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By Root 1236 0

was another, rather terrifying, landscape, not visible from here, and it was probably just as well that it wasn't. There was something lurking there, something furry, shameful, something that belonged in the darkness. Something that belonged to that picture I had tried so hard to forget (and yet also to remember some detail of it that I had not managed to get a good look at), the photo that the Italian prisoner showed me that time through the barbed-wire fence, and I ran away almost before I'd seen it. It also belonged to items of women's clothing that we boys didn't have and neither did the girls in our class yet. In the darkness there was something else living and moving, stirring, and it was moist and full of hair, something that on the one hand it was much better for me not to know anything about but on the other hand if I didn't know anything about it, it followed that my love was nothing more than that of a child.

A child's love is something different, it doesn't hurt and it's not embarrassing, like Yoavi with Noa or Ben-Ammi with Noa or even like Noa with Avner's brother. But in my case it wasn't a girl in my class or someone from the neighborhood, a girl of my own age or just a little older, like Yoezer's big sister: I had fallen in love with a woman. And it was much worse, because she was a teacher. My class teacher. And there was no one in the whole world I could approach and ask about it without being made fun of. She called mockery poison. Lying she regarded as falling. She called disappointment sorrow, or dreamers' sorrow. And arrogance was certainly wing-scorching. And she actually called being ashamed the image of God.

And what about me, whom she sometimes used to point to in class and call a boy flooded with light, and who now, because of her, was flooded with darkness?

All of a sudden I didn't want to go to Children's Realm school anymore. I wanted to go to a real school, with classrooms and a bell and a playground, not in the Nahlielis' apartment with its swarms of cats everywhere, even in the toilet, that clung to your body under your clothes, and without the perpetual smell of old cats' pee that had dried under some piece of furniture. A real school, where the head teacher didn't suddenly come up and pull a booger out of your nose and wasn't married to a cashier in a cooperative store, and where I wouldn't be called flooded with light. A school without falling in love and that sort of thing.

And indeed, after a row between my parents, a whispered row in Russian, a tichtikhchavoyniy kind of row, which Father apparently won, it was decided that at the end of the second grade, when I finished at Children's Realm, after the summer holiday, I would start in the third grade at Tachkemoni, and not at the House of Education for Workers' Children: of the two evils, the red was worse than the black.

But between me and Tachkemoni there still stretched a whole summer of love.

"What are you off to Teacher Zelda's house again for? At half past seven in the morning? Don't you have any friends of your own age?"

"But she invited me. She said I could come whenever I liked. Even every morning."

"That's very nice. But just you tell me, please, don't you think it's a little unnatural for an eight-year-old child to be tied to his teacher's apron strings? His ex-teacher, in fact? Every day? At seven o'clock in the morning? In the summer holidays? Don't you think that's overdoing it a bit? Isn't it a bit impolite? Think about it please. Rationally!"

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, impatiently, waiting for the sermon to be finished, and I blurted out: "Fine, all right! I'll think about it! Rationally!"

I was already running as I spoke, borne on eagles' wings to the yard of her ground-floor apartment on Zephaniah Street, across the road from the No. 3 bus stop, opposite Mrs. Hassia's kindergarten, behind the milkman Mr. Langermann, with his big iron milk churns, which came to our gloomy little streets straight from the highlands of Galilee "from the sun-drenched plains, with the dew beneath us and