo from our wedding night. Groom and bride with yesteryear’s wedding attire. I look at the bride I once was.

  A short wedding dress.

  To this day I still have that feeling of having missed out, because of that cruel 70’s fashion decree which dictated a decisive line of knee-high bridal dresses, as though everyday, nothing, just casual, thus hindering us from the majesties of lush dresses, glorious, flowing silk and lace, for our one and only chance, the way our youth had deserved, the way our childhood dreams of royal splendor had been promised.

  And Ilan, a very thin groom, his Adam’s apple sticking through a throat appearing out of a white shirt with an unbuttoned collar, in dark blue trousers, flowing fair hair, looking at me. My short dress exposing my obviously gorgeous legs - at least the dress proved that - submerged within high heels mercilessly crushing my feet, as will turn out in years to come.

  How young.

  And beautiful.

  Truly. Both of us.

  That beauty will later flow on from us, directly into the two daughters we will have, Dana and Hila. But it will consistently and gloomily drain out of us with the years, until only our
faded shells remain.

  And it’s not that I’m not fighting to capture that elusive youth and preserve it.

  By any means necessary in this war. Wonder creams, doctors, magical serums, syringes filled with promises. Acrobatic exercises and stubborn, exhausting runs over gym treadmills. Ha.

  I’m not dense. I see, understand.

  There’s no victory in this war. A successful battle here, another one there, maybe a few more fine years won through the grace of Botox, freezing our expressions further, but these are the victories of a losing battle. Despairing. There is no more of this, nor will there ever be.

  Recently, it also seems that an inch or two are missing from my stature, sneakily, robbed away from me like a few other fine assets I had owned.

  And still maintaining a reasonable state. Relatively, of course.

  For my age.

  Of course. For my age.

  2

  I drink my morning coffee alone. On the back porch. Facing the tall treetops planted here once by Ilan and me, during times when we, as well as this Monterey Cypress, were yet soft and fresh.

  It’s going to be a hectic day.

  Dana’s phone call from yesterday is burdening me the most.

  And I’m scared. Genuinely.

  “Will you drop by tomorrow?” Dana asked.

  In a kind of flittering casual manner. As though she pitches this kind of invite every day.

  Which is precisely what I’ve feared.

  I’ve seen this coming for a long time now. Dana never drops by casually, nor does she invite others to.

  Not her.

  Dana the serious, the persistent, who had overcome all possible educational hurdles with the determination of an Olympian athlete, bedecked with medals of excellence, who had never noticed the flock of suitors trailing behind her, enchanted by the dimmed beauty encasing her, blind to anything not involving books, and grades, and tests, and essays, and research articles in professional magazines.

  Even when the herd of men yearning for her proximity dwindled with the years, she still wasn’t too forlorn.