ZAMFIR

CONTINUED from Morris Mini. I suggest you download this as it would explain the title and the nostalgia. As it downloads, you might be interested in hearing this.

'Do you want to go back?' Rotem asks. 'Back to the Andes?' The sun hasn't emerged yet, as the little car zooms through the quickest route out of London.
I know the answer. 'No. Maybe to the parts I've not seen yet. Like, the southern Chilean sierra.' I don't want to go back because my identity shifted; my sustenance, my theology, switched.
I can't go back. You stash your fears somewhere, like TNT cylinders, and run away, knowing they'll explode upon return.

Rotem frowns at the early suburban traffic, then fishes a CD case from beneath her seat. 'Look what I've brought,' she flicks it open. 'Zamfir. If we gotta be nostalgic, might as well die from it.'
Gheorghe Zamfir and Ennio Morricone are two musicians she would listen to curled up in pain in the cellar, retching and bleeding, and during withdrawal. In those days of the walkman and coupled earphones, she'd plug us both into surfs of whistles and percussion. She decided that those were the soundtracks to my childhood, which should be an anthropologically correct assumption.

Now Rotem taps the clutch and whistles along, often adding Spanish lyrics. You do not want to be her passenger: she's one of those crackhead drivers who could prefer the opposite lane due to a northwesterly breeze.
Since I have so many questions to rephrase and calculate, I remain silent. The landscape washes past in bluish mist and bare black branches, small cobbled bridges and dark rivulets. Rotem rhymes nonsensically to a sweet melody and I know that she is sick, nearly dead, so I must be precise with my words, as I cannot reinvent a memory.
'Why do you want to visit Norham?' I ask, finding simplicity the best policy.
'Dunno. I like riding ghost roller-coasters,' she shrugs. 'I like chewing on pieces of history. And when I think of Norham, I think of you and cinnamon roads. You do not take Ezekiel to the Red Sea or Mandela to Bosnia.'

'What made it so significant, a "piece of history"?' I say, confused by all the attached importance. 'You could've gone to Sicily or Pretoria, with somebody who has left a more pertinent effect on your life.'
'Effect?' she looks at me, and yes, we could wham into an 18-wheeler now. 'You had pretty pyrotechnical effects on me,' she smirks. 'I'm going back there because it's a nesting ground and winter is thick. Who giveth? Norham is our childhood, mi alma.' When she speaks Spanish her locution is soft and engaging, calling one 'preciosa', 'mi reina', 'hermana'. 'Neither of us had much of a childhood. We were sheltered there, if you want.'
I don't get half of this, but it rings reasonable. Both of us fought for bloody scraps until then, alone.
'Childhood doesn't require a biological age frame,' she clarifies. 'I'm talking about environs and stage of development. Call it a late bloom.'
So am I calling on my childhood? 'You talk as if you're at least 70 years old. You're not even 20 yet.'
She just whistles, a flock of black-faced sheep swimming past.

She parks before the shabby dorm building, now desolate. The trees are bare, which shocks me since I left them in full foliage. I don’t know why this jolts me.
We stare at the buildings that were our home for a good few months. Ha! Gotcha. This wasn't our home, but a mere functionary place we visited between rolling in the hills and smoking by the river. Ain't nostalgic whatsoever.

Rotem pulls the car away from that eerie street. As we head for the hills, she replies, 'You should know it isn't about age. If at 20 you've undergone abuse, assault, initiated prostitution, violence and chemical commerce to some extent' – she chuckles at herself – 'then you've traded your soul a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times, and you've no age at all.' She hits the gas. 'What is age, rather than a convenient social group? Once surpassed – or at the edge of your collective definition – who the hell cares? You're so old you've never been born yet.'

We step out of the vehicle, red and small within the lush swamp of the hills. I forgot how low and vast the sky could be. It still smells faintly of cinnamon, datura, dope.
'At 16,' she continues, knees brushed by wet stalks. 'You were way out of the sweet sixteen league. Your survival skills, your abilities to concoct drugs and dreams, the fact that you're escaped though two continents and an ocean, and switched a mind-frame. At 16 you were past massive neglect, emotional and physical abuse, endured prostitution and dealing. You could be 37 to all I care, or 4.'
We trudge to the river through the wild graze, soaked to our shirts. The rain starts pelting as soon as we hit the bank.

Rotem, who at 15, daughter to a paranoid IDF officer, knew how to reconstruct a submachine-gun, mastered martial arts from 5 different countries, adapted languages within 10 days and traded drugs and her own soul during the 6 years prior to Norham – that child kicks off her boots, wriggles out of her jeans and boxers and leaps into the water pollution. So I figure Time doesn't matter anymore, because not a day passed since Creation, on the shores of the Hiddekel.

CONTINUED on Rain Dance.