Catherina - Day 1

We meandered in the market, overwhelmed by the noise of bargaining, people passing, and plastic bags hanging under the large white tents rubbing against each other when encountering a summer morning breeze. The sky was clear without clouds, and the watery sun had yet reached the zenith, restraining its brightness to a golden lining of that faintly yellow, dominantly white orb. Under the blue doom, the market was populated: shop owners, craft makers, street artists, local customers, and us tourists. Vitality out of chaos – people bumping against each other, shoulders touching shoulders, quietly cursing passer-by for stepping on their toe and the next moment impatiently shushing their equally impatient children down with a sweet.

Plenty of time till mid-day, when we will leave this town, driving across gently rolling hills decorated by patches of farmland. Isolated we will be, and thus I blended into the crowd, drowning in the worldly air of this busy ant nest. Along with my friends, we trotted along the dusty lane, stopping by stores in vibrant shades of red, orange, yellow – each a segment of the rainbow. Full, brilliant hues were clashing, contrasting, complementing, and harmonizing, excelling the most skillful painter, or whoever dared to name oneself as "master of color."

The sun rose higher, along with the heat rising from beneath the earth, sandwiching those who expect to be well-done. I picked an ice cream shop a few meters ahead, decorated by violet boards with white writings in cursive. "The best ice cream," announced the board – though this morning, I had seen the same slogan for double digits times.

I just wanted ice cream for a taste of coolness. Through the freezer door that had been broken and pieced back with tape – as that dirty brown tape too obvious to ignore – I skimmed through my selections. Half-mindedly I asked for the owner (whose face beaming with excitement) a recommendation, wasted no brain on understanding the owner's heavy accent, made my choice (solely based on where her short, fat finger with nail painted magenta was pointing), and paid the highest price shown on price board for a triple bomb (three pathetic melting ice cream balls).

When the owner was finding me my change, I took a spoonful (a tiny plastic spoon the size of my thumbnail) of ice cream – it was pink, made from some local fruits – and was about to pass it into my mouth. At that moment, I saw one thing specific on the shop's interior wall (really, it was just painted cupboards): a poster with curled edges, grey margin, and blue and green lines on a yellow background. "What is that?" I asked the owner after putting down the spoon, as I did not want melted ice cream on my flowery dress.

"Could be a map, Miss." She passed me a dozen coins of varying sizes and patterns- apparently, she wasn't too sure of the poster's identity, "Do you want to take a look?"

"Yes, please." I put the ice cream cup down on the counter, wiping away a trace of sweat almost touching my eye. The owner took the graph down and handed it over the counter. I said, "thank you."

The poster had a title, but I couldn't remember. The blue and green lines represented river flows and lakes in the region, marked by the irregular yellow shape on the background. It was an old, academic making, looking like a figure segmented from an outdated research paper, often found among forgotten files in a dusty corner of libraries.

As she had seen me with no apparent intention of taking the poster away without paying – although I could swear that she didn't mind that piece of paper- the shop owner turned to wipe the freezer.

Absorbed into memory, I went against the current of time, back at that Mediterranean white house in late spring. Oh, the grand white house, how I missed the time spent wandering through its numerous corridors and interconnected rooms. The most splendid of all was its pool – not the two sea blue pools in its maple-guarded front yard, but a two-lane swimming pool at a cornered sector of its back garden.

That day, I had just finished my first semester in the white house and was leaning against the rail of its marble-paved side veranda when the Mademoiselle came towards me. She invited me over to her secret place – a white oval tent just sufficient for encompassing two of us. S-sized shelves, desks, chairs, and decorations – Mademoiselle as the daughter of the white house had her privileges – filled up space, and we changed into bathing suits.

When we exited the tent, I saw the pool for the first time. We warmed up a bit under the afternoon sun, letting the soft light heating our limbs. Then we jump into the pool shaded by lush green trees.

Stretching our arms and legs in coolness, we swam by mild tropical fishes cultivated for Mademoiselle – her wills always fulfilled. She didn't stay in water for long, as she detested possible fish excretions. After she left, I enjoyed the fishes' company – until I saw a black hole on the tiled sidewall. Kicking to pull myself up above the water and take a deep breath, I dived back in, sunken until my feet touched the bottom of the pool, sunlight weaving patterns onto my skin.

The hole was perfectly circular, wide as my shoulder width. I called it a "black hole," for I could see nothing even at its very edge – except its white ceramic (as Mademoiselle told me afterward) outline marking its presence on the wall. I thought it was a water filtering thing, as I saw traces of currents wiggling around it as they were being absorbed. Curiously, fishes swam by unaffected, and they seemed not to notice its existence.

Weird. Young and inexperienced as I was, I drew another breath above water, and tentatively extended my arm towards the hole. Inches by inches, my fingertip almost touching the plane on which the sidewall lies, and suddenly a shiver was sent up my spine. I was on the edge of some great force, a large, sucking force. I cherished my life, and thus I relaxed my arm and swam towards the stairs.

Mademoiselle had gone back to her tent, and I followed. Once inside, I asked about that mysterious "filtration hole." She explained that it was a new tech developed by her father, the owner of our white house. "Papa said this thing inspired it." From her stack of homework sheets, she pulled up a photocopy of a map. The quality of that photocopy wasn't at least satisfactory – the words were bolded and blurred, too hard to decipher. Still, I made the best of it, paying ten times the attention as I did in class.

"I suppose these lines indicate rivers." The lines I referred to were likewise bolded, easy to identify on the pale grey background, "and this," I drew a circle around the grey background outlined by wiggling, bolded line, "I think it represents our region."

"Cool." Mademoiselle expressed decent interest out of politeness. She never was into any sciences or any other subjects. She was well taken cared for and conditioned to be a work of art (music, classics, literature – to name a few), though she always seemed to be absent of mind.

"Here," pointing at an ink-filled circle, I said, "this must be the lake yonder."

Mademoiselle started to exhibit a slight impatience, but she still nodded at my words. "My geography homework." Said she, "in the unit on the water system." A year younger than me, she still took Geography, which was mandatory for their grade.

I pulled myself away from that late spring afternoon, a salty taste of Mademoiselle's pool still at the tip of my tongue. I looked up, the ice cream almost melted completely into a lukewarm cup of liquid, and the shop owner was dealing with another client.

Nothing particular about the map - it was just a segment from my forgone past. I called the shop owner to give the poster back and left for my friends. We agreed to have our respective free shopping period, and as I was already five minutes late, I rushed to the exit.

Driving on the winding country road, we sang cheerily, passing the lavish, green hills. Then, we saw a trailer house stood alone in the field, a small driveway leading up to the main road. Seeing a sign saying something like "museum of the waterway," I asked to stop by.

Doubtfully went my friends, and only to discover it was, in fact, a museum. The owner was a bearded middle-aged man, looking like one who belonged to a biker gang. Maybe hasn't seen visitors for so long, the owner gave us a tour with such enthusiasm that we could not help suspect that he would coax us into buying some ridiculous souvenir.

Then I saw a large picture hanging on the wall, taking half of its space. It was a magnified and colored version of that map I had seen twice. Noticing my interest, the owner explained that the picture showed the historical distribution of local waterways, "which, then, had gone through centuries of natural and artificial modifications." He then pointed to another picture on the opposite wall, "this one shows the current distribution." I nodded to acknowledge his explanation, shifting my focus onto a furry specimen – it was an endemic specie of beaver.

We left with some souvenirs – as tips for the owner's exuberant tour.

"Historical distribution." The phrase haunted me so. I found my memory about the white house and my years spending in its classrooms unclear, blurred, and fading.

A girl's pool. Tropical fishes. A filtration black hole.

(photocredit: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.timeout.com%2Fisrael%2Fshopping%2Fold-city-market-arab-souq&psig=AOvVaw24esHAoyaL5q13hVLqmBsL&ust=1591200596807000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCKjuzKXC4-kCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD)