The Journey to Eternity · A serialized book by Nurit Rozenblat

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Chapter Seven — The First Bite of Eternity

I stood before the Tree of Eternity, and the golden fruit was within a touch of me.

Six times since I arrived on this island I had thought I was drawing closer to an answer. Each time I met something I had not known, and every answer gave birth to new questions within me. I learned about time, about memory, about love and about choice. I saw possibilities for lives I had never lived, and I understood that even eternity cannot exempt me from the responsibility of deciding how I will live.

But now there was no entity before me that could add anything more.

I was alone.

I stretched out my hand toward the fruit, and almost touched it, when I heard a whisper.

At first I thought it was the wind passing through the leaves. But the whisper returned, and this time I heard within it sounds that seemed like words in a language I did not know.

I turned around.

Between the immense roots of the tree there was still the opening through which I had descended earlier to the Hall of Possibilities. But now a golden light burst from it, and the ground around it trembled lightly.

I moved away from the fruit.

The whispers grew stronger.

They sounded like the voices of ancient spirits, speaking to one another across an enormous distance. I did not understand a single word, and yet I felt they were addressing me.

I bent down and looked inside.

The stairs I knew had vanished.

In their place ran a natural passage inside dark rock, which I had not seen before. The golden light flickered on its walls, as if a river of fire flowed beneath the surface of the stone.

And within the light, shadows moved.

At first it seemed to me they were large birds. Their wings were long, and they moved in low circles above the ground. But when I looked closely, I noticed the wings were not moving at all.

The beings were hovering.

One of them passed close to the opening.

I saw a long body, almost transparent, and wings made of thin layers of dark light. I could not make out a head or eyes.

For a moment, fear awoke in me.

The silver bird that had accompanied me on the journey was not there, and the Guardian of the Tree had not been seen since we parted.

I could go back to the fruit. I could also turn around and look for the way home.

But the voices from within the cave carried something I could not ignore.

They did not sound like a warning.

They sounded like longing.

I went in.

The passage was narrow at its start, but the further I advanced, the more its walls moved apart from one another. The light did not come from torches or from openings in the rock. It rose from golden veins that ran through the walls, branching and meeting, like a system of roots within the earth.

One of the winged beings passed above my head.

I stopped.

It made no sound, but at the moment it passed beside me I felt something strange.

For a brief moment I was certain I remembered a place I had never seen.

A wide valley beneath purple skies. Houses built around tall trees. People standing beside a river, lifting their faces to the skies.

The picture vanished almost at once.

I laid a hand on the cave wall to steady myself.

The being continued to hover, as if nothing had happened.

And then the whispers changed.

They became song.

Many voices joined one another, some deep and slow, others so high I could barely hear them. The melody was unlike any music I knew. It advanced in several directions at one and the same time, and yet there was not one sound in it that seemed foreign to the others.

Gradually I began to understand words.

Not because I had learned the language, but as if their meaning reached me before the sound.

The songs told of worlds where beings lived for many generations. Of rivers that carried water to cities that had vanished. Of forests planted by those who did not live to see them grow. Of mothers who prayed for their children's peace, and of people who looked at the skies and asked to understand whether anyone heard them.

I heard prayers for health, for protection, for rain, for a return home.

Among them were names I did not know, and others that sounded strangely familiar.

Within one of the songs I heard the word God.

I stopped.

I listened carefully.

The voices were not all asking for the same thing. Among them were those who asked to lengthen their lives, and those who asked that their loved ones suffer no more. I heard a voice pleading for the salvation of an entire city, and another voice that asked only to see a loved one again.

I understood I was not hearing one choir.

I was hearing prayers spoken at different times and in different places, and something in this cave had preserved their echoes.

One of the winged beings descended slowly and stopped before me.

Its wings spread out to the sides.

Within them I saw hundreds of tiny points of light, and each one carried a miniature picture.

When I drew closer, one of the pictures widened.

I saw an elderly woman sitting beside the bed of a sick child. She held his hand and prayed quietly.

In another picture a man stood alone on a rocky shore, watching a ship move away from him.

In a third picture I saw a group of beings unlike humans, standing together beneath red skies. They too lifted their faces upward.

I gazed at them in amazement.

I did not know if they had lived in the past, were living now, or belonged to a world that no longer exists.

But I understood something.

The longing was not only human.

Beings I did not know also sought to keep what they loved. They too feared loss, hoped, waited, and prayed.

The being folded its wings and moved away.

I kept walking.

The melody accompanied me until the passage opened into a round hall. At its center stood a golden ladder, extending upward and vanishing into an opening in the ceiling.

There were no supporting walls around it.

It stood alone, thin and tall in a way that seemed impossible.

I approached.

Every rung was decorated with delicate shapes of wings, leaves, and branches. When I laid my hand on it, I felt it was warm.

I raised my head.

Somewhere above, a dazzling light burst forth.

The winged beings gathered around the ladder, but did not climb it. They hovered in a wide circle, as if accompanying me to the point beyond which they could not continue.

I set a foot on the first rung.

The ladder was steady.

I began to climb.

At first I counted the rungs, but after a short while I lost count. The higher I climbed, the further the songs receded, and in their place I heard my breaths and the beats of my heart.

Now and then I looked down.

The hall had receded so far that the winged beings looked like dark points moving within golden light.

I continued.

Midway, I stopped to rest.

I held the ladder with both hands and pressed my forehead to it.

I thought about how, as long as I was climbing, my body was still doing what it had always done. The muscles tire. The breathing quickens. The heart pumps blood.

I felt a sudden affection for it.

All these years this body carried me from place to place. It allowed me to hug, to taste, to dance, to swim, to feel sun on my skin.

I was not always pleased with it.

At times I wanted it to change, to grow stronger, to look different.

But now, when I knew I might part from it, I felt how much it had been part of everything I knew.

I laid the palm of my hand on my chest.

My heart beat rapidly.

I did not know whether in a little while I would hear it for the last time.

I kept climbing.

When I reached the top rung, the light was so strong that I had to close my eyes.

I stretched a hand forward, felt firm ground, and pulled myself out.

A pleasant wind touched my face.

I opened my eyes.

Before me spread a wide and beautiful landscape.

Green fields extended to the horizon. Tall trees bore sparkling leaves, and between them flowed clear streams that joined into a large lake. The light on the surface of the water changed between gold and silver, and the skies were so bright that it seemed there was no clear boundary between them and the earth.

But the thing that stopped my breath was the tree.

It stood at the center of the landscape.

The Tree of Eternity.

I recognized its immense trunk and wide branches, but from here I saw it from another angle. Its roots extended into the earth, and in places emerged from it and continued to great distances, as if connecting the whole landscape to one center.

On its branches hung golden fruits.

Dozens of them.

Perhaps hundreds.

I stood motionless.

I did not understand how it could be that I had descended beneath the tree, climbed a ladder, and now I stood before it again.

And then I noticed something else.

The tree did not look exactly as it had looked before.

Between the branches I saw places where the light had thickened into shapes of gates. Some were open, and within them other skies could be seen. In one I noticed a dark sea and two moons. In another I saw a mountain range covered in blue snow.

I approached slowly.

I felt as if the cave had not led me to another place, but had allowed me to see a part of the tree that had been hidden from me.

Near the trunk, a voice was heard.

"Now you see a little more."

I turned around.

There was no one there.

"Who is speaking?" I asked.

"You do not need to see me in order to hear."

The voice was deep, but it did not sound like the voice of a man or a woman.

It came from all directions, and yet I felt it addressed me alone.

"Where am I?"

"In the place where the way to the tree and the way to the worlds meet."

I looked at the branches.

"Is it the same tree?"

"The same tree. But what you saw of it before was only what your body and your consciousness could contain."

I approached the trunk.

It was warm to the touch.

"And what were the voices in the cave?"

"Traces of longing."

"Prayers?"

"Some of them. Others were words spoken without anyone calling them prayer."

I thought of the woman beside the child's bed.

"Did anyone hear them?"

A silence settled.

For a moment I thought the voice had vanished.

And then it answered.

"Hearing is not always an answer, and an answer is not always what they prayed to receive."

I felt sadness.

"That sounds hard."

"At times it is very hard."

There was no promise in the voice that every prayer is answered, and no attempt to explain why people suffer.

I appreciated the silence that remained after it.

I looked at one of the fruits.

"I was told this tree has existed since the beginning of creation."

"It carries within it a very ancient memory."

"Is it the Tree of Life mentioned in the Torah?"

"You know the story of the Tree of Life and of the way that was guarded from man after he ate from the Tree of Knowledge. The place where you stand touches that same secret, but not everything you see here can be explained by means of the things handed down to your world."

I thought of the cherubim and the flame of the turning sword.

"Then why is the way open to me?"

"Because you arrived at it."

"That does not mean I am permitted to eat."

"Correct."

I was surprised.

"Then who gives me permission?"

"There is no one here who can bear the choice in your place."

I looked at the fruits.

"And what will happen if I eat?"

"The body around which your life was built will complete its role. Your existence will no longer depend on breath, on a pulse, or on the passing of the years. But do not confuse freedom from the body with freedom from every boundary."

I remembered everything I had learned.

The Entity of Time.

The Entity of Memory.

The Entities of Light.

The Hall of Possibilities.

I felt I was no longer the same woman who had entered the orchard.

And still, something very familiar remained in me.

The will to live.

Not only to lengthen my days.

To live.

To keep feeling wonder before something new. To understand the world a little more. To discover what I do not know. To love.

"And will I be able to return home?" I asked.

The voice answered only after a long silence.

"Not by the way you left it."

I felt as if something contracted within me.

"Then I will not see my family again?"

"I cannot promise you a meeting, and I cannot promise there will not be one. The way in which you will exist will change, and with it your possibilities will change too."

I looked at the ground.

This was the answer I had feared hearing.

Not a promise.

Not a comfort.

Only the possibility of choosing a thing from which there is no simple return to my former life.

I thought of home.

Of my children.

Of all the small moments of my life that had not seemed especially important while they were happening.

A conversation in the kitchen. Laughter heard from another room. A shared meal. A voice calling me.

I felt an intense longing.

For a moment I wanted to turn around and go.

But when I raised my eyes to the tree, I knew that if I returned now, something in me would go on asking all my life what would have happened had I stayed.

I did not want to choose out of fear.

Nor out of a desire to prove courage.

I wanted to be as sure as possible that I was not fleeing my life, but answering another possibility of existence.

I approached a low branch.

An especially large fruit hung at its tip.

It was smooth, almost round, and within its peel a faint light moved. When I stretched my hand toward it, I felt a delicate warmth at my fingertips.

I touched it.

The warmth spread along my arm.

For a moment a strange feeling rose in me, as if the tree knew the beats of my heart.

I grasped the fruit.

It detached from the branch easily.

I was surprised by its weight. It was heavier than it looked.

I stood holding it in both my hands.

I looked around.

The lake was quiet. The wind moved the leaves, and birds were heard in the distance.

There was no lightning.

No voice was heard declaring that the moment had come.

The world continued to exist in the same serenity.

I thought that perhaps this is how other great decisions in life look too. The world does not stop in their honor. Only the one who chooses knows that something is about to change.

I raised the fruit to my face.

A delicate scent rose from it.

It reminded me of a fruit I had eaten in my childhood, but I could not identify which. The more I tried to remember, the further the memory receded.

I smiled to myself.

Even now, before the Tree of Eternity, my human memory kept playing tricks on me.

I closed my eyes.

I thought of the people I love.

I did not try to part from them.

I did not want to turn this moment into a ceremony of farewell.

I only let their faces rise in my memory, one after another.

And then I opened my eyes.

And I bit.

End of Chapter Seven

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