A Tale of Love and Darkness (79 page)

Orna had green eyes, a slender neck, a caressing, melodic voice, small hands and delicate fingers, but her breasts were full and firm and her thighs were strong. Her normally serious, calm face changed the moment she smiled: she had a captivating, almost suggestive smile, as though she could see into the secret recesses of your mind but forgave you. Her armpits were shaved, but unevenly, as though she had shaded one of them with her drawing pencil. When she was standing, she generally placed most of her weight on her left leg, so that she unconsciously arched her right thigh. She liked to air her views about art and inspiration, and she found me a devoted listener.

A few days later I summoned up the courage to arm myself with Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass
in Halkin's translation (which I had told her about on the first evening) and knocked on her door in the evening—
alone this time. It was just the way I had run around to Teacher Zelda's flat in Zephaniah Street ten years earlier. Orna was wearing a long dress buttoned down the front with a row of big buttons. The dress was cream-colored, but the electric light, filtered through an orange raffia shade, gave it a reddish hue. When she stood between me and the lamp, the outline of her thighs and her underpants showed through the cloth of her dress. This time she had Grieg's
Peer Gynt
on the gramophone. She sat down next to me on the bed with its Middle Eastern bedspread and explained to me the feelings evoked by each of the movements. As for me, I read to her from
Leaves of Grass
and launched into a conjecture about the influence of Walt Whitman on the poetry of O. Hillel. Orna peeled me tangerines, poured me cold water from an earthenware jug with a muslin cover, placed her hand on my knee to indicate that I should stop talking for a moment, and read me a morbid poem by Uri Zvi Greenberg, not from the collection
Streets of the River
, which my father liked to recite from, but from a slim volume that was unfamiliar to me, with the strange title
Anacreon at the Pole of Sadness.
Then she asked me to tell her a little about myself, and I didn't know what, so I said all sorts of muddled things about the idea of beauty, until Orna placed her hand on the back of my neck and said, That's enough now, shall we sit in silence for a bit? At half past ten I got up, said good-night, and went for a walk under the starlight among the sheds and chicken batteries, full of happiness because Orna had invited me to come back, some evening, the day after tomorrow, even tomorrow.

Within a week or two, word had gone around the kibbutz and I was becoming known as "Orna's new bull calf." She had a number of suitors, or conversational partners, in the kibbutz, but not one of them was barely sixteen and not one of them could recite poems by Natan Alter-man and Leah Goldberg by heart like me. Occasionally one of them would be lurking in the dark among the eucalyptus trees in front of her house, waiting for me to leave. Jealously I would hang around by the hedge, and I managed to see him go into the room where she had just made thick Arab coffee for me and called me "unusual," and let me smoke a cigarette with her even though I was still only a little chatterbox from class eleven. I stood there for a quarter of an hour or so, a shadowy figure in the shadows, until they turned the light out.

***

Once, that autumn, I went to Orna's room at eight o'clock, but she was not there. Because the dim orange light of her lamp poured out through the drawn curtains, and because her door was not locked, I went in and lay down on the rug to wait for her. I waited for a long time, until the voices of men and women on the porches died down to be replaced by night sounds, the howling of jackals, the barking of dogs, the lowing of cows in the distance, the chuk-chuk sound of the sprinklers and choruses of frogs and crickets. Two moths were struggling between the bulb and the orange-red lampshade. The thistles in the shell-case vase cast a kind of crushed shadow on the floor tiles and the rug. The Gauguin women on the walls and Orna's own nude pencil sketches suddenly gave me a vague idea of what her body would look like naked in the shower or on this bed at night after I left, not alone, maybe with Yoav or Mendi, even though she had a husband somewhere who was a regular army officer.

Without getting up from the rug, I raised the curtain in front ofher clothes cupboard and I saw white and colored underwear and an almost transparent peach nightgown. As I lay on my back on the rug, my fingers groped to touch this peach of hers and my other hand had to reach out for the mound in my trousers, and my eyes closed and I knew I ought to stop I must stop but not right away just a little more. Finally, right on the edge, I did stop and without taking my fingers off the peach or my hand off the mound in my trousers I opened my eyes and saw that Orna had come back without my noticing and was standing watching me at the edge of the rug, with most of her weight on her left leg so that her right hip was slightly raised and one hand rested on this hip while the other lightly stroked her shoulder under her untied hair. So she stood and looked at me with a warm, mischievous smile on her lips and a laugh in her green eyes as if to say, I know, I know that you'd like to drop dead on the spot, I know that you would be less startled if there was a burglar standing here pointing a submachine gun at you, I know that because of me you're as miserable as can be, but why should you be miserable? Look at me, I'm not at all shocked, so you should stop being miserable.

I was so terrified and helpless that I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep, so that Orna might imagine that nothing had happened, or that, if it had, it was just in a dream, in which case I was indeed guilty and disgusting, but much less than if I'd done it while I was awake.

Orna said: I've interrupted you. She wasn't laughing when she said it, but she went on to say, I'm sorry, and then she did a complicated kind of dance with her hips and said cheerfully that no, actually she was not exactly sorry, she'd enjoyed watching me, because my face had looked pained and lit up at the same time. Then she did not say anything else, she started to unbutton her dress, from the top button to the waist, and she stood in front of me so I could watch and carry on. But how could I? I closed my eyes hard and then I blinked and then I peeped at her and her happy smile begged me not to be afraid, what's wrong, it's all right, and her firm breasts also seemed to beg me. And then she got down on her knees on the rug to my right and lifted my hand off the mound in my trousers and put her own hand there instead, and then she opened and released and a trail of hard sparks like a thick rain of meteorites ran the whole length of my body, and I closed my eyes again but not before I saw her lift up and stoop, and then she lay on top of me and bent over and took my hands and guided them, there and there, and her lips touched my forehead and they touched my closed eyes, and then she reached down and inserted all of me, and instantly several soft rolls of thunder passed through me followed at once by piercing lightning, and because the hardboard partition was so thin she had to press her hand over my mouth hard and when she thought it was over and took her fingers away to let me breathe, she had to put them back again quickly because it wasn't. And after that she laughed and stroked me like a little boy and she kissed me again on my forehead and wrapped my head in her hair and I with tears in my eyes started to give her shy kisses of gratitude on her face her hair the back of her hand, and I wanted to say something but she didn't let me and covered my mouth again with her hand until I gave up.

After an hour or two she woke me and my body asked her for more, and I was full of shame and embarrassment, but she did not spare me, she whispered to me as though she was smiling, Come, take, and she whispered, Look what a little savage, and her legs were yellowy brown and there was a faint almost invisible golden down on her thighs, and after stifling my spurting cries again with her hand she pulled me to my feet and helped me button up my clothes and poured me some cold water from her earthenware jug with its white muslin cover, and stroked
my head and pressed it to her breast and kissed me one last time on the tip of my nose and sent me out into the chill of the thick silence of three o'clock on an autumn morning. But when I came back the next day to say I was sorry, or to pray for a repetition of the miracle, she said: Look at him, he's as white as chalk. What's come over you, here, have a glass of water. And she sat me down on a chair and said something like: Look, there's no harm done, but from now on I want everything to be the way it was before yesterday, OK?

It was hard for me to do what she wanted, and Orna must have felt it too, and so our poetry reading evenings accompanied by strains of Schubert, Grieg, or Brahms on the gramophone faded, and after a couple more times they stopped, and her smile settled on me only from a distance when we passed each other, a smile radiating joy, pride, and affection, not like a benefactor smiling at someone she has given something to, but more like an artist looking at a painting she has made, and even though she has moved on to other paintings, she is still satisfied with her work, proud to be reminded of it and happy to look at it again, from a distance.

And since then I have felt good in the company of women. Like my Grandpa Alexander. And even though over the years I have learned one or two things and I have occasionally gotten my fingers burned, I still have the feeling—just as that evening in Orna's room—that women possess the keys of delight. The expression "she granted him her favors" seems right, seems to hit the mark better than others. Women's favors arouse in me not only desire and wonderment but also a childlike gratitude and a wish to bow down in reverence: I am not worthy of all these marvels; I would be grateful for a single drop, let alone this wide ocean. And always I feel like a beggar at the gate: only a woman has the power to choose whether or not to bestow.

There may also be a vague jealousy of female sexuality: a woman is infinitely richer, gentler, more subtle, like the difference between a fiddle and a drum. Or there may be an echo of a memory from the very beginning of my life: a breast as against a knife. As soon as I came into the world, there was a woman waiting for me, and although I had caused her terrible pain, she repaid me with gentleness, and gave me her breast.
The male sex, on the other hand, was already lying in wait clutching the circumcision knife.

Orna was in her mid-thirties, more than twice my age that night. She scattered a whole river of purple, crimson, and blue and a mass of pearls before a little swine who did not know what to do with them except grab and swallow without chewing, so much I almost choked. A few months later she left her job in the kibbutz. I did not know where she went. Years later I heard that she had divorced and remarried, and for some time she had a regular column in some women's magazine. Not long ago, in America, after a lecture and before the reception, out of a crush of people asking questions and arguing, Orna suddenly shone out at me, green-eyed, lit up, just a little bit older than she was when I was a teenager, in a light-colored dress with buttons, her eyes sparkling with her knowing, seductive, compassionate smile, the smile from that night, and as though under a magic spell I stopped in the middle of a sentence, forced my way toward her through the throng, pushing everyone out of my way, even the blank-faced old woman that Orna was pushing in a wheelchair, and I seized her, hugged her, said her name twice, and kissed her warmly on the lips. She gently disengaged herself, and without switching off that smile, which spoke of favors and which made me blush like a teenager, she pointed to the wheelchair and said in English: That's Orna. I'm her daughter. Sadly, my mother can no longer speak. She hardly recognizes people.

A WEEK OR SO
before her death my mother suddenly got much better. A new sleeping pill prescribed by a new doctor worked miracles overnight. She took two pills in the evening, fell asleep fully dressed at halfpast seven on my bed, which had become her bed, and slept for almost twenty-four hours, until five o'clock the following afternoon, when she got up, took a shower, drank some tea, and must have taken another pill or two, because she fell asleep again at half past seven and slept through till the morning, and when my father got up, shaved, and squeezed two glasses of orange
juice and warmed them to room temperature, Mother also got up, put on a housecoat and apron, combed her hair, and made us both a real breakfast, as she used to before she was ill, fried eggs done on both sides, salad, pots of yogurt, and slices of bread that she could cut much finer than Father's "planks of wood," as she affectionately called them.

So there we sat once more at seven o'clock in the morning on the three wicker stools at the kitchen table with its flower-patterned oilcloth, and Mother told us a story, about a rich furrier who had lived in her hometown, Rovno, an urbane Jew who was visited by buyers from as far away as Paris and Rome because of the rare silver fox furs he had that sparkled like frost on a moonlit night.

One fine day this furrier forswore meat and became a vegetarian. He put the whole business, with all its branches, into the hands of his father-in-law and partner. Some time later he built himself a little hut in the forest and went to live there, because he was sorry for all the thousands of foxes that his trappers had killed on his behalf. Eventually the man vanished and was never seen again. And, she said, when my sisters and I wanted to frighten each other, we used to lie on the floor in the dark and take turns telling how the formerly rich furrier now roamed naked through the forest, possibly ill with rabies, uttering bloodcurdling fox howls in the undergrowth, and if anyone was unfortunate enough to encounter the fox-man in the forest, his hair turned instantly white with terror.

My father, who intensely disliked this kind of story, made a face and said:

"I'm sorry, what is that supposed to be? An allegory? A superstition? Some kind of
bubbe-meiseh
?" But he was so pleased to see Mother looking so much better that he added with a dismissive wave of his hand: