Finding the Pieces Lost And Hidden

Yael, the brunette with the long hair flowing down her back found me sitting on a rock at Masada, and said to me, "why don't you go down into the cistern and feel the water?"

The last rain, a few hours before we arrived, left clear water in the rectangle quarry of red clay.  I rose to stretch my hands over my head, and release the tension at the back of my neck.  Our journey through the Negev seemed to lead us deeper into Jewish cultural history: a tragic memory of identity.  I walked across an arid clifftop, a desert waiting for more water even as it has already just received.  I pulled up the hem of my skirt to enter the narrow passage descending the steps through the dirt.  I looked down at my sandals observing how dirty we had gotten from a short walk up the hill, wondered if Yael felt as thick as I did in the clay of the mountain.  We waited at the bottom a foot below the surface.  A silence fills one there.  The wind swallows over the top, but very little is heard.  I knelt and touched the water.  Ascending the stairs took a few seconds and Yael moved next into the earthen passage.  When she reemerged I could see something, "what is it?" I asked.

"Just that it's the most ancient ritual: immersion."  She frowned and half closed her eyes, "It means something to me to be here, for all the women who can't.  So many people gave their lives here.  I can't explain it.  I feel like I'm capturing something.  I'm finding pieces of my culture."

I smiled at her.  I wanted to feel how she felt, but I couldn't find it in me.  When we came down the hill, I felt tired and disappointed.  I was a Jew, why didn't in mean the same thing to me?  We drove back silently.  I wondered what she might be thinking.

That night I pulled out the bed and put on the sheet.  I made the bed the way I remembered my mother making it for strangers staying with us during shabbat.  I laid down to dream.  And in the early morning I had visions of angels dressed like children playing a childhood game called hide and seek.  Yael and I walked among them watching as they slid objects under rocks and into tree branches.  I watched a thin tall girl place a palm size trinket inside the petals of a Camilla bloom outside my mother's home.  she turned and smiled at me and ran away.

Another boy ran up and placed  his face close to mine and whispered, "watch me."  He ran his hands all around the trunk of a palm tree, pulling from the hairy side a scarf of some type which he trailed behind him as  he ran away from us.  Yale laughed and ran after him.  I watched Gilad approach from the side yard, a place we always liked to play, and walk into the  ivy where a snake crawled up his leg and recoiled to bite him. I screamed.  Instead of biting him he stroked it and it seemed to disintegrate into creamy moths which floated from his side disappearing into the air.

"Gilad..." I called as he walked into an ivy ocean.  He turned to me looking like my father, with green pale eyes against dark skin and he said, "mother misses you".  Then he dove into the water spreading around him and I awoke from my sleep.