A Dove of the East by Mark Helprin Read Free Book Online

passage.’
    â€œ ‘I can’t,’ she said, looking at me from very close. We were right next to one another. I translated for her. It was from dalet.
    â€œâ€˜Walk with me from Lebanon, from Lebanon come. Look ... from the peak of Shenir, and Hermon, from lions’ dens, from mountains of the leopards. Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my bride, with one of your eyes, with one chain from your neck...’”
    â€œAnd then we were silent, and I looked in her eyes for a long time.
    â€œBy the time I left my sleeves were up and I felt entirely comfortable. We had catalogued and shelved all the books shipped in that day. She said: ‘I couldn’t go to Hebrew school most times. I was very sick when I was little,’ and she turned red, so red, as if she were on fire when she said that. ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ I said, ‘I was not so healthy myself.’
    â€œFrom then on I began to talk to her. I found I could talk to her better than to anyone. We understood one another perfectly. We went to the park in the evening. Right here, right in this spot, in the spring and in the summer, we walked past children playing and the kites were like confetti above us, and the sky was clear blue. We could hear shouts far away on the fields. Everyone was dressed in colorful clothes, and the smoke from apartment buildings was beautiful, curling against that new sky, that fresh sky, and the old people on the benches were a good sight to see. The old people here are such gentle people.
    â€œWhen I was a freshman at City she was a senior at Music and Art. We went to school and came back together. I knew I would love her all my life. That is why I said what I said to you. Do you remember Peter Aaron? In his house there was a fireplace with gas jets so it was always steady and bright, like the best of wood fires. It never ran down. I loved Katrina just like that. Always bright, never still. Powerful always, never unsteady.
    â€œBut Katrina had been very sickly as a child. Perhaps that is why her skin was so white and fine and when she blushed she seemed to be the color of the deepest red velvet,” said Biferman as he looked at the stars, thinking that one of the things he could have been was an astronomer, and they might have lived in a big house, and he could have taken her to look at the moon which in an old-fashioned telescope, he knew, has a bright blue rim. And perhaps as they looked at the moon with its bright blue rim he would have kissed her thin lips and entangled her long red hair in his hands, and held her very close to him making her whiter than even her fine white skin or the white of the moon, and feeling the delicacy of her, the delicacy of Katrina, Katrina Rosen, the daughter of the bookstore man.
    â€œShe had been very sickly, Katrina. And when I was a sophomore at City, majoring in History, she got sick again, in November. In the beginning of November she became so deathly sick that her father prayed all the time with tears in his eyes. He raged at God, and shouted in the store, in the street. He was furious at God. ‘God. God. How dare you take from me my wife, and make my daughter deathly sick. There is no God,’ and then he would weep and fall to his knees near the couch, burying his head in the cushion. ‘There is no God,’ he said, and then he said, ‘God, God, God, Lord of Israel, how can you do this?’
    â€œI was young. I am not afraid to say that I enjoyed it in a way. It gave me a chance to care for her, and my love was so much grounded on care; don’t all the Jews love by caring? So as long as she could talk, and read, and listen when I read to her, and learn the Hebrew I was teaching her, it was all right.
    â€œBut I cannot begin to describe the panic into which I was hurled when she began to get worse. Rosen knew from the start, but I was only nineteen. He had seen enough in his life to tell him, but I