and baby tomato plants, bean seedlings about to mount their poles lined the streets. At fourteen-thirty, almost everyone was at work. A robot cleaner puttered along the street, picking up the occasional bit of trash and sweeping madly. The sound of someone practising violin, playing over and over a passage of Wieniawski, came through an open window. She wondered why that seemed startling until she realized that in Y-S, windows were not usually opened. The occasional passerby was casually dressed: open-throated shirts, pants, a full skirt, shorts, for the day was seasonably mild. She felt like a freak in her standard Y-S suit, now streaked with grime and soot. A couple passed her arguing loudly about somebody’s mother, their voices raised unselfconsciously. Behind a hedge, a dog was barking at a rabbit in a hutch. In little yards, chickens were stalking about, and in one, speckled turkeys strutted. Ari would be crazy with excitement to see live animals. The smells assaulted her: animal smells, vegetable smells, the scent of yellow tulips, the heavier scent of narcissus, cooking odours, a tang of manure, the salty breath of the sea. Everything felt… unregulated. How unstimulated her senses had been all those Y-S years. How cold and inert that corporate Shira seemed as she felt herself loosening.
The house of her childhood: from the street a stolid square clapboard house, two storeys offering a row of large multipaned windows. It hid its secret, that it was built around a courtyard like the synagogue she had always gone to, the one called the Synagogue of Water. No one before the twenty-first century had ever loved flowers and fruiting trees and little birds and the simple beauty of green leaves as did those who lived after the Famine, for whom they were precious and rare and always endangered. Shira had been born since the Famine, after the rising oceans had drowned much of the rice and breadbaskets of the world, after the rising temperatures had shifted the ocean and air currents, leaving former farmlands scrubland or desert, after the end of abundant oil had finished agribusiness on land; yet the consequences and tales of the Famine had shaped her childhood too.
Malkah was waiting in the courtyard. “Ah, Shira, you’re home at last.”
“Since Ari was born, I’ve wanted to bring him here and let you get to know each other. Here I am but without my son. What good is it?”
“Time for you to come home. But it’s dangerous here. We’re under siege. We’ll talk about it later. Now come and let me hold you.”
Malkah felt smaller to her, far more fragile, and yet solid enough. The yellow rose still twined on the wall, the courtyard was still planted with peach and plum trees, grapevines and cosmos and tulips, squash and tomato vines, a garden of almost Eden. Shira held Malkah close, feeling a sense at once of her grandmother’s strength and age. Malkah had always seemed old to Shira, because Malkah was Bubeh and grandmothers were old, but Shira recognized in retrospect that Malkah had been a young and extremely vigorous grandmother. Malkah was born in 1978, so she would be seventy-two now.
Shira felt a lightening all through her as if tension so long-standing she had not even recognized it as tension had eased suddenly, a high-pitched background whine of machines suddenly cutting off so that a blessed and startlingly rich inner silence flowed through her. This was the home she had fled, not from an unhappy childhood but from too early and too intense love, paradise torn.
five
Shira
FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF
At thirteen, Shira loved passionately and secretively and was loved in return. However, she also knew this to be a state outlawed and demeaned by everyone except Gadi and herself.
She did not love Gadi alone, only most fiercely. She also loved her grandmother Malkah and her big sleek brown cat, Hermes. Hermes had been hers since she had found him as a kitten abandoned in the raw, where
The house of her childhood: from the street a stolid square clapboard house, two storeys offering a row of large multipaned windows. It hid its secret, that it was built around a courtyard like the synagogue she had always gone to, the one called the Synagogue of Water. No one before the twenty-first century had ever loved flowers and fruiting trees and little birds and the simple beauty of green leaves as did those who lived after the Famine, for whom they were precious and rare and always endangered. Shira had been born since the Famine, after the rising oceans had drowned much of the rice and breadbaskets of the world, after the rising temperatures had shifted the ocean and air currents, leaving former farmlands scrubland or desert, after the end of abundant oil had finished agribusiness on land; yet the consequences and tales of the Famine had shaped her childhood too.
Malkah was waiting in the courtyard. “Ah, Shira, you’re home at last.”
“Since Ari was born, I’ve wanted to bring him here and let you get to know each other. Here I am but without my son. What good is it?”
“Time for you to come home. But it’s dangerous here. We’re under siege. We’ll talk about it later. Now come and let me hold you.”
Malkah felt smaller to her, far more fragile, and yet solid enough. The yellow rose still twined on the wall, the courtyard was still planted with peach and plum trees, grapevines and cosmos and tulips, squash and tomato vines, a garden of almost Eden. Shira held Malkah close, feeling a sense at once of her grandmother’s strength and age. Malkah had always seemed old to Shira, because Malkah was Bubeh and grandmothers were old, but Shira recognized in retrospect that Malkah had been a young and extremely vigorous grandmother. Malkah was born in 1978, so she would be seventy-two now.
Shira felt a lightening all through her as if tension so long-standing she had not even recognized it as tension had eased suddenly, a high-pitched background whine of machines suddenly cutting off so that a blessed and startlingly rich inner silence flowed through her. This was the home she had fled, not from an unhappy childhood but from too early and too intense love, paradise torn.
five
Shira
FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF
At thirteen, Shira loved passionately and secretively and was loved in return. However, she also knew this to be a state outlawed and demeaned by everyone except Gadi and herself.
She did not love Gadi alone, only most fiercely. She also loved her grandmother Malkah and her big sleek brown cat, Hermes. Hermes had been hers since she had found him as a kitten abandoned in the raw, where
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