Free B002FB6BZK EBOK by Yoram Kaniuk Page A

red, and his cheek drooped toward a strong and handsome chin
and a dimple was hollowed in the cheek, and suddenly out of the blue, in
an improvised but wonderfully measured formulation he said: Go, go. It's
important to us that you go!
    And the hose surely granted me freedom of maneuver and I did aim it
at another bush, I started filling the hollow and I thought: Is his pain really more than my pain, can pain be learned? Had he lost more than I? I
recalled how Noga visited us suddenly, that was about two or three months
ago. She came into the house as if she were hopping on air and not on the
ground, as usual, so delicate and yet something solid in her as always. She
sat next to Hasha Masha and was silent. Her eyes were fixed on the album
of the one who had been her lover.
    My wife got up, went to the kitchen, and brought tea. She put on the
water in the kitchen in silence, her hands holding the kerosene stove and
not seared. My wife touched Noga's forehead with a finger, maybe measuring her son by the love of his youth, by my total incomprehension.
Noga sat, more beautiful than ever even though she looked scared that
day. Uneasy, she put on her shawl and took it off again with hands that
were almost shaking. Every now and then she looked in the mirror and
sat next to my wife and then Hasha Masha gave her a black comb and Noga
combed her hair and then she gave Hasha Masha some small tweezers she
pulled out of her purse. The tweezers were silver plated and capered for a
moment in the room whose light came between the slats of the slightly
open shutters, and Hasha Masha plucked out two or three hairs from her left eyebrow and then returned the tweezers to Noga and went to the
kitchen and put on another kettle of water and came back and let the water
steam and when the kettle (I didn't dare do a thing) was empty and about
to turn to carbon, Noga got up slowly, almost deliberately, put the hairs
carefully into the ashtray, and the hairs that Hasha Masha had plucked
were mixed in the water from the vase that was poured into the ashtray and
Noga put down the ashtray, touched my wife's head lightly, walked to the
kitchen, filled the kettle with water, and the kettle fizzed and groaned,
and Hasha Masha, with a certain arrogance, took out her new reading
glasses and sat frozen with the reading glasses on her face and then Noga
held out a sheet of paper and said: That's what I wrote to the judge about
Boaz, and I wondered how Hasha Masha knew that Noga intended to show
her a letter she had written to the judge about Boaz, and my wife read the
letter and nodded her head and glanced mutely at Noga and Noga didn't
lower her eyes but smiled and Hasha Masha said: You know how to condemn scoundrels, Noga, and you also know how to sleep in their beds, and
Noga didn't say a thing but took the letter from Hasha Masha and folded
it up carefully and put it back in the purse and then with the delicate
movement of a tame eagle, she took the glasses off Hasha Masha's eyes
folded them up and put them into the case waiting for them on the table
and Noga measured the room again as she used to do on hundreds of evenings when I sat with her here when she still lived with us, looked through
me and saw a wall and on it, as always, still hung the yellow landscape by
the painter Shot, a picture whose frame had been shattered for years now,
and after she drank the tea and Hasha Masha put the glasses on Noga's
eyes and measured her with a look and took off the glasses and Noga blinked
like somebody who isn't used to reading glasses, Noga took out some
chewing gum, folded the paper, delicately put the gum into her mouth,
chewed it with her mouth closed for a minute or two, went into the bathroom, threw it in the toilet, flushed it, and returned to the table and sat
down. Her hand reached forward and in it was the strip of paper that
wrapped the chewing gum. Hasha Masha carefully folded the strip of rustling paper