 
The Fountain in Victoria Square

by Raquel Gilboa

Published by Raquel Gilboa at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Raquel Gilboa

ISBN 9781311532671

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer.

Thank you for your support, and for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is dedicated to my gorgeous granddaughter Heeli,

hoping that she'll draw from it courage to stand on her own.

I.

And like an intense flash of lightning cutting through a dark grey cloud it all came back to me, and I could hear the rapid unsteady beats of my heart, recalling, living it again as if it's happening now –

that very moment toward which he was gradually leading me during the few weeks we were dating, when at the end of our sexual encounter his left hand (like in the Song of Solomon) is under my neck and his right one embracing me, my head lying motionless on his chest and my mouth, which minutes before had swallowed his juices, is empty and dry, and my hand slowly moves up and down his limbs, sporadically touching his testicles and penis, feeling how it slowly erects.

This spontaneous scene-recollection had been that of my first lesson in fellatio which, at the end, I did not enjoy, as he was the only one to reach orgasm. And my heart palpitation continued while recalling my reaction:

And what about mine? I insist while my hand continued to fondle his penis, and he says "Don't worry dear", and before I have time to grasp what is happening he changes his position, his feet come close to my head while his head nears my vulva and he says "Continue with your hand", giving the next lesson in fellatio, and while I caress his penis with my fingernails he inserts his tongue into my vagina, licking and sucking my clitoris. Then the base of my pelvis contracts and so does my vagina and uterus, and I feel the blood streaming up to my temples, and unwillingly I let out a cry.

"Are you satisfied now?" He says, smiling.

Not completely I say breathing quickly while still continuing to hold his hardening penis which I pressed, and then caress again, and after a short pause during which I regain my breath I add - it's not enough! I need to feel you inside me!

So he penetrates my now lubricated vagina, thrusting his penis again, and again, and again, and this time I feel what my body-nerves were waiting for - an electric explosion in my brain, after which we both let out a cry. That's what I am looking for, I state, breathing more steadily while my trembling body calms itself down - this mutual cry of ultimate satisfaction - not a unilateral mechanical act!

Still breathless, I remember lying there, unmoving, listening to the sounds of the sea waves reaching the shore outside the screen walls of the cabin, sounds reminding me of a similar atmosphere conveyed in a Hebrew poem by Hana Sense. The lyrics, which I had translated into English trying in vain to suit it to the melody, were now echoing in my mind as a sung prayer –

Oh God! My God!

Don't let it come to an end!

The sea and the sand,

The murmurings of the waters,

The glowing light of the skies,

A prayer in Man's heart!

And like a frozen scene in a movie, this is the "frame" imprinted in my mind when this sudden awakening of memories brings me, here in Tel Aviv, after so many years and for the first time, to recall the past, my Australian past.

My sexual experience before meeting him had been limited to the 'missionary' and 'riding' positions and he, founding this hilarious, was obviously amused.

You are a great lover, I said as I walked to the kitchen to make a coffee, and as no male is born a great lover, I am grateful to those who taught you and turned you into one, but I don't want to know who they were.

"Well, I am grateful to those who did not make you an experienced lover, as I have the pleasure of turning you into one".

Knowing almost nothing of my past, the 'those' he was referring to which had not taught me the techniques of love-making, revived the image of 'the one and only' that was my age and, like me, equally ignorant in love-making practices. But nevertheless he, my deceased Israeli partner, my friend and lover whom I intended to marry, knew how to say 'I loved you' and, quoting from The Song of Solomon, had conveyed in every one of his daily acts that for him I was the most important person in the world. We were young and knew each other's background, aspirations and shortcomings and, what was most important of all - we were not ashamed to talk about our feelings. My perfect Australian lover, on the other hand, remained an enigma even after several encounters in the city, and also after our encounter at his cabin at the beach, where I had my lessons in oral sex.

After our first sexual encounter in my student-room he suggested that we continue our meetings there, and I did not insist on going to his town house in central Adelaide because it seemed only proper to let a person in his mid-forties to retain his own past; and as mine was left behind so far away from where I was now, and not talked about, it seemed logical to allow him a similar privacy.

My room served us well, albeit in a somewhat restricted manner due to the proximity of my flat-mates that limited our freedom to voice out our reactions during intercourse, or when showering together, and so, our bedroom pleasures were to a great extent devoted to expand my English vocabulary, naming in proper English every part of our bodies and getting acquainted with it, because I refused, point blank, to use slang or common expressions since I never use them in Hebrew either; therefore we never said 'cunt' or 'dick', but 'vulva' and 'penis', and all the anatomical names of the parts we reached.

Our experimental games, like the lessons in fellatio, took place mainly during the weekends we spent in his cabin at the beach, an hour's drive south of the city. The cabin was the only place where I could see something of his self, detached from his social milieu. In these solitary periods we could, in our own way and to some extent, enjoy the gradual breaking-down of barriers that existed between us, by doing routine household chores, and through the Hebrew poems I translated for him, and the English poems he recited; like 'January', by his friend Geoffrey Dutton –

In summer when the hills are blond

O dark-haired girl with wave-wet ankles

Bare your skin to the sun and to me...

And cutting it short he concluded –

O dark-haired girl stay close to me,

All summer go brown, go salt by the sea.

And to these very sensations, and also of being enveloped by the physical warmth projected by his honey-brown body tanned by the sun, I return on this rarest of occasions, when I allow the repressed memories of my Australian affair to surface, only this once, to take a brief hold on my current Israeli consciousness.

It all came up while I listened to my steady footsteps echo on the bedewed pavements leading from my new home in Ramat Aviv to the northern part of Tel Aviv; from the green suburb to the crowded city. After the intersection where the Planetarium is on the outskirts of Ramat Aviv, I turn left to Haifa Road, and then right to the city's longest green strip lined with tall trees and expansive lawns, with the Yarkon River running in their midst.

I cross the bridge and continue to walk until I reach the graphic design office where I work.

Moving away from the shared flat in the dense city to a private place of my own in the greener environment of Ramat Aviv, and taking a daily walk back into the city to reach my office, has been a blessing for my daily exercise routine, but also for my aesthetic sensibilities and peace of mind. By taking this very route into the city I gain the view of a wide open space of green lawns and of exceptionally tall trees, a view that by taking a bus instead of walking I would miss, as well as missing the sense of placidity, tranquillity and order that it bestows on me.

Only after strolling several times along this route did I realize that its main attraction comes from a subconscious awareness of a similar urban concept from long ago, a route that also conveyed a similar sense of placidity, tranquillity and order. Tel Aviv's strip of greenery, I suddenly realized, echoed the concept of the northern strip of greenery surrounding Adelaide's square-mile which comprises The City, to which I entered daily, leaving my apartment in North Adelaide. I would pass the green lawns of the university Oval with its exceptionally big, tall trees (whose names I never bothered to ask, although I was fascinated by their wide roots which came out up to the ground like thick fingers), and then crossing Adelaide Bridge over the Torrens River toward Victoria Square, and into my studio. There and here, the sounds of my own footsteps accompanied my early morning walks.

Once this allusion dawned upon me I realized that perhaps, unconsciously, during all my daily walking along the strip, I had been avoiding absorbing into my sight the lines of Eucalyptus trees at the river bank, not acknowledging that they were an Australian import to the country. But now, while recalling from the past another kind of Australian flora with their thick roots sending long protruding fingers, I seemed to see virtual fingers appearing everywhere around me, as if trying to take hold of my brain. The deliberately suppressed Adelaide experience re-emerged, striking at my first fellatio lesson and setting in motion similar sensations – a racing pulse, contraction of my vagina around the clitoris, and an electric current moving from my vulva to my breasts.

I had to stand still for a moment in order to let these sensations dissipate before continuing on my way to the office.

I cannot allow it to happen again.

Tomorrow I'll take a bus.

But after a nervous, dreamless night's sleep, and when the morrow has come (as I used to express it in those days of citing English poetry), I am walking again, this time determined to recall all that occurred back then, consciously attempting to solve... or better - to understand why I went on with it, letting it continue in spite of...of what exactly? Perhaps I need to get rid of the weight of my shortcomings? Do I, or perhaps did I then, regret not allowing it another...

Nothing of the sort, I abruptly reassure myself, cutting short each of my confused musings; but the continuous twitching vein in my neck suggests that even after all these years I have not come to terms with what had happened, nor have I fully comprehended the nature of the enigma that for many months took such a hold on my life and is at the root of the bodily-sensations I was feeling yesterday, and feel even now.

How to comprehend and perhaps reconcile with what had happened? How should I, with a recent maturity, elucidate the past of a young Israeli in Adelaide in the mid-1970s? In what manner could I open my black-box and analyse its content, trying to fully understand what had happened years ago and, in the long run, deduce on how did it all affect my life?

How am I to bring a final emotional closure to my past?

Perhaps... perhaps it would be best to veil, as much as possible, my current state of mind and recent awareness, and thus to be less influenced by my present mentality and closer to my past consciousness, while recapturing the confused self I had been?

But with which linguistic means? Ideally, I would like to recapture my then-self and then-awareness of things through what my dear friend Sue called "Hebrewised English"; namely – to engage both my faulty English and my personal rhythm of speech, comprising also of the conjuncture "and" at the beginning of a sentence that characterized it, contrasting English syntax laws?

But I cannot fully recreate it, as no one can completely erase the influence of Time; more so that whenever I recently think about Australia in general, writing and corresponding on private or political events with my friends there, I always do it in my time-improved English, both in my mind and in writing. All I can do is recall events as they pop into my memory, as if I am telling myself a story, and tell it with much of the vocabulary I had then, however incorrect or clichéd, phrasing it in disregard of proper syntax and chronology. After all, a personal use of a language of phrase-division and its rhythm express a personal state of mind...

Not "perhaps" - Yes!

In this hour-long walk to my office I have an opportunity to try and resolve the past by recapturing what I was, heard and felt in that period, letting my memories return to Adelaide of the mid-1970s, to the events that took place during that culturally loaded period, to him, to the sensations I had when we were together. But also to my hesitations, fears and misunderstandings and to my sometimes inappropriate behaviour and reactions, expressed in my typical Israeli outbursts when stating openly what I thought and felt and, yes, unpleasant as I may regard it now, also to my arrogance.

II.

Recovering my regular pulse-rate after the oral-sex on our first day at the cabin, I let my eyes wander around the barren walls that surrounded us. No paintings, no life souvenirs, devoid of any sign of "culture" that would have indicated a personal touch, or reflected the personality of the owner of the place. It could have belonged to anyone, anyone rich of course, as the room, the house and furniture had clearly been designed by a professional with the object of conveying a sense of luxury, comfort, and anonymity.

The soft, carpeted, large space of the bedroom culminating in the bed raising one step above floor level, as well as everything else in the room - including the set for drinks, the wine glasses and bucket of ice on a silver tray - conveyed aesthetic luxury. The audio equipment was controlled by the master of the house by invisible buttons near the bed, so that all I could see and feel was a relatively empty space paved with the embracing softness of the off-white, high woollen pile of the carpet that my feet sunk into when I walked around barefoot.

The cupboards in the bedroom had cleverly designed mirrors that appeared when the owner wanted to inspect his own image during intercourse, and disappeared when they were no longer needed.

I was astonished when he presented the tricking mirror, and after I recited some lines from a poem by his acquaintance Max Harris, he remained stunned and for a while, silent:

You mirror me unfleshed and glimmering,

As if I were but an image in your mind;

That does me little credit, draws a blind

Gesture between intention and your heart.

"Where did you pick this one up?"

From an anthology of Australian verse; you see – I try to understand the state of mind of the people I live among.

He did not reply, but the mirror trick was never repeated.

Off-white walls and off-white cupboards, and warmth emanating from a very off-white mildly- tanned lover on whose lap I lay, amounted to an off-white enigma that continued to remain unknown to me, in spite of the nights we made restrained love in my own room, and wild love in this very cabin.

My lack of carnal knowledge and the pleasures it can elicit from every part of the body confused me, but it also provided him with the opportunity to demonstrate all that he knew, and he knew a lot of – how to call it - Techniques? Tricks? But there was something more to him, important and yet, as I learned during the following years, so rare among those of his gender: the ability to listen to reactions of his partner's body, caressing it carefully without overdoing it and, in particular – knowing when to stop. No wonder that our sexual intercourses often resulted in me trembling with pleasure, embarrassed, overwhelmed, while he – smiling, sweat-drops on his upper lip, almost roaring with conqueror's satisfaction.

But I also remember well how afraid I was of breaching, with my Israeli outbursts of enthusiasm, the silence of the controlled, erotic atmosphere that he always managed to create for us even when we were not making love, believing that my silent acceptance of his restrained attitude would (did I dare think "forever"?) preserve the present state of affairs and, perhaps, might develop toward something more meaningful than mere sexual intercourse.

And I also remember, due to his reserved nature, how careful I was not to cry out affectionate words, because he had once mentioned that such expressions were quite vulgar verbal outbursts, and I suspected that they put him off because they might have forced him to respond and express his own feelings, or worse, to admit his lack of them.

Surprisingly enough for a person like me, who paints and is interested in art and its ramifications, it took quite a while until I began to be bothered by the emptiness - no, better said, the sterility - of what amounted to off-white colourless surroundings and the lack of personal touch in the place. And when this awareness began, I also started to wonder whether there wasn't also a great deal of sterility in his soul and in the alienating aura he projected to the world which, lacking of a better word, I termed as "aloofness".

All he knew about me emanated from our limited conversations on personal issues, mainly about my literary studies in Israel but rarely about my family, and he never inquired beyond the apparent, or expressed a wish to expand on what I had already disclosed. As he did not offer any personal information of his own, I hesitated to ask beyond what I had gathered from appearance, or what he had chosen to tell about his cultural interests. My insistence on reciprocity, both sexual and verbal, resulted in an almost total ignorance on my part regarding his life prior to and during our meetings and, most of all, what he actually felt about me and us.

As time passed, it became harder to develop an emotional relationship with this person with whom I had been infatuated but could not, and did not dare, tell him what I felt and why; whereas for him, apparently, our inner worlds were not an issue to be discussed.

Non-discussed intimate issues were substituted by philosophical conversations revealing our differences that, at first, indicated different perceptions on art. He leaned toward the theory that art has to do with "forms" detached from any literary idea, whereas my way of thinking stressed the importance of Idea as a pre-requisite to any meaningful artistic presentation. It was only later, much later, that I was bound to realize that our different attitudes toward issues of "form vs. idea" bore also contradicting philosophical perceptions on life and on human relationships.

On the other hand, inasmuch as the outer world was concerned, he was an ideal companion with whom to share cultural experiences, be it music, art, literature, and in particular poetry - he could recite many poems by heart, a great deal of Shakespeare and Milton. He had been a source of valuable information on everything I saw, in particular to the cultures that Adelaide's variety of nationalities presented to me daily, to which (coming from an almost consolidated Hebrew culture) I could not remain indifferent,. The same referred to its non-modern architectural styles, namely - pale copies of English architecture and a peculiar mixture of various European architectural elements that did not exist in Israel. He knew so much about the land's history and its people, the stories behind the interesting buildings I pointed out and artists I wanted to know about, that it became a pleasure to draw from his scholarship. But in spite of the wide cultural horizon he opened up for me, and the illuminating conversations we held, he nonetheless never expressed an emotional reaction – either to them or to me.

III.

Naomi was the first Jewish person I met in Adelaide, immediately after arriving in early summer at the students' apartment in North Adelaide, that is – in early December, as the seasons "down-under" are inverse to ours in the northern hemisphere.

Three inhabitants shared a small house divided into three units, united by a small entrance hall which was empty but for a small table with a common phone, a flowerpot and a brass tray for our mail. Each unit had a comfortable room, small shower-toilet and kitchenette.

Naomi had the biggest room, which was lucky because her huge bed occupied most of it.

Why does such a tiny creature like you need such a big bed? I tactlessly asked.

"Because I like my partners big and slim", replied the chubby brunette girl with sparkling eyes - one green, one light brown - petting her long straight hair.

I was immediately captivated by her good nature and sense of humour applied mainly toward herself, but most of all by her readiness to listen and to extend a helping hand.

It was an enormous bit of luck to have immediately after my arrival met someone who could relate, without a grain of malice toward the world, and from the vantage of being a Jew, to what was going on, who's who and why.

I needed her advice because, with my Israeli chutzpah and my limited command of the language, I had enrolled, from Israel, to study English Literature at Adelaide University. As I left Israel somewhat in haste, I did not have time to translate my first-year Tel Aviv University's documents into English, so Naomi took me to meet Wendy Jolly, the Registrar's secretary, who had to confirm my qualifications written in Hebrew.

Wendy - the kindest person I met during my entire stay in Adelaide - had a soft quiet voice, a long pale face without a trace of makeup, a thin tall body that enveloped a placid nature, and a warm sympathy with which she showered me. Her helpful advice had been generously provided whenever 'beurocratically' I felt lost. She belonged to the Israel-supporters Christadelphians, and her sect's interest in Israel and the Jewish people drove her to study Hebrew. Her confirmation of my Israeli papers finally stamped my acceptance to Uni, but only as a guest-student, and on condition that I did not request a graduate certificate. Later on, in between classes, I occasionally popped into her office for a chat in Hebrew, but mainly for mental support whenever I felt that the subjects studied were perhaps too complicated for the mental-barrier that I had to overcome.

Celia, the second inhabitant of the apartment, a lovely Sydney girl with light reddish wavy hair, fair complexion and clear blue eyes, had a vast and overflowing bookshelf. She and Naomi had in common two things: age, nineteen, and height - Celia was as small as Naomi but slimmer. As we were her first Jewish close acquaintances, she was curious about Judaism and about my being an Israeli.

We agreed upon our telephone arrangements – a pad on which each of us was to write down the calls she made, and two knocks on a door to notify of an incoming call.

If you don't mind, I said, I would like to impose my habits, that is – to suggest a state of open doors of our rooms, unless there is a private reason for its owner to keep them closed. I usually keep my door open as I hate closed doors, and when it is open you are most welcome to enter. When it is closed, either I am not at home or for some reason I do not want to be disturbed, O.K?

"Yes Ma'am!" they both laughed.

They brought chairs from their rooms, as my flat had only one attached to the small table in the kitchenette, and I made my first Turkish coffee, the first of endless cups to come.

Naomi, like me, studied literature, and Celia history.

"Here we say – she reads history," said Naomi.

And what are the lecturers like? I asked, starting my plunge into Uni affairs.

"Well, I guess they are o.k., although not very inspiring," replied Naomi.

"Mine give us subjects for papers that are obviously serving their own research, and I resent it," so Celia, "I hate the idea of digging up information on topics relating to 17th–century France; in particular for one of them."

Are you allowed to suggest your own topic?

"Yes, but I wouldn't know what to suggest."

Try what we term 'The elephant and the Jewish point'.

"Even Jewish me doesn't know what that means," so Naomi.

Well, we say that in every topic one can find a Jewish point, namely – something that connects it with Jews; the same applies even to awkward unexpected subjects - like elephants.

???

One of the Maccabeans, who fought the elephant-riding Greeks, was crushed by one of the animals when he wounded it, and thus this is the 'Jewish point' connected with elephants; but as far as I know this is the only one.

"Should I research 17th century elephants?"

No dear, just Jews in France of the 17th century! I'll bet that your lecturer doesn't know much about it, and I'm certain that such a topic won't contribute even a paragraph to his own research.

They roared with laughter.

I was only two-three years older, but they assumed that I was more experienced in the ways of the world, probably impressed by both my army service and my towering above them by more than a head. Both understood and sympathised with my wish to get acquainted with another culture and becoming part of it. Being on their midway to graduation, they could clarify my syntax, my prepositions, and me - how and why I am qualified as 'different'.

"It's not so much your strange look of a tall sculptured figure, especially with those slacks, and with the crown of very short dark curls at the top of your head," said Naomi;

"A slim trunk with foliage, like a palm tree," Celia contributed poetically;

"An Israeli palm tree," Naomi summed up when I asked them to stop.

"It's mainly because of your accent," Naomi explained, "it's not the aristocratic English you may aspire to, but thank God it's not the Aussi Ocker one either, which is very good because when an Ocker speaks he is barely understood."

I think I know what aristocracy is, I said, but what is an Ocker?

"Well, I am sure you don't know what or who 'aristocracy' is in Adelaide, as they belong to the Adelaide Club, and there's a slim chance that you'll ever go there or become closely acquainted with its members. Ockers, on the other hand, you will encounter in abundance."

"Originally, an Ocker was an Aussie that lived in the bush, Australia's outback, and later moved to the cities, and now constitutes a member of the working class that adds the adjective 'bloody' to everything he doesn't like," was Naomi's brief description of the social changes in Australian society.

And what happens to the middle-class Ocker when he lives and raises his family in town?

"He undergoes a process of embourgoisement, studies medicine or law, and for the better becomes bloody rich, and for the worse - a nouveau riche."

IV.

I don't know whether arriving in Victoria Square very early in the morning justified or constituted an added reason for tagging Israeli me as 'different'.

True enough, in late-rising Australia life starts at nine o'clock, so when I was in the square at half-past seven hardly anyone else had been there. It felt great because I could have 'my' bench, the one to which much of all three sculptures on the fountain are exposed. Amidst the silence around I could stretch my legs and listen to the falling water and see the sombre sky acquiring its typical Australian blue-turquoise colour, so common in Drysdale's and Pro-Hart's paintings, and to witness the awakening city while listening to the gradual intrusion of daily-life noises of office clerks filling the pavements of the surrounding buildings.

Within a short while I had become a part of the square, almost an item in it, like the seagulls and the Abos (as the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia used to be nicknamed) which their poet Kath Walker had described:

They came in to the little town

A semi-naked band subdued and silent

all that remained of their tribe.

They used to sit on the grass during the day, reclaiming their rights to the land by occupying a specific corner in the midst of the square, near the public toilets, forming a circle and passing around their drink in a brown paper-bag.

Even the policemen from the nearby station stopped directing suspicious looks at me. At first I was asked, kindly and politely, Aussies are usually polite, whether I needed some help.

Thank you, but no, I replied with the same kind politeness.

So I sat there during the summer that I arrived in Adelaide and, in addition to my student-dwelling provided with the help of the university, I rented on my own account a tiny room, a drawing studio in one of the square's small stylized buildings, where two other women whom I often met had their studios – a classical ballet teacher and a musician who taught piano-accordion.

Oddly enough, in both my Uni-flat life and my studio-life I found myself sharing a kind of women's enclosure. Besides blond-dyed Wendy from the University, my sisterhood embraced also two original blonds: Mattie, my pottery teacher at the course I enrolled into at the YMCA, a lovely young Dutch woman with a delightful family I enjoyed visiting, and a Polish girl I met at her class, June, both of us sharing cultural interests and maternal roots in Poland.

"Who is your favorite Polish writer?" she was kindly questioning me and my roots.

Well, I replied, my mother prefers Adam Mickiewicz because of his Pan Tadeusz, but I like Henryk Sienkiewicz's books more – Pharaoh, Quo Vadis and With Fire and Sword. I read them all when I was young, and I found his historical panorama more interesting.

I passed the test of 'Polishness'.

"Are you still a virgin?" asked one day brunette Naomi from near-to-home sisterhood, while reddish-haired Celia, leaning on her door and smiling with pressed lips, waited for my reply.

Surprised and quite angrily I said - what kind of a question is that? I don't ask you if you are!

"Well," so Naomi, "I know that Israeli girls are not as easy-going as us Aussies, and as we don't know about or haven't seen any male companion around, we were betting on how long an oldie like you can remain dry."

Darlings, I don't see male companions queuing outside your doors!

"Oh! We don't bring them here!"

So you meet them on street corners? I said with a soft, very soft tone, continuing with –

Do you mate in the back seat of a car, a la Américaine?

No reply.

I assure you that when I'll decide to have a male companion I'll bring him here, for you to see and because this is my home, and I'll kill you if I hear a single comment about him, about me, or us! o.k.?

"O.K."

But as you are my friends - are you? The tiny girls nodded 'Yes' and I continued –

I am telling you that I have another place, a drawing studio, to which I don't intend to bring any male companion or, for that matter, any other person, you included. And please, not a word about this is to anyone. In a way, it's a test of friendship, and I hope you'll respond.

To their credit – they did.

Surrounded by all these multi-coloured-haired, wonderful and diverse young women, each enriching me by being different than me and different from each other and thus expanding my social experience, I felt among God's colourful heavenly female choir.

The yellowish stone-fountain in the middle of the square, which constituted the green central spot in the square mile called The City, was not necessarily an exceptionally beautiful element. As a matter of fact and in artistic terms, and with my artistic perceptions gained over the years, the fountain's symmetrical play of geometrical volumes and lines was quite... maybe - banal?

Mussa, my Israeli friend who lived in Adelaide, described it as "boring" because of its perfect symmetry, but as I had never seen at that time in Israel a fountain of this scale posed in such a huge space, it held a kind of novelty for me. The spacious square still encloses a quadrant of greenery, divided by the wide Wakefield Street into southern and northern parts. The northern part has a tiled-paved hexagon, in the centre of which is the fountain - a hexagonal pool with three water-pouring high stands, crowned by a petal-bowl at their top, and accommodating in their midst three human figures holding birds.

The organic lines of these figures, symbolizing the three rivers that supply Adelaide's waters, contrast with the rigid geometrical design of all the other elements in the fountain, and this amalgamation of organic and geometrical into wholeness corresponds well, so I thought and still remember it as such, with the simple straight lines of the stone-work in the old buildings around the square and their delicately curved ornaments. Several sporadic modern skyscrapers had already occupied some blocks around the square, and I wondered when its old romantic buildings, like the one containing my studio, would be removed to accommodate others, much taller and more efficient.

Moving my eyes back and forth to the fountain I realized, as soon as I saw it, that something was bothering me... Its lines and proportions? Its yellowish, almost flesh-tinted colour that contradicted the palette of its surroundings? An allusion to something else? Something in it intrigued me enough to stimulate a long neglected custom and ignited an itching desire to pick up a pencil, a crayon, a brush. That's why two weeks after I came to Adelaide in early summer I rented the studio on the second floor of the nearby building, and started a series of drawings of the fountain. In order to have artistic relief, I sculpted small clay figurines in dancing positions which Mattie, at the YMCA, insisted to be moulded again and again until they acquired the proper equilibrium prior to being kilned. I had been working on those figurines, but mainly on the drawings, almost every day during summer break and before studies were to start in February; taking my time, no hurry, slowly evolving the presentation of the fountain by moving from one perception to another.

The building adjoining my studio had a diner that sold mainly snacks, the unavoidable meat-pies and unsatisfactory coffee. I frequently ordered there a sandwich with a cold drink, taking them out to my bench. Gazing at the sculptures I slowly ate and continued to ponder over the streaming water...drip... drip... disturbed by some elusive formal quality in the fountain's design and proportions, turning my back on it and then quickly turning again to observe its lines and masses, imprinting it all on my mind before returning to the studio to try and transmit the impressions. First I drew them on paper and then onto the canvas, depicting the fountain each time from a different view point and trying different palettes, struggling to convey out of my perceptions that very "something" that I could not yet term.

By mid-January I had finished my first canvases - two small rectangles showing the same angle of the fountain, with two of its figures posed a bit off-centred, and against the background of a tall office building. The primary acrylic colors I bought to start with were of the quick-drying type: red, blue, yellow, black and white. These five primary colours dictated my personal palette and enabled me to regain my lost sense of colour by rediscovering options and possibilities to combine tones; thus the greens and browns had to emanate from them.

The first canvas presented the fountain viewed from a distance, reflecting a scene at an earlier hour when the intruding sun rays from North-East cast light on the buildings. It depicted the modern office building in pink-and-white, and yellows were applied to the small old building with the diner at its left. The elements of the square and the fountain responded with blue and white-blue, accentuated by the darkened waters. The second vantage point was closer to the fountain, and the scene reflected a shadowy later hour when, at sunset, the same building had a darker aura, achieved by a mixture of dark red and blue. The total sum of what I had done was a naturalistic presentation with unnatural colours and flat planes playing the main role in the composition, conveying a serene harmony, but also a blue mood.

  1   2

My presentation with its sombre non-naturalistic palette, whether consciously or unconsciously, demonstrated a rejection of what I termed 'the avenues of eucalyptus trees', namely: watercolours consisting of greens, browns and light blue skies that characterized the common Australian paintings since Hans Heysen's beautiful drawings; such drawings were favoured by the general public and seen in abundance in most shops that sold "art". It took me some time to become less artistically arrogant and discover that Australian art has much more to offer. But by then I had run out of the drive to demonstrate against the common local artistic tendencies, and instead I concentrated on attempts to define my own artistic language and project my own drives.

V.

One early morning, unexpectedly and untimely for this season in Adelaide, it rained; not quite – it just drizzled, and it was bound to be brief. At this early hour, Victoria Square and its surrounding buildings reflected the sky's mood – all seemed to be grey, the same tone that had been there in early summer when my Israeli friend Mussa, the one who after accomplishing his army reserve-service in the Yom Kippur War, brought me – an overwhelmed "widowed" war-fiancé with an added case of an unfulfilled relationship - to Adelaide.

'Mussa' is the Arabic version of 'Moses'. During the 1920s and onwards it had become a common practice to use Arabic versions by what may be termed 'Israelis who wished to accentuate their relation to or amalgamation with the region'. Mussa, my dear old friend, a heavy-weight Eastern Jew, regarded himself as such by birth-right, whereas Peter – call me Pete, he said when we were introduced – a reporter who recently arrived in Israel from Australia, had been still looking for a suitable Arabic version, wanting to be considered 'one of the Israeli boys'.

With the authorization of the relevant army department I took a break from my literary studies at Tel-Aviv University, and had dragged myself with Mussa and Peter through the country because "you are familiar with such tasks due to your work in the information department of the army, and your help is greatly required" said Mussa, but I could have guessed that he also wanted to get me out of my grieving mood over my loss by introducing me to a new suitor.

Our task, supported by the Government Press Bureau, was to show the region and its problems to the Adelaide reporter Peter, a tanned Australian of medium height, with deep blue eyes and curly brown hair which made him look almost like an Israeli. With the honest good will that characterizes many outsiders worrying about the political situation in the region, Peter thought that he might have all the right answers to the complexities between Israel and the Arabs.

"After all, St. Peter was given the keys of heaven," he said smiling when I counteracted his aspirations with astonishment.

Forget about the keys of heaven! I am a secular Jew! What's more important - where did you snatch such blue eyes?

"Most of us in Australia have it; do you like blue eyes?"

Yes, very much.

"Then you have to come to visit Australia; you might like the place because of the blue eyes."

Do you think you might like Israel?

"Not very much perhaps, but I am very attracted by Judaism and favour the idea of a Jewish state."

Take care not to be too attracted to our exclusive Jewish club, I said sounding somewhat cynical, it's not a very welcoming one, and it carries very unpleasant fruits – pogroms and hatred from outsiders, and little gratitude from insiders; the result is that we are not very nice people.

"We Australians are! You'll see!"

So for three weeks we drove from the south toward the north, Peter telling me about his beloved Adelaide, asking questions about Israeli politics and social affairs, and enthusiastic about the relation of so many actual places in today's Israel to the sites in stories he had read in the Bible.

You are gradually becoming a Jew, I said with a kind of dismay at what I regarded as superficiality in a person toward whom I started to develop a liking; or to be more honest - to be very attracted to.

I can recall, even today, strolling with Peter through sites of historic interest, listening to Mussa's anecdotes and dirty jokes while sipping coffee near a bonfire, holding hands while trying to catch some rest in our sleeping-bags near the Lake of Galilee, and conversations that gradually developed into a better understanding of each other.

Mussa, after all, had been on the right track – I resumed a great deal of my Joie de vivre.

I thought that our relationship was gradually developing toward a more intimate phase, but after the visit to Jerusalem events took a different path.

I can't claim that Peter had been stricken by the 'Jerusalem Syndrome', and yet one cannot see Jerusalem without being inspired by it in one way or another. So after two weeks of moving around together, Peter, my St. Peter who said he was given the keys of Heaven, apparently went a bit too far and said that he is "seriously considering converting to Judaism."

I did not take him seriously.

Together with an entourage of two young armed soldiers to care for our security (after all Peter was a guest of The Government Press Bureau), we left Jerusalem and approached the city of Sh'hem (Nablus in Arabic), chosen for this visit because it had all the ingredients that demonstrated some of the local Palestinian problems – a relatively affluent city with appalling public services for the masses. I liked the scenery of Sh'hem because, at that time and when viewed from a distance, it conveyed a Biblical aura.

The city situated between two hills had, and still has on a lower plateau at its eastern outskirts, the Balata Refugee-Camp, with poverty-stricken population. We were standing at the western border of this plateau, on the main road leading westward and upward to Sh'hem. Looking at the scenery of the city I again, as in my previous visits to the area, had the sense of, well – how to define it? Of a déjà vu of long-ago.

The city, a bit raised from the plane on which we were standing, lay ahead as if it was the belly of a naked woman opening her hilly legs for us – the slope of Mount Ebal, the northern hill upon which a curse had been bestowed, and the slope of Mount Gerizim, the southern hill upon which a blessing had been bestowed. Looking through them toward the west, to the horizon behind the city, one saw two lower hills that accomplished the allusion to a naked open-legged woman by conveying the sense of breasts; and between them, like a shining head, was the glowing yellow-red disk of the setting sun.

My interpretation to this view alluded to a Biblical setting which I related to the allegorical-symbolical event described in the ancient text of Genesis 15, in which Abraham and God made their pact, the actual location not accurately identified. When during my studies I had read and re-read its details, in my mind I had interpreted it as a sexual-intercourse-like ceremony: both the pigeon-dove and a chick in the text, standing as metaphors for a penis and a clitoris; and the protagonists' movement in between the two cuts of a heifer, she-goat and ram – as alluding to a thrust between the outer vaginal through the inner lips reaching at the end a womb.

A sudden breeze that stroked us, in accord with the one mentioned in the Biblical text, sent a chill through my spine, and I noticed the same physical effect on all the others, although I could not estimate whether their thoughts and sensations for the scene followed mine; in all probability, and in spite of the similar physical effect, they did not.

Peter, although I never asked him about it, seemed to have followed his own allusions, as this scenery and its evoking Biblical echoes had finally determined for him his long-ago craving to cross the fence and to make his own pact with Judaism because, so he laughingly explained -

"Afterwards I can marry you."

And seeing my astonished face, he smilingly added –

"You, or any other Jewish girl!"

I did not reply, neither commenting on the tribulations he would still be facing before being recognized as a Jew, nor uttering a remark about a possible curse that in the Bible is paired with the blessings on this vicinity where he had taken his crucial decision. Moreover, had I had a dollar for every Jewish girl who would not mind marrying a Gentile, I would have been a very rich person. I did not want to be too cynical, and in my Hebrewized English I would phrase it now: why to spoil for a delightful young man his noble deliberations?

We stayed the night at the nearby army camp with the soldiers and, as it was a Friday meal, the Sergeant of Religious Affairs handled the blessings – the Kiddush. After the coffee had been served we stood and talked while his sister, a young soldier in this camp, was introduced to Peter and seemed impressed by his decision to convert. Noticing the immediate flame between them that seemed to be the 'blessings' Peter received form the Mount of Gerizim, I felt a sense of loss, as if the curse laid on the Ebal had been laid also upon me, and for the second time.

I silently backed off because... Why indeed?

Why didn't I bother to fight for Peter? Thinking about it now, while watching the fountain and its waters in Victoria Square, I am not certain about my motives. Was it because, in spite of my being attracted to him, we had not developed our relationship into a meaningful stage of becoming a pair? Or was it because of my mother's humorous warning that 'a decent girl doesn't try hard to catch a bus or a man' was hammering in my head, remembering that the one time I tried hard to catch a bus ended with a slight hit by a passing car and a wounded leg?

But it was not just that. I eventually developed a less humorous attitude to the issue of 'getting my man', namely - that if the one I want requires patting his ego by "fighting" for him, he does not deserve the effort! As if to justify this attitude, I had the experience with my first lover and best friend, he who never required such assurances of his importance nor asked for proofs of my love; he had been there for me as I for him. Simple, isn't it?

Nonsense...Probably it was my realization that, at the end of the day, I was contented that Peter got a girl who would respect and appreciate what he intended to do and, being of Orthodox background, would lead him smoothly on his path to Judaism.

But suddenly, and in spite of my comforting notions and approving of Peter's choice, I felt lonely at that very moment. Almost as lonely as I felt when he, my first lover and best friend, and the one whom I was to marry, did not return from the front. I wanted to get away from the intimate group that had been formed, and from which I subjectively felt excluded; away from my undetermined personal life and my inability to decide whether literature or art is to be my vocation – just away.

Mussa, who had been living and working as a choreographer in Adelaide, noticed my changing moods. His brown eyes narrowed and on the spot, passing his fingers through his thin receding hair, suggested I come to Adelaide.

"You can afford it! You'll be definitely better off continuing your studies in English Literature there, and experiencing how much more pleasing Adelaide's facilities are to do artistic work, a practice you have neglected lately."

Peter approved – "I am sure you'll like it there! You'll like Adelaide!"

A month after my arrival in Adelaide, when I introduced Mussa to 'my' fountain, he sang to me his adaptation into English of Naomi Shemer's song and, although his lyrics accorded with the music, needless to say it sounds better in Hebrew:

If you want me to show you our city in grey,

Let us wander together, walking slowly all day -

Through the big silent gardens, on the grey side-walk, there -

Near the tallest grey buildings, of the city in grey.

Mussa continued, singing how 'he'll hold my hand in his when we'll walk in the square, looking up at the fountain in the midst of the square', and then on how we'll sit down on 'my' grey bench, watch the birds as they play while I'll throw them crumbs, and 'we'll laugh! Free and gay!'

Stop here, I said, and Mussa laughed.

"When you need the last part of the poem I'll be there for you! Just call me!"

As he often managed to do, also on this occasion Mussa sensed my inner vibrations, in spite of me laughing when he said to call him. By mid-January, in summer-stricken Adelaide and expecting autumn with a new phase in my life, of becoming a student in a foreign country, the novelty and excitement of the migration appeared to lose its edge. I was mentally lonely, and gradually started to feel a need for a shoulder, a mature shoulder of a man or a woman; not to cry on it, but to share a kind of Israeli intimacy that was missing in my present life.

There weren't many options. Australian society in general was very reserved when it came to discussing private matters or inner feelings. The girls at home, or my sisterhood around town, were either too young or too remote from my personal experiences and seemed to project, as I perceived it, a kind of indifference toward and avoidance of intimate issues; "we are very English in these matters," said Celia.

Pam, the wonderful loving Jewish lady who embraced me into her home after discovering that there's a new Israeli in town, was the only member of Adelaide's small Jewish community that I wholeheartedly trusted. But she was much older than me, occupied with her husband Alan, her three kids and her never-ending involvement in Jewish and non-Jewish social affairs. Mussa, dancing Mussa, the extrovert Mussa who, with an acute sense of observation, sensed my frustrations in Israel and brought me here, was not the right person with whom to discuss my personal innermost yearnings, and moreover – the last thing I was looking for after 'escaping' Israel was a flesh and blood Israeli.

The sudden unexpected faint drizzling that very morning in Victoria Square felt good, and with eyes closed I lifted my head to catch some drops with my tongue, assured that no one was watching me at this early hour. But when I shook my head to wave the drops off and opened my eyes, I was looking into the most beautiful blue eyes that I had ever encountered in Adelaide, a place where almost everybody of the old-stock seemed to have blue eyes.

A handsome tall figure - high forehead with greying blond hair indicating a mature age, combed from the middle in two waves aside toward his temples and backwards, looking very Australian and yet with a different aura and a more vivid sparkle in his eyes - stood close to my bench watching me with a tint of a mocking smile on his narrow lips.

Luvlydaey, isenit? was my brilliant contribution to the situation, imitating Ocker accent in order to ease the tension that began to settle inside my stomach.

He laughed with a deep melodic voice, and I wished, badly wished, that he'd do something unpleasant, anything, pick his nose or whatever, because something had to occur to break the spell of his charm.

Well, he did nothing of the sort and instead asked -

"Where do you come from?"

It was a change from the regular formula of 'which nationality are you' that I had been tackling because, as I eventually discovered, few people of European origin presented themselves as Australians. They were Italians, Anglo-Saxons, Germans etc., each national group forming its own tight social bubble and often excluding outsiders, except the Jewish one which had representatives from all possible countries, but of course all of them were Jews.

Is it so obvious that I am not a local? I said smiling.

"Yes."

???

"Locals do not come here at this early hour to enjoy the place, and particularly not when it's wet."

Then you are not a local Aussie!

"Oh yes I am! John," he bowed his head with his hand on his chest, "fifth generation Australian, descendant of the founders of Adelaide. And you?"

A fourth millennia Jewess, a descendant of pioneers in Israel.

"Well, you are a rare specimen in our place."

I would not describe you as a common one to the place either, because I come here regularly, and besides the drunken fellow Viridiana no Aussie comes occasionally here at such an hour.

"Viridiana?"

W-e-ll, she is the heroine of Buñuel's film by that name, and the drunken fellow who comes here reminds me of the head of the gang of beggars in the movie, but as I don't remember his name I call him after the heroine, and it makes me laugh every time I meet him also because his mumblings about his 'poor auld mum' drive me laughing away with tears. Do I make sense?

He laughed and sat close to me, and we talked about films and related books.

I did not disclose that I was in the square because of my painting – just told him that I would be reading (thank you Naomi!) literature at Adelaide University.

Soon the clock on the municipality tower rang nine, signalling the start of a working day in the city, and more people began to cross the square. He stood up intending to walk toward the north entrance.

"When shall we two meet again?"

Hopefully not in thunder or in rain, I said laughing and waved my hand up above my head while moving toward the south, purposely misleading him in case his eyes followed where I was going.

If he indeed was interested in me, then he'll find me in the early morning hours at the square sitting, as always, on my bench.

A warm feeling started to creep through my body. It was the first encounter since I had settled in Adelaide that I could call 'a flirt', and the fact that he was much older than me – how much? I reckoned somewhere in his forties – made the encounter even more favourable.

I became impatient with the young students that, in most cases and in many aspects, were younger than me. Aussies start university at the age of eighteen, nineteen, whereas we in Israel – at twenty-one and after army service, a state that fascinated the girls as well as their friends.

I tried to explain that one does not necessarily have to drive tanks or climb and run on hills with full army gear in order to mature as a person, and added that the mere service, the interaction with different people of the Israeli melting-pot, the responsibility vested in people at the age of eighteen, be it only in the handling of paperwork or the commander's time-table, the preparation of meeting-rooms or summoning people and - yes Naomi - also of making and serving the coffee; all these turn a young girl into an experienced responsible and efficient office-person, performing jobs that in civilian life are given to a senior person after several years on the plant.

In this respect, my army service experience resulted in an amusing occurrence in one of our poetry classes while reading a poem that described distance-measuring using army terms; due to my service I was the only one to understand its meaning. No wonder that I felt mature in comparison with the youngsters around, even in cases when they were older than me. In particular I was not impressed with the males of the species; their conversation on their daily affairs bored me, and when their favourite subjects, sex or sports, were discussed, it became revolting.

The main problem, with my mature viewpoint and not with their youth or mentality, was that they were uninspiring in their exchange of ideas, and pathetic in their clumsy attempts to flirt.

And suddenly, as if out of the blue, this kind of encounter comes along.

VI.

He reappeared after a week.

It's nice to see you again, I said in a sweet voice, angry that he had not come the following day.

"I was away for my New Year's holiday and have just come back."

Frankly, I said, I did not expect to see you again and, may I ask, what it was that drew you here in the first place?

"Well, the sheer coincidence of being around, passing the square and seeing a young creature that did not look like anything I am used to. I could see you were not local."

I did not reply.

"I was curious to see a slim figure with very long legs sitting alone on a bench in the rain, crowned by a lively cascade of dark curls on her head that sits on a columnar neck," he smiled.

So did I, but at the same time I felt a prickle of more than just embarrassment by hearing his "columnar neck", because I recalled it as one of the Biblical sentences cited to me long ago by my dead lover, with a bulk of chains put on it to prove the point. I forced myself to return to the present, beating back the memory by purposely translating the Hebrew sentence on the spot – 'Thy neck is like the tower of David built for an armoury' - and he recognized the source.

We went to the nearby diner for a snack and discuss the hard task of translating poetry in general and Hebrew poetry in particular. He was impressed by my ability to read and comprehend poetry in several languages, even when I could not speak them properly. During the conversation it became clear that up to a certain point I was familiar with his literature whilst the Hebrew one was unknown him, although he recognized my citation from the Bible and was quite well acquainted with its relatively poetic King James Version.

But, I suggested, not even that beautiful translation does fully convey the subtlety of Biblical poetry.

"How is Shakespeare in Hebrew?"

Great, if one disregards the English origin of the author. As a matter of fact, the translation is so good that one may assume Shakespeare to be a great Hebrew poet!

We laughed and departed, he leaving first, thus enabling me to enter directly to my nearby studio.

When immediately afterwards I started to work on the second pair of oil-paintings, I thought how appropriate it was for me to meet a John, as St. John the Evangelist is the patron-saint of booksellers, and his artistic image is usually presented with a book.

This time I drew two canvases in which the fountain itself was blurred, seen behind foliage, because, suddenly, by itself, it had become less important than attempting to convey the elusive atmosphere that I had just experienced. And for the first time I introduced into my paintings various shades of greens. I usually avoided green as I considered it to be God's colour, signifying the Almighty's grace toward us when He paints the world with green vegetation. That's why little me had to find a way around it by using unnatural colours, as I did with the reds and blues in my first two paintings. But now I felt like our mythological foremother Eve who prided herself that she too, like God, could create; for her it was a newborn, and for me it meant, perhaps, being emotionally reborn. And therefore I felt it required introducing God's colour into my painting.

In the third canvas the fountain is viewed from the western edge of the lawn, reflecting the early hour in which we met.

The bottom of the painting had mixed shades of green-and-brown for the grass. I used a darker shade of green with a lot of blue in it for the pointed cypress, a lighter green mixed with yellow for the less dense foliage of the trees that partly camouflaged the fountain, and red and brown shades for the bushes bordering the composition. In the background, hardly seen, is the faint pink-coloured fountain. The fourth painting illustrated the fountain in the bright light of mid-day, viewed from the narrow darkened corridor leading to the staircase of my studio, and the use of green was only in strokes that accentuated the foliage around the yellowed fountain presented in sfumato, conveying a dreamy atmosphere.

3   4

For the first time since I came to Adelaide I felt happy, and the drawings conveyed it. They had something vibrant combined with a kind of optimism, which seemed to rebuke the flash of past memory of my dead lover that had occurred at our recent meeting.

During the work on the canvases, when I reran the scenarios of our two meetings in my mind, I realized that, although I gave him my phone number, I had forgotten to ask him what he was doing 'coincidently' in the square at such an early hour.

VII.

The first evening we dated, after our third meeting in the square, we didn't dine alone; two other couples joined our table at Adelaide's most prestigious restaurant, Ayers House.

During my wanderings back from my studio in the City through King William Street and toward the University for the late-morning lecture I often strolled also in North Terrace, looking at its beautiful public buildings - Governor's House, the Library Museum, the Art Gallery and, toward its eastern end, Ayers House. It is an imposing eclectic white building, with outstretched wings and two round corners and, flanking from its main wall, two arched entrances and with different sizes and shapes of tiled roofs in a hard-to-define style. Once it was the governor's dwellings, and now \- a posh restaurant that did not cater for simple civilians like me. No wonder I felt quite uneasy entering the place, and John, sensing it, kindly pressed my elbow when we went in through the restaurant door.

The first couple we met was John's closest friend Phillip, a lawyer, and his young companion Helen. I was wearing a long frock, a black velvet Arab-style embroidered galabiah I had bought at the Arab market in the Old City of Jerusalem, and when Helen remarked its uniqueness it sounded so kind and so, well – cultured, that in my insecurity I suspected it to be a subtle insult.

"How interesting! So unusual! Where did you get it?"

In a small stall in Via Dolorosa, I dryly replied.

John smiled with narrow lips and I thought that perhaps I had overdone it, but I didn't think she got the irony.

"Were you an officer in the Israeli Army?"

No, I tried to sound cordial, just a Corporal, and now I am Corporal-reserve; not very exciting.

The second couple entered a bit late and was introduced as the banker Mr. and Mrs...., and their actual names are irrelevant because we never socialized with them again, although later on we happened to see them around on several occasions. Apparently he was connected with John's financial affairs in the city, a new piece of information on John I had acquired, and thus my wonderings what he was doing in the square at such an early hour were answered – business.

"An Israeli? Oh shou interesting! shou exotic!" said the banker in what Naomi defined as an upper-class manner of pronouncing the "s", adding: "An exciting addition to our charming ladies Morrosi and Koh, but coming to us from the other end of Asia!"

Now, and in spite of his soft tone and words disguised as a compliment to my appearance, I was sure about an intended insult, as Junie Morrosi and Adele Koh were beautiful petite Asian women with the common Asian strait long black hair (that always aroused my jealousy), who conveniently married Australians in order to get citizenship and after a while, divorced or not, attached themselves to political personalities – a Canberra minister and Adelaide's Premier – working as secretaries.

"As aids," insisted Naomi later, when I told her about it. "An assistant research or an aid is a higher status than the mere little secretary."

So I am just John's girl from the other end of Asia, searching for an entry into Australian ranks.

Oh, No! I said sweetly, I have green eyes and short curly hair, and I am much, much taller.

Laughs.

They were all well dressed, and the simplicity of their luxurious outfits cleverly stressed the as-if-unpretentiousness.

What a style!

They talked about the weather, the new exhibition that they did not like and therefore, in a polite understatement, described it as "peculiarly interesting", and about a new car –

"Which brand do you have? Oh! You don't have!"

"But then, who actually needs a car in the city?"

"Do you like our fair city?"

What cleverly articulated conversation and insults!

I wished I could be so politely nasty. Are people born with this faculty?

Probably not – merely cultivated the art in their private schools!

The aperitif wines were served during our mutual introductions, and then the first course of seafood accompanying a conversation on politics in which, being the average politically-minded Israeli, I thought I could somehow mingle, feed my curiosity and listen to opinions on what was going on. But to my surprise, the conversation on Australian political affairs quickly narrowed down to what they regarded as the most important recent issue - the suggested law to legalize homosexuality between consenting adults. During this conversation I remained quiet, and toward the end Phillip turned to me – "What do you think about the issue, my dea?" eliminating the final sound of the "r"; another sign of posh accent, Naomi later explained.

Well, I said somewhat hesitantly, in Israel the British law regarding homosexuality as a criminal act still applies, but in spite of the Biblical law that supports this notion it was never discussed in Parliament or brought to court because, by the Attorney-General's decree, the law had never been imposed.

"So you in Israel managed to circle around the issue without making it an issue! How clever!" Phillip laughed.

Besides, I added, the whole subject seems to me irrelevant for public discussion or intervention, as it is strictly a private matter.

Whether it was the Israeli general attitude or my personal one, I felt that my reply pleased Phillip.

With the soup the conversation touched national and foreign policies of the Labour government with which no one around the table seemed to be content, and the conflicts of the Middle East reached the table with the heavy fillet-steaks.

I ordered mine well done, but apparently the chef of this elite restaurant could not afford such a culinary sacrilege. At the moment the banker's wife, who was sitting opposite me, expressed her sympathy with the poor Palestinians, I started to cut my fillet and saw a very tiny stream of blood on my plate. I shivered, and the banker who was sitting next to me moved my plate a bit away, saying in a tender, very tender voice, and a sparkle in his eyes which he did not try to hide –

"Oh dea! It isn't kosher? But don't worry, it is definitely not pork!"

This was as far as an Israeli like me could tolerate from him.

Oh no, dear, so me with the same tender voice, it's not the meat but the blood! And resending the somewhat patronizing sound of his "dear" I turned, with a tender smile, to his wife who sat opposite us at John's side, and continued –

You see, dear, many times you Gentiles blamed us with Blood-Ritual Crimes – although, thanks God, not toward the poor Palestinians. Therefore I wouldn't dare to stick my fork into the meat again because, God forbid, I might find myself dipping into an innocent Christian, pardon me, Muslim child's blood. But – turning with a smile to the stunned banker who was still handling my plate \- I added,

You wouldn't mind sticking knives into a bleeding flesh, would you?

John's face at the opposite side of the table froze amidst a total astonished silence.

No Diaspora Jew would have dared to say something like that in public, and particularly not if it could be heard in a very posh elite restaurant.

I kept an innocent look while the waiter, immediately summoned, took the plate from the banker and was asked to bring fillet-mignon well-done.

The silence went on until he returned.

"Is it O.K. now?" so kind Phillip sitting at my other side, while the apologetic waiter retired and the conversation around the table resumed with Phillip's profound remark, "the pepper-sauce is delicious" and to me, in a very low voice "I'm sorry, we did not realize..."

I did not let him finish explaining what he had or had not realized –

It's all right now, I'm fine.

I made an effort to be polite and not spoil, at least for myself, the rest of the evening in this gorgeous place of a standard to which I was not accustomed. John, who did not look at me during the whole incident, cleverly managed to divert the conversation toward my interest in art, albeit not knowing about my painting. The conversation thus moved away from the issue of sauces to the safe sphere of art, where everyone could express his or hers learned opinion and still look clever.

Desert was served with some remarks about the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra and how good they were.

"Do you go often to listen to them?" asked Helen.

No, not really. Surprising as it may seem to you, I prefer to go to your Festival Hall for whatever they have.

"Oh! Really! How come?", and the rest of the crowd were attentively listening.

Well, the Israeli audience arrives late to concerts, coughs, and at the end of the performance hurries out without proper ovations. In Adelaide I have the feeling I'm going to a temple, to some sort of festive ceremony, also because here women wear long frocks that in Israel would be considered ridiculous. I tremendously enjoy the opportunity to wear long frocks.

"I think we do not appreciate what we have here," laughed Helen.

Perhaps, I laughed too, but the neighbour's grass is forever greener, isn't it?

We went to the terrace for the last drink, and Phillip moved toward me, held me in his arms and said gently -

"But we are friends, aren't we, my dea?"

His insistent tone confused me and I smiled, and his embrace slowly tightened and, gently, he kissed me on my lips. An immediate shudder stiffened my back and he let go, still smiling.

"We are friends," he repeated, and this time smiling with reassurance at John who, without looking at me and without uttering a word, returned a smile whilst sipping his Whisky.

Phillip added "she is gorgeous, isn't she?"

John nodded and I sensed that I was approved by someone John cared about, and somewhat embarrassed I continued to sip my drink.

We left the place, me in a better mood than that with which I had entered.

Before going to the car the banker came toward me and with no patronizing tone apologized -

"Sorry dea! I didn't mean to insult or to hurt you. I am not an anti-Semite, you know, just a joking Gentile!"

I smiled with tight lips thinking that perhaps I had let my insecurities drive me out of gear, so I let him kiss me on the cheek in the Anglo-Saxon manner - making a noise with the lips but without a touch - and I returned the same kind of a vague cheek-kiss to him and his wife, saying that it was O.K, no hard feelings.

In the car I asked John why during and after the meat-incident he hadn't even glanced at me, and he was hardly looking at me even then.

"Don't you think you've overdone your reaction? It was not the proper thing to do; you have been quite rude;" and not realizing how it would have suited my feelings some minutes ago he added the common proverb, 'Those who don't apologize first, are the first to be sorry about it'. "Whatever had happened, he, a much older person, had been the first to apologize about something that was grossly exaggerated! Not you!"

But he was horribly nasty, I protested.

"Perhaps he did not mean it the way you understood it! Perhaps you are too sensitive as to what people say in regard to everything Jewish or Israeli and perhaps, no, not perhaps! I categorically think you overreacted."

I felt uneasy, and looking at my untreated fingernails did not respond.

"Whatever you think or feel you should remain reserved; coarseness is not a proper reaction and does not constitute an aesthetic sight."

Later on in our relationship I realized that not being aesthetic, whatever exactly one means by that, bordered for him on committing grave misbehaviour. Right now I sensed his quiet anger, and predicting a rejection I did not mind asking the expected polite end-of-a-date question "would you like to have a late drink?", although to come to someone's place on the very first date may not be a very proper thing to do, at least according to my code of behaviour.

"O.K."

Surprised, in light of the anger I sensed within him in his last words, I decided by a sudden impulse to plunge in, but on my territory -

Let's go to my place; anyhow you'll have to bring me there...eventually.

He did not reply.

After a short drive we arrived; I left the car without looking back to see if he was following and opened the front door. In spite of the late hour Naomi and Celia were standing at the doors of their rooms talking, and they opened their eyes wide when I stormed in and said good night.

John followed me and nodded to the opened-mouth girls.

He locked the door behind us with a mute face and expressionless eyes, his narrow lips narrowing even further.

You hate me, I stated, because I have embarrassed you! Well -

and wanting to tell him to get lost if he resents me, and deciding that in English it amounted to 'coarseness' which he disliked, I opted to my equivalent Israeli slang -

You can jump!

He did; in his own way.

Before I had time to say Jack Robinson I was thrown on the cushions and he jumped on me, pressing my bosom to his, our faces almost touching.

"I should have bashed you!"

Why? Because what I said embarrassed you?

"No! Because I'm annoyed by your tone and your foul language."

I kissed him, trying to penetrate his closed lips with all the force of my tongue.

He lifted the lower part of my galabiah and pressed my thigh under my panties.

I pushed him and stood up. Looking at his slim figure on my cushions induced quicker palpitation, and contractions in my pelvis.

Prepare yourself, I said when I entered the bathroom.

I wished I could take off my draperies in front of him like they always do in the movies; they are always so clean and tidy, the fresh underwear - bras and stockings and panties - never smelling in the movies, and no presence of padded panties. But in real life I had to take off the pad, by now smelly and slightly moist, and remove the sweaty bra. I washed my face, breasts, vulva and armpits and put on deodorant, and mentally tried to prepare myself for a new unfamiliar phenomenon.

When I came out naked, pressing a clean after-act towel to my chest, I expected to find him with a condom, but in those pill-days (and pre-aids) he did not find it necessary. His naked body was expecting me with an erect and circumcised penis - as so many Anglo-Saxons have - and I was relieved seeing the familiar phenomenon, and at once he penetrated me.

No foreplay, no caressing, no 'getting to know each other's parts', no tender kisses – all that I was accustomed to. His attitude apparently corresponded to Naomi's citation from her favourite poet Rod McKuen - I am, and I am not a kind man when it comes to loving.

He was forceful in his thrusts, in and out, in and out, and wanted - what indeed? To hurt me?

But feeling the weight of his body and hearing his sighs I realized that there I was, having sexual intercourse with a man who attracted me to the point where, without foreplay, and for the first time in my life, his immediate penetration had been welcomed by my vagina, already moist in the bathroom by the contractions forecasting the expected act.

My body willingly responded to his movements, and when his juices streamed into me, a choked scream came out of his tight mouth and little drops of sweat appeared on his upper lip. He lay quietly beside me, calming down, not uttering a word but looking around at the room.

"Nice," he murmured after a while, "very aesthetic."

Exhausted we fell asleep without bothering to turn off the light.

In the morning he saw my messy little kitchenette.

"It has to improve if you want me to have a coffee here."

VIII.

My room always welcomed me with its white walls and the few hung items of what appealed to me in Australiana, but with none of my paintings. I kept them in the studio, and when I come to think about it now I realise I wanted to keep myself behind a curtain that no one would penetrate.

There wasn't much more in the room – two low book-shelves I had made from natural wood painted grey and laid on cement blocks I had picked up from a building site, a grey wall-to-wall carpet on which I have spread cushions of several sizes and shades of grey, a rolled antique-pink wide mattress which I opened for sleeping, and a plant in a big black pot that provided a lively green stain in the otherwise cool atmosphere of white walls, antique-pink ceiling and grey furniture. The coloured spots of the paraphernalia and those on the book-covers provided another break for the exploring eyes of my guests, in addition to colourful me in my homely plain cotton embroidered galabiahs.

When I woke up in the mornings, and after a shower, I went to the small, regularly messy, kitchenette to put the kettle on, drinking my coffee on the one chair I had at the tiny table on which I wrote my papers. The space was programmed to provide me with a comfortable cool place, not even a working space, as for that I had the studio.

Oddly enough, as I did not expect it, my fellow students loved the place even when they were looking for the girls; seeing my open door, they often asked whether they might come in. Surprise surprise! They started to bring home their boys!

Sue, whom I met at Uni in one of the literary seminars and almost immediately became close friends with, explained that it was because they were all overwhelmed to see how much comfort and cosines came from so little. They used to sit around on the carpet or on the cushions, holding their cups between their palms, saying very little in spite of my efforts to maintain a conversation. Sue calmed my anxieties about the locals' silence:

"They don't talk much; they come here in order to say that they have been here, and if they manage to drag the time till late night – the better; because then it goes with 'Oh! We were at so-and-so yesterday, and it was terrific, and we stayed there for sooo long!"

After that eye-opener explanation I filled the dead moments by putting a record on the old record player, and the subject of which new modern equipment to acquire filled up the rest of the evening.

The Beatles were equally useful.

"I too like to come here," said Sue, adding "I guess all of us like to come here because the place has nothing of the Australian or of old Europe in it – not stuffy, and good coffee."

This un-stuffiness, as a matter of fact, had been partly due to a shortage of finances, and greatly to my Bauhaus ideology - of having as little as possible to get maximum results.

Furniture of the kind I saw in Australian homes, in most cases heavy dark wood and semi-Persian carpets, filled the space and prevented fresh air circulating, so I felt, whereas my almost empty carpeted room enabled us, as I defined it, 'to feel our legs'; either stretched them to the full, folded in the oriental way, or walking around barefoot. This, I assume, is why I had been attracted to John's place at the beach, where the bed and the floor mingled into one entity, leaving around an empty space where I could freely walk barefoot.

Once John started to come, a second chair was added, and my door was more often locked from the inside and, unless invited in advance, people stopped coming.

An unexpected, but much favoured guest though, found his way to our apartment and into my heart via the Mezuzah – a Jewish symbol of identity – which I attached to the door-post of my room and to the main entrance after settling in the place.

We had to explain to Celia what it means, and moreover - that it is supposed to protect the house. To clarify the point and to add a bit of a smile to something that was awkward to her and important to us even as secular Jews, I told them the anecdote about a visiting Hindu priest who used to bless his American hosts by "let this house be safe from tigers", and when they asked where the hell he sees tigers around, he replied – I rest my case.

The Mezuzah had been unnoticed or ignored by most of the visiting students, but it attracted Father Phillip Smith's attention only after he rang the bell and I opened the door. He apologized for bothering us Jews in vain, and explained that being a Catholic priest he had been making his rounds in the neighbourhood 'looking for his flock'.

Well father, I am not just a Jew; worse - an Israeli one, I said laughing.

"Why do you say 'worse'? I liked it in Israel. I participated in one of our seminars in Israel and stayed there for a while."

So welcome in! Would you like a small Turkish?

"A big one," Father Phillip laughed with shining big brown eyes behind his glasses.

I wonder how many Aussies will understand a mere 'Turkish'", I said.

He came in, sat on one of the cushions, folded his legs as we do in the orient, and sipped his coffee. We talked about his experiences in and impressions of Israel, and it was an interesting conversation that exposed me to another angle on how Israel is viewed by outsiders. Thus, Israelis are warm welcoming people, generally straightforward but not always polite, but it was for him quite refreshing; one knew where one stands, etc. I was pleased to hear it, although I suspected that Father Phillip had been very kind indeed in his description of Israelis.

Afterwards he used to pop-in whenever in the neighbourhood, or when I asked to have his professional advice on how to deter non-Jewish youngsters who decided that Holy Jerusalem is the right place for them. Such "professional" discussions were brief, and our meetings regularly continued deep into the late hours of the night with conversations on philosophical issues.

Our secular talks on spiritual matters soon developed into discussions on the nature of Sin, as emanates from the verse said to Cain (Genesis 4:7) - 'To you is his desire, and you may rule over it', and he rejected my translation-interpretation of "may rule", stating that it is written not as an option but as a command to rule Sin, thou will, and I protested that I was not responsible for the inaccurate translation-interpretation of the source he cited or, for that matter, for any inaccurate translation.

After several of those kinds of meetings I was very happy to have John, because the thought of falling for a Catholic priest was ridiculous and, from a Jewish point of view, ludicrous.

But it felt good whenever he came, and with typical Israeli straightforwardness I asked about his origins, and then for the reason he had not joined the shipping industry of his family in England.

"To care for people rather than for ships," he smiled, and I deplored at what I felt would be his fate, with no family and children. And yes, I loved him very much, if the word "love" is comprehended in its original Biblical connotation – an attachment between kindred spirits, like that between biblical Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi.

But it was not exclusively platonic, as it also felt physically good whenever he popped into my thoughts.

IX.

When I ponder now about my Australian affair, I cannot determine, and needless to say I couldn't have had then, what it was that attracted me to John's particular circle of people.

After the blood-ritual episode in the restaurant, our meetings seemed to continue favourably. And from then on, and for the whole period ahead of me, I remained mute whenever unpleasant things were mentioned about Jews or Israel.

"You have to put things in proportion," said Phillip one day, kindly embracing me. "People comment about the drunken Irish and their stupidity, about the miser Scots and, ironically for ex-convicts, about the English as bloody Pohms (prisoners of His Majesty). Believe me - all of it means no harm!"

But you know that joking remarks about us led eventually to pogroms, I kindly protested, and if you remember - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion started as an innocent parody.

Phillip immediately understood me.

He was rare amongst this circle with his excessive reading, and his knowledge of humanistic studies surprised me over and over again, also when it concerned Jewish matters, and I often found I was required to revise my sources. Among this glitzy crowd, he was the only one with whom I felt confident to converse and to express uncommon notions and ideas.

I often wondered how it came about that so many among John's upper-class crowd were fundamentally non-intellectual. They were well educated, and in private schools, but not what Virginia Woolf had defined as highbrows - those who pursue ideas - although they regarded themselves as being way above the run-of-the-mill. Their indifference to ideas in general and to new ones in particular seemed to me as if they purposely chose to being an anathema to the vibrant cultural life that had just started buzzing around in the Adelaide of Premier Dunstan.

Was it because the new establishment of mid-1970s represented Labour's attempt at avant-gardism, replacing their former long-lived conservatism and pretensions to aristocracy?

Or was it because they were amused by the political change that, in its first stages which I witnessed, reflected confused new elite yet unclear about what is "suitable culture"?

At least the new era attempted to implement a new state of affairs with wide public participation in cultural affairs – "The Athens of the South" as Premier Dunstan termed it, alluding also to Pericles' cultural golden era. But it amused them, because the ancient-Greek logo that conveyed for the general public sunny places with vivid street-life and open-air cafes ignored or disregarded some aspects of Athenian culture – the undemocratic exclusion of women from public life and, moreover, it's having been fundamentally homosexual. Homosexuality was prevalent also in Adelaide, but not openly commented upon and, as a matter of fact, it was publicly denounced by the old establishment, hence the conversation we had at our first dinner at Ayers House.

"Pathetic", John's circle of friends, the so-called aristocratic group, labeled those first attempts in search for new ideas to step out of Australian macho-culture and British notions, and mocked the implementation of a new atmosphere which they did not share. I could not understand it, as an upper-class for Jews usually meant achieving a degree of intellectual superiority, of a craving for ideas; otherwise a person was considered just a nouveau riche.

John laughed.

"We are English, and therefore 'upper class' is defined by the amount of land owned or by what their fortune entitles them to control - that which leftists call 'means of production'."

But lately there is not much land left in the hands of the oldies, nor is it feasible to own land, is it?

"Well, that is why Dunstan's writer-friend Max Harris titled us 'Adelaide's remnants of the ghostly, grand establishment'."

I read some of Harris' articles and poems, and met him when I visited his Mary Martin Bookstore; the elegant Max sitting on his chair with his chin leaning on his hands that held a cane, conveying the very aristocratic air that he used to mock.

Perhaps what at first attracted me to John's circle - hallowed with their self-imposed crown of aristocracy - was their adherence to "proper" etiquette that contrasted with the almost total lack of it in Israel, and to their restraint and stiff-upper-lip attitude so unlike my impulsive reactions. Their social bubble was so different from what I've ever met, so un-Jewish and, in particular, so un-Israeli! Only later, much later and via an unpleasant occurrence, did I find that joining this particular circle was regarded by locals as a social achievement.

Within this circle John constituted a category to which I aspired, an elevated one due to his manners and intellect and, in this respect, it included also Phillip. The three of us, so I thought and felt, formed a group of our own, gradually developing a kind of intimacy in which Phillip's kisses and embraces were accepted as a genuine part of our relationship.

With various members of John's friends we dined quite often, too often to my liking, at posh European restaurants. I favored the ethnic ones that were for me a novelty, as they had not yet reached Tel Aviv. For special occasions we went to Ayers House where I found myself smiling at the proprietor, who was said to molest his waitresses, and smiled at people whose names I could not remember seconds after they had left our table.

After our relationship gained the tint of permanency, I was invited to attend a function at the Adelaide Club, as both Philip and John were members by birth-right.

The girls at home were overwhelmed with admiration to my social "achievement", but it was not repeated because I did not like the over-decorated place, and in particular the over-elegant and over-civilized crowd that tried to convey cordiality, finding myself surrounded by people with whom in all probability I would never form contacts, and me behaving very politely, and me saying nothing (!), as this was John's social alma mater. I preferred the cultural aspect of our meetings, and John, being aware of it, did his best to concentrate on events that did not put a social strain on me.

June, my Polish friend from pottery class had been working at the box-office of Festival Centre. She kindly arranged for me to get always my place - that is, adopted as mine, as was the bench in the square - on the right-side of the gallery, in the first chair in the last box, thus giving me a sense of solitude and of floating above the hall, detached from the crowd. She used to keep the tickets for me until half an hour before performances, and then we had a brief drink at The Kiosk.

When John came into the picture I insisted on retaining "my" favourite place that involved a chat and drinks with June, claiming that I did not want anyone of his crowd sitting with us, not even Phillip toward whom I had developed a real liking, because I feel better being surrounded by complete strangers when I mentally plunge into the performance.

After performances were over, we joined his friends and sipped drinks at the Festival Centre after concerts, and at the Bistro of the Playhouse after theatrical or dance shows.

X.

It did not occur to me, until Lily's plea several months after my arrival to Adelaide, that I had become a kind of a celebrity.

Celia, who came from Sydney, was ignorant of John's circle, and when she became aware of it – she was too kind to remark; and hippie Naomi, after her first surprise, too indifferent to give a damn about it. Neither ever commented about my relationship with John besides saying how gorgeous he was, probably because they remembered our conversation about companions. Although they liked to hear my reports on the performances we had attended, they did not provide any data on him and his milieu.

All I knew was what I saw in the weeks we dated, suspecting that he was far from being poor, not only because he insisted on paying for all our entertainment, and also June for the tickets I ordered, but also by his car, the location of his town-house into which I never entered, his cabin at the beach, his clothing, the restaurants we went to, and all those details and small items that indicated expensive luxury.

He did not provide any information, not even when our conversations opened a way for it, and I had to content myself with what I knew – I had a pleasant and pleasing lover.

This went on until Lily spoke and shook the equilibrium that I had established within me in regard to John and his "aloofness".

Lily was no friend of mine, and this is a gross understatement.

I could not avoid hearing about her because, even on my rare meetings with members of the small Jewish community at Pam's place, everyone gossiped about her extraordinary house and huge income that far transcended her husband's, and her infinite desire to mingle with the blue-ribbon circle of the Adelaide Club where Jews were not admitted as members, although two Jewish families were among its founders. Her wish "to belong" resulted in a minimal involvement with Jewish affairs that enabled her husband, a German refugee labeled Dr. Lily, to be considered a member of the Jewish Orthodox Synagogue.

She was delighted when her sons married out of the faith, as her grandchildren would never be considered Jews by Jewish Orthodoxy, and she wholeheartedly believed that assimilation is the only solution for the Jewish people, particularly in Australia.

Her involvement in non-Jewish social affairs, on the other hand, occupied most of her time, demonstrating that in spite of her Jewish origins she was an organic member of the local community. A week did not pass without her participation in this or that event or fundraising being mentioned in the society columns of local papers. Her presence, in most cases, had been noted as a companion to Mrs. Bonython, the illustrious Adelaide Club lady whose family owned the local prominent newspaper The Advertiser. The later was, in poet Max Harris's definition of her class, 'a remnant' of the Bonythons who once owned the big dramatic-looking house "Carclew", on Montefiore Hill, that often caught my eye in my strolls. When I met this duo of ladies at one of the concerts to which I went with Pam and Allen (John couldn't come), Mrs. Bonython commented how wonderful it was that there was now a Jewish school where Jewish kids could be among 'their own', as years ago Lily's boys had to go to St. Peter's, where her own family members went.

Lily heard Her Ladyship's racially-tinted remark and did not move a muscle, and I kindly smiled in approval.

Although Lily was quite friendly with Pam, dearest Pam who embraced almost everyone who approached her, she took no notice of me on those rare occasions when we met at Pam's house.

Pam said that the only public sign of recognition of her roots was by showing herself on the eve of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) at the Synagogue. A diaspora Jew cannot omit attendance on this occasion, and the prayer of Kol Nidre at the eve of the holy day is when almost everyone attends, even those who were never seen at Jewish functions. No wonder I did not meet her in synagogue the only time I went there, as it was the eve of the Passover.

Israelis - that is, secular Israelis like me - do not attend Synagogue, I once stated, surprising Adelaide's Liberal Jews when I added that in spite of it I am an Orthodox Jew.

"It is an oxymoron," protested Lou Silver from the Liberal Congregation, when I rejected his invitation to join their Synagogue. No, I insisted, it just logically follows the joke that the Synagogue into which I don't go is an Orthodox one.

The 'Synagogue' into which Israelis do go are the huge halls or lawn-parks where they gather to express the Israeli substitute for an institution to which they do not feel attached, holding poetry texts and singing for hours, from the bottom of their hearts, Israeli songs. For some of us songs had become engraved in our minds, and we sing them to ourselves, and in every possible place where we can express through them our sentiments, longings and frustrations, as if they were a prayer; instead of a prayer.

However, as I had not yet been in Adelaide on the eve of Yom Kippur to fulfill the Diaspora's almost-obligatory attendance in THE Jewish institution, I went to present myself at the old Adelaide Orthodox Synagogue in April, on Passover Eve and after having been several months in the city.

John wanted to take me with him to Sydney for the Easter holidays, but I declined with the excuse that it was the time for my period, in which I usually avoided his company. It was a white lie, as the real reason for not going with him was an inner voice that told me not ignore my roots, and as I might not be invited to attend a Seder (the Passover ritual meal), I should commemorate the liberation from Egypt, be it only in attending once at the Synagogue. Perhaps this drive had been an inner unconscious Jewish bond that I overlooked or disregarded. I joked about it with Mussa, saying that I had to go to the Synagogue, as after all I was trying to liberate myself from the burden of my past-memories. But Mussa, who had never attended a service in Adelaide, refused to come with me.

"If afterwards you feel a need for a more profound contact with your roots, come to my place."

I could see from the women's gallery that there were few men in the main prayer hall. Even less people attended in the gallery, most of them old women, and therefore excused from the necessity to toil on the festive meal. The regular hushing of the Rabbi on the lower level did not stop the blabbing in the gallery during the prayers, and the private conversations that characterize almost every Synagogue went on till the end of the session, continuing afterwards with exchanged gossip, bidding farewells and the wishing everyone well with the relevant Jewish blessings for the occasion - Hag Sameah (happy holy festival).

I sensed by glances directed at me that I had been talked about, but although everyone said to me Hag Sameah with a smile, they all went away with the same vague smile, not bothering to ask whether I had been invited to a Seder. Although I did not expect it, and wouldn't have known how to respond if someone I hardly knew had offered such an invitation, the lack of it was odd because in an Orthodox community no solitary Jew is left behind in the Synagogue without being invited.

At the bottom of the gallery-stairs I unexpectedly met Pam's Alan, himself not a regular comer to prayers.

He was surprised and delighted to see me, and wholeheartedly invited me "Dear! Where have you been! We thought that you were away with John because we could not reach you on the phone! There wasn't a reply... Anyway, of course you are coming to us, aren't you? Come with me! We have also the Traubs for the evening and I am sure you'll like them, in particular Adelheid."

I did. Very much. How could I not?

Adelheid and Edmund Traub were delightful people, an intelligent old couple with no children or relatives. Like Alan's family, they had escaped Germany in the mid-1930s, looking for refuge in Australia. After that first meeting I used to chat with them at Pam's place whenever she held a musical event – me with my slight Israeli accent and them with their heavy German one.

We went to Allan's house in Brougham Place, on one of hilly North Adelaide's first streets, where the front of the houses facing the main road presented at their entrances just one modest floor, not disclosing the second floor situated below on the slope of the hill. Alan was quite proud of his property when during John's first visit there he showed us the view of the city from the first floor balcony, and then strolled with us through the lower floor to the terraces leading down to the back alley, ending in a plateau with a small dilapidated cottage that once hosted the carriages and horses of bygone times. What a wonderful studio for a painter it could have been!

We sat for the Seder in the spacious dining room around the grand wooden table covered with white cloth. The singing of the Passover text, the Hagadah, had several traditional German tunes that slightly differed from the East-European ones I knew, but as they stem from folkloric traditions they enabled an outsider like me to...well, to hum them under our noses – as we say in Hebrew. I was curious to see how they all relate to the two erotic sentences which sum up the process of multiplication of the nation in Egypt, describing it in figurative language as the transition into womanhood. Curious, because even Hebrew speakers feel uncomfortable reading loud in public a verse about breasts developed to function and hair that had grown within absolute nakedness. But the faces around me remained mute; apparently none of the grownups regarded it as somewhat pornographic. The children, however, being at their early stage of puberty, giggled while looking at the English translation of the second verse that mentions the woman's cycle of blood that enables life.

I was not familiar even with their musical version of "The Four Questions" sang by the kids, as tradition dictates, and after they finished their four stanzas I sang only the last one in my traditional tune.

The conversation during the meal that divides the Seder into two parts was about Beethoven's nine symphonies which were gradually being performed at the Festival Hall.

"Which one is your favourite?" asked Adelheid.

The Seventh; in particular the second part.

Alan laughed, saying, "It suits you well, doesn't it? The moody atmosphere of the second part, the search for an answer..."

"And at the end, coming to terms with whatever there is and being happy about life itself," added Adelheid.

Hers was a pleasant remark, leading us to the joyful final part of the evening - of singing the songs closing the Passover text and the festive meal.

Socially I had been ignored by almost everyone else in the community, including Lily, and that's why I was speechless when, several days after Passover, going to the square to get some fresh air after I had finished working on a sculptural sketch of a dance-movement in clay, I saw her coming toward my bench, pleasantly greeting me.

"It's shou nice to see you...it's lovely here, ishn't it?"

I could have sworn that she had hardly ever bothered to come here before, and suspected that Pam had told her about my bench.

"Can we go to some place to have a cuppa... perhaps your place?"

Definitely not! I said harshly and then, smiling, softened my voice -

At my student's place? It's impossible! I don't host there – it's so uncomfortable!

The whole encounter of inviting me for "a cuppa" was awkward. My first instinct was to coarsely tell her to get lost, but my curiosity took over. Pleasantly I said O.K. and went with her to a place she had chosen – respectable by her standards, intimate enough to have privacy, and not too populated. She purposely arranged this as-if-casual meeting, but for Pete's sake I couldn't gather why. Instead of disrupting her trivial conversation with a typical Israeli outburst, something on the line of "what's the matter", I examined her face carefully.

She was lovely.

Around John's age and charming the way only a maturing woman could be, reflecting self-confidence and dressed in her unique style - an outstanding combination of colors and cuts, originally arranged and, I had to admit, forming her own elegant individual style that distinguished her from the crowd. Her clear blue eyes, rosy-powdered fair complexion and tidy dyed-brown smooth hair, made her the paradigm of the Aussie WASP lady, although - so unfortunate for her - of Jewish extract.

Her chatter was enviably a model of "art-talk" that actually said very little, concealing whatever purpose it may have had.

I remained pleasant, letting her tighten the rope around her own neck, not advancing the subject she had started - "Do you like Adelaide?"

Oh, yes! Very much, otherwise I wouldn't bother to stay here.

"And what are you actually doing here?"

Well, you might not believe it, but I... live, just live, I said calmly rebuking any further intrusion into my privacy and with a wide smile turning the whole thing into a mild joke.

Lily understood borders and did not attempt to approach the issue again.

She went on babbling.

"Would you like a cake? I recommend the cheese cake... I shaw you at the concert shome time ago... you were escorted... he is such a nice fellow...the coffee here is shou good, not the usual brown mixture you get anywhere..."

She purposely made pauses, hoping I would fill in the gaps, but I picked up the convenient point for me and said yes, the coffee was indeed very good, and I'm sorry I haven't been here before (of course I hadn't! It is so bloody expensive!). I ignored the remark about my escort, as at that concert I saw Lily escorted by a fellow who was neither her husband nor charming, and I went on talking about unpleasant experiences I had had around town with horrible cups of coffee and, as they usually were indeed awful, I could have continued on and on.

As Lily did not ask me for a coffee to talk about coffee, she became impatient and less careful in her handlings, and when I paused to take a sip she asked directly –

"Have you known John for long?"

I did not realize you know John, as previously you referred to him as my escort.

"Of course I know him... of the old establishment. He is sho charming."

Pause.

"I used to know his wife, once, before she left the city... I used to meet her on one of my committees... with him I am less acquainted... he is a very reserved person... more so after she left town... he moves only in the social circle of his own milieu... very few people are invited to their gatherings... the rumor runs that they are quite wild...Beiner (who the hell is he?) told me that he had seen you at Ayers. Do you often dine there?"

I could have sworn that she knew every time I had been there with John and his friends.

So it wasn't me who interested her, it was John. I had become a "somebody" only because I was attached to John. But still, asking these silly questions that border on mere gossip about the nature of their gatherings was not a sufficient reason for someone like her to spend time with me in this posh place, paying a revoltingly high price for coffee and cake.

What was she after?

My silence made her a bit nervous and she became talkative.

"You are shou lucky...he is one of the most sought after fellows in Adelaide, now that his wife is out of sight; did you know that?"

I did not, and perhaps she was clever enough to decipher it in spite of my motionless face.

"Frankly, I myself wouldn't mind having an affair with him, but don't tell my husband, ha ha ha...You don't know much about him, do you? As you have just recently arrived here you couldn't possibly know much. I could tell you most of his biography."

I did not comment on this open invitation to gossip, and if I had to know something about John it would better be coming from him and not from Lily. Besides, her insinuation that there was something interesting to know about him that I did not know just made me angry, and for some awkward reason - or better said, for some awkward unreason - I didn't want to hear what it was.

"I am delighted that you've got him...If I can help you in any way... socially, I mean..."

I did not reply.

"Perhaps I could arrange a cocktail party for you and your friends at our place, as yours in North Adelaide is a small one, isn't it? We have a beautiful spacious home, you know, you should come to see us one day, dea."

Of course I knew about her splendid Springfield house in the dreamland of Adelaide Hills, where the aspiring middle class built there huge houses in English style, English flora and, all in all, amounting to English mansions.

The English pronoun "you" is both plural and singular, and for both sexes. In Hebrew there is no room to be unclear, and had it been said in Hebrew I could have immediately gathered who she was inviting - me, him, or both of us. I was sure that in spite of "dearing" me she didn't care much about my well-being, with or without John; and it became clear that what she cared about was having a hold on John and an entrance to the elusive "society" to which he belonged.

"You are not worried because of me, dea, are you? I was just joking!"

That did it!

As we express it in Hebrew - it lit a fuse in my brain!

Apparently the poor darling social climber, in spite of her already wide social contacts, was still banging on doors and looking to belong in a circle that did not admit her, trying to infiltrate into a particular group through me - the Israeli outsider who little cared for or appreciated the social advantages unintentionally received, being aware only of the privilege of a dream-lover who bestowed on her pleasures that she could hardly have imagined.

Did she guess this last part when she joked about having an affair with him?

I tried very hard not to expose my disgust and to respond in a nonchalant manner -

Oh no! If I'm worried for John in regard to you - I took another sip from my cup - it's because John may not be happy about the shidech, that is – matching with you, because he usually looks for authenticity and you are a fake, you know.

She became pale.

Trying to keep a pleasant voice, in spite of the distress this encounter caused me, I continued -

Had you retained what you really are, or should have been, I could have introduced John to a nice intelligent Jewish woman who runs a nice Jewish home, like Pam and Alan you see, with conversations also about Jewish matters, held around Jewish meals and all the pleasantry of such a social gathering. As a Gentile it interests him a lot, and now that Pam and Alan are away it would have been great if I could show him something else that, as one might say, is a bit of mine. But you do not give a damn about such a setup, do you?

She did not reply.

And repeating the bits of gossip I had heard, I added –

What are we going to get at your place? So-called chosen Gentile company? Cocktails? Lobster and champagne by romantic candle-light? Blue movies and nude-swimming in your pool? He can have all these anywhere, so there is no point in offering all these to him and his crowd at your place!

Still no reply.

So you see dear, you simply cannot provide any novelty for John or for my relationship with him!

She did not even blush when she said "Well, I was just trying to be of some help..."

No dear! You were trying to use me in order to get – what precisely?

His circle?

Him?

No response.

I was laughing when I continued –

I didn't realize I had got such a metziah, such a highly evaluated catch, to deserve your attention.

And to myself I thought - imagine my hutzpah! Me, the outsider who had somehow managed to get into the very place she longed to be!

"Where did you meet him?" she hissed between her teeth.

In the square dear, merely in the square – there, where the fountain pours its waters up to the sky and on the sculptures, and it drizzles all around. You should go sometimes to such common simple places, dea, perhaps you'll get yourself an interesting John and all that he stands for.

I was shou angry when I left the place!

I was angry with Lily, with her demonstration of expensive luxury in that café and with her silly and vain attempt to use me; but also angry with a world which frustrated people like her, otherwise intelligent, to act as they do in order to belong, and angry with myself for forcing her to look into a mirror. But nothing - nothing in the world - justified my last sentence that had been vulgar and unnecessarily cruel, and I was not going to tell John about the whole encounter, and particularly not about my own "non aesthetical coarseness" and foul language.

She had managed to expose venom that I had previously not been aware existed in me, and I felt sorry for and about myself.

On my way back to the studio I started to be sorry for her too because, in spite of her craving to enter the "right" circles and her efforts to belong, for those people whom I took for granted and basically did not care much about she remained a pushy Jew.

Apparently not her money or even a change of religion - had she wanted to go to that extreme - would have granted her and her German refugee-husband an entrance to the crowd she aspired to, whereas a restless Israeli me, with all my eccentricities and perhaps in spite of them, exerted a kind of attraction for those people. In the eyes of this circle she remained in the cell tagged "a Diaspora Jew", and it made me wonder - exactly what cell in theirs and John's consciousness did I occupy?

During work in the studio I gradually came back to my senses.

On clean white canvases I marked two new sketches of the fountain, both from a bird's-eye view, capturing the fountain with its three figures from its southern side. But unlike the previous ones that presented a somewhat transparent quality of the fountain by attaching an ample amount of white color, these ones I covered with dim colors, heavy and condensed, that responded to my heavy thoughts. The space around the fountain in both drawings gained vast overpowering dimensions that, to some extent, reflected the vast emptiness I felt.

The first one was a vertical rectangular in blues and black. The central fountain, devoid of life-giving waters and enclosed within its dark surroundings, had been circumscribed by white strokes; a long bluish perspective of King William Street leading to suspiciously narrow skies stretched in light blue at the horizon. Finishing this canvas seemed to release some burden of anger, and remorse was gradually building itself up in my mind: how could I be so arrogant, so cruel.

5   6

In the second painting I attempted to express a more positive attitude by trying a warmer palette, and thus responding to the bit of understanding I had developed toward Lily.

In this painting, viewed from the same perspective, the rectangular was horizontal, with horizontal masses altering the proportions of the fountain. Streams of water and wider spaces smiling with reds, oranges and yellows bestowed a vivid presentation. The frontal buildings at the north of the square exposed a yellowish wider and more optimistic horizon of sky above King William Street, corresponding to the yellowish tones of the fountain. It was sunset when I felt I hadn't anything else to add.

I stood in front of the stand, a bit further away to gain a better perspective, and examined my work.

The paintings with their awkward colors were surprisingly pastoral although strange-looking, but most of all - uninspiring. Although both projected to me the uneasiness I had felt several hours before, and as well the perversion of the whole affair that was still echoing in my mind, neither was more than, well, pleasant.

It wasn't IT...I had missed again.

I returned to the square.

Sitting on my bench to calm down before returning to my flat made me ponder again – had I been too harsh and perhaps unfair to Lily?

Everyone seemed to be running away from something - Lily from her Jewish background that she resented but could not desert in a nearby church, I from my Israeli memories, and John from...his wife? He never mentioned her existence, and Lily's remarks shed a cloud on my...on what indeed?

In any case, Lily's remarks shattered the placid equilibrium in which I had been living in regard to our relationship, and I was determined never to ask him about his wife unless he'd choose to tell; and while thinking it, at that very moment, I felt a chill streaming through my spine and an uneasy feeling creeping in - things are not going to be the same.

XI.

We resumed our meetings after he returned from his Easter holiday, but something had changed and I, obscured by my longings and desire for his physical presence, was at first blind to realize it.

Gradually I noticed that his smiles about my language mistakes became rare, and he seemed to get accustomed to my Hebrewized English or, a more optimistic option – maybe my English had improved.

His eyes watched me quietly while I moved around, disclosing no emotion, and no expression could be detected in his face even when he asked for, and received, translations of the songs I had been murmuring while working in my kitchenette, an instinctive unconscious habit of mine, or those which I purposely recited in his cabin.

I became less and less comfortable with his lack of expressed emotions and not knowing whether they existed. For the first time after all those months with him I started to ponder where was the intimacy that I had longed for, and whether the mere pleasures in which I had been living had indeed been an end in itself and, not knowing where we were heading in our relationship, I became more and more confused.

"Why are you humming Green Sleeves when he leaves the place?" asked Naomi who could hear my customary Hebrew-singing through the walls or via my open door.

Don't know. I even don't know the traditional English words, and in my head are only fragments of an American version.

"Well?"

Away, away, come away with me, and I'll build you a home in the meadow.

"My poor darling! You are losing your marbles!" so Naomi, returning to her room with an insight into my feelings.

I began to feel she might be right, although to poor-darling me seemed going a bit too far.

Did I hope for a more permanent setting rather than just having a good time?

Perhaps the thought was creeping in, although at the time I had not been, or had not allowed myself to be fully aware of it. Probably because our affair had been so pleasing!

As a matter of fact so pleasing, that it took me quite a time to notice the change in our relationship that, since the Easter Holidays, had been gradually entering into a path I couldn't possible have had predicted. Thus, sexual encounters under his guidance became more condensed in regard to games and explorations, as if we needed to do as much as possible in a brief period. But our meetings for that very purpose were less frequent, which meant that he did not come to my place so often and, as the weather was cooling, weekends at the beach-cabin had become rare.

Our social life, on the other hand, and for a reason that I could not understand, became loaded with events. The enjoyable ones, but oddly enough less frequent, were concerts, movies, the ballet and exhibitions; the less enjoyable were dinners at restaurants.

The least pleasing of all were the abundance, sometimes twice a week, of private parties that remained blurred in my memory, with the unpleasant Biblical-like feeling that 'He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was [not] love'. I disliked being surrounded only by women in those parties, as the Australian common good taste dictated and usually, while trying to keep still and listen, I joined the "boys" who talked politics. When conversation touched the subject of sports I retired into a nearby armchair, sinking into my own thoughts while holding an art-book. Sports bored me and their favorite game, cricket, left me mentally exhausted; I couldn't understand what was going on, as they all hailed when someone missed the ball, and hails were expressed when the same fellow hit it. The first and last time I said it, the people we were dining with responded with laughter, and I never again commented on sports or any other Australian sacred rituals such as races, pubs and weekend picnics.

During the last days of autumn, before and sometimes after Uni classes, I busied myself in the studio, sat on my bench feeding the birds, and went to the YMCA to kiln my little clay figurines. The studio walls were covered with my clumsy attempts to capture what I termed 'the spirit of the fountain', namely – seeking out to express, through its linear architecture and organic curves of the figures, something meaningful.

But something went wrong between whatever vision I craved for and what I had done; no "idea" had materialized into a characteristic style and concept that I could have claimed as mine.

Sometimes I wished I could talk with John about my artistic work, and then rejoiced for not having him around. It was not because of uncertainty in my abilities, as I had a precise estimation of their limitations, nor out of fear of his aesthetic judgment; rather it was to avoid arguing about Form standing for itself, as he firmly insisted, stating that 'it has to be pleasing, aesthetic'. I had my own perceptions - of never divorcing idea from form - and whatever the form engaged, at the end of the day it has to convey an idea; because if it does not – I insisted - then form becomes a mere unemotional decoration, aesthetic as it may be.

I was happy not to have him around in the studio, because what I executed with both my lucidity and sentiments could not have complied with his general restrained and unemotional attitude toward art, which reminded me of his restrained attitude toward life in general, and toward me.

I failed to break through his reserved nature which seemed to serve him as a protective-armour, and I did not know, nor could understand, what he had to be protected from. It induced me to retain for myself this sheltered space and sphere of art of which he was not a part, and to which I could retreat.

Therefore I continued marking rectangles and triangles, drawing and painting the fountain and the sculptures, and the curved lines of the waters, and the bulks of the flora - in various proportions and styles, expressing different moods - but never getting anything that felt as if conveying a perception, at least to me. Was I looking for something that was not there, like explorers of the riddle of the sphinx looking for a magic word to bring it to life?

Why bestow on an indifferent architectural form an idea?

And what idea had I been looking for?

The yet unanswered artistic questions constantly hammered in my head because they reminded me that he, too, remained a riddle. But unlike the imaginary sphinx in the popular story, the riddle that was him might not be sorted out with the help of the simple and affectionate word "Mama".

And perhaps the artistic answer to my questions was less complicated?

Perhaps all it would take was a different arrangement of proportions, not necessarily conceived into a perfect symmetry of height and width, and yet harmonious like the real fountain? Less shades, simpler compositions and colouring, clear and tranquil, and conveying affectionate simplicity as does the word "Mama"?

XII.

Sue, with whom I participated in one of the more advanced literary courses at Uni, had soon become a valuable and completely different kind of contact with Adelaide reality - that of the second and third generation of working class migrants, contrasting John's so-called aristocracy. As if complementing my attraction to Naomi's vivacious nature, I was captivated by Sue's placidity and kind voice, and to her very un-Australian curiosity about other cultures; thus, a Catholic by origin, she became interested in different aspects of Israeli life and Judaism.

She was the daughter of a tall stone-carver and a designer-sculptor of fountains who had migrated during the 1920s from Italy, carving several of the capitals above the columns of Adelaide's Parliament House. Her somewhat petite and dry-humoured mother came from the wine producing Barrossa Valley, being a third generation Aussie of German stock. Sue seemed to have inherited her father's height, her mother's delicate sense of dry humour, and from both parents their placid nature and their curiosity about all forms of art.

As she was my age, she was closer to my mental state than my other Australian student-friends, and by sharing similar cultural interests she soon became a great companion for theatres, movies and art exhibitions whenever John was occupied elsewhere, or whenever I had my period and refused to meet him during the relevant days.

At first, and I believe until the end, he could not comprehend this abstention.

I cannot stand myself, feeling that I smell whether I do or don't, I said slightly embraced, and categorically added: I don't want to expose any aspect of my bleeding situation to you.

"But why? We can have fun without "exposing your bleeding situation", he mimicked me; but I stood firm on my ground.

It's not because of the Jewish religious law of separation during the period, I explained; I simply do not feel well with myself, and I prefer not to have you around.

"How strange," he said, but accepted it.

There was no need to ask whether he had previously done it, namely - "had fun" during woman's periods, as his reaction indicated that he had.

I found it awkwardly strange.

I appreciated Sue's acceptance of me as a person and not as something 'strange', and our funniest talks were about my Israeli English which she termed "Hebrewized English". I tried to explain that in Hebrew, unlike in English, we lack the continuous and the participle, and we have just three tenses among which we are able to oscillate in one paragraph and still retain its chronological logic. Thus, we can say – yesterday when I am walking in the street... something of the sort the American author Damon Runyon does. Moreover, the speech-parts in Hebrew syntax can alter their position in the sentence and still convey the exact meaning of what is said, and repetition of verbs that obviously serve other parts of the sentence can be omitted. Naturally I applied my linguistic habits to my English by starting a sentence with words I regarded as the most important ones, 'and' and 'but', and also by turning nouns into verbs, and Sue said it was charming; and although she laughed whenever she heard my awkward phrasing she always understood me.

How come you understand me to the letter, whereas I find I don't know what people mean when they talk English according to the rules? I once asked her.

"It's because you say what you mean, regardless of tenses, whereas people utilize them in order to disguise what they mean."

You are bloody right about it, dear! I said, trying to casually sound an Australian with 'Bloody' and 'dear'; when I hear people deliver their texts, I always have the sense that a subtext is hidden there, and I just continue the conversation without being certain on what grounds I stand.

"You exaggerate! You credit people with more sophistication than they probably have," she replied laughing.

Sometimes at lunchtime Sue joined me at my bench for a cold drink and a snack, and sitting there quietly we watched the gulls picking the crumbs we had thrown.

Once I couldn't resist the temptation to tease good old Sue, socialist Sue, caring for and empathic with the poor of this world, by saying the horrible sentence "how many poor Indian families could survive on these crumbs"?

In my childhood, I explained, my mother used to bring up the hungry Chinese whenever I did not empty my plate; but it can't be applied to the Chinese anymore because thank God - pardon me: thanks to Chairman Mao and the revolution - everyone supposedly knows that there is no hunger in China.

"Do you think that one day it will apply also to the Indians?" she pondered.

Don't know! I said after a brief pause. I'm sceptic about them.

"Why?"

Well, since our war of independence in 19148 and until these days of the 1970s their policies were quite hypocritical in regard to Israel, and in the long run I do not trust hypocrites to do anything good.

"Do you judge everything by the attitude to Israel?"

Her question reminded me of John's remark on a similar tune, but I did not want to tell her my artistic 'reason' for mistrusting Indians, one that definitely constituted an issue for me getting a psychological treatment. I did not feel at ease uttering that it had nothing to do with race or nationality; it was the colour-mixture in so many Indian faces that confused me and made me uncomfortable - their almost white clear forehead and darkish lower part, all in one face. To this day I don't feel comfortable with this colour-mixture, although their attitude to Israel is now very cordial. But then in Adelaide of the 1970s, and disregarding my artistic hang-ups, it made more sense to reply in political terms.

Basically yes, I said, as it exchanges the old trustworthy yardstick of 'is it good or bad for the Jews'.

"How awkward!"

Yes, indeed it is! But not due a fault of mine! In the several millennia of our history it proved to be a very good universal yardstick. You see - if you want to know the mental state of a society, you should look at their attitude to the Jews. An anti-Semitic society is a sick society, regardless of how they actually treat a Jew or even if they hardly have Jews amongst them; and in these modern times Israel is an adjacent accessory to Judaism.

She remained thoughtful, and I continued -

Although unfortunately the world finds it hard to come to terms with this yardstick, at the end of the day I reckon it is still a valid one. By the way - and it somewhat refutes my peculiar arguments - the Indians had never been anti-Semites.

I was her first close Jewish friend and she - my non-Jewish trusted companion corresponding to my age; and being a foreigner in her country I saw fit to learn through her eyes notions that were alien to me, among them Christianity and all that it involved.

For obvious reasons I didn't discuss Christianity with Father Phillip.

I was not worried that he would try to convert me, but it felt awkward to discuss Christianity with a person who, unlike me, took the issue of religion so seriously. And to this respect belonged also conversations with Wendy which amounted to nil, as kind Christadelphian Wendy - not the qualified person for the job, as she herself stated - refused to discuss Christianity with Jewish me, because "it's too complicated".

A secular counterpart therefore was needed, and I often discussed it also with Sue.

I was autistic to the Christian world around me, whereas Adelaide had the reputation of being 'the city of a thousand Churches' that could be seen at almost every street-corner. Although officially the Anglican Church had been predominant in Adelaide, the expanding Catholic population gave a different tint to the religious panorama of the city.

Yet its inhabitants did not seem to be ardent Church-goers, and when out of curiosity I went into St. Peter's Cathedral, that impressive building with its pointed tower at the corner of Pennington Gardens in North Adelaide, I was among the very few who attended the service.

I could not be counted as a participant because the people sat close to the pulpit whereas little me sat at the other end, close to the entrance of a very large hall; there, but not there.

Sue thought that my relationship with Father Phillip was hilarious, and when she met him she agreed that "as you say, he indeed is a darling, although I would have never used this expression in regard to a priest." In particularly, it seemed to me, in regard to Father Phillip who belonged to the order that sent priests to Sue's school and, oddly enough, they frightened the pupils.

The Catholic influence on me manifested itself by the newly acquired habit of saying 'Jesus Christ' instead of 'Oh God' which, from a Jewish point of view, might be O.K. as Jews are not supposed to utilize HIM for everyday occurrences. This explanation, as well as uttering the expression, made Sue laugh whenever she heard me saying it.

The issue of Christian characteristics and attributes in art and literature that, so I was told, reflect Christian culture and its metaphysical attitude to life, left me unmoved; "Jews and Muslims cannot perceive the metaphysical side of Christianity," said to me once the Catholic priest of Beith-Jala, near Jerusalem. I reckon that many Jews enjoy and appreciate artistic qualities in Christian art, but I suspect that essentially they cannot grasp its implications, namely – the metaphysical aspect of what a Christian feels when standing in front of an image. And as the metaphysical aspect of an idea also reflects a cultural facet, Christian culture remained for me uncomprehended.

The issue of accessibility to the local culture became even more complicated when, with all my past schooling and reading, I had to acknowledge a reality in which my perceptions and opinions on almost every aspect differed to those of people around me; mainly John and his circle, but also different from the texts I had to read for Uni.

"Try to read Kenneth Clark's Civilization" suggested my Christian flat mate Celia when I mentioned my problem, "it will offer you a different cultural and social perspective on Christianity and I'm sure that through its discussion on art it will enrich you with a new point of view".

And indeed – Civilization presented a different narrative of the Christian world than that which was taught in our Israeli schools.

Whether I was lacking the fundamental faculty of empathy with notions contradicting my own, or mainly out of fear of succumbing to them, I regulated myself to assess everything through my Jewish prejudices and Israeli perceptions. My English-Jewish friend Pam had tried to shed light on the problem from a different view-point.

"You have to partly cloak what you call Jewish perceptions," she kindly remarked.

Did you, Pam?

"Well... not entirely, but then I was born here and had been nourished also by other notions. It is easy for me to retain my own culture and, at the same time, to comprehend a different one while not succumbing to its pressures and attractions."

If, like the art critic Wilenski, I define culture as 'a state of mind that determines values', I said, then in what way should I come to terms with different or even contrasting values?

After giving it some thought she suggested an outlet –

"You must read Haim Potok's My name is Asher Lev! He wrote about a situation where an Orthodox Jewish artist who, in order to convey his idea, finds himself in a need to utilize Christian symbols and perceptions while expressing Jewish notions. You are involved with art and literature, aren't you? So try to clarify your mental problem via art and literature."

I looked at her attentively, and she continued -

"You'll read there that utilizing cultural Christian symbols does not rub-off Jewish notions, but on the contrary – it may help to accentuate Jewish ideas and situations by giving a form to a culture devoid of forms. Foreign forms or notions offer alternatives, but they do not necessarily oblige one to leave behind or eliminate one's culture, that is – if one doesn't let them do it."

I was happy to hear that Pam's arguments, indirectly, were in accord with my own inner insecurities on "form-idea". It added strength to my self-confidence which had been shaken by John's arguments that were echoed also in his circle, thus isolating me as the only one with "strange" notions. I had not told Pam about my discussions with John or Phillip, and of the sense that I often had \- of being lost when these two intelligent people argued from different premises than mine. But she was a clever lady who might have sensed my insecurities; therefore she kindly and indirectly encouraged me to hold to my own.

I read Potock's narrative on how the Christian symbol of the cross is artistically utilized in order to express the notion of a Jewish mother's self-sacrifice on the altar of a mission, and realized how a symbol of one culture can serve to express a situation within another culture. However, Potock's protagonist-artist had, to some extent, sacrificed his social relationships in order to follow his art and gain his artistic purpose. And I wondered what would or should I sacrifice on the altar of my personal sexual and cultural desires toward an entity alien to my Jewish roots, and for what gain.

At the end of this mental exercise, and also with the brief exploration at the introductory lessons of English literature and poetry at Uni, I felt I was gradually overcoming my comprehension-block and acquiring a wider perspective. And I also thought that I was gaining more solid ground that would not expose me to further surprises in my social and intellectual intercourse with John.

XIII.

My constant pose of sitting and reading books and papers produced unpleasant effects of physical back-pains, and Mussa suggested I see Madam in order to improve my movements; perhaps she might find me a suitable class to join in and exercise.

"You'll like her." he said smiling.

So I went to the building of the South Australian Ballet Company and climbed the baroque-style flight of stairs. When I reached the top, a very petite woman of unidentified age of about seventy or more approached, with the light walk of a ballerina, black-dyed hair combed backwards from a high forehead and a streak of silver emanating from its centre (as they used to have in Europe of the forties), slanted green eyes and an impressive wide mouth, painted red. Her face reminded me of the repetitive central figure in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's paintings of 1913-14 depicting Berlin's street scenes, but as she later told me that she 'had to run away' from Russia during the revolution, Kirchner could not have had painted her. Pity! Such a resemblance! It could have added spice to the most captivating person I met in Adelaide, the one who lived within the cultural premises of an era that intrigued me, of a past of which I could only read about.

I am looking for Madam, I said to her politely, expecting to be lead to someone tall and impressive deserving of the title.

"I am Madam, and vott do you vontt?'"

When Natasha Kirsta, the Georgian princes Natasha Watchinadze before marrying ballet impresario George Kirsta, heard that I was from Israel, she almost embraced me.

"I had many Jewish friends in Paris. One of them, a delightful Israeli actor, Ben Yossef, do you know him? Ve met in Paris and he invited our ballet group to perform in Israel. Ve had such a vorm velcome there!"

I know who he is, but I don't know him personally, I replied, and in an awkward way I felt good, as if I had found a relative.

She was the administrative manager of the ballet group but had never been a dancer. However, she practiced every day in order to retain muscles at her advanced age, and in her guttural way of speaking she exclaimed – "Touch my thigh! Stronk! Good you come to practice, darlink!"

She knew every important person in Adelaide, moving freely among its social circles, and therefore 'everyone' knew her. In the human panorama that attended cultural events and smacked of 'averageness' - of mediocrity, exclaimed Mussa's wife Remona before escaping to the more avant-garde pastures of Melbourne - Madame stood out as 'a character'. Remona warned me that soon I would be able to recognize "all the three hundred people who attend the cultural events of the city"; and indeed, the Festival Hall was the ambience where I had seen Madam with her companion the choreographer Rex Reid for the first time, without knowing that our paths would soon cross.

Whatever pretensions to avant-garde Australia could have suggested, either of personalities or of cultural productions, nothing could have impressed Madam. She knew the artistic milieu of Paris at the height of the avant-garde days of the 1920s and 1930s – authors and painters of the Left Bank and dancers of the Diaghilev's companies. She belonged to that kind of exciting artistic and cultural world for which Israeli artists and writers (mainly during the 1950s) travelled to Paris, and I - who could only read about that cultural atmosphere - aspired to attain mentally. Yet, as I gradually realized, in her own way and when reaching old age, she had become less avant-garde and quite conservative in her preference of the 'good old days', and this mixture seemed to justify Mussa's claim that "she projects good old Europe". In her conservative European aspect, Madam with her heavy Russian accent, reminded me of Adelheid Traub with her heavy German accent and pre-war cultural notions; both were two charming grand ladies I had been privileged to meet.

After one of my exercise classes I took Madam for lunch at her favourite Italian restaurant "in the Market" she stressed, because outside there were others.

The mere expression 'market' for the Adelaide one had been for Middle Eastern me hilarious - a market with ordered stalls on a clean asphalt floor under a covered space, with polite vendors wearing white aprons and sometimes white hats, offering their orderly piles of fruits and vegetables to patient customers standing in orderly queues.

The first time I was brought there I asked where the market was.

Afterwards I visited the place regularly, also to buy at 'Athens' my personal mix of Turkish coffee grounded on the spot, where the lady of the place kindly replied to my order – "Here we sell Greek coffee."

So we went to Adelaide's market and into the restaurant, she chubby and small, me slim and tall, and when I think about it now I realize that being drawn to her emanated from an unconscious common look in spite of differences: we both conveyed a similar aura of pride; by our green eyes, dark hair and, most of all, by carrying our heads and bodies straight.

She knew the owner, and in no time we had our pizza with stories of her past, which I was excited to hear. They reflected for me a cultural dream-world – her avant-garde friends, poets and authors; her uncle Igor Stravinsky with whose first family she lived in Paris until the early 1930s, and whom she was forced to leave because his wife and daughter were affected by tuberculosis and he was afraid that she too might be infected; the Russian Revolution she had escaped as a young girl with hidden jewellery sewed into her skirt. No wonder I had been attracted to her.

On her side, she must have been touched by my honest interest in her, flattered by my admiration of her ballet world and my fascination with the names she dropped as if from her sleeve – Picasso and his Russian dancer wife - her good friend Olga, and Nijinsky, whose wife she labelled "that horrible voman", probably influenced by the resentment felt by her good homosexual friend Jean Cocteau toward the woman who "cured" another homosexual fellow.

She insisted that we shared the same Jewish spirit, stating "my best friends were Jews and are Jews," and with pride showed me the Star of David on a chain, hidden inside her black dress. Yet she was not a Jew.

But when I thought about her tribulations, wandering around the world in search of a safe place, and where at the end of the day nowhere was 'home', I realized what she meant about sharing a Jewish spirit, more so that both of us were exiles in Adelaide – my exile was voluntary, hers out of necessity.

The growing closeness induced more stories about her life, but curiously enough they all referred to her past – nothing was uttered about the present or about circles of the Adelaide social groups among which she lived. Thus, a curious common issue we talked about was the exodus from Egypt, told with the after-meal coffee and accompanied with the horrible smoke of the strong French cigarette she held in a holder.

Not our Biblical Exodus, but her contemporary one.

Her group performed in Egypt in the early 1950s where, she said, she had become friendly with King Farouk's mother. Some young lively officers who attended her group's performance kidnapped her from the theatre complaining that she socializes only with royals, and took her around in their jeep to show her places royals didn't bother to go. One of them was "what's his name? Nasser! Yes Nasser, and we became quite friendly."

I was stunned, because she was talking about Egypt's President!

Apparently this friendship helped her and Rex to leave Cairo when they were stranded there during our 1956 war with Egypt. Needless to say that afterwards she did not sympathize with the Arabs and, so she said, it was another factor that made her feel close to us Israelis.

She was the only person form the town's so-called society that I invited to my room for a meal; and as I was not sure how she would cope with Middle Eastern dishes, I made us spaghetti because she liked Italian food. After the meal she sat on the chair while I leaned on one of the cushions at her feet, looking up at her like a puppy at its master and listening to her fascinating stories, discussing the latest performances in Adelaide.

When the evening came to an end she said, "Rex is now abroad, but ven he is back I vill invite you to our place for pirushki; it is a delicious Russian food."

It was several years later, after Pam sent me media cuttings about her death, that I discovered the black hole in her past of which she had never uttered a word to me.

During the mid-1930s she was Berlin's darling, a popular figure nicknamed 'Black Garbo'. Later on, when the political situation hardened – "the high artistic quality of her [ballet] company helped them survive the German occupation [in Paris]. Indeed, Mrs. Kirsta took her ballets to Germany" said the cutting.

It made sense that at the early stages of the Nazi regime she, as so many others, regarded it as a barrier against the spreading of Communism, and Princess Natasha was wholeheartedly anti-communist. But what about the later period, when the regime started to persecute avant-garde artists as well as Jews?

And the 'Star of David' she wore on her chest, had it been a kind of, well – penitence?

Was this the reason she bragged about her Jewish connections?

Having received this data at a later stage in my life did not alter my feelings for her, because after all these years that had passed since the 1930s, and after I reached maturity, I also came to the conclusion that dancing in Nazi Germany was not the worst thing one had to do in those days in order to survive.

I still have her photograph, to which I added a small picture of her grave with its Russian cross, on my bookshelf near the Sabbath candlesticks.

The autumn months passed quickly with my studio-work during the early mornings, lunches either with Wendy or with Sue at the Uni cafeteria, or sitting by myself on my bench in Victoria Square watching the water falling over the sculptures. Afterwards studies at Uni, and twice a week exercising at Madam's.

Evenings were dedicated to John and entertainment, and I am surprised now how much energy I had at the time in order to handle such a busy, condensed life.

Did I really like it? Oh yes!

My thirst for artistic performances and John's performances was unlimited.

But in spite of the opportunity to live the kind of life that frustrated housewives read about in glossy magazines, I was looking forward to what had become more and more scarce - the weekends in John's cabin at the beach, just us, with no fake smiles, considerate replies, or insignificant social conversation. There, far from the madding crowd, he was what I wanted him to be – unhesitant to smile at me, and sometimes even laughing his head off at regular household occurrences and jokes. Back in town I had to share him with his crowd, and lately it was mainly with Phillip and his constantly changing male and female companions.

Together with Pam and Alan we attended one of the dance performances organized by Mussa, and at the entrance hall met Madam and Rex.

I was surprised to find that they knew John, but Madam knew "everyone" in town and she was cordial toward us in a manner that projected disapproval.

She remained quiet while we discussed the defection to Israel of the Panovs – the Jewish-Russian dancers - and I expressed the hope that they would encourage Classical ballet in Israel; after all, two Russian migrants had started ballet in Australia, now so flourishing!

Rex was sceptic, as the recent generation in Russia, he said, lacked the drive and organizational skills to establish almost from scratch a significant ballet group, and Madam commented that generally speaking, dancers' brains are in their legs.

We laughed and departed, and when I kissed Madame on her cheek she hardly responded.

As on the previous day we were having coffee near the Dance Theatre, I reckoned that her cool attitude now was not against me per-se but rather toward my attachment to John that she resented, and for the life of me I couldn't understand why.

At first I considered taking the Israeli direct approach of confronting her, but when I realized that since the meeting at the performance I rarely saw her at my exercise classes, I adopted the Pohmy stiff-upper-lip attitude and said nothing, in spite of an inner voice which kept telling me that she might know something I didn't know.

In other occasions, when John and I met her and Rex at various cultural performances, she was cordial and silent; but when I happened to be alone she was talkative almost as ever and I received a kiss on my cheek.

Needless to say I was not invited to their home for pirushki.

XIV.

The rain softly patters on the cabin's glass-screens while my wandering eyes glimpse his long body stretched on the bed; his head is now on the same pillow that was sometimes put under my buttocks to lift my pelvis when he wanted to suck me.

I detect a smile on his lips, and when my eyes meet his half-closed eyes they find the victorious sparkle of a conqueror whose thrust caused me just now to scream with pleasure.

I am the first to move.

I suddenly realize that it had always had been me to be the first one to move, driven by the same kind of glance through his half-closed eyes and a smile that had in it a kind of mockery and, yes, even a tint of cruelty.

"I'll spoil it for you," the eyes that had observed me reaching satisfaction seemed to be saying, "sooner or later I'll do it."

But nothing in his behaviour prior or during intercourse justifies this interpretation.

I get up and go to the bathroom.

And this is the immediate second 'frame' imprinted like a frozen scene of a movie on my memory when I bring myself to recall the past, shivering as if it happens now, while walking through Tel Aviv's green belt to my office. The previous one 'photographed' our first period at his cabin, whereas this one – our last.

After coming out of the bathroom I usually sat on the carpet crossing my legs in front of me while my crossed hands held my shoulders. 'Protecting chastity' as he cynically remarked on the pose I took whenever I sensed my naked body being watched, embarrassed that my organs were not as rosy and smooth as are those in glossy magazines, and my breasts too small for my tall figure.

My uneasiness over what I regarded as my imperfect nakedness grew gradually during our meetings, the more I became aware of how highly he regarded aesthetic forms. Although he never uttered any derogatory remark, and graciously accepted his friends' remarks "she is stunning", I felt anxious both about his constant search for beauty, whether it was in art or life or me, and for his craving for ultimate pleasures.

I never related to his life-credo by its acknowledged name suggested by Naomi, hedonism, because when people use this expression it always conveys a negative connotation that does not necessarily comply with what my search in the OED came up with: 'a doctrine that pleasure is the chief good'. I did not see any wrong in his search for pleasures either in cultural manifestations or in sex, as I fully benefited from both - expanding my cultural horizons and sexual prowess.

But I was well aware that neither my different opinions about art and literature that stressed "idea" over what he stressed as the aesthetic pleasures of "form", nor being somewhat awkwardly uncommon in appearance, posture and manners, responded to his perceptions on what he termed "culture" or "beauty".

Sitting now on the carpet with my legs crossed in front of me, and looking at his beautiful elongated body stretched on the bed, I feel again the sensation of my physical imperfection but, at the same time and for the first time, as if opening my eyes after a long sleep, it occurs to me that all these months he had been well aware of what I felt and why I was, as he mocked, protecting my chastity.

Apparently I am projecting a kind of uneasiness at the very moment of realization of his assumed wish to "spoil it' for me, because he remarks - "What a strange creature you are!"

Previously when he commented on me being different, it seemed to amuse him; and when embarrassed I had replied – and so are you, you sometimes frighten me - it made him burst into laughter. This time when I respond in a similar manner he remains silent, continues looking at me and obviously not amused, pondering on his next move, as if having a hint of my unpleasant thoughts.

I need to escape to something familiar, to something of mine that is not his, something Middle Eastern. Not to a glass of the great South Australian wine on the silver tray near the bed, but to a dark strong Turkish coffee.

I wear the beautiful kimono he bought for me in Sydney over my naked body and go to the open-space kitchen. I boil water in the electric kettle and put three tea-spoons full of coffee into the fin'djan – the special coffee-pot I gave him as a present – and pour three small glasses of boiling water into the pot, now on a very low gas-fire, letting it cook slowly until a ring of foam surrounds all the edge. I lift it up to let the liquid rest and immediately put it again on the low fire until the foam closes toward the centre, and take it off before it boils. During this process I instinctively start murmuring something, as I always do when I am in the kitchen, adding now and then musical fragments, unaware that he is standing close by.

"May I have an English translation to your Jewish murmurings?"

Hebrew, it's Hebrew; and as you already know it's not easy to translate Hebrew poetry.

Hebrew is a condensed language, I continue with a tint of cynicism, where words have profound meaning that often transcends the literal or, as between us we lately define – an idea that transcends the form. A strict translation sounds clumsy and, as you know well by now, compatibility with its beautiful melody is almost impossible.

"Try!" he insists.

I start, slowly, unsuccessfully trying to suit the melody to the translation of my favourite lyrics by Lea Goldberg, but give up immediately; it does not work. Somewhat annoyed by the need to convey what after all are my inmost thoughts, and in order to appear less ridiculous, I turn the event into a poetry-class session.

You came to me, to open my eyes

And your body for me - a look, a window, a mirror.

You see, verbs in Hebrew verse can be omitted, and allusions and metaphors often come in triplets; they are not mere synonyms but rather manifest escalating or different degrees.

Thus, the lover's body is a look to observe by, a window that opens the view to the outside, and a mirror that reflects the inner facet, the self; in other words - for her he is a horizon-opener.

The coffee is ready, shall I go on?

He silently nods his head, and while we sit at the table I continue:

You came, like the night that comes to the owl

To show him, in the dark, all that there is.

Hearing myself saying these words makes it harder for me to continue; but I resume the literary analysis hoping that during the process, and by adding more explanations, he'll get tired and put an end to it.

The owl, as you know, is a bird of prey that operates in the dark but, on the other hand, it is blind to what is obvious to other creatures in daylight; it needs darkness in order to examine reality. The imagery thus expresses a positive act of clarification taken in the darkness of ignorance, but also may point to the owl's implicit disadvantage of being blind to ordinary things that are obvious to all in broad daylight.

Would he understand what I am trying to convey?

He is attentive via his half-closed eyes but doesn't utter a word.

And I learned a name – to every eye-lash and fingernail,

And each hair on the naked flesh;

And the smell of childhood, smell of glue and pines,

And the night-odor of the body.

Still no comment.

As you see - triplets again, describing minute details of the lover's body, thus projecting intimacy enveloped by a triplet of personal memories and past-reflections of smells. And the Hebrew syntax allows omitting the word 'amidst' within the recollection that illustrates the poet's sensations of smell, including that of the night-odor of the body. The 'night-odor of the body', I believe, does not require my interpretation. Do you want more coffee?

"Yes" he smiles, "Please continue."

Trying to sound casual I say - we are nearly there:

If there were agonies, they had drifted to you –

My white sail toward your horizon.

The agonies or heartaches, I suggest, are both physical and mental.

For the more experienced reader it may express the intellectual pains suffered during the process of learning, of reaching her lover's horizon. But the poet who thus confesses her ignorance may probably refer also to her sexual ignorance and the pains involved in the loss of virginity. The white sail, the poet's utilization of the universal sign of surrender, may signify both the mental and physical aspects - the experience she acquired from the lover that enables her to sail away from her ignorance and, at the same time, physically rendering herself to his mercy, because the poem ends with:

Let me go and kneel down

On the shores of forgiveness.

"What is it that you need to be forgiven for?"

He seems curious about this part. Curious but pleased.

Oh! For not being able to respond to you as eagerly as you would like me to, for being so different from what you are used to or may have expected, and for not succumbing to your unjustified notions without struggling to retain my justified ones – I conclude in an attempt to turn the confession of my insecurities into a mild joke.

Pause. Quite a long one, so it seems to me.

"I reckon I like you as you are," he then says softly, getting up from the table and turning his back to me while looking through the huge glass-screen at the darkened sea and its roaring waves. And while mimicking my regular paratactic sentence-structure he, like me, turns the final part into a mild joke -

"I like all that makes you different, and I like to teach you all sort of things, also about yourself, and I like to see you with your inner struggle gradually changing, and absorbing other influences and perceptions, and becoming more like me."

To a point I like it too, I say, disappointed that he made no reference to the owl and its being blind to ordinary things, commenting only about changing myself.

I decide to turn the conversation toward my interests, so I go on -

I love you, and I like changing and expanding my horizons - I say cheerfully - and I believe I too have inspired you, because here in the cabin you are a different person.

He turns toward me with half-closed eyes and a tint of a smile on his narrow lips, but makes no comment.

Remember, I continue, we are together almost six months! How odd and how untypical of our time! Such a long relationship between two uncommitted people!

I laugh, but looking at him and at the tint of the smile frozen on his narrow lips I realize it had been a mistake to say these words aloud, to utter the word 'Love', to mention a commitment, and even hint that here in the cabin he feels free to be himself.

He then smiles tenderly and says "indeed," and our love-making that night is wild as never before, bordering on violence, leaving me stunned and speechless.

"Winter is nearing, so this would probably be our last visit to the Cabin," he says, ending our option to break away from the city.

The changing weather was and is always the best excuse for Pohms to withdraw whenever they are reluctant to state the real cause.

"How was your weekend?" asked Naomi, forever curious but hardly ever receiving the long replies she hoped to hear.

Well, 'we had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun, but like the wine and the song the seasons may have gone', I sung to her, citing her favourite poet McKuen.

XV.

Back in the city and resuming our meetings in my apartment, John continued to hold the status of an orphan or of a creature born out of sea-waves' foam, because I never asked about his family and he never mentioned he had one.

His background had been disclosed only by sporadic memories of youth which he told; by fragments about his army service - an interesting subject for an Israeli - and by remarks made by some Uni friends or some vague 'good old friends' who mentioned the family financial firm which he joined. I was not clear about the nature of the firm, but apparently it had been a sort of modern enterprise that dealt in various aspects of commercial and financial matters. John didn't talk about it but nevertheless I enjoyed its financial fruits, as there were no important performances in town that we didn't attend, and in a place like Adelaide it took but a brief time to be known by the constant consumers of all forms of art.

When I look back at that period, it flatters me to think that our elegant group seemed to distinguish itself from the ordinary night-crowd by the presence of an exotic Israeli, little me, that in order not to compete with others' elegant wardrobe, wore mainly galabiahs, richly embroidered at the front. These garments responded to my desire to wear long frocks, and they had to suffice because, although I had some long cotton skirts, I could not afford elegant evening frocks of the kind the others wore, and the option of asking John for money for this purpose never crossed my mind.

However, when my galabiahs, that to a great extent became part of my night-entity, were worn several times too many, John could not remain blind to something so obvious that could have cast on him an unpleasant light of mistreating his companion –

"Mistress," said Naomi, "mistress! Are you ashamed of it?"

Not if I were, dear, but I am not, as he does not provide for my bread and daily life, just for my cultural pleasures that are also his.

When the issue of what to wear came up between us, it involved a dispute also on fashion and aesthetics because I liked my authentic galabiahs and refused, point blank, to his suggestion to buy me glitzy or exposing evening dresses. After the Easter holidays, and resuming our social engagements, he ordered from a dressmaker two plain galabiahs in superb silk - a lilac one, as 'an advance for the coming season', and a white one "for special occasions", because "of course" I could not appear all the time in the old ones.

With my limited budget I managed somehow to buy two very simple, unadorned, but elegant long frocks ("aesthetically pleasing," said John), one black and one dark blue; they had a plain classic cut, not boasting any particular vintage of fashion.

The month of May had passed, and the coming winter was noticeable by the escalating amount of yellow foliage on the lawns by which I walked daily in the mornings, and by the slowly creeping cold of the evenings in June that changed our routine.

When in outdoors, during the summer months, we sometimes used to take long walks on the green surrounding the city and through its botanical gardens, and it had been a pleasant start to his various plans for the evening. I was thriving, exhilarated by the performances we attended and with the witty intellectual conversations with Phillip that followed, which we continued afterwards in his car driving back to my room. Thus - "read the unabridged version of Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure rather than the common Fanny Hill that is required at Uni; it has more explicit images, a more liberated outlook about sexual practices, and indeed it belongs to England's Libertine Literature of the 17th century. You'll realize that we Pohms are not that boring as we usually impress foreigners. I have such a volume, and you are more than welcome to borrow it."

When we drove back to my room I asked John if, in addition to my Uni load, my enlightening-process indeed required reading explicit descriptions on liberated sex, and he replied that there was no need for it, as he is enlightening me in regard to whatever personal hang-ups I have. "You don't need to borrow the volume if you can't spare the time for it."

So I did not borrow it from Phillip.

But lately, also due the cold evenings, we were mainly indoors, often partying at the private homes of John's friends. I was not happy about these parties but John insisted on going, saying he could not opt-out. These evenings, unavoidably, were spent with more or less the same crowd, stifling for me a deeply claustrophobic ambience.

When the reason for the gathering wasn't to discuss literary or political issues, the partying assumed an atmosphere of sexually-loaded jokes and smiles. In both instances one noticed the same constantly disappearing people of both sexes into bedrooms.

I managed to ignore what I regarded as sexual decadence and promiscuity ("free behaviour sounds better", said John, "and is less insulting") but, in spite of feeling somewhat embarrassed by people freely touching each other's intimate parts, it actually did not affect me. I was moving in this circle as if living in a luxurious dream, within my own bubble of conversations on poetry, art and literature; being inside and yet outside, alien to whatever intimacy took place among the others, interested only on the intellectual part of the meetings which also provided an opportunity to expand my English vocabulary and learn the spoken and silent etiquette of another culture.

Often I felt John's eyes on me while I was engaged in a conversation, and I felt that at least in the cultural sphere I did not embarrassed him, although sometimes I found myself expressing "strange" opinions. These, so I explained to the circle around me, stemmed from my different culture which I defined as 'a different state of mind that determines different values'. Values, which have nothing to do with cultural-products, are what constitute the backbone of a culture and therefore, I argued, our disagreements resulted from our different cultural premises that beget different opinions.

Their polite rejection, kindly expressed with "how interesting!" or "never thought of it this way!", made me feel uneasy, not because of their somewhat vague counter-arguments suggested afterwards, but because of the manner in which they were expressed, resulting in me feeling a bit of a fool and somewhat vulgar.

They were so civilized!

Had my own notions prevented me from being objective and from relating to their approach? Had I been wrong all along?

The more I opened my consciousness to their notions, the less I became opinionated but, on the other hand, more confused, bothered by the fact that the only "values" they discussed in abundance, in detail and depth, were pleasures (mainly sexual ones), aesthetics, subtlety and refinement, all this amounting to Beauty for Beauty's Sake. John's arguments on art and our discussions on Form as an end for itself, independent of idea, seemed to echo what had been agreed upon by the whole group.

I was not able at the time, and to a great extent am still unable, to formalize what I felt between these two cultures – the one they termed British, referring to embracing the aesthetic for its own sake because, so they claimed, it also encouraged freedom of the individual, and the one I came from - which had been based on the notion of the individual as being but a link in a human chain. My Jewish instinct, which I could not escape, forbade me accepting aesthetics as a "value", because in my culture it has been regarded as mere decoration or, where human contacts were concerned, as an issue of manners that was less important than morals, and also sexual morals that had an abiding attitude. What I regarded at that time as my culture, unrefined as it were, lacked or had but a limited response to personal yearnings, and after being a while with John and his circle, listening to their cultural arguments stressing on individuality, mine seemed to have less...conviction? Certitude? No wonder that their culture had held for me a great attraction.

However, and at the same time, I could not avoid the small voice in my brain telling me that there was something unpleasant behind the luring notions of the aesthetic, of beauty-for-its-own-sake, or whatever concept for its own sake, and in particular the unrestricted sexual ménages - mechanical sex for sex's sake - on which I never seen or heard any expression on individual feeling or sentiment.

And yet - they were so civilized!

The whole group's attitude and manners, and in particular their spoken texts and unspoken subtexts – as I defined it when I discussed this phenomenon with Sue - strike me now, looking back at events, as if taken from a BBC period-drama of Imperial England. They just graciously smiled at me, and smiled when we discussed issues, and until this day I am not certain whether they comprehended my arguments or simply rejected them, and me.

The whole atmosphere to which I was exposed reminded me that at the earlier stages of our relationship I was bothered by John's so-called aesthetic attitude, as it smacked of decadence that, alongside the atmosphere of monochromatic aesthetic of his cabin, projected emotional sterility.

But he was so civilized!

XVI.

Father Phillip phoned from the hospital.

He'd had "just a mild stroke," and "please don't worry, I am o.k. now, but our meeting this afternoon is cancelled," he laughed. "Please! No chocolate! I received plenty and am not allowed to touch it!"

I hurried to see him with a small pottery vase I had made, and a bunch of flowers.

He was out of bed, walking in the room wearing only a long pyjama-top, and I could see his gorgeous legs. Without his long black gown he seemed smaller that I estimated him to be.

Did you ever guess that priests have legs under those skirts? I asked Sue when I told her about it. "You are crazy," she responded smiling "I assume they have, but never saw them, lucky you!"

With no sign of embarrassment he kissed me on the cheek, and I turned my eyes when he climbed up to his hospital bed and covered his legs.

"I knew I had a heart condition. Unfortunately it is a family heritage; my brother passed away from heart failure at a young age, but my pump is still working, and it will probably take some time until I see my maker," he joked.

Sister Ann came in and sat on a small stool opposite his bed, and after being introduced she plunged into her prayer book, but I could have sworn that her ears were focused on us.

She looked pale and tired, and Phillip explained that she had to cover for him and take his social duties upon herself, as there were many people asking for their advice.

We barely talked.

We looked into each other's eyes, smiled in silence, and after a while I held his hand in mine, kissed his palm and said – I've missed you lately.

"I'll be out soon," he replied, and I kissed him again, this time on his forehead, saying - do it quickly please - and I left the room.

During my entire visit Sister Ann read her book.

At the desk I asked the nurse about his condition.

"And who are you? Family?"

No, just one who loves him very much.

"Don't feel unique," she laughed, "it is incredible how many people visit him."

Well?

"Soon we'll have to sedate him, as his pain is bound to increase."

Will he overcome?

She did not reply and my heart sank.

Not long after the distressful visit to Father Phillip, John phoned saying that this weekend we were to go to Phillip's town-mansion for a very special party.

"We will be quite a crowd there as Phillip declares he is celebrating fifty, and it is a good excuse for us to get gently drunk."

He knew I could not stand nor understand drunkenness, one of my proclaimed Jewish hang-ups as Jews were not supposed to be drunkards, and therefore I wondered why he had said that.

Deterring me from coming?

Aussies like to drink, beer in particular, and getting too loaded was quite a common phenomenon at the gatherings we attended, and usually I suggested leaving when I sensed that the party had reached what was for me a red line. The first time I asked to leave he refused, and without uttering a word, not even to our host, I left the place alone.

After a week of ostracizing me he came, and with pressed lips asked to forget the affair.

I wasn't graciously responsive when I said in a cold tone that no one, ever, could force me to do something I resented, unless of course sheer physical violence was applied.

Afterwards things went smoothly to the extent that I wasn't worried about the same thing happening again, and I became more pleasantly involved with his drinking crowd.

But now, replying to his description of Phillip's party, and also to what I believed to be a cynical tone in his voice, I asked why we were going.

"I don't want to miss the event, and besides – I might enjoy myself...eventually."

Apparently I mistook his cynicism as encouragement to refrain from coming. However, I wondered what he meant by "enjoying himself" and, in particular, the "eventually". An uneasy sensation crept into my spine, and refusing to succumb to superstitions I let it go.

The crowd was as glitzy as ever, the ladies décolleté deeper than ever, some covered just with transparent clothing while me, in the new white silk galabiah that John had ordered for 'special occasions', covered from neck to toe.

Toward midnight the intelligent conversation dwindled, as most people in couples and triplets had already retired to other rooms.

At the first parties we had attended I noticed Phillip moving with a stunning blond and a brunette into a room, closing the door behind them, but in many of the following ones he retired with mates.

"Are you uneasy about it?" asked John.

"No! It's none of my business, and he is none of my business."

John just looked at me and sipped his drink.

I sensed then, that he was trying to open a door when he asked –

"Would you care if I went to a bedroom with someone else?"

But I immediately closed it down –

"Of course I would! And it wouldn't matter if it were a man, woman or a dog!"

He did not reply and continued sipping his whisky, but at that very moment it occurred to me, only God knows why, that one day he might drop the question again.

As time passed, and after the months we had been together, and we moving from one party to the other, and me mixing quite well with his crowd, and me indifferently watching the free behaviour around, at this party at our best friend Phillip's place, it came up again.

"Would you care if we were to join in..." he took a sip.

No, he would not hear my long-ago remark on 'woman or dog', or my opinion on multiple intercourse ("we say 'orgy'" – so Naomi), and besides - I wondered why the "we" and to what this was leading.

With an indifferent tone, and recalling the final part of our last conversation at the cabin, I nonchalantly said –

If it pleases you; after all we are uncommitted, free persons, aren't we?

At first I could not tell if he 'bought it', as his face regained its most attractive look - the beautiful unmoving mask which oddly enough suddenly reminded me of Sydney Nolan's drawings of Ned Kelly's metallic expressionless faces - the old mask that I had learned to abhor and thought it had faded away during our long relationship.

But looking at him now, I saw it again and lost my mental ground while my heart hastened its beat.

What was happening?

As if awakening from a comma, then and only then did it occur to me that for a while, since the Easter's break, John's behaviour had changed, gradually imposing a different atmosphere on our relationship by adding to our sexual games a tint of cruelty, as in the last night at the cabin.

His one and only attempt to teach me 'the pleasures of spanking' had been categorically rejected; instead - several times I had to stop him amidst his thrust because his hands pressed my breast to a point where I screamed, and his wild quickened movements hurt. The exchange of oral pleasure, so it felt, became a sort of punishment rather than enjoyable game. Was it because he suspected that my heart wasn't in it?

Although I learned to respond to almost every sexual move he suggested, nothing for me had been comparable to the pleasure of feeling the full length and strength of his penis arousing my vulva and penetrating it, thrusting into the depth of my vagina, and feeling the weight of his exhausted body on mine afterwards, and he knew it.

But lately I was often denied these pleasures I cherished.

Was he cooling toward me? Trying to creep out of the relationship?

Sometimes he made excuses to avoid me for several days, but then he came almost running, stripping me and clinging to my body, touching every part of it as if he had to readjust or reassure himself that I was there for him, and we would make love until he remained exhausted.

What was happening?

The place and the timing of his repeated question, and including me as a part in a deal, surprised me but I decided to plunge into it. So nonchalantly I continued my liberating newspeak of being uncommitted by questioning –

When was the last time that we discussed the same subject? About half a year ago, when we were young and fresh! Why do you repeat the question now?

"Well, I believe your attitude has matured," (sip), "Phillip suggested that it had, that you are more attuned to our attitudes, and I am happy to see that indeed this is the case," he misinterpreted the nonchalant phrases by which I tried to cover my surprise when he asked again if I minded us being with someone else.

So he did buy it.

Where did this leave me?

Overwhelmed, I guess.

Hurt, confused, and insulted, when I saw him walking toward Phillip, and smiling Phillip looking at me somewhat surprised but pleased, and me replying with a vague smile while sipping my drink and, while turning my back away, I saw them both going into one of the bedrooms.

Suddenly, amidst Phillip's elegant salon, in the heart of the city, I heard the sounds of the waves outside the cabin on our last night there roaring now in my ears, louder and louder, and I can't remember how long this state went on, as my feet seemed to freeze where they were, me leaning on the glass-door of the veranda.

"I am so happy that you have reached this stage, my dea, of becoming one of us," so Phillip full of smiles after they came back, embracing me strongly and adding a quotation from Judith Wright's verse 'The Company of Lovers' –

We, the lost company, take hands together in the night, forget

the night in our brief happiness, silently.

"Will you join us now, my dea?"

The roaring of the waves in my ears followed me when I hurriedly left the place, leaving behind an astonished Phillip and what seemed to me a pale but unsurprised John, and continued to follow my running through the streets of Adelaide and into the square and to my bench. The Abos had moved away their drink-loaded bodies long ago... an elderly couple passed by... the noise of the dripping of the fountain, drip... drip... drip... that at last quieted the roaring noise in my ears, and I tried to comprehend what happened while

the third 'frame' that will stuck in my brain for the rest of my life is being imprinted:

I'm trembling. I sit quietly in a state of mental distress, looking at the lit fountain and licking the water-drops flown by the wind.

So this is what it was all about.

What I regarded as corruption of innocence at that very stressful moment at the fountain, and still do now looking back to it, was for them a kind of a game, an achievement to be won by granting me a certain kind of experience...They manipulated my honest feelings toward both of them in order to introduce me to another "culture"! What an achievement!

Phillip's smile at John on the first evening we met had been a kind of approval, for picking up an intriguing naïve girl, a bit arrogant perhaps but it made her more interesting to...how would I phrase it? To tame? To cultivate? To adjust her to their kind of society?

Is this why, in particular lately, there were so many parties around? Is this why he decreased the periods of our being alone, and in most cases insisted to have with us the whole crowd or, at least, Phillip and his changing companions?

"What is your 'G-spot'?" Naomi and Celia once asked.

My brain, dears, and I do not allow anyone or anything to screw it up.

But these two bastards, John and Phillip, were trying to do just that, and up to the last moment I let them do it while they expected to achieve my transformation of becoming 'one of them'.

And John even bothered to dress me in a virginal white gown, the Jewish lamb on the sex-for-sex's-sake altar, with Phillip and God knows with whom else it had been intended, while me looking in my newly acquired gown like the immaculate Madonna!

And all those months of their intellectual and emotional effort to turn me into "one of us" had been invested – for what?

For a meaningless, pointless screw?

For a screw!

I cannot stop trembling.

Trying in vain to remember the exact lines that I had studied and attempting to retreat to poetry in order to calm down my nerves and my confused mind, I murmur sitting on my bench:...Blake, Blake wrote about innocence and also about experience the brain gains by going through a furnace, but apparently he had a limited idea of its possible extent! He, as a male, and while writing that 'Cruelty has a Human Heart', could not possibly have understood the furnace-effect of intellectual rape on a woman's mind and heart!

No furnace-heat now!

I continue to sit, trembling as if feeling cold and, oddly enough, the chill that goes through my spine evokes in my tortured mind Peter's image mingling into my present situation. Peter who stood beside me at my assumed place of the Abrahamic pact, perhaps unaware of my sensual perception of it and its sexual connotation!

"You'll like Adelaide," Peter said long ago to the one intended for the binding, "You'll like Adelaide!"

And indeed I did; that is – until now, when I am cast in the role of the sacrificial lamb!

I couldn't stop trembling on my bench, wondering - how could he have taken part in it?

Did his oscillating moods of late, since we came back from the cabin, reflect a belated regret of and discord with Phillip's aims of which, no doubt, and from start, he had been a part?

And why bothering to suggest it in order to ease his part in the awkward game?

The fact is that till the end he went along with it, propagating the aesthetic and liberated notions and watching me gradually adopt a positive attitude toward them, and watching me coming to terms with his culture and ultimately expecting, as he said on the phone, to enjoy himself "eventually", whether I join their invitation for a ménage a trios, thus reaching the end-point of my so-called education initiated by Phillip, or, as he probably may have suspected, reject it. And perhaps this is why he didn't look surprised whilst Phillip did.

Was this last occurrence his small victory over the domineering Phillip?

Over me?

Is this what Madam, the lady who knew the facets of Adelaide society circles, knew about John's? Is this the reason that she cooled toward me, believing that I went along with it?

And Lily with her ambition "to belong" - did she actually want to participate in the decadence of their "wild gatherings" as she had phrased it?

Is this why dearest Pam had been so hesitant when, after introducing John to her and Alan, kindly said to me "I have a complete trust in you and your choices?"

The atmosphere in the darkened square had become dense by the people passing by looking at me, sitting so late at night alone on my bench, murmuring to myself.

One of them approached with a cigarette and asked "Do you have light?"

No, I don't have light, I laughed bitterly, my light lies dead in the dust of my illusions!

The Aussie mate got the message and left.

I continue sitting on my bench murmuring to myself –

When the lamp in the dark is shuttered

The light in the dust lies dead...lies dead

I forgot the rest of what I had studied from Shelly at Uni.

I'm not good at it, I mean, at quoting English poetry whenever it is required.

John is very good at it...John... St. John, whose common artistic depiction of an impressive man holding a book made me forget that his other artistic depiction is that of a charming young man holding a chalice with a dragon on its top.

My John... the charming man who offered me the sweet wine from his chalice... and now I am left with a dragon weighing on my bosom...

When the light in the lamp lies dead...lies dead... lies...

I continue my murmurings, addressing an imaginary-him standing in front of me:

I am better at citing Israeli songs, like the one I translated for you, the one talking of the owl functioning only in the dark, which consciously or subconsciously you refused to understand.

But Shelly's aesthetic and quite sentimental poem about a decaying light is not one of mine. It's yours John, and I'll bet you could have quoted it to the full. Mine, John, which in Hebrew sounds better and is also sung, is perhaps less aesthetic in English, but it expresses emotions - can you comprehend the difference between sentimentality and sentiment?

In my dream, the roses of consolation dried up

In my window, the vision of spaces is being blocked...

What I feel about you with my cultural perceptions is a sentiment, an emotion; what you talk about in yours is sentimentality, applying an aesthetic judgment to something that you actually don't care for, because you don't have a real emotion for it.

Perhaps I should have stayed at the house and claimed my rights over you... but had you ever been mine to claim?

He is slowly fading away.

I started to gather my composure.

One of the night-freaks passing by had misinterpreted my murmurings and sits on the other end of my bench... I rose up.

Perhaps I should have stayed sited and claim the bench as mine...there is plenty of room around for him... but was "my" bench really mine?

Perhaps I can't claim rights over anything...

I was exhausted.

I couldn't go home as I didn't want to see a soul, so I went to the studio, to my mental shelter. No one of them knew about the place, and there I might regain my lucidity and decide on my next move. Anyhow I can't sleep and I can't think either.

XVII.

I looked around at the walls, at all my drawings and paintings of the fountain, and put another frame on the stand to start a new canvas.

Carefully I marked the background with a pencil.

The vantage point was the same as in the last paintings that reflected my sombre mood of my encounter with Lily, namely, looking at the square toward the north. For this one, however, I avoided the bird's eye view and resorted to frontal presentation of eye's level.

I engaged elements from my first couple of paintings made while I was still in my state of innocence by situating the fountain toward the right part of the canvas. I repeated the depiction of only two figures, but this time with the intention to allude to our personal state of affairs - stretching their arms toward opposing directions.

All previous paintings captured the almost natural proportions, and their palettes reflected my moods. This time, remembering my musings on how to achieve expression of an idea, I decided to extend the elements beyond their real scale, to inaccurately detail them and thus making them obviously unrealistic, projection of a state of mind. It was as if I was trying to do in art something similar to what had been done in literature by Alain Robbe-Grillet in his novella Jealousy (La Jalousie) with the bananas and their positions.

Therefore I reduced the lines and masses of the frontal northern buildings and their continuity in King William Street into patches of flat planes, giving the fountain overpowering proportions accentuated by its purposely expanded column-plates, while the fountain's crowns at their top intruding and blocking the narrowed horizon. I rotated the actual angle of the fountain in order to eliminate the central southern figure that, in reality and as in my last drawings, should have been at its centre.

I disregarded the streams of water which give the fountain an illusion of multiple fans, and related only to the bare fountain as if it was bare flesh. The presentation consisted of only two of the fountain's central elements - two column-plates with a gap between their inner straight vertical edges. Thus I achieved an allusion to a woman's opened legs during intercourse, as in the scene I imagined long ago looking at the city of Sh'hem.

In this manner of posing the fountain, its top crown seemed to be sending the silhouette of the narrow vertical third column-plate into the gap, like a penis penetrating the seeming lips of the vaginal inner pool, whereas the seated figures with their organic forms conveyed the sense of stretched begging hands. The linear geometric lines of the pool stood for our bare flesh and the organic lines of the figures and their frozen stretched hands for a silent cry for help. The presentation in my painting thus had become a metaphor for our sexual intercourse, and the unrealistic proportions of the fountain reflected my newly acquired evaluation of our relationship – unrealistic, illusionary, barren and bereft of life-giving water.

The palette was problematic.

How could I express even partly, and through colour, the sense of mental rape?

What palette will reflect the storm in my brain and the disgust in my stomach? Would a colour-storm, similar to the last "Lily Paintings" as I used to title them, do?

John's reserved attitude to aesthetics seemed to be exerting its influence, preventing me from applying strong, shouting colours and tones, all around –

'No exaggeration is needed! The worst phenomenon can be expressed by restricted means'.

John's approach won.

Therefore I divided the space into three horizontal registers of different palettes, uniting them with a vertical element. For the bottom register illustrating the pavement I used soft light grey; the second – the grass around in red and the trees with strokes of brown, thus forming the darker part of the painting, engulfing the fountain like an omen that the tranquillity they engulf is misleading. The background buildings in the third register were whitened combination of various shades of grey and pink, and the enclosed horizon between them was left white – rising to the sky like the white sail in the Hebrew poem I analysed for him in our last encounter in the cabin. Then, for the uniting vertical configuration of the fountain I used soft tranquil whitened yellows, and very light browns to accentuate the borders of the volumes.

The presentation of the whole - the "text" of the painting - projected John's notion of restriction and elegance, but with a sense of a pleasant ice-cream cultured delicacy, like the social life I had been living. It was contrasted by the almost shouting brown-red strip that alluded to blood-thirsty spectators of our social ambience, and the meta-text of the fountain conveyed the hallucinated sexual facet of our relationship and their sterility.

But for God's sake! How come I did not realize this sexual allusion of the fountain from start, when I had been wondering what had been disturbing me while looking at it? The sudden evocation of Peter and the Schem scenery in my mind tonight, looking at the actual fountain, had solved the riddle! How could I be so blind to it all along?

Now, gaining a new elucidation of my love-affair as well as of my personal allusion of the fountain, I almost shouted - Halleluiah!

At last!

Artistically I achieved something I instinctively had been seeking for all along but hadn't managed to properly define or execute, that is – to convey, no matter how crudely, an abstract idea concerning human interest through objects. I had resorted to an Adelaide scenery and notions of restricted behaviour that were not part of my own alma mater, forming through the fountain a disguised symbol of sexual intercourse as a combat with another culture's perceptions on sex, which were not my own.

At last I had reached a stage where I felt I could boast 'my artistic syntax', of deserting the realistic symmetry and beauty in the arrangement of forms and bestowing on the distorted object my own idea and palette. I felt I have gained an artistic starting-point from which to develop further - if I would chose to continue.

But the most important thing I had found was the magic word to solve the riddle in my life and to combat my sphinx. It was the elusive notion called "authenticity" - to be true to oneself to the extent of retaining one's fundamental cultural notions, while at the same time opening oneself to external influences, and even absorbing them - if they suit the personality.

The composition with its de-centred fountain left a space at the left side of the painting, at the west side of the square. West.

This was the personal answer I needed.

Striving to solve my lover's enigma or chasing illusions of fulfilled satisfactions had to stop there and then. I was not going to "fight" for my man, because in spite of my love...or had it been just infatuation?... he simply did not deserve it!

I was going back home.

I left the painting on the stand to dry and detached the rest of my hung fountains from their frames, to be rolled afterwards.

I would bid Father Phillip farewell and no one else, not even Pam.

It was very early morning when I reached the hospital, going there also out of a sheer need for another kind of Phillip, a non-decadent one albeit his different religion and values.

At this early hour the place was almost empty, and seeing a dim light coming out of his room I entered. He was lying with open eyes, thinner than I remembered, heavily breathing, his hands folded on his chest, and he smiled when he saw me.

"I'm sorry that I don't have your flowers and vase; it was broken when Sister Ann accidentally pushed them bringing me a cup of tea. You look lovely... what a nice gown!"

I closed the curtain around his bed in order not to disturb his half-sleeping roommates, and in a low voice told him to move aside, to allow me to sit closer to him instead of on the chair.

We looked at each other, he smiling with a white face and eyes narrowed by pain, me staring at him and starting to feel anger mounting in my stomach.

It's so unfair! I said, trying to calm my trembling voice.

"Everything has its good side. If it comes to the worst, as you define, or to the best – as I see it - I will be meeting my maker soon," he echoed what he had said several days ago.

When you do, please kick his bloody arse in my name.

"It's blasphemy, my dear, but how do you know he has one?"

So it's written.

???

W-e-ll, when Moses asked him to show himself at Mount Sinai, so the text tells us, he exposed his lower part; and as we are made in His image, it makes sense to interpret the lower part as an arse. This particular incident with God in Sinai, you see, resembles the way little kids demonstrate disrespect for their enemies. I believe that God sometimes disrespects us... not sometimes... quite often.

Father Phillip smiled but did not contradict me.

"I'd rather see his face. Talk to me, it makes things more tolerable."

Do you remember our conversations at my place on the nature of Sin?

I stated that you Christians fundamentally regard sex itself as sin, resulting from eating the forbidden fruit in the Eden Affair, whereas for us the sin was to transgress against God's command. Yours, I suggested then, is an attitude toward the physical facet of humanity whereas ours is a manifestation of spiritual radicalism.

"We approve sex only when it is within the frame of wedlock," he looked at me with wide opened eyes, "Where does this come from? What's bothering you?"

Because when I wondered how you could have given it up, I mean sex, pretending that it was requested by the love you are supposed to give to God or to others, I realized how unnatural and nonsensical it is to distinguish between the spiritual and the physical to the extent that one has to overcome the other.

He looked at me attentively, and I continued -

I find this distinction irreconcilable, as does my culture; and I feel lost and even hurt whenever a person like you gives up one part of his being, aspiring or pretending to gain the other, and in your case – to do it in God's name, the God we invented for you, remember?

"You care that much for me?"

Please! Don't play the fool! You know I have a crush on you!

"Is it a person 'like me', as you said, that bothers you?"

Only to a certain point. He is someone I could not reach, I mean - spiritually.

He smiled and pressed my hand –

"Who actually is he?"

I gathered that Father Phillip was not acquainted with society affairs if he asked something known to tutti Adelaide.

He is one who tried, no - almost imposed on me, on my life, and indirectly even on my artistic and literary approach, a differentiation between content and form which I term the spiritual and the physical, and you relate to it as the soul and the flesh. But whereas you have chosen the spiritual, he sanctified the physical and, frankly, I think that by now I hate you both.

"I am happy to see that...eventually you did not succumb to the physical," he said with a kind voice and smiling eyes and lips, which made me wonder whether Father Phillip had been involved more than I suspected with the ways of the Adelaide world. He added -

"Of course I know his name. I just wanted to know who he actually is."

I also wanted to know, but what I found...eventually, I did not like.

And looking at him, at his long pale face with the shinning brown eyes, almost transcendental, whom I did like although he is an alien to my world, I could not but recite in my mind Yona Wallach's Hebrew poem conveying non-attainability which she craved for, and which I wholeheartedly resented

Come lie with me like God

Only in spirit;

Torture me as far as you can,

Be forever unattainable

Leave me to my sufferings

I'll be in deep waters

And never reach a shore.

He closed his eyes and we were silent for a while. Then he murmured

"It's unbearable...it's so painful."

I looked at him helplessly, knowing that he was not talking about my problem.

"They are doing their best in extending my life. I was asked to remain calm, no excitement, so said the doctor, otherwise my heart would explode...only at times, may God forgive me, I wish it had."

In a flash I realized that I could break the transcendental barriers between us, by stepping out of the regular context of our relationships all along. I do hate torture and suffering!

I am still young, and I need to – no! Long to reach a shore - for us both.

I can help you to end this, I said softly.

"How?"

By exciting you, and by uniting through my love to you the physical with the spiritual, I said in a quiet voice, and it will help us both reach a kind of salvation.

Although salvation in Christianity is reached by undergoing suffering, he did not contradict me and, probably due to his pains, did not reply.

Move a bit and let me in.

I lay at his side, moved his hand to my breast, and inserted my hand under the sheet straight to his penis, and petted it until it got harder, holding the shaft and moving my hand up and down.

He closed his eyes while the beat of our breaths accelerated, and my vagina contracted, and I felt a familiar electric current in my body, and with his last sigh I felt his juices wetting my hand, and suddenly he did not move.

I cleaned my hand and his penis with the tissue paper on his side-cupboard, straightened his body, posed his hands on his chest the way I found him when I came in, and before covering his head with the sheet I moved my fingers through his heavy brown hair, down to his cheeks, and kissed his lips - all that I wouldn't dare to do when he was alive nor had he survived his ordeal.

I wanted to open the curtain around the bed, but when I saw the awe in his roommates' eyes, I left it closed.

Daylight was now brighter, and steps were heard all around.

Sister Ann came into the room, moved the curtain and glanced at the bed, and then at me, and I could see in her eyes a resentment bordering on hate.

She seemed to have guessed what had happened, and in order not to leave her in the dark, and pouring on her all my frustrations and the case of the broken vase, I said with a tender voice –

He found his way to salvation, and now I have to find mine.

XVIII.

I returned to the studio and cleared it, added the last painting to the pile of canvases and rolled them into a small parcel, arranged the figurines in a small box, locked the door and inserted the key in the letterbox with a note to the landlord – all has been paid in advance, and whatever stuff was left was not needed.

It was mid-morning when I strolled for the last time all the way from the square via the bridge and the lawns to my room in North Adelaide.

I locked my door from the inside, keeping the window curtains closed.

In a big cardboard box I packed my books, papers and art works, tied it up and marked my address in Israel. The rest of my things went into the two suitcases with which I had arrived.

That was all.

John's white-silk galabiah which I took off and the lilac one were left on the chair, as the girls may want them; I did not.

I started to prepare myself for a shower when Naomi gently knocked –

"Please let me in."

I'm busy dear, I was trying to sound casual, and I'll see you later, after I take a shower.

"He had been here hours ago...several times...looking for you. I won't ask you what has happened. I just want to see that you are O.K."

I'm O.K. I'll see you later; as a matter of fact I'll need you later.

I rang Mussa, and he was furious – "It's early! How could you! I am in the middle of the act!"

Bull! Now listen, and please, please don't ask questions. I need you to sing to me, right now, the last part of the poem The City in Grey that you have adapted into English and sang when I arrived, remember?

Pause.

I need it now because I am going back, and I want you to take me to the airport toward noon when the flights are not so crowded.

Silence, and then "I'm so sorry!"

Don't be, just sing it to me in English.

So he sung, about a sudden sorrow, about longings for another place that fill the heart, ending with:

I'll catch you an iron eagle, high above in the sky,

He'll take you to the land where rainbows are – clear and high.

I took a shower, wore the kimono over my naked body, and opened the door for the girls.

They looked at the suitcases, at my bag and the roll of canvases and did not say a word.

I gave Naomi the box asking her to send it by post, and added –

The fin'jan and the white Galabiah are for Celia, the lilac one and this kimono are for Naomi, that is - if you want them, and no! I don't want to hear anything about John.

They brought chairs from their rooms and for the last time we three sat together having a coffee, my kind of coffee.

I was so exhausted that I could hardly speak.

"We'll miss you a lot."

I'll miss you too. After moving around a bit, I'll be home by September for the high festivals, for a new Jewish year. Come visit me, as I have no intention of coming here again.

After a brief rest I opened the curtains, and there outside was John. He moved forward to the door and knocked.

"Please! Let's talk! I promise I'll leave the moment you'll tell me to."

He came into the room devoid of my personal paraphernalia, but still retaining the cushions and the things I had no intention of taking with me. Looking around he realized I was leaving.

Well, there is nothing you can tell me.

He looked tired and, yes, older.

"You remember how grateful you were to those who taught me everything I knew? It's him, dea, it's him, and not only in regard to sex... We two had been sharing many things for so long... I owe him so much and, in a sense, you too owe him."

Had it been an attempt at a joke?

No! His straight face indicated that he meant what he had just said! He actually believed it!

I understand now that, as the poem goes, he is "your hunter and your chase", I replied, but dea! I am not part of it, and what's more – you didn't ask if I wanted to be! You just took it for granted!

He did not reply.

For Pete's sake! May I know on what grounds you estimated that my wish to open myself to a different culture also implied that I wanted to take part in your decadent games?

"We don't regard our attitude to life as decadent games!" he said with slight anger in his voice. "Can't you understand and accept that we have different perceptions on sex, gender, and social intercourse between people who are fond of each other? You shouldn't have so bluntly tagged our behaviour 'decadent games'!"

His insinuations that my perceptions – he did not tag them 'Jewish' – obstructed my comprehending of theirs, and that the manner in which I expressed my objection had not been tactful, drew me back to the first period of our relationship and to the uncertainties I felt about myself and my conduct.

I remained silent.

"You may not believe it, but both of us love you... had we not though that you were ready, that you had become one of us... liberated enough...freeing yourself from your inhibitions...we wouldn't have expected you to join in or even have dared to hint at it."

Hint precisely at what? I insisted.

"At sharing love among us three."

His clarification and its vocabulary for what had been expected from me put me back on my mental saddle.

How nice! And you call it 'being liberated'! So avant-garde indeed! But surprise surprise! This is the first time in the many months we have been together that the word "love" has come out of your lips! And within such an interesting context!

He made no comment.

Love, my dea, is not sex! Didn't he teach you that simple fact?

Still no comment.

Perhaps he does not know, the poor darling! The poor twisted decadent intellectual darling who added the exorcised dragon to the chalice with your sweet wine!

As John always understood my allusions, he did this one too but remained silent.

I continued –

He managed to twist you too, without your being aware of it! Don't you really comprehend into what he has turned you?

And with more than a bit of cruelty I added -

Did you share your wife with him, or did this liberated attitude start after she left you, vulnerable, and he took advantage?

He looked stunned but did not reply.

In attempting to clarify I added - Love is an emotion, an idea, whereas mere sex is what I regard as its sentimentalisation – giving it a physical touch, a decorative form, like in art, my dea; remember our conversations?

I was mentally exhausted to the extent that during my confused argumentation that followed, and I raised my voice despite his coaching me in social graces -

Your sexual intercourse and his cultural one proved at the end to be for me nothing but mere empty sentimentalized "forms"! And neither of you, collectors of pleasures-in-quantities, neither of you had a shred of understanding of love as an emotion, as a quality needed for giving a meaning to your collection!

And in regard to me, neither of you wanted nor even attempted to unite into any kind of wholeness your "forms" with a sentiment! And I dare say that both of you were and will remain mere barren forms, sterile! Because that's the price for detaching form from idea!

I had to stop and control my escalating palpitation and rising anger.

After a pause that seemed to me an eternity I continued, but with a softer voice.

As for poor Phillip and the ménage-a-trois, I once told you and you didn't take notice, so I'll repeat it in a different phrasing, a poetic one. We both love poetry, don't we?

Well – I don't like the idea of "a third to lie in our embrace", as the poem says, and may I wonder –

I approached and kissed him, licking his unmoving lips –

Would you like it dea? Would you really like it - I mean, to be the third party, watching me kissing and licking Phillip all over?

The little vein in his temple was ticking, and there was another pause that seemed an eternity.

Why did you come here? I asked coming closer to him to see every tiny movement in his face.

"I love you."

???

"I never said it before and perhaps I've been wrong about it... I came because I would like us to forget what happened last night and start again, this time in my house, and recapture what we had and move onwards... is it still possible?"

W-e-l-l, so me with even a softer voice, let's see! I came closer to him and said -

Let's try to recapture what we had!

I opened his shirt while penetrating his mouth with my tongue, sucking his lips, and moving my fingers along his pants. His penis responded immediately, and while I was untying the belt of my kimono and exposing my naked body he also stripped himself. I pushed him to the cushions, and echoing his first movement at our first intercourse I jumped on him, massaging his testicles while my tongue licked his nipples.

Then I changed my position to hold his penis in my mouth.

He started to tongue my clitoris, and when I felt he was going to burst I changed again my position and sat on him moving up and down.

While he had his eyes closed, cooing like a dove, his breath in short beats, I remained cool to the extent of surprising myself – I had not been aroused, had no hurried pulse, no sensations, although when I moved on top of him I realized that my vagina was lubricated. Was it still part of the other Phillip?

When he reached his orgasm, I moved away and looked at his beautiful tanned features for the last time. Now he was looking at me, astonished, covering his nakedness with my bath-towel.

Surprised to find me cool dea? Well, it happens to a woman when her brain is detached from her vagina or, as I term it, when form is detached from idea; males usually call it prostitution, but you lot regard it as freedom. Like it?

He did not reply.

I used all the tricks you taught me, sorry – that Phillip taught me through you. But as he and you both know very little about emotions, your lack of noted feelings all along left me only techniques with which to recapture what we had. And for me it is not enough!

He said nothing; just lay there with closed eyes, and I calmly continued -

Regardless of what happened last night, as if I will ever be able to forget it, I needed all along to know about your inner self about which you did not bother to talk, and I needed the friendship which you did not extend – not the Australian "mateship", but a kind of Israeli comradeship that we did not share - a friendship based on intimacy and complete mutual trust and mutual knowledge of each other. And leaving me bereft of all these accumulated to a state of affairs in which I have no interest anymore in your sexual tricks, or in you!

So kindly leave me now. I have no time left for you, as I need it to myself.

He remained lying on the cushions while I quickly dressed in front of him, for the first time since our acquaintance not caring if he saw the less romantic side of a woman's toilet – the pad on the panties, the deodorizing of the armpits.

And then Mussa arrived, glancing around.

Good Bye dea, and in case I was not clear enough, I'll repeat – I did not like the notion of a third party to lie in our embrace.

John didn't make a move to stop us when Mussa – twice his width and three times heavier - carried my suitcases to his car, and I did not turn my head back to the house as the car moved.

On the way Mussa asked me what the hell the meaning was of what I had just said to John, and I explained that it is a phrase from Judith Wright's poem Woman To Man, where the resentment of a 'third who lie in our embrace' in her case is toward her expected baby.

"Oh my God! Did you have an abortion?"

Don't be stupid! I did not have a physical abortion, just an emotional and intellectual one, and I assure you it can hurt as well, if not more... much more.

Mussa took me to Adelaide's small airport and on the spot I bought a ticket to Sydney; from that international airport I would reach the west. As I missed the immediate flight I had to wait for the coming one, and refused to let Mussa stay with me. Had he stayed he would have wanted to talk, and this was the last thing I wanted to do.

Tell Pam and Alan that I could not see them before leaving, or say goodbye on the phone, but I love them dearly, and...tell them that their trust in me had been justified.

I sat motionless in the hall, waiting.

It rained and stopped, and the sky was grey as on the day I met him in this city that had become for me as well very grey, and when the flight was announced I held my bag and marched across the asphalt-paved field toward the carrier and mounted the steps.

From afar I heard my name being shouted but I did not turn my head, fighting my instincts and my desire to turn back and see him again, he who chased me at this last moment.

One is not allowed to look back at a destroyed vision least one turns into a pillar of salt.

I entered the carrier.

The airplane took off from my personal bacchanalia, and through the small port-hole I could see him standing alone amidst the huge space of the paved field, bereft of a second chance.

The two of us bereft of a second chance.

And now, crossing Hayarkon Bridge on the way to my office, and after reaching a kind of catharsis through awakening of old memories, I am aware that in spite of my conscious effort to disregard or even ignore the past, the Australian experience contributed a great deal to my decision to choose the artistic path as my vocation over the literary one; literature had been our common element, whereas I managed to keep my art to myself.

But the Australian experience had contributed also to a degree of autistic attitude to male companions, resulting in me still being unattached. Perhaps now, after looking back at my relinquished past with more lucidity and less anger and confusion, I will be able to alter my life, opening myself again to absorb into my existence another entity – a helping counterpart, as our Book of Genesis states.

For the first time since I left Adelaide I allow myself to wonder in what way our common experience affected him - did he continue partying with his liberated crowd? Did he remain unattached?

And at that very moment of pondering about his situation, the first stanza of the song I had sung to myself on my last tortured night in Adelaide, on my bench in the square, rings in my ears:

I carry with me the grief of silence,

The view of muteness we burnt out of fear;

No! It hadn't been me who resorted to muteness in regard to sentiments, as then I was not afraid of togetherness! I had been looking for it, tried to achieve it – to reach a shore – and had been shut off and hurt. And after years of muteness between us I didn't want to retrieve this past; just to reconcile with the part I innocently, and to a great extent unintentionally, played in it.

I continue to walk into North Tel Aviv.

However, while I approach the entrance to my office, the last stanza of this poem written by Jacob Orland, this beautiful Israeli poem about regret and a possible retrieval of the past, for some odd reason I cannot explain, and against my will, insists on pouring its lyrics in my mind-ears:

Let's go again to the streets we used to walk,

to the lovers' benches in the city square...

In those dreams, on the cold bench

we'll put to sleep our past,

until one day, tall and familiar -

it'll fall again on our necks with kisses.

