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Show 211 Jerusalem rose bucketful by muddy bucketful, the silence between us continued. After a week he quit. It had nothing to do with me, I later learned; he had gone to Tel-Aviv for some sort of flight training course. Talma simply replaced him at the top and at first the exchange made little difference to me. Chaim's superior glare became Talma's shy smile, that was all; the buckets went up the same as before. But since we now worked togather, and there were no bad feelings between us, it was natural enough that we should also begin spending our breaks together, quietly drinking coffee, sitting on the wooden benches under the steel-corrugated roof if it was cold, on the steps outside if it was nice. If she brought pastries from home, she shared them. If I had chocolate left from the morning I returned the kindness. We taught each other the English and Hebrew words for shovel, pick, autumn, mud. We laughed together at the tourists who came to peer into the ground, as though the black dirty holes themselves were of some deep significance. We inevitably asked about the size of each other's family, and showed the inevitable photographs; and gradually, through simple questions and the language of gesture, we came to know each other as friends. But still, when four o'clock came we walked together for only a short distance before I turned off toward Damascus Gate and she left for Jaffa Gate. At night it rained, a steady drizzle that began with dusk, kept the respectable off the streets through the evening, and put me to sleep-sometimes with a book open on my chest-before midnight. |
