Yardena

Yardena is Shmuel Ash’s buoyant, impulsive former girlfriend, whose decision to leave him and marry her former suitor Nesher Shereshevski sharpens the loneliness that shapes Shmuel’s next chapter. She is remembered not simply as the woman who rejected him: her appetite for movement, attention, and shared life stands in vivid contrast to his fatigue, distraction, and retreat into solitude, while their uneven intimacy leaves its mark on both his daily habits and his sense of himself.

Identity and Character

Yardena’s character emerges through the images others use to describe her and through the ways she tries to draw Shmuel into the world. Shmuel’s sister recalls her as cheerful, boisterous, and almost childlike: while he studied, Yardena would sit opposite him and play the harmonica without knowing how to play it. When he was already tired by nine in the evening and wanted to go to bed, she would make him go out—to the cinema, cafés, or visits with mutual friends. Her energy was not just a contrast to Shmuel’s reserve; it repeatedly became a force that interrupted it.

Yardena also recognized the contradictory rhythms of Shmuel’s temperament. Shortly before leaving him, she compared him to a restless, noisy, playful, affectionate little dog, forever chasing its tail even while sitting in a chair, or, conversely, to an unventilated winter blanket left motionless on a bed for days. The comparison catches his restless movement and his long spells of inertia, qualities that she could find endearing even as they made life together difficult.

She liked what she called Shmuel’s friendly, excitable, helpless, doglike nature: a large dog always close at hand, rubbing against a person and slobbering over their legs. But affection did not resolve the mismatch between them. Shmuel’s kindness and eagerness to help others coexisted with impatience and inattention. He could forget a sock, a household request, or the person to whom he had lent his notebook; when Yardena spoke, his eyelids might close after a few minutes. She accused him of not listening, and when she asked him to repeat what she had just said, he would change the subject to Ben-Gurion. Their companionship thus held warmth and frustration together.

Relationship with Shmuel

The relationship is shown in scenes of both ordinary companionship and sudden, forceful intimacy. One winter, while eating with Shmuel at a restaurant on King George Street, Yardena listened as he talked about the growing isolationism of the Marxist-Zionist party’s left wing. She abruptly took him by the arm, pulled him from his chair, paid the bill in haste, and led him nearly by force to his room in Tel Arza. Without speaking during the walk, she pushed him onto his bed and initiated sex with a ferocity the narration describes as a kind of vengeance. She did not move away until she had climaxed twice; afterward, she dressed, drank two glasses of tap water, and left. The scene gives their intimacy an abruptness that Shmuel cannot explain, rather than supplying a clear reason for her actions.

Shmuel’s memories of Yardena become bound up with questions he cannot answer. He wonders why she left, what he had done, and what she saw in Nesher that he did not possess. Even the ordinary details of his life—his regular meal of spicy goulash, white bread, and fruit salad—are interrupted by recollection of the meal he once shared with her. The past relationship recurs in the present as an unresolved absence, not as a settled account of blame.

After she leaves, Shmuel sometimes wanders alone through the streets at night. He tells Atalia that he had done so not long before, after Yardena left him and went away. Atalia already knows the name of the man she chose, identifying Nesher as the rainwater-collection expert, and responds without mockery, with sadness and something close to affection. The brief exchange shows that Shmuel’s loss is known in the household where he has come to live, and that Yardena’s departure remains a fact through which others understand his isolation.

The Separation and Nesher Shereshevski

Yardena decides to separate from Shmuel and accept the marriage proposal of her former boyfriend, Nesher Shereshevski. Nesher is a diligent, taciturn hydrologist and an expert in collecting rainwater. The account of him emphasizes attentiveness to practical details: he remembers Yardena’s birthday according to the Gregorian calendar and buys her a pretty neckerchief, then remembers the date on the Hebrew calendar two days later and gives her a greenish oriental rug. He also remembers the birthdays of her parents and, as Shmuel sees it, can usually anticipate what she will want next.

These details make Nesher a pointed contrast to Shmuel. Where Shmuel rushes through streets, loses track of small obligations, and turns conversations toward political history, Nesher is described as quiet, diligent, and able to foresee Yardena’s wishes. Shmuel’s sister, writing from Rome, cannot determine why the couple separated. She asks whether they fought, whether Shmuel deceived Yardena, whether Yardena wanted to live with or marry him, or whether Shmuel himself wanted to end the relationship and return to his habitual solitude. The questions are a record of uncertainty, not answers; the text does not disclose a single definitive cause for Yardena’s decision.

Departure and Aftermath

Yardena’s departure is followed by the news that she and Nesher are in a hurry to marry and will not even wait for winter to end. Shmuel receives an invitation to the wedding. He considers responding by arriving unexpectedly, cheerfully and noisily, and joining the ceremony and celebration as an unanticipated guest. In his imagined entrance, he would offer smiles and backslaps, then entertain those present with impressions of Professor Eisenschloss’s accent and gestures. The fantasy turns his familiar impulsiveness into a performance of good cheer: rather than remain absent from the event that confirms his loss, he imagines forcing his way into it as a welcome source of amusement.

The plan never comes to fruition. On the morning of the wedding, Shmuel suffers a severe asthma attack, drags himself to a clinic, and is taken to Bikur Holim hospital when an inhaler and allergy pills do not help. The wedding invitation therefore marks both the immediacy of Yardena’s new life and the point at which Shmuel is physically prevented from acting out his imagined role in it.

Shmuel’s sister learns from his brief letters that he has left his university studies, found work and lodging in an old Jerusalem house, and heard about Yardena’s wedding. Although he never uses the word loneliness in those letters, she reads loneliness in every word. She had hoped Yardena might draw him out of himself, but concludes that his reserve is not merely a shell imposed from outside: the shell is also part of who he is. When Shmuel later explains why he came to live in the Wald household, he places Yardena’s leaving and marriage alongside his father’s financial ruin and his own stalled writing. Her departure is one of several losses, but it is the intimate one that makes his solitude immediately personal.

Narrative Role

Yardena is chiefly presented through recollection, reported observation, and Shmuel’s unanswered questions. The glimpses do not provide her own sustained explanation for leaving; instead, they preserve the difference between Shmuel’s attachment to her and her decision to marry someone else. This limited perspective matters: she remains a lively and affectionate presence in memory, but not a figure whose choice can be reduced to a motive the narrative never supplies.

Her relationship with Shmuel also makes visible a recurring contrast between universal talk and particular attention. Shmuel can deliver impassioned speeches and recall political arguments with precision, yet he may fail to listen to Yardena or to notice what is needed in an ordinary exchange. Yardena’s remembered energy exposes the distance between his generous intentions and his distracted habits. Her departure does not explain all of Shmuel’s isolation, which also has familial and academic causes, but it becomes a decisive part of the emotional chain that carries him away from his former life and toward Jerusalem.