Yardena and Nesher Shereshevski’s relationship

Yardena and Nesher Shereshevski’s relationship is the dependable, quietly attentive partnership Yardena chooses after separating from Shmuel Ash. Nesher’s care is rendered in precise acts of remembering and anticipation, while his impending marriage to Yardena becomes a measure of Shmuel’s loss: the wedding invitation prompts a fantasy of exuberant intrusion, and its morning brings Shmuel’s severe asthma attack instead.

Formation and Contrast

Yardena had enjoyed Shmuel’s restless spirit, helplessness, and what she called his friendly, noisy, impetuous dog-like nature. But his generosity and warmth came with impatience and distraction. When she spoke, he could seem to stop listening after a few minutes; if she asked him to repeat what she had just said, he would change the subject and turn to Ben-Gurion’s error. His absorption in political and historical argument did not make him equally attentive in ordinary conversation.

Nesher, by contrast, is introduced as Yardena’s former boyfriend, a diligent, taciturn hydrologist and specialist in collecting rainwater. He is described as someone who can usually guess what she will want next. The contrast is not simply between talkative and quiet men: Shmuel offers energy and intellectual argument, whereas Nesher’s attentiveness appears as reliable anticipation of Yardena’s wishes and of the small particulars of her life.

The Engagement and Its Rituals

Yardena decides to leave Shmuel and accept Nesher’s proposal of marriage. The decision establishes a clear change in her relationship: the former boyfriend becomes her chosen partner, and Shmuel is left outside the future the two are preparing. Their haste is emphasized when Shmuel receives their wedding invitation. They seem so eager to marry that they cannot wait even for winter to end.

Nesher’s care takes concrete, memorable form in the two birthday gifts he gives Yardena. For her birthday according to the Gregorian calendar, he buys her a pretty neck scarf. Two days later, for her birthday according to the Hebrew calendar, he buys her a greenish Oriental carpet. He also remembers the birthdays of her parents. These details make his attentiveness more than a general characterization: he recognizes both dates on which Yardena’s birthday is marked and extends his memory to her family.

Shmuel and the Wedding

The relationship is also revealed through the effect it has on Shmuel. Considering leaving Jerusalem for a simple job in a remote place, perhaps as a night watchman in the Ramon Mountains, he receives the wedding invitation and decides instead to attend. He imagines surprising the couple and their guests by arriving without warning in the middle of a ceremony intended for close family and friends, greeting everyone with smiles and backslaps, and joining the celebration afterward.

In this imagined entrance, Shmuel plans not merely to endure the wedding but to become part of its spectacle. He pictures himself contributing to the party with his celebrated imitations of Professor Eisenschloss’s accent and gestures. The exuberant performance he imagines is an answer to his exclusion: he would make himself conspicuous in the very setting that confirms Yardena’s choice of another man.

But on the morning of the wedding, Shmuel suffers a severe asthma attack. He drags himself to a clinic, where an inhaler and allergy pills fail to help; when his condition worsens, he is taken to Bikur Holim Hospital. The planned appearance and performance never come to pass. The wedding’s timing turns the illness into a sharp narrative reversal, placing his bodily vulnerability against the noisy, outgoing role he had imagined for himself.

Memory, Comparison, and Rejection

Later, on a winter walk through Jerusalem, Shmuel imagines Yardena at the press-clipping agency where she had worked before marrying. He pictures her marking clients’ names in newspapers and imagines Nesher at his desk at the Institute of Marine and Lake Research, diligently writing a report with an expression of moderate satisfaction. These are Shmuel’s conjectures, not scenes of the couple’s shared domestic life: their ordinary workday becomes something he constructs from a distance, a life in which he has no place.

His thoughts turn to the marriage bed, where he imagines Yardena sleeping in Nesher’s arms, and to the question of whether he still loves her or has turned toward Atalia. The comparison leaves his attachment unsettled rather than resolved. Yardena’s marriage makes her absence concrete, while his own feelings remain divided between memories of her and fantasies about another woman.

A memory from the previous winter further complicates the picture. At a restaurant, Shmuel had been speaking to Yardena about growing isolationism within the more left-wing faction of the Marxist-Zionist party. She abruptly stared at him, seized his arm, pulled him from his chair, paid the bill in haste, and dragged him nearly by force to his room in Tel Arza. There, without explanation, she pushed him onto the bed and made love to him violently. He covered 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 intensity and abruptness of this encounter do not undo her decision to marry Nesher. Instead, the remembered episode sits beside the wedding and the ordinary signs of Nesher’s attentiveness, making the relation between Yardena and Shmuel difficult for him to interpret. His questions about why she left and what she saw in Nesher carry the sting of comparison. He recalls Yardena’s last name for him, “restless puppy,” and, although he privately agrees with it, feels ashamed, offended, and humiliated. Nesher’s apparent reasonableness and care become, in Shmuel’s mind, evidence of what he lacks.

Significance

The relationship is presented largely through contrast and through Shmuel’s one-sided imagining of the couple’s future. Nesher’s quiet diligence, his remembered gifts, and his attention to birthdays supply the most concrete evidence of the partnership; the text does not give an extended account of the couple’s life together after the wedding. What it does show is Yardena’s choice and Shmuel’s response to it: a planned comic entrance gives way to hospitalization, and later everyday scenes he imagines for the married couple deepen his isolation.

For Shmuel, Nesher is at once a particular rival and the embodiment of an alternative kind of attention. Shmuel can deliver impassioned speeches and recall details from political history with precision, yet Yardena’s needs and conversations expose the limits of that attentiveness. His memories do not settle whether his love for Yardena persists, but they reveal how rejection has become bound up with shame and self-judgment. The couple’s marriage is therefore significant not only as Yardena’s new partnership, but as the loss against which Shmuel measures both his desires and his capacity to be present to another person.