spring2015

David FlynnThe Woman Covered in FliesThe woman stood in the middle of the desert covered in flies. She was a skeleton with burnt brownparchment skin. Her hair was shaved to a gauze. Her body in beige shorts and a red top was a skeleton. Shestared at me with intense blue eyes.“My name is Dana,” she said in a New York accent. “It’s Hebrew for ‘God is my judge.’”I told her my name, but she had no further questions. What are you doing in Israel? How do youknow Peter? What is the nature of God?Peter got the directions to the tent from the woman covered in flies, then she followed us wordlessly.He was a truancy officer for the local Negev school system hunting for a student who hadn’t appeared forclasses in a week. The settlement consisted of two rows of white tents in the beige dirt that stretched toinfinity in all directions.“I can’t control the boy,” the mother finally told us when we appeared at the right tent. Danaintroduced us. “I don’t know where he is.”The woman covered in flies walked us back to Peter’s car, an old Citroen, and at last turned to me.“We will see each other again,” she said, like a command.“She’s here to rediscover her Jewishness,” Peter told me as we bumped away on the dirt road. “Theother settlers don’t like her.”We turned onto the paved road and soon came to a stop sign. Peter raised the shock absorbers, upup up, then lowered the shock absorbers, down down down. He constantly adjusted them. In this lifetime, Ihad kidded him, he would never find the perfect setting for the shock absorbers. I was just a fallen CatholicAmerican renting a cheap apartment in Mitzpe Ramon, and he had taken it onto himself to cure my intenselonesomeness. Plus he was bored. His family had me over for Shabbat. There were no jobs in the town, builtin the middle of the Negev. Peter ran tours of the nearby Maktesh Ramon, a kind of Grand Canyon of theMiddle East, taught Hebrew to Russian emigres, drew kabala charts, was the truancy officer, anything. I meta former surgeon from Moscow who was hoping to get a job as a street sweeper.Knock knock.“I am here,” she said.“So you are. Come in.”“No. Let’s eat.”And so we did. Without the flies Dana was burnt flesh and ribs. I couldn’t tell if she was goodlooking or not below that basicness. The eyes, bluer than the sky, blazed from their holes, but the rest wasonly vaguely human.27