The Clay Urn Read online

  “We’ll have the wedding in the spring in the garden,” Ari whispers.

  Her lips stretch.

  “I’ll make a nice path from the back door to the stone fence.”

  He pushes dirt away from her eyes. She blinks. He lays his head on her blood-soaked shirt. A surge runs through him. For a moment the wind settles. White ash rains down from a blackened sky and covers her face. Her chest deflates. A puff of air grazes his cheek. Light pulls back from her pupils. Ilana’s cold body succumbs to the hard, red earth.

  Chapter 7

  Saturated in darkness Ari draws the curtains. Winter sun breaks through a sliver of morning clouds spilling light into the unkept, overgrown garden. Steam collects on the window. Moving his index finger over the cold, wet glass, he writes the date—December 6, 1989—and Ilana’s name next to it. He then adds the date of the tragedy: July 6, 1989. Radiator pipes clang and sputter. A housefly lands on a picture frame and scurries down the glass, stopping at Ilana’s face. The phone rings. Ari stares at the fly’s pulsating body spread over her smiling face. He swipes at the receiver knocking it off the base and onto the hard tile floor.

  “Ari, it’s your mother. Are you there? You alright?”

  Listening to his mother’s voice transmitting from the receiver he watches the letters on Ilana’s name drip to the bottom of the window ledge. He kicks a ball of dust under his chair. The particles of matter float upwards, intersecting with the light from the window.

  “Ari, can you hear me?” Shira says.

  After the hectic seven-day period of mourning, Ari locked the front door of his apartment, took the phone off the hook and laid on his bed staring at the ceiling without eating for a week. Twice his friend Itamar came to see him, but Ari refused to open the door. At times, the thought of getting out of bed meant he could experience another tragedy or be the cause of one. His nightmares about the dog and Naser’s mother have become more frequent and now they are all together on a bus with Ilana.

  “Are you alright?” Shira’s voice crackles through the receiver.

  The particles of dust settle back onto the tile surface. The housefly hurls its body at the window, joining others that gather near the opaque letters.

  “You taking the valium my doctor prescribed?” she asks.

  Ari holds his head in his palms hoping the pain in his stomach will subside and she will hang up. He lifts the receiver off the floor and presses it firmly to his ear.

  “Mom,” he says while squinting to read the clock on the wall. “It’s too much.”

  “I can’t hear you, Ari. Say it again.”

  “I’m not okay.”

  “I understand, Ari. You want me to come over?”

  Except for the muffled ticking of the clock, a heavy silence pervades the room. Ari exhales, picks his head up and straightens his back. The pain in his stomach subsides. He breathes in as deep as he can, letting the air fill his lungs.

  “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

  “Please talk into the receiver. I can’t hear you.”

  Ari can see the details of his father’s face looking up at the path on the mound where they found the vessel. He feels his hand tightening around his small fingers. They are rough and warm.

  “I’ll make tea. Please come over,” Ari says.

  He moves his foot over the dust ball and presses down.

  “I’d like that very much,” she says. “We can read through dad’s letters. I haven’t looked at them for so long.”

  Ari walks over to the shelf. The photo of Ilana rests next to the urn. He touches the vessel and runs his hand over the ancient clay. He remembers his father’s face and his scar. He recalls the details of Ilana’s drawing–a rope tied around his waist floating above the Dead Sea.

  “I gave the urn away to a friend and forgot to take out the letters.”

  The fly jumps off the window glass and settles on Ari’s forehead. He swipes at it. With lightning speed, it hurls itself at full force into the bright light of the window. Ari inhales and pushes the receiver cap against his ear. A crackling sound breaks the silence.

  “You still there?” Ari says.

  Stretching out the twisted phone cord he walks to the other end of the room, unlatches the window and pushes it open with the ball of his palm. The fly escapes.

  “I’m sorry that I never told you. You want to come over another time?”

  “That’s okay, Ari. I’ll come this afternoon.”

  He takes the vessel down from the shelf, reaches inside the wide belly and removes his father’s letters. Untying the red ribbon he inhales the musty odor of aged paper and lays them out in chronological order from the first day of the war. The first one he wrote was dated, October 6, 1973.

  ‘I write to you,

  my love,

  at the end of our harvest, from the Valley of Tears

  fireworks arch in the night sky,

  illuminating a narrow path, to the end of our dreams’

  At the top of the page Ari writes, ‘chapter one.’ The black ink spreads through the veins of the paper. Ari blows on it and puts it at the bottom of the stack. Flattening the next poem Benny wrote to Shira on the second day of the war, he moves his ink pen across the top and forms the words, ‘chapter two.’ He blows on it again, turns it over and lays it on the table. Thick winter clouds gather over the Judean Hills blocking the early afternoon sun. He repeats the action until the last one and writes on it, ‘chapter seven,’ and puts them all to the side.

  He rereads the letter that he never sent to Ilana and tapes it to the inside flaps of one of her unused sketchbooks. He inhales and writes across the blank page, ‘chapter one,’ and, “Ilana removes her glasses from the nightstand and carefully outlines my contours as she remembers them from the night before. Through the corner of my tired eyes I see her long hair fall over the sketchpad. Engrossed in her work she doesn’t bother to move it. I lean closer. There is a figure of a man resembling me. He is naked in a shallow body of water. Above his head she writes the hebrew word ‘Ahhavar,’ the same way it appeared on a clay urn that I excavated with my father years ago. Pushing her hair behind her shoulders, I lean forward, kiss her cheek and whisper the word into her ear. She smiles and presses her wet lips to mine.”

  Ari’s hand glides effortlessly across the page forming rows of sentences that absorb quickly into the sturdy paper. He rocks back and forth. His brain and pen work in sync, letting out a steady flow of words that builds a beginning to a long story. This is the first time since she was on the ground and bloodied that he is able to see her as she was. Vibrant and beautiful. Ari likes this feeling and continues writing for a long time until he hears a gentle patter of tiny raindrops gathering on the dusty window. He breathes in the moist air and puts down his pen. Closing his eyes he envisions the deep scar on his father’s face. Exhaling, he anchors the sketchbook with his new writing on top of his father’s poems. Pushing down on the bundle he ties them together and puts them inside his desk drawer.

  Taking in all the air he is able, he rises, walks over to the shelf and removes Ilana’s photo from the frame and tears it into tiny pieces. Ari takes the clay urn down from the top shelf, opens the back door and walks barefoot through a narrow path to the makeshift table he made for Ilana. The view of the depression across the sloping expanse of the barren Judean desert towards the Dead Sea is dark and foreboding. The light drizzle turns to a cold, steady rain. Ari plants his bare feet on the moist ground, places the urn on the table and whispers, “Exalted and hallowed be God’s great name.”

  He thinks back to the first time he saw the mouth of the urn bulging from the earth and remembers his father’s eyes lighting up. How his mother embraced him and gave reassurance that on the highest shelf his urn will always be safe. The wind shifts and blows rain into Ari’s face. With blurred vision he struggles to remember the bus and the weak sound of Ilana’s voice. He raises the vessel over his head and sees Naser counting to himself whi
le he walked down the aisle tapping every seat handle. According to Naser’s plan, Ari should have been a victim of the carnage, too. Ari breathes in and with all his strength hurls the ancient vessel to the ground. Shards scatter over the rain-soaked garden. Arranging them into intricate patterns he uses his thumb and presses them into the earth. He picks a handful of rosemary and winter flowers then returns to his apartment. The sweet scent fills the room. Ari puts the kettle on the stove and spreads a long white cloth over the wooden table. Setting the wildflowers in a vase he places them between two sets of teacups, pulls up a chair and waits for the pulsating water to push steam through the tiny hole.