15.11.1987

A NOVEMBER SECRET AVAILABLE TO ANYONE

One of the biggest secrets in the country is out in the open, available to anyone who wants to take a look. In a way, it's a secret almost as important as the one Mordechai Vanunu is accused of handing out, for while his secret was all about security, this one is about sanity and its preservation.

It's the beach in November.

On these sunny fall days when the air is crisp, cleansed by constant breezes, but the sun is warm enough to encourage stripping, the beach is there, and even if only once a week you can get there for only a single hour of serenity, it's worth it.

With you back tot he buildings, the traffic, the rush and crush of the city, you look westward to a horizon interrupted only by the fantasies of planes bringing people from Europe.

Sometimes you can see a sleek yacht lower its sails and crank up the engine for a maneuver into the marina.

You can watch fishing trawlers, hazy in the brightness, plunge back and forth across the horizon.

You can see Abie Nathan's ship way off in the distance.

You can see a lot of things, if you pay attention.

Turn you head to the right. There's a tourist couple, maybe engaged, maybe newlywed, maybe just met, almost making love on the beach.

She golden haired and long-legged in a fading gold bikini, he shirtless as she leans against him.

To the left there's another pair of lovers, much, much older, walking a dog and speaking some familiar but unknown mamalashon that they brought with them decades ago or last week.

Right behind you, a soldier has plonked down his kitbag.

He's rolled up his trousers into bulky cuffs and taken off a dusty shirt. From the kitbag he has taken a book and a walkman. He could be listening to Handel, but from the way he taps his bear foot in the sand, it's more likely to be Chrissie Hynde.

The ice cream man comes by.

In summer, in the heat, you can see 20 years of effort in his face, and in his calf muscles, stained black and blue, from plodding through the sand with a heavy box slung over his shoulders. Now he's more relaxed, able to chat. "I don't make as much on days like this, but I get more pleasure out of it", he says. "No rushing around".

He watches the tourist couple. "I don't want to interrupt them" he says, "but I got to make a living".

He calls out "ice cream, ice cream", in English, but either they don't hear or don't understand or don't care.

The soldier asks for menta limon, and for a few minutes the ice cream man squats on his heels, his heavy box a dark and scarred object on the whiteness of the sand, which is not as dirty as in summer. There even seems to be less tar.

There are certainly fewer beach tennis players. Instead of the summer's obtrusive rhythm of innumerable pairs, a single game in the distance taps a steady metronome that helps close the eyes for a doze.

Young women, inevitably tourists, take off their bikini tops. There seems to be more of them than in summer. Perhaps its because there are fewer beach-bums to harass them.

Few people actually go into the water-a few windsurfers, a few health nuts, some tourists from colder coasts, for whom the relative chill of the Mediterranean in fall is a bathtub compared to the Atlantic or the Pacific or the North Sea.

There is no real sense of time, except as the sun first warms the shoulders and then reaches the face.

It could be anywhere, except it's here, down the block around the corner, a secret available to anyone.


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