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PARTISAN REVIEW
that the three days I'd stayed with her hadn't set her back more than a
hundred. So what, I said, you've earned the rest from me honestly, you
can use it to buy a television, call it a present from me, if you start
watching a bit in the evenings you might learn some Spanish at last. Noa
said, I'm all for a television, but they start at six hundred here and I can't
make up the difference. I liked that. And I liked the way she could tum
her back on me for a couple of hours, immune to
all
pleas and blandish–
ments, concentrating on marking some tests that she'd promised to hand
back the next morning. Even when we only had one evening together.
Once she looked up suddenly from her marking and said in a concen–
trated way, without a smile: You're a man who likes summing up. Don't
sum me up just yet.
In April we both fell sick, me first, with relapsing fever. We must
have picked up a tick or a louse on one of our Sunday outings. She put
me to bed in a sort of flannel prison nightshirt, with a blue wollen turban
on my head like an Indian baby's that covered my forehead and my ears,
covered me with four blankets, half-drowned me with a boiling-hot in–
fusion of cactuses that her mad aunt had taught her to make, took several
days off work in the Israeli class and the Embassy to nurse me and, wrap–
ping herself in a thick brown grandmotherly dressing gown, she sat next
to me and told me in a soft, soporific voice
all
about her father the para–
lyzed boxer and her Tolstoyan aunt and Yoshku the born-again Jew and
some clown of a peeping tom by the name of Golovoy or Gorovoy. The
story got more and more complicated and more and more misty until I
fell asleep, and I slept for three days and woke cured and cancelled my
flight to Veracruz because Noa herself fell sick. She was a demanding
in–
valid. She wrapped her two fists in my hands and wouldn't let me open
them for several hours, it was the only way she could keep warm, despite
the four blankets and leather jacket that I wrapped tightly round her legs
and zipped up. By the time we had recovered there was such a deep in–
timacy between us that Noa commissioned me to buy her some German
cream for a vaginal inflammation in a pharmacy in Mexico City.
At Easter I took her for a weekend to see the place where they were
building a new town with a ring of six modem villages round it, all ac–
cording to my plans,
all
in the first phases of construction in the southern
state of Tabasco. Noa said: it's spectacular; no it's not, it's human - if only
they'd realize back home that its possible to build like this before it's too
late. I said: Maybe in Israel they don't need to build like this, they cer–
tainly don't need to build the kind of barracks they build there. In Israel
the horizon is different. At least, it used to be. Incidentally, what makes
you think that spectacular is the opposite of human?
