The girl that could fly
My name is Sarah and I am old now. My body has wasted away into this old shell that I do not recognize as myself in the mirror. My memories are stealing away one by one at night when I am sleeping or not paying enough attention to them.
I know that soon I will forget my most guarded thoughts, the ones that I have saved and looked after for nearly 90 years now. It is time to tell you about Rachel, my youngest sister. The one that could fly.
Rachel was born, together with a five other children, in the year 1900 in Zichron Yaakov. She was the only girl born that year and it was a great disappointment for my parents. All of my other siblings born after me were boys but they died in their infancy. Rachel was to be their last child, their final effort of having someone to read kiddush for them after their death. Little did we know that not being a boy, was probably the least of Rachel’s ‘problems’.
I knew she was special the moment she was born. My mother insisted that I should help the midwife deliver the baby. She thought the presence of her only living child will bring good luck to the birth of the latest and final baby. I was preparing myself for a long drawn-out session filled with anguish and screams, as my friend Lea had so gleefully described to me. But actually Rachel came very quickly into the world. It was as if she just couldn’t wait anymore to leave my mother’s watery womb and feel the soft air on her skin.
Actually, she came so fast into the world, that the midwife was not 100% ready for her. The one moment she was talking to my mother and a few seconds later the new baby was wrapped in her arms. It was however those few seconds in between that made the midwife share a terrified look with me before she grabbed Rachel into the receiving blanket. Instead of slipping straight to the floor, the baby floated. Yes, that is right, little Rachel was floating the second she was born.
Later, after the baby was cleaned and my mother seen to, the still shaken midwife told me not to mention anything about Rachel being a bit ‘unusual’. It was sorrow enough for my parents that she was born a girl and not the much anticipated boy. The midwife soon left to work in Hadera and later on moved to Jerusalem. She was never seen again in Zichron Yaakov.
Rachel was the perfect baby during her first two years. She slept throughout the night and was charming and smiled to anybody who picked her up or even looked at her. She inherited my father’s blue eyes and my mother’s red hair and looked just like those cute babies that one always see these days on the advertisements.
It was exactly two years later, on the date of her second birthday that she did something ‘unusual’ again. Some of our friends and neighbours were invited to help celebrate Rachel’s birthday. Just before the cake was served, my father and three other men lifted Rachel with her chair three times high into the air. Two times for the two years that she has lived and an extra lift for the next year. Rachel was not scared at all and was crowing with laughter. At the first two lifts she still sat quietly in her chair but at the third lift into the air, she spread her arms and flung herself into the air. And there she stayed, hanging in the air, close to the ceiling, beaming down at us.
Everybody froze and stared at her with their mouths open for a long time. And then the chair that Rachel had sat in and was still held in the air by the four men suddenly clattered to the floor. The sound seemed to unfreeze the crowd and they all grabbed their belongings and left our house quickly. I noticed that a few even took with them the presents that they have brought for Rachel’s party.
My mother seemed to shake herself awake like someone wrestling herself out of a strange dream. She sent my father to go and fetch the rabbi while she went to get the doctor and ordered me to try and get Rachel down from the ceiling. Rachel thought it was a game and kept laughing at me and dodging away but finally I stood on the table, grabbed her ankle and brought her down to the floor. As soon as she set foot on the floor however, she used it to launch herself into the air again.
Eventually I just gave up and let her float around the house. My mother however managed to coach her down with food and then got to the doctor to have a look at her. Of course everything was fine with her and told he us to just make sure that she gets enough water and food and not too scold her for doing something that is so natural for her.
The rabbi however was not so open-minded. For months he pried into our private lives and dug around our closets looking for anything that might shed a light on why we have this demon in our house. At last my mother threw him out of the house yelling that all babies are a gift from God and should be treated like that.
As Rachel grew bigger she started to venture outside more and more. My mother was in despair that Rachel would float too far away but Ahmed, our Arab worker suggested that we tether her to the yard just like one of the horses. Every year on her birthday my parents would ask him to make her rope a few meters longer.
My mother insisted that she attend school with the other children but she was just too much of a distraction. Rachel hated sitting quiet for too long and would often launch herself into the air and float near the ceiling. This amused the other children tremendously but irritated our teacher very uch . The more he yelled at her and tried to pull her down, the more Rachel would just stare quietly at him and float effortlessly out of his reach.
In the end Rachel basically just spend her days floating or flying around in the sky around our house and the nearby fields. She would come down to earth to do some yard work or help a bit in the kitchen and then have her meals with us. At night she slept quietly above her bed, slowly floating up and down as she breathed in and out.
We all worried that one day she would realize that she could loosen her rope and fly wherever she wanted to but Rachel seemed to be content to stay close to us.
We were all happy when at sixteen she fell in love with Daniel, the golden boy of the town. His father was one of the hated clerks who worked for the Baron and his mom was the biggest snob in the town but Daniel was not like them at all. He was the most humble person that I have ever met in my long years on this earth. He loved animals and was often found studying ant hills or climbing trees to peek into birds’ nests. There was even a rumour that he tried to tame one of the hyenas that still lived in the hills those days.
Daniel delighted in Rachel and called her his “ little red-haired bird”. He was the only person with whom she would spent hours for on the ground. They explored all the caves in the nearby cliffs and sometimes took the buggy to the sea. Most of the time they would just lie in the cow field behind our house talking about who knows what while pointing out at the clouds or the birds in the sky.
But then of course tragedy struck, as it always does to special people. Daniel was murdered near Bat Shlomo on one of the night patrols. As soon as Rachel heard the news she took to the sky and did not come down for days. My mother and I pulled her in by the rope like we did when she was little. The one forced some food and water through her lips while the other hold on as tight to her as possible. As soon as we let go of her, she floated back into the sky.
Everyday she grew thinner and more and more transparent, her face aspale as the clouds. She only looked a little bit alive again with the arrival of the migrating storks on their way to Africa. For a few days she watched them constantly and then one day she just gave my mother and I a quick hug after we had fed her, removed the tether from her leg and then took to the sky, joining the large storks flying near the clouds. So terribly high up in the sky.
Every year, autumn and spring, I waited for her with the arrival of the migrating birds. I finally got married, had children of my own and buried my parents. I never left Zichron, fearing that I would miss her return, but she never flew back to us again.
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Links to my other Zichron Yaakov stories:
1885: The Rescue
1940: The Yemen cobbler’s son
1980: Simson and the sheep
2010: The ghost of Sarah Aaronsohn
