I watched the waves from the Mediterranean roll gently towards me as I was standing on the beach not far from my house, a home I would soon have to leave forever. It was situated on the outskirts of Yamit, a town which had existed for almost a decade by now and was targeted for demolition the very next day. There were drawings of flowers and hearts on the moist sand by the waterfront, the work of my youngest daughter. They would soon be washed away by the tide.
I lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and then sighed as I exhaled. What, indeed, was I going to do after they had left? I knew that my husband Mordechai, a pediatrician, already had a job waiting for him, but what about me? I loved every room in the house and knew every inch of it. With the passage of time, the house would turn into sand. I went back inside and left the porch door open.
Some of the inhabitants of Yamit had occupied the main entrance to the town to prevent the army from entering while others were preparing for a confrontation in their houses. Their protests were to no avail, however, as the army used water canons on those that had climbed to the roofs of their houses to prevent the soldiers from evacuating them. Everyone but myself had left the town before that evening.
I was in the army reserves and had been called to help evacuate the people of Yamit, my own neighbours. I had refused. I negotiated a compromise with the officer in charge of the evacuation. They granted my wish to stay one last night, but I would have to agree to further reserve duty after the evacuation had taken place. If not, there would be consequences, serious consequences.
I felt it would have been unfair to ask my family to stay with me. I might become overwhelmed with emotion and that might upset both the children and Mordechai. He had grudgingly accepted my wish to stay. My neighbours knew nothing about any of this.
It was 23:30. The electricity and telephone service would be cut at 00:00.
I picked up the phone. It felt somewhat heavier this time, maybe all that had happened had made me weaker. I had to check the number on a piece of paper I had stuck to the fridge, the phone had just been connected in our new house in the city. One of my daughters picked up the phone and told me how beautiful the new apartment was. I lied and said that made me happy. I asked to talk to Mordechai. He wondered how I was doing and I answered, hesitantly, that I was Ok. I could tell from his voice that he was worried about me.
He said "good night, Tziporah, and take care of yourself". I hung up the phone and dimmed the electric lights. I lit candles in the kitchen and brewed myself a cup of tea. On the top of a stack of old albums I picked up a record and started playing it, the vinyl letting off a hissing sound as the needle hit it.
Beside the stove on the counter top was I photo album. I opened it and started flipping the pages. The album was dated chronologically, starting in 1977 when we had just moved in. We had had one daughter at the time and we had, piece by piece, started building a home. In the picture, I was filling the freezer with tartlets I had prepared to have in handy when friends and family would visit. I could remember the taste of the frosting, vanilla and peach. Now it just contained a pre-prepared sandwich for breakfast the following morning.
I flipped the page to 1978, when my second daughter and my sister and my husband had visited us to celebrate our engagement. They had brought the children a giant teddy bear, and now I reminiscened how it had been towering over the children as they lay asleep in their beds.
I flipped the page to 1979. In the picture, Mordechai was was holding up the chess trophy he had won in a championship that had put Yamit on the map in the rest of the country. I put the photo album down.
As I pulled the chair out to sit at the kitchen table with my freshly brewed cup of tea, I heard the chair bump against something with a soft thud. It was a small cardboard removal box that I must have left behind when we had been moving all of our things into the removal van. I put it on the kitchen table and opened it. It contained a deck of Tarot cards and what appeared to be an instruction manual. I asked herself how it had ended up there. Mordechai had a superstitious grandmother, had she given it to him? I did not know, but I knew that I had not seen it before. I picked up the deck and the manual and put it on the table, then sat down. The instructions first outlined examples of the goal of the divination. I wanted to know everything about my future.
I had always been a fast learner and I spread the cards across the table according to the instructions. The results showed me a potentially bright future, a decent financial situation, a happy marriage. I smiled. The candles flickered. One card remained. I shuffled the deck and gazed in anticipation of the final reveal.
I suddenly heard a vague whispering, it sounded like it was from outside. I went across the room and felt a cool breeze hit me as I approached the open door leading onto the porch and stepped out into the starlit night with the sound of the perpetually crashing sounds of the waves. There was no whispering sound, only the waves and a gentle breeze. My daughter's drawings in the sound were gone, washed away by the tide. I watched the grey horizon, I could hear the sound of thunder. If it started raining, I would close the window shutters. I did not like to hear the smattering of rain against windows, it made it difficult to fall asleep.
I turned around towards the house and smelled the warm fragrance of my cup of tea waiting for me on the table and the soft melting of candle wax, the sound of the music playing in the background. Just one more Tarot card, and I might get an answer to her questions about my future.
I closed the outside door and stepped into the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face and looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were slightly sunken, my hair unwashed and disheveled.
What immediately caught my eye when I went out into the kitchen was that the last Tarot card had been laid on the table. I went up to the table, the music in the background sounding more muffled to me, the flickering candles casting playful shadows across the room. I looked at the card. "Death", "Pestilence". I threw all the cards on the floor and put my face in my hands. Droplets of sweat formed on my forehead, and I slowly lowered my hands to look at the clock on the wall above the doorway.
The time was 23:59. My heart pounded, echoing the seconds left until the electricity would be cut, the music would stop, and the remaining electric lights would go out. I did not have the time to pick up the phone and call Mordechai, call anyone. Something was in the house. A rattling sound was heard as the music abruptly stopped and the flickering candles became the only source of light. The whispering sound was heard again, it was heard from the doorway. From inside the house.
I picked up the knife from the countertop and pointed it in a random direction, toward whatever it was I could not see, whatever had laid the last Tarot card. The flickering candles were extinguished as the window shutters slammed shut and their latches firmly sliding into place. Every source of light disappeared. I dropped the knife and charged through the hallway towards the door, feeling myself yanked back by the foot just as I clutched the door knob to turn it.
I fell onto the floor with a thud, my nails scratching on the wooden boards as I tried to hold on to the floor. The entire room started shaking violently, the glass lamp above the kitchen table breaking, the chairs being flung across the room and breaking into pieces. I heard the sound of kitchen drawers being pulled out rapidly, one by one, the utensils clattering as they hit the floor. The kitchen table flied across the room and crashed against the wall.
I was catapulted across the room and heard a snapping sound as I landed. I screamed in pain, my ankle broken, and started crawling acrood the floor, away from whatever was attacking me and toward the door. I felt the contours of a potato peeler and grabbed it. I was suddenly lifted up in the against the kitchen cupboard, feeling a tight grip around my neck, strangling me. As I coughed to catch my breath, I gathered the force to stab at the entity which suddenly let go of my throat. I continud crawling toward the door when I heard the metallic sound of the door being locked. I then heard a sound I recognized from my childhood when my brother pulled a prank on our grandmother when she did not buy him candy, he had broken of the key in the door lock so that it could bot be opened, neither from the inside nor the outside.
It came to me suddenly, an epiphany that could save me. I remembered the breeze that had awoken me that morning, it came from the windows upstairs. The windows were for a balcony that we were going to build as an extension to the house, but that had never been completed. I must have forgotten to close the windows. I could try to stand and limp to the staircase, drag myself up by holding the railing, the peeler in my other hand. The windows went all the way down to the floor and were covered by a thick curtain.
I quitely stood up halfway, trying to quell my instinctive reaction, to scream in agony. Imbetween my own steps, causing the floorboards to gently creak, I heard the faint sound of other steps behind me. I reached the first step of the staircase and carefully balanced my body weight against the railing while climbing the stairs with my undamaged foot. As I had reached the middle part of the staircase, I could hear the creaking from the first step behind me. The sound was protracted and gentle, as if it was hesitant.
As I approached the landing, I could discern a small sliver of light from the windows and heard the steps behind me stop. I heaved myself across the final step to the landing. There were now two meters between me and the windows. I limped across the landing and opened the curtain with one swift sweep, preparing to throw myself through the open windows and the small vegetable patch I would land in. I heard rapid and heavy steps approaching me. I pushed the windows open.
The fall felt like it lasted longer than it actually did, and, when I landed, adrenaline pumped through my body and mitigated the pain. The sky had turned greyer, the waves gently rolling in across the serene beach as if nothing had happened. I dragged myself towards the beachline, maybe I could float away and land on a cliff across the other side of the beach. I did not look back toward the house, I was concentrating on my destination. A sound was heard from the house, I turned around and saw the door slowly opening.
I saw disembodied footprints in the sand from the distance slowly proceeding toward me. I thought back to Mordechai's mother, the superstitious one. She had said that one could protect oneself from evil spirits by drawing a circle around oneself, like a shield. The footprints kept on coming toward me. I drew a circle around me in the sand, far enough from the waves for it not to be washed away. The whispering sounds were heard again, the footsteps stopped right outside the circle. I clutched the potato peeler and looked around me as the waves suddenly gained traction, washing around me and erased the circle around me. I screamed and lost consciousness in a blue haze.
Mordechai was let into the psychiatric ward and met with the doctor who had admitted Tziporah in the morning. The doctor had recorded Tziporah's entire deposition and retold it to Mordechai. The doctor told Mordechai that she would have to stay in the psychiatric ward for observation and could not give him a definite answer as to when she could be released. He told Mordechai that her story was potentially the result of trauma because of the issue of the impending demolition of Yamit, but that there were also things discovered by the police at the scene where Tziporah had been found that were being investigated, such as the force with which heavy objects in the house had been destroyed. Mordechai said that Tziporah had to come home, that she was fine and had just had a rough time lately. He told the doctor how they had a new apartment and were going to start a new life together. The doctor told him that he would get back to him the next day, but he knew that she would have to remain in the ward. Most likely for a very long time.
Tziporah was lying in a hospital bed, sedated. She had no memory of what had happened after she had collapsed on the beach. She had not be allowed to meet Mordechai. She missed him, and she missed her children. Maybe she was insane, or maybe last night's events had actually happened. She looked into the pale white ceiling and, within a few minutes, starting feeling sleepy. The last thing she heard before losing consciousness was the sound of whispering in her ear.