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flicker with the glimmer of a will-o'-the-wisp . Your demented fury ,
whether I was obedient or not, whether I seemed to you sick with
desire or whether I seemed indifferent, whether I described what had
been done to me or stayed stubbornly silent. You would disappear
from home for days and nights on end, shut yourself up in that hole–
in-the-wall you rented near the Russian Compound, conquering
your doctorate as though taking enemy fortifications by storm; and
without warning you used to descend on me at eight o'clock in the
morning or three in the afternoon , lock Boaz in his room, extract a
detailed confession from me, and exhaust in me the torrent of your
lust. Then began the suicides, with tablets and with gas . And your
alliance with Zakheim and your savage war against your father and
the accursed house in Yefe Nof. Our tropical hell. A parade of dirty
towels . Stinking socks of grinning belching men. The reek of garlic
and radishes and shish kebab. Hiccoughs from Coca-Cola or beer.
Choking on cheap cigarettes. Sourness of sticky lustful male sweat.
Their trousers lowered to their ankles, not troubling to take off their
shirts; some were even too slovenly to remove their shoes. Their
dribble on my shoulders.
In
my hair. Spunk stains on my sheets .
Murmured obscenities and hoarse lascivious whispers . Their lecher–
ous, meaningless endearments . And afterward, the ludicrous search
for their underwear, lost in the bedding. The jocular arrogance that
descended upon them once their desire was satisfied . The absent–
minded yawns. The invariable glance at their watches. Crushing me
as though in me they were vanquishing the whole female sex. Like
avengers . Or as though they were scoring points on some masculine
league table. Or clocking engine hours. Only very rarely there came
a stranger who tried to listen to my body and produce a tune. Or a
youth who managed to make me feel a fleeting compassion beyond
my lasting disgust. And you with your tide of desperate hatred. Un–
til I became repugnant to myself and to you and you divorced me .
At the bottom of my make-up drawer I keep a note in your hand–
writing . Zakheim handed it to me the day of our decree, when the
court declared that henceforth we had no claims on one another.
You had written down four lines for me from a poem by Alterman:
"You are the sadness of my balding head. / The melancholy of my
aging claws: / You'll hear me in the plaster of your walls, / And in
the nightly creaking of your floors. "
That is what you wrote in the courthouse, and sent to me via
Zakheim. You did not add a word of your own . For seven whole
years . Why have you returned now like a phantom to the window of
