Dedicated to: Hope
By M.A. Matyash

The only thing I really ever wanted was to get married. I know it’s not particularly popular admitting something like that in our modern progressive world, but it’s the only thing that was a real dream to me. Ever since my parents staged a wedding for me with my kindergarten boyfriend it’s been a fixation.

My mother regrets it to this day. She’s head nurse at the local hospital and her daughter was supposed to grow up a doctor, and not a twinkle eyed young woman who’s idea of a good day is planning her meeting with prince charming and the bouquet of flowers she’ll be holding the next day.

Anyway, suffice to say that neither of our expectations came out just as we would have liked it. I’m 25 and prince charming still hasn’t arrived. I did manage to find something productive to do in the meanwhile. It’s not quite the same but photographing weddings keeps your dream alive and gets you enough money so you can leave your parents’ home. Then you only have to see her begrudging eyes once a week.

It’s 2001 and my mother has just found a new reason why I should quit my job. Weddings are gatherings; gatherings are where lots of people get together. Lots of people together are an invitation for terrorists. We live in a crazy world.

So I was considering going back to school. That’s actually what most of my friends are doing. My boyfriend of three years (yes, I have been doing the modern – lets get to know each other until the passion ends routine) has gone back to school after getting a degree in computers. It’s not really what he wants but these days it’s the only thing one can do to keep his dignity if he doesn’t want to admit he just can’t get a job.

We live in a crazy world. The year he graduated he got dozens of offers for jobs you wouldn’t believe. I could have worked for a year to get the salaries he was being offered monthly. He had to go traveling. Clear his mind. Life in the real world is always waiting around the corner except it seems that by the time he came back the corner had somehow moved because the whole world economy had crashed. Hi-tech, what seemed to be in Israel the equivalent of the ‘American dream’ was no longer so high and he spent more than a couple of months lounging in the park discussing how rich the life in India is. We really do live in a crazy world.

Finally he realized he had to go back to bartending which isn’t as glamorous after you’ve spent a few years hitting the books just so you could get a better chance at life, and the only way to rescue a tortured ego is to have a good excuse.
We’re going to have an extremely educated generation.

Anyway, we were doing fine. We got ourselves a dusty bedroom downtown Tel-Aviv and put a colorful rug on the floor that screams of Peru, and long Indian fabrics cover the wall. You would hardly guess what country the apartment was in if we didn’t leave the television on all day. My bourgeoisie parents even got me a small white Fiat so I wouldn’t have to travel by bus. It’s lucky too; because the other day the restaurant by my would-be bus station was blasted, and you can really never know can you? It was in the evening and that’s usually when I go to work.

I guess one day we’ll be telling our grandchildren that we were living at an historical turning point of events. A time when we didn’t know that salvation was just around the corner. And we were so brave. Or are we? And is it?
Back to my dream of getting married.

I guess it was part of that childish yearning for true love, or just that silly feeling that you YOU are someone special. Some people want to rule the world, some people want to ruin the world and I just wanted to be that one person who finds true love. Or maybe that second person because my lover would stand first place of course. That’s what true love is all about isn’t it. And of course there’s that dreamy moment when you’re standing in you’re gorgeous white dress. The one dress where it doesn’t matter that you’ll be paying for it probably as long as the mortgage on your house, and your under your ‘huppa’, and people are standing behind you and they’re all soggy eyed. And all you can do is smile, and I just know, or I must believe that you are in real ecstasy. And I don’t mean something that you feel ‘cause you just took five heads and nothing like your first acid party. Just true ecstasy. Somebody wrote about it a long time ago and I refuse to believe that it was a figment of his or her imagination. If it was imagined, then I damn that person to hell for putting miserable hopes into young girls heads for all generations to come. I call forth that man as a criminal of humanity. And you see?

I can’t even write about my wedding without getting cynical anymore. I think it started happening in the midst of my army service. Right along the same time when I discovered that serving your country bravely meant serving coffee and donuts to an excessively round man, who will be killed by cholesterol before any war, and who’s lack of imagination and well, ‘ecstasy material’ is frighteningly real.

Somebody mentioned the words ‘comfort’ and ‘familiarity’ and a couple of years later I met David.
I still dream about that ecstasy from time to time, and I probably would have had a wedding. Although I’m doubtful that everyone around me would be soggy eyed. Well maybe my mother who’d be on her cell phone five minutes later, but the rest would probably spend my wedding, emphasis on MY WEDDING debating the borders that the new Palestinian state should have, and what the latest speech by the American presidents’ effect will be on Israeli policy.

I want guests discussing dessert, and holding martinis ‘shaken not stirred’. Bright balloons that little girls see for the first time. I want great smelling people and beautiful cloths, and I don’t want that day to stand in terrible contrast to everything everyone there experiences the moment they exit the hall.


So I met David as I mentioned. And he had these beautiful eyes so I thought that perhaps he was the one. After it became clear he was not, it became ok that he should be the one until the actual ‘one’ would appear. Then he just stayed. He’s really all right though. Perhaps a little too depressed but who could blame him.

It’s not something he talks about, and it’s probably not something I should talk about but his father was killed when he was a baby in the war of ‘Yom Kippur’ and his older brother was killed on a bus bomb, back in the terrorist attacks in the early nineties. Twice a year his mother and he have these organized meetings. One is a group that supports families who have lost loved ones in the wars of Israel. That should really cover both but the second one is new, and it’s support for families who’ve lost loved ones to terror. Those two days were the only times when the house would get really quiet, and we’d have a dark night on the couch, just the two of us, wondering.

I don’t want to sound awful but it’s actually then that I always feel that there is a real reason that we’re together. He really does have beautiful eyes.
I guess I owed him a little more than… you see, I met this man.

At a wedding. Like a dream. He stood out of my pictures like a hologram would from an 1890 family portrait. I didn’t go straight home after that wedding. I silenced my cellular phone and we drove away. I thought – this is the one time in my life that I am willing to be crazy. This is what I’ve been waiting for. I didn’t have to do anything. I wasn’t smart, and I wasn’t pretty. Not that night. I was just me, and silent. Perhaps he could read my mind. Perhaps he knew without words that there was a reason he should want to be by my side. We drove off.

Found myself at the shore of the Kinneret. Listening to old love songs, gazing at the moon in the arms of my beloved. And he had soft hands. Gentle.
He had a white tablecloth with embroidery in trunk of his car. Perfect. We covered ourselves in it and slept through the night.

I could make a wedding dress out of this cloth I thought as I fell asleep. When my beloved breathed in his sleep he smelt of mint. I’ve never met anyone who could smell so sweet when they slumbered.

In the morning we bathed and I wondered how it could be that the world was so silent. We were lucky to be alone. Only the soft wind and my loved ones voice in my ear.
Afterwards we walked to the car with the birds still singing. He was holding my hand and I sat waiting for him.

He turned the radio on when the car was ignited. He smiled at me, and that’s when I heard it.

There was an attack on a wedding last night. Dozens killed. Even the photographer hadn’t escaped. The police was developing her film as they spoke. It was a black night.
No wonder the world was so silent.

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'Moran.A.Matyash is twenty-two years old. She lives in Tel-Aviv and is begining her undergraduate course in Film Art this comming October at the Tel-Aviv university. She served 21 months in the Israeli military. Over the years she has had the opportunity to reside in many different countries, as a child as well as an adult and participated several times in gatherings at the UN called "kids meeting kids". These gatherings brought children from all over the world together to discuss current issues, in particular the Israeli - Palestinian one. In her free time Moran enjoys singing and music and has also recently completed her first novel. Sender her mail at M.A. Matyash

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