500
PARTISAN REVIEW
On fine Saturdays I sometimes wake her at half past six in the morn–
ing, we get dressed and have a coffee, then put on trainers and set off to
find out what's new in the desert, walking down one wadi for a couple of
hours and coming back up by another one. Once home we munch
something from the fridge without bothering to sit down, then go back
to sleep till the afternoon, when she likes to sit at the kitchen table, re–
mote, bent forward, concentrating, planning a lesson or marking, while I
sit and watch the red pen trembling between her fingers that have aged
prematurely as though betraying her youthful body. One day I'll surprise
her and buy her a little desk that can stand in the corner of her bedroom.
Meanwhile I put it off so as to be able to watch her sitting at the kitchen
table. While she finishes her marking I get some food together for us and
switch on the TV and we sit and watch the Saturday afternoon French
film. On Saturday evenings we sometimes go out to a cafe or to the Paris.
We stroll in the evening air for another half an hour in the square. Then
we go home and listen to some quiet music sitting at the kitchen table.
The next day another week begins here. Seven years have gone by like
this, carefully avoiding the troupe of strolling players repeating, as if they
were accursed, their old passion play: wandering, suffering, perdition.
Until a weird pupil of hers died, in an accident when he was drugged, or
it may have been suicide, there's no way of telling, and instead of editing
a memorial volume, she agreed to help set up a rehabilitation clinic in his
memory. The father of the boy has promised a financial donation, and for
some reason I can't fathom decided to pick on her to run a sort of board
of trustees. What does Noa know of committees and trusteeship, it's
bound to lead to disappointment and embarrassment that I'd have liked to
spare her, only I've no idea how. At first I tried to warn her off gently,
and she responded with a sarcastic anger that I didn't know she had in
her. Then I tried to help with various simple suggestions and was met
with her cutting resentment. She did agree in an absent-minded way to
accept a loan from me, without seeing that as a shackle or a trap.
The only way I can help her is by avoiding any attempt to help. I
have to hold back, as if to diminish a pain by regulating my breathing -
and that I have no difficulty doing. Her strange project is becoming pre–
cious to her, "the gleam in your eye" as Shlomo Benizri says. As though
she had got herself a lover.
What about me? I followed her here, to her world's end, because I
only wanted to be with her. Instead of the peace of the desert, all I have
now is a sense of approaching danger. Which I can't prevent because I
have no idea which direction it's coming from. Once, before all this, in
the army, I volunteered to serve for six months in a small reconnaissance
task-force in the desert, dashing around the Ramon Mountains in a cou-
