EIGHTEEN MONTHS (A STORY)

BEN-NER, YITZHAK

EIGHTEEN MONTHS (A STORY) YITZHAK BEN-NER TRANSLATED BY ROBERT WHITEHILL AND SUSAN CULLY I'm the father Of twins. You say "father of twins"—and you're in a story. Twins are always a story....

...There's a line of action...
...Even though it's the first of spring now, with Passover near, with warm nights and days, my flesh is shivering...
...Many hours I-sit with the people...
...Their good mother, my wife Alexandra, stood over us...
...Yoav-Ido, Ido-Yoav...
...Without explanation...
...The bearded youth with her would not cease his prattle...
...She drops upon my shoulders...
...I ask again...
...how the turret cover stuck and injured his thigh...
...My whole body shakes...
...His scorched body was scabbing over, but his shrunken soul could not find tranquility except in sleep...
...I cannot be afraid in her presence...
...A remembrance...
...She turned her head a little and said bluntly to her escort: "Arik, maybe that's enough now...
...Tank commander...
...I built contacts with him...
...Yoav always loved his mother...
...She had not told me not to print them...
...The worst has happened, and yet I'm still standing on my feet, am in command of my senses...
...Until they were each bar mitzvah (What comfort their grandfather derived when they got up together to give their speeches...
...Do you want me...
...She asks no questions...
...The war has ended, and the land is still spewing forth fury and wrath...
...She brought some of her poems to me, to be published in the quarterly I help edit...
...All the time...
...A very pretty girl...
...Sit here...
...She was almost excited to see her name printed in tiny letters over the poems, as she felt the rough paper between her fingers...
...Her loneliness...
...Perhaps I'm not a poet at all...
...I know where I am...
...Then why do you write poems...
...Her body is stopped, her clothes unflattering...
...Her room on Smolenskin Street...
...Her insult and her anger were too great...
...I yearn for her love, even in small portions...
...For a long time we had not been man and wife...
...I'm ready to face physical danger...
...she said, "I'm Erela Mendelman's roommate, she was in your class...
...They resembled one another until they were teenagers...
...Traitor...
...Yoav had thought that he wouldn't be inducted due to his activities—and there he was in uniform...
...Dayan...
...Her light waits for me on the other side...
...I grab the handles of the seat in the bus to control the trembling...
...Every last detail...
...She questioned him almost savagely...
...Not irrevocably likejiim...
...I pull open the tarp door...
...She is evasive...
...Then I become more and more convinced...
...My son Yoav picked up the receiver at the other end...
...Her poems were ready-made formulas...
...It is only fear that I fear...
...The sun by day at my gate/ and over my body I bend by night./ Doom, pain, torrents/ and waking without purpose...
...I remain with my son...
...I meet them in the lecture halls, at my desk in the editorial room, at nighttime cafes, at distant parties...
...Almost without a sign...
...Suspicion...
...Yoav with his third or fourth girl friend, older than him as always, a journalist and leftist activist...
...All right," she said...
...They used to quarrel a lot...
...We would run, phone, speculate...
...I'm searching by myself...
...For the first time, I hide things from my wife...
...how he bemoaned the fact, in jest, as was his custom, that he had failed to sign for his fatigues...
...In feverish silence...
...in some place or another, warm, small, invisible, in some place that I manage to reveal to her and to myself, she is keeping a corner for me...
...Almost in love, I would say...
...He never gave up...
...The prettiest I've ever seen...
...Her quiet breathing...
...I don't have to explain anything to you, and I don't have to apologize...
...We spent the night together in a local hotel...
...The wind has obliterated your footprints, my son—and I know you are still there...
...Shuiamit...
...I see him, but not in the context of his life or his death...
...Only when there is no other place...
...I felt so humiliated...
...Ask him...
...I still have years to live in the world, but I'm already frightened of the end...
...He is the author of Orvim Chumim, a book of Hebrew poems...
...Immediately her eyes read my pain...
...They greeted each other with little smiles of understanding, and Shuiamit locked herself in her room as we got dressed...
...What love there was in those simple words: "In a couple of weeks we'll get our first leave, you hear...
...I had to break through walls before me...
...His opinion grew settled, and the tragedy fit into his thought patterns...
...At the girl...
...His glance sends away two or three of his boys, who have rushed in at the yelling...
...Whoreson...
...I'll take you home...
...I pull my hand from his and he jumps at me from across the seat, heavy yet supple and tense...
...Please...
...His suit is aflame...
...The Saturday before they went away...
...She faded quickly...
...Their mother dressed them in different clothes, to lessen the resemblance—and the two of them used to exchange shirts and pants quickly in the bathroom or in the old shower in the yard and come back to make us laugh...
...the air shimmers like the air over a field during a heat wave...
...Maybe it'll be this way...
...And I'm the father of twins...
...They were still children but their childhood was already behind them...
...My visits to Shuiamit have grown more infrequent, and if I go to her, I go to an entirely different place...
...He gets up and runs toward the waves of smoke...
...The little light by my wife's bed illumined her face as she read Tender is the Night...
...Expecting nothing anymore...
...The girls at the college, my students, were attracted to me...
...I slip my head beneath the large pillow, as I used to do when I was a child...
...We look at each other, in mutual embarrassed thankfulness...
...He was an extremist from the start...
...Just three weeks later I heard from Shuiamit...
...Where are you running, my lost son...
...Searching by myself...
...Taking on herself all the pain and all the disappointments...
...Those who were lost are lost and arc no more, and those who have not come to terms with their grief have given up and learned that they will not find relief there...
...We relax, side by side...
...I squeeze out of them, with all that is left of pain, wrath...
...Eighteen months have passed since then...
...Student-teachers...
...One after another...
...Her eyes were on me...
...I had second thoughts...
...I saw the young army officer at the little kitchen table...
...But inside I know that she is jtrong...
...I'm almost a visitor in my home...
...I lectured on various subjects at kibbutzim, at institutions— and I felt that I was being supported by charity, from the bottom of the cup...
...I'm intentionally cutting myself off from the troubles and hardships of this convulsing nation...
...The boy from Ashdod manages to brake the heavy vehicle that has gone off course...
...I rush toward you, my son...
...I drive round in a military jeep with a patient education officer named Aharon, who remembers my forgotten articles and incessantly asks me for my opinions...
...She does not consider herself a saint...
...I was serving in the Civil Guard in south Tel-Aviv, and my wife implored me during my few free hours, between guard duties, to search for them both...
...A wife with whom time has not been kind, and she did more than I did to support our home and children, working in a day nursery...
...Since then, many men have been with her...
...I'm a pleasant man, and I've had more than a dozen of them, besides Shuiamit—and her image still does not leave me alone...
...I ask...
...A little family, and it's as if I am outside...
...You're incapable of judging facts as they exist...
...During childhood they looked alike, but Ido cried more, and Yoav lost his temper more...
...The hatred and strangeness between us are growing steadily more intense...
...I examined every face—thick black printing dots blown up—but could not discover the facial features of my son...
...In crude articles with a lot of naive, unforgiving ill-will, Golda Meir, Abba Eban and Dayan were caricatured...
...Three days after he was drafted, I remember, the phone rang...
...She started smoking...
...I see her leaning toward him, her nakedness toward his, slowly, in full delight and love— and in pain and horror I cut off my dream...
...Accepting...
...At Tel-Hashomer Hospital in Tel-Aviv I sat at his bedside...
...Look at him as a strategist...
...Repenting my lie, I tried delicately to hint at my opinion on her poems...
...He gave up soon...
...He says nothing, swallowing his great abhorrence...
...I don't drag him into arguments as before...
...I'm not satisfied...
...The Clockwork Orange...
...She doesn't generally change things...
...At night we embraced in that suburban park, and her whole body was in me...
...Alone...
...You don't despair...
...I pass by Shulamit's apartment...
...What do you think...
...Alexandra does not know that I am searching, nor do I include Yoav in these matters anymore...
...I worked as counsellor at a neighborhood youth center...
...Salad, omelettes, yoghurt—I hate yoghurt...
...The blood pulsing through her arteries...
...Why had she asked for me...
...My wife grew accustomed to it and sank into herself and her aging...
...Scouts...
...No longer are there do/ens of fear-torn women or helplessly enraged fathers...
...Nor is there any inside him...
...The way he flings me a hard blank glance, and goes to look at his mother with other eyes...
...I felt ashamed and humiliated...
...Yellowish light rested on her face, and she was nestled into a thick old down quilt...
...Speaking little...
...With the aid of a magnifying glass I attempted to identify my son...
...Merom Hagolan...
...I heard his voice again...
...Not now...
...They were bad...
...I'm searching for something...
...What's wrong with me...
...Stubborn, deserted, undespairing, I was left to myself...
...She refused, with a persistency unlike her nature...
...Only my body," she says, "nothing more...
...Gaunt, afraid, gloomy, their eyes downcast, lost...
...I dismissed the memory of my lost son from my mind...
...He still does today...
...How's the book...
...I arrive there...
...Her hair was short like a boy's...
...I was in the hall, and he had just arrived in his camp—probably with shorn hair, in a new uniform too large for him, heavy boots...
...Her face was delicate...
...They'll serve as bargaining tools when the need comes...
...The Saturday before they went away...
...1 slip away from work and go back to the army offices...
...What do they talk about all the time...
...Not even with the man who married her, that glib, bearded artist...
...I've gone through many days of searching...
...He gets up and runs, lost, into the clouds pf smoke and is no more...
...Where is he hiding my son...
...No one sees him again...
...You hear me...
...Everybody thinks like I do," he argued...
...But this will pass, I tell myself...
...Maybe there's a speck of hope...
...He's a big mama's boy...
...Her delicate, almost boyish, body was in a yellow robe...
...A Yemenite, good-looking, the age of my two sons...
...Palestinian entity...
...Her warm hands pass over my body to warm it...
...I fall asleep like a stone...
...Once I had to bail him out of police custody...
...I try to catch him, but his fear is greater than mine and his feet hardly touch the ground as he runs...
...We shouted at each other, and I was longing for her, her hands, her body...
...Maybe some other time...
...Only as a last refuge...
...I took the long route home during the night, alone...
...The fog of war, the fears, the entanglements, the convulsions calm down—but my boy is not there...
...I have nothing to do, and I see no sense in anything...
...I spend my days at work and in searching for my other son...
...During my free hours I worked as copy editor and proofer of a literary quarterly...
...I don't remember them...
...Her hands hung dead...
...Later on, more than a year ago...
...Because ...," she said in a thin disconnected voice...
...Smoke rose from her mouth to me...
...She looks straight at me...
...We were in the street...
...I'll stay here in some hotel...
...It's already seventeen months since the war," I cry...
...I've found nothing...
...I remember everything, as someone rising from a long and pure sleep, and I'm not afraid anymore...
...In them, I tried to present, within a given framework, with uncertain, primary analysis, some of the ideas that have been crystallizing over the years in the realm of political and social thought...
...They've appeared and disappeared into the consciousness of their few readers...
...Do you love me...
...Often I wonder if he knows the secrets I'm hiding...
...In a quarter hour I knew almost everything about her—but I didn't know her name...
...Do I know where I am...
...With her other son...
...I run home when I have no other refuge, full of depression and fear...
...She hides nothing...
...Ido will be nineteen years and four months then...
...She finally gave in for some reason I cannot fathom...
...I turn and leave...
...If it's still on during my next leave, I'll go back...
...His face before mine, now as well...
...I asked...
...My son's commander...
...Levinsky Street, breathless, restless...
...I love you...
...With unkempt hair and slovenly dress, their beauty is coarse and shabby...
...Where did we stand then...
...During the few hours that I slept, Alexandra sat feverish, endlessly by the telephone...
...In the soft yellow light of the old kerosene lamp I had made into an electric light, we would sit and dine...
...My lips split from the terrible frost...
...Do you love me...
...I print her poems after I labor over them alone for a long time...
...He was in an almost hypnotic terror...
...You look very tired," she says quietly...
...Ybav came first and Ido second, but the latter did not clutch the heel of the former...
...I couldn't...
...I locate all of my son's comrades, all who would have been with him on that day, Sunday the seventh...
...The hallways are empty now...
...You're almost twenty-one already," I say...
...I knew that his hair was black...
...I don't see her for days on end but can't get her picture out of my mind...
...They went with others to see Dahn Ben-Amotz at his home in Jaffa...
...Walking...
...I tortured myself over her and my thoughts about her...
...In her room near the college, after one of the evening lectures...
...I think that he hadn't slept with her yet, since he was just too good...
...She was light-haired, I remember, with a delicate body, cold, wearing thin-framed glasses designed for show...
...Time passed, yet no taxi...
...Yoav is alive...
...From the north...
...Like three brothers we walk together gravely down the cold street...
...Without any ideological middle ground, without any conflict of loyalty, he abandoned one set of opinions and friends and found others...
...Paltry loves, brief, mighty, almost savage...
...Yoav will be twenty-one in June...
...And Ido says: "Look...
...They don't reveal the first thing about them...
...All her soul, or so I imagined then...
...I evaded this, afraid of the bond that had been created...
...The fear that lurks around the corner...
...Maybe I'm afraid of his answer...
...I didn't want to hurt her...
...There are no taxis...
...Nodding our heads...
...Her body was slender...
...Okay...
...A home in Acre...
...I, too, over the years have changed my path and my ideas...
...Every stone...
...I was in wars: Sinai in '56...
...You filthy old lech...
...Talking...
...Another commander's wife, in front of her house...
...I check all the possibilities, as in a game of logic...
...From Poland...
...Untiringly...
...UN liaison officers...
...The last war...
...He was thirteen or fourteen and his look was already firm and stubborn...
...A small house, rented with key-money with the help of my kind father, my wife's parents, and toil and many debts...
...sweating, and I was already waiting for them—serene, laughing, relaxed...
...I've been searching for Ido for many months, but he's gone...
...On the way to the park...
...Neither of them was ready to be defeated...
...Everyone is blindly seeking someone to hold on to...
...She avoided my searches...
...They jump out...
...I also know Skulamit's story...
...Exposes in the newspapers...
...Evening...
...Stolen rendezvous, more widely spaced, I demand...
...A picture of their son stood in the small family room...
...Her poems were in print...
...A boy from Ashdod...
...Sha'b...
...The tempests reached their end...
...She had never been hurt by love...
...Liaison and reserve officers...
...Mimi...
...Her boy friend, a student from Netanya, with whom she had just finished the evening in a big argument...
...She did not leave me long in my embarrassment: "Tell me, do you think you'll be able to help me...
...I open the door...
...I don't weep...
...A tiny light pierced my eyes, distorting her face...
...The general pain is no longer my own...
...My hands are slack once again...
...My sons reached the abandoned Arab house out of breath, excited...
...I'm not afraid of wars...
...I want you," she said...
...She was so sure of her victory...
...Other things...
...I leave the air-raid shelter and head upstairs...
...The philosophy of little whores from cheap novels, I tell myself angrily...
...Yoav is alive...
...One of them survived...
...What's her house number...
...No, she does not love me...
...For three months he could not remember a thing...
...There was no answer...
...And this one...
...I enter the apartment buildings and glance at the names on the mail boxes...
...He visits her during his furloughs, especially when I'm away from the house, so that she won't be upset by our quarrels or silences...
...Tank sergeant...
...The city adjutant...
...One of my students...
...This is my son...
...Damn it, I don't want you to feel sorry for me," I say, almost shriveled, when unintentionally I sense that I want her to...
...The world of material things, coldly alien to the spiritual values for which I believed I had struggled...
...I was astounded at the resonance of my words...
...Ido's not lost," I said dryly...
...They have not been like her...
...I've invested my love in her and have received almost nothing in return...
...Yitzhak Ben-Ner is an Israeli writer whose books include The Man From There, Rustic Sunset, and more recently, After the Rain...
...Her great love for a young lecturer...
...I shake him hard—but he does not stop me...
...They are now silent...
...Maybe...
...I want to breach the wall inside her...
...you couldn't argue with him...
...Eighteen months...
...We were young...
...On an old iron bed, under the yellow light of a naked bulb, I try to take stock of myself, but I cannot...
...I was desperate from the start, and the love-act did not succeed...
...That's what is said about such people...
...Do you love me...
...She.has not wanted me again as she ilid then...
...Hey...
...She hardly visits her parents...
...In the face of this holy fervor, his brother Ido, more mature and forgiving, would smile at him, understanding but saying nothing...
...As if consumed by madness we screamed in each other's ears, again and again, unsatiated...
...You owe me an answer finally...
...fervor cools...
...The Agranat Commission...
...Giora Neumann...
...Finally, in a strange voice, he says: "Come on...
...Two months have passed since then—and in three more months he'll be out of uniform...
...Her father's a Christian who converted...
...They bite their lips and go forward...
...A high forehead, a mass of hair...
...He and his girl friend leave, and we sit alone...
...All her beauty...
...I found in her my lost, forgotten mighty love, and I transferred it to her...
...Mama...
...She gazes at me silently...
...At myself...
...Ido was giggling from embarrassment) they were never apart...
...What in hell difference does it make...
...Tomorrow morning I'll run home to see you, to say hello before I go to work, to give a sign of life...
...Came to Israel at age three...
...her soft face is wrinkled...
...For a long time he has considered me a traitor to principles—a father who sent his son to die in the sandy wastes for a phony cause...
...His commanders refuse to meet with me...
...Like an experienced man who is beyond yearning, I know that she won't...
...As I slept I heard the rustle of the pages of her book turning, one after the other...
...Like in childhood games: Ido, say something...
...Ido, who didn't join a youth group, followed after him a little, then deserted...
...I wanted to find warmth in her all the time...
...I took her hand to comfort her...
...She gets up and brings me winter blankets, a gift from her parents from twenty-two years ago, and spreads them over me...
...The sand and dust and smoke have settled...
...I know it all: his fatigues burning—he didn't manage to sign for his new, fireproof fatigues when he set out— my son Ido, wounded in the thigh, leaps from the flaming tank and rolls in the sand...
...Despite the pain, my face does not betray my years, does not reveal my anxiety...
...I alone still go there to sit and bother my son's comrades...
...I press my head into the pillow in my bed, to control the trembling that passes through my body...
...Like a boy I yearn for her to love me again as she did in the early days...
...She maintains a shaky bond...
...Like a madman, I continued searching for him...
...I can't find it...
...I've retreated, too late, into worrying about my own affairs...
...It's been a long time since I've eaten meals like those...
...I'm going to Smolenskin Street," I say and stand up...
...Now I am unable, after so long, to mourn for him...
...Her voice was hoarse and high, her fingers stained by tobacco...
...The pain returned to her eyes...
...Her mouthed twitched a bit...
...how he ran and climbed into his vehicle and took off with his buddies while a mist of sleep still lingered in his eyes and brain...
...My flesh is still firm, my body is tall...
...her green eyes have dimmed and grayed...
...My other son: his jaw more square and solid, his lips tighter, his hair more abundant than mine...
...he asked...
...I see him alone, by his mother's bed, bending down and patting her head in great sympathy, and I see his all-knowing eyes—and they gaze at me from across time...
...I'll go on foot...
...Between seventeen and twenty-five...
...Suddenly...
...Alone...
...A rainy night in Netanya a month later...
...Yoav had already stopped listening to me...
...My sort is lost and no more...
...They are different...
...He finds things for them to talk about...
...She talked about every subject in the world...
...At everyone...
...She shouted: "Perhaps...
...True faith lies in hoping...
...In their own .way...
...I was copy editor of a number of weeklies and journals...
...I wonder if she knows, if she cares, if the knowledge hurts her...
...You've got to see it, Dad," he said...
...I telephoned home...
...I tried to remove them...
...She is a short-lived flower whose soft delicate beauty quickly fades and dies...
...Like me, he has no slackening...
...I can get any of them for an hour or two, with a single smile...
...His translation of "Kokomo," a story by Yitzhak Ben-Ner, appeared in moment, March 1979...
...Why was I seeing clusters of black dots that make up his face...
...I was embarrassed, but they, in their foolish, beautiful twenties, were not embarrassed at all...
...I want her love...
...We parted in the morning...
...I was already intent on winning her heart...
...They became active in school in the unaffiliated left...
...There are things you seem to do better," I said...
...At first I'm angry with myself for thinking this, excusing it with my vague fears...
...I am very tired...
...New names: Moti Ashkenazi, Assa Kadmoni...
...His girl friend takes her friend— again, I think, her roommate—and they disappear...
...Of what I do not know...
...Silent, cold, she surveyed me through her glasses as I read her poems...
...Poets...
...I grab hold of him and shake him: "You've got to give me an answer, damn it," I scream...
...Only those searches gave me strength...
...I am hers, and she is mine...
...He shrugs his shoulders...
...Then there was another girl friend, also a year or so older then he, hard, with frizzled hair, jeans and a thick wool sweater...
...I'm an old lecher...
...Don't rely on his memory," his psychiatrist told me...
...Incidental adventures with students...
...My father is seventy-seven, and he is still as vigorous and clear-headed as ever...
...I obtained the good graces of one of those in charge, the military rabbi, Major Cahana, since I was distinguishable from the others...
...Her job as a secretary at the university...
...I listened to the prisoners-of-war on Radio Cairo and Radio Damascus...
...I can't bear Alexandra's passive, almost silent misery...
...Without this shvahntz here—Yoav...
...I acquired a mania for foreign newspapers, sought out articles and pictures of the war, the prisoners...
...It's good that Yoav is still here with us...
...Silent...
...She's divorced from him but he still comes to see her...
...What am I afraid of...
...We did not find a way to the two boys—she less than I. Sometimes 1 agoni/.e over the fact that because of me she collapsed before she could stand on her feet...
...Robert Whitehill is an American poet and translator...
...Everything is moving away from me...
...He looks down...
...I give no rest to myself or to others...
...The hallways in the location offices grow empty...
...As back then, on that rainy night...
...She invited me, almost directly and openly, to come to her and to her hidden pleasures...
...I was not among those who pounded their fists and threw accusations...
...I search, beyond her, a distressed and beautiful rain-girl...
...Maybe, she says, she has no love in her at all...
...There was no need to...
...You leftists are undermining the principles of the state," he lashed out at me...
...I visit my home for three or four hours sleep at night next to my wife, who reads and smokes without letting up...
...But does she really give?' his brother asked insistently...
...Almost desperate, I lead her to bed...
...There was something pressing, doubting in the tone of his words...
...The cruel years have done their work, and she has not resisted them...
...If that's the case," his lost brother answered back, sober, lucid, "how come all you guys serve in the occupied territories...
...he blurts out...
...The line becomes entrenched and bulldozers turn up the sand...
...The driver was hysterical when the body fell on him...
...Her stepfather...
...We went around in circles, trying to be helped, to locate missing men, to discover, to find, to know...
...Although it is summer, the clean, crisp smell of the rainy night in Netanya returns to my nostrils...
...My twins were fifteen then, and the strong resemblance between them was fading...
...Her flow of words ceased...
...Maybe I don't love her at all...
...Look...
...His friends are already running away from me...
...She locks herself in with her furniture, the pictures of her sons, the living oqe and the dead one, her books and kitchenware...
...I shout at them—and they answer me, in surprise or as a routine reply: "Oh, I love you...
...She needs no one but herself—but still she docs not want me to break off from her entirely...
...I'm freezing away," I groan...
...My heart ached...
...The shaking passes...
...My students...
...Sneh and his ideas...
...Lets me talk...
...I go back to the desert...
...Maybe some of the ones I've made it with, a month ago, a year ago...
...Cries turn to whimpers, moans, suppressed groans, undying pain—but I still search...
...Michaela...
...Perhaps, more than I love, I seek in her the willingness to love, that warmth, that willingness to give and to be given, to take and be taken without barriers—but there is nothing...
...Why here...
...Why do we love such people...
...Like a stubborn lioness...
...One way or another, I feel her pain...
...Others...
...You want another blanket...
...For a long time after that, I regretted running away...
...I am fprty-two, I try to console myself...
...In some place or another I console myself...
...I don't smoke much, only absent-mindedly, now and then...
...Is there ill-will in her...
...I knew how he combed his hair...
...I pass the lit cafes...
...Her eyes were on me...
...Like a prophet...
...Not afraid...
...her small breasts have shriveled...
...I was afraid...
...From day to day she consumes more and more books...
...I continued my search...
...2 Many, many years ago, when I was his age, I was like him...
...At 3:30 A.M...
...I find no refuge for myself...
...I'm shaken...
...We exchanged a few casual words...
...Later, the doctor joined the Communist Party, and we—I and others—remained on its threshold...
...a lover who does not return for love: a land in pain, seething, devoid of tranquility or calm—and a piercing fear that does not let up...
...delighting in our appetites...
...At the beach...
...Her heart never has...
...I lit a cigarette in her mouth...
...I already know all the twisting routes it took—unprepared, hasty, panicky—from the moment the order had been given...
...In the evening they distributed leaflets on Dizengoff street...
...Her handwriting was nice and round and unblemished...
...But I am searching for the other, the great love...
...She told me her name, but I can't remember it...
...Vietnam...
...Then I stood and looked at her and them, and in my pleasure, perplexity and great pity...
...Some of the offices have been closed...
...I don't want them...
...Her weak mother...
...By night...
...We met again after that—and she was already cold...
...At age sixteen she was with a man for the first time...
...I taught literature...
...He grabs my arm...
...She looks at me in silence...
...In their little rooms...
...Uri Avneri...
...At once she sent the visitor away...
...Why all of a sudden could I not recall what my son Ido looked like...
...Two little boys...
...Sit down...
...Al-Jabari...
...She didn't identify herself...
...his family related to me as to someone bizarre...
...They're talking...
...I think so...
...Two or three friends...
...And this one too...
...What would I Have done here if I hadn't found you...
...Maybe her most devoted love would give me no pleasure...
...Maybe they are burying his live body...
...Ido had a little eleventh-grade student, sWeet, naive...
...My wife lights the kerosene stove and closes the bedroom doors and windows...
...And I'm stuck in this terrible rain in Netanya," I said, as if apologizing...
...I pass among the bodies of slain comrades...
...Everyone is,afraid...
...Erela was her name...
...I ask...
...I would not leave him alone...
...My son...
...As if someone had pressed a hidden button...
...Her formulations are mature, balanced, like her poems—words picked with cold care from the endless storehouse of tested truths from high school diaries, from poets who are teenage idols...
...We hardly have any words to say to each other...
...Okay," she answered...
...They would roll on the floor...
...I moved from job to job to bring bread and security to my family...
...I love you, I love you, I love you," I said like a lost child...
...Under the street light I can see his muscles moving, his jaws clamped, his squinting eyes, his full hatred...
...He too is gradually, daily, moving away from me...
...Some of the girls smile at me, wave at me...
...I interrupted her...
...He sighs...
...The first to die...
...She was drawn to me more when I became tougher, more direct with her...
...The room is an oven, but I'm shivering from the cold...
...Why had she called me...
...His hand moves decisively, angrily, back and forth...
...I've already conceded, painfully...
...putting everything aside, ready for all my dreams...
...Time passed...
...I wanted to leave, but she saw the proof pages in my hand and jumped to her feet...
...He joined a model airplane flying club...
...Yearning does not join details...
...I find nothing...
...Intolerance...
...I take off my clothes and get into bed beside her...
...If I ask, he'll answer me...
...They invited me to public debates, radio interviews, and though I had no desire to do anything with my thoughts but let them out, I entered this carnival, somewhat ashamed, awkwardly, even a bit joyous...
...Ido was a dedicated student, listening and absorbing...
...She groans...
...I'm not afraid...
...First I sat with her in the tiny editorial room at the side of the printing house and rewrote her damned poems with her...
...I would calm her and watch them strike toward manhood...
...After three barren, meaningless weeks, Shuiamit called...
...I demand to know...
...he was one of the most active ones in the Ikrit and Bir'am affair and in the Rafiah expusion scandal...
...They laid out their comments in the papers...
...Ido tries to calm him...
...They were clamp-mouthed, obstinate, wrathful...
...I grope a bit, and I generally find a hand stretched out, and I grasp it...
...Again and again they repeat—how they had awakened Ido from sleep in the morning...
...They were tranquil and accepting, as if they knew what was in store...
...She was not angered or hurt...
...With much hard work, with the help of my wife and father, I finished my first degree—English literature and philosophy—older than all the other students, at Tel-Aviv University, and for the first time I found a regular position, as lecturer at a teacher's college...
...So far, but no further...
...4 In a small stairwell, in an old quarter, almost without youngsters, I hold one of them in the darkness...
...The burden of the war has not passed, but grows heavier upon them, and they are trying to free themselves...
...1 remember her on those days, but memory is not enough for me...
...You spoke about God...
...That Dayan of yours," says Yoav, "you can stuff him you know where...
...I knew his face—with something babyish in it, his eyes, his slender body, his proportions—these I remembered, the way his mouth gaped open somewhat when he laughed, when he was embarrassed, or during an argument or conversation...
...It's wonderful how Fitzgerald knows how to describe a person's leading himself to decline and destruction like that...
...I. I know, am still young in the eyes of many girls, even when I am old enough to be their father...
...My desire for her...
...I'm unable to cry...
...There's something in you that deserves admiration," he told me...
...We were alone, and her joy turned to ash when she saw what I'd done to her poems...
...I waited long moments until she opened the door...
...The more she alienates herself from me since our first encounter, the more she refuses, the more I want her...
...I weep tears of snow, quietly, to myself...
...I wait...
...Where do I stand now...
...She was afraid, and in her fear she cut things snort...
...My son is years more mature than I am...
...though I'm youthful...
...Clutching at fragments of ideas...
...Formulated in cold intelligence, technical understanding, with an awareness of various patterns...
...I had never gotten used to this when I was a youth, I didn't believe I could, without the cover of love...
...We used to imagine that our being together was in itself youth...
...All our conversations are brief...
...A political and military strategist...
...Sometimes he interrupts me almost angrily with squinted eyes: "Listen...
...One day followed another, and my lost son grew farther ahd farther from me...
...She tossed insults at me...
...I don't know which one it was who was crying then...
...I pull myself together and walk the streets, blunt to emotions...
...A blinding, evil white light floods us...
...Aqraba...
...Ido blushed...
...He talks a lot, that Dayan of yours...
...Then his parents drew me a picture of his character: hard and decisive, stubborn, challenging, brash, sociable, independent, capable of making instant, clear-cut decisions...
...Yoav used to provoke his teachers...
...How come you don't have the guts to go all the way...
...How's the book...
...That had never happened to me before...
...The first time...
...I did not know my own feelings...
...She must have been laughing inside, with a maturity beyond her years...
...I mean, I know that my poems are far from polished, but I don't know the direction exactly to...
...Once he struck a former friend from Betar who had yelled: "You Trotskyite pig...
...And I'm cold...
...Sometimes, I return home late at night, I find him in his uniform, in his heavy shoes, sitting with his mother...
...We'll find the film and go there, I told myself for eighteen months...
...She's open...
...If only the Egyptians let us search again in their territory," he says...
...All my loves...
...We joined in conversation...
...For three years, hard, sharp, cutting words sawed through the house...
...They responded in anger or in assent, and they wanted more...
...New Israel Left...
...I was a stranger in my views and my position...
...Do you love me...
...A light goes on in the window...
...their youth was unfolding before them...
...I called him at home during the night when he took short rests from the hell of his daily tasks...
...I was embarrassed...
...I found my wife's lost beauty in a girl named Shulamit...
...It is waiting for me, and comes to me...
...I changed from father to rival, and now I am no longer even that...
...From the high window...
...My son Ido is dead...
...Never rebelling...
...I scream my love at her, and don't know whether I'm lying to her and to myself, as she is...
...Then I see him, strangely, holding the hand of my beautiful, cold Shulamit—and all the warmth hoarded up in her, which I was unable to extract, flows out to him...
...I fight her...
...I want to say: "No," "That's not necessary," "I'll go by myselF'—but suddenly I'm an old man, very feeble, in decline, obtuse...
...She was not jealous...
...Sometimes my father would stop by and sit with us...
...When he went with his crowd to see the political satire, The Queen of the Bathtub, it was as if he was going to a ceremony, his eyes intent on opponents and name-callers...
...Somehow I trudged through my work...
...I've despaired of solving the world's problems, and I've despaired of its solvers...
...Abba Eban...
...I lost my temper but was happy not to degrade myself...
...So that his image would not be forgotten...
...They probably think it's because of my own strangeness...
...I return home...
...She was more relaxed than I. She smiled at me, consenting without surrendering, acknowledging my holiness...
...I took her, finally, into my arms, and she was indifferent...
...We hid away in the shrubs until we finished...
...They are suspicious, ill-at-ease, and shy away from a bereaved father who does not accept his bereavement...
...I tried my hand at writing skits and songs...
...The country is upset—and I by my nature need some calm just now to come over me...
...Whoreson...
...Yoav used to draw his brother into debates...
...I can't stop it...
...Yoav is alive...
...Something like that...
...White-faced, in a white delivery gown, on a white sheet, flooded by fluorescent light, exhausted—my wife Alexandra lay on the delivery table with a weary smile of agony's end at the cofners of her mouth...
...She has never again yielded to me...
...She understood my intention...
...Many days have passed as I search for my younger son, Ido...
...Golda...
...My wife has wilted since then...
...Like then, as before my two sons had gone to the army...
...Trite, I know, but poetry is never truly refined in the soul of someone whose heart has never been broken...
...I used to be a follower of Dr...
...My friends and I would surround him wherever he went...
...In the jeep he has trouble shifting gears...
...She groans without answering...
...There are rumors...
...I stand and wait at the street corner until late in the night...
...He had dropped in for twenty-four hours...
...Ha'aliya Street...
...Small lines of pain beneath her eyes...
...I think there's no hope," I say...
...Almost relaxed, I stood daily in the crowd of desperate parents, wives, brothers, sisters and lovers who shouted in the corridors of the missing-persons office...
...I became a failure in my own eyes and maybe in the eyes of others...
...They were born with great agony to my wife...
...She asked for a light...
...She was very hurt, much more than her calm revealed...
...Saturday, unexpectedly, without bitter quarrels, without anger that can't be resolved...
...What 'maybe...
...Crippled soldiers...
...Maybe your son is there____" And I shout: "What 'maybe...
...She opposed me with all her might...
...With the same intensity, without regret or hesitation, suddenly he went to the opposite pole...
...Where is my son...
...The girl Shuiamit is also moving away from me gradually, in the same cloud of mist...
...I couldn't take my eyes off her...
...His mother caresses the face of the only one left to her, with love, helpless tenderness...
...I travel all the roads that Brigade "B" had taken on its way to the war...
...Maybe with implications...
...After the war this chapter ended...
...Where have you gone, my son...
...Trying not to frighten his mother...
...One always must hope...
...Her hair was already thinning out, and her dresses, chosen at random, were neither well-pressed nor mended...
...People swiftly discovered me behind my pseudonym...
...If the lands are occupied territories—and you don't want tb be an occupier—then take off your uniform and go to jail, like that prick Giora Neumann...
...Not now...
...I already know who loved Ido and who could not stand him...
...Do you love me...
...I speak, and he impatiently fails to stand his ground...
...I became very apprehensive then, four months after the war...
...Gone...
...She she has not been lost with me, swept away, aroused, yielding...
...Can't you, with all your great army, you fucking messenger of God, find the strength to tell me that my son is gone and won't come back...
...Suddenly...
...My pain...
...All her warmth...
...I ask passersby on the dark street...
...Beyond them...
...At first, every time he came home, during the months after the war, he helped me...
...A familiar face looks at me...
...I put down the receiver...
...Oftep when I come home, my wife and her friends lift their eyes to me over the empty coffee cups in the kitchen, in a fog of cigarette smoke...
...The beginning of harsh perplexity...
...The catastrophe around the corner is waiting for everyqne...
...The second became my enemy...
...I was holy in her eyes for more than a few days...
...I can't take this scene...
...We became lovers by the end of the week in a little grove in one of the suburbs...
...It's frightening," she said, shaking in her cape...
...I go down Smolenskin Street...
...I lean against the wall to allay my fear...
...She is not afraid...
...As if he were nodding his head to everything: I told you...
...She retreated into herself and her disintegration...
...She was very attached to my son, who is handsome and virile and no fool, even though I find fanaticism in him all the time...
...Not too much...
...Her beauty was harsher...
...He nurtured our political thought, and the leftist faction was our mainstay in the political life crystallizing in Israel in those days...
...I ask her again...
...We enjoy a brief moment of marriage...
...She is aware of her beauty and the power it wields...
...I leave my fear at home...
...I gave in, hid my eyes from the pictures...
...When angry they used to hit one another, repeatedly...
...At three in the morning, two weeks later, the phone rang...
...she blurted out...
...Out of loneliness or obt of a desire to torment me...
...Things like that...
...She did not know those little joys that soften the quiet, monotonous, never-ending pain...
...I'm not satisfied with that...
...Then she gave me a pert little smile that I yearn for so much now: "You don't remember me, do you...
...All her strength...
...She paused...
...So characteristic: ) Yoav couldn't stand the film...
...When he stuck his head out of the turret...
...She used to be pretty, I tell myself again...
...We were very young parents then...
...The people who look for bodies...
...One was lost in the war...
...Silently...
...I'll go wherever I want, Yoav," I tell him and feel my face growing white...
...I'm still searching...
...An indication...
...I've got to run now...
...She looked at me with comely, somewhat dead eyes when I undressed and muttered something about a late lecture, the questions that were asked and what I answered...
...You hear me...
...Students...
...I try to say something...
...It's a house," says a girl...
...Since then we haven't spoken to each other except when we happen to meet at home under the eyes of his mother...
...A long-haired young man embraces her...
...Our friends were making their way to the universities, to work in immigrant settlements in the Negev and to the capitals of the world...
...She returns to bed, slips under the blanket, and her body rests beside my own...
...The names mix together, and there have been other girls since then...
...Through the window I see my surviving son sitting with his mother...
...I get up to tie the noose...
...I entered a small, dimly lit room that hosted young couples on sparse summer honeymoons, and I locked the door...
...I become enraged and try to torment her...
...I go as a lecturer...
...how the radio fell silent and how he comforted the tank driver in that fearful trip toward death...
...Like a charity meal...
...I have nothing else to rely on...
...He also brings his girl friend to visit her...
...He could have become a commissioned officer...
...My hair turned gray ten years ago...
...All the time...
...Alive...
...I do not love...
...She hasn't whispered words of love as she did then...
...The living and the dead...
...One sees none in him...
...I will never collapse from the terrible weakness inside me...
...I went to her apartment on Hess Street, late in the night, carrying the proofs of her poems...
...And she—cold, gracious, reserved, conversant—smiled at herself from across the tiny kitchen table...
...I want only the greatest of loves...
...I revive gradually to the light of dawn...
...Now the uncertainty over Ido became increasingly more desperate and burning...
...I love her and seek her love...
...Tell me," he whispered fearfully, "did we lose?," as if he had returned from a long journey...
...You know what...
...Her naked body...
...Within a week the Yom Kip-pur War would break out...
...You ought to go over this one...
...Those bitter days have passed...
...a strange light is in her eyes...
...At home, I remember, long after midnight, Alexandra was reading The Oversight, the Yom Kippur War book currently in fashion...
...In the bedroom my wife looks up at me from her new book...
...For two weeks my wife Alexandra awakened to new life, during that time...
...I waited for a cab after the lecture...
...Everyone tries to ignore it...
...Do you love, my love...
...I do not wish to be quenched...
...Maybe she's bringing me renewed youth...
...I don't know how to bridge them...
...I talk about myself, about her...
...She told me about the man she had had during my absence...
...she has accepted it...
...I filled my moments with meetings...
...I listened to him say these things...
...All the astonishment, contempt, distance and hate...
...I hid my eyes from my wife's, ignored the glances of Erela and her giggling girl friends as they passed by me on the stairs, looking at me...
...A beautiful, desperate, feverish night of lovemaking for two anonymous persons...
...The other was down south...
...On nighttime streets in south Tel-Aviv, he's running...
...I live my fear...
...The streets were empty, and the rain struck them furiously...
...I laid my head down on my pillow...
...I can reconstruct the scene...
...All her body was in me...
...I turn my back to him and walk away into the night...
...I even visited the parents of the tank commander, at Kibbutz Naan...
...At him...
...Every sign...
...The hallways are empty...
...This is how I search: I go down to Sinai, to the columns of soldiers still licking their wounds...
...When he was twelve, he became friendly with the son of Knesset-Member B. of the Herut rightist front, and he became a fervent member of the Herut youth group Betar...
...I tried to talk to him, but she would not hand me the receiver...
...How come you know so much about how the world is run...
...A youngster...
...All of us lie from time to time...
...I don't ask...
...Like her...
...What are you searching for...
...The room burns like a furnace...
...Alone...
...I was embarrassed...
...Bishop Raya...
...Shi laughed...
...I competed with them, running alongside the road in the early morning hours and even beat them...
...Painters...
...Then anxiety takes hold of me with all its might...
...The light goes out...
...She is steadily withering away in her misery...
...A big boy...
...Fifteen...
...I search for your last footfalls in the now quiet sands, beyond the clouds of smoke (hat have long since dispersed...
...He mutters between his lips: "You sit here...
...Have you heard anything from Ido...
...Ask your God...
...It wasn't just coffee that that boy had here," she blurted out, knowing where to strike me...
...Tell me what happens at the end...
...Entire nights I toss and turn in fear in my bed, and other nights I hide from fear in heavy, troubled sleep...
...Ido's picture, from childhood to army-age, emerged out of every corner of the house in thin frames...
...She does not break loose again...
...She holds me in delicate, troubled arms, in pleasure, and for me trouble is pleasure...
...The pain abates...
...With a rope...
...I'm discovering, lately, my need for small, j stolen pleasures, tiny white lies like these...
...Yes...
...I got into bed with a pinching throat, a dimmed brain, a heart beating somewhere else, anxious...
...The fear of his doom was gradually increasing...
...Everyone, like me, hides his fear...
...The Rogers Plan...
...I go back to that kind-hearted rabbi...
...Her lovely dark hair hangs in strands now...
...She loves to define her senses and emotions...
...In the morning...
...Air support...
...In every speech he contradicts what he said in his previous speech...
...Finally, little by little, he opened up to me...
...Dina...
...The Matzpen Trotskyists...
...A two-week-old lioness, strewing fear and despair, sought her cubs...
...I'll____" And he interrupts: "You sit here...
...She invited me to her castle—and I rushed to go to her...
...Until she returns...
...I took her hand to comfort her...
...I want to see it in peace and quiet...
...We get up, put our clothes back on, part...
...I come in, and he hurries to leave...
...It might well have been...
...Yes," I say...
...She observed me silently...
...It's evening...
...Her eyes were devoid of love...
...Outside, my son has said goodbye to his mother and slammed the door...
...Her innocence...
...Not to cease hoping...
...One was up north...
...My son looks at me and I lower my eyes...
...All routes...
...Three months after the war, as I searched for my lost son, I went to bed with another woman for the first time since I had met my wife...
...She was not even thirty before she was a stooped old woman...
...Unwillingly she gives a cold, formulated reply...
...Their mother would turn pale...
...so I'm on my feet all the time—rushing between my job, my searching, my fears and my quick loves...
...fear and love, everything that might fill in the picture...
...I feel nothing...
...I paid the desk clerk and hurried to get away from her, my head throbbing, into the rain...
...I drag myself after him...
...The prisoners return...
...There is surprise in her look...
...Like the others...
...A girl in a sheepskin cape waited also beneath the same dripping balcony, shifting her weight from foot to foot in the cold...
...He doesn't need me anymore...
...Some of them aren't in the pictures," my military rabbi told me...
...Maybe we can take a walk before Mother has breakfast ready," I say...
...and my father, their grandfather, observing us from the distance of his years...
...I discovered that my youth had gone and that I had no real profession, except fo> my logic and adaptiveness...
...She was three or four years older than my sons...
...I don't imagine anything to myself...
...Silence...
...God wants us to hope...
...She embraced me, and the good storm inside her was planned and measured to start and to end in its own time, painlessly, without a sign...
...I'm forty-two years old today...
...Consistent...
...God, how I'm longing to sit with you on the porch and talk...
...Idit...
...And Yoav says: "Consistent my ass, buddy...
...The days pass by, and my love, unanswered, dims...
...Then I lose my temper...
...We've reconnoitered every fold of earth...
...How he ate, slept, got angry, how he explained things, silent, sad, happy, ashamed, annoyed...
...I press them quietly.' I dp not let up.»With an unquenchable thirst I gather everything connected to my lost son...
...I pour myself a cup of coffee, but the conversation does not revive...
...A word or two, our eyes downcast, so that she won't know...
...And so, I suddenly felt, gripped tight by the thought, any one of them might be my son...
...The one in my arms pulls herself together quickly, straightens her clothes, smiles...
...Maybe...
...Mourning adds honor to them...
...Was she taking pleasure in this...
...He gave me the story of my son's final moments...
...But still, I could not draw his complete image...
...Once they went out together with girls to the movies...
...Dead...
...His love for her is tender, astonishingly compassionate, supportive...
...I think that she was acquainted with some things that he had not yet experienced...
...Tiny sweat-beads form on her brow...
...Says nothing...
...Watergate...
...Between rare meetings with Shuiamit I search for a refuge in other young women...
...With the record I've had since high school," he used to say with emphasized scorn, "with all my activities, they certainly wouldn't let me move up...
...I never hear the word "Dad" on his lips anymore...
...We checked a thousand times there, before we prepared the fortifications," he tells me, as he locks his small office...
...That evening, at the movie, a bitter argument erupted between the two brothers, so bad that they left in the middle of the movie, the people around them were so angry...
...They published journals...
...I leave her but am already expectant of the next time...
...To despair is forbidden," he says...
...We accepted it too quickly...
...I've never felt so cold in my life...
...I listened to others...
...I tried to find her, but couldn't...
...I looked up from the poems and saw a familiar face...
...But no...
...Parents of members of the unit...
...There's a purpose...
...I embraced a warm, soft, delicate, longed-for, emotionless body...
...A young man—a painter—was with her, talking endlessly with the complete self-assurance of dolts, about every subject in the world...
...Ido was in uniform— he had to return to his unit that morning—and Yoav, despite the rain, was in his exercise shorts...
...Such are the ways of dreams, perhaps, and I can't understand them...
...I'm afraid...
...She was slovenly dressed...
...Distrust...
...You said it was forbidden to despair...
...Her mother's Jewish...
...I was one of the first to examine very apprehensively the pictures of the prisoners, enlarged to gigantic proportions, taken from the Egyptian papers...
...I found myself, like a youth, muttering emotional words of love to her...
...I heard and read the first testimonies...
...She finished one cigarette and wanted to light another...
...The radio is out...
...The bereaved bend their heads...
...What's her name...
...I have no grip on time...
...I excuse myself with a few words, plop into the chair in my work-corner jn the bedroom and give myself over to fear until tjie trembling slowly passes...
...I check all the possibilities...
...Every sand dune in thesector...
...In high school, when they started to listen to things with maturing ears, they would work over every topic for hours, read the newspapers cover to cover, discovering the world with the first boastfulness of maturity, and their rivalry changed...
...Almost amused, I consider all the possibilities...
...I must come to terms, I tell myself...
...I told her, she has no talent and can do nothing but draw geometric forms on the paper, without forming them into poems...
...I'm anxious but don't know why...
...Daniel Ellsberg...
...Not sharply...
...I see him in bizarre situations...
...No answer...
...She goes wild from me...
...Yoav was curling his lip in unwillingness...
...I don't know the meaning of his contempt...
...And I go out, pursued by hope, to retrieve my lost love from then...
...I left banished...
...She takes my cold hand...
...Maybe in an hour of loneliness, among all the other men she knows, she will need me...
...She says that she never experienced love with any of them...
...My head was pounding as after a drunken night...
...Hope, you said...
...Former friends, acquaintances, friends of friends, discharged officers forgotten during the course of the war, military reporters who went back and forth on the battlefields...
...Then, as a victor, she allowed herself to gather me unto her, to lean my head on her tiny, soft carved bosom—to comfort me...
...She withdraws into herself in a kind of tense tranquility...
...My entire body is shaking...
...Where is he...
...Please...
...My blood freezes in my arteries...
...The commander's wife, over the phone...
...She hinted, painfully, that she would like to see me again...
...He listened to Meir Pa'il's leftist lectures at the university out of admiration for the man, and he was always in the first row at demonstrations outside the Prime Minister's house...
...I picked up the receiver...
...My pride cannot handle that...
...I'm not jealous...
...my good wife asks me, forty-one years old, like a concerned mother...
...I'm not afraid of others' violence...
...I must come to terms...
...And she, light-haired, smartly dressed in nice light colors, thin-lipped, slender, waited calmly for my reaction...
...My grandfather reached ninety-one...
...Mimi gimme," he used to say to her...
...Demonstrations in Jerusalem...
...Please, Ido, please...
...Deliberately I ponder how I'll do it...
...I cannot...
...A few years...
...Two babies, black-haired, moist, squint-eyed, bunched-up, lay on either side: one quiet, the other crying...
...At the corner of a quiet street we stand facing one another, father and son...
...The missile strikes its base...
...The Six-Day War...
...In the evenings their mother used to prepare family meals...
...The abandoned offices of unit commanders, in the rear, empty except for an anxious crowd of relatives and female soldiers working as office helps, children...
...This country doesn't allow kids to be kids...
...I remember his words...
...It's a way of running away, I tell myself...
...Sit here...
...I shudder...
...His first girl friend, the sister of a Gadna Youth Corps leader hated by everyone, a year older than he...
...I don't think so...
...She's moving away from me...
...Little by little I assembled and published a series of articles entitled The Fear that Lurks Around the Corner...
...But you told me not to despair," I counter, for the first time...
...If it's possible to say this, I was withdrawing, nourished by my inner resources...
...From day to day he despises me more...
...I see my son Ido—during sleepless nights and in endless dreams in heavy, sweaty sleep...
...Empty, I go down to the air-raid shelter...
...She tried to reject me, again and again...
...Ido r loved what he saw with all his heart...
...You told me that they—the Egyptians—are concealing additional Israeli prisoners...
...I want to torture myself...
...My son Yoav...
...Slowly, my body thaws...
...George Habash...
...Why am I so afraid...
...A sign...
...Ten years, a year, a month, week, day and hour: Everything in me is turning into fog...
...They had been rivals since childhood, and the more they grew, the bigger the rivalry became...
...Look...
...I don't know...
...He was shouting from afar...
...There was perhaps no wickedness in her, but I searched for warmth during our snatched rendezvous and didn't find it...
...This little quest of mine demands a solution...
...General Sharon...
...Everyone's afraid today, I console myself again, as always...
...The next day I got up to go to work and to continue my search...
...They accept it honorably...
...Bodies are uncovered and revealed on the battle-front...
...New faces appear on the television screen...
...I attempted to use my refined logic to investigate and find out, and I was answered by the confused logic of those In charge...
...I didn't hear my son's voice...
...Yoav...
...I'll take you home...
...My boys and I together in the yellow light: my wife, their mother, standing over us...
...He's dead...
...The fear of taking stock of oneself, for what once was would not withstand self-criticism...
...Maybe that's how I attempt to preserve my fleeting youth...
...My legs are like two bars of ice...
...A miniature love instead of a great splendid one that consumes everything...
...Yes," I answer...
...I saw him but I didn't see him...
...Thus I move unceasingly...
...I don't go in...
...I want you...
...I was twenty-one then, and she was twenty...
...He has always stood silently, secure with his faith, with his mission, before his God, with the despairing and angry bereaved...
...With what strength I have left, when I'm in her room amid the velvet pillows and carpets, I play the game of prowess, maturity and indifference...
...My friends are surprised at me: Who is she, and why does she deserve all this...
...I laugh and turn to go upstairs...
...The years pass...
...They were inferior afterwards as well...
...She was hurting me and she knew it...
...She offered me a "Nelson," a harsh-tasting cigarette...
...She asked nothing...
...We'll go there together, Ido...
...3 Eight months before that, the war began...
...They went to a school with parallel classes in each grade, and each one quickly acquired his own crowd, without meeting the other one outside the house...
...If only it were...
...She was nice, and her body was full...
...The humiliation dims...
...I've gone through a lot...
...he was an arguer, a doubter...
...In my memory those evening meals are little joys...
...When we were finished with each other, the apartment door opened, and her roommate walked in...
...Mama," I cry softly...
...We'll sit and talk a little...
...I know that, for her, loneliness is almost an ideal, a mood into which she would enclose herself...
...Tell Mother not to worry...
...I station myself in front of him, almost blocking his way...
...Maybe he was a virgin when he was lost...
...We've got to accept it...
...I ask myself now whether they loved each other...
...I kept going to see him every week...
...And I say: "Why don't both of you stop this idiotic talk...
...At seven Ido learned how to keep from crying and strike back at his brother, who was always the tougher of the two...
...I think that he wanted to—but his pride wouldn't let him...
...You fuck little girls...
...I've said it all: forty-two and still young: father of two sons, one living and one lost: a fading wife...
...I didn't see the girl again...
...I know what the crewmembers of the tank felt—who was afraid and who bore his fear in silence...
...And she held me...
...I imagine that I hear the echo of your voice...
...We didn't know a thing about our sons...
...I knew this...
...I'm the father of twins...
...I nod at the desk clerk, who had awakened from his nap to listen in suspiciously, and I saw my son's face before my eyes...
...I met Shuiamit again three months after that chance meeting in Erela's room...
...He jumps and rolls in the sand...
...She is strong...
...He probably did well with her sensually...
...Don't you dare touch my poems...
...On the grass...
...I can't still the tempest inside me...
...Her body hardened to my touch...
...I drew the first part of the picture to myself...
...I'm the father of two grown sons, I'm the husband of a wife...
...I come in, and the conversation is cut off...
...And I run away...
...Baby-faced, he looked even younger than my son...
...I am not comforted...
...They have other prisoners they haven't announced anything about...
...I'm so cold...
...There are some nice things here," I said...
...I used to consume it every time, to show them how good it was—and cocoa...
...You don't love her, I tell myself...
...Everything's fine," he said to her soft|y...
...Things are too simple and convenient to sanctify...
...I walk down the streets and suddenly I'm terrified that I will forget who I am, where I'm going, where I'm coming from and where I am now...
...I have no opinions anymore, but there is no end to my hunger for searching...
...When I thought that she had finally found some comfort, I heard the match strike the box...
...For many years, since childhood, I haven't wept...
...Pe'er Cinema...
...It's shaking to know that that's how it began...
...His girl friend...
...Twenty-and-a-half when he died...
...I waited for her, expected her phone call, a sign...
...Do you love me, damn it...
...That that's how Ido was lost...
...The darkness is frightening," she said...
...Yigal...
...He met her about a year before the war...
...For the proper sanctification of national bereavement" he ejects angrily...
...Rabbi Meir Kahane...
...Continuous...
...I have the jeep here...
...When he is with us, I wander around the house tense and bewildered...
...You're just nineteen and a half, for God's sake...
...How he was...
...I don't want a woman...
...Outside the rain beat upon the night, and the darkness swirled the water...
...On Saturdays and leaves, they would bicker...
...They laugh as they go up to her apartment...
...I reviled myself for having been hurled into all'this...
...Sober...
...Without fear I decide to take my own life...

Vol. 5 • April 1980 • No. 4


 
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