Mother Exile, The Water, Return: Three Flash Fiction Pieces

Mother Exile

“How can you find your way home when you have never known a home in the first place? If home is an abstract construct there is no path back to something which has receded into the tangled gardens of time. Exile becomes home, even if that home always keeps a sense of uneasy longing, as if the walls might cave in, as if they are the ribs of some nauseated whale, convulsing and collapsing until it spews you out to walk some more until you find another temporary place to rest.” David was no longer listening to his mother. What did it matter, all of her crazy talk, about whales and exiles and homes and vomit? What did it matter if she never quite felt as if she belonged, and he could see her bending under the weight of the stares of others, and the loud protests that blew through the City with clockwork regularity?

His mother looked as if she was pressed out of a mould, tipped into this world with a stamp on her tuchus that read “Return to Israel before expiration”. Her hair was thick and almost black, and sprouted at right angles from her head. Her brow was heavy, her eyes hooded, her mouth full, and her nose was at times both mocked, faulted and admired, depending on who was looking. She was not the kind of woman to find a faithful surgeon and get a neat little button installed in the middle of her face, though she was never the kind of person to judge those who did. He could hear in his head, echoes of her barking ‘good for her…good for you!” Live and let live, a certain kind of permissiveness that had come from her own long exile and lack of family and home, that sat uneasily with her book of Tehillim and her quiet dedication.

She was five foot of holy terror when roused, and an entire world of kindness when not. She had more fierceness in her little finger than he had in his entire body. He wondered if this was all Jewish women, or just his mother. There was no one to compare her to. He looked at himself in the mirror. Ethnically ambiguous is what ‘they’ say, when they say things about him. Asian eyes, darker skin, a mop of curly hair, shockingly lighter than his mothers, and his nose a toned down version of hers, but still did not belong with either eyes nor skin. When people asked where he was from, he said ‘Los Angeles”, and when they wrinkled their noses that sat in the middle of their less ambiguous faces, he stared back and changed the subject. It was all generally ok until they met his mother, then he got to know who his real friends were.

His mother had taken to wearing long black dresses, her chai necklace and a scarf around her neck. Somehow it made her look even smaller than she actually was, more delicate, more vulnerable. He worried about her when she left the house, hauling an oversized tote bag and her walking stick with her. She worried about him all the time, no matter what he did. It was her job to worry. It was her job to be sad. Sadness has formed her and sadness informed her ways and days. She would watch holocaust documentaries her face streaming with silent tears, jammed into the corner of the sofa with a tissue and a cup of tea, to stoically sit and mutter curses. She never turned her head. She never looked away. She stared life in the full in the eyes and kissed it on the lips, no matter what terror was shoved before her. He wished she let herself be naive, allowed herself to be innocent, but innocence has left his mother high and dry before she was even his mother.

She had grown up with the feeling of life being vulnerable, of the chances of survival being slim, and the sure and certain knowledge that life and other people were to be endured for the most part, and divided into groups of ‘would hide us in the Shoah…and would throw us to the wolves’. She was the very last of her line apart from him. Their DNA was not successful. It had been hounded out of existence, and his mother, having grown up in the exile of adoption, was one woman against a world of hurt. His father was long gone. He was her entire family, whether he liked it or not. She was a good mother, he loved her, but of course he had to love her. Who else was going to?

She moved in the hospital bed, shifting her weight upwards a little. ” . . .and soon you will be free of me!” She looked triumphant in her cruelty and the brutality of freedom, “You will be free of all ‘this’!” His mother motioned expansively with the one hand that was not tied to a drip pole. “You won’t have to light candles with me, or pretend to participate in Passover. You will be able to hide, assimilate . . . survive. You won’t have to be ashamed of me as we walk down the street, or see me cower on the bus full of protesters waving signs in my face. I will have won, because you will be there, and you will blend in with everybody, and you will be able to live!” He looked down at his mother, and squeezed her hand, tears running down his cheeks. She didn’t need to be so unkind, not now. “Promise me, you will move on. Tell your children about me. Tell them about how we walked on the Pier and ate cinnamon buns out the bag. Tell them how we wandered around Chinatown together and laughed as we talked. Tell them about our movie nights and how we did that impossible puzzle together. Tell them I was a terrible cook, but a good mother and I would have loved to have met them. Have many children and make all of them good. Teach them how to survive.” His mother sighed as she pressed the morphine button she held in her hand. “Tell them we survived, and now they have too as well.”

“You are going to get better, Ma. We will go to the Pier next week and look at the sealions in the Bay.” She shook her head. “I am not from here. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere. I wonder if I had ever gone to Israel if I would have felt like I belonged there, or if I would have been a stranger there too?” David put his head on her shoulder, trying to hug as much of her as he could. “There is no going home, not until the end. Even then, where do we even go? Perhaps I will see you again one day, Ill be bones and skin and have been dead many years, and we will walk together and see if it feels like home yet. In the meantime, hide, sweetheart, hide. I love you . . . now go and get me some ice. My mouth is as dry as the Sinai. Don’t ask that little nurse with the bad attitude, she would see me die of thirst before the disease or the morphine gets me. Ask that nice young man with the big smile…” She paused, thinking of what she needed to say before he left the room. “I love you more than I can explain. You are a wonderful son. Thank you for being my David…You are loved.” There was no word big enough for what she wanted to say, and so she stopped talking and tried to smile through the pain.

David looked at the glass door and saw no reflection in the bed, just the face of his long-gone sister in the hallway, and he knew it was time to find how if he could survive as well as his mother had managed. He put his hand on his mother’s head and walked out the door. He knew she hadn’t sent him out for ice, but instead iced him out to spare him. He never did work out where she found the strength for any of it. It was as if a train had pulled into a station that had been built just for her, to take her somewhere else that she would only return from when it suited her. It was her only selfish act, he thought to himself, somehow finding some of her cruelty, and he resented her wholly for it. Freedom was not all it was cracked up to be.

The Water

Her little boat was taking on water. It was no easy matter to keep repeating to herself the mantra, ‘My name is Rachel. My son is David. My daughter is Sara. I have no husband. I live in in Apartment C, 1212 Jordan Terrace. She laughed at that one. Live. What was it that she was doing in this little boat on a seemingly endless sea? Was it living? She was definitely not alive, she had worked that one out when she saw them wheel her old body out from the ICU, in something that looked like a laundry cart. Her hand has fallen off the gurney and flopped uselessly towards the floor, trailing a piece of tubing. She did not feel anything for it. Her old body was a husk, used up and broken. It couldn’t piss or digest or breathe or think.

Perhaps the body didn’t do much of the thinking after all, because she was still doing that, at least. It didn’t seem to do much of the feeling, either, outside of the realm of pain. Really, the body was not much use after all. She never had been a worshipper of the body. Bodies did bad things to other bodies, possibly more often than good. A hand held out to another hand did not seem nearly as prevalent as a hand held out to another body who was its own little self contained unit, and slap it, punch it, drill holes through it, make it bleed and give out and end up in one of those ridiculous laundry carts to be pushed down corridors by nurses with bad attitudes and clean uniforms. To hug, to kiss, to hold and to pull out of the water or out of another body that is trying to bring it into the world, those were the things she held tightly to her. The rest of it seemed like so much static, so much Bad Intention Radio Station broadcasts, so much interference on the soundwaves she rode on, the endless sea bouncing her little boat around.

She had one oar and a little bowl, that had a crack running right through it, to bail out water. She didn’t remember how she got in the boat, nor how she had ended up wearing the white poplin dress with the sprigs of red flowers woven into its weft and warp. She did not know how her hands had ended up looking so tan and young, nor how the legs she could see herself tapping against the inner hull of her little wooden boat, were not wrapped with bandages, nor distorted with swelling. She remembered some of it. How she got stuck in the place with the slim metal trays and the other souls around her wailing about the impossibility of their situation. Someone really should open a window in that place. Let some air in. Let some suffering out. Her David had come for her quickly. He didn’t leave her there long. She was so proud of him for that. She was not forgotten. They would get her buried quick, before the sun came up and down again.

She remembered the funeral director putting lipstick on her body and screaming at him to not do that. She had never worn it in life and had no need of it in death. He was making her look like somebody else, and that would never do. She remembered how her son came alone to sit with her, and took his time to wipe her face clean with a wet flannel and a towel. She saw how he cried and she sat with him, held his hands, and talked to him. He seemed to almost hear her. Almost. It was a long night. He drank a soda angrily and threw his trash across the room, then apologized to her. He adjusted her feet and put her arms more naturally at her sides. He stroked her hair and asked her to come back. By the time they put her in the ground his hands were shaking. He looked older, sadder, and more lost than she ever remembered seeing him. Freedom was perhaps simply the act of getting lost and learning to enjoy the lost-ness. He was not enjoying it.

She stood with her hand at his back as he threw a flower into the grave and felt the stone in his pocket weigh him down. There was no marker yet, just a little wooden stake that went right through his heart and into hers. He didn’t want anyone else there, just the Rebbe, his wife and the small group of eight other men who offered to say the Kaddish for her with him. He didn’t know them. He didn’t want to. He asked the Rebbe with his slim face and his long delicate hands if he would make sure the Kaddish was said for her. He wouldn’t do it. He placed the piece of granite with the message written on its smooth side, on the dirt where her head lay, kissed his fingers, and lay them on the earth. This was where his heart lay. She had been his mother, his father, his sister and his friend. It was just the two of them, and now it was just him. As the first words of the Kaddish were uttered, and as her son walked away, she felt free: free of the grave, free of the earth, free from the sorrow that was caused by her leaving. Free of everything, except the endless ocean she now bobbed up and down upon, chanting her own name and staring at her youthful reflection in the water, marveling at the lack of lines running between nose and mouth and how her hair hung long and how the tips floated in the water, mermaid-like and full of wonder once again.

Another boat bobbed up towards her, its owner throwing her a rope. “Coming to shore?”

“I’m ready.” She replied, grabbing hold of the rope and tying it to the round fixing on the hull of the boat. The rope felt like a snake in her fingers, wriggling free and refusing to stay tied. The man looked at her and smiled.

“You sure, you’re ready? You don’t have to come along. We can leave you a while, or we can leave you forever if you wish. You can forget who you are, or you can remember. Both take effort and both take time, but you have plenty of that now. None of this is easy: even drifting out further into the endless ocean and entirely forgetting who you are takes effort. It is not easy to give up on yourself, but I find most prefer it in the end. How is your ego doing?

“My name is Dirt, but some call me Rachel. My son is beautiful, I call him David. I live at 1212 Jordan Terrace. They buried me in a white robe, but someone put lipstick on me. My son wiped it off. He was all I ever had. I had nothing else.

The man in the other boat smiled at her with concern on his face. “How is your boat?”

“My boat was leaking a little, but it is seaworthy I think. I have not had to bail out in a while. I only have one oar.”

“None of us have two oars, not unless someone gives us another one. Some don’t want their oars, they want to drift away. If you want to drift away I could take your oar, but I will not take it if you want to come ashore. There are not enough oars for us all to have two if we all chose to row. That is not really a problem. It just teaches us value. It teaches us to value the oars and to value those who chose to drift. How is your heart?”

“My heart hurts. I am worried about David. I am worried about the house and the bills and the way the world is going to the dogs. I am worried about what is happening to my body, even though I feel no affection for it. I feel real enough without it. Row with me? Is there land?”

“There is land, he said. The water is wide, but there is land. I will take you there. I have good tea and a good story. We can talk about your boat and we can talk about your heart and we can talk about the world we have left behind and the one we live in.”

“Yes.” She said; and she meant it. Yes, she said. She said, yes and they rowed to shore.

The Return

There had been time away from the minds of others, out of the time of the world, out of the time that the flesh has to interact with the physical around it. There had been time for tea and time to love. There had been time to remember and time to forget. There had been time to reunite and time to visit the world she had left behind. She saw that the world went on without her in that part of it. She saw she was remembered and she blessed those who did. She saw there was suffering because she was not there, and she saw there was life, despite her not being in it. She saw her grandchildren born, and she saw David grow older and grow sadder and sometimes grow lonely, but mostly he grew strong and happy and full of love. There was a girl and a love story and a home and a purpose, and it pleased her immensely, even if she was not there to see it in her body, she saw it in her soul and it blessed her with joy.

Rachel learnt to love the ocean and she learnt to love the shore. She learnt to lean on the ones she was tied to by the heart strings of her soul, despite being divided by the vagaries of time in the flesh. She learnt how to weave and she learnt how to sing the song of the universe. She had her purpose and she began to love it. She never forgot her name, nor where she was from. She never forgot her family and she refused to return. She stood on the shore and stayed there, steadfast. One day she went out to offer to pull a new boat-rower to shore, and they told her they wanted to forget, they wanted to drift, and she cried as she understood and she took their oar from them and rowed back to the shore with two. She had a monkey who sat by her and a horse that she spent her days trying to tempt closer. A parrot sat on her shoulder and told her stories of the world that lay beyond the endless water. He claimed to have flown it all and then flown back, but she didn’t believe him. Parrots are fanciful creatures, prone to wishful thinking. Their thoughts are feathered and their brains are birdy, nevertheless he was a faithful friend, and perhaps he had flown the sea and back again, after all.

Once her David had his wife, who was kind and gentle and beautiful, and he had his family, who numbered three boys and two girls, he became the strong one who fixed everything around him. He took her role, but his life was happier than hers ever was. Sometimes he spoke to her. Sometimes he held up a baby or two and they looked at the moon and they talked to her as if they knew she was in the room. Sometimes one of the babies told tales on her, and said they saw a woman who sang them songs by their beds, and laid her cool spirit hand on their hot heads when they were unwell. David knew who came to them, and he told them about the Pier and the sealions and the puzzles and how he had the best mother a boy could ever wish for. He told them about his Japanese grandfather and his love of chocolate and the USA. He told them about their wild great Uncle and his motorcycle, and how they came from strong people who survived and then survived some more.

Once the war came, the big war, David worked in the hospitals putting together more puzzles. He sewed people together, he made whole skin out of bloody patchwork. He eased suffering and he spoke kindness. When one was not going to make it, he spoke the name of his G_d and the name of his mother and asked her to come and take them to what came after. David didn’t know about the endless sea, nor the boats, nor the little shoreline with the souls who chose to remember and remain who they were, despite the maddening nature of eternity’s halls and pitfalls, but he did know his mother and he remembered her and how she dragged him with her to the future.

One day the bombs paused in the skies and the planes landed themselves, and the bullets stopped in midair and turned around to muzzle the guns they had flown from. One day the skies opened and the sun seemed to split and his children cried in the arms of their mother in fear of what was happening. Time itself paused and the seas rose in the bays. A man stood next to a soldier, who was holding the halter of a donkey. Ashes and water were ebbing and flowing on the floor of the temple as attackers cowered and kicked their legs in anger. The soldier had helped his friend onto the donkey and the one who rode patted him on the back and told him that it was going to be better now. With a swift motion of his hand he landed violence upon the earth and turned the workings of the machinery of war into nothing more than feathers and sawdust. The stupid raged until they saw the sky open, and the earth swallow the remnants of the old Temple walls, then they stood and looked and waited. Apologies fell from their mouths whether they liked it or not.

It was then that Rachel, who stood in the kitchen of her little cabin by the shore of the endless ocean, felt herself drawn forwards. In the blink of an eye she was no longer making tea on her stove nor was she toasting bread over her little fire, using a fork and her fingertips. In a fragment of a moment she was standing under an olive tree, staring into David’s eyes, and holding her tea cup in surprise. Behind her stood her aunt, her grandmother, her grandfather and theirs’ too. To her left was her daughter and before her five children smiled and called her name. Next to David was his beautiful wife and behind them a line of people waited to see if the world had ended, or if it had begun, and she began to sing. It was as if they had never been separated, as if she had never gone to live on the endless ocean.

The crowd moved forward, on flesh and blood legs, toward the man and the donkey and the soldier who stood by him, toward a temple which had grown out of the ground, reconstituted from the ghost of its ancestors. She heard the bellow of the heifers and the call of the doves. Three doves settled on her forearm, putting their soft heads into the crook of her elbow and nuzzling themselves into her breast, and she said a small prayer remembering those who were not strong enough to remember themselves after the little death they suffered removed them from the physical world and put them onto the endless sea.

She asked the small child next to her: “How is your boat? How is your heart? How does it sit? How does it beat? How does it balance? Do you run through life with the waterpot on your head, unsteadied by your hands, running downhill, helter-skelter, as if you are a mountain goat pursued by a wolf or a bear?” The child smiled. “Here I am!” she said, “Here I am!”

“Yes you are, child. Here you are and here we are, and here I am too.”

The man on the donkey looked at the ragged man and sent him out onto the endless sea to float alone. There were no need of thorns nor symbols of pagan antiquity. And the sky opened, and the hand came down and it touched his shoulders. Where he walked flowers blossomed, and animals sat down and wept. Some laid down sheaves of wheat, or boughs of pomegranates. Some gave him sunflowers and others passed him dollar bills with the words: “In G_d we Trust” written on them, that turned into doves in his hands and settled on their shoulders, cooing and trilling happily. There was peace because there was no other option, and as they walked towards the doors of the new-old Temple and the water and ashes were sprayed upon them, the doves flew into the knives and the Cohanim collected the sacrifices to lay upon the fire of the altar, and none were rejected.

Rachel walked forward alone, seeing ahead of her the figure of a woman who looked neither old nor young, and had the same eyes as her. The woman was chewing a crust of bread and held a lamb firmly under her arm. “Took his time, didn’t he, Rachel?” she said softly. “Took his time…but I reckon it will be worth it. I think it already is.” Rachel saw the woman’s eyes were blind and her gaze was soft and fuzzy. As the water sprayed upon them, and the ashes purified them, the woman’s eyes cleared and she saw clearly the Temple and the lamb and the Rachel and the line behind her that stretched so far she could not see the end and the woman who was running forward to grasp Rachel by the shoulders, and she raised her voice to the skies calling out in the voice of her people, in the call of women who are joyous and whose very flesh and blood belongs to the Levant, and she set off an avalanche of voices behind her.

And Rachel knew that although the time was long, that the man was right on time, and that there would be no more desolation in freedom, and to be free no longer had to mean loss or lost. There was to be no more mother-exile. Freedom was worth both the cracker and the wine and there were no empty seats at the table.

And David smiled both before and behind her.