Two She-Bears Read Free

bottom it means that somebody turned it upside down. Somebody picked it up and didn’t put it back the right way.”
    “Nature looks like one big mess,” he told her more than once, “but it’s not. Everything in nature is in its place.” And she smiled to herself as she remembered, because that’s what he would say when they were making love: “What a mess in this bed! One leg there, one leg here, and this little friend, what’s he doing here? Let’s put him in place. Here. Much better when everything’s organized.”
    “So come, Neta, let’s put the stone back in its place. Here, the way it was. You see these little sprouts? How here they’re totally white and only their tips are green? They sprouted underneath, crawled sideways to escape, and only when they got into the light did they become green. Everything white was under the stone, and everything green was outside. And that tells us one more thing—that it was moved recently. This is interesting, right, Neta? We’re like police detectives.”
    “Hikes for guys,” he told her. He looked at their son, their son looked at him, and the two of them—like generous winners—at her. Who could top a pair of guys like this, a father and son, smiling at each other, sharing secrets and schemes? Hikes for guys on hills in the south, hikes for guys in the big cornfields north of the moshava, where they picked fresh ears of the sweet corn she loved so much.
    “We’ll roast them for Mommy on the fire. Come here, I’ll show you how.”
    “I brought you this, Mommy, is it yummy?”
    “Eat, just for you.”
    I ate. I enjoyed. I got angry.
    And hikes for guys along the rocks on the seashore, and over the rocks behind the Crusader fortress, where at Hanukkah time the cyclamen are already in bloom. “Lookee here, what a miracle,” Grandpa Ze’ev told me when he was alive and I was a girl. “These flowers are blooming, and their green leaves haven’t even pushed through the dirt. This only happens here, by us. So close to the village and nobody knows. Just you and me.”
    And a hike for guys in the desert, for the first and last time, twelve years ago exactly, the hike after which they never hiked again, not the guys alone or me with them—and to tell the truth, we never did anything together again. Twelve years have passed, which for me seem like a hundred.
    3
    I see him getting ready to go. I know him and don’t know him. I again take note of the changes in him. Were it not for the disaster that caused them I could happily smile inside. Despite the time gone by and everything that happened, I still look young, as I see reflected in the mirror and the eyes of my students and their parents, the misty gaze of men and women in the street. And he, you, my man—that’s what I called you then—became a different man, you lost your looks.
    I know: It can’t just be dismissed as aging. Aging is slow, always preserving some youthful features, which is gratifying at first and, later—when it’s clear that they linger only to remind us and taunt us—is annoying. Whereas in your case the change is complete, like an insect’s metamorphosis.
    And I look at him and again count the ways: His smile is erased. His fire, his eternal flame, is extinguished. His golden skin, the delight of my fingers and eyes, has paled and chilled and lost its luster. His good smell, the myrrh of early manhood, has evaporated. His body—once the body of a youth—became thick and clumsy. He didn’t get fat and weak; he actually got stronger. His arms, once shapely and nimble, became the heavy arms of a bear with a fearsome hug.
    My man, my first husband, golden and lean, has disappeared. A second husband—white and thick and different—has taken his place. His thickness is pure power. His whiteness is the whiteness of death. The eye of the sun does not tan him, and human eyes are averted.
    I remember: One day he cut himself, and blood flowed from his finger. He didn’t even look at