Edges by Leora Skolkin-Smith

Author:Leora Skolkin-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fiction Studio Books
Published: 2015-05-13T21:33:24+00:00

Chapter Four

Six weeks later, I awoke from a siesta nap. I watched the light crawl in through the window, and the shadows altering on the dirty mouse-colored basement walls.

I was lying on a mattress in the cellar of St. Sebastian’s monastery, across the border in Arab Jordan.

I stretched, my arms and neck were numb from sleeping. I was dressed in a muslin gown with long sleeves, its fabric as thin as paper. I looked out the window. The courtyard and garden were empty. The air was silent, but for the lashing of the summer wind against our makeshift cardboard window shutters.

William and I settled down to live inside the cellar of a monastery we spotted the first night we crossed over the border. The abandoned building was somewhere between the end of the last Israeli military zone, five kilometers south of here, and the mountainous ledge overlooking the Jordan River, ten kilometers north.

The first day we were here, William sent his parents a Western Union telegram telling them he was all right. That hot day, he drew out some old linseed oil from his supplies, and propped some loose boards up against a far wall in our cellar. “I want to see if I can build a kayak,” he said. “Take it down to the river bank. Soon maybe.”

He constructed a design, then he began sawing the boards. A Bedouin trader at a camp by a cemetery ordered special epoxy for him, and sandpaper from Amman.

What was my design? Did I have one? It was enough for me these bright days to have the reflections I saw of myself as a female on the window glass here in the monastery, the shadows William and I made together on our walls.

The monastery was built of sun-seared limestone blocks. A water tank stood outside the entrance gates; the tank’s rust and emptiness giving the walled garden inside the complex a disreputable feeling. The garden was filled with shreds of litter and errant vines. The dilapidated chapel above our heads might have been the hideaway of a gang of thieves, with its cloistered vaults and grottoes.

Here in this spot, I thought, there must have been a Village of Lepers, too. Long ago maybe. Sometimes I believed I could smell the mold of a thousand years in these cellar walls.

Listlessly, I studied the writing on a pill bottle William picked up for me in the village for my headaches. It lay on its side, a few meters from the mattress on the floor, near the plates of muscat grapes William and I washed this morning after the farmers dropped us off from the back of their wagon. We picked the wild grapes in the fields. I read who the prescription was made out to: “Dorian Karchimer.” We had changed my name from Liana T. Bialik. What had the T. stood for? I forgot now, and then, just as abruptly, remembered. “Tree.” We had given me the new middle name Tree when I changed the rest of my name.

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