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By Root 277 0

not in a hurry either," she said. "We've got the whole evening ahead of us, and the night is still young. Tell me a bit about yourself. No, don't, actually. I already know what I need to know, and whatever I don't know, I don't need to know. My father used to lock me in this cellar for an hour or two when I was little whenever I annoyed him. For instance, once when I was eight or nine I was standing by his desk and saw his manuscript full of heavy deletions, so I picked up a pencil and drew a little cat smiling or a little monkey pulling faces on every page. I wanted to make him happy. But my father was furious and locked me in the cellar in the dark to teach me that I mustn't touch his papers, that I mustn't even look at them. I stayed here for a thousand years, until he sent my grandmother to let me out. And it worked: I have never read any of his books, and when he died, my grandmother, my mother and I sent all his notebooks and index cards and slips of paper to the archive of the Writers' Union. We didn't want to have to deal with his literary estate, Grandma because she couldn't bear to read about the Holocaust, it gave her nightmares, my mother because she was angry with my father, and me for no particular reason. I simply don't like his sort of books and I can't stand the style. Once, in the sixth grade, they made us learn a chapter from one of his novels by heart, and I felt, how can I put it, like he was imprisoning and stifling me under his heavy winter blanket with his body smells, without any light or air. Since then I have never read or even tried to read anything he has written. How about you?"

I told her that I once tried to read one of Eldad Rubin's novels—after all, he was from here, from our village, and the entire village was proud of him—but I couldn't finish it; I read thrillers, agricultural supplements in the papers and occasionally books about politics, or biographies of political leaders.

Yardena said, "It's nice that you came tonight, Yossi." I reached out hesitantly and touched her shoulder, and when she didn't say anything I held her hand, and after a moment I took her other hand too, and so we sat for a few minutes, face to face on two packing cases in the cellar, her hands clasped in mine, as though the fact that neither of us had read any of Eldad Rubin's books forged a bond between us. Or maybe it wasn't that but the emptiness of the house and the silence of the cellar with its thick smells.

After a while Yardena stood up. So did I. She withdrew her hands and held me tight, with all the warmth of her body, and I plunged my face into her long brown hair and inhaled her smell, a smell of lemon-scented shampoo with a faint tinge of soap. And I kissed her twice, in the corners of her eyes. We stood there without moving, and I felt a strange mixture of desire and brotherly affection. "Let's go to the kitchen and get something to eat," she said, but she went on hugging me as though her body couldn't hear what her lips were saying to me. My hands stroked her back and her hands held my back tight and I could feel her breasts pressed to my chest and the feeling of brotherliness was still stronger than the desire. So I stroked her hair long and slow and I kissed the corners of her eyes again, but I avoided her lips, fearing to give up something irreplaceable. She buried her head in the hollow of my neck and the warmth of her skin radiated into my skin and stirred a silent joy that overcame the desire and reined in my body. Nor was her embrace one of desire but rather of wanting to hold on to me so that we shouldn't stumble.

7

AND THEN IN A CORNER of the cellar we discovered her father's old wheelchair, padded with worn-out cushions and equipped with two big wheels, each with a rubber hoop attached to it. Yardena sat me in the chair and pushed me to and fro across the cellar, from the steps to the heaps of sacks and from the shelves of preserved vegetables to the piled-up books. As she pushed me, she laughed and said, "Now I can do anything I feel like to you." I laughed too, and asked what