Do Not Strike the Wall

Elisha Malchin was nineteen when he got off the village bus that Friday noon, and a girl he did not know got off before him. His soldier’s shirt was too big and his kitbag almost floored him. He put the kitbag down on the bus-stop asphalt and showed her the way to the secretariat. You see those three poplars? There, on the right, you go down six steps and walk to the building with the blue shutters. She turned right towards the three poplars and he turned left to his house, and in the oval shadow cast by the kitbag on the limestone gravel he saw a slim brown ankle and a white sandal strap. Her name was Almah, and she’s been gone these past eleven years, and all these years the cantor of the burial society prays for her to rest in peace and his request is denied, because two are troubling her rest – Elisha, about whom they say that his love is as strong as death, which is why death has no advantage over him, and me. Now he’s already thirty-eight, and he has a daughter and an orange grove and a white house down our street and ugly shrubs in his yard, and me – I’m twenty-five.