I knew that Hertz and his wife could not possibly be home at this hour. I even had a note ready in my purse: “Came by but found you were out. So sorry. Shoshana”. It was a good thing, for it could save me from paying a dreary duty call to this house for another six months at least. I had no choice but to finally go visit with these people, who would invite me over with a kind of bothersome tenacity whenever we’d meet in the street, whence again and again I would recuse myself with an habitual “Sure, sure, I will gladly drop by”, wearing that exultant politeness that is wiped off of your face the moment you turn away. The tenuous youthful connection that had endured so many years ago between Yechezkel and Chana Hertz and myself had long since been cut and consigned to oblivion; and what little grace they had possessed while their ignorance was innocent and passionate had expired and transformed into smug complacency, not uncommon among the more fortunate petits bourgeois.

Dutybound, then, I climbed the stairs up to the third floor and rang the doorbell. To my great surprise the ringing was immediately answered by the sound of footsteps. Presently through the small peephole there appeared an eye, which, as far as I could see, was gray. A pause followed, as of held breath, and then the lock squeaked and the door opened, and I entered a hallway and stood facing an image out of a confused dream, facing my past which sank away fourteen years ago, the ghostly scent of my first love, made flesh.

I recognized Binyamin right away, despite this face of his, which had grown old and spare, and had hardened as well, despite his hair, which now was white as snow. There was no question who was standing before me. But this very certainty was, in a sense, reality. So I did not even cry out in shock, or call his name, or say anything; it felt as if the air would not convey my voice. We just stood opposite each other for two impossibly long seconds and were silent.

He spoke first. His voice was choked and thick, unlike the voice that I had once known and loved. He said:

“Hertz and Chana aren’t home. They’ve gone to Haifa for a few days”.

I drew breath then and my lips babbled:

“Ben, are they out?…”

His face stirred in a nervous, unfamiliar gesture. He said:

“I knew that you were here. And I met you once before in the street. But you didn’t recognize me”.

“This can’t be”, I said, “Ben, I’d always recognize you, anywhere”.

A glimmer flashed in his eyes. He spoke in a different voice now, the one I had known.

“Yes, maybe. It was evening. And I turned my head… After all, I know and remember what I did to you. And perhaps you wouldn’t want –”

“Oh, what are you talking about, Ben! What are you talking about!” – I said. And I admit that when I opened my mouth to answer, my response was hollow, but once repeated I knew that it was true: all the insults of old were null and void, and I wanted nothing but to be near him again.

And upon hearing my response his face softened, and his eyes caught mine for a moment. By and by our arms were wrapping around each other’s neck and our lips were pressing together in a long and breathless kiss, until no space was left between our mouths to account for that fourteen-year barrier. And when, winded, I withdrew my lips from his, he started kissing, as in the old days, my eyes and my earlobes and the hair on my temples.

Then he pulled me after him and said:

“Come, Shana”, and I rejoiced to hear my name spoken as he would say it then.

A moment later we were in Hertz and his wife’s bedroom. And we were embraced and entangled in that sort of embrace and entanglement of bodies, where one cannot tell whose heartbeat one hears, and it feels as if the briefest parting might rip your heart out of your chest.

And I, in his arms, felt the ardor of the animated body of a man whom five years since I have thought dead, and myself full of animated love, twelve years since I thought I had buried it.

We neither asked nor told each other anything, merely uttering disjointedly those words that are saved for when two people are pleasurably met. Words as beautiful as stars, those stars that snuff out when harsh daylight breaks, bearing its white logic.

Over and over again he repeated my name in my ear, a name so infrequently spoken in the old days when we were together; and the name was a recompense to me, a joy, a delight, it was rich, meaningful, special, his, my own.

Over and over he said:

“Shana, Shana, Shana”.

Then, when with riven breaths and joyous bodies we lay side by side, we started asking in between silences:

“Tell me, Ben”. “Now, tell me, Shana”.

But in that moment of convergence of beginning and end, we knew not how to start, and told nothing.

Till I said:

“How is it that you’re here?”

He looked at me and said nothing.

“No, I didn’t mean – in Israel. Here: at the Hertzs’?”

“Why, Chana is my cousin”, he said.

“Oh, right, I forgot… Have I grown very old, Ben?”

He stroked my back and whispered in my ear: “Shana”.

Never in my life did I feel as beautiful as in that moment.

“And all that happened – was it very difficult?” I said.

“Don’t ask. See here?” – he pointed to his right side, where in the dim lamplight I saw red and white streaks.

“These are the marks of their bludgeons, from the camp. They will not fade”.

I rose up a little, bent over his side and kissed those horrible streaks, as though trying to kiss away the frightful years he had suffered, and he caressed my head with his hand. And when I lifted my head, I saw the number on his arm, and I kissed the number as well.

“All this time I’ve been waiting for you”, I said. And indeed when saying this it really seemed to me as if those fourteen years of life that separated us, years of sorrow and satisfaction, years of love and disappointment, years of grief and merriment, of focus and woolgathering, years filled with turmoil and change, those persistent companions of human life, were nothing to me but one long anticipation of this moment, of this meeting.

But he did not reply, and suddenly turned away from me, and opened a space between our bodies, and I saw his face harden again, but he covered it with his hands, uttering something between a moan and choked laughter.

“Oh my God, oh my God, Shana!” he said from behind his hands. “I forgot everything. I never meant, I really never meant to do this despicable thing to you… Oh my God”.

Fear suddenly washed over me, and I started to sober out of my happy intoxication.

“Your wife?” I whispered a question.

With his hands still covering his face, he shook his head.

“She perished in the first roundup”.

He said it the way they often say such things, stating facts with that callous mien that erects a wall between man and the terror that echoes not in the world of the living.

And I, sitting already, my toes groping the floor for my sandals, suddenly felt such horrible guilt towards this woman, who in life I had so hated; a woman who had cunning and malice and wickedness, who in her intrigue had destroyed my happiness and had married Binyamin though she did not love him, and then boasted of it publicly. And now she was dead and I was sitting here beside him, and I, I, who was saved, as if at her expense was saved. Still – I knew that I was with him, that I should be comforting him, but I could not speak. Only my hand reached out to him to convey it all through touch. But his flesh would not respond to my touch, and my hand dropped. Then he said:

“Not this one. Not this one. Later. Right after Liberation I married again. You all cannot understand. We were lonely. We could not bear this loneliness. She was a girl whose entire family was murdered, not a single one survived. Young and helpless. Why weren’t you there then?” – he scolded me suddenly. Then spoke dryly again. “She is a very decent woman. I mean, she really is a very decent woman, and she has no one but me”.

“And now?” I said so as to get him to finish. I still had, perhaps, a glimmer of hope.

“Now”, he said, “she is with Hertz and Chana in Haifa. She went looking for some place for us to live”.

I said nothing. I bent down and put on my shoes. My eyes were dry, and so were my tongue and my mouth.

He rose up himself, and started putting on his clothes.

“I, really – ” he tried to say something else, but felt that it was pointless, for it would make no difference.

At the doorway he made as if to walk me home, but I shook my head. And I had almost shut the door when I suddenly recalled the note that I had prepared in my purse. I took it out and handed it to him and asked him to give it to Hertz and his wife, and tell them that he had found it under the door.

 

1949