Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

Tractors towed the trailer and its passengers to the place where the event was to take place. The area was festooned with bales of hay and the flags of the regional council, the movement, and the nation. Making a home in the desert was still in its early stages and the inhabitants eagerly looked forward to every communal event.

When we got off the trailer, Orit stood at my side. She was a few centimetres taller than me, but I consoled myself with the thought that she was fully grown and I still had some way to go, an assumption which turned out to be not entirely correct. Come and sit with our group, I suggested, trying to be gracious, and ignoring the fact that the group’s instructors had been the ones to place her in our trailer. Her smile was friendly, though perhaps somewhat ironic, as she walked with me to our seating area.

In honour of the fourth graders joining the youth movement, the pupils from my year had arranged a set of original songs about the Israeli southern desert. I was the soloist in ‘On a Clear Day I Travelled South’.

It wasn’t easy to persuade me to sing solo in front of a crowd. I’m naturally quite shy, and in those days I was even more so. But now, as I climbed onto the stage and saw that Orit was all by herself in my year’s allocated seats I was happy to do it.

I travelled south, to work in the Arava, I continued with the opening words in my deep bass voice. I ploughed, I sowed and reaped, but managed to find love. My friends joined me in the verse: She was like the sun in the sky, and in her eyes a spark of gaiety and joy.

Once they had joined in the singing I was able to shed my shyness and look straight into Orit’s eyes. She responded with a smile, a sparkle of gaiety and delight in her blue eyes staring right back at me.

From that day on we were a couple. Afterwards I sometimes thought that I hadn’t left her much of a choice. We became a couple before she met Yoni, who was a lot more amusing than me, or the tall Gidi, or Yonatan, the first to appear in Israel’s southern desert with a punk haircut playing hard rock music, or Dori, the class genius, or Yariv, the regional school’s champion at both the high and long jump. But Orit lovingly accepted the protection I offered. Before long it was clear to the whole school that we were a couple for good.

Not for a moment did Orit let me feel that she was with me because I’d ‘chosen’ her. The mystique that went with her being a stranger in town occasionally gave the impression of a young girl who knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it quickly and in the most effective way.

There’s not much to do in the desert, certainly not in our small moshav. There were only five boys in our year. Ninth grade was when my friends discovered cigarettes, then the nargileh, then grass, and spent their time smoking behind the clubhouse. None of that was for me. I helped my parents on the farm. After school, I worked in the tomato, pepper, and watermelon fields, and helped with sorting in the packing shed we’d set up in the big yard. My evenings were spent reading.

When the regional high school opened we got closer to classmates from the five other villages in the area. But the distances we had to travel took their toll and at the end of the school day we all had to go our separate ways.

Then Orit came into my life, filling it with a new harmony and a different tempo. After school I’d stay at her house in a residential neighbourhood close to the school and soon became one of the family. The small neighbourhood community set against the vastness of an arid desert landscape was home to a few teachers, two doctors, and some council and water company workers. They lived in cramped, asbestos-roofed houses, their brown-coloured exterior walls blending beautifully with the yellowish-grey sand all around. I swapped working on my parent’s farm for helping to nurture Orit’s family’s small garden, happy to be at their disposal and offer them my newly acquired horticultural skills. I raked the loose, crumbly soil, planted vegetable seedlings from my parent’s fields, together with a few ornamental plants that Orit’s mother brought.

Orit’s little brother enjoyed throwing a basketball through an improvised hoop attached to the wall of the house and her parents were impressed by my seriousness. Her father expressed his surprise at the books I read, sometimes even engaging me in detailed conversation about various fictional characters and different interpretations of the novels. Occasionally, he would recall his own passionate enjoyment of the same books.

I loved watching Orit paint. Her murals added stunning patches of colour to the walls of the school, a building that had been designed, with its greyish plaster and reddish clay walls, to merge with the desert all around it. I also liked accompanying her to her gymnastics and dance lessons in the hall adjoining the school, and was amazed by her supple, cat-like movements.

She welcomed my love–and the poems I wrote to her. At least I think she did. Being with Orit brought out the romantic in me, a sentiment I didn’t know I was capable of. I wrote her a poem almost every week, and every now and again I’d set the poem to music and sing her the lyrics to the accompaniment of my guitar. We went for long walks along the ancient Spice Route through a wadi that led to our school. From there this biblical path wound its way to the slopes of the low hills in the distance. I always had my guitar slung over my shoulder and I’d play it as we occasionally took a break in the shade of an acacia tree. Orit would sit facing me, hugging her long bare legs, exposed by her ever so brief shorts, and listen to my music attentively, her blue eyes reflecting a happy smile. When I finished playing she’d put her arms around me and kiss me.

One evening, when we were all alone, she really surprised me. Do you masturbate? she asked. I did, but that particular word wasn’t yet common in our part of the world. The liberated girl from a more cosmopolitan part of the country wasted no time waiting for my answer and decided instead to tutor me. First by caressing the bulge in my jeans, and then by sliding her hands inside them.

My poems thus far had described her blue eyes (which if you believe the poems were bluer than the sea and sky), the blonde fringe across her forehead, and her long plait. Now there were poems about her ripening breasts that already filled the palm of my hand. I searched for new words to describe the mystery hidden between her thighs, by then rounder and more like those of a grown woman.

On my seventeenth birthday Orit announced that she wanted to give me a present. She’d been holding this gift back, she explained, for almost a year and now the time had come for her to give it to me. After school we took the bus to my parents’ home. Once the heat of the day had subsided, we rode our bikes out beyond the residential area, through the east gate and continued past the hothouses and vegetable fields that bordered the patrol path along the Jordanian border. The last rays of the setting sun coloured the peaks of Edom with the redness that gave them their name in Hebrew, and which made them seem higher, closer, and more menacing than ever. The farmers had already left the fields. The army patrol that would check the dirt road for the footprints of intruders was not due till nightfall.

Orit guided us to an area in the lower reaches of a date palm plantation where there was more shade. To my surprise she had planned it all to the nth degree. From the wicker basket attached to the front of her bike she took out a light woven blanket, a bottle of wine, two glasses, and even a corkscrew.

I’d already got to know every feature of Orit’s face and slender body. I was more familiar than she was with the almost imperceptible slant of her mouth, formed by her asymmetrical cheek bones. This was a feature I spotted–apparently the only one to do so–when we were doing our homework together one day and a pencil held in her mouth was slanted instead of being horizontal. My discovery led to prolonged orthodontic treatment, during which I had to get used to the braces and wires in her mouth. You’ve only yourself to blame, she would say, chortling. A moment before she laughed or got angry, I could tell what was about to happen from the tiny creases that appeared in the corners of her eyes, or the slight shadow that darted across her face. When she became an outstanding gymnast, captaining the girls’ regional artistic gymnastics team, her magnificent legs turned slightly more muscly, sinew that was barely visible to the naked eye. Yet I immediately knew she was about to move because I could see a thin muscle tense up like the string of an archer’s bow. But now, here in the plantation, was a different Orit. Serious, keyed-up, excited, practical and dreamy, all at the same time.