Between Friends Read Online Free Page B

embarrassment, and shame filled his heart. Every morning he would go to his workshop, fix electric lights and cookers, replace old plugs with new ones, repair broken appliances. He would go out to the yard, a long ladder over his shoulder, toolbox in hand, to perform his duties, such as running a new power line to the kindergarten. Morning, noon, and night he would appear in the dining hall to stand mutely in the line at the serving counter, load his meal onto a tray, and then sit down in a corner to eat, preferably in silence. He always sat in the same corner. People spoke to him gently, as if they were speaking to someone who was terminally ill, avoiding any mention or even hint of his problem, and he would answer briefly in his quiet, composed, slightly hoarse voice. To himself he said: One more day and I’ll go and talk to her. And to him, too. After all, she’s still a child.
    But time passed. Day after day, Nahum Asherov sat in the electrician’s workshop, shoulders stooped, glasses sliding down his nose, working on the appliances in need of repair: electric kettles, radios, fans. He told himself: After work today, I will definitely go there. I’ll talk to both of them. I’ll say only one or two things, then I’ll grab Edna’s arm and drag her home. Not to her room in the dormitory, but here, home. How will I begin, though? How shall I put it? Will I get angry or should I restrain myself and appeal to their sense of reason and duty? Yet inside, he felt neither anger nor rebuke, only pain and disappointment. David Dagan had sons who were a few years older than Edna and they had already done their military service. Maybe instead of going there, he should talk to one of them? But what exactly would he say?
    From the time she was a child, Edna had been closer to Nahum than to her mother. Although she rarely expressed this closeness in words, Nahum always knew, from some unspoken mutual understanding, what to ask and what not to ask, when to concede and when to stand his ground. Since her mother’s death, Edna had taken it upon herself to drop off her father’s clothes at the laundry every Monday and return with a bundle of clean, ironed clothes every Friday; or she would sew on missing buttons for him. Since her brother’s death, she came to his apartment every day in the late afternoon, made them coffee, and sat with him for an hour or so. They spoke very little, usually just about her studies or his work. Sometimes they talked about a book. They listened to music together. Peeled and ate fruit. After the hour had passed, she would get up, take the cups to the sink, but would leave them for her father to wash after she had left for the school dormitory. Though Nahum knew almost nothing about her social life, he did know that her teachers were pleased with her, and he was proud that she’d learned Arabic on her own. A quiet girl, they said about her on the kibbutz, not impetuous like her mother, but devoted and diligent, like her father. What a shame she had cut off her braids for a short bob with bangs. With her hair braided and parted down the middle, she had looked just like one of those pioneer girls of an earlier generation.
    One evening several months before, Nahum had gone to look for her in her dorm room to bring her a sweater she had left in his apartment. He found her with two of her girlfriends sitting on their beds, all playing recorders, practicing a simple scale over and over again. As he came in, he apologized for interrupting, then laid the folded sweater on the corner of the bed, brushed a speck of invisible dust off the table, apologized again, and tiptoed away. Outside, he stood under their window in the dark for five minutes and listened: they were now playing a light, lengthy etude that repeated itself in a melancholy way. His heart suddenly clenched. He walked to his apartment, sat down, and listened to the radio until his eyes closed. At night, half awake, he heard the jackals howling close