1948

Twenty-two

I wanted a girl. The ones I’d known before thought you got pregnant from kissing. I wanted to kiss a woman, after I’d killed people. I stood on the promenade one night with a girl at my side. She smelled of laundry soap and a kind of sweet stench. We turned to each other, and suddenly, as if it had been planned, we kissed. We held hands and went up to the Excelsior Hotel, a small hotel for soldiers on Hayarkon Street, and took a room. I asked them to put a baby’s crib inside. The cast on my leg did its job, and they brought a crib and placed it by the window overlooking the sea. It was nice there. She taught me everything I didn’t know. I loved her with a great love. She spoke hardly any Hebrew. She mumbled in Polish. She was lovely and sad and thought I was a German officer and she crouched on the floor and wept and shouted at me in German, and we came together again, and the night passed. We named the baby that would be born out of that love, but I don’t remember what we called it. Then it was morning. I wanted to know her name and tell her mine, but after an entire night of love it was difficult.

We came out of the hotel and walked toward Ben-Yehuda Street. Buses and carts and trucks and a few cars were already on the streets. There was an old kiosk on the corner, and the man knew me and sold us each a roll and poured us black coffee, and we drank and kissed, and without thinking what I was doing I started walking toward my parents’ home farther down Ben-Yehuda. After a while I remembered and looked behind me, I was totally confused, she was standing there far away, in wonderment. She seemed angry. I felt so good that I smiled lovingly at her and went on walking, and then I realized that I didn’t know who she was, and how would I find her, and I turned to go back. Hordes of people were hurrying to work. She disappeared among them and I tried to run after her, and even saw her from a distance, but the cast restricted me. She’d vanished. Afterward I walked the city for a month trying to find my beloved and not succeeding. To this day, sixty-two years later, I don’t know who she was, her name, where she came from, whether she’d come from a camp. I loved her until the love faded. I fell in love with a different girl each day, but none of them was the mother of my would-be son, in that crib facing the sea.