In the beginning was the womb, and somehow she knew what it was: it was comfortable and warm and as she grew she became aware of her mother and her mother’s thoughts, and learned much about the world. There were refugees in the world from a place called Darfur, and there were women who sold their bodies in the place of transport called the Old Bus Station. And there were monsters dwelling upon the earth in those days. Creatures of wind who came from the sea and ravaged the city which was called the Place of Spring, Tel Aviv, where white buildings rose up to the skies before the other world came and dwelt in its midst.
Being born was like travelling through a tunnel of light and emerging into sensation. Fingers on her tender body, and wind and air and the smells of campfire smoke and the taste of her mother’s milk and the warmth of her father’s chest as he held her close, and so much to see, mountains and springs and snows and trees and birds.
“She is not meant to grow so quickly,” her father had said, and she knew that he was worried for her. They moved often, camping in caves and in the open savannahs, and she soon learned how to hunt and skin and cook, for the smaller creatures of the mountains had never seen a human being and were not afraid.
“The Garden of Eden,” her father often declared, and her mother snorted but said nothing. And her father told her stories: of Adam and Eve, of a Tree of Knowledge and a snake, and of a flaming sword that turned every way. And her mother told her of the suffering of Women, and of Patriarchal Subjugation, and the Importance of Rebelling Against Orthodox Hierarchy, and her father sang to her, children’s songs about donkeys and goats and birds, and told her the legends of Solomon, who was a wise king, and how he met Asmodeus, the king of the demons, and how he fell in love with the Queen of Sheba, and how she tested his wisdom, and the story of the flowers she presented to him, and challenged him to find the real one amongst all the artificial ones, and how the king followed the path of a lone bee as it traversed the field of flowers, and came to land on the one that was true.
They moved a lot, and when it rained, sought shelter in the nooks and crannies of the great mountains, and watched the passage of the great wind beings, thousands of them at a time passing across the plains, and her parents were awed, while she felt a yearning inside her, to be with them and soar with them into the air.
Always the mountains rose above them, and the higher they climbed always the peaks were farther away. They traversed great chasms, hiked upon glaciers as ancient as any world, and she knew them all, knew their names and their histories and could summon the small, shy creatures of the snow and the veldt. Time had no meaning there, and her parents watched her grow with love but also with concern, and one day her mother said, “You’ll be a woman soon,” and sighed, and her father hugged her mother and she saw the love between them, and felt a momentary emotion she did not at first recognize: jealousy.
Though they disagreed on most things, on the subject of love her mother and father were in agreement. They told her stories of the way they once were: her father pale and studious and unhappy, sitting in a place called a yeshiva, which literally meant a Place of Sitting, and her mother always running, always on the move, a thing called a camera in hand, always documenting other people’s lives. She could not imagine them so: her father, strong and brown from the sun, a silent hunter, her mother the same, and both content, both in love and loving her too, their daughter, and so they lived and much time passed there, on the eternal mountains, with only the wind and the wind’s children and the strange animals of snow and earth for company. And so time passed.