THE ROSE GARDEN (2)
IF ALL THE plants of the garden competed, the rose would defeat its rivals. For everything that the heart desires from a flower, the rose provides in abundance.
Beauty, delicacy, smell, and color. And not only its blooms. Its fruit is decorative, its foliage delicate, its bushes colorful, and its branches variegated.
The cultivation of the rose has always been challenging. It appears to be a special task, demanding careful attention, the combat of disease, plentiful watering, correct fertilization, professional pruning … on the other hand, a garden without roses is like a body without a soul. No other flower has given rise to so many legends. And no other plant has so many uses. From ancient times to our own day, the rose has been used for medicine and cosmetics, food and drink, and many other diverse purposes.
Roses are divided into a number of popular varieties:
Hybrid teas: these originated in a Chinese species imported to Europe by traders in tea, hence the name. When we speak of the classic rose, what we usually see is a rose of this type. It has tens of thousands of strains used for picking and other purposes.
Polyantha: the origins of this group are in various species and it is characterized by dense, herbaceous growth and low height. The inflorescence developing on the branches emerging from the base of the plant is plentiful and consists of clusters of many small flowers.
Floribunda: this is a species that combines characteristics of the hybrid tea with those of the polyantha. The number of clusters is small but the individual blooms are large and resemble those of the hybrid tea. They create an expanse of color in the garden but their flowers can also be picked for the vase.
Grandiflora: very similar to the floribunda and originating in the crossing of this species with the hybrid tea. They bear large flowers in small clusters.
Dwarf roses: they originate in the Chinese dwarf rose and other hybrids. They appear in all the other categories but their flowers are small and few.
Climbers: the classic climbers bloom once a year in large clusters consisting of small flowers. Their growth is vigorous and very strong. Flexible herbaceous growth. They are used to cover high fences, hedges, and out-of-the-way expanses.
THE ROSE GARDEN (3)
SHE FIRST PLANTED the floribunda, combining the characteristics of the hybrid tea and the polyantha, behind the shack, in the long bed under the windows of the hall and the living room, which she changed around four times, and she changed the floribunda, too, after a few weeks, for classic climbers blooming in large clusters, which changed places and moved to the side of the shack, in the area between the shack and the brick wall of the welding shop, until they failed to flourish and she moved them back again to the back of the house, but this time to a new bed, to the right of the lawn next to the laundry lines, instead of the polyantha, which dried up completely and were thrown into the trash, or were burned together with the hybrid teas that were planted in front of the house, close to the path, in neat rows, where they bloomed once and never again, crushed by the heavy branches of the mango tree, which she sawed off to thin them out, and in their place she planted grandiflora bushes, some of which were left where they were and some uprooted and moved five yards away to the narrow strip of ground between the paving stones of the porch and the lawn, and they, too, failed to flourish, and for a while she tried to revive them in the big clay pots she bought from Marko, until she gave up and exchanged them for dwarf roses of the rambling variety, or the grandiflora polyantha hybrid tea, the Chinese or European species.
She wiped her hands covered with loose soil on the hem of her dress, sadly pursing her lips: “I don’t understand why I never succeed with these roses.”
THE GARDEN: “ELGNENA”
“ELGNENA” AS A tireless arena of experiment, substitution, and change.
Elgnena as a battlefield.
Elgnena as unsuspended desire, eluding her the harder she tried to take hold of it.
Elgnena in place of suspended desire, her suspended desires.
Elgnena as the place where she tried to tame herself, in vain.
Elgnena as the place where she hardly learned anything, where she refused to learn.
Elgnena as an ancient, childish vision of purity, order, and beauty.
Elgnena as the defeat of order, purity, and beauty.
Elgnena as a playground, a sandbox, plastic blocks.
Elgnena as a constant yearning for the real, not as-if home, that she wanted to make for herself.
Elgnena as an invitation to climb a slippery mountain slope, to reach the peak, the rose garden.
Elgnena as a penal colony, a forced labor camp — for her, for her fellows.
Elgnena as a sanatorium.
Elgnena as a natural extension of the interior of the house, with the furniture and everything.
Elgnena is hers, only hers, hers.
Elgnena as an extorter of money, thousands and thousands of liras and shekels buried in its ground.
Elgnena as the main source of income for the owner of the plant nursery, Marko, who built a whole house from her horticultural ignorance.
Elgnena as a protest.
Elgnena as a protest against knowledge in favor of capricious, ignorant love, the opposite of knowledge.
Elgnena as a protest against the non-gardening neighbors.
Elgnena as a protest against herself.
Elgnena as a manifesto of love for the nature she never knew, never saw.
Elgnena as the aspiration for a life with a sky.
Elgnena as a pledge to something.
Elgnena instead of the yearning of the body, her body.
Elgnena instead of the body of a loving woman, her body in her imagination with the shutters closed.
SKY
SHE GAVE THE child to Nona, twenty days after she was born. This was the agreement between them and also a necessity: that she would give the baby to Nona and go back to work “after twenty days.” She always spoke about babies in days: twenty, forty. She would say, “When a baby has forty days, it means he’ll live. You have to wait for forty days.”
The twenty days, however, turned into a scale with a number of weights on it: that she had given the child to Nona, that she had gone to work right after, that she was “like a lion” after the birth, after giving up the child (“I was like a lion”), that she had been arrested for forty-eight hours, together with the child (“the child had twenty days”) because of Maurice’s debts, promissory notes he had made her sign before disappearing. They had let her go on the guarantee of Rabbi Nathaniel (“he was a good man, Allah yarhamo”) in whose Savyon home she worked. He brought a fine gift for the child, a gift over the precise nature of which she and Nona argued for years.