She was looking at the bed. A strange bed, wide, low, and enthroned on a carpeted area between the two levels. She did not turn to her companion. The corners of her mouth dented a moment, then with a flick of the head, as if a fly had been encircling it, she went over and snapped open the elegant overnight bag the rich aunt had given her for one of the holidays to Cape Town — it was all she had had time to snatch from the cottage. She took out her yellow swimsuit.
Udi left the room. When he came back they saw one another first in the mirror she was standing before, tying a piece of Kanga cloth round her breasts over the yellow suit. He felt himself a voyeur thrust in to replace the figure in a favourite painting in one of his damp-rippled books, Manet’s Nana watched at her toilet by a gross man. His face showed it; but dismay was all the girl read. Hillela smiled at him in the mirror.
— I’ve been to tell them we must have two rooms. I’m terribly sorry. I kicked up a fuss but it doesn’t help. They are completely full tonight, they’ve promised that if we stay tomorrow … Anyway, I can sleep on the sofa, they will bring bedding. Or in this climate … look at the carpet, how thick (now he was able to smile, and distance himself in one of his pleasantries) — my turn to sleep on the floor. Everyone has his chance, in this life, good and bad. — I’m really sorry, Hillela, that idiot on the phone got the booking wrong. Believe me, I didn’t expect this.—
— Oh it doesn’t matter. Are you coming to swim? I’ll wait for you. — She was wiggling her toes in the white sheepskin carpet; he saw one little crooked toe folded over a straight one.
He came out of the bathroom bearing his familiar unattractive head on an unfamiliar body; taken out of its wrappings, a hidden self appeared. It belonged to a younger, happier man, this well-made thick body with finely-turned muscular thighs and calves, and tight buttocks in black trunks. She had not been able to coax him out of his chair, but now he emerged of his own accord — or rather out of the volition of that hidden body — from the avuncular category in which a young girl would regard him. He hired skin-diving equipment and they laughed and clowned with Chaplin-flippered feet. He swam better than she did and led her into the green and purple-dark of passages undersea; be-goggled and rubber-finned, they were companionably identified with each other, the human species among other species that glowed with phosphorescence, steered past — hundreds of striped, ovoid discs making up one living streamer — or felt timidly with twiddling antennae from nests of rock, the blind silently tapping their way across the ocean bed. At sunset they walked on the beach like any other oddly-assorted couple seeking the retreat of a place like this: laughing black government Ministers from neighbouring states with their away-from-home girls, Greeks and Lebanese with their women, the wives sourly carrying their high-heeled shoes and trailing children, the mistresses hanging on the men’s arms and inclining their heads with animated affection, earning the trip.
At dinner he ordered grilled fish. Again she ate with appetite the dubious food he avoided. — If I keel over and die during the night, you aren’t responsible.—
— Don’t say that. I brought you here. I am responsible.—
His sudden moments of solemnity were something she ignored, like an embarrassing tic disturbing someone’s face.
A band shook and plucked at rattles and electric guitars. She did not seem to expect him to go so far as to dance with her; they drank wine, intensifying sea-laved well-being and the little, delightful shudders that puckered their sunburned bare arms with the night breath off the ocean. When a young olive-coloured man came across and asked her to dance, Udi watched her enjoying herself. The young man was a good dancer, someone transformed from obscurity by the grace and skill — perhaps the only skill? — he knew he had. She did more than follow; she moved as one body with the man she had never seen before in her life. Watching her, Udi had the impression she might never stop, that she might dance away, return night after night to the dance, to the man because he was the dance, something someone so young could mistake. dance her life away. My poor Hillela. An echo sounded from him, of another country and another time, set off by a body, moving thighs, embracing arms inherited from another dancer. That was what was unexplained, to himself as well, when he said it always adamantly, bluntly: —She was innocent.—
But she came back. This dancer was not one to make mistakes. Trust her! — that was what others said of her. She came back and asked for soda and ice, took a cube out of the drink with her fingers and passed it over her forehead and neck. When the young man approached again to take her away she shook her head, smiling as if he knew very well why she was smiling; no, no.
They walked on the dark beach again, late. A fine luminous mist made an element neither air nor sea; they could barely see each other. He did not speak and — a small vessel calling out at sea — she spoke only once. — I wish I had my guitar. — He knew she was happy.
In the room with its ridiculous harem-bed he found Hillela lying plumb in the middle, a sheet over her shape up to the armpits. He came out of the bathroom in pyjamas. She gave an exaggerated sigh at her luxury. Then she shifted over to one side of the bed. He stood there with the spare bedding he had picked up from a chair. She patted the empty side of the bed.
He went over to the higher section of the room and started arranging the bedding on the floor. When he turned her hand was lying palm up, rejected, where she had patted the bed.
He came and picked up a pillow for himself. But could not walk away and leave her: her generosity, her honesty. He sat down on the bed and slowly took the sunburned empty hand. Her head was sunk deeply in the billows of down, her curly hair bleached the colour of bronze-brown seaweed and sticky with damp. Against cheeks shiny, reddened and slightly puffy with the fever of sun her eyes were glistening convex black in whose expression he saw only himself, himself as she must be seeing him.
She smiled, in spite of that. — Mohammed won’t know.—
He kissed the hand with his sad, marked lips and, not familiar with the old-fashioned gesture, she casually pulled the hand away. On his back, laying himself out straight beside the body of the girl that was volume and weight and softness, the angle of each flexed and relaxed limb rounded-off by the soft bed as a Matisse odalisque has no angles or Picassos of a certain period have no joints in the continuous curved lines of bodies in a bacchanal, he took the hand again. The odd-assorted couple were now figures on a tomb; he put an end to the image in himself by gently coming alive to turn and give her a child’s goodnight kiss on the cheek. But it was a long time since one of her surrogate parents sent her to sleep like that; she turned obediently, as a woman, so that he kissed her on the mouth, and was received by her mouth. She drew close to him and although she did not touch him with her hands, her body laid its caress along his side. For a long time he stroked her hair while she waited for the next well-known moves in love-making, and he waited to speak.
— Hillela. — Try out the possibility by pronouncing her, invoking her. Take again the hand, the empty hand he could not fill. — I can’t, Hillela. Since my wife died it’s finished.—
Of course he saw the girl misunderstood: so this was the famous love you read about in books, the eternal faithfulness, remote as the love religious people know for a god you can’t see or touch.
— It’s not out of some vow or conviction, some such nonsense. It’s not at all even what Petra would want. She wasn’t that kind, trying for promises ‘you’ll never marry another woman’. My god no. From time to time, we both … we had others, and neither of us made a fuss. It wasn’t important for us while we were together; it only concerned each of us separately, you know. So it’s not that.—