The Same Sea Read Online Free

on but in the pitch dark
was insatiable. In the dark he entered into his own element.
No butterflies now and no tortoise at all, but like a hart panting for water
or a swallow for its nest. His chest to her back, and belly to belly, horse
and his rider and into every breach.

And what is hiding behind the story?
    The fictional Narrator puts the cap back on his pen and pushes away the writing pad. He is tired. And his back aches. He asks himself how on earth he came to write such a story. Bulgarian, Bat Yam, written in verse and even, here and there, in rhyme. Now that his children have grown up and he has known the joy of grandchildren, and he has produced several books and traveled and lectured and been photographed, why should he suddenly return to versification? As in the bad old days of his youth when he used to run away at night to be all alone in the reading room on the edge of the kibbutz where he would cover page after page with jackals' howls. An acne-scarred, yellow-haired, angular boy forever swallowing insults, with his high-falutin talk arousing some ridicule and some pity, hanging around the girls' quarters, hoping that Gila or Tsila might want him to read them a poem he had just written. Naively imagining that a woman is acquired by a sermon or a verse. And indeed he sometimes managed to stir something inside those girls that later, in the night, accompanied them when they went to the woods to give and receive love, not with him but with burly haymakers who reaped with joy what he had sown with his words almost in tears. He is almost sixty, this Narrator, and he might sum it up roughly as follows: there is love and there is love. In the end everyone is left alone: those hairy haymakers, and Tsila, and Gila, and Bettine, and Albert, and even the Narrator in question. And he who is climbing mountains in Tibet and she who embroidered in the quiet of her bedroom. We go and we come, we see and we want until it is time to shut up and leave. And then silence. Born in Jerusalem lives in Arad looked around him and wanted this and that. Since he was a child he has heard, impatiently, time and again from Auntie Sonya, a woman who suffers, that we should be happy with what we have. We should always count our blessings. Now he finds himself at last quite close to this way of thinking. Whatever is here, the moon and the breeze, the glass of wine, the pen, words, a fan, the desk lamp, Schubert in the background, and the desk itself: a carpenter who died nine years ago worked hard to make you this desk so that you would remember that you didn't start from nothing. From starlight down to olives, or soap, from a thread to a shoelace, from a sheet to the autumn. It wouldn't be a bad thing to leave behind in return a few lines worthy of the name. All this is diminishing. Disintegrating. Fading. What has been is being gradually wrapped in pallor. Nadia and Rico, Dita, Albert, Stavros Evangelides the Greek who brought up the dead and then died himself. The Tibetan mountains will last for a while, as will the nights, and the sea. All the rivers flow into the sea, and the sea is silence silence silence. It's ten o'clock. Dogs are barking. Take up your pen and return to Bat Yam.

Refuge
    Dita is at the door. On her slender back a mountain of a backpack
with another bundle tied to it, clutching some plastic bags
and a handbag: she is seeking refuge, for a couple of days,
a week at most, if it's not an imposition. She's ended up with no flat
and no money, all her savings and everything gone; she found
some kind of producer, got taken for a ride. But why are you standing
in the doorway? You'll fall over. Come inside. Then you can
tell me all about it. We'll have a think. We'll get you out of this mess.
    She gulped down a soft drink. Undressed. Took a shower. For a moment she embarrassed him when she emerged wrapped in a towel from mid-breast
to thigh. She stood in front of him
in the kitchen and told him in detail how she had got