Requiem for a beautiful girl

I remember seeing her in high school when I was in 9th grade, and thinking she was so cool - always smiling, her long dark hair floating in the breeze, always hanging with cool looking kids - and wishing to meet her and become her friend. Then, when I started 10th grade, she was in my class, which was really a piece of luck. We quickly became good friends, as one does at 15, and it was even better than I expected. She was indeed a wonderful girl - not conventionally pretty, but with such a contagious smile and bright eyes, long dark hair often braided Bo Derek style, funny and good-humored, and extremely clever, witty and intelligent, one of the brightest people I had met in school so far. She didn't care much about grades and being a successful student, and I remember several teachers wondering how come I, always the top of the class, was such a close friend with her. Little did they know that I was the one who had more to learn.

And we talked and talked, outside and inside the classroom, we were at the same desk in most classes, and kept on talking, about everything, but mostly music - we exchanged song lyrics and sang together Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Doors, Queen... Our favorite duo was Wish You Were Here, where we also sang the guitar and bass parts - usually at the Philosophy class. Many people thought we were going steady and we had fun sometimes pretending we did, but we were just good friends. Actually, later, I developed a crush on her, but I was too shy to make advances - I was such a nerdish kid - and then we got separated by circumstances.

Intense as teenage friendships are, they're also very fragile. I changed schools and we stopped seeing each other - we both thought too prosaic to plan and left to chance our meeting again, silly immature kids that we were. And so it was a kind of opposite of serendipity, we let things to chance and I lost her. Later, I knew through a common friend that she had gotten into serious problems with drugs, and I was very upset about it; I looked for her then but couldn't find her (it was before cell phones and the internet!).

And life went on. A couple of years ago, I was browsing my facebook wall and thought about looking for her. I typed her name, and suddenly there it was - her name, and a picture of a woman much older than the girl I used to know but with a unique and recognizable smile. I contacted her, and we talked again. More than 30 years had passed since we had last seen each other, but we felt as close as if we had just chatted last week. We told each other our lives' stories, so different, and I was so happy to hear about her children and her unorthodox but rich life - as it had to be, because a brilliant mind always makes things happen. We didn't meet, because we were living in different cities; after a time of much talk to get up to date we communicated from time to time. She didn't use facebook much, so I wasn't surprised for not seeing any posts or comments for a while.

Then last week, they told me she had died, that it was on her facebook page. I checked, and it was true. I can't quite express how I felt - shocked, upset, sad, mad at myself that I didn't meet her again... But mostly I felt sadness and a sense of loss. Yes, I know that we hadn't met for years, that we seldom talked. But whenever we did it was always easy, friendly and warm, we always felt connected, our friendship had never died - real friendships are like that, you can be years apart but you pick it up as if those years were but a moment. Above all, I knew she was there, somewhere, smiling and brilliant as always, a joy to the world. And now she isn't. And I wish she was here, or somewhere.

A Journey to the End of the Millennium, by A. B. Yehoshua

An extremely interesting book. I read Mr. Mani a few months ago, and liked it very much, so when I saw this one at a bookstore during my last trip to Israel, I was curious and bought it (I love historical novels). And I was duly rewarded. This is a dense novel, historical because it's set in 999, but actually it could be anytime, since it deal with conscience and timeless moral issues. I think it is, in a way, a very Jewish book, as Mr. Mani was, which is good, since one can learn about other cultures from books - like I learned about Islamic culture from Naguib Mahfouz or Orhan Pamuk's books, for instance. And I like Yehoshua's writing, very elegant and intelligent.