Shavout

I sit at a table, can’t wait till it’s all over. Cheeses of all kinds are scattered on gleaming plates all across the eight-seat table, fat and luscious watermelon slices piled in a thick bowl, carrots and broccolis mixed on a slim platter, and various chips served in basins basking with good grace and like a ghost on the flowery map.

I bite a chip and stare into space, soft, bittersweet music slithering in the scent of cheese. They make me crash into memories, like a blind bicycle collapsing on a brick wall. Ambulance, police, they all come to check me up, what happened. It’s too long a story, I don’t even open my mouth.

It’s the kind of music the music teacher made my third grade class listen to, sing. The kind of music my father put on during holidays in Israel. In Hebrew. About Jerusalem, and harvest, children holding hands, very gentle.

I pick at the watermelon on my plate. Next to me, someone is grabbing food from all over, making jokes, laughing, and they don’t find this event even remotely unique, no significance, no memories, not even… it’s just another dinner at family friends. But I can still feel my foot twisting. It was only—only? I am not that young—eight years before: dad tossing me on the couch, breaks, head on his lap, car ride, hospital, months in the kindergarten rolling on the floor, my butt like a broom sweeping up the marble. And then tears bond in my eyelids, but no stone emerges in my throat, and I bite the watermelon viciously. The tears go away.

I am old, too old, thirteen years; it seems like my entire life all went too fast, was all another yesterday. I am not dying, but still I am good as dead, no more childhood, now it was only coffee in the morning, college, and then wife and children and all those things, all those things I am scared of. Eight years! Eight years since I broke my foot, and yet it’s clean in my mind, fresh and beautiful.

No. It’s a dream of a memory. So far away but it all happened yesterday.

The music is still dancing in the air. Noami Shemer, Givatron, a girl skipping in the hills. I was born for the peace that is supposed to come, that’s what I hear darting in the sound, and now the stone reaches up my mouth. I know this song, it was a memory, a dream, both, something that is invisible, on a n abandoned dessert next to Egypt. No, no, no, no, my mind says, no! Please, come back to me. Please…

I ask to be excused, finish the math homework, read a book. The music stops when I want to go to sleep. School tomorrow. But it would play in mind for the entire night, I know, like a car radio turned on dimly in the dark. A part of me wants it to stop, another wants it to live in my head forevermore.