B002FB6BZK EBOK Read Online Free PDF Page A

office and a woman passed by him,
bumped into him, hiccuped, and Boaz laughed. She had cruel small teeth,
she dropped a hat, and when she picked it up she opened her purse, took
out powder, and smeared it on her cheeks and then in the light of the
streetlamp she smeared lipstick on her lips. Since he was stuck to the corner, he could see her gaping mouth, her squinting eyes, her teeth with a
little bit of lipstick stuck to them, and then she blotted the lipstick with
a handkerchief. Boaz tried to remember the dead, recalled that Menahem
Henkin lay next to him, but was dead and his blood stuck to him, so Boaz
wanted to break a clothes hanger because Menahem Henkin used to break
hangers in his childhood, Menahem Henken told Boaz.
    Then he went to see the second show of a film whose name he forgot,
and felt as if he had come to the end of the road and where would he escape now, and then the strange event happened to him that I'm telling
about in these tapes. Boaz stood at the kiosk and tried to read the head line of the evening paper and very close to the counter, next to a hurricane
lamp, stood a young man Boaz was sure came out of the battle the man in
the cafe had told him about. His head was wreathed with a halo of light and
his face looked like the face of Boaz that the man had told him about. The
kiosk owner said to the young man: So from the ship you were sent straight
to the war? And the young man said, No, first I was in the port of Haifa.
And the young man was so familiar, when Boaz looked at his arm in the light
of the hurricane lamp and saw that it moved from his own shoulder. The
young man finished drinking and now hid the newspaper headline from Boaz
and over his head hung an ad for Nesher beer. Boaz thought, The betrayals will end for a while, so he also understood that no envy would save
him but he knew that signals were sent to him from the depths of the
war he had fought in, or that that young man had fought in for him. Headlights flashed and there were still many painted streetlamps from the war
and the lights seemed to be caressing the gloom. Thoughts that didn't
come from a certain place stuck in his mind and a bird built itself a nest on
the roof of the kiosk. The man said: That's a honeysucker, so small, every
year he comes and makes his nest on the roof. And the young man asked
if that tiny sucker could be the same bird and Boaz who knew the answer
from childhood, couldn't have spoken, stood on the side, darkened, terrified, the back of the young man's neck filled him with longings for Minna's
finger dripping blood and he tried to remember when he had bought her
the ring in Hepzibah where Grandmother thought he was stealing pens
and erasers, but he couldn't recall. When the young man moved a shadow
seemed to shift or a curtain to be pulled. The kiosk was gaping like a
wound. A caprice of chiaroscuro made the young man look as if he were
going away into a halo of light, but it was only outlines of non-body.

    A man chewing sesame and drinking soda held a fragrant wormwood leaf
between his fingers and the smell was tormenting and sweet. The desert
wildness in the city street was sudden and assuaged some pain that gnawed
in him. The man paid and the young man started walking and Boaz found
himself hopping behind him, he was hopping because now he had a pain
in his foot, wanted to stop, settle things, but he followed the young man
like a blind man. And then he said: That young man took off Minna's ring,
loves blood, is disguised as a crow. They eat sesame seeds in Tel Aviv with
desert wormwood. I'm walking behind a yell that came from inside me, he said to himself, but what's happening to me, what am I, a car thief, a warmonger, that silence will drive me out of my mind: the young man turned
into a dark street and went off toward a house with a thick tree sprouting
from it. The tree was dead but the house around the tree wasn't destroyed.
The crest of the tree