Sonya all her life has fiercely loved her old house, its brick walls, rooted into the ground up to the windows, black crooked boards of the fence overgrown with bright green moss, a big apple tree with the thick bottom branch, so comfortable to sit on, munching on yellow-and-red stripy apples with pink core, giant nettle, twice Sonya’s height, blooming with pretty lilac brushes. And a creek, no – a river down there, among the green hills, so mighty and beautiful. Sonya has never seen a more beautiful river in her life.
But of course she has seen a lot, it’s like life was playing badminton with her – just like Sonya used to play with her mom and dad during the summer, long time ago, Sonya couldn’t even remember their faces anymore, but she remembered the shuttlecock flying through the high warm sky.
And that’s how Sonya was flying – from a small Polish town to Auschwitz, and then, after the liberation, she was found by her father’s relatives wailing over bent-legged little skeleton, and taken to America, to Boston, and then she lived in Paris while studying math in École normale.
Sonya was a gifted child, everybody said that, and so she graduated from school at 16 and left to Europe right away, missing her green hills and apple trees.
But her house was burned to the ground during the first days of war, mom died in the camp, dad vanished without a trace. Her beloved river became narrow and somewhat dreggy, the hills where plowed for growing vegetables.
Sonya left to Paris and met Khaled there.
Khaled’s parents fled Syria, hiding their passports with the red stamp “Mossave”, which means “Jew”. Their cozy little fabric shop was mutilated by a crookedly nailed board with the same inscription so that the devote would not even think to buy there.
And they didn’t, why buy when you can just grab anything you like in the helter-skelter of yet another pogrom.
Khaled faintly remembered the sea, the stinky cramped boat, his mom crying quietly, his dad firmly clutching in his lap a small bag which contains their most prized possession – his grandpa’s Torah scroll. Grandpa refused to leave, he said – it’s my home, let them kill me right here. He was killed a month later, on the shop’s doorway, right under the board that said “Jew”.
Khaled and Sonya met at a student’s party, they strolled the Latin Quarter all night long talking about their childhood.
About the nettle and the smell of dust after a summer rain, about the shimmer of a blue silk and magic ikat patterns that bring luck, smell of sandalwood on a hot, stuffy evening, cup of tea with apple slices, golden viscous baklava.
They have only talked about childhood, they haven’t mentioned what came after, because all of it has passed and didn’t matter anymore. And childhood, it’s forever.
And when many years later in Tel-Aviv they were sitting on their balcony – it took Khaled a long time to find that very tint of blue, just like the patterned gratings in his grandpa’s shop; and putting on the blue table white cups with golden rim – very similar to those used in a gazebo under the big apple tree; and down there, under their balcony a street of old Jaffa was flowing by; and each was drinking his or her own: Sonya was fumbling with the apple slices in a cup of amber tea, Khaled dipped a tiny sugar cube in the strongest coffee brewed in a copper cezve on sand; and then so fiercely, so desperately they didn’t talk about what happened to them after the childhood.
Light steam was floating above her teacup, smelling like apples, like soft warm road dust slightly wetted by summer rain, tasting like a lilac flower with five petals, eaten stealthily while promptly making a wish (what wish? don’t remember), it smelled like wet freshly mowed grass and buzzing bumblebee above raspberry jam (oh, who left the jam open?! The bumblebee drowned!)…
The coffee was dense and slick like Damask; it smelled like grandpa’s smile and melted in the air with fragrance of glass vials with fancy golden lace, with silky shimmer and precious threads of expensive Damask it touched the dark skin, with a crooked alley and the cool darkness of a synagogue, the chanting murmur of the rabbi and the mujizin’s lingering cry from the tower…
“Is everything okay, motek?*” – Sonya asks carefully, glancing at her husband with some concern.
“Everything is fine, mami**” – He echoes, “Everything is fine, don’t you worry, my heart”…
Translated by Diana Shnaiderman-Pereira
-------------------- *Motek- sweetheart (Hebrew) **Mami – term of endearment in Hebrew