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Show "It doesn't matter," she reassured me. Her father didn't look at me again, however, or speak to either of us, but suffered his meal in silence, opening his mouth only for food or to ask that it be passed. And when toward the end of the meal I began to cough and couldn't stop, began to sputter and choke on the stuff rising from my infected lungs, it was with pleasure I know that he got up and came around to my chair to thump me once, very hard, on .the back. I gasped with the shock of it and was cured. We finished eating. There was thick coffee in small cups but Talma and I took ours to the sofa. Her father went back to the kitchen and her mother disappeared; and I too was anxious to escape. But I drank the coffee, as Talma talked, and when she asked if I would like to see some photographs I coughed to cover the groan I felt inside and said sure, but then I really had to go. She showed me pictures of friends and relatives and of herself at school, pictures of trips she had made to Eilat and the Dead Sea and Massada; one picture, taken of her in uniform the summer before, especially intrigued me. "Every Israeli must learn to fight," she said, "but I find the clothes of a soldier uncomfortable." I was hot and cold at the same time and I choked on the last of my coffee. In this and every photograph where I could see her face, I realized, even those taken of her as a child, she was looking out at me with that same expression of understanding and unnatural concern; looking out at me, Ian Alden, as from year to |
