Sunburnt Faces

 

She was awakened by the yowling of cats in heat and in the dim weightiness of awakening consciousness she carried on listening, but it gradually faded, threads of a dream dwindling into the vast silence of the night. Yet she sat up in bed and cocked an ear, feeling for echoes and refractions. Nothing. Some of the lightening darkness filtered into the room through the almost completely closed slats of the shutter on the only window; darkness mingling with deeper darkness. And apart from that – a hush. You could drown in the density of the silence. It had been one of those nights in which summer breaks through the thickness of winter. Only two weeks ago they had celebrated the New Year of Trees at school, and the sword of the first hamsin heat wave had already struck Netivot. It had taken nature by surprise, albeit with exemplary precision as it did every year in March. And the sound of the insects coming from the wild vegetation of early summer, from the nauseating blossom of the acacia and oleander, from the provocative eruption of the honeysuckle – the bees with their menacing buzzing and the cicadas and their sawing – and the bothersome rustling, the constantly stimulated air still waited, cheated by the feeble movement of the seasons’ clock. It had not rained and the dissonance of the clouds as they collided in their passing, and the whipping of the water, from the hesitant, shy drops of November to the assaults of the December and January hailstorms – the night was clean of all these, innocent of the orchestras of winter and summer. She recognized its deep, scorched smell and inhaled it until her throat became dry.

She threw off the light summer quilt and put both feet onto the floor; putting them down all at once, ready, but not at all prepared for the chill of the tiles that flowed through them, up her body to her shoulders. Then she shivered. She hugged her shoulders mechanically and rubbed them, concentrating momentarily on the focal points of the heat beneath her hands and feeling how thin her arms were. She was almost twelve but relatively small for her age. It seemed that childhood still lingered in her, slow to leave, evaporate, unlike her classmates, especially Gvinush of whom her big brother...