Shmuel Ash and Yardena’s relationship

Shmuel Ash and Yardena’s relationship is an intimacy shaped by genuine affection and a persistent mismatch: Yardena values Shmuel’s warmth and unruly energy, yet ultimately leaves him for the dependable Nesher Shereshevski. Her vivid account of Shmuel as a restless, affectionate dog who can also lie inert for days becomes the language through which he revisits the breakup, measures himself against her new husband, and imagines becoming someone she might have chosen.

Character and Relationship

Yardena is not merely the object of Shmuel’s longing. She knows his habits closely: his frantic pace, his exhaustion, and the way he can become absorbed in his own speeches rather than attend to another person. Shmuel, for his part, is generous and eager to help, but impatient and distractible. The tenderness between them coexists with a gap in attention and temperament. He can speak ardently about overturning conventions, yet when Yardena talks, his eyelids may close after a few minutes; when she challenges him to repeat what she has said, he evades the test by changing the subject.

Yardena’s comparison captures that contradiction as a bodily rhythm. Shmuel seems to race even while seated, pursuing his own tail, and then to disappear beneath the blanket for whole days. His usual movement is equally divided: his head thrusts forward, his torso follows, and his legs scramble to keep up. The image is affectionate, but it also names the strain of living beside someone who is at once intensely animated and hard to reach.

The Break and Yardena’s Choice

Yardena decides to separate from Shmuel and accept the marriage proposal of Nesher Shereshevski, her former boyfriend. He is a diligent, taciturn hydrologist who studies rainwater collection and seems almost uncannily attentive to her preferences. He remembers both of her birthdays: he gives her a handsome neckerchief for the date on the Gregorian calendar, then a greenish oriental rug for the Hebrew-calendar date two days later. He even remembers the birthdays of her parents. In Shmuel’s later comparisons, this precise, considerate attentiveness stands opposite his own forgetfulness and disorder.

The breakup unsettles more than Shmuel’s romantic life. About three weeks before Yardena’s wedding, he abandons his master’s thesis, “Jesus in the Eyes of the Jews.” He had begun it in a rush of intellectual excitement, convinced he had found a bold new subject, but source research shows him that the central idea had already appeared in a footnote by his teacher, Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss, in the early 1930s. His relationship’s collapse and the discovery that his scholarly insight is not original form part of a wider retreat from projects that had seemed to promise direction.

Shmuel considers leaving Jerusalem for simple work in a remote place, perhaps as a night watchman in the Ramon mountains, where a new desert town is being built. The wedding invitation interrupts that plan. He imagines making an unexpected, exuberant entrance among the couple’s close family and friends, then joining the celebration and entertaining them with imitations of Eisenschloss. The fantasy turns the breakup into a scene he might master through performance: rather than appear as the rejected man, he would arrive smiling and contribute to the occasion. On the morning of the wedding, however, a severe asthma attack sends him first to a clinic and then to Bikur Holim Hospital; he cannot enact the imagined appearance.

Memory, Desire, and Comparison

After leaving Jerusalem life for a more secluded household, Shmuel sometimes longs to find Yardena and take her away from Nesher for an hour or two. He wants to speak vehemently about his altered, almost monastic existence and show that he has overcome his anxiety, talkativeness, tearfulness, and impatience. He imagines himself becoming calm and mature, like the husband Yardena chose. The imagined encounter is less a practical plan than a rehearsal in which he hopes to make the breakup reversible by presenting a changed self.

His daily routines keep that imagined audience close. At the attic window, with coffee in one hand and the fox-headed cane beside him, he watches for a cat in the frozen mist. Sometimes he taps the glass with the cane, as if calling the carved fox after its prey or sending a signal from his confinement. His thoughts turn to Yardena laughing in the university cafeteria at his characteristic, headlong way of taking the stairs. The image combines remembered intimacy with anticipated ridicule: he pictures her laughter as evidence that she still sees him, even as he feels exposed by the trait she once described.

A walk through Jerusalem sharpens the contrast between the life Yardena has chosen and his own drifting days. Shmuel imagines her at the press-clipping office where she worked before marriage, marking clients’ names in newspapers, while Nesher writes reports at the institute of marine and lake research with his characteristic air of moderate satisfaction. In his self-reproach, they have settled into work and marriage while he wanders without purpose, fearing that successive winters will leave him stunted by memories of Yardena and fantasies about Atalia. His questions about whether he still loves Yardena, or has begun to love Atalia without admitting it, show that the old attachment persists even as his desire is turning elsewhere.

Intimacy and Humiliation

One memory resists the neatness of Yardena’s decision to marry someone else. During a meal together the previous winter, Shmuel had been speaking about growing isolationism in the Marxist-Zionist party’s left wing. Yardena abruptly stared at him, seized his arm, paid the bill, and dragged him to his room in Tel Arza without explaining herself. There she pushed him onto the bed and initiated sex with startling force. Shmuel had to cover her mouth to keep her cries from alarming the landlady in the next room. Afterward, Yardena dressed, drank two glasses of tap water, and left.

The episode offers no simple answer to Shmuel’s questions about why Yardena abandoned him or what she found in Nesher that he lacked. Instead, its abrupt, wordless intensity sits beside the later marriage: desire was present, but it did not settle the relationship into a shared future. Shmuel remembers the scene while eating his usual goulash and fruit salad, turning an ordinary meal into an occasion for returning to the intimate past and measuring himself against the man Yardena chose.

In the same recollection, Nesher’s reasonable manner becomes an object of Shmuel’s resentment. He mocks the hydrologist’s elaborate, obvious pronouncements, including that Tel Aviv is less ancient than Jerusalem but more modern, and that the majority decides while the minority must accept its view. The mockery does not dispel his humiliation. He agrees, at least inwardly, with Yardena’s description of him as a restless little dog, yet still feels wounded by it. Her words are painful precisely because they express something he recognizes in himself.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

Yardena’s description recurs at moments when Shmuel tries to understand his own character. In the darkness of a cinema with Atalia, after Atalia explains that men often seem childish and dependent on a constant stream of successes, Shmuel remembers Yardena’s parting image of the fidgeting dog and the stale winter blanket. The memory links the two women without making them interchangeable: Yardena’s judgment names the insecurity Shmuel carries into his new attraction, while Atalia’s distance intensifies his awareness that he cannot simply become the composed man he admires in others.

The relationship therefore remains active after its formal end. Yardena has married Nesher, but Shmuel’s recollections structure his shame, his imagined self-improvement, and his uncertainty about whom he loves. The story grants both the attachment’s tenderness and its failure: Yardena appreciates Shmuel’s nervous, generous liveliness, yet chooses a partner whose practical attentiveness contrasts with his scattered energy. Shmuel’s hope of becoming the man she wanted never becomes a reunion; it remains a private effort to turn rejection into the beginning of a different life.