THE HIGH GLASS WALL
by Yisroel Baruchin
translated from the Hebrew  

by the author

1.

I'll start with memories.  So clear is autumn in Nahal
Alexander, you fear  that just one inadvertent punch, or a
hard and unexpected kick, will shatter this skyhigh glass
wall.  The light changes abruptly and then the clarity plays
tricks on you.  The Samarian lowlands seem near enough for
you to make out mosque minarets, ramps on the new highways,
even windows in houses.  It was from this spot, where the
new footbridge now stands, that the famous archive photo was
taken of the little camp of tents each as white as a bathed
lamb.  In the distance, Samaria's bare hills loom gray and
dull in the old photo.  Nowadays, towns and villages cover
the western slopes facing the coastal plain.  But in the
picture, dating from the early '30s, the hillsides are still
entirely vacant and smooth.  Mighty lysthrums suddenly turn
violet along the wadi and even a dirty green thicket of
raspberry bushes assumes a fresh, invigorating aspect.  Now
that the long, steamy, suffocating summer has passed, you
can fill your lungs with dry, fragrant air.
When was the last time we had an autumn like that?  Was it
perhaps in the  late '50s?  I used to ride my old bike along
the banks.  I was starved for the new sights of the season:
the cotton harvest, the monotonous drone of the red picking
machines, the rows of white cotton plants as far as the
horizon.  Heaped in carts were mounds of cotton so snowy
white you could still see them on crisp fall evenings.  In
the vineyards, where the grape harvest already had begun,
the remnants left to blacken among the withering leaves only
accentuated the sudden barrenness of the vines.  I would
fall in love again with Nahal Alexander, its verdant banks
flanked by dirt paths, on days like that.  The rush of
holidays, the great autumn celebrations, framed the sights
in yet another way.  The wailing of those days of awe, the
tears of Yom Kippur followed by the songs of forgetting of
Rosh Hashana and Sukkot, permeated the wadi and purged the
soul.  In all this there was an imperceptible happiness.  On
my rides, I could hear a melody of joy that seemed to come
from the pleasant hiss of rubber made by my bike tires
swishing through the loose soil of the road.
I left the wadi many years ago.  When I returned, by train
from Tel Aviv to  Hadera and then driving a borrowed car
through the forest, I told myself that however short my
visit )and I hardly had any free time(, I would ramble along
the banks of the wadi just as I had long ago as a boy.  Our
children had long since grown up and scattered across the
land, my wife was busy with her affairs, and so I could
permit myself these few moments to immerse myself again in
that long-gone, distant sense of contentment.

On the run-down limestone road to the fish ponds, a route
that for years has played a starring role in my dreams, I
saw a couple in exercise outfits jogging steadily out the
old kibbutz gate towards the first bridge.  They waved hello
as I rode past.  The man, tall and thin with gray hair, no
doubt was a foreign professor on vacation.  The woman, who
once had been attractive, fleetingly seemed familiar.  Their
running clothes were by no means plain and they evidently
kept in shape.  When they were well behind me, I suddenly
remembered the woman's name.  She'd been born here, then
still young had married one of the volunteer workers, a
teacher from England whom she had followed when he went back
to the private school where he taught.  Did they long for
Nahal Alexander the way I did?  Did she too see the battered
limestone road in her dreams?  And what about him?  Did he
remember the white path through the vineyards, between the
wadi and the old packing shed, as I do?
On the kibbutz grounds, the autumn routine went on as
always.  A garbage  truck banged the rusting dumpster,
delivery men unloaded vegetables and milk from their trucks
onto the raised dock behind the kitchen.  My kibbutz, the
village where I was born, the eternal focus of my longing,
seemed to have adjusted to the oppressive summer weather.
It felt nothing of what it poured into the air; rank, putrid
smoke from the chicken incinerators rose high into the ficus
trees.  In the heavy, humid, stifling summer air, you could
even sniff the stench of sulfur drifting along the coast
from the Hadera power station's smokestacks.  The joggers
I'd met in the fields returned to the residences and
children shouted across the lawns.  I suddenly felt
inexplicably triumphant.  I'd survived another brutal
summer.  I could breathe the clean autumn air, enjoy the
bouquet of aromas wafting from the fields and orchards, and
feel: that's it, this is autumn, the killer summer has
passed.
Whether from excitement or lack of sleep, my ears rang with
a low buzz.  Yet this humming actually sharpened my hearing,
and I suddenly heard each bird in the garden, the querulous
blackbirds shrieking from the carob trees outside the
secretariat offices, the earth working ceaselessly as it
coursed beneath the building foun-dations, the perpetual
cracking of the collapsing walls, the deep whir of the
refrigerator motors in the milking stalls on the hill, the
cows lowing as they struggled to escape the barns, and the
soft, rhythmic thuds of the expensive running shoes worn by
the couple now jogging past the stable, where they startled
the horses peacefully trotting in the yard and set every
breeding dog in the paddock barking at once.
I stopped, got off my bicycle and parked it in the shade of
the round building that once served as the kibbutz cooling
house.  The English joggers came by close enough to touch,
yet so remote.  In an instant, I took in the swaying hips of
the woman, whom I'd known when she was a girl, and the
wrinkles on the aging English teacher's face.  He was
huffing, I saw, his lips were dry and he wanted a drink.  I
followed his glance to the left, towards the parking lot
where a gleaming Jeep maneuvered into a space.  Through its
open left door, a lovely leg stepped down.  Bent over my
bike, I watched as beautiful Michal, returning from the
city, got out in front of the English teacher.
I slowly approached the silent Jeep.  She was leaning over
the mirror, fixing her hair before slipping on a pair of
sunglasses.  When she looked at me, I could count the
seconds passing before the familiar twinkle lit up her eyes.
She wasn't surprised.  Yet each time we'd met since that
wild night that had made us so close, she still, oddly
enough, was slow in recognizing me, as though I'd been
erased from her memory bank of faces.  As she rose above the
Jeep's mirror, I could feel her begin to recognize me.  It
seemed to start from below, in her legs, and rise to her
face until it reached her hands, which were turned to me in
greeting.  I let go of the bike and came towards her.  As
the French do, we embraced and warmly nuzzled one another
two or three times on the cheeks.  There was a time when we
really would have kissed on meeting and parting.  She even
had dared to cling to me once or twice.  On one of her
visits, synchronized like a pair of lovers, we even had
strolled along the lines marked on the parking lot, from the
bench at the bus stop to the door of the public laundry.
But that was then.  It had been a long time since I'd felt
the touch I craved.

2.

"Hey, look, Avishai's here, too," she said to me and the
entire empty parking lot.  "How're your wife and the
children?"
Fine, fine, I nodded.  "And how about Ron?" I added.  "Did
you bring him  with you?"
She hooked an elbow around mine.  "Yes, of course, Ron came,
too.  He  just went down to say hello to his friends in the
garage."  We stood that way a moment, our elbows entwined,
my eyes blinded by Nahal Alexander's autumn.  "But I have
only a couple of minutes.  I have to drop by the Si'udis.
Bring your bike," she said, pulling my elbow.  "Walk me to
the old-timers' house."
I shouldn't force myself to recall what she and I have done.
When I look back on the course of events, from the first
time we met to our latest encounter, it's as though worms
are gnawing at my heart.  But I can't prevent the flood of
memories from washing over me as it will.  All the earlier
episodes grab me before I go on.  And if this is now the
crystalline, heartrending autumn of Nahal Alexander, this is
all the time we have.  With or without her, all is revealed
with a great, aching clarity, like the snow-capped peak of
Mr. Hermon far in the distance, which I've sometimes seen
from a hill above the wadi.  I can't conceal a single
detail, nor can any pain conceal itself from me, even if
this should be the last time we meet.  This clarity allows
me no refuge, no corner in which to yearn or pine, no
shadows in which to seek shelter.
When was it we first met?  1960?  Her boyfriend, the first
she'd had, left on a short summer trip to the Norwegian
fiords after a going-away party that lasted nearly till
morning.  Somehow or other, we left the party together and
went back to the huts.  I already was studying at the Oranim
teachers college near Haifa, Michal talked about getting
married.  We were about the same age and I'd seen her around
many times.  But she quite suddenly had bloomed into a
beauty and the past didn't count any more.  She seemed
terribly young that night as we walked through dew-covered
grass on the path to the shacks.  Her boyfriend, an
outstanding officer in one of the elite recon units, had
succeeded in his military service far better than I had.  No
sooner had he returned after his discharge than the army,
I'd heard, was pressing him to return to service, even
putting pressure on the kibbutz.  He had a long, amiable
talk.  There were some pet phrases of his that I always
waited for when he spoke.  I knew he'd get to them in a
moment or two.  When he spoke with Michal, it was in the
manner of an older, more experienced youth group leader.
Word once went around the kibbutz that she'd thrown him out
because she couldn't stand his haughty, patronizing air.
It was dark around the huts.  Frogs croaked raucously in the
marsh behind the eucalyptus grove.  The chill of morning
already hung in the air.  I saw her to the netted doorway of
her shack.  She paused.  I groped for the switch and turned
on the hall light.
"That's alright," she said.  "You can turn off the light."

I found the switch and turned off the light.  I didn't know
what she wanted.   She seemed tipsy, swaying on her legs.
"Let's go behind the trees," she said.  "Maybe we'll see the
sun come up."
I can barely remember what really happened there at the door
to her hut.  She might actually have asked me along and we
might in fact have wandered through the damp grass to see
the day break.  Everything is possible.  A dark curtain lies
between me and that night's events.  Too many emotions were
at play that night, as they say these days, too many
mistakes and misunderstandings.  Too much inappropriate
touching, too many misguided physical urges.  And, in the
end, insult and hurt.
I leaned against the frame of the mesh door.  Her boyfriend,
I knew, was off at the Scandinavian fiords for several
weeks.  I had nothing to fear; but that perhaps was my
foolish error.  It would be easy to draw her inside the
room, I thought.  I believed that she willingly would cling
to me and together we would find the bed.  I might not even
have to lead her to it.
"Michal," I said.  "Beautiful Michal."  She closed her eyes
and leaned back.  I think I then bent over her neck and
kissed it.  Her hands signaled me her rejection: no, not
now.  But I was too confused to let go of her.  Then she
fell upon me.  I felt her lips searching for mine.
The sun rose just then, or meant to rise.  The early shift
awakened for work in the chicken coops and the barn.
Someone switched on the lights in the other section of the
hut, a tractor rumbled past on the dirt path.  Slipping from
my grasp, Michal slowly drew back and away from me.  She
went to her room and I to mine without speaking with her the
way I'd hoped.  I never imagined that night would begin a
relationship between us that would last, with long gaps, 15
or 20 years.  I couldn't take my eyes off her.  When she
drew back, she might even have shut her eyes again as she
fumbled for the door to her room, tripped over a protruding
rack of work shoes and nearly fell.  At last, to the rattle
of dried jacaranda fruit dangling from her curtain, she
disappeared behind the door.  I knew then I'd lost her.  I
lay in bed for hours, still dressed, an annoying buzz
droning in my ears as I tried to recreate the sense of
closeness that suddenly had sprung up between us.
I stopped her momentarily as we crossed the parking lot from
her Jeep to the Si'udis' home.  "Let's try to remember where
we started meeting and where we met the last time," I said.
I wanted to stir up Michal.  I wanted to say something that
would make her look the way she had when she'd stumbled off
so pale, her eyes shut, that I'd thought she was drunk.  But
she was unmoved and her gaze denied my entreaties.  She had
no intention that clear autumn day of reviving the life we'd
lived from one hurried rendezvous to the next.  The image of
the netted doorway didn't arouse her.  Nor did her own
phrase, "Maybe we'll see the sun come up," which I repeated
in a monotone, have any effect on her.  She simply rushed
ahead for her visit.
I escorted her to the Si'udis, went inside and sat with her
at the nurses' station.  On the counter, she put several
things she'd brought them - a beautiful bouquet of
artificial silk flowers and a box of imported candies.  "You
can wait for me outside if you like," she said, then walked
to one of the rooms.  I went outside and sat on the rough
stone bench, looking at the squill stalks lining the
playground.  Here, too, not just on the banks of Nahal
Alexander, autumn was felt in all its glory.  I told myself
at that moment that I was prepared to sit there and wait for
her all my life, or what was left of it.  Days, nights, the
changing seasons, here on this stone bench outside the door
to the geriatric home, across from the squills white in the
pure air.  In fact, I thought, that's how I've lived all my
life.  It has been one long wait for her, from that dewey
morning after the summer party to this morning and all the
thousands of days in between.
I got up when she came out.  She showed no surprise, as
though she'd been sure to find me there waiting for her at
the entrance.  I walked back with her to the Jeep awaiting
her in the parking lot.  The carobs outside the
administrative offices spread their heavy blossoms, emitting
an intoxicating aroma.  Birds twittered among the branches
and this transparent sheet of glass, the world become a
glassworks, soared up from the path on which we walked,
rising from the red, interlocking stones below to the
distant sky I would never reach.  Michal approached the Jeep
and, just as before, bent towards the mirror while quickly
running her fingers through her hair.  "Sorry I don't have a
comb for you," I said.  Still hunched over the mirror, she
looked up and smiled, really smiled, at me.

3.

This was that smile of hers for which I'd have given all the
secret spots in  which we'd met over the years - the small
hotel rooms, the friends' cramped apartment, the rocks on
the coast between Dor and Habonim, her own room when Ron
unavoidably was late returning from a newspaper assignment.
This was the sad smile she used to give me during lambing
season as we sought shelter from the pouring rain among the
stinking sheep.  Thunder cracked, lightning flashed, it was
black as night outside, we sweated from the heat of the
sheep.  Swinging her legs up, she laid them on the thick,
wet wool of the bleating ewes - just as in that Turkish film
in which an innocent boy lusts for a woman in a cattle car
packed with animals on their way to a slaughterhouse outside
Izmir.
I remember the radiant flush in her cheeks when I told her
how the ewes in  rutting season would stand before me,
flapping their tails as they waited for me to mount them
from behind, as though I were a rambunctious ram burning
with pent-up desire.  Her blush deepened when I confirmed
the truth of those stories in which village boys make love
to demanding sheep.  Everything is so pro-vocative during
rutting season: the heavy heat, the air of licen-tiousness,
the ceaseless acts of love.  To my surprise, she wasn't
embarrassed.  She understood such things happened because
people and animals, amazingly enough, sometimes are much
alike.
After we and our families left the kibbutz, I saw very
little of her.  I heard that she'd parted from her first
boyfriend and fallen for Ron, the reporter.  We did bump
into one another once at an informal party at one of the Tel
Aviv newspapers.  I saw her the instant I entered the room.
As pretty as always, a glow in her cheeks, she was speaking
to the others around her with her usual enthusiasm.  I
lowered my gaze and hid behind the woman who would become my
wife.  Driven by malice and envy, I examined the faces of
the men close by her.  I could almost guess which of them
was sleeping with her and which had succeeded in knowing her
as I had.  When she saw me a ways off, she stopped speaking
and searched my face as though struggling to identify me.
Then, breaking through the circle of party-goers, she came
up to me, put her arm in mine and shamelessly started to
kiss me.
She might as well have announced, "Your attention for a
moment, please.   This was my lover on the kibbutz."  She
drew me into the center of the crowd to make clear that once
- yes, once, many years earlier, when she had been very
young and pure - we might have been lovers for a short time
in the kibbutz sheep pen or strolling the green banks of
Nahal Alexander or by the little dams of the fish ponds.
Ignoring my flustered future wife, and beaming that smile of
hers, she took me by the hand and patiently led me from
guest to guest, making introductions.  When we sat, she
leaned over me, appearing to hug me while conversing with
others.
After that, she vanished again from my life.  I saw her name
occasionally in the newspapers.  My wife and I went back to
the kibbutz, then left again and finally settled nearby.  I
think that's when she began writing for the newspaper,
poetry, stories and silly columns that made her reputation
as a bold, free spirit.  Someone even told me she was much
sought after in certain circles.  One winter night, as my
wife and I returned from a family funeral, I saw lovely
Michal on a platform at the central bus station.  She was
awash in flowers, the centerpiece of their blossoms.  I saw
the well-dressed men, some puffing on pipes or smoking
cigarettes, thronging around her.  They made quite a little
commotion about her in public.  Still, she spotted me
through the dark and the thick pipe smoke, calling me from
afar as she tossed me the flowers.
We approached one another warily.  I introduced my wife,
whom she'd forgotten from the bohemian editorial affair in
Tel Aviv.  And my wife had forgotten snatching me from
Michal's arms back then and thrusting me into the center of
the group.  I shot a quick glance at the forsaken
pipe-puffers and cigarette-suckers.  They looked back at me,
curious but contemptuous.  Although I pitied them, I knew -
oh, how I knew! - what they were feeling just then.  When I
turned back to her, she was already gossiping with my wife
about close mutual friends who had stayed on the kibbutz,
moved to the city or left the country.  After several
emotional separations and reconciliations, she told my wife,
she at long last had decided to marry Ron.  Yes, Ron, the
famous journalist, whom we'd met under entirely different
circumstances.
A taxi she'd called for arrived.  The driver got out and
opened the right-side door for luggage.  Taking leave of
the be-wildered pipe-suckers and smokers, she kissed them
with abandon, hugged them and then disappeared behind the
taxi's tinted glass.  I saw her, or imagined seeing her,
unsling her shoulder bag, spread it expansively on the soft
seat and utterly vanish from all of us watching forlornly
outside.  That odious veil of disdain and dis-regard, which
I knew so well, appeared in her eyes.  I knew very well that
she had already forgotten us: my wife, me, the pack of
dandies encircling her on the platform.  As the taxi
maneuvered back and forth off the narrow platform, we slowly
drew closer to it.  It was cold and we jammed our hands into
our coat pockets.
Like a princess from another world, warm and glowing, she
fumbled to open the taxi window until the driver reached
back and rolled down the tinted glass.  Leaning out into the
wintry city, she called us each us by name, omitting no one,
in her pampered voice.  One of the dandies ran after the
taxi shouting, "Michal, you forgot the newspapers and the
book," and gave her a bag.  As ridiculous as it looked, she
stroked his head and appeared to whisper him her thanks,
which we were too far away to hear.  "'Bye everyone, goodbye
darlings," I thought I heard her spoiled voice across the
platform.  When the taxi was gone, the flowers she'd thrown
away at the last moment swirled around the platform.  I shut
my eyes, I didn't want to watch.  One of the men from her
coterie stooped to the wet ground and picked up the
discarded flowers.
As I sat on the chilly bus with my silent wife, I imagined
her image shining through the window.  Shining and winking
at me, riding across from me in a bubble of pale light, as
though seated in another bus alongside us.  In my
excitement, I unconsciously crushed the bus tickets into a
tight wad of paper and stuffed them into the window frame.
I don't know why but I was singing to myself the "Wadi
Hawarit" song, which the founders of our kibbutz had
composed.  They had sat in their tent camp on Hadera's hill
singing all the night, then stilled their hunger the next
morning with oranges filched in the groves beside the fence.
Their bellies ached, their bodies were limp with weakness,
yet what joyful songs they wrote.  The lyrics were painfully
vapid and banal but the tune, which they stole from an old
Russian folk song, was so sweet it practically sang itself
in your ears.  I saw Michal's beautiful face, framed by the
bus window, riding beside me through the dark orange groves
of Sharon.  Without realizing it, I kept returning to the
line of the song, "Nahal Alexander, oh beloved Nahal
Alexan-der, whither flow your waters?".

4.

Three years later, I took an express elevator to the eighth
floor of a large office building in Tel Aviv.  There, in
its new suite, an embassy was holding a reception in honor
of a visiting poet from the host country.  The reading from
his new book had already begun.  I saw her as I got off the
elevator.  My old heart skipped several beats from surprise.
I went up to her.  As usual, she was slow in recognizing
me.  We shook hands.  I wanted to hug her but she said,
"Ron's here.  He's dropped in on his friend Adi, the
yachtsman, who has a fancy office."  In her usual way, she
put her arm in mine and guided me to the armchairs beside
the elevator doors.  She was even more beautiful than
always.  The years had only improved her face and figure.
"Why are you so excited?  You see one reception, you've seen
them all."   True, I was excited and she of course had felt
the quiver in my hand.  How many such surprise encounters
with Michal did life have in store for me? I asked myself.
I sat beside her in the armchair, her shoulder against mine.
Although she didn't speak, she seemed to be saying, "Calm
down, my friend.  Take it easy, you old country bumpkin.
All these poets put together aren't worth a single hour in
the sheep pen with you in rutting season."
Ron was a man of no small ambition.  I would read of his
doings in the newspaper from time to time.  He seemed to
have a kind of charisma, a gift for charming people.  The
papers reported his exotic, apparently undercover trips to
every sort of dangerous country in the world.  Since writing
his memoirs of the War of Attrition along the Suez Canal in
the late '60s, he'd had the false image of a "super
soldier."  This was ludicrous, of course, since he'd never
been in combat.  He'd always trailed the fighting, a
sycophant and boot-licker in the retinue of some valiant
general.  What kind of warrior can you be planted in the
CO's office?  And yet the special Memorial Day and
Independence Day supplements always carried something by
him, some short piece, some revealing interview or a chapter
from a new work in progress.  Wherever you looked, there was
his arrogant announcement that he was about to explode the
poor, local literary world with a global best-seller.
In his photographs, he always seemed relaxed, imperious,
never without a fat cigar jutting from his mouth.  Those
who knew him said he made a lengthy ritual out of preparing
and lighting the cigars.  But smoke them?  That he rarely
did.  It's bad for your health.  There also were malicious
rumors that he had a drinking habit.  I once read on the
gossip page a mocking description of a "jet of alcohol"
squirting from his lips.  Friends had stepped back several
feet and struck a match; then he had astounded onlookers by
exhaling a stream of burning breath.  He made sure that this
story, and others like it, got around to earn him a name as
a "daring bohemian."  Yes, her Ron was the "mercurial" type,
if you can call it that, and I'd already begun to worry
about her.  She could never guess how and when he would
surprise her next.
Just out of curiosity, I borrowed all three of his books
from the kibbutz library.  Before lambasting him, as I
naturally was itching to do, I had to know what I was
condemning.  His pathetic writing greatly disappointed me.
From first to last, every page of the books gave the
loathsome impression of attempting to impress the reader by
any means.  His first book and possibly the second had been
very popular.  Foolish critics, who disgraced themselves by
treating his work seriously, filled the literary pages with
their nonsense.  By his third book, however, the reading
public realized that he wrote miserably.  I don't think the
book sold well and copies accumulated in stacks as high as
the warehouse ceilings.  Quickly grasping his failure as a
writer, he switched to the sister field of journalism.  His
name still continued to appear in the gossip columns.  Only
now the tattlers had another title for him: Ron the
super-reporter.  Everyone seemed happy.
A band of admiring friends gradually gathered around him.
He attracted  every kind of shallow publicity seeker, every
ne'er-do-well and self-centered hedonist who felt he would
go far with Ron the celebrity.  "Just hold onto his
coattails," one of them was quoted in the papers, "and he'll
carry you across the world."  Willingly or not, Michal,
lovely Michal, became the "queen" of the retinue around him.
They worshipped her beauty and aura of mystery while she in
return was their soul mate and confidante.  She also served
Ron himself as an effective publicist and advocate.
Can it be that I actually met them once at some fashionable
restaurant in Tel Aviv?  Yes, it's beginning to come back
to me, I think I did.  The restaurant was at the end of Ben
Yehuda and Dizengoff Streets, not far from the old city
port.  It was after-noon, as I recall, when someone in the
restaurant called my name as I walked past.  I went inside
and immediately saw their table.  You couldn't miss the
table.  Ron held court in the center of the group, the smoke
from his cigar billowing over their heads.  Lean-ing against
the wall, Michal looked tense in her seat.  She might have
been the one who had hailed me through the open doors but I
can't swear it was her voice.  Had she summoned me to rescue
her from the band of rogues around her?  A sudden,
inexplicable fear for her safety fleetingly passed through
me.  Wearing the de rig-ueur ragged denim suit, Ron as usual
was posing as an American intellectual, just as he appeared
in the famous photos circulated at the time in the art scene
journals.  A short army jacket of faded khaki, the emblem of
our rebel artists, was draped as re-quired over the back of
a chair.  He spoke to his mesmerized fol-lowers, puffed on
his fat cigar and blew the smoke over their heads.  I'm sure
he heard Michal call me.  I'm also sure he knew even then
who I was.  Even so, he didn't bother to turn his head.  He
neither looked at me nor stopped speaking even for a second.
Had he heard a plea for help in her greeting?
Some members of the group also were celebrities.  The press
occasionally printed their photos and they even appeared on
the short late night TV arts program.  There was a
belligerent artist who, in an angry, prophetic tone, seized
every opportunity to vilify the nation, its climate and its
people.  What he cursed above all was the country's distance
from central Europe, which evidently was the perpetual
object of his desire.  There was a well-known singer whose
love affairs shocked the newspapers' more prudish readers.
Sporting a colorful shirt that reached to his knees, he sat
there endlessly caressing a young woman seated on his lap.
I also recognized a young movie actor whose star lately had
risen and who treated the shy waitresses like personal
slaves.  He wore a flashy exercise outfit and was trying to
sound profound but kept tripping over his tongue because he
was dead drunk.
Some of them, encouraged by Ron, obviously were pursuing
Michal.   Although Michal's own expression didn't foreclose
the possibility, she was careful to keep her distance from
them.  Was she in distress there at the table?  She leaned
against the painted wall, rebuffing all their advances while
drinking tea with lemon.  She smiled at me when I came in.
I wanted to join the circle of admirers around Ron but she
waved me off.  When the crowd, led by Ron, began harassing
an elderly couple seated in the corner of the restaurant
beneath the rear window, Michal squirmed.  I saw there was
nothing for me there.  I said goodbye to her from afar and
left.  I hadn't gone in there to rescue the old patrons or
to fight the rowdiness and insults of their drunken
tormentors.
Ron, however, hadn't forgotten.  He sought me out, trying to
meet and befriend me. I suddenly started receiving
invitations to events he'd organized.  Someone kept sending
me his newspaper articles and reports.  Overnight, he'd
become a fashionable "mule."  I also received copies of
interviews in which he bragged like an adolescent boy of how
he intended to take the world by storm.  He himself sent me
several short notes, tearing into a veteran liter-ary critic
who had compared our work.  "What do you think of that
blathering ivory tower idiot?" he asked me in one of his
notes.  In others, he complained that the learned critics
not only were thickheaded and conceited but obviously had
united to deny him literary success.  Well, I had to smile
at him.  I even brought up his name here and there, as
circumstances warranted, and not always derogatorily.  His
charm sometimes worked even on me.  Still, I never replied
to his request that I review his books.  Nor did I agree to
praise them in any publisher advertising.  Actually, I
secretly rejoiced whenever a critic roasted his atrocious
books with fire and brimstone.

5.

Then I happened to meet Adi, the filthy rich yachtsman from
Herzliya who clung to Ron like a barnacle.  I ran into
them at the kibbutz cemetery.  I don't know what they were
doing there or why they'd come.  Perhaps Ron, in a gesture
to Michal, had come with her to visit the graves of her
friends.  It was an odd encounter, extremely affected, I
would say.  Ron was beating the headstones with a fresh
eucalyptus branch.  With each stroke, he took a long draw on
his cigar.  His jeans were flawless and his beat-up army
jacket seemed made for him.  Looking like he'd stepped right
out of an American magazine, he was the very image of the
super-Yank who won't sell his soul to Hollywood fiction
merchants.  Adi, as dolled up as a girl, walked beside him.
I remembered what Michal had said about him.  "Don't think
he's all swagger.  Inside, he's really a softee."  His
acquaintances knew he had a tender soul.  I wanted to escape
back into the deep shadows of the grove but Ron saw me,
called out and hurried over.  What a hug he gave me, what a
warm handshake he pressed on me, what a hearty but foul
cloud of smoke he blew in my face, all as if we were
life-long pals, the best of friends.
"Your weather's as awful as always," he said.  "The humidity
could kill an elephant."  I didn't know what he wanted of
me or why he suddenly was ranting about the weather.
"I'd like you to meet Adi.  He's my best friend.  In fact,
he's the best friend I'll ever have."
I felt compelled to follow them.  I was powerless to leave.
That damned charm of his was working on me.  Adi, his
patron, led the way with Michal walking beside me at the
rear, saying nothing.  Afraid to look up and meet her eyes,
I fretfully kicked the traces of dry eucalyptus leaves.
What had she been doing with them all these years? I
wondered.  It was maddening.  Days and weeks went by, the
years crept up endlessly.  Was she to be dragged all her
life from party to party and one amusement to another, from
the Mediterranean Sea, "which Adi's yacht just loves," to
the Indian Ocean?  The utter waste of life was enough to
make you burst.  What had happened to her?  Was she going to
pass the time still left her at the trendiest pleasure
domes?
"Ron has no great love for that life," she told me once.
"His editors are always after him to send him somewhere.
Fortunately, Adi has the yacht and we like sailing from
place to place.  We save a bundle and there's always time to
lie on the deck and pine away.  But he's already getting
tired of the vagabond's life."
At our guest quarters, they asked to come in.  I felt unable
to say no and had my wife serve coffee with some of her
scrumptious cookies.  As he went by, Ron struck the
furniture the way he'd hit the gravestones.  "Look at them,
Adi," he said.  "Look at these penniless kibbutzniks.  But
how proud they are, how uppity and snooty."  The women went
off deep in conversation, needing no time at all to become
close.  Michal, nearly bereft of jewelry, was simply but
exquisitely dressed.  Examining the pictures on the walls,
she noticed a photo of us taken many years earlier at the
kibbutz sheep-shearing festival.  It had been May, the girls
wore long white dresses while the boys went about with
shepherd staffs on their shoulders.  She was thrilled, I
could see that as she craned at the photo.  In the picture,
we stood with all the shep-herds among heaps of shorn
fleece.  My hand lay on her shoulder, her left arm grazed my
waist.  I remembered how soft her loins had felt against me
until I'd begun sneezing spasmodically from the acrid odor
of tar.
One time, she'd brazenly visited me with her sturdy young
boyfriend, a handsome but bashful lad.  "Come on, show us
around the kibbutz," she'd asked, and who was I to refuse
her?  After I gave them a quick tour of the essential
sights, we took the beaten limestone path to the abandoned
fish ponds and Nahal Alexander.  When she held my hand with
the passion of a first-time lover, I was ready to swoon for
her.  I hovered over them like a pestering old fogy.  I knew
I was in their way but couldn't help myself.  After all,
she'd asked me to be their guide and I had immediately
agreed.  All I hoped was that she would bestow on me just a
small portion of what she was giving him.  For a moment, I
forgot everything.  I didn't care that she was playing with
this boyfriend as she had with others, or whether Ron knew
about it.  No, she could break his heart, too.  Let him
suffer as she had tormented others over the years.  How had
this damned, happy fellow been lucky enough to steal her for
himself, leaving no scrap for others?  I prayed that he
wouldn't seek cruel revenge on her for that.  I always
suspected that he was used to this.
I have no idea whether she felt anything of what I was
feeling or guessed what that surprise visit was doing to
me.  But she was happy then, supremely happy.  Like a child,
she exclaimed at the impressive view of the Samarian
mountains close by.  By the banks of Nahal Alexander, she
fell into the arms of her young, taciturn beau when the
waterfowl suddenly flapped their wings and martens darted
through the thicket.  "Remember?" she kept asking.  "Do you
remember?  Here's where we used to put the sacks of sorghum,
the fish food.  And one time the flock found the bags, they
were so crazy with hunger.  Remember how they trampled the
bags and scat-tered all the grain?  And how they swelled up
from all that gorging?"  Unable to look at her, I
nonchalantly answered, "Yes, of course I remember.  I
remember the whole thing, including the pretty shepherd girl
who used to sunbathe nude with the animals."  Nestling in
the shy boyfriend's arms, she laughed knowingly and put out
her hand to caress my elbow.  At that moment, she seemed
pale and unsteady, as though she'd been drinking.  Nailed to
the door of the cabin next to the netting.  I heard her
voice imploring me to let her be and turn the light back on
in the hallway.
She came one day to tell me that her marriage was going
through a crisis.   Eventually, however, Ron gave in and
came back to her.  No small part of this reconciliation was
due to the es-timable Adi, Ron's dear friend.  He may be a
dandy and a crass materialist but she worships him because
he's such a sweet fellow.  She isn't the only one to have a
secret life, so she learned.  Everyone does, even the most
upstanding of us.  "And what about your secret life?" she
asked me gravely.  "Are you ever going to tell me about it?"
She'd come during the Sukkot holiday to invite me on a trip
to the scenic shores of Cyprus and Turkey on Adi's new
yacht, which was nearly ready.  "Ron won't bother us," she
said.  He owed his publisher a blockbuster book on some
intricate, secret affair whose implications affected the
country's richest and most powerful families.  The
publisher, who had given Ron a sizeable advance, insisted
that he finish the book at once.  Everything was ready for
the voyage, she told me.  The yacht shone and sparkled.  Adi
had bought a new model, a splendid catamaran, which she'd
inspected that morning.  It had everything: a kitchenette, a
small salon, a tanning deck and even a small section on
which to dance nude at night.  Reaching for my elbow, she
looked into my eyes and said, "Come with us.  I'm asking
you."

6.

The holiday was drawing near and I had to give her an
answer.  Autumn suddenly fell on Nahal Alexander.
Mountains of translucent glass again rose to the sky.  Great
lysthrum flowers turned the banks violet while inula plants
on the splitting embankments of the fish ponds bloomed in
immense yellow patches.  Michal said she had come just to
invite me.  No telephone or fax or mail for her.  
She had to deliver her message personally, in our little
garden, after stopping by the cemetery.  Adi's catamaran had
exactly four berths.  Above each jib of the yacht there was
a sleeping nook with two mattresses.  It was a dream come
true, she said, putting her arm in mine.  Nights were cool
now, the sea was calm and generous Adi would see to
everything.  Ron had been wrapped up for weeks in the plot
of his new thriller.  She knew how he was consumed by the
book, too immersed in it to interfere.  When he started
writing, she knew, he devoted himself to it and forgot all
else around him.
How many times had she come into my life?  And how many
times had she left?  What hopes had she roused in me over
the years?  How swiftly had she disappointed me?  I stood
before her like a chas-tised boy.  "I can't Michal, I just
can't.  There's my wife, my family, work and the kibbutz."
I could have gone on, ticking off an endless list of
reasons.  But I yearned to go.  Her hand tight-ened on my
elbow.  "We need you aboard.  I need you.  We have four
berths.  Four mattresses in two compartments.  Ron will
work, Adi will run things, and you and I can continue what
we didn't finish in the dark back then, the night of the
summer party when we re-turned to my room."  I promised I'd
consider her offer and get back to her soon.  She got up and
I walked her back to her gleaming Jeep, which was in its
usual parking spot near the laundry.  The couple visiting
from England, or another pair, waved hello on recognizing me
as they jogged past us.  "Where's your bike?" they inquired
sociably.  I made a disparaging gesture with my hand, as
though these things, the bike, their running, the shiny
parked Jeep - over which Michal soon would lean in her usual
way to straighten her hair with the quick, short motions
that heated my aging heart -had no importance just now.
Her lingering invitation gnawed at me.  There were moments
when I was sure I would say yes; I'd immediately start
getting ready, packing my papers and calling Adi to come and
take care of the rest.  And then there were moments when I
was furious with myself.  So many years had passed since
we'd chased after wayward sheep and still she governed me as
though the events had happened yesterday.  My next feeling
was pity for me, and for her, and for my wife, and even for
her insufferable Ron.  I'd forgotten what it meant to bear
such torture.  I'd forgotten how exhausting this internal
conflict could be for me.  I'd forgotten how I would have
given the world, everything I wanted and had fought for,
just to relive those excruciating moments.  Crossing the
lawn damp with dew, the sweet smell of her body, my fatuous
confidence that I would win her, all of her, before long.
One day, while going up the hill to the central kibbutz
offices, I saw a crowd gathering.  I knew the difference
between a celebration and the observance of a tragedy.
"What happened?" I asked.  "Who's been hurt?"
"Haven't you heard?" someone whispered.  "Adi's yacht sank
last night.   We're still waiting for details.  All we know
is that Adi, who owned the ship and had several friends on
the kibbutz, didn't survive."
"And Michal?" I suddenly screamed with a great roar of pain
that invaded my throat.  "And Michal?  What about her?"
My outburst drew looks.  "Take it easy.  Why are you
shouting?  Don't you know she was the first found
drowned?"
"And that bastard," I screamed unwittingly.  "That bastard,
Ron, what about him?"
"Oh, he's been rescued," they told me.  "A Turkish Coast
Guard cutter brought him into port.  The funerals will be
held soon."
Adi's new yacht, that wonder craft skimming across the
Medi-terranean, flipped over like a walnut shell when a
huge wave unex-pectedly crashed into it.  The ultra-modern
catamaran, with its two sleeping compartments and four
mattresses, was crushed like a porcelain bowl hurled against
the wall.  The voyage to enticing shores, the sweet,
promised holiday trip, a glorious autumn on the smooth sea
and my obstinate refusal - they had buried her.  And Ron,
who was supposed to devote himself to his writing, leaving
us alone and even shutting his eyes if she slipped into my
berth during the humid night, he alone had survived.  I ran
down to the limestone path and then loped to the new bridge
across Nahal Alexander.  At every turn, I thought I saw her
and heard her voice.  Here was where she had taken off her
blouse to sunbathe, here she'd helped a straining ewe
deliver her lamb.  Here the sheep had run wild, here they
had started to stampede toward the mountains.
The translucent glass wall above me suddenly rose to the
cloudless sky.  I wanted to punch it, slam it with the
elbow she'd held just weeks before.  I wanted to smash the
surrounding glass shelter to smithereens.  Right here at the
footbridge, I'd picked her up once in the winter, soaked to
the bone.  "Come on, I'll dry you off," I'd said, aching to
clamp my arms around her.  But she had refused.  "No, it's
nothing," she'd said.  "Let's go back and I'll change my
clothes."  Everything froze inside and around me in that
vast glass vessel.  The autumn light transformed it into a
shattered glass object.  The English couple finished their
circuit around the river bank and prepared to run back.
Searching for my old bike, they watched me, concerned.  But
I, waving them off with a crude gesture, refused to speak
with them.  Wouldn't the world let me stay a minute with her
alone?  Wouldn't it, that agonizing autumn on Nahal
Alexander's fractured bank?