My Michael Read Free

listening to the radio. That blue dress you liked on me this morning—my mother knitted it."
    Michael smiled:
    "It might be nice for your mother and my father to meet. I'm sure they would find a lot to talk about. Not like us, Hannah—sitting here talking about our parents. Are you bored?" he asked anxiously, and as he asked he flinched, as if he had hurt himself by asking.
    "No," I said. "No, I'm not bored. I like it here."

    Michael asked whether I hadn't said that merely out of politeness. I insisted. I begged him to tell me more about his father. I said that I liked the way he talked.
    Michael's father was an austere, unassuming man. He gave over his evenings voluntarily to running the Holon workingmen's club. Running? Arranging benches, filing chits, duplicating notices, picking up cigarette butts after meetings. It might be nice if our parents could meet ... Oh, he had already said that once. He apologized for repeating himself and boring me. What was I studying at the University? Archaeology?
    I told him I was I rooming with an Orthodox family in Achva. In the mornings I worked as a teacher in Sarah Zeldin's kindergarten in Kerem Avraham. In the afternoons I attended lectures on Hebrew literature. But I was only a first-year student.
    "Student rhymes with prudent." Straining to be witty in his anxiety to avoid pauses in the conversation, Michael resorted to a play on words. But the point was not clear, and he tried to rephrase it. Suddenly he stopped talking and made a fresh, furious attempt at lighting his obstinate pipe. I enjoyed his discomfiture. At that time I was still repelled by the sight of the rough men my friends used to worship in those days: great bears of
Palmach
-men who used to tackle you with a gushing torrent of deceptive kindness; thick-limbed tractor drivers coming all dusty from the Negev like marauders carrying off the women of some captured city. I loved the embarrassment of the student Michael Gonen in Cafe Atara on a winter's night.
    A famous scholar came into the cafe in the company of two women. Michael leaned toward me to whisper his name in my ear. His lips may have brushed my hair. I said:
    "I can see right through you. I can read your mind. You're saying to yourself: 'What's going to happen next? Where do we go from here?' Am I right?"
    Michael reddened suddenly like a child caught stealing sweets:

    "I've never had a regular girlfriend before."
    "Before?"
    Thoughtfully Michael moved his empty cup. He looked at me. Deep down, underneath his meekness, a suppressed sneer lurked in his eyes.
    "Till now."

    A quarter of an hour later the famous scholar left with one of the women. Her friend moved over to a table in a corner and lit a cigarette. Her expression was bitter.
    Michael remarked:
    "That woman is jealous."
    "Of us?"
    "Of you, perhaps." He tried to cover up. He was ill at ease, because he was trying too hard. If only I could tell him that his efforts did him credit. That I found his fingers fascinating. I could not speak, but I was afraid to keep silent. I told Michael that I adored meeting the celebrities of Jerusalem, the writers and scholars. It was an interest I had inherited from my father. When I was small my father used to point them out to me in the street. My father was extremely fond of the phrase "world-famous." He would whisper excitedly that some professor who had just vanished into a florist's shop was world-famous, or that some man out shopping was of international fame. And I would see a diminutive old man cautiously feeling his way like a stranger in an unfamiliar city. When we read the Books of the Prophets at school, I imagined the Prophets as being like the writers and scholars my father had pointed out to me: men of refined features, bespectacled, with neatly trimmed white beards, their pace troubled and hesitant, as if they were walking down the steep slope of a glacier. And when I tried to imagine these frail old men thundering against the sins of the people, I