few days, and yet when the time came to bid farewell, I felt sad, almost grieved. Would I ever
see this tiny village in Guatemala again? I didn’t think so.
Each time I say good-bye to a place I like, I feel like I am leaving a part of me behind. I guess
whether we choose to travel as much as Marco Polo did or stay in the same spot from cradle to
grave, life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments are born and moments die. For new
experiences to come to light, old ones need to wither away. Don’t you think?
While in Momostenango, I meditated and tried to visualize your aura. Before long,
three colors
came to me: warm yellow, timid orange, and reserved metallic purple. I had a feeling these were
your colors. I thought they were beautiful both separately and together.
My final stop in Guatemala is Chajul—a small town with adobe houses and children with eyes
wise beyond their years. In each house, women of all ages weave magnificent tapestries. I asked
a granny to choose a tapestry and said it was for a lady living in Northampton. After giving it
some thought, she pulled a tapestry from a huge pile behind her. I swear to God, there were more
than fifty tapestries of every possible color in that pile. Yet the one she chose for you was
composed of only three tones: yellow, orange, and purple. I thought you might like to know
about
this coincidence, if there is such a thing in God’s universe.
Does it ever occur to you that our exchange might not be a result of coincidence?
Warm regards,
Aziz
P.S. If you want, I can send you your tapestry via mail, or I can wait till the day we meet for
coffee and bring it myself.
Ella closed her eyes and tried to imagine how the colors of her aura surrounded her face.
Interestingly, the image of herself that popped up in her mind was not her grown-up self but her
as a child, around seven years of age.
Many things came flooding back to her, memories that she thought she had long left behind. The
sight of her mother standing still with a pistachio green apron around her waist and a measuring
cup in her hand, her face an ashen mask of pain; dangling paper
hearts on the walls, bright and
sparkly; and the body of her father hanging from the ceiling as if he wanted to blend with the
Christmas decorations and give the house a festive look. She remembered how she had spent her
teenage years holding her mother responsible for the suicide of her father. As a young girl, Ella
had promised herself that when she got married, she would always make her husband happy and
not fail in her marriage, like her mother. In her endeavor to make her
marriage as different from
her mother’s as possible, she had not married a Christian man, preferring to marry inside her
faith.
It was only a few years earlier that Ella had stopped hating her aging mother, and though the two
of them had been on good terms lately, the truth was, deep inside she still felt ill at ease when she
remembered the past.
“Mom! … Earth to Mom! Earth to Mom!”
Ella heard a ripple of giggles and whispers behind her shoulder.
When she turned around, she
saw four pairs of eyes watching her with amusement. Orly, Avi, Jeannette, and David had for
once all come to breakfast at the same time and were now standing side by side inspecting her as
if she were an exotic creature. From the way they looked, it seemed they had been standing there
for a while, trying to get her attention.
“Good morning, you all.” Ella smiled.
“How come you didn’t hear us?” Orly asked, sounding genuinely surprised.
“You seemed so absorbed in that screen,” David said without looking at her.
Ella’s gaze followed her husband’s, and there on the open screen in front of her, she saw Aziz Z.
Zahara’s e-mail shining dimly. In
a flash she closed her laptop, without waiting for it to shut
down.
“I’ve got a lot of reading to do for the literary agency,” Ella said, rolling her eyes. “I was
working on my report.”
“No you were not! You were reading your e-mails,” Avi said, his face serious, matter-of-fact.
What was it in teenage boys that made them so eager to detect everyone’s flaws and lies? Ella
wondered. But, to her relief, the others didn’t seem interested in the subject. In fact, they were all
looking somewhere else now, focused on the kitchen counter.
It
was Orly who turned to Ella, voicing the question for them all. “Mom, how come you haven’t
made us any breakfast this morning?”
Now Ella turned to the counter and saw what they had seen. There was no coffee brewing, no
scrambled eggs on the stove, no toast with blueberry sauce. She nodded repeatedly as if agreeing
with an inner voice that spoke an undeniable truth.
Right, she thought, how come she had forgotten the breakfast?
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