as one might have imagined for a young boy losing his innocence to an older, more experienced, woman. What’s more, his younger brother had always been the one the girls were interested in, allowing his own romantic life to remain abstract and imaginary. And that was just the way he might—had he reflected upon such matters at all—have preferred it.
The day he had kissed Daphna for the first time they had ridden their bikes to the Sea of Galilee for a swim. It was late August—just at the height of Israeli summer before the High Holy Days—and the air was crisp and clear, the water revivifying, even shockingly, cold. Even he couldn’t help notice how lovely she was—even lovelier in a bathing suit where one could see, or imagine, all of her. She was small and dark, with fiery, passionate eyes and a little-girl-like laugh that suggested someone far younger than her years. And then there was her skin—dark, well-oiled, beckoning. It seemed to him like the skin of the heroines of the great romantic novels. It made him timid, but it also made something just below his waist begin to tingle.
When they lay together on the grassy shore of Galilee after emerging from the water, she placed a hand on his leg, stroking the thin hairs. Then she began kissing his neck, caressing his feet with her own. It felt good—no, it felt very good. And—awkwardly, timidly, ineptly at first—he responded, with her more than willing to show the way.
David and Sarah Yogev, like many members of the Israeli artistic and intellectual elite, were libertines insofar as their children’s sexual experience was concerned. So it was not so much disturbing that their almost twenty-one-year-old son was sleeping with their best friend’s married daughter in their house as it was bizarre—particularly for Sarah Yogev—to be suddenly awoken to the pleasure-induced moans of a woman whose three young children and their father she had fed at her table just weeks before. She wasn’t sure what she felt—Was it betrayal? Jealousy? Merely confusion? But one thing she knew for certain: She didn’t like it. Why couldn’t her older son, like his younger brother before him, simply choose an appropriate young virgin with whom to first experience the pleasures of the flesh?
But, then, she reasoned, nothing else about her elder son had ever been appropriate—why should this be? She too had had her share of wild times, after all. As a twenty-five-year-old girl, she had gone to Paris for the express purpose of seducing the twenty-five year-older famous sculptor who was to become the boys’ father. And there had been plenty of amorous adventures prior to that as well. So why deny her young sons theirs? And, after several months, urged on by the obvious bemusement and vicarious pleasure her husband felt at this turn of events, she had even begun to get used to the idea.
“Elle a quand même un beau cul,” David Yogev would remark in French, suggesting that certain of the more admirable portions of Daphna’s anatomy had not entirely escaped his attention. “Non, pas du tout,” his wife was forced to admit. Her husband, she recalled, had always been particularly fond of nice asses. Before gravity had begun to exact its inevitable toll, she had even been possessed of one of her own.
As a young couple in Paris—or, rather, as a young woman and a significantly older man—she and David often sat in cafés and played what they affectionately called “the three-bed game.” Each one would name an artist or intellectual in Tel Aviv whom they knew (a man for him, a woman for her) and then—by going through a list of the lovers they each knew their selection to have had—they could usually determine that the two people they had chosen were never more than three beds apart! So incestuous was the world of the Israeli intelligentsia! So one had to admit that the story of Daphna Flinker and Etan Yogev seemed to fit right in.
The real trouble, however, only began when Daphna’s attentions and ministrations began to shift from Etan to his younger brother. It had begun rather subtly—with her often sitting beside Simon, rather than Etan, at the dinner table, followed by what seemed longer and longer periods, during her visits with the children to the Yogev’s Galilee week-end home; that the two of them were absent from the house altogether. Then there were the glances, the seemingly accidental touches, all the signs Sarah Yogev could so well recognize from her own younger years.
Daphna and Simon, of course, had done their best to make it seem as if there had been a full stop, followed by a long ellipse rather than a mere segue, that separated her relationships with the two brothers. The facts, however, belied such an explanation. Simon Yogev well remembered the first night Daphna Flinker had come to his bed in his parents’ Tel Aviv apartment. There had been a quiet dinner downstairs—his mother’s famous Hungarian goulash followed by her equally famous cheese-and-apricot strudel—during which he couldn’t help notice that Daphna’s gaze, rather than being directed at his older brother, was perpetually fixed on him, and that, from across the table, her feet brushed against his more frequently than mere chance might have allowed.
That night, sleeping rather fitfully, he woke to the rustling of his own sheets and the warm, not unfamiliar, feeling of a woman’s flesh beside him, and then of equally warm lips descending his chest toward his still-sleeping member, accompanied by a feminine voice whispering sweetly in Hebrew, Ahuvi Simon… ahuvi, ahuvi, ahuvi. What had followed from that was the inevitable—a night filled with such fantastically lubricated lust and tenderness that not even a glimmer of fraternal loyalty could interfere with its pleasures. In the morning he would have to, as some writer his father liked—perhaps it was the Frenchman Zola?—had written, “swallow his large toad of nausea and regret,” in any event. There was now little question as to what Daphna Flinker’s real desires had been: Simon’s brother had merely been a way station en route to her actual goal, and now she had attained it. But, even before this, a certain unspoken tension between the brothers had long been in the air—how could it not have been? It would be devastating to his older brother, Simon thought guiltily (he was well acquainted with the story of Cain and Abel), from whom he had already stolen most of the future family glory, to have his first lover taken from him by his brother as well?
She would simply break up with Etan, she promised him, she would tell him what perhaps had become obvious to him already—that, painting or no painting, they really didn’t have very much in common, that she didn’t really feel the relationship was good for either of them in the long run, and so on and so forth. (How then, Simon wondered, would she explain why the relationship was good for the two of them?)
But beneath Simon Yogev’s veneer of otherworldliness there lay rather acute powers of intuition and observation. He had sensed Daphna’s impending flight from his sheets in favor of his brothers’ even before it had actually taken place. He may have looked like Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter, but he was possessed of his father’s foresight and intuition. And he could feel, nightly, the sense of Daphna’s flesh, as well as her attentions, unwinding from his own.
Living in two almost entirely separate worlds—Etan in the world of intellect and art, Simon in that of sports and women—whatever rivalry might ever have existed between the brothers previously had been contained mostly below the surface. At times, Etan had even ventured a foray into his younger brother’s territory—as, for example, several years earlier, when he had taken up swimming and bicycling with a vengeance, managing to join the annual summer swim all the way across the Galilee. In the process, he had also developed a body far more muscular and sculpted physique than his disheveled, unkempt coiffure and otherworldly gaze might have suggested.
But each seemed dominant within his own sphere, into which the other dared not tread, and Simon Yogev had always taken it for granted than his older brother—if he could somehow survive the daily tasks of paying the bills and doing his laundry—was heir apparent to their father’s artistic gifts, even if not to his capacities with women and soccer balls.
So that Etan Yogev’s little romance with Daphna Flinker, in addition to providing his mother with a few sleepless nights, had provided a not entirely unwelcome realignment of the status quo, and that, if nothing else, had provided Sarah Yogev with a certain welcome relief: Perhaps her
