The roof top

An excerpt of my fourth manuscript 'Summer Tempest'.

The roof top

All that while Ruvke was answering to Nehama's questions about the trip Talma and he have just returned from in the United States. He quoted names of well known cities and sites, New York, Chicago, Niagara falls, the grand canyon. Most of the conversation details have not penetrated Yoske's brain at the beginning beginning, but Talma's appearance with a huge loaded platter in her hands has cut off his illusions and he sat listening attentively to the dialogue between Ruvke and his wife.

It has reached a lively peak, photos were passed around; after a few moments of preparations they watched a video abundant with American landscapes, and their friends' smiling faces now and then.

In spite of his gloomy feelings Yoske hoped that this evening would be a pleasant one thus he hoped and prayed, that this meeting would dispel the last remnants of the mistrust that was sown lately between Nehama and himself.

Ruvke poured him a glass of bourbon, while Talma was teasing her husband and telling them all about an unexpected meeting with Ruvke's first girl friend in Niagara Falls.

'That Yemenite girl that made you lose your head.' She remarked laughing.

After one more glass of bourbon Yoske heard himself telling them an episode of his own childhood, about another Yemenite woman that made many lose their heads.

'I was about nine or ten years old then and I climbed to our house roof to look for my best friend. His mother was up there dealing with their laundry, and in those days if you remember every family had its day of laundry on top of the roof. There was an open room in one corner where the laundry was boiled in a huge boiler upon a fire. My friend was supposed to help his mother to keep the fire going, and some other small errands which he was able to fulfill.

His mother was a Yemenite, a beautiful woman with black curly hair, black eyes. She was married a second time to my best friend's step father, and young men still courted her with much zeal. I reached the roof and saw her standing near the roof's parapet, and a young pale man stood next to her leaning on the parapet with his elbo  while she was hanging her washed laundry.'

Yoske made a short pause and emptied his glass, surprised how eager they all were to hear more, including his own wife that never heard that certain story ever before.

'Well that young man was talking to her ceaselessly, while she looked at him from time to time with a shade of a smile, a Mona Lisa mysterious smile. I was approaching them to ask her where my friend could be. My lips almost uttered my question: "Jacob's mother where's Jacob?"; when I heared the young man say: 'Just one word from you and I'll jump off the roof.' Yes that's what he said, and he was much younger than her, no more than twenty, twenty two years old. I was a yard away when she turned to me smiling and asked me 'shall I tell him?' Shocked and frightened I raised both my hands as if to protect my face, and shouted no, no and ran back to the staircase and all the way down to the ground floor.'

© Haim Kadman 2007 " all rights reserved.