Read The Same Sea for Free Online

confidence, prepared to debase himself so long as he made a good impression. He began to expand on an idea he had conceived about the eternal conflict between genuine art and popular taste. So he gained some more time in the company of his paternal host, who appeared to be sensible, attentive, just the way he himself would be happy to appear on the stage of life but had never managed to. And besides, on another matter, tax, for some years now I've had an accountant, Mr. So-and-So, from whom I have never had an ounce of human warmth. Is it out of the question, lets say, for me to put myself in your hands? Be looked after by you personally? That is to say as a client who needs an occasional guiding hand? Actually "guiding hand" might seem to be a religious expression, whereas I am, lets be clear, an ardent secularist, even though there are moments—but that's nothing at all to do with what we were talking about I'm sorry, I've wandered off the point again. I need a guiding hand. Actually I've been like that ever since my wife left me for a well-known singer. And by the way my parents, both of them, were killed in the El Al disaster when I was a child. So that now, let's say at the present juncture in my life, I'm coming to terms the hard way with the fact that I'll probably never be the Israeli Steven Spielberg. A pig in a poke is an expression that generally denotes an unconsidered purchase, but in my case it describes my actual condition, both commercially and personally, or, let's say, existentially. But how did we get on to that? After all, we were only talking about the occasional tax advice and making up my annual accounts.
    Mr. Danon apologized, he couldn't take on, overwhelmed with work, etc., but finally, on the doorstep, to their mutual surprise, he suddenly heard himself utter the words Call me, we'll talk about it.

She goes out and he stays in
    At six she woke from a heavy siesta. She took a shower
and washed her hair. Stopped in the doorway of his room,
wearing only a wet shirt that did not quite cover her underwear.
I slept like a log and I must rush to work (receptionist
in a hotel). Be a dear and lend me two hundred shekels
just till the end of the week, will you. There's some rice and chicken
in the fridge and tonight after the news there's a program
about Tibet. Will you watch and tell me about it tomorrow?
She combed her hair, dressed and stopped in his doorway again,
I'm off now, bye, and don't you dare wait up for me,
just you go to bed, don't worry, I promise not to take any sweets
from strangers. She blew him a kiss and left him
changing a light bulb in the hall, in deepening gloom.

And when the shadows overwhelmed him
    And if she stays out all night what will he do all night, and if she gets back
at midnight and goes straight to bed what will he do while she sleeps?
Tomorrow he'll tell her that her money is safe, that from now on
she is free and he is of no further use. Around nine there was a power outage,
and like a solitary mountaineer on whom night falls in a deserted place
he groped and found a flashlight and shifted the blocks of shadow around.
When the shadows overwhelmed him he gave up and went
to Bettine's, which was also in darkness with only an emergency light
glowing palely by her bed. And as the lights did not come back on
and the emergency light was fading he found himself telling her how
a bedraggled bird had nested uninvited in his flat, and how today he
himself had made sure—why on earth had he done it—that she too
would soon fly away. Reading between the lines, Bettine picked up
his secret and found it partly ridiculous and partly moving and painful. She
took his hand in hers, and they listened to the tossing and turning
of the sea in the depths of the dark, and then came a reaching out, a shy
embrace with no clothing removed, partly for loneliness of the flesh
and partly for grace and favor. Bettine knew from her flesh that he
was imagining another in her but she forgave him: had