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By Root 975 0

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