Once I had a summer girl who left me at summer’s end. At first I thought when she left and autumn came that if she hadn’t gone there would have been no autumn, that her leaving had caused the coming of autumn. Since then I have learned that there was no connection between the two events. There are many such parallel cycles: the cycle of seasons, the cycle of my life, the cycle of my loves, and that of my loneliness. Because of her and others too, and because of all of these, I was late going on my vacation to Ashkelon.

I came to the place like the Roman merchant who was buried there upon his return from a visit to Southern Italy, his birthplace; he returned to the East and died. Artists were brought to decorate the interior of his grave. This same Roman merchant inspired various reflections and dreams in me. Not far from the hotel was his grave, in a hollow between two sand dunes.

People sitting on the grass in the hotel garden said: “One has to see the antiquities.” Why are people in our country so excited about antiquities? Perhaps because the present is not certain, and the future less so. In ancient times they used to forecast the future. Now we program the past.

In the evening, the proprietor of the hotel strolled among his guests, delighted to see that they ate with gusto. He was red all over, like sausages boiled in water. Sometimes he put his hands on the table as if he wanted to serve himself up, so eager was he to please his guests. Aside from myself, the guests included a young couple who had been married the day before, and a muscular German woman with a strong, aggressive voice, and many others.

The next day we went to the historic excavations near the hotel. In the grave of the Roman merchant were some mosaics and broken pillars and marking places for the archaeologists—little notations like pricetags in a shop window. Also there were chalk lines and wires strung about to aid the digging. We clustered around our guide. Once upon a time I hated to go to such places in an organized group. Now I loved the crowd, the closeness of bodies, the voices. Watch your step, behold, see the bas relief. Marvelous!

Sometimes I return alone to a place like this after having toured it with a group. And so it happened that in the evening I returned to the dead Roman’s grave and sat in the soft, loose sand among the slips of paper and wires. On the road a car was passing slowly, like a police car, cruising, looking for something. Young men and women were sitting in the car, discussing whether they should stop and get out. Finally they drove on toward the tall tower in town. I studied the excavations. As in an architect’s plan, you could see the foundations. This was house construction in reverse. The site had been turned into a plan, the plan flew into the builder’s head, and from his head to the wide world.

I walked down to the sea and took off my shoes. The small crabs fled from me and disappeared into their holes, as did the sun, which was speeding toward the hole in the West where it would vanish. I watched the sun set while tying my sandals. We have learned to perform many actions simultaneously: I could sit tying on my sandals, sit and kneel and look toward the setting sun. If we are trained well, we can do three or four things together at the same time: ride in a car, cry, and look through a window; eat, love, think. And all the time consciousness passes like an elevator among the floors.

Later in the evening, a movie was shown in the garden. Everyone took a chair and sat down. Dogs and children ran about, draining off the attention of the audience; then they ran away and our attention returned to the preparations for the movie, the memory of supper, and gossip. The movie projectionists arrived late. A chair was placed on top of another chair to raise the projector to the proper height. The movie was about dancing, stabbing, and loving, all three of which seemed to be going on at the same time.

A girl passed between the screen and the projector. All the adventures mounted her back. I was jealous of her; she smiled. Her body moved in her dress as in a sea. Tomorrow she would go down once more to the soft beach. She did not have to labor much; life came her way, as readily as the movie that was now being shown on her white back. Two dogs jumped on each other. In a distant wing of the hotel a light went on. Someone left the audience. Someone didn’t feel well. From the kitchen we heard the voice of a girl, singing.

The hotel owner said, “Later we shall go down to the beach and fry sausages.” Those were his exact words. The movie ended and the chairs were left for the waiters to replace. We all descended to the beach. On the way we passed Shemuel’s coffee-house, where there were many pillars and a paved floor for dancing. That was Shemuel’s coffee-house. Shemuel had tried many things before he opened his coffee-house near the sea that was black by night and green by day. That evening he had strung colored bulbs in happy chains in the sky of his coffee-house, along the tops of the pillars which surrounded the dance floor. He governed his skies with the help of electric wires at night, and by day with canvas awnings that fenced out the noonday sun. That evening, soldiers from a nearby camp sat under his skies near the whispery sand. They had come to celebrate a victory, or to be comforted after defeat. At any rate, they had come to rest from the training-grounds, the outposts, and the army offices. Silken girls put fumbling hands on their shoulders. Girls with rosy ice-cream thighs and eyes of chocolate cake. Whispering sand-girls who kept their warmth at night. Some of the soldiers had come with their heavy boots on, and danced like bears, swayed like drunkards. Shemuel looked upon all of them with pleasure and satisfaction; every once in a while he took a tray and passed among the dancers to attend to their wishes. We decided to postpone the sausage business until the following night. Some of the older women wanted to stay and watch the young soldiers dance. We sat with the local doctor. He nudged my shoulder and said: “Look, there is Shemuel’s beautiful wife.”

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She was standing near the exit, in front of a sign which said: “Discount for soldiers. Today—shashlik and liver.” She had green eyes and a week ago she had returned to her husband. Once, a rich American had come to Ashkelon and she had run after him—literally. They had exchanged a few words while she served him in her husband’s restaurant, then, simple as it sounds, she ran to the kitchen, threw off her apron, and ran after him across the sands through the thin bushes. That is to say, sitting in his hotel room in the town of Ashkelon, he did not yet know that she was pursuing him. Her shoes had filled with sand and she threw them away, she almost did the same with her skirt and lace panties. All these things—shoes, clothes, strange thoughts, the outgrowths of culture—disturbed her in her flight and her green eyes were those of a wildcat in an ancient forest. It was early morning when she arrived at the American’s room. The next day she married him and they left together. After three months she returned. It is not to be supposed that she crossed the sea on her own power, although she was an able swimmer and fully capable of leaving her clothes in a heap near the shore in Naples and swimming to the shores of Israel. How and why they parted was not known.

Anyway, she came back through the sands, without a suitcase and clad in the same dress she had been wearing when she left; she was tired and barefoot. A week ago the exact same thing happened; she came back, disheveled, from a similar adventure, and refused to utter a word. She had to be taught to speak all over again.

That evening, as I have said, she stood near the exit, framed by the large sign, green-eyed, nose tossing, her mouth large and quiet in her white, traveler’s face. The fat doctor looked her over and said: “She is ready for new sands and new dances. That one will never be cured. She’s like a Siamese twin to the whole world. A new American will come, or even a Greek or a Roman, as they used to come here in ancient days, and she will run after him.” The doctor pointed to the Roman’s tomb and fell silent.

One of the officers on the dance floor went out, picked some narcissus flowers, and handed them to her. She said to him: “I know their scent.” He answered: “I do not yet know yours.” She said: “For you it is not worthwhile.” Her husband was not jealous, and he permitted the officer to hand her the flowers. Shemuel had learned not to be jealous. Every day he wrote out the menu on the board in front of which his wife was now standing. He knew what was to be served at the noon meal, and he knew whether there would be a dance for the soldiers in the evening. But he didn’t know if his wife would stay with him.

A dog ran after a moth but failed to trap it. A soldier caught his girl while dancing and lifted her up, swung her about like a young palm branch so that she would bring him a blessing. Shemuel’s wife stood still, as if she were examining cloth in a shop. Her eyes were open. The moth tried to fly into her eyes; she shut her lids. The elderly guests returned to the hotel. The doctor stayed with us. The soldiers returned to camp. No one blew the bugle.

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At breakfast, conversation was lively. Plans for the day were spread out on the tables. Most of the women came down in shorts; the older the woman, the shorter the shorts. After the meal I strolled out toward the bushes, to the site of ancient Ashkelon. I had seen the area by night, surrounded and protected from the three winds by a rampart on which could be seen the remains of walls and towers, and in the West the sea. At night it had looked foreboding and somber, like a snarled entanglement with no exit. So I had decided to explore the area by morning light.

Still, the moment I entered the tangled bushes, my mood became blunt and heavy; I felt threatened. After walking a few hundred yards down the blue road, I reached the edge of the ancient townsite. My feet sank into the flour-like sand. Instantly I found myself in a deserted orange grove. In our country we are used to deserted places, to seeing houses without roofs, windows without houses, bodies without life, blackened plantations, and the remains of cracked roads. But nothing ever nauseated me as much as that orange grove. The dead branches were covered with white snails, the whole grove seemed stricken with leprosy. I stared at the broken aqueducts, partly filled by sand from the sea. Thorns at once beautiful and terrible twined their way to the tops of the branches. There were dark corners among the trees that were too large, too large for their own good: ruined corners that guarded the sterility of their shadows. Green flies buzzed around the sweat on my forehead. I continued walking. Fat fruits dropped from sycamore trees and burst on the ground. Everywhere there was the depressing sensation of sand over dead bodies, of dead bodies over the earth. Sand flies burst in a cloud. The road turned, pathways opened, leading into thickets of tamarisks, pathways at the end of which anything at all might happen. A lair of dark curses in various Mediterranean tongues, the vomit of cultures torn from their homeland and transported here. Now this unholy thicket had all those layers beneath it. Such Mediterranean trickery! Phoenician merchants, Greek merchants, Jewish merchants—striking bargains with heaven and with the dead, bringing the smell of perfume and expensive cloth to the detriment of the native population. It is like this: a skeleton, but not yet a clean skeleton; the odor of a rotting cadaver. I do not mean the odor of the coyotes and wildcats that die night after night in this thicket among the salted branches covered with snails. Such an odor would not nauseate me as did the sweet smell of this skeleton, but not yet a skeleton, of the ancient cultures rotting here in this thicket.

Here, for example, is a sycamore tree, leaning sideways in an unnatural fashion. I know there are trees near the sea and on the slopes that have been bent by the wind, but these sycamores had been permanently twisted by some intrinsic, predetermined corruptness. This landscape had been prostituted, pampered, spoiled. It destroyed its stomach on sweets. It should not pretend now to have a face of white marble, a girl’s face, the tanned face of a soldier. All that is conjuring.

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But I, at least, knew what lay underneath, what nourished the sycamores and the groves, what had really caused the marble pillars to be built. Even those narcissus flowers, so innocent in their whiteness—where did they get that exaggerated scent? It did not come from the sand. Indeed, it is best not to inquire what is in their roots. And those flies of Beelzebub that prey on live bodies and sculptures alike? I speak here of things which have refused to die, that continue an underground existence, beneath the sand and beneath the water, like submerged and incoherent whispers. A landscape that tosses in its bed with wild dreams. And what about that figure of Pan in the Roman’s grave? By what metamorphosis did it arrive on this shore? And Shemuel’s wife—where was she from? How did she escape, running through the sands, through the sea? And her green eyes?

I went on until I reached the small amphitheater where statues and broken mosaic tiles and Greek ledges lay about in disorder. Every historical period had collected in this hole, as in a textbook. The wind rose from the sea and the trees leaned toward the East.

From the amphitheater I took a side trail and walked down past one of the terrible sycamores that bent almost to the earth—that is to say, it was still standing, but in repose. The sycamore was not dead, because the ends of its branches sprouted leaves and sickening, fat fruits. An old, crumbling well-house stood there, with an apparatus made of a double chain and small rectangular scoops for drawing water. I did what every man does when he passes a well: I threw a stone into it, but I heard nothing, neither the sound of water nor the smack of stone on stone. I threw a second stone, but nothing happened. I tried to pull the draw chain. I bent over and suddenly I felt myself covered with a cold sweat. I turned around.

Shemuel’s wife was sitting on the trunk of the sycamore, swinging. She bared her teeth:

Such a one as you are then, a snooper.

Where do you know me from?

You—don’t you live in the hotel?

Yes . . . but you . . .

Yesterday you were sitting with the fat doctor. He is also my doctor. How funny he is. When he examined me after I came back he wanted to kiss me. He’s the same size as the Roman merchant buried in the sands.

What do you know about the merchant?

And what are you looking for underneath this town?

I’m not looking for anything.

All that time she was sitting swinging on that evil tree. Then she asked me:

Have you been to the ancient harbor already?

Again she bared her teeth, then jumped off the tree in a bound and disappeared down one of the trails, parting the bushes with her hands to work her way through. The bushes sprang back after she passed. I was still standing near the old well. Nothing had changed here, I saw. This landscape was no more strange and terrible today than it was a week ago, years ago, millennia ago. Shemuel’s wife could as easily have sat in the private amphitheater watching two wrestlers as she stood last night on the dance floor, watching the soldiers. I can imagine one of the wrestlers felling his opponent, then kneeling over him, gripping him with tong-like thighs while looking up at her for further instructions. She sticks to character: “Continue to the death!” The results are known. One of the two, the one lying upon the ground, grapples the other’s chest with such force that a jet of blood breaks from his nostrils. The results are well known, known to this landscape, to the sycamore, to the marble, and to the wife of Shemuel, who pretends.

I went on to the harbor and stood on the hill where the pillars faced the sea and there were no ships. In the distance I saw the beach. A whitened skeleton of a cat lay in the deep grass. Near it was a yellow paper and empty cans. I saw that I was standing above some Arab houses. Suddenly I heard a voice calling me; it was the masculine woman from the hotel. All this time I had tried to avoid her, but now I was happy to see her waving to me from the trail. At once the spell vanished. Together we climbed the sand ramparts above which stood the remnants of an ancient wall. She said: “I saw Shemuel’s wife, the one from last night. She’s a whore. Do you like her?” As she said this she poked me in the chest with her fist and laughed in a coarse, masculine manner. “When I was young, the men looked for sporty girls. I was good at winter sports. I caught my husband on a steep slope in the Alps. What do young men look for today? Fluttering, spoiled, green-eyed elastic-limbed females like Shemuel’s wife.”

In the midst of this onesided conversation we reached the orange groves at the entrance to the ancient town. I discovered that many of the trees bore green fruit. It was the end of summer and yet the fruit had not ripened. On a single, broken branch, two oranges were yellowing in sterile, premature ripeness.

Before arriving at the hotel I took leave of my sportive companion, and was again rewarded with a punch that shook me to my bones. I went down to the sea. This time the beach was empty. I had not realized that I had spent almost a whole day on the site of ancient Ashkelon. A blackbird perched on a pillar that had once been consecrated to the gods. Two girls rolled in the sand and shouted. The sea left lines in the sand, but it was impossible to read the future in the palm of this shore. I ran after a crab that was sparkling with a strange silver color, but the silver—a tiny fish, the crab’s prey—disappeared. The tamarisks finished their preparations for the night. The sun began to descend into the sea. When I returned to the hotel I was once more surprised by the amount of time that had passed.

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After supper, the red-faced hotel keeper donned a white hat and apron. With a huge fork in his hand, he entered the reading room: “Be ready to go down to the sea.” Two cooks were kept busy transporting a large stove to the beach; one of the young hotel maids adorned her neck with chains of red sausages, the way daughters of the Hawaiian Islands decorate themselves with flower chains. A merry procession then made its way to the sands. The young married couple preferred not to join us, but remained seated in the reading room. They had not yet acquired an apartment, and they wanted to make believe they owned the hotel.

The landlord and the masculine woman did most of the talking. It did their hearts good to be on the beach, so they began singing, first a Hebrew song, then German hiking songs. The landlord’s white hat served to illuminate the way for us. The sea was lazy that night and the moon had not yet come up. The cooks placed the stove on the sand and began stoking it with charcoal. Everyone was enchanted with the blaze, especially those who were close to the stove. Behind us dozed the somber mass of ancient Ashkelon. I did not sit close to the fire. We finished eating the sausages. Then came watermelon, and after the watermelon there were party games. One or two people would leave the group, the rest sat around in a circle, whispering. Then the people who left were called back; they were supposed to guess the plans of those who were sitting in the circle. Later, someone brought out a drum and a harmonica and everyone became sad. Still later they started dancing.

“Let’s dance barefoot!” The hotel owner began to worry about the good name of his hotel, and about the welfare of the stove. He told the cooks to take the stove back to the hotel. Some people came from Shemuel’s cafe—a few officers, some girl soldiers, the doctor and his quiet wife, and also Shemuel and his wife. At first they participated in the dancing and singing, then they split into separate groups. Suddenly, Shemuel’s wife got up and ran in the direction of the waves. She left her shoes near me. The doctor said: “It is nothing. That is always her custom. It is a sort of courtesy visit she pays to the sea.”

After a few minutes she came back, all wild and untidy and strange, the hems of her dress wet like lips after drinking. She caught up the hem of her dress and squeezed water out of it and bared her teeth in my face like a terrible biting animal. I saw that her watch had gotten wet. She took off her watch and held it between her teeth.

I told her: “Your watch got wet.”

She took her watch out of her mouth and put it next to my ear. Then she walked away. From walking she switched to jumping and from jumping to high, wonderful dance steps near the sea. When she returned, she said to me, “This is a mitzvah dance.”

I said: “What’s possessed you, Penina?”

She laughed and said: “My name is not Penina. They call me Nina.”

“A nice name that is.”

“That isn’t the entire name. They call me Nina the Seagull.”

Her voice was hoarse, as if lined with salt and seaweed. Shemuel approached and said:

Here is a crate brought here by the sea. Once the sea brought a crate full of sardines. Once it brought a young dead whale. The sea brings many strange things. It brings things to my wife too. Sometimes in the morning I see strange objects lying near her sleeping body, like branches, like snails, like objects from an ancient ship that foundered on the rocks. Maybe you could tell me what to do about her?

Get her pregnant.

Shemuel laughed, and sighed, and then became silent. Later, one of the officers suggested playing tag near the sea. I remained sitting with Shemuel, who was slow. The doctor took part in the game, then he joined us. Because of his fat belly he couldn’t keep running very long. Shemuel stopped talking when the doctor approached. Suddenly we heard screams and laughter and before I knew what had happened Nina jumped up and hid behind me. A young officer passed by us, running in great strides; he didn’t realize that she was hiding. Nina’s heart was beating hard.

The moon began to rise. Everybody put on bathing suits and went into the sea. Nina’s voice was hoarse. All that she had left behind in the world was her little bundle of clothes on the wide sands. The doctor said: “After all, God himself is like that. He is far away from us, and all He left behind is a little pack of clothes on the vast sand, and to us that seems God.” Nina screamed from the sea. I rose in alarm, but the doctor calmed me: “That is her custom. Don’t be alarmed.” I left the doctor and Shemuel and God and Nina’s parcel of clothes and joined another group. The masculine woman was among them, demonstrating such heroic feats as running fast, lifting rocks, and other manly deeds. The soldiers stood around her. Some tried to race with her, but she always won. When I approached she shouted: “Come, come!”

Afterward they brought drinks and we drank and the night never became cold. They made a fire in the sand out of old crates. I heard a whisper, a moan: “Get me out! Get me out!” Nobody heard it but me. I went in the direction of the voice. Nina was buried up to her hips in the sand, like a statue found on the beach, laughing. I uncovered her.

“Why don’t you ask me? Sometimes intelligent people and artists come from the city and they are glad to find an interesting type like me.”

“If I asked, you would lie to me anyway.”

“But that, too, is a truth.”

“I was convinced you had a fish-tail like the daughters of the sea.”

“Come with me to the hotel bar,” Nina said.

I agreed; we went up to the hotel in our bathing suits. In came the suntanned Roman merchant and sat with us at the bar. There was no bartender because the hour was late. I went behind the bar and served them. The Roman looked in my direction and said: “Who is he?”

Nina said: “He’s mine. I caught him in the sea.”

The merchant looked at me from under his short, curly hair and said: “He is good for the big games in the arena.” They both laughed until I fell asleep.

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I woke up as the first morning chill penetrated the room. I heard a car stop; a man jumped out and called for the cafe owner. I came out wearing pajamas. The man seemed to have come from afar; he asked me: “Are you the cafe owner?” I explained that I was not the cafe owner and that this was a hotel. I could not see clearly in the early dawn.

He said: “Never mind. Come quick!”

I climbed into his car and we drove the length of the shore road in the direction of the dunes. He stopped the car in the high grass, jumped out and ran toward the sea. A woman was lying under a rough army blanket. I was alarmed.

“Don’t be afraid,” my companion said. Angrily, he pulled the blanket from the figure. The woman was nude. She woke up instantly. It was Nina.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Are you a worrier too? Enough people worry about me.”

I told her: “Come back with me to your home.”

She laughed: “I have no clothes. He took my clothes as a pawn.”

I advised her to cover herself with the blanket. The man who drove me out said: “The blanket is mine. I was passing by and saw a woman lying nude on the sand by the first light of dawn, and I covered her.” Finally he agreed to drive us home. On the way she cried on my shoulder.

Shemuel was waiting at the gate of his house. All that day Nina didn’t show up at the beach. I sat in the sand by myself and felt the first winds of autumn. Many of the awnings that had been spread against the summer sun were now torn. Papers were flying about or lay on the beach, covered with sand. A group of soldiers, boys and girls, arranged themselves to be photographed, then rearranged themselves after each snapshot. The ones who were standing lay down, a boy put his hand on a girl’s shoulder, they posed in profile, then in groups of two and five, and then they all lay down as if dead. The two girls I had seen earlier rolling in the sand came over. They were still laughing and rolling. One of them wore a red bathing suit and her face was loud with pleasure. Everyone cleared a passage for them and they rolled on by us. The place where we had sat the night before was already covered with new sand. The old people sat in red lounge chairs and looked at the sea and waited in silence for death—hoping that death, too, would come to them in silence. Where do they derive their certainty that death will come from the West?

Near the lifeguard’s tower a crowd had gathered. Two women undressed underneath a towel, twisting like snakes so as not to reveal their bodies. The lifeguard’s skin was covered with tattoos and drawings of daughters of the sea, flowers, and an anchor in deep grass. People dragged up lounge chairs. A woman came out dressed in a white apron embroidered with the Star of David. She turned to me: “Do you see that blanket? The gray one?”

“Yes, I see it.”

“Yesterday it was used to cover a dead man who had drowned.”

A girl walked by, arm-in-arm with a young man. The camera hanging on his bare chest was like a third eye. They chatted together, then the girl began to leap in happy dancing steps. She ran up to a sandstone boulder, leaned against it with her hands folded behind her back, her face to the sea. There she stood like Andromeda in the Greek legend, waiting for her savior. She wore a helpless smile. The lifeguard, big and husky, walked toward her with a camera in his hands. She stood against the rock; there was no place for her to hide. He came closer, raised a hand as if to hold up a sword, counted aloud, one, two, three, and the girl, saved, jumped against him. But he was too busy turning knobs keeping the pictures in order.

Later, the afternoon games began. Mothers called their children. All the gods in heaven and on earth called their prophets, who began to prophesy without pity, near the terrible woods and the sea. Toward nightfall, everything awoke, and the foreign sea gurgled in small waves toward the beach. People shook the sand from their bodies as if preparing for the resurrection. Some of them walked over to the concrete breakwater where they sat emptying the sand from their sandals and stockings and hair. They were all in a hurry to forget the sea. The shoreline, too, was in a hurry, and raced to join the sea and the sandstone wall at the horizon. I knew it was a false joining, a play of perspective. Everything was an illusion of the eyes. The children’s cries, too, joined the great silence on the horizon. And everything covered itself with the somber soft grass of night. The sea’s thoughts were dry and empty like darkening ears of corn thrown onto the sand. Everything was burnt.

I lay for a short while longer in the sand, watching the feet of those returning home. Then I too returned to the hotel, where I saw Nina sitting on the terrace. Her limbs were elastic and brown from a surfeit of sun. She was wearing red shorts that were so tight I could see the crease of her buttocks. I sat next to her, behind a bush that had provided a screen for us. She rested her feet on the railing, lifting her legs until they looked like a gate, like wings. Then she laughed: “This morning you were quite alarmed—this morning when he awakened you and you found me lying among the weeds at dawn.”

We watched a procession of black ants traverse the terrace floor. Nina put on her glasses and took a letter out of her purse. I asked if it was from an admirer. She said she had no admirer because one did not admire her but became crazy about her. Did it please her to have men become crazed at the sight of her face? Why not? Why, then, did she, too, become crazed when she lay out on the sands covered by a strange blanket? She was infected by the craziness of the crazed. There was nothing left for me to say to her. Nina took out her hairpins, letting her hair fall. Her hair flowed down to her waist, to her hips. And my thoughts at that instant were unknit and wild.

In the evening I took leave from Shemuel, her good husband. The next day I was to return to my town. Shemuel received me by himself. We talked about all the subjects in the world but Nina. Each time we felt the conversation coming around to Nina I led him around the subject without fail. Later, I got up to say goodbye. The bedroom door was open and I saw Nina lying in bed. One of her eyes was hidden by the pillow. The second was awake and open. For me, it will never close.

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The next day I returned home and right away started work and forgot everything. My profession is to forget; my destination is to remember. One evening I forgot to shut off the radio after the news broadcast. I went to shut it off when they began to announce that the Israeli police were asking for the public’s help to locate a certain Nina. They mentioned her family name. Last seen wearing a striped white skirt and a white blouse with rolled sleeves. I returned to my guests and remained silent. How had I seen her last? Dressed in short red pants and with her hair loose. We sat up until midnight and talked about the announcements that are made to the public concerning missing persons. One of my guests said that it was all exaggerated. No sooner does someone go to visit his friends than everybody gets alarmed and announces on the radio that he is lost. Many people get lost in the world. Some of them are announced, some not. I told my guests that in Nina’s case it was very serious and that I knew her. At midnight I suddenly heard voices coming from one of the houses nearby. A woman was screaming through her tears: “Go away! Leave me alone, you bastard!” I stood near the window. I saw nothing and then the voices stopped. A train whistled as it passed through the valley. It seemed to me that I had heard Nina’s voice. Maybe she needed help. Maybe she was hiding in one of the houses in the neighborhood. The suntanned Roman, who once sat with us at the bar, must have kidnapped her. Maybe they were still hiding around Ashkelon, in the white sands, among the statues.

The following day there was another call for help on the radio. But in this broadcast Nina was described as wearing red pants and with her hair wild. They also announced the languages she knew, and some of the special habits she had, like pulling up her knees, and such personal characteristics as the smile in her eyes. I remembered her with one eye hidden in the pillow and one eye awake and staring. Poor Nina—she must certainly be very tired, wandering through the world with a Roman who wore the uniform of a UN officer. I was sure that he would treat her rudely whenever she became tired or asked for a few minutes’ rest by the side of the blue road.

And so the two of them wandered about, hiding from time to time in various places. Once they hid at the house of her girlfriend, who was an expert manicurist. In the same building there was a movie theater, and her friend’s apartment adjoined the projection booth and loudspeakers. The soundtrack could be heard on the staircase. I came in haste but Nina was not there. Her friend asked me if I wanted a manicure.

Then they hid in the Caves of the Judges in Sanhedria. Nina sat, her head leaning on his chest; she was pulling and tearing at the hair on his bare chest. Near them was a radio in a small suitcase. To the police description of Nina the Roman added his own: her breasts are brown and small, her thighs are fast and never rest.

On the next news bulletin they again detailed the languages Nina knew. All the Mediterranean tongues: a little bit of Greek and a little Italian and Spanish and Hebrew and a bit of Arabic.

One night, walking along the street, I saw a display window that was still lit. It belonged to a dress shop. One of the big mannequins in the window moved and I saw that it was Nina. Quickly she came out to me and said, “Be quiet, be quiet, don’t say a thing.” Also, she said that it had become impossible for her to imagine his hands without his voice, nor his eyes without his blood, and at last she said: “I am happy in my wanderings. Don’t reveal anything to anyone, otherwise I will die.”

I told her: “All this will end in a terrible fall, like the fall of the sycamore fruits.”

They began to change their clothing from time to time to avoid being recognized. The radio description no longer corresponded to the real Nina. Yet, if they had known her true description and had searched with true love they would have found them easily. After a while the broadcasts stopped and the police began looking for other people: lunatics who had escaped from asylums, children who had run away from home. One evening, as I was on my way home, I was reminded of a letter that had been lying in my inside pocket. In the street the children were throwing stones at the metal telephone poles, and the poles rang out with each hit. Sometimes a little piece of paper in your pocket becomes more important than all the stones and metal and houses in the outside world. I opened the letter and knew where they were. They had reached the ruined crusader’s castle that is near Jerusalem and is called Aqua Bella.

I went there alone. Near the road lay the charred trunk of an olive tree, and near the tree grew five red poppies. I reached the fountains near the ruin. The two of them were sitting under a tall oak tree. Their sandals lay nearby and their belts were loose—a sign that they intended to remain here for awhile. I looked into their eyes with an inquisitorial gaze. First I spoke to him alone near one of the thick roots, but he didn’t listen to me. His hair was smooth and had been greased with shiny oil. My words did not stay with him. Nina’s hair was loose; dry oak leaves and flying thorn seeds clung to it. Her hair was open, and my words clung to her heart. I sat opposite her in the arch of the ruined window over the fountain. Nina didn’t look too happy. Vagabonding was not good for her. Her eyes were too wide. She had not slept. Questions and replies played about her eyes and mouth and ears and in her anxious sleep; there were few answers in her mouth. The night came and devoured us like the wolf in the fairy tale.

The next day Nina returned to her husband Shemuel. Shemuel wrote me that she had returned, that one morning she was standing in front of his door, that he had bathed her and put her to bed and that she slept fourteen full hours. I wanted to write him that he must leave Ashkelon because it was a bad place for both of them. Once, as I rode in a darkened bus, I thought I heard Nina’s voice. I turned around and no one was there, but it seemed to me that I caught a glimpse of her bright dress and of a white strap shining over her collarbone. Maybe her dress had fallen down over her shoulder, revealing the straps of her brassiere.

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Autumn arrived soon after and the clock had to be turned back an hour. All my friends looked forward to the night when they would win a free hour of anarchy, an extra hour of life. For some reason I was afraid of that hour as of an unhealthy growth on the body—a terrible hour of luxury, of Ashkelon. I awoke a bit before the moment when the clock was to be set back. I stood next to the window. Cries for help filled the vacuum of the night, like distress signals from ships at sea. I rolled up my thoughts as if to put them in an empty bottle and set them loose on the wide sea.

At that hour there came a knock on Nina’s window. The Roman stood outside, white, smooth, and wonderful like the statue of a god. She followed him to that terrible thicket. There they sat on the trunk of that bent sycamore. Then he drew her with his kisses toward the deserted well house, where the draw chain hung deep into the abyss. She guessed his intention and began to struggle. But he, who had been trained to wrestle from his youth and was nude and greased with wrestler’s oil, only laughed. He lifted her and her arms flew upward, as in the ancient sculptures depicting the rape of helpless women. Then he dropped her into the abyss.

The extra hour passed and I closed the window. Next day the radio again began to request help in finding Nina. She had last been seen wearing a white nightgown in the manner of a Greek goddess. After a few days these broadcasts stopped too.

I forgot Nina. But sometimes, I remember her well. First I see her head, then her whole body, her elastic, brown Mediterranean body. They say that sailors first discovered the world was round when they noticed that only the top of a mountain was visible from afar at sea, but that as they approached land, the entire mountain loomed into view. So does Nina rise in the horizon of my memory. First her head, then her entire body. Then I know, like those sailors, that my life too never rests, but revolves and revolves without end.

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Coming in Commentary…

“Liberal Anti-Communism Revisited,” a symposium with the following participants:

Lionel Abel / David T. Bazelon / Daniel Bell / Lewis A. Coser / Robert Gorham Davis / Leslie A. Fiedler / Nathan Glazer / Paul Goodman / Elizabeth Hardwick / Michael Harrington / Sidney Hook / Irving Howe / Alfred Kazin / Murray Kempton / Robert Lowell / Dwight Macdonald / William Phillips / Robert Pickus / Philip Rahv / Harold Rosenberg / Richard H. Rovere / Meyer Schapiro / Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. / Ignazio Silone / Stephen Spender / Diana Trilling / Lionel Trilling / Dennis H. Wrong

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