The Dead Man by Nora Gold

Author:Nora Gold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Published: 2016-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

RECAPITULATION

16. KIBBUTZ

THE NEXT MORNING, FRIDAY, Eve finishes up at the seminar and the conference (the final half-day for both). Then she hops a bus up north. It’s a two-and-a-half hour ride and looking out the window at the changing Israeli landscape (from mountainous desert to flat plain, then to rolling hills and valleys), she worries about still not having an ending, or even a title, for her love-and-hate cycle. She has barely given this any thought over the past five days, and in only three more she’ll be back home, and just one week after that is the deadline for the annual Jewish music competition that she wants to submit her cycle to. This contest feels like her only chance to get her cycle performed and also to get her name “out there.” And equally – maybe more — important, there’s a bag of money attached to this prize: $10,000, which would buy her some time away from her music therapy practice so she could compose full-time for almost six months. How I’d love to win that prize money, she thinks, gazing out the window at a lone farmhouse, four cows eating grass with their heads bowed as if they’re praying, and a neglected-looking broken tree. I need to find an ending for this cycle (this cycle that keeps going round and round). Time is running out.

At three o’clock she reaches her cousin’s kibbutz. The kibbutz is glorious this time of year: it’s the rainy season and everything is green, moist, fragrant, and swelling with life. The main crop here is avocados, which Eve visits as soon as she has dumped her canvas bag on the porch of her cousin’s little three-room bungalow. They’re not expecting her till four; she is sure they won’t mind if she goes for a walk now. In the orchard the ripe avocados hang heavily from the trees. They’re a deep, dark green, their leaves (the same colour) are shiny and dripping wet from the recent rain, and the orchard smells like life itself. Recalling the story about the four rabbis who entered an orchard and had a mystical experience there, Eve — wearing her cousin’s rubber boots, borrowed from his front porch — sloshes along the muddy paths feeling happy and alive. For the next half hour, there are no thoughts in her head as she tramps her way through the avocado grove. She is all avocado fruit and rustling leaves and strong rough tree trunks and the smell of the wet earth and the fresh damp air and the forest’s deep magical silence. Co-existing with this silence, not disturbing it at all, there’s the boom, boom of her footsteps and the snapping of branches and the scurrying of small animals in the underbrush and the chirping of birds high up in the trees, while along the forest floor, the late afternoon sun has silkscreened a dappled pattern onto the shadows. In the midst of all this, she feels such joy, such ecstasy, that at one point, noticing it, she is embarrassed.

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