The Last Rain (7 page)

Dori
 

Daddy has to work in the Kitchen all day today so I can’t see him until bedtime. Mummy is in the Room but she’s busy with my sister Sara. I lie on the floor and look at the black book of paintings. I love that book. I simply love it.

My favourite painting is the one of the woman falling out of the tiger’s mouth. There are bones and snakes spilling out too. I asked Daddy what the painting was about and he said it was a dream but I could tell he only said that because he didn’t know how to explain it. I don’t think he likes that painting very much.
²⁴

I look at it for a long time. Then I find the beautiful painting with the gas station. I like it as much as the tiger one. I want to be right inside that painting.
²⁵

After that I go in order. Some pictures are boring and I skip them. Others are very interesting. I try to figure out their story.

I ask Daddy which painting he likes best. He says he likes them all but I keep asking so he looks at the pictures and chooses the one that has two soldiers helping a woman nurse her baby. One soldier holds his canteen to her mouth and the other soldier helps her hold up the baby. She was probably dying but the soldiers saved her.
²⁶

I like canteens. My brother David has one. The water inside it tastes like metal. When I’m a soldier I’ll carry a canteen wherever I go.

Our First Year

19 January 1949.
The mosque was blown up today. Cloudy, drab day with bitter wind but no rain. A small group of us stood off to one side, way out of danger, with a beautiful view of the western wadi behind us, and this looming, softly curved and mysterious monument of a culture which none of us even begins to understand rising before us, its fate doomed within a matter of seconds.

There was a shattering explosion which shot a bolt of shock through each of us, wrenching our bodies with tension, and then the dome seemed to rise slowly into the grey sky, like a giant eggshell, with the steel reinforcing rods mangled and twisting out from the sides; it fell in pieces into the mass of earth and rubble and flying stone which was once the prince of Eldar’s skyline.

Dori

Mummy takes my sister Sara to the Children’s House. Then she comes back and we sing songs from a book I like. It’s called
Uga Uga
. I know all the songs except for the train song which doesn’t have a tune.

The pictures in the book are pretty but there’s one I don’t understand. It’s for I’ve Been to Yemen—

I’ve been to Yemen

And very soon

The little black boy I met there

Will be Ruthie’s groom

In the picture a little black boy in red and white shorts and a Yemenite hat is handing flowers to a much bigger girl in a wedding dress. It’s only pretend so why is the boy dressed like someone from Yemen and why is he so little and why is Ruthie wearing a wedding dress and why is there a mosque like in Yemen and why is he black? I asked Mummy but she didn’t understand the problem.
²⁷

We sing all the songs in the book and then Mummy takes me back to the Children’s House. I don’t beg for more time because with Mummy when it’s time it’s time and if you beg for more songs she only says
next time
.

At least she doesn’t laugh with Shoshana the way Daddy does.

Baby Diary

July 7

She gets a bottle at night every second night. Today she followed Naftali’s finger. And the next day [sic] she looked at a toy. I now have to rock her bed after almost every feeding. She moans, kvetches, lifts her head—after light rocking she falls asleep. Between the third and fourth feeding she wakes up and cries and gets water and she falls asleep again. That happens every day at 5:00. Her bellybutton is already dry and perfectly fine.

During the day, at almost every feeding, Naftali comes to visit. She still eats every four hours and sleeps well during the day and is gaining nicely.

Dori

Shoshana is in a very bad mood today. For supper we have leben and cold beet soup and rice with carrots and cheese triangles. I can’t decide if I like the cheese triangles or not. I like unwrapping them but I don’t know if I like eating them.

We decide to have a contest to see who can have the pinkest pee. The more beet soup you drink, the pinker your pee is. We’re going to check everyone’s pee tonight to see who wins.

Dessert is apple sauce with cinnamon but everyone’s too full from all the beet soup.

Shoshana gets angry that no one’s eating their apple sauce. We can tell there’s trouble coming but we don’t know what it is.

Letter to the Editor

29 March 1961

I read with interest the article by K. Shabtai on Jews in Canada, including what Pomerantz, Editor of the Toronto Yiddish paper
The Forward,
had to say. As Pomerantz based his harsh words on the book by Naftali Satie,
Between the Motion and the Act
(or, according to him,
Between the Movement and the Act
), which he criticized and did not correctly evaluate in my opinion, I feel it incumbent upon me to right the wrong.

He wronged the author, first and foremost. Naftali Satie is one of the founders of Eldar, which borders on Lebanon. A year ago he finished writing
Between the Motion and the Act
and approached Vantage Press, which published it, not in paperback but in attractive hardback format. As soon as the book appeared it aroused great interest in Canada’s literary and artistic community.

Pomerantz, and following him Shabtai, were shocked for some reason by the scene of coupling in the Christian cemetery in Montreal. Because Shabtai didn’t read the book, my comments are directed mainly at Pomerantz. Firstly, the girl he refers to as a Christian prostitute is actually the young man’s Jewish girlfriend. Secondly, they do not desecrate the grave of a youth killed in the war, but in fact weep over it. Finally, they do not have sex on the grave, or even near it.

If Pomerantz had read the book more objectively, and with a little less fear of “what the goyim will say,” maybe he would have grasped its symbolic meaning. If an author attempts to expose, reveal and demonstrate, he must do so without arrogance, and if the Communists who left the Zionist movement are depicted as undergoing a spiritual crisis brought on by a lack of direction, then that is the way things are and nothing will come of silence.

—Zeev Tchornitski,
Davar

Dori

The trouble comes. It mostly comes for Lulu.

We’re all brushing our teeth at the sinks. Shoshana notices that Lulu isn’t there. She’s already in the bedroom putting on her pyjamas. Shoshana says
Lulu did you brush your teeth
? Lulu says
yes
. Shoshana checks Lulu’s toothbrush and it’s dry.

She grabs Lulu’s arm and pulls her back to the room with the sinks and yells at her
is this toothbrush wet? is it wet? feel it feel it! is it wet?
Shoshana makes us feel the toothbrush. We’re standing next to the wall and she asks us one by one to feel it and tell her if it’s wet. We don’t want to say but we have no choice. Shoshana yells at Lulu
you lied to me you lied to me!
She slaps Lulu twice on her face. Then she pulls her hair and throws her on the floor and begins to kick her with her sandal. Lulu screams. Shoshana kicks and yells
you lied
. If anyone on Eldar saw this they’d throw Shoshana out. But no one sees. No one but us.

Skye doesn’t see either. She escaped to the bedroom when the trouble started.

No one says anything after Shoshana leaves. I suck my finger. Only instead of my eye or my ear the soft thing I touch tonight is my jinnie.

I wait and wait for my goodnight kiss. Finally Daddy comes. I’m so happy to see him! I sit up in bed and reach out my arms to him. He hugs me and kisses me and says he’s sorry he missed me when I visited. He says
goodnight doda sweet dreams
. I tell him Shoshana hit Lulu but he only smiles and doesn’t say anything.

Daddy doesn’t really believe me. He has to believe me because he thinks you have to respect children but I can tell that even though he respects me and wants to believe me he doesn’t believe me.

The truth is that Mummy once hit me too. It was in the house on Davaar Street.

I loved the house on Davaar Street. There was a long long hall with the kitchen at the end and there was a living room with a big window and a television and a record player and a couch. Mummy and Daddy slept in a bedroom that was right next to the bedroom I shared with my brother David. Their bed was between two doors. I don’t know why that bedroom had two doors. They both led to the same place.