Motti by Asaf Schurr

another moment and the wind will carry her away, even though she walks so determinedly against it, walking up some street against the wind, lowering her head decisively. Her cheekbones will almost cut the flesh of her cheeks, they’ll protrude that much, but they won’t look harsh and cruel. Just the opposite. Delicate. With straight hair she’ll walk like that, in a T-shirt a little too big for her, her eyes light green now, with a hint of honey, giving them depth. Forest green, those eyes, rich, you can just drown in them. Or the opposite, she’ll almost be pudgy, sturdy, with round and heavy breasts, smiling. At night she’ll rest her head on his chest and absentmindedly caress him as they watch the TV. And he in return, teasing her—just as she plays with his chest hair, so he plays with her breasts. Places a hand there and swings them back and forth (this isn’t sexual, it’s a lover’s joke), and so they laugh together, her and him, a laugh of deep recognition. After they calm down, and the laughter subsides, he’ll say to her, my love, I love you more than anything. I love your hands more than anything, your legs, your tummy, the lines of your face, your spleen, the toes on your feet, your nails, your eyelashes, this beauty mark, that beauty mark, and this one as well, your voice, the way you move, your fantasies, your beautiful thoughts, your pupils, your nostrils, the hairs in your nostrils (and she’ll protest, I have absolutely no hairs in my nostrils!—he’ll correct himself, the nonhairs in your nostrils, but the hairs in your ears I just adore! and she’ll protest, and he’ll continue), I love your neck more than anything, your cute ass, your shins, your knees, keep going? The back of your knees, elbows, shoulders, your boobs, your little belly button (she’ll say, what, you don’t love my, you know, vagina? and he’ll say, I love it, just love it), your earlobes, the nape of your neck, behind your ears, your tongue, your teeth, your forehead, your cheeks, your gums. I love to see your hair more than anything. More than anything I love to see it shoot off your shoulders like little flames, like a bonfire. And she’ll say in a sweet voice, what’s burning? He’ll say, my heart, dear, and laugh deeply, as though belittling the beautiful things that he himself just said.
    And if fate—of all things—laughs at him, and they actually don’t meet again when she’s grown up, without even knowing, some door will close in him that was open only for her. This he’s already mourned, in the very moment he thought of it: that with her he could be a man who he could never be without her. Not a better man, not necessarily, but nevertheless a different man, and if nothing out of all the things he’s now thought up will ever be, then this man too will never come to be, and already now he mourns his ongoing departure (mourns the thoughts he won’t think when she won’t be there, the jokes that won’t come to him, even the small acts of cruelty that in her presence are liable to break loose inside him and who knows where they’ll blossom now, if at all).

23
    And if I may, like officers in the army are so fond of doing, offer a personal example, I’ll point out only the diamonds that glittered at me years ago, as a boy, on the way back from Friday night dinner at Grandma’s. Giant diamonds and chandeliers sparkling that I spotted from a distance, on the ceiling of some wonderful house that you could see from the road for a moment, through the car window, and they stayed with me so many years, until two or three months ago I actually went there, to the actual place, to someone’s Bar Mitzvah celebration. And instantly all of them, all the diamonds and such, transformed into neon lights (even though in my memory there still remains something of all the marvelous radiance, and this paragraph is