A Wall of Light by Edeet Ravel Page A

expressed petulant doubts about Heidegger during the lesson, and went up to Eli after class with urgent questions about phenomenology.
    It wasn’t until I was faculty that Eli tried to seduce me. I was sitting at the outdoor cafeteria of the law building, correcting exams under the shade of a large striped umbrella that was secured to the center of the table. Out of the corner of my eye I saw someone coming toward me; it was Eli. He pulled out a chair, not opposite but next to me, and sank heavily onto it. Then he set down his coffee, took the pen from my hand, and wrote in the margin of one of the exams, “You have your mother’s eyes. How is she?”
    “Visit her and see for yourself,” I answered, signing as I spoke. “My eyes aren’t anything like my mother’s,” I added. “Are you sure you knew her?”
    “Of course I knew her,” he scribbled, in his barely legible handwriting. “Everyone knew her. She was the life of the party. A golden-haired Russian princess.”
    “She once studied physics,” I said defensively.
    “Yes, she was smart,” he agreed. And without warning he slid his arm around my waist.
    You can’t acquire or attain through deliberate effort the sort of magnetism Eli had; it’s something you’re born with. I’d been aware of his charisma before, but only in the way one is aware of a bird’s red wings or an ant’s ability to carry a corpse twice its size on its back. I never came under his spell and I considered myself immune until he touched me. I was aroused, and suddenly I was also curious. When someone has that sort of reputation, you can’t help wondering what it’s all about. For a few seconds I was tempted, I felt I wanted to follow him to his car, bring him home and find out what made him special, if anything. But sanity prevailed. I got up and gathered my exam papers.
    He wrote, “I know what you went through. I’m sorry.”
    “What do you know?” I replied defiantly. Even by Israeli standards, Eli operated on and elicited a level of directness that was unusual.
    “The two men.”
    “Does that turn you on?”
    “No, it makes me sad.”
    “Why?”
    “I can’t imagine anyone doing things like that to another person.”
    “People say you’re into S&M.”
    He didn’t answer; he merely stared at me with a pointed expression: partly amused, partly disappointed but forgiving.
    “That event has nothing to do with how I feel about you,” I wrote. “I don’t go to bed with men who don’t speak my language.”
    He looked surprised and a little confused. I spelled good-bye and left quickly, before I changed my mind. Eli made you feel he was inviting you to join a club, a very exclusive and wonderful club, and that was the problem, that was the lie. There wasn’t any club, only Eli’s insatiable hunger; and the fact that he had the ability to tempt women with this lie, tempt them by placing his arm around their waists, made his lie all the more inexcusable. In the end, I decided, he was nothing more than a wicked wizard who used his magic powers for his own benefit and, in so doing, created havoc and pain.
    Matar, because he was more innocent than Eli, had managed to get farther: he’d taken me into his arms and kissed me. I moved away, taking a step back. What a strange thing kissing was—entirely instinctive and yet so unlikely. Why would two mammals want to slide their tongues into each other’s mouths? No other species did that, as far as I knew. And yet it felt wonderful: generous and intimate, and somehow innocent, as if you were playing. Shall we have a round of checkers or would you like to kiss?
    Not allowed , I wrote on the board, in small letters.
    He wrote Allowed next to the Xs surrounding the square, and then he drew a heart and wrote under it, Not allowed.
    I said, “Wait until the course is over. At least then we can talk.” I sketched a cartoon version of Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve , with Tel Aviv University in the background, and dean