The Houseguest by Kim Brooks Page A

something.
    â€œI’m thinking about it,” he said into the receiver.
    It was a woman’s voice that answered. “Could I speak with Max Hoffman, please? This is Ana Beidler.”
    He picked up a piece of paper on his desk, folded it in two for no reason.
    â€œMiss Beidler. I’m so glad you called. I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”
    â€œYes,” she said. “I’ve been waiting, too.”

6.
    H ER NAME WAS Sonia. Sonia the beautiful. Sonia the prostitute Abe met and made love to under the bridge on the banks of the Neman nearly thirty years ago. Make love? he interrogated. Does a sixteen-year-old boy make love to a whore? To her, he did. He doted on her, dreamt about her, hungered for her affection and approval. He stole things for her, brought her flowers and jewelry and perfume and books. Of course, she wasn’t only a whore. She was also an intellectual. A member of Hitahdut, the Socialist-Zionist Labor Party. “A revolutionary from the waist down,” she called herself if anyone asked. This dark figure from his past was who Ana Beidler brought back to his mind. The memory, long buried, coming up to him not in images at first but in sounds, the timbre of her voice. Her breathing heavily in his ear, the distant train, the traffic over the bridge as they made love in the high grass. Sonia. Her favorite customers were older men—journalists, agitators, anarchists, university professors, not sixteen-year-old schoolboys, the bourgeois son of the owner of a cigarette factory. But somehow, the day she met Abe at the market, convinced him to buy her an apple, then ate it in front of him, relishing it, licking the juice off her soft lips, she took pity on him and asked if he’d like to walk her home. He could still remember the sweetness of the apple on her breath, the stickiness on her fingers. They never made it farther than the bridge. He muddied his clothes and bruised his knees on the rocks.Then he emptied his pockets without the slightest regret. This was how it went. Sometimes he paid her and sometimes he didn’t. It depended on her mood, how things went between them on any day.
    â€œI like you, Abe,” she used to tell him. “You’re a funny boy. Tell me a funny joke and then you can have it for free.”
    Other times she’d be strict. “Fifteen rubles? You must be joking. That was worth fifty, at least.”
    â€œCome on. You know I haven’t got that much.”
    â€œMeet me tomorrow then and bring some of your mother’s jewelry. Your parents are rich, aren’t they? She won’t miss it.”
    He protested, but eventually gave in. Regardless of what they did together under the bridge, he thought she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, and not beautiful in the way the girls at school tried to be. Her face was covered with freckles. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were white-blonde. She painted her lips dark red, but he suspected that without this paint, they’d be as pale as her lashes. Her dresses were wrinkled and threadbare but somehow more lovely to him for this quality. She had wide hips and small breasts and a mole on the lower part of her neck, which he liked to kiss. It was not only the way she looked but also the way she smelled and the way she laughed and the way she sat under the bridge while they talked, legs apart, back rounded. She sat like a man, without shyness or modesty. He loved the dirty way she talked, too, the bit of gravel in her voice, and the way she wasn’t shy or prickly or stuck up like the other girls he knew. It seemed to him his feelings were, at least a little bit, reciprocated.
    â€œI like you,” she told him often. “I do. Even if you are a strange kid.”
    â€œWhat makes me so strange?” he asked.
    She thought about it for a moment, then said in a more serious tone of voice than he’d heard her use before, “Most people want to lift