River

by Shira Nayman

  “I hear a motor,” I said.

  Talia jumped up. On the other side of the spent fire, where the plain stretched out, I could see an open Jeep, bumping along the rocky ground. As it got closer, I saw Grandpa Jack’s silver-white hair flying around his handsome, youthful face.

  “Look! It’s Dad!” Talia limped surprisingly quickly in the direction of the approaching Jeep. I stayed put, watching as the distance between them closed. The Jeep slowed, then stopped, and Grandpa Jack leapt out and wrapped his arms around Talia. They stood there like that for some time. Another man was at the wheel—an Aboriginal person somewhat older than Jimmy. Soon, Talia and her father were back in the Jeep heading toward me.

  “Jasmine! Talia’s been telling me about your visitor. Where is he?” The Jeep came to a halt. Grandpa Jack climbed out; he put out an arm and drew me to his side.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He took off when he heard the Jeep coming.”

  “Too bad. I would have liked to thank him for taking care of my two girls.”

  My heart leapt at this: my two girls. Grandpa Jack smiled down at me. Looking into those welcoming brown eyes, I felt overcome by a feeling of calm joy; for a moment, the ache of missing home—of missing Mama and Papa and Billy, my house, my neighborhood, my friends, my school—vanished. Here, in this foreign time and place, looking into eyes that were strangely familiar, I was, for an instant, also home.

  “How’s the leg, Tal?” he asked.

  “Hurts a bit, not too bad,” Talia said.

  “There’s a clinic, about two hours away,” Grandpa Jack said. “I’m exhausted, though. Need a bit of sleep, first. So does Mick, I think. Give us an hour, then we’ll get going.”

  The man in the Jeep nodded. Both of them did look very tired. I suddenly noticed that the sky, at the horizon, was faintly streaked with gold and pink.

  “You’ve been gone longer than I realized,” I said.

  Grandpa Jack grinned. “Four solid hours of walking in this bush didn’t go so fast for me.” He yawned widely.

  “I see you’ve set up the tent. Why don’t you girls go in there and grab some sleep. I’ll cuddle up to this rock here.”

  Talia and I insisted that Grandpa Jack take the tent; he was the one who’d done all the walking, not to mention the strain of battle-worthy piloting, before our terrible—but miraculous—crash landing. With a little coaxing, he agreed. The driver, Mick, stretched out on the back seat of the Jeep and in a moment the sound of his quiet snoring reached our ears.

  Talia and I sat back down by the spent fire.

  “What happened to Jimmy?” she asked.

  “He finished his story and then, when he heard the Jeep, he just took off.”

  “He didn’t say goodbye?”

  “Well yes, he did, as a matter of fact. But it was strange—like he was leaving me with a puzzle.”

  “A puzzle?”

  “Something to solve. Something important.”

  “I missed the ending of the story,” Talia said. “I got to the part about Ngaardi crying tears that became the rivers and lakes. Didn’t he have a wonderful voice? I was so tired, though. I couldn’t help falling asleep. Like someone hit me on the back of the head and knocked me out.” Talia sat up, shook off the blanket. “What sort of puzzle did he leave you with?”

  I hesitated before I spoke. “He seemed to think I was on some kind of journey. As if I was looking for—”

  “For what?”

  “For my people. For my home.”

  “Well, are you?”

  Above the mountain in the distance, the sky was lighting up with dawn.

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “Yes, maybe I am.”

  Talia reached up and fiddled at the back of her neck. When she drew her hands down, she was holding something, which she passed to me.

  “This is a Star of David,” she said. “I wear it underneath my clothing, so you’ve probably never noticed it. It was my grandmother’s. She brought it with her to South Africa from Lithuania when she was about our age. They had to flee the pogroms.”

  “Pogroms?”

  “I wish I knew more about her, about her life. I hardly knew her, really.”

  Talia gave me that look again, the sidelong glance.

  “You’re not Jewish … Why do I not know this?”

  “Actually, I’m half Jewish,” I said in a halting voice. “My mother’s Jewish, my father’s not.”

  Talia shook her head, as I’d seen her do, now, several times, as if she was trying to shake something perturbing away.

  “It makes no difference. This Star of David is special. I can’t explain it. And I don’t know why, but I have this feeling …”

  “Yes?”

  “I have this feeling that it belongs to you.”

  Talia waved her arm in a semicircle, bringing it to rest with her hand pointing at the plane’s cabin some three hundred yards from where we were sitting.

  “We might have lost our lives, here. It’s like we were spared by the gods. Given a second chance. I know this is going to sound really weird, but I sense that you being here with us is what saved us.”

  Talia looked down at the necklace she was holding, and when she spoke, it was as if she was talking not to me, but to the little Star of David.

  “Jasmine,” she said, “who are you?”

  Then, she looked up at me. The frown appeared again only this time, instead of confusion in her eyes, I saw inklings of a troubled realization. Was the truth dawning on her? That the girl sitting with her, the girl she thought of as her friend Jasmine, was in fact a person from her own future—the child she would one day name Emily? Her very own daughter?

  Talia blushed. “I’m sorry, I must be going mad. The crash, hardly any sleep. It’s been such a long night. I don’t know, being here, in the bush. I think it’s all been a bit too much.”

  I could see the distress bubbling up; Talia’s face crumpled a little, as if she was about to cry. She did not, after all, know the truth, and yet my presence, here, was upsetting her. I felt I owed her an explanation, though I had no idea what I could say that would make any sense.

  “I’ve often wondered,” I found myself saying, “how you can tell where a river begins and where it ends. It seems to me that in the end, it’s rather arbitrary. The labels we give to things.”

  Talia’s face relaxed. She seemed relieved. “I love such riddles myself,” she said.

  I lowered my voice to a whisper. “In answer to your question, the truth is I’m not sure I quite know. Who I am.”

  Something my mother told me once came back to me. “Isn’t that what the Sphinx said was the ultimate point of life? To know thyself?”

  We both looked soberly at the gray ashes of what had been our cozy little fire.

  Talia nodded. “I think I know what you mean,” she said.

  “Jimmy was trying to tell me something,” I said in a whisper, almost to myself. Watching the dawn light diffuse the remaining shadows of night, it occurred to me that perhaps Jimmy was my guide. Isn’t that what Mama had said to me, through the terror of the squall, as I was hurtling back through time?

  There will be guides to help you. If you keep your eyes open, you will find them.

  I looked over at Talia. Now, she smiled.

  “Here, take it,” she said, handing me the Star of David.

  There it was, that mischievous, fully alive smile: my mama’s smile. I felt a ballooning happiness.

  “What a night,” she said. “I feel like we need some kind of ceremony. I know! I’m going to say a blessing—a Jewish prayer. I don’t usually go in for stuff like this but—I don’t know, it seems right.

  “For religious Jews, this prayer is the most important one of the day. They’re supposed to say it every morning, when they wake up. The English translation goes like this: Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Blessed be the Holy Name of the Lord, King of the Universe forever. Okay, now in Hebrew.”

  Through
the pain in my eyes, which was rising in gloomy crescendo, I looked at the necklace she’d handed me: the fine gold chain bearing a small gold star with two Hebrew letters in the center, which of course I did not know how to read. I closed my fist tightly around the star. We both stood: I felt the firm land beneath my feet, breathed in the rich scent of the bush, strongly tinged with eucalyptus, and closed my eyes.

  “Shemah Yisroel, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehud,” Talia said. The words sounded so foreign to me—if it had been Hindi, they would have been no more familiar—and yet they slipped from Talia’s mouth like a native tongue. “Baruch Shem K’vod Malchutoh L’Olam Va’ed.”

  But then, Talia winced and she sat back down. Her hand reached for her calf.

  “Okay?” I asked.

  “Wow—”

  “What?”

  “Dunno, like someone just stabbed into it.”

  “Let’s get your dad,” I said, the panic returning.

  Talia shook her head. “No, let him sleep. Mick, too. We have a long drive. I’m just going to take a quick look.”

  Talia reached down and removed the tape and the gauze.

  “Here,” I said, flicking on the flashlight and directing the beam to the wound.

  It looked awful, nothing like the clean, dressed cut of last night. Her calf was swollen and the skin around it was mottled red. A sliver of something yellow shone in the beam of light.

  “Pus,” Talia said. “This isn’t good.”

  My head was getting worse by the minute. I looked over at Talia. Something shifted in the atmosphere, something peculiar, as if the air were being sucked away.

  “Hey,” Talia said, glancing over to the ruined cabin of the plane. “Did you tell your mum you were going up in a small airplane?”

  I shook my head, no.

  “We should have gotten their permission,” she said. “They’re going to be upset. We shouldn’t have brought you, not without their permission.”

  An abrupt dread poured into me, leaving a chalky feeling in my mouth of doom. I looked at Talia. Her skin was tinged green. What if my being here at all was undermining everything? What if I had somehow been responsible for the crash? What if the infection in Talia’s leg had turned septic? I knew about septicemia. Knew that one day, Grandma would end up in a coma for a month with a raging case that almost killed her. The pain in my head was now excruciating. I reached up to find the small bump on my head had grown to the size of a large plum.

  “Jasmine, are you okay?” Talia asked. “You’re doing it again—shaking all over like a leaf.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “We’ll call your mum as soon as we get to town. We’ll—”

  A terrible loneliness filled my veins. How lost I was! How far from everything I’d ever known. From home, from my family—but no! She was my family! It was impossible, but—

  “Talia!” I said, almost shouting. “Don’t you see? Don’t you know who you are?”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked, looking afraid herself.

  “I can’t tell my mother anything! Not unless I tell you!”

  Grandpa Jack popped his head out of the tent.

  “Girls, is everything okay?” he asked.

  I could see his head there, at the opening of the tent, but everything was pitching, turning sideways. I tried to speak, but no sound came out. And then, something erupted in Talia’s face, a look of horror that was the most frightening thing of all. The ground was sliding. Talia’s hands flew out to steady herself, as if she were trying to take hold of the ground and set it to rights.

  What if I’d done something terrible! What if Talia was going to get really, really ill, even die, so that—so that—how could that be? Then I would never be born?

  I had to tell her! Had to tell her everything—that she’d grow up and leave her home, that she’d raise her own children far from her family, that she’d hardly see her parents and siblings as the years poured by, that her father—Grandpa Jack! How vital he was! So utterly alive!—would die way too young, when Talia was not yet out of graduate school, that she would herself get very sick when I was only—well, the exact age I was now, with Billy, her darling little boy, only five years old. That—

  Her face was a mask of fear as the earth slid and she slid with it, down into the dark shadow that had abruptly opened up in the sky and plunged down to where we were sitting on the ground.

  And then, my whole body tipped. My eyes slammed shut, I tried to open them but they were glued tight, and the spinning began. All around me, a shuddering cold: I was tumbling again. I stretched out my arms—tried to howl—Talia! Grandpa Jack! Come back! Don’t leave me! I need you! The words stormed in my head; I tumbled into the cold, whipping wind, a motion crazier even than the motion of the first storm. Inside, I was shrieking. Mama! Mama! I recalled Talia’s desperate cry as the plane was crashing through the trees, bouncing every which way, filling us all with the great danger of what was happening, with the dreadful awareness that perhaps our lives were about to end.

  In the midst of the terrible cold and wind, the tumbling that sucked away my breath, I heard it again—the calm, loving voice of my mother. Not Talia, the girl who would be my mother one day, but my grown mother, who was at that moment very ill, far away in Brooklyn.

  “Stay brave and you will return. I am here, waiting for you.”

  With the sound of her voice, the panic within evaporated; suddenly, I felt I was on a calm sea. I opened my mouth to respond to my mother’s voice—and found that my lips were no longer sealed, nor my eyes, which now opened.

  Gone, the Australian bush. Gone, the plane wreckage. Gone, Talia—Mama, as a girl. Gone, Grandpa Jack—the grandfather I’d never known, who had died before I was born. A surge of grief took hold of me, but then also, a feeling of gratitude. On this strange journey, I had finally met my Grandpa Jack.

  Now I was walking on a dirt road in an utterly unfamiliar landscape. Dry grass all around, but of a different color than in Australia: washed-out, wintry browns and greens. All around me, rather than wild bush, were crudely cultivated fields. In the distance, I could see a small colony of mud huts, with roofs of thatched straw. I looked down to see unfamiliar shoes on my feet—old-fashioned leather boots with worn soles and badly scuffed toes. Someone was walking beside me. A girl. She was talking in a beautiful, melodic voice. And with a different accent from Talia’s broad Australian tones. Much more English sounding. I turned to look at her, and as I did so, before I actually saw her face, I realized with a jolt where I was, realized what had happened. Understood, with astonishment, with whom I was walking.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MY FEET AND ANKLES ACHED; we must have been walking for some time. I found myself slowing down.

  “Camellia, we’re going to be late!”

  My name, then, was to be Camellia in this new place. Why, of course! Grandma’s favorite flower! Just as I had been Jasmine—my mother’s favorite flower—in Australia.

  I knew her immediately, this girl hurrying beside me: there was something about the feel of her, more than anything physical, as she looked so different from the Grandma I knew. Something dramatic must happen to the way people look once they move into that shady time-world of being old. As beautiful, dynamic, and alive as Grandma in Australia was, I had to search the face of this pretty young girl—thin as a rake and with a mop of curly, dark hair—to find her. Yes, there was that spark in her eyes, which revealed delight in the world, but also something wary.

  And here I was, in faraway South Africa, very likely somewhere near the tiny town of Koppies—a one-horse town, as she’d always described it—where Grandma had grown up.

  She was not, of course, yet Grandma, but Darlene. I picked up my pace to match hers, stumbling on the loose stones of the unpaved road. All around us, stretching endlessly, were bleached fields, dotted here and there with enormous haystacks. The mud-hut village was behind us, and I could see another up ahead on the horizon. The sky showed the cautiou
s light of a new day and, already, it was hot. The cotton jacket I was wearing—faded blue, slightly too large—felt uncomfortably heavy.

  We hurried along in silence, drawing closer to what had looked like an old barn but that I saw, as we approached, was a schoolhouse standing in a field and encircled by wire-mesh fencing. To keep out animals, I imagined—sheep, goats, maybe donkeys.

  Behind the schoolhouse was a tar macadam yard on which the remains of a white diamond were still visible, though the paint was old and peeling and in certain places altogether gone. Clusters of children of all ages gathered in front of the schoolhouse on the patchy, yellowed grass, some crouching over marbles, others playing a game with a ball and stick, and a number just milling about. We slowed to an amble as we entered through the gate.

  I glanced at Darlene and saw that her jaw was clamped tight. She seemed to have suddenly grown an inch or two—her neck elongated and back held very straight. She did not approach any of the little groupings and greeted no one. As we passed among the other children, I saw heads turning our way; their faces held unpleasant, sneering expressions. There was a look to those kids, especially the boys, I’d not seen before: angry, hungry, abandoned.

  When we were halfway to the steps of the schoolhouse, a boy of about fifteen made a beeline for us. He was gangly and tall, with sandy hair and freckles, and a grim, fierce expression. When he was almost upon us, Darlene reached into her satchel and drew something out. As he passed us, Darlene casually, surreptitiously, handed him whatever she’d taken from her satchel.

  “What is it—?” I said, my voice heavy with a South African accent.

  “Ssshh,” Darlene said. “I’ll tell you later.”

  After that, I followed Darlene’s example; I stopped stealing glances around me and instead looked straight ahead.

  Inside, the schoolhouse was larger than it appeared from outside. It consisted of four comfortably sized rooms, two on each side of a wide bare hallway lined with old wooden cubbies in ramshackle condition. Darlene paused by one: the shelf and hook were missing, and the wood on the sides was split. She removed a notebook from her satchel and placed the bag on the floor of the cubby. Then, she took off her jacket, folded it neatly, and laid it on top of the bag. I did the same—finding I had a similar notebook—placing first my satchel and then my folded jacket into the adjoining cubby.