Hoopoe's Song

Marianne Loeble

Description

Oran, a Belgian painter, spends a weekend in London and meets Shani, a woman from the Negev Desert, near Beersheba.Almost a year later, Oran sets off to her agricultural community in Israel. The huge farm is similar to the ancient settlements.There he meets Hagar, Shani's sister, who has both Jewish and Egyptian roots and yearns for peace.The community is a stone's throw from the Gaza strip. Times are hard in the first decade of the 21st century. Oran turns out to be a member of an international secret association, and Hagar will try, in vain, to prevent him from going to Gaza to look for his Jewish roots.From cosmopolitan Brussels to the arid Negev Desert and from convivial Haifa to bustling Tel-Aviv, Hoopoe's Song is the gripping story about the right to happiness for all and a critical analysis of the manipulative tricks used by some international organizations.

Sujets

• Historical romance
• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 04 mai 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781645753087
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Hoopoe’s Song
Marianne Loeble
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-04-05
Hoopoe’s Song About The Author Dedication Copyright Information © Chapter 1 From London to a Desert London, June 2005 Beersheba, April 2006 Chapter 2 At the Library Chapter 3 Passover in Israel Chapter 4 Shlomo Chapter 5 Hagar’s Monologue Chapter 6 Yom Rishon, Sunday, 9th of August Chapter 7 Oran Chapter 8 Gaza Chapter 9 Hagar and Shlomo Chapter 10 Looking into Oran’s Past Chapter 11 Shlomo in Brussels Chapter 12 Hagar in Jaffa Friday, April 3 rd Saturday, April 4 th April 10th, 2009 Chapter 13 Shlomo Talks to Ula Chapter 14 Jenny in Ostend Chapter 15 Jenny and Hagar Chapter 16 Shlomo Chapter 17 Hagar Chapter 18 An Explosive Encounter
About The Author
Marianne Loeble was born in Brussels, Belgium. She is an English teacher who became a poet, novelist, multilingual author, and globetrotter. Her favorite destinations are America and the Middle East.
She aims to bridge cultures and people. Languages and art lead to understanding and acceptance of many differences.
Dedication
To my dear friends in the Middle East.
Copyright Information ©
Marianne Loeble (2020)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Loeble, Marianne
Hoopoe’s Song
ISBN 9781645753063 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781645753070 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645753087 (ePub e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020903384
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
[e-mail]
[phone]
Chapter 1

From London to a Desert

London, June 2005
“Are you alone? Can I join your table?”
“Of course!”
The woman sitting in front of Oran was smiling. Her curly shoulder-length hair, which was still damp from the shower she had at the hotel, framed a beautiful tanned face. She was watching him as a writer or an adventurer would, looking for inspiration. They tried to break the silence. She had turned up in the dining room and immediately avoided a group of noisy tourists at the other side of the room. He stared at her with expectation.
She belonged to his generation and radiated a deep and introverted appearance of someone who had been through hardships. Her accent did not give away where she was from: “My name is Shani. I live in the Negev Desert, near Beersheba.”
Oran was unable to hide his joy, a joy coming from his unconscious. This woman represented everything he had been waiting for – The Middle East.
At that moment, he took the invitation card with a green and turquoise fish shoal from the Red Sea: “This is an invitation to my painting exhibition in Brussels. The pastel on the card represents a view from a submarine in Eilat.”
When Shani was about to return it to him, he insisted on her keeping it as a souvenir of their accidental meeting in London. She had crossed the oceans from East to West to pay a visit to her son whose student job was selling toys.
“Please, tell me what life is like in Beersheba?”
“We all live together and share everything.”
“What is your job?”
“I am a film director.”
“What type of films do you shoot?”
“Regional films.”
This piqued his curiosity.
“And what about you? Are you a painter?”
“Yes, especially pastels. I am in London to buy new material.”
Shani looked silently at the fish on his card.
"I called this painting Seeking Freedom."
She seemed moved and suddenly said:
“Come to Beersheba. After winter, the tulips grow in the desert and you can paint them.”
Oran answered in the same spontaneous manner:
“I will come.”

Beersheba, April 2006
Oran’s name derived from a harbor in Algeria and meant happy in Hebrew. When he was a child, he often thought of his Semite origins and kept looking for points of references. There in Beersheba, the city of the seven wells, where Abraham, the father of three religions, used to live, he imagined being a Jew or a Bedouin on his way from Jordan sixty years ago, wandering along the Wadi , the dry riverbed leading to an oasis in the Negev Desert.
Pioneers were singing in Hebrew, carrying children and great expectations in their lively tunes. From the tip of my fingers, I was touching the ochre sand from which sprout jojoba and acacia plants. This gesture made me feel the settlers from ages ago.
The bus stopping abruptly brought him back to reality. There were pastoral white bungalows all over, in this green scenery full of children’s games and toys. A dog, whose fur seemed to blend with the desert sand, barked joyfully in front of Oran. It was called Duba. It guided Oran towards a semicircular white house: Shani’s refuge, where she made big decisions and creations. She was waiting for him and welcomed him warmly.
Shani placed his suitcase on her bicycle. “Let me introduce you to my family, Oran. What should I tell them?”
“The truth: I’m on a journey looking for my roots, while pursuing an old dream I had as a student.”
Oran knew Shani had a Colombian husband, a teenage daughter named Dorit and a son named Shlomo, who enjoyed traveling the world. Miguel, her husband, greeted Oran in the living room. He came down with a cold and had to leave after a few minutes.
When Shani Eshel told him who she was in London, she didn’t realize how shocked Oran was. She had opened the door to his past and gave him a chance to comprehend some of life’s greatest mysteries.
In October, she sent him an e-mail: “My birthday is in December. Let’s celebrate together in the desert.”
Shani really wanted to see him again. He was surprised and immediately replied: “Unfortunately, I can’t make it; I’ll be in Chile.”
She sent him a second invitation: “Why don’t you come in spring?”
He landed in Tel Aviv at the beginning of April 2006; the bus drove him south, from the Ben-Gurion Airport close to Tel Aviv, to Beersheba.
Shani woke him by phone every morning. He slept on the other side of the camp; in the red guest room. He was an early bird and generally started drawing or writing at dawn. A splendid migratory bird, colored ochre and purple, inspired both a pastel painting and a poem that day. It was a hoopoe, which looked down at him from the adjacent bungalow’s roof.
Bird of the World
Hoopoe, Beer Sheba’s Bird
Proud, dark eyes in a hole
Sharp look at the world
On the edge of a House
Majestic wings like a fan
Ochre crest to cover a crown
Queen of the Negev Desert
Hoopoe, Beer Sheba’s Bird
Sings and whistles yoo-hoo
Silencing crime and violence
Printing its claws in the deaf

As soon as Shani had buzzed him, he returned to the common dining room full of people he was eager to meet. There, he sat face to face with his friend. He loved these moments of rare intimacy. They spoke a lot during breakfast, just as they did at the hotel in London.
“Tell me Oran, what were you doing in Chile last December?”
She examined Oran’s expression. After hesitating for a while, he whispered: “I wanted to adopt a child.”
Shani seemed confused and echoed his words in a form of a question: “Adopt a child?”
Their silence signified both embarrassment and surprise. “Our son, Shlomo, is adopted too.”
Oran listened closely as Shani revealed personal parts of her life. “At first, Miguel and I thought we could never have a child. We began a difficult adoption procedure and eventually adopted Shlomo.”
“Does Shlomo know anything about his life before the adoption?”
“He knows he was abandoned at birth, but he doesn’t want to know everything just yet.”
“Shlomo had another name: he was called Badran. Badr means moon in Arabic, it’s from an old myth.”
“Badran!”
At hearing this name, Oran turned as pale as a ghost. One night, when he was feeling blue, his father told him that Oran had a half-brother somewhere in the East: Badran, a child conceived in a passionate romance.
“Shani, who are Badran’s biological parents?”
“The mother is a Jewish Algerian singer and the father is a European writer whose first name was all we knew.”
“What was his first name?”
“Roy.”
“Roy, is my father’s name…”
Chapter 2

At the Library
That day, Oran wasn’t writing his typically poetic e-mails, which he mostly wrote to his European relatives or his sister (who enjoyed them, especially, since she was language teacher at the Belgian Flemish coast who was hooked up on poetry and history). Instead of sending her dull descriptive letters about his feelings and experiences on his trip to Israel, Oran would imagine writing a concise poem every day; a snapshot account of the Middle East.
The staircase leading down did not reveal much of the richness of the library itself. First, Oran was struck by how different the atmosphere and lighting was; this shaded barn-like archive reminded him of a German synagogue, unlike the meticulous almost pristine look of the offices above. A few round tables placed on the dark brown parquet welcomed the guests. Oran could smell that the wood was waxed regularly. The boo