Yardena abandons Shmuel and marries Nesher Shereshevski

Yardena abandons Shmuel Ash and marries Nesher Shereshevski, choosing the dependable attentiveness of a former boyfriend over Shmuel’s warmth, impulsiveness, and distraction. The separation is not merely a change in her domestic life: it remains a wound and a point of comparison for Shmuel, who later imagines proving to Yardena that he has become the composed man she might have wanted.

The Relationship Before the Separation

Shmuel could hold forth to Yardena in impassioned speeches, challenging prejudice and convention and moving freely between conclusions and hypotheses. Yet when she spoke, his eyelids usually closed after two or three minutes. When she accused him of not listening, he denied it; when she asked him to repeat what she had just said, he changed the subject and began talking about Ben-Gurion’s error. He was generous, kind, and eager to help, but also impatient and absent-minded, forgetting a sock, a request from the person whose house he was staying in, or who had borrowed the notebook in which he wrote his speeches.

That scatterbrained quality did not extend to everything. Shmuel could stand up and recite exactly what Kropotkin had said about Nechayev after their first meeting and what he said two years later; he also remembered which of Jesus’s disciples spoke least. The contrast helps explain the peculiar imbalance in his relationship with Yardena: he could attend minutely to ideas and historical details while failing to sustain attention in the ordinary exchange between them.

Yardena liked his nervous spirit, helplessness, and what she described as the character of a friendly, noisy, impetuous dog: a large animal always pressed close, rubbing against a person and slobbering over their legs. Affection did not make that exuberance easy to live with. Her image registers both his warmth and the exhausting closeness she associated with him.

Her Choice of Nesher

Yardena decided to separate from Shmuel and accept the marriage proposal of Nesher Shereshevski, her former boyfriend. A diligent, taciturn hydrologist who specialized in collecting rainwater, Nesher offered a marked contrast to Shmuel’s restless talk and forgetfulness. He almost always guessed Yardena’s next wish.

His attentiveness appears in concrete acts of remembrance. For her birthday according to the Gregorian calendar, he bought her a pretty neckerchief; two days later, on the date of her Hebrew-calendar birthday, he bought her a greenish Oriental carpet. He remembered even the birthdays of Yardena’s parents. The paired gifts and family dates make his care look habitual and precise, rather than a single gesture made to impress. In the contrast the story draws, the qualities that frustrate Yardena in Shmuel are answered by Nesher’s quiet anticipation of what she wants.

The Separation’s Afterlife in Shmuel

After the breakup, Shmuel sometimes felt an intense urge to run to Yardena, take her away from her rainwater-collecting husband for an hour or two, and speak fervently about his present life. He imagined describing it as monastic and unlike his former existence, almost as though he had been reborn. In this fantasy, he would show that he had overcome his anxiety, loquacity, tendency to cry, and constant impatience, and was becoming calm and mature like the husband Yardena had chosen.

At other times, he imagined saying nothing at all. He would bring her to the shadowed house where he now lived and show her the winter stone courtyard, the small attic where he led a life of isolation and reflection, and the library where he spent hours talking with Gershom Wald and learning, little by little, to be patient and attentive. He also pictured introducing Yardena to Wald and to Atalia Abravanel. The imagined visit turns the new household into an answer to the old rejection: Shmuel wants Yardena to see not only that he has changed, but that he has found a place and company he would want her to share.

A Recalled Judgment

The breakup returns to Shmuel during a later outing with Atalia Abravanel. At the cold, half-empty Orion cinema, he watched Jean Gabin maintain an ironic severity and composure while pursued by his enemies. Shmuel envied that steadiness and quietly asked Atalia whether she would want a man like Gabin. She said she wanted none of that for herself, explaining that men were almost always childish and dependent on a constant flow of success and triumph; without it, they became bitter and weak. Shmuel fell silent, realizing that the woman beside him was inaccessible to him.

As he watched Gabin relate to women with a wry, paternal tenderness, Shmuel recognized a manner he needed but felt was beyond his character. His eyes filled with tears of compassion for himself, Atalia, Gabin, men he considered childish, and the complicated existence of two different sexes. In that moment he remembered what Yardena had told him when she left him for Nesher: he was either a restless, noisy, troublesome, clingy little dog, circling around his own tail even while seated, or the opposite, shut up in bed for entire days like an unventilated winter blanket. Her remembered verdict gives a sharper edge to the affectionate dog image: Shmuel’s extremes, rather than simple lack of goodness, had made him difficult to depend on.

The episode establishes no reconciliation. Instead, Yardena’s decision continues to shape Shmuel’s self-understanding: he measures his hoped-for transformation against Nesher’s steadiness and against Yardena’s precise account of his volatile alternatives. The marriage is thus both the consequence of her choice and the enduring standard by which Shmuel imagines the man he might become.