Read Online B002FB6BZK EBOK by Yoram Kaniuk - Free Book Online Page A

Giladis stopped coming and if they did come they felt uncomfortable and
fled, and so ties slackened and we were also cut off from other people we
knew and new ties were made that were essential, at least to me, and even
Amihud stopped coming and I dimly remember that he invited me to his
wedding or maybe some other event, and I couldn't go and then we didn't
see each other anymore and now I discover that they're not here anymore
and I didn't notice that they had moved. And I thought, funny how people
cut themselves off. The place took on a new form. The gardens I had de stroyed in my mourning, the Giladis whose secrets I had long ago not tried
to decipher in meandering conversations with Mr. Giladi, Ben-Yehuda Street
where I walk every morning is changing, tourists come to photograph ruins,
couples in cars on the seashore, petting or perhaps even copulating, and
Berla's kiosk has closed, the huts of the youth movement have disappeared,
and the sands have been concealed under the impetus of hotel building and
only Singer's little shop with an old sign advertising a brand of cigarettes
they don't make anymore is still here, and the sign hangs in the salty sea air,
rusted, groaning when the wind blows in winter, cobwebs of an old man who
was once the first one to wrap food in clean parchment paper and not in
newspaper, and we're left an abandoned island next to the closed port and
in the grocery they confirmed it, yes, a strange new neighbor lives there,
a refugee they told me. Comes to the store, buys, is silent, and goes, always
dressed for the theater, Singer's son told me, dragging a crate of eggs from
the pickup truck on the sidewalk, cartons of eggs in a crate, like all of us,
and so I paid attention to the garden that put an end to some gnawing
grief, some misery we all felt but didn't talk about, and there was fertilizer
there and suddenly piles of red loam and planting grass and you just don't
see who does it, he's solitary as a thief at night and working when everybody's sleeping maybe afraid of being seen and I work my garden and my
garden starts touching his garden and a kind of union is created here, I fix
and somebody else fixes, I uproot crabgrass and suddenly the street is full
of uprooted crabgrass and who the man is, I didn't know then.

    And so we met, Ebenezer and I. When the pine tree looked green and
fresh and the bougainvillea started blooming and the piles of sand disappeared and the new lawn was planted and looked green and soft and
mowed and the geranium bushes started blooming I was filled with a kind
of pleasure, a plea for far-off days and the tombstone around my house was
shattered and my body stood erect, even my face took on color and at night
I could sleep from fatigue, and in my mind's eye I saw Menahem running
around in the garden I had planted for him, as if life has cycles and there's
a return from death, and he pushes a wheelbarrow as if it were a train and
goes toot toot and then I saw the walls of my house peeling and I bought
paint to paint them and I fixed the roof tiles and a carpenter came and
fixed the windows and I stretched new screens and I cleaned the gutters
and I made a new gate and I put Menahem's wheelbarrow next to the new faucet and my wife refused to go out to see and peeped out the window,
and who knows, maybe she smiled to herself, and I wanted to hug her and
she avoided me with an almost virginal laugh of an old woman, and she
even said: So what, Menahem will grow up in you to be a gardener. And she
tried to wipe away invisible tears and ran to our room and I didn't say a
thing, but then I saw my neighbor, he was pruning a rosebush that almost
touched a vine that started preening wildly on the trunk of the cypress that
looked green again and not dusty.

    It was summer then, perhaps late summer, because of the heat I took off
my shirt and stayed in my undershirt. A nice smell of a watered garden
stood in the air, the cool of