I always thought deep down that I would marry a young scholar who was destined to become world-famous. On tiptoe I would creep into his severely furnished study, put a glass of tea down on one of the heavy German tomes scattered on his desk, empty the ashtray and close the shutters silently, then without his noticing me creep out on tiptoe. If my husband had attacked me like a man dying of thirst I should have been ashamed of myself. If Michael approached me as if I were a delicate instrument, or like a scientist handling a test tube, why was I upset? At night I recalled the warm, rough overcoat he had worn that night when we walked from Tirat Yaar to the bus stop on the Jerusalem road. And the spoon his fingers had toyed with in the Terra Sancta cafeteria came back to me on those first nights.
The coffee cup shook in my hands as I asked my husband one of those mornings, my eyes fixed on a cracked tile in the floor, if I was a good woman. He thought for a moment, then answered, in a rather scholarly way, that he could not judge because he had never known another woman. His answer was frank; why did my hands still shake, so that the coffee spilled on the new tablecloth?
Each morning I would fry a double omelette. Make coffee for us both. Michael sliced the bread.
I enjoyed putting on a blue apron and arranging each vessel and utensil in its new place in my kitchen. The days were quiet. At eight o'clock Michael would leave for his lectures, carrying a new briefcase, a large black briefcase which his father had bought him as a wedding present. I said goodbye to him on the corner of the street and turned toward Sarah Zeldin's kindergarten. I had bought myself a new spring dress, a light cotton print with yellow flowers. But spring held back and the winter continued. The winter was long and hard in Jerusalem in 1950.
Thanks to the sleeping pills I dreamed all day. Old Sarah Zeldin eyed me knowingly through her gold-rimmed spectacles. Perhaps she was imagining wild nights. I wanted to put her right, but I was lost for words. Our nights were quiet. Sometimes I thought I felt a vague expectancy creeping up my spine. As if a decisive event had not yet taken place. As if it were all a preface, a rehearsal, a preliminary. I was learning a complicated part which I should soon have to play. An important event would soon take place.
I should like to record a curious fact about Peretz Smolenskin.
The professor had completed his series of lectures on Abraham Mapu, and had moved on to a discussion of Smolenskin's
The Wanderer in Life's Paths.
He spoke in detail of the author's travels and his emotional difficulties. At that time scholars still believed that the writer himself is bound up in his book.
I remember moments when I was overcome by a strong feeling that I knew Peretz Smolenskin personally. Possibly the portrait printed in his books reminded me of someone I knew. But I do not think that was the real reason. I felt that I had heard from him as a child things which affected my life, and that I should soon meet him again. I must, must formulate in my mind the right questions, so that I would know what to ask Peretz Smolenskin. All I had to do, in fact, was to consider the influence of Dickens on Smolenskin's stories.
Every afternoon I sat at my usual desk in the reading room in Terra Sancta and read
David Copperfield
in an old English edition. Dickens' orphan, David, resembled Joseph, the orphan from the town of Madmena in Smolenskin's story. They both suffered various kinds of hardship. Both writers, since they felt pity for the orphans, had no pity on society. I would sit peacefully for two or three hours, reading about suffering and cruelty as if I were reading about long-extinct dinosaurs. Or as if I were confronted with meaningless fables of which the moral was unimportant. It was a detached acquaintance.
At that time there worked in the basement of Terra Sancta a short, elderly librarian who wore a skullcap, and who
The coffee cup shook in my hands as I asked my husband one of those mornings, my eyes fixed on a cracked tile in the floor, if I was a good woman. He thought for a moment, then answered, in a rather scholarly way, that he could not judge because he had never known another woman. His answer was frank; why did my hands still shake, so that the coffee spilled on the new tablecloth?
Each morning I would fry a double omelette. Make coffee for us both. Michael sliced the bread.
I enjoyed putting on a blue apron and arranging each vessel and utensil in its new place in my kitchen. The days were quiet. At eight o'clock Michael would leave for his lectures, carrying a new briefcase, a large black briefcase which his father had bought him as a wedding present. I said goodbye to him on the corner of the street and turned toward Sarah Zeldin's kindergarten. I had bought myself a new spring dress, a light cotton print with yellow flowers. But spring held back and the winter continued. The winter was long and hard in Jerusalem in 1950.
Thanks to the sleeping pills I dreamed all day. Old Sarah Zeldin eyed me knowingly through her gold-rimmed spectacles. Perhaps she was imagining wild nights. I wanted to put her right, but I was lost for words. Our nights were quiet. Sometimes I thought I felt a vague expectancy creeping up my spine. As if a decisive event had not yet taken place. As if it were all a preface, a rehearsal, a preliminary. I was learning a complicated part which I should soon have to play. An important event would soon take place.
I should like to record a curious fact about Peretz Smolenskin.
The professor had completed his series of lectures on Abraham Mapu, and had moved on to a discussion of Smolenskin's
The Wanderer in Life's Paths.
He spoke in detail of the author's travels and his emotional difficulties. At that time scholars still believed that the writer himself is bound up in his book.
I remember moments when I was overcome by a strong feeling that I knew Peretz Smolenskin personally. Possibly the portrait printed in his books reminded me of someone I knew. But I do not think that was the real reason. I felt that I had heard from him as a child things which affected my life, and that I should soon meet him again. I must, must formulate in my mind the right questions, so that I would know what to ask Peretz Smolenskin. All I had to do, in fact, was to consider the influence of Dickens on Smolenskin's stories.
Every afternoon I sat at my usual desk in the reading room in Terra Sancta and read
David Copperfield
in an old English edition. Dickens' orphan, David, resembled Joseph, the orphan from the town of Madmena in Smolenskin's story. They both suffered various kinds of hardship. Both writers, since they felt pity for the orphans, had no pity on society. I would sit peacefully for two or three hours, reading about suffering and cruelty as if I were reading about long-extinct dinosaurs. Or as if I were confronted with meaningless fables of which the moral was unimportant. It was a detached acquaintance.
At that time there worked in the basement of Terra Sancta a short, elderly librarian who wore a skullcap, and who
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