There was something obscure about her, ideas that were confused but daring, something strange to me, very intellectual, almost a chatterbox, but very interesting. We talked and talked and half of the next watch had gone by when suddenly we were attacked by the gym teacher who was in charge of the guard. He snatched the flashlight from her hand and threw it to the ground, told us to shut up, to lie on the ground, to move farther apart and to keep watch quietly for the enemy.
When he had gone and we were still lying on the ground, a little amused and a little annoyed, I said to her, “Did I wake you from a dream?” and she was amazed. “How did you know?” She insisted, she was determined to know how in the darkness of the tent I could tell that she was dreaming. And then she told me her dream, something about her father.
The watch was over and we returned to our separate tents. I took her flashlight to try and repair it. The next day, during the training and the excursions, we didn’t exchange a word. I still have time to decide whether to fall in love with her, I thought. In the afternoon I gave her the mended flashlight. She thanked me, touched my hand lightly, intentionally, wanting to start a conversation, but I slipped away, uneasy, still hesitant, afraid of making a fool of myself.
That evening Yitzhak disappeared. Apparently he’d been gone since midday, but it was only in the evening that he was missed. All the training and the activities were suspended and all of us, including the children from the other schools, went out to search for him. Walking over the hills in long lines, searching every bush and every crevice and all the time calling his name. The headmaster supervised the search, shouting excitedly, walking among us pale and desperate. Suddenly she was in the centre. They all looked at her accusingly, curiously. Even the children from the other schools came to see her, they all knew by now the reason for the disappearance. Again and again she was called to the headmaster to give more information about him. He stood and shouted at her as if she were to blame for not returning Yitzhak’s love.
In the morning two British policemen arrived with a dog. They were very much amused, inspecting the camp and taking advantage of the opportunity to search for weapons. After a few minutes he was found. He’d simply hidden in a little cave about a hundred metres from the camp. The dog flushed him out. He emerged weeping bitterly, shouting in his foreign accent, “Don’t kill me.” Down on his knees before the headmaster and before her. It was impossible even to scold him, he was so miserable. She was told to sit with him, to comfort him. I couldn’t get close to her now, until camp was over.
But it seems that his hopeless love infected me. In the holidays I thought about her constantly, walking by her house in the evenings, searching for some contact. I was already working full-time in the garage, I didn’t register for the new school year. My father was growing weaker, already there were screws that he was unable to turn. He used to sit on a chair beside the car and tell me what to do. Now and then when I had time to spare I would go to the school, just as I was, in my dirty overalls, sit on the fence and wait for break, to see my friends, to try to keep in touch with them. Searching for her, sometimes seeing her suddenly, hardly managing to hold a proper conversation with her at all, especially as Yitzhak was still at her heels and she was cautious because of him. It seemed that in spite of everything they were friends. After a while I stopped going to the school, I broke off, the work in the garage kept me more and more busy. My friends suddenly seemed childish to me, with their books and their note pads and their little stories about the teachers.
In the middle of the sixth grade she disappeared. Her family moved to Tel Aviv. Her father’s name sometimes appeared in the papers as one of the leaders behind the scenes, a security chief. The months leading up to the establishment of the state were upon us, there was turmoil in the land. I tried to study in the evenings, to prepare at least superficially for the matriculation exam, but I gave it up.
At the beginning of the War of Independence my father died and I joined the army as a mechanic, maintaining armoured vehicles. It was years since I’d seen her.
It wasn’t until after the war that we met again, at a school reunion. It was impossible to invite only those who had completed their schooling, many like me had left halfway through, had taken up employment, had joined the army or the Palmach. Some had fallen in the war.
It was supposed to be a big occasion. An assembly, parties, speeches, an all-night barbecue. At first I didn’t recognize the girl who approached me. In the years since we’d last met I’d grown taller, and she suddenly seemed small to me.
“How’s the revolution?” I asked with a smile.
She was surprised, then she smiled.
“It’ll come … it’ll come.”
And from that moment she didn’t leave me. We both felt a bit out of place there. We’d both left the school in the sixth grade. Many of the people there were strangers to us. Some of them were married and had brought wives and husbands with them. We sat apart from the others at the back of the hall and listened to the long speeches, she was whispering in my ear all the time, telling me about herself, about her studies in the teachers’ seminary. When we stood up to remember the dead, listening with bowed heads to the long list, and Yitzhak’s name was mentioned, I glanced at her. She stood there, her head bowed, not batting an eyelid. I didn’t know what to do, she stayed at my side all evening, going with me from place to place, unwilling to enter into long conversation with other friends. Her father’s name was in the news at the time, something to do with some obscure episode, a hasty decision taken with unpleasant consequences. Her father had been dismissed from office and there had been demands that he be brought to trial, but in the end they let him alone on account of his past service.
Perhaps this was the reason for her oversensitivity with the others, for her decision to leave in the middle of the party and return home to Tel Aviv. She asked me to accompany her to the bus station and I took her there in my car, my father’s old Morris, the back seat full of tools, automobile parts, oil cans. We stood and waited for a bus in the deserted bus station in the lower city. She grew closer and closer to me, talking about herself, asking me about my work. She remembered the night watch that we’d shared, and what I’d said then. The bus was late in coming. I decided to drive her to her home in Tel Aviv. We arrived there after midnight. A small, modest house with a neglected garden in south Tel Aviv. She insisted that I spend the night there. I agreed, I was a little curious to see her father. It was dark inside the house, huge piles of newspapers lay in every corner. Her father came out to meet us, a hairy man, older and smaller than he looked in the newspaper photographs, with a hard face. She told him a little about me, he nodded distractedly and disappeared into another room. I thought that we’d sit for a while and continue our conversation, but she made up a bed for me on the sofa in the living room, lent me some of her father’s old pyjamas and left me. At first I had difficulty getting to sleep, still thrown by the sharp transition from the noise of the party, the speeches, the meetings with old friends to this dark and quiet house among the sparse orchards of Tel Aviv. But finally I slept. At three in the morning I heard somebody moving about beside my bed. It was her father, in khaki trousers and a torn pyjama top. He was bending over the radio and fiddling with it, going from station to station, the B.B.C., broadcasts in Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, languages that I couldn’t even identify. All the stations of the awakening east. Listening for a while and then passing on to another station, his eyes tightly closed, perhaps it was a habit that he couldn’t shake off from the period when he was in charge of the Ministry of Information, or perhaps he was searching for something affecting him, some commentary on his case from a foreign and distant source. He ignored me, as if I didn’t exist. He didn’t care that he’d roused me from sleep, that I was exhausted, sitting beside him in silence, listening with him.