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Alyoshka says:

"Excuse me, Alec, but you're simply not praying from the same prayer book as us."

Moishe Kalker says:

"Alec, when everyone else is eating borscht, you're singing the national anthem; when everyone else is fasting for Tisha Be-Av, you're celebrating Purim."

Alec, offended, gets up to go, but the two bachelors, as usual, insist on accompanying him to his door while continuing to debate, and he, as usual, invites them in. Why not, Zushka will be delighted, and we'll drink some tea, but they refuse politely. They always refuse. For years now he has been inviting them both to tea in his home after the newspaper room, Come inside, come in for a while, we'll drink a glass of tea, why not, Zushka will be delighted, but year after year they always refuse his invitation politely. Until one day—

Here, that is how I will write stories.

And because it is night outside and jackals are howling hungrily very close to the perimeter fence, I will put them in the story too. Why not. Let them weep under the windows. And the night watchman who lost his son on a reprisal raid, too. And the gossipy widow who is called the Black Widow behind her back. And the barking dogs and the movement of the cypress trees that are trembling slightly in the breeze in the dark, which makes me think of them as a row of people praying in an undertone.

58

AND THERE was a kindergarten or primary school teacher in Hulda, whom I shall call Orna, a hired teacher in her mid-thirties who lived in the end room in one ofthe old blocks. Every Thursday she left to be with her husband, returning early on Sunday morning. One evening she invited me and a couple of girls in my class to her room, to talk about a book of poems by Natan Alterman, Stars Outside, and to listen to Mendelssohn's violin concerto and the Schubert octet. The gramophone stood on a wicker stool in a corner of her room, which also contained a bed, a table, two chairs, an electric coffeepot, a clothes cupboard covered by a flowery curtain, and a shell case that served as a vase and sprouted an arrangement of purple thistles.

Orna had decorated the walls of her room with two reproductions of Gauguin paintings, of plump, sleepy, half-naked Tahitian women, and some pencil drawings of her own that she had framed herself. Perhaps under the influence of Gauguin she had also drawn full-bodied nude women, in lying or reclining positions. All the women, Gauguin's and Orna's, looked sated and slack, as though they had just been pleasured. Yet their inviting poses suggested that they were willing to give plenty more pleasure to anyone who had not had enough yet.

On the bookshelf at the head of Orna's bed I found the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam, Camus's The Plague, Peer Gynt, Hemingway, Kafka, poems by Alterman, Rahel, Shlonsky, Leah Goldberg, Hayyim Guri, Natan Yonatan and Zerubbabel Gilead, S. Yizhar's short stories, Yigal Mossensohn's The Way of a Man, Amir Gilboa's Early Morning Poems, O. Hillel's Noonday Land, and two books by Rabindranath Tagore. (A few weeks later I bought her his Fireflies out of my pocket money, and on the flyleaf I inscribed a soulful dedication that included the word "moved.")

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