Read My Michael for Free Online

happiness in the world. Not in the crumbling pathway, not in the darkling hills around.
    "Michael," I said, despairing. "Michael, last week you said you liked the word 'ankle.' Tell me this, for heaven's sake: Do you realize that my shoes are full of water and my ankles hurt as if I were walking barefoot through a field of thorns? Tell me, who's to blame?"
    Michael turned round sharply, frighteningly. He glared at me in confusion. Then he put his wet cheek against my face, and pressed his warm lips to my neck like a suckling child. I could feel every bristle on his cheek against the skin of my neck. I enjoyed the feel of the rough cloth of his coat. The cloth was a warm, quiet sigh. He unbuttoned his coat and drew me inside. We were together. I breathed in his smell. He felt very real. So did I. I was not a figment of his thoughts, he was not a fear inside me. We were real. I took in his pent-up panic. I reveled in it. "You're mine," I whispered. "Don't ever be distant," I whispered. My lips touched his forehead and his fingers found the nape of my neck. His touch was cautious and sensitive. Suddenly I was reminded of the spoon in the cafeteria in Terra Sancta, and how it had enjoyed being held in his fingers. If Michael had been an evil man, then surely his fingers, too, would have been evil.

7
    A FORTNIGHT or so before the wedding Michael and I went to see his father and his aunts in Holon, and my mother and my brother's family at Kibbutz Nof Harim.

    Michael's father lived in a cramped and gloomy two-room flat in a "Workers' Dwelling" housing project. Our visit coincided with a power failure. Yehezkel Gonen introduced himself to me by the light of a sooty paraffin lamp. He had a cold, and refused to kiss me out of fear I might catch it from him just before my wedding. He was clad in a warm dressing gown, and his face was sallow. He told me he was entrusting a precious burden to my care—his Michael. Then he was embarrassed and regretted what he had said. He tried to pass it off as a joke. Anxiously, shyly, the old man enumerated all the illnesses Michael had had as a child. He lingered only on a very bad fever which had nearly proved fatal to Michael when he was ten. He stressed, finally, that Michael had not been ill since he was fourteen. Despite everything, our Michael, though not one of the strongest, was a decidedly healthy young man.
    I recalled that when my father was selling a second-hand radio he used to talk to the customer in the same tones: frankness, fairness, a reserved familiarity, a quiet eagerness to please.
    While Yehezkel Gonen addressed me in this tone of courteous helpfulness, with his son he barely exchanged two words. He merely said that he had been amazed to receive his letter, with the news it contained. He regretted that he could not make us some tea or coffee, as the electricity was cut off and he did not have a paraffin stove or even a gas ring. When Tova, God rest her, was alive—Tova was Michael's mother ... if only she could have been with us on this occasion, everything would have been more festive. Tova had been a remarkable woman. He wouldn't talk about her now because he didn't want to mingle sorrow with gladness. One day he would tell me a very sad story.

    "What can I offer you instead? Ah, a chocolate."
    So, feverishly, as if he had been accused of neglecting his duty, he rummaged in his chest of drawers and produced an ancient box of chocolates, still in its original gift wrapping. "Here you are, my dears, help yourselves. Please.
    "I am sorry, I didn't quite catch what it is you are studying at the University. Ah yes, of course, Hebrew literature. I shall remember in future. Under Professor Klausner? Yes, Klausner is a great man, even though he doesn't approve of the Labor Movement. I have a copy somewhere of one of the volumes of his
History of the Second Temple.
I'll find it to show you. In fact, I'd like to give you the book as a gift. It will be more useful to you than to me: