A Tale of Love and Darkness

AND THERE was a kindergarten or primary school teacher in Hulda, whom I shall call Orna, a hired teacher in her mid-thirties who lived in the end room in one ofthe old blocks. Every Thursday she left to be with her husband, returning early on Sunday morning. One evening she invited me and a couple of girls in my class to her room, to talk about a book of poems by Natan Alterman, Stars Outside, and to listen to Mendelssohn's violin concerto and the Schubert octet. The gramophone stood on a wicker stool in a corner of her room, which also contained a bed, a table, two chairs, an electric coffeepot, a clothes cupboard covered by a flowery curtain, and a shell case that served as a vase and sprouted an arrangement of purple thistles.

Orna had decorated the walls of her room with two reproductions of Gauguin paintings, of plump, sleepy, half-naked Tahitian women, and some pencil drawings of her own that she had framed herself. Perhaps under the influence of Gauguin she had also drawn full-bodied nude women, in lying or reclining positions. All the women, Gauguin's and Orna's, looked sated and slack, as though they had just been pleasured. Yet their inviting poses suggested that they were willing to give plenty more pleasure to anyone who had not had enough yet.