Michal

My Israeli girlfriend had the intense sense of injustice which is normally only seen in children, who have not had acceptance of the unfairness of life wearily drummed into them through experience.

I met her when I was running a little wine-bar for a friend who had gone away for the weekend. She had come from London and arranged to meet some friends there, and the friends had not turned up.

She ordered a drink and asked if I had seen her friends. When I replied that I had not, she said she may come back to the bar and talk to me, if that was ok.

I said, "You can come and talk to me any time you like", then she went away.

Ten minutes later, she returned and sat at the bar saying, "Well you did say that I could come and talk to you any time, so here I am". These were the first meaningful words she spoke, and - if I had known - were an insight into how she viewed her rightful position in society. People had to make conditional promises and then stick to them, or else. She was as insecure as a child.

The trouble was that she could not relax until she had forced conditional promises out of me, and after that she could not relax as she waited for me to break them.

She would spend hours on the telephone to her sister, speaking Hebrew in a childish, sing-song, squeaky voice which I could tell was peppered with pet names and endearments. She once said that if I ever treated her badly, her sister would come all the way from Tel Aviv just to kill me. I could tell that this was a promise that she or her sister would not break.

A friend of mine said that he thought she looked very nice while she was smiling. The smile could drop from her face in an instant, to be replaced with a Yemeni dark-eyed, brooding look of malevolence bordering on hatred, and this was always brought about through a sense of some injustice.

Looking back, I think I got off lightly with just three broken ribs.