Once Hemdat sat by the window as dusk fell. The door of his room was wide open. The branches of the eucalyptus trees cast long shadows and the world was fading into darkness. A poet might have said that Sir Day was departing and Fair Night was about to arrive. Yael came for her lesson. Hemdat did not hear her. His bowed head was wreathed in shadow. He felt dull, and all he could think of was a lone cow standing in a field.
What was on his mind? Yael stood there saying nothing. She was thinking of the evenings in the town where she grew up. It was more of a forest than a town, and the whole summer had been one long frolic, every tree a maypole. But as soon as summer ended, so did the good times. The forest grew ever so dreary and sunken in snow. If a boy and girl went off into it, their voices were heard from afar and their footprints stood out in the snow.
Yael felt a flush. She wanted to take Hemdat’s head in her warm arms and hold it tightly. He had such fine hair. She thought of her own gorgeous head of rich hair with its auburn braids that had been like nothing else. Her friends could have told you about that hair. “Just imagine what it must do to a man,” they said, staring at it, “if that’s what it does to us.”
Hemdat’s eyes felt moist. Softly his hand grazed her short hair. Though he had never seen it long, he had heard of it. It had glowed like chestnuts half in shade and half in sunlight. Her old friends had burst into tears when she cut it because of the typhus. One, who was no longer even on good terms with her, woke from a dream crying out, “Oh, no, they’re cutting Yael’s hair!”
Hemdat sat up and looked at her like a man waking from his sleep. “Is that you, Yael?” he asked. She should forgive him for not having noticed her. Although this was an odd way of putting it, since he had just touched her hair, he was not conscious of telling a lie.
“Have you been here long?” he asked, rising in his confusion to offer her his chair while at the same time pointing to the divan. Yael retreated a step but did not leave. Even though she knew that he would rather be alone, she sat down. In fact, she sat down beside him on the divan.
Hemdat did not light the lamp as usual and sat with her in the dark. How afraid she once had been of him! But she was not anymore. They sat half-touching, and when the other half touched she took his head in her hands. He was so close that she could have bitten off the lock of hair on his forehead. What did he need it for? “What a fantastical idea,” laughed Hemdat loudly. “Go ahead and try.”
Yael leaned forward and bit off Hemdat’s hair. He had never laughed so hard in his life. What a she-devil she was, this quiet, sedate young lady! It was incredible. Who would have thought she had such spunk? He would never have believed it if he hadn’t felt it with his own head.
Although he had spent long hours with her, it only now struck him that she deserved a closer look. She was — with her green eyes, green hat, and green jersey — a living, breathing emerald. It thrilled him to see her so wild and full of life and youth. He gave her hand a friendly squeeze.
She looked at him and said, “I know why you did that.”
“You do?” he asked with a smile.
“I suppose you think I haven’t read my Forel. A handshake is a sexual release.” Hemdat beamed at her lovely innocence. Let him meet the cads who spread stories about her and he would tear them to shreds.
What a shame time couldn’t stand still. It was getting late. Yael rose to go. It was past her bedtime. Hemdat took his hat and set out to walk her home.
In the tender moonlight, the sand stretched for miles all around. The eucalyptus trees by the railroad tracks gave off a good smell, their branches whispering the heart’s language in the wind. The surf sounded far away, and the bells of a departing caravan chimed to the singing of the camel drivers. Nothing stirred in the world without Hemdat seeing or hearing it. He had a sharp eye. How many times have you passed the tree poking through the wall of the garden near his house without noticing that it was whitewashed? Not Hemdat. It was a clever joke on someone’s part to paint it white, as though that were its true color. You can’t fool me, he thought, because I know what I’m looking at. He walked Yael home and headed back.
3
She lived in one room with her friend Pnina. Hemdat had never been there. One Saturday night Pizmoni talked him into going. Disorder reigned everywhere. All kinds of things lay untidily about, one on top of another, as if thumbing their noses at their owners. A few young men were sitting around. It was a Saturday and they had had the day off.
Dorban, the poet who had trekked the length and breadth of Palestine, was ridiculing the latest Hebrew poetry. Anyone who had heard the music of camel steps in a howling sandstorm could tell you that all that was written nowadays sounded like a creaky door. Dorban’s meters were based on camel steps. You had to have heard them to appreciate his verse.
Seated opposite him was fat Gurishkin. Gurishkin had a bushy, waxed black mustache tilting up at the ends that he resisted the temptation to twirl by ordering his hand to rub his forehead instead, which gave him a philosophical look. His eyes were red from hauling sand to building sites by day and writing his autobiography by night. Not that it was a major work yet, since he was young and hadn’t lived much, but it would be by the time he was finished. Gurishkin thought so far ahead that he had trouble keeping up with himself.
Gurishkin was no poet, and his imagination was not his strong suit. From time to time, he turned to look at Pnina. Pnina had a high opinion of him, but she never fell in love with her opinions. He was too big and fat. Not even his being a writer, that most spiritual of occupations, could make him less so.
Shammai was there too. Shammai was neither a poet like Dorban nor a workingman like Gurishkin but a student at the American College in Beirut. However, he thought highly of both poetry and work, having learned to admire them as a child from the Hebrew primers used by his teachers.
Apart from these three, several other young men were having an argument, gusting windily from politics to art to literature to the Hebrew press to the Ninth Zionist Congress and its consequences. Hemdat sat without joining them, alone with his thoughts. Now and then he glanced at Yael’s bed, which was made of a board and some oil cans. It looked more like an instrument of torture than something to rest on.
After the argument they sat around chatting. Pizmoni joked with Pnina, and Shammai with Yael. Shammai spat into a cracked pail, then looked at it and said, “Of course, I could be wrong.” Soon another argument broke out and lasted until everyone was hoarse. “How about a glass of tea?” Dorban asked. When he wasn’t trekking through the desert, he liked his creature comforts. “With pleasure,” said Yael and Pnina in one breath. Pnina lit the battered oil burner and Yael poured water in a kettle while Hemdat watched. Unless he imagined it, she took the water from the pail Shammai spat in. The smoke was too much for him.
Hemdat sat on an empty crate near the window, a wallflower in a garden of words. He had a headache and hoped the fresh air would help. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Hemdat,” said Yael, “you’ll get a concussion from pressing your head against that window.” The kettle began to boil. Pnina grabbed a handful of tea leaves and tossed them in. Presto, tea!
“And sugar too,” said Yael from her heights. Hemdat sipped his tea. He could not help thinking that he was drinking someone’s spittle. When he was done he put the empty glass on the shaky table. “More?” asked Pnina. Hemdat shook his head and said, “No.” He sat there silently, answering any questions as though at gunpoint. Words did not come easily to him. He knew he was not clever or witty like the others, and he had no desire to be. In the end they fell flat beneath their own jokes, blank and burdened by weariness. How he yearned for a face that was free, for friends who did not peck at life’s slops, who dreamed in the pallor of morning and saw through the noonday sun and ate the bread of unworriedness and spoke of themselves without banter! He threw an involuntary glance at the two girls sitting arm-in-arm on the edge of the bed: Pnina, so good and pure-faced, with her pretty tresses that bored him to tears, and dewier-but-just-as dull Yael. He rose and left.