By the Ravine of the Desert

A big apology for being so late publishing and showing up for you; here's another small window into my childhood.

Our Citroën 2CV grips the steep hills leading to school, a blatant hint to our origin: orange and adorned with Astérix and Obélix that papa painted on its sides.  The fifteen minutes drive is quite an ordeal for the old Adelaide, the pet name given to every one of papa's cars, both since and before. 
I quietly urge her to make it through the carousel of dips and slopes as they play havoc with my quiet vertigo.  At times I stop breathing, convinced that the car will never reach the top of the steepest of hills, reverse of its own accord, beaten by the superior tilt. I'm quite sure that gravity implies this cannot work.  Yet it does, every time, but the fear doesn't subside.  It lingers on, somewhere between my anxious mind and clumsy limbs.  Nighttime affords little respite. I often dream of it breaking down, despite papa's best efforts and my panicked attempts to push the driver's seat forward to give it the impetus it needs, but it rolls back, all the way down to the narrow snake of tarmac verging on the arid terrains bordering the cliff-like inclinations jaggedly, before the desert swallows us.

The squeaky green gate of the French School Of Jerusalem pushes open reluctantly and I timidly join a sea of deafening toddlers and older children waiting for kinder-garden to kick-start its short day.  I am three years old, and we just moved from southern France to Jerusalem.  

My parents belonged to a Christian charismatic community, La Théophanie, and we lived in an old monastery in Ein Karem, on the outskirts of Jerusalem.  We had no electricity nor running water; we shared meagre supplies with other families, monks, nuns, recovering drug users, all intent on spreading their truth in the densely spiritual morsels of the Holy Land.   
I vaguely remember watching them as they concocted their own version of mass, heavily inspired by the Byzantine rites; I witnessed, distant, their singing in tongues.  It sounded made-up and nowhere near as harmonious as the languages around us.  My brother is four years older than me, and together we mashed up English, Arabic and Hebrew to communicate with each other.  It was our language of unity; we needed no one else to converse.
Soon, mama was to break away from the life she convinced papa was their destiny, taking me with her back to France, leaving my brother behind.  Mama had found, in one of the monks, a soulmate who encouraged her spiritual quests; she was going to save the Holy Land, her destiny was beyond that of a mother and wife. It took a couple of years before Mama's recurring ill health became a driving force in needing to return to France since the local doctors couldn't fathom how to treat her.  And so I followed her to a gloomy Paris, where, very soon after our arrival, the monk came to visit.  Papa never believed his relentless claims he was just mama's spiritual father.  His fears had been rebuffed by the community's leader, who suggested he should instead work with his jealousy and pray further. Papa soon received divorce papers, and as his world collapsed, he also left the Théophanie, my brother in tow, for months of disarray, jobless and poverty-stricken.  They survived on a diet of harissa paste on pitta bread for several weeks. Once they left the community, there was no safety net. Papa spoke 10 words of English, Arabic and Hebrew.  All our belongings gifted to La Théophanie, our old house and papa's heart.
It was the mid seventies, and whilst their peers were seeking free love and hallucinogens, my parents wanted to save the planet and its lost souls.  We were vegetarians, eating organic produce, we wore clothes donated to the Red Cross and pushed back against the capitalist culture. 
My brother  was more interested in performing, singing at the top of his lungs and making up plays where I would become his toy, following his command and watching in awe as he created costumes and characters for me to rehearse. 
We held on to each other and played in the shade of the pine trees, cones full of pine nuts housed in their shiny black shells which we learnt to break open with stones to reveal the creamy edibles.  We sank our famished teeth into thick cuts of watermelons, the juice staining my face before mama would wipe it away with a wet soapy flannel, and I would religiously put my tongue out to taste the soap. That and salt, two of my favourite things.
Night-times were haunted by the screeching sounds of the jackals, the relentless mosquitoes and the salamanders, pale and musical, beady eyes locking into mine watching me upside down.  I never tried to stroke them, I just imagined they felt as they looked, faithful companions of bedtime.

Photo by Damian Denis on Unsplash